Heh. My lawyer's defense will be to demo that not only is this approach widely used outside Microsoft; it was widely used in the computer industry before Microsoft even existed. It is therefore not a trade secret, and can't be a violation of an NDA. How could you possibly violate an NDA by revealing that a company follows an "industry standard"?
This isn't at all hard to believe, if you've ever read anything about the details of handling fingerprints.
There are a number of good texts on the subject. One of the first things they typically do is disabuse the reader of the Hollywood/TV cop-show idea that fingerprints are unique. This is done by mentioning that identifying fingerprints is mostly done by examining the "loops" and "whorls", and noting that the main way to characterize fingerprints is by the "points", i.e., the intersections in the lines caused by the loops and whorls.
Then the text simply shows prints that contain no points, loops or whorls. They are simply an array of wavy lines without any real distinguishing characteristics. In most finterprint identification schemes, these all map to the same code. Such fingerprints aren't all that common. I don't have any. But they're not really rare, either. Chances are that a number of readers of this message can respond by saying "My ___ finger on my ___ hand is like that".
Your friend and the IT manager probably had an index finger like that. Less likely, but still quite possible, is that their index fingers do have points, but the patterns are the same and map to the same code in the software.
Distinguishing fingerprints in such cases takes careful examining to detect subtle differences in the curves or thicknesses of the lines. This often can't be done at all, even with high-quality prints, and in any case is very difficult to program.
Anyway, don't take my word for any of this. Go find yourself a text on the subject. You'll learn a lot about how complicated and unreliable fingerprinting can be even in the best of controlled conditions.
Damn! I looked at that site hoping for something that I could use, and read:
Foxit PDF Reader for Windows
So I can't use it on my linux and Mac machines. Yeah, I have a Windows box, which gets turned on when I need to test network things against it, but is otherwise turned off. (That way, it doesn't contract viral infections.;-)
PDF files online are rather obnoxious. When I opened this article's doc on my Powerbook, Acrobat took over the entire screen and showed the text in a much larger font than I ever want to use. It was impossible to read it next to the/. discussion, because it hid the browser window (and all other windows. There were no controls visible, and it took me several minutes to stumble onto the trick (ESC;-) that reverted Acrobat to a window with controls. Finally I could shrink it to a decent size and read it in parallel with the discussion.
This is nasty behavior that seems to be built into Acrobat. They think that you'd never want to have anything other than the one document on your screen, and you'd love to have a huge font to make it readable from across the room. So every PDF opens in full-screen mode (though usually with a border and menu bar, which this doc somehow suppressed). I've looked around for Preferences settings that will make it play nicer with other apps (and my eyes), to no avail. So each time, I have to laboriously resize the window, which in this case discovering how to turn the resize corner back on.
Acrobat just doesn't play nice with others. Reader-friendly writers wouldn't put PDFs online. There's software to convert PDF to HTML. Now if we could get people to use it...
You also see it spelled "ganja". It probably should qualify as an English word, but as both a foreign and slang term, it's not surprising that it wouldn't have a standard spelling.
You're right, of course (except for mispeling "strait";-). This is presumably why most Americans gave the wrong answer to the question. Psychologically, The US and Russia are a long distance apart, even though legally they share a border.
Similarly, when you ask what's the most southern point in the US, people will try to figure out whether it's at the bottom of Texas or Florida. It's actually on the big island of Hawaii.
That's unless you include American "territories", of course, in which case the answer is in Samoa.;-)
There are long lists of geographical trivia questions that almost everyone gets wrong.
"Oh, you're canadian! You don't need this! Welcome to America! Next!!!".
This sort of thing is fairly routine in many countries, even where there are serious frictions.
For example, I've known a number of people who described being waved through security like this when they get off a plane in Israel. The reason is that they have spent sufficient time there to speak Hebrew quite well. When the security people hear them speaking fluent Hebrew, the reaction is a few friendly, casual words welcoming them. It's a "You're one of us" reaction.
On a couple of occasions, I've wondered out loud what would happen when they Palistinian radicals realize that what they need is a few fluent Hebrew speakers. The answer inevitably is "Oh, we know a number of such Arabs, just as we know Israeli Jews who are fluent in Arabic." But, they explain, anyone who is fluent in both languages inevitably has a lot of friends in the other group, understands the other culture, and doesn't take a "they're all evil" attitude. You might as well welcome them and speed them through security checks, because they're exactly the sort of people you want around you.
Others can probably describe other places in the world where the same reasoning applies.
Whether it actually always works is another question. It's probably a lot more reliable with a minor language like Hebrew than it would be with English. It's possible to become fluent in American or British English without spending any time in the country.
... a word that when commonly misspelled has a meaning similar to the original word?
One of the senses of "capital" is somewhat similar to "capitol". They are both the top or head of something (a column, a government). Both are derived from the Latin for "head", of course.
Actually, there are lots of educated Americans who consider "colour", and "color" to be normal alternate spellings of the word, as are "gray" and "grey". I routinely flip a mental coin to decide whether a word ends in "-ise" or "-ize". I'm aware that one's an American spelling and the other is British, but the idea that one might be more correct than the other seems mainly silly.
I'm not really confident that I could consistently use either American or British spellings, though. There are probably a lot of cases where I don't actually know which is which.
But "gaol" still looks a bit weird. Where else is 'g' pronounced like 'j' before an 'a' or an 'o'? (There's gotta be another in this insane language, but I can't think of one.;-)
Reminds me of the old geographical trivia question that Americans used to almost always get wrong:
What's the closest Communist country to the US?
The usual answer is Cuba (90 miles).
Until it fell apart, the correct anwer was the USSR (50 miles).
I guess now Americans finally answer the question correctly.
Of course, there have always been wise asses who answer "Canada". And here in The People's Commonwealth of Massachusetts, some people answer "Massachusetts".
Hmmm... I wouldn't use slashdot as an example of searchable DBs. I occasionally try to find something with/.'s search thingy, hoping beyond hope, and invariably it fails me. Even if I give it a single word to find, it often returns articles that don't contain that word at all. If this is an example of mysql's search capability, I'll use something else.
In my experience, (e)grep usually finds me a match much faster than SQL searches in whatever DB system we're using. I keep wishing this weren't true, but that's what the time(1) command tells me.
(And google is better for finding/. articles than/. is.;-)
Considering the nature of Microsoft's ongoing assault on Linux, I'm surprised they haven't tried to patent Linus yet.
They tried, but found that a number of biotech companies have already been granted patents for each of Linus's genes. Microsoft is now trying to buy those companies.
Luckily, linus already had two children. If he and Tove have any more, they'll run a serious risk of being hit by patent-infringement lawsuits.
He hasn't. If you dig through dejanews and assorted mailing-list archives, looking for Linus's posts, you'll find similar comments in past years. Not a lot of them, true, but Linus has a reputation for being more concerned with practical, everyday issues (and working on things that he considers fun.)
If this isn't the first time he's spoken out against them, then why is it news?
Because a "news" person realized that Linus is one of the movers in the computer biz, and decided to ask him a few questions. Five years ago, the same news people would have dismissed him as a nobody.
... neither of them even gets to finish their sentences! Are all American programs like this, or just Fox?
No, but it's the norm on "conservative" shows, radio or TV. I've listened to a lot of them, out of curiosity, and I've found that this is the main thing that stands out. If a guest or caller tries talking about something that doesn't fit the moderator's ideology, it had better be expressible in "bumper sticker" form, max 4 or 5 words. If the thought requires a complete, coherent English sentence to express, the speaker rarely gets a chance to complete it without being shouted down.
I think it's a cultural thing. In some circles, the standard is to let a guest express themselves, unless they get into hopeless rambling that nobody can follow. Then, after they've made some sort of coherent statement, you rip into them and tear their ideas apart.
In "conservative" circles, the standard is to listen only long enough to hear a few keywords, assume from those words whatever evil belief you'd like to attribute to the speaker, and drown them out with an attack on that. Then, when they try to object that that wasn't what they were trying to say, you do the same thing so they can't complete their explanation.
This doesn't work as well in a forum like slashdot, though some people can simulate it by quoting only a few of your words and replying to some random statement that contains those words.
"I'm the anti-visionary. I distrust people with visions. You don't see what's right in front of your face and you don't see the technical issues that face everyday users."
Linus is starting to rival Larry Wall in the clever-quote department.
"protocol" and "file" are two different words, for a reason. By insisting that they both (aswell as "API" mean the exact same thing, you contribute nothing but lessening the usefulness of all words.
Yeah, but the point is that that they don't mean the same thing; "protocol" is a special case of "file", as are "disk file", "keyboard", "A/D converter", "socket", "process", etc.
We really need a general term for "something that holds data", and the common term for this is "file". There are lots of special kinds of files that have additional properties.
This isn't a specious point in this discussion. There's a real danger to letting people get away with treating "file" as if it only meant "disk file" or something similar. And that danger is illustrated by the suggestion that we include "protocol" in any law decreeing "file formats" to be public. The problem is that people will try to weasel their way out of this by claiming that their format isn't covered because their data isn't a "file".
Consider the scenario: I send you a message, and it's formatted in XML. This is a growing possibility, as XML becomes a standard of data exchange. Your reader says it can't decode part of the message and asks what to do with it. You do a bit of experimenting (or asking in a newsgroup), and find that app X can decode it and display the contents on your screen. You look at the message, and send me a reply.
My next message asks you if you have a license for your app X that decoded the message. It turns out that the chunk in question was formatted using one of the XML encodings that Microsoft has patented. If you don't have a license to decode it, you have violated the patent, and since you've decoded a decrypted message, you have committed a felony under the DMCA. I notify the authorities, and you end up in a federal prison for five years.
If our open-format law only applies to "files" under the strict meaning, then it won't help you in court. The prosecution will just claim that the data in question was a "message", not a "file", and the file-format laws don't apply. Your only defense is if the open-format law applies to data in general, no matter how it's packaged. And the best way at present to guarantee this is to make it clear that "file" means anything that contains data, no matter how it's packaged or what the sender calls it.
There are many other problems with the current laws about data, of course. The idea that a corporation can patent an XML encoding is a clear violation of everything that XML is about, and can easily lead to entrapment like the above scenario. But we do seem to be entering an era when I really can send you a message and then prosecute you for successfully reading it. Just as they can sell you a DVD of a movie and then prosecute you for successfully viewing it on your screen.
To defend against such absurdity, it helps a lot to have your terminology straight. The current fuzziness over, for example, whether a protocol is or is not a special case of a file format is one of the things that we need to standardize. If we allow the use of "file" to exclude things like comm channels, A/D converters and processes, then we have no commonly-understood term for "anything that contains data". This makes it very difficult to formulate rules that cover all the various ways that I can send you a string of bits, and lets me weasel my way out of the rules. I just give my transmission a special name and claim that it's not covered by the rules that only apply to "file formats".
BTW, the general sense of "file" wasn't invented by the unix guys at Bell Labs. They took it from multics, which in turn adopted it from the general discussions of such topics that were widespread in academic computing. The use of "file" in this general way was widespread by around 1970. This was in part to fix all the software problems in commercial system, where you typically needed special code to talk to different kinds of devices, and there was no way to writ
- Times New Roman Font (applies only to Linux, and is still do-able, but is not there out of the box)
So what's the legal situation with Times New Roman? I've seen any number of hints about it being owned (patent? trademark?) by someone, but the details seem to be difficult to come by. Thus, google finds over a thousand matches for "Times New Roman" and "copyright", but they all seem to be incidental uses of the two in different parts of the same document. Wikipedia has an interesting history of Times New Roman, but doesn't say what its current ownership might be.
Can I, as a "nobody" independent programmer, legally write software that uses Times New Roman? If I were to develop and sell a gadget or software that uses Times New Roman, could I be sued by someone? Is it truly an open font, usable by anyone?
Such things could easily bankrupt a solo developer or small firm.
Would it be safer to use Times Roman, and make the software treat the two fonts as logically equivalent?
Of course, in a well-designed OS, programs talk to each other via files, and a protocol is merely the data format used in such files. So a file format and a protocol are really (special cases of) the same thing.
Going at it from the other direction, we might notice that things like disk drives are in fact "running" or "active" objects in the same class as a process. So reading and writing disk files are in fact special cases of inter-process communication. The I/O channel commands used to do disk I/O are in fact a protocol.
The fact that you can use different terms for special cases doesn't mean that you're actually talking about different things.
Someday soon, too, Steve Ballmer will complain that GPL'd formats are "closed to Innovation®".
Probably. This fits the definition I've seen:
Innovation (n): taking something built by someone else, making small cosmetic changes, and claiming the result as yours.
This is as distinct from "invention", which is a term you don't hear much in the corporate world these days. Only little guys invent; the corporations innovate. And since you can now patent innovations, you have a way to legally prevent the inventors from marketing their own inventions without paying you a license.
If the GPL can interfere with innovation in the above sense, it could be a Good Thing®.
Burning the flag is the preferred method of disposing of a US flag that is beyond repair. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, VFWs, American Legions, etc will often hold flag retirements just for this purpose.
Indeed. Some years back, in the late 1970's, there was a fun court case in Chicago. A theatre group produced a play in which an American flag was burned as part of one scene. The actors involved were arrested.
When they got to court, their defense was simple: They produced the oficial rules for handling flags, and pointed out that flags are supposed to be destroyed by burning. Their flags had come from local organizations such as the VFW. They had sent these organizations the script, and asked for worn-out flags that they could use (and burn) in the play. It seems that all these organizations had discussed the request, and decided that this was in fact a proper (if unusual) way to dispose of the flags. The play itself wasn't "disrespectful"; it merely had fictional characters that were disrespectful of the flag.
I only read the first reports, including the fact that the judge thought it was all pretty silly and tossed out the case. There were, however, lots of offended "patriots", and there was some sort of appeal. I never read what happened in the appeals.
But it is fun to mention to people that burning is the officially-approved way to dispose of old flags, and watch their confusion. After all, would you want someone to just toss a flag in the trash?
Also, how do used-car dealers dispose of their old flags?
How am I going to understand how high explosives work when you won't let me play with them?
Funny, but not actually a very good comparison. If you were to take a class in explosives, either military or construction, it would be a while before you would be allowed to play with them. The reason should be pretty obvious, and no student with any sense would want to start by blowing things up. First you'd want a long course teaching the theory of how explosives work, and how to calculate the size and effects of a blast. This would include a lot of information about the dangers, including the variability of a lot of the ingredients.
So, if you are going to use this as the basis of an argument, the obvious parallel would be that kids in school shouldn't be permitted free expression. They should first understand the theories and the dangers.
And, of course, lots of people will way "Exactly." But they get it wrong, too, since few things kids can say aren't really any danger to anyone.
So this may qualify as a good wisecrack, but it's not very informative. Unless, of course, you use it as the starting point for a discussion...
If I were asked such things, I'd just point out that the Bush administration can and does "disappear" people, holding them incommunicado for years without charges or trial. Yeah; the courts have said "You can't do that." The response was announcing a new program to build a prison to house such prisoners for the rest of their lives.
Under such circumstances, the Constitution is little more than a quaint and irrelevant historical document, like the Geneva Conventions.
(There is a question of whether, all rhetoric aside, there is any country where the actual situation is any different. If the authorities in, say, Canada or Sweden wanted someone to disappear, what would happen? How would we know?)
Now, this is probably guaranteed to get a "troll" rating. But the question is serious. How would we know?
Once, back in high school, I had some friends who got into handwriting analysis. They asked me for some samples, so the next day I took along some things I'd recently written and gave a page to each. Then I somehow managed to get them together to tell me all about myself.
The fun part was how different they all were. After a while, they got really confused, and tried to figure out how each other had gone so wrong. This led to comparing the handwriting samples. And that led to mass confusion.
It took them a while to get past the accusations ("You didn't write all of those, did you?"), and finally the truth came out. I'd been studying handwriting myself, but I'd been doing it in the sense of learning scripts (fonts for you recent techie types who don't understand the difference;-). By that time, I was quite comfortable using at least a half dozen different scripts, and I routinely varied the script that I was using to keep myself in practice with all of them.
A lot of the things they were picking up as psychological were in fact features of the particular script that I was using when I wrote the page. Thus Italic defaults to more of a slant and more oval loops than American cursive. Each script uses different kinds of connectors. Risers and descenders vary between scripts. And, rather than realizing that these were features of the script, they were interpreted as having some phychological meaning.
The real fun was wtching them try hard not to understand this. They "knew" that these things were all psychological and controlled by tthe subconscious. They couldn't accept the idea that such things could be conscious, artistic choices that could be changed in an instant.
Not that I would accuse Blair or Gates of making conscious, artistic choices...
Yeah, but we'd immediately break down into a long, branching discussion tree of just how you define a "top brand".
I noticed that the article didn't exactly make this clear. Most recognized? Best image? Most purchased? Can't tell./. readers really shouldn't let them get away with such fuzziness. We're geeks, after all, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Prepare for a visit from the lawyers.
Heh. My lawyer's defense will be to demo that not only is this approach widely used outside Microsoft; it was widely used in the computer industry before Microsoft even existed. It is therefore not a trade secret, and can't be a violation of an NDA. How could you possibly violate an NDA by revealing that a company follows an "industry standard"?
This isn't at all hard to believe, if you've ever read anything about the details of handling fingerprints.
There are a number of good texts on the subject. One of the first things they typically do is disabuse the reader of the Hollywood/TV cop-show idea that fingerprints are unique. This is done by mentioning that identifying fingerprints is mostly done by examining the "loops" and "whorls", and noting that the main way to characterize fingerprints is by the "points", i.e., the intersections in the lines caused by the loops and whorls.
Then the text simply shows prints that contain no points, loops or whorls. They are simply an array of wavy lines without any real distinguishing characteristics. In most finterprint identification schemes, these all map to the same code. Such fingerprints aren't all that common. I don't have any. But they're not really rare, either. Chances are that a number of readers of this message can respond by saying "My ___ finger on my ___ hand is like that".
Your friend and the IT manager probably had an index finger like that. Less likely, but still quite possible, is that their index fingers do have points, but the patterns are the same and map to the same code in the software.
Distinguishing fingerprints in such cases takes careful examining to detect subtle differences in the curves or thicknesses of the lines. This often can't be done at all, even with high-quality prints, and in any case is very difficult to program.
Anyway, don't take my word for any of this. Go find yourself a text on the subject. You'll learn a lot about how complicated and unreliable fingerprinting can be even in the best of controlled conditions.
Damn! I looked at that site hoping for something that I could use, and read:
;-)
/. discussion, because it hid the browser window (and all other windows. There were no controls visible, and it took me several minutes to stumble onto the trick (ESC ;-) that reverted Acrobat to a window with controls. Finally I could shrink it to a decent size and read it in parallel with the discussion.
...
Foxit PDF Reader for Windows
So I can't use it on my linux and Mac machines. Yeah, I have a Windows box, which gets turned on when I need to test network things against it, but is otherwise turned off. (That way, it doesn't contract viral infections.
PDF files online are rather obnoxious. When I opened this article's doc on my Powerbook, Acrobat took over the entire screen and showed the text in a much larger font than I ever want to use. It was impossible to read it next to the
This is nasty behavior that seems to be built into Acrobat. They think that you'd never want to have anything other than the one document on your screen, and you'd love to have a huge font to make it readable from across the room. So every PDF opens in full-screen mode (though usually with a border and menu bar, which this doc somehow suppressed). I've looked around for Preferences settings that will make it play nicer with other apps (and my eyes), to no avail. So each time, I have to laboriously resize the window, which in this case discovering how to turn the resize corner back on.
Acrobat just doesn't play nice with others. Reader-friendly writers wouldn't put PDFs online. There's software to convert PDF to HTML. Now if we could get people to use it
I for one welcome ... ... to be followed up by "All your database are belong to us".
You also see it spelled "ganja". It probably should qualify as an English word, but as both a foreign and slang term, it's not surprising that it wouldn't have a standard spelling.
You're right, of course (except for mispeling "strait" ;-). This is presumably why most Americans gave the wrong answer to the question. Psychologically, The US and Russia are a long distance apart, even though legally they share a border.
;-)
Similarly, when you ask what's the most southern point in the US, people will try to figure out whether it's at the bottom of Texas or Florida. It's actually on the big island of Hawaii.
That's unless you include American "territories", of course, in which case the answer is in Samoa.
There are long lists of geographical trivia questions that almost everyone gets wrong.
"Oh, you're canadian! You don't need this! Welcome to America! Next!!!".
This sort of thing is fairly routine in many countries, even where there are serious frictions.
For example, I've known a number of people who described being waved through security like this when they get off a plane in Israel. The reason is that they have spent sufficient time there to speak Hebrew quite well. When the security people hear them speaking fluent Hebrew, the reaction is a few friendly, casual words welcoming them. It's a "You're one of us" reaction.
On a couple of occasions, I've wondered out loud what would happen when they Palistinian radicals realize that what they need is a few fluent Hebrew speakers. The answer inevitably is "Oh, we know a number of such Arabs, just as we know Israeli Jews who are fluent in Arabic." But, they explain, anyone who is fluent in both languages inevitably has a lot of friends in the other group, understands the other culture, and doesn't take a "they're all evil" attitude. You might as well welcome them and speed them through security checks, because they're exactly the sort of people you want around you.
Others can probably describe other places in the world where the same reasoning applies.
Whether it actually always works is another question. It's probably a lot more reliable with a minor language like Hebrew than it would be with English. It's possible to become fluent in American or British English without spending any time in the country.
... a word that when commonly misspelled has a meaning similar to the original word?
One of the senses of "capital" is somewhat similar to "capitol". They are both the top or head of something (a column, a government). Both are derived from the Latin for "head", of course.
Actually, there are lots of educated Americans who consider "colour", and "color" to be normal alternate spellings of the word, as are "gray" and "grey". I routinely flip a mental coin to decide whether a word ends in "-ise" or "-ize". I'm aware that one's an American spelling and the other is British, but the idea that one might be more correct than the other seems mainly silly.
;-)
I'm not really confident that I could consistently use either American or British spellings, though. There are probably a lot of cases where I don't actually know which is which.
But "gaol" still looks a bit weird. Where else is 'g' pronounced like 'j' before an 'a' or an 'o'? (There's gotta be another in this insane language, but I can't think of one.
Reminds me of the old geographical trivia question that Americans used to almost always get wrong:
What's the closest Communist country to the US?
The usual answer is Cuba (90 miles).
Until it fell apart, the correct anwer was the USSR (50 miles).
I guess now Americans finally answer the question correctly.
Of course, there have always been wise asses who answer "Canada". And here in The People's Commonwealth of Massachusetts, some people answer "Massachusetts".
Hmmm ... I wouldn't use slashdot as an example of searchable DBs. I occasionally try to find something with /.'s search thingy, hoping beyond hope, and invariably it fails me. Even if I give it a single word to find, it often returns articles that don't contain that word at all. If this is an example of mysql's search capability, I'll use something else.
/. articles than /. is. ;-)
In my experience, (e)grep usually finds me a match much faster than SQL searches in whatever DB system we're using. I keep wishing this weren't true, but that's what the time(1) command tells me.
(And google is better for finding
Considering the nature of Microsoft's ongoing assault on Linux, I'm surprised they haven't tried to patent Linus yet.
They tried, but found that a number of biotech companies have already been granted patents for each of Linus's genes. Microsoft is now trying to buy those companies.
Luckily, linus already had two children. If he and Tove have any more, they'll run a serious risk of being hit by patent-infringement lawsuits.
why has he waited so long?
He hasn't. If you dig through dejanews and assorted mailing-list archives, looking for Linus's posts, you'll find similar comments in past years. Not a lot of them, true, but Linus has a reputation for being more concerned with practical, everyday issues (and working on things that he considers fun.)
If this isn't the first time he's spoken out against them, then why is it news?
Because a "news" person realized that Linus is one of the movers in the computer biz, and decided to ask him a few questions. Five years ago, the same news people would have dismissed him as a nobody.
... neither of them even gets to finish their sentences! Are all American programs like this, or just Fox?
No, but it's the norm on "conservative" shows, radio or TV. I've listened to a lot of them, out of curiosity, and I've found that this is the main thing that stands out. If a guest or caller tries talking about something that doesn't fit the moderator's ideology, it had better be expressible in "bumper sticker" form, max 4 or 5 words. If the thought requires a complete, coherent English sentence to express, the speaker rarely gets a chance to complete it without being shouted down.
I think it's a cultural thing. In some circles, the standard is to let a guest express themselves, unless they get into hopeless rambling that nobody can follow. Then, after they've made some sort of coherent statement, you rip into them and tear their ideas apart.
In "conservative" circles, the standard is to listen only long enough to hear a few keywords, assume from those words whatever evil belief you'd like to attribute to the speaker, and drown them out with an attack on that. Then, when they try to object that that wasn't what they were trying to say, you do the same thing so they can't complete their explanation.
This doesn't work as well in a forum like slashdot, though some people can simulate it by quoting only a few of your words and replying to some random statement that contains those words.
"I'm the anti-visionary. I distrust people with visions. You don't see what's right in front of your face and you don't see the technical issues that face everyday users."
Linus is starting to rival Larry Wall in the clever-quote department.
"protocol" and "file" are two different words, for a reason. By insisting that they both (aswell as "API" mean the exact same thing, you contribute nothing but lessening the usefulness of all words.
Yeah, but the point is that that they don't mean the same thing; "protocol" is a special case of "file", as are "disk file", "keyboard", "A/D converter", "socket", "process", etc.
We really need a general term for "something that holds data", and the common term for this is "file". There are lots of special kinds of files that have additional properties.
This isn't a specious point in this discussion. There's a real danger to letting people get away with treating "file" as if it only meant "disk file" or something similar. And that danger is illustrated by the suggestion that we include "protocol" in any law decreeing "file formats" to be public. The problem is that people will try to weasel their way out of this by claiming that their format isn't covered because their data isn't a "file".
Consider the scenario: I send you a message, and it's formatted in XML. This is a growing possibility, as XML becomes a standard of data exchange. Your reader says it can't decode part of the message and asks what to do with it. You do a bit of experimenting (or asking in a newsgroup), and find that app X can decode it and display the contents on your screen. You look at the message, and send me a reply.
My next message asks you if you have a license for your app X that decoded the message. It turns out that the chunk in question was formatted using one of the XML encodings that Microsoft has patented. If you don't have a license to decode it, you have violated the patent, and since you've decoded a decrypted message, you have committed a felony under the DMCA. I notify the authorities, and you end up in a federal prison for five years.
If our open-format law only applies to "files" under the strict meaning, then it won't help you in court. The prosecution will just claim that the data in question was a "message", not a "file", and the file-format laws don't apply. Your only defense is if the open-format law applies to data in general, no matter how it's packaged. And the best way at present to guarantee this is to make it clear that "file" means anything that contains data, no matter how it's packaged or what the sender calls it.
There are many other problems with the current laws about data, of course. The idea that a corporation can patent an XML encoding is a clear violation of everything that XML is about, and can easily lead to entrapment like the above scenario. But we do seem to be entering an era when I really can send you a message and then prosecute you for successfully reading it. Just as they can sell you a DVD of a movie and then prosecute you for successfully viewing it on your screen.
To defend against such absurdity, it helps a lot to have your terminology straight. The current fuzziness over, for example, whether a protocol is or is not a special case of a file format is one of the things that we need to standardize. If we allow the use of "file" to exclude things like comm channels, A/D converters and processes, then we have no commonly-understood term for "anything that contains data". This makes it very difficult to formulate rules that cover all the various ways that I can send you a string of bits, and lets me weasel my way out of the rules. I just give my transmission a special name and claim that it's not covered by the rules that only apply to "file formats".
BTW, the general sense of "file" wasn't invented by the unix guys at Bell Labs. They took it from multics, which in turn adopted it from the general discussions of such topics that were widespread in academic computing. The use of "file" in this general way was widespread by around 1970. This was in part to fix all the software problems in commercial system, where you typically needed special code to talk to different kinds of devices, and there was no way to writ
- Times New Roman Font (applies only to Linux, and is still do-able, but is not there out of the box)
So what's the legal situation with Times New Roman? I've seen any number of hints about it being owned (patent? trademark?) by someone, but the details seem to be difficult to come by. Thus, google finds over a thousand matches for "Times New Roman" and "copyright", but they all seem to be incidental uses of the two in different parts of the same document. Wikipedia has an interesting history of Times New Roman, but doesn't say what its current ownership might be.
Can I, as a "nobody" independent programmer, legally write software that uses Times New Roman? If I were to develop and sell a gadget or software that uses Times New Roman, could I be sued by someone? Is it truly an open font, usable by anyone?
Such things could easily bankrupt a solo developer or small firm.
Would it be safer to use Times Roman, and make the software treat the two fonts as logically equivalent?
Of course, in a well-designed OS, programs talk to each other via files, and a protocol is merely the data format used in such files. So a file format and a protocol are really (special cases of) the same thing.
Going at it from the other direction, we might notice that things like disk drives are in fact "running" or "active" objects in the same class as a process. So reading and writing disk files are in fact special cases of inter-process communication. The I/O channel commands used to do disk I/O are in fact a protocol.
The fact that you can use different terms for special cases doesn't mean that you're actually talking about different things.
Someday soon, too, Steve Ballmer will complain that GPL'd formats are "closed to Innovation®".
Probably. This fits the definition I've seen:
Innovation (n): taking something built by someone else, making small cosmetic changes, and claiming the result as yours.
This is as distinct from "invention", which is a term you don't hear much in the corporate world these days. Only little guys invent; the corporations innovate. And since you can now patent innovations, you have a way to legally prevent the inventors from marketing their own inventions without paying you a license.
If the GPL can interfere with innovation in the above sense, it could be a Good Thing®.
Burning the flag is the preferred method of disposing of a US flag that is beyond repair. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, VFWs, American Legions, etc will often hold flag retirements just for this purpose.
Indeed. Some years back, in the late 1970's, there was a fun court case in Chicago. A theatre group produced a play in which an American flag was burned as part of one scene. The actors involved were arrested.
When they got to court, their defense was simple: They produced the oficial rules for handling flags, and pointed out that flags are supposed to be destroyed by burning. Their flags had come from local organizations such as the VFW. They had sent these organizations the script, and asked for worn-out flags that they could use (and burn) in the play. It seems that all these organizations had discussed the request, and decided that this was in fact a proper (if unusual) way to dispose of the flags. The play itself wasn't "disrespectful"; it merely had fictional characters that were disrespectful of the flag.
I only read the first reports, including the fact that the judge thought it was all pretty silly and tossed out the case. There were, however, lots of offended "patriots", and there was some sort of appeal. I never read what happened in the appeals.
But it is fun to mention to people that burning is the officially-approved way to dispose of old flags, and watch their confusion. After all, would you want someone to just toss a flag in the trash?
Also, how do used-car dealers dispose of their old flags?
How am I going to understand how high explosives work when you won't let me play with them?
...
Funny, but not actually a very good comparison. If you were to take a class in explosives, either military or construction, it would be a while before you would be allowed to play with them. The reason should be pretty obvious, and no student with any sense would want to start by blowing things up. First you'd want a long course teaching the theory of how explosives work, and how to calculate the size and effects of a blast. This would include a lot of information about the dangers, including the variability of a lot of the ingredients.
So, if you are going to use this as the basis of an argument, the obvious parallel would be that kids in school shouldn't be permitted free expression. They should first understand the theories and the dangers.
And, of course, lots of people will way "Exactly." But they get it wrong, too, since few things kids can say aren't really any danger to anyone.
So this may qualify as a good wisecrack, but it's not very informative. Unless, of course, you use it as the starting point for a discussion
Pretty accurate summary.
If I were asked such things, I'd just point out that the Bush administration can and does "disappear" people, holding them incommunicado for years without charges or trial. Yeah; the courts have said "You can't do that." The response was announcing a new program to build a prison to house such prisoners for the rest of their lives.
Under such circumstances, the Constitution is little more than a quaint and irrelevant historical document, like the Geneva Conventions.
(There is a question of whether, all rhetoric aside, there is any country where the actual situation is any different. If the authorities in, say, Canada or Sweden wanted someone to disappear, what would happen? How would we know?)
Now, this is probably guaranteed to get a "troll" rating. But the question is serious. How would we know?
Once, back in high school, I had some friends who got into handwriting analysis. They asked me for some samples, so the next day I took along some things I'd recently written and gave a page to each. Then I somehow managed to get them together to tell me all about myself.
;-). By that time, I was quite comfortable using at least a half dozen different scripts, and I routinely varied the script that I was using to keep myself in practice with all of them.
...
The fun part was how different they all were. After a while, they got really confused, and tried to figure out how each other had gone so wrong. This led to comparing the handwriting samples. And that led to mass confusion.
It took them a while to get past the accusations ("You didn't write all of those, did you?"), and finally the truth came out. I'd been studying handwriting myself, but I'd been doing it in the sense of learning scripts (fonts for you recent techie types who don't understand the difference
A lot of the things they were picking up as psychological were in fact features of the particular script that I was using when I wrote the page. Thus Italic defaults to more of a slant and more oval loops than American cursive. Each script uses different kinds of connectors. Risers and descenders vary between scripts. And, rather than realizing that these were features of the script, they were interpreted as having some phychological meaning.
The real fun was wtching them try hard not to understand this. They "knew" that these things were all psychological and controlled by tthe subconscious. They couldn't accept the idea that such things could be conscious, artistic choices that could be changed in an instant.
Not that I would accuse Blair or Gates of making conscious, artistic choices
So has anyone yet published the followup article that compares their doodles with their horoscopes?
Anyone know their birthdays?
Must be a top five brand for geeks?
/. readers really shouldn't let them get away with such fuzziness. We're geeks, after all, right?
Yeah, but we'd immediately break down into a long, branching discussion tree of just how you define a "top brand".
I noticed that the article didn't exactly make this clear. Most recognized? Best image? Most purchased? Can't tell.