In addition, all of the Novell patents will be subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2 and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license in Linux, the DOJ said. CPTN will not have the right to limit which of the patents are available under the OIN license, and CPTN and its owners will be prohibited from encouraging Novell or Attachmate to modify which patents are available under the OIN license, the DOJ said.
So what exactly is MSFT and CPTN buying here?
I suspect that they will get a license PRIOR to it being subject to the GPL2, and may work to allow them to use these unencumbered by the GPL. Otherwise, there is exactly zero value to these patents because they could gain access via the GPL.
Microsoft abhors GPL code in anything they put into windows itself (they still do use some GPL items). So obtaining a license that was not GPL encumbered might still be worth while to them.
Joe Merchant eats all credit card fraud (beyond the first $50). Doesn't matter what the Judge says. Doesn't matter if it was an on-line sale or a in-person sale.
It affects the price of everything you buy, even when you use cash.
Your glib dismissal of credit card fraud on the basis that it is not safe at all and therefore its very safe [nihilism at its best] sort of ignores the fact that a merchant somewhere is out a 60 inch TV and has no way to get it back. Pretty cavalier if you ask me. Try running a business someday.
Anything to make it harder for an unauthorized user to use my credit card is fine by me. To argue against this on the grounds that it will be EASIER to commit identity theft or credit card fraud is just pointless and silly.
The thug that mugs you for your iPhone does not have enough brains to crack the encryption. The dumpster diver who creates fake accounts from your discarded Best Buy bill will not have your public key on file.
You seem to insist upon invalidating the effort on the basis that some agency with NSA level technology might be able to break the encryption. Its not perfect, so lets not do it at all - is that your take?
Of course, contributing to Android is to undermine open source as a whole, seeing as how they continue to hide the Honeycomb source but deliver it to Intel. If you truly appreciate open source and want it to succeed in the mobile space, you should support and push for MeeGo (and stop buying shit from companies like Motorola.)
I'm saying the private sector will design, build, and manage the entire system, and there will be multiple competing vendors. They will be for-profit companies, you may have to buy a secure ID, or you may get one when you sign up with your Bank.
Case in point: most "identity theft" happens not at the level of the individual, but from "data leaks" at the very corporations with whom we are supposed to trust our data.
Citation needed.
Also, you seem to ignore the fact that there is NO HUMAN at the other end in most E-commerce today. Buy a book from Amazon and your CC# is never seen by a human anywhere along the route other than you.
And how do we know that they're not simply joining up to see what others have there, to make it easier for them to win IP lawsuits?
Most patent portfolios come with irrevocable commitments to allow any patent they submit to the portfolio to be used freely forever. This one apparently DOES NOT have such a commitment.
From their Agreement:
1.1 Subject to Section 1.2(b), OIN, grants to You and Your Subsidiaries a royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive, non-transferable license under OIN Patents to make, have made, use, import, and Distribute any products or services. In addition to the foregoing and without limitation thereof, with respect only to the Linux System, the license granted herein includes the right to engage in activities that in the absence of this Agreement would constitute inducement to infringe or contributory infringement (or infringement under any other analogous legal doctrine in the applicable jurisdiction).
Sounds all laudable and such, BUT:
There are still some worrisome features of this organization, such as the fact that the FSF is NOT part of it, and they are really granting cross licensing only to other members. Further, they have built a pretty massive escape clause into their License Agreement in Section 2.
A careful read of their cross license agreement suggest this could turn ugly after enough patents are in the system which also find their way into Linux.
You can dumpster dive all you want, but you still can't access my accounts without my digital credentials stored on my phone. And Even if you steal my cell phone with my credentials on it, you can't use them because they are encrypted and password protected on the phone.
More importantly, make sure they read AT LEAST THIS FAR:
The government has set out principles — chief among them “choice, efficiency, security and privacy” — more than mechanics. But the basic idea is that you could have your offline identity verified online by a company of your choosing. That company would then provide you with a single credential you could then present (when you don’t want to be anonymous online) to Amazon, or VA.gov, instead of having to re-establish that you are who you say you are with every online transaction. The device carrying your credential — a flash drive, a cellphone, a smart card of some kind — would authenticate itself, rather than referring Amazon to the company that vouches for you. Amazon would know the buyer was secure, and the credential would know it was communicating with a bookseller, but the authentication provider would never learn that you just bought Bob Woodward’s new book. In this way, all of the parties involved would never freely communicate with each other, preventing precisely the web of information that you probably don’t want anyone — private company or government agency — to track.
In short it is a strictly voluntary program of obtaining authentication credentials which only YOU say what you share with each. Like your PGP signature with a somewhat more reliable web of trust than some guy in Slovenia that signed your key.
The biggest problem I see is the mentioned "Mission Creep", where such an ID becomes mandatory in order to purchase anything on line. I could easily see that happening at the insistence of credit card companies.
After all, if you ORBIT the red dwarf, the Far star is going to have to be QUITE FAR away, or you would find yourself orbiting the far star in short order.
Light falls off as the square of distance. So a Second Sun, located, say for example, at the orbit of Saturn would still be but a speck of light.
This Image is what our sun would look like from Saturn. Even a red dwarf would provide more light (or heat energy) than a bright sun at that distance.
If that second sun was located any closer than Saturn in a binary system the solar system would have developed dramatically different than today due to gravitational effects. Its unlikely that there exists any planets orbiting a star at photosynthetic-life bearing distance which would also see the companion star as anything close to the same size.
But be that as it may, lets take your theory at face value, and assume you could contrive a binary-star system where one planet provided more light than the other. In this case, plant life would develop to take advantage of the most abundant light source. In all probability, the secondary light source would simply be ignored. There is no plant that I know of that takes advantage of moon light. Yet moon light is several orders of magnitude brighter than the sun viewed from Saturn.
You failed to explain some things, making your objection seem ridiculous:
1) why would every tweet be 1000 characters long? Is every Email 4 megabytes long? 2) Why would you follow someone who babbles on for 1000 characters in the first place. 3) Who would spend time writing 1000 characters unless it was necessary? 4) Do you ever follow links in tweets?
how is anything hard on the magnetron? all it does is emit energy, which the metal readily soaks up and superheats. The real danger is more catching the microwave on fire than anything.
Spoken like one who has never killed a microwave in their day. Its easier than you think. Chances are that its the main circuit board that is actually damaged and not the magnetron itself, but I've killed a couple with no sign of fire. (Lightning in a box, but no smoke and no fire).
Because someone with patience can piece a shredded item back together again.
Not a CD they can't.
Even if you managed to get all the pieces physically back in the correct positions, it would not be readable. The error rate would overwhelm the redundancy algorithms.
Green trees would grow tall from the light of the large yellow star, while the underbrush would be full of red leafy ferns which absorb light from the smaller star.
If the large star's light can't penetrate the trees to get to the underbrush, why would the smaller star's light do so?
Plants evolve to thrive on the light available. You would have nearly the perfect amount, the amount just right for the plant that evolved there.
Viewing it as if your were an African Violate suddenly transported and trying to cope with a different configuration of suns is the mistake this article makes.
There is no basis for suggesting one color over another for plants on such a world.
Stars are either going to be close enough together that both will rise and set very close together, -OR- they will be far enough apart that one appears as a very bright, and the other is too far away to offer enough light for growth.
Orbital mechanics dictate that you see two close stars, or one close and one VERY distant star.
In the first case, life supporting planets would have to orbit a common center of gravity of the two planets, and viewed from such a planet, the stars would rise and set together (or very close together). Plants would not likely evolve to distinguish the difference, they would simply evolve to benefit from the average of the two stars.
In the second case, the companion star would have to be a great distance away, and would never contribute significant light to the planet orbiting the main star. In this case the light received from the closest star would so-overwhelm the distant star that plants would be tuned to the close star only. (No plant life is known to benefit from moon light).
There is very little chance that a planet would survive being located exactly half way between binary stars, such that two bright suns rise and set at opposite horizons. Such a planet is is a very perilous and unstable position and would probably not exist long enough in that location to evolve plant life.
But the preponderance of tweets that come with shortened URLs and twitpics seems to suggest that the appeal of 140 is dieing out and people are sick to death of hearing what someone had for lunch.
People who post drivel are silently un-followed or blocked. People are ALREADY annoyed by pointless stupid tweets, especially when the smartphone in their pocket is blowning up every 5 minutes with the fact that Teacher X is such a dork, or someone is eating at Starbucks.
An app that brings out the brainless utterance as its central design criteria has grown up beyond its original market (just like Facebook has nothing to do with College any more). 140 is a hindrance to its growth and usefulness. Probably 30,000 characters is unwarranted, but can the same be said for 500? 1000?
People spend way too much time building links (usually to Facebook or some picture sharing site) to get around this issue.
Watch what happens in the next 6-9 months. Twitter is getting more aggressive about controlling the interface. Usually this means they need a better way to monetize it, and intend to introduce some changes. I predict a longer message format, for at least some users.
I might be wrong, but I think people are sick of 140.
OOo had actually not gained much (some say it lost quite a bit) from the days when it was StarOffice. Significant portions of the large document (read: book sized) management capabilities, (pagination, cross-references, document linking and embedding, table and illustration management, etc), actually deteriorated significantly once Sun and Oracle took over.
Further more, everybody who mattered in the developer base already bailed out of Oracle, and is working for LibreOffice. There is very little that Oracle has left to merge.
Oracle has thrown in the towel, (but you can rest assured there will be a few poison pills in anything they release that is not already in LibreOffice) and at best the open-sourcing of this project is their way of telling the remaining developers on their payroll, "here's your hat, what's your hurry". Those that didn't leave probably didn't because they needed the pay check.
Point, Set, and Match to LibreOffice. This is probably one of the most significant watershed events in Open Source development. Even more so than when XFree86 was forked and Xorg totally took over X servers on every distribution, leaving XFree86 into obscurity.
That being said, the article title does NOT square with the source, which makes no blanket statements about NO possible merger. I read it completely the opposite way, they will accept new members, and they may well cherry pick the released code.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the agreement,
In addition, all of the Novell patents will be subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2 and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license in Linux, the DOJ said. CPTN will not have the right to limit which of the patents are available under the OIN license, and CPTN and its owners will be prohibited from encouraging Novell or Attachmate to modify which patents are available under the OIN license, the DOJ said.
So what exactly is MSFT and CPTN buying here?
I suspect that they will get a license PRIOR to it being subject to the GPL2, and may work to allow them to use these unencumbered by the GPL. Otherwise, there is exactly zero value to these patents because they could gain access via the GPL.
Microsoft abhors GPL code in anything they put into windows itself (they still do use some GPL items). So obtaining a license that was not GPL encumbered might still be worth while to them.
Joe Merchant eats all credit card fraud (beyond the first $50). Doesn't matter what the Judge says.
Doesn't matter if it was an on-line sale or a in-person sale.
It affects the price of everything you buy, even when you use cash.
Your glib dismissal of credit card fraud on the basis that it is not safe at all and therefore its very safe [nihilism at its best] sort of ignores the fact that a merchant somewhere is out a 60 inch TV and has no way to get it back. Pretty cavalier if you ask me. Try running a business someday.
Anything to make it harder for an unauthorized user to use my credit card is fine by me. To argue against this on the grounds that it will be EASIER to commit identity theft or credit card fraud is just pointless and silly.
The thug that mugs you for your iPhone does not have enough brains to crack the encryption. The dumpster diver who creates fake accounts from your discarded Best Buy bill will not have your public key on file.
You seem to insist upon invalidating the effort on the basis that some agency with NSA level technology might be able to break the encryption. Its not perfect, so lets not do it at all - is that your take?
Of course, contributing to Android is to undermine open source as a whole, seeing as how they continue to hide the Honeycomb source but deliver it to Intel. If you truly appreciate open source and want it to succeed in the mobile space, you should support and push for MeeGo (and stop buying shit from companies like Motorola.)
Really? http://www.androidcentral.com/gpl-portions-honeycomb-entered-aosp
I'm saying the private sector will design, build, and manage the entire system, and there will be multiple competing vendors. They will be for-profit companies, you may have to buy a secure ID, or you may get one when you sign up with your Bank.
I thought you said you read the document?
Case in point: most "identity theft" happens not at the level of the individual, but from "data leaks" at the very corporations with whom we are supposed to trust our data.
Citation needed.
Also, you seem to ignore the fact that there is NO HUMAN at the other end in most E-commerce today. Buy a book from Amazon and your CC# is never seen by a human anywhere along the route other than you.
So what?
Its still better than your credit card number slurped across the net due to a broken SSL layer or a dumpster diver.
You kill the credential and start using a new one.
And how do we know that they're not simply joining up to see what others have there, to make it easier for them to win IP lawsuits?
Most patent portfolios come with irrevocable commitments to allow any patent they submit to the portfolio to be used freely forever.
This one apparently DOES NOT have such a commitment.
From their Agreement:
1.1 Subject to Section 1.2(b), OIN, grants to You and Your Subsidiaries a royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive, non-transferable license under OIN Patents to make, have made, use, import, and Distribute any products or services. In addition to the foregoing and without limitation thereof, with respect only to the Linux System, the license granted herein includes the right to engage in activities that in the absence of this Agreement would constitute inducement to infringe or contributory infringement (or infringement under any other analogous legal doctrine in the applicable jurisdiction).
Sounds all laudable and such, BUT:
There are still some worrisome features of this organization, such as the fact that the FSF is NOT part of it, and they are really granting cross licensing only to other members. Further, they have built a pretty massive escape clause into their License Agreement in Section 2.
A careful read of their cross license agreement suggest this could turn ugly after enough patents are in the system which also find their way into Linux.
The FAQ is here: http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/about_faq.php
The membership is here: http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/licensees.php (just about every Distro you ever heard of is represented).
Its safer than credit cards.
You can dumpster dive all you want, but you still can't access my accounts without my digital credentials stored on my phone. And Even if you steal my cell phone with my credentials on it, you can't use them because they are encrypted and password protected on the phone.
Its not going to be government run. Have you not read one single thing about this program?
Any ID you can establish, you can also revoke.
More importantly, make sure they read AT LEAST THIS FAR:
The government has set out principles — chief among them “choice, efficiency, security and privacy” — more than mechanics. But the basic idea is that you could have your offline identity verified online by a company of your choosing. That company would then provide you with a single credential you could then present (when you don’t want to be anonymous online) to Amazon, or VA.gov, instead of having to re-establish that you are who you say you are with every online transaction.
The device carrying your credential — a flash drive, a cellphone, a smart card of some kind — would authenticate itself, rather than referring Amazon to the company that vouches for you. Amazon would know the buyer was secure, and the credential would know it was communicating with a bookseller, but the authentication provider would never learn that you just bought Bob Woodward’s new book. In this way, all of the parties involved would never freely communicate with each other, preventing precisely the web of information that you probably don’t want anyone — private company or government agency — to track.
In short it is a strictly voluntary program of obtaining authentication credentials which only YOU say what you share with each. Like your PGP signature with a somewhat more reliable web of trust than some guy in Slovenia that signed your key.
Seriously, you can tell the author simply skimmed, and never read the actual government release on this idea, which can be found in pdf form here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/NSTICstrategy_041511.pdf
The biggest problem I see is the mentioned "Mission Creep", where such an ID becomes mandatory in order to purchase anything on line. I could easily see that happening at the insistence of credit card companies.
Not really.
Your post shows you have read neither the summary or the article.
And your cat is dead.
Is there substantially less?
After all, if you ORBIT the red dwarf, the Far star is going to have to be QUITE FAR away, or you would find yourself orbiting the far star in short order.
Light falls off as the square of distance. So a Second Sun, located, say for example, at the orbit of Saturn would still be but a speck of light.
Nasa has a cool simulator for visualizing this located here: http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/
This Image is what our sun would look like from Saturn. Even a red dwarf would provide more light (or heat energy) than a bright sun at that distance.
If that second sun was located any closer than Saturn in a binary system the solar system would have developed dramatically different than today due to gravitational effects. Its unlikely that there exists any planets orbiting a star at photosynthetic-life bearing distance which would also see the companion star as anything close to the same size.
But be that as it may, lets take your theory at face value, and assume you could contrive a binary-star system where one planet provided more light than the other. In this case, plant life would develop to take advantage of the most abundant light source. In all probability, the secondary light source would simply be ignored. There is no plant that I know of that takes advantage of moon light. Yet moon light is several orders of magnitude brighter than the sun viewed from Saturn.
So you are postulating transparent leaves in the tall trees?
You failed to explain some things, making your objection seem ridiculous:
1) why would every tweet be 1000 characters long? Is every Email 4 megabytes long?
2) Why would you follow someone who babbles on for 1000 characters in the first place.
3) Who would spend time writing 1000 characters unless it was necessary?
4) Do you ever follow links in tweets?
how is anything hard on the magnetron? all it does is emit energy, which the metal readily soaks up and superheats. The real danger is more catching the microwave on fire than anything.
Spoken like one who has never killed a microwave in their day. Its easier than you think. Chances are that its the main circuit board that is actually damaged and not the magnetron itself, but I've killed a couple with no sign of fire. (Lightning in a box, but no smoke and no fire).
Because someone with patience can piece a shredded item back together again.
Not a CD they can't.
Even if you managed to get all the pieces physically back in the correct positions, it would not be readable.
The error rate would overwhelm the redundancy algorithms.
Green trees would grow tall from the light of the large yellow star, while the underbrush would be full of red leafy ferns which absorb light from the smaller star.
If the large star's light can't penetrate the trees to get to the underbrush, why would the smaller star's light do so?
You won't have an over abundance of light.
Plants evolve to thrive on the light available. You would have nearly the perfect amount, the amount just right for the plant that evolved there.
Viewing it as if your were an African Violate suddenly transported and trying to cope with a different configuration of suns is the mistake this article makes.
There is no basis for suggesting one color over another for plants on such a world.
Stars are either going to be close enough together that both will rise and set very close together, -OR- they will be far enough apart that one appears as a very bright, and the other is too far away to offer enough light for growth.
Orbital mechanics dictate that you see two close stars, or one close and one VERY distant star.
In the first case, life supporting planets would have to orbit a common center of gravity of the two planets, and viewed from such a planet, the stars would rise and set together (or very close together). Plants would not likely evolve to distinguish the difference, they would simply evolve to benefit from the average of the two stars.
In the second case, the companion star would have to be a great distance away, and would never contribute significant light to the planet orbiting the main star. In this case the light received from the closest star would so-overwhelm the distant star that plants would be tuned to the close star only. (No plant life is known to benefit from moon light).
There is very little chance that a planet would survive being located exactly half way between binary stars, such that two bright suns rise and set at opposite horizons. Such a planet is is a very perilous and unstable position and would probably not exist long enough in that location to evolve plant life.
Exportable and imposable style sheets are the one thing Word really did well.
Unfortunately, Word messed that up as well, and now its not reliable anywhere.
Ah right. Whoops. Who cares anyways, just a slow news day.
No, just an author pimping his own blog post.
Jeremy Ford = kkleiner = shameless self promoter.
I understand where you are coming from.
But the preponderance of tweets that come with shortened URLs and twitpics seems to suggest that the appeal of 140 is dieing out and people are sick to death of hearing what someone had for lunch.
People who post drivel are silently un-followed or blocked. People are ALREADY annoyed by pointless stupid tweets, especially when the smartphone in their pocket is blowning up every 5 minutes with the fact that Teacher X is such a dork, or someone is eating at Starbucks.
An app that brings out the brainless utterance as its central design criteria has grown up beyond its original market (just like Facebook has nothing to do with College any more). 140 is a hindrance to its growth and usefulness. Probably 30,000 characters is unwarranted, but can the same be said for 500? 1000?
People spend way too much time building links (usually to Facebook or some picture sharing site) to get around this issue.
Watch what happens in the next 6-9 months. Twitter is getting more aggressive about controlling the interface. Usually this means they need a better way to monetize it, and intend to introduce some changes. I predict a longer message format, for at least some users.
I might be wrong, but I think people are sick of 140.
I'm trying to recall ... didn't they strip out a bunch of functionality due to ownership issues?
I think it was mostly look and feel items, and dead unused code.
OOo had actually not gained much (some say it lost quite a bit) from the days when it was StarOffice. Significant portions of the large document (read: book sized) management capabilities, (pagination, cross-references, document linking and embedding, table and illustration management, etc), actually deteriorated significantly once Sun and Oracle took over.
Exactly right.
Further more, everybody who mattered in the developer base already bailed out of Oracle, and is working for LibreOffice. There is very little that Oracle has left to merge.
Oracle has thrown in the towel, (but you can rest assured there will be a few poison pills in anything they release that is not already in LibreOffice) and at best the open-sourcing of this project is their way of telling the remaining developers on their payroll, "here's your hat, what's your hurry". Those that didn't leave probably didn't because they needed the pay check.
Point, Set, and Match to LibreOffice. This is probably one of the most significant watershed events in Open Source development. Even more so than when XFree86 was forked and Xorg totally took over X servers on every distribution, leaving XFree86 into obscurity.
That being said, the article title does NOT square with the source, which makes no blanket statements about NO possible merger. I read it completely the opposite way, they will accept new members, and they may well cherry pick the released code.