You'll have to define "successfully," then. Notwithstanding your criticisms of Apple's business models, MacOS X has sold as many copies in its initial week of issue as there exist estimated users of most free distros of BSD-based UNIX systems.
I got the August, 96 date from the date they stated as their first use in commerce from their trademark application. While it is possible that they might not have considered distribution of a public beta to be a use in commerce, I anticipate they would have used the earliest date plausible.
Quake, first commercially published in August of 1996, does not predate the patent application by a year. Without passing upon the question whether or not the patent's claims read upon Quake, Quake may not be relevant in determining its validity.
The analogies to GPL seem quite imperfect. GPL is designed to assure that software stays "free" in the Stallman sense, to facilitate the process of use derivation of software, while assuring that those works are made available as a result of its distribution. That process is far less meaningful in the music business, in part because of the nature of musical work and phonorecord copyrights (which are different kinds of assets, with different protections, and are often owned by different people), but also in part because of how music is "derived" in practice.
In short, the license, which seems more meaningful with respect to facilitating copying and file sharing, is too much. A mere "consent to copy and share the file" would suffice. The license, which doesn't really hit on the nuances of how musical works and samples are used in the business for artistic works, is not enough.
I don't see why anyone needs Open Music as conceived in this license, or why anyone aspiring to develop open music in the sense of "free" music would use it. In short, my concerns fall into the following, most simple question:
What are they really trying to accomplish with the license?
We should measure our concerns about the license in that light, after the question has been answered. Then, we will know whether the flaws identified on this site by others are relevant, and if so, whether changes are necessary. We will also be able to far more easily discern whether the license will be used in such a manner (from a practical standpoint) to achieve those ends.
P.S.: Note that you cannot use this license for a recording unless you have also gotten the author of the musical work to agree, or the musical work is in the public domain. Further, given that most musical work phonorecords entail plural performers, technicians and sometimes plural composers, these notices are going to be moby.
Rupert Murdoch, media baron, began his career by buying a publishing business based on academic journals. The aggregate business of these journals is very profitable.
I'll presume the first sentence is true. Why does the second sentence follow therefrom? Is there any documentary evidence, one way or the other, in this regard?
MI>Exactly. However, nothing says that they are entitled to obscene profit margins. In fact, nothing says that they are entitled to preservation of a business model.
That's why I asked the question. What are the economics. Are these guys making obscene profit margins, as you seem to be suggesting, or are they barely breaking even, as others have suggested?
How easy is it to obtain a six-month old copy of a journal? Go to the library, find the issue in question, and photocopy the article. Does the publisher make any more money from this? Even a one-day old issue will not earn any additional money when used this way.
Actually, post-issue publication copies are a strong source of revenues.
Depending upon the purposes for which the copy is used, such practice may well violate copyright. It is infringement to make and maintain files of "personal copies" of journal articles without a license, even for purposes in support of academic research.
Most corporate entities, and many academic research facilities subscribe to an organization called the "CCC," which provides a means for licensing individual copies for "personal files."
This was a great story. It reminds me of Sky Masterson's soliloquy from Guys and Dolls, in rejecting a proposed sucker bet about the number of sales for various pastries at a deli:
"Let me tell you a story. When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says to me a very valuable thing. 'Son,' the old guy says, 'I'm sorry that I am not able to bankroll you a very large start. But not having any potatoes to give you, I am going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, you are going to come across a guy with a nice brand new deck of cards, with the wrap and seal unbroken, and this guy is going to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, you do not take this bet. For if you do, as sure as you are standing there, you are going to end up with an ear full of cider.' "
Sky, an extraordinary proposition gambler, responded by countering. He covered the offeror's eyes and bet he couldn't tell what color was Sky's tie. "No bet."
I say this to point out the difference between sucker betting and proposition gambling. It is a sucker bet to offer a bet challenging a mark to do something that is, in fact, impossible. In proposition gambling, the offeror gives the mark a proposition they are unlikely to win, or that is worded in such a clever way that the winning of it leaves the mark too embarassed, entertained or impressed by the cleverness to attempt to challenge having lost.
In this case, the first offer (compressing high-entropy data) was a sucker bet. Shame on him. The response, doing the sucker bet using multiple files, was a sweet proposition gamble. Shame on him. Once taken, the offeror-now-mark did weasel, but as I see it, ultimately welched.
I admit that I, too, didn't consider the import of the multiple files on first reading (but, hey, I didn't have $5K against $100 riding on the result).
At the end of the day, the sucker-bettor was the mark, and he had an earful of cider.
Indeed, some of these journals cost a small fortune for subscriptions. But aside from library and corporate sales, they don't sell many subscriptions.
It is apparently outrageous when viewed in some ways ($0 for content, no meaningful advertising, etc.) to think that they rely on CCC and on-line fees as their mode of collecting fees for reprint distribution.
On the other hand, what are, in fact, the economics of the journal business. Do these companies make lots of money, as return on investment, or not? Clearly, they provide an important and significant service -- were there no journal publishers, managing and mediating substantive editorial panels, supervising publication and editorial deadlines, and so forth, we might be much less well off. So we want publishers to exist.
So, are they making money? Are they making enough money that it makes sense for them to keep doing it, rather than publishing something else?
While it is nice to say that these guys owe us a living, they don't. They are businessmen, pure and simple, and will only stay in the business if it makes them a buck. We don't want scientists to step into that breach, involving themselves even more deeply into the mechanics of publishing, because we want scientists to practice their sciences -- beyond peer review and reviewing their own galleys, I am quite certain I don't want our best minds dedicated to anything other than their research.
The plaintiff seeks remedies, presumably for negligence, resulting from allegations that a computer game tortiously resulted in the injury, death and mental injury suffered by the students in Columbine. Even assuming that the first amendment the claim could stand after a first amendment analysis, it seems an unlikely result.
Its very difficult to be liable under a negligence theory for the criminal intentional acts of a third party. The Plaintiff will have to prove that the defendants owed a duty of care to the particular plaintiffs (or in the case of wrongful death, the decedents), and further that the video game caused (not just in the "but for" sense, but also in the sense of legally, or proximally causing the result). This is an enormously tough row to hoe, both legally and factually.
In each case, the plaintiff will have to prove that it was forseeable that this particular individual would have injured these particular defendants, or similarly situated defendants. Unlikely. A substantial body of law tends to treat intentional torts, such as violent crimes, to be intervening acts that are not forseeable, perhaps even as a matter of law. Such an intervening act might well "cut off" the chain of proximate cause from prior conduct of a defendant.
While the abuse excuse might have (however unlikely) been a defense for those who actually did the shooting, had they lived, there is no law of which I am aware that would provide reasonable grounds for using abuse excuse as grounds in support of a plaintiff in a civil case to impute proximate cause to a vender of content for the intentional acts of a third party.
In other words, there may well be legal grounds that would, in themselves, preclude bringing the matter to trial, or admit judgment as a matter of law for the defendants. Even if it did survive summary judgment and motions to dismiss, and even if the tearful and sympathetic plaintiffs led a jury to find for them, the judge might well issue judgment for the defendants notwithstanding the verdict. Even were the judge too timid to intervene as she should in the face of a meaningful verdict, there could well be rock-solid grounds for appeal.
All that from basic tort law issues, even presuming that the first amendment does not, itself, preclude the cause of action entirely.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share.
Gosh, the Wall Street Journal indicated recently that Apple sales of Darwin-based MacOS X in the last month dwarfed "sales" of "free" unices by a long shot. That was a qualitative report. Does anyone know how many Apple actually sold?
If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists, dabblers, and dilettantes. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Hmmm.... Darwin (pun intended), not wishful thinking, seems to control the fates of these systems.
This opinion did not hold that you can do anything you want to do anonymously, and that the First Amendment provides complete protection for any speech. What distinguishes this case from other cases involving discovery of speakers from an ISP is that the anonymous speaker was not a subject of any claim brought forward in the lawsuit.
Usually, the subject of a subpoena where disvovery is sought is the "John Doe" defendant of a cause of action, be it copyright infringement or defamation. The opinion didn't address that question at all.
Instead, the Court held, intensely properly IMHO, that unless more than mere innuendo is alleged against an anonymous speaker, the privacy of the anonymous speaker must be respected -- even in matters of judicial discovery.
The UI that it comes with is so oddball that it turns off about 90% of the people who try to get started with it.
I'm sure you took a poll.
Alt-Spacebar, the standard Windows way to move a Window? No, this is a cross-platform tool, doesn't do Windows stuff. Five mouse clicks on the demo they pop up to show off, and my computer is hostage to a Window that won't go away. Great modern UI.
Here, Squeak is critcized for failing to emulate Windows. To me, this is blessing with faint criticism. True, Squeak is not a Windows or MacOS emulator. So what?
I note, with interest, that the specific "features" you request could be added with a few lines of code. Unlike NT, however, this can be added in Squeak by ANY user, since 100% of the system's source code is persistently available and immediately modifiable in seconds.
Squeak's GUI is quite modern. Unlike Windows, which has not embodied any significant new ideas or developments since the 80's (when it was ripped off from Apple and Xerox), Squeak's Morphic (which was designed by a team comprising many of the Xerox PARC research scientists) interface is a novel, interesting and exciting new GUI framework that is well worth studying. Sure, its a research tool -- that's why its fun.
Competent Squeak users routinely modify the appearance to taste. True, Squeak isn't market driven to suit people such as the poster who would prefer it was Windows NT. So what?
About every 6 months someone points out that Squeak would be ten times more popular if it came with a user interface that didn't look like the 1937 version of Klingon to a Windows user.
And, indeed, every year or so someone posts a Windows look-and-operate-alike skin to appease them. These skins and corresponding codes are not generally adopted or used by the community, and routinely fall into the bit-bucket of neglected and unsupported code.
BTW, I do like ST, but the trap is that you've got to commit really big bucks to get the professional versions that can really deliver. Maybe $20k per seat and up, since you have to buy lots of training because the docs are bad and its a culture that you can't catch from a book.
People who say things like this tend not to be the same people who "really deliver" things for a living. I have delivered ST-based product using software costing far less than $20K a seat, and in fact costing exactly $20K a seat less than that. I never spent a dime on Smalltalk, and found the printed books more than adequate to give me all I needed.
Maybe $20k per seat and up, since you have to buy lots of training because the docs are bad and its a culture that you can't catch from a book. And then your user gets an app that runs a little slower and takes a little more hardware, and you've got some run-time issues, etc.
BTW, the biggest multimedia gizmo, the Times Square Jumbotron, is programmed in Ada. Let us know when Squeak gets that one.
Non sequitur. I admit that Squeak doesn't implement the Jumbotron. So what?
I note that the Jumbotron doesn't support Alt-spacebar either. This much is certain, Jumbotron is not portable at all, let alone pixel-for-pixel identical across virtually every modern software platform. On the other hand, Disney is presently using Squeak and other non-Ada software to run its attractions and demonstrations.
It most certainly does not. I've just spent a semester here at Georgia Tech taking a course on OO-design and -programming, with Squeak being the language of (instructor, definitely not student) choice. Our ongoing semester project was to build an MP3 player (seems cool, right?). However, nobody seemed to notice that people who ran Squeak under Windows (a majority of the class, I believe) had no MP3 support. Oops. They were delayed at least two weeks while someone scrambled to find (or write, I dunno) the appropriate library. Even then, the Windows users had to use a specially-modified Squeak binary.
Squeak itself didn't have an MP3 driver (we call them plugins) until just a few months ago, and it did take some time to sort it out cross-platform (there were also some licensing issues). I thought that they had this sorted by now, but I'm not sure one way or the other to where John Macintosh's excellent work has been ported.
It is most certainly true that C-language plugin code is not automatically cross-platform portable, even when plugged into Squeak.
God, someone just had to bring up Squeak. Ugh.
Wow, someone who uses Squeak in the real world! I hope you're getting paid a very large sum of money to do so, since I can't imagine anyone doing it out of personal preference.
As stated above I'm currently in a OOP class using Squeak, and maybe 75% of the people I know in there would agree with me when I say Squeak has been the worst programming language I've ever had to deal with (out of the seven or eight I've learned).
Interesting, my personal preferences were exactly the reverse, but I suspect this may be the difference between "learning seven or eight programming languages" and building real commercial code in one. Smalltalk is an excellent tool for prototyping and building OO systems, and then for extending the prototype to a solid commercial result, at least in my experience. Perhaps this may not be apparent when writing toy programs for a class in school, but in time, you may come to understand the virtues of a programming language that makes programming easier and more efficient.
The Squeak IDE is one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had to use. Slow, ugly as sin (both the original MVC and the newer Morphic GUI), and bloated as all hell. You must have superhuman patience to be able to create a game for your wife using it.
De gustibus non disputandum est. My experience is much to the contrary. While I am regarded by some as an excellent hacker, capable of generating high quality code with breakneck speed. I have never been as efficient as I was since I started hacking in Squeak, or as happy while coding and debugging.
I met Squeak in early November a year or so ago after it was demonstrated by Ted Kaehler at Hackers. I went home, downloaded it, spent a little time with the old Smalltalk books, and had the product running in production form in time for her December 26 birthday, and still attend all the holiday parties.
Since that experience, in which I was a rank newbie to Smalltalk (and now, I realize to OOP -- though I had been writing in OOPLs for years), it has only gotten better.
I suppose we will have to take our respective positions as reasonable people, and agree to disagree.
It's *really* hard to believe that Squeak was supposed to become the language used on the Dynabook, If a bunch of college students can't get the hang of it, I don't see how elementary-school kids could either.
I'm trying to be polite here. MMy experience is to the contrary. For example, my 9-year old son codes in Squeak, having picked it up, indeed with some decent coaching, in just a week or so. His code is awkward at times and unpolished, but hey, he's actually writing code and thinking its fun.
It most certainly does not. I've just spent a semester here at Georgia Tech taking a course on OO-design and -programming, with Squeak being the language of (instructor, definitely not student) choice. Our ongoing semester project was to build an MP3 player (seems cool, right?). However, nobody seemed to notice that people who ran Squeak under Windows (a majority of the class, I believe) had no MP3 support. Oops. They were delayed at least two weeks while someone scrambled to find (or write, I dunno) the appropriate library. Even then, the Windows users had to use a specially-modified Squeak binary.
Squeak itself didn't have an MP3 driver (we call them plugins) until just a few months ago, and it did take some time to sort it out cross-platform (there were also some licensing issues). I thought that they had this sorted by now, but I'm not sure one way or the other to where John Macintosh's excellent work has been ported.
It is most certainly true that C-language plugin code is not automatically cross-platform portable, even when plugged into Squeak.
God, someone just had to bring up Squeak. Ugh.
Wow, someone who uses Squeak in the real world! I hope you're getting paid a very large sum of money to do so, since I can't imagine anyone doing it out of personal preference.
As stated above I'm currently in a OOP class using Squeak, and maybe 75% of the people I know in there would agree with me when I say Squeak has been the worst programming language I've ever had to deal with (out of the seven or eight I've learned).
Interesting, my personal preferences were exactly the reverse, but I suspect this may be the difference between "learning seven or eight programming languages" and building real commercial code in one. Smalltalk is an excellent tool for prototyping and building OO systems, and then for extending the prototype to a solid commercial result, at least in my experience. Perhaps this may not be apparent when writing toy programs for a class in school, but in time, you may come to understand the virtues of a programming language that makes programming easier and more efficient.
The Squeak IDE is one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had to use. Slow, ugly as sin (both the original MVC and the newer Morphic GUI), and bloated as all hell. You must have superhuman patience to be able to create a game for your wife using it.
De gustibus non disputandum est. My experience is much to the contrary. While I am regarded by some as an excellent hacker, capable of generating high quality code with breakneck speed. I have never been as efficient as I was since I started hacking in Squeak, or as happy while coding and debugging.
I met Squeak in early November a year or so ago after it was demonstrated by Ted Kaehler at Hackers. I went home, downloaded it, spent a little time with the old Smalltalk books, and had the product running in production form in time for her December 26 birthday, and still attend all the holiday parties.
Since that experience, in which I was a rank newbie to Smalltalk (and now, I realize to OOP -- though I had been writing in OOPLs for years), it has only gotten better.
I suppose we will have to take our respective positions as reasonable people, and agree to disagree.
It's *really* hard to believe that Squeak was supposed to become the language used on the Dynabook, If a bunch of college students can't get the hang of it, I don't see how elementary-school kids could either.
I'm trying to be polite here. MMy experience is to the contrary. For example, my 9-year old son codes in Squeak, having picked it up, indeed with some decent coaching, in just a week or so. His code is awkward at times and unpolished, but hey, he's actually writing code and thinking its fun.
nobody bothered to solve the interesting problems that Java addressed - perfect portability of source and byte codes, a single standard and just-in-time compilation
No, that isn't the case. The free Disney R&D implementation of Smalltalk, Squeak addresses these issues, in some cases profoundly better than does Java.
Indeed, Java hardly offers "perfect portability," the "write-once, run anywhere" claim is marketing hype at its best. It is, in practice, quite difficult to get identical results from any but the most trivial Java programs.
In comparison, a multimedia GUI-based application in Squeak runs pixel-for-pixel IDENTICALLY across a vast array of platforms. I wrote a video game for my wife's birthday in Squeak, complete with animation sound and graphics, from the machine at my Office, a Dell PC Laptop. I sent the image by e-mail to my home, flipped it on her iMac while she slept, fired it up, and it just worked. Identically.
On the other counts, Squeak has a JIT (plus many other nice internal features including object send caching, a sweet and super-fast generational garbage collector), and there is, in fact, an ANSI standard.
Indeed, Smalltalk's source code is virtually identical across implementations. (The syntax, which --in this sense only-- is super-elegant, can be trivially described in a handful of rules). Except for one religious issue (closures for code blocks). Differences in and interoperability problems between implementations derive primarily from the underlying framework libraries provided with those codes -- a problem hardly unique to Smalltalk.
How about a single substantive argument to that end? Perl is useless for Object-oriented design. Python is better than Perl in this regard, but different, in many ways.
Language bigotry has no place in this forum, particularly when propounded in a naive and uninformed fashion. The author of the comment has apparently not built too many enterprise back-office systems, a venue in which Smalltalk has yet to be surpassed, or been following the extraordinary work at Disney R&D with Squeak.
Smalltalk has its place in the cannon, just as does Perl and other languages. It has aged quite well, in fact, among those who have taken the time to learn something about it.
The bigots are free to their own views. I commend to the rest of us, however, a second look. Consider Squeak, an excellent, modern and free Smalltalk implementation. Play with it a bit, and see if you don't begin, at least, to "get it."
1. Will this information now be available to all under the FOIA?
2. My main concern with "outsourcing" investigations is that the government might well engage private entities who have in vigilante-style gathered information and then tipped off the government, in the meanwhile engaging in conduct that the Fourth Amendment search and seizure requirements would preclude. Does purchasing that information without having solicited the invasions of privacy permit the government to do indirectly what it was not permitted to do directly? [An issue related to one raised during the first Claus Von Bulow appeal.]
Slashdot Mirror
You'll have to define "successfully," then. Notwithstanding your criticisms of Apple's business models, MacOS X has sold as many copies in its initial week of issue as there exist estimated users of most free distros of BSD-based UNIX systems.
It surely might, but I tend to doubt it.
I got the August, 96 date from the date they stated as their first use in commerce from their trademark application. While it is possible that they might not have considered distribution of a public beta to be a use in commerce, I anticipate they would have used the earliest date plausible.
Quake, first commercially published in August of 1996, does not predate the patent application by a year. Without passing upon the question whether or not the patent's claims read upon Quake, Quake may not be relevant in determining its validity.
Darwin isn't licensed under BSD. Reasonable people might prefer BSD to ASPL
BTW - Mach has done more to stiffle microkernels than any theory or performance debate has ever.
No more than COBOL, FORTRAN or BASIC stifled programming languages. In this community, such debates are won on the merits.
To most people microkernel == Mach (which has never been used successfully in a production system)
MacOS X?
The analogies to GPL seem quite imperfect. GPL is designed to assure that software stays "free" in the Stallman sense, to facilitate the process of use derivation of software, while assuring that those works are made available as a result of its distribution. That process is far less meaningful in the music business, in part because of the nature of musical work and phonorecord copyrights (which are different kinds of assets, with different protections, and are often owned by different people), but also in part because of how music is "derived" in practice.
In short, the license, which seems more meaningful with respect to facilitating copying and file sharing, is too much. A mere "consent to copy and share the file" would suffice. The license, which doesn't really hit on the nuances of how musical works and samples are used in the business for artistic works, is not enough.
I don't see why anyone needs Open Music as conceived in this license, or why anyone aspiring to develop open music in the sense of "free" music would use it. In short, my concerns fall into the following, most simple question:
What are they really trying to accomplish with the license?
We should measure our concerns about the license in that light, after the question has been answered. Then, we will know whether the flaws identified on this site by others are relevant, and if so, whether changes are necessary. We will also be able to far more easily discern whether the license will be used in such a manner (from a practical standpoint) to achieve those ends.
P.S.: Note that you cannot use this license for a recording unless you have also gotten the author of the musical work to agree, or the musical work is in the public domain. Further, given that most musical work phonorecords entail plural performers, technicians and sometimes plural composers, these notices are going to be moby.
Rupert Murdoch, media baron, began his career by buying a publishing business based on academic journals. The aggregate business of these journals is very profitable.
I'll presume the first sentence is true. Why does the second sentence follow therefrom? Is there any documentary evidence, one way or the other, in this regard?
I thought international work was the jurisdiction of the CIA.
MI>Exactly. However, nothing says that they are entitled to obscene profit margins. In fact, nothing says that they are entitled to preservation of a business model.
That's why I asked the question. What are the economics. Are these guys making obscene profit margins, as you seem to be suggesting, or are they barely breaking even, as others have suggested?
How easy is it to obtain a six-month old copy of a journal? Go to the library, find the issue in question, and photocopy the article. Does the publisher make any more money from this? Even a one-day old issue will not earn any additional money when used this way.
Actually, post-issue publication copies are a strong source of revenues.
Depending upon the purposes for which the copy is used, such practice may well violate copyright. It is infringement to make and maintain files of "personal copies" of journal articles without a license, even for purposes in support of academic research.
Most corporate entities, and many academic research facilities subscribe to an organization called the "CCC," which provides a means for licensing individual copies for "personal files."
Sky, an extraordinary proposition gambler, responded by countering. He covered the offeror's eyes and bet he couldn't tell what color was Sky's tie. "No bet."
I say this to point out the difference between sucker betting and proposition gambling. It is a sucker bet to offer a bet challenging a mark to do something that is, in fact, impossible. In proposition gambling, the offeror gives the mark a proposition they are unlikely to win, or that is worded in such a clever way that the winning of it leaves the mark too embarassed, entertained or impressed by the cleverness to attempt to challenge having lost.
In this case, the first offer (compressing high-entropy data) was a sucker bet. Shame on him. The response, doing the sucker bet using multiple files, was a sweet proposition gamble. Shame on him. Once taken, the offeror-now-mark did weasel, but as I see it, ultimately welched.
I admit that I, too, didn't consider the import of the multiple files on first reading (but, hey, I didn't have $5K against $100 riding on the result).
At the end of the day, the sucker-bettor was the mark, and he had an earful of cider.
No sympathy.
Indeed, some of these journals cost a small fortune for subscriptions. But aside from library and corporate sales, they don't sell many subscriptions.
It is apparently outrageous when viewed in some ways ($0 for content, no meaningful advertising, etc.) to think that they rely on CCC and on-line fees as their mode of collecting fees for reprint distribution.
On the other hand, what are, in fact, the economics of the journal business. Do these companies make lots of money, as return on investment, or not? Clearly, they provide an important and significant service -- were there no journal publishers, managing and mediating substantive editorial panels, supervising publication and editorial deadlines, and so forth, we might be much less well off. So we want publishers to exist.
So, are they making money? Are they making enough money that it makes sense for them to keep doing it, rather than publishing something else?
While it is nice to say that these guys owe us a living, they don't. They are businessmen, pure and simple, and will only stay in the business if it makes them a buck. We don't want scientists to step into that breach, involving themselves even more deeply into the mechanics of publishing, because we want scientists to practice their sciences -- beyond peer review and reviewing their own galleys, I am quite certain I don't want our best minds dedicated to anything other than their research.
The plaintiff seeks remedies, presumably for negligence, resulting from allegations that a computer game tortiously resulted in the injury, death and mental injury suffered by the students in Columbine. Even assuming that the first amendment the claim could stand after a first amendment analysis, it seems an unlikely result.
Its very difficult to be liable under a negligence theory for the criminal intentional acts of a third party. The Plaintiff will have to prove that the defendants owed a duty of care to the particular plaintiffs (or in the case of wrongful death, the decedents), and further that the video game caused (not just in the "but for" sense, but also in the sense of legally, or proximally causing the result). This is an enormously tough row to hoe, both legally and factually.
In each case, the plaintiff will have to prove that it was forseeable that this particular individual would have injured these particular defendants, or similarly situated defendants. Unlikely. A substantial body of law tends to treat intentional torts, such as violent crimes, to be intervening acts that are not forseeable, perhaps even as a matter of law. Such an intervening act might well "cut off" the chain of proximate cause from prior conduct of a defendant.
While the abuse excuse might have (however unlikely) been a defense for those who actually did the shooting, had they lived, there is no law of which I am aware that would provide reasonable grounds for using abuse excuse as grounds in support of a plaintiff in a civil case to impute proximate cause to a vender of content for the intentional acts of a third party.
In other words, there may well be legal grounds that would, in themselves, preclude bringing the matter to trial, or admit judgment as a matter of law for the defendants. Even if it did survive summary judgment and motions to dismiss, and even if the tearful and sympathetic plaintiffs led a jury to find for them, the judge might well issue judgment for the defendants notwithstanding the verdict. Even were the judge too timid to intervene as she should in the face of a meaningful verdict, there could well be rock-solid grounds for appeal.
All that from basic tort law issues, even presuming that the first amendment does not, itself, preclude the cause of action entirely.
in one week.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share.
Gosh, the Wall Street Journal indicated recently that Apple sales of Darwin-based MacOS X in the last month dwarfed "sales" of "free" unices by a long shot. That was a qualitative report. Does anyone know how many Apple actually sold?
If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists, dabblers, and dilettantes. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Hmmm.... Darwin (pun intended), not wishful thinking, seems to control the fates of these systems.
This opinion did not hold that you can do anything you want to do anonymously, and that the First Amendment provides complete protection for any speech. What distinguishes this case from other cases involving discovery of speakers from an ISP is that the anonymous speaker was not a subject of any claim brought forward in the lawsuit.
Usually, the subject of a subpoena where disvovery is sought is the "John Doe" defendant of a cause of action, be it copyright infringement or defamation. The opinion didn't address that question at all.
Instead, the Court held, intensely properly IMHO, that unless more than mere innuendo is alleged against an anonymous speaker, the privacy of the anonymous speaker must be respected -- even in matters of judicial discovery.
The UI that it comes with is so oddball that it turns off about 90% of the people who try to get started with it.
I'm sure you took a poll.
Alt-Spacebar, the standard Windows way to move a Window? No, this is a cross-platform tool, doesn't do Windows stuff. Five mouse clicks on the demo they pop up to show off, and my computer is hostage to a Window that won't go away. Great modern UI.
Here, Squeak is critcized for failing to emulate Windows. To me, this is blessing with faint criticism. True, Squeak is not a Windows or MacOS emulator. So what?
I note, with interest, that the specific "features" you request could be added with a few lines of code. Unlike NT, however, this can be added in Squeak by ANY user, since 100% of the system's source code is persistently available and immediately modifiable in seconds.
Squeak's GUI is quite modern. Unlike Windows, which has not embodied any significant new ideas or developments since the 80's (when it was ripped off from Apple and Xerox), Squeak's Morphic (which was designed by a team comprising many of the Xerox PARC research scientists) interface is a novel, interesting and exciting new GUI framework that is well worth studying. Sure, its a research tool -- that's why its fun.
Competent Squeak users routinely modify the appearance to taste. True, Squeak isn't market driven to suit people such as the poster who would prefer it was Windows NT. So what?
About every 6 months someone points out that Squeak would be ten times more popular if it came with a user interface that didn't look like the 1937 version of Klingon to a Windows user.
And, indeed, every year or so someone posts a Windows look-and-operate-alike skin to appease them. These skins and corresponding codes are not generally adopted or used by the community, and routinely fall into the bit-bucket of neglected and unsupported code.
BTW, I do like ST, but the trap is that you've got to commit really big bucks to get the professional versions that can really deliver. Maybe $20k per seat and up, since you have to buy lots of training because the docs are bad and its a culture that you can't catch from a book.
People who say things like this tend not to be the same people who "really deliver" things for a living. I have delivered ST-based product using software costing far less than $20K a seat, and in fact costing exactly $20K a seat less than that. I never spent a dime on Smalltalk, and found the printed books more than adequate to give me all I needed.
Maybe $20k per seat and up, since you have to buy lots of training because the docs are bad and its a culture that you can't catch from a book. And then your user gets an app that runs a little slower and takes a little more hardware, and you've got some run-time issues, etc.
BTW, the biggest multimedia gizmo, the Times Square Jumbotron, is programmed in Ada. Let us know when Squeak gets that one.
Non sequitur. I admit that Squeak doesn't implement the Jumbotron. So what?
I note that the Jumbotron doesn't support Alt-spacebar either. This much is certain, Jumbotron is not portable at all, let alone pixel-for-pixel identical across virtually every modern software platform. On the other hand, Disney is presently using Squeak and other non-Ada software to run its attractions and demonstrations.
It most certainly does not. I've just spent a semester here at Georgia Tech taking a course on OO-design and -programming, with Squeak being the language of (instructor, definitely not student) choice. Our ongoing semester project was to build an MP3 player (seems cool, right?). However, nobody seemed to notice that people who ran Squeak under Windows (a majority of the class, I believe) had no MP3 support. Oops. They were delayed at least two weeks while someone scrambled to find (or write, I dunno) the appropriate library. Even then, the Windows users had to use a specially-modified Squeak binary.
Squeak itself didn't have an MP3 driver (we call them plugins) until just a few months ago, and it did take some time to sort it out cross-platform (there were also some licensing issues). I thought that they had this sorted by now, but I'm not sure one way or the other to where John Macintosh's excellent work has been ported.
It is most certainly true that C-language plugin code is not automatically cross-platform portable, even when plugged into Squeak.
God, someone just had to bring up Squeak. Ugh.
Wow, someone who uses Squeak in the real world! I hope you're getting paid a very large sum of money to do so, since I can't imagine anyone doing it out of personal preference.
As stated above I'm currently in a OOP class using Squeak, and maybe 75% of the people I know in there would agree with me when I say Squeak has been the worst programming language I've ever had to deal with (out of the seven or eight I've learned).
Interesting, my personal preferences were exactly the reverse, but I suspect this may be the difference between "learning seven or eight programming languages" and building real commercial code in one. Smalltalk is an excellent tool for prototyping and building OO systems, and then for extending the prototype to a solid commercial result, at least in my experience. Perhaps this may not be apparent when writing toy programs for a class in school, but in time, you may come to understand the virtues of a programming language that makes programming easier and more efficient.
The Squeak IDE is one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had to use. Slow, ugly as sin (both the original MVC and the newer Morphic GUI), and bloated as all hell. You must have superhuman patience to be able to create a game for your wife using it.
De gustibus non disputandum est. My experience is much to the contrary. While I am regarded by some as an excellent hacker, capable of generating high quality code with breakneck speed. I have never been as efficient as I was since I started hacking in Squeak, or as happy while coding and debugging.
I met Squeak in early November a year or so ago after it was demonstrated by Ted Kaehler at Hackers. I went home, downloaded it, spent a little time with the old Smalltalk books, and had the product running in production form in time for her December 26 birthday, and still attend all the holiday parties.
Since that experience, in which I was a rank newbie to Smalltalk (and now, I realize to OOP -- though I had been writing in OOPLs for years), it has only gotten better.
I suppose we will have to take our respective positions as reasonable people, and agree to disagree.
It's *really* hard to believe that Squeak was supposed to become the language used on the Dynabook, If a bunch of college students can't get the hang of it, I don't see how elementary-school kids could either.
I'm trying to be polite here. MMy experience is to the contrary. For example, my 9-year old son codes in Squeak, having picked it up, indeed with some decent coaching, in just a week or so. His code is awkward at times and unpolished, but hey, he's actually writing code and thinking its fun.
It most certainly does not. I've just spent a semester here at Georgia Tech taking a course on OO-design and -programming, with Squeak being the language of (instructor, definitely not student) choice. Our ongoing semester project was to build an MP3 player (seems cool, right?). However, nobody seemed to notice that people who ran Squeak under Windows (a majority of the class, I believe) had no MP3 support. Oops. They were delayed at least two weeks while someone scrambled to find (or write, I dunno) the appropriate library. Even then, the Windows users had to use a specially-modified Squeak binary.
Squeak itself didn't have an MP3 driver (we call them plugins) until just a few months ago, and it did take some time to sort it out cross-platform (there were also some licensing issues). I thought that they had this sorted by now, but I'm not sure one way or the other to where John Macintosh's excellent work has been ported.
It is most certainly true that C-language plugin code is not automatically cross-platform portable, even when plugged into Squeak.
God, someone just had to bring up Squeak. Ugh.
Wow, someone who uses Squeak in the real world! I hope you're getting paid a very large sum of money to do so, since I can't imagine anyone doing it out of personal preference.
As stated above I'm currently in a OOP class using Squeak, and maybe 75% of the people I know in there would agree with me when I say Squeak has been the worst programming language I've ever had to deal with (out of the seven or eight I've learned).
Interesting, my personal preferences were exactly the reverse, but I suspect this may be the difference between "learning seven or eight programming languages" and building real commercial code in one. Smalltalk is an excellent tool for prototyping and building OO systems, and then for extending the prototype to a solid commercial result, at least in my experience. Perhaps this may not be apparent when writing toy programs for a class in school, but in time, you may come to understand the virtues of a programming language that makes programming easier and more efficient.
The Squeak IDE is one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had to use. Slow, ugly as sin (both the original MVC and the newer Morphic GUI), and bloated as all hell. You must have superhuman patience to be able to create a game for your wife using it.
De gustibus non disputandum est. My experience is much to the contrary. While I am regarded by some as an excellent hacker, capable of generating high quality code with breakneck speed. I have never been as efficient as I was since I started hacking in Squeak, or as happy while coding and debugging.
I met Squeak in early November a year or so ago after it was demonstrated by Ted Kaehler at Hackers. I went home, downloaded it, spent a little time with the old Smalltalk books, and had the product running in production form in time for her December 26 birthday, and still attend all the holiday parties.
Since that experience, in which I was a rank newbie to Smalltalk (and now, I realize to OOP -- though I had been writing in OOPLs for years), it has only gotten better.
I suppose we will have to take our respective positions as reasonable people, and agree to disagree.
It's *really* hard to believe that Squeak was supposed to become the language used on the Dynabook, If a bunch of college students can't get the hang of it, I don't see how elementary-school kids could either.
I'm trying to be polite here. MMy experience is to the contrary. For example, my 9-year old son codes in Squeak, having picked it up, indeed with some decent coaching, in just a week or so. His code is awkward at times and unpolished, but hey, he's actually writing code and thinking its fun.
This guy seems to never have heard of the Betamax court case which legitimized time-shifting.
Unfortunately, neither did the Ninth Circuit in the Napster opinion. . . .
here and here
nobody bothered to solve the interesting problems that Java addressed - perfect portability of source and byte codes, a single standard and just-in-time compilation
No, that isn't the case. The free Disney R&D implementation of Smalltalk, Squeak addresses these issues, in some cases profoundly better than does Java.
Indeed, Java hardly offers "perfect portability," the "write-once, run anywhere" claim is marketing hype at its best. It is, in practice, quite difficult to get identical results from any but the most trivial Java programs.
In comparison, a multimedia GUI-based application in Squeak runs pixel-for-pixel IDENTICALLY across a vast array of platforms. I wrote a video game for my wife's birthday in Squeak, complete with animation sound and graphics, from the machine at my Office, a Dell PC Laptop. I sent the image by e-mail to my home, flipped it on her iMac while she slept, fired it up, and it just worked. Identically.
On the other counts, Squeak has a JIT (plus many other nice internal features including object send caching, a sweet and super-fast generational garbage collector), and there is, in fact, an ANSI standard.
Indeed, Smalltalk's source code is virtually identical across implementations. (The syntax, which --in this sense only-- is super-elegant, can be trivially described in a handful of rules). Except for one religious issue (closures for code blocks). Differences in and interoperability problems between implementations derive primarily from the underlying framework libraries provided with those codes -- a problem hardly unique to Smalltalk.
How about a single substantive argument to that end? Perl is useless for Object-oriented design. Python is better than Perl in this regard, but different, in many ways.
Have you anything to offer us but a conclusion?
Language bigotry has no place in this forum, particularly when propounded in a naive and uninformed fashion. The author of the comment has apparently not built too many enterprise back-office systems, a venue in which Smalltalk has yet to be surpassed, or been following the extraordinary work at Disney R&D with Squeak.
Smalltalk has its place in the cannon, just as does Perl and other languages. It has aged quite well, in fact, among those who have taken the time to learn something about it.
The bigots are free to their own views. I commend to the rest of us, however, a second look. Consider Squeak, an excellent, modern and free Smalltalk implementation. Play with it a bit, and see if you don't begin, at least, to "get it."
1. Will this information now be available to all under the FOIA?
2. My main concern with "outsourcing" investigations is that the government might well engage private entities who have in vigilante-style gathered information and then tipped off the government, in the meanwhile engaging in conduct that the Fourth Amendment search and seizure requirements would preclude. Does purchasing that information without having solicited the invasions of privacy permit the government to do indirectly what it was not permitted to do directly? [An issue related to one raised during the first Claus Von Bulow appeal.]