The only problem I found with your proposal is that Microsoft can develop their file formats/protocols/APIs internally and then implement them without releasing them until they release their product.
I was assuming that the disclosure would be through the mechanisms already in the proposal, which requires disclosure once the product is in beta. Not ideal, but any earlier and MS would basically have to release its entire product development plan to its competitors.
Bear in mind that the remedies are meant to level the playing field, not deliberately tilt it against MS.
Better yet would be to force all these file formats/protocols/APIs to go through an open standards committee before changes can be made.
Thereby forcing MS to hand its entire technology strategy over to a bunch of people with every motive for seeing it fail... I don't think so.
And of course better file formats/protocols/APIs should be designed in the long run as many of these are poorly designed...
If this is true and makes a difference to the product (and I think it is and does) then it will act as a competitive disadvantage to MS, hence persuading them to improve. All that is required is a level playing field.
They are rather long, so I thought I'd post a link instead. But anyone who agrees with them is welcome to send them in. You might want to delete the bit about me being a UK citizen and replace it with yourself though:-/
A garbage collector has to scan all the data in memory to decide which bits are needed and which bits are garbage. If you have gigabytes of data, or you allocate lots of data and therefore need to run the GC a lot to reclaim it, then the GC is going to take a correspondingly long time.
In this case they are getting the best of both worlds by using GC where appropriate, and then using special knowledge about the application to optimise away the overhead.
...mercenaries to help ensure compliance with their extortion...
Or in other words making people pay what they agreed to pay when they started using the software. Its not like they didn't have a choice.
Emotive words like "mercenaries" and "extortion" don't help, any more than words like "piracy" and "software theft".
Meantime this is an excellent time to stop preaching to the choir and start telling those businesses about open source software. Issue press releases. Get interviewed by radio and TV.
AIUI the judgement required that any system with access to BIA data be pulled off the net. But this leaves no time for anyone to carry out an inventory of which systems that applies to.
Imagine you are one of the senior people in the DOI, high enough that its your head on the plate in a contempt hearing. The law says "pull those computers now", but nobody knows which computers that means, or who to ask to find out. Anyway, all you know about computers is how to use Word and Powerpoint on your laptop.
You could issue an order saying "any computer with access to Indian data must be taken down now", but you also know three other things:
Memos from Up High that demand something as inconvenient as that will be ignored if at all possible. All sorts of people will quietly forget that they have access to BIA machines.
In some cases the forgetfulness will be perfectly genuine. Sysadmins are busy, and there is continual turnover. There are going to be lots of odd connections, dialup modems and programs scattered around, any of which might give access to BIA data because some summer student needed it five years ago.
If even a single machine slips through the net then you are in contempt of court and could theoretically serve time in jail. There are people out there trying to make this happen. Your career is in enough trouble as it is. Why take the risk? OTOH nobody can complain if you overreact because the law leaves no leaway. Its going to be expensive, but the money you waste is not your own and there is always plenty more where that came from.
Paul.
Confusing tech knowledge with politics
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You seem to be assuming that anyone with knowledge of the situation will automatically agree with you, and hence concluding that therefore the politicians and judges you don't agree with are therefore ignorant. Thats a very large assumption, although I suppose its marginally better than the similar logic which declares that they must be corrupt instead.
Always bear in mind the other possibility: that they might actually know the facts but honestly disagree with your conclusions. Whatever you and I may think of the DeCSS decisions recently, there is no denying that Kaplan and the appeal court knew and understood the technology and the law that was relevant to the case.
The idea that artists and inventors should be granted limited monopolies on their works is a very old and respectable idea (e.g. the US constitution). It takes a bit more than arm-waving to cast it all aside.
Also, bear in mind that the judges in the DeCSS case have very properly had to defer to Congress except where Congress exceeds its constitutional powers. The system was designed that way for good reason. Believe me, you really don't want judges making up the law as they go along.
I have a lower opinion of Congress as a venue for getting these things right though. For a variety of reasons they get a clearer view of the arguments to increase IPR than to limit them. Most of these come down to a combination of money and the tendency of focussed interests (e.g. 5 movie studios) to over-ride diffuse interests (e.g. 500e6 movie fans). But thats about par for the course. Congress has made some stunningly bad decisions over the past couple of centuries, and will no doubt make more. If you want to improve it, you know what to do.
Which is what Dr. David S. Touretzky has done here.
Its noticable that Dr. Touretzky has been threatened by the MPA, but the threat has neither been withdrawn nor acted upon (AFAIK). It seems to me that the EFF might have used that in the Felten case as evidence that the threat against Felten was not an isolated case, and the withdrawal of the threat against Felten was an attempt to avoid clarification of the law.
Paul.
Re:This is not the traditional embedded market
on
Windows XP Embedded
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Here in the UK they have been putting plasma screens in motorway service stations to show adverts and bits of news and travel info.
I was there when the server rebooted. It showed a Windows 2000 desktop with an error message in a dialog box.
Hmmm. Microsoft Windows: Suddenly everything sticks.
Hmmm. I don't know exactly what the court was trying to say here. For that matter, I don't think I understand what 2600 was trying to argue. The legal status of using DeCSS to make fair use of purchased material was not at issue.
The recent decision on first sale seems to me to apply here. Regardless of the fine print, if you buy a DVD you own both it and the copy of the data thereon. Viewing that data by any means cannot be considered a violation of the rights of the copyright holder even if done on an unlicensed player. Likewise, a bona-fide player could not be argued to be a "protection circumvention device" if it honours the protection flags on the disk.
In any event, the Defendants offer no evidence that the Plaintiffs have either explicitly or implicitly authorized DVD buyes to circumvent encryption technology to support use on multiple platforms
Which is not to say that such evidence could not be found, merely that 2600 failed to present it in this case.
I think that if a case actually hung on this point then it would not be difficult to establish that purchasing a DVD implies that you are allowed to look at the movie it contains, and that this implied license does not contain any implicit limitation as to the technology you can use to do so. Even if there was an explicit clause in the fine print on the back of the case it would certainly not be legally binding in the UK, and probably not in the US either, although UCITA might make this an interesting question in some states.
Paul.
Re:Not willing to go to jail to prove a point?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2
Let the corporate
goon squads of the DOJ/FBI prosecute the scientists, in front of the American media, obviously violating their
consitutional rights?
They wouldn't prosecute an obvious poster boy.
The initial cease-and-desist letter to Felten was a major tactical blunder, caused by the fire-and-forget attitude of the legal department concerned. Once they realised what they had done they backtracked fast.
This case is not about actually getting sued, its about the "chilling effect" of uncertainty due to a grey area in the law. The uncertainty caused by this grey area gives the government and media industries much more control over publication than
a solid boundary would, so they will try to keep the boundary as vague as possible. They can best do this by keeping cases out of court unless they are sure they can win, because if they lose a case then it automatically paints a large area of white over what was previously grey.
In this particular case the defendents argued that there was no grey, or so little as not to matter. The EFF argued that there was lots of grey and it did matter. The EFF lost, but like them I'm pretty confident that this will be reversed on appeal. They seemed to have a strong case. The "chilling" effect of vague law is taken seriously by the courts.
I've just ploughed my way through the entire 2600 appeal judgement. It was heavy going since the posted document appears to be a scan of the raw transcript, complete with phonetic typos and dropped letters.
The meat of the judgement is on how the "functional" aspects of DeCSS weigh against its "expressive" aspects. Two key elements seem to have wieghed against 2600 in this case:
2600 explicitly advocated using DeCSS to break the law. Such advocacy is not protected speech. Just as your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, so does your right to tell someone else to swing their fist. If 2600 had advocated using DeCSS purely for "fair use" purposes then they would have had a much stronger case.
DeCSS, as posted, is a key component in the illegal ripping of DVDs. This does not require the user to read and understand DeCSS, just to compile and run it.
So now consider a hypothetical DVD player for Linux. Its distributed as source, but if compiled and run unmodified then it simply plays DVDs in exactly the same way as any licensed player. The bulk of DeCSS is to be found inside it, and any user with a modicum of technical knowledge could add a one line patch to make the player to divert a copy of the decrypted data into a separate file.
It seems fairly clear to me that the distribution of this program, even in source, would be protected under the First Amendment. At the very least the MPAA would need to get a separate injunction to cover it, and to obtain such an injunction they would need to overcome the functional vs expressive hurdle.
In the 2600 case the DeCSS code was distributed in a form which, when run without modification, would create an unencrypted copy of a movie. But our hypothetical Linux player would not do this. For the purpose of a would-be DVD copyright breaker the program has no use. The fact that a one-line patch could turn it into such a program is irrelevant, just as the cryptographic weakness of CSS was irrelevent to its being an "effective" content protection measure for legal purposes.
Suppose the Linux DVD player allows you to grab screenshots, or even extract short clips? It would probably still be protected, since such extracts would generally be for "fair use".
What would push this hypothetical player over the line would be publishing instructions for making the 1-line patch, especially if accompanied by a suggestion that this be used to break copyright law. Even then, it would be the patch instructions that would be the legitamate target of DMCA enforcement, not the player.
I'm not so well up on US and Canadian law, but here in the UK it would work like this. I'll bet US and Canadian law is similar in most respects.
First of all you can short-circuit the runaround. Who did you pay? They are the people you have a contract with, and can therefore sue. The buck goes with the cheque. If they offloaded part of the job to someone else then that is their problem.
Unfortunately this is likely to mean that you are suing the Canadian part rather than the US part, and will thus either have to hire a Canadian lawyer to do it for you or travel back to Canada to actually sue them. OTOH if they are basically the same corporation then you may be able to sue them in the US. There are also likely to be rules about holding hearings at the defendents home address (e.g. wherever their registered office is). This is something to find out about. You may be able to argue that since they are a multinational corporation it makes no difference to them where the hearing is, so it might as well be held where you are.
Secondly, the exclusion of liability clause in their contract is unlikely to cover malicious damage, even if they try to claim it does. And the photos you published do look like malicious damage. That bent phono jack may be the smoking gun here: it looks like someone stuck a screwdriver in there and bent it. There is no way this could have happened by accident. Take a look inside and you might even be able to see the marks left by the screwdriver.
If malicious damage occured then you have a much stronger case for compensation. Details will depend on the relevant laws. Go to a library and find out what they are. Then think about talking to a lawyer.
Bear in mind that you can invalidate some claims but not others. So for example one of the claims is:
7. A method as in claim 1 wherein said method produces anti-aliased text in said destination image by performing the method with the
source image being a pattern and the mask image being anti-aliased text.
(Claim 1 is the basic alpha-transparency concept).
Suppose that someone comes up with prior art that invalidates claim 1. Apple can still claim rights over the use of this technique for anti-aliased text unless someone can show prior art which covers that specific application. So don't just look for prior descriptions of alpha-transparency: look for prior use of alpha transparency for text, and anything else in the claims.
More likely I think is a chain reaction from the shockwave of implosion. These photomultipliers are basically big vacuum tubes. If one breaks under water then the water is going to accelerate rapidly inwards, then stop suddenly when it meets other water coming the other way. This will generate a pressure pulse which would break nearby tubes, causing a chain reaction to spread across the entire system.
In software terms, the same terms would be "fixed percent of sale price." The astute reader will observe that this allows continued distribution of free (gratis) software w/o royalty encumberance, even if it causes RMS to break out in a rash.
OK, I can see how this saves gratis distribution. What about non-gratis distribution. Suppose I am Blue Beret Software selling my Linux distribution. I want to include a package where the RAND terms include a 1% license fee. Does that entitle them to 1% of the sale price of my distribution boxes? What about my consultancy and support fees, given that these are all derived from a distribution which incorporates the RAND-licensed package.
What if I have fifty such packages. Am I now going to be paying 50% of my turnover in royalty fees? What if I have 101 of them?
Paul.
Re:The Lexus and the Olive Tree
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not every culture holds as its highest ideal the individual pursuit of wealth.
Do you plan on going to live in one of these alternatives? I thought not.
It is important for a people to be able to define their own terms of participation in the global economy.
Amazing how a single letter can completely reverse the meaning of a sentence. I think it is important for people to define their own terms of participation in the global economy. But "a people" implies some kind of collective decision making and enforcement of that decision. This inevitably comes down to forcing people to stay where they are instead of letting them seek their own fortunes in whatever way seems best to them as individuals.
Yup. The Anglican bishops sit in the House of Lords (the unelected upper house we have here). They are the "Lords Spiritual" rather than the "Lords Temporal". ISTR that there is also an allocation for Catholics and Jews, and the Muslims are demanding parity.
The idea of Yoda sitting on the Front Bench is a little startling though. "Hmmm. Make my maiden speech I will".
Its a fair bet that the terrorists practised on PCs running off-the-shelf flight simulators. It would be an obvious way of learning enough about flying large jets.
True, the American Bar Assoc does require lawyers to spend some time on pro bono work. But I don't think it sets any specific amounts, and since the ABA is controlled by its members the profession could easily get rid of the requirement if it wanted to.
For much the same reasons that lawyers do Pro Bono work:
Establish a professional reputation for quality work
Establish a social reputation as a nice person
Make the world a better place
(any lawyers out there want to add to the list?)
A congressman will be familiar with lawyers, and probably has a legal background himself, so comparing open source to legal pro bono work will put him on familiar ground and give you a shared context. Eg, ask "how would you feel if a big law firm called Pro Bono work 'unamerican'?")
Of course there are also all the commercial reasons why companies produce open source code. Its worth emphasising that many open source coders are actually employed to do it, so its not just a geek hobby. See Opensource.org for all the commercial reasons for releasing open source.
Its good to see that the big companies are being hurt by this. In the past they could use cross-licensing agreements to tie up whole areas of technology for themselves and shut out new companies. (Cross licensing, BTW, is where A says to B "I'll let you use all my patents if you let me use all yours, and since your pile of patents is smaller than mine you can pay me $$$ to make up the difference". Never mind the quality, feel the width!)
But the threat of an injunction which stops production for a year or so whilst the lawyers fight it out in court is a gun to the head of these companies. So we have what amounts to a protection racket: pay up or be put out of business. At the moment the fees are tolerable, but this kind of thing has a way of growing exponentially as more people catch on to the idea of easy money. Once patent trolls start making a measurable dent in the bottom line you can bet that these companies are going to start complaining to their tame congresscritters.
(Not that I've got anything against large companies in themselves: some things just really do need a large organisation to make happen. But I've noticed that getting something done is just so much easier when you have the president of a large company backing you)
Over here we have this thing called the National Curriculum. Its a requirements document listing all the things that kids have to be taught. It does not specify how or when (beyond broad 2-3 year bands) things get taught.
Naturally such a document is a magnet to everyone with an axe to grind. It seems like everyone has something they want put in the National Curriculum. Most of these things are fairly worthy, like road safety, how to apply for a job, how compound interest works, and how to extract cube roots without a calculator. Most people think that their favourite author ought to go in the English section. And so on.
As a result of all this the first version of the NC had a bad case of bloat brought on by creeping featurism. After that a revised version was bought out which was slimmed down to the things that the education academics think that kids actually need to know. Copyright law is not (AFAIK) on the list.
There is still a lot of pressure for feature creep in the NC, but the people in charge of it seem to have learned how to say "no". You still get pressure groups of one sort or another popping up and asking for their pet cause to go in the NC, but nobody takes any notice. This is just another similar suggestion, and I don't think its going to go anywhere.
Problem with cell phones isn't talking, its dialling. OK if you've got a voice-activated one, but not everyone does.
As for your statistics: beware the semi-attached figure. Accident rates involving cellphones are going to be under-reported because nobody is going to admit to a policeman after an accident that they were breaking the law by using their cellphone at the time.
And remember, this guy was also tapping on a PDA on his leg, fielding a pager strapped to another leg, and fumbling with a clipboard of directions. All without enough sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem I found with your proposal is that Microsoft can develop their file formats/protocols/APIs internally and then implement them without releasing them until they release their product.
I was assuming that the disclosure would be through the mechanisms already in the proposal, which requires disclosure once the product is in beta. Not ideal, but any earlier and MS would basically have to release its entire product development plan to its competitors.
Bear in mind that the remedies are meant to level the playing field, not deliberately tilt it against MS.
Better yet would be to force all these file formats/protocols/APIs to go through an open standards committee before changes can be made.
Thereby forcing MS to hand its entire technology strategy over to a bunch of people with every motive for seeing it fail... I don't think so.
And of course better file formats/protocols/APIs should be designed in the long run as many of these are poorly designed...
If this is true and makes a difference to the product (and I think it is and does) then it will act as a competitive disadvantage to MS, hence persuading them to improve. All that is required is a level playing field.
Paul.
In case you missed it the first time, READ MY COMMENTS!!! .
Does anyone know if comments from non-US citizens are accepted?
Paul.
In this case they are getting the best of both worlds by using GC where appropriate, and then using special knowledge about the application to optimise away the overhead.
Paul.
Or in other words making people pay what they agreed to pay when they started using the software. Its not like they didn't have a choice.
Emotive words like "mercenaries" and "extortion" don't help, any more than words like "piracy" and "software theft".
Meantime this is an excellent time to stop preaching to the choir and start telling those businesses about open source software. Issue press releases. Get interviewed by radio and TV.
Paul.
Imagine you are one of the senior people in the DOI, high enough that its your head on the plate in a contempt hearing. The law says "pull those computers now", but nobody knows which computers that means, or who to ask to find out. Anyway, all you know about computers is how to use Word and Powerpoint on your laptop.
You could issue an order saying "any computer with access to Indian data must be taken down now", but you also know three other things:
Paul.
Always bear in mind the other possibility: that they might actually know the facts but honestly disagree with your conclusions. Whatever you and I may think of the DeCSS decisions recently, there is no denying that Kaplan and the appeal court knew and understood the technology and the law that was relevant to the case.
The idea that artists and inventors should be granted limited monopolies on their works is a very old and respectable idea (e.g. the US constitution). It takes a bit more than arm-waving to cast it all aside.
Also, bear in mind that the judges in the DeCSS case have very properly had to defer to Congress except where Congress exceeds its constitutional powers. The system was designed that way for good reason. Believe me, you really don't want judges making up the law as they go along.
I have a lower opinion of Congress as a venue for getting these things right though. For a variety of reasons they get a clearer view of the arguments to increase IPR than to limit them. Most of these come down to a combination of money and the tendency of focussed interests (e.g. 5 movie studios) to over-ride diffuse interests (e.g. 500e6 movie fans). But thats about par for the course. Congress has made some stunningly bad decisions over the past couple of centuries, and will no doubt make more. If you want to improve it, you know what to do.
Paul.
Its noticable that Dr. Touretzky has been threatened by the MPA, but the threat has neither been withdrawn nor acted upon (AFAIK). It seems to me that the EFF might have used that in the Felten case as evidence that the threat against Felten was not an isolated case, and the withdrawal of the threat against Felten was an attempt to avoid clarification of the law.
Paul.
I was there when the server rebooted. It showed a Windows 2000 desktop with an error message in a dialog box.
Hmmm. Microsoft Windows: Suddenly everything sticks.
Paul.
The recent decision on first sale seems to me to apply here. Regardless of the fine print, if you buy a DVD you own both it and the copy of the data thereon. Viewing that data by any means cannot be considered a violation of the rights of the copyright holder even if done on an unlicensed player. Likewise, a bona-fide player could not be argued to be a "protection circumvention device" if it honours the protection flags on the disk.
In any event, the Defendants offer no evidence that the Plaintiffs have either explicitly or implicitly authorized DVD buyes to circumvent encryption technology to support use on multiple platforms
Which is not to say that such evidence could not be found, merely that 2600 failed to present it in this case.
I think that if a case actually hung on this point then it would not be difficult to establish that purchasing a DVD implies that you are allowed to look at the movie it contains, and that this implied license does not contain any implicit limitation as to the technology you can use to do so. Even if there was an explicit clause in the fine print on the back of the case it would certainly not be legally binding in the UK, and probably not in the US either, although UCITA might make this an interesting question in some states.
Paul.
goon squads of the DOJ/FBI prosecute the scientists, in front of the American media, obviously violating their
consitutional rights?
They wouldn't prosecute an obvious poster boy.
The initial cease-and-desist letter to Felten was a major tactical blunder, caused by the fire-and-forget attitude of the legal department concerned. Once they realised what they had done they backtracked fast.
This case is not about actually getting sued, its about the "chilling effect" of uncertainty due to a grey area in the law. The uncertainty caused by this grey area gives the government and media industries much more control over publication than
a solid boundary would, so they will try to keep the boundary as vague as possible. They can best do this by keeping cases out of court unless they are sure they can win, because if they lose a case then it automatically paints a large area of white over what was previously grey.
In this particular case the defendents argued that there was no grey, or so little as not to matter. The EFF argued that there was lots of grey and it did matter. The EFF lost, but like them I'm pretty confident that this will be reversed on appeal. They seemed to have a strong case. The "chilling" effect of vague law is taken seriously by the courts.
Paul.
I've just ploughed my way through the entire 2600 appeal judgement. It was heavy going since the posted document appears to be a scan of the raw transcript, complete with phonetic typos and dropped letters.
The meat of the judgement is on how the "functional" aspects of DeCSS weigh against its "expressive" aspects. Two key elements seem to have wieghed against 2600 in this case:
So now consider a hypothetical DVD player for Linux. Its distributed as source, but if compiled and run unmodified then it simply plays DVDs in exactly the same way as any licensed player. The bulk of DeCSS is to be found inside it, and any user with a modicum of technical knowledge could add a one line patch to make the player to divert a copy of the decrypted data into a separate file.
It seems fairly clear to me that the distribution of this program, even in source, would be protected under the First Amendment. At the very least the MPAA would need to get a separate injunction to cover it, and to obtain such an injunction they would need to overcome the functional vs expressive hurdle.
In the 2600 case the DeCSS code was distributed in a form which, when run without modification, would create an unencrypted copy of a movie. But our hypothetical Linux player would not do this. For the purpose of a would-be DVD copyright breaker the program has no use. The fact that a one-line patch could turn it into such a program is irrelevant, just as the cryptographic weakness of CSS was irrelevent to its being an "effective" content protection measure for legal purposes.
Suppose the Linux DVD player allows you to grab screenshots, or even extract short clips? It would probably still be protected, since such extracts would generally be for "fair use".
What would push this hypothetical player over the line would be publishing instructions for making the 1-line patch, especially if accompanied by a suggestion that this be used to break copyright law. Even then, it would be the patch instructions that would be the legitamate target of DMCA enforcement, not the player.
Paul.
First of all you can short-circuit the runaround. Who did you pay? They are the people you have a contract with, and can therefore sue. The buck goes with the cheque. If they offloaded part of the job to someone else then that is their problem.
Unfortunately this is likely to mean that you are suing the Canadian part rather than the US part, and will thus either have to hire a Canadian lawyer to do it for you or travel back to Canada to actually sue them. OTOH if they are basically the same corporation then you may be able to sue them in the US. There are also likely to be rules about holding hearings at the defendents home address (e.g. wherever their registered office is). This is something to find out about. You may be able to argue that since they are a multinational corporation it makes no difference to them where the hearing is, so it might as well be held where you are.
Secondly, the exclusion of liability clause in their contract is unlikely to cover malicious damage, even if they try to claim it does. And the photos you published do look like malicious damage. That bent phono jack may be the smoking gun here: it looks like someone stuck a screwdriver in there and bent it. There is no way this could have happened by accident. Take a look inside and you might even be able to see the marks left by the screwdriver.
If malicious damage occured then you have a much stronger case for compensation. Details will depend on the relevant laws. Go to a library and find out what they are. Then think about talking to a lawyer.
Paul.
7. A method as in claim 1 wherein said method produces anti-aliased text in said destination image by performing the method with the
source image being a pattern and the mask image being anti-aliased text.
(Claim 1 is the basic alpha-transparency concept).
Suppose that someone comes up with prior art that invalidates claim 1. Apple can still claim rights over the use of this technique for anti-aliased text unless someone can show prior art which covers that specific application. So don't just look for prior descriptions of alpha-transparency: look for prior use of alpha transparency for text, and anything else in the claims.
Paul.
Paul.
OK, I can see how this saves gratis distribution. What about non-gratis distribution. Suppose I am Blue Beret Software selling my Linux distribution. I want to include a package where the RAND terms include a 1% license fee. Does that entitle them to 1% of the sale price of my distribution boxes? What about my consultancy and support fees, given that these are all derived from a distribution which incorporates the RAND-licensed package.
What if I have fifty such packages. Am I now going to be paying 50% of my turnover in royalty fees? What if I have 101 of them?
Paul.
Do you plan on going to live in one of these alternatives? I thought not.
It is important for a people to be able to define their own terms of participation in the global economy.
Amazing how a single letter can completely reverse the meaning of a sentence. I think it is important for people to define their own terms of participation in the global economy. But "a people" implies some kind of collective decision making and enforcement of that decision. This inevitably comes down to forcing people to stay where they are instead of letting them seek their own fortunes in whatever way seems best to them as individuals.
Paul.
The idea of Yoda sitting on the Front Bench is a little startling though. "Hmmm. Make my maiden speech I will".
Paul.
Only until Congress finds out about it. Then it will be regulated to death.
Paul.
Are they going to ban those too?
Paul.
Paul.
(any lawyers out there want to add to the list?)
A congressman will be familiar with lawyers, and probably has a legal background himself, so comparing open source to legal pro bono work will put him on familiar ground and give you a shared context. Eg, ask "how would you feel if a big law firm called Pro Bono work 'unamerican'?")
Of course there are also all the commercial reasons why companies produce open source code. Its worth emphasising that many open source coders are actually employed to do it, so its not just a geek hobby. See Opensource.org for all the commercial reasons for releasing open source.
Paul.
But the threat of an injunction which stops production for a year or so whilst the lawyers fight it out in court is a gun to the head of these companies. So we have what amounts to a protection racket: pay up or be put out of business. At the moment the fees are tolerable, but this kind of thing has a way of growing exponentially as more people catch on to the idea of easy money. Once patent trolls start making a measurable dent in the bottom line you can bet that these companies are going to start complaining to their tame congresscritters.
(Not that I've got anything against large companies in themselves: some things just really do need a large organisation to make happen. But I've noticed that getting something done is just so much easier when you have the president of a large company backing you)
Paul.
Naturally such a document is a magnet to everyone with an axe to grind. It seems like everyone has something they want put in the National Curriculum. Most of these things are fairly worthy, like road safety, how to apply for a job, how compound interest works, and how to extract cube roots without a calculator. Most people think that their favourite author ought to go in the English section. And so on.
As a result of all this the first version of the NC had a bad case of bloat brought on by creeping featurism. After that a revised version was bought out which was slimmed down to the things that the education academics think that kids actually need to know. Copyright law is not (AFAIK) on the list.
There is still a lot of pressure for feature creep in the NC, but the people in charge of it seem to have learned how to say "no". You still get pressure groups of one sort or another popping up and asking for their pet cause to go in the NC, but nobody takes any notice. This is just another similar suggestion, and I don't think its going to go anywhere.
Paul
As for your statistics: beware the semi-attached figure. Accident rates involving cellphones are going to be under-reported because nobody is going to admit to a policeman after an accident that they were breaking the law by using their cellphone at the time.
And remember, this guy was also tapping on a PDA on his leg, fielding a pager strapped to another leg, and fumbling with a clipboard of directions. All without enough sleep.
An accident waiting to happen.
Paul.