yup, shorter copyright per se wouldn't fix that issue.
but requiring people to register and store their material in order to get copyright could.
something along the lines of 1) you pay for an independent registered copyright storage facility to keep a copy 2) that gets you copyright for x years on the stored material 3) after x years, the hosted material goes public
that's the problem in this case. Under the new 'fast track' extradidion, a British court never gets to consider whether there is evidence to justify the charge.
That's important in this case, because although Gary admits that he hacked the computers, the key point is what level of damage he did. There is a strong implication that the damage numbers were concocted in order to meet the threshhold required to justify extradition.
Essentially, in order for the extradition to work, the US have to state damages above a certain level. Gary's team contest that the $700k damages alleged were simply concocted to meet this level. Given that Gary hacked into computers that just had the default windows password set - and that the damage was calculated by figuring the cost to audit and fix this breach, there is at least an argument that this should have been done anyway, and isn't damage caused by Gary.
Unfortunately, Gary doesn't get to make that argument until after extradition.
the labour government was all for shortcuts to locking people up. They campaigned hard for the right to lock them up for 42 days without even charging them with anything.
this is a classic example, the son looks like a bad guy - but the police can't actually pin anything 'real' on him, so they do him for possessing information.
FWIW, I downloaded the anarchist cookbook many years ago and it has lingered in my personal documents since then.
1) buy PS3 for $500 each and completely void the warantee 2) buy some other cell computer for $5000 with support
then - in the context that they know this system works already, I don't see how they could do anything other than buy the PS3s and get some extra ones for backup.
[numbers for illustrative purposes only, I can't be bothered to check what a ps3 costs]
not really. fta -the judge is pretty clear that the reason for the ruling was that the software company basically misrepresented what the software could do, and also didn't let the hotel test it or read docs, etc.
for this reason, he threw out the clause which says 'you pick the software, it's your problem if it doesn't work'
--- "The exclusions in clause 10.2 [of the terms and conditions] only applied where the Operating Documents as defined in Clause 1.1.6 were supplied to the customer before the contract was signed," it said. "In this case such documents were not supplied by Red Sky to Kingsway. Therefore, Clause 10.2 and the exclusions derived there from did not apply."...
Tom Greenbank of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that the case underlines to software publishers that they need to be careful how they sell their products and make sure their processes are precise if they want to claim that the buyer is responsible for choosing the product. ---
so a hobbyist who sells some software in an open way (honest, docs, trials, etc) has nothing to fear here.
of course, if their software doesn't work then the user can get a refund. But I can't see any reasonable objection to that.
What happened here is that the company blatantly misrepresented what their software could do. Sold it, knowing it wouldn't work. Didn't provide docs, or a method for the user to try it. Then argued that the hotel was responsible for testing that the software was apropriate for them. Then got pissy when the hotel complained that they'd been sold a lemon.
lots of speculation here that it could be a competition based case 'you won't let us play in the iPhone monopoly'. That seems to rest on the tenuous argument that the iPhone is a monopoly of something.
There might be a stronger case for the wasted effort that Adobe put into the flash runtime.
legal argument something along the lines of:
1) I (adobe) entered into a contract with you via the developer sdk. I paid my $99 2) the rules didn't disallow me from creating my adobe runtime, and the associated flash to iPhone compiler 3) You knew I was spending a lot of time and money on this work 4) You have an implicit duty of care to me through our contract 5) You waited until I had invested a lot of time and money, then changed the rules 6) This was in breach of your implicit duty of care
Of course there would be endless legal wrangling about what was covered by contracts to whom, and whether apple's 'we can change watever we like' clauses in the sdk applied and whether black was white, or some law applied on sundays.
still - from a naive reading, it is clear that Apple could definitely forsee that these rules would cause harm to Adobe. The timing seems to imply that they deliberately waited until Adobe had done the work before warning them rather than telling them early on in the game that this would not be accepted.
-oh, that makes sense. Not just a power play then.
wait - wouldn't the flash stuff actually be running in C/Obj C, using the same code that I might write. Certainly not using any forbidden private APIs which apple would disallow them for.
Hmm - I wonder how apple is able to profile my code and not theirs...
in this case, the only rich country is Africa. Sure, they might take your business - but it is by far the best place to do business.
yes - I make most of my living from the apple store yes - I have developed an app (with significant effort and money spent on development) and been told by Apple that it breaks no rules, but is not welcome nonetheless
as you say. In the apple store, you are apple's bitch.
sorry to reply to my own comment - but this is pretty insane.
the whole android app info is stored in the android market - but while you can flick through a couple of pages of top apps; you can't search.
Seriously - Google has created a site with a crap load of info that you can not search.
Better than that - It isn't even indexed!
I tabbed through some of their apps and found one called JETCET PDF. You can see some of the details and screenshots. Googling for JETCET PDF site:android.com gives a couple of results which do not show JETCET PDF
I'm sure the carriers would attempt to muscle in anyway, but there would be less room for them to make this move if Google did a better job with the market.
Here are just a handful of ways the market is crap
1) No way to browse on the web and download to your phone. I can't even post an http link to my app that will work on the desktop and on the device*. -Apple does it through iTunes -Palm does it by sending you an sms link to your phone
2) Actually, you can't even browse the appstore on your desktop without going to some third party scraped site. I challenge you to find VLC Remote on the android.com/market
3) Developers have to price apps in the currency they live. Seriously - I live in the UK, so you have to buy my app for £x. It's insane. And particularly after apple have demonstrated a simple tier-based model that is simple for consumers
4) Loads of countries just can't buy stuff. If this is hard for you google - just talk to Mobihand or one of the many mobile app-store companies who have figured out how to take international payments
5) Even if your country does support sales, the international billing means that credit cards keep getting declined (us credit cards don't want to authorise $1 for an international sale via google checkout).
This would be excusable for a few months as the store rolled out. It is long past a joke now.
*I built a site that at least lets you create an http link for your android app which will work on the device and on the web. http://and-download.hobbyistsoftware.com/
and Arvato will skim an extra 20% off the revenue. -And Arvato will have painful testing hoops you have to jump through -And you'll probably have to pay for the privilege and pay again every time you upgrade.
no, the carriers are just too crap to manage that.
they'll tie themselves up in 'appropriate bandwidth usage' and 'brand compatibility guideline' and 'independent testing certification' and 'no external linking policy' and a bajillion other crap requirements that make it impractical or too expensive for independent developers to list their apps.
try listing something at the Orange app store. I jumped through the first few hoops. Then they wrote to me and said they liked my app (for Denmark mind - not internationally). They told me to write to one of their third party suppliers who handled hosting and included two contacts in the email.
I wrote to both (with the orange email attached). One ignored me. The other told me that they don't do that kind of business.
After a couple of emails, the second one agreed that they do do that kind of business and sent me a huge pack of requirments that I have to fill in. Including testing (for which they bill me if I don't generate enough revenue in three months), a bunch of spreadsheets to fill in, and the deal that ends up with me getting about 30% of the sale price.
Popcap will jump through those hoops. Independent developers mostly won't.
the really special kick in the arse for Adobe is the way that Apple let them develop this system, test it, talk about it, spend cash on it and get it right to the point of release before responding with a simple
NO.
It's a really vicious message: Don't try to push things. There is no way for you to know if you are wasting your money until you have already wasted it.
no - not 'a unified ad service for smaller developers who don't have the resources to roll their own'
it is already a matter of about two hours to sign up, download and integrate the sdk from admob or a few other folks.
any small developer can serve ads and generate revenue.
This is Apple's ballsy grab of the mobile advertising market. They get to pre-integrate the sdk, and make their sdk more compelling than the competition.
They have significant advantages over the competition. Admob, mobclix, and the others just got screwed.
Google just spent $750million on Admob. I'm sure Apple is loving the fact that they just reduced the value of that investment by hundreds of millions.
hi -not sure what you mean by (google oops message)
any chance of you dropping me an email to explain what didn't work?
rob at hobbyistsoftware dot com
re the useability; This doesn't try to fix the search issue. It just lets you provide a link from your website to an app. More aimed at the developer than the searcher.
I just built a site to handle the integration. You can now at least post a link on your site that will link to the market if clicked from an android device, and do something useful (send a link by email) if clicked on the desktop
...and then...nothing bad happens. The pilot reports a gps failure, air traffic guide her by radar towards the airport. When in range of the airport (assuming the weather is bad enough that the pilot can't see out the window) the pilot lands using the airport's instrument landing beacons.
There is slight disruption to traffic in the area due to slightly wider berth being given to our troubled aircraft, and the priority landing pattern.
this is a pretty huge thing for any nerd who is looking to become self employed.
I see a lot of discussions on my geek mailing lists about whether it is possible to get reasonably priced insurance if you go self employed (particularly if you have a sick kid).
Slashdot Mirror
yup, shorter copyright per se wouldn't fix that issue.
but requiring people to register and store their material in order to get copyright could.
something along the lines of
1) you pay for an independent registered copyright storage facility to keep a copy
2) that gets you copyright for x years on the stored material
3) after x years, the hosted material goes public
with of course x = smallish number
actually, the max sentence in the UK at the time of the offence would be 6 months. (according to wikipedia anyway)
-and given that this was low tech hacking (just using default passwords and not damaging stuff), he might get off with a slap on the wrist.
that's the problem in this case. Under the new 'fast track' extradidion, a British court never gets to consider whether there is evidence to justify the charge.
That's important in this case, because although Gary admits that he hacked the computers, the key point is what level of damage he did. There is a strong implication that the damage numbers were concocted in order to meet the threshhold required to justify extradition.
Essentially, in order for the extradition to work, the US have to state damages above a certain level. Gary's team contest that the $700k damages alleged were simply concocted to meet this level.
Given that Gary hacked into computers that just had the default windows password set - and that the damage was calculated by figuring the cost to audit and fix this breach, there is at least an argument that this should have been done anyway, and isn't damage caused by Gary.
Unfortunately, Gary doesn't get to make that argument until after extradition.
Particle physicists deal almost entirely in probabilistic measurements, so they get pretty good at understanding their error bars.
1% could be enormous, or tiny depending on the sample size.
The fact that this has been published in Physical Review gives a strong implication that they have done and checked their sums.
it's a nice easy way to lock up 'bad guys'
the labour government was all for shortcuts to locking people up. They campaigned hard for the right to lock them up for 42 days without even charging them with anything.
the Poor Man's James Bond is available at the pirate bay
http://thepiratebay.org/search/Poor%20Man%5C's%20James%20Bond/0/99/0
as is the Anarchist Cookbook.
http://thepiratebay.org/search/the%20Anarchist%20Cookbook/0/99/0
this is a classic example, the son looks like a bad guy - but the police can't actually pin anything 'real' on him, so they do him for possessing information.
FWIW, I downloaded the anarchist cookbook many years ago and it has lingered in my personal documents since then.
really?
if the options are
1) buy PS3 for $500 each and completely void the warantee
2) buy some other cell computer for $5000 with support
then - in the context that they know this system works already, I don't see how they could do anything other than buy the PS3s and get some extra ones for backup.
[numbers for illustrative purposes only, I can't be bothered to check what a ps3 costs]
not really. fta -the judge is pretty clear that the reason for the ruling was that the software company basically misrepresented what the software could do, and also didn't let the hotel test it or read docs, etc.
for this reason, he threw out the clause which says 'you pick the software, it's your problem if it doesn't work'
--- ...
"The exclusions in clause 10.2 [of the terms and conditions] only applied where the Operating Documents as defined in Clause 1.1.6 were supplied to the customer before the contract was signed," it said. "In this case such documents were not supplied by Red Sky to Kingsway. Therefore, Clause 10.2 and the exclusions derived there from did not apply."
Tom Greenbank of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that the case underlines to software publishers that they need to be careful how they sell their products and make sure their processes are precise if they want to claim that the buyer is responsible for choosing the product.
---
so a hobbyist who sells some software in an open way (honest, docs, trials, etc) has nothing to fear here.
of course, if their software doesn't work then the user can get a refund. But I can't see any reasonable objection to that.
What happened here is that the company blatantly misrepresented what their software could do. Sold it, knowing it wouldn't work. Didn't provide docs, or a method for the user to try it. Then argued that the hotel was responsible for testing that the software was apropriate for them. Then got pissy when the hotel complained that they'd been sold a lemon.
the question seems backwards. Why would you want retractable gear?
you are definitely only going to land once - so you definitely don't need to retract the gear during a mission.
why would you waste any weight on something you definitely don't need?
lots of speculation here that it could be a competition based case 'you won't let us play in the iPhone monopoly'.
That seems to rest on the tenuous argument that the iPhone is a monopoly of something.
There might be a stronger case for the wasted effort that Adobe put into the flash runtime.
legal argument something along the lines of:
1) I (adobe) entered into a contract with you via the developer sdk. I paid my $99
2) the rules didn't disallow me from creating my adobe runtime, and the associated flash to iPhone compiler
3) You knew I was spending a lot of time and money on this work
4) You have an implicit duty of care to me through our contract
5) You waited until I had invested a lot of time and money, then changed the rules
6) This was in breach of your implicit duty of care
of course IANAL,
wikipedia has an article on US based duty of care
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_care#United_States
Of course there would be endless legal wrangling about what was covered by contracts to whom, and whether apple's 'we can change watever we like' clauses in the sdk applied and whether black was white, or some law applied on sundays.
still - from a naive reading, it is clear that Apple could definitely forsee that these rules would cause harm to Adobe.
The timing seems to imply that they deliberately waited until Adobe had done the work before warning them rather than telling them early on in the game that this would not be accepted.
*cough* multitasking *cough*
-oh, that makes sense. Not just a power play then.
wait - wouldn't the flash stuff actually be running in C/Obj C, using the same code that I might write. Certainly not using any forbidden private APIs which apple would disallow them for.
Hmm - I wonder how apple is able to profile my code and not theirs...
I'll stretch the analogy here -
in this case, the only rich country is Africa. Sure, they might take your business - but it is by far the best place to do business.
yes - I make most of my living from the apple store
yes - I have developed an app (with significant effort and money spent on development) and been told by Apple that it breaks no rules, but is not welcome nonetheless
as you say. In the apple store, you are apple's bitch.
sorry to reply to my own comment - but this is pretty insane.
the whole android app info is stored in the android market - but while you can flick through a couple of pages of top apps; you can't search.
Seriously - Google has created a site with a crap load of info that you can not search.
Better than that - It isn't even indexed!
I tabbed through some of their apps and found one called JETCET PDF. You can see some of the details and screenshots.
Googling for JETCET PDF site:android.com gives a couple of results which do not show JETCET PDF
how does that happen?
I'm sure the carriers would attempt to muscle in anyway, but there would be less room for them to make this move if Google did a better job with the market.
Here are just a handful of ways the market is crap
1) No way to browse on the web and download to your phone. I can't even post an http link to my app that will work on the desktop and on the device*.
-Apple does it through iTunes
-Palm does it by sending you an sms link to your phone
2) Actually, you can't even browse the appstore on your desktop without going to some third party scraped site. I challenge you to find VLC Remote on the android.com/market
3) Developers have to price apps in the currency they live. Seriously - I live in the UK, so you have to buy my app for £x. It's insane. And particularly after apple have demonstrated a simple tier-based model that is simple for consumers
4) Loads of countries just can't buy stuff. If this is hard for you google - just talk to Mobihand or one of the many mobile app-store companies who have figured out how to take international payments
5) Even if your country does support sales, the international billing means that credit cards keep getting declined (us credit cards don't want to authorise $1 for an international sale via google checkout).
This would be excusable for a few months as the store rolled out.
It is long past a joke now.
*I built a site that at least lets you create an http link for your android app which will work on the device and on the web.
http://and-download.hobbyistsoftware.com/
and Arvato will skim an extra 20% off the revenue.
-And Arvato will have painful testing hoops you have to jump through
-And you'll probably have to pay for the privilege and pay again every time you upgrade.
no, the carriers are just too crap to manage that.
they'll tie themselves up in 'appropriate bandwidth usage' and 'brand compatibility guideline' and 'independent testing certification' and 'no external linking policy' and a bajillion other crap requirements that make it impractical or too expensive for independent developers to list their apps.
try listing something at the Orange app store. I jumped through the first few hoops. Then they wrote to me and said they liked my app (for Denmark mind - not internationally). They told me to write to one of their third party suppliers who handled hosting and included two contacts in the email.
I wrote to both (with the orange email attached). One ignored me. The other told me that they don't do that kind of business.
After a couple of emails, the second one agreed that they do do that kind of business and sent me a huge pack of requirments that I have to fill in. Including testing (for which they bill me if I don't generate enough revenue in three months), a bunch of spreadsheets to fill in, and the deal that ends up with me getting about 30% of the sale price.
Popcap will jump through those hoops. Independent developers mostly won't.
no - it's so developers don't have to implement one of the many competing simple ad systems out there.
admob, mobclix, quattro, etc.
the really special kick in the arse for Adobe is the way that Apple let them develop this system, test it, talk about it, spend cash on it and get it right to the point of release before responding with a simple
NO.
It's a really vicious message: Don't try to push things. There is no way for you to know if you are wasting your money until you have already wasted it.
no - not 'a unified ad service for smaller developers who don't have the resources to roll their own'
it is already a matter of about two hours to sign up, download and integrate the sdk from admob or a few other folks.
any small developer can serve ads and generate revenue.
This is Apple's ballsy grab of the mobile advertising market.
They get to pre-integrate the sdk, and make their sdk more compelling than the competition.
They have significant advantages over the competition. Admob, mobclix, and the others just got screwed.
Google just spent $750million on Admob. I'm sure Apple is loving the fact that they just reduced the value of that investment by hundreds of millions.
hi -not sure what you mean by (google oops message)
any chance of you dropping me an email to explain what didn't work?
rob at hobbyistsoftware dot com
re the useability; This doesn't try to fix the search issue. It just lets you provide a link from your website to an app. More aimed at the developer than the searcher.
Why is anyone patenting the idea of docking some controls to an iphone?
seriously - how is this non-obvious.
let's have some prior art
1) keyboards (yup, they connect to most things)
2) any number of gaming controls for phones
blah blah blah
go make one, sell it, I wish you luck.
keep the patent lawyers out of the game.
I just built a site to handle the integration.
You can now at least post a link on your site that will link to the market if clicked from an android device, and do something useful (send a link by email) if clicked on the desktop
http://and-download.hobbyistsoftware.com/
How amusing. I clicked through to watch Microsoft's video on how bad Google are.
But the video requires silverlight.
I'll just have to carry on in ignorance...
It is similar to opera in many ways;
It has a turbo mode that loads pages faster (reroutes the urls via google's compression service)
displays tabs graphically (though I use a coverflow-style interface)
and the key part: the actual pages are rendered by apple's UIWebView
it went live this morning...
http://hobbyistsoftware.com/eyebrowse
...and then ...nothing bad happens. The pilot reports a gps failure, air traffic guide her by radar towards the airport. When in range of the airport (assuming the weather is bad enough that the pilot can't see out the window) the pilot lands using the airport's instrument landing beacons.
There is slight disruption to traffic in the area due to slightly wider berth being given to our troubled aircraft, and the priority landing pattern.
(precise details made up - broad effect accurate)
this is a pretty huge thing for any nerd who is looking to become self employed.
I see a lot of discussions on my geek mailing lists about whether it is possible to get reasonably priced insurance if you go self employed (particularly if you have a sick kid).
This should make that a lot easier...