They just have to show that an infringing products does the same that the patent protects.
There are so many patent lawsuits (mostly baseless) and not a single line of code is shown.
If people do not understanding the issues there is no chance to be prepared to resists these idiotic attempts of MS to own every computer code ever written under the sun.
Iraq was stable by most serious measures after the UN impossed sanctions.
They were no longer a threat to the Kurds in the north, forget about their own neighbours (every time they did anything unbecomming the coalition forces punished them as required, normally for violating the exclusion zones).
And Saddam Hussein lead a secularist regime, in which women studied and worked and went to universities. If you think he was a religious fanatic it just shows how badly misinformed you are, for which you should feel trully ashamed at this stage of this macabre game.
The recent actions of the US have brought peace and prosperity to the peoples of the middle east, they live happy and content in their now improved standards of life.
There, don't say there are no people just and sensitive to the realities of the Middle East.
Wake up people. You are been giving propaganda Kool Aid and you are having it with relish.
The real terrorists the West should be worried about, as the attacks in NY, Madrid, London, Bali and Istanbul show, most likely are already living on their targets of choice, in many occassions they may even be citizens of the country they intend to attack.
Your comment about Hezbollah is uninofrmed and inane and only clouds the real issues.
These organizations are not the same as Al Quaeda.
They don't go around bombing countries that have not done anything against them, unlike Al Quaeda that has bombed places as dissimilar as Indonesia (Bali), Istanbul, Spain, and the US for all kind of completely disjointed reasons.
You may agree or dissagree with the plight of the Arab peoples in Lebanon or Palestine, but they keep their attacks focussed in an enemy state that has no qualms in doing extrajudiciary executions, punishments by association, and contravenes the most basic rules of war engagement whne it suits their needs.
That Iran supports these organizations is not surprising, the US has its own puppets in the area and both countries play this macabre dance with gusto.
Those real guys you are mentioning have not attaked anybody that has not attacked them as far as I know. Al Quaeda has, any serious government should concentrate on that while keep an eye on Iran without make the mess worst than it is.
WHat Bush seems to want is to somehow fix the monumental idiocity that Iraq was by commiting the US to something even worst: the complete destruction of the Middle East, Israel included, as the only means to solve the crisis there.
No country in the region would be a functioning society anymore if the US decides to attack Iran. WHat the US should do is what many US presidents did with the USSR: contain the threat and wait the the idiocity that an Islamic Republic is collapses under its own weigth.
Since Mexicans are reclaming what used to be ours first.
The native population can send their representatives can negotiate with us one the US is an hispanic country (not that they will be very lucky, they should look at native people in Mexico itself for a clue about how bad they could be treated).
And although you jest, the only fair thing to do would to give to those people at least part of their *good* land back as a very small token of compensation.
But as your attitude points out, the legitimization of forceful removal of entire populations by force is a human trait that we may never manage to extirpate from our humanity.
You want to do a quick and dirty script to solve some small problem, perl will do, but then revisit the same script some time later and I am telling you, you will not know what you were thinking or why did you use a certain perl idiom that may have seen brilliant while coding in a hurry.
Perl has its place. Somewhere. I don't know where, but somewhere.
But in scripting there are many options that keep things simpler. Very often using the traditional UNIX pipes clarifies immensily a problem (because you have to digest the different parts of it) while perl my cloudy it in an unmantainable brilliant code snippet.
And it creates unnecessary risks (why the fluffy bunny should you be touching that hardware when it is not failing?).
You will need to replace disks, no question about it, but given the redundancy and hot swappability in modern devices of enterprise quality, preemtive action just increases the risks of something else going wrong (pulling a cable, doing something stoopid).
Or tell me, how do you explain shuting down that machine by mistake when you were changing a diks that was in perfect working order? If I was your user, it would make absolutely no sense to me.
You can't replace something that is found to be infringing a patent.
A patent (at least in stupid legal systems like the US's) is the description of how to solve a problem, not the exact implementation of the solution.
If Linux is found infringing for "transfering digital images to a magentic device" lets say, then you can't reimplement the gimp or any other similar programs, because all would be doing more less the same.
THe problem with software patents is that they are maliciously broad, so the patent would actually say something like "transfering data to a storage device" so the patent owner blocks as much competition as possible.
Wake up and smell the coffee: software patents are an abomination because they are intending to stop the distribution of ideas (you can write any computer program in plain English. Software should be considered speech for bunnies sakes).
There are uncountable examples/. has brought to you in which companies with no product, but with a patent portfolio, can sue you quite happily and even win.
The horrific thing about patenting of software, is that you don't need to show any code.
You just need a vaguely described process that you may or may not have implemented, once in a court of law the bets are off, a patent can be so spacious that it can encompass things that have absolutely nothing to do with a real solution in the real world, and this would need to be interpreted by people that are not remotely technicaly proficient. The only thing to would need to be "demonstrated" is that the "infringing" software does something vaguely similar to what is described by the patent. Neither part needs to show their code.
If the SCO fiasco has showed us something, is that no matter if reason is on your side, if a company as smalle as SCO in relative terms, with no merit whatsoecver on their allegations, in a copyright and contract dispute (which are far narrower in scope than patents) can drag a case for years, just imagine what MS could do using all their billions, They could arguably paralize any commercial realeases of any other competing software, then the use by any big companies or institutions. That my friends, would be the end of FOSS as a bussiness model for at least the duration of any trial.
If you guys in the US do not wake up and smell the coffee, you are going to drag us in a wolrd in which only megacorporations are allowed to do any thinking. You may think I am paranoid, but just look at MS, their intentions are all too clear to be ignored.
When MS (or any other company for that matter) deals with repressive regimes, they profit from it.
By sharing knowledge (what is what FOSS is all about) nobody is profiting, Cubans are perfectly capable to do their own development and deployments, Red Hat or Novell are not going to go there any time soon.
And just for your information, there is no embargo when it comes to certain things, educational and cultural cooperation being one of them, which I think is what FOSS is all about (not a product, but technological education and cooperation).
I do not know how much of their budget Cubans use for repressive activities. What I know is that they devote a substantial amount to health and education (health standards are comparable to those of rich, developped countries, embargo and all), so the hope would be that some of the money saved by using FOSS would also go to those activities.
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It is impossible to please and schizoprenic maniac with persecution delirium, a big ego and the weapons to defend those sentiments...
They just have to show that an infringing products does the same that the patent protects.
There are so many patent lawsuits (mostly baseless) and not a single line of code is shown.
If people do not understanding the issues there is no chance to be prepared to resists these idiotic attempts of MS to own every computer code ever written under the sun.
Iraq was stable by most serious measures after the UN impossed sanctions.
They were no longer a threat to the Kurds in the north, forget about their own neighbours (every time they did anything unbecomming the coalition forces punished them as required, normally for violating the exclusion zones).
And Saddam Hussein lead a secularist regime, in which women studied and worked and went to universities. If you think he was a religious fanatic it just shows how badly misinformed you are, for which you should feel trully ashamed at this stage of this macabre game.
OK, let me redress the balance:
The recent actions of the US have brought peace and prosperity to the peoples of the middle east, they live happy and content in their now improved standards of life.
There, don't say there are no people just and sensitive to the realities of the Middle East.
.... that are in conflict with the US.
Clarification: hating the US for being a full supporter of Israel is not to be in conflict with the might country in question.
Futher hint: Iran did not like the Taleban.
Wake up people. You are been giving propaganda Kool Aid and you are having it with relish.
The real terrorists the West should be worried about, as the attacks in NY, Madrid, London, Bali and Istanbul show, most likely are already living on their targets of choice, in many occassions they may even be citizens of the country they intend to attack.
Your comment about Hezbollah is uninofrmed and inane and only clouds the real issues.
These organizations are not the same as Al Quaeda.
They don't go around bombing countries that have not done anything against them, unlike Al Quaeda that has bombed places as dissimilar as Indonesia (Bali), Istanbul, Spain, and the US for all kind of completely disjointed reasons.
You may agree or dissagree with the plight of the Arab peoples in Lebanon or Palestine, but they keep their attacks focussed in an enemy state that has no qualms in doing extrajudiciary executions, punishments by association, and contravenes the most basic rules of war engagement whne it suits their needs.
That Iran supports these organizations is not surprising, the US has its own puppets in the area and both countries play this macabre dance with gusto.
Those real guys you are mentioning have not attaked anybody that has not attacked them as far as I know. Al Quaeda has, any serious government should concentrate on that while keep an eye on Iran without make the mess worst than it is.
WHat Bush seems to want is to somehow fix the monumental idiocity that Iraq was by commiting the US to something even worst: the complete destruction of the Middle East, Israel included, as the only means to solve the crisis there.
No country in the region would be a functioning society anymore if the US decides to attack Iran. WHat the US should do is what many US presidents did with the USSR: contain the threat and wait the the idiocity that an Islamic Republic is collapses under its own weigth.
Since Mexicans are reclaming what used to be ours first.
The native population can send their representatives can negotiate with us one the US is an hispanic country (not that they will be very lucky, they should look at native people in Mexico itself for a clue about how bad they could be treated).
And although you jest, the only fair thing to do would to give to those people at least part of their *good* land back as a very small token of compensation.
But as your attitude points out, the legitimization of forceful removal of entire populations by force is a human trait that we may never manage to extirpate from our humanity.
Perl is bent on been unreadable.
You want to do a quick and dirty script to solve some small problem, perl will do, but then revisit the same script some time later and I am telling you, you will not know what you were thinking or why did you use a certain perl idiom that may have seen brilliant while coding in a hurry.
Perl has its place. Somewhere. I don't know where, but somewhere.
But in scripting there are many options that keep things simpler. Very often using the traditional UNIX pipes clarifies immensily a problem (because you have to digest the different parts of it) while perl my cloudy it in an unmantainable brilliant code snippet.
Because perl is not UNIX.
UNIX came first, perl was added later.
As an experienced System Administrator I still have to find a task that *requires* perl.
if (increment_them) {a++; b++;}
anything that prevent such abominations is a good thing.
I think you don't have a full grasp of prioritites....
.... can you please find us the place where it sees that you lost attribution for your own work when it is distributed under a free licence?
In order to troll successfully your claims have to past a basic lithmus test of credibility....
It is a waste of time and money.
And it creates unnecessary risks (why the fluffy bunny should you be touching that hardware when it is not failing?).
You will need to replace disks, no question about it, but given the redundancy and hot swappability in modern devices of enterprise quality, preemtive action just increases the risks of something else going wrong (pulling a cable, doing something stoopid).
Or tell me, how do you explain shuting down that machine by mistake when you were changing a diks that was in perfect working order? If I was your user, it would make absolutely no sense to me.
You just named one of the greatest piano players of the XXth century.
Allow me to stand as a mark od respect.
You can't replace something that is found to be infringing a patent.
A patent (at least in stupid legal systems like the US's) is the description of how to solve a problem, not the exact implementation of the solution.
If Linux is found infringing for "transfering digital images to a magentic device" lets say, then you can't reimplement the gimp or any other similar programs, because all would be doing more less the same.
THe problem with software patents is that they are maliciously broad, so the patent would actually say something like "transfering data to a storage device" so the patent owner blocks as much competition as possible.
Wake up and smell the coffee: software patents are an abomination because they are intending to stop the distribution of ideas (you can write any computer program in plain English. Software should be considered speech for bunnies sakes).
There are uncountable examples /. has brought to you in which companies with no product, but with a patent portfolio, can sue you quite happily and even win.
The horrific thing about patenting of software, is that you don't need to show any code.
You just need a vaguely described process that you may or may not have implemented, once in a court of law the bets are off, a patent can be so spacious that it can encompass things that have absolutely nothing to do with a real solution in the real world, and this would need to be interpreted by people that are not remotely technicaly proficient. The only thing to would need to be "demonstrated" is that the "infringing" software does something vaguely similar to what is described by the patent. Neither part needs to show their code.
If the SCO fiasco has showed us something, is that no matter if reason is on your side, if a company as smalle as SCO in relative terms, with no merit whatsoecver on their allegations, in a copyright and contract dispute (which are far narrower in scope than patents) can drag a case for years, just imagine what MS could do using all their billions, They could arguably paralize any commercial realeases of any other competing software, then the use by any big companies or institutions. That my friends, would be the end of FOSS as a bussiness model for at least the duration of any trial.
If you guys in the US do not wake up and smell the coffee, you are going to drag us in a wolrd in which only megacorporations are allowed to do any thinking. You may think I am paranoid, but just look at MS, their intentions are all too clear to be ignored.
So many more people should read that book.
That is 1984 guys, if you think people are needlesdly paranoid about ID cards I suggest you read this book and then think again.
The actors are in full view.
Purchasers very often use credit cards, so any person with the correct legal clearance. can get to the person buiyng stuff anyway.
SO agian, which privacy issues?
Then we can compare equal with equal.
Stallman is promoting freedom in a country that has precious little of it.
If you can't see why that is a good thing, we have very little else to talk about regarding this topic.
When MS (or any other company for that matter) deals with repressive regimes, they profit from it.
By sharing knowledge (what is what FOSS is all about) nobody is profiting, Cubans are perfectly capable to do their own development and deployments, Red Hat or Novell are not going to go there any time soon.
And just for your information, there is no embargo when it comes to certain things, educational and cultural cooperation being one of them, which I think is what FOSS is all about (not a product, but technological education and cooperation).
I do not know how much of their budget Cubans use for repressive activities. What I know is that they devote a substantial amount to health and education (health standards are comparable to those of rich, developped countries, embargo and all), so the hope would be that some of the money saved by using FOSS would also go to those activities.
... it is almost impossible to pirate software.
We all know all those copies of software, in uncountable countries around the world, sold on street stalls, are all the real deal.
Repressive regime? Yes.
Murderous? Show us your numbers and your sources.
There are many examples of tribal societites that can't be described in those terms.
Maybe when humans associate in big conglomerates certain valued of solidarity dissapear, but it is not in our genese to be egoistic motherfuckers.