At least you can could claim later that you made an effort to prevent that behavior, and that it was blatantly disregarded. It's better to have done something and not had it work than to have done nothing at all.
This is more like, you run a shop and sell wicker baskets you created, so your door is always open (anonymous FTP access in this case). Someone walks in, masquerading as someone else (guest@nobody.com for the password field). A day later, you get a letter saying you copied a design of theirs; you contest, they agree. The thing of note here is the time that it took to respond to this letter, if nothing else, the BSA should at least be billed with that, nonwithstanding the original letter's claim that under penalty of perjury the BSA was acting on behalf of the copyright holder (which they were not).
I'd ask him what measures they're taking to ensure things like this don't happen, and then, what went wrong here and why? Maybe add something about there not being a human element to all this, which may have been able to spot a good number of false positives.
Well, they made a mistake, fine, that's forgivable. The thing here is that the BSA's first email here stated:
"BSA represents that the information in this notification is accurate and states, under penalty of perjury, that it is authorized to act in this matter on behalf of the copyright owners listed above."
Note the second part, where they claim to be acting on behalf of the copyright holder, under penalty of perjury. It's a step that they apologized, at least, but by their own statement, are liable to a lawsuit for perjury here.
Hacking, as well as perjury for this statement:
"BSA represents that the information in this notification is accurate and states, under penalty of perjury, that it is authorized to act in this matter on behalf of the copyright owners listed above."
Unless OpenOffice authorized the BSA to do that, then it's perjury, by their own statement.
You do realize that copyright doesn't cover ideas, but the expression of those ideas? The words you used, the way you formatted, etc. is what you own the copyright on, but there's nothing to stop anyone else from writing about the same thing.
Why are we so sure there will be a 'next' terrorist attack? Why is it such a big deal now? Where was this whole line of thinking before 9/11?
Before 9/11, we had one attack by a foreign terrorist cell. It was a bomb in a parking garage at the WTC, 10 years ago yesterday. That was the first and only (until 9/11) foreign terrorist attack on US soil. Then we have 9/11, and in the 2 and a half years since then, we've been told to be 'on alert' for an attack which so far, has not come, and has no solid evidence of happening. I'm not going to say anything with certainty, since I don't know the motivations of the Bush administration, but it certainly seems like fear is being used as a tactic for the advancement of their own agenda (Iraq, loss of many civil liberties & rights, etc).
I think it's a gross overstatement to say that most patents are absurd. Most of the patents we read about on/. are absurd, and there are numerous others we don't hear about, but would you be willing to bet that a significant percentage of all patents (I can't find even an estimation of this number) are absurd?
That said, I agree with you, this is definitely a case of patenting something that actually should/could be patented.
Windows Update only provides driver updates and updates to MS software, if it sends anything else, it's against their privacy statement (which I didn't expect them to follow anyway).
At Stevens Inst. of Tech., you have to have your MAC address registered to get an IP from DHCP after the first month or so of the semester. Since everyone with other computers is lazy, we just set up static IP addresses in some unused space, and it works just fine.
I'd actually gone there less than 3 weeks before 9/11 with my g/f.
And umm, advice so that I stay somewhat on-topic, uh, travel when you can, it's better than shunning it for time on a computer.
I glanced at the headline quickly and picked out the words 'Warning', 'Battle', and 'Texas'. Maybe I should start really paying attention what I read;)
But then you get something like OpenOffice. I run Gentoo, started from Stage 1, so I've compiled everything, and when it came to OpenOffice, the compile took me 16 hours on a P3/1GHz.
I have no problem with stuff being compiled from source, it's just that in some cases it's more time-efficient (OO, for example) to have a binary, and in others, it prevents having to worry about the subtle differences between systems that prevent code from compiling.
I've run in to the same problem, my college gives every incoming freshman a laptop.
Over the course of my freshman year, I had 3 hard drives fail, and I know plenty of other people who have lost 1 or 2, and several people who've lost 3 or more. I'm just lucky now that I have a new desktop, the laptop hardly ever gets used.
I actually made it a point of mine to NOT move the laptop around, if possible, after my second drive died, and for the most part it sat on my desk, with the same result as when I did carry it around with me.
You know you have HD problems when the service guy can't believe that you were able to get ANYTHING off the disk, that's always a good thing to be hearing.
It's not that she didn't know she was agreeing, she bought it, took it home, went to open, saw the sticker, and stopped. Then she tried to return it, but the store wouldn't take it back.
The license says to return it if you don't agree, but the stores are refusing to accept returns. While the summary only mentions Symantec & Microsoft, the women bringing the lawsuit claims that they are working with stores such as CompUSA and Best Buy (and unnamed others).
It's one thing to follow standards (which IE does a little better as of late), it's another to intentionally sabatoge the display of a page in a competitor's browser.
The IE6 stylesheet for msn.com works fine with Opera, it's a special stylesheet MS is sending to Opera (when identifying as itself) that causes the page to render horribly, not due to extensions, but to general crappy things to do (setting child elements 30 pixels left of the parent).
If anything, MS is playing off Opera's adherance to standards here.
Slashdot Mirror
Best...reply...ever...
:)
I got a good laugh reading this
At least you can could claim later that you made an effort to prevent that behavior, and that it was blatantly disregarded. It's better to have done something and not had it work than to have done nothing at all.
This is more like, you run a shop and sell wicker baskets you created, so your door is always open (anonymous FTP access in this case). Someone walks in, masquerading as someone else (guest@nobody.com for the password field). A day later, you get a letter saying you copied a design of theirs; you contest, they agree.
The thing of note here is the time that it took to respond to this letter, if nothing else, the BSA should at least be billed with that, nonwithstanding the original letter's claim that under penalty of perjury the BSA was acting on behalf of the copyright holder (which they were not).
I'd ask him what measures they're taking to ensure things like this don't happen, and then, what went wrong here and why?
Maybe add something about there not being a human element to all this, which may have been able to spot a good number of false positives.
Well, they made a mistake, fine, that's forgivable. The thing here is that the BSA's first email here stated:
"BSA represents that the information in this notification is accurate and states, under penalty of perjury, that it is authorized to act in this matter on behalf of the copyright owners listed above."
Note the second part, where they claim to be acting on behalf of the copyright holder, under penalty of perjury. It's a step that they apologized, at least, but by their own statement, are liable to a lawsuit for perjury here.
Hacking, as well as perjury for this statement:
"BSA represents that the information in this notification is accurate and states, under penalty of perjury, that it is authorized to act in this matter on behalf of the copyright owners listed above."
Unless OpenOffice authorized the BSA to do that, then it's perjury, by their own statement.
You do realize that copyright doesn't cover ideas, but the expression of those ideas? The words you used, the way you formatted, etc. is what you own the copyright on, but there's nothing to stop anyone else from writing about the same thing.
No, this is actually true, for once.
Story here, among many others found at Google News.
25DEC == Christmas, 1JAN == New Years. Not to mention Columbus Day is only the 2nd Monday in Oct, not set as the 21st.
:)
It was good for a laugh though
PS it's only been 1 year and a half since 9/11.
:)
D'oh! So THAT'S what math skills are good for
Why are we so sure there will be a 'next' terrorist attack? Why is it such a big deal now? Where was this whole line of thinking before 9/11?
Before 9/11, we had one attack by a foreign terrorist cell. It was a bomb in a parking garage at the WTC, 10 years ago yesterday. That was the first and only (until 9/11) foreign terrorist attack on US soil. Then we have 9/11, and in the 2 and a half years since then, we've been told to be 'on alert' for an attack which so far, has not come, and has no solid evidence of happening.
I'm not going to say anything with certainty, since I don't know the motivations of the Bush administration, but it certainly seems like fear is being used as a tactic for the advancement of their own agenda (Iraq, loss of many civil liberties & rights, etc).
I think it's a gross overstatement to say that most patents are absurd. Most of the patents we read about on /. are absurd, and there are numerous others we don't hear about, but would you be willing to bet that a significant percentage of all patents (I can't find even an estimation of this number) are absurd?
That said, I agree with you, this is definitely a case of patenting something that actually should/could be patented.
for which Windows Update provides updates
Windows Update only provides driver updates and updates to MS software, if it sends anything else, it's against their privacy statement (which I didn't expect them to follow anyway).
At Stevens Inst. of Tech., you have to have your MAC address registered to get an IP from DHCP after the first month or so of the semester. Since everyone with other computers is lazy, we just set up static IP addresses in some unused space, and it works just fine.
We may rise and fall, but in the end, we'll meet our fate together
-Creed, "One"
I'd actually gone there less than 3 weeks before 9/11 with my g/f. And umm, advice so that I stay somewhat on-topic, uh, travel when you can, it's better than shunning it for time on a computer.
journal from september
I glanced at the headline quickly and picked out the words 'Warning', 'Battle', and 'Texas'. ;)
Maybe I should start really paying attention what I read
But then you get something like OpenOffice. I run Gentoo, started from Stage 1, so I've compiled everything, and when it came to OpenOffice, the compile took me 16 hours on a P3/1GHz.
I have no problem with stuff being compiled from source, it's just that in some cases it's more time-efficient (OO, for example) to have a binary, and in others, it prevents having to worry about the subtle differences between systems that prevent code from compiling.
I've run in to the same problem, my college gives every incoming freshman a laptop.
Over the course of my freshman year, I had 3 hard drives fail, and I know plenty of other people who have lost 1 or 2, and several people who've lost 3 or more. I'm just lucky now that I have a new desktop, the laptop hardly ever gets used.
I actually made it a point of mine to NOT move the laptop around, if possible, after my second drive died, and for the most part it sat on my desk, with the same result as when I did carry it around with me.
You know you have HD problems when the service guy can't believe that you were able to get ANYTHING off the disk, that's always a good thing to be hearing.
It's not that she didn't know she was agreeing, she bought it, took it home, went to open, saw the sticker, and stopped. Then she tried to return it, but the store wouldn't take it back.
The license says to return it if you don't agree, but the stores are refusing to accept returns. While the summary only mentions Symantec & Microsoft, the women bringing the lawsuit claims that they are working with stores such as CompUSA and Best Buy (and unnamed others).
Since you've been doing work for the FSF pro bono since 1993, have you felt it was worth it?
Sounds enough like 'virus' that I'd be wary of installing it in the first place.
It's one thing to follow standards (which IE does a little better as of late), it's another to intentionally sabatoge the display of a page in a competitor's browser.
The IE6 stylesheet for msn.com works fine with Opera, it's a special stylesheet MS is sending to Opera (when identifying as itself) that causes the page to render horribly, not due to extensions, but to general crappy things to do (setting child elements 30 pixels left of the parent).
If anything, MS is playing off Opera's adherance to standards here.