* Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone. * Nokia and Microsoft will closely collaborate on development, joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap
They are both in bed with a hardware manufacturer now, have both claimed it won't affect other licenses of the OS, and both have something to loose if they alienate the other OEMs.
The Android handset makers have to abide by the same rules as everyone else. If they modify the kernel or any other GPL application, then they have to release that code as GPL (and despite Florian's lies they do). If they write their own applications to run on top of the kernel, and don't link against GPL libraries, then they don't have to release their code under the GPL unless they want to. This is no different from running proprietary game on a desktop Linux distribution.
And as an aside the Android Java libraries are all released under Apache and BSD-like licenses, not the GPL, so software that uses those can be released using just about any license they want.
As for your talk of a defensive patent pool, the difficulty of this type approach is that is generally requires patent holders to surrender some control over their patens and if the patents in question are ones that bring in revenue through licensing, then companies are generally reluctant to do this.
Another problem is existing cross-licensing deals. Hypothetically, if Samsung already had a cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, and Microsoft pushed on HTC to pay patent royalties, HTC couldn't use Samsung's patents to push back against Microsoft. I think that would really limit what patents are available to be effectively used in an Android patent pool.
2. Your second option is to accept the terms of the GPL, and therefore license the whole under the GPL. This gives you a license that gives you the right to distribute the DLL.
This wouldn't be necessary. Section 5 of the GPL only applies to "works based on the Program", and the GPL defines this as a modification that "requires copyright permission". Thus if linking DLLs were determined to be fair use, then then section 5 of GPL would not apply to the combined code, because it is not a "work based on the Program".
Thus they would have a third option:
3. Accept the terms of the license, understanding that your code is not a derivative work, and thus you only need to distribute the original source code according to the terms of the GPL.
As an example, there are many applications in distributions shipping today that are basically GUIs (for system configuration, CD ripping, etc) that execute command-line applications to do the bulk of their work. It is widely agreed upon that using sysexec and pipes doesn't constitute a derivative work, and thus it is okay to distribute the GUI by itself (rather than with the command line tools as a whole), and under a different license than the GPL. If it were established that combining.NET assemblies also did not constitute a derivative work, then the same would apply in that situation.
Finally, I didn't really make this clear, but I consider everything I've said to be legal nitpicking. I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone go against the spirit of a license, including the general consensus of what constitutes a derivative work. I am personally of the opinion that linking DLLs, JARs and.NET assemblies does constitute a derivative work. I was just pointing that from a legal point of view it isn't a settled matter, and that the GPL was intentionally written as a copyright license not a contract, and thus relies on the court's definition of derivative work.
So even if you keep the original work in a separate DLL, the whole must still be released under the GPL3.
...assuming the new work is covered by the GPL3, in which case it is the whole for which the old code is a part. However, if something is determined to be fair use then you don't need any license to do so, and no license can trump your fair use rights (a contract/EULA sometimes can).
This caveat is specifically spelled out in the definitions section of the GPL3:
To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work.
If the adaptation does not require copyright permission (ie is fair use), then section 5 (actually the whole license), does not apply.
Linux 2.6.1 was released only three weeks after 2.6.0. By my count there were 10 releases in 2004, and then 4-5 releases every year after that. This works out okay for the kernel since the "official" kernel is treated as the beta kernel for most distributions, which update less frequently and with more testing, and about once a year, they designate a kernel for long-term support, and it receives bug patches.
Firefox releases are user facing, however and I have yet to hear any plan for long term support of versions in this new scheme. Both those factors make it more problematic IMHO.
Secondly, the Linux version bump is a good thing. The first number in the version was meaningless anyway these days, so merging it with the second so it only has 3 parts, not 4 is just good house keeping. I would be fine with Firefox doing the same thing; many of their.5 releases in the past have had enough new features to justify a.0 release, and then the point releases could be reserved for bug-fixes only.
Not necessarily. Copyright law gives copyright holders certain exclusive rights, and (being a pure copyright license, not a EULA) the GPL can only restrict people from doing those things. One them is creating derivative works, however it is the courts (not the GPL/LGPL) that draw the line between what constitutes a derivative work and what is fair use. Like many fair use situations, that line is pretty fuzzy. The general consensus within the tech community is:
Incorporating a significant amount of source code: Certainly a derivative work Static linking a third-party library: Almost certainly a derivative work. Dynamically linking a library/plugin/etc: Probably a derivative work but debatable. Some people have varying opinions based on the context of the linking. Linking system libraries / system calls: Probably fair use, but explicitly allowed by GPL and other OS API/SDK licenses just to be safe. Communicating via proprietary network/IPC protocol: Almost certainly fair use, but some try to claim it isn't. Communicating via open network/IPC protocol: Certainly fair use.
However, there is very little case law on this matter, so it is still possible that courts could decide that some uses of GPL code are acceptable, even thought they doesn't fit the rules of thumb above. If a judge were to rule that combining.NET assemblies was fair use in this case, then the most that Hamstersoft would have to do to be legal would be to distribute Calibre separately, and then users could legally run the combined application.
The DMCA take-down notices are to be sent to the providers that are hosting the content. The search engines are not hosting this content, and sending them take-down notices is a heavy-handed abuse of the law.
So either John misunderstands the DMCA or is willfully abusing it. Either way it makes it a lot harder to sympathize with his attempt to address violation of copyright law, when he himself is willing to resort to the very behavior of other copyright abusers.
But at the very least, shouldn't the OSS community have an army of lawyers willing to work probono, or financed by various foundations, for this kind of thing exactly?
What exactly do you expect them to do? The offender is in Russia and is hosted in Russia. How is a small donation-funded organization supposed to enforce copyright in situations where even large well-funded companies like Microsoft have been unable to do so?
People sometimes get away with breaking the law, especially far away countries. It sucks, but it's life and you have to learn to accept it. The people who won't are exactly the ones that drive us further and further into a police state in their unending drive to "decrease crime", not understanding the trade-off they are making.
Given the other 100 defendants settled for the amount they were asking, then Eon-Net made $2.5 - 7.5 million dollars as a result of their trolling. The consequence they had to pay only amounted to 9 to 25 settlements, and it took the defendant $600k to make that happen. Unless it becomes much easier to counter these people, it is still much cheaper to settle, and it is still very profitable for them to continue.
Yeah, the real problem here is that the governmet has decided to take reasoning that makes perfect sense in a war zone and apply it to our communities.
At places where IEDs are a common and real threat to soldiers, it makes sense to treat any jury-rigged wiring as a potential IED. In a country that has millions of people flying every year without a single actual incident of a bomb, it doesn't.
Same with all the no-knock raids that end up killing innocent people. It is perfectly reasonable for the resident to have a gun in hand when responding to someone busting into his house at night. It is also perfectly reasonable for a cop to defend himself. The problem is the idiots in the police department that think it is a good idea have our cops act like soldiers in a war-zone, just to enforce laws which aren't a life-and-death matter.
This won't work because people don't make their own schedules - their boss does. Since the ones making the decision isn't the one impacted by the fee they will rarely take it into consideration as part of the decision. Likewise, people flying in for business meeting aren't going to plan their trip around the cost of tolls, if they even know it varies.
The express lanes are an economic plus because it lets impatient people with money subsidize the cost of the road for everyone else. This doesn't extend to your time-variable toll rate as everyone has to pay it. Furthermore, it makes it much harder to pay by cash and have exact change, pushing more people into using "easy-pay" systems with all the privacy concerns that come with them.
Finally, the type of fee charged has nothing to do with the "free market". Markets exist when consumers have choice between multiple competing providers. People have little to no choice about which roads they take. The endpoints dictate the begining and end sections, and there are only a small number of ways to connect them in between. The decision to charge based on miles driven, or gallons of gas used, or flat monthly fees, or periodic toll points are all just business decisions and which one works best will vary on the circumstances.
I don't really consider Groovy to be a middle-ground language like Java and C# are. It's performance isn't any better than python, ruby, or the other high-level languages, so I just lump it along with them.
I know that when I have been in large classes, the added value of taking the class compared to just learning from a book was much lower than with small class sizes. Stanford students may feel cheated if they think that the online portion of this class takes time and attention away from the Stanford class and students.
To me it appears that what killed Nokia was lack of focus.
Mameo was very promising, and instead of focusing on polishing it, they decided to make a huge side-step with MeeGo. From my outsider perspective, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that an engineer would do - decide to refactor code rather than focus on user-facing features. The same thing happened between Gnome 1-2, and KDE 3-4 (projects run by engineers), breaking all sorts of things for the sake of cleaning up the codebase. Such things might be a good decision in the long term, but it was a horrible decision considering the need to get something to market at a crucial time.
Deciding to consolidate on QT to unify Symbian and MeeGo development was also a good decision for the long term, but had horrible business timing, and again has the smell of engineers in charge.
Finally, continuing to invest so much into Symbian without making hardly any user-noticeable progress and under-investing Mameo, sounds like people that were too attached to their "baby" to recognize that it was becoming irrelevant in the market. I could see both engineers and management having that failing.
OK, so why does anyone think Adobe is busy making an HTML5 tool if it thinks HTML5 is going to kill Flash?
Because HTML5 is going to take some of Flash's market share (more and more as capabilities improve), and they would rather transition to selling HTML5 tools than to loose all those customers.
It's just a matter of a little time and those users will be on IE9
No they won't. You can't install IE9 on Windows XP and according to your same source half of all windows users are using XP. They will continue to do so until they get a new computer, and if they haven't moved away from IE yet, they are unlikely to do so in the future. It will be a good 3 years before you can use HTML5 and expect it to work on most computers.
All scientists need to understand what constitutes valid science, so that they can be trusted to use valid scientific methods in their own work. Intelligent Design isn't science and if he believes that it is, then what else does he believe is legitimate science, which isn't?
It doesn't completely discredit him as it's not unheard of for people to compartmentalize their beliefs, and become good at maintaining cognitive dissonance in doing so. But it is a perfectly good reason to be skeptical of him.
That said, it does appear that he does good work. He offers a lot of unsubstantiated opinion to the media, but as far as the few published papers I have read go, he has good methodology, doesn't overstate conclusions, and responds well to legitimate criticism.
The article, on the other hand is complete crap. The Heartland Institute are liars to the core, and this is no exception.
The title of the panel was "Whoever Fights Monsters... Aaron Barr, Anonymous and Ourselves", so it is pretty clear what general topic he was going to talk about. He also signed a separation agreement when leaving HBGary where he stated that he would not disclose certain information about that exact affair.
HBGary can't force him to not participate in the panel, but they can sue him for it after the fact, and they can forewarn him that they will sue him if he says anything he shouldn't.
He obviously decided that it wasn't worthwhile to hold the panel given the limitations on what he can say. The real question is why he agreed to it to begin with. Either he didn't think it through (not the first time for him), or he interpreted his separation agreement differently than HBGary, but decided it wasn't worth a fight.
They doesn't make sense. If they don't care about streaming, then they would just cancel it and get the DVD-only option from Netflix. All the subscribers got emails telling them about this new option, so it's not like anyone would be unaware of it.
The people that only care about streaming or DVDs aren't upset about the recent price changes (or shouldn't be) - their prices decreased compared to when the services had to be combined. It is the people who care about both that are upset, and Blockbuster isn't any cheaper for them. Their DVD plan is more expensive than Netflix. Their streaming is pay-per-view which quickly adds up to be more than Netflix and is almost always more expensive than Amazon's pay-per-view.
If people switch it is because they think Blockbuster has better service of some sort (probably selection), or just because they are pissed, not because it is cheaper.
I completely disagree with your assessment. My parents have been teachers for 30+ years, and it is the parent's attitude not their wealth or free time that affects their success.
In fact, very often the children of poor parents are often the best ones because their parents actually discipline them. They want their kids to succeed and reinforce what needs to be done for this to happen.
Then there is another group of poor, the fatalistic, who don't believe it is possible to move up, and who don't want to do anything but stay drunk/drugged and skirt along. Their kids have the same attitude seeing school as a waste of time, and look down on students who do well.
There is no difference in time/money between the two groups above, just attitude.
Likewise, rich parents with plenty of time and money sometimes use that to enrich their kid's education, but just as many ignore their kids in favor of their career or defend everything they do wrong rather than discipline them. Again, time/money isn't the difference here. It is the quality of the parent.
I find one thing from this far more disturbing: google claims that real damages should be based on android value only, and since android is zero-cost that damages must be zero-cost as well.The judge declared that zero-cost is not applicable as their other income (ad-revenue) must be considered as tied in with this. This is very concerning because it would make the likely liability of open-source projects that are sued by patent trolls far higher, if the revenue from the supposedly infringing product is to be expanded to include revenue from any other software, service or product which in some way gets bundled or shared on that product then many open-source companies face a far higher risk in patents than they previously did.
Imagine if a company sued wordpress for patent infringement and then claimed that every ad shown on their commercial wordpress.com free blog hosting site is revenue that should count toward the calculation of patent damages ?
That seems perfectly reasonably to me. Try turning this around (and applying to copyrights not patents). If someone violated on the license of an FLOSS license, then the infringer could argue that since the code is available at no cost, then they should not be responsible for any damages. Normally, these cases are settled by just releasing the source or ceasing to distribute the software. However, it is good that the courts recognize that damages can be recouped for "zero cost" software, for egregious cases where the infringers will not cooperate or settle without going to court.
Furthermore (assuming that Oracle had a valid case here, which they don't) the damages are not just the money that Android earned (or did not earn). Android is competing with other products, some of whom did have licenses from Oracle. Refusing to pay for licenses puts them at an unfair advantage to their competitors, and Oracle's lost licensing revenue from these products is a legitimate damage. If the patents were legit they should be responsible for FRAND licenses fees.
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Straight from their own mouth
* Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone.
* Nokia and Microsoft will closely collaborate on development, joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap
They are both in bed with a hardware manufacturer now, have both claimed it won't affect other licenses of the OS, and both have something to loose if they alienate the other OEMs.
The Android handset makers have to abide by the same rules as everyone else. If they modify the kernel or any other GPL application, then they have to release that code as GPL (and despite Florian's lies they do). If they write their own applications to run on top of the kernel, and don't link against GPL libraries, then they don't have to release their code under the GPL unless they want to. This is no different from running proprietary game on a desktop Linux distribution.
And as an aside the Android Java libraries are all released under Apache and BSD-like licenses, not the GPL, so software that uses those can be released using just about any license they want.
As for your talk of a defensive patent pool, the difficulty of this type approach is that is generally requires patent holders to surrender some control over their patens and if the patents in question are ones that bring in revenue through licensing, then companies are generally reluctant to do this.
Another problem is existing cross-licensing deals. Hypothetically, if Samsung already had a cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, and Microsoft pushed on HTC to pay patent royalties, HTC couldn't use Samsung's patents to push back against Microsoft. I think that would really limit what patents are available to be effectively used in an Android patent pool.
2. Your second option is to accept the terms of the GPL, and therefore license the whole under the GPL. This gives you a license that gives you the right to distribute the DLL.
This wouldn't be necessary. Section 5 of the GPL only applies to "works based on the Program", and the GPL defines this as a modification that "requires copyright permission". Thus if linking DLLs were determined to be fair use, then then section 5 of GPL would not apply to the combined code, because it is not a "work based on the Program".
Thus they would have a third option:
3. Accept the terms of the license, understanding that your code is not a derivative work, and thus you only need to distribute the original source code according to the terms of the GPL.
As an example, there are many applications in distributions shipping today that are basically GUIs (for system configuration, CD ripping, etc) that execute command-line applications to do the bulk of their work. It is widely agreed upon that using sysexec and pipes doesn't constitute a derivative work, and thus it is okay to distribute the GUI by itself (rather than with the command line tools as a whole), and under a different license than the GPL. If it were established that combining .NET assemblies also did not constitute a derivative work, then the same would apply in that situation.
Finally, I didn't really make this clear, but I consider everything I've said to be legal nitpicking. I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone go against the spirit of a license, including the general consensus of what constitutes a derivative work. I am personally of the opinion that linking DLLs, JARs and .NET assemblies does constitute a derivative work. I was just pointing that from a legal point of view it isn't a settled matter, and that the GPL was intentionally written as a copyright license not a contract, and thus relies on the court's definition of derivative work.
So even if you keep the original work in a separate DLL, the whole must still be released under the GPL3.
...assuming the new work is covered by the GPL3, in which case it is the whole for which the old code is a part. However, if something is determined to be fair use then you don't need any license to do so, and no license can trump your fair use rights (a contract/EULA sometimes can).
This caveat is specifically spelled out in the definitions section of the GPL3:
To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work.
If the adaptation does not require copyright permission (ie is fair use), then section 5 (actually the whole license), does not apply.
Linux 2.6.1 was released only three weeks after 2.6.0. By my count there were 10 releases in 2004, and then 4-5 releases every year after that. This works out okay for the kernel since the "official" kernel is treated as the beta kernel for most distributions, which update less frequently and with more testing, and about once a year, they designate a kernel for long-term support, and it receives bug patches.
Firefox releases are user facing, however and I have yet to hear any plan for long term support of versions in this new scheme. Both those factors make it more problematic IMHO.
Secondly, the Linux version bump is a good thing. The first number in the version was meaningless anyway these days, so merging it with the second so it only has 3 parts, not 4 is just good house keeping. I would be fine with Firefox doing the same thing; many of their .5 releases in the past have had enough new features to justify a .0 release, and then the point releases could be reserved for bug-fixes only.
Not necessarily. Copyright law gives copyright holders certain exclusive rights, and (being a pure copyright license, not a EULA) the GPL can only restrict people from doing those things. One them is creating derivative works, however it is the courts (not the GPL/LGPL) that draw the line between what constitutes a derivative work and what is fair use. Like many fair use situations, that line is pretty fuzzy. The general consensus within the tech community is:
Incorporating a significant amount of source code: Certainly a derivative work
Static linking a third-party library: Almost certainly a derivative work.
Dynamically linking a library/plugin/etc: Probably a derivative work but debatable. Some people have varying opinions based on the context of the linking.
Linking system libraries / system calls: Probably fair use, but explicitly allowed by GPL and other OS API/SDK licenses just to be safe.
Communicating via proprietary network/IPC protocol: Almost certainly fair use, but some try to claim it isn't.
Communicating via open network/IPC protocol: Certainly fair use.
However, there is very little case law on this matter, so it is still possible that courts could decide that some uses of GPL code are acceptable, even thought they doesn't fit the rules of thumb above. If a judge were to rule that combining .NET assemblies was fair use in this case, then the most that Hamstersoft would have to do to be legal would be to distribute Calibre separately, and then users could legally run the combined application.
The DMCA take-down notices are to be sent to the providers that are hosting the content. The search engines are not hosting this content, and sending them take-down notices is a heavy-handed abuse of the law.
So either John misunderstands the DMCA or is willfully abusing it. Either way it makes it a lot harder to sympathize with his attempt to address violation of copyright law, when he himself is willing to resort to the very behavior of other copyright abusers.
But at the very least, shouldn't the OSS community have an army of lawyers willing to work probono, or financed by various foundations, for this kind of thing exactly?
What exactly do you expect them to do? The offender is in Russia and is hosted in Russia. How is a small donation-funded organization supposed to enforce copyright in situations where even large well-funded companies like Microsoft have been unable to do so?
People sometimes get away with breaking the law, especially far away countries. It sucks, but it's life and you have to learn to accept it. The people who won't are exactly the ones that drive us further and further into a police state in their unending drive to "decrease crime", not understanding the trade-off they are making.
Nokia said straight out that the N9 isn't coming to the US. The writer wasn't inferring anything. RTFA.
Given the other 100 defendants settled for the amount they were asking, then Eon-Net made $2.5 - 7.5 million dollars as a result of their trolling. The consequence they had to pay only amounted to 9 to 25 settlements, and it took the defendant $600k to make that happen. Unless it becomes much easier to counter these people, it is still much cheaper to settle, and it is still very profitable for them to continue.
Yeah, the real problem here is that the governmet has decided to take reasoning that makes perfect sense in a war zone and apply it to our communities.
At places where IEDs are a common and real threat to soldiers, it makes sense to treat any jury-rigged wiring as a potential IED. In a country that has millions of people flying every year without a single actual incident of a bomb, it doesn't.
Same with all the no-knock raids that end up killing innocent people. It is perfectly reasonable for the resident to have a gun in hand when responding to someone busting into his house at night. It is also perfectly reasonable for a cop to defend himself. The problem is the idiots in the police department that think it is a good idea have our cops act like soldiers in a war-zone, just to enforce laws which aren't a life-and-death matter.
This won't work because people don't make their own schedules - their boss does. Since the ones making the decision isn't the one impacted by the fee they will rarely take it into consideration as part of the decision. Likewise, people flying in for business meeting aren't going to plan their trip around the cost of tolls, if they even know it varies.
The express lanes are an economic plus because it lets impatient people with money subsidize the cost of the road for everyone else. This doesn't extend to your time-variable toll rate as everyone has to pay it. Furthermore, it makes it much harder to pay by cash and have exact change, pushing more people into using "easy-pay" systems with all the privacy concerns that come with them.
Finally, the type of fee charged has nothing to do with the "free market". Markets exist when consumers have choice between multiple competing providers. People have little to no choice about which roads they take. The endpoints dictate the begining and end sections, and there are only a small number of ways to connect them in between. The decision to charge based on miles driven, or gallons of gas used, or flat monthly fees, or periodic toll points are all just business decisions and which one works best will vary on the circumstances.
I don't really consider Groovy to be a middle-ground language like Java and C# are. It's performance isn't any better than python, ruby, or the other high-level languages, so I just lump it along with them.
I know that when I have been in large classes, the added value of taking the class compared to just learning from a book was much lower than with small class sizes. Stanford students may feel cheated if they think that the online portion of this class takes time and attention away from the Stanford class and students.
To me it appears that what killed Nokia was lack of focus.
Mameo was very promising, and instead of focusing on polishing it, they decided to make a huge side-step with MeeGo. From my outsider perspective, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that an engineer would do - decide to refactor code rather than focus on user-facing features. The same thing happened between Gnome 1-2, and KDE 3-4 (projects run by engineers), breaking all sorts of things for the sake of cleaning up the codebase. Such things might be a good decision in the long term, but it was a horrible decision considering the need to get something to market at a crucial time.
Deciding to consolidate on QT to unify Symbian and MeeGo development was also a good decision for the long term, but had horrible business timing, and again has the smell of engineers in charge.
Finally, continuing to invest so much into Symbian without making hardly any user-noticeable progress and under-investing Mameo, sounds like people that were too attached to their "baby" to recognize that it was becoming irrelevant in the market. I could see both engineers and management having that failing.
And LibreOffice is working on reimplementing many of those features without Java.
OK, so why does anyone think Adobe is busy making an HTML5 tool if it thinks HTML5 is going to kill Flash?
Because HTML5 is going to take some of Flash's market share (more and more as capabilities improve), and they would rather transition to selling HTML5 tools than to loose all those customers.
It's just a matter of a little time and those users will be on IE9
No they won't. You can't install IE9 on Windows XP and according to your same source half of all windows users are using XP. They will continue to do so until they get a new computer, and if they haven't moved away from IE yet, they are unlikely to do so in the future. It will be a good 3 years before you can use HTML5 and expect it to work on most computers.
A professional troll, who keeps posting hatchet-jobs stories about Google/Android only to have them promptly rebuffed.
All scientists need to understand what constitutes valid science, so that they can be trusted to use valid scientific methods in their own work. Intelligent Design isn't science and if he believes that it is, then what else does he believe is legitimate science, which isn't?
It doesn't completely discredit him as it's not unheard of for people to compartmentalize their beliefs, and become good at maintaining cognitive dissonance in doing so. But it is a perfectly good reason to be skeptical of him.
That said, it does appear that he does good work. He offers a lot of unsubstantiated opinion to the media, but as far as the few published papers I have read go, he has good methodology, doesn't overstate conclusions, and responds well to legitimate criticism.
The article, on the other hand is complete crap. The Heartland Institute are liars to the core, and this is no exception.
The patent royalties decrease the profit margin of the device, which affects all aspects of the company's budget, including R&D.
The title of the panel was "Whoever Fights Monsters... Aaron Barr, Anonymous and Ourselves", so it is pretty clear what general topic he was going to talk about. He also signed a separation agreement when leaving HBGary where he stated that he would not disclose certain information about that exact affair.
HBGary can't force him to not participate in the panel, but they can sue him for it after the fact, and they can forewarn him that they will sue him if he says anything he shouldn't.
He obviously decided that it wasn't worthwhile to hold the panel given the limitations on what he can say. The real question is why he agreed to it to begin with. Either he didn't think it through (not the first time for him), or he interpreted his separation agreement differently than HBGary, but decided it wasn't worth a fight.
They doesn't make sense. If they don't care about streaming, then they would just cancel it and get the DVD-only option from Netflix. All the subscribers got emails telling them about this new option, so it's not like anyone would be unaware of it.
The people that only care about streaming or DVDs aren't upset about the recent price changes (or shouldn't be) - their prices decreased compared to when the services had to be combined. It is the people who care about both that are upset, and Blockbuster isn't any cheaper for them. Their DVD plan is more expensive than Netflix. Their streaming is pay-per-view which quickly adds up to be more than Netflix and is almost always more expensive than Amazon's pay-per-view.
If people switch it is because they think Blockbuster has better service of some sort (probably selection), or just because they are pissed, not because it is cheaper.
I completely disagree with your assessment. My parents have been teachers for 30+ years, and it is the parent's attitude not their wealth or free time that affects their success.
In fact, very often the children of poor parents are often the best ones because their parents actually discipline them. They want their kids to succeed and reinforce what needs to be done for this to happen.
Then there is another group of poor, the fatalistic, who don't believe it is possible to move up, and who don't want to do anything but stay drunk/drugged and skirt along. Their kids have the same attitude seeing school as a waste of time, and look down on students who do well.
There is no difference in time/money between the two groups above, just attitude.
Likewise, rich parents with plenty of time and money sometimes use that to enrich their kid's education, but just as many ignore their kids in favor of their career or defend everything they do wrong rather than discipline them. Again, time/money isn't the difference here. It is the quality of the parent.
I find one thing from this far more disturbing: google claims that real damages should be based on android value only, and since android is zero-cost that damages must be zero-cost as well.The judge declared that zero-cost is not applicable as their other income (ad-revenue) must be considered as tied in with this. This is very concerning because it would make the likely liability of open-source projects that are sued by patent trolls far higher, if the revenue from the supposedly infringing product is to be expanded to include revenue from any other software, service or product which in some way gets bundled or shared on that product then many open-source companies face a far higher risk in patents than they previously did.
Imagine if a company sued wordpress for patent infringement and then claimed that every ad shown on their commercial wordpress.com free blog hosting site is revenue that should count toward the calculation of patent damages ?
That seems perfectly reasonably to me. Try turning this around (and applying to copyrights not patents). If someone violated on the license of an FLOSS license, then the infringer could argue that since the code is available at no cost, then they should not be responsible for any damages. Normally, these cases are settled by just releasing the source or ceasing to distribute the software. However, it is good that the courts recognize that damages can be recouped for "zero cost" software, for egregious cases where the infringers will not cooperate or settle without going to court.
Furthermore (assuming that Oracle had a valid case here, which they don't) the damages are not just the money that Android earned (or did not earn). Android is competing with other products, some of whom did have licenses from Oracle. Refusing to pay for licenses puts them at an unfair advantage to their competitors, and Oracle's lost licensing revenue from these products is a legitimate damage. If the patents were legit they should be responsible for FRAND licenses fees.