How can you prove harm to the consumers? You can't.
Sure you can. The harm to consumers is in directly denying them their choice. Consumers overwhelmingly chose netscape until MS made it a violation of their OEM license agreement to preinstall netscape. Microsoft's actions harmed consumers by denying them their choice.
So what happens if samba actively violated this license? There was a (completely unrelated) thread on the linux kernel mailing list recently that had an interesting post that described the difference between a license and a law. The author describes a hypothetical situation where he lets his neighbor park cars in his driveway during a party that they neighbor is having. In this case he has granted a "non-exclusive license to
use [his] property under specified conditions".
IANAL, but I found this statement particularly interesting.
Enforcement of a license is up to the property owner. If a licensee
violates the specifics, or even the intent of a license, the
property owner who issued that license, may bring civil action
against the violator. In the United States, (and it's different in
different states) such a civil action may prevail if the property
owner can show that he/she was harmed by the tort. For instance, if
you parked a truck on my property, rather than an automobile, you
may have violated either the wording or the intent of the license
issued, however it's unlikely that I would prevail in court bringing
an action against you unless your truck was so heavy it damaged my
property.
So if this is true, and the samba folks violate the license, won't Microsoft, as the property owner, be compelled to show damage from violation of the license? Microsoft could (probably) claim that they experienced damages from any free (including GPL) implementation of those specs. But could they demonstrate damages specific to a GPL implementation? If not, why not just violate the license?
One or both of these claims may have a greater chance of success than the jurisdiction claim.
We can certainly hope. The claim that the US doesn't have jurisdiction doesn't discuss the constitutionality of the DMCA at all. Whereas the other claims directly challenge the DMCA, and if those claims are upheld set the stage for overturning that stupid law.
I would absolutely love this. I live in N. Carolina. But I hail from Wisconsin. I would absolutely *love* to get the Wisconsin local TV stations, in addition to my local stations. That way I could get the Green Bay Packer telecasts every sunday. Right now I have to go to a bar or subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket.
I don't want NFL sunday ticket. I just want one game per week: the Packers. I don't want to have to pay $139 every season for "up to 13 games each weekend", when I really only want 1 game per weekend. If something like this happens, the NFL will very definately get involved. They maintain serious control over their broadcasts, and this will completely screw up the exclusive contract that the NFL has with DirecTV to provide these broadcasts.
Which is, I suspect exactly why EchoStar is filing this suit. Notice, at the bottom of the article a reference to another article:
Late last week, regulators at the US Federal Communication Commission suspended a review of the proposed $26 billion satellite TV merger of EchoStar Communications and DirecTV pending further information from EchoStar.
I think a more than likely scenario that will come out of regulation is that the regulators will want it so that they only have to investigat/audit/regulate one, and only one, DSL provider. If there are two organizations that provide DSL, then the government has to run an audit twice. They have to address two (possibly) completely different business structures. Essentially, competition under government regulated industries requires at least twice the amount of regulatory effort. Thus they tend towards a single provider that they watch closely.
IMHO, regulating DSL is the worst thing that could happen to competition in the CA DSL market, and the best thing that could happen to the winner of the lottery for becoming that single DSL provider.
Yes there is! WMP comes pre-installed on windows. Real can't get pre-installed becuase it violates the OEM license agreements that OEM's have with MS. So to get Real, you have to download it. To get WMP you don't have to do anything. To get real, you have to go out of your way and download the thing. 99% of the consumer buying public doesn't do this. Thus WMP gets a market for free, that Real (and others) have worked very hard to establish. Developers know this. So they, whether they like WMP or not, are basically forced to use it.
This is black letter antitrust violation: Using a monopoly in one market to extend into another market. The government, in their efforts to remove WMP from windows, is trying to level the playing field so that WMP is evaluated on the same terms as Real. The *entire* purpose is to restore competition to a market, from which MS has forcibly removed any and all competition.
There is a *much* bigger penalty for cisco's non-compliance to standards than MS's. As far as actual non-compliance to standards, I have built many networks with non-cisco equipment interoperating with cisco equipment. Yes there are potholes that you have to be careful of, but interoperability works.
Contrast this with Microsoft, where there is no competetor at all. Cisco, IMHO, may be bad, but they're no Microsoft, and they're not likely to ever effectively become Microsot. The natural penalty (non-interoperability) is just too high.
You've missed the point, which is that cisco routers interoperate with all of those smarter, more standard routers to which you compare cisco. Of course they don't do EIGRP, or CDP, but so what? They interoperate with each other in so many other ways that if you want interoperability, you can have it.
Contrast this with Microsoft, where interoperability is entirely non-existant, whether you want it that way or not. Interoperability is so non-existant that great numbers of people went to great lengths to reverse engineer most of their networking protocols (samba). No one has reverse engineered EIGRP because OSPF interoperates just fine. Why go to all the effort to reverse engineer EIGRP when turning on OSPF is quicker, easier, and more likely to be successful.
No one is talking about removing the software developers ability to choose the MS middle ware if they want it. But currently, windows imposes an expense on every other middle ware out there. What the government is trying to do is level the playing field so that MS middle ware imposes the same expenses on the software developer as any other middle ware. Which means that the software developer will start to look at the other choices and decide which one works best, not just use what Microsoft hands out.
In written testimony, RealNetworks' David Richards said the proposed settlement doesn't give software developers enough incentive to make new products. That's because an application can easily sniff out and continue to use the Windows product rather than, say, RealNetworks' competing product.
And also:
But, perhaps more importantly, the states say software developers would have a greater incentive to build applications that also work with competing operating systems like Linux and Apple's Macintosh, thus diluting the power of Windows, now found in as many as 95 percent of desktop computers.
The entire point is to increase competition by not allowing MS products to be the default standard installed everywhere. The goal is to increase competition.
The article specifically addresses that point. In referring to the proposed final judgement offered by the DOJ and the settling states, it says:
In written testimony, RealNetworks' David Richards said the proposed settlement doesn't give software developers enough incentive to make new products. That's because an application can easily sniff out and continue to use the Windows product rather than, say, RealNetworks' competing product.
There's no question that GM's designing of a new car and some guy's writing of a mail daemon are very different things. But when you start comparing apples to apples-- large-scale mechanical or civil engineering to large-scale software engineering-- I think you'll find that the two are more alike than they are different.
That may very well be the case. The problem that I have with what you're doing, though, is that you're defining "large scale" in both software engineering and civil/mechanical engineering by measuring how much effort goes into them. The thing that makes something a large scale software project is if it takes about the same amount of effort as a large scale civil/mechanical engineering project.
I'm trying to assess how much complexity goes into each of those projects, and then relate the complexity to the effort. I hypothesizing that in building a physical thing, the amount of effort, for the level of complexity, is dramatically higher than for software projects. Which means that for the same amount of effort, you can build dramatically more complex things in software than you can in a physical thing. The ability to build complex things in software depends on our ability to leverage the techniques we've learned already. Otherwise, we are not able to build any new complex software.
Remembering that the point of this is to discuss software patents, it seem pretty intuitive to me that innovation in software depends enormously on the ability to freely use previous ideas. And that granting patents on software imposes such a large restriction on the use of previous ideas, as to discourage innovation, negating the entire purpose that patents were invented to fulfill.
Take the other example that RMS uses: a word processor. If software patents existed for word processors, then we'd still all be using WordStar. Why? Because in order for someone to improve on WordStar, they would have had to violate the patent granted to WordStar. Perhaps the patent on "cut & paste". No one could write a better word processor, because to do so would imply the violation of patents from the first ever word processor - who would write a word processor w/out "cut & paste"? And that's just one simple example. There are probably about a thousand unique things that define what makes a word processor a word processor.
Imagine that in your flight sim for the USAF, that you had to go and check the patent status of every technique you used in that project. I remember that Microsoft wrote a flight sim almost 20 years ago. How much more work would your project have been if it also required you to license patents from Microsoft?
I think that RMS is saying that if you keep the number of parts identical, that the effort involved in the development of a physical thing is much greater than the effort involved in developing a software project with the same number of parts.
Let's use the car for example. How many parts are in a car? 10,000? 100,000? I don't think it's 1,000,000, but I could be wrong. Let's just say 100,000 for argument's sake. How many people are involved in the development and production of a 100,000 part car? I would think that it's safe to say at least 1000 people. But you might know better than I.
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that each line of code is a "software part". How many people are involved in a 100,000 line software project? Using a program called sloccount
I was able to count up the number of real lines of source code in qmail 1.03. This project is basically a one man project. It contains approximately 17,000 lines of source code.
If these are numbers are to believed as reasonable numbers. Then it takes about 5-6 people to produce the and assemble a software project with the same number of parts as a physical item that requires upwards of thousands of people to produce.
The offshoot is that, part for part, software is easier to develop. Consequently we make software much more complicated, with many many more parts than we make in physical objects. This leads to a situation that to make any useful software at all, you rely on techniques used in previous software. To prevent a developer from using those techniques (as software patents do) is to prevent any further innovation in software.
I think RMS puts forth a pretty compelling argument.
It sounds to me like RMS is arguing that patents are an obstacle to the writing of software using well-known algorithms or principles.
I think it's more than that. RMS is arguing that engineering software is very different from engineeering physical things. He says that, if you compare building a 1 million part physical thing with a 1 million part software project, you're going to end up with dramatically different effort levels.
In the physical thing you have to worry about how the most basic parts are going to interract with each other. For example, you need to make sure that a screw that connects two parts together isn't going to corrode because the physical properties of the screw interracts with the physical properties of the parts it's connected to. Whereas in software, you don't have to worry about an if statement embeded in a while statement corroding.
Additionally, there's an unbelievable cost associated with producing a 1 million part physical thing. You have to build a factory. You have to make sure that the factory can reliably build the thign, and you have to make sure that the factory itself is safe for people to work in. In software, once you've built a thing, to reproduce it simply means invoking an already existing copy command.
He uses this to say that building a million piece software project is much easier than building a 1 million piece physical thing. Which means that we make software much bigger and much more complicated than physical things because we can. Which means that it's dramatically more important in software to depend on previous ideas ideas in order to build anything that's useful. The dependancy on already used ideas is just too great. To completely abandon all previously used ideas is to relegate your software to the state of uselessness. In other words, innovation in software depends entirely on the ability to freely use previous ideas.
Thus he argues that patents in software, actually discourage innovation. And he even uses biotech as a precedent for how the improvement on previous ideas creates an entirely new idea worthy of entirely new protection. Whereas in software, if I improve upon your idea, I'm violating your patent.
I think he makes a really good case for the idea that software patents actually discourage innovation becuase of the dramatically different nature of building software. So if you were to ask, is building software more like composing music, or building an engine, I think he's got a pretty good point to say that it's more like composing music.
I do not understand the draw of this game. There, I said it. I live life every day, mow the lawn when it needs it, go to work...why the HELL would I want to play a "game" within which I get to do the same crap?
Becuase, if you're a geek, in the sims you occasionally get laid. For some of us, that's as unrealistic as running around with a BFG, and being able to get shot with a rocket launcher 7 times before dieing.
Re:Litigation time...
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You're trying to make a legal argument (hence the use of the word "sue"), so "moral" is an inappropriate word in your text.
What do you think the basis of the law is? Opinion? Feelings? No. Laws are simply a community assessment of write and wrong. It's against the law to kill people, because the community is in agreement that this is wrong. In areas where there is controversy in the law, it's because we've codified something into the law as being either right or wrong, but a large, and vocal population strongly disagrees with the codification and wants to see it changed. Why do they want it changed? Becuase the law either says something is right, that they believe is wrong, or vice versa.
Take for example the DMCA. That codifies as wrong the ability to make copies of digital content (under certain circumstances). Why is/. so up arms about it? Because we believe that the DMCA wrongly restricts our freedoms. Freedoms granted by other laws already on the books. In other words, we think that law is wrong.
While the morality isn't the law, the law is meant to reflect the cumulative morality of those it governs.
Re:Mmmm.. FUN! And a legal nightmare..
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In that case, shouldn't you sue the person who installed it rather than the company who makes the software? Didn't we all agree that there was nothing wrong with writing DeCSS or Napster or other software - it was only the person using it for illegal purposes who was at fault?
IANAL, but you're comparing apples & oranges. DeCSS did not embed some alternate functionality into its software. It did exactly what it advertised itself to do. A better comparison is to that of a virus or a worm. When I download an email, my intention is to read my email. But when that email exploits my machine in a way that I hadn't intended, the author of the virus or worm is held accountable. This is the current law.
It doesn't matter who installed the software. What matters is that a clandestine operation took place in direct subversion of the user's intention. This software is a virus, and I suspect that if you read the current crop of computer crimes, you'd probably be able to classify this software as such.
Uh, no. Spyware are just applications that do what they are designed to do, and are loaded on just like any other application. A virus breaks into your computer in unauthorized ways. A virus can be spyware, but spyware is not a virus.
I would argue that anyone that does anything to your computer, in an unauthorized manner is morally equivalant. So a virus, which is loaded on your computer through a legitmate downloading of email, is just as unauthorized as my installing a piece of software for one purpose, but it performs another entirely on it's own.
The issue is merchantability. I bought or downloaded a piece of software because it had a particular use to me. I gave up my money and the right to run on my computer, as consideration for a specific set of functionality that is being performed. I want function. If function Y comes along as a bug, that's one thing. But if function Y is intentionally installed by the software author, and even more, if function Y attempts to disable my stop Y software, that's a problem. Replace "function Y" with spyware or email virus and the statements should still both be true.
Installing software may be a legitimate thing to do. But so is reading email. The fact that an intentional clandestine alternate action takes place as a result of that should be enough to convict the software author of a crime.
And would you also sue a binocular manufacturer if someone spys on your wife in your backyard?
Yes I would. If the binocular manufacturer built them to target nearby women, even when the user of them was trying to look at stars, or watch an opera, then yes, in that case I very much would sue the binocular manufacturer.
Lest we forget, Microsoft broke the law, and this is being suggested as a punishment for having done that. The question isn't "is this fair?" it's "is this an appropriate punishment for the crime that has been committed?".
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. This is called the "remedy" phase of the trial. That means that the reaction to a guilty finding of antitrust law is not punishment. It's a remedy to bringing back competition to the market. So the *only* thing that the judge has to order is something that she believes will bring a remedy to the problem of non-competition w/in the market.
Now, of course, Microsoft is guilty of being an illegal monopolist. So they're subject to a huge number of civil suits. Punitive damages (i.e. punishment) may be part of those trials. But the result of the antitrust trial will be a remedy, not a punishment.
This is significant because the standard is only to restore competition to the market. AFAIK, that's all that antitrust law calls for, and it seems like something much less painful for Microsoft than punishment.
It's not the eye candy that I'm worried about. It's the functionality that I'm worried about. It's the ability to add initial datasets and weekly (sometimes daily) updates. It's the ability to use it to track & maintain a budget - i.e. comparing monthly category spending to a preset limit. Of course, in gnucash categories are called accounts.
I'll check out 1.6. I think I was using 1.4, but I'm not sure anymore. It was about 4 months ago. Thanks for the advice.
Ok! I admit it. I use MS Money! There I said it. I'm not proud of it. I'd use quicken, if they'd have offered a free evaluation download (they didn't at the time don't know if they do now). I tried using gnucash. It took me about 2 weeks to get the data into gnucash in a sane manner. It took me about 4 hours to get it into MS Money. And maintaining updates from my financial institutions in MS Money was simply an issue of importing a file - a 5 minute process at most. Doing the same thing in gnucash was a 45 minute process at best!
I hang my head in shame for choosing non-free software (ironically enough called "money"), especially non-free software from the evil empire. But I couldn't find similar, effective software in the free software world.
Oh, and just so you know, MS Money may have the easy functionality, but of course it wouldn't be a MS product unless it contained some really seriously fscked up bugs. Like in the budget section, if you add a monthly bill or deposit, and then decide that you're going to delete it. Your budget doesn't reflect the change for a couple of months! Which completely screws up any sort of automated tracking. A phone call to MS about this got a "yeah we know about that" but no plans to ever actually fix it. I guess lieing with lions, I should expect to get bit.
Hmm... I wonder what the implications of something like this are on auto responders. I use TMDA to autmotically respond to any emails that I get from people that I don't know. I wonder if an auto response constitutes being served.
The most surprising thing about this is that not only do you're wife's grandparents use the internet, they use it enough to be able to forward (what they think are) amusing pictures to you.
Reading email is challenging enough for my parents. My grandparents (those who are still left) can barely use a microwave oven. The concept of actually reading an email, and forwarding one to someone else, is far beyond them!
What's interesting to me about this is that I have my old yahoo account forwarded. I now have my own domain so I rarely use my yahoo account anymore except for testing.
I've noticed that if I leave the yahoo account non-forwarded and only accessable through the web, that the account accumulates somewhere around 10-15 spams per day. Some of which get autmoatically put into bulk mail, some of which don't. But if I forward the account to my domain, I don't really get any spam at all. Perhaps 1-2 per week.
I've tested this over several weeks now, and it's a strange thing. Yahoo! are the *only* people who know whether or not I'm forwarding. Are they sending more spam to webmail accounts in order to encourage people to move to forwarding accounts? Why would it behave like this?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can. The harm to consumers is in directly denying them their choice. Consumers overwhelmingly chose netscape until MS made it a violation of their OEM license agreement to preinstall netscape. Microsoft's actions harmed consumers by denying them their choice.
IANAL, but I found this statement particularly interesting.
So if this is true, and the samba folks violate the license, won't Microsoft, as the property owner, be compelled to show damage from violation of the license? Microsoft could (probably) claim that they experienced damages from any free (including GPL) implementation of those specs. But could they demonstrate damages specific to a GPL implementation? If not, why not just violate the license?
We can certainly hope. The claim that the US doesn't have jurisdiction doesn't discuss the constitutionality of the DMCA at all. Whereas the other claims directly challenge the DMCA, and if those claims are upheld set the stage for overturning that stupid law.
I don't want NFL sunday ticket. I just want one game per week: the Packers. I don't want to have to pay $139 every season for "up to 13 games each weekend", when I really only want 1 game per weekend. If something like this happens, the NFL will very definately get involved. They maintain serious control over their broadcasts, and this will completely screw up the exclusive contract that the NFL has with DirecTV to provide these broadcasts.
Which is, I suspect exactly why EchoStar is filing this suit. Notice, at the bottom of the article a reference to another article:
IMHO, regulating DSL is the worst thing that could happen to competition in the CA DSL market, and the best thing that could happen to the winner of the lottery for becoming that single DSL provider.
Yes there is! WMP comes pre-installed on windows. Real can't get pre-installed becuase it violates the OEM license agreements that OEM's have with MS. So to get Real, you have to download it. To get WMP you don't have to do anything. To get real, you have to go out of your way and download the thing. 99% of the consumer buying public doesn't do this. Thus WMP gets a market for free, that Real (and others) have worked very hard to establish. Developers know this. So they, whether they like WMP or not, are basically forced to use it.
This is black letter antitrust violation: Using a monopoly in one market to extend into another market. The government, in their efforts to remove WMP from windows, is trying to level the playing field so that WMP is evaluated on the same terms as Real. The *entire* purpose is to restore competition to a market, from which MS has forcibly removed any and all competition.
There is a *much* bigger penalty for cisco's non-compliance to standards than MS's. As far as actual non-compliance to standards, I have built many networks with non-cisco equipment interoperating with cisco equipment. Yes there are potholes that you have to be careful of, but interoperability works.
Contrast this with Microsoft, where there is no competetor at all. Cisco, IMHO, may be bad, but they're no Microsoft, and they're not likely to ever effectively become Microsot. The natural penalty (non-interoperability) is just too high.
You've missed the point, which is that cisco routers interoperate with all of those smarter, more standard routers to which you compare cisco. Of course they don't do EIGRP, or CDP, but so what? They interoperate with each other in so many other ways that if you want interoperability, you can have it.
Contrast this with Microsoft, where interoperability is entirely non-existant, whether you want it that way or not. Interoperability is so non-existant that great numbers of people went to great lengths to reverse engineer most of their networking protocols (samba). No one has reverse engineered EIGRP because OSPF interoperates just fine. Why go to all the effort to reverse engineer EIGRP when turning on OSPF is quicker, easier, and more likely to be successful.
No one is talking about removing the software developers ability to choose the MS middle ware if they want it. But currently, windows imposes an expense on every other middle ware out there. What the government is trying to do is level the playing field so that MS middle ware imposes the same expenses on the software developer as any other middle ware. Which means that the software developer will start to look at the other choices and decide which one works best, not just use what Microsoft hands out.
If windows isn't designed to be modular, that means it's not designed to allow users to decide what software they want and don't want.
Is that an admission that windows is designed to be Microsoft forcing software down users throats whether they want it or not?
And also:
The entire point is to increase competition by not allowing MS products to be the default standard installed everywhere. The goal is to increase competition.
That may very well be the case. The problem that I have with what you're doing, though, is that you're defining "large scale" in both software engineering and civil/mechanical engineering by measuring how much effort goes into them. The thing that makes something a large scale software project is if it takes about the same amount of effort as a large scale civil/mechanical engineering project.
I'm trying to assess how much complexity goes into each of those projects, and then relate the complexity to the effort. I hypothesizing that in building a physical thing, the amount of effort, for the level of complexity, is dramatically higher than for software projects. Which means that for the same amount of effort, you can build dramatically more complex things in software than you can in a physical thing. The ability to build complex things in software depends on our ability to leverage the techniques we've learned already. Otherwise, we are not able to build any new complex software.
Remembering that the point of this is to discuss software patents, it seem pretty intuitive to me that innovation in software depends enormously on the ability to freely use previous ideas. And that granting patents on software imposes such a large restriction on the use of previous ideas, as to discourage innovation, negating the entire purpose that patents were invented to fulfill.
Take the other example that RMS uses: a word processor. If software patents existed for word processors, then we'd still all be using WordStar. Why? Because in order for someone to improve on WordStar, they would have had to violate the patent granted to WordStar. Perhaps the patent on "cut & paste". No one could write a better word processor, because to do so would imply the violation of patents from the first ever word processor - who would write a word processor w/out "cut & paste"? And that's just one simple example. There are probably about a thousand unique things that define what makes a word processor a word processor.
Imagine that in your flight sim for the USAF, that you had to go and check the patent status of every technique you used in that project. I remember that Microsoft wrote a flight sim almost 20 years ago. How much more work would your project have been if it also required you to license patents from Microsoft?
Let's use the car for example. How many parts are in a car? 10,000? 100,000? I don't think it's 1,000,000, but I could be wrong. Let's just say 100,000 for argument's sake. How many people are involved in the development and production of a 100,000 part car? I would think that it's safe to say at least 1000 people. But you might know better than I.
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that each line of code is a "software part". How many people are involved in a 100,000 line software project? Using a program called sloccount I was able to count up the number of real lines of source code in qmail 1.03. This project is basically a one man project. It contains approximately 17,000 lines of source code.
If these are numbers are to believed as reasonable numbers. Then it takes about 5-6 people to produce the and assemble a software project with the same number of parts as a physical item that requires upwards of thousands of people to produce.
The offshoot is that, part for part, software is easier to develop. Consequently we make software much more complicated, with many many more parts than we make in physical objects. This leads to a situation that to make any useful software at all, you rely on techniques used in previous software. To prevent a developer from using those techniques (as software patents do) is to prevent any further innovation in software.
I think RMS puts forth a pretty compelling argument.
I think it's more than that. RMS is arguing that engineering software is very different from engineeering physical things. He says that, if you compare building a 1 million part physical thing with a 1 million part software project, you're going to end up with dramatically different effort levels.
In the physical thing you have to worry about how the most basic parts are going to interract with each other. For example, you need to make sure that a screw that connects two parts together isn't going to corrode because the physical properties of the screw interracts with the physical properties of the parts it's connected to. Whereas in software, you don't have to worry about an if statement embeded in a while statement corroding.
Additionally, there's an unbelievable cost associated with producing a 1 million part physical thing. You have to build a factory. You have to make sure that the factory can reliably build the thign, and you have to make sure that the factory itself is safe for people to work in. In software, once you've built a thing, to reproduce it simply means invoking an already existing copy command.
He uses this to say that building a million piece software project is much easier than building a 1 million piece physical thing. Which means that we make software much bigger and much more complicated than physical things because we can. Which means that it's dramatically more important in software to depend on previous ideas ideas in order to build anything that's useful. The dependancy on already used ideas is just too great. To completely abandon all previously used ideas is to relegate your software to the state of uselessness. In other words, innovation in software depends entirely on the ability to freely use previous ideas.
Thus he argues that patents in software, actually discourage innovation. And he even uses biotech as a precedent for how the improvement on previous ideas creates an entirely new idea worthy of entirely new protection. Whereas in software, if I improve upon your idea, I'm violating your patent.
I think he makes a really good case for the idea that software patents actually discourage innovation becuase of the dramatically different nature of building software. So if you were to ask, is building software more like composing music, or building an engine, I think he's got a pretty good point to say that it's more like composing music.
Becuase, if you're a geek, in the sims you occasionally get laid. For some of us, that's as unrealistic as running around with a BFG, and being able to get shot with a rocket launcher 7 times before dieing.
What do you think the basis of the law is? Opinion? Feelings? No. Laws are simply a community assessment of write and wrong. It's against the law to kill people, because the community is in agreement that this is wrong. In areas where there is controversy in the law, it's because we've codified something into the law as being either right or wrong, but a large, and vocal population strongly disagrees with the codification and wants to see it changed. Why do they want it changed? Becuase the law either says something is right, that they believe is wrong, or vice versa.
Take for example the DMCA. That codifies as wrong the ability to make copies of digital content (under certain circumstances). Why is /. so up arms about it? Because we believe that the DMCA wrongly restricts our freedoms. Freedoms granted by other laws already on the books. In other words, we think that law is wrong.
While the morality isn't the law, the law is meant to reflect the cumulative morality of those it governs.
IANAL, but you're comparing apples & oranges. DeCSS did not embed some alternate functionality into its software. It did exactly what it advertised itself to do. A better comparison is to that of a virus or a worm. When I download an email, my intention is to read my email. But when that email exploits my machine in a way that I hadn't intended, the author of the virus or worm is held accountable. This is the current law.
It doesn't matter who installed the software. What matters is that a clandestine operation took place in direct subversion of the user's intention. This software is a virus, and I suspect that if you read the current crop of computer crimes, you'd probably be able to classify this software as such.
I would argue that anyone that does anything to your computer, in an unauthorized manner is morally equivalant. So a virus, which is loaded on your computer through a legitmate downloading of email, is just as unauthorized as my installing a piece of software for one purpose, but it performs another entirely on it's own.
The issue is merchantability. I bought or downloaded a piece of software because it had a particular use to me. I gave up my money and the right to run on my computer, as consideration for a specific set of functionality that is being performed. I want function. If function Y comes along as a bug, that's one thing. But if function Y is intentionally installed by the software author, and even more, if function Y attempts to disable my stop Y software, that's a problem. Replace "function Y" with spyware or email virus and the statements should still both be true.
Installing software may be a legitimate thing to do. But so is reading email. The fact that an intentional clandestine alternate action takes place as a result of that should be enough to convict the software author of a crime.
Yes I would. If the binocular manufacturer built them to target nearby women, even when the user of them was trying to look at stars, or watch an opera, then yes, in that case I very much would sue the binocular manufacturer.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. This is called the "remedy" phase of the trial. That means that the reaction to a guilty finding of antitrust law is not punishment. It's a remedy to bringing back competition to the market. So the *only* thing that the judge has to order is something that she believes will bring a remedy to the problem of non-competition w/in the market.
Now, of course, Microsoft is guilty of being an illegal monopolist. So they're subject to a huge number of civil suits. Punitive damages (i.e. punishment) may be part of those trials. But the result of the antitrust trial will be a remedy, not a punishment.
This is significant because the standard is only to restore competition to the market. AFAIK, that's all that antitrust law calls for, and it seems like something much less painful for Microsoft than punishment.
It's not the eye candy that I'm worried about. It's the functionality that I'm worried about. It's the ability to add initial datasets and weekly (sometimes daily) updates. It's the ability to use it to track & maintain a budget - i.e. comparing monthly category spending to a preset limit. Of course, in gnucash categories are called accounts.
I'll check out 1.6. I think I was using 1.4, but I'm not sure anymore. It was about 4 months ago. Thanks for the advice.
Ok! I admit it. I use MS Money! There I said it. I'm not proud of it. I'd use quicken, if they'd have offered a free evaluation download (they didn't at the time don't know if they do now). I tried using gnucash. It took me about 2 weeks to get the data into gnucash in a sane manner. It took me about 4 hours to get it into MS Money. And maintaining updates from my financial institutions in MS Money was simply an issue of importing a file - a 5 minute process at most. Doing the same thing in gnucash was a 45 minute process at best!
I hang my head in shame for choosing non-free software (ironically enough called "money"), especially non-free software from the evil empire. But I couldn't find similar, effective software in the free software world.
Oh, and just so you know, MS Money may have the easy functionality, but of course it wouldn't be a MS product unless it contained some really seriously fscked up bugs. Like in the budget section, if you add a monthly bill or deposit, and then decide that you're going to delete it. Your budget doesn't reflect the change for a couple of months! Which completely screws up any sort of automated tracking. A phone call to MS about this got a "yeah we know about that" but no plans to ever actually fix it. I guess lieing with lions, I should expect to get bit.
Hmm... I wonder what the implications of something like this are on auto responders. I use TMDA to autmotically respond to any emails that I get from people that I don't know. I wonder if an auto response constitutes being served.
Hmmm...
The most surprising thing about this is that not only do you're wife's grandparents use the internet, they use it enough to be able to forward (what they think are) amusing pictures to you.
Reading email is challenging enough for my parents. My grandparents (those who are still left) can barely use a microwave oven. The concept of actually reading an email, and forwarding one to someone else, is far beyond them!
What's interesting to me about this is that I have my old yahoo account forwarded. I now have my own domain so I rarely use my yahoo account anymore except for testing.
I've noticed that if I leave the yahoo account non-forwarded and only accessable through the web, that the account accumulates somewhere around 10-15 spams per day. Some of which get autmoatically put into bulk mail, some of which don't. But if I forward the account to my domain, I don't really get any spam at all. Perhaps 1-2 per week.
I've tested this over several weeks now, and it's a strange thing. Yahoo! are the *only* people who know whether or not I'm forwarding. Are they sending more spam to webmail accounts in order to encourage people to move to forwarding accounts? Why would it behave like this?