Seriously, stuff like this is what we used to poke fun at the Soviets for back in the good ole' Cold War days when Regan was prez and high schools still had gun target practice as an extra curricular activity. One of the things the US prides itself on is the open and free access to public data and the freedom to publish it. Maps are one of the key centerpieces that we measure our open society by...
Guy's and idiot and should be forcibly ejected from the country.
Don't stop there, continue the practice of not replacing street signs and building names and address numbers... That will really keep them getting lost!
After all, if you don't know how to get there, what's your purpose for being there?
The problem is copyrights and trade secrets. In "steel and stone" patents, product difference are quite apparent, arguing that your product does something different, or even "different enough" is relatively easy as you can point to the parts and demonstrate the actions to the judge. Often a company pays a small fee, then goes back with a "different enough" design to satisfy the judge that infringement is not occurring, then everybody moves on.
With software, it's never about the "parts" or the source code, it's always about end function. A moped and a tractor-trailer are the same thing on paper.. both have motors and carry people.. but in reality they are way different. There's no such "common sense" test for software, especially when dealing with higher-level things like databases and object oriented. On paper they may do the same thing, but in reality they may differ quite wildly.. These cases never get down to source code and flow charts and architectures because those are "trade secrets"... but cornerstone to the case of patent infringement.
it's closed source DMCA protected software. There's no way law abiding programmers could see the source code and most of the key developers in these cases have too little time to reverse engineer other people's products.
In short a person "skilled in the art" saw some trade magazine article about a products general function and recreated it without looking... that's pretty much the definition of "general knowledge" as applied to patents.
The problem with SVG is that it tried to be a "kitchen sink" spec and big companies like Adobe and Microsoft sat on the committee throwing in every thing to get at their competitors. It's a great spec but several dozens of times more complex than HTML/XML/CSS. It's not a "grown" spec, one that grew by specification and implementation like HTML did. It's a "spec by committee" with a bunch of conflicting good ideas that nobody took the time to put into real software. Even the people that are implementing it are all starting in different places because it's so big... so what each browser does have doesn't even act right.
The whole thing needs stripped down into what we can have in 6 months on every browser that's started it. Then write another spec for 1 year's worth of work after that... then see where it goes from there. The same issue with CSS2/3 that the specs are smaller, but too big, there's no synchronization of implementations.. nobody uses ANY of the features.. and none get tested or standardized.
People have been trotting this since stupid OSS wannabes at Novell keep trying to cozy up to Microsoft instead of standing and fighting..Net is not a language but a suite of tools to replace the aging windows APIs. Microsoft has the heck patented out of it. Stupid bozos think they can have mono, which is just the stripped down EMCA submission and then play catchup. Their like Charlie Brown with the football. Instead of leading the way to something new they're chasing money at the coattails of the big bad wolf.
Java is opening up, so there's no need for mono at all. It was the attempt by one proprietary company to "play open source house" with the big player and needs to die to free up resources for real open languages.
exactly, Microsoft is "completing" with Adobe Flash here, not Apple or Linux. It's in their interest to embrace everybody using Adobe Flash... and they'll throw PHds at doing it better.
When they get tired of losing money on this hobby project they'll cut and extinguish all the solutions they've built up.. leaving every body in the lurch of choosing the "microsoft way" or another platform. It happens over and over.
The only way to really stop this is to gut all of Microsoft's cash. A court needs to take 150% of Microsoft's cash and give it to the stock holders (it's their money being mismanaged) then put a ban on buying companies and on issuing stocks. They'll do just fine and be a stronger company, but it will force them to sell assets they've been "collecting" simply so nobody else can have them. That will push those assets out in to the world and create voids where Microsoft can't touch for a few years. Imagine investors stuck with only the high margin products that pull 85% margins and none of the dead weight!!
And sliverlight runs under what broswers? It will run under IE 5.5 right? Why not just demand all your users get Firefox 3/Opera/Safari 4 and write cutting edge CSS3 pages with XML and SVG for all those cool effects. The only browser that's broken is IE. Yet every body jumps to the "microsoft only" solution as the savior to the problem??? Why???
He didn't have a license, so typically they won't release it to you because you aren't allowed to drive it. You'd have to show up with TWO friends to prove you're not cheating. Technically, mandatory auto insurance is also void without a valid license of the owner. That let them rack up fees over the $80 ticket.
No, I think the point is that you started talking to the cops and indicated there were drugs in your trunk of your car. Then tried to hide the key to the trunk even after they got a valid warrant from a court. They have already determined enough evidence to satisfy a judge if it was a locked door or safe to crack it. At that point it becomes a "lawful order" and not a random search. This is about as "invasive" as a body cavity search for illegal drugs. (happens all the time)
At this point he's screwed.. and worse probably actually did something wrong.
You'd think that the "corporate shield" would protect these investors from such suits. I guess they could argue that if a company like Napster got no VC funding in the first place they would not have built the infringing network. The VC that funded Napster got very rich and bailed just before the litigation started. I think that's what they're trying to stop. Look how the Apple is going after Psystar's list of investors because they want to punish not just the company, but the people that allowed them funding to build up a case.
They only unplugged 3-4 before they got the message... that's when they stopped doing it and the prosecutor went nuts on the guy for the passwords. They WERE going to have to rework the network settings from scratch... but he turned over the passwords, so they shouldn't have had to do that.
At this point, he's no threat at all. In fact the prosecutor isn't coming up with charges that warrant much more jail time than he's already served as there's been no "damages" or even potential damages discovered. Like any non-admin they're reaching for straws that because routine stuff has "broken" with no intervention he "planned" it... you'd be surprised how many highly paid, intelligent people think that little of IT people.
I think they're just buying up the competition's workspace. After all TMSC is going to KNOW the check from Intel will cash, no matter what... and like Apple buying up Samsung flash ram, this makes prices higher for everybody else...and gives Intel CONTROL over one of the few companies that could make VIA's nano or Nvidia's ION. It's also, lower cost, older process equipment closer to China where they want these chips to be sold.
I think you're also looking at the patent front, that Intel will fill the place up with their patented processes and TMSC won't be able to fill orders for VIA/AMD/Nvidia without stepping on some Intel patents.. or have to run those jobs in the backroom on old, unproductive, equipment.
They've had rovers on Mars for several years now... a 3 hour tour turned long term expedition. All they need to do is the same thing.... with a shovel.
The moon is closer, and gets the same sunlight as Earth versus less than half on Mars. Other than dealing with several weeks of dark when the moon faces earth there's not much difference as Mars has to shut down for "winter" when sunlight drops below enough to recharge the batteries.
and when Ma Bell controlled ALL telephone lines and hence data communication people said the same thing about a network that was "all peers",letting any "phone" dial any other "phone" without a mother ship to keep them in line.. it would never work. Oh wait...
The guy nailed it. If you're going to have a free and open source game that NOBODY owns then he presented the valid problems....opportunities.. In order to afford bandwidth and cpu time, every body would need to bring their own. In order to make a fun game from that pool of options you'd have to overcome versioning, cheating, and the ability of ANY host/server to change and manipulate it's own code and still obey whatever rules you have as part of your game.
no, that's exactly the reasoning for EULAs on shiny video game disks when they are met to "play" just like CDs. In fact Sony tried adding an auto load on their CDs so you would have to accept a "license" to play a PC on a computer so they could add their rootkit software.
Big expensive Executives and Lawyers have the same attitude about CDs and copyright.. not just slashodot trolls.
more musicians are funded as "studio players" that work 9-5 than as rock stars by a wide margin.
In the same way more programmers are out there paid to write "TPS report 2009" than are paid to write games or operating systems by an even wider margin. The customer is an internal middle manager that's going to decree what the product does, who uses it, and how much it costs.
except that by Microsoft OFFERING the solution, now those 10 small vendors are closed up shop. Microsoft always enters new markets "at a loss"... ie put the current players out of business. Then chooses not to deliver.
Good work building anything else off your work because whatever vendor you do use will just get sued for patent infringement... just because Microsoft dropped the product doesn't mean they won't stop others from using things LIKE it.
Slashdot Mirror
safety glasses!
it's only good for 4 years.
the big "G" is a California company.
I suppose they could outsource that to Washington State as a separate Map Services Earth company.
Seriously, stuff like this is what we used to poke fun at the Soviets for back in the good ole' Cold War days when Regan was prez and high schools still had gun target practice as an extra curricular activity. One of the things the US prides itself on is the open and free access to public data and the freedom to publish it. Maps are one of the key centerpieces that we measure our open society by...
Guy's and idiot and should be forcibly ejected from the country.
Don't stop there, continue the practice of not replacing street signs and building names and address numbers... That will really keep them getting lost!
After all, if you don't know how to get there, what's your purpose for being there?
The problem is copyrights and trade secrets. In "steel and stone" patents, product difference are quite apparent, arguing that your product does something different, or even "different enough" is relatively easy as you can point to the parts and demonstrate the actions to the judge. Often a company pays a small fee, then goes back with a "different enough" design to satisfy the judge that infringement is not occurring, then everybody moves on.
With software, it's never about the "parts" or the source code, it's always about end function. A moped and a tractor-trailer are the same thing on paper.. both have motors and carry people.. but in reality they are way different. There's no such "common sense" test for software, especially when dealing with higher-level things like databases and object oriented. On paper they may do the same thing, but in reality they may differ quite wildly.. These cases never get down to source code and flow charts and architectures because those are "trade secrets"... but cornerstone to the case of patent infringement.
it's closed source DMCA protected software. There's no way law abiding programmers could see the source code and most of the key developers in these cases have too little time to reverse engineer other people's products.
In short a person "skilled in the art" saw some trade magazine article about a products general function and recreated it without looking... that's pretty much the definition of "general knowledge" as applied to patents.
These are Federal courts, so it's easier to cherry pick ... it's all in the USA after all.
The problem with SVG is that it tried to be a "kitchen sink" spec and big companies like Adobe and Microsoft sat on the committee throwing in every thing to get at their competitors. It's a great spec but several dozens of times more complex than HTML/XML/CSS. It's not a "grown" spec, one that grew by specification and implementation like HTML did. It's a "spec by committee" with a bunch of conflicting good ideas that nobody took the time to put into real software. Even the people that are implementing it are all starting in different places because it's so big... so what each browser does have doesn't even act right.
The whole thing needs stripped down into what we can have in 6 months on every browser that's started it. Then write another spec for 1 year's worth of work after that... then see where it goes from there. The same issue with CSS2/3 that the specs are smaller, but too big, there's no synchronization of implementations.. nobody uses ANY of the features.. and none get tested or standardized.
People have been trotting this since stupid OSS wannabes at Novell keep trying to cozy up to Microsoft instead of standing and fighting. .Net is not a language but a suite of tools to replace the aging windows APIs. Microsoft has the heck patented out of it. Stupid bozos think they can have mono, which is just the stripped down EMCA submission and then play catchup. Their like Charlie Brown with the football. Instead of leading the way to something new they're chasing money at the coattails of the big bad wolf.
Java is opening up, so there's no need for mono at all. It was the attempt by one proprietary company to "play open source house" with the big player and needs to die to free up resources for real open languages.
exactly, Microsoft is "completing" with Adobe Flash here, not Apple or Linux. It's in their interest to embrace everybody using Adobe Flash... and they'll throw PHds at doing it better.
When they get tired of losing money on this hobby project they'll cut and extinguish all the solutions they've built up.. leaving every body in the lurch of choosing the "microsoft way" or another platform. It happens over and over.
The only way to really stop this is to gut all of Microsoft's cash. A court needs to take 150% of Microsoft's cash and give it to the stock holders (it's their money being mismanaged) then put a ban on buying companies and on issuing stocks. They'll do just fine and be a stronger company, but it will force them to sell assets they've been "collecting" simply so nobody else can have them. That will push those assets out in to the world and create voids where Microsoft can't touch for a few years. Imagine investors stuck with only the high margin products that pull 85% margins and none of the dead weight!!
And sliverlight runs under what broswers? It will run under IE 5.5 right? Why not just demand all your users get Firefox 3/Opera/Safari 4 and write cutting edge CSS3 pages with XML and SVG for all those cool effects. The only browser that's broken is IE. Yet every body jumps to the "microsoft only" solution as the savior to the problem??? Why???
Um... Slashdot and Linux.com were owned by the same company... now they're not.. a little late to ask about content on a site after it's sold!
He didn't have a license, so typically they won't release it to you because you aren't allowed to drive it. You'd have to show up with TWO friends to prove you're not cheating. Technically, mandatory auto insurance is also void without a valid license of the owner. That let them rack up fees over the $80 ticket.
so how do the workers at Gitmo get back in?
No, I think the point is that you started talking to the cops and indicated there were drugs in your trunk of your car. Then tried to hide the key to the trunk even after they got a valid warrant from a court. They have already determined enough evidence to satisfy a judge if it was a locked door or safe to crack it. At that point it becomes a "lawful order" and not a random search. This is about as "invasive" as a body cavity search for illegal drugs. (happens all the time)
At this point he's screwed.. and worse probably actually did something wrong.
You'd think that the "corporate shield" would protect these investors from such suits. I guess they could argue that if a company like Napster got no VC funding in the first place they would not have built the infringing network. The VC that funded Napster got very rich and bailed just before the litigation started. I think that's what they're trying to stop. Look how the Apple is going after Psystar's list of investors because they want to punish not just the company, but the people that allowed them funding to build up a case.
They only unplugged 3-4 before they got the message... that's when they stopped doing it and the prosecutor went nuts on the guy for the passwords. They WERE going to have to rework the network settings from scratch... but he turned over the passwords, so they shouldn't have had to do that.
At this point, he's no threat at all. In fact the prosecutor isn't coming up with charges that warrant much more jail time than he's already served as there's been no "damages" or even potential damages discovered. Like any non-admin they're reaching for straws that because routine stuff has "broken" with no intervention he "planned" it... you'd be surprised how many highly paid, intelligent people think that little of IT people.
I think they're just buying up the competition's workspace. After all TMSC is going to KNOW the check from Intel will cash, no matter what... and like Apple buying up Samsung flash ram, this makes prices higher for everybody else...and gives Intel CONTROL over one of the few companies that could make VIA's nano or Nvidia's ION. It's also, lower cost, older process equipment closer to China where they want these chips to be sold.
I think you're also looking at the patent front, that Intel will fill the place up with their patented processes and TMSC won't be able to fill orders for VIA/AMD/Nvidia without stepping on some Intel patents.. or have to run those jobs in the backroom on old, unproductive, equipment.
They've had rovers on Mars for several years now... a 3 hour tour turned long term expedition. All they need to do is the same thing.... with a shovel.
The moon is closer, and gets the same sunlight as Earth versus less than half on Mars. Other than dealing with several weeks of dark when the moon faces earth there's not much difference as Mars has to shut down for "winter" when sunlight drops below enough to recharge the batteries.
and when Ma Bell controlled ALL telephone lines and hence data communication people said the same thing about a network that was "all peers",letting any "phone" dial any other "phone" without a mother ship to keep them in line.. it would never work. Oh wait...
The guy nailed it. If you're going to have a free and open source game that NOBODY owns then he presented the valid problems....opportunities.. In order to afford bandwidth and cpu time, every body would need to bring their own. In order to make a fun game from that pool of options you'd have to overcome versioning, cheating, and the ability of ANY host/server to change and manipulate it's own code and still obey whatever rules you have as part of your game.
Sony tried just that with their autorun exe... so they could say you "accepted" the malware on your computer.
no, that's exactly the reasoning for EULAs on shiny video game disks when they are met to "play" just like CDs. In fact Sony tried adding an auto load on their CDs so you would have to accept a "license" to play a PC on a computer so they could add their rootkit software.
Big expensive Executives and Lawyers have the same attitude about CDs and copyright.. not just slashodot trolls.
more musicians are funded as "studio players" that work 9-5 than as rock stars by a wide margin.
In the same way more programmers are out there paid to write "TPS report 2009" than are paid to write games or operating systems by an even wider margin. The customer is an internal middle manager that's going to decree what the product does, who uses it, and how much it costs.
except that by Microsoft OFFERING the solution, now those 10 small vendors are closed up shop. Microsoft always enters new markets "at a loss"... ie put the current players out of business. Then chooses not to deliver.
Good work building anything else off your work because whatever vendor you do use will just get sued for patent infringement... just because Microsoft dropped the product doesn't mean they won't stop others from using things LIKE it.