To what extent are the likely remedies going to affect Microsofts expected revenues?
One of the more drastic remedies suggested on slashdot (compatible with its open source stance) has been to open up the source to Win95 / Win98 / WinNT: this could affect MS revenues drastically. To what extent would this be a deterrent to the courts? Is impact on revenues likely to guide the courts at all?
Oops: forgot to censor my +1 bonus... I meant that remark tongue-in-cheek. Freedom of speech is well defended in the US, and is compromised in Germany (as well as some other European countries) by anti-fascist and anti-anti-semitic laws (Holocaust denial is illegal, as are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Privacy is well-defended, as is the right to disobey a superior on moral grounds (fear of the `just following orders' defence).
As to American economic wellbeing, it seems to me that it is more talked about than felt. Sure, a lot of money is being made, but this boom is remarkably unequal in the way its rewards are distributed, and seems to be biting hard into job security. In terms of economic fundamentals it doesn't look so hot either: productivity growth is running at little more than half that of Europe, a high proportion of new jobs are in the `casual work' sector, and the US has a rather worrying balance of payments deficit.
Germans take a lot of civil rights more seriously than Americans, especially privacy. The main difference between Germans and Americans seems to be that Germans like to tell everyone what is wrong with their country, whilst Americans like to say that America is the best country in the world. More a marketing difference if you ask me...
For the sake of argument, lets drop the `professors are incompetent and overpaid and college fees are a rip-off' line and suppose that college professors have some slight skill in figuring out what a student needs in order to learn. Doesn't it then follow that a professor is in a better position to rpovide the best education if he actually knows what resources the student is making use of?
Like I say, I think note sharing *could* be a good thing: it is more likely to be so if the professors have some input into the process...
It sounds like this is not individual college professors but the administration who are upset about this(the original complaint was made by the assistant provost).
I think that this kind of note sharing scheme *could* be a good thing, but what bothers me about it is that it is done behind the universities' back, by direct appeal to the students. If the scheme is such a good adjunct to classes, why don't they approach the course instructors directly and ask for their cooperation?
Right. It isn't exactly good interview practice to ask questions which include flames of the answerer. Maybe JP is as bad as attrition.org says he is but these two slashdot stories do nothing to advance the case.
How does the bill handle the problem of authentication? I am not keen on the idea that I might be legally bound by a spoofed signature, so how does the law ensure that signatures belong to who they say they do? It seems to me that in the case of notification this might be a real problem: I might be legally bound by a message that was not preceded by any communication from myself to the issuing company.
I agree about the problems with splitting up the company, though I think it is what is most likely to happen.
Opening up the source brutal? If it was just Win98 and WinNT that would still allow MS exclusive rights on Win2000. Furthermore MS would have a crucial assets in the form of the development team that created the operating systems in the first place. I'm rather at a loss of what to make of your remark `open source is just a pop phenomenon'. Do you mean that opening up the source would not remove MS's monopoly position? If not, what do you mean?
Republicans are strong anti-trust supporters, by and large. Remember that Reagan supported the anti-trust findnings against Bell when he was elected in 1980.
Having said that, it seems as if Microsoft is wooing George Bush. Still, I think it is dangerous to be seen to be too close with Microsoft: Microsoft's favourable media treatment has depended upon Microsoft being seen as an icon of the computer industry, and that might easily stop very soon.
Getting split up is by far the most likely outcome, and the one that both the WSJ and FT seem to have expected in yesterday's editions. Weaker remedies would have been to have fined the company, to impose restrictions on the kind of bundled features that MS could include with its OS software.
These aren't likely remedies by themselves anymore: the severity of Jackson's initial rulings suggests a similarly severe outcome. The FT suggested that dismantling MS along product lines would be the most likely punishment, and it is rather hard to see how it could otherwise be achieved.
I haven't seen any mention elsewhere (ie. other than on slashdot) of the idea of releasing the source to Win98/WinNT/IE under an open source license. It would be a nice remedy in that it would transform them overnight into non-monopoly goods without restructuring MS or interfering with its `right to innovate'. It would badly hurt MS revenues, but that sounds inevitable anyhow: it seems a much more tenable outcome today than it did before the ruling.
It is an important step to a completely component based architecture programmable via languages such as XML in as powerful a manner as the native API.
XML a language? Surely not, or has it become more ambitious since I last checked up on it...
Nitpicking apart, this strikes me as a very sensible approach. CORBA is a bloated enough standard as it stands without being made to do things it wasn't designed for. Has anyone ever heard of DCOM before? Where else is it used?
The original intention of patents was to give companies an incentive to make their discoveries known, and so promote the dissemination of knowledge. The fear was that companies would conceal the functioning of their inventions which was held to hold up technological progress. So, perhaps paradoxically, patent law has its roots in a desire for openness.
There is a readable, if lengthy, summary of how patent law came to be the way it is at Franklin Pierece law school.
There is no intellectual property law applicable to software in China. Therefore it isn't theft to use it without payment, and terms like piracy should not be applied. One might equally argue that `property' should not be applied to goods for which we need not be in conflict if we both make use of, and that it is usury to charge for that which should be free (Hume's argument for the need for property was based upon the need to avoid conflict, I think so was Hobbes).
Of course this might change, since America is putting heavy pressure on such countries (India being the other big example) to adopt US-style IP laws, and so MS is probably promoting NT in the hope of establishing an effective monopoly in years to come.
I am quite sure you are right about companies being able to work on a new distribution `behind company walls' so to speak. My understanding is that while an employee is working under contract, he/she is considered to be an `organ' of the company, and legally identified with the company under normal circumstances.
So I think the sketch you draw is legally plausible. Pragmatically, I think it isn't believable: it supposes that MS can permanently stay two steps ahead of the field with every release (implying a massive development effort at perpetual risk of being wrongstepped by the open source community), whose revenue model is profoundly breached by free redistribution.
BUT, they were number 17 or something like that when it came to productivity.
... and the US shows pretty mediocre productivity growth (1.1% pa over the past five years, compared to an average of about 2.0% in Europe).
There was an article in the economist a couple of months ago that made an even more distressing analysis: almost all of the productivity growth was due to massive productivity gains in computer hardware (costs of production have been decreasing dramatically). Once these figures are factored out, the only industrial sector showing positive productivity growth was agriculture.
I wrote `shameless plug' because their political stance does not appeal to everyone. Certainly they adhere to a `positive' conception of liberty (ie. the right to self-expression means very little when you are starving), and they are broadly against the second amendment (a mark of sanity, IMO). I find I pretty much support every issue they take a stand on, so you might say that their politics is mine.
Absolute power for the Supreme Court? I am struggling to figure out what you might mean... It is probably too much to hope that you might be able to support your statement?
I presume that the full price of the equipment would count as a campaign contribution only if the equipment's sole use were for this campaigning. Otherwise it would be usual (in company accounting) to divide the cost pro-rata amongst the uses to which it is put
And there is no way in which my innocent act of reading your campaign material could count as campaigning itself. You seem to have a `GNU-viral' conception of what political campaigning is...
Agreed: the campaign finance law is supposed to meant to protect the voice of the individual citizen against the `one dollar, one vote' logic of mass media establishment cronyism. What's wrong in the current case is it acts against the very voices it is trying to protect...
Shameless plug time -
The constitution by itself does not protect freedom in America: the division of power only works if the public campiagns for openness and civil liberties, so support the ACLU...
Wouldn't do a damn thing. Vague rules are the friends of the people with big legal budgets. What IP needs is clarity, not the sense-defying rubbish that it is today.
Journals typically insist that one does not submit articles simultaneously to several journals, but they do not insist that the ideas in a submitted article have been kept secret beforehand. On the contrary, it is normal practice for there to be a long development arc for academic journals, starting with informal seminars presenting new results, then conference submissions and then journal submissions.
The importance of journals is that they, together with book publications, represent the `long-term memory' of the academic system. But journals do not represent the only form of peer review, and the typical journal article has already undergone a process of evolution under criticism by the time it is submitted. The advantage of open mailing lists over thse already existing processes is that they represent a breadth of opinion that none of the other formats have, combatting the incestuousness of much academic clique-building. The foundations of mathematics mailing list is the kind of thing I have in mind.
Again, of course, you are right about academics not choosing to adapt. The price of this, as it has always been, is irrelevance.
I had a look back at the older story, and was puzzled by a few things I saw:
1. The prosecutors allege he made a profit of CAN$7 million. Why is the fine only CAN$1 million?
2. The CBC story says that it will not affect his position in the company, which strikes me as odd if he could spend up to two years in jail...
3. An AC made a remark to the effect that Cowpland still expected to make his sales figures at the time of the stock sale, which suggests that he did not sell his stock to avoid an anticipated capital loss.
If the third remark is true, then the only serious allegation is that he lied to the investigators. I couldn't figure out what misrepresentation he was expected to have made from the allegations. Any enlightenment?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the more drastic remedies suggested on slashdot (compatible with its open source stance) has been to open up the source to Win95 / Win98 / WinNT: this could affect MS revenues drastically. To what extent would this be a deterrent to the courts? Is impact on revenues likely to guide the courts at all?
As to American economic wellbeing, it seems to me that it is more talked about than felt. Sure, a lot of money is being made, but this boom is remarkably unequal in the way its rewards are distributed, and seems to be biting hard into job security. In terms of economic fundamentals it doesn't look so hot either: productivity growth is running at little more than half that of Europe, a high proportion of new jobs are in the `casual work' sector, and the US has a rather worrying balance of payments deficit.
Germans take a lot of civil rights more seriously than Americans, especially privacy. The main difference between Germans and Americans seems to be that Germans like to tell everyone what is wrong with their country, whilst Americans like to say that America is the best country in the world. More a marketing difference if you ask me...
Like I say, I think note sharing *could* be a good thing: it is more likely to be so if the professors have some input into the process...
I think that this kind of note sharing scheme *could* be a good thing, but what bothers me about it is that it is done behind the universities' back, by direct appeal to the students. If the scheme is such a good adjunct to classes, why don't they approach the course instructors directly and ask for their cooperation?
Right. It isn't exactly good interview practice to ask questions which include flames of the answerer. Maybe JP is as bad as attrition.org says he is but these two slashdot stories do nothing to advance the case.
Does e-speak have any concrete advantages over XML-RPC?
How does the bill handle the problem of authentication? I am not keen on the idea that I might be legally bound by a spoofed signature, so how does the law ensure that signatures belong to who they say they do? It seems to me that in the case of notification this might be a real problem: I might be legally bound by a message that was not preceded by any communication from myself to the issuing company.
They make integrated development environments. Their most famous product is Code Fusion.
Why do people think this makes a monopoly? It looks like a horizontal acquisition to me.
Opening up the source brutal? If it was just Win98 and WinNT that would still allow MS exclusive rights on Win2000. Furthermore MS would have a crucial assets in the form of the development team that created the operating systems in the first place. I'm rather at a loss of what to make of your remark `open source is just a pop phenomenon'. Do you mean that opening up the source would not remove MS's monopoly position? If not, what do you mean?
Having said that, it seems as if Microsoft is wooing George Bush. Still, I think it is dangerous to be seen to be too close with Microsoft: Microsoft's favourable media treatment has depended upon Microsoft being seen as an icon of the computer industry, and that might easily stop very soon.
These aren't likely remedies by themselves anymore: the severity of Jackson's initial rulings suggests a similarly severe outcome. The FT suggested that dismantling MS along product lines would be the most likely punishment, and it is rather hard to see how it could otherwise be achieved.
I haven't seen any mention elsewhere (ie. other than on slashdot) of the idea of releasing the source to Win98/WinNT/IE under an open source license. It would be a nice remedy in that it would transform them overnight into non-monopoly goods without restructuring MS or interfering with its `right to innovate'. It would badly hurt MS revenues, but that sounds inevitable anyhow: it seems a much more tenable outcome today than it did before the ruling.
Ah yes, XML-RPC. It makes sense now.
I meant DCOP of course...
It is an important step to a completely component based architecture programmable via languages such as XML in as powerful a manner as the native API.
XML a language? Surely not, or has it become more ambitious since I last checked up on it...
Nitpicking apart, this strikes me as a very sensible approach. CORBA is a bloated enough standard as it stands without being made to do things it wasn't designed for. Has anyone ever heard of DCOM before? Where else is it used?
There is a readable, if lengthy, summary of how patent law came to be the way it is at Franklin Pierece law school.
Of course this might change, since America is putting heavy pressure on such countries (India being the other big example) to adopt US-style IP laws, and so MS is probably promoting NT in the hope of establishing an effective monopoly in years to come.
So I think the sketch you draw is legally plausible. Pragmatically, I think it isn't believable: it supposes that MS can permanently stay two steps ahead of the field with every release (implying a massive development effort at perpetual risk of being wrongstepped by the open source community), whose revenue model is profoundly breached by free redistribution.
... and the US shows pretty mediocre productivity growth (1.1% pa over the past five years, compared to an average of about 2.0% in Europe).
There was an article in the economist a couple of months ago that made an even more distressing analysis: almost all of the productivity growth was due to massive productivity gains in computer hardware (costs of production have been decreasing dramatically). Once these figures are factored out, the only industrial sector showing positive productivity growth was agriculture.
Absolute power for the Supreme Court? I am struggling to figure out what you might mean... It is probably too much to hope that you might be able to support your statement?
And there is no way in which my innocent act of reading your campaign material could count as campaigning itself. You seem to have a `GNU-viral' conception of what political campaigning is...
Shameless plug time -
The constitution by itself does not protect freedom in America: the division of power only works if the public campiagns for openness and civil liberties, so support the ACLU ...
Wouldn't do a damn thing. Vague rules are the friends of the people with big legal budgets. What IP needs is clarity, not the sense-defying rubbish that it is today.
The importance of journals is that they, together with book publications, represent the `long-term memory' of the academic system. But journals do not represent the only form of peer review, and the typical journal article has already undergone a process of evolution under criticism by the time it is submitted. The advantage of open mailing lists over thse already existing processes is that they represent a breadth of opinion that none of the other formats have, combatting the incestuousness of much academic clique-building. The foundations of mathematics mailing list is the kind of thing I have in mind.
Again, of course, you are right about academics not choosing to adapt. The price of this, as it has always been, is irrelevance.
1. The prosecutors allege he made a profit of CAN$7 million. Why is the fine only CAN$1 million?
2. The CBC story says that it will not affect his position in the company, which strikes me as odd if he could spend up to two years in jail...
3. An AC made a remark to the effect that Cowpland still expected to make his sales figures at the time of the stock sale, which suggests that he did not sell his stock to avoid an anticipated capital loss.
If the third remark is true, then the only serious allegation is that he lied to the investigators. I couldn't figure out what misrepresentation he was expected to have made from the allegations. Any enlightenment?