Plate tectonics doesn't explain the continental shelf.
Yes, something magical creating matter from nothing and violating the third law of thermodynamics makes much more sense. Scientists must have made up those GPS measurements that show it happening. Although you can evidence of prior eruptions of the hot spot that created Yellowstone National Park trailing up into Canada, it must have been something other than the plates moving as predicted. Of course the entire continent (planet?) must have been underwater, the earth must have gotten bigger but we have the same amount of water?
Actually, the earth used to be larger before a planetoid knocked the moon from it, but it does get slightly larger from asteroids and comets hitting it's surface from time to time.
You misunderstand why people are complaining, or they are complaining about the wrong thing...
DX10 relies heavily on graphics card memory virtualization...
Yes it does, but why? That is great for Vista's new user interface and running multiple apps at once, but it isn't necessary for geometry shaders. People are complaining about not having DirectX 10 on XP, but what they mostly want is prettier and faster graphics for their games. Microsoft could add that functionality to DirectX 9 so that people don't have to upgrade to Vista. They didn't do that though, preferring to force people to upgrade. There are two things keeping me tied to Windows now. One is Visual Studio (which I use for work and fun development). The other is games. I only have one main computer and I don't want to be rebooting all the time to run a game, or I would have Linux installed as my main OS. I certainly don't want to upgrade to Vista, and not having new DirectX 10 features in XP will probably make me hold off a long time in buying a video card.
I'm going to be the first one to level the new accounting profession to 375 so I can handle peoples' online tax forms! I'll be rich! I'll have to get some investors so that I can offer advances on expected refunds and I can charge huge interest rates! Look for my new office in Org...
I don't follow. You repeatedly refer to stock as being tangible. It's not. Tangible means you can touch it [reference.com]. (None of the other definitions fits what you mean here either.) You can't touch stock. You can touch stock *certificates*, but the "stock" itself is "ownership of a company". When you buy stock, you're buying a certain kind of (intangible) relationship with others about control of a commercial venture. That is tangled up with all sorts of expectations about whether the board must listen to you, whether courts will smack them up if they don't, etc.
Being able to touch something isn't the only definition:
capable of being touched; discernible by the touch; material or substantial.
real or actual, rather than imaginary or visionary: the tangible benefits of sunshine.
definite; not vague or elusive: no tangible grounds for suspicion.
(of an asset) having actual physical existence, as real estate or chattels, and therefore capable of being assigned a value in monetary terms.
A company only has a certain number of shares of stock. Each share of stock has a definite owner. There are people waiting to buy stock at a certain price and people willing to sell stock for another price. When the sale takes place, money changes hands. You pay for the increase in value of the stock from when you bought it to when you sold it, the actual difference in money you paid and money you received.
I'd have to disagree. Like the stock (that you classify as tangible), your gnome is a claim to a certain kind of performance (from Blizzard). Yes, Blizzard could "inflate" your gnome into worthlessness, or delete it, for the heck of it. Just like the board of directors could tell you they're not sharing dividends with shareholders anymore. What creates value for the gnome and the shares is the (well-founded) expectation that that won't happen.
That's not true at all. Blizzard makes it clear in their terms of service that they own any rights to your online characters. They could be deleted tomorrow. They specifically forbid you from attempting to sell your character or gold. If you are on either end of such a transaction you face losing your account with no legal recourse. You can create new characters whenever you want, up to eight per server. It's nothing like stocks. The board of directors deciding not to pay dividends might make your shares of stock worth less, but you still own exactly the same number of shares. This would be the same as the company deleting your shares of stock because you bought them from someone.
Read the MySpace page in question. It's obviously not real and the only hints of 'pedophilia' I noticed anyway was that he belonged to the 'Baby Gap Inc.' club and that he said his favorite clothes style was "XXXSmall". Everyone tries to make a mountain out of a molehill and bend the truth in court cases.
He should have just gone with it, and had fun with it.
That would work if they said "He's fat and bald" or made him look like a monkey or something like that, but it sounds like the page labelled him as a pedophile among other things. In this day and age, that's not a laughing matter: he can't start playing along with that: "Oh yeah, I really like to have sex with students, don't tell anyone." The suspicion of pedophilia could be enough to ruin his career and his life.
Have you checked out the MySpace page in question? If you can't tell this page is a joke you need to have your head examined. I assume the 'pedophelia' charge came from the page listing him in the "Baby Gap Inc." club and the cloting style he's looking for in a mate as "XXXsmall". His daughter really cried because she saw this? How old is she, 5? In his legal documents he is going to make it sound as bad as he can, but the evidence just doesn't match...
I think the idea of an open wiki or collaboration group with peer review for "obviousness" among other things would be great. The USPTO needs more examiners though. I don't see why they can't fund the increase by raising patent prices (could require a law). That, and maybe make them pay for researcher's time if the patent is not granted.
Hmmm... It seems to me that Microsoft could have a problem here. They specifically crafted their agreement with Novell to interfere with Novell's license to use Linux (the GPL). The changes on patents in GPL v3 are just clarifications. Version 2 already "makes it clear" that patents must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. Novell's deal with Microsoft is framed as a "covenant not to sue" Novell's customers, but it is in fact a license for their customers to use Microsoft's patents. A license is nothing more than a covenant not to sue.
IBM has no connection to the editorial content posted on Groklaw.
Groklaw's website, and hundreds of others, are hosted on a website at the University of North Carolina (UNC), called ibliblio. This site is described by UNC as a public library. ibiblio runs on IBM System x servers which were funded through an IBM Shared University Award Grant awarded to UNC -- a grant that predates Groklaw ever being hosted on ibiblio. Anyone can host a site there and IBM does not sponsor, nor endorse, the content of those sites.
IBM is proud to sponsor many universities around the world in various ways, including helping them host websites like the one at UNC."
Groklaw met the criteria for hosting on ibiblio's free servers. If your web site meets the criteria, you can host it there for free also. View some other sites on their collection page. Groklaw is a site to discuss open source legal issues, it is not limited to IBM or to SCO, although that is the predominant legal battle going on at this time. If you read Groklaw, you will know that there are not only articles about the other SCO litigation (RedHat, AutoZone, Daimler-Chrysler and Novell), but discussions about Microsoft, patents, ODF vs. MSXML, other GPL cases and the new GPL V3. Ibiblio is run by the University of North Carolina. IBM has contributed servers to the project long before Groklaw came into existence. IBM has no say in the sites hosted at Ibiblio or their content. Ibiblio could host SCO's site if it met their criteria.
I want to know why it matters though... Groklaw looks at the public filings that anyone could get if they were willing to go to the courthouse for a copy. They don't have any secret information and don't get information from IBM. IBM has been nearly quiet in the media since the case has begun, citing their preference not to comment on litigation.
Since before the IBM case started, SCO has been issuing public statements both through their media shills and on their own web site. They've made outrageous claims with no evidence whatsoever to support them. They've tried to co-opt the GNU/Linux operating system as their own, charging $700 per processor to run it. That's a slap in the face for the thousands of contributors who relied on the GPL and made their own contributions, and to Linus Trovalds who initially developed Linux. After initially claiming that three teams of experts found millions of lines of infringing code in Linux, they waited three years to show ANY evidence and then it was only 326 lines. They transformed their case from Trade Secrets (since UNIX contains none as admitted by their lawyer Kevin McBride) into some bizzare "ladder" theory where IBM loses control of it's own independent creations simply by associating them with their flavors of licensed UNIX.
The most bizarre thing is how they value their "core UNIX intellectual property". Caldera was created as a Linux company in 1994. They raised about $70 million in an IPO as a Linux company when they went public in 2000. They purchased assets and operations from Tarentalla (Santa Cruz Operation) for $93.8 million in 2001. You can see that in the 10-Q report they filed with the SEC (search for "Purchase price allocation"). They allocated that money this way:
$66.1 million - Goodwill (SCO customer base)
$26.7 million - Distribution/reseller channel
$5.8 million - Existing technology (consisting primarily of UnixWare and OpenServer)
$1.5 million - Acquired in-process research and development
Ever since I installed them, I've been getting Blue Screens Of Death multiple times per day on both my work computer and my laptop computer. It could be something with the SQL Server 2005 update or the "critical" vulnerability fix, I don't know. It was always stop 0x00000050, with the third number 0x89E773DE. I would think my memory was going bad or that it was a driver issue, but the only change on my computers was installing those updates, and it has happened on both consistently. It doesn't matter what I'm doing on the computers, it usually happens when I'm away from them. A friend of mine had just started getting BSODs too and hadn't made the connection, but he just performed the updates before it started happening also...
This was from a polling of 3000 readers of one SCI-FI magazine. I don't know if Serenity should even be in the top 10. Don't get me wrong... Serenity was a good movie. Firefly was even better. If you haven't watched it, go out and buy the complete series on DVD, it will only set you back $30 on Amazon and is WELL worth it. It was certainly an amazing show. What it did best was character development. It was also realistic in a way most shows and movies don't even try to be. The best part had to be the humor though, it always felt like it flowed from the story and was true to the characters. You just can't fit that much character development into 90 minutes for a movie when the series opener was two hours and you only started to get to know the characters...
[Flashback to the war, where Zoë quietly kills a man about to shoot a private having a meal.] Tracey: Thanks. I didn't know you were out there. Zoë: Sort of the point. Stealth -- you may have heard of it. Tracey: I don't think they covered that in basic. Zoë: Well, at least they covered "Dropping Your Weapon So You Can Eat Beans and Get Yourself Shot". Tracey: Yeah, I got a badge in that. [seriously] Won't happen again. Zoë: It does, I'm just gonna watch.
. .. Zoë: First rule of battle, little one... don't ever let them know where you are. [Cut to Mal, firing behind himself as he runs toward the two.] Mal: WHOO-HOO! I'M RIGHT HERE! I'M RIGHT HERE! YOU WANT SOME O' ME?! YEAH YOU DO! COME ON! COME ON! AAAAAH! [He lands with a grunt behind some nearby rocks.] Mal: Whoo-hoo! Zoë: Course, there're other schools of thought.
I can't believe Terminator didn't score higher. I hope they were going by "series" also. I can't bear the omission of "The Empire Strikes Back", easily the best of the Star Wars movies.
Also consider XP runs well on 80MB and a 200mhz processor (faster than Win95 or Win98 did), it is time to let these computers die, as most Linux distributions won't even run on them.
XP doesn't even run well sometimes on my 1.6 ghz core duo laptop with 1 gig of ram. Windows 95 (and Linux) ran ok on my 33 mhz 486 with 8mb ram.
The guy should be held accountable for frivolous lawsuits, but he has the right to say whatever he wants. To sue him squawking about "free speech", with the intention of "shutting him up", is way beyond hypocritical - almost lawyerish.
They aren't suing to shut him up, they are suing him to stop his frivolous lawsuits. They aren't preventing him from expressing his views at all, just from harassing people that are expressing theirs. If someone decided that shooting lawyers was their way to "speak out" against lawyers, is that free speech?
They are providing a service, a place where people can come and publish their works for free that they want the world to see. This generates a thing called "web traffic", which is when people on the internet come to the site to "visit". This gets people called "advertisers" to spend money, hoping that the "visitors" will click on their link and maybe buy a product. It's similar to how just about every free website out there makes money from Yahoo search and message boards to Ebay to Google itself to even Slashdot. To do this, they provide the web application that enables people to share their creations and they pay for the servers, support staff, developers, and bandwidth.
If it were possible to build such a machine, we would all be millionaires. If long-term the Google plan was reasonable, we could all be selling ad space to each other and never have to work again.
It's not Google or Youtube's fault that you haven't started a company, created a web application, hired employees, purchased servers, and setup your network capacity, and marketed your site to attract visitors.
The safe harbor also protects sites like Slashdot, who also make money from advertisements and not hosting. The only difference is that the content is video instead of text. Also I think the vast majority of videos (at least the ones I click on to watch) are not infringing copyrights, they are posted by people who created them. Most of the rest are funny commercials that the advertisers probably wouldn't mind me watching all that I want. The thing that killed Napster is that 99% of the traffic was for copyright infringement.
Beyond my disdain for most TV to begin with, I am blown away that with all of our current problems -- homelessness and crime on the home front, war fighting and terrorism abroad -- our government is seriously going to spend this much money on upgrading peoples' televisions.
This doesn't make any sense. 98.2% of U.S. households have a television, 12.6% live below the poverty line. Would you like to force them to pay for a converter themselves or go without TV? I think the left would be ecstatic that the poor are getting another government handout. The wealthy won't apply for this, they probably already have TVs with built-in tuners or other tuners themselves.
I guess you say it all right here: "Beyond my disdain for most TV to begin with...", so you just want to do away with TV?
I believe that anonymous speech is very important. The U.S. Supreme Court agrees with me. There are things that people can say when anonymous that they wouldn't say normally for fear of embarrassment or retalition.
Expecially in the superman movie where he lifts the statue of liberty, and proceeds to move the moon to cause a solar eclipse. If he exerted enough force, he would simply fly through the moon.
Cherenkov radiation is similar to them talking about phosphorus, light is only emitted when the high-energy particles are traveling through a medium like water at faster than the speed of light in that medium. The light is produced by radiation traveling through the medium, not by the radioactive object directly. Simply handling a radioactive object or being near a radiation source will not make you radioactive, at least not at nearly the levels of the original radioative elements. Most of the 'fallout' from a radioactive incident is in the elements that are radioactive being released and absorbed into the environment. For instance, the human body absorbs Strontium as if it were calcium, but compound containing radioactive Strontium would have to be absorbed by the body somehow, just standing next to it will not make you radioactive.
The actual radiation could cause atoms in your body to become radioactive themselves, but exposure to radiation creates much less radioactivity than the radiation itself, which is a lot less radiation than is contained in the radioactive materials. For instance the half-life of Strontium 90 is about 28 years. If you encased a pellet of Strontium 90 in something and planted it in your body, 1/2 of it would decay over 28 years, producing radiation. If ALL of that radiation went into turning elements in your body into radioactive isotopes, then your whole body, minus the strontium pellet, could contain about 1/2 the radiation from the original pellet in the form of those isotopes. However, those would have been decaying over the years as well, so you will never come close to being as radioactive as the original isotopes. If the radio active isotopes in your body decayed faster than strontium, most would already be gone at the 28 year point. If they decayed slower, they would put out less radiation. In either case, you wouldn't glow. Also, most of the radiation will simply pass through your body, punching wholes in your cell walls and interfering with cell division, killing your cells and causing radiation sickness if the exposure is high enough.
This led to an odd exchange with Representative Mary Bono who compared Berner-Lee's suggestion to 'having a speed limit but not enforcing the speed limit.
DRM is not like arresting people that are guilty of doing something, it is like preventing them from doing it (or other things they are allowed to do) in the first place. Comparing it to speeding, it would be like this:
You cannot drive over 55 MPH, period. You may try to pass someone doing 50 mph, but you had better leave plenty of room since you can only go 55. As a matter of fact, if you attempt to go over 55, your car might just shut off.
You are licensed for driving 55 MPH on highways. When you attempt to enter an interstate, you might just find that your license is no longer valid and your car turns itself off.
When you want to drive your wife's car, you have to transfer your license to that car. When you want to drive your car again, you have to transfer the license back to it. If the internet isn't available, your car might not be able to get a license and you can't even start it. If her car is in a wreck and you can't deactivate your license, you may not be able to get your car licensed again.
You find out when you come home that the DRM doesn't work with your garage, and your car shuts down before you enter it, placing itself in park so you can't even push it in.
The Linux community doesn't know what patents are being infringed, if any. If Microsoft has this information, which they claim to, and they are doing nothing about it, equitable estoppel could come into play. If Microsoft fails to mitigate their damages in the face of defendants begging them to at least tell them what is wrong so they can fix it, then Microsoft will have no case. You cannot allow infringement to occur in order to further your business interests. If Microsoft doesn't provide any details, one can only assume that infringement is not occurring.
So - how easy would it be, for Ballmer to find a chance similarity between linux and vista, and how would you distinguish between this and real similarity? (homoplasy vs. homology for you evolutionary biologists out there).
Ballmer's threats have to do with Patents. It doesn't matter if it is chance or if the other people came up with it completely on their own. A Patent gives you an exclusive right for a limited term to make use of the "invention". If you were to talk about copyrights, then substantial similarity is a requirement. Once that has been proven, you have further hurdles to prove copyright infringement. You must then show that copying took place. You must prove for instance that there was access to the copyrighted work, you can't copy something if you've never seen it. That is where your chance similarities would matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, something magical creating matter from nothing and violating the third law of thermodynamics makes much more sense. Scientists must have made up those GPS measurements that show it happening. Although you can evidence of prior eruptions of the hot spot that created Yellowstone National Park trailing up into Canada, it must have been something other than the plates moving as predicted. Of course the entire continent (planet?) must have been underwater, the earth must have gotten bigger but we have the same amount of water?
Actually, the earth used to be larger before a planetoid knocked the moon from it, but it does get slightly larger from asteroids and comets hitting it's surface from time to time.
You misunderstand why people are complaining, or they are complaining about the wrong thing...
Yes it does, but why? That is great for Vista's new user interface and running multiple apps at once, but it isn't necessary for geometry shaders. People are complaining about not having DirectX 10 on XP, but what they mostly want is prettier and faster graphics for their games. Microsoft could add that functionality to DirectX 9 so that people don't have to upgrade to Vista. They didn't do that though, preferring to force people to upgrade. There are two things keeping me tied to Windows now. One is Visual Studio (which I use for work and fun development). The other is games. I only have one main computer and I don't want to be rebooting all the time to run a game, or I would have Linux installed as my main OS. I certainly don't want to upgrade to Vista, and not having new DirectX 10 features in XP will probably make me hold off a long time in buying a video card.
I'm going to be the first one to level the new accounting profession to 375 so I can handle peoples' online tax forms! I'll be rich! I'll have to get some investors so that I can offer advances on expected refunds and I can charge huge interest rates! Look for my new office in Org...
Being able to touch something isn't the only definition:
A company only has a certain number of shares of stock. Each share of stock has a definite owner. There are people waiting to buy stock at a certain price and people willing to sell stock for another price. When the sale takes place, money changes hands. You pay for the increase in value of the stock from when you bought it to when you sold it, the actual difference in money you paid and money you received.
That's not true at all. Blizzard makes it clear in their terms of service that they own any rights to your online characters. They could be deleted tomorrow. They specifically forbid you from attempting to sell your character or gold. If you are on either end of such a transaction you face losing your account with no legal recourse. You can create new characters whenever you want, up to eight per server. It's nothing like stocks. The board of directors deciding not to pay dividends might make your shares of stock worth less, but you still own exactly the same number of shares. This would be the same as the company deleting your shares of stock because you bought them from someone.
Read the MySpace page in question. It's obviously not real and the only hints of 'pedophilia' I noticed anyway was that he belonged to the 'Baby Gap Inc.' club and that he said his favorite clothes style was "XXXSmall". Everyone tries to make a mountain out of a molehill and bend the truth in court cases.
I think the idea of an open wiki or collaboration group with peer review for "obviousness" among other things would be great. The USPTO needs more examiners though. I don't see why they can't fund the increase by raising patent prices (could require a law). That, and maybe make them pay for researcher's time if the patent is not granted.
Hmmm... It seems to me that Microsoft could have a problem here. They specifically crafted their agreement with Novell to interfere with Novell's license to use Linux (the GPL). The changes on patents in GPL v3 are just clarifications. Version 2 already "makes it clear" that patents must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. Novell's deal with Microsoft is framed as a "covenant not to sue" Novell's customers, but it is in fact a license for their customers to use Microsoft's patents. A license is nothing more than a covenant not to sue.
Groklaw met the criteria for hosting on ibiblio's free servers. If your web site meets the criteria, you can host it there for free also. View some other sites on their collection page. Groklaw is a site to discuss open source legal issues, it is not limited to IBM or to SCO, although that is the predominant legal battle going on at this time. If you read Groklaw, you will know that there are not only articles about the other SCO litigation (RedHat, AutoZone, Daimler-Chrysler and Novell), but discussions about Microsoft, patents, ODF vs. MSXML, other GPL cases and the new GPL V3. Ibiblio is run by the University of North Carolina. IBM has contributed servers to the project long before Groklaw came into existence. IBM has no say in the sites hosted at Ibiblio or their content. Ibiblio could host SCO's site if it met their criteria.
I want to know why it matters though... Groklaw looks at the public filings that anyone could get if they were willing to go to the courthouse for a copy. They don't have any secret information and don't get information from IBM. IBM has been nearly quiet in the media since the case has begun, citing their preference not to comment on litigation.
Since before the IBM case started, SCO has been issuing public statements both through their media shills and on their own web site. They've made outrageous claims with no evidence whatsoever to support them. They've tried to co-opt the GNU/Linux operating system as their own, charging $700 per processor to run it. That's a slap in the face for the thousands of contributors who relied on the GPL and made their own contributions, and to Linus Trovalds who initially developed Linux. After initially claiming that three teams of experts found millions of lines of infringing code in Linux, they waited three years to show ANY evidence and then it was only 326 lines. They transformed their case from Trade Secrets (since UNIX contains none as admitted by their lawyer Kevin McBride) into some bizzare "ladder" theory where IBM loses control of it's own independent creations simply by associating them with their flavors of licensed UNIX.
The most bizarre thing is how they value their "core UNIX intellectual property". Caldera was created as a Linux company in 1994. They raised about $70 million in an IPO as a Linux company when they went public in 2000. They purchased assets and operations from Tarentalla (Santa Cruz Operation) for $93.8 million in 2001. You can see that in the 10-Q report they filed with the SEC (search for "Purchase price allocation"). They allocated that money this way:
Calde
"lxrun" might be under the Mozilla Public License, but the Linux binaries that SCO is hosting without the source code are not.
Ever since I installed them, I've been getting Blue Screens Of Death multiple times per day on both my work computer and my laptop computer. It could be something with the SQL Server 2005 update or the "critical" vulnerability fix, I don't know. It was always stop 0x00000050, with the third number 0x89E773DE. I would think my memory was going bad or that it was a driver issue, but the only change on my computers was installing those updates, and it has happened on both consistently. It doesn't matter what I'm doing on the computers, it usually happens when I'm away from them. A friend of mine had just started getting BSODs too and hadn't made the connection, but he just performed the updates before it started happening also...
This was from a polling of 3000 readers of one SCI-FI magazine. I don't know if Serenity should even be in the top 10. Don't get me wrong... Serenity was a good movie. Firefly was even better. If you haven't watched it, go out and buy the complete series on DVD, it will only set you back $30 on Amazon and is WELL worth it. It was certainly an amazing show. What it did best was character development. It was also realistic in a way most shows and movies don't even try to be. The best part had to be the humor though, it always felt like it flowed from the story and was true to the characters. You just can't fit that much character development into 90 minutes for a movie when the series opener was two hours and you only started to get to know the characters...
I can't believe Terminator didn't score higher. I hope they were going by "series" also. I can't bear the omission of "The Empire Strikes Back", easily the best of the Star Wars movies.
XP doesn't even run well sometimes on my 1.6 ghz core duo laptop with 1 gig of ram. Windows 95 (and Linux) ran ok on my 33 mhz 486 with 8mb ram.
They aren't suing to shut him up, they are suing him to stop his frivolous lawsuits. They aren't preventing him from expressing his views at all, just from harassing people that are expressing theirs. If someone decided that shooting lawyers was their way to "speak out" against lawyers, is that free speech?
They are providing a service, a place where people can come and publish their works for free that they want the world to see. This generates a thing called "web traffic", which is when people on the internet come to the site to "visit". This gets people called "advertisers" to spend money, hoping that the "visitors" will click on their link and maybe buy a product. It's similar to how just about every free website out there makes money from Yahoo search and message boards to Ebay to Google itself to even Slashdot. To do this, they provide the web application that enables people to share their creations and they pay for the servers, support staff, developers, and bandwidth.
It's not Google or Youtube's fault that you haven't started a company, created a web application, hired employees, purchased servers, and setup your network capacity, and marketed your site to attract visitors.
The safe harbor also protects sites like Slashdot, who also make money from advertisements and not hosting. The only difference is that the content is video instead of text. Also I think the vast majority of videos (at least the ones I click on to watch) are not infringing copyrights, they are posted by people who created them. Most of the rest are funny commercials that the advertisers probably wouldn't mind me watching all that I want. The thing that killed Napster is that 99% of the traffic was for copyright infringement.
This doesn't make any sense. 98.2% of U.S. households have a television, 12.6% live below the poverty line. Would you like to force them to pay for a converter themselves or go without TV? I think the left would be ecstatic that the poor are getting another government handout. The wealthy won't apply for this, they probably already have TVs with built-in tuners or other tuners themselves. I guess you say it all right here: "Beyond my disdain for most TV to begin with...", so you just want to do away with TV?
So on average, it will last 570 years instead of 228?
I believe that anonymous speech is very important. The U.S. Supreme Court agrees with me. There are things that people can say when anonymous that they wouldn't say normally for fear of embarrassment or retalition.
This is just one link I came upon:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/cyber.rig
Expecially in the superman movie where he lifts the statue of liberty, and proceeds to move the moon to cause a solar eclipse. If he exerted enough force, he would simply fly through the moon.
Cherenkov radiation is similar to them talking about phosphorus, light is only emitted when the high-energy particles are traveling through a medium like water at faster than the speed of light in that medium. The light is produced by radiation traveling through the medium, not by the radioactive object directly. Simply handling a radioactive object or being near a radiation source will not make you radioactive, at least not at nearly the levels of the original radioative elements. Most of the 'fallout' from a radioactive incident is in the elements that are radioactive being released and absorbed into the environment. For instance, the human body absorbs Strontium as if it were calcium, but compound containing radioactive Strontium would have to be absorbed by the body somehow, just standing next to it will not make you radioactive.
The actual radiation could cause atoms in your body to become radioactive themselves, but exposure to radiation creates much less radioactivity than the radiation itself, which is a lot less radiation than is contained in the radioactive materials. For instance the half-life of Strontium 90 is about 28 years. If you encased a pellet of Strontium 90 in something and planted it in your body, 1/2 of it would decay over 28 years, producing radiation. If ALL of that radiation went into turning elements in your body into radioactive isotopes, then your whole body, minus the strontium pellet, could contain about 1/2 the radiation from the original pellet in the form of those isotopes. However, those would have been decaying over the years as well, so you will never come close to being as radioactive as the original isotopes. If the radio active isotopes in your body decayed faster than strontium, most would already be gone at the 28 year point. If they decayed slower, they would put out less radiation. In either case, you wouldn't glow. Also, most of the radiation will simply pass through your body, punching wholes in your cell walls and interfering with cell division, killing your cells and causing radiation sickness if the exposure is high enough.
DRM is not like arresting people that are guilty of doing something, it is like preventing them from doing it (or other things they are allowed to do) in the first place. Comparing it to speeding, it would be like this:
The Linux community doesn't know what patents are being infringed, if any. If Microsoft has this information, which they claim to, and they are doing nothing about it, equitable estoppel could come into play. If Microsoft fails to mitigate their damages in the face of defendants begging them to at least tell them what is wrong so they can fix it, then Microsoft will have no case. You cannot allow infringement to occur in order to further your business interests. If Microsoft doesn't provide any details, one can only assume that infringement is not occurring.
Ballmer's threats have to do with Patents. It doesn't matter if it is chance or if the other people came up with it completely on their own. A Patent gives you an exclusive right for a limited term to make use of the "invention". If you were to talk about copyrights, then substantial similarity is a requirement. Once that has been proven, you have further hurdles to prove copyright infringement. You must then show that copying took place. You must prove for instance that there was access to the copyrighted work, you can't copy something if you've never seen it. That is where your chance similarities would matter.