There was no copyright or other IP protection of foreign material in the early days of the US, and this was deliberate, to help the US economy to grow to be the juggernaut that it is today. Now that the US is the big kid, it's time to make sure no-one else uses that trick.
On a serious note, I think that section is aimed at web hosting companies that know they are serving fraudulent sites - how is my local telco going to be "aware of facts or circumstances from which it is apparent that the material contains a misrepresentation" if all they are doing is serving me packets that I have requested from some random web site?
Just pass a law saying the ISPs must block all spam, problem solved. Next, they should make them block all viruses as well. Wow, I never thought it would be this easy. Block any discussion of terrorist acts as well, and all pictures of ugly women.
This isn't a new technology, it's been around for a while in one form or another. Sure it's less mature than conventional hydraulic, but hydraulic are much less mature than banging two sticks together, doesn't make the sticks better than hydraulic.
That's a ridiculous comparison. Computer systems are inherently difficult to understand, they don't work the same way that the physical world that we have an instinctive understanding of works. Physics has limits, computers don't. There's no way that the forces involved in a physical cable-and-hydraulic system can be infinite, but a computer can easily go into an infinite loop or accidentally end up trying to divide by zero.
Computers *are* still a new technology, and they probably will be in engineering terms for the rest of my life-time.
Just because these computers counted in, say INT/10, and therefore could represent 0.1 seconds exactly does not mean, for example, that the timebase used to drive that counting was accurate and stable.
Ah, but that's a hardware problem, I'm a software guy.:)
Well, in this specific instance a decimal system would have been ok, but it isn't a general answer. The general answer is "make sure your increments are divisible into your number base", if they had used 1/8th or 1/16ths of a second, or even 3/32 of a second, as their timer increment then they would not have had this problem. There's no reason why 1/10th of a second has any magic properties.
In general terms, all number bases have other number bases with which they are incompatible. The inability of binary to represent 1/10 accurately is just the same as the inability of decimal to represent 1/3 accurately. It's only because we use decimal all the time that we overlook decimal's shortcomings (or instinctively compensate for or avoid them) and then blame computers for binary's incompatibility with decimal.
- I hate writing, and always have and avoid it wherever possible - it hurts my hand and my handwriting is awful. - I was using computers way before anyone else in my school
My mum was a schoolteacher, and some trendy young adviser came round to give a presentation on this new "multimedia" thing, and my mum's answer was "Oh, you mean just like Audio-Visual Tools? I've been doing that for thirty years."
If their patent covers a novel method of calculating exactly how many and which words to change in order to minimize pirates' ability to cross-reference the alterations in a number of leaked documents and produce a "clean" version, then maybe there is something in the patent. It's easy to look at the top line of a patent and say "prior art!", it's the detail of the claims that matters.
They do that everywhere? Like, on every street in every town? I've never heard about it. If you're talking about a small number of hard-core techies, then yes, maybe, but they'll just get cut off again as soon as their ISP is notified about the torrent traffic on the IP. I just doubt that thousands of people will set up free wifi just to provide a smokescreen.
Won't affect it at all - basically, the EU has removed the requirement that member states protect the right to internet access. They can continue to do so, but they are no longer required to. So, if the government of Finland wants to keep that law, they can.
Indeed this bug in OO was used as an excuse by Microsoft to make their ODF output be incompatible.
The OOo people never really considered it a bug, it was a deliberate "philosophical" choice (see the comment history on the "bug" page).
Their argument was basically "since these two different ODF programs treat this sample document differently, we are allowed to write a completely different third implementation".
That's one way of putting it - I think most people would consider OOo to be the de-facto reference implementation, though.
This bogus argument was wrapped in a disgusting and somewhat horrifying amount of obfuscated technobabble by obviously intelligent but amoral individuals at Microsoft (you can find several repeated links to this posted by astroturfers right here on Slashdot).
I know, I got accused of being a shill myself during that debate.
Truly I used to think that Microsoft was just somewhat incompetent and rushed so that their programmers tended to reinvent things without finding out there was a standard already. But this deliberate outright lying, with enough wording to make a pointed-headed boss think it is some complex technical argument, convinced me that there really are evil people there. Scary indeed.
Calling Microsoft evil is kind of like calling lions evil. It might seem that way if you are a gazelle.
One of the "fixes" is that it will convert text cells to numbers in formulae if it can. This is one of the major differences from Excel that led Microsoft to move all their formulae into a different namespace, in order to prevent users from seeing behavioural inconsistencies across products. That's the way they put it, The Internet described it as deliberately breaking interoperability. I'm agnostic on that distinction, but OOo is now in line with just about every other spreadsheet in existence including Excel, Gnumeric, and Google Docs in this respect. It will be interesting to see what happens to the msoxl namespace when this comes out. I don't know if 3.2 will convert the msoxl namespace formuale to the default namespace when it opens an Excel ODF file.
Minor correction to the story, the dispute isn't really about pay, it's about changes in working conditions. There are some aspects that cover what counts as overtime so pay is involved, but it's not just "we want more money".
Maybe they got the impression that voting was anonymous from the fact that it usually is in elections. Secret ballots are necessary for democracy to function free from intimidation - these people took part in a non-secret ballot, and now they are being intimidated, Q.E.D.
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Dunno why you'd need it on Mac OS X though, the built-in Keychain and Keychain Access.app does the same thing and more.
How are you going to use your Keychain file at the airport internet cafe?
They're going to have fun sifting through /Trade chat trying to work out if "Anal [Terror] LOL" is a secret code...
There was no copyright or other IP protection of foreign material in the early days of the US, and this was deliberate, to help the US economy to grow to be the juggernaut that it is today. Now that the US is the big kid, it's time to make sure no-one else uses that trick.
On a serious note, I think that section is aimed at web hosting companies that know they are serving fraudulent sites - how is my local telco going to be "aware of facts or circumstances from which it is apparent that the material contains a misrepresentation" if all they are doing is serving me packets that I have requested from some random web site?
Just pass a law saying the ISPs must block all spam, problem solved. Next, they should make them block all viruses as well. Wow, I never thought it would be this easy. Block any discussion of terrorist acts as well, and all pictures of ugly women.
This isn't a new technology, it's been around for a while in one form or another. Sure it's less mature than conventional hydraulic, but hydraulic are much less mature than banging two sticks together, doesn't make the sticks better than hydraulic.
That's a ridiculous comparison. Computer systems are inherently difficult to understand, they don't work the same way that the physical world that we have an instinctive understanding of works. Physics has limits, computers don't. There's no way that the forces involved in a physical cable-and-hydraulic system can be infinite, but a computer can easily go into an infinite loop or accidentally end up trying to divide by zero.
Computers *are* still a new technology, and they probably will be in engineering terms for the rest of my life-time.
Patriot anti-missile systems run off the mains?
Just because these computers counted in, say INT/10, and therefore could represent 0.1 seconds exactly does not mean, for example, that the timebase used to drive that counting was accurate and stable.
Ah, but that's a hardware problem, I'm a software guy. :)
Well, in this specific instance a decimal system would have been ok, but it isn't a general answer. The general answer is "make sure your increments are divisible into your number base", if they had used 1/8th or 1/16ths of a second, or even 3/32 of a second, as their timer increment then they would not have had this problem. There's no reason why 1/10th of a second has any magic properties.
In general terms, all number bases have other number bases with which they are incompatible. The inability of binary to represent 1/10 accurately is just the same as the inability of decimal to represent 1/3 accurately. It's only because we use decimal all the time that we overlook decimal's shortcomings (or instinctively compensate for or avoid them) and then blame computers for binary's incompatibility with decimal.
- I hate writing, and always have and avoid it wherever possible - it hurts my hand and my handwriting is awful.
- I was using computers way before anyone else in my school
You just said the same thing twice.
My mum was a schoolteacher, and some trendy young adviser came round to give a presentation on this new "multimedia" thing, and my mum's answer was "Oh, you mean just like Audio-Visual Tools? I've been doing that for thirty years."
If their patent covers a novel method of calculating exactly how many and which words to change in order to minimize pirates' ability to cross-reference the alterations in a number of leaked documents and produce a "clean" version, then maybe there is something in the patent. It's easy to look at the top line of a patent and say "prior art!", it's the detail of the claims that matters.
I don't think it takes a trial to have your driving licence taken away if you get 12 points on it.
They do that everywhere? Like, on every street in every town? I've never heard about it. If you're talking about a small number of hard-core techies, then yes, maybe, but they'll just get cut off again as soon as their ISP is notified about the torrent traffic on the IP. I just doubt that thousands of people will set up free wifi just to provide a smokescreen.
Won't affect it at all - basically, the EU has removed the requirement that member states protect the right to internet access. They can continue to do so, but they are no longer required to. So, if the government of Finland wants to keep that law, they can.
If internet access is not considered a fundamental right, then it is not protected by the ECHR.
People will just setup anonymous free access Wifi everywhere.
I'm guessing you're wrong, and people won't actually do that.
But that's exactly the point. Why is it that you automatically assume that women are weaker technologically? Institutionalized sexism.
Why is it that you assume that I assume that?
Indeed this bug in OO was used as an excuse by Microsoft to make their ODF output be incompatible.
The OOo people never really considered it a bug, it was a deliberate "philosophical" choice (see the comment history on the "bug" page).
Their argument was basically "since these two different ODF programs treat this sample document differently, we are allowed to write a completely different third implementation".
That's one way of putting it - I think most people would consider OOo to be the de-facto reference implementation, though.
This bogus argument was wrapped in a disgusting and somewhat horrifying amount of obfuscated technobabble by obviously intelligent but amoral individuals at Microsoft (you can find several repeated links to this posted by astroturfers right here on Slashdot).
I know, I got accused of being a shill myself during that debate.
Truly I used to think that Microsoft was just somewhat incompetent and rushed so that their programmers tended to reinvent things without finding out there was a standard already. But this deliberate outright lying, with enough wording to make a pointed-headed boss think it is some complex technical argument, convinced me that there really are evil people there. Scary indeed.
Calling Microsoft evil is kind of like calling lions evil. It might seem that way if you are a gazelle.
It's "the TFA article"!
Why does OOo need to compete with Google Docs? They both support ODF. There's no need for Sun and Google to get into an online office war.
One of the "fixes" is that it will convert text cells to numbers in formulae if it can. This is one of the major differences from Excel that led Microsoft to move all their formulae into a different namespace, in order to prevent users from seeing behavioural inconsistencies across products. That's the way they put it, The Internet described it as deliberately breaking interoperability. I'm agnostic on that distinction, but OOo is now in line with just about every other spreadsheet in existence including Excel, Gnumeric, and Google Docs in this respect. It will be interesting to see what happens to the msoxl namespace when this comes out. I don't know if 3.2 will convert the msoxl namespace formuale to the default namespace when it opens an Excel ODF file.
No, that one was Sept 11.
Minor correction to the story, the dispute isn't really about pay, it's about changes in working conditions. There are some aspects that cover what counts as overtime so pay is involved, but it's not just "we want more money".
Maybe they got the impression that voting was anonymous from the fact that it usually is in elections. Secret ballots are necessary for democracy to function free from intimidation - these people took part in a non-secret ballot, and now they are being intimidated, Q.E.D.