Seriously. I used ERRNO in some old programs I wrote in the early 70's. 'Course it was a variable name and not a Definition, but there are no definitions in FORTRAN anyway, so that doesn't count.
SCO: if you have $9,000,000 to pay lawyers, you can pay me a $1,000,000. IAAL. 'Fess up, or stop threatening people with MY copyright.
The PTO is a beaurocracy. In every beaurocracy, the boss is the group that signs the paychecks, i.e. the U.S. Congress, for the PTO. The first rule in every beaurocracy is "Never Embarasss The Boss". Different organizational cultures have different meanings for "Embarass The Boss", but for U.S. Federal Agencies, that means being invisible outside the organization, and never doing anything that generates complaints about performance, well made or not. Right now, big corporations rule. They complain to Congress about the cost and difficulty of the Patent process (imagine that!), and the cost and difficulty goes down (because more junk gets through). To raise the price for the individual, raise the number of complaints about incompetently approved patents. It has to be after-the-fact, because Patent proceedings are confidential prior to issue. So create a web site that posts individual patents, the name of the patent examiner that approved the patent (very important), and the prior art and comments from experienced developers commenting that the content of the patent is obvious to ones skilled in the art. This is now a source of reliable information to be used by voters when they notify their congressman that X in the PTO does a damn poor job when it comes to prior art and obviousness. First, the PTO will find ways to do better checks on prior art, Second, the PTO will discover that many more submissions are obvious (and right now, many are), Third, Congress will give more money to the PTO for investigators to turn up prior art and reject unqualified patents, so that Congress will not be embarassed in front of their boss, the voters.
There was supposed to be a.sig here
U.S. Federal District Judges are political appointees -- essentially for as long as they want the job. I fear few people, but District Court Judges top my list.
They owe no one.
You should be much more concerned about judge shopping - the plaintiff selecting the district and date and time, so that he gets the justice of his choice.
I think we are all missing a big point here. SCO registered their copyright in SysV. It was hard to do. They had to create a copy of the source code and file it with the Patent and Trademark Office. That puppy is there so that *we* can look at it. This is specifically *fair use*. It is there so that individuals can protect themselves by comparing what they have to what has been registered. No match means no problem. It just doesn't get any more *fair use* than that. Just have somebody nip up to the PTO, copy the registration for comparison purposes only, (really!) then do the comparisons. How hard is that?
Yes, IAAL, but this is not legal advice. Hire your own mouthpiece.
Almost all modern machines (chips, what-have-you)that do serious multiplication (i.e., not necessarily embedded systems) use something called Booth coding. I am not so sure that it is beneficial, but all the major manufacturers think so, so they use it. One of the multiplicands is converted to a multimode binary number (digits have values of -1, 0, 1). It saves a bunch of time on repetitive additions, especially when accelerated with a Wallace tree. The original Booth paper was published in 1951, but no one seems to have a copy anymore (boy, I would love to get my hands on a copy of that!)
"I don't need no stinkin' sig"
FWIW,IAAL. What about Samba using the Red Hat fund and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Without the GPL, SCO has *no* license to distribute. If, as SCO claims, the GPL is invalid, then SCO has no license. In any event, SCO is distributing without the GPL. Samba is not free. Whatever else, the copyrights are not owned by SCO, and the copyrights are not public domain.
I applaud Samba's integrity for Open Source, but I see zero ethical conflict here. If SCO does not want to play by the licensing rules, they can close up shop.
If you have been missing the point, re-read the article. Do not let the government into this. It will be the camel's nose in the tent. There is absolutely no need to charge every email for transmission. I am already paying for that by using an ISP, thank you very much.
Also, try looking at the statistics that have been posted on/. about the source of email addresses.
Lame solution: Spammers get their addresses by scouring the web. If you are going to post an email address, post a forwarding address. Joe's Email forwarding will charge a tiny fee to forward ($.05). Joe's charges the sender, not you. If you reply, Joe's will fiddle your reply message and properly send the reply with Joe's address. The entire fee will be donated to the FSF. You can still use your own regular email for free (as in beer) communications with your friends.
Hey. If somebody wants to send me Pr0n ads at a nickel a pop for the FSF, they can be my guest. It would tickle me pink to hit the delete key, every time.
I just cannot figure out a simple way to charge ordinary folks a nickel.
I do not think credit card fraud will be that much of a problem. The fundamental problem with spam is that it is *legal*. Any time Joe's Forwarding bounces a credit card number, they just send the notice to the FBI. Within a very short time, spammers using stolen credit cards will be serving very long sentences, and will have to stop spamming.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. I used ERRNO in some old programs I wrote in the early 70's. 'Course it was a variable name and not a Definition, but there are no definitions in FORTRAN anyway, so that doesn't count.
.sig in other pants.
SCO: if you have $9,000,000 to pay lawyers, you can pay me a $1,000,000. IAAL. 'Fess up, or stop threatening people with MY copyright.
sorry. Left
The PTO is a beaurocracy. In every beaurocracy, the boss is the group that signs the paychecks, i.e. the U.S. Congress, for the PTO. The first rule in every beaurocracy is "Never Embarasss The Boss". Different organizational cultures have different meanings for "Embarass The Boss", but for U.S. Federal Agencies, that means being invisible outside the organization, and never doing anything that generates complaints about performance, well made or not. Right now, big corporations rule. They complain to Congress about the cost and difficulty of the Patent process (imagine that!), and the cost and difficulty goes down (because more junk gets through). To raise the price for the individual, raise the number of complaints about incompetently approved patents. It has to be after-the-fact, because Patent proceedings are confidential prior to issue. So create a web site that posts individual patents, the name of the patent examiner that approved the patent (very important), and the prior art and comments from experienced developers commenting that the content of the patent is obvious to ones skilled in the art. This is now a source of reliable information to be used by voters when they notify their congressman that X in the PTO does a damn poor job when it comes to prior art and obviousness. First, the PTO will find ways to do better checks on prior art, Second, the PTO will discover that many more submissions are obvious (and right now, many are), Third, Congress will give more money to the PTO for investigators to turn up prior art and reject unqualified patents, so that Congress will not be embarassed in front of their boss, the voters. There was supposed to be a .sig here
U.S. Federal District Judges are political appointees -- essentially for as long as they want the job. I fear few people, but District Court Judges top my list. They owe no one. You should be much more concerned about judge shopping - the plaintiff selecting the district and date and time, so that he gets the justice of his choice.
I think we are all missing a big point here. SCO registered their copyright in SysV. It was hard to do. They had to create a copy of the source code and file it with the Patent and Trademark Office. That puppy is there so that *we* can look at it. This is specifically *fair use*. It is there so that individuals can protect themselves by comparing what they have to what has been registered. No match means no problem. It just doesn't get any more *fair use* than that. Just have somebody nip up to the PTO, copy the registration for comparison purposes only, (really!) then do the comparisons. How hard is that? Yes, IAAL, but this is not legal advice. Hire your own mouthpiece.
Almost all modern machines (chips, what-have-you)that do serious multiplication (i.e., not necessarily embedded systems) use something called Booth coding. I am not so sure that it is beneficial, but all the major manufacturers think so, so they use it. One of the multiplicands is converted to a multimode binary number (digits have values of -1, 0, 1). It saves a bunch of time on repetitive additions, especially when accelerated with a Wallace tree. The original Booth paper was published in 1951, but no one seems to have a copy anymore (boy, I would love to get my hands on a copy of that!) "I don't need no stinkin' sig"
FWIW,IAAL. What about Samba using the Red Hat fund and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Without the GPL, SCO has *no* license to distribute. If, as SCO claims, the GPL is invalid, then SCO has no license. In any event, SCO is distributing without the GPL. Samba is not free. Whatever else, the copyrights are not owned by SCO, and the copyrights are not public domain. I applaud Samba's integrity for Open Source, but I see zero ethical conflict here. If SCO does not want to play by the licensing rules, they can close up shop.
If you have been missing the point, re-read the article. Do not let the government into this. It will be the camel's nose in the tent. There is absolutely no need to charge every email for transmission. I am already paying for that by using an ISP, thank you very much. Also, try looking at the statistics that have been posted on /. about the source of email addresses.
Lame solution: Spammers get their addresses by scouring the web. If you are going to post an email address, post a forwarding address. Joe's Email forwarding will charge a tiny fee to forward ($.05). Joe's charges the sender, not you. If you reply, Joe's will fiddle your reply message and properly send the reply with Joe's address. The entire fee will be donated to the FSF. You can still use your own regular email for free (as in beer) communications with your friends.
Hey. If somebody wants to send me Pr0n ads at a nickel a pop for the FSF, they can be my guest. It would tickle me pink to hit the delete key, every time.
I just cannot figure out a simple way to charge ordinary folks a nickel.
I do not think credit card fraud will be that much of a problem. The fundamental problem with spam is that it is *legal*. Any time Joe's Forwarding bounces a credit card number, they just send the notice to the FBI. Within a very short time, spammers using stolen credit cards will be serving very long sentences, and will have to stop spamming.