The article _is_ flamebait. Not because most of those actions aren't infringement, but because most of the infringements are presumably on unregistered works. (Do you register a copyright on all your emails? I didn't think so. So the copyright holders can only get ACTUAL damages for the infringements, not the statutory damages of $150K from 504(c)(2). This is because of 17 USC 412. The criminal penalties won't apply because there's no commercial value of the infringed works.
Actual damages will be zero in most if not all of the examples in the article. Not $4 Billion per year.
So, Tehranian certainly knows this, but doesn't even mention it in the article. Talk about crying wolf.
If you read the article you will see that these numbers include:
only $100 million in actual legal fees...and the rest appears to be settlement monies. i.e. MS paying for patent infringement claims. Not the same as legal fees or a "patent tax." How much would MS have to pay otherwise to license the technology or design around it? How much revenue would they have lost for not creating the infringing product.
Take for one that the article says MS paid Sun $1.25 B. Ok, but a quick google shows, e.g., that MS paid Sun $900M to resolve the patent issues, and $700M for antitrust claims, which have NOTHING to do with the patent system.
Even if we take the article on its face, you're talking $4B over a period when MS had $120B in revenue, or 3.3% of revenues. For a company whose products are 95% IP, I don't think that's harming MS or its consumers.
It's exactly like pre-printed stationary, which also meets the signature requirement under the statute of frauds. Ridiculous or not, letterhead, "X", email signature, any symbol placed on the document with the intent of authtenticating it will do.
The issue was Texaco's tortious interference with Pennzoil's contract to buy Getty Oil.
Texaco did not raise the statute of frauds, an affirmative defense, in its pleadings. Therefore, statute of frauds did not make the contract unenforceable.
First of, the statute of frauds is exactly that, a statute. In the U.S. ach state has its own. So whether it applies to email could vary from state to state. The original English statute does not apply in the U.S.
However, most states also adopt the UCC (which applies to sales of good vs. services), which has already been interpreted that signed emails satisfy the statute of frauds writing requirement.
This isn't that big a deal, after all, even an unsigned letterhead satisfies the statute of frauds. You still need to prove offer, acceptance, and consideration to form a contract. You could still contest an email contract if there were fraudulent emails.
I'm in the same boat, I went to undergrad pre (practical) laptop and am now in law school.
I don't think notetaking in math/science/engineering would be helped by a laptop. It's too hard to draw all the equation symbols, even on a tablet PC. Since many undergrad classes are lecture orientated, it's also less useful to to have a laptop.
But for law school, it's awesome: 1) I take 90% of my notes BEFORE class, from the assigned readings, and just fill in the blanks from professor/class discussion for things I missed or did not understand correctly.
2) You can look up data/cases online while a dicussion is going on and contribute
3) my handwriting is unreadable
4) notes are searchable.
5) Humans can only pay attention for 20-30 minutes at a time anyway, so taking a diversion when things get boring makes things more bearable.
Not any more than liability for say antilock brakes or airbags. These things don't have to be perfect to be useful.
A rudimentary collision avoidance system is already being sold on Cadillacs. A radar-sensing microcontroller can reduce the throttle or apply brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of you.
Making progress here is long overdue. The government has been studying this for at least 15 years.... I did some research work on this in the early 90's: Collision avoidance systems (radar or laser based) drowsy driver detection, etc.
google IVHS (intelligent vehicle highway system) for starters.
Not the Microsoft would be my first choice to design mass-produced life-threatening embedded systems.
Over the long haul (i.e. from teenage to retirement), you should expect about 4-6% annualized real returns in a retirement account.
Over a 20 year stretch, in the last century, your real tax-deferred returns could have been anywhere from 0 to 10%, depending on when you started. These maps here illustrate this very well.
Many financial magazines, mutual fund companies, etc. advertise average rate of return, calculated by averaging the annual returns of a set of years. But this is not the same thing as the annulized return that a stock investor will see. For one, negative numbers hurt more: e.g. a 20% gain followed by a 20% loss is a zero "average return", but you end up with only 96% of your original investment.
He also has done an analysis of a couple of the Columbia powerpoint foils engineering presented to management here.
"BTW, our models are based on real data from a 3 cu in piece of foam hitting the wing. We think the piece of foam that hit the wing was actually 1920 cu in"
As the Supreme Court dissent in the last Mickey Mouse ruling noted, the average change in present value of a new copyright by changing the term from 70 to 90 years is about 7 cents per $100. (i.e. if your copyright is worth $100 with a 70 year limit, it's worth $100.07 with a 90 year limit)
How much harder are you going to work for that 7 cents?
(sorry no link, but you can search the SCOTUS rulings for the dissent)
Yast2 (Suse) IS good. I don't know why you say it's not intended as a desktop OS, that's what I'm using it for, my non-computer-literate is setup with StarOffice & Mozilla with not problems.
Yast2 gives you control panels for configuring system services. I've used it for setting up apache, samba, sshd, lpd. the only thing I needed an editor for was getting the print server set up in samba. It's getting there....
I live in a big town (600K people), we have cable and DSL, and I still pay ~$50/mo. And they charged me $300 for an external modem! So quit yer whining!
All assignments must reflect an individual effort, and must be completed "from scratch." It is a violation of the Honor Code
to copy or derive solutions from text books, internet resources, or previous instances of this course unless specifically
instructed to do so in assignment directions. When instructed to do so, all material not created by you and its source must
be clearly identified. Copying solutions from other students, including those who previous took the course, is prohibited. A
good guideline is that you must be able to explain and/or reproduce anything that you submit for any assignment.
..... So where is discussion (all he did, according the post article) with other students banned? Only copying or deriving from other works.
they're accusing 20% of the class of cheating!
Collaboration was heavily encouraged at my school, and I'm glad it was. We did the homework independently and then collaborated when stuck, or when we had different answers. Sort of like the real world hunh?
OTA HDTV content is slowly increasing. CBS primetime is mostly HDTV. From the article above, sounds like ABC is doing 50% next season My local PBS station broadcasts quite a bit HDTV in the evening. Sports (Olympics, NCAA Final Four + SE Regional, etc.)
On the other hand, the impact of HDTV is very content dependent. Sports and nature shows, documentaries are awesome. Watching the winter olympics at the Good Guys is what sold me. Some shows like CSI benefit from HDTV. However, sitcoms/talk shows don't really benefit. I don't care if I can see the texture of the actor's fabrics. And I'd rather watch Letterman in 480i than Leno in 1080i....
I should have elaborated. You can write code in
either format (lisp or "C" style) but only
get stack traces in one or the other.
Even if you write all your the "correct" (LISP),
you still run into someone else's code written in
the other style, and then can't match the stack
to the source.
From the LISP point view, the question is "why have the first element of a list outside the parens, and the rest of the elements inside"?
There's no distinction between
(myfunction a b)
and
(x y z)
until you evaluate.
Many EDA (electronic design CAD) tools use LISP variants. Cadence's SKILL, Avanti uses Scheme. It's 10X faster to write code than procedural languages, and the code is rock-solid (if you know what you're doing) because you can easily test the pieces as you build up your code. I spend 10X less time debugging LISP than procedural languages.
Even if you don't use it, any programmer should at least code enough lisp to understand how elegant programming can be. Become one with the stack. Witness the power of (mapcar It's a completely different kind of mindset than the procedural languages.
Cadence did exactly this in SKILL (a proprietary version of LISP used in chip design CAD) and
it's absolutely awful. Your code and stack traces become completely unreadable. LISP only makes
sense like it is, with the operator inside the paren. You just need to program LISP long enough
until your brain "gets it", then you will be writing code very quickly....
Slashdot Mirror
The article _is_ flamebait. Not because most of those actions aren't infringement, but because most of the infringements are presumably on unregistered works. (Do you register a copyright on all your emails? I didn't think so. So the copyright holders can only get ACTUAL damages for the infringements, not the statutory damages of $150K from 504(c)(2). This is because of 17 USC 412. The criminal penalties won't apply because there's no commercial value of the infringed works.
Actual damages will be zero in most if not all of the examples in the article. Not $4 Billion per year.
So, Tehranian certainly knows this, but doesn't even mention it in the article. Talk about crying wolf.
If you read the article you will see that these numbers include:
...and the rest appears to be settlement monies. i.e. MS paying for patent infringement claims. Not the same as legal fees or a "patent tax." How much would MS have to pay otherwise to license the technology or design around it? How much revenue would they have lost for not creating the infringing product.
only $100 million in actual legal fees
Take for one that the article says MS paid Sun $1.25 B. Ok, but a quick google shows, e.g., that MS paid Sun $900M to resolve the patent issues, and $700M for antitrust claims, which have NOTHING to do with the patent system.
Even if we take the article on its face, you're talking $4B over a period when MS had $120B in revenue, or 3.3% of revenues. For a company whose products are 95% IP, I don't think that's harming MS or its consumers.
It's exactly like pre-printed stationary, which also meets the signature requirement under the statute of frauds. Ridiculous or not, letterhead, "X", email signature, any symbol placed on the document with the intent of authtenticating it will do.
Wrong. if you look at the case, you will see:
The issue was Texaco's tortious interference with Pennzoil's contract to buy Getty Oil.
Texaco did not raise the statute of frauds, an affirmative defense, in its pleadings. Therefore, statute of frauds did not make the contract unenforceable.
First of, the statute of frauds is exactly that, a statute. In the U.S. ach state has its own. So whether it applies to email could vary from state to state. The original English statute does not apply in the U.S.
However, most states also adopt the UCC (which applies to sales of good vs. services), which has already been interpreted that signed emails satisfy the statute of frauds writing requirement.
This isn't that big a deal, after all, even an unsigned letterhead satisfies the statute of frauds. You still need to prove offer, acceptance, and consideration to form a contract. You could still contest an email contract if there were fraudulent emails.
I'm in the same boat, I went to undergrad pre (practical) laptop and am now in law school.
I don't think notetaking in math/science/engineering would be helped by a laptop. It's too hard to draw all the equation symbols, even on a tablet PC. Since many undergrad classes are lecture orientated, it's also less useful to to have a laptop.
But for law school, it's awesome:
1) I take 90% of my notes BEFORE class, from the assigned readings, and just fill in the blanks from professor/class discussion for things I missed or did not understand correctly.
2) You can look up data/cases online while a dicussion is going on and contribute
3) my handwriting is unreadable
4) notes are searchable.
5) Humans can only pay attention for 20-30 minutes at a time anyway, so taking a diversion when things get boring makes things more bearable.
Don't most VCRs and cellphones get their time from PBS or WWVB anyway?
If a product was designed to do this with a calendar, instead of a query, well, that's just bad design/planned obsolesence.
Not any more than liability for say antilock brakes or airbags. These things don't have to be perfect to be useful.
A rudimentary collision avoidance system is already being sold on Cadillacs. A radar-sensing microcontroller can reduce the throttle or apply brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of you.
Making progress here is long overdue. The government has been studying this for at least 15 years.... I did some research work on this in the early 90's: Collision avoidance systems (radar or laser based) drowsy driver detection, etc.
google IVHS (intelligent vehicle highway system) for starters.
Not the Microsoft would be my first choice to design mass-produced life-threatening embedded systems.
Over a 20 year stretch, in the last century, your real tax-deferred returns could have been anywhere from 0 to 10%, depending on when you started. These maps here illustrate this very well.
Many financial magazines, mutual fund companies, etc. advertise average rate of return, calculated by averaging the annual returns of a set of years. But this is not the same thing as the annulized return that a stock investor will see. For one, negative numbers hurt more: e.g. a 20% gain followed by a 20% loss is a zero "average return", but you end up with only 96% of your original investment.
He also has done an analysis of a couple of the Columbia powerpoint foils engineering presented to management here.
"BTW, our models are based on real data from a 3 cu in piece of foam hitting the wing. We think the piece of foam that hit the wing was actually 1920 cu in"
As the Supreme Court dissent in the last Mickey Mouse ruling noted, the average change in present value of a new copyright by changing the term from 70 to 90 years is about 7 cents per $100.
(i.e. if your copyright is worth $100 with a 70 year limit, it's worth $100.07 with a 90 year limit)
How much harder are you going to work for that 7 cents?
(sorry no link, but you can search the SCOTUS rulings for the dissent)
If you are talking US income taxes, your history is wrong.
16th Amendmendment passed in 1913, and an income tax has been levied since.
There were also income taxes leveled during the civil war and up to 1913, though these are of dubious constitutionality (upheld at the time though).
Yast2 (Suse) IS good. I don't know why you say it's not intended as a desktop OS, that's what I'm using it for, my non-computer-literate is setup with StarOffice & Mozilla with not problems.
Yast2 gives you control panels for configuring system services. I've used it for setting up apache, samba, sshd, lpd. the only thing I needed an editor for was getting the print server set up in samba. It's getting there....
I live in a big town (600K people), we have cable and DSL, and I still pay ~$50/mo. And they charged me $300 for an external modem! So quit yer whining!
Even at $50/mo. it's still worth it.
I don't see how discussing with other students even violates the honor code, at least not the one posted for the spring semester of the same class:
s pr ing/syllabus.html
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2002/cs1321_
All assignments must reflect an individual effort, and must be completed "from scratch." It is a violation of the Honor Code
to copy or derive solutions from text books, internet resources, or previous instances of this course unless specifically
instructed to do so in assignment directions. When instructed to do so, all material not created by you and its source must
be clearly identified. Copying solutions from other students, including those who previous took the course, is prohibited. A
good guideline is that you must be able to explain and/or reproduce anything that you submit for any assignment.
..... So where is discussion (all he did, according the post article) with other students
banned? Only copying or deriving from other works.
they're accusing 20% of the class of cheating!
Collaboration was heavily encouraged at my school,
and I'm glad it was. We did the homework independently and then collaborated when stuck, or
when we had different answers. Sort of like the
real world hunh?
OTA HDTV content is slowly increasing.
CBS primetime is mostly HDTV.
From the article above, sounds like ABC is doing
50% next season
My local PBS station broadcasts quite a bit
HDTV in the evening.
Sports (Olympics, NCAA Final Four + SE Regional,
etc.)
On the other hand, the impact of HDTV is very
content dependent. Sports and nature shows,
documentaries are awesome. Watching the winter olympics at the Good Guys is what sold me. Some shows like CSI benefit from HDTV. However, sitcoms/talk shows don't really benefit. I don't care if I can
see the texture of the actor's fabrics. And I'd rather watch
Letterman in 480i than Leno in 1080i....
I should have elaborated. You can write code in
either format (lisp or "C" style) but only
get stack traces in one or the other.
Even if you write all your the "correct" (LISP),
you still run into someone else's code written in
the other style, and then can't match the stack
to the source.
From the LISP point view, the question is "why have the first element of a list outside the parens, and the rest of the elements inside"?
There's no distinction between
(myfunction a b)
and
(x y z)
until you evaluate.
Many EDA (electronic design CAD) tools use LISP variants. Cadence's SKILL, Avanti uses Scheme. It's 10X faster to write code than procedural languages, and the code is rock-solid (if you know what you're doing) because you can easily test the pieces as you build up your code. I spend 10X less time debugging LISP than procedural languages.
Even if you don't use it, any programmer should at least code enough lisp to understand how elegant programming can be. Become one with the stack. Witness the power of (mapcar It's a completely different kind of mindset than the procedural languages.
Cadence did exactly this in SKILL (a proprietary version of LISP used in chip design CAD) and
it's absolutely awful. Your code and stack traces become completely unreadable. LISP only makes
sense like it is, with the operator inside the paren. You just need to program LISP long enough
until your brain "gets it", then you will be writing code very quickly....