Given your response, I had to go back and check it out myself. I admit that I hadn't updated Firefox since 1.01 and decided to see if that was the problem and upgraded to the latest version of Firefox. Lo and behold Snopes is no longer showing popups.
Who says that Slashdot is just a waste of time, right?
However, it does place a lot of demand on the content provider to provide metadata-rich content
This statement is why I was wondering why this was considered such a wonderful thing. For a while now, there's been a research project at IBM called WebFountain that not only does everything that Semantic Web attempts to do, but doesn't require any special mark up either. Its goal is to work with completely unstructured data of any type, including web pages, powerpoint documents, word docs, PDFs, etc etc. Based on the article I linked above (which is 18 months old), it seems Semantic Web is actually much more primitive.
More to the point, in this blog there was an arcticle on WebFountain. In the comments section there was this mention of WebFountain in an RDF/OWL environment:
if everyone were to agree on a tag set and apply it consistently, and tag everything of possible business interest, then yes, WebFountain would not be so relevant...and people would also need to tag for things that they don't even know will be businesses in 50 years [...] We'll see if that pans out!
To me, that hit the nail on the head and why a markup-based semantic engine is doomed to failure. While the remark was in a business-context, I think its just as valid in any context.
I agree. If the GIGOs can come to an agreement, it shouldn't be any problem for the LSMFTs and the network ROFLs to interface, provided that they set up the appropriate YHBT translators. However, you have to be sure the VNCs don't collide in the process.
Wouldn't Amaya (W3C's browser) be compliant? Granted, it sucks horribly, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't totally compliant.
Then suprise is your meal of the day. Amaya not only failed the acid2 test, but actually did much worse than even Firefox. Here's a screenshot for your amusement.
You are fallaciously supposing a cause-effect relationship where there likely isn't one. People only fansub anime that they like. People only buy anime that they like. Therefore, the fansub vs market size don't share a cause-effect relationship, but actually have the same cause (people like the anime because its good). If its no good, not only would no one buy it, but no one would bother to fansub it either.
Compare the fansubs with the massive marketing machine that anime enjoys today (visit any Suncoast to see what I mean), and it is easy to see that relatively low-quality fansubs with practically no distribution to speak of have almost no effect on sales of anime.
Its the same thing with Battlestar Galactica. People watched the show because the show was good, not because of BitTorrents. The vast, vast, vast majority of the people who tuned into the show did so not because of some guy who watched it on a BitTorrent and told his buddies, but because of a highly hyped miniseries, multiple magazine articles, a featurette in TV Guide, commericials out the ying-yang, billboards, print ads, and yes, even word of mouth of those who watched the show legally (which are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than those who downloaded it via BitTorrent).
This whole article seems to employ a lot of wishful thinking and some very sketchy, highly faulty, and impossible to prove logic to rationalize morally questionable behavior.
"A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library..." could be interpreted to mean that including a header file into your project violates this. You are assuming this is not the case. I'll agree that this would be against the general understanding of the intent of the LGPL but how does the license define this?
I think the fourth paragraph of Section 5 defines it pretty well actually:
If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work. (Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library will still fall under Section 6.)
That's not general understanding or simple intent. That's pretty cut-and-dry.
I hate reponding to my own posts. I said the "AC" was wrong. However, I failed to realize that BOTH parties were ACs. I meant the AC at the top of this thread.
The AC was the troll. The place where the "scenario comes into being" is the remainder of Section 5 of the LGPL. The AC at the top of this thread took one paragraph out of section 5 and displayed it out of context, giving a much different impression of its purpose than if it was taken as part of the whole. Specifically, the AC removed all the parts of section 5 that countered his main argument.
Here's the whole of section 5: A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
However, linking a "work that uses the Library" with the Library creates an executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library), rather than a "work that uses the library". The executable is therefore covered by this License. Section 6 states terms for distribution of such executables.
When a "work that uses the Library" uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not. Whether this is true is especially significant if the work can be linked without the Library, or if the work is itself a library. The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law.
If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work. (Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library will still fall under Section 6.)
Otherwise, if the work is a derivative of the Library, you may distribute the object code for the work under the terms of Section 6. Any executables containing that work also fall under Section 6, whether or not they are linked directly with the Library itself.
Here's my translation:
1. If the program that uses the library is dynamically linked with it, it is not a derivative work and it can be distributed any way you want.
2. If the program that uses the library is statically linked with it, the executable is a derivative work but not the source code.
3. It is understood that #include statements in C literally brings in code from the header files into the executable, so therefore technically there is LGPL code in the executable of dynamically linked executables. (This was the part that was taken out of context.)
4. However, if the #included LGPL code is nothing more than basic header stuff like struct definitions, constants, #defines, and the like, then a dynamically linked executable is excused from being considered a derivative work. (This was the part that was convienantly excluded that completed negated the AC's point.)
5. If someone decided to #include some code that actually does real work (i.e. #include "majorfunctions.c") then that is being naughty and the resulting executable is a deriviative work.
I'm willing to bet that you are on a high-speed connection. The bug wasn't so much a bug with the layout, but rather a problem with rendering pages over a high-latency connection. While I can't say for sure, I think the fact that/. pages tend to be longer in length made it seem to happen on Slashdot more often than on other sites.
But as TPB has pointed out in several of their other replies to legal threats, they're Swedish and they have sane copyright law. There is nothing Apple can do to shut them down
Except that Sweden is a signatory to the Berne Convention since 1904, the WIPO Convention since 1970, and signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty (which explicitly discusses software in Article 4) in 1996.
Under international copyright law, there's quite a lot that Apple can do.
If you add your own functions and variables outside of the scope of the _jspService method that is stateful, it sounds like the application architecture is fundementally flawed.
The JSP/Servlet paradigm was always intended to be transitive and stateless, thus forcing (as much as possible) applications into a tiered MVC-like architecture. If you are trying to put stateful information in your JSPs or Servlets, then you need to take a hard look at your architecture and consider redesign/refactoring.
Another example is the use of StringBuffers instead of Strings when you need to concatinate them. Strings are immutable, so it has to do a copy every time you cat two strings, and the old copy is lost.
In reality, nearly every Java compiler since 1.2.1 will optimize for this and will auto-generate StringBuffers on the fly if you concat two Strings.
Wasn't just slashdot. The article itself was worded pretty shitty:
Microsoft has granted clemency to the 19 year-old author of the Blaster worm. Rather than pay $500,000 in restitution, the youth will be sentenced to 225 hours of community service, which may not involve computers.
That gives the strong impression that Microsoft has the power of clemency and sentencing authority.
Its MGM v. Grokster, not Grokster v. MGM. The way it currently reads in the summary, it gives the strong impression that Grokster is suing MGM and that Mark Cuban is defending MGM.
Its always Plaintiff v. Defendant, NEVER the other way around.
The biggest problem with Office is the price. What sort of person is going to cough up $300 for an office suite that will be rarely used.
Microsoft's target market for Office isn't your Granddad, it's (wait for it...) offices, who don't use it rarely but use it every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
Microsoft charges so much for it because that's what companies are willing to pay for it, and I'm sure most offices consider it a bargain at that price considering how much they do with it on a daily basis.
If they priced it for common people who don't really need it to begin with (e.g. your Granddad), they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. It would be complete lunacy for them to do so I don't blame Microsoft one bit for pricing it out of the price range of the masses.
For the common man, Microsoft developed and sells Microsoft Works (which is Word/Excel compatible) for a measely $50.
How did forests survive before we started logging then?
Well.. fires mostly. However, since the current approach to fires is to put them out immediately, nature's housecleaning doesn't happen. Disciplined and smart logging has the advantage of providing the same service to the forest but in a less random and destructive way with the added benefit of providing lumber to we humans. Its a win-win situation really.
We're not talking about U.S. laws here. The overriding standard in this case is the Berne Convention, to which both Japan and the United States are signatories (along with 94 other countries). Here, it really is a "Universal Law".
Slashdot Mirror
Given your response, I had to go back and check it out myself. I admit that I hadn't updated Firefox since 1.01 and decided to see if that was the problem and upgraded to the latest version of Firefox. Lo and behold Snopes is no longer showing popups.
Who says that Slashdot is just a waste of time, right?
They do it using the ol' JavaScript-writing-JavaScript trick:Arg.
This statement is why I was wondering why this was considered such a wonderful thing. For a while now, there's been a research project at IBM called WebFountain that not only does everything that Semantic Web attempts to do, but doesn't require any special mark up either. Its goal is to work with completely unstructured data of any type, including web pages, powerpoint documents, word docs, PDFs, etc etc. Based on the article I linked above (which is 18 months old), it seems Semantic Web is actually much more primitive.
More to the point, in this blog there was an arcticle on WebFountain. In the comments section there was this mention of WebFountain in an RDF/OWL environment:
To me, that hit the nail on the head and why a markup-based semantic engine is doomed to failure. While the remark was in a business-context, I think its just as valid in any context.
You are right about the CIA and mostly right about the FBI. However, two departments of the FBI /did/ move to DHS, to wit:
- National Domestic Preparedness Office
- National Infrastructure Protection Center
I agree. If the GIGOs can come to an agreement, it shouldn't be any problem for the LSMFTs and the network ROFLs to interface, provided that they set up the appropriate YHBT translators. However, you have to be sure the VNCs don't collide in the process.
Wouldn't Amaya (W3C's browser) be compliant? Granted, it sucks horribly, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't totally compliant.
Then suprise is your meal of the day. Amaya not only failed the acid2 test, but actually did much worse than even Firefox. Here's a screenshot for your amusement.
Thank you for copy-and-pasting, verbatim, this blog entry
The link would have been sufficient (oh wait, the link was given -- in the first post!)
You are fallaciously supposing a cause-effect relationship where there likely isn't one. People only fansub anime that they like. People only buy anime that they like. Therefore, the fansub vs market size don't share a cause-effect relationship, but actually have the same cause (people like the anime because its good). If its no good, not only would no one buy it, but no one would bother to fansub it either.
Compare the fansubs with the massive marketing machine that anime enjoys today (visit any Suncoast to see what I mean), and it is easy to see that relatively low-quality fansubs with practically no distribution to speak of have almost no effect on sales of anime.
Its the same thing with Battlestar Galactica. People watched the show because the show was good, not because of BitTorrents. The vast, vast, vast majority of the people who tuned into the show did so not because of some guy who watched it on a BitTorrent and told his buddies, but because of a highly hyped miniseries, multiple magazine articles, a featurette in TV Guide, commericials out the ying-yang, billboards, print ads, and yes, even word of mouth of those who watched the show legally (which are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than those who downloaded it via BitTorrent).
This whole article seems to employ a lot of wishful thinking and some very sketchy, highly faulty, and impossible to prove logic to rationalize morally questionable behavior.
"A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library ..." could be interpreted to mean that including a header file into your project violates this. You are assuming this is not the case. I'll agree that this would be against the general understanding of the intent of the LGPL but how does the license define this?
I think the fourth paragraph of Section 5 defines it pretty well actually:
If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work. (Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library will still fall under Section 6.)
That's not general understanding or simple intent. That's pretty cut-and-dry.
I hate reponding to my own posts. I said the "AC" was wrong. However, I failed to realize that BOTH parties were ACs. I meant the AC at the top of this thread.
The AC was the troll. The place where the "scenario comes into being" is the remainder of Section 5 of the LGPL. The AC at the top of this thread took one paragraph out of section 5 and displayed it out of context, giving a much different impression of its purpose than if it was taken as part of the whole. Specifically, the AC removed all the parts of section 5 that countered his main argument.
Here's the whole of section 5:
A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
However, linking a "work that uses the Library" with the Library creates an executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library), rather than a "work that uses the library". The executable is therefore covered by this License. Section 6 states terms for distribution of such executables.
When a "work that uses the Library" uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not. Whether this is true is especially significant if the work can be linked without the Library, or if the work is itself a library. The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law.
If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work. (Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library will still fall under Section 6.)
Otherwise, if the work is a derivative of the Library, you may distribute the object code for the work under the terms of Section 6. Any executables containing that work also fall under Section 6, whether or not they are linked directly with the Library itself.
Here's my translation:
1. If the program that uses the library is dynamically linked with it, it is not a derivative work and it can be distributed any way you want.
2. If the program that uses the library is statically linked with it, the executable is a derivative work but not the source code.
3. It is understood that #include statements in C literally brings in code from the header files into the executable, so therefore technically there is LGPL code in the executable of dynamically linked executables. (This was the part that was taken out of context.)
4. However, if the #included LGPL code is nothing more than basic header stuff like struct definitions, constants, #defines, and the like, then a dynamically linked executable is excused from being considered a derivative work. (This was the part that was convienantly excluded that completed negated the AC's point.)
5. If someone decided to #include some code that actually does real work (i.e. #include "majorfunctions.c") then that is being naughty and the resulting executable is a deriviative work.
No, the problem was that it stayed messed up after loading. Definately a quirky thing.
I'm willing to bet that you are on a high-speed connection. The bug wasn't so much a bug with the layout, but rather a problem with rendering pages over a high-latency connection. While I can't say for sure, I think the fact that /. pages tend to be longer in length made it seem to happen on Slashdot more often than on other sites.
But as TPB has pointed out in several of their other replies to legal threats, they're Swedish and they have sane copyright law. There is nothing Apple can do to shut them down
Except that Sweden is a signatory to the Berne Convention since 1904, the WIPO Convention since 1970, and signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty (which explicitly discusses software in Article 4) in 1996.
Under international copyright law, there's quite a lot that Apple can do.
If you add your own functions and variables outside of the scope of the _jspService method that is stateful, it sounds like the application architecture is fundementally flawed.
The JSP/Servlet paradigm was always intended to be transitive and stateless, thus forcing (as much as possible) applications into a tiered MVC-like architecture. If you are trying to put stateful information in your JSPs or Servlets, then you need to take a hard look at your architecture and consider redesign/refactoring.
I know of a place where you can sit in one Starbucks and look out the window across the street at guess what... Another Starbucks!
Yes. This place is called the End of the Universe.
You had me right up until you wrote this:
Another example is the use of StringBuffers instead of Strings when you need to concatinate them. Strings are immutable, so it has to do a copy every time you cat two strings, and the old copy is lost.
In reality, nearly every Java compiler since 1.2.1 will optimize for this and will auto-generate StringBuffers on the fly if you concat two Strings.
Wasn't just slashdot. The article itself was worded pretty shitty:
Microsoft has granted clemency to the 19 year-old author of the Blaster worm. Rather than pay $500,000 in restitution, the youth will be sentenced to 225 hours of community service, which may not involve computers.
That gives the strong impression that Microsoft has the power of clemency and sentencing authority.
You are right. It would have been more accurate of me to say that the party making the motion to the court is first.
Its MGM v. Grokster, not Grokster v. MGM. The way it currently reads in the summary, it gives the strong impression that Grokster is suing MGM and that Mark Cuban is defending MGM.
Its always Plaintiff v. Defendant, NEVER the other way around.
(per cent)
... and its wasn't that amusing, either.
The parent was making an amusing statement by deliberately misinterpreting a typo, do you see?
No, I don't see. Where is the typo? The words "per cent" is perfectly correct.
The biggest problem with Office is the price. What sort of person is going to cough up $300 for an office suite that will be rarely used.
Microsoft's target market for Office isn't your Granddad, it's (wait for it...) offices, who don't use it rarely but use it every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
Microsoft charges so much for it because that's what companies are willing to pay for it, and I'm sure most offices consider it a bargain at that price considering how much they do with it on a daily basis.
If they priced it for common people who don't really need it to begin with (e.g. your Granddad), they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. It would be complete lunacy for them to do so I don't blame Microsoft one bit for pricing it out of the price range of the masses.
For the common man, Microsoft developed and sells Microsoft Works (which is Word/Excel compatible) for a measely $50.
How did forests survive before we started logging then?
Well.. fires mostly. However, since the current approach to fires is to put them out immediately, nature's housecleaning doesn't happen. Disciplined and smart logging has the advantage of providing the same service to the forest but in a less random and destructive way with the added benefit of providing lumber to we humans. Its a win-win situation really.
We're not talking about U.S. laws here. The overriding standard in this case is the Berne Convention, to which both Japan and the United States are signatories (along with 94 other countries). Here, it really is a "Universal Law".
And it was so OBVIOUS too. LaTeX for secretaries.... jeez.