I think it's mainly due to incompetent lawyers. As the original post said, it should be pretty black and white that if the customer claims to own the source, and there's nothing obvious indicating the contrary, it's the customer who is violating the copyright, not Wal-Mart. Any lawyer worth his salt could win that argument.
In fact, a good lawyer would counter-sue for restraint of trade, frivolous lawsuit, or something similar. Look at what the result turned out to be here -- a restraint of trade. So I think a case could easily be made that that was the true intention of the lawsuit against Wal-Mart.
Corporate lawyers are supposed to protect companies, but instead their spreading fear and doubt, hurting companies by restraining them from legitimate business. And by rolling over so easily, they've hurt companies by showing that they'll just shell out the money in response to any legal threat.
Don't concentrate on Open Source. Concentrate on creativity.
Start by talking about how everything idea is built upon the ideas of others. As Isaac Newton said, I can see further because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Tell him how the whole ideas of patents and copyrights were designed to ENCOURAGE creativity and new ideas, but they've been coopted to do the opposite. Explain to him the logical conclusion of what will happen if we don't fix that -- the US will quickly lose its leading role in technology, art, and entertainment.
You should only mention Open Source, in the context that people are creating computer programs and sharing them for free, in order to build up their own creative pool of work, in order to work around the laws that are mostly preventing such collaborative efforts. Mention that these folks are forsaking some amount of money in order to build these things and return to the model of building on the works of others, and wanting others to build upon their work. Restricting them from doing this doesn't make sense. Also mention that every large enterptrise is using this Open Source software, so promoting it helps all companies.
Concentrate on the reasoning behind the Constitution's patent/copyright clause. Explain how it requires balance, and that not only is it currently off balance, but large corporations have enough money and clout to successfully lobby for even more restrictive laws. Mention the Mickey Mouse extensions. Talk about how small companies are where most of the creativity in the world happen, but the laws are increasingly preventing them from creating.
Basically, summarize the larger issues. Read up on Lawrence Lessig's work and other such material. Try to get in as much of the larger issues so your rep can see the Big Picture.
there isn't enough words in our language to have a unique name for every commercial organization.
Really? It seems to me that every state requires that every business have a unique name. If Bob's House of Computers exists, I cannot start a company named Bob's House of Computers, but I can probably start a company named Bob's Computer Store. Perhaps you missed the fact that company names can (and usually do) consist of more than 1 word.
I too lament the fact that we don't have a more hierarchical domain system. I.e. we should be able to have computers.apple.com and records.apple.com owned by separate companies. But what we have isn't all that bad. Companies can just go with applecomputers.com and applerecords.com. So far, it's worked pretty well.
Copy it over to the latest and greatest technology available. That's about all you can do. Once it's in digital format, that becomes quite a bit easier; you can automate any conversions, and you don't have to lose any information. (No more loss of resolution due to multi-generation copies.) And copying from an old hard disk to a new one is simple. (I've copied my data from drive to drive over several generations of PCs.)
As for backups, I currently suggest DVDs stored off-site. With long-term data like music, you really only need to make one backup, not every week or anything. Although you should test restoring the off-site backups at least once a year.
First of all, this is not someone who sponsors Microsoft. It is Microsoft. So it'd be more like the Ford auto racing team driving a Chevy. Second, there have been media stinks made when a Pepsi spokesperson drinks Coke, or vice-versa. I believe it was Brittney Spears who got caught in such a "scandal" a year or 2 ago.
The sad thing is, most things are invented WAY BEFORE they come into popular use. For instance, the telephone answering machine was patented in 1898. About 90 years before it really came into common usage. That inventor certainly had some idea what the future would be like.
On the other hand, that kind of meshes with your statement that technology doesn't always/usually follow a straight line. People like to say that it's always been growing at an exponential rate, but realistically, there have been busy periods and slow periods. Look at the Renaissance; definitely a bubble period.
But I don't think it's so much to do with randomness, as society's willingness to put resources to the task of science and invention. Probably the 3 most prolific periods of the 20th century were WWII, the space race, and the PC/Internet boom. The first was due to the necessity of military technology; the 2nd due to a national goal; and the 3rd due to stock market funding. I suspect that the US' future will be turning away from technology, if today's political winds are any indication.
I remembering reading a year or so ago about a futurist's predictions from 1950 or so about what today would be like. He was about 50% accurate. I consider that to be remarkably good. He was pretty close on microwave ovens and frozen dinners. He was wrong about EVERYTHING in your house being plastic, so you could hose down your living room to clean it. But it certainly shows that there are people who can do a relatively good job as a futurist.
But I suspect that you would have a heck of a hard time adapting to your new hardware. Our bodies and our senses give us a ton of context. Our minds were created for the purpose of controlling our bodies. I seriously don't think you'd be able to adjust without the context you were "designed" for.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on parthenogenesis, which is the term for reproduction of diploids (living things with 2 sets of chromosomes) without fertilization. It does unfortunately miss the story about the shark that reproduced via spontaneous parthenogenesis a few years back. But it covers several different forms, and mentions turkeys, salamanders, and lizards. Also of note is that scientists were able to make a mouse to reproduce parthenogenetically, and that parthenogenesis may help with embryonic stem cells.
Note that this adds credance to the claim that men are useless (biologically speaking). Why Is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond touches on this a bit.
Yeah, admittedly some of my answers are subjective or borderline. And some results are not immediately obvious without thinking through a series of consequences. (Especially with this proposal.) I probably should have use a few question marks in some of the boxes. Still, the original poster was WAY off the mark.
Also, I was thinking that the onus to collect would fall on the recipient. After re-reading the article, I guess it falls on the sender to send a bond that the recipient determines to be 1) legitimate, and 2) worth enough money.
> () Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
It's hard to imagine a system of determining "legitimate" bonds that can be collected on, without some central authority. Would probably be a CA system, like SSL uses. Perhaps we could use the same CA system. I guess you're right in that a central EMAIL authority wouldn't be required though.
> (*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
This was definitely in my "not sure" list. I assumed they'd be white-listed. Looking at the article again, the mailing-list of my LUG would send un-bonded messages. We'd just require that the recipients white-list us or miss out. I guess you could call that "affected".
> (*) Users of email will not put up with it
I don't know. This one actually shows some promise.
> () Unpopularity of weird new taxes
I took a very inclusive reading of the word "tax".;)
> () Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
I was assuming that the spammers could somehow spoof their sending info. Even after re-reading I believe this is possible in several ways: 1) hack someone's bond authenticator; 2) spoof the from address in order to pass though white lists; 3) send spam from zombied systems to recipients in the infected user's address book. Perhaps those could be viewed as separate issues from spam though.
BTW, you seem to have made 2 contradictory assumptions: that recipients won't be presented with emails that don't meet their lower limit on bond prices, and that recipients can choose to view emails from well-known people who don't send bonded messages.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
Just kidding. Yeah, I think SpamAssassin and DSPAM both do a pretty good job. Although there's definitely an arms race still involved, as the spammers find ways to get around the filters. For example, DSPAM was working pretty good for me at first, but recently quite a few messages have been getting through each day. Even after it's been trained with several thousand messages. I suppose my webmail provider probably needs to upgrade to the latest version of the filters, but that just points to the arms race nature.
Plus, there have been false positives, so I still need to sift through the spam folder once in a while and find the 2 messages out of 2000 that are important.
You'll note that these 2 "solutions" are actually amalgamations of several other "solutions". And the fact that they have to be upgraded frequently shows that they're not the "final solution", just a pretty good "interim solution". Unfortunately, this is probably the closest we're ever going to get to eliminating spam. I suspect that we're in the same situation regarding security vulnerabilities of other Internet services.
Yeah, back when it was called Chips & Dips. It was actually a pretty decent site, even back then. The only reason my Slashdot ID isn't smaller than it is, is that I didn't see the need to get one when they were first issued.
You didn't seem to have any difficulty distinguishing between uploading and downloading in your post. Why would a judge have any difficulty? It's simply a matter of the direction of the data transferred. Just because uploading is automatic when running the program doesn't mean you aren't doing it.
It is if there's a law against it. In this case, the law is called copyright, and the act involved is *copying*, not *lending*. You're not lending your copy of music files on a P2P system, you're lending copies of your files.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (*) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (*) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (*) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (*) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (*) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (*) Sending email should be free (*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
This definitely isn't a GPL violation, and doesn't even violate the spirit of Free/Open Source Software. The Apple developers are making their resulting branch of the code available in compliance with the KDE license. They're even trying to work to contribute their changes back to KHTML. Even if the patches don't apply cleanly, the KHTML developers are more than free to look at Apple's changes and add them by hand. Apple is even offering to give back their entire branch, to make it the new official KHTML, since their branch has advanced faster.
This really seems to be a case of the Apple guys offering their changes (or at the very least, making them available), and the KDE guys not being interested in them, or unable to use them for various reasons. It's really hard to blame Apple for that.
Except for the fact that the battery should be used for acceleration, and gasoline for coasting. Gasoline engines are VERY efficient at maintaining speed over long distances. Electric motors are more efficient at accelerating than at long distances.
Where I work, time saving methods are discouraged. Middle management thrives on head count, and time savings could lead to reduced head count. I wish I was kidding.
That germs cause disease is not a 100% proven fact. So should we leave it open for students to challenge it? Should we allow them to suggest that perhaps it's really evil spirits? Should we make room for African shaman to come and explain about evil spirits? Should we stop teaching children to wash their hands?
What are you people afraid of? That legions of scientists will give up research in exchange for mysticism?
Yes! Or more likely, that the religious nuts will make it illegal. At the very least, less people will want to study science. Which many of us find to be harmful to society.
Let me tell you a little story about the Muslims. In the 1400s, they were the center of the world, with tons of scientific and mathematical discoveries. So how did they get where they are today, with all their backwards ideas and difficult living conditions? Their religion changed, and started to frown upon the ideas of science.
America is already headed in that direction. Many of us can see it. That's why we're kicking and screaming.
You should cry. Because Religion is not losing, it is winning in the hearts and minds of Americans. Not that that would be bad, except that it's winning in its war against Science and making America as a whole more ignorant.
why must the scientific processes that describe any such events, and any potential forces that may transcend our understanding of the physical world, have to be mutually exclusive?
They don't. It's just that a literal reading of the Bible (or rather, it's interpretation into our modern language) doesn't support some of the conclusions that Science has come up with. The odd thing is that the Bible doesn't really claim to explain the details of everything, but some religious zealots seem to think that it does. However, these zealots are either deluded, ignorant, or ignoring the obvious in order to advance an agenda.
For instance, some like to claim that certain things never existed, because the Bible never mentioned them. Which is ridiculous. The Bible never mentions kangaroos, but I've never heard anyone claim that they don't exist. Or germs. Or airplanes. Or gravity. So it's plain to see that the Bible doesn't attempt to explain or enumerate everything. Not to mention that many concepts are hard to describe in the languages of those times.
The oddest thing about those adhering to a strict "literal interpretation" of the Bible read a lot of other things into the Bible. Such as the man in the white robe you mentioned. And the claim that they follow all the instructions of the Bible, while missing things such as the admonitions on cutting their hair, wearing mixed fibers, and mis-treating slaves.
Yeah, it almost seems like this company WANTS to get sued. They keep trying the same thing, even after they get caught. I'd be surprised if they don't get what they're asking for.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's mainly due to incompetent lawyers. As the original post said, it should be pretty black and white that if the customer claims to own the source, and there's nothing obvious indicating the contrary, it's the customer who is violating the copyright, not Wal-Mart. Any lawyer worth his salt could win that argument.
In fact, a good lawyer would counter-sue for restraint of trade, frivolous lawsuit, or something similar. Look at what the result turned out to be here -- a restraint of trade. So I think a case could easily be made that that was the true intention of the lawsuit against Wal-Mart.
Corporate lawyers are supposed to protect companies, but instead their spreading fear and doubt, hurting companies by restraining them from legitimate business. And by rolling over so easily, they've hurt companies by showing that they'll just shell out the money in response to any legal threat.
Don't concentrate on Open Source. Concentrate on creativity.
Start by talking about how everything idea is built upon the ideas of others. As Isaac Newton said, I can see further because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Tell him how the whole ideas of patents and copyrights were designed to ENCOURAGE creativity and new ideas, but they've been coopted to do the opposite. Explain to him the logical conclusion of what will happen if we don't fix that -- the US will quickly lose its leading role in technology, art, and entertainment.
You should only mention Open Source, in the context that people are creating computer programs and sharing them for free, in order to build up their own creative pool of work, in order to work around the laws that are mostly preventing such collaborative efforts. Mention that these folks are forsaking some amount of money in order to build these things and return to the model of building on the works of others, and wanting others to build upon their work. Restricting them from doing this doesn't make sense. Also mention that every large enterptrise is using this Open Source software, so promoting it helps all companies.
Concentrate on the reasoning behind the Constitution's patent/copyright clause. Explain how it requires balance, and that not only is it currently off balance, but large corporations have enough money and clout to successfully lobby for even more restrictive laws. Mention the Mickey Mouse extensions. Talk about how small companies are where most of the creativity in the world happen, but the laws are increasingly preventing them from creating.
Basically, summarize the larger issues. Read up on Lawrence Lessig's work and other such material. Try to get in as much of the larger issues so your rep can see the Big Picture.
Really? It seems to me that every state requires that every business have a unique name. If Bob's House of Computers exists, I cannot start a company named Bob's House of Computers, but I can probably start a company named Bob's Computer Store. Perhaps you missed the fact that company names can (and usually do) consist of more than 1 word.
I too lament the fact that we don't have a more hierarchical domain system. I.e. we should be able to have computers.apple.com and records.apple.com owned by separate companies. But what we have isn't all that bad. Companies can just go with applecomputers.com and applerecords.com. So far, it's worked pretty well.
Copy it over to the latest and greatest technology available. That's about all you can do. Once it's in digital format, that becomes quite a bit easier; you can automate any conversions, and you don't have to lose any information. (No more loss of resolution due to multi-generation copies.) And copying from an old hard disk to a new one is simple. (I've copied my data from drive to drive over several generations of PCs.)
As for backups, I currently suggest DVDs stored off-site. With long-term data like music, you really only need to make one backup, not every week or anything. Although you should test restoring the off-site backups at least once a year.
First of all, this is not someone who sponsors Microsoft. It is Microsoft. So it'd be more like the Ford auto racing team driving a Chevy. Second, there have been media stinks made when a Pepsi spokesperson drinks Coke, or vice-versa. I believe it was Brittney Spears who got caught in such a "scandal" a year or 2 ago.
The sad thing is, most things are invented WAY BEFORE they come into popular use. For instance, the telephone answering machine was patented in 1898. About 90 years before it really came into common usage. That inventor certainly had some idea what the future would be like.
On the other hand, that kind of meshes with your statement that technology doesn't always/usually follow a straight line. People like to say that it's always been growing at an exponential rate, but realistically, there have been busy periods and slow periods. Look at the Renaissance; definitely a bubble period.
But I don't think it's so much to do with randomness, as society's willingness to put resources to the task of science and invention. Probably the 3 most prolific periods of the 20th century were WWII, the space race, and the PC/Internet boom. The first was due to the necessity of military technology; the 2nd due to a national goal; and the 3rd due to stock market funding. I suspect that the US' future will be turning away from technology, if today's political winds are any indication.
I remembering reading a year or so ago about a futurist's predictions from 1950 or so about what today would be like. He was about 50% accurate. I consider that to be remarkably good. He was pretty close on microwave ovens and frozen dinners. He was wrong about EVERYTHING in your house being plastic, so you could hose down your living room to clean it. But it certainly shows that there are people who can do a relatively good job as a futurist.
But I suspect that you would have a heck of a hard time adapting to your new hardware. Our bodies and our senses give us a ton of context. Our minds were created for the purpose of controlling our bodies. I seriously don't think you'd be able to adjust without the context you were "designed" for.
Note that this adds credance to the claim that men are useless (biologically speaking). Why Is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond touches on this a bit.
Yeah, admittedly some of my answers are subjective or borderline. And some results are not immediately obvious without thinking through a series of consequences. (Especially with this proposal.) I probably should have use a few question marks in some of the boxes. Still, the original poster was WAY off the mark.
;)
Also, I was thinking that the onus to collect would fall on the recipient. After re-reading the article, I guess it falls on the sender to send a bond that the recipient determines to be 1) legitimate, and 2) worth enough money.
> () Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
It's hard to imagine a system of determining "legitimate" bonds that can be collected on, without some central authority. Would probably be a CA system, like SSL uses. Perhaps we could use the same CA system. I guess you're right in that a central EMAIL authority wouldn't be required though.
> (*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
This was definitely in my "not sure" list. I assumed they'd be white-listed. Looking at the article again, the mailing-list of my LUG would send un-bonded messages. We'd just require that the recipients white-list us or miss out. I guess you could call that "affected".
> (*) Users of email will not put up with it
I don't know. This one actually shows some promise.
> () Unpopularity of weird new taxes
I took a very inclusive reading of the word "tax".
> () Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
I was assuming that the spammers could somehow spoof their sending info. Even after re-reading I believe this is possible in several ways: 1) hack someone's bond authenticator; 2) spoof the from address in order to pass though white lists; 3) send spam from zombied systems to recipients in the infected user's address book. Perhaps those could be viewed as separate issues from spam though.
BTW, you seem to have made 2 contradictory assumptions: that recipients won't be presented with emails that don't meet their lower limit on bond prices, and that recipients can choose to view emails from well-known people who don't send bonded messages.
Anyway, good discussion.
Sure, here you go.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
Just kidding. Yeah, I think SpamAssassin and DSPAM both do a pretty good job. Although there's definitely an arms race still involved, as the spammers find ways to get around the filters. For example, DSPAM was working pretty good for me at first, but recently quite a few messages have been getting through each day. Even after it's been trained with several thousand messages. I suppose my webmail provider probably needs to upgrade to the latest version of the filters, but that just points to the arms race nature.
Plus, there have been false positives, so I still need to sift through the spam folder once in a while and find the 2 messages out of 2000 that are important.
You'll note that these 2 "solutions" are actually amalgamations of several other "solutions". And the fact that they have to be upgraded frequently shows that they're not the "final solution", just a pretty good "interim solution". Unfortunately, this is probably the closest we're ever going to get to eliminating spam. I suspect that we're in the same situation regarding security vulnerabilities of other Internet services.
Yeah, back when it was called Chips & Dips. It was actually a pretty decent site, even back then. The only reason my Slashdot ID isn't smaller than it is, is that I didn't see the need to get one when they were first issued.
You didn't seem to have any difficulty distinguishing between uploading and downloading in your post. Why would a judge have any difficulty? It's simply a matter of the direction of the data transferred. Just because uploading is automatic when running the program doesn't mean you aren't doing it.
It is if there's a law against it. In this case, the law is called copyright, and the act involved is *copying*, not *lending*. You're not lending your copy of music files on a P2P system, you're lending copies of your files.
If you're going to fill out the form, please fill it out CORRECTLTY:
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (*) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(*) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(*) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(*) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(*) Sending email should be free
(*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
This definitely isn't a GPL violation, and doesn't even violate the spirit of Free/Open Source Software. The Apple developers are making their resulting branch of the code available in compliance with the KDE license. They're even trying to work to contribute their changes back to KHTML. Even if the patches don't apply cleanly, the KHTML developers are more than free to look at Apple's changes and add them by hand. Apple is even offering to give back their entire branch, to make it the new official KHTML, since their branch has advanced faster.
This really seems to be a case of the Apple guys offering their changes (or at the very least, making them available), and the KDE guys not being interested in them, or unable to use them for various reasons. It's really hard to blame Apple for that.
What's up with such a big book? Does he have Stephen Wolfram syndrome or something?
Except for the fact that the battery should be used for acceleration, and gasoline for coasting. Gasoline engines are VERY efficient at maintaining speed over long distances. Electric motors are more efficient at accelerating than at long distances.
More likely, you need more sex.
Where I work, time saving methods are discouraged. Middle management thrives on head count, and time savings could lead to reduced head count. I wish I was kidding.
That germs cause disease is not a 100% proven fact. So should we leave it open for students to challenge it? Should we allow them to suggest that perhaps it's really evil spirits? Should we make room for African shaman to come and explain about evil spirits? Should we stop teaching children to wash their hands?
Yes! Or more likely, that the religious nuts will make it illegal. At the very least, less people will want to study science. Which many of us find to be harmful to society.
Let me tell you a little story about the Muslims. In the 1400s, they were the center of the world, with tons of scientific and mathematical discoveries. So how did they get where they are today, with all their backwards ideas and difficult living conditions? Their religion changed, and started to frown upon the ideas of science.
America is already headed in that direction. Many of us can see it. That's why we're kicking and screaming.
You should cry. Because Religion is not losing, it is winning in the hearts and minds of Americans. Not that that would be bad, except that it's winning in its war against Science and making America as a whole more ignorant.
They don't. It's just that a literal reading of the Bible (or rather, it's interpretation into our modern language) doesn't support some of the conclusions that Science has come up with. The odd thing is that the Bible doesn't really claim to explain the details of everything, but some religious zealots seem to think that it does. However, these zealots are either deluded, ignorant, or ignoring the obvious in order to advance an agenda.
For instance, some like to claim that certain things never existed, because the Bible never mentioned them. Which is ridiculous. The Bible never mentions kangaroos, but I've never heard anyone claim that they don't exist. Or germs. Or airplanes. Or gravity. So it's plain to see that the Bible doesn't attempt to explain or enumerate everything. Not to mention that many concepts are hard to describe in the languages of those times.
The oddest thing about those adhering to a strict "literal interpretation" of the Bible read a lot of other things into the Bible. Such as the man in the white robe you mentioned. And the claim that they follow all the instructions of the Bible, while missing things such as the admonitions on cutting their hair, wearing mixed fibers, and mis-treating slaves.
It's even more difficult to believe when you conside that GM has a division that is the largest maker of locomotive engines. And GM has owned the company since 1930.
Yeah, it almost seems like this company WANTS to get sued. They keep trying the same thing, even after they get caught. I'd be surprised if they don't get what they're asking for.