When you make such nice web sites, full of such valuable and unique information, you have to anticipate getting linked from major news sites. When the editors get something as good as this, they just have to post it, and who can blame them for that?
But see, I don't make donations to terrorist organizations, so I know they aren't going to come after me.
Mike Hawash didn't make any donations to terrorist organisations either... as far as he knew. In fact, GRF hasn't even been proven to be a terrorist organisation at this point; it is only suspected of being one.
I submitted this article but it got rejected.... In the description I said something to the effect of Unlike most/.ers I will not editorialize. I then linked to the article.
Gosh, how unfair those editors are not to add a story to the front page of/. that includes a completely unrelated remark disparaging/.'s users!
Maybe what we really need is some moderators with brains who won't mod up sensationalist comments like yours. By the way, given the facts of this case, I think the phrase 'material witness' requires quote marks at least as much as the word 'disappeared.'
Assuming this is C89, the absence of stdio.h is the only legitimate complaint of yours. It would be a good idea to include 'int' and 'void' for clarity, but it is not necessary. Check the first example in K&R2 if you don't believe me.
Can someone give me an honest answer why "main (int argc, char **argv)" wouldn't work just as well?
For the same reason that if(strcmp(foo,bar)==0) is better than if(!strcmp(foo,bar)) at testing two strings for equality. The code works either way, but the former makes more sense.
In this case, it's more sensical to think of argv as an array of char pointers than it is to think of it as a pointer to a char pointer.
(Now watch while I seamlessly tie this answer back into the topic of this article.)
This kind of difference is important to take into account when writing free software. Only when we consistently write clear and readable code will we all be able to unite and defeat Windows on the desktop.
If you don't defend your patent, and over the next few years you start getting companies, formats and standards that are actually infringing your non-enforced patent, how is it fair to say you still have a right to it? You'd suddenly be putting companies out of business (RealNetworks would be hard-pressed to survive without streaming media, for one). You'd be forcing open-source initatives to pay royalties they obviously can't afford (Ogg can stream).
So your solution is to prevent RealNetworks and Ogg (hypothetically) from ever having existed? That doesn't sound a lot better. Look at it this way:
Getting overbroad patents and enforcing them early = Bad
Getting overbroad patents and enforcing them late = Bad
thus
Getting overbroad patents and enforcing them = Bad
and since there's no point in a patent if it isn't going to be enforced
Getting overbroad patents = Bad
Often the patent office doesn't have people with enough knowledge to decide if a patent is too broad or not. Often patents are filed on new research where there are only a couple of people in the world that know enough about it to decide if it's overly broad - and those are the people filing the patent.
So you think they approve patents they don't even understand? The patent office is supposed to decide if the patent is okay or not, and if they don't know what the hell they're doing, then they have no purpose. Why not ditch the patent office and automatically approve any patent that comes through? If the applicant says it's okay, it certainly must be!
Instead, it should be rememebered that the patent system is designed to protect intellectual property, and not a place to make money by basically using entrapment.
The patent system is not designed to protect intellectual property; patents are intellectual property. Intellectual property is supposed to encourage advancement of sciences (and arts, though not in this case). If you get a good original idea, you patent it, and for a limited amount of time only you can use the good idea. Therefore, you have a motivation to come up with good ideas.
I don't know where you're getting this entrapment stuff from. Believe it or not, you can actually search for and read already issued patents. Did you think they were top secret?
I know that our current patent system is set up so that, if you don't defend your patent for a certain amount of time, you can't just come back and start attempting to enforce it.
You must be thinking of trademarks; see my comment on that. Patents cannot be lost by neglect to defend them. However, it may happen that the patent cannot be enforced in a certain case.
If company B has been infringing company A's patent for five years, and company A knew about it all along, and then suddenly decides to sue over it, B can use as a defense that, in effect, A's ignorage of the infringement excused it.
But if company C then comes along and infringes the same patent for the first time, A would still be able to enforce the patent on C. So patents are never lost completely, only partially under certain circumstances.
Also, this kind of situation doesn't tend to come up very often.
That raises an interesting idea. Shouldn't the onus be on the patent owner to enforce their patent when someone else first starts to violate it?
No.
That sounds like the situation with trademarks today: if your trademark is infringed, and you don't defend it, you lose it. That's how we ended up with companies being ridiculously overzealous about trademarks. Remember KIllustrator? Remember the mailing list owner who received legal threats because someone had posted a message with the subject 'sendmail for dummies,' and it was in the archive?
A company with an overbroad patent can screw everyone over whether they enforce it immediately or not. The only way out is not to issue overbroad patents.
Google is very much in the mainstream, so that the 'average user' turns to it for daily use, and it runs GNU/Linux. Do you suppose that might have something to do with it?
It seems to me that it would serve Microsoft quite well if the leading search engine ran Microsoft software, not something they have been denouncing as a toy or communism or whatever.
I'm not thinking about personal users, but businesses. The pointy-hairedest of managers knows how well Google works and has probably been hearing at least a little about how Microsoft products aren't quite the most secure or trustworthy. Maybe he'll think, 'If it works for Google, it should work here,' recommend using Linux in the company, and cost Microsoft some potential money.
Anyone agree this might be a motivating factor in the announcement, or am I just reading too far into this?
If this comment were made against Linux it would have been considered a troll, but it gets posted on the front page because it's against MS. Nice unbiased editing guys.
Just for the record, I don't think Linux is much of a Google competitor either.
I haven't had Flash installed for a long time. Advertisements are not its only annoying use; most of its uses are unnecessary crap: stupid intros, animated logos, and the like. I can't remember the last time I actually wanted to see something in Flash.
I am considering ditching the Java plug-in as well, but it's used for good instead of evil in a few cases. (I'll keep AppletViewer handy if I do get rid of it.)
The study points out a positive correlation between B and C, where B is antipiracy measures and C is IT growth. This, they say, is enough to show that B leads to C.
What if C leads to B? What if another condition A leads to both B and C?
The article doesn't say a damn thing about that. They just drew the conclusion that supports their agenda.
This would be hard news to take on its own, but at the same time that BSD is dying and Apple is going out of business?! (Well, at least RFC 3514 will clear up a lot of security concerns, assuming anyone's still around to implement it.)
No. Some AC mentioned that his evil bit submission was rejected.
My tip if you want to see this duplicated again is: submit some unrelated April Fool's joke stories. The duplicates must have some other articles in-between. (Otherwise it would be too obvious.)
You chose a bad example. Microsoft products are crap no matter what the cost or license.
Anyway, software that is free as in speech is in a way free as in beer as well. If someone sells you software for $5000 under the GPL, you can turn right around and give a copy to your friend for free. If you couldn't do that, it would not be free in either sense.
Out of curiosity, about how much of Red Hat's income is from the subscription thing in the first place?
While I am not familiar with this particular situation, I would expect that most of their money comes from selling their software in boxes. You can't download those nice big manuals with BitTorrent or FTP.
And by the way, if a week-long wait is not so long, then why would this decrease the value of the subscriptions?
I can identify with this almost exactly. I also want the CDs though, because the enclosed booklet sometimes contains COOL STUFF! (Also, ogg is better than mp3, of course; higher-quality sound for less space and whatnot.)
The seemingly obvious solution is warez the songs and then get the broken CDs, but then the labels will think people don't mind buying broken CDs. Oh dear, what to do... well, at least none of the CDs from my favourite artists are on the 'definitely broken' list (yet).
A friend of mine who work part-time in a large record store (city with 300k population) told me that after they started sellinng cd's with copy-protection last summer the total number of returned CD's was totaling.......*silence waiting for the numbers*...... "somewhere between 25 and 50".
And they are selling something like 1000-1500 cs's a day (open 7 days a week). Go figure.
How many copy-protected CDs were they selling a day? There would be some heavy-duty returning if most or all of those CDs were corru... uh, copy-protected. Last summer, copy-protection wasn't all that common yet; that's why this article is news.
These so-called CDs are usually unmarked, so you might not even know you have bought one. You can check somelists, but they're certainly not complete. The distributors apparently don't even tell CD vendors which ones are broken.
Slashdot Mirror
When you make such nice web sites, full of such valuable and unique information, you have to anticipate getting linked from major news sites. When the editors get something as good as this, they just have to post it, and who can blame them for that?
And what's this business about floppies not working more than once? I've been using some of the same floppies for nearly 10 years without any trouble.
Mike Hawash didn't make any donations to terrorist organisations either... as far as he knew. In fact, GRF hasn't even been proven to be a terrorist organisation at this point; it is only suspected of being one.
I think you need to read a certain quote by Martin Niemoller.
Gosh, how unfair those editors are not to add a story to the front page of /. that includes a completely unrelated remark disparaging /.'s users!
Maybe what we really need is some moderators with brains who won't mod up sensationalist comments like yours. By the way, given the facts of this case, I think the phrase 'material witness' requires quote marks at least as much as the word 'disappeared.'
Yes, that's true, and maybe he wasn't creepy either; the grandparent post is referring to how the average person thought of him in the case.
That was supposed to be funny? I must have missed the joke. If I'd had mod points, I would have called it Insightful.
Assuming this is C89, the absence of stdio.h is the only legitimate complaint of yours. It would be a good idea to include 'int' and 'void' for clarity, but it is not necessary. Check the first example in K&R2 if you don't believe me.
For the same reason that if(strcmp(foo,bar)==0) is better than if(!strcmp(foo,bar)) at testing two strings for equality. The code works either way, but the former makes more sense.
In this case, it's more sensical to think of argv as an array of char pointers than it is to think of it as a pointer to a char pointer.
(Now watch while I seamlessly tie this answer back into the topic of this article.)
This kind of difference is important to take into account when writing free software. Only when we consistently write clear and readable code will we all be able to unite and defeat Windows on the desktop.
ANSI also states that the default return type for a function is int, so main() is equivalent to int main(), unless it is C99 you are talking about.
So your solution is to prevent RealNetworks and Ogg (hypothetically) from ever having existed? That doesn't sound a lot better. Look at it this way:
Getting overbroad patents and enforcing them early = Bad
Getting overbroad patents and enforcing them late = Bad
thus
Getting overbroad patents and enforcing them = Bad
and since there's no point in a patent if it isn't going to be enforced
Getting overbroad patents = Bad
Often the patent office doesn't have people with enough knowledge to decide if a patent is too broad or not. Often patents are filed on new research where there are only a couple of people in the world that know enough about it to decide if it's overly broad - and those are the people filing the patent.
So you think they approve patents they don't even understand? The patent office is supposed to decide if the patent is okay or not, and if they don't know what the hell they're doing, then they have no purpose. Why not ditch the patent office and automatically approve any patent that comes through? If the applicant says it's okay, it certainly must be!
Instead, it should be rememebered that the patent system is designed to protect intellectual property, and not a place to make money by basically using entrapment.
The patent system is not designed to protect intellectual property; patents are intellectual property. Intellectual property is supposed to encourage advancement of sciences (and arts, though not in this case). If you get a good original idea, you patent it, and for a limited amount of time only you can use the good idea. Therefore, you have a motivation to come up with good ideas.
I don't know where you're getting this entrapment stuff from. Believe it or not, you can actually search for and read already issued patents. Did you think they were top secret?
You must be thinking of trademarks; see my comment on that. Patents cannot be lost by neglect to defend them. However, it may happen that the patent cannot be enforced in a certain case.
If company B has been infringing company A's patent for five years, and company A knew about it all along, and then suddenly decides to sue over it, B can use as a defense that, in effect, A's ignorage of the infringement excused it.
But if company C then comes along and infringes the same patent for the first time, A would still be able to enforce the patent on C. So patents are never lost completely, only partially under certain circumstances.
Also, this kind of situation doesn't tend to come up very often.
No.
That sounds like the situation with trademarks today: if your trademark is infringed, and you don't defend it, you lose it. That's how we ended up with companies being ridiculously overzealous about trademarks. Remember KIllustrator? Remember the mailing list owner who received legal threats because someone had posted a message with the subject 'sendmail for dummies,' and it was in the archive?
A company with an overbroad patent can screw everyone over whether they enforce it immediately or not. The only way out is not to issue overbroad patents.
It seems to me that it would serve Microsoft quite well if the leading search engine ran Microsoft software, not something they have been denouncing as a toy or communism or whatever.
I'm not thinking about personal users, but businesses. The pointy-hairedest of managers knows how well Google works and has probably been hearing at least a little about how Microsoft products aren't quite the most secure or trustworthy. Maybe he'll think, 'If it works for Google, it should work here,' recommend using Linux in the company, and cost Microsoft some potential money.
Anyone agree this might be a motivating factor in the announcement, or am I just reading too far into this?
Just for the record, I don't think Linux is much of a Google competitor either.
I am considering ditching the Java plug-in as well, but it's used for good instead of evil in a few cases. (I'll keep AppletViewer handy if I do get rid of it.)
What if C leads to B? What if another condition A leads to both B and C?
The article doesn't say a damn thing about that. They just drew the conclusion that supports their agenda.
This would be hard news to take on its own, but at the same time that BSD is dying and Apple is going out of business?! (Well, at least RFC 3514 will clear up a lot of security concerns, assuming anyone's still around to implement it.)
No. Some AC mentioned that his evil bit submission was rejected. My tip if you want to see this duplicated again is: submit some unrelated April Fool's joke stories. The duplicates must have some other articles in-between. (Otherwise it would be too obvious.)
The other four evil bit articles were just to throw us off.
Anyway, software that is free as in speech is in a way free as in beer as well. If someone sells you software for $5000 under the GPL, you can turn right around and give a copy to your friend for free. If you couldn't do that, it would not be free in either sense.
While I am not familiar with this particular situation, I would expect that most of their money comes from selling their software in boxes. You can't download those nice big manuals with BitTorrent or FTP.
And by the way, if a week-long wait is not so long, then why would this decrease the value of the subscriptions?
The seemingly obvious solution is warez the songs and then get the broken CDs, but then the labels will think people don't mind buying broken CDs. Oh dear, what to do... well, at least none of the CDs from my favourite artists are on the 'definitely broken' list (yet).
The retailers don't necessarily know that the CDs they're selling are corrupt.
And they are selling something like 1000-1500 cs's a day (open 7 days a week). Go figure.
How many copy-protected CDs were they selling a day? There would be some heavy-duty returning if most or all of those CDs were corru... uh, copy-protected. Last summer, copy-protection wasn't all that common yet; that's why this article is news.
These so-called CDs are usually unmarked, so you might not even know you have bought one. You can check some lists, but they're certainly not complete. The distributors apparently don't even tell CD vendors which ones are broken.