If the war the soldier is fighting is illegal[1]doesn't he need to be able to find that out to satisfy his duty?
Yep. As soon as someone (the UN, the US Supreme Court, etc) says uncategorically that it's an illegal war, then the troops should be told...of course, they would be coming home at that point, so it wouldn't matter much.
At this point, you can make a case that that particular speech is either opinion or sedition, neither of which are necessarily related to it being factual. In either case, what is the soldier finding out? If the soldier (like the people that believe...not know...believe that the war is illegal or immoral) doesn't have factual information, they can't make a good decision.
I would think that it's better to have fully informed troops, and that it's the duty of the people running the war to make sure that the cause is good enough.
I agree, but I haven't devoted anything close to two hundred years (multiplied by whatever average number of people work on it in a given year) on evaluating that opinion and its merit. I submit that the military probably has empirical evidence that theirs is the better way, or else they damn sure wouldn't do it.
There are always going to be people who oppose any war. If your officers can't convince volunteer soldiers that these people are wrong, is it just possible that the cause is a crock?
Of course...anything's possible...but is it likely or true?
There are differences between logistics and censorship that you fail to acknowledge here. Logistics (at a strategic level, anyway) is pure science - count your troops, measure average rate of expenditure of stores, and multiply[2]. To censor or not is pure philosophy.
In civilian life, maybe. I will say again that I'm pretty much certain that the military has empirical evidence to support or discount the effectiveness of any particular action they might take.
Does the morale gain outweigh the dishonesty to your soldiers? When they see the censorship, what will their minds put in the blanks? This is more open to debate, don't you think?
My gut instinct is that censorship is bad, but then, I've already said that. I know that I wasn't told things when I was in Iraq and Korea, and I probably would have *liked* to know them, but I can also see how certain information would have seriously undermined my effectiveness at doing my job. If I'm not effective, other people's lives are at risk, and that's worse than me being angry about not knowing everything I believe I should know.
Does the morale gain outweigh the dishonesty? I would have to say "yes", or else it wouldn't be done. We're looking at things in terms of what's correct, from a first-amendment point of view, and the military is looking at things in terms of what's correct , from a keep-soldiers-alive point of view.
Bullshitting the troops is hardly a new thing, and it's not always an effective thing. Censoring the web won't boost morale, because soldiers aren't morons. Even during Vietnam soldiers knew which way the wind was blowing. But, at the same time, it serves the leadership of any military to make believe that if the censor letters from home, that the soldiers will be mentally retarded enough not to know at least in broad terms what's going on. In short, this makes the Pentagon feel real special, as they continue to fuck things up.
There's a lot of feeling in your post, and I can understand it to a certain extent.
As someone who was once a soldier (not quite 10 years of service), I tend to agree with you that soldiers are not morons. I would also say that instead of being distracted by what certain people *feel* is going on, they are better served by their own direct observation of events.
In Vietnam, there were a lot of soldiers fighting that had no choice in the matter, and that's not the case today. Many of them have mentioned that there's precious little news about the things they're accomplishing outside of fighting over there, but the typical commentary on the war is negative. With that in mind, I think that rather than the pentagon making themselves somehow "feel special", they are doing what they can to maintain a functional fighting force. In the same way that the soldiers aren't mentally retarded children, neither are their bosses. They're doing what they're doing because historically it works, and is better for the troops than not doing so.
What would the logical reason for doing something that takes so much effort, but is only effective at making higher-ups feel better be? Remember that this [the military] isn't congress, and results matter. Commanders are very conscious of how the plans they put in place actually affect a given situation.
Censorship sucks, and in almost every circumstance, it hurts more than it helps, but (again), you'll have to explain to me how a group of people that can move hundreds of thousands of soldiers and vehicles (and countless tons of support equipment and food) across an ocean and then supply them with what they need for staying alive could not have managed to think about this subject at least as much as you or I have.
The civilian world suffers because of ego and foolishness a lot more than the military does. Ego and foolishness gets people killed...you either need to give some support to your hypothesis, or rethink it a bit.
Great, but don't forget that these military folks are also voters. It seems to very, very convenient for one side or the other to define a common political view as "bad for morale". Then they can block their opponents outright. If political speech is so dangerous to morale, the filtering is at least as dangerous to our democracy, since it allows one side or the other to sculpt the political opinions of a large portion of the voting population.
We're not talking about political speech, in general, we're talking about speech specifically related to opining on the troops, their activities, and whether or not what they're doing is worthwhile. I'll write a bit more in response to the next post below...
The opinions that matter (as far as when to release soldiers from active duty or decide which web sites they should be able to access), have nothing to do with the public.
Often stated and often ignored in the posts above is the fact that you have to knowingly commit yourself into service in the united states military. When you do so, you are made to understand that your life no longer belongs to you at that point. Your raison d'etre at that point is to support and defend the constitution and obey the orders of the officers appointed over you, in that order. Beyond that, you are told that you serve at the discretion of the branch of service you are a part of, and that's it.
You are given a chance during basic and advanced training to quit. Just pack it up and go home. No harm, no foul. If you decide to stay past that point, then the military will do it's best to get a return on the investment of time and money they put into trainng you. It'd be stupid for them not to.
As for the websites, it's not a matter of political bias, it's a matter of morale and welfare management that causes the apparent political slant to which sites get blocked. Rush is an idiot, but he's an idiot that isn't constantly saying "Pull the troops out now, they're fighting an illegal war, etc, etc". If he began to do so, you can be sure he'd be blocked as well. It's easier to maintain a fighting force's morale by limiting their exposure to that kind of speech, and it's within the rights of the military to do so.
Soldiers don't have the same rights that ordinary citizens do, and they have very little control over anything that they have not been placed in charge of. Yes, some want to leave. Yes, the military wants them to stay...it's easier to put effort into getting people to stay than to train new recruits well enough to replace them.
It's all to easy to say "that's wrong! Do it this way instead!". If you think about it for a split second before saying that, though, you'll probably realize that a lot of other people within the military have been working for a century or two at addressing precisely those issues, including addressing those issues in cases where the servicemen involved were conscripted and not volunteers.
Calm down and think about the whole situation for a minute, then ask yourself what it would take, in terms of intelligence and ability, to mobilize and deploy that many people and whether a group with that much planning and thinking ability would be likely to not have considered the option you're proposing.
I understand the argument trying to make, and the obvious response is: "one of the two targets of the wiretap is a non-domestic - making it non-domestic spying."...you can take into consideration both ends of the call, or neither, but taking only one into consideration is oddly selective.
Can somebody explain it in non-contradictory terms? Why are wiretapped calls between US and non-US phones considered "domestic"? As I just noted, the argument you just made could be used to say that all such calls should be labeled as "non-domestic".
This is Slashdot...I know there's someone with more autism genes than political genes that can build a case that makes sense, I just haven't heard a response like that yet.
Because airline terminology "domestic" vs "international" isn't the same as the political definitions. It's "domestic" because they're spying on US citizens.
I thought they were spying on communications between US citizens and people outside of the US...If we're ignoring the "people outside the US" part, then I guess it makes sense, but I don't understand why that distinction would get dropped.
If a US-Iraq call is considered "domestic" (forget airling terminology and use telephone company terminology, I guess, since it's a phone call), what is a US-US call considered?
I'm not arguing legality or illegality of the activity...that's an issue for the DOJ. I'm trying to understand the reason for the term chosen to describe the wiretapping. Aside from soundbite-related issues, it doesn't make sense to me.
I agree with your overall statement, but I have a question. Why do the papers/news keep calling it "domestic" spying instead of "international" spying. Using parallel logic to that which dictates what is a domestic or international flight, for example, why did the word "domestic" catch on to describe this?
I haven't yet heard anyone say that there is 'tapping going on on actual domestic calls.
Well, okay, but the reasonable person you're thinking of (ala the cop in the article) would be someone who doesn't understand that Mozilla lets people copy and distribute their software under certain conditions.
If the software was from a company offering a product under different licensing, it'd be a fair assumption, but because of the different distribution model, the reasonable assumption is different. In the case of Mozilla or linux or GPL or MPL licenses products in general), there would have to be an extremely high level of subterfuge and misleading involved, or at least an unreasonable price for a CD with nothing but the browser on it (no modifications, etc).
In the sense of what do people who are unaware of GPL and MPL licensing think is reasonable, I can see the point you're trying to make, but I think from a legal standpoint, there's no there there.
There's nothing there to dilute Mozilla's brand or harm their business on trademark or copyright grounds because of the licensing terms. Selling copies of Mozilla Firefox that are labeled as being products from Mozilla doesn't drive people to other products or take income away from them, and as long as they are complying with the terms of the MPL, Mozilla has explicitly said "that's fine".
While there is no likelihood of confusion as to the actual product (the software), there is likelihood of confusion as to the source of the product. A person seeing a CD labeled "Mozilla Firefox" could be confused into believing that the CD itself was produced by Mozilla and that the source of the physical CD itself is from Mozilla.
There is not likelihood of confusion as to the source of the product, though. The source of the product is Mozilla.org. If the distributor is saying "Hi, I'm an employee of Mozilla and Mozilla is selling these CD's...", then there's confusion about the physical source of the CD.
Assuming that Mozilla Firefox is the software that is on the CD, there is no confusion as to the source of the product...that's why there's no trademark violation. If they were selling *another* product (say a web server) and used Mozilla branding to perhaps imply some kind of unwarranted support from mozilla, that would infringe...likewise, if they had another browser they wanted to sell and labeled it as mozilla firefox, they'd run afoul of copyright restrictions.
Since the license allows reproduction and allows someone who distributes copies to charge some nominal fee, they don't run afoul of copyright restrictions either.
The IANAL comment saves you on this one. Trademark prevents another company making another product from confusing customers by using your mark.
If they were distributing a different browser and calling it Mozilla or Firefox then they'd run afoul of trademark law. What's at issue here is copyright, which is added to by the MPL that explicitly allows for copying.
The fact that the cops can't comprehend what's allowed via the MPL is humorous, as is their failure to understand how it relates to copyright with no additional permissive license.
Man...If you want to talk about someone sucking the humor out of something, look no further than the post I'm replying to...
Then again, it wouldn't be slashdot without someone taking something badly and arguing something to the point of mirthlessness. I've certainly been guilty of that before. Damn those geek genes to hell.
Thank you, sir. I figured everybody on/. already reads groklaw (so I didn't bother mentioning what you just did about patents on software), but apparently not...
I had a subscription to "RUN" magazine...I used to always get irritated because all of the cool graphics code they put in was for Apple II machines.
DATA statements...man, yeah, I remember those. Do you remember the "keyboard" program they had in the C-64 manual? Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release...Square, Sawtooth, Sine wave...
Do you remember when 150 lines seemed like a *really* long program?
Shit, now I sound like a yearbook note: "Do you remember..."
Good comments...which were in place in my code in 1986...I always ignore that warning about there being a preview button on slashdot.
As for your poking the video buffer directly, I salute your geekiness (never had a user manual for the PET/CBM, or I probably would've tried it).
If you remember, also, on the PET and CBM machines, you could drop into an assembly-savvy prompt right on the terminal...I don't recall how that worked anymore, though...I wonder if any are for sale cheap on ebay?
Excellent point. Since we're not talking about a device, there's no infringement, then...unless there's an MPEG-4 device of some type that AT&T patented and that Pentax et-al have infringed upon.
Very good example of wht patents and software are a bad marriage.
True, but then the argument that the telcos make loses most of its merit. If Google traffic is travelling primarily on Google's own network infrastructure, and the part that it is not travelling on is the last mile to the telco's customers, then it'd be really, really hard to argue that that portion of the connection isn't being paid for by the telcos' customers.
As it stands, the argument is already moot because of the fact that the customer pays the operating costs of the telcos (assuming they're not under-charging), but that would underscore the point more deeply.
Right. I get that, it's just beside the point of the argument at hand, which is whether or not software should be patentable. I made it a bit further through the article, and noticed the author talking about software patents expiring sooner than copyright, and copyright lasting 95 years...
That's true, but it misses the fundamental difference between copyright and patent, which is that copyright protects a particular work, and patents protect a particular invention. Since writing software in and of itself is an act of creation, it leans towards copyright. Since software is used in business and equipment and processes, there is a desire to keep other people from recreating the same thing.
The first page is a classic pro-patent FUD passage, which is where my comment about motivations came from.
If you presume that software patents are good (which I do not), then it's a no-brainer. The problem is that presumption and whether it's correct or helpful to software innovation.
That's almost correct, except that you've already paid (as have we all) for them to bring that 100mbps fiber to your door. Now, they want to leverage the fact that it's not common knowledge that they didn't pay for that rollout themselves and give you about 19% of the bandwidth that you paid them to provide...with no competition, unlike what they agreed to.
I made a first attempt at reading TFA, when I ran across the first two sentences:
There are big problems with patents, especially software patents. It takes too long to get patent protection, particularly for fast-moving high-tech industries.
Is that *seriously* what they wanted to lead with? The first "problem" mentioned is that it takes too long to get them?
For as long as those with big patent portfolios have been trying to feed us the line that software patents are good, and others have been arguing back that copyright makes more sense, it astonishes me that the IEEE can sprint past that part of the discussion and go directly to "We need *more* software patents...and faster, too".
Maybe there's a patent attorney who has a brother-in-law in the IEEE group that proposed this, or something. I just don't understand where the impetus for this comes from.
I'll try reading the article again, and see if I can make it past the opening...maybe I'll skip those two sentences and pretend they're not there.
If deliberate degradation of service is written into the TOS as something that they're allowed to do, then I guess the "pack your sh*t and go somewhere else" option is the only one that has any bearing.
This isn't an issue of what they're allowed to do (legally) with their network. It's theirs, and they can do what they want with the parts they control, as far as prioritizing traffic.
The interesting issue is exactly how much Verizon thinks it can get away with before they start irritating customers. It's not like it'll be hushed up, and it's not as if people won't explain exactly why it's a bad idea.
Offtopic, but I don't care...mod me down, already...yes, I looked, no Perl hacker has actually done this yet, so if someone has time to waste, feel free to expand upon this.
#!perl -w
use strict;
our %creations; our $creator = 'God';
sub beginning() { create('heaven',$creator); create('earth',$creator); }
sub end() { exit(0); }
sub create() { my $what = shift(); my $who = shift(); if ($what =~ 'earth') { $creations{$what} = ''; } else { $creations{$what} = $who; } }
"It was recently decided in a court of law that certain portions of code found in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Access 2002 infringe a third-party patent," Microsoft said in an e-mail to customers. "As a result, Microsoft must make available a revised version of these products with the allegedly infringing code replaced."
Allegedly? No...not allegedly, definitively. It went to court, and the plaintiff was able to prove infringement. It's not alleged, it's legally proven fact. Talk about weasel-words...
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. As soon as someone (the UN, the US Supreme Court, etc) says uncategorically that it's an illegal war, then the troops should be told...of course, they would be coming home at that point, so it wouldn't matter much.
At this point, you can make a case that that particular speech is either opinion or sedition, neither of which are necessarily related to it being factual. In either case, what is the soldier finding out? If the soldier (like the people that believe...not know...believe that the war is illegal or immoral) doesn't have factual information, they can't make a good decision.
I would think that it's better to have fully informed troops, and that it's the duty of the people running the war to make sure that the cause is good enough.
I agree, but I haven't devoted anything close to two hundred years (multiplied by whatever average number of people work on it in a given year) on evaluating that opinion and its merit. I submit that the military probably has empirical evidence that theirs is the better way, or else they damn sure wouldn't do it.
There are always going to be people who oppose any war. If your officers can't convince volunteer soldiers that these people are wrong, is it just possible that the cause is a crock?
Of course...anything's possible...but is it likely or true?
There are differences between logistics and censorship that you fail to acknowledge here. Logistics (at a strategic level, anyway) is pure science - count your troops, measure average rate of expenditure of stores, and multiply[2]. To censor or not is pure philosophy.
In civilian life, maybe. I will say again that I'm pretty much certain that the military has empirical evidence to support or discount the effectiveness of any particular action they might take.
Does the morale gain outweigh the dishonesty to your soldiers? When they see the censorship, what will their minds put in the blanks? This is more open to debate, don't you think?
My gut instinct is that censorship is bad, but then, I've already said that. I know that I wasn't told things when I was in Iraq and Korea, and I probably would have *liked* to know them, but I can also see how certain information would have seriously undermined my effectiveness at doing my job. If I'm not effective, other people's lives are at risk, and that's worse than me being angry about not knowing everything I believe I should know.
Does the morale gain outweigh the dishonesty? I would have to say "yes", or else it wouldn't be done. We're looking at things in terms of what's correct, from a first-amendment point of view, and the military is looking at things in terms of what's correct , from a keep-soldiers-alive point of view.
There's a lot of feeling in your post, and I can understand it to a certain extent.
As someone who was once a soldier (not quite 10 years of service), I tend to agree with you that soldiers are not morons. I would also say that instead of being distracted by what certain people *feel* is going on, they are better served by their own direct observation of events.
In Vietnam, there were a lot of soldiers fighting that had no choice in the matter, and that's not the case today. Many of them have mentioned that there's precious little news about the things they're accomplishing outside of fighting over there, but the typical commentary on the war is negative. With that in mind, I think that rather than the pentagon making themselves somehow "feel special", they are doing what they can to maintain a functional fighting force. In the same way that the soldiers aren't mentally retarded children, neither are their bosses. They're doing what they're doing because historically it works, and is better for the troops than not doing so.
What would the logical reason for doing something that takes so much effort, but is only effective at making higher-ups feel better be? Remember that this [the military] isn't congress, and results matter. Commanders are very conscious of how the plans they put in place actually affect a given situation.
Censorship sucks, and in almost every circumstance, it hurts more than it helps, but (again), you'll have to explain to me how a group of people that can move hundreds of thousands of soldiers and vehicles (and countless tons of support equipment and food) across an ocean and then supply them with what they need for staying alive could not have managed to think about this subject at least as much as you or I have.
The civilian world suffers because of ego and foolishness a lot more than the military does. Ego and foolishness gets people killed...you either need to give some support to your hypothesis, or rethink it a bit.
We're not talking about political speech, in general, we're talking about speech specifically related to opining on the troops, their activities, and whether or not what they're doing is worthwhile. I'll write a bit more in response to the next post below...
Often stated and often ignored in the posts above is the fact that you have to knowingly commit yourself into service in the united states military. When you do so, you are made to understand that your life no longer belongs to you at that point. Your raison d'etre at that point is to support and defend the constitution and obey the orders of the officers appointed over you, in that order. Beyond that, you are told that you serve at the discretion of the branch of service you are a part of, and that's it.
You are given a chance during basic and advanced training to quit. Just pack it up and go home. No harm, no foul. If you decide to stay past that point, then the military will do it's best to get a return on the investment of time and money they put into trainng you. It'd be stupid for them not to.
As for the websites, it's not a matter of political bias, it's a matter of morale and welfare management that causes the apparent political slant to which sites get blocked. Rush is an idiot, but he's an idiot that isn't constantly saying "Pull the troops out now, they're fighting an illegal war, etc, etc". If he began to do so, you can be sure he'd be blocked as well. It's easier to maintain a fighting force's morale by limiting their exposure to that kind of speech, and it's within the rights of the military to do so.
Soldiers don't have the same rights that ordinary citizens do, and they have very little control over anything that they have not been placed in charge of. Yes, some want to leave. Yes, the military wants them to stay...it's easier to put effort into getting people to stay than to train new recruits well enough to replace them.
It's all to easy to say "that's wrong! Do it this way instead!". If you think about it for a split second before saying that, though, you'll probably realize that a lot of other people within the military have been working for a century or two at addressing precisely those issues, including addressing those issues in cases where the servicemen involved were conscripted and not volunteers.
Calm down and think about the whole situation for a minute, then ask yourself what it would take, in terms of intelligence and ability, to mobilize and deploy that many people and whether a group with that much planning and thinking ability would be likely to not have considered the option you're proposing.
Can somebody explain it in non-contradictory terms? Why are wiretapped calls between US and non-US phones considered "domestic"? As I just noted, the argument you just made could be used to say that all such calls should be labeled as "non-domestic".
This is Slashdot...I know there's someone with more autism genes than political genes that can build a case that makes sense, I just haven't heard a response like that yet.
I thought they were spying on communications between US citizens and people outside of the US...If we're ignoring the "people outside the US" part, then I guess it makes sense, but I don't understand why that distinction would get dropped.
If a US-Iraq call is considered "domestic" (forget airling terminology and use telephone company terminology, I guess, since it's a phone call), what is a US-US call considered?
I'm not arguing legality or illegality of the activity...that's an issue for the DOJ. I'm trying to understand the reason for the term chosen to describe the wiretapping. Aside from soundbite-related issues, it doesn't make sense to me.
I haven't yet heard anyone say that there is 'tapping going on on actual domestic calls.
Not only is there an alternative, there are several.
If the software was from a company offering a product under different licensing, it'd be a fair assumption, but because of the different distribution model, the reasonable assumption is different. In the case of Mozilla or linux or GPL or MPL licenses products in general), there would have to be an extremely high level of subterfuge and misleading involved, or at least an unreasonable price for a CD with nothing but the browser on it (no modifications, etc).
In the sense of what do people who are unaware of GPL and MPL licensing think is reasonable, I can see the point you're trying to make, but I think from a legal standpoint, there's no there there.
There's nothing there to dilute Mozilla's brand or harm their business on trademark or copyright grounds because of the licensing terms. Selling copies of Mozilla Firefox that are labeled as being products from Mozilla doesn't drive people to other products or take income away from them, and as long as they are complying with the terms of the MPL, Mozilla has explicitly said "that's fine".
There is not likelihood of confusion as to the source of the product, though. The source of the product is Mozilla.org. If the distributor is saying "Hi, I'm an employee of Mozilla and Mozilla is selling these CD's...", then there's confusion about the physical source of the CD.
Assuming that Mozilla Firefox is the software that is on the CD, there is no confusion as to the source of the product...that's why there's no trademark violation. If they were selling *another* product (say a web server) and used Mozilla branding to perhaps imply some kind of unwarranted support from mozilla, that would infringe...likewise, if they had another browser they wanted to sell and labeled it as mozilla firefox, they'd run afoul of copyright restrictions.
Since the license allows reproduction and allows someone who distributes copies to charge some nominal fee, they don't run afoul of copyright restrictions either.
If they were distributing a different browser and calling it Mozilla or Firefox then they'd run afoul of trademark law. What's at issue here is copyright, which is added to by the MPL that explicitly allows for copying.
The fact that the cops can't comprehend what's allowed via the MPL is humorous, as is their failure to understand how it relates to copyright with no additional permissive license.
Then again, it wouldn't be slashdot without someone taking something badly and arguing something to the point of mirthlessness. I've certainly been guilty of that before. Damn those geek genes to hell.
Thank you, sir. I figured everybody on /. already reads groklaw (so I didn't bother mentioning what you just did about patents on software), but apparently not...
DATA statements...man, yeah, I remember those. Do you remember the "keyboard" program they had in the C-64 manual? Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release...Square, Sawtooth, Sine wave...
Do you remember when 150 lines seemed like a *really* long program?
Shit, now I sound like a yearbook note: "Do you remember..."
Had my memory jogged by someone with less alzheimers' than me.
As for your poking the video buffer directly, I salute your geekiness (never had a user manual for the PET/CBM, or I probably would've tried it).
If you remember, also, on the PET and CBM machines, you could drop into an assembly-savvy prompt right on the terminal...I don't recall how that worked anymore, though...I wonder if any are for sale cheap on ebay?
For those of us who cut our teeth on PET/CBM/C-64/C-128/VIC-20 machines:
used to do that to as many of the PET and CBM machines as I could in the computer lab right before the bell rang...
Very good example of wht patents and software are a bad marriage.
As it stands, the argument is already moot because of the fact that the customer pays the operating costs of the telcos (assuming they're not under-charging), but that would underscore the point more deeply.
That's true, but it misses the fundamental difference between copyright and patent, which is that copyright protects a particular work, and patents protect a particular invention. Since writing software in and of itself is an act of creation, it leans towards copyright. Since software is used in business and equipment and processes, there is a desire to keep other people from recreating the same thing.
The first page is a classic pro-patent FUD passage, which is where my comment about motivations came from.
If you presume that software patents are good (which I do not), then it's a no-brainer. The problem is that presumption and whether it's correct or helpful to software innovation.
That's almost correct, except that you've already paid (as have we all) for them to bring that 100mbps fiber to your door. Now, they want to leverage the fact that it's not common knowledge that they didn't pay for that rollout themselves and give you about 19% of the bandwidth that you paid them to provide...with no competition, unlike what they agreed to.
There are big problems with patents, especially software patents. It takes too long to get patent protection, particularly for fast-moving high-tech industries.
Is that *seriously* what they wanted to lead with? The first "problem" mentioned is that it takes too long to get them?
For as long as those with big patent portfolios have been trying to feed us the line that software patents are good, and others have been arguing back that copyright makes more sense, it astonishes me that the IEEE can sprint past that part of the discussion and go directly to "We need *more* software patents...and faster, too".
Maybe there's a patent attorney who has a brother-in-law in the IEEE group that proposed this, or something. I just don't understand where the impetus for this comes from.
I'll try reading the article again, and see if I can make it past the opening...maybe I'll skip those two sentences and pretend they're not there.
This isn't an issue of what they're allowed to do (legally) with their network. It's theirs, and they can do what they want with the parts they control, as far as prioritizing traffic.
The interesting issue is exactly how much Verizon thinks it can get away with before they start irritating customers. It's not like it'll be hushed up, and it's not as if people won't explain exactly why it's a bad idea.
Offtopic, but I don't care...mod me down, already...yes, I looked, no Perl hacker has actually done this yet, so if someone has time to waste, feel free to expand upon this.
"It was recently decided in a court of law that certain portions of code found in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Access 2002 infringe a third-party patent," Microsoft said in an e-mail to customers. "As a result, Microsoft must make available a revised version of these products with the allegedly infringing code replaced."
Allegedly? No...not allegedly, definitively. It went to court, and the plaintiff was able to prove infringement. It's not alleged, it's legally proven fact. Talk about weasel-words...