Interesting interview, well worth reading. I liked his comment that he has no evidence at all supporting his virus conjecture. It's one of many signs that he is making a reasonable analysis of what we actually know on the topic, and proposing a reasonable hypothesis that could be tested.
We might also observe that, if homosexuality is caused by an infective agent, it must be a rather general one. Homosexuality is routinely observed in pretty much all primates that have been studied. So any infective agent would be either a generalist that can at least use any primate as a host, or it would have evolved (sub)species to match the set of primate species.
There is also the hypothesis that, in social species like ours, sex very often functions as a social-bonding mechanism. Humans aren't the only social species whose females are sexually receptive when not ovulating. Some (but not all) primate species use sex as one of their social activities, and it has been reported in non-primate species (e.g. lions) as well. For social bonding, male-male and female-female sex works just as well as male-female sex.
Of course, this is really just another common hypothesis that hasn't been tested to any degree. And there's no reason that both it and Cochran's virus hypothesis couldn't both be true.
Now if we could get them tested. But there are some obvious social and political constraints on doing valid scientific research on the topic.
If there wasn't any benefit these genes gave, common sense would suggest they'd have died out long ago.
Careful there. What you are calling "common sense" is nothing other than Darwinism. In some parts of the world, especially here the US, such ideas are not politically acceptable, and can get you banned from such areas as the public school system. We can't allow you to impose this sort of common sense on our impressionable youth.
The politically correct interpretation is that the genetic problems under consideration are punishments from the Intelligent Designer of the universe. Presumably for the sins of the ancestors.
But [such studies] will not see the light of day due to the politically correct, media-charged world we live in today.
Actually, there's a straightforward way to get such studies published, used by many researchers in the past. You simply express your ideas in turgid, jargon-laden terms that are impenetrable by all but specialists.
If this paper gets more attention, it's probably a sign that it was written too clearly. Maybe the author should take a course in scientific obfuscation.
Maybe he actually wants to be understood. But, as this discussion shows, that's often merely an invitation to attack and ridicule. Better he should express his thoughts and results in a way that's comprehensible only to his professional colleagues. That way, he might contribute to scientific comprehension, which might possibly lead to treatments for the genetic problems he's studying.
And analysts say Linux is picking up steam outside North America, which the Cowen survey doesn't cover.
Linux was created outside North America, so it's surprising that the Cowen survey crew even noticed that it exists. If they look around a bit, they just might find other useful software that was written somewhere else in the world.
(Honestly, when will those Norteamericanos notice that they are no longer in control of the computer industry? Haven't been for years, actually.;-)
Indeed. So the rule about server logs for anyone running a web server should be:
Purge early; purge often.
Web-server logs do have a way of filling your disk. I've written a lot of little perl programs to scand the logs, extract some statistics, write them to a summary file, and then delete the log. Anyone running a serious web server needs to do something about those logs.
I can see a law being passed to require that I keep my servers' logs. If that happens, I'll do my best to force the gummint to refund this unnecessary expense, probably by including the price of the disks as a deduction. After all, they really can't force me to do their work for them; that's involuntary servitude. And I certainly have no business reason to keep anything other than statistics; nobody will ever pay me for the content of those logs.
Then there's the industry statistic that backups are unreadable roughly 50% of the time. It'd be too bad if the backups I made of those server logs just happened to be unreadable. But considering the sorry state of commercial backup equipment, well documented in the literature, is it my fault if I can't recover that data? If so, how much am I required to spend for reliable backup, and who pays for it?
Actually, to cross-reference another recent story, maybe what a small web-site operator should do is put the server logs online. Then google would save them forever...
6.... You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein....
Aha! Now I see why I couldn't find it. It doesn't talk about "extra requirements" at all. It talks about restrictions
I suppose this is an appropriate time to mention IANAL.;-)
Anyway, the next question, which I may be able to find answered, is why this legally means the opposite of the obvious common-English meaning.
After all, if I add a requirement that attribution of all authors be added for any changes, and that all previous attributions be maintained in the source code, I am not "imposing a further restriction". I'm not restricting anyone's behavior at all, in the usual sense of "restrict". I'm telling them that they must do something in addition to just adding code or fixing bugs. An addition is not a restriction; they are usually considered opposites.
However, I'm willing to believe that in legalspeak, requiring some specific action such as attribution could indeed be considered a "restriction". I suppose you could express it in a double-negative form, in that you are restricting someone from neglecting to give proper attribution.
Anyhow, I'll do a bit of googling and see if I can learn why the legal interpretation of this clause is the opposite of it's apparent meaning.
Strings like "attrib" and "extra" don't appear anywhere in the GPL that I'm looking at right now, with any capitalization. The string "require" does appear four times, but none of the occurrences talk about allowing or forbidding extra requirements. The strings "forbid" and "allow" do occur (once and twice respectively), but none of these are in sentences that deal with extra requirements.
How can I locate the clause that forbids "extra requirements"?
I don't think it's the patent you should be concerned with; it's the DMCA, at least if you're in the US.
A basic problem is that, if MS has any patent at all on any encoding in a Word doc, you really can't know if it's used in a particular doc without "decoding" that doc. Then, if you find anything that's covered by patent, you know you've just committed a criminal act. If you don't find anything covered by a patent, you could have still committed a criminal act; you just don't know about it.
(This is the most likely result, since we don't know which MS Word-format patents are valid until the courts tell us, and that will be years from now.)
The only way out of this "gotcha" state is to never attempt to read any Word doc from any source. Well, either that, or run only approved Microsoft software. If you're using a non-MS system for anything, there's no way to avoid this legal threat other than not doing anything that could be considered "decoding" a Word doc.
It may not even be safe on a Windows system. You should first make sure that that particular machine has proper documentation that every bit of software is properly licensed from Microsoft for use on that machine. If someone has slipped in some pirated software or misplaced the documentation for the license, you could be illegally decoding the doc.
In particular, the Microsoft patent licence is incompatible with the GPL since it:
* Contains an advertising clause
So what clause in the GPL forbids this? I have a number of GPLs lying about in various directories. I looked at one, which identified itself as "Version 2, June 1991". I couldn't find anything that seemed to cover advertising. Of course, I could have missed it because it's expressed in different terminology. In any case, I didn't see anything that sounded to me to say anything like this.
To express it differently, I'd think you'd want your software to give proper attribution to everyone whose ideas you used, when you can discover who originated them. If you are using person or corporation X's encoding scheme, I'd think you'd want to acknowledge this fact. Why would you want your license to forbid proper attribution?
Actually, it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would ask. I mean, we're talking about only a few words. With most mailers, you'll find it faster to type it yourself than to locate and copy a file.
If Microsoft sues based on this, they will get slammed into the ground. This should be the easiest patent ever to get overturned.
Yeah, but it'll take you 10 years of your time and at least $10,000,000 of your money to exhaust all the appeals and win. Are you prepared for that when they sue you?
Some time back, I saw a cute cartoon of a man talking to his stereotype lawyer, who was saying "You have a pretty good case here. Now, how much justice can you afford?" I wish I'd kept a copy.
Note that about 5 years ago the US government essentially caved in their lawsuit against Microsoft, and "settled" for an agreement that leaves MS in the driver's seat of an oversight "technical committee" that has the power to indemnify them for nearly anything. This was after MS became one of George Bush's biggest campaign contributors.
If the US government can't win even after convicting them of anti-trust violations, what sort of chance do you think you'll have?
What I've found more useful is to use MS's XML patent applications in replies when people send me Word docs. I mention the pending patents, and the fact that unauthorized "decryption" of the files on my non-MS computer can get me 5 years in a federal prison and a $500,000 fine, under the terms of the DMCA. I quickly get the doc back in HTML or plain-text format, and subsequent discussions with the sender shows that they were invariably rather rattled by this.
Rather than a futile effort to overturn such patents, what we really should do is publicise the situation at every opportunity. Let people know that sending someone a MS-format doc is potentially a serious legal threat. You have no way of knowing, without "decoding" the doc, and that act may make you a criminal under US law. Most Windows users don't understand this; they think that Word and other MS formats are standards that anyone can read. They should be taught the legal situation.
Yeah, maybe MS won't use the DMCA against you if you "decode" their XML. Do you really want to be the test case?
Just a side note about your point 2: not everybody is living in the US, you know..:-),
Hey, I've heard that. The current US administration has a name for those non-Americans: Irrelevant.;)
I'm French and if memory serves, there is about 30% of French who are "non-believers", and among the believers only a little are going to church even once a year..
A couple of years ago, at a social gathering of some of my wife's co-grad-students at Boston University, my wife asked a French student about the large Catholic majority in France. The reply was "Well, every so often we kill any non-Catholics who didn't have the sense to get out."
There's a lot of history behind that observation. You can substitute many other religious groups and still get an accurate statement. And the people doing the killing don't have to actually practice whatever their supposed faith is; they can still use it to justify oppressing or killing non-believers. There is a theory that this is the primary reason for most religious faiths, no matter how strongly the founders tried to advise otherwise.
Every once in a while, religious doctrines produce groups like Quakers or Baha'i. But not too often. It might be interesting to see the behavior of a government run by such a religion. But there don't seem to be enough historical cases to be able to draw any conclusions.
Yeah, that can happen if you don't know how to program for Windows.
So I suppose I should follow this advice, and not do any Windows programming until I learn how to do it right. Of course, if I'm not doing it, it's not obvious how I could ever learn to do it right;-)
What specific problems did your friends' applications encounter?
Well, I do remember pretty clearly a demo that one fellow did a couple of years ago. He insisted that a bunch of us watch, so we could verify that he wasn't crazy or lying or hallucinating.
What he did was install his app fresh, and in a command window typed a dir command showing the timestamps and sizes of a set of files in his app's directory. After verifying that his app ran he fired up WMP, let it run for a minute or so, and then told it to exit. He then repeated the dir command, and showed that one specific file had changed. His app no longer worked as a result.
He repeated the demo several times, showing convincingly that the file was stable until he ran WMP, and then the file changed. His app wasn't running when the file changed, but WMP was. This was considered by all of us as pretty good evidence that WMP (or something that it called) had changed the file. We couldn't really get any more evidence than this.
He did change his file's name, and then the problem didn't recur. But, of course, this is only a temporary fix. It didn't help customers that already had his app installed. They could upgrade, but who knows how long this would fix the problem?
Actually, I've seen the same sort of thing happen on unixoid systems. But there, it typically happens with "global" files, such as those $HOME/.*rc files that some apps use. This was a bit of a mistake, of course, since such file-name conventions are prone to collisions. More often these days, an app "foo" will set up a $HOME/.foo directory for its private files, which effectively prevents collisions unless two apps have the same name.
In any case, an app that hits a file in a directory that usually doesn't exist is a bit bizarre. It's hard to see how this could really be an accident. The simplest explanation is that the app is targeting that file for some reason.
Of course, it's often a good idea to don your tinfoil hat when suggesting this in public. But really, nobody should be surprised when an app appears to be doing something to kill a competitor. It's not like people have never done such things.
I'm sure you'd say the same if installing Visual Studio rendered an old version of GCC unusable.
Actually, this is a well-known phenomenon among "independent" Windows software developers.
I have a number of friends who are working on high-quality audio and video apps. One of their ongoing problems is that, when installed on Windows, they tend to break. Usually this happens soon after someone runs Windows Media Player (WMP).
I remember reading reviews back when WMP first came out. After giving WMP a poor review, the reviewers would then comment on how, when they tried running their other higher-quality audio apps, they were all broken and had to be reinstalled. They would then work until something triggered WMP, and then they'd all be broken again. And WMP couldn't be fully uninstalled.
The story became clear when the news got out that Microsoft had a simple solution: License your audio/video app through Microsoft, and it would keep working.
That's right; WMP contains a search-and-destroy component that disables unapproved AV apps. To make your app work, you have to sign over most of the rights to Microsoft. They'll then put your app on their "approved" list, and they'll give you a royalty on the sales.
Anyway, I know a number of people who have become rather depressed when the import of all this gets through their thick skulls. They had this silly idea that they could write their own app and sell it on the Open Market. Hah.
I just tell them that their naive economic theory is still alive and well, if they write their apps for OSX or linux. Or Solaris, for that matter. But Microsoft owns Windows, and they control the software that runs on it. This doesn't alleviate their depression. But a few of them have become Mac and/or linux fans.
My wife had a collection of audio/video stuff on her Windows box. She was getting more and more frustrated by WMP breaking in and taking over, totally screwing things up. One day we installed a bunch of things on my Mac Powerbook, and I let her play with it for a few hours. She then went out and bought one. A few days later, she gave me her Windows box, which I turn on when I need to do some testing of web pages against IE. She shudders at the thought of ever using it again (though she has to use Windows at work, and knows it quite well).
Anyway, I'd consider NS screwing up IE to be merely payback for what MS does to independent software. Too bad there aren't any laws against this sort of thing. At least, there aren't any that can be used effectively against Microsoft.
I decided to install Netscape on a copy of Windows that did not have IE installed. From there I would see how Netscape ran.
But, but...
Bill Gates testified in court, under oath, that IE was an integral part of Windows, and you can't have Windows without IE. Bill would never tell a lie, would he? Would he?
Before Gutenberg..., it was not possible to make money publishing books.
This is a bit of false history that keeps getting repeated.
One of the books on my shelves is a history of the early years of the Mongol empire. On Genghis (not yet Khan)'s first exploratory expedition to the West, part of his entourage was a portable print shop. The author explained that the expedition partly paid its own way, and made a lot of friends in some locales, by printing cheap copies of local books.
Mostly they printed Korans and Bibles. They had printing presses in some of their wagons, and with the help of a few literate locals, they could make up a print run in a week or two. Since the Westerners didn't have much in the way of printing technology yet, the Mongols could sell books at a fraction of what local copiers charged, and make a good profit. They were supplying the locals with what was in effect a luxury item previously restricted to the clergy and the wealthy.
This was in the early 1200's, with Gutenberg more than two centuries in the future.
Part of the confusion here is that people remember Gutenberg inventing the printing press. He didn't, of course. He invented a new kind of printing press. But most people couldn't tell you what it was, so they credit him with the whole thing. Also, Westerners usually can't be bothered learning about Oriental inventions. It doesn't matter how many centuries the Koreans had been printing books; only a European gets credited for something like inventing a printing press. But some people were printing books profitably long before the 1400's.
I've long had the suspicion that this was the main thing that made the Internet win out over the alternatives like OSI and DecNet. I'll ignore the long debates over which was technically superior. I was involved in any number of projects that started off with TCP or UDP simply because all the specs were freely available and took only minutes to locate and download. The others all required a purchase order - a couple weeks of bureaucracy - plus a wait for delivery of the specs. During that time, we could get the Internet version of the product up and running and in the hands of customers who had IP software. This was a real winner in any discussion of the merits.
"Yeah; we really should get the OSI version working. But our immediate task is that our current customers have sent in these bug reports and requests for new features..."
Funny thing; I read this on my laptop, sitting on the "throne". I didn't see any good reason to stop reading just because I was involved in another boring repetetive-but-necessary task at the same time.
I suppose there must be a few other readers in the same situation.
For $10 plus shipping and handling, I will print a greeting card with the previous statements and mail it to you.
Hey, I've got a better idea for you. Write it up in Cliff Notes fashion, and submit it for publication. Then a million college students will buy it rather than watch Moore's stuff for their class, and you'll get $.10 from each of them.
And then if anyone writes it on a post card, you'll be able to sue them for infringement.
Actually, publishers do routinely attempt to claim copyright over PD material. This is especially visible in the music publishing business. Look at any edition of the works of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. You'll find copyright notices.
Now, you and I may realize that this can't possibly cover the notes. It obviously covers only that specific print edition. But the copyright notices never seem to make that clear. They're always a vague copyright notice with a year and publisher, but no information at all about what they claim to own.
The intent of this is clear. They are attempting to mislead their customers into thinking that the publisher owns the music. And there have been cases reported that clearly show this intent.
There is now a fair amount of music online in an assortment of public formats. It's mostly older music, due to copyright problems with music of the past century. There have been a number of reports from people who have received a nasty letter from a publisher, demanding that they remove some particular piece of music from their web site. The person does a bit of research, and sends back a reply saying something like "That music was published by so-and-so in Paris in 1783. The file is in computerized format X, and is not a scan of any publication. How do you claim to own the rights to this file?" The publisher slinks off and is never heard from again - until they make a similar attempt with a different piece of music.
Such incidents make it clear that the publishers are intentionally attempting to defraud musicians with bogus copyright claims. But it's nothing new. It's what publishers have done for ages, ever since copyright was invented.
I've read of similar attempts to claim copyright on works of Shakespeare. This was for the original work, in English, not a translation, and not a scan of a published book.
Some publishers have no shame at all. If they can con you into believing that they own something, they will do so.
Being able to read a contract doesn't help when they all say "We own you". It's an industry standard contract...
True in general, but there are some interesting exceptions in academia.
For example, last year the publishers of Nature changed their copyright rules. They now require that the authors retain copyright of anything published in Nature (and require a contract stating that the copyright can't be assigned without Nature's permission, preventing heavy-handed university admins from demanding the copyright after publication).
They have announced that they are returning the copyright of all previously-published papers to the original authors.
They also stated that papers published in Nature can be put online, but only on sites that give the authors complete control over the paper's files. In fact, they actively encourage putting your papers online, six months after publication. They also strongly encourage making all original data available online, unless there's a good technical reason that it can't be done. Information on obtaining physical materials (such as biological samples) should also be available.
This is significant in a number of fields for which Nature is the top-status publication. If you've accepted research money that requires giving the copyright to the funding agency, you can no longer get your results published in Nature. If your institution claims the copyright on your work, you can't be published in Nature.
Their stated goals were that published authors should retain the rights to their own work, and that others should be able to build on your published results.
There is serious discussion going on in academia about forcing other publishers to adopt a similar policy. This may not be possible with for-profit publishers. But many publications are produced by professional societies that are controlled by their members. There's a good chance that they will all soon adopt similar rules.
Loss of control of your own work is a growing scandal in much of academia. But people are figuring out that they just might have the power to fix the problem. After all, if Nature can do it, why can't every other academic society?
(It'll be interesting to see if Nature maintains these policies)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting interview, well worth reading. I liked his comment that he has no evidence at all supporting his virus conjecture. It's one of many signs that he is making a reasonable analysis of what we actually know on the topic, and proposing a reasonable hypothesis that could be tested.
We might also observe that, if homosexuality is caused by an infective agent, it must be a rather general one. Homosexuality is routinely observed in pretty much all primates that have been studied. So any infective agent would be either a generalist that can at least use any primate as a host, or it would have evolved (sub)species to match the set of primate species.
There is also the hypothesis that, in social species like ours, sex very often functions as a social-bonding mechanism. Humans aren't the only social species whose females are sexually receptive when not ovulating. Some (but not all) primate species use sex as one of their social activities, and it has been reported in non-primate species (e.g. lions) as well. For social bonding, male-male and female-female sex works just as well as male-female sex.
Of course, this is really just another common hypothesis that hasn't been tested to any degree. And there's no reason that both it and Cochran's virus hypothesis couldn't both be true.
Now if we could get them tested. But there are some obvious social and political constraints on doing valid scientific research on the topic.
If there wasn't any benefit these genes gave, common sense would suggest they'd have died out long ago.
Careful there. What you are calling "common sense" is nothing other than Darwinism. In some parts of the world, especially here the US, such ideas are not politically acceptable, and can get you banned from such areas as the public school system. We can't allow you to impose this sort of common sense on our impressionable youth.
The politically correct interpretation is that the genetic problems under consideration are punishments from the Intelligent Designer of the universe. Presumably for the sins of the ancestors.
But [such studies] will not see the light of day due to the politically correct, media-charged world we live in today.
Actually, there's a straightforward way to get such studies published, used by many researchers in the past. You simply express your ideas in turgid, jargon-laden terms that are impenetrable by all but specialists.
If this paper gets more attention, it's probably a sign that it was written too clearly. Maybe the author should take a course in scientific obfuscation.
Maybe he actually wants to be understood. But, as this discussion shows, that's often merely an invitation to attack and ridicule. Better he should express his thoughts and results in a way that's comprehensible only to his professional colleagues. That way, he might contribute to scientific comprehension, which might possibly lead to treatments for the genetic problems he's studying.
It doesn't mean Linux adoption on a per user basis is slowing, as I read it, the growth rate of new companies using it is slowing.
Hey, this is "News for Nerds". Express it in terms people here can understand: The second derivative has decreased.
And analysts say Linux is picking up steam outside North America, which the Cowen survey doesn't cover.
;-)
Linux was created outside North America, so it's surprising that the Cowen survey crew even noticed that it exists. If they look around a bit, they just might find other useful software that was written somewhere else in the world.
(Honestly, when will those Norteamericanos notice that they are no longer in control of the computer industry? Haven't been for years, actually.
For those who haven't, it shows tons of virgin forest spread over the US in 1620 and 1850, then a dramatic reduction by 1920, ...
;-)
Huh? Where did they find satellite images from 1620, 1850 and 1920?
Inquiring minds want to know.
(Could they have been made by the Vogon survey crew?)
Indeed. So the rule about server logs for anyone running a web server should be:
...
Purge early; purge often.
Web-server logs do have a way of filling your disk. I've written a lot of little perl programs to scand the logs, extract some statistics, write them to a summary file, and then delete the log. Anyone running a serious web server needs to do something about those logs.
I can see a law being passed to require that I keep my servers' logs. If that happens, I'll do my best to force the gummint to refund this unnecessary expense, probably by including the price of the disks as a deduction. After all, they really can't force me to do their work for them; that's involuntary servitude. And I certainly have no business reason to keep anything other than statistics; nobody will ever pay me for the content of those logs.
Then there's the industry statistic that backups are unreadable roughly 50% of the time. It'd be too bad if the backups I made of those server logs just happened to be unreadable. But considering the sorry state of commercial backup equipment, well documented in the literature, is it my fault if I can't recover that data? If so, how much am I required to spend for reliable backup, and who pays for it?
Actually, to cross-reference another recent story, maybe what a small web-site operator should do is put the server logs online. Then google would save them forever
6. ... You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. ...
;-)
Aha! Now I see why I couldn't find it. It doesn't talk about "extra requirements" at all. It talks about restrictions
I suppose this is an appropriate time to mention IANAL.
Anyway, the next question, which I may be able to find answered, is why this legally means the opposite of the obvious common-English meaning.
After all, if I add a requirement that attribution of all authors be added for any changes, and that all previous attributions be maintained in the source code, I am not "imposing a further restriction". I'm not restricting anyone's behavior at all, in the usual sense of "restrict". I'm telling them that they must do something in addition to just adding code or fixing bugs. An addition is not a restriction; they are usually considered opposites.
However, I'm willing to believe that in legalspeak, requiring some specific action such as attribution could indeed be considered a "restriction". I suppose you could express it in a double-negative form, in that you are restricting someone from neglecting to give proper attribution.
Anyhow, I'll do a bit of googling and see if I can learn why the legal interpretation of this clause is the opposite of it's apparent meaning.
So exactly where in the GPL does it say this?
Strings like "attrib" and "extra" don't appear anywhere in the GPL that I'm looking at right now, with any capitalization. The string "require" does appear four times, but none of the occurrences talk about allowing or forbidding extra requirements. The strings "forbid" and "allow" do occur (once and twice respectively), but none of these are in sentences that deal with extra requirements.
How can I locate the clause that forbids "extra requirements"?
I don't think it's the patent you should be concerned with; it's the DMCA, at least if you're in the US.
A basic problem is that, if MS has any patent at all on any encoding in a Word doc, you really can't know if it's used in a particular doc without "decoding" that doc. Then, if you find anything that's covered by patent, you know you've just committed a criminal act. If you don't find anything covered by a patent, you could have still committed a criminal act; you just don't know about it.
(This is the most likely result, since we don't know which MS Word-format patents are valid until the courts tell us, and that will be years from now.)
The only way out of this "gotcha" state is to never attempt to read any Word doc from any source. Well, either that, or run only approved Microsoft software. If you're using a non-MS system for anything, there's no way to avoid this legal threat other than not doing anything that could be considered "decoding" a Word doc.
It may not even be safe on a Windows system. You should first make sure that that particular machine has proper documentation that every bit of software is properly licensed from Microsoft for use on that machine. If someone has slipped in some pirated software or misplaced the documentation for the license, you could be illegally decoding the doc.
In particular, the Microsoft patent licence is incompatible with the GPL since it:
* Contains an advertising clause
So what clause in the GPL forbids this? I have a number of GPLs lying about in various directories. I looked at one, which identified itself as "Version 2, June 1991". I couldn't find anything that seemed to cover advertising. Of course, I could have missed it because it's expressed in different terminology. In any case, I didn't see anything that sounded to me to say anything like this.
To express it differently, I'd think you'd want your software to give proper attribution to everyone whose ideas you used, when you can discover who originated them. If you are using person or corporation X's encoding scheme, I'd think you'd want to acknowledge this fact. Why would you want your license to forbid proper attribution?
What a lazy bum! ;-)
Actually, it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would ask. I mean, we're talking about only a few words. With most mailers, you'll find it faster to type it yourself than to locate and copy a file.
If Microsoft sues based on this, they will get slammed into the ground. This should be the easiest patent ever to get overturned.
;-]
Yeah, but it'll take you 10 years of your time and at least $10,000,000 of your money to exhaust all the appeals and win. Are you prepared for that when they sue you?
Some time back, I saw a cute cartoon of a man talking to his stereotype lawyer, who was saying "You have a pretty good case here. Now, how much justice can you afford?" I wish I'd kept a copy.
Note that about 5 years ago the US government essentially caved in their lawsuit against Microsoft, and "settled" for an agreement that leaves MS in the driver's seat of an oversight "technical committee" that has the power to indemnify them for nearly anything. This was after MS became one of George Bush's biggest campaign contributors.
If the US government can't win even after convicting them of anti-trust violations, what sort of chance do you think you'll have?
What I've found more useful is to use MS's XML patent applications in replies when people send me Word docs. I mention the pending patents, and the fact that unauthorized "decryption" of the files on my non-MS computer can get me 5 years in a federal prison and a $500,000 fine, under the terms of the DMCA. I quickly get the doc back in HTML or plain-text format, and subsequent discussions with the sender shows that they were invariably rather rattled by this.
Rather than a futile effort to overturn such patents, what we really should do is publicise the situation at every opportunity. Let people know that sending someone a MS-format doc is potentially a serious legal threat. You have no way of knowing, without "decoding" the doc, and that act may make you a criminal under US law. Most Windows users don't understand this; they think that Word and other MS formats are standards that anyone can read. They should be taught the legal situation.
Yeah, maybe MS won't use the DMCA against you if you "decode" their XML. Do you really want to be the test case?
If so, how much justice can you afford?
[This isn't exactly a new topic here.
Just a side note about your point 2: not everybody is living in the US, you know.. :-),
;)
Hey, I've heard that. The current US administration has a name for those non-Americans: Irrelevant.
I'm French and if memory serves, there is about 30% of French who are "non-believers", and among the believers only a little are going to church even once a year..
A couple of years ago, at a social gathering of some of my wife's co-grad-students at Boston University, my wife asked a French student about the large Catholic majority in France. The reply was "Well, every so often we kill any non-Catholics who didn't have the sense to get out."
There's a lot of history behind that observation. You can substitute many other religious groups and still get an accurate statement. And the people doing the killing don't have to actually practice whatever their supposed faith is; they can still use it to justify oppressing or killing non-believers. There is a theory that this is the primary reason for most religious faiths, no matter how strongly the founders tried to advise otherwise.
Every once in a while, religious doctrines produce groups like Quakers or Baha'i. But not too often. It might be interesting to see the behavior of a government run by such a religion. But there don't seem to be enough historical cases to be able to draw any conclusions.
Yeah, that can happen if you don't know how to program for Windows.
;-)
So I suppose I should follow this advice, and not do any Windows programming until I learn how to do it right. Of course, if I'm not doing it, it's not obvious how I could ever learn to do it right
What specific problems did your friends' applications encounter?
Well, I do remember pretty clearly a demo that one fellow did a couple of years ago. He insisted that a bunch of us watch, so we could verify that he wasn't crazy or lying or hallucinating.
What he did was install his app fresh, and in a command window typed a dir command showing the timestamps and sizes of a set of files in his app's directory. After verifying that his app ran he fired up WMP, let it run for a minute or so, and then told it to exit. He then repeated the dir command, and showed that one specific file had changed. His app no longer worked as a result.
He repeated the demo several times, showing convincingly that the file was stable until he ran WMP, and then the file changed. His app wasn't running when the file changed, but WMP was. This was considered by all of us as pretty good evidence that WMP (or something that it called) had changed the file. We couldn't really get any more evidence than this.
He did change his file's name, and then the problem didn't recur. But, of course, this is only a temporary fix. It didn't help customers that already had his app installed. They could upgrade, but who knows how long this would fix the problem?
Actually, I've seen the same sort of thing happen on unixoid systems. But there, it typically happens with "global" files, such as those $HOME/.*rc files that some apps use. This was a bit of a mistake, of course, since such file-name conventions are prone to collisions. More often these days, an app "foo" will set up a $HOME/.foo directory for its private files, which effectively prevents collisions unless two apps have the same name.
In any case, an app that hits a file in a directory that usually doesn't exist is a bit bizarre. It's hard to see how this could really be an accident. The simplest explanation is that the app is targeting that file for some reason.
Of course, it's often a good idea to don your tinfoil hat when suggesting this in public. But really, nobody should be surprised when an app appears to be doing something to kill a competitor. It's not like people have never done such things.
I'm sure you'd say the same if installing Visual Studio rendered an old version of GCC unusable.
Actually, this is a well-known phenomenon among "independent" Windows software developers.
I have a number of friends who are working on high-quality audio and video apps. One of their ongoing problems is that, when installed on Windows, they tend to break. Usually this happens soon after someone runs Windows Media Player (WMP).
I remember reading reviews back when WMP first came out. After giving WMP a poor review, the reviewers would then comment on how, when they tried running their other higher-quality audio apps, they were all broken and had to be reinstalled. They would then work until something triggered WMP, and then they'd all be broken again. And WMP couldn't be fully uninstalled.
The story became clear when the news got out that Microsoft had a simple solution: License your audio/video app through Microsoft, and it would keep working.
That's right; WMP contains a search-and-destroy component that disables unapproved AV apps. To make your app work, you have to sign over most of the rights to Microsoft. They'll then put your app on their "approved" list, and they'll give you a royalty on the sales.
Anyway, I know a number of people who have become rather depressed when the import of all this gets through their thick skulls. They had this silly idea that they could write their own app and sell it on the Open Market. Hah.
I just tell them that their naive economic theory is still alive and well, if they write their apps for OSX or linux. Or Solaris, for that matter. But Microsoft owns Windows, and they control the software that runs on it. This doesn't alleviate their depression. But a few of them have become Mac and/or linux fans.
My wife had a collection of audio/video stuff on her Windows box. She was getting more and more frustrated by WMP breaking in and taking over, totally screwing things up. One day we installed a bunch of things on my Mac Powerbook, and I let her play with it for a few hours. She then went out and bought one. A few days later, she gave me her Windows box, which I turn on when I need to do some testing of web pages against IE. She shudders at the thought of ever using it again (though she has to use Windows at work, and knows it quite well).
Anyway, I'd consider NS screwing up IE to be merely payback for what MS does to independent software. Too bad there aren't any laws against this sort of thing. At least, there aren't any that can be used effectively against Microsoft.
How the hell did I get an interesting rating on this? I was trying for +5, Funny.
...
My world is doubly shattered
(Well, one person modded it funny.)
The article says:
...
...
I decided to install Netscape on a copy of Windows that did not have IE installed. From there I would see how Netscape ran.
But, but
Bill Gates testified in court, under oath, that IE was an integral part of Windows, and you can't have Windows without IE. Bill would never tell a lie, would he? Would he?
My world is shattered
You keep the piece of paper - or probably a business-card sized card - in your wallet, dumbass, where you keep your credit cards.
Nah. I keep mine in a few hidden files in a few of my web directories.
Good luck guessing the rather demented-looking URLs.
And I don't try to access the files from public Windows machines. Too likely to be a keylogger there.
I know a number of people who keep useful but private information "hidden in plain view" this way. It's pretty easy to hide stuff on the Web.
Before Gutenberg ..., it was not possible to make money publishing books.
This is a bit of false history that keeps getting repeated.
One of the books on my shelves is a history of the early years of the Mongol empire. On Genghis (not yet Khan)'s first exploratory expedition to the West, part of his entourage was a portable print shop. The author explained that the expedition partly paid its own way, and made a lot of friends in some locales, by printing cheap copies of local books.
Mostly they printed Korans and Bibles. They had printing presses in some of their wagons, and with the help of a few literate locals, they could make up a print run in a week or two. Since the Westerners didn't have much in the way of printing technology yet, the Mongols could sell books at a fraction of what local copiers charged, and make a good profit. They were supplying the locals with what was in effect a luxury item previously restricted to the clergy and the wealthy.
This was in the early 1200's, with Gutenberg more than two centuries in the future.
Part of the confusion here is that people remember Gutenberg inventing the printing press. He didn't, of course. He invented a new kind of printing press. But most people couldn't tell you what it was, so they credit him with the whole thing. Also, Westerners usually can't be bothered learning about Oriental inventions. It doesn't matter how many centuries the Koreans had been printing books; only a European gets credited for something like inventing a printing press. But some people were printing books profitably long before the 1400's.
I've long had the suspicion that this was the main thing that made the Internet win out over the alternatives like OSI and DecNet. I'll ignore the long debates over which was technically superior. I was involved in any number of projects that started off with TCP or UDP simply because all the specs were freely available and took only minutes to locate and download. The others all required a purchase order - a couple weeks of bureaucracy - plus a wait for delivery of the specs. During that time, we could get the Internet version of the product up and running and in the hands of customers who had IP software. This was a real winner in any discussion of the merits.
..."
"Yeah; we really should get the OSI version working. But our immediate task is that our current customers have sent in these bug reports and requests for new features
can you bring it to the washroom?
Funny thing; I read this on my laptop, sitting on the "throne". I didn't see any good reason to stop reading just because I was involved in another boring repetetive-but-necessary task at the same time.
I suppose there must be a few other readers in the same situation.
For $10 plus shipping and handling, I will print a greeting card with the previous statements and mail it to you.
Hey, I've got a better idea for you. Write it up in Cliff Notes fashion, and submit it for publication. Then a million college students will buy it rather than watch Moore's stuff for their class, and you'll get $.10 from each of them.
And then if anyone writes it on a post card, you'll be able to sue them for infringement.
Actually, publishers do routinely attempt to claim copyright over PD material. This is especially visible in the music publishing business. Look at any edition of the works of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. You'll find copyright notices.
Now, you and I may realize that this can't possibly cover the notes. It obviously covers only that specific print edition. But the copyright notices never seem to make that clear. They're always a vague copyright notice with a year and publisher, but no information at all about what they claim to own.
The intent of this is clear. They are attempting to mislead their customers into thinking that the publisher owns the music. And there have been cases reported that clearly show this intent.
There is now a fair amount of music online in an assortment of public formats. It's mostly older music, due to copyright problems with music of the past century. There have been a number of reports from people who have received a nasty letter from a publisher, demanding that they remove some particular piece of music from their web site. The person does a bit of research, and sends back a reply saying something like "That music was published by so-and-so in Paris in 1783. The file is in computerized format X, and is not a scan of any publication. How do you claim to own the rights to this file?" The publisher slinks off and is never heard from again - until they make a similar attempt with a different piece of music.
Such incidents make it clear that the publishers are intentionally attempting to defraud musicians with bogus copyright claims. But it's nothing new. It's what publishers have done for ages, ever since copyright was invented.
I've read of similar attempts to claim copyright on works of Shakespeare. This was for the original work, in English, not a translation, and not a scan of a published book.
Some publishers have no shame at all. If they can con you into believing that they own something, they will do so.
Being able to read a contract doesn't help when they all say "We own you". It's an industry standard contract ...
True in general, but there are some interesting exceptions in academia.
For example, last year the publishers of Nature changed their copyright rules. They now require that the authors retain copyright of anything published in Nature (and require a contract stating that the copyright can't be assigned without Nature's permission, preventing heavy-handed university admins from demanding the copyright after publication).
They have announced that they are returning the copyright of all previously-published papers to the original authors.
They also stated that papers published in Nature can be put online, but only on sites that give the authors complete control over the paper's files. In fact, they actively encourage putting your papers online, six months after publication. They also strongly encourage making all original data available online, unless there's a good technical reason that it can't be done. Information on obtaining physical materials (such as biological samples) should also be available.
This is significant in a number of fields for which Nature is the top-status publication. If you've accepted research money that requires giving the copyright to the funding agency, you can no longer get your results published in Nature. If your institution claims the copyright on your work, you can't be published in Nature.
Their stated goals were that published authors should retain the rights to their own work, and that others should be able to build on your published results.
There is serious discussion going on in academia about forcing other publishers to adopt a similar policy. This may not be possible with for-profit publishers. But many publications are produced by professional societies that are controlled by their members. There's a good chance that they will all soon adopt similar rules.
Loss of control of your own work is a growing scandal in much of academia. But people are figuring out that they just might have the power to fix the problem. After all, if Nature can do it, why can't every other academic society?
(It'll be interesting to see if Nature maintains these policies)