Actually, that's not where the lemon law comes into play. Lemon Laws generally put a limit on the number of defects or the number of times a defect must be repaired before the dealer has to buy the car back. So, if your new car has been in 8 times because the starter doesn't work, a Lemon Law would let you take the car back to the dealer as a lemon and demand your money back.
A car catching on fire is usually caught by product liability law or an implied warranty on the sale. In Microsoft's case, one of the purposes of the shrink-wrap EULA is to disclaim those as much as possible.
New Problems for RIAA
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WiFi Gone Wild
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· Score: 5, Interesting
So far, the RIAA's "sue the world" strategy has relied on subpoenas sent to ISPs to identify the filesharer who was using a specific IP address at a specific time. What happens when the ISP has no idea: "Well, it was somebody travelling on I-20."? If the ISP were a private entity, the RIAA _may_ be able to sue the ISP. But, what happens when the ISP is the State of Texas? My one semester of ConLaw says that the 11th Amendment would bar that suit.
> And if more paper is needed, more crop will be planted.
So, you had me until that point. In the long run, it's probably true, as it is in most markets -- rising demand eventually leads to rising supply to meet the demand. But, the lead time on paper is a lot longer than it is on wheat. If the demand spikes next year, the price of paper will go up to offset the demand and some trees that weren't slated to be turned into paper will be turned into paper.
I think the original point was made in jest, and SCO would have to be idiots not to request electronic versions of the documents. IBM would probably face a contempt charge if it did sent over that much paper.
In a bunch of jurisdictions, certain terms in contracts need to be in all-caps. The idea is that courts don't want you burying things like "I disclaim all warranties" in the depths of a contract, and so require those parts to be in all-caps.
So, when you read a standard form contract, and there's a section there in all-caps, that's probably something that somebody thought needed to be brought to your attention.
Mmmm... Not so sure of that. You're saying that the requirement for injury is prudential (a rule that the court chooses to follow for "judicial economy") rather than constitutional (a rule that the court has to follow b/c it's in the Constitution.) If it's a constitutional limitation, then you can't just pass a statute that says "so and so has standing."
Think about it: Congress passes a law that says "any slashdot reader is allowed to sue Microsoft if they violate some antitrust law and hurt consumers in Sri Lanka." Is the court really going to say "Ok. You're a Pennsylvania resident. You haven't been injured in the least, but we'll let you sue anyway"?
In any case, it's a horrible idea -- why does the government need to step in here? Seems to me that the copyright holders have proved themselves perfectly capable of doing their own suing.
So, recognize that I've only had one semester of constitutional law, but....
Article III Section 2 of the US Constitution says that the judicial power applies to "cases" and "Controversies." Under current constitutional doctrine, this means that in order to get into federal courts on a civil matter, there is a requirement that the person bringing the suit have standing: He has to have an injury which can be remedied by the court.
I don't think that the Justice Department would have standing because it neither (1) has been injured nor (2) is an organization litigating the rights of its members, who have been injured -- this is about what happens when the RIAA sues people.
IANAL (yet...), so don't consider this legal advice. But, the whole thing just seems a bit fishy.
(1) What does VoIP offer to telecommunications providers?
(2) What does VoIP offer to end users?
The answer to (1) is basically that it's cheaper to run one network than two. With VoIP (or VoATM or any voice-over-packet technology), companies that want to offer both voice and data service really only need the network intrastructure for the data service. The amount of data transmitted on commercial networks surpassed the amount of voice transmitted in the last 1990s, and has been growing at a much faster rate since then. Voice is rapidly becoming a blip in the whole landscape. At the same time, data networking equipment is a lot cheaper than voice equipment.
Voice, however, is still where most of the revenue is. So, the solution has been to use voice to provide the revenue to build the data networks, and just carry the voice over the data networks.
The answer to (2) depends on how integrated you want your telecommunications to be. You can do things like forward voice-mail in an e-mail and so on. In addition, there is a price advantage -- long-distance over VoIP is 10-50% the price of the same thing over TDM.
If you want to see complicated, check out a telephone switch. The DMS-100, a popular switch, has more lines of code than the space shuttle.
VoIP is the long-term solution. You may have analog phones in your house for a long time, but once it gets out of your neighborhood, it'll be Voice over Packet behind your back.
Incidently, one thing that Cell Phones still don't universally do is provide location information to the 911 people when you call them.
IMHO and IANAL (but I hope to be one in 2 years), so don't take this as legal advice:
It won't hold up in court. Liquidated damages are supposed to be an approximation of actual damages incurred. If they're not, then they amount to an illegal penalty, which courts do not enforce. Here, neither the $5M nor $250/phone call is an approximation of their actual cost. As a result, those "liquidated damages" would be tossed out.
Along that lines, if you cancel your cell phone contract 2 days before it expires, the cell phone company is going to have difficulty proving that their damages for those 2 days amount anywhere close to $200.
If you're renting an apartment and want to get out of the lease early, go and find somebody else to finish off the lease for you. You ought to be able to get out of it because the new person means that they haven't suffered any loss.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're different. The problem that you may end up with in playing these games with either your cell phone provider or landlord is that you may need to go to court to resolve it, and that's probably more expensive than what you're saving.
Pfft. There have always been people, including protestants, willing to do things for the greater good of society. The Salvation Army (mainly protestant), for example, has been around since Civil War times.
Even the production of intellectual property -- the idea of freely sharing ideas -- has been around for a long time. For example, 'Fine Woodworking' magazine, about as far away from software as you can get, has a space where readers write in a blurb about the clever ways that they've used to solve problems. There is some marginal compensation for the 'best' one in each issue, but people share their ideas -- their IP -- with others because there's a sense of community.
Productive leisure activity has been around for as long as knitting, sewing, painting and whittling.
In reality, part of the reason that many people give away the product of their work is because there is no reasonable way for them to make money off of it: Not only is there no inexpensive mechanism to charge, but there isn't even a good way to figure out how much to charge.
There are also non-monetary forms of payback. Law Reviews, for example, generally don't pay anything to the writers of their articles. But, the writers get prestiege in a specific community. People who contribute to free (as in speech) software also receive similar benefits.
Occasionally pragmatic business reasons for doing so exist, especially in the world of communications standards. For example, the IETF relies on 'loose consensus and running code' in the promulgation of internet standards. If you're a corporation trying to push a standard, you can help yourself by publishing a free version.
There are probably people producing software just out of the goodness of their hearts, with no desire for any other benefit to themselves. But, I don't think you can characterize the entire free software movement as being like that.
Even James Boyle, one of the 'Copy Left' people in the book, has said that he likes earning royalties from the publication of his works. (I happened to take a class from him in the fall.)
Well, this isn't exactly right. In the US, at least, copyright violation is generally a civil charge, not a criminal charge. Basically, this means that you have a right to sue them. If you win, then you can likely get either an injunction ordering them to stop using your work, collect damages or both. You may collect damages for past infringement and get an injunction preventing future infringement, for example.
In either case, two things to do: 1. register the copyright. 2. See a lawyer.
(BTW... That wasn't legal advice. IANAL, so I can't give it....)
Uhh... So, I've only completed my first semester of law school, which included a course on contracts. So, IANAL. Anyway... in the best of worlds, this would be true. In the real world, however, it's not. The fact is that we agree to standard form contracts all the time which we don't fully understand. And, as long as the contract terms are not 'unconscionable' (nice lawyerly double negative there), they're generally enforced.
As far as the 'we may amend this at any time' deal, you do in fact agree by continuing to use the service after having received the update.
If you think about it, this makes some sense -- you don't want to have to negotiate your cell phone contract through a lawyer, for example.
Geez... Been in law school for under 3 months and it's already coming in handy.
The deal behind the litany of affirmative defenses is that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Rules 8(c)-8(d), for those who care), if SCO doesn't assert these defenses in its response, then it can't assert them later. So, the standard trick for lawyers is to put in everything but the kitchen sink.
Also, under rule 8(e), they're allowed to state as many defenses as they can, 'regardless of consistency.'
Now, they're really only supposed to list the real defenses and they could get into trouble for listing frivolous ones (I think their first affirmative defense is frivolous, for example). But, sanctions for this sort of thing don't happen as often as they probably should. They do run the risk of PO'ing the judge, though....
Why not just buy a copy from somebody else? If it costs $X to buy the list, offer somebody who has it $X/2.
To my knowledge, in the US, databases still are not copyrightable. Even if they were, I don't think that the government is allowed to copyright its own work.
So, if I can cut to the chase, the *MOST* that was done here under the provisions of the Patriot Act is that some people were told, in advance, that the FBI was going to try to subpoena their records, so they should take care to make sure they're not destroyed before the subpoena actually happened.
Nothing has changed with regard to the government's ability to get the subpoenas or their ability enforce those subpoenas. They're just giving fair notice "Hey... I'm going to try to get these things. Please make sure that they're not destroyed."
I fail to see how this is a big deal. Similarly, they could go to a gun dealer and say "Hey. I'm going to try to subpoena records about this one guy, Bob, who bought an 'assault rifle' here. Please make sure that you don't inadvertantly allow those records to be destroyed."
The need for secrecy is pretty obvious -- if you were telling 30 people the same thing, and the first guy blabbed, then the next 29 could destroy their records before the request came in.
As soon as you add 'under the patriot act...' to a sentance, people have a knee-jerk reaction, even if the controversial provisions of that act aren't invoked.
This is actually one of the funny problems with VoIP. If you just take a standard phone call, you can packetize it and if you haven't tried to gather too much audio into one packet, the additional latency won't even be noticable on the other end. Heck, you can even drop an occasional packet and chances are nobody will notice.
Modems, however, do not handle either latency or packet loss well -- part of the initial V.(90??) standards take a latency measurement at the beginning, expecting it to be some small number that doesn't change. In VoIP, not only isn't the number small (closer to 100ms than 20ms), but it can vary over the life of the call.
So, what ends up happening is that your local gateway (the thing that converts between traditional phone and packet communications) listens for your modem tones and kicks in a V./G.whatever codec to convert it into packet. Then, at the far end, the same thing happens.
UGH... Talk about all the wrong things to do! The idea of fixing problems early is good, but your method of doing it sounds to be out of control.
There's no better way to guarantee that your product will never congeal than to be constantly changing it. What happens when the quirky code you just changed 5 minutes ago had just finished a month of testing and debugging? Or when your architectural re-write has a chain-reaction further downstream?
One of the most important things that good software development companies do is to track their defects, figure out where they came from and develop a plan for fixing them (or not...)
In the Apollo space program, the astronauts had a listing of every known bug in the computer software and what they needed to do when that bug got hit. You may ask "If they knew where these bugs were, why didn't they fix them?" It's a good question and I believe that the answer boiled down to "Because then you'd be introducing a bunch of bugs that you didn't know about."
Remember the time-money-quality (pick any 2) triangle.
How many people here have worked on significant software development projects that DIDN'T have something go wrong along the way. A common way to handle such problems without slipping the schedule is through overtime.
What is going to happen to this project when 3 weeks in, a problem happens that would otherwise require overtime? If the developers are already working at the max (or beyond it, as this case seems to say), then the managers have lost the flexibility to deal with those problems.
You're making a semantic argument. Their side has always been that copyright infringement is akin to stealing, not that it is legally and technically stealing.
The sharing thing is a decent point on their side -- I'm legally not allowed to make a copy of a CD and then let a friend borrow just the duplicate while I listen to the original, just like he can't borrow a photocopy of a book I own.
From there, though, it breaks down a little bit as follows: I am allowed to make a personal copy of a CD. But, let's pretend that I lose my original. Am I allowed to listen to my copy? Let's say somebody finds my original -- are they allowed to listen to it? What happens if they make a personal copy and then lose the original again?
Is the answer to the first question different if instead of losing my copy, it was destroyed? Let's say I have 2,000 CDs consuming a lot of space in a tiny apartment. So, I convert them to mp3 format. How can I legally get rid of the original copies without also having to get rid of the mp3s I've made from them? Or in order for me to legally use my mp3s, do I have to retain the originals? Would I have to send the originals back to the record companies?
mp3.com got into trouble because they broke the 'you can only have a duplicate made from your specific original' rule -- if you have the latest Dave Matthews CD, you have to rip and encode the mp3s yourself and can't just copy mine. I believe that you can send me (temporarily) a copy of the original and have me convert it to mp3 for you, as long as I don't retain a copy. Can I use lossless compression of my original in my transmission to you? What if I manage to achieve really great lossless compression, when I send you a 64-bit number, and you can decompress that to the entire original? And, how is that different from what mp3.com did (you inserted the disk in your machine, it pulled the identifying information from the disk and sent it to mp3.com, which effectively did a table lookup to decompress that information.)?
My point in all this is that traditional copyright (and fair-use, along with it) need to be redefined in terms of what technology makes possible. I'd argue that the DMCA is a head-in-the-sand step backwards from that direction.
So, first of all, a patent can easily cost $15K. Patent a few things that nobody wants and pretty soon, you've got through a lot of cash. Even if you do actually get a worthwhile patent, enforcing it is completely another manner -- your target company can tie you up in court for YEARS (costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars), at the end of which you may lose.
Secondly, you can't patent obvious or already existing technologies -- it's one of the reasons people can lose patent fights -- they patented something that somebody else invented or that anybody reasonably knowledgeable in the field would predict.
Finally, though, you can't just patent an idea -- it needs to be "reduced to practice." In other words, Wilbur and Orville couldn't just say "We have this great idea -- a flying machine. Please give us a patent on it." Part of the patent describes exactly how it works. Just patenting an idea while lying to the patent office that you've reduced it to practice is considered fraud.
Now, the problem with all this is that people regularly patent already existing ideas, they regularly patent obvious things and they regularly patent things that don't (or can't) exist. The patent office does not have the ability to make sure that every patent is good (cost, manpower, cost, speed of technology, cost, etc....) Instead, the USPTO effectively relies on patent litigation as a method of getting rid of crummy patents. Very inefficient and leads to people licensing technologies rather than spending the money to litigate obviously bad patents.
So, there are going to be two possible things that can come of this: One, the media companies will be effective at giving people what they want. In this case, both consumers and the media companies win.
The other option is that media companies are not effective at giving people what they want. In this case, people will stop listening to them and the media companies will lose. Consumers will lose a little in that the radios in their cars will become pretty much useless. However, they'll be able to branch out into other forms of entertainment -- DVDs, video games, independent music, web surfing, and so on. The real winners will be the companies that figure out how to give consumers what they want.
I think that one can make a pretty good argument that the media ownership rules have outlived their usefulness. When each city only had 4 TV stations, a dozen radio stations and one newspaper, the rules made some sense because it guaranteed a wider variety of information and entertainment. But now, if I don't like what's on my local radio station, I can stream music from some independent station across the country. If I think the news from my local ABC news/newspaper/6 favorite radio stations is biased, there are a thousand options for me on the internet.
I'd argue that local broadcast media (TV/radio) and local newspapers are something of an anachronism anyway, for everything but the local stuff. I don't receive the local paper, because I can go online and read the news (for free). I rarely watch network TV because I have 50 cable stations and I'd rather watch Comedy Central than ABC.
To me, this seems to be equivilant to complaining about how few choices we have in bus and train transportation, while ignoring the fact that we have so many choices in cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, airplanes, taxis, rollerskates, subways and so on.
So, I'm a very recent ex-nortel person who did a lot of packet stuff. If I recall correctly, Sprint's network is an ATM one, either AAL1 or AAL2. AAL5 is IP-over-ATM, and isn't as common.
Note that in general, these are all behind-the-scenes private networks. You will still be circuit-switched to a point (inside your local office, typically). Then there'll be a TDM-to-packet gateway which converts your circuit-switched connection into ATM (or IP).
From an IP point of view, one of the side effects of this is that you don't need a seperate IP address for every phone, or even a seperate address for every house. All you need is an IP address/port number combination for each end of an active call in any given network. (And there are ways of getting around that restriction too.) Since these are all private networks cut off from the internet, IPV4 provides more than enough addresses.
Packet telephony all the way to the home, at least from the telcos, is some ways off. You'd either have to have a gateway inside your house to which you connect all your legacy phones, or you'd replace all the phones with IP phones. As you can probably see, there's a lot of inertia behind that *not* happening -- try convincing your great uncle Bert that he needs to replace all the phones in his house.
Ok, so I'm a diving professional. Apart from what I've read, I don't know the exact details of the case. However, this definately seems to be one of those cases where they were all at fault.
The physics of what diving does to your body is not yet fully understood. Sure, we have models that tell you what your body should and should not be able to handle, but they're only approximations and their accuracy can vary widely by your body composition, your level of exhaustion, your level of hydration and so on. (Partying all night and drinking would be a very bad thing to do. Your computer doesn't count how many drinks you had or how late you stayed up.) Some of the factors are probably yet-to-be-discovered. To my knowledge, no computer yet even has a way of monitoring those variables, yet alone modeling them.
In any case, here are some mistakes that it appears the divers made:
1. Making increasingly deeper dives. This is exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do -- taking your deepest dive first. By increasing the dive depth, you allow nitrogen to build up in your system. Their second dive (which they aborted) was likely shallower than their third dive.
2. Extremely short surface interval -- the surfacing to replace camera lights.
3. Flying merely 8 1/2 hours after diving. After (presumably) several consecutive days of diving, a full day would have been more appropriate.
What would have made more sense? I would have finished the second dive and just not taken pictures and would have waited an additional day between diving and flying. There's a lot to do in Miami that doesn't require going 100 ft under water.
If the software was bad and the company knew it but didn't do anything about it, then they deserve what they get. *BUT*, had the divers acted more reasonably, they'd still be diving today.
Whether or not SCO has a legitimate claim remains to be seen -- the whole thing seems to be very nebulous without an example of SCO IP which converted into Linux, and then there's the whole "If it was infringing, then why did you have your own Linux distribution" question.
I suspect one reason that SCO isn't being specific is that if they were, it would take very little time for the Open Source community to re-write the code in a clean-room environment. And that would diminish their argument.
In any case, SCO has hit on a good point -- one of the problems with Open Source software is the whole intellectual property thing. It's quite possible for somebody else's IP to make it into the Linux Base, either intentionally or unintentionally. For example, what if there's some crazy Microsoft patent on filesystems that is inadverently infringed in ext3?
It appears to me that SCO, by threatening to sue end users, is pursuing a 'scorched earth policy' -- the idea being that "if we're going down, we're going to take as many people with us as we can. So, it's in your best interest to save us."
By theatening those end users, there's a chill that could come over adoption of open-source products. All Microsoft will ever need to do is say "Sure, the SCO lawsuit didn't turn into anything. But, how many other SCOs are out there? Do you really want to use Linux and risk all that litigation?"
(On the other hand, the letter's assertion that commercial software design processes include verifying legality of the IP used is laughable. When was the last time an engineer said "Hey! I have a great idea to solve this problem. I'd better see if it's patented before I code it up."?)
Argh... Let's remember that we're talking about a wide range of ages here -- 5 to 18 years old and within each age, kids have a wide range of maturity.
In general, your point is good -- if you have to force your kid to do something for the entire time he's living with you, chances are that he's not going to do it on his own once he leaves.
But, on the other side, just having the information about your kid's homework, discipline, class attendance and so on can be used in any number of ways. Consider: your 15-year-old who's been an A student suddenly starts skipping class and not doing his homework. Doesn't that indicate a problem that a parent may want to address sooner rather than later? Or your 6th grader starts falling behind in math... Wouldn't you want to know about that before the report card came so you could get her some help? If the 5th grader is getting great comments and grades in music class, maybe they'd be interested in learning a musical instrument.
The fact that the information is available doesn't mean that the parents have to get it, or that there's any particular way in which they have to use it.
One interesting point, which I haven't seen brought up is the fact that many high school seniors are 18 and are thus no longer minors. It strikes me that they should have the right to deny access to their information.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's not where the lemon law comes into play. Lemon Laws generally put a limit on the number of defects or the number of times a defect must be repaired before the dealer has to buy the car back. So, if your new car has been in 8 times because the starter doesn't work, a Lemon Law would let you take the car back to the dealer as a lemon and demand your money back.
A car catching on fire is usually caught by product liability law or an implied warranty on the sale. In Microsoft's case, one of the purposes of the shrink-wrap EULA is to disclaim those as much as possible.
So far, the RIAA's "sue the world" strategy has relied on subpoenas sent to ISPs to identify the filesharer who was using a specific IP address at a specific time. What happens when the ISP has no idea: "Well, it was somebody travelling on I-20."? If the ISP were a private entity, the RIAA _may_ be able to sue the ISP. But, what happens when the ISP is the State of Texas? My one semester of ConLaw says that the 11th Amendment would bar that suit.
> And if more paper is needed, more crop will be planted.
So, you had me until that point. In the long run, it's probably true, as it is in most markets -- rising demand eventually leads to rising supply to meet the demand. But, the lead time on paper is a lot longer than it is on wheat. If the demand spikes next year, the price of paper will go up to offset the demand and some trees that weren't slated to be turned into paper will be turned into paper.
I think the original point was made in jest, and SCO would have to be idiots not to request electronic versions of the documents. IBM would probably face a contempt charge if it did sent over that much paper.
In a bunch of jurisdictions, certain terms in contracts need to be in all-caps. The idea is that courts don't want you burying things like "I disclaim all warranties" in the depths of a contract, and so require those parts to be in all-caps.
So, when you read a standard form contract, and there's a section there in all-caps, that's probably something that somebody thought needed to be brought to your attention.
Mmmm... Not so sure of that. You're saying that the requirement for injury is prudential (a rule that the court chooses to follow for "judicial economy") rather than constitutional (a rule that the court has to follow b/c it's in the Constitution.) If it's a constitutional limitation, then you can't just pass a statute that says "so and so has standing."
Think about it: Congress passes a law that says "any slashdot reader is allowed to sue Microsoft if they violate some antitrust law and hurt consumers in Sri Lanka." Is the court really going to say "Ok. You're a Pennsylvania resident. You haven't been injured in the least, but we'll let you sue anyway"?
In any case, it's a horrible idea -- why does the government need to step in here? Seems to me that the copyright holders have proved themselves perfectly capable of doing their own suing.
So, recognize that I've only had one semester of constitutional law, but....
Article III Section 2 of the US Constitution says that the judicial power applies to "cases" and "Controversies." Under current constitutional doctrine, this means that in order to get into federal courts on a civil matter, there is a requirement that the person bringing the suit have standing: He has to have an injury which can be remedied by the court.
I don't think that the Justice Department would have standing because it neither (1) has been injured nor (2) is an organization litigating the rights of its members, who have been injured -- this is about what happens when the RIAA sues people.
IANAL (yet...), so don't consider this legal advice. But, the whole thing just seems a bit fishy.
So, there are really two sides to the question:
(1) What does VoIP offer to telecommunications providers?
(2) What does VoIP offer to end users?
The answer to (1) is basically that it's cheaper to run one network than two. With VoIP (or VoATM or any voice-over-packet technology), companies that want to offer both voice and data service really only need the network intrastructure for the data service. The amount of data transmitted on commercial networks surpassed the amount of voice transmitted in the last 1990s, and has been growing at a much faster rate since then. Voice is rapidly becoming a blip in the whole landscape. At the same time, data networking equipment is a lot cheaper than voice equipment.
Voice, however, is still where most of the revenue is. So, the solution has been to use voice to provide the revenue to build the data networks, and just carry the voice over the data networks.
The answer to (2) depends on how integrated you want your telecommunications to be. You can do things like forward voice-mail in an e-mail and so on. In addition, there is a price advantage -- long-distance over VoIP is 10-50% the price of the same thing over TDM.
If you want to see complicated, check out a telephone switch. The DMS-100, a popular switch, has more lines of code than the space shuttle.
VoIP is the long-term solution. You may have analog phones in your house for a long time, but once it gets out of your neighborhood, it'll be Voice over Packet behind your back.
Incidently, one thing that Cell Phones still don't universally do is provide location information to the 911 people when you call them.
--
C
IMHO and IANAL (but I hope to be one in 2 years), so don't take this as legal advice:
It won't hold up in court. Liquidated damages are supposed to be an approximation of actual damages incurred. If they're not, then they amount to an illegal penalty, which courts do not enforce. Here, neither the $5M nor $250/phone call is an approximation of their actual cost. As a result, those "liquidated damages" would be tossed out.
Along that lines, if you cancel your cell phone contract 2 days before it expires, the cell phone company is going to have difficulty proving that their damages for those 2 days amount anywhere close to $200.
If you're renting an apartment and want to get out of the lease early, go and find somebody else to finish off the lease for you. You ought to be able to get out of it because the new person means that they haven't suffered any loss.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're different. The problem that you may end up with in playing these games with either your cell phone provider or landlord is that you may need to go to court to resolve it, and that's probably more expensive than what you're saving.
Pfft. There have always been people, including protestants, willing to do things for the greater good of society. The Salvation Army (mainly protestant), for example, has been around since Civil War times.
Even the production of intellectual property -- the idea of freely sharing ideas -- has been around for a long time. For example, 'Fine Woodworking' magazine, about as far away from software as you can get, has a space where readers write in a blurb about the clever ways that they've used to solve problems. There is some marginal compensation for the 'best' one in each issue, but people share their ideas -- their IP -- with others because there's a sense of community.
Productive leisure activity has been around for as long as knitting, sewing, painting and whittling.
In reality, part of the reason that many people give away the product of their work is because there is no reasonable way for them to make money off of it: Not only is there no inexpensive mechanism to charge, but there isn't even a good way to figure out how much to charge.
There are also non-monetary forms of payback. Law Reviews, for example, generally don't pay anything to the writers of their articles. But, the writers get prestiege in a specific community. People who contribute to free (as in speech) software also receive similar benefits.
Occasionally pragmatic business reasons for doing so exist, especially in the world of communications standards. For example, the IETF relies on 'loose consensus and running code' in the promulgation of internet standards. If you're a corporation trying to push a standard, you can help yourself by publishing a free version.
There are probably people producing software just out of the goodness of their hearts, with no desire for any other benefit to themselves. But, I don't think you can characterize the entire free software movement as being like that.
Even James Boyle, one of the 'Copy Left' people in the book, has said that he likes earning royalties from the publication of his works. (I happened to take a class from him in the fall.)
Well, this isn't exactly right. In the US, at least, copyright violation is generally a civil charge, not a criminal charge. Basically, this means that you have a right to sue them. If you win, then you can likely get either an injunction ordering them to stop using your work, collect damages or both. You may collect damages for past infringement and get an injunction preventing future infringement, for example.
In either case, two things to do: 1. register the copyright. 2. See a lawyer.
(BTW... That wasn't legal advice. IANAL, so I can't give it....)
Uhh... So, I've only completed my first semester of law school, which included a course on contracts. So, IANAL. Anyway... in the best of worlds, this would be true. In the real world, however, it's not. The fact is that we agree to standard form contracts all the time which we don't fully understand. And, as long as the contract terms are not 'unconscionable' (nice lawyerly double negative there), they're generally enforced.
As far as the 'we may amend this at any time' deal, you do in fact agree by continuing to use the service after having received the update.
If you think about it, this makes some sense -- you don't want to have to negotiate your cell phone contract through a lawyer, for example.
Geez... Been in law school for under 3 months and it's already coming in handy.
The deal behind the litany of affirmative defenses is that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Rules 8(c)-8(d), for those who care), if SCO doesn't assert these defenses in its response, then it can't assert them later. So, the standard trick for lawyers is to put in everything but the kitchen sink.
Also, under rule 8(e), they're allowed to state as many defenses as they can, 'regardless of consistency.'
Now, they're really only supposed to list the real defenses and they could get into trouble for listing frivolous ones (I think their first affirmative defense is frivolous, for example). But, sanctions for this sort of thing don't happen as often as they probably should. They do run the risk of PO'ing the judge, though....
IANAL (yet...)
Why not just buy a copy from somebody else? If it costs $X to buy the list, offer somebody who has it $X/2.
To my knowledge, in the US, databases still are not copyrightable. Even if they were, I don't think that the government is allowed to copyright its own work.
So, if I can cut to the chase, the *MOST* that was done here under the provisions of the Patriot Act is that some people were told, in advance, that the FBI was going to try to subpoena their records, so they should take care to make sure they're not destroyed before the subpoena actually happened.
Nothing has changed with regard to the government's ability to get the subpoenas or their ability enforce those subpoenas. They're just giving fair notice "Hey... I'm going to try to get these things. Please make sure that they're not destroyed."
I fail to see how this is a big deal. Similarly, they could go to a gun dealer and say "Hey. I'm going to try to subpoena records about this one guy, Bob, who bought an 'assault rifle' here. Please make sure that you don't inadvertantly allow those records to be destroyed."
The need for secrecy is pretty obvious -- if you were telling 30 people the same thing, and the first guy blabbed, then the next 29 could destroy their records before the request came in.
As soon as you add 'under the patriot act...' to a sentance, people have a knee-jerk reaction, even if the controversial provisions of that act aren't invoked.
This is actually one of the funny problems with VoIP. If you just take a standard phone call, you can packetize it and if you haven't tried to gather too much audio into one packet, the additional latency won't even be noticable on the other end. Heck, you can even drop an occasional packet and chances are nobody will notice.
Modems, however, do not handle either latency or packet loss well -- part of the initial V.(90??) standards take a latency measurement at the beginning, expecting it to be some small number that doesn't change. In VoIP, not only isn't the number small (closer to 100ms than 20ms), but it can vary over the life of the call.
So, what ends up happening is that your local gateway (the thing that converts between traditional phone and packet communications) listens for your modem tones and kicks in a V./G.whatever codec to convert it into packet. Then, at the far end, the same thing happens.
UGH... Talk about all the wrong things to do! The idea of fixing problems early is good, but your method of doing it sounds to be out of control.
There's no better way to guarantee that your product will never congeal than to be constantly changing it. What happens when the quirky code you just changed 5 minutes ago had just finished a month of testing and debugging? Or when your architectural re-write has a chain-reaction further downstream?
One of the most important things that good software development companies do is to track their defects, figure out where they came from and develop a plan for fixing them (or not...)
In the Apollo space program, the astronauts had a listing of every known bug in the computer software and what they needed to do when that bug got hit. You may ask "If they knew where these bugs were, why didn't they fix them?" It's a good question and I believe that the answer boiled down to "Because then you'd be introducing a bunch of bugs that you didn't know about."
Remember the time-money-quality (pick any 2) triangle.
Way off-topic...
Considering the amount of pay-per-view pr0n in their hotels, I certainly hope Marriott isn't controlled either by Mormons or by the LDS church.
How many people here have worked on significant software development projects that DIDN'T have something go wrong along the way. A common way to handle such problems without slipping the schedule is through overtime.
What is going to happen to this project when 3 weeks in, a problem happens that would otherwise require overtime? If the developers are already working at the max (or beyond it, as this case seems to say), then the managers have lost the flexibility to deal with those problems.
You're making a semantic argument. Their side has always been that copyright infringement is akin to stealing, not that it is legally and technically stealing.
The sharing thing is a decent point on their side -- I'm legally not allowed to make a copy of a CD and then let a friend borrow just the duplicate while I listen to the original, just like he can't borrow a photocopy of a book I own.
From there, though, it breaks down a little bit as follows: I am allowed to make a personal copy of a CD. But, let's pretend that I lose my original. Am I allowed to listen to my copy? Let's say somebody finds my original -- are they allowed to listen to it? What happens if they make a personal copy and then lose the original again?
Is the answer to the first question different if instead of losing my copy, it was destroyed? Let's say I have 2,000 CDs consuming a lot of space in a tiny apartment. So, I convert them to mp3 format. How can I legally get rid of the original copies without also having to get rid of the mp3s I've made from them? Or in order for me to legally use my mp3s, do I have to retain the originals? Would I have to send the originals back to the record companies?
mp3.com got into trouble because they broke the 'you can only have a duplicate made from your specific original' rule -- if you have the latest Dave Matthews CD, you have to rip and encode the mp3s yourself and can't just copy mine. I believe that you can send me (temporarily) a copy of the original and have me convert it to mp3 for you, as long as I don't retain a copy. Can I use lossless compression of my original in my transmission to you? What if I manage to achieve really great lossless compression, when I send you a 64-bit number, and you can decompress that to the entire original? And, how is that different from what mp3.com did (you inserted the disk in your machine, it pulled the identifying information from the disk and sent it to mp3.com, which effectively did a table lookup to decompress that information.)?
My point in all this is that traditional copyright (and fair-use, along with it) need to be redefined in terms of what technology makes possible. I'd argue that the DMCA is a head-in-the-sand step backwards from that direction.
IANAL (YET!)
So, first of all, a patent can easily cost $15K. Patent a few things that nobody wants and pretty soon, you've got through a lot of cash. Even if you do actually get a worthwhile patent, enforcing it is completely another manner -- your target company can tie you up in court for YEARS (costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars), at the end of which you may lose.
Secondly, you can't patent obvious or already existing technologies -- it's one of the reasons people can lose patent fights -- they patented something that somebody else invented or that anybody reasonably knowledgeable in the field would predict.
Finally, though, you can't just patent an idea -- it needs to be "reduced to practice." In other words, Wilbur and Orville couldn't just say "We have this great idea -- a flying machine. Please give us a patent on it." Part of the patent describes exactly how it works. Just patenting an idea while lying to the patent office that you've reduced it to practice is considered fraud.
Now, the problem with all this is that people regularly patent already existing ideas, they regularly patent obvious things and they regularly patent things that don't (or can't) exist. The patent office does not have the ability to make sure that every patent is good (cost, manpower, cost, speed of technology, cost, etc....) Instead, the USPTO effectively relies on patent litigation as a method of getting rid of crummy patents. Very inefficient and leads to people licensing technologies rather than spending the money to litigate obviously bad patents.
So, there are going to be two possible things that can come of this: One, the media companies will be effective at giving people what they want. In this case, both consumers and the media companies win.
The other option is that media companies are not effective at giving people what they want. In this case, people will stop listening to them and the media companies will lose. Consumers will lose a little in that the radios in their cars will become pretty much useless. However, they'll be able to branch out into other forms of entertainment -- DVDs, video games, independent music, web surfing, and so on. The real winners will be the companies that figure out how to give consumers what they want.
I think that one can make a pretty good argument that the media ownership rules have outlived their usefulness. When each city only had 4 TV stations, a dozen radio stations and one newspaper, the rules made some sense because it guaranteed a wider variety of information and entertainment. But now, if I don't like what's on my local radio station, I can stream music from some independent station across the country. If I think the news from my local ABC news/newspaper/6 favorite radio stations is biased, there are a thousand options for me on the internet.
I'd argue that local broadcast media (TV/radio) and local newspapers are something of an anachronism anyway, for everything but the local stuff. I don't receive the local paper, because I can go online and read the news (for free). I rarely watch network TV because I have 50 cable stations and I'd rather watch Comedy Central than ABC.
To me, this seems to be equivilant to complaining about how few choices we have in bus and train transportation, while ignoring the fact that we have so many choices in cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, airplanes, taxis, rollerskates, subways and so on.
So, I'm a very recent ex-nortel person who did a lot of packet stuff. If I recall correctly, Sprint's network is an ATM one, either AAL1 or AAL2. AAL5 is IP-over-ATM, and isn't as common.
Note that in general, these are all behind-the-scenes private networks. You will still be circuit-switched to a point (inside your local office, typically). Then there'll be a TDM-to-packet gateway which converts your circuit-switched connection into ATM (or IP).
From an IP point of view, one of the side effects of this is that you don't need a seperate IP address for every phone, or even a seperate address for every house. All you need is an IP address/port number combination for each end of an active call in any given network. (And there are ways of getting around that restriction too.) Since these are all private networks cut off from the internet, IPV4 provides more than enough addresses.
Packet telephony all the way to the home, at least from the telcos, is some ways off. You'd either have to have a gateway inside your house to which you connect all your legacy phones, or you'd replace all the phones with IP phones. As you can probably see, there's a lot of inertia behind that *not* happening -- try convincing your great uncle Bert that he needs to replace all the phones in his house.
Ok, so I'm a diving professional. Apart from what I've read, I don't know the exact details of the case. However, this definately seems to be one of those cases where they were all at fault.
The physics of what diving does to your body is not yet fully understood. Sure, we have models that tell you what your body should and should not be able to handle, but they're only approximations and their accuracy can vary widely by your body composition, your level of exhaustion, your level of hydration and so on. (Partying all night and drinking would be a very bad thing to do. Your computer doesn't count how many drinks you had or how late you stayed up.) Some of the factors are probably yet-to-be-discovered. To my knowledge, no computer yet even has a way of monitoring those variables, yet alone modeling them.
In any case, here are some mistakes that it appears the divers made:
1. Making increasingly deeper dives. This is exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do -- taking your deepest dive first. By increasing the dive depth, you allow nitrogen to build up in your system. Their second dive (which they aborted) was likely shallower than their third dive.
2. Extremely short surface interval -- the surfacing to replace camera lights.
3. Flying merely 8 1/2 hours after diving. After (presumably) several consecutive days of diving, a full day would have been more appropriate.
What would have made more sense? I would have finished the second dive and just not taken pictures and would have waited an additional day between diving and flying. There's a lot to do in Miami that doesn't require going 100 ft under water.
If the software was bad and the company knew it but didn't do anything about it, then they deserve what they get. *BUT*, had the divers acted more reasonably, they'd still be diving today.
Whether or not SCO has a legitimate claim remains to be seen -- the whole thing seems to be very nebulous without an example of SCO IP which converted into Linux, and then there's the whole "If it was infringing, then why did you have your own Linux distribution" question.
I suspect one reason that SCO isn't being specific is that if they were, it would take very little time for the Open Source community to re-write the code in a clean-room environment. And that would diminish their argument.
In any case, SCO has hit on a good point -- one of the problems with Open Source software is the whole intellectual property thing. It's quite possible for somebody else's IP to make it into the Linux Base, either intentionally or unintentionally. For example, what if there's some crazy Microsoft patent on filesystems that is inadverently infringed in ext3?
It appears to me that SCO, by threatening to sue end users, is pursuing a 'scorched earth policy' -- the idea being that "if we're going down, we're going to take as many people with us as we can. So, it's in your best interest to save us."
By theatening those end users, there's a chill that could come over adoption of open-source products. All Microsoft will ever need to do is say "Sure, the SCO lawsuit didn't turn into anything. But, how many other SCOs are out there? Do you really want to use Linux and risk all that litigation?"
(On the other hand, the letter's assertion that commercial software design processes include verifying legality of the IP used is laughable. When was the last time an engineer said "Hey! I have a great idea to solve this problem. I'd better see if it's patented before I code it up."?)
Argh... Let's remember that we're talking about a wide range of ages here -- 5 to 18 years old and within each age, kids have a wide range of maturity.
In general, your point is good -- if you have to force your kid to do something for the entire time he's living with you, chances are that he's not going to do it on his own once he leaves.
But, on the other side, just having the information about your kid's homework, discipline, class attendance and so on can be used in any number of ways. Consider: your 15-year-old who's been an A student suddenly starts skipping class and not doing his homework. Doesn't that indicate a problem that a parent may want to address sooner rather than later? Or your 6th grader starts falling behind in math... Wouldn't you want to know about that before the report card came so you could get her some help? If the 5th grader is getting great comments and grades in music class, maybe they'd be interested in learning a musical instrument.
The fact that the information is available doesn't mean that the parents have to get it, or that there's any particular way in which they have to use it.
One interesting point, which I haven't seen brought up is the fact that many high school seniors are 18 and are thus no longer minors. It strikes me that they should have the right to deny access to their information.