Many of the "rules" you describe have never been tested in court. Not only that a number of them advocated by many appear to fall in the category of wishful thinking.
In particular the idea that something that is distributed separately is a derivative work just because it uses any kind of interface to another work whatsoever without actually incorporating that work is positively ridiculous. By that standard _every_ Win32 program is a derivative of Windows.
Most GPL libraries are pretty explicit that EVERYTHING is an internal interface and referencing it make a derivative work
Guess what? No license has the power to make something a derivative work just by do declaring. That is a question of copyright law that as absolutely nothing to do with what any license says about it.
There are actions that a licensor can take to discourage the runtime dynamic linking of their code to code with licenses they disagree with, but generally speaking copyright law gives them absolutely no leverage against an end user, nor is any sort of license required to run a software package that one possesses a legitimate copy of.
The GPL (for example) simply cannot restrict how people run their code, and unless the distributor of the offending code is also a distributor of the GPLed code, there is very little the authors of the GPLed code can do about it.
In this case, I think the question is whether Windows checks the certificate revocation lists. It is a code signature, nothing to do with the browser per se.
The whitepaper is silent on the subject, but presumably there is some sort of secure authentication, if not encryption scheme. If not this protocol is more or less worthless.
Because I, J, K, L, M, or variable names beginnning with them, are integers in Fortran
I am afraid the tradition is much older than that. "i", "j", and "k" are standard subscript variables in math and physics, almost as common as "x", "y", and "z".
I believe for practical reasons nearly all of these internationalized domains will be aliases for romanized domain names that can easily be used by anyone from anywhere.
If the Windows developers had a clue, they would make it so that application developers could update their software without requiring a reboot much of the time. Reboot intervals should be measured in years, not hours.
The Windows mandatory file locking scheme is brain damaged. Windows filesystems need to support a mode where a file can be replaced (Unix style) without disturbing people who currently have a file open for read only access (like running executables, for example).
ACTA is an end run around the legislative process. Treaties like this should ratify what is already the the consensus of the legislative bodies of the participating countries, not try to legislate entirely new bodies of law by subterfuge, on a take it or be considered an international pariah basis. Unelected international bureaucrats have no business deciding what that consensus should be.
Early termination fees are simply part of the way service providers effectively finance equipment purchases at above market prices and at exorbitant rates of interest, while hiding that fact from the user as much as possible.
Doesn't death let you out of any contracts you are in by law?
Yes, but that doesn't mean your estate is off the hook. If you have any assets in your name when you die, those assets must be applied to any outstanding debts. That is what probate is all about. The reminder goes to your heirs.
Now the Court has issued its ruling: signatures are part of the public record.
The Court decided no such thing. What the Court did rule was that a law that made them part of the public record did not violate the First Amendment. Whether petition signatures are actually part of the public record is up to the states.
Using a nonstandard video format defeats the that purpose
You have got to be kidding. WebM is freely available. H.264 is not. Both are well specified. The former is likely to become far more predominant than the latter due to the lack of patent encumbrances. That means WebM is likely to become far more "standard" than H.264 will ever be.
H.264 is well on its way to becoming the Mac of the codec word. Precious, rare, and expensive.
Unless you are writing a wide audience Internet facing e-commerce site, I would forgo any special measures to support IE6 completely. That is what Microsoft wants you to do. IE6 is so old that going out of your way to support it is usually a waste of time.
IE7, on the other hand, probably needs to be supported for two more years, and IE8 for five, on most general purpose websites. Seven years is more than enough.
The best part about this preview is the addition of HTML5 Canvas support, the lack of which would be a serious impediment to cross platform deployment of a large number of useful applications.
"we can stop payment at any time for any reason but you are required to finish the job or face litigation"
A valid contract has an essential property called "consideration", essentially a fancy way of saying quid pro quo, or something for something. A good judge should have laughed the cell phone company out of court, and denied their claim as a matter of public policy.
"The real scam is where companies charge overage rates that are radically out of line with the average cost of delivering bandwidth."
Really? If this happened that often, there would be an outcry
Historically, it has been pretty much standard practice with voice minute overages. If the cell phone companies don't adopt similar tactics with data plans in the future it will be a considerable victory. When the marginal rate for something goes up instead of down with increasing quantity, something is usually very wrong. They call it "economies of scale" for a reason.
In part, that is because Apple intentionally adopted a PDF style rendering model in Quartz. Not actual PDF, mind you, but very similar at a low level. Less translation required, and the translation is more accurate. It is too bad Apple and Adobe don't get along very well anymore. Apple probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for Adobe, and possibly the reverse as well.
PDF is not a variant of Postscript. Postscript is intrinsically a Forth like programming language with rendering commands. PDF is intrinsically a list of objects to render. Of course more recent PDF implementations have Javascript style scripting, but that has little or nothing to do with the rendering process. The link you refer to is mostly a bunch of marketing hype, unfortunately, but this sentence is relevant:
A PDF file is actually a PostScript file which has already been interpreted by a RIP and made into clearly defined objects.
That is not completely accurate (there is no Postscript when the conversion process is complete, nor is Postscript required to produce a PDF file), but you get the idea. You can get more information about the technical details of PDF here and here (PDF).
It is unlikely, even in a perfectly competitive market, that there wouldn't both be be a minimum monthly charge (for having service at all), and data plans where you get up to so many GB in a base charge, and some overage fee or throttling after that.
The former is a simple matter of cost, the latter is due to the strong preference on the part of customers for fixed monthly rates, plus the ability (as you describe) to maintain a sizeable per-customer profit margin even on those that do not use very much data, without driving away those that use more typical amounts.
The real scam is where companies charge overage rates that are radically out of line with the average cost of delivering bandwidth. They make a lot of money that way, of course, but it is such a shady practice it ought to be regulated out of existence. Customers have to play a game to change plans all the time not to gain some marginal advantage or another, but to avoid being sent to the poor house.
You keep trying to argue any number of points I haven't the slightest disagreement with. My only substantive disagreement is over nomenclature, and it is not worth further debate.
They indicated that text messages are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy.
So? That doesn't mean that the fourth amendment or (strictly speaking) "a fourth amendment standard" applies in any way shape or form to all cases involving text messages.
Other than that, I don't see any disagreement. So as this argument is getting rather tedious, perhaps we should quit.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the "rules" you describe have never been tested in court. Not only that a number of them advocated by many appear to fall in the category of wishful thinking.
In particular the idea that something that is distributed separately is a derivative work just because it uses any kind of interface to another work whatsoever without actually incorporating that work is positively ridiculous. By that standard _every_ Win32 program is a derivative of Windows.
Most GPL libraries are pretty explicit that EVERYTHING is an internal interface and referencing it make a derivative work
Guess what? No license has the power to make something a derivative work just by do declaring. That is a question of copyright law that as absolutely nothing to do with what any license says about it.
There are actions that a licensor can take to discourage the runtime dynamic linking of their code to code with licenses they disagree with, but generally speaking copyright law gives them absolutely no leverage against an end user, nor is any sort of license required to run a software package that one possesses a legitimate copy of.
The GPL (for example) simply cannot restrict how people run their code, and unless the distributor of the offending code is also a distributor of the GPLed code, there is very little the authors of the GPLed code can do about it.
In this case, I think the question is whether Windows checks the certificate revocation lists. It is a code signature, nothing to do with the browser per se.
The whitepaper is silent on the subject, but presumably there is some sort of secure authentication, if not encryption scheme. If not this protocol is more or less worthless.
Because I, J, K, L, M, or variable names beginnning with them, are integers in Fortran
I am afraid the tradition is much older than that. "i", "j", and "k" are standard subscript variables in math and physics, almost as common as "x", "y", and "z".
No doubt he means pre-1978 copyright registration errors.
the very idea of an index makes very little sense if the entire table fits in RAM
You really think it is a good use of your CPU to scan through several GB of data to do a single row lookup?
I believe for practical reasons nearly all of these internationalized domains will be aliases for romanized domain names that can easily be used by anyone from anywhere.
They _where_? Twice in a row?
If the Windows developers had a clue, they would make it so that application developers could update their software without requiring a reboot much of the time. Reboot intervals should be measured in years, not hours.
The Windows mandatory file locking scheme is brain damaged. Windows filesystems need to support a mode where a file can be replaced (Unix style) without disturbing people who currently have a file open for read only access (like running executables, for example).
ACTA is an end run around the legislative process. Treaties like this should ratify what is already the the consensus of the legislative bodies of the participating countries, not try to legislate entirely new bodies of law by subterfuge, on a take it or be considered an international pariah basis. Unelected international bureaucrats have no business deciding what that consensus should be.
Early termination fees are simply part of the way service providers effectively finance equipment purchases at above market prices and at exorbitant rates of interest, while hiding that fact from the user as much as possible.
Doesn't death let you out of any contracts you are in by law?
Yes, but that doesn't mean your estate is off the hook. If you have any assets in your name when you die, those assets must be applied to any outstanding debts. That is what probate is all about. The reminder goes to your heirs.
Now the Court has issued its ruling: signatures are part of the public record.
The Court decided no such thing. What the Court did rule was that a law that made them part of the public record did not violate the First Amendment. Whether petition signatures are actually part of the public record is up to the states.
Using a nonstandard video format defeats the that purpose
You have got to be kidding. WebM is freely available. H.264 is not. Both are well specified. The former is likely to become far more predominant than the latter due to the lack of patent encumbrances. That means WebM is likely to become far more "standard" than H.264 will ever be.
H.264 is well on its way to becoming the Mac of the codec word. Precious, rare, and expensive.
Unless you are writing a wide audience Internet facing e-commerce site, I would forgo any special measures to support IE6 completely. That is what Microsoft wants you to do. IE6 is so old that going out of your way to support it is usually a waste of time.
IE7, on the other hand, probably needs to be supported for two more years, and IE8 for five, on most general purpose websites. Seven years is more than enough.
The best part about this preview is the addition of HTML5 Canvas support, the lack of which would be a serious impediment to cross platform deployment of a large number of useful applications.
Out of curiosity, which provision of the Magnusson Moss Act covers reverse engineering? I thought it was all about warranties.
"we can stop payment at any time for any reason but you are required to finish the job or face litigation"
A valid contract has an essential property called "consideration", essentially a fancy way of saying quid pro quo, or something for something. A good judge should have laughed the cell phone company out of court, and denied their claim as a matter of public policy.
Historically, it has been pretty much standard practice with voice minute overages. If the cell phone companies don't adopt similar tactics with data plans in the future it will be a considerable victory. When the marginal rate for something goes up instead of down with increasing quantity, something is usually very wrong. They call it "economies of scale" for a reason.
In part, that is because Apple intentionally adopted a PDF style rendering model in Quartz. Not actual PDF, mind you, but very similar at a low level. Less translation required, and the translation is more accurate. It is too bad Apple and Adobe don't get along very well anymore. Apple probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for Adobe, and possibly the reverse as well.
PDF is not a variant of Postscript. Postscript is intrinsically a Forth like programming language with rendering commands. PDF is intrinsically a list of objects to render. Of course more recent PDF implementations have Javascript style scripting, but that has little or nothing to do with the rendering process. The link you refer to is mostly a bunch of marketing hype, unfortunately, but this sentence is relevant:
That is not completely accurate (there is no Postscript when the conversion process is complete, nor is Postscript required to produce a PDF file), but you get the idea. You can get more information about the technical details of PDF here and here (PDF).
It is unlikely, even in a perfectly competitive market, that there wouldn't both be be a minimum monthly charge (for having service at all), and data plans where you get up to so many GB in a base charge, and some overage fee or throttling after that.
The former is a simple matter of cost, the latter is due to the strong preference on the part of customers for fixed monthly rates, plus the ability (as you describe) to maintain a sizeable per-customer profit margin even on those that do not use very much data, without driving away those that use more typical amounts.
The real scam is where companies charge overage rates that are radically out of line with the average cost of delivering bandwidth. They make a lot of money that way, of course, but it is such a shady practice it ought to be regulated out of existence. Customers have to play a game to change plans all the time not to gain some marginal advantage or another, but to avoid being sent to the poor house.
it is not about having lots of bandwidth, its about insurance, or piece of mind
I have lost a piece of my mind, and I don't know where to find it.
You keep trying to argue any number of points I haven't the slightest disagreement with. My only substantive disagreement is over nomenclature, and it is not worth further debate.
They indicated that text messages are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy.
So? That doesn't mean that the fourth amendment or (strictly speaking) "a fourth amendment standard" applies in any way shape or form to all cases involving text messages.
Other than that, I don't see any disagreement. So as this argument is getting rather tedious, perhaps we should quit.