Sorry, but 10cmx10cmx10cm is not reasonable. Not only because you run into functional yield issues, but also because you can only fit so many dies of that size and form factor on a single wafer. And it ain't many. Manufacturing cost would skyrocket even in case the yield would be 100%, which it never will be.
To say it was Linux is to say that Linux is a sure moneymaker.
No. It only says that competing against Linux is harder than Darl thought it to be. You can't just go about blabbering nonsense and succesfully ask money for whatever you do, because: 1) some of Linux really is for free as in beer; 2) there is no room for making serious sure money off Linux unless you adhere to its principles and spirit. Room for doing the latter combo is limited, precisely because on its own Linux is not a sure moneymaker and some established companies (Novell (i.e. Suse), Redhat, IBM) have taken a considerable portion of that market already.
Nope. Linux is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix" and as long as it doesn't do that in illegal ways - which it doesn't - that's a Good Thing (TM). The fact that Darl did not have a valid answer to that reality and that he was incompetent enough to think that his lawsuits would save him is utterly irrelevant as far as the trends in UNIX land are concerned.
All the people in this discussion that now go like: "No, we Linuxers sure had nothing to do with it. It's all Darl. We're in no way involved and it's all the other guy's fault for singlehandedly getting SCO into trouble." are doing the very thing they accuse him of: shifting away the "blame", using their own version of that so-called cop-out speak. But for the non-SCO parties in this comedy, there is no blame that needs shifting! Please stop feeling so insecure: SCO didn't just loose, the Linux community won! Now go strengthen that by building something even more use- and powerful, instead of all the whining about how Big Bad Darl incorrectly blames you for being stronger than he was!
SCO and Darl are virtually dead. Stop looking back and move on instead.
First, I did not say that there was no incompetence, nor that there was no crimial activity (see also my second post in this threat. So what if Darl made mistakes with respect to Linux and failed? That only proves that the Linux phenomenon was stronger. So what if he made his mistakes because he didn't "get it"? That doesn't diminish the fact that Linux did him in. In fact, him "not getting is" is exactly what the open source idea did to him "to do him in". This is survival of the fittest, but in a new kind of world, where those that previously were the fittest no longer are unless they adapt.
Second, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with Linux being the thing that killed SCO in one way or another. In fact, it is good, because it proves once and for all that Linux has real impact beyond the purely technical geek realm. It's a badge of honour. What SCO's motives and mistakes were is irrelevant, what matters is that the community defeated them.
You need to think longer term and with a larger scope. And then you need to do that not with hindsight, but at the moment of the events under discussion. Caldera as it was had no real future.
PS: Read my sig. I've been around long enough to remember Caldera first hand.
Darl knew that full well back in 2003. He also knew, and this is what you are not getting, that he could not compete. Lots of Free Software and/or Open Source zealots don't get that. While they may be technical geniuses, many don't understand the economical aspects of it all. It's way too simplistic to think that "whenever the other guy is beating you over the head today, you just go out there change these and those technical or feature aspects, work a few more long nights for free, and compete until you beat him instead. And if that doesn't work, you just go back to start and loop the same procedure."
Given that they could not keep up the competition and knew it, the correct and honourable thing for SCO to do would have been to get out of this particular business and go do something else. SCO didn't get out, but that does not mean they were so stupid as to not know. Given that they wanted to stay in the business they were in, litigation as indeed the only their only option. Their big mistake was to think that they could make it stick.
Most people in these discussions make the SCO managers look like nitwits to dumb to hold a pen, let alone a keyboard. But that's doing them a service, because there is no law against being incompetent. There is, however, a bunch of laws against the kind of criminal tricks SCO employed and that is what they should be tackled on.
Indeed. And what's wrong with that? They filed for chapter 11, so now they naturally have to explain why. Competition that they cannot beat is the reason. The real one. What's wrong with little Darl saying that, other than that it probably is the first accurate business related statement coming out of his mouth in years and that he should have said it a long time ago?
I truely don't understand why you guys are screaming so much about this one. What McBride said is true amd he has to say it: Linux is the thing that ruined their business. It was doing that back in 2003 already. The fact that SCO used the dirty method they did to try to escape from the inevitable, does not change the basic facts. Get over it. You should all be happy, for $YOUR_DEITY_HERE's sake! So stop wasting time on such blahblah and get back to work, making Linux even better. SCO is history.
Nobody claimed that Amundsen has not done it back then. The claim is that the passage now is practicable in one go, because the whole passage is open. Amundsen needed several years to make it all the way through in bits and pieces. And he couldn't have done it in any larger ship than the one he used, due to the water water being as shallow as 3 feet. Not exactly an economically viable solution.
I get your drift, but had the power failure occured while you were aware of the ongoing update, the effect would have been the same. You can't blame that on the stealthyness of the update.
Note: I'm also assuming that during a normal - i.e. intended - shutdown this kind of thing can't happen anyway, as anyone can always decide to shutdown a machine while an ongoing automatic update is in progress, especially as most users don't even seem to know what an OS update is in the first place. So it's a condition MicroSoft surely has been testing very much. But you can't expect them to predict badly timed power failures, no matter how much they try to minimize the size of the vulnerability time window.
The SEC has been known to take a close look at that in the past.
Which is exactly why this is not a case of insiders dumping in the last minutes before the press release. Such insider trading is perceived very very very badly and ruins one's career forever when discovered. Totally. In a high profile case like this one, no insider, no matter how utterly braindead, would trade before a chapter 11 filing is made public. It's just the reaction to the press release, possibly involving some insiders trying to sell some stock after the news had gone public. But the latter is not "illegal insider trading".
I didn't say that you denied that indentifying people is possible or the goal (hey, I actually did read all the stuff, you know: TFA, the sumnary, your posts, and the post you replied to). All I did was point out the logic that can be used to do it (without attachting emotional labels of "good" or "bad" to it) and point out that you made a mistake in how to treat the data sets. Nowhere did I claim that you denied the purpose.
Now please point out where I screamed about holy privacy, my sacred anonymity, Mark Foley, child molesters, or that idiot of a senator (he is an idiot irrespective of what happened, because "pleading guilty" was a stupid thing to do in any case). [ Phew, you sure know how to throw an unfocussed rant when you've been cornered on the actual facts and logic. ] Please also point out where I tacitly approved of abuse of power or a lack of oversight of the watchers. All I did, was present facts and logic. But no, that does not imply that I can't think beyond the mere stuff I write.
By the way, It's OK to change your mind. Intelligent people do that all the time. But don't start by saying "this technique is a non-issue because I could do better without it simply by using someone's signature", only to state within about an hour that "the problem is not that watchers can use this, but that they can abuse it because they are not being watched." If it's a useless technique anyway, let the uncontrolled watchers watch all they want. (At least from a civil rights point of view, because of course they still cost money that could in that scenario be put to much better use.)
I know what you mean. And not having read the article (yet) I'm also tempted to suspect such a bias in reception, but that would be wrong of me: maybe these new numbers really do have a better foundation than those of the MPAA or the RIAA.
But you know what: it doesn't matter that much whether we on/. accept these numbers more only because they suit us. It matters a lot more that the companies involved (esp. "evil" Microsoft as the produced of a ton of DRM software and "do no evil" Google as the owner of YouTube) published this report. That's because these guys carry a lot more weight in Congress than/. does.
Your first mistake is that you are splitting the pool of postings into two pools: anonymous and non-anonymous. Quoting your first post: "The best thing this could do would be to tie a group of anonymous sources together as coming from one source and then hope and pray you can get enough matches between that pool from the single anonymous source to a single identified source".
Of course matching an "only" 95% accuracy result in one pool with a couple of identified sources in the other pool, looking for similar style, isn't worth the effort and the 95% figure that TFA claims does not apply to this phase. But the key thing to do is not to spilt the data pool in the first place. Then the system is going to come with (quoting again) "a 95% accurate guess that a single person is responsible for more than one entry", and/but some of those entries will have also names attached at the same time. If there is only one name and occurs often enough, a pretty certain "full identification" can still be achieved. If there are more names but one of those names is very predominant, the same still holds.
The other thing is this: a system that can achieve 95% accuracy at something, can do exactly that. That it doesn't always do it is completely irrelevant until somebody cialms that it can do that.
A final note that does not apply to your post, but to many posts in many discussions about this topic, is this: If one investigation says that there is a 95% probability that the author of a given crime is Belgian, I'm not worried. If that causes the investigating US or Chinese or... agency to have a closer look at Belgium and to then conclude that there is a 95% probability that the author lives in my town, I'm still not worried. If they then pull in another data source and eliminate 95% of the local population of that town because they probably (!) don't have the required IT knowledge, I'm still not worried, but it's starting to feel a bit warmer. If they then check up all the remaining people one by one and use whatever analysis method to conclude with 95% probability that I'm matching the remaining profile info they have about the criminal, they still don't have proof, but it's starting to feel pretty warm nonetheless. Because at that point they will pull out all the tricks to try to pin it on me and the few remaining people. From then on, if I really am the one they need, the smallest mistake I make, e.g. under the pressure of stress, will betray me. Once this point has been reached, it does not matter at all that they took a big gamble when zooming in on Belgium in the first place and again when zooming in on my town, and... because by then they have proof and maybe even a confession.
I can't speak for the parent poster, but I can tell you from personal experience that in my country an employer is not entitled to read an employee's e-mail, specificallu because doing so would be blatant a privacy violation. The only way to get access is via a police investigation, using a proper search warrant.
I recently worked somewhere for 2 months as part of an MBA internship. The company wanted to have access to the project history after I was gone. Due to the nature of the project, my e-mail history was a rather big part of that. They told me up front and I agreed, as I have more than enough e-mail adresses for use when I want to do something my supervisor was not entitled to know anyway (like searching for a new job, inclusing at that very same company). But IT told us that it could not legally be done. As a workaround, we had to create a project e-mail account instead of a personal one.
No, I did read what you wrote, but I see that I only typed half the reply I initially had in mind. A separate service can be duplicated and shielded juat as was well as anything else. Not exactly superefficient, but it can easily be done. All your first application needs to work is a port number to talk to. Idem for the second. The applications don't care whether those numbers are the same and/or served by a common process.
Anyway, even if you share the service process between multiple applications, it is trivial to track whether or not an ongoing uninstall is the last one. All it takes on Windows is a single registry key.
Quoting the article: "I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism,"
In what way is blocking words like genocide going to help preventing terrorism? Does our friend the commisioner even know what the word means? Is he serious that covering up the WWII holocaust or the whole Yugoslavia disaster is the best way forward? The last parties that tried to cover those things up are now laughing in their graves, if they have any, for it seems that they have won their criminal wars after all.
By the way, does he know that "kill" is a standard UNIX command that doesn't harm anyone?:-)
Here in Kansas, we tried to eliminate... embryos... and other things that weren't in the bible.
You mean you guys and galls tried to make abortion mandatory?:-) Of course that's not working for preventing terrorists from getting hold of bomb recepies...
... that stays on the system after uninstalling the first piece of software (How else could it work, if you have multiple pieces of software that uses it?), and, as you say service, I assume it runs while the original piece of software is not.
You obviously have no clue what you are blabbering about. There is no reason whatsoever why you can't have multiple independent products protected by the same third party mechanism without linking said products together. I know, because I've done it.
In short: Nobody interested in anti-pirating wants the licensing to be in a dedicated dll, since those are easy to locate, break, and replace. Licensing code should always be fully merged into a key component of the product you're protecting and as such be "invisible". That automatically means that you can have multiple copies of it that are not aware of each other and that are automatically uninstalled together with the product they protect.
Do you seriously mean to say that IT savvy people are not allowed to work outside the IT department? Then how do you ever expect upper management to understand IT and the IT department's needs and concerns? Or maybe let me ask you this: do you consider Microsoft or Google to have an IT department or to be their own IT department?
You misunderstood my message. The game I'm refering to has only one outcome: "patents are bad". Until, that is, this stance suddenly doesn't fit the/. dogmas after all, because then it suddenly has multiple ones. Hence the cookie applies, even if I don't say so at all.
Note that it's not the game I personally play, as I don't agree that patents are either bad or panacea, but it's the game that many people on/. play when the whole attacking concept of IP.
Oh yes you do. Maybe not any more by the time you're almost completely gone. And also not when it all first starts (slowly). But in between there is a period when you're aware of what's happening and still lucid enough to understand. That phase is the true torture period for the person affected.
So what do you want instead? Do you want Apple to patent, trademark, copyright, and encrypt, the hell out of the entire iAlphabet range of potential products and how they might work just so nobody can copy them? Why are patents used to prevent copying of innovative ideas judged to be bad when they are owned by certain companies, while copying a great idea is judged to be bad when the item being copied was engineered by some "holy grail" company or nerd god?
For $DEITY's sake, what Nokia may not be very original or creative, but if Apple didn't patent their iPhone properly, there's nothing wrong with it. If Apple did patent it properly, Nokia wouldn't have copied or would/will be facing a law suit. Note that if Nokia found a way around any relevant existing Apple patents, then: 1) Apple didn't patent properly after all, despite having their patents; 2) Nokia has been more creative in finding a way around the patents than a very first look at their phone suggests and hence should get the credit for it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: one can't have one's cookie and eat it as well.
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Sorry, but 10cmx10cmx10cm is not reasonable. Not only because you run into functional yield issues, but also because you can only fit so many dies of that size and form factor on a single wafer. And it ain't many. Manufacturing cost would skyrocket even in case the yield would be 100%, which it never will be.
Nobody will ever need more than twice the computing power he already has available on the moment he makes this assessment.
To say it was Linux is to say that Linux is a sure moneymaker.
No. It only says that competing against Linux is harder than Darl thought it to be. You can't just go about blabbering nonsense and succesfully ask money for whatever you do, because: 1) some of Linux really is for free as in beer; 2) there is no room for making serious sure money off Linux unless you adhere to its principles and spirit. Room for doing the latter combo is limited, precisely because on its own Linux is not a sure moneymaker and some established companies (Novell (i.e. Suse), Redhat, IBM) have taken a considerable portion of that market already.
Nope. Linux is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix" and as long as it doesn't do that in illegal ways - which it doesn't - that's a Good Thing (TM). The fact that Darl did not have a valid answer to that reality and that he was incompetent enough to think that his lawsuits would save him is utterly irrelevant as far as the trends in UNIX land are concerned.
All the people in this discussion that now go like: "No, we Linuxers sure had nothing to do with it. It's all Darl. We're in no way involved and it's all the other guy's fault for singlehandedly getting SCO into trouble." are doing the very thing they accuse him of: shifting away the "blame", using their own version of that so-called cop-out speak. But for the non-SCO parties in this comedy, there is no blame that needs shifting! Please stop feeling so insecure: SCO didn't just loose, the Linux community won! Now go strengthen that by building something even more use- and powerful, instead of all the whining about how Big Bad Darl incorrectly blames you for being stronger than he was!
SCO and Darl are virtually dead. Stop looking back and move on instead.
Two answers:
First, I did not say that there was no incompetence, nor that there was no crimial activity (see also my second post in this threat. So what if Darl made mistakes with respect to Linux and failed? That only proves that the Linux phenomenon was stronger. So what if he made his mistakes because he didn't "get it"? That doesn't diminish the fact that Linux did him in. In fact, him "not getting is" is exactly what the open source idea did to him "to do him in". This is survival of the fittest, but in a new kind of world, where those that previously were the fittest no longer are unless they adapt.
Second, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with Linux being the thing that killed SCO in one way or another. In fact, it is good, because it proves once and for all that Linux has real impact beyond the purely technical geek realm. It's a badge of honour. What SCO's motives and mistakes were is irrelevant, what matters is that the community defeated them.
Linux was NOT ruining their business ...
You need to think longer term and with a larger scope. And then you need to do that not with hindsight, but at the moment of the events under discussion. Caldera as it was had no real future.
PS: Read my sig. I've been around long enough to remember Caldera first hand.
Darl knew that full well back in 2003. He also knew, and this is what you are not getting, that he could not compete. Lots of Free Software and/or Open Source zealots don't get that. While they may be technical geniuses, many don't understand the economical aspects of it all. It's way too simplistic to think that "whenever the other guy is beating you over the head today, you just go out there change these and those technical or feature aspects, work a few more long nights for free, and compete until you beat him instead. And if that doesn't work, you just go back to start and loop the same procedure."
Given that they could not keep up the competition and knew it, the correct and honourable thing for SCO to do would have been to get out of this particular business and go do something else. SCO didn't get out, but that does not mean they were so stupid as to not know. Given that they wanted to stay in the business they were in, litigation as indeed the only their only option. Their big mistake was to think that they could make it stick.
Most people in these discussions make the SCO managers look like nitwits to dumb to hold a pen, let alone a keyboard. But that's doing them a service, because there is no law against being incompetent. There is, however, a bunch of laws against the kind of criminal tricks SCO employed and that is what they should be tackled on.
Indeed. And what's wrong with that? They filed for chapter 11, so now they naturally have to explain why. Competition that they cannot beat is the reason. The real one. What's wrong with little Darl saying that, other than that it probably is the first accurate business related statement coming out of his mouth in years and that he should have said it a long time ago?
I truely don't understand why you guys are screaming so much about this one. What McBride said is true amd he has to say it: Linux is the thing that ruined their business. It was doing that back in 2003 already. The fact that SCO used the dirty method they did to try to escape from the inevitable, does not change the basic facts. Get over it. You should all be happy, for $YOUR_DEITY_HERE's sake! So stop wasting time on such blahblah and get back to work, making Linux even better. SCO is history.
Nobody claimed that Amundsen has not done it back then. The claim is that the passage now is practicable in one go, because the whole passage is open. Amundsen needed several years to make it all the way through in bits and pieces. And he couldn't have done it in any larger ship than the one he used, due to the water water being as shallow as 3 feet. Not exactly an economically viable solution.
I get your drift, but had the power failure occured while you were aware of the ongoing update, the effect would have been the same. You can't blame that on the stealthyness of the update.
Note: I'm also assuming that during a normal - i.e. intended - shutdown this kind of thing can't happen anyway, as anyone can always decide to shutdown a machine while an ongoing automatic update is in progress, especially as most users don't even seem to know what an OS update is in the first place. So it's a condition MicroSoft surely has been testing very much. But you can't expect them to predict badly timed power failures, no matter how much they try to minimize the size of the vulnerability time window.
The SEC has been known to take a close look at that in the past.
Which is exactly why this is not a case of insiders dumping in the last minutes before the press release. Such insider trading is perceived very very very badly and ruins one's career forever when discovered. Totally. In a high profile case like this one, no insider, no matter how utterly braindead, would trade before a chapter 11 filing is made public. It's just the reaction to the press release, possibly involving some insiders trying to sell some stock after the news had gone public. But the latter is not "illegal insider trading".
I didn't say that you denied that indentifying people is possible or the goal (hey, I actually did read all the stuff, you know: TFA, the sumnary, your posts, and the post you replied to). All I did was point out the logic that can be used to do it (without attachting emotional labels of "good" or "bad" to it) and point out that you made a mistake in how to treat the data sets. Nowhere did I claim that you denied the purpose.
Now please point out where I screamed about holy privacy, my sacred anonymity, Mark Foley, child molesters, or that idiot of a senator (he is an idiot irrespective of what happened, because "pleading guilty" was a stupid thing to do in any case). [ Phew, you sure know how to throw an unfocussed rant when you've been cornered on the actual facts and logic. ] Please also point out where I tacitly approved of abuse of power or a lack of oversight of the watchers. All I did, was present facts and logic. But no, that does not imply that I can't think beyond the mere stuff I write.
By the way, It's OK to change your mind. Intelligent people do that all the time. But don't start by saying "this technique is a non-issue because I could do better without it simply by using someone's signature", only to state within about an hour that "the problem is not that watchers can use this, but that they can abuse it because they are not being watched." If it's a useless technique anyway, let the uncontrolled watchers watch all they want. (At least from a civil rights point of view, because of course they still cost money that could in that scenario be put to much better use.)
I know what you mean. And not having read the article (yet) I'm also tempted to suspect such a bias in reception, but that would be wrong of me: maybe these new numbers really do have a better foundation than those of the MPAA or the RIAA.
But you know what: it doesn't matter that much whether we on /. accept these numbers more only because they suit us. It matters a lot more that the companies involved (esp. "evil" Microsoft as the produced of a ton of DRM software and "do no evil" Google as the owner of YouTube) published this report. That's because these guys carry a lot more weight in Congress than /. does.
Your first mistake is that you are splitting the pool of postings into two pools: anonymous and non-anonymous. Quoting your first post: "The best thing this could do would be to tie a group of anonymous sources together as coming from one source and then hope and pray you can get enough matches between that pool from the single anonymous source to a single identified source".
Of course matching an "only" 95% accuracy result in one pool with a couple of identified sources in the other pool, looking for similar style, isn't worth the effort and the 95% figure that TFA claims does not apply to this phase. But the key thing to do is not to spilt the data pool in the first place. Then the system is going to come with (quoting again) "a 95% accurate guess that a single person is responsible for more than one entry", and/but some of those entries will have also names attached at the same time. If there is only one name and occurs often enough, a pretty certain "full identification" can still be achieved. If there are more names but one of those names is very predominant, the same still holds.
The other thing is this: a system that can achieve 95% accuracy at something, can do exactly that. That it doesn't always do it is completely irrelevant until somebody cialms that it can do that.
A final note that does not apply to your post, but to many posts in many discussions about this topic, is this: If one investigation says that there is a 95% probability that the author of a given crime is Belgian, I'm not worried. If that causes the investigating US or Chinese or ... agency to have a closer look at Belgium and to then conclude that there is a 95% probability that the author lives in my town, I'm still not worried. If they then pull in another data source and eliminate 95% of the local population of that town because they probably (!) don't have the required IT knowledge, I'm still not worried, but it's starting to feel a bit warmer. If they then check up all the remaining people one by one and use whatever analysis method to conclude with 95% probability that I'm matching the remaining profile info they have about the criminal, they still don't have proof, but it's starting to feel pretty warm nonetheless. Because at that point they will pull out all the tricks to try to pin it on me and the few remaining people. From then on, if I really am the one they need, the smallest mistake I make, e.g. under the pressure of stress, will betray me. Once this point has been reached, it does not matter at all that they took a big gamble when zooming in on Belgium in the first place and again when zooming in on my town, and... because by then they have proof and maybe even a confession.
Quoting from part 2: "Now let me show you what multi-tasking is." On Win95. ROTFLMAO!!!!! :-)
I can't speak for the parent poster, but I can tell you from personal experience that in my country an employer is not entitled to read an employee's e-mail, specificallu because doing so would be blatant a privacy violation. The only way to get access is via a police investigation, using a proper search warrant.
I recently worked somewhere for 2 months as part of an MBA internship. The company wanted to have access to the project history after I was gone. Due to the nature of the project, my e-mail history was a rather big part of that. They told me up front and I agreed, as I have more than enough e-mail adresses for use when I want to do something my supervisor was not entitled to know anyway (like searching for a new job, inclusing at that very same company). But IT told us that it could not legally be done. As a workaround, we had to create a project e-mail account instead of a personal one.
No, I did read what you wrote, but I see that I only typed half the reply I initially had in mind. A separate service can be duplicated and shielded juat as was well as anything else. Not exactly superefficient, but it can easily be done. All your first application needs to work is a port number to talk to. Idem for the second. The applications don't care whether those numbers are the same and/or served by a common process.
Anyway, even if you share the service process between multiple applications, it is trivial to track whether or not an ongoing uninstall is the last one. All it takes on Windows is a single registry key.
Quoting the article: "I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism,"
In what way is blocking words like genocide going to help preventing terrorism? Does our friend the commisioner even know what the word means? Is he serious that covering up the WWII holocaust or the whole Yugoslavia disaster is the best way forward? The last parties that tried to cover those things up are now laughing in their graves, if they have any, for it seems that they have won their criminal wars after all.
By the way, does he know that "kill" is a standard UNIX command that doesn't harm anyone? :-)
Here in Kansas, we tried to eliminate ... embryos ... and other things that weren't in the bible.
You mean you guys and galls tried to make abortion mandatory? :-) Of course that's not working for preventing terrorists from getting hold of bomb recepies...
You obviously have no clue what you are blabbering about. There is no reason whatsoever why you can't have multiple independent products protected by the same third party mechanism without linking said products together. I know, because I've done it.
In short: Nobody interested in anti-pirating wants the licensing to be in a dedicated dll, since those are easy to locate, break, and replace. Licensing code should always be fully merged into a key component of the product you're protecting and as such be "invisible". That automatically means that you can have multiple copies of it that are not aware of each other and that are automatically uninstalled together with the product they protect.
Do you seriously mean to say that IT savvy people are not allowed to work outside the IT department? Then how do you ever expect upper management to understand IT and the IT department's needs and concerns? Or maybe let me ask you this: do you consider Microsoft or Google to have an IT department or to be their own IT department?
He must be, given that he thinks that 50K lines is a lot.
You misunderstood my message. The game I'm refering to has only one outcome: "patents are bad". Until, that is, this stance suddenly doesn't fit the /. dogmas after all, because then it suddenly has multiple ones. Hence the cookie applies, even if I don't say so at all.
Note that it's not the game I personally play, as I don't agree that patents are either bad or panacea, but it's the game that many people on /. play when the whole attacking concept of IP.
Oh yes you do. Maybe not any more by the time you're almost completely gone. And also not when it all first starts (slowly). But in between there is a period when you're aware of what's happening and still lucid enough to understand. That phase is the true torture period for the person affected.
So what do you want instead? Do you want Apple to patent, trademark, copyright, and encrypt, the hell out of the entire iAlphabet range of potential products and how they might work just so nobody can copy them? Why are patents used to prevent copying of innovative ideas judged to be bad when they are owned by certain companies, while copying a great idea is judged to be bad when the item being copied was engineered by some "holy grail" company or nerd god?
For $DEITY's sake, what Nokia may not be very original or creative, but if Apple didn't patent their iPhone properly, there's nothing wrong with it. If Apple did patent it properly, Nokia wouldn't have copied or would/will be facing a law suit. Note that if Nokia found a way around any relevant existing Apple patents, then: 1) Apple didn't patent properly after all, despite having their patents; 2) Nokia has been more creative in finding a way around the patents than a very first look at their phone suggests and hence should get the credit for it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: one can't have one's cookie and eat it as well.