If you're saying that the beta is published, then there's a disincentive for "incomplete" works to be shared. If copyright can't protect the beta, then they need to use EULAs to do the same. In this particular case, Windows 7 will probably be published in a few months. But the longer the term between a public review of the work and the "publishing" date, the bigger the issue becomes.
Worse, it's only one logical step from using EULAs to say that you've never actually published it, to never declare the software "finished". Gmail was in "beta" for how long? What about Wine? 15 years before 1.0?
So what if Microsoft says in 2015 that Windows 7 was never published and therefore will never be public domain? They could argue to congress or whomever that they don't want copyright protection and would prefer to litigate privately.
How hard would it be to extend this EULA private litigation model towards movies, music and other media?
If copyright is so ineffective that private litigation is preferred, then maybe the only people who will be able to afford long term protection would be the big companies.
5 year copyright on music recordings, news articles, maps, and other self-dating material seems reasonable. Even 5 years on non-professional photographs, videos etc. A 5 year term is sufficient encouragement for that kind of stuff.
...but software takes more than 5 years to write. Same for fiction. Does the author just keep it under EULA until "complete"? If such a law exists to protect an author from having his work stolen before it is "published", what encouragement is there to actually "publish" it and not just keep it under perpectual EULA as a "work in progress"?
A 5 year term won't protect incomplete works... what if Harry Potter were considered "one book" and rather than "selling" books, Rowling just sold licenses to read the "current manuscripts" and kept adding to the book forever?
I like the idea of a short term. 5 is too short for some kinds of work. Maybe adding something like a non-linear increasing intellectual property tax or a one-time renewable clause, along with a "only the author or the commissioner of the work can own the copyright" would be cool.
But 5? I'd love to support that, but I can't. There's more to their policy right?
"There were many observers from different countries during the Iranian presidential elections, has anyone of the observers shown evidence that there were enough serious frauds to declare the election void?"
This is a *very* important point. Mousavi *may* have lost. It might be true. Tehran probably voted for Mousavi, but there are a LOT of people in Iran who feel that Ahmadinejad is perfectly fine. Iran is a huge country and Tehran is only one small part. On the international stage, he sucks, but people generally read the national media, and he's not *that* bad internally. We're not talking about Iraq here. People still have jobs, healthcare, food, water, still practice Islam just fine. There's social mobility and all that in society. Not a lot of leisure time, and the people should probably be wealthier given the heritage of oil and culture.
I feel what makes Iran very hard to deal with is that despite all this terrible press, the country is *not* falling apart.
Where the government failed terribly, and where I feel that the people of Iran have a legitimate concern and *should* be protesting in the streets, is when the government shut down the foreign media, locked down the Internet, beat people in the streets, and started killing people for what I can only believe is to set an example and re-instill fear in the population.
Personally? I think Ahmadinejad may very well have won. Definitely NOT by the margins in the media, but there's a good chance that he did win and I think that the people of Iran would have accepted it. There would have been protests in the streets, a long vote-count, a re-count and a reasonably close margin. But as long as it wasn't a landslide and the government didn't open fire, then everyone would have gone back to work and said "bah. next time, there's hope".
I really hope Iran gets out of this. The world needs Iran.
I was in Iran recently. It was just before the protests. Internet connectivity in Tehran pretty sluggish. It's like stepping back ten years. Most people are using dial-up. Cybercafes brag that they're hooked up on a 1Mbps DSL.
For kicks, I thought I would dig up something on the CIA World Fact book. cia.gov is blocked. Imagine that.
There were many other sites which were blocked, but for the most part, the censorship on the net was pretty moderate. The real tool in the government arsenal is fear.
It's truly sad what the government is doing. Old technology, like yelling from rooftops seems to be all that you can muster. Apparently the possession and use of encryption technology is illegal, and the govenrment merely has to suspect you of doing something wrong for you to get into serious trouble. Remember too, that just asking your friends to gather at your home is also very suspicious.
Remember too that the government employs tactics like the German Stasi. They corrupt, influence and interfere with citizenry to turn your neighbours into spies. You can never be sure that the person you're talking to is legitimate. So the bad guys aren't aways wearing uniforms or beating people. And the bad guys are often good guys who are just trying to get themselves out of trouble. Your dial-up connection has your name on it and every cybercafe probably has somebody who's loosely in the services of the government.
The Internet is not safe in Iran. Not safe at all. I'm sure the phone systems are just as bad and satellite is, as other posters have pointed out, quite illegal, although comparatively lax in penalties.
The question is how do you create a decentralized kind of communication system which requires legally available technology?
Yelling messages of peace from rooftops is one way to get a message out and avoid being killed for it.
All this wasn't so bad when I was there. People are willing to risk a beating to spend time together and talk about slightly subversive topics, particularly with a foreigner. As a foreigner, I too had to be careful that the person I was talking to was not reporting to the government... else I could find myself... well, they'd probably arrest me, cancel my visa and take me to the airport. They're not too bad to foreigners.
Point is. No. I think they really did turn the screws on the net connections. The pipes in the capital are slow enough that modern technology could be doing automated deep-packet inspection and building databases correlating data on everything going in and out of the country.
A comment before the election was telling about the feeling of the average Iranian. "Not much is going to change... except we'll see an increase in the price of green paint."
That government needs reforms. Badly. And I can't see it coming about peacefully when the people aren't even allowed to talk to one another about it.
I think that's a great idea. Normally I *hate* skinning, but deeply skinning OO shouldn't even be necessary, but retaining the old UIs through version after version of the software and even creating some alternatives like Word-5 like UI would be *awesome*.
Personally, I'd like a very keyboard-centric UI. I would *adore* a Wordperfect-like tags editor. In fact, I would be eternally grateful if there were a resizable character mode structured text UI with tags editor like the old Wordperfect 5.1 days but with OO's formats. A mouse-driven UI is a *flaw* in a wordprocessor.
Add me to the exception list.
When I think it is flawless in Linux, it's broken for either mixing, volume, recording, blah blah. I don't have the time nor inclination to bother fixing it anymore.
Sound has worked flawlessly for me in Windows since Windows 3.1.
Telephone records are interesting. The government just has to look at who in Iran is talking to people outside of Iran. Then they look at little closer, or just beat them for good measure.
I have friends in Iran who I'm afraid to contact. We've sent a couple emails saying little more than "I'm well". Anything more is risky.
In parts of the world where posession of encryption technology is punishable, and the government has a "secret police", there's not much you can do which doesn't involve stenography. Stenographic technology is not widespread enough and the nature of it is chatty enough that in countries where bandwidth is scarce, it's not all that useful.
It's all very upsetting.
Refrain from expressing ideas about how to circumvent this. The Iranian government of course can read this forum too.
The police raided Tehran university, beat, robbed and killed students who were speaking their mind or taking pictures. This was not unexpected. Not at all unexpected. It already happened before, it's why the university was gated and controlled by private security.
When people live in fear of being beaten or killed for kissing or holding hands, and everyone knows that they can bribe the police to get off the charges, it doesn't create a proud society, it creates unrest.
I don't think the election has to do with foreign politics at all. It's too dangerous to express disenting opinions about foreign politics in Iran. Nobody gets foreign news without feeling watched. People just want to live their lives and not be in fear of being attacked by the government.
I think the election was rigged, but the results might have been the same without the rigging.
I think this rigging was a catalyst to get a lot of people who were afraid, working way too hard and dealing with difficult living conditions in Tehran to stand up together and protest the terrible behaviour of the government and the religious police.
The police are killing and beating people, the media is cut off and people are afraid to use their real names when speaking to people outside the country.
And you think they're just poor losers? People are really f-ing scared that if they stop protesting, the police will silently round up identified people and beat them or kill them.
I have no idea how it could be fixed or how this will end. This could be a civil war or a bloodbath which will result in the entrenchment of an extreme, oppressive power. If members of the provinces could see this as an improvement in the Islamic revolution, then maybe the police would lose their will to enforce the orders of their corrupt leaders. No doubt, they're scared too.
Health and Safety, facilities, and even technical support would have a hell of a time.
Facilities: "You want what? What kind of electrical sockets would be on these power strips? We have to consult with the state health and safety"
Health and Safety: "240@60Hz, standard? ppphff. Maybe an electical heater socket NEMA 6-15 would be okay."
Deployment: "WTF is with all these stupid flat outlets?"
Procuring: "We need a few hundred NEMA 6-15 to IEC C-13 power adapters."
Shared racks: "Holy sh*t! wtf is this?"
Technical consultant: "Where the hell do I plug in my test equipment?"
Technical Support: "Oh, you're running your switch at 240V 60Hz? That's not a tested or supported configuration, we only test and support 240@50 or 120@60. "
This kind of chaos is very expensive and I seriously don't think there are any power savings. Maybe in your current role you have to deal with the bureaucracy of having new power lines pulled to server racks and just doubling the voltage would solve all your problems, but being on the receiving end of this once, I was the guy with the test equipment... a PC-type machine, BAM! 3 business days delay to the project and 4 billable hours of wasted travel, troubleshooting, testing and swapping of power supplies later, we were back on track with the new PS set to 240V. I added a label to the IEC-13 sockets that they were mysteriously set to 240@60. It was a lab, so I made some inquiries and raised a few flags (billable time to the project). I think it was just mistake made by facilities. Serious mistake, but oh well.
Somebody still played that piano to generate that roll. I think it's awesome.
I find the perfection of midi reproductions shrill. Even when done with very good midi equipment, there are so many variations in the conversation between the pianist and other instruments, the pressure, attack, decay, tuning, blah blah blah, that it is just much easier to record audio of a real musician on a piano.
I think the human brain is *very* good at picking out repetition in sound. It might not be conscious, and even the performance of a good midi player might be pleasant at first, but somehow, it gets tiring to hear it.
I also find the experience of hearing a classical piece done on midi so... upsetting... that I don't even want to try to hear more. Even when the midi is really good, it somehow sounds like a disinterested music teacher blurting out a performance to get it over with. It makes me feel ill.
Maybe if a really good musician produced a midi score... and it was unaltered when played back, it would be like this one. It would be flawed but there's a real person behind it who we can only guess what they were feeling.
Let's try an experiment. Wrongfully imprison a few million people, blockade aid from their borders and threaten to invade. Keep it up for a generation...
How many people would respond similarly? How many people would learn to pick up rockets?
I think they mean that the sub was incapacitated for 18 days while a transition plan was executed.
If it really took 18 days, they wouldn't be installing Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
It is mysterious to me as to why they would use Windows. I'd also love to know what is being commanded with the system? Is it just the Naval IT? e.g, sending encrypted email, accessing charts, documentation etc, crew communications, hiding pornography, printing happy birthday banners? I doubt it is controlling ballast tanks and dive planes and I can't imagine it controlling reactor or launch functions.
And if it's just the case of internal email and minesweeper games, isn't 18 days a long time? Especially if MS decided not to include hardware transition work and training in those numbers?
What were they using before that it was so expensive?
How can 8 years of evaluation time possibly save the military 22M pounds per year?
Meh. I guess it's on MSDN, so it's going to be a *little* biased. Kudos to the MS sales team. Good job, don't know how you did it.
Software patents are dangerous. Public domain affects copyright issues. As does the GPL. And the GPL can do very little to help except to deny the redistribution privilege if a patent causes you to be unable to distribute the software with royalty-free usage rights.
Many patents are absurd and trivial, and cannot be circumvented.
Your MP3 player is subject to a patent. Most codecs are subject to patents. How do you circumvent codec patents?
Historically, patents *have* caused problems for free software. The patent on the LZW compression/decompression in GIFs, the patents on the creation of MP3s. Libungif was not a reasonable workaround. Discluding the ability to create mp3s is not a reasonable workaround. Those two, IMHO happen to be non-trivial patents.
This is not a problem exclusively limited to free software. The Eolas lawsuit demonstrates the danger of a *trivial* patent. Microsoft almost lost the ability to include plugins due to the Eolas patent. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39116982,00.htm
Frauenhofer ALLOWS you to play MP3s. Eolas ALLOWED Firefox to use plugins. This freedom is granted on a case-by-case basis with no long-term commitment. It is fickle and in the case of the patents I described, not circumventable in any reasonable way.
Microsoft's legal team could only fight to have the Eolas patent overthrown. I seriously doubt that FOSS could do similar to an Eolas.
So this has nothing to do with the public domain. This has nothing to do with the GPL and parts which you try to rewrite will at best be expensive, and at worst be impossible to work around.
Software patents need to be reformed or abolished. Until then, no software is free.
Under the current system of software patents, no software is free. It's just that most patent holders haven't figured out what, if anything, to do about it.
A bunch of robots go out into "battle". They encounter the enemy, and fluently in the local dialect, they suggest beer or coffee and spend a few hours with the "bad guys" talking about how much their bosses suck.
Then the robots forge some backdated birth certificates for the "enemy", generate some CGI of a glorious bloody battle for Reuters, splatter each other with ground beef and have the guys on the other side begin submitting missing person and death certificates.
The "destroyed" robots disarm and sell themselves to the enemy to aid in education, manufacturing and construction. The resultant income is used to pay for the ground beef, and for local actors to beg for their lives while faking torture in fake prison sets.
Human "allies" who accompany the robots and threaten to betray the secret mission are all mysteriously captured and are forced to work as custodians, cooks and maintenance workers in the new schools.
Slashdot Mirror
As a German citizen, but non-resident who speaks very poor German, can I register to vote on an absentee ballot?
If you're saying that the beta is published, then there's a disincentive for "incomplete" works to be shared. If copyright can't protect the beta, then they need to use EULAs to do the same. In this particular case, Windows 7 will probably be published in a few months. But the longer the term between a public review of the work and the "publishing" date, the bigger the issue becomes.
Worse, it's only one logical step from using EULAs to say that you've never actually published it, to never declare the software "finished". Gmail was in "beta" for how long? What about Wine? 15 years before 1.0?
So what if Microsoft says in 2015 that Windows 7 was never published and therefore will never be public domain? They could argue to congress or whomever that they don't want copyright protection and would prefer to litigate privately.
How hard would it be to extend this EULA private litigation model towards movies, music and other media?
If copyright is so ineffective that private litigation is preferred, then maybe the only people who will be able to afford long term protection would be the big companies.
5 year copyright on music recordings, news articles, maps, and other self-dating material seems reasonable. Even 5 years on non-professional photographs, videos etc. A 5 year term is sufficient encouragement for that kind of stuff.
...but software takes more than 5 years to write. Same for fiction. Does the author just keep it under EULA until "complete"? If such a law exists to protect an author from having his work stolen before it is "published", what encouragement is there to actually "publish" it and not just keep it under perpectual EULA as a "work in progress"?
A 5 year term won't protect incomplete works... what if Harry Potter were considered "one book" and rather than "selling" books, Rowling just sold licenses to read the "current manuscripts" and kept adding to the book forever?
I like the idea of a short term. 5 is too short for some kinds of work. Maybe adding something like a non-linear increasing intellectual property tax or a one-time renewable clause, along with a "only the author or the commissioner of the work can own the copyright" would be cool.
But 5? I'd love to support that, but I can't. There's more to their policy right?
The enemy of your enemy is your friend.
... unless they're both enemies, and they're really big, then you just stand back and be happy that they're not fighting you.
Maybe Bing learns from previous searches.
"There were many observers from different countries during the Iranian presidential elections, has anyone of the observers shown evidence that there were enough serious frauds to declare the election void?"
This is a *very* important point. Mousavi *may* have lost. It might be true. Tehran probably voted for Mousavi, but there are a LOT of people in Iran who feel that Ahmadinejad is perfectly fine. Iran is a huge country and Tehran is only one small part. On the international stage, he sucks, but people generally read the national media, and he's not *that* bad internally. We're not talking about Iraq here. People still have jobs, healthcare, food, water, still practice Islam just fine. There's social mobility and all that in society. Not a lot of leisure time, and the people should probably be wealthier given the heritage of oil and culture.
I feel what makes Iran very hard to deal with is that despite all this terrible press, the country is *not* falling apart.
Where the government failed terribly, and where I feel that the people of Iran have a legitimate concern and *should* be protesting in the streets, is when the government shut down the foreign media, locked down the Internet, beat people in the streets, and started killing people for what I can only believe is to set an example and re-instill fear in the population.
Personally? I think Ahmadinejad may very well have won. Definitely NOT by the margins in the media, but there's a good chance that he did win and I think that the people of Iran would have accepted it. There would have been protests in the streets, a long vote-count, a re-count and a reasonably close margin. But as long as it wasn't a landslide and the government didn't open fire, then everyone would have gone back to work and said "bah. next time, there's hope".
I really hope Iran gets out of this. The world needs Iran.
I was in Iran recently. It was just before the protests. Internet connectivity in Tehran pretty sluggish. It's like stepping back ten years. Most people are using dial-up. Cybercafes brag that they're hooked up on a 1Mbps DSL.
For kicks, I thought I would dig up something on the CIA World Fact book. cia.gov is blocked. Imagine that.
There were many other sites which were blocked, but for the most part, the censorship on the net was pretty moderate. The real tool in the government arsenal is fear.
It's truly sad what the government is doing. Old technology, like yelling from rooftops seems to be all that you can muster. Apparently the possession and use of encryption technology is illegal, and the govenrment merely has to suspect you of doing something wrong for you to get into serious trouble. Remember too, that just asking your friends to gather at your home is also very suspicious.
Remember too that the government employs tactics like the German Stasi. They corrupt, influence and interfere with citizenry to turn your neighbours into spies. You can never be sure that the person you're talking to is legitimate. So the bad guys aren't aways wearing uniforms or beating people. And the bad guys are often good guys who are just trying to get themselves out of trouble. Your dial-up connection has your name on it and every cybercafe probably has somebody who's loosely in the services of the government.
The Internet is not safe in Iran. Not safe at all. I'm sure the phone systems are just as bad and satellite is, as other posters have pointed out, quite illegal, although comparatively lax in penalties.
The question is how do you create a decentralized kind of communication system which requires legally available technology?
Yelling messages of peace from rooftops is one way to get a message out and avoid being killed for it.
All this wasn't so bad when I was there. People are willing to risk a beating to spend time together and talk about slightly subversive topics, particularly with a foreigner. As a foreigner, I too had to be careful that the person I was talking to was not reporting to the government... else I could find myself... well, they'd probably arrest me, cancel my visa and take me to the airport. They're not too bad to foreigners.
Point is. No. I think they really did turn the screws on the net connections. The pipes in the capital are slow enough that modern technology could be doing automated deep-packet inspection and building databases correlating data on everything going in and out of the country.
A comment before the election was telling about the feeling of the average Iranian. "Not much is going to change... except we'll see an increase in the price of green paint."
That government needs reforms. Badly. And I can't see it coming about peacefully when the people aren't even allowed to talk to one another about it.
Some of us use both Windows and Linux extensively, choosing the best tool for the job as needed.
I think that's a great idea. Normally I *hate* skinning, but deeply skinning OO shouldn't even be necessary, but retaining the old UIs through version after version of the software and even creating some alternatives like Word-5 like UI would be *awesome*.
Personally, I'd like a very keyboard-centric UI. I would *adore* a Wordperfect-like tags editor. In fact, I would be eternally grateful if there were a resizable character mode structured text UI with tags editor like the old Wordperfect 5.1 days but with OO's formats. A mouse-driven UI is a *flaw* in a wordprocessor.
Add me to the exception list. When I think it is flawless in Linux, it's broken for either mixing, volume, recording, blah blah. I don't have the time nor inclination to bother fixing it anymore. Sound has worked flawlessly for me in Windows since Windows 3.1.
Memories are getting shorter these days.
Telephone records are interesting. The government just has to look at who in Iran is talking to people outside of Iran. Then they look at little closer, or just beat them for good measure.
I have friends in Iran who I'm afraid to contact. We've sent a couple emails saying little more than "I'm well". Anything more is risky.
In parts of the world where posession of encryption technology is punishable, and the government has a "secret police", there's not much you can do which doesn't involve stenography. Stenographic technology is not widespread enough and the nature of it is chatty enough that in countries where bandwidth is scarce, it's not all that useful.
It's all very upsetting.
Refrain from expressing ideas about how to circumvent this. The Iranian government of course can read this forum too.
The police raided Tehran university, beat, robbed and killed students who were speaking their mind or taking pictures. This was not unexpected. Not at all unexpected. It already happened before, it's why the university was gated and controlled by private security.
When people live in fear of being beaten or killed for kissing or holding hands, and everyone knows that they can bribe the police to get off the charges, it doesn't create a proud society, it creates unrest.
I don't think the election has to do with foreign politics at all. It's too dangerous to express disenting opinions about foreign politics in Iran. Nobody gets foreign news without feeling watched. People just want to live their lives and not be in fear of being attacked by the government.
I think the election was rigged, but the results might have been the same without the rigging.
I think this rigging was a catalyst to get a lot of people who were afraid, working way too hard and dealing with difficult living conditions in Tehran to stand up together and protest the terrible behaviour of the government and the religious police.
The police are killing and beating people, the media is cut off and people are afraid to use their real names when speaking to people outside the country.
And you think they're just poor losers? People are really f-ing scared that if they stop protesting, the police will silently round up identified people and beat them or kill them.
I have no idea how it could be fixed or how this will end. This could be a civil war or a bloodbath which will result in the entrenchment of an extreme, oppressive power. If members of the provinces could see this as an improvement in the Islamic revolution, then maybe the police would lose their will to enforce the orders of their corrupt leaders. No doubt, they're scared too.
So, *are* you a cop?
If his notebook is from the 90's, the battery cost well over $100 and it would be a fluke if it held any charge at all.
There are plenty of cars from the 90's, many of them worth less than the replacement cost of a battery for his notebook computer.
If that's too vague, I think what we're trying to say is that battery technology was *REALLY BAD* in the early to mid 90's
Teach them their phone number and give them a bracelet or something with their address on it.
You should also probably stop watching television. Give up on the news especially. It's just scare mongering crap.
Oh and watch Finding Nemo. It's got some lesson in there about being an overprotective parent.
Shouldn't you be troubleshooting your soundcard or something?
You have monkeys flying out of your nose.
Health and Safety, facilities, and even technical support would have a hell of a time.
Facilities: "You want what? What kind of electrical sockets would be on these power strips? We have to consult with the state health and safety"
Health and Safety: "240@60Hz, standard? ppphff. Maybe an electical heater socket NEMA 6-15 would be okay."
Deployment: "WTF is with all these stupid flat outlets?"
Procuring: "We need a few hundred NEMA 6-15 to IEC C-13 power adapters."
Shared racks: "Holy sh*t! wtf is this?"
Technical consultant: "Where the hell do I plug in my test equipment?"
Technical Support: "Oh, you're running your switch at 240V 60Hz? That's not a tested or supported configuration, we only test and support 240@50 or 120@60. "
This kind of chaos is very expensive and I seriously don't think there are any power savings. Maybe in your current role you have to deal with the bureaucracy of having new power lines pulled to server racks and just doubling the voltage would solve all your problems, but being on the receiving end of this once, I was the guy with the test equipment... a PC-type machine, BAM! 3 business days delay to the project and 4 billable hours of wasted travel, troubleshooting, testing and swapping of power supplies later, we were back on track with the new PS set to 240V. I added a label to the IEC-13 sockets that they were mysteriously set to 240@60. It was a lab, so I made some inquiries and raised a few flags (billable time to the project). I think it was just mistake made by facilities. Serious mistake, but oh well.
Somebody still played that piano to generate that roll. I think it's awesome.
I find the perfection of midi reproductions shrill. Even when done with very good midi equipment, there are so many variations in the conversation between the pianist and other instruments, the pressure, attack, decay, tuning, blah blah blah, that it is just much easier to record audio of a real musician on a piano.
I think the human brain is *very* good at picking out repetition in sound. It might not be conscious, and even the performance of a good midi player might be pleasant at first, but somehow, it gets tiring to hear it.
I also find the experience of hearing a classical piece done on midi so... upsetting... that I don't even want to try to hear more. Even when the midi is really good, it somehow sounds like a disinterested music teacher blurting out a performance to get it over with. It makes me feel ill.
Maybe if a really good musician produced a midi score... and it was unaltered when played back, it would be like this one. It would be flawed but there's a real person behind it who we can only guess what they were feeling.
... with the world's most wrongfully imprisoned.
Let's try an experiment. Wrongfully imprison a few million people, blockade aid from their borders and threaten to invade. Keep it up for a generation...
How many people would respond similarly? How many people would learn to pick up rockets?
I think they mean that the sub was incapacitated for 18 days while a transition plan was executed.
If it really took 18 days, they wouldn't be installing Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
It is mysterious to me as to why they would use Windows. I'd also love to know what is being commanded with the system? Is it just the Naval IT? e.g, sending encrypted email, accessing charts, documentation etc, crew communications, hiding pornography, printing happy birthday banners? I doubt it is controlling ballast tanks and dive planes and I can't imagine it controlling reactor or launch functions.
And if it's just the case of internal email and minesweeper games, isn't 18 days a long time? Especially if MS decided not to include hardware transition work and training in those numbers?
What were they using before that it was so expensive?
How can 8 years of evaluation time possibly save the military 22M pounds per year?
Meh. I guess it's on MSDN, so it's going to be a *little* biased. Kudos to the MS sales team. Good job, don't know how you did it.
There's no point in being terse and dismissive.
Software patents are dangerous. Public domain affects copyright issues. As does the GPL. And the GPL can do very little to help except to deny the redistribution privilege if a patent causes you to be unable to distribute the software with royalty-free usage rights.
Many patents are absurd and trivial, and cannot be circumvented.
Your MP3 player is subject to a patent. Most codecs are subject to patents. How do you circumvent codec patents?
Historically, patents *have* caused problems for free software. The patent on the LZW compression/decompression in GIFs, the patents on the creation of MP3s. Libungif was not a reasonable workaround. Discluding the ability to create mp3s is not a reasonable workaround. Those two, IMHO happen to be non-trivial patents.
This is not a problem exclusively limited to free software. The Eolas lawsuit demonstrates the danger of a *trivial* patent. Microsoft almost lost the ability to include plugins due to the Eolas patent. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39116982,00.htm
Frauenhofer ALLOWS you to play MP3s. Eolas ALLOWED Firefox to use plugins. This freedom is granted on a case-by-case basis with no long-term commitment. It is fickle and in the case of the patents I described, not circumventable in any reasonable way.
Microsoft's legal team could only fight to have the Eolas patent overthrown. I seriously doubt that FOSS could do similar to an Eolas.
So this has nothing to do with the public domain. This has nothing to do with the GPL and parts which you try to rewrite will at best be expensive, and at worst be impossible to work around.
Software patents need to be reformed or abolished. Until then, no software is free.
Under the current system of software patents, no software is free. It's just that most patent holders haven't figured out what, if anything, to do about it.
Ya, internalized homophobia is totally the gay.
A bunch of robots go out into "battle". They encounter the enemy, and fluently in the local dialect, they suggest beer or coffee and spend a few hours with the "bad guys" talking about how much their bosses suck.
Then the robots forge some backdated birth certificates for the "enemy", generate some CGI of a glorious bloody battle for Reuters, splatter each other with ground beef and have the guys on the other side begin submitting missing person and death certificates.
The "destroyed" robots disarm and sell themselves to the enemy to aid in education, manufacturing and construction. The resultant income is used to pay for the ground beef, and for local actors to beg for their lives while faking torture in fake prison sets.
Human "allies" who accompany the robots and threaten to betray the secret mission are all mysteriously captured and are forced to work as custodians, cooks and maintenance workers in the new schools.
Much better outcome.