SCO can lose this piddling point only if their lawyer is dumber than ESR is. But ESR makes his money reprinting other peoples' words, so he can't be too smart. I'd make it 60-40 SCO leaves ESR in a puddle on the courtroom floor.
If Linus developed Linux before 1998 (and he did) then he used trade secrets, since the Lions book didn't become available to the public until 1998.
AT&T did due diligence on the Lions book. Everyone obtaining it knew it was improperly distributed. Anything derived from it was developed using UNIX trade secrets.
AT&T protected the Lions book. If it got into the public, that doesn't abrogate any of their IP rights. And it means any work derived from anything in the book was illegally derived.
People understand that mathematically proving a complicated computer program is an unprofitable task. It would be impossible to have software-controlled devices assisting in safety-critical situations if that were the absolute standard.
So those who adhere to standards apply a structured development organization and perform an acceptable level of inspection (i.e., proving), testing and documentation. If they do that correctly, then the government and courts will absolve them of most liabilities.
In the process, effectively almost all of the program is proved mathematically, though the proofs are done only in the eyes of an experienced inspector checking for "program correctness", and documented only as a mark on a checklist. If the inspector sees a construct that is likely to be dangerous, he should have it rewritten by the developer to be recognizably safe, or tested exhaustively by the tester.
It's not a perfect system, but it's enough until someone sues the government for allowing it to have holes.
He has no case. He'd have to show that the IP holder knew about the failure to NDA and did nothing about it. If the failure to NDA was between a sublicensee and an employee, that wouldn't count as abandonment of the IP rights. The IP rights weren't ever abandond. Bell Labs did due diligence on the Lions book. The people who bought UNIX since have kept it close because really all they had bought was the IP.
Movie pricing is kept simple because, traditionally, moviegoers are simpler than theatergoers.
The popularity of The Matrix trilogy should prove that.
Why health care is expensive.
on
Build Your Own ECG
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Econ 101.
Inelastic pricing.
You pay whatever we ask, or you die, or lie there in pain and fear.
Oh, and we'll pretend we have these standards for quality of drugs and equipment and caregivers, but that's just to forestall liability. This stuff is just as crappy as the stuff you buy at Walgreens, and these people are just as incompetent as the people who work at Walgreens.
And half of it is padding and sandbagging because you're too ignorant to know that you don't use a rheostat in a colonoscopy.
And we have all the money now, so we own the votes we need to stop you whenever you try to change the system by changing the law.
Now. Back to the price.
Every time you upgrade your video card
on
Ant Farm PC
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The first operating system I ever learned was JCL for the 360. I was 14, and learning it and FORTRAN on my own by reading a book, with no access to hardware, until later on when I got into the school's computer classes.
I learned all of JCL (don't remember a thing off the top of my head, btw; it was over a quarter-century ago, after all...) and stopped using it almost as soon as I started, because the teacher came back from Comsat on the day after our weekly run and chewed me out because the Comsat ops had chewed her out because I had put a few cards in that did things like rack the printer and, iirc, reset the machine during our batch...oops...
Physical ballots can be replaced surreptitiously as easily as software can. In either case, the problem is physical security failure.
Paper ballots do not promise a proper recount any more than electronic ballots do in the case of compromised physical security. Even to the point that the people doing the recount are not unknown to lie about their counts. But placing the data store through multiple independently secured recount programs would be very fast, very cheap, and would immediately uncover any errors or chicanery.
Ensuring the security of software is far easier than ensuring the physical security of transporting tons of paper ballots around the state, and while it would still be personnel intensive, would be far less expensive.
As we saw in the Florida elections, aside from the fallibility of the punchcard ballots, the primary fallibilities were the bias of the Secretary of State and the State Troopers guarding the way to the polling places. And finally, the biased loyalties of the state and U.S. Supreme Courts.
Redundant, secured, bias-neutralized electronic systems would go much farther towards making polls secure and trusted.
Microsoft just paid SCO for a UNIX license so it wouldn't have to worry about being accused of stealing any more.
Microsoft has lawyers that crap all over the Department of Justice. They wouldn't pay for a license from a two-bit, nearly bankrupt holding company if they didn't think they had to.
ESR is playing the Jean Valjean part, appealing to emotion to contravene the law. But he's not stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family, he's stealing $millions in IP to keep his business in the black. He's hardly the symbol of pathos Victor Hugo gave us.
I did read the article. Twice. I didn't see a legal argument in there. Just a thief, whining that he won't be able to profit from stolen property any more.
Private members are not a security feature.
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OO coders have known this for a couple of decades, I think. (I forget; when was the "private member" invented?)
Private members are a reliability measure, preventing subclasses from accessing members in dangerous ways, but certainly are not a security feature, because it's always possible to troll the object code.
Oh, and BTW: The Internet is not secure, either. "Internet Security" is a security blanket, not a security door.
After he became famous by stealing the Jargon File and publishing it for his own benefit, he's moved on to writing fluffy, irrelevant, legally moot junk in an attempt to deprive SCO of any of its legal rights to the intellectual property it owns.
Long ago in an undergrad computing theory course, we proved that the most efficient counting system was base-e, with each place in a number being a power of Napier's constant, e.
However, since every power of e is transcendental, every whole number would be an infinite decimal.
Thus proving that efficiency is not always practical.
Base-2 is close enough, but base-3 would be closer.
The point of the paper ballots is to recreate the original result of the ballotting, not simply prove that ballots were destroyed. It's worthless if the proof of the result *can* be destroyed by force or accident.
Slashdot Mirror
"Initital draft"
So he--as usual--keeps changing his story.
And now he's off the "position paper" and onto trying to find evidence that won't help him prove a thing.
SCO can lose this piddling point only if their lawyer is dumber than ESR is. But ESR makes his money reprinting other peoples' words, so he can't be too smart. I'd make it 60-40 SCO leaves ESR in a puddle on the courtroom floor.
If Linus developed Linux before 1998 (and he did) then he used trade secrets, since the Lions book didn't become available to the public until 1998.
AT&T did due diligence on the Lions book. Everyone obtaining it knew it was improperly distributed. Anything derived from it was developed using UNIX trade secrets.
Trade secrets are IP, Einstein.
Next time, Eric, post under your own name.
Did I say "copyright"?
I said "IP".
Of which trade secrets are an important part.
AT&T protected the Lions book. If it got into the public, that doesn't abrogate any of their IP rights. And it means any work derived from anything in the book was illegally derived.
ESR may be helping SCO find more people to sue.
It's not a "failure to recognize."
It's a business decision.
People understand that mathematically proving a complicated computer program is an unprofitable task. It would be impossible to have software-controlled devices assisting in safety-critical situations if that were the absolute standard.
So those who adhere to standards apply a structured development organization and perform an acceptable level of inspection (i.e., proving), testing and documentation. If they do that correctly, then the government and courts will absolve them of most liabilities.
In the process, effectively almost all of the program is proved mathematically, though the proofs are done only in the eyes of an experienced inspector checking for "program correctness", and documented only as a mark on a checklist. If the inspector sees a construct that is likely to be dangerous, he should have it rewritten by the developer to be recognizably safe, or tested exhaustively by the tester.
It's not a perfect system, but it's enough until someone sues the government for allowing it to have holes.
He has no case. He'd have to show that the IP holder knew about the failure to NDA and did nothing about it. If the failure to NDA was between a sublicensee and an employee, that wouldn't count as abandonment of the IP rights. The IP rights weren't ever abandond. Bell Labs did due diligence on the Lions book. The people who bought UNIX since have kept it close because really all they had bought was the IP.
And your metaphor with the polls is just silly.
Take it from someone who lives in t'weed country.
They roll and roll and roll...until they hit something. Then they sit until they rot.
And if you're dropping them where they can't possibly hit anything, then why make them ambulatory? The climate won't change until the terrain does.
Movie pricing is kept simple because, traditionally, moviegoers are simpler than theatergoers.
The popularity of The Matrix trilogy should prove that.
Econ 101.
Inelastic pricing.
You pay whatever we ask, or you die, or lie there in pain and fear.
Oh, and we'll pretend we have these standards for quality of drugs and equipment and caregivers, but that's just to forestall liability. This stuff is just as crappy as the stuff you buy at Walgreens, and these people are just as incompetent as the people who work at Walgreens.
And half of it is padding and sandbagging because you're too ignorant to know that you don't use a rheostat in a colonoscopy.
And we have all the money now, so we own the votes we need to stop you whenever you try to change the system by changing the law.
Now. Back to the price.
God kills a hundred ants.
Because that mofo's gonna be looking for work in 18 months.
You don't know much about people.
If you discount any exploit, that is the one that will eventually result in compromise of the system.
Paper ballots won't improve the situation, they will only permit a false sense of confidence, and add both complexity and fragility to the system.
They are a waste of time and an open exploit path.
The first operating system I ever learned was JCL for the 360. I was 14, and learning it and FORTRAN on my own by reading a book, with no access to hardware, until later on when I got into the school's computer classes.
I learned all of JCL (don't remember a thing off the top of my head, btw; it was over a quarter-century ago, after all...) and stopped using it almost as soon as I started, because the teacher came back from Comsat on the day after our weekly run and chewed me out because the Comsat ops had chewed her out because I had put a few cards in that did things like rack the printer and, iirc, reset the machine during our batch...oops...
I've been a good boy ever since. Honest.
Stallman, as usual, is wrong.
Physical ballots can be replaced surreptitiously as easily as software can. In either case, the problem is physical security failure.
Paper ballots do not promise a proper recount any more than electronic ballots do in the case of compromised physical security. Even to the point that the people doing the recount are not unknown to lie about their counts. But placing the data store through multiple independently secured recount programs would be very fast, very cheap, and would immediately uncover any errors or chicanery.
Ensuring the security of software is far easier than ensuring the physical security of transporting tons of paper ballots around the state, and while it would still be personnel intensive, would be far less expensive.
As we saw in the Florida elections, aside from the fallibility of the punchcard ballots, the primary fallibilities were the bias of the Secretary of State and the State Troopers guarding the way to the polling places. And finally, the biased loyalties of the state and U.S. Supreme Courts.
Redundant, secured, bias-neutralized electronic systems would go much farther towards making polls secure and trusted.
Microsoft pimp?
Microsoft just paid SCO for a UNIX license so it wouldn't have to worry about being accused of stealing any more.
Microsoft has lawyers that crap all over the Department of Justice. They wouldn't pay for a license from a two-bit, nearly bankrupt holding company if they didn't think they had to.
ESR is playing the Jean Valjean part, appealing to emotion to contravene the law. But he's not stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family, he's stealing $millions in IP to keep his business in the black. He's hardly the symbol of pathos Victor Hugo gave us.
I did read the article. Twice. I didn't see a legal argument in there. Just a thief, whining that he won't be able to profit from stolen property any more.
OO coders have known this for a couple of decades, I think. (I forget; when was the "private member" invented?)
Private members are a reliability measure, preventing subclasses from accessing members in dangerous ways, but certainly are not a security feature, because it's always possible to troll the object code.
Oh, and BTW: The Internet is not secure, either. "Internet Security" is a security blanket, not a security door.
After he became famous by stealing the Jargon File and publishing it for his own benefit, he's moved on to writing fluffy, irrelevant, legally moot junk in an attempt to deprive SCO of any of its legal rights to the intellectual property it owns.
Not.
So it takes half the power to extract silicon from silica.
Big whoop.
It's one step in the thousand-step process from deciding to scoop sand to powering up an integrated circuit.
Stuff that matters. Says so right up there on the banner. Try to keep it that way.
You've contradicted yourself.
A right is a defense against superior might.
Long ago in an undergrad computing theory course, we proved that the most efficient counting system was base-e, with each place in a number being a power of Napier's constant, e.
However, since every power of e is transcendental, every whole number would be an infinite decimal.
Thus proving that efficiency is not always practical.
Base-2 is close enough, but base-3 would be closer.
What happens if you take both pills?
You've just allowed the exploit to succeed.
The point of the paper ballots is to recreate the original result of the ballotting, not simply prove that ballots were destroyed. It's worthless if the proof of the result *can* be destroyed by force or accident.
Where are the other 20 projects of this scope necessary to reanimenate the personal computer industry?