Each and every company who gets involved in such a licensing deal knows full well what they are getting into and exactly what they are licensing...
Of course they know exactly what the agreement is. But you're assuming that the agreement is a license for specific patents that Microsoft alleges Linux infringes. Despite being called a "license agreement", the actual contract the two parties are signing need not exclusively involve such patents.
The agreement probably includes some patent licensing, but the part about Linux is most likely in the form of an agreement by Microsoft not to sue IO Data over patent infringement in Linux. They can make such an agreement without specifying which patents might hypothetically be involved; it would be a blanket agreement.
If you have a list of patents you hold and know that a competitor is violating, you sue that competitor. Not threaten random customers of that competitor. When Intel has a patent issue with AMD, they go after AMD, not HP and Dell and all of AMD's customers.
Which do you think is more effective at harming a competitor: 1) The hypothetical threat of liability for customers of the competitor, who can clearly see you taking no action against the allegedly infringing competitor itself? 2) The hypothetical threat of liability for customers of the competitor, who can see that you are taking legal action against the infringing competitor? 3) Getting court-ordered injunction against the competitor shipping their product to ANY of their customer, THEN going to the customers and striking a deal about their hypothetical liability?
Hmmmmmm.
So how do I know that Microsoft's list of patents is in fact imaginary, and that the contract agreement with IO Data does not specify which patents Linux violates?
Because none of the Linux distros have been sued. If this list was real, and thus the possibility of a patent violation suit was real, it would be a devastatingly effective weapon against Linux. Yeah, yeah, the kernel developers et al could work around the patents. In the intervening months Red Hat, Canonical, kernel.org et. al. would be legally barred from distributing their product. You think Linux customers might jump ship?
Why rely on FUD when you can have the certainty of patent infringement dangers?
Oh the other reason I know their list is imaginary is that their statements about Linux infringement come from mis-quoting a study done by someone else about patent infringements in Linux and other software. The study said Linux potentially violates 200-some patents, and MS used this to say that Linux violated 200-some Microsoft patents. Which was a lie.
This sounds like a much better idea than when they studied the Dead Zone in the 80s using Christopher Walken. Dead bloated pig corpses are more plentiful, not to mention way less creepy.
So you're positing that primitive cultures would conduct archaeological digs in order to find ancient egg shells to write on, rather than using the shells of eggs placed conveniently on the ground by contemporary birds.
Interesting.
Hey, since it was one of the archaeologists who made this discovery that pointed out that bushmen still carved shells recently, I bet he could test out this hypothesis.
"This may be one of [the writing traditions], most probably not the first and certainly not the last."
I appreciate the "probably" on this being the first, but certainly not the last? Well I think it's a little presumptuous to assert that! I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years this scientist is eating crow because it turns out this was the last form of writing!
Funny, when I think about controlling people with music, I think of a different movie. This wasn't about aversion, though, just straight up mind control! And beer. And hockey. And a dog named Hosehead.
When Necula was unable to pass the item after about four days, doctors--concerned that the drive was not compatible with the suspect's GI tract--concluded he "would be injured if they allowed the flash drive to remain inside of him," reported Borger. Necula eventually agreed to allow doctors at New York Downtown Hospital to remove the item, according to a source familiar with the incident.
Doctors don't just get to perform surgery on you. Even if you're such a prat that you'd refuse surgery that would save your life. But he didn't... eventually.
Personally I'm excited about this just so that some day the MPAA will put out an ad saying "When you steal music, you steal from the creator of the music you love." And then the camera pans to a shelf of forlorn-looking Dells.
So I'll say this: what's with all the black in outer space anyway. Black holes, black energy, black matter, even the nothing part is black. Black black black. It's depressing.
Thus the old astrophysicist saying: "Always bet on black".
Yeah, I kinda figured that was the case. But for a second there I was about to be very upset that Germans had become cyborgs before we even had the option.
But now that I think of it, if they already had chip implants but only 25% were happy about it that'd be kinda disturbing. I mean why'd they get them then? Overhyped marketing claims seems plausible. Another option would be government coercion. Which then raises the question: Why didn't they design the chips to alter the recipient's mind so that they'd be happy to be chipped? Maybe they did but that feature is only 25% effective?
Is killing a zombie legal outside of self-defense?always self-defense.
Even if you make a game out of it like "zombie head t-ball" or "see how many times you can shoot the zombie's limbs before it has to start dragging itself after you with its lips". After your thousandth self-defense zombie killing, you start to want to take the edge off the monotony!
For that reason, I think our ancestors domesticated cattle, then happened to develop a gene to allow them to drink milk, then adapted milk drinking into their culture. Then again, we really don't know.
We don't really know, but still that's almost certainly what happened.
Obviously we didn't have a "milk drinking" culture before the mutation appeared because we couldn't digest milk, and I doubt a "horrific stomach cramps and screaming diarrhea" culture would have lasted very long.
However in the absence of domesticated cattle, such a mutation would serve no benefit and wouldn't have spread like it has.
Therefore culture changed the selective criterion, and a mutation that before would be useless was now quite useful and strongly selected for. Role of Human Culture in Natural Selection? There it is.
But being advantageous doesn't cause the mutation to appear... That's why it only showed up in some populations that had domesticated cattle.
Yes, yes they can. Plants in particular have crazily complex mechanisms for enabling/disabling genes (since that's pretty much the only way they can adapt to changing environments). But animals do it too.
The enzyme that allows you to digest lactose is a protein, lactase. This protein is coded for by a particular sequence of DNA. Another sequence of DNA controls whether or not the first sequence is active and producing the enzyme it codes for.
Traditionally the lactase gene is disabled after weaning. But then a mutation arose in the lactase-gene-controlling-gene, and for people with that mutation the gene stays activated.
So the description quoted is pretty much accurate. No the gene doesn't directly dissolve lactose, it just produces the protein that does it, but it's the gene itself that is affected by the mutation that causes it to stay "switched on" into adulthood.
Well yeah. If the moon was soft -- like if it was made of cheese for example -- then that would have made landing and subsequent takeoff more difficult.
It's simple. Take your dwelling (apartment, house, condo, whatever). Play a mental game where you have to depend ONLY on whatever you have on your property for one month. If that doesn't concern you, you're probably good, as long as your neighbors have gone through the same mental exercise OR you are better armed than they are.:)
Alternatively, you're probably good if all of your neighbors have played this mental game and aren't concerned, AND you're better armed than they are.;)
They thought about that, but putting a clamp-and-swing system in place for every person, and for these people to constantly remain where the clamps can grab them in case of an earthquake, turned out to be impractical.
In our business, it's called a "Time and Materials" project. Keep throwing money until the buyer gets a finished project, or they run out of money.
Which works pretty well in my limited experience with cost-plus contracts as long as the buyer is regularly paying the contractor, because it means at any point when the buyer or contractor wants to back out, the buyer isn't on the hook for a lot of promised payments, and the contractor isn't on the hook for a lot of extra work.
If NASA has a lot of back payments to make for work that was already done because they wanted to play games shifting the expenses to different budget years or something, well that was dumb, but still just paying for work that's been done. Shouldn't be that big a deal.
However if these were bid contracts (common with defense contractors, and always seemingly with clauses for cost overruns so the bid can still be a bald-faced lie), then NASA could simply have promised these contractors a certain amount of money, and if NASA says they don't want them to do the work, well they'll still owe the money.
Someone else said it best, that the main difference in the new Obama plan is the changes to procurement.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. It prohibits p2p software that: is installed without informed consent; tries to prevent the user from blocking installation; tries to prevent the user from disabling/removing once installed.
It certainly is not prohibiting the user from uninstalling p2p software.:P
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least.
Indeed Visual Studio is orders of magnitude better than edlin, which is orders of magnitude better than flipping dip switches on the front panel.
These are clearly relevant comparisons.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired.
I think they meant written and fully debugged, like 1000 lines of good code a year. I've also heard 20 lines a day of fully debugged code a day, which sounds more reasonable.
Personally, I'd run screaming from any job that looked at how many lines of code I've written as a measure of my worth as an employee, rather than how much I get done regardless of the amount of lines of code it took.
And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not.
LOL, that's a good one.
Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files
That's funny, I use emacs, and I just hit ^C-s-g to see definitions. Can't remember the last time I had to grep.
Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
Yeah, I can see how given a choice between Visual Studio and ed you'd go with Visual Studio. That is a decision I agree with 100%.
But seriously, VC is a fine IDE. The difference between it and other fine IDEs is not an order of magnitude.
the most complex of person might immediately understand that "could be habitable" is equal to "could be unhabitable"...
Yes, they would understand that, which is why my response to your first post (when it wasn't clear that you were nitpicking the wording of the headline alone) was simply "Huh?" as in "Why are you saying something so obvious?"
They would also understood that the degrees of "could be" and "could be not" are not necessarily "equal", and that emphasizing the "could" was not an accident or mistake. They would understand that stating that a specific moon "could" be habitable was meant to imply a greater degree of "could" than your average rock in the solar system. They would understand it is a stronger statement than "well we don't know it's impossible".
but you seem to believe that news items are all magically justified based on nothing but their existence. that's why you are incorrect.
LOL, no. We're talking about conveyed knowledge in the headline, as in meaning, as in communication in a natural language.
If the actual content of the article showed there was no justification for emphasizing "could" over "could not" because no knew knowledge on the habitability to life of Enceladus had been acquired, you could say that the headline was misleading or simply wrong for suggesting otherwise.
To say that the headline doesn't suggest that life is more likely on Eneceladus than previously thought, and more likely than your average cold dead space rock, is to blatantly fail reading comprehension. It's incredibly obvious what meaning the headline intended to convey -- everyone else got it. Everyone else expected that the article would cover new discoveries that made life on Enceladus seem more likely.
Oh and look, that intended meaning turns out to also be completely correct! What a coincidence!
The funny part is I bet you automatically understood what the intended message was when you first read it. Then you had to remind yourself to be mindlessly literal, and deliberately make yourself not understand plain English. Who told you that reading comprehension of natural language communication was best done through context-free literalism? I know it wasn't an educator.
in the context of a universe with a changing default degree of habitability implicitly makes all claims relative to it non-deterministic.
Yes, which is why you were wrong to interpret the headline in a "deterministic context"! Because this isn't one!
FFS.
But please, do continue to congratulate yourself for being so smart that you fail to understand plain English. Please continue explaining how it's wrong to use context and interpretation to figure out the implied strength of non-deterministic words like "could". Please explain how it is never possible to tell if someone using "could" means "it's a distinct possibility" vs "*shrug* anything could happen". You could really show how smart you are!
Slashdot Mirror
Each and every company who gets involved in such a licensing deal knows full well what they are getting into and exactly what they are licensing...
Of course they know exactly what the agreement is. But you're assuming that the agreement is a license for specific patents that Microsoft alleges Linux infringes. Despite being called a "license agreement", the actual contract the two parties are signing need not exclusively involve such patents.
The agreement probably includes some patent licensing, but the part about Linux is most likely in the form of an agreement by Microsoft not to sue IO Data over patent infringement in Linux. They can make such an agreement without specifying which patents might hypothetically be involved; it would be a blanket agreement.
If you have a list of patents you hold and know that a competitor is violating, you sue that competitor. Not threaten random customers of that competitor. When Intel has a patent issue with AMD, they go after AMD, not HP and Dell and all of AMD's customers.
Which do you think is more effective at harming a competitor:
1) The hypothetical threat of liability for customers of the competitor, who can clearly see you taking no action against the allegedly infringing competitor itself?
2) The hypothetical threat of liability for customers of the competitor, who can see that you are taking legal action against the infringing competitor?
3) Getting court-ordered injunction against the competitor shipping their product to ANY of their customer, THEN going to the customers and striking a deal about their hypothetical liability?
Hmmmmmm.
So how do I know that Microsoft's list of patents is in fact imaginary, and that the contract agreement with IO Data does not specify which patents Linux violates?
Because none of the Linux distros have been sued. If this list was real, and thus the possibility of a patent violation suit was real, it would be a devastatingly effective weapon against Linux. Yeah, yeah, the kernel developers et al could work around the patents. In the intervening months Red Hat, Canonical, kernel.org et. al. would be legally barred from distributing their product. You think Linux customers might jump ship?
Why rely on FUD when you can have the certainty of patent infringement dangers?
Oh the other reason I know their list is imaginary is that their statements about Linux infringement come from mis-quoting a study done by someone else about patent infringements in Linux and other software. The study said Linux potentially violates 200-some patents, and MS used this to say that Linux violated 200-some Microsoft patents. Which was a lie.
Destroying the universe by becoming nothing is the ultimate ninja technique!
This sounds like a much better idea than when they studied the Dead Zone in the 80s using Christopher Walken. Dead bloated pig corpses are more plentiful, not to mention way less creepy.
So you're positing that primitive cultures would conduct archaeological digs in order to find ancient egg shells to write on, rather than using the shells of eggs placed conveniently on the ground by contemporary birds.
Interesting.
Hey, since it was one of the archaeologists who made this discovery that pointed out that bushmen still carved shells recently, I bet he could test out this hypothesis.
"This may be one of [the writing traditions], most probably not the first and certainly not the last."
I appreciate the "probably" on this being the first, but certainly not the last? Well I think it's a little presumptuous to assert that! I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years this scientist is eating crow because it turns out this was the last form of writing!
Funny, when I think about controlling people with music, I think of a different movie. This wasn't about aversion, though, just straight up mind control! And beer. And hockey. And a dog named Hosehead.
Hm, yeah, reading...
Doctors don't just get to perform surgery on you. Even if you're such a prat that you'd refuse surgery that would save your life. But he didn't... eventually.
Personally I'm excited about this just so that some day the MPAA will put out an ad saying "When you steal music, you steal from the creator of the music you love." And then the camera pans to a shelf of forlorn-looking Dells.
Won't someone think of the AIs?!
So I'll say this: what's with all the black in outer space anyway. Black holes, black energy, black matter, even the nothing part is black. Black black black. It's depressing.
Thus the old astrophysicist saying: "Always bet on black".
Fermi Space Telescope deepens mystery of gamma rays. When Inquisitive Hulk get more curious, Hulk get stronger!
Do Not Eat (if containing evidence in a federal investigation)
Yeah, I kinda figured that was the case. But for a second there I was about to be very upset that Germans had become cyborgs before we even had the option.
But now that I think of it, if they already had chip implants but only 25% were happy about it that'd be kinda disturbing. I mean why'd they get them then? Overhyped marketing claims seems plausible. Another option would be government coercion. Which then raises the question: Why didn't they design the chips to alter the recipient's mind so that they'd be happy to be chipped? Maybe they did but that feature is only 25% effective?
Is killing a zombie legal outside of self-defense?always self-defense.
Even if you make a game out of it like "zombie head t-ball" or "see how many times you can shoot the zombie's limbs before it has to start dragging itself after you with its lips". After your thousandth self-defense zombie killing, you start to want to take the edge off the monotony!
That's crazy -- how are we going to get the ice from the moon to earth to put in the VW Beetle so we can measure it?
For that reason, I think our ancestors domesticated cattle, then happened to develop a gene to allow them to drink milk, then adapted milk drinking into their culture. Then again, we really don't know.
We don't really know, but still that's almost certainly what happened.
Obviously we didn't have a "milk drinking" culture before the mutation appeared because we couldn't digest milk, and I doubt a "horrific stomach cramps and screaming diarrhea" culture would have lasted very long.
However in the absence of domesticated cattle, such a mutation would serve no benefit and wouldn't have spread like it has.
Therefore culture changed the selective criterion, and a mutation that before would be useless was now quite useful and strongly selected for. Role of Human Culture in Natural Selection? There it is.
But being advantageous doesn't cause the mutation to appear... That's why it only showed up in some populations that had domesticated cattle.
Yes, yes they can. Plants in particular have crazily complex mechanisms for enabling/disabling genes (since that's pretty much the only way they can adapt to changing environments). But animals do it too.
The enzyme that allows you to digest lactose is a protein, lactase. This protein is coded for by a particular sequence of DNA. Another sequence of DNA controls whether or not the first sequence is active and producing the enzyme it codes for.
Traditionally the lactase gene is disabled after weaning. But then a mutation arose in the lactase-gene-controlling-gene, and for people with that mutation the gene stays activated.
So the description quoted is pretty much accurate. No the gene doesn't directly dissolve lactose, it just produces the protein that does it, but it's the gene itself that is affected by the mutation that causes it to stay "switched on" into adulthood.
Well yeah. If the moon was soft -- like if it was made of cheese for example -- then that would have made landing and subsequent takeoff more difficult.
It's simple. Take your dwelling (apartment, house, condo, whatever). Play a mental game where you have to depend ONLY on whatever you have on your property for one month. If that doesn't concern you, you're probably good, as long as your neighbors have gone through the same mental exercise OR you are better armed than they are. :)
Alternatively, you're probably good if all of your neighbors have played this mental game and aren't concerned, AND you're better armed than they are. ;)
I'm not sure I can agree or disagree until I figure out the ramifications of gassing Jews with Hebrew Dioxide.
They thought about that, but putting a clamp-and-swing system in place for every person, and for these people to constantly remain where the clamps can grab them in case of an earthquake, turned out to be impractical.
In our business, it's called a "Time and Materials" project. Keep throwing money until the buyer gets a finished project, or they run out of money.
Which works pretty well in my limited experience with cost-plus contracts as long as the buyer is regularly paying the contractor, because it means at any point when the buyer or contractor wants to back out, the buyer isn't on the hook for a lot of promised payments, and the contractor isn't on the hook for a lot of extra work.
If NASA has a lot of back payments to make for work that was already done because they wanted to play games shifting the expenses to different budget years or something, well that was dumb, but still just paying for work that's been done. Shouldn't be that big a deal.
However if these were bid contracts (common with defense contractors, and always seemingly with clauses for cost overruns so the bid can still be a bald-faced lie), then NASA could simply have promised these contractors a certain amount of money, and if NASA says they don't want them to do the work, well they'll still owe the money.
Someone else said it best, that the main difference in the new Obama plan is the changes to procurement.
You needs to get yourself some cscope. :)
Yeah, that's pretty much it. It prohibits p2p software that: is installed without informed consent; tries to prevent the user from blocking installation; tries to prevent the user from disabling/removing once installed.
It certainly is not prohibiting the user from uninstalling p2p software. :P
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least.
Indeed Visual Studio is orders of magnitude better than edlin, which is orders of magnitude better than flipping dip switches on the front panel.
These are clearly relevant comparisons.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired.
I think they meant written and fully debugged, like 1000 lines of good code a year. I've also heard 20 lines a day of fully debugged code a day, which sounds more reasonable.
Personally, I'd run screaming from any job that looked at how many lines of code I've written as a measure of my worth as an employee, rather than how much I get done regardless of the amount of lines of code it took.
And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not.
LOL, that's a good one.
Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files
That's funny, I use emacs, and I just hit ^C-s-g to see definitions. Can't remember the last time I had to grep.
Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
Yeah, I can see how given a choice between Visual Studio and ed you'd go with Visual Studio. That is a decision I agree with 100%.
But seriously, VC is a fine IDE. The difference between it and other fine IDEs is not an order of magnitude.
the most complex of person might immediately understand that "could be habitable" is equal to "could be unhabitable"...
Yes, they would understand that, which is why my response to your first post (when it wasn't clear that you were nitpicking the wording of the headline alone) was simply "Huh?" as in "Why are you saying something so obvious?"
They would also understood that the degrees of "could be" and "could be not" are not necessarily "equal", and that emphasizing the "could" was not an accident or mistake. They would understand that stating that a specific moon "could" be habitable was meant to imply a greater degree of "could" than your average rock in the solar system. They would understand it is a stronger statement than "well we don't know it's impossible".
but you seem to believe that news items are all magically justified based on nothing but their existence. that's why you are incorrect.
LOL, no. We're talking about conveyed knowledge in the headline, as in meaning, as in communication in a natural language.
If the actual content of the article showed there was no justification for emphasizing "could" over "could not" because no knew knowledge on the habitability to life of Enceladus had been acquired, you could say that the headline was misleading or simply wrong for suggesting otherwise.
To say that the headline doesn't suggest that life is more likely on Eneceladus than previously thought, and more likely than your average cold dead space rock, is to blatantly fail reading comprehension. It's incredibly obvious what meaning the headline intended to convey -- everyone else got it. Everyone else expected that the article would cover new discoveries that made life on Enceladus seem more likely.
Oh and look, that intended meaning turns out to also be completely correct! What a coincidence!
The funny part is I bet you automatically understood what the intended message was when you first read it. Then you had to remind yourself to be mindlessly literal, and deliberately make yourself not understand plain English. Who told you that reading comprehension of natural language communication was best done through context-free literalism? I know it wasn't an educator.
in the context of a universe with a changing default degree of habitability implicitly makes all claims relative to it non-deterministic.
Yes, which is why you were wrong to interpret the headline in a "deterministic context"! Because this isn't one!
FFS.
But please, do continue to congratulate yourself for being so smart that you fail to understand plain English. Please continue explaining how it's wrong to use context and interpretation to figure out the implied strength of non-deterministic words like "could". Please explain how it is never possible to tell if someone using "could" means "it's a distinct possibility" vs "*shrug* anything could happen". You could really show how smart you are!