Yes, a work of fiction has described a technological innovation. However, fiction is not considered relevant for prior art. Among other things, it does not describe something in sufficient detail to educate the reader how it works. Try getting a Star Trek transporter to work. Second, it's fiction, so it's not "credible." However, as we see from flip phones, it does inspire engineers.
All this is saying is that long line lengths are bad; which is nothing new.[1] Newspapers keep their columns narrow to improve readability. All this does is tweak the indentation to try to speed things up; but is that good for comprehension?
The author's essay misunderstands copyright and accuses the prior article of slight-of-hand while subtly acknowledging the fundamental premise of the prior article.
GPL is a license under current copyright law. Conversely, absent copyright law's enforceability, GPL is unenforceable. Abolition of copyright law does not result in GPL---it results in all works immediately entering public domain. This strips all control from the author.
There is a subtle nod in the OS community that discourages code forks for the sake of forking code. I'm involved in a community where a member of the community is presently engaging in a sort of "embrace and extend." He claims his enhancements make the underlying core code better, but at the same time radically change its behavior. When challenged, he implicitly admits his plans. This results in a response from the community to check his attempt to fork the code. The point is, even though there is GPL, OS people try to avoid derivations unless necessary. The contra example is X11 and XORG---the former stagnated and the latter breathed new life.
The original intent of copyright law is one of reward and fairness. The first to articulate an idea should profit somewhat from that articulation. Modern copyright law abuses that fairness by extending the limits of copyright protecting too far. What is wanted is reform of copyright, not removal.
That said, if you look at the development of American copyright, it has become abusive in response to copyright laws of the Continent; especially France---where the creator can enjoy moral rights for grossly long periods of time. What we need to do is embrace our Anglo-American legal heritage and not French law.
"The guy has been accused of violating copyright law by certain people in the US. He has not been convicted. The question of his guilt has not even been examined by a court. He has been extradited not for violating copyright law, but for being accused of violating copyright law."
FTFA: "...Griffiths, 44, is in a Virginia cell, facing up to 10 years in an American prison after a guilty plea late last month...."
This means the "accused" admitted he was wrong. Therefore, in the eyes of the law, his "question of guilt" has been examined by a court. Actually, there is not even a question of guilt, but an admission of guilt. He convicted himself in court. No need for the whole process. How many more times do I have to say he's guilty as examined by a court. A judge even has the chance to look at the facts of the case with a guilty plea and say "there's no case here, dismissed." But, that is not happening here because what occurred is legal in the US, Australia, and international law.
Better check your facts next time. Oh, wait; this is Slashdot.
This sort of thing happens enough among uneducated (legally speaking) developers and companies that there's a term for it---non-exclusive license of copyright---which is essentially a contract issue. This is an equitable issue (unjust enrichment) which falls under state law. The long and the short of is is that they cannot prevent your using it, redistributing it, or even selling it to another software house; but neither can you stop them.
The normal rule is the author of the work owns the copyright. However, when the work is done by an employee for an employer, or when the contract explicitly transfers ownership, we typically have a work-for-hire. When the contract is silent and the author is not an employee, we can have a non-exclusive transfer of license. Since the author did the work and was compensated, then the compensating party has the right to use the property free of any license control. The _Foad_ case is a good example of this. (http://www.ivanhoffman.com/nightmare.html)
The author cannot prevent you from using the software because you paid for its development. Heck, the author cannot prevent you from giving the software to a third party for them to improve it. Foad involved an architecture firm creating plans of a shopping mall for a contractor who sold the construction project to another contractor. The second contractor then gave the plans to its outsourced architecture firm who removed all references to the original firm and essentially copied it. The Ninth Circuit said the nature of the relationship between the original parties created a non-exclusive license which allowed for this. In law, this is grounded in equitable principles of quasi-contract or unjust enrichment. The court in _Foad_ split in two directions (2-1) on the underlying cause of the transfer, but were unified in the existence of the transfer.
This is a state law issue because Congress implicitly ignores non-exclusive transfers, and the occurrence of these transfers is contractual in nature. Contracts are usually governed by state law.
I think they can revoke the license; but only by paying you back all that you spent. When the grant is made "for compensation" (usually money), the grant is irrevocable. In two circuits, the revocation can only happen when the license is between 35 and 40 years old!
Get thee to a good IP attorney and stop asking/. We are not lawyers, and this is not legal advice.
As an aside, the Open-Gaming License put out by WOTC (Hasbro is it now) is a explicit non-exclusive license grant.
"No. It's just not true. You couldn't find a prosecutor in this country who would prosecute either of us for lying about a BJ unless there were some ulterior motive behind it. And you wouldn't find an honest judge who would entertain such arguments."
Federal prosecutors go after perjury all the time. That's why its better never to say anything to them under oath---because they will invariably catch you in some lie then use that to get you for perjury. This is what happened to Libby and Martha Stewart: they could not be convicted of the crime they were investigated for; so they were convicted of lying under oath (i.e., perjury). This happens far more than you may think at first blush.
Clinton perjured himself. Perjury is a felony. A felony is a high crime. A President is impeachable for committing a high crime. Therefore, Clinton was impeached. However, impeachment is by its nature a highly political event. It's about like engaging in a coup d'etat. If you're going to do either, you had better be sure you win; or the political (or physical) repercussions will be (politically or physically) fatal. Just ask Asa Hutchinson. Now, do you think the Dems will succeed in impeaching Dick? No.
I think the true message of Fed 10 is that you will always have factions. Checks and Balances _needs_ factions to be viable. With factions you have Group A trying to undermine Group B. So, no group can get away with too much power because C&B will allow the other group to pull them off balance.
The worst situation with C&B is for factions to get along. Then, it does not matter who's trying to be unconstitutional, because everybody is working together. Pork Barrel spending was supposed to be impossible because factionalism was supposed to block a single congressman from funneling Federal money home. However, _all_ congressmen do it, so they work together to spread the pork out effectively.
When you say "no" parties, the only _real_ way for that to happen is for there to be _one_ party.
"There are more trees today [in North America] than there has ever been, and the simple reason is because we [Americans] use a lot of paper."
I beg to differ. Manhattan was covered in trees, as was the footprint of just about every major city on the East Coast. Most of Arkansas was covered in trees, but now roughly half has been converted into farms. With the exception of the Great Plains areas and perhaps Kaliphornea, farm land has reduced the amount of "tree-able" space. Then there are all those highways and interstates that occupy space once occupied by tress.
So, while there may have been fewer trees 100 years ago, there are still fewer trees than _ever_ were.
"You create more carbon dioxide emissions by making paper and burying it to get rid of the minute amount of carbon that the tree(s) obtained from its photosynthesis process."
Right. The better way to reduce CO2 emissions is to just burn the trees where they stand. Landfills are the obvious cause of CO2 emissions.
"Even if the planet is 2 times as big as our planet, it could be spinning faster than ours."
As the GPP said, the planet is likely tidal locked to its star. The planet has an orbit period of 13 days, which would make that its revolution rate. I'm not going to sit here and do the math that determines whether we're looking at a tidal locked planet. Even if we are not, it is close enough that its revolution rate will not be fast enough to significantly offset its gravity.
As for living on 2.25Gs, you may manage to pull that driving, but pull that falling down the stairs and see what happens. The first humans would have an exceedingly difficult time not killing themselves stumbling around---which is something they would do a lot of because of the high gravity.
"Can anyone suggest a good explanations (sic) for this seemingly dubious election-eve transfer?"
Somebody obviously hacked the Netcraft server to make it look like the Republicans were so stupid as to try to steal an election by using their own block of IPs. It also seems amazing that the GOP would wait until the last minute to change the DNS, as it can sometimes take a bit longer than expected for such a transfer to properly propagate. Heck, if they were smart enough to steal an election by changing the DNS, why not spoof the entry to make it look like it pointed to the Democrat Party?
"Quantum mechanics is an actual scientific theory based on empirical evidence..."
The same could be said of the old Earth-centric theory, once upon a time. Retrograde made perfect sense. Then came that crazy fellow who said the Sun was the center, which led to much weeping and gnashing of teeth. For the toothless scientists, teeth were provided for adequate gnashing.
Patent coverage is effective on date of filing; but only actionable after the patent is issued. That is, if you file in 1987, you have to wait until the patent is issued (1991) until you can start enforcing it---even against those who started using the patented idea in 1990. But, the patent coverage runs for 20 years from filing date (even then).[1] The patent was filed in March, 1987, which means the patent should have expired by now.
What we appear to have here is a patent troll who waited until the last minute to file, hoping to grab as much infringing money as possible. However, the doctrine of laches prevents this sort of behavior. Laches means that you cannot sit on your rights and constructively encourage infringement only to later sue. Think of it as entrapment or inducement.
More importantly, this idea has been mainstream for years. Visual Basic (et al.) allow for this sort of tabbing behavior. The question is whether M$ is licensed, or whether the troll has been sitting on his rights. Beyond that, we can't know all of the ins and outs of the case at this point.
My problem with upgrading recently was how Ubuntu handled my Grub menu.lst. The box I am referring to has/hda1 as a FAT drive with the system restore junk for WinXP./hda2 is WinXP./hda3 is Linux. One of the late alpha (or was it early beta) updates redid the menu.lst to map to UUID numbers instead of the more user friendly/hdX series.
The problem is that it thinks/hda1 is Linux, and/hda2 is WinXP. Naturally, the latter is right, and I haven't the time to go back and correct the box so that it points to the right partition. I would, if I knew enough about UUIDs.
Could somebody explain why we left the old way?
My other issue is the FF series uses a more recent driver for my Linksys wireless PCI card---a release that has been broken since December. The professed solution is to recompile. I used to use Gentoo, so I can handle that; but this is Ubuntu---I shouldn't have to.
http://webtypography.net/ This link goes to a way of implementing Elements of Typology online; which is supposed to improve readability. Its interesting in that it sort of goes against the common idea with screen size and web text. The common idea, as I understand it, is that we should not worry about the 800X600 and use as much screen real estate as possible. Then, text columns can stretch as wide as my 19" monitor will let them. The problem is, that works against readability. The "optimal" is about 4.5". I use 37em for text body width, and that seems to work.
The statement "only country" belies an argumentum ad populum. When we acknowledged the woman's right to vote, we were the only country (or one of the only). So, was that wrong? We are one of the few countries to use the common law system; a system of law that proved its success for over a 1000 years and derived from the rights _rich_ Romans got (such as jury trial), which the peasants did not.
There's nothing wrong with being the only country, especially when we're right.
You've heard the likes of Steve Forbes say that a flat tax would work wonders for the U.S. Why not use a virtual world setting to test it out? That is, have a virtual world where there is progressive taxation, and another where there is flat tax. Then, measure the effects. I mean, why not use virtual worlds to test out various economic theories?
"...the Republican senate tried to impeach Clinton..."
You might want to re-check your copy of the Constitution. The House impeaches; the Senate convicts or acquits. The House passed the bill of impeachment, making Billy the second President to be impeached (the other being A. Johnson). As with the former impeachment, Billy was not convicted. Conversely, Nixon was never impeached, but only because he quit first. In all likelihood, he would have been convicted.
"The law might change to make the process legal before the patent runs out. But you need to patent it right away to establish priority."
The answer is no, you cannot. First, the patent law clearly says you cannot. Second, public policy says you can't. In courts, patents are given the binding effect of a law---with the same rules for statutory interpretation, etc. So, if you patent an illegal thing, then it would be legal. A patent is "legislated" through the USPTO under authority of the president acting under Congressional legislation which derives its authority from the Constitution. Thus, if anybody "above" you in authority says it is illegal, then the patent does not have its binding effect of law.
Okay, I think these versions need some work. HTML 4.x was nice. HTML 5.0 sounds a bit much. Perhaps we should jazz it up a bit? It's too late for HTML XP, as the "eXtreme" ship has sailed. Perhaps HTML Vista? *ducks*
"Also irrelevant. If someone has a political agenda, we might suspect that they slant or distort the data, then we check the data through a peer-review process."
But there's the rub. The peer-review process is inherently political---any process involving more than one person is political. The hope is enough dispassionate people will put politics aside and look at the facts. However, global warming has become a hotly political issue which serves to reduce the population of dispassionate people; therefore peer review is another form of politics.
I have heard (I'm a rank layman) that hard-core environmentalists have achieved majority status on the boards of several peer-reviewed journals. The fact that it is even possible reduces the credibility of peer review. I conclude "peer review" is just another way of making another argumentum ad verecundiam argument. You don't need peer review to assert gravity, heliocentricity, or tooth decay.
Please remember that peer review would have discounted Galileo. You can put a dress on a pig, lipstick on its lips and call it Hillary; but in the end, its still a peer review---er, pig.
"...No idea how that happened. Oh well, since there's no evidence of our transgressions thanks to this 'oopsie', we'll just go home now..."
Except, it does not exactly work like that. Law is more experience than reason; courts know that if you have evidence that points to your guilt you're more likely to "lose" it. So, when the plaintiff can prove you probably had evidence showing your guilt and you fail to produce it, the court can allow a negative inference to be drawn. This means the judge will tell the jury that the defendant likely had incriminating evidence and destroyed it and that the jury is free to assume it was destroyed to cover the defendant's ass.
I clerked for a plaintiff's firm that was good at this sort of thing. The attorney tended to have defendants who had dispatch records that were destroyed quarterly by standard operating procedure (SOP) (required by law that they have _a_ SOP). However, one defendant had a special SOP to destroy such tapes as soon as frigg'n possible when something bad happened---like three separate, fatal accidents caused by its company on one day recorded on one dispatch tape. The request for the tape was made within a couple of weeks and "oops," the defendant lost it. The Court had a field day with the defendant.
The problem, however, is that a gullible jury can be persuaded that the adage "never assume malice where incompetence will suffice" is in play.
Here there was probably an email retention SOP that was violated by these emails going missing. In that case, the judge is probably giving Intel another week to settle or come up with the emails or allow AMD to move for a negative inference that it will more likely win.
This is a problem of the FOSS community turning on itself. If there was a GPL violation, the proper thing to do is own up to it and seek a re-license, which is what the owner of the GPL'd code wanted.
I am still reading the whole Gmain thread, and am quite shocked by Theo's comments. I agree with another fellow who said that FOSS wireless driver development teams should work closely together to ensure the proprietary world doesn't overwhelm the effort. But, I digress . . .
The core issue is whether the BCW developer copied GPL'd code, which the holder of the GPL copyright asserts. Plenty of clean examples were given, and the ability to investigate the entire tree for both sets of code makes it a quick search issue. Much better than the SCO/M$ v. IBM suit. Theo's response to the allegation is immature at least:
1. Ad hominem attacks: calling Mike inhuman and attacking him for making the issue public. 2. Irrelevant: saying that the bcw code does not work so there's no copyright issue. Copyright speaks to content, not functionality. 3. It was an accident: Claiming the bcw "accidentally" copied GPL'd code. How can you accidentally copy entire blocks of code? 4. That the code copy was temporary scaffolding: which counters #3, above. You can't claim the code copy was an accident or unintentional then say the copy was intentional for a short period of time. Theo says the code was copied to get other parts of the bcw driver to work, then would be re-written. The problem here is twofold. First, the code was copied and checked into the repository under BSD licensing, which is a violation in-and-of-itself. Second, putting the code there pending re-write means the re-write would be a derivative of the original GPL'd code---which is still a copyright violation.
Above all, the entire line of discussion is not relevant. There's a claim of copyright violation. If the code is there, then it is a violation, whether or not it was "accidental." This extends beyond issues of header calls which are so ordinary as to not be copyrightable. (At least, under U.S. law, if there are only a few ways to convey an idea, then it cannot be copyrighted.) Whether the accusation was public is not relevant; was there a violation? The responsible action would be to investigate when the GPL'd author made the accusation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, a work of fiction has described a technological innovation. However, fiction is not considered relevant for prior art. Among other things, it does not describe something in sufficient detail to educate the reader how it works. Try getting a Star Trek transporter to work. Second, it's fiction, so it's not "credible." However, as we see from flip phones, it does inspire engineers.
All this is saying is that long line lengths are bad; which is nothing new.[1] Newspapers keep their columns narrow to improve readability. All this does is tweak the indentation to try to speed things up; but is that good for comprehension?
r izontal_Motion/2.1.2/
[1]: http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Ho
The author's essay misunderstands copyright and accuses the prior article of slight-of-hand while subtly acknowledging the fundamental premise of the prior article.
GPL is a license under current copyright law. Conversely, absent copyright law's enforceability, GPL is unenforceable. Abolition of copyright law does not result in GPL---it results in all works immediately entering public domain. This strips all control from the author.
There is a subtle nod in the OS community that discourages code forks for the sake of forking code. I'm involved in a community where a member of the community is presently engaging in a sort of "embrace and extend." He claims his enhancements make the underlying core code better, but at the same time radically change its behavior. When challenged, he implicitly admits his plans. This results in a response from the community to check his attempt to fork the code. The point is, even though there is GPL, OS people try to avoid derivations unless necessary. The contra example is X11 and XORG---the former stagnated and the latter breathed new life.
The original intent of copyright law is one of reward and fairness. The first to articulate an idea should profit somewhat from that articulation. Modern copyright law abuses that fairness by extending the limits of copyright protecting too far. What is wanted is reform of copyright, not removal.
That said, if you look at the development of American copyright, it has become abusive in response to copyright laws of the Continent; especially France---where the creator can enjoy moral rights for grossly long periods of time. What we need to do is embrace our Anglo-American legal heritage and not French law.
"The guy has been accused of violating copyright law by certain people in the US. He has not been convicted. The question of his guilt has not even been examined by a court. He has been extradited not for violating copyright law, but for being accused of violating copyright law."
FTFA: "...Griffiths, 44, is in a Virginia cell, facing up to 10 years in an American prison after a guilty plea late last month...."
This means the "accused" admitted he was wrong. Therefore, in the eyes of the law, his "question of guilt" has been examined by a court. Actually, there is not even a question of guilt, but an admission of guilt. He convicted himself in court. No need for the whole process. How many more times do I have to say he's guilty as examined by a court. A judge even has the chance to look at the facts of the case with a guilty plea and say "there's no case here, dismissed." But, that is not happening here because what occurred is legal in the US, Australia, and international law.
Better check your facts next time. Oh, wait; this is Slashdot.
This sort of thing happens enough among uneducated (legally speaking) developers and companies that there's a term for it---non-exclusive license of copyright---which is essentially a contract issue. This is an equitable issue (unjust enrichment) which falls under state law. The long and the short of is is that they cannot prevent your using it, redistributing it, or even selling it to another software house; but neither can you stop them.
/. We are not lawyers, and this is not legal advice.
The normal rule is the author of the work owns the copyright. However, when the work is done by an employee for an employer, or when the contract explicitly transfers ownership, we typically have a work-for-hire. When the contract is silent and the author is not an employee, we can have a non-exclusive transfer of license. Since the author did the work and was compensated, then the compensating party has the right to use the property free of any license control. The _Foad_ case is a good example of this. (http://www.ivanhoffman.com/nightmare.html)
The author cannot prevent you from using the software because you paid for its development. Heck, the author cannot prevent you from giving the software to a third party for them to improve it. Foad involved an architecture firm creating plans of a shopping mall for a contractor who sold the construction project to another contractor. The second contractor then gave the plans to its outsourced architecture firm who removed all references to the original firm and essentially copied it. The Ninth Circuit said the nature of the relationship between the original parties created a non-exclusive license which allowed for this. In law, this is grounded in equitable principles of quasi-contract or unjust enrichment. The court in _Foad_ split in two directions (2-1) on the underlying cause of the transfer, but were unified in the existence of the transfer.
This is a state law issue because Congress implicitly ignores non-exclusive transfers, and the occurrence of these transfers is contractual in nature. Contracts are usually governed by state law.
I think they can revoke the license; but only by paying you back all that you spent. When the grant is made "for compensation" (usually money), the grant is irrevocable. In two circuits, the revocation can only happen when the license is between 35 and 40 years old!
Get thee to a good IP attorney and stop asking
As an aside, the Open-Gaming License put out by WOTC (Hasbro is it now) is a explicit non-exclusive license grant.
"No. It's just not true. You couldn't find a prosecutor in this country who would prosecute either of us for lying about a BJ unless there were some ulterior motive behind it. And you wouldn't find an honest judge who would entertain such arguments."
Federal prosecutors go after perjury all the time. That's why its better never to say anything to them under oath---because they will invariably catch you in some lie then use that to get you for perjury. This is what happened to Libby and Martha Stewart: they could not be convicted of the crime they were investigated for; so they were convicted of lying under oath (i.e., perjury). This happens far more than you may think at first blush.
Clinton perjured himself. Perjury is a felony. A felony is a high crime. A President is impeachable for committing a high crime. Therefore, Clinton was impeached. However, impeachment is by its nature a highly political event. It's about like engaging in a coup d'etat. If you're going to do either, you had better be sure you win; or the political (or physical) repercussions will be (politically or physically) fatal. Just ask Asa Hutchinson. Now, do you think the Dems will succeed in impeaching Dick? No.
I think the true message of Fed 10 is that you will always have factions. Checks and Balances _needs_ factions to be viable. With factions you have Group A trying to undermine Group B. So, no group can get away with too much power because C&B will allow the other group to pull them off balance.
The worst situation with C&B is for factions to get along. Then, it does not matter who's trying to be unconstitutional, because everybody is working together. Pork Barrel spending was supposed to be impossible because factionalism was supposed to block a single congressman from funneling Federal money home. However, _all_ congressmen do it, so they work together to spread the pork out effectively.
When you say "no" parties, the only _real_ way for that to happen is for there to be _one_ party.
"There are more trees today [in North America] than there has ever been, and the simple reason is because we [Americans] use a lot of paper."
I beg to differ. Manhattan was covered in trees, as was the footprint of just about every major city on the East Coast. Most of Arkansas was covered in trees, but now roughly half has been converted into farms. With the exception of the Great Plains areas and perhaps Kaliphornea, farm land has reduced the amount of "tree-able" space. Then there are all those highways and interstates that occupy space once occupied by tress.
So, while there may have been fewer trees 100 years ago, there are still fewer trees than _ever_ were.
"You create more carbon dioxide emissions by making paper and burying it to get rid of the minute amount of carbon that the tree(s) obtained from its photosynthesis process."
Right. The better way to reduce CO2 emissions is to just burn the trees where they stand. Landfills are the obvious cause of CO2 emissions.
"Even if the planet is 2 times as big as our planet, it could be spinning faster than ours."
As the GPP said, the planet is likely tidal locked to its star. The planet has an orbit period of 13 days, which would make that its revolution rate. I'm not going to sit here and do the math that determines whether we're looking at a tidal locked planet. Even if we are not, it is close enough that its revolution rate will not be fast enough to significantly offset its gravity.
As for living on 2.25Gs, you may manage to pull that driving, but pull that falling down the stairs and see what happens. The first humans would have an exceedingly difficult time not killing themselves stumbling around---which is something they would do a lot of because of the high gravity.
"Can anyone suggest a good explanations (sic) for this seemingly dubious election-eve transfer?"
Somebody obviously hacked the Netcraft server to make it look like the Republicans were so stupid as to try to steal an election by using their own block of IPs. It also seems amazing that the GOP would wait until the last minute to change the DNS, as it can sometimes take a bit longer than expected for such a transfer to properly propagate. Heck, if they were smart enough to steal an election by changing the DNS, why not spoof the entry to make it look like it pointed to the Democrat Party?
"Quantum mechanics is an actual scientific theory based on empirical evidence..."
The same could be said of the old Earth-centric theory, once upon a time. Retrograde made perfect sense. Then came that crazy fellow who said the Sun was the center, which led to much weeping and gnashing of teeth. For the toothless scientists, teeth were provided for adequate gnashing.
Patent coverage is effective on date of filing; but only actionable after the patent is issued. That is, if you file in 1987, you have to wait until the patent is issued (1991) until you can start enforcing it---even against those who started using the patented idea in 1990. But, the patent coverage runs for 20 years from filing date (even then).[1] The patent was filed in March, 1987, which means the patent should have expired by now.
What we appear to have here is a patent troll who waited until the last minute to file, hoping to grab as much infringing money as possible. However, the doctrine of laches prevents this sort of behavior. Laches means that you cannot sit on your rights and constructively encourage infringement only to later sue. Think of it as entrapment or inducement.
More importantly, this idea has been mainstream for years. Visual Basic (et al.) allow for this sort of tabbing behavior. The question is whether M$ is licensed, or whether the troll has been sitting on his rights. Beyond that, we can't know all of the ins and outs of the case at this point.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
Thanks. That makes sense. I suppose my uses have been too pedestrian to encounter that problem.
My problem with upgrading recently was how Ubuntu handled my Grub menu.lst. The box I am referring to has /hda1 as a FAT drive with the system restore junk for WinXP. /hda2 is WinXP. /hda3 is Linux. One of the late alpha (or was it early beta) updates redid the menu.lst to map to UUID numbers instead of the more user friendly /hdX series.
/hda1 is Linux, and /hda2 is WinXP. Naturally, the latter is right, and I haven't the time to go back and correct the box so that it points to the right partition. I would, if I knew enough about UUIDs.
The problem is that it thinks
Could somebody explain why we left the old way?
My other issue is the FF series uses a more recent driver for my Linksys wireless PCI card---a release that has been broken since December. The professed solution is to recompile. I used to use Gentoo, so I can handle that; but this is Ubuntu---I shouldn't have to.
http://webtypography.net/ This link goes to a way of implementing Elements of Typology online; which is supposed to improve readability. Its interesting in that it sort of goes against the common idea with screen size and web text. The common idea, as I understand it, is that we should not worry about the 800X600 and use as much screen real estate as possible. Then, text columns can stretch as wide as my 19" monitor will let them. The problem is, that works against readability. The "optimal" is about 4.5". I use 37em for text body width, and that seems to work.
The statement "only country" belies an argumentum ad populum. When we acknowledged the woman's right to vote, we were the only country (or one of the only). So, was that wrong? We are one of the few countries to use the common law system; a system of law that proved its success for over a 1000 years and derived from the rights _rich_ Romans got (such as jury trial), which the peasants did not.
There's nothing wrong with being the only country, especially when we're right.
You've heard the likes of Steve Forbes say that a flat tax would work wonders for the U.S. Why not use a virtual world setting to test it out? That is, have a virtual world where there is progressive taxation, and another where there is flat tax. Then, measure the effects. I mean, why not use virtual worlds to test out various economic theories?
"...the Republican senate tried to impeach Clinton..."
You might want to re-check your copy of the Constitution. The House impeaches; the Senate convicts or acquits. The House passed the bill of impeachment, making Billy the second President to be impeached (the other being A. Johnson). As with the former impeachment, Billy was not convicted. Conversely, Nixon was never impeached, but only because he quit first. In all likelihood, he would have been convicted.
"'Can you patent an illegal process?'
"The law might change to make the process legal before the patent runs out. But you need to patent it right away to establish priority."
The answer is no, you cannot. First, the patent law clearly says you cannot. Second, public policy says you can't. In courts, patents are given the binding effect of a law---with the same rules for statutory interpretation, etc. So, if you patent an illegal thing, then it would be legal. A patent is "legislated" through the USPTO under authority of the president acting under Congressional legislation which derives its authority from the Constitution. Thus, if anybody "above" you in authority says it is illegal, then the patent does not have its binding effect of law.
Okay, I think these versions need some work. HTML 4.x was nice. HTML 5.0 sounds a bit much. Perhaps we should jazz it up a bit? It's too late for HTML XP, as the "eXtreme" ship has sailed. Perhaps HTML Vista? *ducks*
We need better fact checking here. Mark Pryor is the junior senator from Arkansas. The FTC official is William Kovacic.
"Also irrelevant. If someone has a political agenda, we might suspect that they slant or distort the data, then we check the data through a peer-review process."
But there's the rub. The peer-review process is inherently political---any process involving more than one person is political. The hope is enough dispassionate people will put politics aside and look at the facts. However, global warming has become a hotly political issue which serves to reduce the population of dispassionate people; therefore peer review is another form of politics.
I have heard (I'm a rank layman) that hard-core environmentalists have achieved majority status on the boards of several peer-reviewed journals. The fact that it is even possible reduces the credibility of peer review. I conclude "peer review" is just another way of making another argumentum ad verecundiam argument. You don't need peer review to assert gravity, heliocentricity, or tooth decay.
Please remember that peer review would have discounted Galileo. You can put a dress on a pig, lipstick on its lips and call it Hillary; but in the end, its still a peer review---er, pig.
"...No idea how that happened. Oh well, since there's no evidence of our transgressions thanks to this 'oopsie', we'll just go home now..."
Except, it does not exactly work like that. Law is more experience than reason; courts know that if you have evidence that points to your guilt you're more likely to "lose" it. So, when the plaintiff can prove you probably had evidence showing your guilt and you fail to produce it, the court can allow a negative inference to be drawn. This means the judge will tell the jury that the defendant likely had incriminating evidence and destroyed it and that the jury is free to assume it was destroyed to cover the defendant's ass.
I clerked for a plaintiff's firm that was good at this sort of thing. The attorney tended to have defendants who had dispatch records that were destroyed quarterly by standard operating procedure (SOP) (required by law that they have _a_ SOP). However, one defendant had a special SOP to destroy such tapes as soon as frigg'n possible when something bad happened---like three separate, fatal accidents caused by its company on one day recorded on one dispatch tape. The request for the tape was made within a couple of weeks and "oops," the defendant lost it. The Court had a field day with the defendant.
The problem, however, is that a gullible jury can be persuaded that the adage "never assume malice where incompetence will suffice" is in play.
Here there was probably an email retention SOP that was violated by these emails going missing. In that case, the judge is probably giving Intel another week to settle or come up with the emails or allow AMD to move for a negative inference that it will more likely win.
This is a problem of the FOSS community turning on itself. If there was a GPL violation, the proper thing to do is own up to it and seek a re-license, which is what the owner of the GPL'd code wanted.
I am still reading the whole Gmain thread, and am quite shocked by Theo's comments. I agree with another fellow who said that FOSS wireless driver development teams should work closely together to ensure the proprietary world doesn't overwhelm the effort. But, I digress . . .
The core issue is whether the BCW developer copied GPL'd code, which the holder of the GPL copyright asserts. Plenty of clean examples were given, and the ability to investigate the entire tree for both sets of code makes it a quick search issue. Much better than the SCO/M$ v. IBM suit. Theo's response to the allegation is immature at least:
1. Ad hominem attacks: calling Mike inhuman and attacking him for making the issue public.
2. Irrelevant: saying that the bcw code does not work so there's no copyright issue. Copyright speaks to content, not functionality.
3. It was an accident: Claiming the bcw "accidentally" copied GPL'd code. How can you accidentally copy entire blocks of code?
4. That the code copy was temporary scaffolding: which counters #3, above. You can't claim the code copy was an accident or unintentional then say the copy was intentional for a short period of time. Theo says the code was copied to get other parts of the bcw driver to work, then would be re-written. The problem here is twofold. First, the code was copied and checked into the repository under BSD licensing, which is a violation in-and-of-itself. Second, putting the code there pending re-write means the re-write would be a derivative of the original GPL'd code---which is still a copyright violation.
Above all, the entire line of discussion is not relevant. There's a claim of copyright violation. If the code is there, then it is a violation, whether or not it was "accidental." This extends beyond issues of header calls which are so ordinary as to not be copyrightable. (At least, under U.S. law, if there are only a few ways to convey an idea, then it cannot be copyrighted.) Whether the accusation was public is not relevant; was there a violation? The responsible action would be to investigate when the GPL'd author made the accusation.