Actually that's the solution of a different problem. For compatbility with Windows,
all you need is Microsoft's desire to be able
to allow their new products to
interoperate (both ways!) with their old ones.
This, by the way, is the same reason that
IBM plug-compatables survived: IBM couldn't
change the interfaces enough to eliminate
their competitors without at the same time
eliminating their existing customers (;-))
Like most swords, the Notwithstanding Clause has two sides: it allows one to do things that are
arguably right, but unconstitutional, and others
that are arguably both wrong and unconstitutional.
As such, it can be used for both good and ill,
subject to some seemingly weak restrictions.
However, it adresses two very real problems: the first is well known to U.S. citizens as "Dred Scott" problem: how do you change a supposedly constitutional but evil supreme court decision
to a good, but possibly unconsitutional one?
In the U.S., you theoretically can't. You have to pull a dodge and reinterpret the constitution, which changes more than just
the wrong decision(!) It can, you understand, lead to the
reversal of arguably correct decisions, and
do more evil than it corrects. This in turn leads to an understandable fear of "judge-made law".
Canada dodges that bullet by admitting that legislatures may do things that the courts can't countenance, and
only forces the constitution to be
eventually reinterpreted (ie, rewritten!) when the evil deeds are
mandated by the constitution.
I hope you'll agree with me that if that happens, it's a good time for a rewrite...
The second case where it's used is an action that's arguably good,
has both proponets and detractors, and appears
unconstitutional.
Being Canadians, we admit such exist, even when
we don't want them to. We remember the Abestos Massacre. We don't admit we do (especially to Americans), but we do. We're fallable.
So we leave a big, brightly-lit hole in
the fence. If a legislature is prepared
to say, "we know it's supposed to be right,
but we refuse to do it", publically and conspicuously , and keep saying it publically
year after year, it can override a constitutional
clause it thinks is wrong.
Quebec really fears a constitutional interpretation
that makes it possible for the rest of
Canada to squeeze its language out of existance
(Quebec speaks French). So they used the Notwithstanding Clause to force
french onto every sign in the province, and force
it to be bigger than the english.
It's unconstitutional to make people use both
languages, and even more so to favor one, but
the Quebecois honestly fear that if they let
it, french will be eradicated in a matter of generations.
Are they
right? I don't know, but I do know some
Cajuns who can't speak French, so they could be... we'll have to wait and see.
If the answer is no, the language law will time out and die. If they are, then and only then do we
need to consider rewriting the Constitution.
zpengo wrote: studying rhetorical theory, which basically assumes EEVRYTHING... is intended to influence and persuade.
Formally, that would be sophistry, not rhetorical
theory. The Sophists were one of two schools of
rhetoricians in Athens with competing assumptions.
They're primarily rememberd as the chaps who got
Socrates fed a nice cool glass of hemlock (;-)).
This is a tactical move: if you are not
sure about the legality or "optics" of
the charge, you start off with small penalties
and see if people will plead guilty or nolo contendere. If so, and if no-one suggests
that you're overstepping societial bounds, then
you ease the penalties up.
And yes, this is also the behavior of
cautious prosecutors in antitrust cases...
Pfhor said: If having an open society is so key to our ability as a nation to defend itself, wouldn't that mean that anything that inhibits the free flow of information should be considered a threat to open society? [...] But wait! Didn't the author mention that news one person
wouldn't think as important, another person would be able to get some vital information
from?
My wife once said "the Atlantic doesn't actually care what you think, they care that you think". I think Mr. Fallows had done a
very good job for his slightly unusual magazine (as usual!)
--dave
MontytheMooch wrote According to the article
In Philadelphia, for instance, a university stopped testing 700 anxious women a year for a
genetic predisposition to breast cancer because its lab was accused of violating a
biotechnology company's patents.
Ontario was approached by the same company,
asking for payments for all persons tested
in the province. The request was (very)
publicly rejected as an improper attempt to
license a scientific discovery.
Interestingly, the company didn't actually
sue... so it my have only been a threat
to do something that wouldn't stand up in court.
I'll echo curunir's suggestion: Bob Eckstein,
Peter Kelly and I wrote the O'Reilly "Using
Samba" book, under their non-open licence, and
then at the request of Andrew Tridgell of
the Samba team and Tim O'Reilly (!) released
it as part of the Open Book initiative.
The license makes the book
both free source and free beer. O'Reilly
retains the right to print it commercially.
Andy Oram, the editor, and the O'Reilly production
crew then generated a very viewable html version
of the book, done in sections that are just about
exactly the size you'd want to send to the printer as a portable reference on a given subject.
The book is shipped with Samba, is available
here on-line, and is being
prepared for its second edition by Jay Ts as we
speak.
The license made it very well-known at the time, the low cost of trying it made it much-sampled,
and so the on-paper book promptly sold out! Quick, Andy, schedule a second printing! (This brought us a nice chunk of income.)
Moral of the story? If you want a professional publisher for a salebale book and still want to use
an Open Source licence, speak to O'Reilly.
--dave
One normally doesn't ask for a compeditor's customer list in an examination for discovery, and if one does, one expects it to be given to the court under seal, not handed over to a compeditor...
We used to get Word virii by the thousands at York (yorku.ca), so it's not just an urban legend. I
generally tell folks that my company doesn't use Word files for just that reason.
I'd reccomend the "please don't send me.doc file,
they are subject to viruses" approach, rather
than saying that your machine is in some way
deficient.
A followup on that question: can Sun break
the normal reluctance of major companies to
use something without all three of
- a distribution kit (a CD at least)
- a service contract (even if they don't actually buy it) and
- a popular book.
And have you noticed any other pre-/co-requisites that customers are asking for?
Back in those bad old days I worked for Xanaro,
a competitor of Lotus and after a
fairly serious analysis of the cost/benefit
ratio, we elected to ship without copy protection.
The issue we were seeing was customer
resistance to disks that were "defective".
End users weren't terribly technical, and
tended to call a colleague company's help
line whenever their disks didn't read.
Of course, stealing copies of our program was as illegal as breaking copy protection is
now, and that was sufficient for the majority of our customer base. When a customer called our
help line with what turned out to be a stolen
copy, we first helped them, then arrange for
them to get a copy of the update release (with
some bug fixes they needed!) for the regular
update price.
I recollect actually going out to both a
local college and high school and helping them
set up whole labs of our product after they
agreed to put us on next year's budget at
the reduced academic rate (;-)).
Just like they were non-technical, you see,
they were also well-meaning and faily
law-abiding. We played to these, gained
friendly customers, and
got our profit margin
back by selling upgrades, which were much
chaper to produce than the whole package with
manuals, etc. This approach allowed us to entirely avoid the known, quantified (and large) cost of copy protection. And this in turn allowed us to survive
far longer than our management deserved!
My conclusion? Companies selling ordinary
CDs without copy protection will have
a business advantage over the ones trying
to shoulder both the costs of DVDs for
normal-fidelity audio and the support
costs of "copy protection". Scofflaws
will further reduce the profitability
of copy-protected DVDs if they target
them preferentially...
dfeldman wrote: They spend millions of dollars a year supporting Windows NT clients, open source
efforts, and R&D into doomed technologies...
Since few of these things will ever pay off
in our lifetime, the money is as good as
wasted.
The money they spent supporting Samba, on the other hand, made them a very credible fileserver
for Windows clients. This sold and sells servers.
Krapangor is concerned that When a company switches to 100 percent MS free they might have very much problems to exchange data with their customers.
This is a problem that turned up back
in the IBM "plug-compatable" era, and that
was conveniently solved for us by the folks
back then. You see, for IBM to continue to
connect to their own older equipment, there had to be a backwards-compatablity mechanism. If there
weren't, no-one would ever buy the new equipment
unless they were planning on throwing out
all their previous work!
Microsoft can't give up on backwards compatability either, and so can't give
up on compatability with their compeditors.
Specifically, MS designed.rtf (rich text format)
as a format that guaranteed that older versions
of MS products could continue to use data
from newer products. If you have Word
99, and I have word 100, you tell me "save
as rtf", and vice versa.
RTF has the additional advantage that Word
viruses can't be represented, so folks
who don't like virii already require
their windows files be saved/sent as rtf!
ncc74656 wrote: I'd have to characterize that as a Nutscrape problem [..] Ditto for Eudora.
It's a Rogers problem: it breaks RFC 822. IE
doesn't follow 822, as excessive compatability
with internet standards is a business risk to their employer (;-))
Alas, the change in their pop3 setup is
breaks the RFC 822 as well as the clients
and their work-around is to create a new account with no access to one's previous emails.
This is less than impressive: most people
know an email address is a "@" , and a local-part is a legal userid or
alias on the underlying system. A mailbox containing an @ is prohibited... See
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html for details.
And the workaround for Rogers' goof provided their customers is to use the new account wizard
to create a new acount/profile with a name
that shows a @rogers.com externally, and as @rogers.com@rogers.com internally. This
approach leaves the users with one account/profile
containing all their old mail, preferences and bookmarks, and a new account with the mail missing.
I wonder how many support calls come in
entitled "you stole my email"?
Pyrro writes: would you extend these arguments to support it in non-virtual security?
Very much so: Jan Wong of the Globe and Mail (the Canadian equivalent of the New York Times)
found she could walk through airport security
with a whole range of weapons, including the
infamous box cutters, without detection.
Her paper publicised this, for exactly the same reason as we publicise explots: to force the airports to tighten up security!
Actually that a misconception: copyright is a monopoly specifically granted by a government
(e.g., the King of England) to a person or
organization, authorizing them to
use the King's law-men to enforce the monopoly.
In the U.S. it takes a specific constitutional clause to make this type of monopoly legal.
Given that, every grant of copyright is
a "permission".
The line from the article is misleading,
however:
the author may understand the constitutional
issue but misunderstand what the specific American
law says.
No irony whatsoever in the creation of yet another "new" organization:
the RIAA simply wanted a different deal than
they had with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. So they
refused to negotiate digital rights with those
bodies and perforce created a new one.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that's the solution of a different problem. For compatbility with Windows, all you need is Microsoft's desire to be able to allow their new products to interoperate (both ways!) with their old ones. This, by the way, is the same reason that IBM plug-compatables survived: IBM couldn't change the interfaces enough to eliminate their competitors without at the same time eliminating their existing customers (;-))
If it's an attemt to do regulation of non-commercial speech on the internet, the law applies, just as the court explicitly said it did.
Like most swords, the Notwithstanding Clause has two sides: it allows one to do things that are arguably right, but unconstitutional, and others that are arguably both wrong and unconstitutional. As such, it can be used for both good and ill, subject to some seemingly weak restrictions. However, it adresses two very real problems: the first is well known to U.S. citizens as "Dred Scott" problem: how do you change a supposedly constitutional but evil supreme court decision to a good, but possibly unconsitutional one? In the U.S., you theoretically can't. You have to pull a dodge and reinterpret the constitution, which changes more than just the wrong decision(!) It can, you understand, lead to the reversal of arguably correct decisions, and do more evil than it corrects. This in turn leads to an understandable fear of "judge-made law". Canada dodges that bullet by admitting that legislatures may do things that the courts can't countenance, and only forces the constitution to be eventually reinterpreted (ie, rewritten!) when the evil deeds are mandated by the constitution. I hope you'll agree with me that if that happens, it's a good time for a rewrite... The second case where it's used is an action that's arguably good, has both proponets and detractors, and appears unconstitutional. Being Canadians, we admit such exist, even when we don't want them to. We remember the Abestos Massacre. We don't admit we do (especially to Americans), but we do. We're fallable. So we leave a big, brightly-lit hole in the fence. If a legislature is prepared to say, "we know it's supposed to be right, but we refuse to do it", publically and conspicuously , and keep saying it publically year after year, it can override a constitutional clause it thinks is wrong. Quebec really fears a constitutional interpretation that makes it possible for the rest of Canada to squeeze its language out of existance (Quebec speaks French). So they used the Notwithstanding Clause to force french onto every sign in the province, and force it to be bigger than the english. It's unconstitutional to make people use both languages, and even more so to favor one, but the Quebecois honestly fear that if they let it, french will be eradicated in a matter of generations. Are they right? I don't know, but I do know some Cajuns who can't speak French, so they could be... we'll have to wait and see. If the answer is no, the language law will time out and die. If they are, then and only then do we need to consider rewriting the Constitution.
zpengo wrote: studying rhetorical theory, which basically assumes EEVRYTHING ... is intended to influence and persuade.
Formally, that would be sophistry, not rhetorical
theory. The Sophists were one of two schools of
rhetoricians in Athens with competing assumptions.
They're primarily rememberd as the chaps who got
Socrates fed a nice cool glass of hemlock (;-)).
And yes, I'm biased
Required disclaimer: I'm biased toward a well-known non-intel chipset (;-))
And yes, this is also the behavior of cautious prosecutors in antitrust cases...
Disclaimer required: that's my opinion, not my employer's, and I'm biased.
Pfhor said: If having an open society is so key to our ability as a nation to defend itself, wouldn't that mean that anything that inhibits the free flow of information should be considered a threat to open society? [...] But wait! Didn't the author mention that news one person wouldn't think as important, another person would be able to get some vital information from? My wife once said "the Atlantic doesn't actually care what you think, they care that you think". I think Mr. Fallows had done a very good job for his slightly unusual magazine (as usual!) --dave
Ontario was approached by the same company, asking for payments for all persons tested in the province. The request was (very) publicly rejected as an improper attempt to license a scientific discovery.
Interestingly, the company didn't actually sue... so it my have only been a threat to do something that wouldn't stand up in court.I'll echo curunir's suggestion: Bob Eckstein, Peter Kelly and I wrote the O'Reilly "Using Samba" book, under their non-open licence, and then at the request of Andrew Tridgell of the Samba team and Tim O'Reilly (!) released it as part of the Open Book initiative. The license makes the book both free source and free beer. O'Reilly retains the right to print it commercially. Andy Oram, the editor, and the O'Reilly production crew then generated a very viewable html version of the book, done in sections that are just about exactly the size you'd want to send to the printer as a portable reference on a given subject. The book is shipped with Samba, is available here on-line, and is being prepared for its second edition by Jay Ts as we speak. The license made it very well-known at the time, the low cost of trying it made it much-sampled, and so the on-paper book promptly sold out! Quick, Andy, schedule a second printing! (This brought us a nice chunk of income.) Moral of the story? If you want a professional publisher for a salebale book and still want to use an Open Source licence, speak to O'Reilly. --dave
That's the licence for NON-open-source books from O'Reilly. You want the licence we published the Samba book under, instead.
--dave, the second author
One normally doesn't ask for a compeditor's customer list in an examination for discovery, and if one does, one expects it to be given to the court under seal, not handed over to a compeditor...
mlong write: That's called a scare tactic.
We used to get Word virii by the thousands at York (yorku.ca), so it's not just an urban legend. I
generally tell folks that my company doesn't use Word files for just that reason.
I'd reccomend the "please don't send me .doc file,
they are subject to viruses" approach, rather
than saying that your machine is in some way
deficient.
- a distribution kit (a CD at least)
- a service contract (even if they don't actually buy it) and
- a popular book.
And have you noticed any other pre-/co-requisites that customers are asking for?
--dave (the samba-book one) c-b
The issue we were seeing was customer resistance to disks that were "defective". End users weren't terribly technical, and tended to call a colleague company's help line whenever their disks didn't read.
Of course, stealing copies of our program was as illegal as breaking copy protection is now, and that was sufficient for the majority of our customer base. When a customer called our help line with what turned out to be a stolen copy, we first helped them, then arrange for them to get a copy of the update release (with some bug fixes they needed!) for the regular update price.
I recollect actually going out to both a local college and high school and helping them set up whole labs of our product after they agreed to put us on next year's budget at the reduced academic rate (;-)).
Just like they were non-technical, you see, they were also well-meaning and faily law-abiding. We played to these, gained friendly customers, and got our profit margin back by selling upgrades, which were much chaper to produce than the whole package with manuals, etc. This approach allowed us to entirely avoid the known, quantified (and large) cost of copy protection. And this in turn allowed us to survive far longer than our management deserved!
My conclusion? Companies selling ordinary CDs without copy protection will have a business advantage over the ones trying to shoulder both the costs of DVDs for normal-fidelity audio and the support costs of "copy protection". Scofflaws will further reduce the profitability of copy-protected DVDs if they target them preferentially...
dfeldman wrote:
They spend millions of dollars a year supporting Windows NT clients, open source efforts, and R&D into doomed technologies... Since few of these things will ever pay off in our lifetime, the money is as good as wasted. The money they spent supporting Samba, on the other hand, made them a very credible fileserver for Windows clients. This sold and sells servers.
This is a problem that turned up back
in the IBM "plug-compatable" era, and that
was conveniently solved for us by the folks
back then. You see, for IBM to continue to
connect to their own older equipment, there had to be a backwards-compatablity mechanism. If there
weren't, no-one would ever buy the new equipment
unless they were planning on throwing out
all their previous work!
Microsoft can't give up on backwards compatability either, and so can't give
up on compatability with their compeditors.
Specifically, MS designed
as a format that guaranteed that older versions
of MS products could continue to use data
from newer products. If you have Word
99, and I have word 100, you tell me "save
as rtf", and vice versa.
RTF has the additional advantage that Word
viruses can't be represented, so folks
who don't like virii already require
their windows files be saved/sent as rtf!
It's a Rogers problem: it breaks RFC 822. IE doesn't follow 822, as excessive compatability with internet standards is a business risk to their employer (;-))
This is less than impressive: most people know an email address is a "@" , and a local-part is a legal userid or alias on the underlying system. A mailbox containing an @ is prohibited... See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html for details.
And the workaround for Rogers' goof provided their customers is to use the new account wizard to create a new acount/profile with a name that shows a @rogers.com externally, and as @rogers.com@rogers.com internally. This approach leaves the users with one account/profile containing all their old mail, preferences and bookmarks, and a new account with the mail missing.
I wonder how many support calls come in entitled "you stole my email"?
Very much so: Jan Wong of the Globe and Mail (the Canadian equivalent of the New York Times) found she could walk through airport security with a whole range of weapons, including the infamous box cutters, without detection.
Her paper publicised this, for exactly the same reason as we publicise explots: to force the airports to tighten up security!
Given that, every grant of copyright is a "permission".
The line from the article is misleading, however: the author may understand the constitutional issue but misunderstand what the specific American law says.
No irony whatsoever in the creation of yet another "new" organization: the RIAA simply wanted a different deal than they had with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. So they refused to negotiate digital rights with those bodies and perforce created a new one.
So they would have an opportunity to negotiate different terms than they did with ASCAP, BMI and finally SESAC.