If you don't like people "borrowing" your stuff, keep it to yourself.
Actually the whole point of a patent is that you invent something that takes time and effort and you tell everyone about it instead of keeping it a trade secret. As a reward for not keeping it to yourself, you are given a monopoly on it for a few years (stopping others from using your idea).
Of course, this patent is not really a valid patent as it is not on an invention (and didn't take time and effort and there's probably prior art and it would likely not have been kept a trade secret).
I repeat the grandparent's post: it doesn't bring anything to Linux.
Only if you are in the USA and are encoding/decoding MP3s for certain commercial purposes (as Thomson explicitly let you do it for personal use) does this patent apply to you.
Even then, you are highly unlikely to be sued by Thomson and can claim ignorance of their stupid (and possibly invalid) patent claims.
It would be against the DFSG (and probably a GNU GPL `violation' by Debian) if Thomson told Debian about this patent of theirs (and Debian found it did cover MP3). ATM, Debian can claim ignorance. Maybe Debian should move MP3 decoders and encoders to non-US (given that this patent probably only covers the US and would be invalid in other countries).
no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.
That applies to decoding and encoding.
Also, does anyone know were the patent on decoding is so we can check whether it is valid (in the USA--it is obviously invalid in the free (i.e.: non-US) world)?
And, if you don't want to be sued, use a free and better lossy format (e.g.: Ogg Vorbis for music or Ogg Speex for speech).
What you are saying is broadly correct. However, the majority of the council of minsters are against this proposal. It is currently being pushed by the €C.
Actually its the EPO (who have been unlawfully breaking the current laws to create more work for themselves and want to have their unlawful action legitimised) and the European Commision (who are being bribed by a certain large US software company) who are pushing this through.
The majority of the council of ministers are against and nearly all of the parliament are (in fact I think every single MEP is against the proposal as it currently stands including McCarthy).
That's the point. The unelected €C want to pass this directive (despite the member states' governments, the EU Parliament, the public and the European software industry being against it) as a certain large US software company is bribing their commissioners.
The €C were hoping that the farmers and fishing folk wouldn't notice that this fishy directive was being shoved through their council. NB: the €C only added it to the list of directives to pass at the council one working day before the council met (even though they are supposed to give at least six weeks notice) and were hoping no one would notice so it would have got passed by default.
Thankfully, both times they've tried this trick the Polish minister has been awake. Clearly they intend to keep on trying in the hope that eventually they'll get away with it. It seems
that if everyone in the room snores through the entire meeting, it gets accepted by default.
Launch is a site I truet, so I don't have qualms about ActiveX there
Well, though I haven't used it, I believe, if you read the link I gave you, you will find that the Active X plugin for Firefox can (and should) be set up to only work on a whitelist that you specify.
Having said that you still need MSW and still need to run the same proprietary Active X code that MSIE uses.
I seem to recall Yahoo! is a BSD shop...
I seem to recall that everything Yahoo! never works and looks like it has been created by a bunch of yahoos anyway.
Actually the first WWW browser was a fully GUI one, but I was not talking about the ways in which early UAs (for any given medium) may have been limited. I was talking about what the standards say and how TimBL (and WWW users) think it should be (semantically); you are talking about something totally different.
I am also not objecting to users being able to change their scroll bars. I am objecting to the idea that all GUI UAs should force users to use the scroll bar colour that the WWW site designer wants them to (and the code to do this should be added to (X)HTML, which is, after all, a semantic language).
There is also an Active X plugin for Firefox (which works with that site) if you have to use that site, but if a site really needs Active X I would avoid it like the plague (as it allows the execution of arbitary code from WWW pages).
As well as using the IE View extension, try spoofing your UA product token as that of MSIE using the User Agent Switcher extension then you can use Firefox on sites that ban non-MSIE browsers.
The real answer is to phone/email/write to the banks in question to ask them to fix the bug though. (NB: they are probably also violating your local disability and/or advertising laws.)
In the unlikely circumstances that making it work in one UA makes it break in another and vice versa, they can sniff for the product token ("UA string") of the different UAs and serve different versions of the pages.
Maybe, this lawsuit could also be an opportunity to challenge their forcing the use of CSS (and regions) (in violation of the DVD video standard, misleading-advertsing laws and anti-trust laws) on most films to further their monopoly.
BTW, as you seem to think that these coloured scroll bar things are so amazingly l33t then why don't you write an extension for Firefox/Mozilla to support them.
Then you and your other handful of friends who want WWW designers to randomly change the colour of their window widgets can let this happen, while the rest of us can browse the WWW normally as it was intended.
Maybe the developers of your browser should make it comply with at least one version of (X)HTML before you gloat about how other browsers don't have a seemingly useless scroll-bar-colouring `feature'. In fact, maybe the seeming uselessness of this feature was why it was never added to HTML or CSS.
What exactly does scroll-bar colouring add to the semantics of a page anyway.
WRT to my questions about speed &c, I will ignore your numerous ad-hominem counter arguments and concentrate on your only valid counter-argument, namely, XML is slow.
What formats are `faster' than XML then and you are refering to the speed of what exactly?
BTW, in the grandparent, I was parodying your invalid argument. Its called humour.
Never mind that it doesn't support any version of HTML or CSS, it has awesome coloured scroll bars--How amaxingly L33t--all those n00bs think I took over their PeeCee's--this means its a real man's browser even if it isn't technically a WWW browser. Ye, ye...
In what way are its toolbars any less configurable than MSIEs or is it slower anyway? I find it is faster and more configurable...
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And if you don't live in the USA or are not enocding/decoding for commercial purposes you can use MP3 so stop moaning.
Of course, this patent is not really a valid patent as it is not on an invention (and didn't take time and effort and there's probably prior art and it would likely not have been kept a trade secret).
Only if you are in the USA and are encoding/decoding MP3s for certain commercial purposes (as Thomson explicitly let you do it for personal use) does this patent apply to you.
Even then, you are highly unlikely to be sued by Thomson and can claim ignorance of their stupid (and possibly invalid) patent claims.
It would be against the DFSG (and probably a GNU GPL `violation' by Debian) if Thomson told Debian about this patent of theirs (and Debian found it did cover MP3). ATM, Debian can claim ignorance. Maybe Debian should move MP3 decoders and encoders to non-US (given that this patent probably only covers the US and would be invalid in other countries).
Also, does anyone know were the patent on decoding is so we can check whether it is valid (in the USA--it is obviously invalid in the free (i.e.: non-US) world)?
And, if you don't want to be sued, use a free and better lossy format (e.g.: Ogg Vorbis for music or Ogg Speex for speech).
What you are saying is broadly correct. However, the majority of the council of minsters are against this proposal. It is currently being pushed by the €C.
The majority of the council of ministers are against and nearly all of the parliament are (in fact I think every single MEP is against the proposal as it currently stands including McCarthy).
The €C were hoping that the farmers and fishing folk wouldn't notice that this fishy directive was being shoved through their council. NB: the €C only added it to the list of directives to pass at the council one working day before the council met (even though they are supposed to give at least six weeks notice) and were hoping no one would notice so it would have got passed by default.
Thankfully, both times they've tried this trick the Polish minister has been awake. Clearly they intend to keep on trying in the hope that eventually they'll get away with it. It seems that if everyone in the room snores through the entire meeting, it gets accepted by default.
Also anyone who is too stupid to understand how encryption works (this covers most MS Outlook users) should not be using it.
There are several GUI implementations like WinPG.
I have the FSF's kernel (the Hurd) working on my PC; it isn't too unstable.
Having said that you still need MSW and still need to run the same proprietary Active X code that MSIE uses.
I seem to recall that everything Yahoo! never works and looks like it has been created by a bunch of yahoos anyway.
I am also not objecting to users being able to change their scroll bars. I am objecting to the idea that all GUI UAs should force users to use the scroll bar colour that the WWW site designer wants them to (and the code to do this should be added to (X)HTML, which is, after all, a semantic language).
Instructions on installing Active X in Firefox.
Not sure how I misread that. I suppose it does contain "MSN". Replace MSN with AIM in my parent then; same difference.
The real answer is to phone/email/write to the banks in question to ask them to fix the bug though. (NB: they are probably also violating your local disability and/or advertising laws.)
In the unlikely circumstances that making it work in one UA makes it break in another and vice versa, they can sniff for the product token ("UA string") of the different UAs and serve different versions of the pages.
Maybe, this lawsuit could also be an opportunity to challenge their forcing the use of CSS (and regions) (in violation of the DVD video standard, misleading-advertsing laws and anti-trust laws) on most films to further their monopoly.
I would like to second the parent and also use one of those gel wrist wrests.
Then you and your other handful of friends who want WWW designers to randomly change the colour of their window widgets can let this happen, while the rest of us can browse the WWW normally as it was intended.
What exactly does scroll-bar colouring add to the semantics of a page anyway.
WRT to my questions about speed &c, I will ignore your numerous ad-hominem counter arguments and concentrate on your only valid counter-argument, namely, XML is slow.
What formats are `faster' than XML then and you are refering to the speed of what exactly?
BTW, in the grandparent, I was parodying your invalid argument. Its called humour.
Sorry? Are you claiming that Lindows have been illegally copying copylefted software? I haven't heard anyone else make that claim.
In what way are its toolbars any less configurable than MSIEs or is it slower anyway? I find it is faster and more configurable...