I'm all for good conspiracy theories, but this one is a bit lofty....
First, they wouldn't just be bribing one judge... Large cases like this are generally tossed back and forth between a number of local and national courts if a settlement isn't reached before the appeals process begins. Thats a lot of judges, plus all the guys at the trademark office.
Second, established judges usually don't do all that much campaigning. The run for retention, not against other possible judges, and their reelection usually depends upon the opinions of the laywers who have tried cases before them. This is known as a bar retention percentage. Making poor decisions (whether because of money or not) would greatly deminish a judges chance at retention, and it would be very hard for any amount of money to make up for this.
Third, many many laywers, possibly even most of them, are very honorable. (examples... public defenders, many defense attornies, many prosecutors, the cabal of laywers at EFF and other public interest groups) What is not honorable is some of the arguments some laywers are forced to make as part of their job. Blame the problems on the perpetrators, not the laywers defending them.
The root of the problem is that if you throw enough money and laywers at a case, even if they are on the side that may be "evil" in the eyes of the public, they will be able to come up with some pretty convincing arguments. If the other side doesn't have enough laywers and money to refute these arguments there isn't much a judge can do. Plus, on the issue of Excel being a trademark, its pretty hard to argue against microsoft on this one. If you say "Excel" in relation to a computer to anyone in the world (who is at least a little familiar with computers) they will know exactly what you are talking about. TurboExcel, being a spreadsheet related utility, may in fact be infriging on this trademark... but we'll have to see how that case turns out.
One last thing... I do think the fact that the DoJ stopped pursuing microsoft right after Bush came into office is rather fishy... but thats the Prez and attorney general's call (John Ashcroft), not any judges.
Although it could be argued that the terms 'office' and 'word', in relation to a computer, are typically interpretted as meaning microsoft's productivity software, it really doesn't matter because they aren't even trying to trademark those words... they are registering an existing trademark for Excel and trying to enforce it against TurboExcel.
Its virtually impossible to argue that the word "Excel" in relation to productivity software means anything other than Microsoft Excel. They will have no problem registering the trademark. The real question is whether or not Savvysoft should be allowed to continue distrubuting their spreadsheet conversion tool under the name TurboExcel. Some would argue that they do not infringe on the trademark because they are not in direct competition with Excel. TurboExcel is a conversion tool, not a spreadsheet program. Of course others argue that even though TurboExcel might not be competing directly with Excel, it is unfairly biggybacking on the coat-tails of Microsoft's marketing muscle by using the word Excel in the name of the product. It will be an interesting outcome.
Seeing as its a foam, which is inherently weak in comparison to nanotubes or buckyballs, I wouldn't think so. I would expect that a fabric or other material made from carbon nanotubes would be a much more likely replacement for the ceramic tiles that spacecraft currently use for re-entry.
Depending on the type of community, preventing anonymous posting could be a bad idea, and may be unnecessary to the integrity of the site.
If the site is a closed group of individuals, like a guild or clan site for a game, then anonymous posting is bad. But, if its a large site like slashdot, where its an open community, then blocking anonymous voices is a bad thing.
Instead, you can just restrict the ability of rogues threatening the site's integrity by using moderation techniques similar to slashdots. Where bad posts can just be moderated down, regardless of whether they were posted anonymously. Regular members would get moderation points at random to help, and you could revoke the priviledges of those who moderate poorly, which would probably be less than you think, and would not effect the system all that much.
However, you may also want to do things like make forums off limits to anonymous posting, or restrict them to certain boards only, and allow registered users to have plenty of sanctuary from anonymous posters to discuss whatever they want.
The arguments against pop-ups are somewhat irrelevant because it would be fairly trivial to modify the software to display the chat windows inside the webpage itself.
Some simple session handling would allow you to keep a consistant conversation no matter where they navigated on the site.
Earthlink has been doing this for quite some time. You've been able to access a live person through support.earthlink.net for over a year now I think.
The technology that enabled this was a hot topic like 2 years ago. There have been tons of companies since that have implemented it. I don't understand why this is now newsworthy.
you can not prove whether copyright violation is theft simply by asking people if it is
actually, in a democratic society you can. Regulators and judges base their decisions on majority concensous, and the entire government body is supposed to be indicitive of the will of the people.
Imagine that you own an engineering firm that designs heavy haul trucks. One of your engineers has resigned and taken a job elsewhere. Before he leaves he uploads your AutoCad drawings (like source code to the manufacturing business) to his server at home.
The fact is that is not theft by itself, and you will find no court cases saying otherwise. The point at which that scenario would turn to theft is if he turned around and sold or made profit from that intellectual property, and that would only be if this was copyrighted really. It is not a crime to keep a copy of things that that he worked on or helped worked on, or any information prevy to him as an employee. The only exception to this would be if he signed a non-discolsure agreement, and in that case the issue would be breach of contract... not theft or copyright infringment.
No, the majority is not always right, but you sir do not have your facts straight. The fact is that a couple court cases are not the end all be all of the P2P battle. There is a little bit of precedence the RIAA has to work with, but there is no law that states P2P application are illegal. This is only the current interpretation of current laws, and the battle over these interpretations and the laws themselves are still being heavily fought.
Personally, I think any reproduction should be fair use, so long as it does not result in any sort of commercial use/promotion/profit or other use that would allow someone besides the creator from profiting (this would not include claims for lack of compensation... they have to prove someone else profited, not that they didn't profit because of something). I think you're being a little too black and white. This is one issue where there are more than 2 sides. Anti-copyright people would probably be easily quieted if their request for comprehensive fair use was answered. Copyrights are basically a compromise between creators and consumers, and the fact is that this compromise is no longer balanced and needs some heavy adjustmnet towards the consumer.
he doesn't really die. at the end they show him glowing like the f'cking sun, and i don't know too many dead people that do that. The only thing you can really be sure of is that he was unconcious after defeating smith, but there really isn't much evidence beyond that besides the glowing factor, which would suggest he's not dead.
Re:Market forces that be, please start working
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 1
I think you are underestimating the number of ATi Rage based integrated video solutions floating around, or the numerous VIA solutions (which is S3), or all the nForce stuff, or the slim TNT2 M64/nVidia Vanta cards they stuffed in SO many computers. Then you've got the low end ATi off board stuff like the ATi Expert series, or the more modern Radeon 7000 series. And don't forget Trident who is still regularly finding there way into computers all over the place. And we haven't even touched on laptops, where Intel is really a small player despite its solutions aparent good fit to that market.
As a computer technician obsessed with all graphics solutions (low end, high end, or otherwise) I can tell you that Intel Extreme Graphics is FAR FAR FAR from a majority, and is probably not even the biggest market share holder. I'm sure during certain quarters or even during certain years they have have been number 1 (still way under 50% though). However, you've got to think about INSTALLED base, not sales figures... and ATI probably has that title, or possibly nVidia who would be a close second if not the leader. I really think Intel is a paltry 3rd in the installed rankings... but I could be wrong I suppose. Facts and figures anyone?
nothing against you mofo... your comment was just one of many i have already read, but i needed to say this:
brand loyalty is ignorance
While this may not always be true with small businesses or some service industries... as far as hardware is concerned, or any other non-service industry its ridiculous. nVida, ATi, S3, 3dfx, etc... they've all had good chipset/driver combos and their share of bad ones. Every once in a while there are brands that should be avoided, and these are usually easily spotted by poor reviews, mounting financial losses that often ends with the company going under, disappearing, or being "restructured".
However, there is never any reason to trust hardware based on the brand, or even make a decision between two products you know to be decent based on the brand. You're escaping your responsibility as a consumer to not just inform yourself, but to force manufacturers to innovate, and disclose more information to their customers. Brand loyalty destroys competition. Do you think the recent nVidia driver "fiasco" was uncovered by trusting nVidia zealots? Or even ATi love children? NAY! These descrepencies were found by objective people who continuely look past and ignore brand names, company propaganda, and marketing hoopla.
The next time I go to buy a card I'll have no problem considering nVidia along side ATi, S3, and anyone else on the block at that time. Hell, if BitBoyz decides to try again with one of their crazy designs I'll be all ears; and if enough objective minds support using their product, then... BitBoyz, here I come!
When has any product ever "lived" up to the marketing claims? If I expected everything I bought to live up to their claims, I'd be dissapointed with every bar of soap, every beer, and every Big Mac.
Agreed. This is way to ambiguous. Depending on how you look at it every peice of software has lived up to this claim. Windows CAN be stable and do many of the things it claims under the right conditions. Then again, you can say that no software, even free software has totally lived up to its claims. If the average joe can't get it working, is it really working like it should? This is too subjective and is the only part of the Software Consumer Bill of Rights that I definately DISAGREE with. Yes, software vendors have gotten out of hand, but be rational guys... as a programmer I don't want to deal with those type of requirements. I miss a bug or something and I have to go to court? Bull shit.
you don't know what your are talking about. learn about hardware before posting about it. there are absolutely no circuitry limitations with integrated components. Great video cards can be made extremely small... thats not the point. The reason they suck is because they share the memory bus with the cpu, which creates a huge bottleneck.
integrated sound, however, is often extremely good. many motherboard makers are now choosing high quality 6 channel solutions due to the low price premium over crappy sound.
also, integrated networking devices are generally faster than pci NICs, because they are optimized with the motherboard's chipset.
a motherboard with integrated components is not sacrificing anything. not stability, not expandability, not speed, not quality, not anything. They are, however, offering people added functionality. a motherboard should have all the essential pc components, and its hard denying that sound and networking are pretty essential for most computers today.
DDR doesn't cost much more than SDRAM, and both are extremely cheap at the moment. Thats not really a good reason to not upgrade, especially since it would be double the memory bandwidth.
PS2 did NOT sell at a break even point when it was released, it was sold at a loss. After cost savings from a long production run, they eventually reached a break even point (not sure if they are still there after the price drops). Every console that I know of since the N64 has been sold at a loss upon introduction.
thats not true, every Xbox game outputs at NO LESS THAN 640x480. While many TVs may not be able to show all those lines of resolution, that is the output from the box. Some games even use higher resolutions like 800x600 and 1024x768, and many use AA to make up for the somewhat low resolutions. Plus, did you forget that the Xbox is GeForce 3 based? How is THAT a cheap card? Thats why microsoft was losing over $100 per console BEFORE they lowered their price to $199 (from $299). Production prices are going down for them, so I doubt they are loosing over $200 per console now, but they are deffinately still losing money. Plus, the Xbox is a dedicated machine, unlike your computer, and its much more efficient (clock for clock, pixel for pixel) than your PC. Just get your facts straight.
Re:first post and the answer
on
Rear View LCD?
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· Score: 1
how is this offtopic? yeah, its a first post post, but its the answer to the problem! Great solution!
no, it doesn't allow spammer... don't just read the first couple paragraphs, read the whole thing. Spammer, while evil, are not technically inclined enough, nor would they want to be caught at forging hearders. He said he see message after message being sent to his server, and they are all regected, as they should be, only the danish group who maintains the blacklist was able to get through because they ILLEGALLY trespassed and forged headers. Spammmers don't do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for good conspiracy theories, but this one is a bit lofty....
First, they wouldn't just be bribing one judge... Large cases like this are generally tossed back and forth between a number of local and national courts if a settlement isn't reached before the appeals process begins. Thats a lot of judges, plus all the guys at the trademark office.
Second, established judges usually don't do all that much campaigning. The run for retention, not against other possible judges, and their reelection usually depends upon the opinions of the laywers who have tried cases before them. This is known as a bar retention percentage. Making poor decisions (whether because of money or not) would greatly deminish a judges chance at retention, and it would be very hard for any amount of money to make up for this.
Third, many many laywers, possibly even most of them, are very honorable. (examples... public defenders, many defense attornies, many prosecutors, the cabal of laywers at EFF and other public interest groups) What is not honorable is some of the arguments some laywers are forced to make as part of their job. Blame the problems on the perpetrators, not the laywers defending them.
The root of the problem is that if you throw enough money and laywers at a case, even if they are on the side that may be "evil" in the eyes of the public, they will be able to come up with some pretty convincing arguments. If the other side doesn't have enough laywers and money to refute these arguments there isn't much a judge can do. Plus, on the issue of Excel being a trademark, its pretty hard to argue against microsoft on this one. If you say "Excel" in relation to a computer to anyone in the world (who is at least a little familiar with computers) they will know exactly what you are talking about. TurboExcel, being a spreadsheet related utility, may in fact be infriging on this trademark... but we'll have to see how that case turns out.
One last thing... I do think the fact that the DoJ stopped pursuing microsoft right after Bush came into office is rather fishy... but thats the Prez and attorney general's call (John Ashcroft), not any judges.
Although it could be argued that the terms 'office' and 'word', in relation to a computer, are typically interpretted as meaning microsoft's productivity software, it really doesn't matter because they aren't even trying to trademark those words... they are registering an existing trademark for Excel and trying to enforce it against TurboExcel.
Its virtually impossible to argue that the word "Excel" in relation to productivity software means anything other than Microsoft Excel. They will have no problem registering the trademark. The real question is whether or not Savvysoft should be allowed to continue distrubuting their spreadsheet conversion tool under the name TurboExcel. Some would argue that they do not infringe on the trademark because they are not in direct competition with Excel. TurboExcel is a conversion tool, not a spreadsheet program. Of course others argue that even though TurboExcel might not be competing directly with Excel, it is unfairly biggybacking on the coat-tails of Microsoft's marketing muscle by using the word Excel in the name of the product. It will be an interesting outcome.
Seeing as its a foam, which is inherently weak in comparison to nanotubes or buckyballs, I wouldn't think so. I would expect that a fabric or other material made from carbon nanotubes would be a much more likely replacement for the ceramic tiles that spacecraft currently use for re-entry.
If the site is a closed group of individuals, like a guild or clan site for a game, then anonymous posting is bad. But, if its a large site like slashdot, where its an open community, then blocking anonymous voices is a bad thing.
Instead, you can just restrict the ability of rogues threatening the site's integrity by using moderation techniques similar to slashdots. Where bad posts can just be moderated down, regardless of whether they were posted anonymously. Regular members would get moderation points at random to help, and you could revoke the priviledges of those who moderate poorly, which would probably be less than you think, and would not effect the system all that much.
However, you may also want to do things like make forums off limits to anonymous posting, or restrict them to certain boards only, and allow registered users to have plenty of sanctuary from anonymous posters to discuss whatever they want.
The arguments against pop-ups are somewhat irrelevant because it would be fairly trivial to modify the software to display the chat windows inside the webpage itself.
Some simple session handling would allow you to keep a consistant conversation no matter where they navigated on the site.
Earthlink has been doing this for quite some time. You've been able to access a live person through support.earthlink.net for over a year now I think. The technology that enabled this was a hot topic like 2 years ago. There have been tons of companies since that have implemented it. I don't understand why this is now newsworthy.
you can not prove whether copyright violation is theft simply by asking people if it is actually, in a democratic society you can. Regulators and judges base their decisions on majority concensous, and the entire government body is supposed to be indicitive of the will of the people. Imagine that you own an engineering firm that designs heavy haul trucks. One of your engineers has resigned and taken a job elsewhere. Before he leaves he uploads your AutoCad drawings (like source code to the manufacturing business) to his server at home. The fact is that is not theft by itself, and you will find no court cases saying otherwise. The point at which that scenario would turn to theft is if he turned around and sold or made profit from that intellectual property, and that would only be if this was copyrighted really. It is not a crime to keep a copy of things that that he worked on or helped worked on, or any information prevy to him as an employee. The only exception to this would be if he signed a non-discolsure agreement, and in that case the issue would be breach of contract... not theft or copyright infringment. No, the majority is not always right, but you sir do not have your facts straight. The fact is that a couple court cases are not the end all be all of the P2P battle. There is a little bit of precedence the RIAA has to work with, but there is no law that states P2P application are illegal. This is only the current interpretation of current laws, and the battle over these interpretations and the laws themselves are still being heavily fought. Personally, I think any reproduction should be fair use, so long as it does not result in any sort of commercial use/promotion/profit or other use that would allow someone besides the creator from profiting (this would not include claims for lack of compensation... they have to prove someone else profited, not that they didn't profit because of something). I think you're being a little too black and white. This is one issue where there are more than 2 sides. Anti-copyright people would probably be easily quieted if their request for comprehensive fair use was answered. Copyrights are basically a compromise between creators and consumers, and the fact is that this compromise is no longer balanced and needs some heavy adjustmnet towards the consumer.
he doesn't really die. at the end they show him glowing like the f'cking sun, and i don't know too many dead people that do that. The only thing you can really be sure of is that he was unconcious after defeating smith, but there really isn't much evidence beyond that besides the glowing factor, which would suggest he's not dead.
I think you are underestimating the number of ATi Rage based integrated video solutions floating around, or the numerous VIA solutions (which is S3), or all the nForce stuff, or the slim TNT2 M64/nVidia Vanta cards they stuffed in SO many computers. Then you've got the low end ATi off board stuff like the ATi Expert series, or the more modern Radeon 7000 series. And don't forget Trident who is still regularly finding there way into computers all over the place. And we haven't even touched on laptops, where Intel is really a small player despite its solutions aparent good fit to that market. As a computer technician obsessed with all graphics solutions (low end, high end, or otherwise) I can tell you that Intel Extreme Graphics is FAR FAR FAR from a majority, and is probably not even the biggest market share holder. I'm sure during certain quarters or even during certain years they have have been number 1 (still way under 50% though). However, you've got to think about INSTALLED base, not sales figures... and ATI probably has that title, or possibly nVidia who would be a close second if not the leader. I really think Intel is a paltry 3rd in the installed rankings... but I could be wrong I suppose. Facts and figures anyone?
nothing against you mofo... your comment was just one of many i have already read, but i needed to say this: brand loyalty is ignorance While this may not always be true with small businesses or some service industries... as far as hardware is concerned, or any other non-service industry its ridiculous. nVida, ATi, S3, 3dfx, etc... they've all had good chipset/driver combos and their share of bad ones. Every once in a while there are brands that should be avoided, and these are usually easily spotted by poor reviews, mounting financial losses that often ends with the company going under, disappearing, or being "restructured". However, there is never any reason to trust hardware based on the brand, or even make a decision between two products you know to be decent based on the brand. You're escaping your responsibility as a consumer to not just inform yourself, but to force manufacturers to innovate, and disclose more information to their customers. Brand loyalty destroys competition. Do you think the recent nVidia driver "fiasco" was uncovered by trusting nVidia zealots? Or even ATi love children? NAY! These descrepencies were found by objective people who continuely look past and ignore brand names, company propaganda, and marketing hoopla. The next time I go to buy a card I'll have no problem considering nVidia along side ATi, S3, and anyone else on the block at that time. Hell, if BitBoyz decides to try again with one of their crazy designs I'll be all ears; and if enough objective minds support using their product, then... BitBoyz, here I come!
omg... you are my hero! thanks a bunch for my new motto :)
you don't know what your are talking about. learn about hardware before posting about it. there are absolutely no circuitry limitations with integrated components. Great video cards can be made extremely small... thats not the point. The reason they suck is because they share the memory bus with the cpu, which creates a huge bottleneck. integrated sound, however, is often extremely good. many motherboard makers are now choosing high quality 6 channel solutions due to the low price premium over crappy sound. also, integrated networking devices are generally faster than pci NICs, because they are optimized with the motherboard's chipset. a motherboard with integrated components is not sacrificing anything. not stability, not expandability, not speed, not quality, not anything. They are, however, offering people added functionality. a motherboard should have all the essential pc components, and its hard denying that sound and networking are pretty essential for most computers today.
DDR doesn't cost much more than SDRAM, and both are extremely cheap at the moment. Thats not really a good reason to not upgrade, especially since it would be double the memory bandwidth.
not only would access times be faster, but transfer speeds would be much higher
it would be a decent solution because a RAM drive, while limited by the PCI bus would still be WAY faster as a swap drive than a hard drive.
PS2 did NOT sell at a break even point when it was released, it was sold at a loss. After cost savings from a long production run, they eventually reached a break even point (not sure if they are still there after the price drops). Every console that I know of since the N64 has been sold at a loss upon introduction.
thats not true, every Xbox game outputs at NO LESS THAN 640x480. While many TVs may not be able to show all those lines of resolution, that is the output from the box. Some games even use higher resolutions like 800x600 and 1024x768, and many use AA to make up for the somewhat low resolutions. Plus, did you forget that the Xbox is GeForce 3 based? How is THAT a cheap card? Thats why microsoft was losing over $100 per console BEFORE they lowered their price to $199 (from $299). Production prices are going down for them, so I doubt they are loosing over $200 per console now, but they are deffinately still losing money. Plus, the Xbox is a dedicated machine, unlike your computer, and its much more efficient (clock for clock, pixel for pixel) than your PC. Just get your facts straight.
how is this offtopic? yeah, its a first post post, but its the answer to the problem! Great solution!
why should he be forced into paying more for professional hosting and management of his domain? Thats not a solution, you can't force people to pay.
no, it doesn't allow spammer... don't just read the first couple paragraphs, read the whole thing. Spammer, while evil, are not technically inclined enough, nor would they want to be caught at forging hearders. He said he see message after message being sent to his server, and they are all regected, as they should be, only the danish group who maintains the blacklist was able to get through because they ILLEGALLY trespassed and forged headers. Spammmers don't do that.