Well, the DMCA was a compromise between the interests of ISPs and those of copyright holders -- so, the result of lobbyist dollars. But secondary copyright liability (vicarious or contributory liability for the direct infringement of third parties) is entirely judicially created. There's no statute on the books w/r/t secondary infringement liability. (Federal judges are appointed for life -- they don't campaign, they don't need to run for re-election, I've worked "on the inside" of enough MPAA etc. litigation to know that the rights holders are as much at the mercy of the judiciary as are the tech heroes. Witness how Grokster was decided by Judge Wilson, then by the 9th Circuit, before SCOTUS used it to graft the doctrine of inducement liability onto copyright law...)
Anyway, for everyone asking "why do we let judges rule on / lawmakers govern the Internet" -- the Internet is us. We are the Internet. Just because something occurs over TCP/IP packets instead of in an alley, doesn't make it any less a part of 'the real world,' where real laws apply.
I knew I'd never reliably hit a gym, etc. (BTDT, repeatedly), and working out *at* work wasn't really feasible, so I worked out by going to / from work by bicycle. At first it was 5 miles each way, then I changed jobs and it was a 35 mile round trip, daily. Lost ~100 lbs in about 8 months. Have kept ~80 of those off since 2008...
Ah, France. You’re so dynamic and quick to embrace change From the Toubon Law to propping up Minitel to the stoic way you embraced labor regulations aimed at easing ridiculously high unemployment by making the first two years of employment somewhat more flexible with your non à la précarité movement... (Does make for decent wine, though, and likely will for centuries.)
Over the years, I've kept tabs on, and used to one degree or another, various Office alternatives. Apple's Pages. OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. Etc. None of them are 100% compatible with Microsoft's file formats. For the type of work I do (law-and-motion briefs, appellate briefs, etc.), there are strict formatting requirements (e.g., line numbers 1-28 down the left side of the page, double-line borders, specific font and margin requirements, page limits, etc). There's also quite often a need to exchange documents with opposing counsel, for, e.g., joint stipulations. Finally, I need to be able to submit documents to the judge's chambers in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect.WPD) format, and they have to look right when the judge opens them. The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!)...
None of the 'Office alternatives' has been able to work with a document created by 'real' Office and retain its formatting; likewise, none of the documents I've created using Pages or OOo or... has looked anything close to what it should (all line numbering/borders gone, etc) when opened in 'real' Office.
For even moderately complex documents, the alternatives, including Google Docs (a/k/a/ Drive), QuickOffice, etc., do not create or properly work with fully Word compatible documents, and hence I cannot use them in my profession. Office 2011 is a cost of doing business for me.
(1) Even if the term "precedent" is being used as a non-legal-term-of-art, it still doesn't apply; one of the principal distinguishing characteristics of civil law jurisdictions is it doesn't matter what another court has done before. All primary law is codified in a jus civile system, whereas in a jus gentium system statutes are only the beginning of the analysis, and judicial "decisional law" (i.e., precedent) must also be considered.
In Brussels, from an Italian court? I thought the EU countries (except England, which is still Common Law) were civil law jurisdictions, which don't recognize stare decisis (i.e., no "precedent" from prior decisions)...?
The idea of the project was to create a laptop for developers, based around 'the idea that developers are the kings of IT and set the agenda for web companies, who in turn, set the agenda for the whole industry
And those developers started moving to Apple laptops en masse (as a capable UNIX system that also runs Photoshop and Omnigraffle and...) a decade ago...
Re:Right to Privacy is Implicit in the 4th Amendme
on
The Privacy Illusion
·
· Score: 1
I don't know why people forget the Fourth Amendment when they talk about privacy and the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
Maybe because even the Supreme Court doesn't see the 4th Amendment as conferring a general "right to privacy," and had to pull "penumbras" out of their Constitutionally educated asses: Griswold v. Connecticut.
Although referring to government powers, and not explicitly about what corporations might be able to do, (since the founding fathers could never have envisioned what the world would become), the very idea of a right to privacy is implicit in the Fourth Amendment.
(1) Implicit, not explicit. There you go. (Hence, "penumbras.")
May I assume he thought the same of the Zune? or Windows Mobile/CE?
On the Zune vs. the iPod: "We're in the game, we're driving our innovation hard, and, okay, we're not the incumbent, [Steve Jobs] is the incumbent in this game, but at the end of the day, he's going to have to keep up with an agenda that we're going to drive as well." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U (Also great "missed the mark" assessment of the iPhone vs. Windows Mobile devices earlier in the video.)
After "developers, developers" and the chair incident, Ballmer wants another quote for the hall of fame:)
Oh, there's plenty of Ballmer HoF quotes post-Developers.
"[The iPhone] doesn't appeal to business customers, because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U (hawking the Motorola Q -- which, of course, set the world on fire and has become an iconic brand in its own right -- as a much better phone than the iPhone)...
why do people think that "I didn't like it" is a valid reason to return something they've purchased? Even if it's part of the store's return policy and all
I'm going out on a limb here, but, "if it's part of the store's return policy," then, by definition, 'I didn't like it' is "a valid reason to return something they've purchased."
I would never use a return policy to test drive new toys. It really takes some warped sense of entitlement to have that attitude. It actually seems unethical to me to demand money back for a product that functions as advertised.
It seems unethical to me to not provide purchasers with a viable way of determining whether or not a product meets their needs. Advertising is just that. The proof is in the pudding.
Locking a laptop to a retail counter and then locking it into a self-serving demo mode doesn't tell me how heavy it really is, if it's going to fit in my briefcase, if the on-board serial ports are the 16550A UARTs I need to interface with the laser cutter in the lab (dating myself a bit here, but...), etc. And speaking as a former retail slave (Best Buy, Computer City, on-campus Apple sales rep), 99.95% of the retail sales people can't answer highly specific technical questions.
If there's no feasible way to determine if a product meets your needs (by trying it out in actual use case scenarios) before purchasing it, and if the store return policy expressly permits returning it after such a trial, it's absolutely ethical to return something you realized -- at the only point you could have so realized, i.e., after purchase -- does not meet your needs.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some serious credibility problems, as a federal judge in California recently observed:
“It is unfortunate that the parties were unable to provide more authoritative evidence. One court recently noted the danger of relying on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia.com [is] a website that allows virtually anyone to upload an article into what is essentially a free, online encyclopedia. A review of the Wikipedia website reveals a pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers, among them, that: (i) any given Wikipedia article ‘may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized;’ (ii) Wikipedia articles are ‘also subject to remarkable oversights and omissions;’ (iii) ‘Wikipedia articles (or series of related articles) are liable to be incomplete in ways that would be less usual in a more tightly controlled reference work;’ (iv) ‘[a]nother problem with a lot of content on Wikipedia is that many contributors do not cite their sources, something that makes it hard for the reader to judge the credibility of what is written;’ and (v) ‘many articles commence their lives as partisan drafts' and may be ‘caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint.’ ” Campbell ex rel. Campbell v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, 69 Fed.Cl. 775, 781 (2006).
“See also Badasa v. Mukasey, 540 F.3d 909, 910 (8th Cir.2008) (noting that Wikipedia is not a sufficiently reliable source on which to rest judicial findings for the reasons stated in Campbell); Kole v. Astrue, No. CV 08–0411–LMB, 2010 WL 1338092, *7 n. 3 (D.Idaho Mar. 31, 2010) (“At this point, it must be noted that, in support of his brief, Respondent cites to Wikipedia. While it may support his contention of what the mathematical symbols of ‘’ refer to, Respondent is admonished from using Wikipedia as an authority in this District again. Wikipedia is not a reliable source at this level of discourse. As an attorney representing the United States, Mr. Rodriguez should know that citations to such unreliable sources only serve to undermine his reliability as counsel”); R. Jason Richards, Courting Wikipedia, 44 TRIAL 62, 62 (2008) (“Since when did a Web site that any Internet surfer can edit become an authoritative source by which law students could write passing papers, experts could provide credible testimony, lawyers could craft legal arguments, and judges could issue precedents?”); James Glerick, Wikipedians Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt, WALL ST. J., Aug. 8, 2008, at W1 (“Anyone can edit [a Wikipedia] article, anonymously, hit and run. From the very beginning that has been Wikipedia's greatest strength and its greatest weakness”).” Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc., 717 F.Supp.2d 965, 976 (C.D. Cal., 2010).
Agreed. As an Apple fanboi since they only shipped 6502-based machines, and the current owner of a MacBook, Pro, and Air and last-gen Mac mini, plus iPod Nano, Touch; first gen iPad, iPhone 4S...
And a Nexus 7 (and various other Android tablets)... There's no way (based on the Bexus) Apple can hit the $249 price point at the build quality they demand and their users expect... The Nexus 7 is great (compared to my previous Abdroid tablet experiences), but plasticky and with too much chassis flex. It's like a Toyota Camry vs. a Lexus ES...
Look, it's mainstream US media, they got the general concept and the branch of the military correct. They're lucky they didn't confuse it with the Space Shuttle or Disneyland (both in Florida).
Which is what, exactly? I'm a copyright attorney who has studied computer science at the post-graduate level (and am a Tau Beta Pi member), and I still can't give you a coherent, comprehensive definition for 'derived work' in software that's applicable throughout the whole of the United States, let alone internationally. The GPL is a clusterfuck in that respect, and it's never been considered by any authoritative (i.e., Federal Circuit level) court...
Because they include a lot of patented stuff (including algorithms) in their hardware that would be exposed if the full source code for the drivers was available, and they legally are not allowed to permit that.
Bzzt. In order to get a patent in the first place, you have to describe the process you're patenting in sufficient detail so that a practitioner of ordinary skill can implement the process (when the patent expires). Thus, the public domain is enhanced by the (delayed, but inevitable) inclusion of your (temporarily exclusively yours, but eventually "the world's") patented process.
They might, however, have trade secret algorithms that may not necessarily be patentable (or the useful life of the TS is expected to outlive a traditional patent), that they may wish to protect.
They may have third party code that they cannot (re)license under an open source license.
Isn't the Linux kernel and its API expressly exempted from the viral nature of the GPL? Per the COPYING file: “NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".”
Started off in '95 with Slackware 2.2.0 (kernel 1.2.13), though I also dabbled with a retail version of RedHat 5 and I think Mandrake "Secure" Linux 6.x ('secure' in that it came with SSL tech, back when it was still encumbered by the RSA patent and cost money to deploy).
When I started working in the 'real world' (circa 2000) RedHat 6.2 - 7.3. These days, anything not running OS X is running either Ubuntu (laptops and workstations), Fedora (LXDE spin for older hardware), or CentOS (servers).
Which makes me wonder why the order was issued to her instead of Facebook.
Might have something to do with the fact that Facebook isn't a party to the litigation and thus can't be ordered (outside of, perhaps, the very specific circumstance of an order to enforce a subpoena, but given the ECPA/SCA, good luck with even that) by that judge to do anything...
In Vernor Vinge "A fire upon the Deep", humans are marooned in orbit around a low-tech civilization...
Actually, you're thinking of A Deepness in the Sky. In A Fire Upon the Deep, humans are stranded on a planet with a low-tech canine civilization, and the 'interference' (radios, gunpowder, etc) is direct. (And technically, they're not marooned in orbit, they anchor themselves in a LaGrange point. They only enter the planet's orbit at the beginning, and at the end...)
Honestly I can't tell if you are serious or not. postscript and lp? Is this 1988?
Why mess with what works? I fairly recently (2006) automated a high-volume production and shipping facility, using packing slips (with Postscript bar codes) generated using Perl and HTML::Template Postscript files, that were FTP'd to HP LaserJets. The whole thing took maybe a day to automate (including figuring out how to embed JPEGs in Postscript), was light-weight and reliable, and ran for years.
"IBM signed the license agreement because of an old antitrust lawsuit regarding the bundling of their OS with their hardware (mainframes at the time). Had they done otherwise, they would have opened up a whole new can of worms. Besides, this was back in the days when people thought the real money was in hardware", crrkrieger"
What lawsuit, how did they sell, and continue to sell their OS bundled with their own hardware. How does Apple do it? Please give verifiable citations?
The lawsuit was United States v. IBM, 69 Civ. 200 (S.D.N.Y. 1969); in a subsequent case, the Justice Dept. provided a good summary of it.
Apple does it because the USDOJ hasn't sued them as a monopoly and forced them to unbundle. (The relevant 'market' is "personal computers," not "OS X personal computers," and Apple, while prominent, has nowhere near a monopoly position in the computer world -- unlike IBM circa the late 1960s.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the DMCA was a compromise between the interests of ISPs and those of copyright holders -- so, the result of lobbyist dollars. But secondary copyright liability (vicarious or contributory liability for the direct infringement of third parties) is entirely judicially created. There's no statute on the books w/r/t secondary infringement liability. (Federal judges are appointed for life -- they don't campaign, they don't need to run for re-election, I've worked "on the inside" of enough MPAA etc. litigation to know that the rights holders are as much at the mercy of the judiciary as are the tech heroes. Witness how Grokster was decided by Judge Wilson, then by the 9th Circuit, before SCOTUS used it to graft the doctrine of inducement liability onto copyright law...)
Anyway, for everyone asking "why do we let judges rule on / lawmakers govern the Internet" -- the Internet is us. We are the Internet. Just because something occurs over TCP/IP packets instead of in an alley, doesn't make it any less a part of 'the real world,' where real laws apply.
I knew I'd never reliably hit a gym, etc. (BTDT, repeatedly), and working out *at* work wasn't really feasible, so I worked out by going to / from work by bicycle. At first it was 5 miles each way, then I changed jobs and it was a 35 mile round trip, daily. Lost ~100 lbs in about 8 months. Have kept ~80 of those off since 2008...
Ah, France. You’re so dynamic and quick to embrace change From the Toubon Law to propping up Minitel to the stoic way you embraced labor regulations aimed at easing ridiculously high unemployment by making the first two years of employment somewhat more flexible with your non à la précarité movement... (Does make for decent wine, though, and likely will for centuries.)
Over the years, I've kept tabs on, and used to one degree or another, various Office alternatives. Apple's Pages. OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. Etc. None of them are 100% compatible with Microsoft's file formats. For the type of work I do (law-and-motion briefs, appellate briefs, etc.), there are strict formatting requirements (e.g., line numbers 1-28 down the left side of the page, double-line borders, specific font and margin requirements, page limits, etc). There's also quite often a need to exchange documents with opposing counsel, for, e.g., joint stipulations. Finally, I need to be able to submit documents to the judge's chambers in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect .WPD) format, and they have to look right when the judge opens them. The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!)...
None of the 'Office alternatives' has been able to work with a document created by 'real' Office and retain its formatting; likewise, none of the documents I've created using Pages or OOo or ... has looked anything close to what it should (all line numbering/borders gone, etc) when opened in 'real' Office.
For even moderately complex documents, the alternatives, including Google Docs (a/k/a/ Drive), QuickOffice, etc., do not create or properly work with fully Word compatible documents, and hence I cannot use them in my profession. Office 2011 is a cost of doing business for me.
Sounds a lot like the "willful ignorance" that Aimster tried to pull off, and got smacked down for. https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/334/334.F3d.643.02-4125.html
(1) Even if the term "precedent" is being used as a non-legal-term-of-art, it still doesn't apply; one of the principal distinguishing characteristics of civil law jurisdictions is it doesn't matter what another court has done before. All primary law is codified in a jus civile system, whereas in a jus gentium system statutes are only the beginning of the analysis, and judicial "decisional law" (i.e., precedent) must also be considered.
(2) There's no "3 years[sic] legal guarantee" in Europe; the EU mandates a two year warranty coverage (with a three year statute of limitations). http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/consumers/protection_of_consumers/l32022_en.htm
In Brussels, from an Italian court? I thought the EU countries (except England, which is still Common Law) were civil law jurisdictions, which don't recognize stare decisis (i.e., no "precedent" from prior decisions)...?
And those developers started moving to Apple laptops en masse (as a capable UNIX system that also runs Photoshop and Omnigraffle and ...) a decade ago...
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/03/11/1542218/how-mac-os-x-is-changing-the-mac-community
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/08/11/17/1920206/why-developers-are-switching-to-macs
I don't know why people forget the Fourth Amendment when they talk about privacy and the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
Maybe because even the Supreme Court doesn't see the 4th Amendment as conferring a general "right to privacy," and had to pull "penumbras" out of their Constitutionally educated asses: Griswold v. Connecticut.
Although referring to government powers, and not explicitly about what corporations might be able to do, (since the founding fathers could never have envisioned what the world would become), the very idea of a right to privacy is implicit in the Fourth Amendment.
(1) Implicit, not explicit. There you go. (Hence, "penumbras.")
(2) Yeah, the Founding Fathers could never have envisioned globe-spanning megacorps.
May I assume he thought the same of the Zune? or Windows Mobile/CE?
On the Zune vs. the iPod: "We're in the game, we're driving our innovation hard, and, okay, we're not the incumbent, [Steve Jobs] is the incumbent in this game, but at the end of the day, he's going to have to keep up with an agenda that we're going to drive as well." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U (Also great "missed the mark" assessment of the iPhone vs. Windows Mobile devices earlier in the video.)
After "developers, developers" and the chair incident, Ballmer wants another quote for the hall of fame :)
Oh, there's plenty of Ballmer HoF quotes post-Developers.
"[The iPhone] doesn't appeal to business customers, because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U (hawking the Motorola Q -- which, of course, set the world on fire and has become an iconic brand in its own right -- as a much better phone than the iPhone)...
why do people think that "I didn't like it" is a valid reason to return something they've purchased? Even if it's part of the store's return policy and all
I'm going out on a limb here, but, "if it's part of the store's return policy," then, by definition, 'I didn't like it' is "a valid reason to return something they've purchased."
I would never use a return policy to test drive new toys. It really takes some warped sense of entitlement to have that attitude. It actually seems unethical to me to demand money back for a product that functions as advertised.
It seems unethical to me to not provide purchasers with a viable way of determining whether or not a product meets their needs. Advertising is just that. The proof is in the pudding.
Locking a laptop to a retail counter and then locking it into a self-serving demo mode doesn't tell me how heavy it really is, if it's going to fit in my briefcase, if the on-board serial ports are the 16550A UARTs I need to interface with the laser cutter in the lab (dating myself a bit here, but...), etc. And speaking as a former retail slave (Best Buy, Computer City, on-campus Apple sales rep), 99.95% of the retail sales people can't answer highly specific technical questions.
If there's no feasible way to determine if a product meets your needs (by trying it out in actual use case scenarios) before purchasing it, and if the store return policy expressly permits returning it after such a trial, it's absolutely ethical to return something you realized -- at the only point you could have so realized, i.e., after purchase -- does not meet your needs.
Q.E.D.
obligatory humorous link to an article on.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some serious credibility problems, as a federal judge in California recently observed:
“It is unfortunate that the parties were unable to provide more authoritative evidence. One court recently noted the danger of relying
on Wikipedia:
“See also Badasa v. Mukasey, 540 F.3d 909, 910 (8th Cir.2008) (noting that Wikipedia is not a sufficiently reliable source on
which to rest judicial findings for the reasons stated in Campbell); Kole v. Astrue, No. CV 08–0411–LMB, 2010 WL 1338092,
*7 n. 3 (D.Idaho Mar. 31, 2010) (“At this point, it must be noted that, in support of his brief, Respondent cites to Wikipedia.
While it may support his contention of what the mathematical symbols of ‘’ refer to, Respondent is admonished from
using Wikipedia as an authority in this District again. Wikipedia is not a reliable source at this level of discourse. As an attorney
representing the United States, Mr. Rodriguez should know that citations to such unreliable sources only serve to undermine his
reliability as counsel”); R. Jason Richards, Courting Wikipedia, 44 TRIAL 62, 62 (2008) (“Since when did a Web site that any
Internet surfer can edit become an authoritative source by which law students could write passing papers, experts could provide
credible testimony, lawyers could craft legal arguments, and judges could issue precedents?”); James Glerick, Wikipedians Leave
Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt, WALL ST. J., Aug. 8, 2008, at W1 (“Anyone can edit [a Wikipedia] article, anonymously, hit and
run. From the very beginning that has been Wikipedia's greatest strength and its greatest weakness”).” Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc., 717 F.Supp.2d 965, 976 (C.D. Cal., 2010).
Definitely not 'scholarly mature.'
$250 would be nice but it's probably $329.
Agreed. As an Apple fanboi since they only shipped 6502-based machines, and the current owner of a MacBook, Pro, and Air and last-gen Mac mini, plus iPod Nano, Touch; first gen iPad, iPhone 4S...
And a Nexus 7 (and various other Android tablets)... There's no way (based on the Bexus) Apple can hit the $249 price point at the build quality they demand and their users expect... The Nexus 7 is great (compared to my previous Abdroid tablet experiences), but plasticky and with too much chassis flex. It's like a Toyota Camry vs. a Lexus ES...
Look, it's mainstream US media, they got the general concept and the branch of the military correct. They're lucky they didn't confuse it with the Space Shuttle or Disneyland (both in Florida).
Anaheim moved to Florida?
derived works definition for software.
Which is what, exactly? I'm a copyright attorney who has studied computer science at the post-graduate level (and am a Tau Beta Pi member), and I still can't give you a coherent, comprehensive definition for 'derived work' in software that's applicable throughout the whole of the United States, let alone internationally. The GPL is a clusterfuck in that respect, and it's never been considered by any authoritative (i.e., Federal Circuit level) court...
Because they include a lot of patented stuff (including algorithms) in their hardware that would be exposed if the full source code for the drivers was available, and they legally are not allowed to permit that.
Bzzt. In order to get a patent in the first place, you have to describe the process you're patenting in sufficient detail so that a practitioner of ordinary skill can implement the process (when the patent expires). Thus, the public domain is enhanced by the (delayed, but inevitable) inclusion of your (temporarily exclusively yours, but eventually "the world's") patented process.
They might, however, have trade secret algorithms that may not necessarily be patentable (or the useful life of the TS is expected to outlive a traditional patent), that they may wish to protect.
They may have third party code that they cannot (re)license under an open source license.
Who knows what their rationales are...
Isn't the Linux kernel and its API expressly exempted from the viral nature of the GPL? Per the COPYING file: “NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".”
Started off in '95 with Slackware 2.2.0 (kernel 1.2.13), though I also dabbled with a retail version of RedHat 5 and I think Mandrake "Secure" Linux 6.x ('secure' in that it came with SSL tech, back when it was still encumbered by the RSA patent and cost money to deploy).
When I started working in the 'real world' (circa 2000) RedHat 6.2 - 7.3. These days, anything not running OS X is running either Ubuntu (laptops and workstations), Fedora (LXDE spin for older hardware), or CentOS (servers).
Which makes me wonder why the order was issued to her instead of Facebook.
Might have something to do with the fact that Facebook isn't a party to the litigation and thus can't be ordered (outside of, perhaps, the very specific circumstance of an order to enforce a subpoena, but given the ECPA/SCA, good luck with even that) by that judge to do anything...
In Vernor Vinge "A fire upon the Deep", humans are marooned in orbit around a low-tech civilization...
Actually, you're thinking of A Deepness in the Sky. In A Fire Upon the Deep, humans are stranded on a planet with a low-tech canine civilization, and the 'interference' (radios, gunpowder, etc) is direct. (And technically, they're not marooned in orbit, they anchor themselves in a LaGrange point. They only enter the planet's orbit at the beginning, and at the end...)
Communicators: DUH! Motorola even named the first Flip-phone the "Star Tac" -- how did the author miss this OBVIOUS one?
Actually, Motorola used the "*TAC" designation for about a decade before the StarTAC, including on flip phones (starting with the MicroTAC, and including the TeleTAC, etc). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MicroTAC http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://baber.com/baber/gifs/cellphone/motorola/teletac_dpc500.jpg&imgrefurl=http://baber.com/baber/cellular/teletac.htm&h=300&w=131&sz=16&tbnid=0MUDh7QvJLlC1M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=39&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dmotorola%2BteleTAC%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=motorola+teleTAC&usg=__LixE5D_LyWJs4Xxu4tYK1xoXONc=&docid=xUetb3eYtp2oLM&sa=X&ei=SmtRUJ_mGeKDiwKesIGgDQ&ved=0CDMQ9QEwBA&dur=342 ...
I saw paperwhite and was hoping this was a resurgence for E-Ink. Sadly no, it's not.
It's e-Ink, at least according to http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/06/kindle-paperwhite/. It would have to be, to have an 8 week runtime.
Honestly I can't tell if you are serious or not. postscript and lp? Is this 1988?
Why mess with what works? I fairly recently (2006) automated a high-volume production and shipping facility, using packing slips (with Postscript bar codes) generated using Perl and HTML::Template Postscript files, that were FTP'd to HP LaserJets. The whole thing took maybe a day to automate (including figuring out how to embed JPEGs in Postscript), was light-weight and reliable, and ran for years.
"IBM signed the license agreement because of an old antitrust lawsuit regarding the bundling of their OS with their hardware (mainframes at the time). Had they done otherwise, they would have opened up a whole new can of worms. Besides, this was back in the days when people thought the real money was in hardware", crrkrieger"
What lawsuit, how did they sell, and continue to sell their OS bundled with their own hardware. How does Apple do it? Please give verifiable citations?
The lawsuit was United States v. IBM, 69 Civ. 200 (S.D.N.Y. 1969); in a subsequent case, the Justice Dept. provided a good summary of it.
Apple does it because the USDOJ hasn't sued them as a monopoly and forced them to unbundle. (The relevant 'market' is "personal computers," not "OS X personal computers," and Apple, while prominent, has nowhere near a monopoly position in the computer world -- unlike IBM circa the late 1960s.)