A company that telemarkets doesn't have to remove or respect the No-Call List with respect to customers with which it has an existing business relationship.
True.
Some years back I had a combination calling/credit card from AT&T.
AT&T telemarketers called frequently, usually at supper time.
I got to a supervisor once who told me that they didn't have to honor my no-call requests because of the "existing business relationship."
I asked him if he could cancel the card.
When he said yes, I pulled the scissors out of the drawer, cut the card up, told him that I had done so, instructed him to cancel the card, and NOW put me on the no-call list.
Haven't heard from them since.
I just hope we don't go doing something foolish, which we always seem to manage to do.
I am much more scared that SOME of us will manage to do something foolish ON PURPOSE.
I don't want to be a Luddite -- I like many of the ways that technology improves my life.
But I am scared that in the next 30 or so years, some people will manage to perform BIG-TIME EVIL with the technology that is at their disposal.
It seems inevitable that, within that time frame, $100M will make it possible for you to buy a "designer" disease.
Too many people will know how to do it.
The raw materials and basic technology will be too readily available (unlike the raw materials for building a nuke, which are relatively scarce and easy to track).
Some nut case will come up with the money, build the disease, and release it.
Evolution is cool with the idea of killing off 98% of the population in order to gain resistance to a particular disease, but I'm really unhappy about that prospect.
I'm old enough now that I may not live to see it, but I'm seriously concerned about what things my children may have to live through.
But you get the point, don't you? Trade wars are conducted by governments. Private companies routinely make decisions about the markets where they will operate, and those decisions are influenced by many things: opportunities, costs, regulatory environment, exchange rate risks, etc. Maybe DeBeers is a better example. They do not operate in the US (they run TV commercials here advertising diamonds, but they do NOT sell diamonds in the US) because they have been told by the US DOJ that their business practices violate US antitrust law, and they prefer to maintain their current practices rather than participate directly in the US market.
MS and its shareholders may prefer not selling in the EU to paying a billion-dollar fine or writing an EU-specific version of the OS or revealing all of their client/server protocols. If DeBeers is the analogy, one supposes that EU companies would then like to get into the business of buying MS software elsewhere and importing it. Of course, MS would have to cooperate in such an operation, which appears to be forbidden by some of the current licensing arrangements. It turns into a trade war when the EU forbids the import of MS software, or places high tariffs on it.
Who said anything about a trade war between countries? MS is a private company that could simply say, "We find the regulations in Europe to be onerous, so for the time being we have decided to quit doing business there." Same as if Saab said, "We find the pollution regulations in California to be onerous, so for the time being we have decided to quit selling Saabs in California." I'm sure we could come up with a long list of US companies that have withdrawn from EU markets for one reason or another, and vice versa. It's possible that the Swedish government might announce, "We have required Saab to stop selling cars in California because MS won't sell us Windows," but that seems pretty silly.
As in the US, EU consumers have put MS software in a very dominant position. Like any other addict, the withdrawal process if your drug is taken from you would be painful. Is the EU in total willing to deal with that pain? Are the EU regulators able to maintain their position if MS's response is to withdraw their products?
you can't not do what the government of the country you do buissness in tells you to do.
I love a good game of chicken. What happens if sometime soon (say, about the beginning of next month), MS says, "Fine, we're not doing business in Europe. Sales of all MS products stop on Monday." And as of that Monday, you can't buy a new PC with Windows in Europe, or import one, and you can't buy a copy of Office. Yes, it would hurt MS, but they've got $49B US in the bank. How long can the EU antitrust commission hold out when all of those consumers, both private and corporate, scream?
It's one thing to carefully plan and execute a migration away from MS -- it's quite another to be forced to start such a migration on a few days' notice.
One reason is that portions of WMA are covered by PATENTS. Until those MS patents expire, MS can absolutely control who can legally implement players for the content, and the terms under which they are allowed to do the implementation. For example, the license may include large monetary penalties for failure to honor the DRM flags. Unlike the situation under DMCA, which attempts to block reverse engineering on copyright grounds, and may be subject to overturn on the basis of fair use precedents, reverse engineering of patented techniques has always been illegal and the case law all supports that.
I can't find the links, but IIRC, at least one open source program for converting between different media formats, has withdrawn support for WMA because MS threatened them with a patent infringement lawsuit. The only real defense against an existing patent is to invalidate it in court, which can be a VERY expensive undertaking.
since even if there is not one pice of SysV code in thoes files
Immaterial. The relevant issue is whether the code in AIX today is "derived from" the SysV code, which can be true even if 100% of the original SysV code has been replaced. The easiest way to prove that the current AIX is NOT derived from SysV would be to show that at some point there was a complete break in continuity -- if at some point IBM took a set of publicly-available specs and wrote all new code to implement them. That seems unlikely, but I don't know the details of AIX's development history. It's not enough that you COULD have done such a cleanroom implementation -- DID you do it? If not, then a court MIGHT hold that the "derived from" conditions apply.
Then the case comes down to the court's interpretation of the contract and its history. I think some of the strongest arguments that IBM has are (1) the existance of the side memo that lets them off the hook, if that memo exists (big companies misplace legal documents -- it's entirely possible that SCO could have bought the contract and never been given a copy of such a side agreement), (2) the fact that IBM has revealed methods if not actual code in technical journals over the years, and neither AT&T nor Novell questioned it, suggesting that AT&T and Novell had waived their rights under the contract (making it hard for SCO to reassert them), and (3) that SCO distributed Linux code themselves even after they knew that "their" secrets were being revealed, effectively waiving their rights.
SCO's case is about contract law, not copyright law. Asserting contractual rights to benefit your business is certainly legitimate. OTOH, SCO are unlikely to prevail IMO, have acted like assholes throughout, and I hope some judge somewhere along the line punishes them for it.
Supposedly can store twice the charge of lead acid batteries, recharge in 1 minute
Maybe I've just grown overly cautious in my old age, but if it can be charged quickly, it must capable of discharging quickly, no? Energy-storage devices of reasonable density that can discharge very quickly make me nervous about bad things happening. Maybe not on the order of your gas tank "discharging" suddenly, but certainly the possibility of heating conductors enough to start a fire.
The computer is a non-specialized, multipurpose artifact. A programmer can make it into a very expensive word processor, or a very expensive ledger, or a very expensive sliderule, or a very expensive map, or...
So most people need to know two classes of things -- how to launch the software that turns the computer into the proper single-purpose artifact, and how to run that particular artifact. Some artifacts are simple to use, and some are complex. Writing a letter with a word-processor is (or should be) simple. Creating and editing a complex piece of audio and video -- the equivalent of splicing film, mixing down music tracks, etc -- requires a very different set of knowledge. I don't think that it's fair to say that this by itself has made the computer irreducibly complex -- it shouldn't be any more complex than the collection of devices that it is replacing.
It does get more complex, and you begin to get into the need for programming (or at least scripting), when those "virtual tools" are going to be used in ways that their single-purpose equivalents aren't. For example, to take the audio track from the "film" and play it in the "jukebox" -- no one expected to take the sound track off a piece of film and put it on a vinyl record for a mechanical jukebox without a great deal of time, effort and money. Doing it on the computer may be complex, but doing it pre-computer was so complicated no one but an engineer with a big budget would even think about attempting it. Replacing the word "principle" with "principal" in 20 documents meant retyping all of them, not writing a script that instructed the program about what to do and which documents to apply it to.
I think it is interesting to compare how different computer systems of the past 20 years have dealt with the issue. UNIX was put together by and for programmers -- so file formats were simple and open, scripting was readily available, apps tended to be simple because it was EXPECTED that users would put them together with scripts. The early Macintosh went to the other extreme -- files could only be opened by the application that created them. How many failed attempts has MS made to try to make GUI-based apps provide "services" to one another?
I would say that any worker using a computer who can do his job without doing ANY programming could be replaced by a slightly better program than the one he is "operating".
I have to disagree with you at least somewhat on this. Many jobs that "use" a computer do so because the computer is a more efficient and lower-cost way of replacing one or more special-purpose devices. Granted, a user who can take advantage of the more sophisticated features of the applications will be more productive than one who can't, but that doesn't make it easy to replace them with a slightly better application. We may be thinking differently about jobs -- if the job is 100% sitting at a keyboard and doing something nearly mindless, you're probably right. But I don't think there are all that many of those jobs.
Re:but there are thousands of lines of copied code
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SCO really must provide evidence and prove its case since it is the one that brought the suit. SCO would like to get away with just saying that the contract covers everything IBM ever did that could possibly be similar to AIX. And that the mere fact that IBM worked on Linux is evidence of a breach of contract and trade secret misappropriation. Unfortunately, a judge is not likely to allow such a tenuous position to stand and SCO will be forced to provide actual evidence.
Well, IBM will have to provide the evidence, and is doing so through the discovery process, although it may fall to SCO to organize it. To beat an example to death, consider JFS. There is no question that it is available as part of AIX. There is no question that the code and methods were revealed to the world through Linux. What remains at question are (1) was it ported to Linux from AIX or not, and (2) more importantly, if it was ported to Linux from AIX, do the contract terms require SCO to approve such a revelation? Only IBM has the evidence to prove or disprove the first proposition. If I were one of SCO's attorneys, I would be doing my best to get the judge to rule that IBM should be organizing the evidence to show the development history. And I would be telling Darl and the rest of them to STFU, that there's a whole lot more potential value in quietly winning the contract case in court than there is in sending those damned invoices out...
IANAL but I play one on TV.
Really? Is it fun? The closest I ever came was playing obnoxious witnesses in mock trials at law school. That was fun!
But this is so hypothetical: there are no trade secrets left in System V
You and I absolutely agree on that. However, IMO, SCO is making the following analogy. Suppose you bought a nice new car in 1985. Over the years, you replaced components of that car, in many cases with a substantial upgrade: more powerful engine, carbon fiber body panels, and so on. Now it's 2003, and no single component of the original vehicle remains. Is it still the same car? If not, is it "derived from" the original car? If not, when did it cease being "derived from" the original car? I have a program that I use regularly that I wrote the first version in 1984. It does many more things than it used to, and it does them in better ways. Certainly nothing more complicated than
#include "config.h"
survives from the original code. Is it "derived from" the original program?
Now suppose you had signed a contract when you purchased the above car in 1985 that said someone could come and take it away in 2003; does the fact that it contains none of the original components mean that you're free-and-clear from the contract? IBM signed a contract that MIGHT be interpreted to mean that they agreed to treat all of the improvements they made FOREVER as trade secrets requiring AT&T's permission to disclose, so long as those upgrades are part of a system "derived from" the original code. I know it sounds stupid when put that way, and I DON'T believe that SCO will prevail, but I do think that the contract terms are at least arguable on those grounds, and that the court will have to decide.
Re:but there are thousands of lines of copied code
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IBM Puts Pressure On SCO
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· Score: 5, Informative
SCO pulled up some 519 files which have around 300,000 lines of code, which might or might not contain tainted code. That is something like 1 percent of Linux kernel code. Rewriting the whole thing might take a month or two at the maximum, assuming cleanroom specs can be developed out of it.
First point -- on the assumption that the case will continue, which I believe, it may be some time before anyone knows which lines are "tainted". For example, SCO points at the source files for JFS and says "These may be tainted." IBM says, "Which lines?" SCO responds with, "Any lines which you developed under AIX. Which are those?" SCO's legal theory seems to be that any features of AIX which were transfered to Linux are a violation, unless IBM can prove that the code given to Linux was developed as part of a non-AIX operating system, then ported to Linux directly from that non-AIX system. IBM is using the obvious tactic of providing a mountain of raw information, then demanding that SCO sift through it and identify the lines that are in question -- make it too EXPENSIVE for SCO to continue the case.
Second point -- on the assumption that SCO wins, which I don't believe will happen, generating cleanroom specs may well be a problem. As I understand it, the contract forbids revealing the methods as well as the source code. IBM would be in the position of having to say to the Linux community, "The code and documentation that we revealed to you, and on which your specs are based, were trade secrets that we did not have the right to reveal." ANY use of that information -- such as writing specs -- could be deemed improper by a court. However, if SCO wins and gets a large settlement from IBM, I would expect the judge to rule that SCO has now been compensated for the loss of their trade secrets, and that the Linux community is free to make use of those "secrets".
SCO appears to have (although IANAL) a simple case that is at least arguable. I have to believe that all of the public posturing, much if not all of which is irrelevant, is intended to run the share price up so that the executives can cash out.
Why is VLIW not more popular? Because compiler technology isn't yet good enough...
VLIW seems to have worked out reasonably well in specialized niches -- TI's DSP chips and media processors by Equator Technologies are examples.
I know that Equator has been working on their proprietary compiler technology for on the order of 15 years, so your comment about compiler technology is pretty much on target -- the people who seem to have at least some of the answers are holding them rather tightly.
And of course, many of those niche applications can afford to spend time hand-tuning critical code sections.
I used to think it would be cool to live forever (stipulating that physical aging stopped at about 25).
As I got older I thought that forever would probably get boring, but it would be cool to live for at least 200-300 years.
As I got still older, I decided that movies like "Bicentennial Man" and stories like Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" clearly illustrate the problem of living long enough to outlive the people you care about.
Hell, I'm still trying to get over putting down a dog last year.
OTOH, I would like to live long enough to see the first Oscar for a synthetic actor/actress handed out, and to meet a real artificial intelligence.
You raise an interesting question, particularly when you think about the world after the 1950 cut-off date. Of significant scientists that did not come from the West, how many received their training in the West, or at a university modeled after those of the West? Should an Indian or Chinese scientist (or engineer or mathematician or whatever) who earned a Ph.D. at Oxford or Stanford and then returned to India or China and did significant work be counted as a Western or Eastern scientist?
I would argue that they count as Western, since the critical training was delivered in the West, or by using an institutional style that was developed in the West.
I did my undergraduate work at a big-time football factory. It is relatively cheap for alumni in the area where I now live to rent a local radio station for four hours on Saturday afternoons and provide a local broadcast of the home-town game coverage. Said broadcast is available to me whether I'm sitting at home, mowing the grass, bicycling, driving the car, etc. Given that it's just audio, I suppose that it would be possible to do over assorted wireless media -- wifi, cell phone, etc. But it sure wouldn't be as easy or as cheap.
Cheap especially for me, since I piggy-back on the contributions of alumni members who are so fanatical they are willing to make a $100 contribution each year.
While I don't think this would have any effect under current law, I think it might be worth trying to make something like this into law. That is, find a way to make works available only with DRM or through a license covered by something other than copyright.
I guess if I were one of the big studios or publishing houses, I'd be torn about it. On the one hand, the studios seem to be trying to turn the purchase of a CD or DVD into a license anyway; a license with miserable terms for the purchaser, since there's no protection against media damage. Despite their normally draconian EULA, there's usually some mechanism for getting replacement media from a software house for distribution CDs that become unusable due to damage. In fact, my own opinion about whether the studios are selling an object or a license is that the lack of any way to get a replacement means that you're simply buying an object -- play it any way you want.
On the other hand, with trade secrets I think (IANAL) that you give up some of the ability to pursue people all along the chain of illegal copying. Certainly someone has violated their original license when they distributed a copy; and hitting that person for damages is easy, if you can find them; but I'm not so sure about getting damages from people further along the chain. Trade secrets that have "leaked" are difficult to recover, in practice. Perhaps one of the lawyers that read SlashDot can comment?
Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment -- just for grins:^)
Recall that the case is fundamentally about the contract that IBM originally signed with AT&T for the UNIX source code. SCO asserts that the terms of that contract are such that any code developed by IBM at any point in time as part of their UNIX-derived product must be treated as a trade secret, and AT&T (whose rights are now held by SCO) must approve the terms under which the source code (and methods) are revealed to third parties. As I understand the claim, it wouldn't matter if all the original AT&T code has been removed from AIX at this point in time -- if AIX was originally derived from that code then the contract applies.
Under that legal theory, this last SCO response actually makes some sense. Take JFS as an example. SCO is saying, in effect, that they don't know the development history of JFS, whether it was developed under AIX, who did the development, when the source code was shown to Linux (or other outside) developers, etc. Which is reasonable -- they DON'T know those things and IBM presumably does. The SCO case asserts that, since JFS is currently part of AIX, it is up to IBM to prove that the code doesn't fall under the terms of the contract.
Chances seem good that at least some of the code that IBM has donated to Linux was originally developed as part of AIX -- not as part of OS/2 or VMS or some other OS. That's the code that will be argued in court, and it will be up to IBM to identify it -- or prove that there's no continuity between the current AIX product and the UNIX that they licensed, which seems unlikely. The real arguments will be about the contract, not the code. For example, does the fact that neither AT&T nor Novell filed a suit like this during all those years that they held the contract rights indicate that those rights have been waived?
Cases that appeared weak HAVE been won. Since the theory appears to be at least arguable, and there's a LOT of money involved, a large law firm that has adequate funds might well take such a case as a potential investment -- you don't have to win very many of your $3B lawsuits in order for the contingent fees to make you wealthy. Now THERE'S a serious conflict of interest within the legal system.
I spent ten years as a service research guy at broadband companies banging my head against this wall.
I could show all kinds of interesting services based on multicast in the lab, but it wasn't practical to deploy multicast in the local distribution systems.
Early DSL suffered from the problem that DSLAMs didn't understand about IP, and you had to replicate packets at the last IP router that did understand.
DOCSIS 1.0 cable modems could pass multicast, but it was "all or nothing" and there was the possibility of swamping subscribers with undesired multicast traffic.
While no longer working in that field, I understand that DOCSIS 2.0 has addressed the issue by IGMP snooping, and that DSLAMs can do cell copying.
Whether it will scale beyond local multicasts is still somewhat problematic in my mind -- I'm not sure that the backbones are up to tracking the routes for millions of dynamic multicast groups.
Interesting. My HMO is one of the Kaisers, and about three years ago they gave up dictated notes and started making the doctors and nurses type the material in directly. Each examination room was equipped with a networked PC and custom software for the notes. The software also included assorted forms/tools so that it was easy to order lab tests, commonly prescribed drugs, etc.
It was kind of sad to watch my family doctor struggle to put in notes at first, but over time his keyboard skills have improved dramatically. I was a little concerned at first about errors creeping in due to bad typing, but that didn't seem to happen. He (the doctor) now thinks that direct typing is as fast as dictation ever was, and subject to fewer errors. There have been some other informal process changes -- the nurse I see first puts general health and specific symptiom information into the opening page of the notes, and the doctor scans that first, rather than making me repeat the whole story.
Almost 25 years ago, over the space of about a year, Bell Labs made the transition from typing pools with typewriters to typing pools with UNIX and troff to no typing pool and engineers typing their own material. I had been touch-typing since 6th grade, so was relieved that I could compose at the keyboard. The Labs could have spared themselves a certain amount of pain if they had made touch-typing classes available to the engineering staff.
Part of me is surprised that the medical professions took so long to get to direct entry by the doctors and nurses, and that it isn't more common.
David Brin's uplift books -- The Uplift War, Startide Rising, etc. In his universe, planets are periodically (every few million years) cleared of sapient races so that new intelligence has a chance to evolve. In some cases, stuff that's too durable to break down in that time frame and too big to remove is dumped into subduction zones so that it has no effect on the evolving species.
IIRC, in at least one case, where there's an illegal group living on a "fallow" planet, the inhabitants dump their mechanical trash into a subduction zone so that the evidence of their presence will eventually disappear.
Correct. Discovery of the photoelectric effect is credited to Hertz in 1887, so it's less than 120 years old even if you use that discovery, rather than Einstein's explaining how it works.
I am always entertained by my brother-in-law's tales of the physical security around the critical machines in the Army's command-and-control bunkers in Germany in the late 1980s. He was a civilian contractor doing installation and upgrades of the software written by his company. The computers themselves were physically isolated. The room was under armed guard. The guards never knew their watch schedule more than 24 hours in advance. A small number of people entering or leaving the room were selected at random by some device (the guards could not influence it) for complete strip search. If you were out of touch for 72 hours, your security clearance was canceled (on holidays, he had to check in at a US embassy at least that often).
As my brother-in-law said, "These people take their paranoia seriously!"
I'm assuming that I didn't miss a sarcasm tag on this.
Privatization is often a good thing, particularly when there is a competitive market for the services in question.
Six garbage collection companies competing on the basis of price and service will probably give the consumer better results than a city-government monopoly on trash collection.
Until they all discover that it's dangerous and expensive to do trash collection in the bad parts of town, and all give up on that.
Having many independent, private companies generate power for the California electric grid looked like a good deal.
Until they figured out that if they took enough generating capacity offline, they could create a shortage and gouge the consumers.
Competitive markets work well when there are many firms and barriers to entry are low.
It is much harder to get consistently good results when there are only a small number of firms and the barriers to entry are high.
In general, a private monopoly will not produce much better results than a public one.
And when not properly regulated (that is, forced to operate under a set of constraints to address the public interest aspects), a private monopoly or cartel can easily turn out to be worse.
It's not hypocritical for criticizing China for it's spending as I am equally critical of the US, though the US more or less needed to be involved in a space program during the cold war as it was a potential combat theatre.
Absolutely, it's not hypocritical to criticize China's space program if you criticize all space programs on the same grounds. My perception of the article to which I originally responded was that the author was asserting that China was too "poor" to afford a manned space program, but that other countries were not. I can even buy the cold war argument as it relates to LEO or MEO, but not to the moon. An attack launched by the Soviet Union from the moon may be unstoppable (see Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress for an early treatment of the difficulty of intercepting things approaching the planet at escape velocity), but is clearly visible coming for a few days in advance, and mutually-assured-destruction makes that a failing stragety.
When the market finds a value in mining the moon or in scientific studies, space programs will manifest themselves and at least be profitable
I would actually argue that some aspects of the space program have social value that might justify the government expense -- weather satellites that aid in accurately predicting hurricane landfalls, and the savings in human life and property damage due to adequate preparation, for example. Also, government funding of the R&D for putting birds in geosynchronous orbit made it possible for Dish and DirecTV to be profitable applications -- but they almost certainly wouldn't be if they had to develop their own orbit capability.
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True. Some years back I had a combination calling/credit card from AT&T. AT&T telemarketers called frequently, usually at supper time. I got to a supervisor once who told me that they didn't have to honor my no-call requests because of the "existing business relationship." I asked him if he could cancel the card. When he said yes, I pulled the scissors out of the drawer, cut the card up, told him that I had done so, instructed him to cancel the card, and NOW put me on the no-call list. Haven't heard from them since.
I am much more scared that SOME of us will manage to do something foolish ON PURPOSE. I don't want to be a Luddite -- I like many of the ways that technology improves my life. But I am scared that in the next 30 or so years, some people will manage to perform BIG-TIME EVIL with the technology that is at their disposal. It seems inevitable that, within that time frame, $100M will make it possible for you to buy a "designer" disease. Too many people will know how to do it. The raw materials and basic technology will be too readily available (unlike the raw materials for building a nuke, which are relatively scarce and easy to track). Some nut case will come up with the money, build the disease, and release it. Evolution is cool with the idea of killing off 98% of the population in order to gain resistance to a particular disease, but I'm really unhappy about that prospect.
I'm old enough now that I may not live to see it, but I'm seriously concerned about what things my children may have to live through.
But you get the point, don't you? Trade wars are conducted by governments. Private companies routinely make decisions about the markets where they will operate, and those decisions are influenced by many things: opportunities, costs, regulatory environment, exchange rate risks, etc. Maybe DeBeers is a better example. They do not operate in the US (they run TV commercials here advertising diamonds, but they do NOT sell diamonds in the US) because they have been told by the US DOJ that their business practices violate US antitrust law, and they prefer to maintain their current practices rather than participate directly in the US market.
MS and its shareholders may prefer not selling in the EU to paying a billion-dollar fine or writing an EU-specific version of the OS or revealing all of their client/server protocols. If DeBeers is the analogy, one supposes that EU companies would then like to get into the business of buying MS software elsewhere and importing it. Of course, MS would have to cooperate in such an operation, which appears to be forbidden by some of the current licensing arrangements. It turns into a trade war when the EU forbids the import of MS software, or places high tariffs on it.
Who said anything about a trade war between countries? MS is a private company that could simply say, "We find the regulations in Europe to be onerous, so for the time being we have decided to quit doing business there." Same as if Saab said, "We find the pollution regulations in California to be onerous, so for the time being we have decided to quit selling Saabs in California." I'm sure we could come up with a long list of US companies that have withdrawn from EU markets for one reason or another, and vice versa. It's possible that the Swedish government might announce, "We have required Saab to stop selling cars in California because MS won't sell us Windows," but that seems pretty silly.
As in the US, EU consumers have put MS software in a very dominant position. Like any other addict, the withdrawal process if your drug is taken from you would be painful. Is the EU in total willing to deal with that pain? Are the EU regulators able to maintain their position if MS's response is to withdraw their products?
I love a good game of chicken. What happens if sometime soon (say, about the beginning of next month), MS says, "Fine, we're not doing business in Europe. Sales of all MS products stop on Monday." And as of that Monday, you can't buy a new PC with Windows in Europe, or import one, and you can't buy a copy of Office. Yes, it would hurt MS, but they've got $49B US in the bank. How long can the EU antitrust commission hold out when all of those consumers, both private and corporate, scream?
It's one thing to carefully plan and execute a migration away from MS -- it's quite another to be forced to start such a migration on a few days' notice.
One reason is that portions of WMA are covered by PATENTS. Until those MS patents expire, MS can absolutely control who can legally implement players for the content, and the terms under which they are allowed to do the implementation. For example, the license may include large monetary penalties for failure to honor the DRM flags. Unlike the situation under DMCA, which attempts to block reverse engineering on copyright grounds, and may be subject to overturn on the basis of fair use precedents, reverse engineering of patented techniques has always been illegal and the case law all supports that.
I can't find the links, but IIRC, at least one open source program for converting between different media formats, has withdrawn support for WMA because MS threatened them with a patent infringement lawsuit. The only real defense against an existing patent is to invalidate it in court, which can be a VERY expensive undertaking.
Immaterial. The relevant issue is whether the code in AIX today is "derived from" the SysV code, which can be true even if 100% of the original SysV code has been replaced. The easiest way to prove that the current AIX is NOT derived from SysV would be to show that at some point there was a complete break in continuity -- if at some point IBM took a set of publicly-available specs and wrote all new code to implement them. That seems unlikely, but I don't know the details of AIX's development history. It's not enough that you COULD have done such a cleanroom implementation -- DID you do it? If not, then a court MIGHT hold that the "derived from" conditions apply.
Then the case comes down to the court's interpretation of the contract and its history. I think some of the strongest arguments that IBM has are (1) the existance of the side memo that lets them off the hook, if that memo exists (big companies misplace legal documents -- it's entirely possible that SCO could have bought the contract and never been given a copy of such a side agreement), (2) the fact that IBM has revealed methods if not actual code in technical journals over the years, and neither AT&T nor Novell questioned it, suggesting that AT&T and Novell had waived their rights under the contract (making it hard for SCO to reassert them), and (3) that SCO distributed Linux code themselves even after they knew that "their" secrets were being revealed, effectively waiving their rights.
SCO's case is about contract law, not copyright law. Asserting contractual rights to benefit your business is certainly legitimate. OTOH, SCO are unlikely to prevail IMO, have acted like assholes throughout, and I hope some judge somewhere along the line punishes them for it.
Maybe I've just grown overly cautious in my old age, but if it can be charged quickly, it must capable of discharging quickly, no? Energy-storage devices of reasonable density that can discharge very quickly make me nervous about bad things happening. Maybe not on the order of your gas tank "discharging" suddenly, but certainly the possibility of heating conductors enough to start a fire.
So most people need to know two classes of things -- how to launch the software that turns the computer into the proper single-purpose artifact, and how to run that particular artifact. Some artifacts are simple to use, and some are complex. Writing a letter with a word-processor is (or should be) simple. Creating and editing a complex piece of audio and video -- the equivalent of splicing film, mixing down music tracks, etc -- requires a very different set of knowledge. I don't think that it's fair to say that this by itself has made the computer irreducibly complex -- it shouldn't be any more complex than the collection of devices that it is replacing.
It does get more complex, and you begin to get into the need for programming (or at least scripting), when those "virtual tools" are going to be used in ways that their single-purpose equivalents aren't. For example, to take the audio track from the "film" and play it in the "jukebox" -- no one expected to take the sound track off a piece of film and put it on a vinyl record for a mechanical jukebox without a great deal of time, effort and money. Doing it on the computer may be complex, but doing it pre-computer was so complicated no one but an engineer with a big budget would even think about attempting it. Replacing the word "principle" with "principal" in 20 documents meant retyping all of them, not writing a script that instructed the program about what to do and which documents to apply it to.
I think it is interesting to compare how different computer systems of the past 20 years have dealt with the issue. UNIX was put together by and for programmers -- so file formats were simple and open, scripting was readily available, apps tended to be simple because it was EXPECTED that users would put them together with scripts. The early Macintosh went to the other extreme -- files could only be opened by the application that created them. How many failed attempts has MS made to try to make GUI-based apps provide "services" to one another?
I have to disagree with you at least somewhat on this. Many jobs that "use" a computer do so because the computer is a more efficient and lower-cost way of replacing one or more special-purpose devices. Granted, a user who can take advantage of the more sophisticated features of the applications will be more productive than one who can't, but that doesn't make it easy to replace them with a slightly better application. We may be thinking differently about jobs -- if the job is 100% sitting at a keyboard and doing something nearly mindless, you're probably right. But I don't think there are all that many of those jobs.Well, IBM will have to provide the evidence, and is doing so through the discovery process, although it may fall to SCO to organize it. To beat an example to death, consider JFS. There is no question that it is available as part of AIX. There is no question that the code and methods were revealed to the world through Linux. What remains at question are (1) was it ported to Linux from AIX or not, and (2) more importantly, if it was ported to Linux from AIX, do the contract terms require SCO to approve such a revelation? Only IBM has the evidence to prove or disprove the first proposition. If I were one of SCO's attorneys, I would be doing my best to get the judge to rule that IBM should be organizing the evidence to show the development history. And I would be telling Darl and the rest of them to STFU, that there's a whole lot more potential value in quietly winning the contract case in court than there is in sending those damned invoices out...
Really? Is it fun? The closest I ever came was playing obnoxious witnesses in mock trials at law school. That was fun!
#include "config.h"
survives from the original code. Is it "derived from" the original program?
Now suppose you had signed a contract when you purchased the above car in 1985 that said someone could come and take it away in 2003; does the fact that it contains none of the original components mean that you're free-and-clear from the contract? IBM signed a contract that MIGHT be interpreted to mean that they agreed to treat all of the improvements they made FOREVER as trade secrets requiring AT&T's permission to disclose, so long as those upgrades are part of a system "derived from" the original code. I know it sounds stupid when put that way, and I DON'T believe that SCO will prevail, but I do think that the contract terms are at least arguable on those grounds, and that the court will have to decide.
First point -- on the assumption that the case will continue, which I believe, it may be some time before anyone knows which lines are "tainted". For example, SCO points at the source files for JFS and says "These may be tainted." IBM says, "Which lines?" SCO responds with, "Any lines which you developed under AIX. Which are those?" SCO's legal theory seems to be that any features of AIX which were transfered to Linux are a violation, unless IBM can prove that the code given to Linux was developed as part of a non-AIX operating system, then ported to Linux directly from that non-AIX system. IBM is using the obvious tactic of providing a mountain of raw information, then demanding that SCO sift through it and identify the lines that are in question -- make it too EXPENSIVE for SCO to continue the case.
Second point -- on the assumption that SCO wins, which I don't believe will happen, generating cleanroom specs may well be a problem. As I understand it, the contract forbids revealing the methods as well as the source code. IBM would be in the position of having to say to the Linux community, "The code and documentation that we revealed to you, and on which your specs are based, were trade secrets that we did not have the right to reveal." ANY use of that information -- such as writing specs -- could be deemed improper by a court. However, if SCO wins and gets a large settlement from IBM, I would expect the judge to rule that SCO has now been compensated for the loss of their trade secrets, and that the Linux community is free to make use of those "secrets".
SCO appears to have (although IANAL) a simple case that is at least arguable. I have to believe that all of the public posturing, much if not all of which is irrelevant, is intended to run the share price up so that the executives can cash out.
I used to think it would be cool to live forever (stipulating that physical aging stopped at about 25). As I got older I thought that forever would probably get boring, but it would be cool to live for at least 200-300 years. As I got still older, I decided that movies like "Bicentennial Man" and stories like Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" clearly illustrate the problem of living long enough to outlive the people you care about. Hell, I'm still trying to get over putting down a dog last year.
OTOH, I would like to live long enough to see the first Oscar for a synthetic actor/actress handed out, and to meet a real artificial intelligence.
You raise an interesting question, particularly when you think about the world after the 1950 cut-off date. Of significant scientists that did not come from the West, how many received their training in the West, or at a university modeled after those of the West? Should an Indian or Chinese scientist (or engineer or mathematician or whatever) who earned a Ph.D. at Oxford or Stanford and then returned to India or China and did significant work be counted as a Western or Eastern scientist?
I would argue that they count as Western, since the critical training was delivered in the West, or by using an institutional style that was developed in the West.
I did my undergraduate work at a big-time football factory. It is relatively cheap for alumni in the area where I now live to rent a local radio station for four hours on Saturday afternoons and provide a local broadcast of the home-town game coverage. Said broadcast is available to me whether I'm sitting at home, mowing the grass, bicycling, driving the car, etc. Given that it's just audio, I suppose that it would be possible to do over assorted wireless media -- wifi, cell phone, etc. But it sure wouldn't be as easy or as cheap.
Cheap especially for me, since I piggy-back on the contributions of alumni members who are so fanatical they are willing to make a $100 contribution each year.
On the other hand, with trade secrets I think (IANAL) that you give up some of the ability to pursue people all along the chain of illegal copying. Certainly someone has violated their original license when they distributed a copy; and hitting that person for damages is easy, if you can find them; but I'm not so sure about getting damages from people further along the chain. Trade secrets that have "leaked" are difficult to recover, in practice. Perhaps one of the lawyers that read SlashDot can comment?
Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment -- just for grins :^)
Recall that the case is fundamentally about the contract that IBM originally signed with AT&T for the UNIX source code. SCO asserts that the terms of that contract are such that any code developed by IBM at any point in time as part of their UNIX-derived product must be treated as a trade secret, and AT&T (whose rights are now held by SCO) must approve the terms under which the source code (and methods) are revealed to third parties. As I understand the claim, it wouldn't matter if all the original AT&T code has been removed from AIX at this point in time -- if AIX was originally derived from that code then the contract applies.
Under that legal theory, this last SCO response actually makes some sense. Take JFS as an example. SCO is saying, in effect, that they don't know the development history of JFS, whether it was developed under AIX, who did the development, when the source code was shown to Linux (or other outside) developers, etc. Which is reasonable -- they DON'T know those things and IBM presumably does. The SCO case asserts that, since JFS is currently part of AIX, it is up to IBM to prove that the code doesn't fall under the terms of the contract.
Chances seem good that at least some of the code that IBM has donated to Linux was originally developed as part of AIX -- not as part of OS/2 or VMS or some other OS. That's the code that will be argued in court, and it will be up to IBM to identify it -- or prove that there's no continuity between the current AIX product and the UNIX that they licensed, which seems unlikely. The real arguments will be about the contract, not the code. For example, does the fact that neither AT&T nor Novell filed a suit like this during all those years that they held the contract rights indicate that those rights have been waived?
Cases that appeared weak HAVE been won. Since the theory appears to be at least arguable, and there's a LOT of money involved, a large law firm that has adequate funds might well take such a case as a potential investment -- you don't have to win very many of your $3B lawsuits in order for the contingent fees to make you wealthy. Now THERE'S a serious conflict of interest within the legal system.
I spent ten years as a service research guy at broadband companies banging my head against this wall. I could show all kinds of interesting services based on multicast in the lab, but it wasn't practical to deploy multicast in the local distribution systems. Early DSL suffered from the problem that DSLAMs didn't understand about IP, and you had to replicate packets at the last IP router that did understand. DOCSIS 1.0 cable modems could pass multicast, but it was "all or nothing" and there was the possibility of swamping subscribers with undesired multicast traffic. While no longer working in that field, I understand that DOCSIS 2.0 has addressed the issue by IGMP snooping, and that DSLAMs can do cell copying.
Whether it will scale beyond local multicasts is still somewhat problematic in my mind -- I'm not sure that the backbones are up to tracking the routes for millions of dynamic multicast groups.
Interesting. My HMO is one of the Kaisers, and about three years ago they gave up dictated notes and started making the doctors and nurses type the material in directly. Each examination room was equipped with a networked PC and custom software for the notes. The software also included assorted forms/tools so that it was easy to order lab tests, commonly prescribed drugs, etc.
It was kind of sad to watch my family doctor struggle to put in notes at first, but over time his keyboard skills have improved dramatically. I was a little concerned at first about errors creeping in due to bad typing, but that didn't seem to happen. He (the doctor) now thinks that direct typing is as fast as dictation ever was, and subject to fewer errors. There have been some other informal process changes -- the nurse I see first puts general health and specific symptiom information into the opening page of the notes, and the doctor scans that first, rather than making me repeat the whole story.
Almost 25 years ago, over the space of about a year, Bell Labs made the transition from typing pools with typewriters to typing pools with UNIX and troff to no typing pool and engineers typing their own material. I had been touch-typing since 6th grade, so was relieved that I could compose at the keyboard. The Labs could have spared themselves a certain amount of pain if they had made touch-typing classes available to the engineering staff.
Part of me is surprised that the medical professions took so long to get to direct entry by the doctors and nurses, and that it isn't more common.
David Brin's uplift books -- The Uplift War, Startide Rising, etc. In his universe, planets are periodically (every few million years) cleared of sapient races so that new intelligence has a chance to evolve. In some cases, stuff that's too durable to break down in that time frame and too big to remove is dumped into subduction zones so that it has no effect on the evolving species.
IIRC, in at least one case, where there's an illegal group living on a "fallow" planet, the inhabitants dump their mechanical trash into a subduction zone so that the evidence of their presence will eventually disappear.
Correct. Discovery of the photoelectric effect is credited to Hertz in 1887, so it's less than 120 years old even if you use that discovery, rather than Einstein's explaining how it works.
I am always entertained by my brother-in-law's tales of the physical security around the critical machines in the Army's command-and-control bunkers in Germany in the late 1980s. He was a civilian contractor doing installation and upgrades of the software written by his company. The computers themselves were physically isolated. The room was under armed guard. The guards never knew their watch schedule more than 24 hours in advance. A small number of people entering or leaving the room were selected at random by some device (the guards could not influence it) for complete strip search. If you were out of touch for 72 hours, your security clearance was canceled (on holidays, he had to check in at a US embassy at least that often).
As my brother-in-law said, "These people take their paranoia seriously!"
Privatization is often a good thing, particularly when there is a competitive market for the services in question. Six garbage collection companies competing on the basis of price and service will probably give the consumer better results than a city-government monopoly on trash collection. Until they all discover that it's dangerous and expensive to do trash collection in the bad parts of town, and all give up on that. Having many independent, private companies generate power for the California electric grid looked like a good deal. Until they figured out that if they took enough generating capacity offline, they could create a shortage and gouge the consumers.
Competitive markets work well when there are many firms and barriers to entry are low. It is much harder to get consistently good results when there are only a small number of firms and the barriers to entry are high. In general, a private monopoly will not produce much better results than a public one. And when not properly regulated (that is, forced to operate under a set of constraints to address the public interest aspects), a private monopoly or cartel can easily turn out to be worse.