Ok, let's start the pseudo-science and conspiracy theory generator:-)
Well, you know, in Rosswell there's a dark energy vortex, which extents to the core. This BTW is why the alien space ship crashed; it's quite unusual to have dark energy vortices on earth-like planets (it's not that unusual on gas planets, for example the Great Red Spot is in reality the result of a - much bigger - dark energy vortex [don't believe the scientist telling you it's just a big storm!]), therefore the aliens were not prepared to it. Indeed Earth is quite special to have a particularly rich dark energy vortex structure (a rather big one is e.g. at the Bermuda triangle, although that one reaches a few hundred kilometers into the air, instead going down), which is also the cause of earth rays (water just acts as focus lense for them).
Now the delta-omega in conjunction with the other periodic effects from sun and moon causes certain structures of the core to coincide with the vortex axis about every 200,000 years. This results in a temporary slowdown of the core (the rotation energy gets transferred into the vortex during that time, and then back into the core to let it spin again). This slowdown lets the magnetic field vanish. Now the time of this breakdown happens to coincide with half a period of the vortex' intrinsic oszillation, therefore when the magnetic field is re-built, it points into the opposite direction.
Ok, where do the right-wing conspiracies come in? Well, the knowledge of this is actually held back by the right-wing politicians because the dark energy vortex interacts with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now the increasing level of CO2 might cause the vortex to move, and secret calculations show that in doing so it would permanently kill the rotation of the core and therefore destroy the magnetic field of the Earth. In order to avoid any danger to the oil sales, right-wing politicians actively suppress this knowled... wait, why are those black helicopters in front of my... NO CARRIER
But then, being at the source, they'd have much more information in order to detect spam. Not to mention that they could just limit the number of recipients per day to, say, 50 (i.e. you could have an unlimited number of mails to the same person, but you cannot mail to more than 50 different persons on the same day). This would make gmail accounts completely worthless for spammers, while not interfering with normal use (you don't usually write to 50 different persons at the same day; and if you do, you'll probably use a mailing list, so from what google is concerned, there's just one recipient).
Or imagine the unclassified user managing to reflash the BIOS. Since the BIOS is the very first code to get control, this would give him a very high level of control. Especially since the BIOS also controls things like unlocking password-protected HDs (i.e. those which come with password protection built-in, which today is all laptop and most desktop HDs). And to get data out, he could use the CMOS RAM for small amounts of data (e.g. the HD password), or reflash the BIOS again during classified use for larger amounts of data (e.g. if the system runs exclusively on SCSI, probably nobody would notice if he removes the BIOS IDE routines and uses the saved space for data. The same is true for floppy disk routines on a floppy-less computer).
But when you delete files, usually they are just "put in pieces", i.e. all the data is still on the disk, just the linking information is gone, and with proper tools it can be recovered if you manage to put the pieces together, until it gets overwritten by another file.
But then, I never thought in this lines anyway. For me it was always clear that a shredder destroys what you put in it, so if I drag a file on the shredder, it's gone. Which is exactly what happened. Now one may argue that a trashcan (with the corresponding behaviour, i.e. being able to pull files out of it easily) would have been more useful. But that's a different story.
And I personally liked the notebook-tabs more than on-the-top tabs. They are also more efficient if there are many of them, because they line up on their small side, so more of them can be displayed at the same time without resorting to scrolling (which means that not all tabs can be seen at the same time) or multi-row tabs (one of the worst things you'll find on the Windows user interface).
I cannot remember having seen on-the-top tabs on Warp 3, however (except in Windows applications run on WinOS/2). Maybe in OS/2 2.x IBM was just in a transision from tab to notebook interface.
However I've definitely seen them on some Warp 4 screenshot on the Web, and I remember my first thought was "did they get a Windows brainwash?" From what you write, I conclude it was more of a going-back (maybe you were not the only one who disliked the notebook interface).
BTW, what exactly did you not like about the notebook interface?
Of course you could just buy a new PSP for the newer games, and reserve the old one for old games. Of course, there's still the risk of accidentally inserting a disk in the wrong PSP (besides the fact that a second PSP costs money again, of course).
Well, at least initially, the BRD price will probably be higher, because it needs separate production lines, while HD-DVD can be produced on adapted DVD production lines (which in addition still can produce standard DVDs).
I will buy discs that have DVD on one side and some sort of non-DRM'ed HD on the other side.
Sorry, you won't find non-DRMed HD. But otherwise, combined media are indeed possible. For BRD both can even be on the same side! Of course there's the question if this possibility will be used much. On one hand, it may be a selling argument ("future-proof", well, at least if they bet on the right format), OTOH it may be more lucrative to first sell a DVD, and later sell the same stuff again in HD format.
Well, if they use the possibility to revoke model keys for cracked models, then it will affect normal users as well: Their player will not play any newer disks, despite the fact that they themselves did not do anything wrong. They just happened to have the bad luck to own a model which was cracked by someone completely unrelated.
I cannot imagine that anyone will be happy if their (legally acquired) player suddenly doesn't play their newer (legally acquired) disks.
It says that if you have trademark with Linux in the name with it, you have to pay - it is trademark enforecement, it is simple as that.
<sarcasm>Sure, that's probably why it was in a section speaking about what may happen to you if you don't register.</sarcasm>
Now as I said, IANAL, so I don't know if the term "trademark search" has the specific meaning you imply. But if so, the whole sentence will not make sense at the place it was in Linus' mail: If you didn't register a trademark, how could a search for registered trademarks turn up your name (or, if someone else registered, how would this name point back to you?)
To quote the complete paragraph from Linus' mail, where I've put the relevant parts in bold:
And let's repeat: somebody who doesn't want to _protect_ that name would never do this. You can call anything "MyLinux", but the downside is that you may have somebody else who _did_ protect himself come along and send you a cease-and-desist letter. Or, if the name ends up showing up in a trademark search that LMI needs to do every once in a while just to protect the trademark (another legal requirement for trademarks), LMI itself might have to send you a cease-and-desist-or-sublicense it letter.
In your interpretation of the term "trademark search" (i.e. search for trademarks which contain the "Linux" trademark), the if clause would always be false in the given context, therefore the whole last sentence would be a null statement.
Now of course strictly speaking it's possible that Linus wrote a meaningless sentence here. But I cannot imagine that he wanted to write a meaningless sentence here, so what he meant obviously has to be something different than what you say it means. The only reasonable interpretation I can find is "trademark search" to be a term meaning "searching for product names which contain the/infringe on the trademark."
After all, if I were selling self-made "Genuine Adidas" shoes, I'd not exactly be safe from Adidas C&D letters just because I never tried to register the trade mark "Genuine Adidas".
It is simple - if you are non-profit and want to call your product 'My Linux Babe', you can do it - just you won't get ANY protection when someone also takes this title. BUT if you are sublicenser of trademark "Linux", then your title is also protected.
It's not quite as simple. From Linus' mail:
Or, if the name ends up showing up in a trademark search that LMI needs to do every once in a while just to protect the trademark (another legal requirement for trademarks), LMI itself might have to send you a cease-and-desist-or-sublicense it letter.
Which means, that you are practically guaranteed to get a C&D letter from LMI sooner or later, even if you chose a name which isn't likely to be used by anyone else. Which in turn means that you are effectively forced to license the name.
BTW, I don't see how this legal requirement to enforce the trademark should suddenly disappear if it's in combination with another trademark. "Microsoft Linux" would still infringe on the trademark rights even though "Microsoft" is a trademarked name in itself. Therefore "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" should be an infringment either, despite "Red Hat" being a trademark in itself, and therefore the legal requirement of enforcement should hold there either.
No, a trademark is essentially a stand-in for quality. A customer can know, based on the mark, that drinks branded as Coke will have a particular taste; that cars branded as Yugos will suck.
If these expectations aren't met, due to quality standards that vary (either way) among identically-branded goods, then the trademark is no longer serving its purpose. Then bad things happen to the mark holder's rights.
So if a Yugo car company would start to make the best cars in the world, they'd suddenly would lose their trademark rights, because they don't meet the expectations? I strongly doubt that!
Per se, the trademark rights have nothing to do with quality. If Coca-Cola would start to produce utterly bad Coke tomorrow, or Coke of varying quality, they'd still retain all the rights they have to the trademark. And another company which made good-quality Cola, maybe even with the same taste as todays Coke, still could not call their product Coke, despite essentially being the same which true Coke is today.
Of course, the effect is that the trademark usually is bound to the quality the given company produces, which usually doesn't change rapidly (and if it does, the trademark will also be connected to this change). But there's absolutely no guarantee. As a simple example, say, company Foo creates a superb product named FooBar. Now, that company gets bought by company XY Enterprises, who also get that trademark. However, XY Enterprises don't continue to produce the original FooBar, but use the trademark on a similar, but inferior product.
What about things like Damn Small Linux, Linux On A Floppy, Polish Linux Distribution and all those non-commercial Linux distros? If I made a Tiny Linux Router distro for my own firewall, and make it available on my FTP, do I have to rename it, or shell out $200 to continue using the name?
Hi! I bold'ed the part you need to re-read from your own question...
The software is free, but you have to pay to use it.
You don't have to pay to use the software. You don't have to distribute it or anything based on it either. You don't even have to pay for selling it. You do have to pay for calling the thing yor distribute "Linux" (or anything which contains "Linux").
For example, Knoppix will not have to pay anything, because it's not named "Linux", but, well, "Knoppix". I'm not sure if "Linspire" is already considered close enough to "Linux" to need a license, however.
Note that software licensing and trademark licensing are two completely different things. For example, if you make a Linux Distro and name it "T-Linux", I'm sure you'll get trouble with the Deutsche Telekom, depite them not being involved with Linux code at all: AFAIK they have a trademark on the initial "T-" part (T-Online, T-Mobile,...)
Slashdot Mirror
Not to forget the popular Liquid Crystal Display display.
Of course they do. The whole planet is slightly deformed.
Tidal friction has also slowed down the moon rotation so much that it now shows us the same side all the time.
Ok, let's start the pseudo-science and conspiracy theory generator :-)
... NO CARRIER
Well, you know, in Rosswell there's a dark energy vortex, which extents to the core. This BTW is why the alien space ship crashed; it's quite unusual to have dark energy vortices on earth-like planets (it's not that unusual on gas planets, for example the Great Red Spot is in reality the result of a - much bigger - dark energy vortex [don't believe the scientist telling you it's just a big storm!]), therefore the aliens were not prepared to it. Indeed Earth is quite special to have a particularly rich dark energy vortex structure (a rather big one is e.g. at the Bermuda triangle, although that one reaches a few hundred kilometers into the air, instead going down), which is also the cause of earth rays (water just acts as focus lense for them).
Now the delta-omega in conjunction with the other periodic effects from sun and moon causes certain structures of the core to coincide with the vortex axis about every 200,000 years. This results in a temporary slowdown of the core (the rotation energy gets transferred into the vortex during that time, and then back into the core to let it spin again). This slowdown lets the magnetic field vanish. Now the time of this breakdown happens to coincide with half a period of the vortex' intrinsic oszillation, therefore when the magnetic field is re-built, it points into the opposite direction.
Ok, where do the right-wing conspiracies come in? Well, the knowledge of this is actually held back by the right-wing politicians because the dark energy vortex interacts with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now the increasing level of CO2 might cause the vortex to move, and secret calculations show that in doing so it would permanently kill the rotation of the core and therefore destroy the magnetic field of the Earth. In order to avoid any danger to the oil sales, right-wing politicians actively suppress this knowled... wait, why are those black helicopters in front of my
No, ^H deletes from back, and he had an extra space after the ^Hs therefore:
6. Pr Karma?
Ok, let's shorten it a bit:
Prohibited Conduct
Following acts are not allowed when using this Web Site:
(1) to (7) break the law
(8) do anything else we don't like
Does that mean all submitters of dupes now must fear legal actions due to illegal copying?
But then, being at the source, they'd have much more information in order to detect spam. Not to mention that they could just limit the number of recipients per day to, say, 50 (i.e. you could have an unlimited number of mails to the same person, but you cannot mail to more than 50 different persons on the same day).
This would make gmail accounts completely worthless for spammers, while not interfering with normal use (you don't usually write to 50 different persons at the same day; and if you do, you'll probably use a mailing list, so from what google is concerned, there's just one recipient).
The other question is of course: How large is the danger of non-spam mail being classified as spam.
I can write a very easy spam filter which will catch 100% of all spam, guaranteed. Downside is, it will also mark 100% legitimate messages as spam.
He just wanted to demonstrate that he doesn't know how to spell "terabyte" ;-)
SCNR
Or imagine the unclassified user managing to reflash the BIOS. Since the BIOS is the very first code to get control, this would give him a very high level of control. Especially since the BIOS also controls things like unlocking password-protected HDs (i.e. those which come with password protection built-in, which today is all laptop and most desktop HDs). And to get data out, he could use the CMOS RAM for small amounts of data (e.g. the HD password), or reflash the BIOS again during classified use for larger amounts of data (e.g. if the system runs exclusively on SCSI, probably nobody would notice if he removes the BIOS IDE routines and uses the saved space for data. The same is true for floppy disk routines on a floppy-less computer).
But when you delete files, usually they are just "put in pieces", i.e. all the data is still on the disk, just the linking information is gone, and with proper tools it can be recovered if you manage to put the pieces together, until it gets overwritten by another file.
But then, I never thought in this lines anyway. For me it was always clear that a shredder destroys what you put in it, so if I drag a file on the shredder, it's gone. Which is exactly what happened. Now one may argue that a trashcan (with the corresponding behaviour, i.e. being able to pull files out of it easily) would have been more useful. But that's a different story.
And I personally liked the notebook-tabs more than on-the-top tabs. They are also more efficient if there are many of them, because they line up on their small side, so more of them can be displayed at the same time without resorting to scrolling (which means that not all tabs can be seen at the same time) or multi-row tabs (one of the worst things you'll find on the Windows user interface).
I cannot remember having seen on-the-top tabs on Warp 3, however (except in Windows applications run on WinOS/2). Maybe in OS/2 2.x IBM was just in a transision from tab to notebook interface.
However I've definitely seen them on some Warp 4 screenshot on the Web, and I remember my first thought was "did they get a Windows brainwash?" From what you write, I conclude it was more of a going-back (maybe you were not the only one who disliked the notebook interface).
BTW, what exactly did you not like about the notebook interface?
vi has a tutorial and help? Maybe you're thinkin of vim instead? (This is the program which actually is started when typing "vi" on Linux)
I'm almost sure that the huge majority of "vi fans" have never used vi in their whole life, but only used vim.
Yes, I just tried to type ":help" on vi. I got told it's not a vi command.
Of course you could just buy a new PSP for the newer games, and reserve the old one for old games. Of course, there's still the risk of accidentally inserting a disk in the wrong PSP (besides the fact that a second PSP costs money again, of course).
Well, at least initially, the BRD price will probably be higher, because it needs separate production lines, while HD-DVD can be produced on adapted DVD production lines (which in addition still can produce standard DVDs).
Sorry, you won't find non-DRMed HD. But otherwise, combined media are indeed possible. For BRD both can even be on the same side! Of course there's the question if this possibility will be used much. On one hand, it may be a selling argument ("future-proof", well, at least if they bet on the right format), OTOH it may be more lucrative to first sell a DVD, and later sell the same stuff again in HD format.
"VHS" was the cooler video standard name?!?
Well, if they use the possibility to revoke model keys for cracked models, then it will affect normal users as well: Their player will not play any newer disks, despite the fact that they themselves did not do anything wrong. They just happened to have the bad luck to own a model which was cracked by someone completely unrelated.
I cannot imagine that anyone will be happy if their (legally acquired) player suddenly doesn't play their newer (legally acquired) disks.
<sarcasm>Sure, that's probably why it was in a section speaking about what may happen to you if you don't register.</sarcasm>
Now as I said, IANAL, so I don't know if the term "trademark search" has the specific meaning you imply. But if so, the whole sentence will not make sense at the place it was in Linus' mail: If you didn't register a trademark, how could a search for registered trademarks turn up your name (or, if someone else registered, how would this name point back to you?)
To quote the complete paragraph from Linus' mail, where I've put the relevant parts in bold:
And let's repeat: somebody who doesn't want to _protect_ that name would
never do this. You can call anything "MyLinux", but the downside is that
you may have somebody else who _did_ protect himself come along and send
you a cease-and-desist letter. Or, if the name ends up showing up in a
trademark search that LMI needs to do every once in a while just to
protect the trademark (another legal requirement for trademarks), LMI
itself might have to send you a cease-and-desist-or-sublicense it letter.
In your interpretation of the term "trademark search" (i.e. search for trademarks which contain the "Linux" trademark), the if clause would always be false in the given context, therefore the whole last sentence would be a null statement.
Now of course strictly speaking it's possible that Linus wrote a meaningless sentence here. But I cannot imagine that he wanted to write a meaningless sentence here, so what he meant obviously has to be something different than what you say it means. The only reasonable interpretation I can find is "trademark search" to be a term meaning "searching for product names which contain the/infringe on the trademark."
After all, if I were selling self-made "Genuine Adidas" shoes, I'd not exactly be safe from Adidas C&D letters just because I never tried to register the trade mark "Genuine Adidas".
It's not quite as simple. From Linus' mail:
Or, if the name ends up showing up in a trademark search that LMI needs to do every once in a while just to protect the trademark (another legal requirement for trademarks), LMI itself might have to send you a cease-and-desist-or-sublicense it letter.
Which means, that you are practically guaranteed to get a C&D letter from LMI sooner or later, even if you chose a name which isn't likely to be used by anyone else. Which in turn means that you are effectively forced to license the name.
BTW, I don't see how this legal requirement to enforce the trademark should suddenly disappear if it's in combination with another trademark. "Microsoft Linux" would still infringe on the trademark rights even though "Microsoft" is a trademarked name in itself. Therefore "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" should be an infringment either, despite "Red Hat" being a trademark in itself, and therefore the legal requirement of enforcement should hold there either.
IANAL, however.
But GNU is short for "GNU's Not Unix", and Unix is a trademark ... so maybe just "Debian GN"?
So if a Yugo car company would start to make the best cars in the world, they'd suddenly would lose their trademark rights, because they don't meet the expectations? I strongly doubt that!
Per se, the trademark rights have nothing to do with quality. If Coca-Cola would start to produce utterly bad Coke tomorrow, or Coke of varying quality, they'd still retain all the rights they have to the trademark. And another company which made good-quality Cola, maybe even with the same taste as todays Coke, still could not call their product Coke, despite essentially being the same which true Coke is today.
Of course, the effect is that the trademark usually is bound to the quality the given company produces, which usually doesn't change rapidly (and if it does, the trademark will also be connected to this change). But there's absolutely no guarantee. As a simple example, say, company Foo creates a superb product named FooBar. Now, that company gets bought by company XY Enterprises, who also get that trademark. However, XY Enterprises don't continue to produce the original FooBar, but use the trademark on a similar, but inferior product.
From http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050816
Non-Profit Tier
Annual Fee = US$200
I've bolded the part you need to read to find the correct answer.
You don't have to pay to use the software. You don't have to distribute it or anything based on it either. You don't even have to pay for selling it. You do have to pay for calling the thing yor distribute "Linux" (or anything which contains "Linux").
For example, Knoppix will not have to pay anything, because it's not named "Linux", but, well, "Knoppix". I'm not sure if "Linspire" is already considered close enough to "Linux" to need a license, however.
Note that software licensing and trademark licensing are two completely different things. For example, if you make a Linux Distro and name it "T-Linux", I'm sure you'll get trouble with the Deutsche Telekom, depite them not being involved with Linux code at all: AFAIK they have a trademark on the initial "T-" part (T-Online, T-Mobile,