Name a single thing you used to be able to do on Mac OS X that you can't do anymore on Mac OS X.
Download the compiler toolchain without "registering".
"Download the compiler toolchain", or "download the current version of the compiler toolchain"? Yes, "I can download the latest version of the compiler toolchain without registering" is better than "I get a version of the compiler toolchain with the OS on my machine", but the latter is better than "I can't get any toolchain without registering", and, as far as I know, it was always possible. Did they ever offer the latest shiniest version without requiring an ADC account, with the requirement to register with ADC to get the latest shiniest version starting with Xcode 4.x? (BTW, I think I may have had to register to get this, but it's interesting that they've offered a free-as-in-beer version for a while now....)
I think you just jumped from UI design to internal software architecture.
You'd already taken it there when you said "Also, leaving an application running without a UI is a perfectly reasonable idea". The notion of an application "running" in a way that it can be "quit" is an issue of internal software architecture. Consider a hypothetical system in which all threads of control run in the same address space and in which particular user-facing functions (simple text editing, source code editing, word processing, spreadsheet editing, Web browsing, viewing system settings, etc.) are implemented by subroutines/methods called in one of those threads of control. If, for example, a package of those subroutines/methods are assigned a virtual address at the time they're installed, and live there until they're uninstalled, what would it mean to "quit", say, a text editor? It wouldn't mean un-mapping the code that implemented the simple text editor, as that would only happen if you uninstalled it; it might mean "close all the windows for that text editor", but if you have compound documents and, for example, the text editor code is used in spreadsheet cells and text-entry fields and..., there might be a lot of "windows for that text editor" that didn't open as a result of opening a simple text document.
There's absolutely no reason whatsoever the two should even be related.
Arguably, no, there is no such reason - and whether an application is "running" or not should be completely transparent to the user, so that they should neither know nor care whether the system uses a Mac OS X-style model, a Windows/{most UN*X desktops other than the OS X one} model, the model I described above, etc.. In that world, you might not even have Task Manager/Activity Monitor/{whatever it's called in GNOME}/{whatever it's called in KDE}/etc. view showing running applications or processes, nothing in the Dock/system tray/whatever to indicate what's running, etc., although there might be some special "geek tool" to show whatever the appropriate information is.
You can call the unix box thing whatever you like. What I care about is that I get a unix box where I know for a fact that all the hardware inside will work.
Which has as much, if not more, to do with "Mac OS X being purpose-made to run on the machine" as "the machine being purpose-made for Mac OS X", much less "the machine being purpose-made to run Unix" (whatever that means, given the number of Un*xes out there; it's more "purpose-made to run Mac OS X" than "to run Unix", given the one-button trackpads and Command keys and so on). All the hardware inside will work because Apple will either write, or have the vendor write, or will co-develop with the vendor, Mac OS X drivers for it; it's not as if they choose hardware that "works with Unix", they choose hardware and then make it work with their Unix.
They'll have a hard time getting back in the server room.
To what extent was Apple in the enterprise server room in the first place? (Not a purely-rhetorical question; if there are cases where the Xserve was used significantly in an enterprise whose name doesn't match "Apple (Computer|Inc)", the details would be interesting.)
Also, leaving an application running without a UI is a perfectly reasonable idea, once you dissociate applications and windows -- in fact, there are many, many programs that practically demand it (mail, bittorrent, IM in general).
Or, rather, disassociate processes and windows. In Mac OS X, all documents opened by a given app are normally handled by the same process (which might be a bit of a pain if you have many documents that chew up a lot of application address space open and the app is 32-bit, but 64-bit is the future); that's a lot less common on other desktop environments, as far as I know - are Web browsers the main exception there?
Windows 7 finally supports windowless applications properly, though that's a recent advance and many applications still don't support it. I can't honestly think of any non-X11 applications that actually close completely when you close the last window.
So if you have, say, four Word documents open, are there four processes running Word, or just one?
All in all, though, I agree: the best part of modern Macs is what's underneath the hood. They're effectively the only consumer-grade machines in the market that are purpose-made to run Unix.
Not that this makes the hardware particularly different from other consumer-grade machines. It's perhaps better stated as "the only consumer-grade machines in the market that ship with a flavor of Unix as the native OS". (Well, except for netbooks running Linux; I assume the market in question doesn't include tablets, say.)
I recently switched to Mac from Linux (primarily for the nice hardware) but am having trouble getting used to OS X and the odd keyboard. How do you program on it?
With microEMACS (just as I do on Solaris and Linux and FreeBSD and...).
I find the keyboard lacks a few crucial keys (a real delete key,
Presumably meaning "delete the character under the cursor" rather than "delete the character to the left of the cursor". Control-D should work in a lot of cases (hint: there's a sequence of five capital letters in my previous reply paragraph that describes where a lot of keystrokes supported by a lot of Mac OS X come from:-)).
pgup/pgdn)
At least on my MacBook Pro, {fn}+the cursor up and down keys do the job there.
and odd use of other keys (the command - flower power key - seems to do most of what the ctrl key does on Linux
Yes, for menu accelerators, it's the Command key in Mac OS and Control in Windows/KDE/GNOME/etc.. It does have the advantage that copy and paste in a terminal window can use the same sequence as in other windows, rather than having to use Control+Shift rather than Control; given how much time I spend in Terminal, that's a win for me, at least.
Don't look now, but your Apple is showing. Here's a reality check for you, if you care to open the "scary terminal" in your copy of Lion....
Look at what's buried below that clean, unblemished UI.... BSD. Free Software. Stuff that "has a ways to go" before it reaches Apple's level of "absorption".
As for the torture, do you have any evidence to substantiate that claim? I did a quick search and I couldn't find any torture articles that weren't for Apple products being stress tested by people.
No, Steve Jobs didn't. He defended the indefensible and did his best to minimize & brush-off the problem. Instead, Apple and Foxconn just blamed the workers for the problems and made them sign anti-suicide pacts.
In the case of Foxconn, I'm not really sure that Steve Jobs or Apple really deserves as much bad press as they've gotten. There are plenty of other companies that use their services to make their products that are also to blame for that. IIRC, the last Dell I had used a Foxconn motherboard. Apple at least made some attempt at improving the situation, I haven't heard of any of the other companies doing so.
That's pretty bizarre. I hope the **AAs don't find a way to make a similar license (though their massive extension of copyright is about the same thing for most of those execs - they probably don't care what happens to things after they die).
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti’s proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.
But I think it's quite feasible and quite desirable if it allows them to put something between the price of a tablet and full MacBook.
If Apple were to build such a machine, it might well just run straight iOS. iOS already supports hardware keyboards (at least via Bluetooth), and could conceivably support pointing devices other than the ones most people have on their hands (probably a trackpad if they build a machine that's not touchscreen-only; given the Magic Trackpad, Apple's interest in mice seems to be waning). It could well be that Mac OS X, complete with "go ahead and download a source tarball, compile it, and install it, if you want, or buy somebody's non-App Store software and install it", will remain as long as there are enough customers who want that type of OS (truck drivers, if you will, using Jobs' analogy) and iOS will be used for machines for customers for whom it's sufficient, even if those machines happen to look like notebook computers.
You don't need to be a programmer to program a computer. My boss isn't a programmer, yet he can program a computer simply by paying me money and telling me what to do. My mum isn't a programmer, but she can program a computer by asking me a favour. Stallman assumes people realise that.
And I, despite having a Y chromosome, can give birth to a baby by paying a surrogate mother.:-)
A better way to state the point in question is "...a world where every user can have their device reprogrammed at will" (whether they're the ones who actually do the reprogramming or not - most probably won't).
I'm sure developers will get supported in one way or another, probably by being required to develop on more expensive Intel Macs while they still exist.
I wonder if it is a limitation of CDMA that makes it overly complicated. I know for a fact that both AT&T and T-Mobile are more than happy to sell me a SIM card when I walk in with an unlocked phone, and judging from the fine print on Apple's page, it seems it might be more of a technical limitation of CDMA, instead of the carriers not wanting to sell service to someone.
At least from what I understand from the Wikipedia page for the Universal Integrated Circuit Card), a UICC can support GSM, UMTS, and cdmaONE/CDMA2000, so, at least in theory, it sounds as if a single phone could support both GSM/UMTS and cdmaONE/CDMA2000 networks. Whether a given cdmaONE/CDMA2000 network provider will let you sign up with an unlocked phone, and give you a UICC for their network, is another matter. At least according to the Wikipedia page for the Removable User Identity Module, they're in use mainly in Asia; if North American cdmaONE/CDMA2000 carriers don't use them, the limitation Apple mentions applies, as you can't get an unlocked iPhone 4S and a contract from Verizon or Sprint and plug Verizon or Sprint's UICC into it, as you can't get a UICC from Verizon or Sprint.
These guys probably believe that if they win they will collect royalties for every copy of tzdata distributed for the next 150 years. Instead, a cleanroom version would be rapidly produced based on primary sources. The initial version may be short on historical data but it would eventually be filled out: all the data has been published by governments. This may be done anyway.
A very informative writeup on the copyrightability of facts and even compilations of facts in the U.S. is this.
To quote the "bottom line" from that writeup:
--Facts that are readily available from numerous sources are pretty
much public property for anyone to use (though even here, there may be
some "hot news" limitations on how quickly such facts can be copied
and republished).
--Facts published in an open fashion, without user restrictions (e.g.
a book that includes facts from research that the author undertook)
may be okay to use, though I am not aware of any recent case law on
this particular situation.
--For facts that are subject to a user license, it is important to
read the license very carefully, as for the most part, these licenses
are worded to restrict use and republication of the information at
hand.
I've never seen Shanks' atlases (and, at this point, I intend to avoid reading them - it's bad enough that I'm "mentally contaminated" by having seen AT&T's UNIX code, I don't want any more "mental contamination"), so I don't know what his (and, for the international atlas, his co-author's) sources were, and don't know whether his atlases read like Eggert's comments (e.g., "well, this source says X, and this other source says Y; for reason Z, I'm going with the first source") or what. He's almost certainly not the original source of the information, as he's not, as far as I know, somebody in the government who set the offset from UTC and the daylight savings time rules for particular locales, so the atlases are probably somewhere between "facts that are readily available from numerous sources" and "a book that includes facts from research that the author undertook", with the "research", in the latter case, being research in other sources.
In particular, note the specific rejection of "sweat of the brow" per se as a basis for copyright protection in matters of databases. The key is whether the database is "arranged and selected in an original manner." I can see this case being decided either way. The White Pages telephone directory is not protected, but on the other hand you cannot copy Webster's Unabridged without consequence. Whether you can copy the gist of a subset of articles in the dictionary is more arguable.
I suspect it's more like "whether you can cite the Encyclopedia Brittanica's claim of X about Y when talking about Y" - but, again, I've not read Shanks.
The work in contention clearly entails a whole different level of research than the White Pages, and quite possibly a level comparable in some sense to Webster's Unabridged. These are not obvious facts growing on trees.
I.e., just as Eggert dug into a whole bunch of documents, including but not limited to Shanks' atlases, to do his updates to the time zone database, Shanks presumably looked at a bunch of sources to produce his atlases.
However, to receive awards based on damages, you have to show damage! Again, that may or may not be the case here. I would suggest that plaintiff does intend to show damage. I have seen the work in question (heck, it's found on a lot of Unix-like systems and repositories). IMHO attribution is given, but there is no verbiage cautioning the reader that its use should be restricted to its intended mission: i.e., telling time in the course of normal operation of the operating system and common programs running thereon.
Actually, its intended mission could be summarized crudely as "make localtime() and mktime() work", and those routines are used for more than "telling time" in the sense of telling you what time it is now by feeding the result of time() to localtime(); they're used for reporting the local time corresponding to time_t values of all
Submitter fails Physics. Magnetized materials don't have to be electrically charged (and usually aren't).
Unless there's something else they read but didn't cite, submitter apparently pulled "positive or negatively charged building materials" ex recto, as the cited story says nothing about it. (I certainly wouldn't sign a contract with any such clause - if I discovered I was living in a giant capacitor, I'd be pretty upset and want the builder to do something about it, e.g. they could attach electrodes to both plates and then grab one electrode with each hand.)
Slashdot Mirror
Download the compiler toolchain without "registering".
"Download the compiler toolchain", or "download the current version of the compiler toolchain"? Yes, "I can download the latest version of the compiler toolchain without registering" is better than "I get a version of the compiler toolchain with the OS on my machine", but the latter is better than "I can't get any toolchain without registering", and, as far as I know, it was always possible. Did they ever offer the latest shiniest version without requiring an ADC account, with the requirement to register with ADC to get the latest shiniest version starting with Xcode 4.x? (BTW, I think I may have had to register to get this, but it's interesting that they've offered a free-as-in-beer version for a while now....)
I think you just jumped from UI design to internal software architecture.
You'd already taken it there when you said "Also, leaving an application running without a UI is a perfectly reasonable idea". The notion of an application "running" in a way that it can be "quit" is an issue of internal software architecture. Consider a hypothetical system in which all threads of control run in the same address space and in which particular user-facing functions (simple text editing, source code editing, word processing, spreadsheet editing, Web browsing, viewing system settings, etc.) are implemented by subroutines/methods called in one of those threads of control. If, for example, a package of those subroutines/methods are assigned a virtual address at the time they're installed, and live there until they're uninstalled, what would it mean to "quit", say, a text editor? It wouldn't mean un-mapping the code that implemented the simple text editor, as that would only happen if you uninstalled it; it might mean "close all the windows for that text editor", but if you have compound documents and, for example, the text editor code is used in spreadsheet cells and text-entry fields and..., there might be a lot of "windows for that text editor" that didn't open as a result of opening a simple text document.
There's absolutely no reason whatsoever the two should even be related.
Arguably, no, there is no such reason - and whether an application is "running" or not should be completely transparent to the user, so that they should neither know nor care whether the system uses a Mac OS X-style model, a Windows/{most UN*X desktops other than the OS X one} model, the model I described above, etc.. In that world, you might not even have Task Manager/Activity Monitor/{whatever it's called in GNOME}/{whatever it's called in KDE}/etc. view showing running applications or processes, nothing in the Dock/system tray/whatever to indicate what's running, etc., although there might be some special "geek tool" to show whatever the appropriate information is.
You can call the unix box thing whatever you like. What I care about is that I get a unix box where I know for a fact that all the hardware inside will work.
Which has as much, if not more, to do with "Mac OS X being purpose-made to run on the machine" as "the machine being purpose-made for Mac OS X", much less "the machine being purpose-made to run Unix" (whatever that means, given the number of Un*xes out there; it's more "purpose-made to run Mac OS X" than "to run Unix", given the one-button trackpads and Command keys and so on). All the hardware inside will work because Apple will either write, or have the vendor write, or will co-develop with the vendor, Mac OS X drivers for it; it's not as if they choose hardware that "works with Unix", they choose hardware and then make it work with their Unix.
They'll have a hard time getting back in the server room.
To what extent was Apple in the enterprise server room in the first place? (Not a purely-rhetorical question; if there are cases where the Xserve was used significantly in an enterprise whose name doesn't match "Apple (Computer|Inc)", the details would be interesting.)
correct, the power chips they used before had extensions that did tend to give it a slight edge over x86 in encoding and photoshop tasks.
Did that still apply with the generation of x86 processors Apple started shipping with (much less what they ship with now)?
Also, leaving an application running without a UI is a perfectly reasonable idea, once you dissociate applications and windows -- in fact, there are many, many programs that practically demand it (mail, bittorrent, IM in general).
Or, rather, disassociate processes and windows. In Mac OS X, all documents opened by a given app are normally handled by the same process (which might be a bit of a pain if you have many documents that chew up a lot of application address space open and the app is 32-bit, but 64-bit is the future); that's a lot less common on other desktop environments, as far as I know - are Web browsers the main exception there?
Windows 7 finally supports windowless applications properly, though that's a recent advance and many applications still don't support it. I can't honestly think of any non-X11 applications that actually close completely when you close the last window.
So if you have, say, four Word documents open, are there four processes running Word, or just one?
All in all, though, I agree: the best part of modern Macs is what's underneath the hood. They're effectively the only consumer-grade machines in the market that are purpose-made to run Unix.
Not that this makes the hardware particularly different from other consumer-grade machines. It's perhaps better stated as "the only consumer-grade machines in the market that ship with a flavor of Unix as the native OS". (Well, except for netbooks running Linux; I assume the market in question doesn't include tablets, say.)
I recently switched to Mac from Linux (primarily for the nice hardware) but am having trouble getting used to OS X and the odd keyboard. How do you program on it?
With microEMACS (just as I do on Solaris and Linux and FreeBSD and...).
I find the keyboard lacks a few crucial keys (a real delete key,
Presumably meaning "delete the character under the cursor" rather than "delete the character to the left of the cursor". Control-D should work in a lot of cases (hint: there's a sequence of five capital letters in my previous reply paragraph that describes where a lot of keystrokes supported by a lot of Mac OS X come from :-)).
pgup/pgdn)
At least on my MacBook Pro, {fn}+the cursor up and down keys do the job there.
and odd use of other keys (the command - flower power key - seems to do most of what the ctrl key does on Linux
Yes, for menu accelerators, it's the Command key in Mac OS and Control in Windows/KDE/GNOME/etc.. It does have the advantage that copy and paste in a terminal window can use the same sequence as in other windows, rather than having to use Control+Shift rather than Control; given how much time I spend in Terminal, that's a win for me, at least.
Sixth, Steve Jobs replaced init with launchd.
You misspelled "Dave Zarzycki". launchd wasn't Jobs's idea. At most, he said "OK, sounds like a good idea" and didn't block it.
Don't look now, but your Apple is showing. Here's a reality check for you, if you care to open the "scary terminal" in your copy of Lion....
Look at what's buried below that clean, unblemished UI.... BSD. Free Software. Stuff that "has a ways to go" before it reaches Apple's level of "absorption".
And then go look in /usr/bin/emacs. :-)
Steve Jobs was also in part responsible for a lot of bad, remember the Foxconn worker 'suicide'?
Do you think Apple should be held responsible for the suicide rate at Foxconn? Altogether, totally, completely, one hundred percent responsible?
He said "suicide", singular, not "suicides", plural, or "suicide rate".
As for the torture, do you have any evidence to substantiate that claim? I did a quick search and I couldn't find any torture articles that weren't for Apple products being stress tested by people.
Try missing iphone foxconn, which turns up a Forbes article about a Foxconn worker accused of stealing an iPhone prototype who was "illegally detained and physically abused by a security manager surnamed Yuan".
No, Steve Jobs didn't. He defended the indefensible and did his best to minimize & brush-off the problem. Instead, Apple and Foxconn just blamed the workers for the problems and made them sign anti-suicide pacts.
You may be mixing up the suicide of the worker blamed for the missing iPhone prototype and other suicides at Foxconn; as far as I know, the anti-suicide pledges and suicide nets weren't specifically related to the suicide of that particular worker.
In the case of Foxconn, I'm not really sure that Steve Jobs or Apple really deserves as much bad press as they've gotten. There are plenty of other companies that use their services to make their products that are also to blame for that. IIRC, the last Dell I had used a Foxconn motherboard. Apple at least made some attempt at improving the situation, I haven't heard of any of the other companies doing so.
I presume Luthair was specifically referring to the suicide of the Foxconn worker who was accused of having stolen an iPhone prototype and was "illegally detained and physically abused by a security manager surnamed Yuan", not to other Foxconn suicides for which Apple cannot solely be blamed.
That's pretty bizarre. I hope the **AAs don't find a way to make a similar license (though their massive extension of copyright is about the same thing for most of those execs - they probably don't care what happens to things after they die).
I think "Not based on past legislative evidence was referring to said massive extension of copyright. Mary Bono asserted that the (deceased) former Mr. Cherilyn Sarkisian wanted copyright to last forever, assuming that wasn't just a sarcastic outburst:
Perhaps it's just an experiment to see if it's even feasible.
Yes, given that Apple have built other prototype hardware in the past.
But I think it's quite feasible and quite desirable if it allows them to put something between the price of a tablet and full MacBook.
If Apple were to build such a machine, it might well just run straight iOS. iOS already supports hardware keyboards (at least via Bluetooth), and could conceivably support pointing devices other than the ones most people have on their hands (probably a trackpad if they build a machine that's not touchscreen-only; given the Magic Trackpad, Apple's interest in mice seems to be waning). It could well be that Mac OS X, complete with "go ahead and download a source tarball, compile it, and install it, if you want, or buy somebody's non-App Store software and install it", will remain as long as there are enough customers who want that type of OS (truck drivers, if you will, using Jobs' analogy) and iOS will be used for machines for customers for whom it's sufficient, even if those machines happen to look like notebook computers.
You don't need to be a programmer to program a computer. My boss isn't a programmer, yet he can program a computer simply by paying me money and telling me what to do. My mum isn't a programmer, but she can program a computer by asking me a favour. Stallman assumes people realise that.
And I, despite having a Y chromosome, can give birth to a baby by paying a surrogate mother. :-)
A better way to state the point in question is "...a world where every user can have their device reprogrammed at will" (whether they're the ones who actually do the reprogramming or not - most probably won't).
Which brings us back to the notion that Linux really is GNU/Linux,
No, it really is GNU/Linux/BSD/KDE/GIMP/Firefox/Google/Pidgin/CUPS/HPIJS/SANE/Standard Epson Scanner Driver/Whoever Makes ZSH/Eclipse... (And he forgot X.org. :-)) One could perhaps argue that libc and most of the commands come from the GNU project, so perhaps the GNU project should get more attention in the naming than all the other contributors to userland, but it's not as if a typical Linux distribution is just "GNU with the Hurd replaced by the Linux kernel".
xerox actually invented both the mouse
Umm, no; that was Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute.
People such as myself are able to observe how app store has been made extremely prominent in OS X, observe how Apple announced plans for ARM,
What sort of "plans for ARM"? Plans for the ARM architecture come from ARM Holdings, not from Apple. Plans for future An processors would come from Apple Inc., as would plans for use of ARM with OSes other than iOS; my suspicion is that you're referring to the last of those. If so, as you've used the word "announced", could you please give a URL for the Apple press release wherein they've announced that they plan to have a line of Mac OS X devices running ARM? (NOTE: something such as, for example, "Word has reached SemiAccurate that Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) is going to show Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) the door, at least as far as laptops are concerned. It won’t be really soon, but we are told it is a done deal." is not an "announcement" or a "press release", it's a "rumor".)
I'm sure developers will get supported in one way or another, probably by being required to develop on more expensive Intel Macs while they still exist.
And when they no longer exist?
The bit about how some people misinterpret the amount of free memory the OS reports is totally true, though.
And not unique to Windows; the Mac OS X Activity Monitor's "Free" statistic in the "System Memory" pane gets misinterpreted the same way.
I bet Apple has sued him because Apple has invented the timezones and has the sole right to update and sell them.
Another case of #include <anti_Apple_rant.h> , but, in this particular case, if Apple takes any legal action at all, my guess is that it'd be an amicus curiae brief supporting the defendants....
I wonder if it is a limitation of CDMA that makes it overly complicated. I know for a fact that both AT&T and T-Mobile are more than happy to sell me a SIM card when I walk in with an unlocked phone, and judging from the fine print on Apple's page, it seems it might be more of a technical limitation of CDMA, instead of the carriers not wanting to sell service to someone.
At least from what I understand from the Wikipedia page for the Universal Integrated Circuit Card), a UICC can support GSM, UMTS, and cdmaONE/CDMA2000, so, at least in theory, it sounds as if a single phone could support both GSM/UMTS and cdmaONE/CDMA2000 networks. Whether a given cdmaONE/CDMA2000 network provider will let you sign up with an unlocked phone, and give you a UICC for their network, is another matter. At least according to the Wikipedia page for the Removable User Identity Module, they're in use mainly in Asia; if North American cdmaONE/CDMA2000 carriers don't use them, the limitation Apple mentions applies, as you can't get an unlocked iPhone 4S and a contract from Verizon or Sprint and plug Verizon or Sprint's UICC into it, as you can't get a UICC from Verizon or Sprint.
Assuming this isn't a troll, you might be unfamiliar with the English-language term "Balkanize".
These guys probably believe that if they win they will collect royalties for every copy of tzdata distributed for the next 150 years. Instead, a cleanroom version would be rapidly produced based on primary sources. The initial version may be short on historical data but it would eventually be filled out: all the data has been published by governments. This may be done anyway.
Or, alternatively, they may believe that if they win they can shut down this guy's competing software, and have no interest in pissing off some of these lawyered-up companies by asking them for royalties.
Note: IANAL (thank god).
A very informative writeup on the copyrightability of facts and even compilations of facts in the U.S. is this.
To quote the "bottom line" from that writeup:
I've never seen Shanks' atlases (and, at this point, I intend to avoid reading them - it's bad enough that I'm "mentally contaminated" by having seen AT&T's UNIX code, I don't want any more "mental contamination"), so I don't know what his (and, for the international atlas, his co-author's) sources were, and don't know whether his atlases read like Eggert's comments (e.g., "well, this source says X, and this other source says Y; for reason Z, I'm going with the first source") or what. He's almost certainly not the original source of the information, as he's not, as far as I know, somebody in the government who set the offset from UTC and the daylight savings time rules for particular locales, so the atlases are probably somewhere between "facts that are readily available from numerous sources" and "a book that includes facts from research that the author undertook", with the "research", in the latter case, being research in other sources.
In particular, note the specific rejection of "sweat of the brow" per se as a basis for copyright protection in matters of databases. The key is whether the database is "arranged and selected in an original manner." I can see this case being decided either way. The White Pages telephone directory is not protected, but on the other hand you cannot copy Webster's Unabridged without consequence. Whether you can copy the gist of a subset of articles in the dictionary is more arguable.
I suspect it's more like "whether you can cite the Encyclopedia Brittanica's claim of X about Y when talking about Y" - but, again, I've not read Shanks.
The work in contention clearly entails a whole different level of research than the White Pages, and quite possibly a level comparable in some sense to Webster's Unabridged. These are not obvious facts growing on trees.
I.e., just as Eggert dug into a whole bunch of documents, including but not limited to Shanks' atlases, to do his updates to the time zone database, Shanks presumably looked at a bunch of sources to produce his atlases.
However, to receive awards based on damages, you have to show damage! Again, that may or may not be the case here. I would suggest that plaintiff does intend to show damage. I have seen the work in question (heck, it's found on a lot of Unix-like systems and repositories). IMHO attribution is given, but there is no verbiage cautioning the reader that its use should be restricted to its intended mission: i.e., telling time in the course of normal operation of the operating system and common programs running thereon.
Actually, its intended mission could be summarized crudely as "make localtime() and mktime() work", and those routines are used for more than "telling time" in the sense of telling you what time it is now by feeding the result of time() to localtime(); they're used for reporting the local time corresponding to time_t values of all
Submitter fails Physics. Magnetized materials don't have to be electrically charged (and usually aren't).
Unless there's something else they read but didn't cite, submitter apparently pulled "positive or negatively charged building materials" ex recto, as the cited story says nothing about it. (I certainly wouldn't sign a contract with any such clause - if I discovered I was living in a giant capacitor, I'd be pretty upset and want the builder to do something about it, e.g. they could attach electrodes to both plates and then grab one electrode with each hand.)
Maybe they are all Juggalos?
Fucking Slashdot submissions, how do they work?