It looks like there are narrow enough technicalities
distinguishing web links from the cited prior art
that BT may win it. We need such an outrage to
make it obvious that the patent system is broken
and needs to be reformed. Otherwise instead of
having one big outrage lead to doing our something about
the problem, we'll keep having our endless parade
of slightly smaller outrages screwing up our
lives for the rest of eternity.
1. Nearly all name-brand laptop computers come with Windows preinstalled. It's not optional. If you don't want Windows, you have to pick a different computer that doesn't have the hardware you want. If you were buying some generic clone desktop computer, sure, getting it with preinstalled software would be stupid. But that's not always type of computer you're buying.
2. Getting refunds out of MS isn't unheard of, but it's very difficult. There are many entertaining stories about the hoops people have jumped through to get refunds, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Either way, not everyone wants to jump through hoops.
Say I recently bought a new laptop installed. I powered it up, declined the Windows EULA, reformatted the disk (trashed Windows) and installed Linux.
The Linuxjournal article indicates that I can now resell the bundled Windows copy (well, the restore CD, if I was lucky enough to get one) and that's equivalent to getting a Windows refund. But it isn't:
Many computers these days come with Windows preinstalled in a hard disc partition, so there's no CD to resell. I doubt very much that the ruling extends to letting you copy the HD partition to CD-R and sell the CD-R. You're definitely copying something if you do that.
Even if you get an install CD, chances are it will only work on the exact computer model that it came with. There's a significant aftermarket in install CD's for various models of laptops, but they generally don't sell for nearly as much as generic OEM Windows installation CD's.
So while being able to resell bundled software is better than nothing, it's less good (even in pure monetary terms, not counting the resale hassle) than not having to pay for the unwanted bundled software in the first place.
1. Low cost ANR headphones (that are basically microphones playing back the ambient noise out of phase through Walkman headphones) aren't that useful for office-type noise. They're fairly useful on airliners, where there's a LOT of low-frequency rumble they can remove, and fairly quiet at mid frequencies.
2. Expensive aviation-type ANR headphones (someone posted links) are better than the low cost ones but you still shouldn't expect any miracles. There's no substitute for an actual quiet environment.
3. For quieting down your closet, check the products and info pages at soundproofing.org.
Despite its.org domain it appears to be a regular
commercial outfit, and the website design is not so great, but the stuff there looks
pretty good.
No. It's the bubble before you need a license and FBI background check before you can
own any personal computer (registered with the government) that you can install your own
software on. See
The Right To Read for more info about the coming regime.
a month or so ago. I figured then that they must be discontinued. I was going to get one (hard to resist at the price) but didn't get around to it. I don't know if any are left. I'll check next time I'm there.
Really though, the device was just not all that impressive. I don't know what I'd use it for if I had one. The Zaurus is a lot nicer.
which happened to be on a traditional party holiday a few years ago, I went to a party and the host played some LP phonograph records in honor of the occasion. It was fun.
If you look at the photo near the bottom of this news article, you'll see the box of shreds delivered to Congress by an Enron person are long, thin strips, which can be reassembled by computer imaging. The US Embassy in Teheran used a shredder like that in the days before cheap computers but nonetheless, the shreds were reassembled by Iranian students after the embassy was seized in 1979, causing the US embarassment. US agencies must now use secret-approved shredders for classified documents. They chop the paper into tiny pieces about the size of folded staples.
There was once a company called unshredder.com which sold software for shredded document reassembly. They're gone now, and their domain name has been acquired by the Art of Hacking, which kept Unshredder's original blurb on its site (linked above). I'm sure the FBI and other forensic agencies have similar capabilities, so if they're not already working on reconstructing the Enron stuff, it's probably due to political corruption, though I'm hardly surprised.
I found most of this stuff out while shopping for shredders a couple months ago--I ended up getting a Royal Orca CIA 12x at Office Max. See my review here if such things interest you.
are more cheap satellites (built by the amateur radio community since the 1960's) that are almost certainly part of the inspiration of this project. They spawned the whole field of microsatellites.
At $8k the main attraction of the fuel cell is that you can use it indoors. That can be vital if you're dependent on some electrically powered medical device or something like that. If you just want electric power in the desert for normal purposes, at least til fuel cells get cheaper, it's far more practical to use a standard gasoline-powered generator.
If Microsoft is serious about security, they'll supply encrypted file systems and encrypted email that are easy to enable and use, and suddenly vast amounts of email traffic will go "dark" to eavesdropping and wiretaps. The FBI tolerates some geeks using PGP now, but will completely flip out if it's deployed on the scale of Outlook encrypting everything by default. Legislated, mandatory key escrow will be a done deal. Ashcroft will read our mail forever.
as far as I know. If you're thinking of the AT&T vs. University of California case (the idiot CEO of AT&T's Unix division sued UC Berkeley for distributing Berkeley Unix not realizing that what he was suing over was code written at Berkeley), it was settled out of court when Berkeley pointed out that if AT&T pressed the suit, it would have to stop distributing a lot of System V Unix because they had breached the BSD license and not given credit. Berkeley had to remove a few files from its distribution (hence "4.4BSD Lite") but then was able to ship an almost-complete system that was entirely free (previous versions needed Unix licenses). The AT&T CEO was fired/resigned immediately afterwards and went on to screw up some different company.
This was happening, by the way, right around the time when the first usable free Unix-oid systems for 386's started circulating: Bill Jolitz's BSD-based system and one based on a new kernel written by some CS student in Finland who nobody had ever heard of. BSD was by far the more established system but the legal cloud created by the AT&T lawsuit was IMHO a large factor in why Linux overtook BSD in popularity and never looked back.
According to former Los Alamos nuclear bomb designer Ted Taylor (in John McPhee's excellent book
The Curve of Binding Energy, which is about nuclear proliferation), separating plutonium from reactor fuel is much easier than separating U235 from a uranium isotope mix.
The issue is that U235 and U238 are the same chemical element with the same chemical properties. They can only be separated by distinguishing their atomic weights, hence very expensive gaseous diffusion processes, centrifuges, laser isotope separation, etc.
Plutonium, on the other hand, is a chemical element in its own right, and can be separated from reactor fuel by chemical means. That's certainly not trivial, but it's much easier than isotope separation.
Taylor compared the difficulty of separating plutonium with the difficulty of processing opium poppies into heroin: both are achievable by someone with money to obtain the required materials and chemical engineering skills. And as the heroin example shows, it can be done on a large scale despite the efforts of governments to stop it.
Call me a throwback or GNU-head but I like texinfo. The stuff you type reflects the structure of your document, it's plain ascii (easy to edit with emacs or your favorite editor), and compiles to online docs, html, or printed docs using TeX. It does make some impositions on your writing style but I find the texinfo formatting commands much easier to deal with than (say) html tags. I use it even when I want plain ascii docs. I just don't put in any "node" commands. Then I run the texinfo doc
through the emacs formatter and use the formatted ascii output.
Doubtful. They'll just have more suits to defend.
Besides Creative Labs vs. Aureal we'll also have
J. Random Idiot vs. Aureal.
If a big company wants to make you spend money,
they can do that through endless depositions and
discovery, no matter how quickly the courts
themselves operate.
The idea of streamlining the legal process sounds nice from an efficiency point of view but misses the purpose of a lot of court procedures. More efficiency doesn't mean people will spend less money getting the courts to resolve their disputes. It means that on the same amount of money, they'll be able to litigate more.
Part of the reason for all the mandatory personal court appearances in the various stages of a lawsuit is to make sure both sides continue to incur legal fees every step of the way. That encourages them to settle their differences and get their cases out of the courts. It actually works fairly well in practice. An awful lot of lawsuits are bogus and the current system is set up to make the litigants ask themselves "is it really worth this hassle and expense?".
If you think we have too many lawsuits now, imagine what it would be like if litigating was easier.
Steve Smale is a real mathematician, one of the great ones of the 20th century (he'd be in his mid 60's now). I had some classes from him at UC Berkeley in the 90's and know him slightly. He's not a computer guy, but there's no bullshit about him and I'm amazed if he's actually been pulled into a scam like this. He retired from UC a few years ago and last I heard he was teaching in Hong Kong. I'll see if I can find an email address for him and ask him what the story is.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like there are narrow enough technicalities distinguishing web links from the cited prior art that BT may win it. We need such an outrage to make it obvious that the patent system is broken and needs to be reformed. Otherwise instead of having one big outrage lead to doing our something about the problem, we'll keep having our endless parade of slightly smaller outrages screwing up our lives for the rest of eternity.
1. Nearly all name-brand laptop computers come with Windows preinstalled. It's not optional. If you don't want Windows, you have to pick a different computer that doesn't have the hardware you want. If you were buying some generic clone desktop computer, sure, getting it with preinstalled software would be stupid. But that's not always type of computer you're buying. 2. Getting refunds out of MS isn't unheard of, but it's very difficult. There are many entertaining stories about the hoops people have jumped through to get refunds, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Either way, not everyone wants to jump through hoops.
The Linuxjournal article indicates that I can now resell the bundled Windows copy (well, the restore CD, if I was lucky enough to get one) and that's equivalent to getting a Windows refund. But it isn't:
- Many computers these days come with Windows preinstalled in a hard disc partition, so there's no CD to resell. I doubt very much that the ruling extends to letting you copy the HD partition to CD-R and sell the CD-R. You're definitely copying something if you do that.
- Even if you get an install CD, chances are it will only work on the exact computer model that it came with. There's a significant aftermarket in install CD's for various models of laptops, but they generally don't sell for nearly as much as generic OEM Windows installation CD's.
So while being able to resell bundled software is better than nothing, it's less good (even in pure monetary terms, not counting the resale hassle) than not having to pay for the unwanted bundled software in the first place.2. Expensive aviation-type ANR headphones (someone posted links) are better than the low cost ones but you still shouldn't expect any miracles. There's no substitute for an actual quiet environment.
3. For quieting down your closet, check the products and info pages at soundproofing.org. Despite its .org domain it appears to be a regular
commercial outfit, and the website design is not so great, but the stuff there looks
pretty good.
No. It's the bubble before you need a license and FBI background check before you can own any personal computer (registered with the government) that you can install your own software on. See The Right To Read for more info about the coming regime.
a month or so ago. I figured then that they must be discontinued. I was going to get one (hard to resist at the price) but didn't get around to it. I don't know if any are left. I'll check next time I'm there. Really though, the device was just not all that impressive. I don't know what I'd use it for if I had one. The Zaurus is a lot nicer.
which happened to be on a traditional party holiday a few years ago, I went to a party and the host played some LP phonograph records in honor of the occasion. It was fun.
There was once a company called unshredder.com which sold software for shredded document reassembly. They're gone now, and their domain name has been acquired by the Art of Hacking, which kept Unshredder's original blurb on its site (linked above). I'm sure the FBI and other forensic agencies have similar capabilities, so if they're not already working on reconstructing the Enron stuff, it's probably due to political corruption, though I'm hardly surprised. I found most of this stuff out while shopping for shredders a couple months ago--I ended up getting a Royal Orca CIA 12x at Office Max. See my review here if such things interest you.
are more cheap satellites (built by the amateur radio community since the 1960's) that are almost certainly part of the inspiration of this project. They spawned the whole field of microsatellites.
I think you mean 200 minutes, not 200 hours.
At $8k the main attraction of the fuel cell is that you can use it indoors. That can be vital if you're dependent on some electrically powered medical device or something like that. If you just want electric power in the desert for normal purposes, at least til fuel cells get cheaper, it's far more practical to use a standard gasoline-powered generator.
If Microsoft is serious about security, they'll supply encrypted file systems and encrypted email that are easy to enable and use, and suddenly vast amounts of email traffic will go "dark" to eavesdropping and wiretaps. The FBI tolerates some geeks using PGP now, but will completely flip out if it's deployed on the scale of Outlook encrypting everything by default. Legislated, mandatory key escrow will be a done deal. Ashcroft will read our mail forever.
This was happening, by the way, right around the time when the first usable free Unix-oid systems for 386's started circulating: Bill Jolitz's BSD-based system and one based on a new kernel written by some CS student in Finland who nobody had ever heard of. BSD was by far the more established system but the legal cloud created by the AT&T lawsuit was IMHO a large factor in why Linux overtook BSD in popularity and never looked back.
This CBS Marketwatch article gives some insight into how these decisions get made. Welcome to the Corporate States of America.
The issue is that U235 and U238 are the same chemical element with the same chemical properties. They can only be separated by distinguishing their atomic weights, hence very expensive gaseous diffusion processes, centrifuges, laser isotope separation, etc. Plutonium, on the other hand, is a chemical element in its own right, and can be separated from reactor fuel by chemical means. That's certainly not trivial, but it's much easier than isotope separation.
Taylor compared the difficulty of separating plutonium with the difficulty of processing opium poppies into heroin: both are achievable by someone with money to obtain the required materials and chemical engineering skills. And as the heroin example shows, it can be done on a large scale despite the efforts of governments to stop it.
Call me a throwback or GNU-head but I like texinfo. The stuff you type reflects the structure of your document, it's plain ascii (easy to edit with emacs or your favorite editor), and compiles to online docs, html, or printed docs using TeX. It does make some impositions on your writing style but I find the texinfo formatting commands much easier to deal with than (say) html tags. I use it even when I want plain ascii docs. I just don't put in any "node" commands. Then I run the texinfo doc
through the emacs formatter and use the formatted ascii output.
So, it's old and limited but still my favorite.
Doubtful. They'll just have more suits to defend.
Besides Creative Labs vs. Aureal we'll also have
J. Random Idiot vs. Aureal.
If a big company wants to make you spend money,
they can do that through endless depositions and
discovery, no matter how quickly the courts
themselves operate.
The idea of streamlining the legal process sounds nice from an efficiency point of view but misses the purpose of a lot of court procedures. More efficiency doesn't mean people will spend less money getting the courts to resolve their disputes. It means that on the same amount of money, they'll be able to litigate more.
Part of the reason for all the mandatory personal court appearances in the various stages of a lawsuit is to make sure both sides continue to incur legal fees every step of the way. That encourages them to settle their differences and get their cases out of the courts. It actually works fairly well in practice. An awful lot of lawsuits are bogus and the current system is set up to make the litigants ask themselves "is it really worth this hassle and expense?".
If you think we have too many lawsuits now, imagine what it would be like if litigating was easier.
Steve Smale is a real mathematician, one of the great ones of the 20th century (he'd be in his mid 60's now). I had some classes from him at UC Berkeley in the 90's and know him slightly. He's not a computer guy, but there's no bullshit about him and I'm amazed if he's actually been pulled into a scam like this. He retired from UC a few years ago and last I heard he was teaching in Hong Kong. I'll see if I can find an email address for him and ask him what the story is.