It'll be amazing how many people suddenly come down with "disabilities" once insurance companies start paying for fancy PDAs and SmartPhones...
Guess the Republican mods are out in force because this is utter rubbish. How the hell are you going to fake having Downs Syndrome? Surely any half decent doctor would see through this a mile off. You do usually have to see a medical doctor in person to make an insurance claim don't you?
Also, once a PDA or SmartPhone is declared a "medical device," it will be subject to the same approvals and liabilities as medical devices, and will therefore cost 10 to 20 times as much as they do today...
More rubbish here too. Dedicated medical devices cost more than generic devices due to this thing called "Economies of Scale". The idea is the the more of a particular product you can produce, the cheaper you can produce it. The medical devices you talk about being 20 times more expensive are like that because they only appeal to a niche market. Iphones have much more universal appeal so have a manufacturing run many times the size. This means they can be produced far more cheaply. This is what mass-production is all about.
Seriously, I'm completely blown away by the sheer insanity of people. Hundreds of tabs, several windows, 40-something YouTube tabs open. wtf? Go close the 147 of 150 tabs you aren't using anymore, close 49 of the 50 YouTube videos you aren't watching, and close the 4 Firefox windows you haven't even looked at since (apparently) yesterday.
But surely that was exactly the point of Tabbed browsing, to do away with the need for bookmarks:)
The sole reason for DRM is to make (more) profits: by enforcing you to buy music several times (car, ipod, home, after X years or when old mp3 dies, resale is impossible, virgin store closure, playsforsure,...).
The reason for DRM is to stop you giving the game to your friends and you all playing it at the same time on several different machines. For games that are not online it is one of the only options. For online games they can just lock your copy of the game to a particular account but then let the account have multiple players, that way if you want a noob account to practice on you can have one.
For games with a single player storyline based concept though and no online component how else do the prevent multiple installations of the game being played at the same time on different PC's be different people?
I always wonder how so many people have issues with firefox. For me it is far more stable than Chrome under windows. Under Linux I dont have any problems with it either. Are you sure it is not one of the addons you have installed bringing it down?
Analogies with people do not really work as most people cannot drammatically redraw there borders when they change jobs. That is the point a lot of posters are missing. The current state of Europe is very different to the way the borders looked before the first world war.
In my experience hardware works or does not. Generally if a server is always on, then when it fails if completely fails. If it has failed it would probably take about a day to figure out what went wrong and replace it. This is a strange coincidence, because for one day of my time you can buy a new server.
When servers fail, they are usually now thrown in the bin since figuring out what failed is not worth the time a skilled employee will spend on it. Hardware is now so cheap, that diagnosing hardware faults is a thing of the past.
If something went horribly awry with either of these two -- or even with an operation that has only a few hundred employees -- the better action is to prosecute the executives and those employees who knew or reasonably should have known that what they were doing was wrong.
This is pretty much what the law in my country (UK) says should happen. The problem is that many business decisions are taken behind closed doors in informal meetings. Once you get high up the corporate structure proving who "reasonably should have known" beyond reasonable doubt becomes a complete impossibility.
For a good example of this see Hatfield Rail Crash. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield_rail_crash). All the executives were acquitted in this case, although we then nationalised the company. Maybe this is better idea than a corporate death penalty.
It is also worth noting that there are probably many executives who want the staff under them to take these risks and leave them out of the loop so they have plausible deniability in court, the media or simply to help them sleep at night.
Please bear in mind they tested on the latest stable version firefox, not the latest alpha 3.6 which has various speed improvements. Yet Chrome they used a development branch. Seems a bit biased in Chromes favour.
Pesky lawyers reading slashdot and taking part in debates about points of law, where is the fun in that. We are all supposed to be techie students rambling on about shit we know nothing about and pretending we experts.
Oh, my mistake, you are probably doing just that:)
In the latest version of Americas Army, the rectuiting tool produced by the United States you get to zip tie people after you have wounded them and let them bleed out on the floor.
Bullshit. It is obtaining something that many people put many hours of work into without recompensing them for thier efforts. Even if it is not theft (which I believe it is) it is certainly freeloading and anti-social.
Or should everybody be forced into giving things away for free just because the cost of duplication is very low? Surely even with a nonexisitant cost of making an extra copy, someone has to pay for things, and if someone has to then why should you be an exception?
Or should everybody be forced into the software as a service model? In which case would people buy a copy of bioshock or whatever if it charged per hour of playtime.
No way this thing is going worldwide without China's okay, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
China? There is no way any any system could apply to the US unless it was biased in US favour. The US has persistently said it would not be governed by any sort of international law unless it can veto the bits it does not like. Any sort of fair international system would mean the Supreme Court was no longer supreme, even if it was in a single area of law. Their would have to be higher international court to decide on patent issues that was impartial and not tied to a particular country.
This whole idea is a pipe dream unless it is really MS saying the all other countries should be bullied into adopting the US patent system. If that is really what they want then they can forget it, the US already acts enough like a global dictatorship. Remember, I do not elect US presidents, so they should have no say in determining what I can and cannot do.
No, the injunction was quite correct. Did you read what I4I said? They said they won't go after the existing copies, only new infringement.
The problem is that this is still a legal nightmare for people who have unsold machines. They simply cannot risk selling them with word on as it exposes them to litigation. Even if you subsequently win lititgation is very expensive, this is why some companies actually settle out of court and pay a small amount even if they know they are legally in the right.
Managers should never be scrum masters, as often scrum masters need to go against management in order to get the team through blockers.
In management terms this is called managing up, it is the hardest but most important part of being a manager as it involves convincing people on merit alone. Managing down is easy as the people under you have to do what they are told as you set their wages and are ultimately reponsible for their continued employment. Managing up often means going to bat for the team and explaining to upper management why things need to be done a certain way to succeed, even if they do not want to have it done that way. Just because someone has a job title of developement manager does not mean they always have to take upper managements point of view.
In short, a good manager can go against his own management above him in order to get the team through blockers. They will probably not do it in front of junior staff though as this undermines confidence in upper management. Management might appear to be a united front, but that is just an appearance to those who are at the bottom of the ladder.
How would you feel if a company actually required you to a agree to something like that? I know if it was me, my reaction would be "FUCK OFF".
That is a perfectly reasonable reaction. What is not reasonable is to say "Fuck Off, I am going use it anyway and not pay or agree to your terms."
I am a long term Linux user who really only uses Windows so connect to my work VPN and play games nowadays. I do think that I should pay for any software I use now since I also make my living from writing software and I like getting paid for my work. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself is something I try an live by.
Firstly, its not breaking in if I give them permission and a set of keys.
Secondly, the difference is intelligence. We are talking about an automated scanning tool with no ability to make rational decisions and very limited reporting capabilities.
Thirdly, we all know that most of the objections to Genuine Advantage are because it makes it harder to steal from them. That is why so many people are trying to justify pirating software.
The reality is that stealing free copies of windows and violating the GPL are both actually copyright issues. If we want a world where copyright is unenforceable then companies will be able to take open source software and do as they please with it, including sell closed source products. If microsoft stole loads of OSS code to include in in windows I would consider that theft as well.
Some of the sins microsoft commit though according to the site are just rubbish.
They list inspecting your hard disk for pirated copies of their software as a sin. Is it really a sin for microsoft to try and find out if you are stealing from them?
Next thing you know they will be complaining about me putting a lock on my front door to stop someone emptying my house while I am at work.
The best example of when to use goto in C is when you want to produce an endless loop. This is a pretty rare occurrence but there are times when the program is never designed to exit under normal conditions. Mostly this comes up in embedded devices. On these occasions you are fairly limited and any sort of while loop with a null exit condition I consider to be an ugly hack.
The anti-goto rhetoric you hear at university is because it is far too easy to make a complete horrendous mess using goto statements and the occasions when it is the correct tool are very few and far between. It is easier to tell noobie programmers that they should never use goto then let them figure out the one or two exceptions to this when they have a few years experience.
Personally I think it pure class but I have always listened to 6music for the music and thought the endless waffle about the background of bands was too dry. The wide variety of music they play though has always put them in a class of their own.
I like the fact that he injects a bit of irreverence and banter into the mix since there are far too many people who take music far too seriously. It's not rocket science, its a form of entertainment and nothing more.
Anyway, the real point is that if you hate his radio show the solution is too not listen to it, not spam wikipedia. Unfortunately it seems that not all his detractors can grasp this. There are plenty of other people who spam wikipedia for just as childish reasons though, but it does surprise me that most of it revolves around people rather than facts. I would have expected things like religion to be far more controversial.
Basically, he was given a morning slot on what was previously a radio station aimed at analy retentive muso's as an attempt to make it appeal to a wider crowd. The original crowd who liked it are so up in arms that the started a campaign to get him him off air. It seems that campaign revolves around repeated vandalism and flaming anywhere where it is mentioned.
I'm all for requiring a college degree to serve on a jury.
How would that help?
My point was regarding specialist knowledge, not that the average texan jury did not have any education. The older population of eastern texas are probably equally likely to have been through college, just not as likely to have been through college recently enough to have been exposed to technology based courses.
To put it in terms of my example on my taxation and healthcare: I am a college graduate who is highly technically literate, however my knowledge of tax law and accounting as pretty much non-existant. This does not mean I cannot make any good decisions, it just means I do not make the best decisions with regards to how to pay less tax. This is the way the world is shifting as to be an expert in any field now requires so many years of specialisation you cannot hope to become an expert in every field.
I have chosen to specialise in software development, so studying that in college for several years does not make me good enough at economics to decide if I am better off under a new taxation scheme or under the old one. For that, I hire an accountant who has specialised in maths and then tax law instead.
Instead of trying to educate the jury that the whole point of "Extensible" markup language is to extend and customize the files the lawyers were pulling stunts.
Please bear in mind that this case was being conducted in Eastern Texas.
This court has long history of being friendly to patent trolls because of the aging population who will make up the jury and Pro-IP jugdes. Do you really want to try and teach a bunch of 50-60 year olds XML in front of a judge who is bias in favour of the opposing lawyer? Chances are the judge himself has no idea about XML, and any time you brought up what it was to educate the jury as to what it was he would assume that knowledge was not needed to decide on this case since he did not understand it either and probably has no desire to learn.
While the technology the underlies this patent may be blisteringly obvious to anyone who is technologically inclined, patent troll choose this courtroom and this judge specifically to get a non-technical jury who will have no idea what is obvious. This then brings the case to who can get the most convincing expert witness to the completely clueless, the game the patent troll is most adept at.
This is a problem with putting so much power in the hands of the people, if the people also have the right to remain uneducated then you are more likely to get poor outcomes in decisions that can only be made by people who are highly educated.
To dredge up every slashdotters favourite, the car analogy: Would you let someone who could not drive become a driving test examiner?
Not that I am saying that we should abandon juries or democracy, but they both have this inherent problem that will need to be addressed: More and more of what affects our lives can only be understood with years of study and is therefore outside the scope of general knowledge for most of the population.
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In many cases they could also use the LGPL (provided they can cleanly separate the proprietary and open components), and I have no idea why they do not.
Because the LGPL means you have to constant work within a legal framework that it sets down, whereas BSD licences give developers the freedom to ignore the legal implications of what they are doing and just get on with their job. Laywers are expensive and to constantly have to consult specialist legal consul just to ensure you are on the right side of the LGPL quickly pushes a projects costs up. In the commercial world the BSD licence gives the most freedom to the original creator of the project, yet still lets outside parties contribute.
You might argue that outside would never contribute to a BSD project as there is the possibility their work could be used in closed source projects but that is not the case since plenty of people do. Some people might be put off, but that is a trade off for having the freedom to adopt a different licencing scheme in future without having to trace every contributer to your project and get them to sign a waver saying they will not enforce the GPL over the code they comitted to your project.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be amazing how many people suddenly come down with "disabilities" once insurance companies start paying for fancy PDAs and SmartPhones...
Guess the Republican mods are out in force because this is utter rubbish. How the hell are you going to fake having Downs Syndrome? Surely any half decent doctor would see through this a mile off. You do usually have to see a medical doctor in person to make an insurance claim don't you?
Also, once a PDA or SmartPhone is declared a "medical device," it will be subject to the same approvals and liabilities as medical devices, and will therefore cost 10 to 20 times as much as they do today...
More rubbish here too. Dedicated medical devices cost more than generic devices due to this thing called "Economies of Scale". The idea is the the more of a particular product you can produce, the cheaper you can produce it. The medical devices you talk about being 20 times more expensive are like that because they only appeal to a niche market. Iphones have much more universal appeal so have a manufacturing run many times the size. This means they can be produced far more cheaply. This is what mass-production is all about.
Seriously, I'm completely blown away by the sheer insanity of people. Hundreds of tabs, several windows, 40-something YouTube tabs open. wtf? Go close the 147 of 150 tabs you aren't using anymore, close 49 of the 50 YouTube videos you aren't watching, and close the 4 Firefox windows you haven't even looked at since (apparently) yesterday.
But surely that was exactly the point of Tabbed browsing, to do away with the need for bookmarks :)
The sole reason for DRM is to make (more) profits: by enforcing you to buy music several times (car, ipod, home, after X years or when old mp3 dies, resale is impossible, virgin store closure, playsforsure, ...).
The reason for DRM is to stop you giving the game to your friends and you all playing it at the same time on several different machines. For games that are not online it is one of the only options. For online games they can just lock your copy of the game to a particular account but then let the account have multiple players, that way if you want a noob account to practice on you can have one.
For games with a single player storyline based concept though and no online component how else do the prevent multiple installations of the game being played at the same time on different PC's be different people?
I always wonder how so many people have issues with firefox. For me it is far more stable than Chrome under windows. Under Linux I dont have any problems with it either. Are you sure it is not one of the addons you have installed bringing it down?
Oh yes it is (Wow, just like panto)
Analogies with people do not really work as most people cannot drammatically redraw there borders when they change jobs. That is the point a lot of posters are missing. The current state of Europe is very different to the way the borders looked before the first world war.
Potential Hardware issue?
In my experience hardware works or does not. Generally if a server is always on, then when it fails if completely fails. If it has failed it would probably take about a day to figure out what went wrong and replace it. This is a strange coincidence, because for one day of my time you can buy a new server.
When servers fail, they are usually now thrown in the bin since figuring out what failed is not worth the time a skilled employee will spend on it. Hardware is now so cheap, that diagnosing hardware faults is a thing of the past.
Maybe, but since they didnt test it we do not really know, we are just guessing.
If something went horribly awry with either of these two -- or even with an operation that has only a few hundred employees -- the better action is to prosecute the executives and those employees who knew or reasonably should have known that what they were doing was wrong.
This is pretty much what the law in my country (UK) says should happen. The problem is that many business decisions are taken behind closed doors in informal meetings. Once you get high up the corporate structure proving who "reasonably should have known" beyond reasonable doubt becomes a complete impossibility.
For a good example of this see Hatfield Rail Crash. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield_rail_crash). All the executives were acquitted in this case, although we then nationalised the company. Maybe this is better idea than a corporate death penalty.
It is also worth noting that there are probably many executives who want the staff under them to take these risks and leave them out of the loop so they have plausible deniability in court, the media or simply to help them sleep at night.
Please bear in mind they tested on the latest stable version firefox, not the latest alpha 3.6 which has various speed improvements. Yet Chrome they used a development branch. Seems a bit biased in Chromes favour.
Pesky lawyers reading slashdot and taking part in debates about points of law, where is the fun in that. We are all supposed to be techie students rambling on about shit we know nothing about and pretending we experts.
Oh, my mistake, you are probably doing just that :)
In the latest version of Americas Army, the rectuiting tool produced by the United States you get to zip tie people after you have wounded them and let them bleed out on the floor.
Pirate it.
Piracy is not theft.
Bullshit. It is obtaining something that many people put many hours of work into without recompensing them for thier efforts. Even if it is not theft (which I believe it is) it is certainly freeloading and anti-social.
Or should everybody be forced into giving things away for free just because the cost of duplication is very low? Surely even with a nonexisitant cost of making an extra copy, someone has to pay for things, and if someone has to then why should you be an exception?
Or should everybody be forced into the software as a service model? In which case would people buy a copy of bioshock or whatever if it charged per hour of playtime.
No way this thing is going worldwide without China's okay, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
China? There is no way any any system could apply to the US unless it was biased in US favour. The US has persistently said it would not be governed by any sort of international law unless it can veto the bits it does not like. Any sort of fair international system would mean the Supreme Court was no longer supreme, even if it was in a single area of law. Their would have to be higher international court to decide on patent issues that was impartial and not tied to a particular country.
This whole idea is a pipe dream unless it is really MS saying the all other countries should be bullied into adopting the US patent system. If that is really what they want then they can forget it, the US already acts enough like a global dictatorship. Remember, I do not elect US presidents, so they should have no say in determining what I can and cannot do.
No, the injunction was quite correct. Did you read what I4I said? They said they won't go after the existing copies, only new infringement.
The problem is that this is still a legal nightmare for people who have unsold machines. They simply cannot risk selling them with word on as it exposes them to litigation. Even if you subsequently win lititgation is very expensive, this is why some companies actually settle out of court and pay a small amount even if they know they are legally in the right.
Managers should never be scrum masters, as often scrum masters need to go against management in order to get the team through blockers.
In management terms this is called managing up, it is the hardest but most important part of being a manager as it involves convincing people on merit alone. Managing down is easy as the people under you have to do what they are told as you set their wages and are ultimately reponsible for their continued employment. Managing up often means going to bat for the team and explaining to upper management why things need to be done a certain way to succeed, even if they do not want to have it done that way. Just because someone has a job title of developement manager does not mean they always have to take upper managements point of view.
In short, a good manager can go against his own management above him in order to get the team through blockers. They will probably not do it in front of junior staff though as this undermines confidence in upper management. Management might appear to be a united front, but that is just an appearance to those who are at the bottom of the ladder.
How would you feel if a company actually required you to a agree to something like that? I know if it was me, my reaction would be "FUCK OFF".
That is a perfectly reasonable reaction. What is not reasonable is to say "Fuck Off, I am going use it anyway and not pay or agree to your terms."
I am a long term Linux user who really only uses Windows so connect to my work VPN and play games nowadays. I do think that I should pay for any software I use now since I also make my living from writing software and I like getting paid for my work. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself is something I try an live by.
Firstly, its not breaking in if I give them permission and a set of keys.
Secondly, the difference is intelligence. We are talking about an automated scanning tool with no ability to make rational decisions and very limited reporting capabilities.
Thirdly, we all know that most of the objections to Genuine Advantage are because it makes it harder to steal from them. That is why so many people are trying to justify pirating software.
The reality is that stealing free copies of windows and violating the GPL are both actually copyright issues. If we want a world where copyright is unenforceable then companies will be able to take open source software and do as they please with it, including sell closed source products. If microsoft stole loads of OSS code to include in in windows I would consider that theft as well.
Some of the sins microsoft commit though according to the site are just rubbish.
They list inspecting your hard disk for pirated copies of their software as a sin. Is it really a sin for microsoft to try and find out if you are stealing from them?
Next thing you know they will be complaining about me putting a lock on my front door to stop someone emptying my house while I am at work.
The best example of when to use goto in C is when you want to produce an endless loop. This is a pretty rare occurrence but there are times when the program is never designed to exit under normal conditions. Mostly this comes up in embedded devices. On these occasions you are fairly limited and any sort of while loop with a null exit condition I consider to be an ugly hack.
The anti-goto rhetoric you hear at university is because it is far too easy to make a complete horrendous mess using goto statements and the occasions when it is the correct tool are very few and far between. It is easier to tell noobie programmers that they should never use goto then let them figure out the one or two exceptions to this when they have a few years experience.
Personally I think it pure class but I have always listened to 6music for the music and thought the endless waffle about the background of bands was too dry. The wide variety of music they play though has always put them in a class of their own.
I like the fact that he injects a bit of irreverence and banter into the mix since there are far too many people who take music far too seriously. It's not rocket science, its a form of entertainment and nothing more.
Anyway, the real point is that if you hate his radio show the solution is too not listen to it, not spam wikipedia. Unfortunately it seems that not all his detractors can grasp this. There are plenty of other people who spam wikipedia for just as childish reasons though, but it does surprise me that most of it revolves around people rather than facts. I would have expected things like religion to be far more controversial.
Have you ever noticed how many times "George is a faggot" has been added to Wikipedia articles?
This is a persistant campaign of vandalism about George Lamb, and english radio DJ. Go check out the edit history on his wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lamb_(presenter)
Basically, he was given a morning slot on what was previously a radio station aimed at analy retentive muso's as an attempt to make it appeal to a wider crowd. The original crowd who liked it are so up in arms that the started a campaign to get him him off air. It seems that campaign revolves around repeated vandalism and flaming anywhere where it is mentioned.
I'm all for requiring a college degree to serve on a jury.
How would that help?
My point was regarding specialist knowledge, not that the average texan jury did not have any education. The older population of eastern texas are probably equally likely to have been through college, just not as likely to have been through college recently enough to have been exposed to technology based courses.
To put it in terms of my example on my taxation and healthcare: I am a college graduate who is highly technically literate, however my knowledge of tax law and accounting as pretty much non-existant. This does not mean I cannot make any good decisions, it just means I do not make the best decisions with regards to how to pay less tax. This is the way the world is shifting as to be an expert in any field now requires so many years of specialisation you cannot hope to become an expert in every field.
I have chosen to specialise in software development, so studying that in college for several years does not make me good enough at economics to decide if I am better off under a new taxation scheme or under the old one. For that, I hire an accountant who has specialised in maths and then tax law instead.
Instead of trying to educate the jury that the whole point of "Extensible" markup language is to extend and customize the files the lawyers were pulling stunts.
Please bear in mind that this case was being conducted in Eastern Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Eastern_District_of_Texas
This court has long history of being friendly to patent trolls because of the aging population who will make up the jury and Pro-IP jugdes. Do you really want to try and teach a bunch of 50-60 year olds XML in front of a judge who is bias in favour of the opposing lawyer? Chances are the judge himself has no idea about XML, and any time you brought up what it was to educate the jury as to what it was he would assume that knowledge was not needed to decide on this case since he did not understand it either and probably has no desire to learn.
While the technology the underlies this patent may be blisteringly obvious to anyone who is technologically inclined, patent troll choose this courtroom and this judge specifically to get a non-technical jury who will have no idea what is obvious. This then brings the case to who can get the most convincing expert witness to the completely clueless, the game the patent troll is most adept at.
This is a problem with putting so much power in the hands of the people, if the people also have the right to remain uneducated then you are more likely to get poor outcomes in decisions that can only be made by people who are highly educated.
To dredge up every slashdotters favourite, the car analogy: Would you let someone who could not drive become a driving test examiner?
Not that I am saying that we should abandon juries or democracy, but they both have this inherent problem that will need to be addressed: More and more of what affects our lives can only be understood with years of study and is therefore outside the scope of general knowledge for most of the population.
In many cases they could also use the LGPL (provided they can cleanly separate the proprietary and open components), and I have no idea why they do not.
Because the LGPL means you have to constant work within a legal framework that it sets down, whereas BSD licences give developers the freedom to ignore the legal implications of what they are doing and just get on with their job. Laywers are expensive and to constantly have to consult specialist legal consul just to ensure you are on the right side of the LGPL quickly pushes a projects costs up. In the commercial world the BSD licence gives the most freedom to the original creator of the project, yet still lets outside parties contribute.
You might argue that outside would never contribute to a BSD project as there is the possibility their work could be used in closed source projects but that is not the case since plenty of people do. Some people might be put off, but that is a trade off for having the freedom to adopt a different licencing scheme in future without having to trace every contributer to your project and get them to sign a waver saying they will not enforce the GPL over the code they comitted to your project.