If Microsoft really started requiring Third party Programs to fully clean themselves up, including the registry, or lose that little Windows compatable mark on the box art, they would lose over half the companies claiming to be compatable. That means Windows stops claiming to run just about everything. Not at all good for the bottom line.
Microsoft cut third party companies a lot of slack during the growth years, to be able to brag about how much more software runs on Windows than the competition. Now they have saturated the market, there's no direction left for compatability percentages to move, except down, and the policy is starting to come back to haunt them. Any threat to deny a company that little Windows symbol is a hollow threat, as more and more companies realize MS will take a hit from it too.
What's sad is the John family had an accessable cell phone, but when the daughter couldn't get through via internet phone, she was paniced enough she ran next door to a neigbor's phone instead of using it. While Vonage should certainly take steps here, there are no steps at their end that will guarentee good results in an emergency situation.
I've still got a Connor CP 3544 that works. It's formatted at 544.3 Mb. I acquired it after it was taken out of an instrumentation package that had been used for onboard data gathering. What was it onboard? A series of passenger cars, being tested in t-bone type collisions with Deisel locomotives - The package was usually bolt mounted to the shift column area between the two crash test dummys in the front seats, and was recording accellerations from multiple sensors in the dummys, not the car. The design involved a time delay so it could write data after the drive had settled down - The guys who kludged it together having decided there was no way to do it in real time. They said most of the drives worked at least twice before failure.
On the other hand, I've had newer Connors fail after 8 months or less in a benign environment, so the one exotic stand out on reliability proves nothing.
Now if I just had a real use for something that small.
2. I'll get serious for a moment. Humans share some very old genes, with just about everything alive. There are others like the Ubiquitin producing gene or the gene for making Dihydrofolate Reductase, that most or all the multicellular organisms have the exact same gene, or the HOX genes, that are shared by all vertebrates and have only minor differences with the versions used by creatures as diffferent from us as fruit flys or squid. Some things in genetics seem to code only one way. The 2% measurement for chimps was never very meaningful, as it implied that there could be terrestrial organisms that shared absolutely no genes with us.
No one appears to have noticed that the number of chromosomes I gave was bogus to get the joke to work out right. It is, of course, 23 pairs, or 46 chromosomes in all human cells except the sperm and egg.
Suppose we take the proposition: The 28 year limit on copyright was the last form of the law that should be recognized - the Supreme court was wrong in ruling that the phrase in the Constitution "for a limited time" meant anything up to 1 day short of eternity.
then:
1a.) Copyright infringment of works under 28 years old on P2P networks is not OK. 1b.) It's not necessarily theft either, but its not OK.
2a.) Copyright infringment of works over 28 years old on P2P networks is OK. 2b.) (Corrolary derived from another proposition below) - If it should be legal, then it's definitely not theft, (as no form of theft should be legal). 2c.) (Corrolary derived from another proposition below) - If it is theft, then that trumps the 28 year expiration rule and violates one of our first premises, (as no form of theft should have an expiration date, after which it stops being theft). 2d.) If it is theft, then that also trumps the current life +70 rule (by analogy with 2c.))
3a.) Copyright infringment of GPL code is not OK, simply because it's under all under 28 years old. 3b.) It's not necessarily theft, but again it's not OK.
I don't actually support taking just that point as the whole basis for copyright law, and yet I can come up with related arguements from other premises that lead to other such conclusions - you are aware that you stated four propositions with just two numbers there, aren't you? Leaves you wide open.
We could start with the premise that the 56 year version of the law was valid, although now that some forms of copyright violation are criminal, the changes in requiring registration in that law look like they make it a case of taking without compensation from the taxpayers to me (but IANAL). We could start from a later version, although ex-post-facto arguements are being ignored there (again in my NAL opinion). We could start from a given fair use definition, and come to one conclusion or another. Personally, I favor a fair use definition that recognizes both time and space shifting rights, and some forms of hardware agnosticism.
Men and Women differ by one Chromosome in 26, which works out to roughly a 4% difference in genes. A male Chimpanzee has only about a 2% difference from a male human. Ergo, despite my best efforts in the case of women, I have twice the chance of understanding Bonzo as I do understanding my wife.
As further proof of that, she doesn't understand this excuse.
Besides your rationalization, making an illegal copy of a bank database genuinely isn't stealing, simply because it's only a tool towards such an end instead. In the same way, tresspassing isn't stealing, it's just a step along the way towards stealing or other crimes *. Carrying a gun isn't stealing until you use it to rob somebody. It can still be illegal, but it's not yet theft. While we're at it, kidnapping is not murder unless the hostage dies, and you can't commit prostitution by just offering sex, until money or valuables are asked for in exchange. Why do we have to keep explaining such things to people who don't seem to get them?
This is one of the problems I have with IP law theory as it stands. It's Orwellian - "All property is equal, but some properties are more equal than others". Physically rob a bank, and you have committed one theft. By the way some people treat IP, crack a database and use the information to transfer one person's money out of one account, and you have committed two thefts. IP doctrine doesn't make intellectual property the equal of real property, it makes it superior.
Another example of this is the 5 to 1 ratio for damages when infringement is shown to be "willful", while real property enjoys only triple damage rules in civil court at best, and even there, you have to prove a much tougher standard, i.e. criminal neglegence. IP is being treated as better than real property.
If the record company is entitled to 5 times damage for willful infringment, then I want 5 times damage from the guy who got drunk and plowed into my work van. I want it because he willfully drank before driving, and I don't want to have to spend extra time effort and money proving he drank so much he was criminally neglegent - that's fair. Absent this, the law as it stands creates a privledged class.
* Note, I live in a state where to commit trespass, you have to have some form of malicious intent or action. Walking across someone's lawn isn't trespass until you are shown to be damaging their property by doing so, or trying to commit some other crime like being a peeping tom or a thief. Your state or nation may define trespass more broadly.
With both versions being released by the same people, as a free choice, this is not what that old engraving was about. Now distros taking opposing sides on the whole KDE-Gnome flamewar is just the sort of behavior that the hacked up serpent was meant to symbolize, and oppose. Ubuntu is actually taking this step to avoid making the very mistake for which you are criticising them.
That's precisely my point - Unless someone has a 'flashy' new feature I haven't seen mentioned at MozillaZine, it's all pretty incremental right now. This means when IE 7 comes out, it will probably have all the major features, and people will have to argue over who does them better, which is less likely to motivate people to actually switch than arguing from who has the features at all did.
Firefox is likely to release much more often than IE, and to continue to grow, but they will get slower expansion from a typical upgrade. If a new release has some feature as useful as pop-up blocking, or even tabbed browsing, Firefox attracts a big bunch of new users. Unless there's a really impressive feature in some new release, expect incremental growth, and a long struggle with Microsoft.
Full CSS implementation for the net will be sweet, and will probably come about partly through Mozilla Foundation, but it won't draw customers as fast as pop-up blocking did.
Microsoft has one inherent advantage - they load IE as part of windows, so the average user doesn't see the load time. If it weren't for that, they would have lost a lot more share already. Making Firefox smaller and faster, and plugging aledged memory leaks needs to happen, so as to "minimize drag". It's not glamorous work, but doing it minimizes MS's one remaining big advantage in the browser wars.
For firefox coders, if you don't have a feature at least as useful as tabbed browsing to add, it looks like it's all a matter of improving bloat, security, or stability.
I was going to say you overstated the case re. Windows. Then I thought about all the web pages explaining how advanced users can swap some program, e.g. Defrag, or Scandisk, into an older windows distribution, swap pieces between NT and 9X lines, unbundle IE, get around FAT 32 size limits in XP, and so on. I think you may have something there. Just because fewer Windows users by total percentages would make any such changes doesn't mean the difference in Windows distros is especially large or the boundaries extra-firm. Windows might be pretty flexable for assembling new distros, but a large clueless user base and Microsoft's closed mouth attitude could still easily obscure it.
One of the things that counts as anti-social behavior is age-inappropriate behavior. In minors, there is some correlation between starting smoking pot at a given age, and behaving for years like you are still in that age group - i.e. start smoking every weekend at age 15, and at age 18, your dating behavior, choice of entertainment, and other such factors may still resemble a 15 year old's. For older test subjects, one of the factors measured was how often the person chanmged jobs or was fired from a job, and related employment history.
Of course correlation does not equal causation. However, there are a lot of interesting points about these studies:
They have been careful to quantify use, to see how much of THC breakdown product was actually measuered in urine tests, and compare that with reported use. This has been done in case use was being reported inaccurately, but stronger matches in data seem to result with increasing measured use, and less strong correlation is seen with reported use.
The categories of use have been duplicated from study to study so the data range is becoming very broad, with tens of thousands of participants in several nations that have very different drug laws. This helps refute the counter-hypothesis that the observers are seeing immature people for their age group simply because immature people turn to 'criminal' lifestyles.
Follow up studies to see if people who stop using pot stay proportionately immature, get worse, or close the gap seem to show the same correlation, i.e. the subjects generally make up for lost time, at least partially if they go completely straight.
Well, now that you're being precise about the difference between literally no testing and testing by a group that may be too small for some purposes, you're making a better case. Still, I'd have to say that the foundation should sacrefice thorough testing if they can't get enough of a test environment from people who understand what the purpose of those builds is.
At this point, people are argueing over whetther the foundation should have explained anything differently, but the reports and most of the individual posts are assuming any problems are genuinely inadvertent. On the other hand, your reasoning doesn't just support an accidentally ambiguous approach to naming, or point out that there are reasons why people should have helped out besides the reasons they thought they knew. Whether you mean to take it that far or not, if having more testing is that important, it justifies a deliberate scheme to manipulate testers.
I'm pretty confident that there were and are ways to ask people to knowingly run a build with the real reward of contributing to testing an engine that may show up again in other projects later, while explaining fairly that there won't be more applications to this project.
Personally, If you were a software builder, and you said to me, "I made Foobar 1.0 and gave it to everyone. If you use it, how about running this for me. It won't lead to Foobar 2.0, but it will help me figure out some things, and just maybe lead to more good stuff from me later.", I'd tend to trust that. You could call it Foobar 1.1, Foobar Test, or Foobar XP Pro (Well, maybe not that last one), and I'd tend to cooperate if I respected the existing Foobar.
But, If there aren't any such ways to get people to cooperate in enough numbers, then the rule is simple: Lieing to and manipulating people is evil. If you can't get enough testing with any legitimate explanation, then settle for what you can get without breaking the rule. I know that's a black and white answer, but your clause starting with "because" in your final sentence makes it an either/or question.
There's a difference between continuing the cutting edge nightly builds and starting to single out some and refer to some of them as alphas and eventually betas.
There's also a difference between updating version numbers on 1.7 to attract users to the more critical patches and doing it for non-security or stability related patches. Updating to reflect that it's an important change may falsely give some people the idea that it's updating counting towards a new major revision, but that's something the foundation can affect with its announcements. It's also pretty common for some programs to see updated versions with no one expecting those to eventually lead to a 2.0 version or more, but that's not the general expectation I gather most people had of Mozilla.
There's another difference if there are patches that include parts of 1.8's potential new functionalities (or even in discussing or announcing possible new functions for 1.8 at all, once the decision was made). Note: I don't know if there were any patches past 1.5 or so specifically just to prepare the way for functionalities that wouldn't be added until 1.8 or later versions, or not. If there were, people working on them still may or may not have any beef about how timely the foundation's notifications were, but that's for them to discuss.
We're also talking about much less than a year's changes. v 1.7 is a stable release which was presumably built on well tested Gecko, and patches up to 1.7.5 also presumably include the results of some further testing, at least if the tests showed a serious flaw in security or stability. Somebody may have a legitimate beef in not being told certain things for a few weeks, but a whole year looks pretty unlikely.
This could be a case where a single patent is appropriate. At this point, we don't know if it uses some existing patents or some processes that have already become public, or both, so legally, it might be that only some elements should get seperate patents.
If you believe that software patents should be allowed at all, then arguably the software as a whole may be subject to a patent, but it's much more likely that only some portions of it are.
Remember, patents require some element of "not being obvious". This particular design wasn't obvious before the fact to you, or me either, but is that supposed to be obvious to a lay-person, an EE, or a specialist in medical related electronic hardware that we're talking about?
So, you've never heard "free as in speech, not as in beer?".
Freedom of association...
Now... I thought that was a freedom for the betterment of mankind, or some such garbage rhetoric?
Now that someone is charging you for the...ahem... hall rental, you're upset about it?
What does one type of free have to do with the other? You can sell software based on free software, charge money for it if you like, or give your contributions away too.* So if someone takes your work, and lies, claiming they did it and you didn't, that's OK if no money is involved, and only becomes criminal if they are charging for it, right? Free in one sense is free in all senses, or none, right? Since either case implies a contradiction, there are no freedoms anywhere, right?
What you seem to be argueing is: There's no such thing as freedom of worship, churches pass collection plates. There's no freedom of travel, airline tickets cost money. There's no freedom of speech, unless you own a TV station.... etc.
The GPL gives people some freedoms they do not otherwise have under law - more legal freedom than they have otherwise. You're complaining that it doesn't give all possible freedoms under all conditions, even freedoms that contradict each other. I'm not sure if you're even taking a position on the GPL as a matter of law - It's more like you have a problem with the very way reality itself is constructed, and think contract law can change reality.
*the details depend on the exact liscence, naturally. GPL'ed software is not the only free software out there.
This crime actually involves two seperate considerations: 1 CherryOS apparently is in violation of current copyright law. 1b. This violation aledgedly came about in part through breaking a contract (1 or more examples of the GPL). That's a civil matter, not a criminal one, so the GPL violations themselves definitely aren't theft in just about anyone's book. 2. In this particular case, the copyright violation was intended to lead to CherryOS getting paid money for someone else's work. That work was generally being given away, but with conditions. It is argueably worth money, and is being given away out of the goodness of the creator's hearts, rather than because it is worthless. Accepting the contract conditions was itself a form of payment that was also demonstratably worth money, simply because it costs many entities complying employee time and server space to make their own revisions avaiable. It can be argued reasonably that such type of profiting from other people's work without compensation is theft.
This is one perfect example of how copyright vioaltion by itself isn't theft. In this case, copyright violation was a tool that was used to attempt a theft. Contract violation was also a tool, but there are few people indeed arguing that all contract violations are criminal or, more particularly, the type of crime we call theft.
CherryOS could have violated a copyright on something without taking anything of real value. They could have used a 5 year old kid's refrigerator drawing without permission, and it could be widely apparent that no customer was buying their code because they wanted to get that drawing, and there would still be a technical violation of copyright.
CherryOS could have also tried to take the value of someone else's work by breaking a contract, without there being any copyright on the work involved. If CherryOS failed to pay the power company for electricty used, does there need to be a copyright on the electron flow before we call it theft? If copyright violation is theft, then we are essentially arguing that two thefts of the same item occurred, one by copyright violation, and the other by contract violation.
Is he upset that his lawyer (whom he did not pay) did not get to speak to lawyer at the RIAA? Doesn't the RIAA have the right to handle their case the way they want do?
Of course they have a right to let non-lawyer emploees handle assembling case records, fielding calls from opponent lawyers, and so on. The US has a legal right to send its troops into battle armed with nothing more than sharpened sticks and trash can lids,* but what does it say about the balance of power if we were fighting any foe where that would work?
Letting non-lawyers handle pre-trial relations with opposed lawyers is generally considered just as dumb as going into court without lawyers at all. It's suicidal - UNLESS you have such OVERWHELMING POWER THAT YOU OWN THE LEGAL SYSTEM. If I were a shareholder in any RIAA related company, I'd be asking what the hell they were doing, taking risks like that - OR - I'd know there were solid bribes and blackmail in place to let them get away with such apparent foolish risk taking.
You are welcome to draw your own conclusions as to why the RIAA client corps aren't getting upset about the non-lawyer involvement. Maybe most of them just aren't watching all that closely and in a few months we'll start seeing some investors making a (IMHO much needed) reassesment of the RIAA's strategy, or maybe this should be all the proof anyone needs that the whole thing is about power and not justice.
* Actually, I'm not sure the Geneva convention allows sharpened sticks, unless they are sterilized regularly.;-)
One of the best comments I ever saw was along the lines of "Last Names are sorted into 27 groups, including "Mc".". It probably should have been more verbose, for as it turned out, an overseas developer still had no idea why that was being done and ignored it when modifying part of the code until the local prevalence of Scottish surnames was explained to him. Once someone who understood it read it though, both problem and solution became obvious.
... People love particular episodes, or particular dialog or plotlines or characters. So what's going to happen if the fans get another episode of Enterprise, and it's a "bad" episode? How will you feel if you paid to get more episodes, and that actor or actress you hoped would get some really good character development gets a lot of wooden lines and writing that seems to go totally against the character as already envisioned? What if you were hoping to see more Ferengi, and Paramount turns out three episodes with nary a Feringi in sight?
Right now, the fanbase is making a promise it can't keep - "Here's money! Give us Trek, and none of these thousands of investors will nit-pick about where that money went afterwards!".
Professionals in Hollywood know that, if you add more and more investors in a project, there will inevitably be more who complain later. With tens of thousands involved, this adds greatly to the uncertainty of the project. Anyone acting in it, or writng the scripts or even just doing the special effects becomes worried that they will get extra helpings of blame if it doesn't work out. At this point, the fanbase is asking a lot of people to take exceptional risks with their careers for little or no upside. Maybe Rick Berman deserves that, but do all the others involved? Again, maybe a few of the executives have already taken a negative impact on their future in Hollywood, and should, in 'fairness' have to seize on a chance to prove they could do better, even if the odds are against them, but Hollywood doesn't seem to be saying "You'll never work in this town again." to those execs, and it has a nasty tendency to say that to other people. Those other people are probably responsible for the parts of Enterprise somebody actually loves.
Lawrence V. Texas was found in favor of Lawrence. Since it would obviously be Lawrence that would have raised the issue of scientier if it had come up, if I had been referencing Lawrence, I would still have posted a claim that L. v. Texas was a possible precident to this one and not vice versa. I freely admit that I'm not an expert on law, but I'm also not dumb enough to think that a case decided in 2003 will be influenced by a case decided (we hope) by the end of 2005, instead of influencing the latter case. See, 2003 happened before 2005. It's called causality, and believe it or not, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand it.
Texas has had at least one legal challenge over textbooks every year since well before the turn of the millennium. There are over 20 such cases over the last 15 years. This is largely because Texas is very populous, and what they buy influences what's available for many other states to buy. Right now, there is one established case in process over the changes made by the Texas school boards in Nov of 2004, re. teaching of Evolution, and that's the case I was referring to. As it turns out, it looks like another Nov 2004 decision by the same school boards, re. Contraception Education, may also result in a challenge including the same grounds (that references to the established state laws were stricken). This, however, has some questions of standing on one of the parties seeking to file (Planned Parenthood), so I don't want to imply it will even necessarily get to a formal motion.
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If Microsoft really started requiring Third party Programs to fully clean themselves up, including the registry, or lose that little Windows compatable mark on the box art, they would lose over half the companies claiming to be compatable. That means Windows stops claiming to run just about everything. Not at all good for the bottom line.
Microsoft cut third party companies a lot of slack during the growth years, to be able to brag about how much more software runs on Windows than the competition. Now they have saturated the market, there's no direction left for compatability percentages to move, except down, and the policy is starting to come back to haunt them. Any threat to deny a company that little Windows symbol is a hollow threat, as more and more companies realize MS will take a hit from it too.
Komar can be reached from:
http://www.studiofoglio.com/
You want Phil, not Dixie.
What's sad is the John family had an accessable cell phone, but when the daughter couldn't get through via internet phone, she was paniced enough she ran next door to a neigbor's phone instead of using it.
While Vonage should certainly take steps here, there are no steps at their end that will guarentee good results in an emergency situation.
I've still got a Connor CP 3544 that works. It's formatted at 544.3 Mb. I acquired it after it was taken out of an instrumentation package that had been used for onboard data gathering. What was it onboard? A series of passenger cars, being tested in t-bone type collisions with Deisel locomotives - The package was usually bolt mounted to the shift column area between the two crash test dummys in the front seats, and was recording accellerations from multiple sensors in the dummys, not the car. The design involved a time delay so it could write data after the drive had settled down - The guys who kludged it together having decided there was no way to do it in real time. They said most of the drives worked at least twice before failure.
On the other hand, I've had newer Connors fail after 8 months or less in a benign environment, so the one exotic stand out on reliability proves nothing.
Now if I just had a real use for something that small.
1. Humor Impaired?
2. I'll get serious for a moment.
Humans share some very old genes, with just about everything alive. There are others like the Ubiquitin producing gene or the gene for making Dihydrofolate Reductase, that most or all the multicellular organisms have the exact same gene, or the HOX genes, that are shared by all vertebrates and have only minor differences with the versions used by creatures as diffferent from us as fruit flys or squid. Some things in genetics seem to code only one way. The 2% measurement for chimps was never very meaningful, as it implied that there could be terrestrial organisms that shared absolutely no genes with us.
No one appears to have noticed that the number of chromosomes I gave was bogus to get the joke to work out right. It is, of course, 23 pairs, or 46 chromosomes in all human cells except the sperm and egg.
Suppose we take the proposition: The 28 year limit on copyright was the last form of the law that should be recognized - the Supreme court was wrong in ruling that the phrase in the Constitution "for a limited time" meant anything up to 1 day short of eternity.
then:
1a.) Copyright infringment of works under 28 years old on P2P networks is not OK.
1b.) It's not necessarily theft either, but its not OK.
2a.) Copyright infringment of works over 28 years old on P2P networks is OK.
2b.) (Corrolary derived from another proposition below) - If it should be legal, then it's definitely not theft, (as no form of theft should be legal).
2c.) (Corrolary derived from another proposition below) - If it is theft, then that trumps the 28 year expiration rule and violates one of our first premises, (as no form of theft should have an expiration date, after which it stops being theft).
2d.) If it is theft, then that also trumps the current life +70 rule (by analogy with 2c.))
3a.) Copyright infringment of GPL code is not OK, simply because it's under all under 28 years old.
3b.) It's not necessarily theft, but again it's not OK.
I don't actually support taking just that point as the whole basis for copyright law, and yet I can come up with related arguements from other premises that lead to other such conclusions - you are aware that you stated four propositions with just two numbers there, aren't you? Leaves you wide open.
We could start with the premise that the 56 year version of the law was valid, although now that some forms of copyright violation are criminal, the changes in requiring registration in that law look like they make it a case of taking without compensation from the taxpayers to me (but IANAL). We could start from a later version, although ex-post-facto arguements are being ignored there (again in my NAL opinion). We could start from a given fair use definition, and come to one conclusion or another. Personally, I favor a fair use definition that recognizes both time and space shifting rights, and some forms of hardware agnosticism.
Giant Space Dildoes with Frickin Lasers in their foreheads? The 50's just don't go away, do they?
Men and Women differ by one Chromosome in 26, which works out to roughly a 4% difference in genes. A male Chimpanzee has only about a 2% difference from a male human. Ergo, despite my best efforts in the case of women, I have twice the chance of understanding Bonzo as I do understanding my wife.
As further proof of that, she doesn't understand this excuse.
Just Kids? That sounds like age discrimination!
Besides your rationalization, making an illegal copy of a bank database genuinely isn't stealing, simply because it's only a tool towards such an end instead. In the same way, tresspassing isn't stealing, it's just a step along the way towards stealing or other crimes *. Carrying a gun isn't stealing until you use it to rob somebody. It can still be illegal, but it's not yet theft. While we're at it, kidnapping is not murder unless the hostage dies, and you can't commit prostitution by just offering sex, until money or valuables are asked for in exchange. Why do we have to keep explaining such things to people who don't seem to get them?
This is one of the problems I have with IP law theory as it stands. It's Orwellian - "All property is equal, but some properties are more equal than others". Physically rob a bank, and you have committed one theft. By the way some people treat IP, crack a database and use the information to transfer one person's money out of one account, and you have committed two thefts. IP doctrine doesn't make intellectual property the equal of real property, it makes it superior.
Another example of this is the 5 to 1 ratio for damages when infringement is shown to be "willful", while real property enjoys only triple damage rules in civil court at best, and even there, you have to prove a much tougher standard, i.e. criminal neglegence. IP is being treated as better than real property.
If the record company is entitled to 5 times damage for willful infringment, then I want 5 times damage from the guy who got drunk and plowed into my work van. I want it because he willfully drank before driving, and I don't want to have to spend extra time effort and money proving he drank so much he was criminally neglegent - that's fair. Absent this, the law as it stands creates a privledged class.
* Note, I live in a state where to commit trespass, you have to have some form of malicious intent or action. Walking across someone's lawn isn't trespass until you are shown to be damaging their property by doing so, or trying to commit some other crime like being a peeping tom or a thief. Your state or nation may define trespass more broadly.
With both versions being released by the same people, as a free choice, this is not what that old engraving was about. Now distros taking opposing sides on the whole KDE-Gnome flamewar is just the sort of behavior that the hacked up serpent was meant to symbolize, and oppose. Ubuntu is actually taking this step to avoid making the very mistake for which you are criticising them.
That's precisely my point - Unless someone has a 'flashy' new feature I haven't seen mentioned at MozillaZine, it's all pretty incremental right now. This means when IE 7 comes out, it will probably have all the major features, and people will have to argue over who does them better, which is less likely to motivate people to actually switch than arguing from who has the features at all did.
Firefox is likely to release much more often than IE, and to continue to grow, but they will get slower expansion from a typical upgrade. If a new release has some feature as useful as pop-up blocking, or even tabbed browsing, Firefox attracts a big bunch of new users. Unless there's a really impressive feature in some new release, expect incremental growth, and a long struggle with Microsoft.
Full CSS implementation for the net will be sweet, and will probably come about partly through Mozilla Foundation, but it won't draw customers as fast as pop-up blocking did.
Microsoft has one inherent advantage - they load IE as part of windows, so the average user doesn't see the load time. If it weren't for that, they would have lost a lot more share already. Making Firefox smaller and faster, and plugging aledged memory leaks needs to happen, so as to "minimize drag". It's not glamorous work, but doing it minimizes MS's one remaining big advantage in the browser wars.
For firefox coders, if you don't have a feature at least as useful as tabbed browsing to add, it looks like it's all a matter of improving bloat, security, or stability.
I was going to say you overstated the case re. Windows. Then I thought about all the web pages explaining how advanced users can swap some program, e.g. Defrag, or Scandisk, into an older windows distribution, swap pieces between NT and 9X lines, unbundle IE, get around FAT 32 size limits in XP, and so on. I think you may have something there. Just because fewer Windows users by total percentages would make any such changes doesn't mean the difference in Windows distros is especially large or the boundaries extra-firm. Windows might be pretty flexable for assembling new distros, but a large clueless user base and Microsoft's closed mouth attitude could still easily obscure it.
One of the things that counts as anti-social behavior is age-inappropriate behavior. In minors, there is some correlation between starting smoking pot at a given age, and behaving for years like you are still in that age group - i.e. start smoking every weekend at age 15, and at age 18, your dating behavior, choice of entertainment, and other such factors may still resemble a 15 year old's. For older test subjects, one of the factors measured was how often the person chanmged jobs or was fired from a job, and related employment history.
Of course correlation does not equal causation. However, there are a lot of interesting points about these studies:
They have been careful to quantify use, to see how much of THC breakdown product was actually measuered in urine tests, and compare that with reported use. This has been done in case use was being reported inaccurately, but stronger matches in data seem to result with increasing measured use, and less strong correlation is seen with reported use.
The categories of use have been duplicated from study to study so the data range is becoming very broad, with tens of thousands of participants in several nations that have very different drug laws. This helps refute the counter-hypothesis that the observers are seeing immature people for their age group simply because immature people turn to 'criminal' lifestyles.
Follow up studies to see if people who stop using pot stay proportionately immature, get worse, or close the gap seem to show the same correlation, i.e. the subjects generally make up for lost time, at least partially if they go completely straight.
Blance - it's simple, it's crisp. I like it. We should use that word for something.
Well, now that you're being precise about the difference between literally no testing and testing by a group that may be too small for some purposes, you're making a better case. Still, I'd have to say that the foundation should sacrefice thorough testing if they can't get enough of a test environment from people who understand what the purpose of those builds is.
At this point, people are argueing over whetther the foundation should have explained anything differently, but the reports and most of the individual posts are assuming any problems are genuinely inadvertent. On the other hand, your reasoning doesn't just support an accidentally ambiguous approach to naming, or point out that there are reasons why people should have helped out besides the reasons they thought they knew. Whether you mean to take it that far or not, if having more testing is that important, it justifies a deliberate scheme to manipulate testers.
I'm pretty confident that there were and are ways to ask people to knowingly run a build with the real reward of contributing to testing an engine that may show up again in other projects later, while explaining fairly that there won't be more applications to this project.
Personally, If you were a software builder, and you said to me, "I made Foobar 1.0 and gave it to everyone. If you use it, how about running this for me. It won't lead to Foobar 2.0, but it will help me figure out some things, and just maybe lead to more good stuff from me later.", I'd tend to trust that. You could call it Foobar 1.1, Foobar Test, or Foobar XP Pro (Well, maybe not that last one), and I'd tend to cooperate if I respected the existing Foobar.
But, If there aren't any such ways to get people to cooperate in enough numbers, then the rule is simple: Lieing to and manipulating people is evil. If you can't get enough testing with any legitimate explanation, then settle for what you can get without breaking the rule. I know that's a black and white answer, but your clause starting with "because" in your final sentence makes it an either/or question.
There's a difference between continuing the cutting edge nightly builds and starting to single out some and refer to some of them as alphas and eventually betas.
There's also a difference between updating version numbers on 1.7 to attract users to the more critical patches and doing it for non-security or stability related patches. Updating to reflect that it's an important change may falsely give some people the idea that it's updating counting towards a new major revision, but that's something the foundation can affect with its announcements. It's also pretty common for some programs to see updated versions with no one expecting those to eventually lead to a 2.0 version or more, but that's not the general expectation I gather most people had of Mozilla.
There's another difference if there are patches that include parts of 1.8's potential new functionalities (or even in discussing or announcing possible new functions for 1.8 at all, once the decision was made). Note: I don't know if there were any patches past 1.5 or so specifically just to prepare the way for functionalities that wouldn't be added until 1.8 or later versions, or not. If there were, people working on them still may or may not have any beef about how timely the foundation's notifications were, but that's for them to discuss.
We're also talking about much less than a year's changes. v 1.7 is a stable release which was presumably built on well tested Gecko, and patches up to 1.7.5 also presumably include the results of some further testing, at least if the tests showed a serious flaw in security or stability. Somebody may have a legitimate beef in not being told certain things for a few weeks, but a whole year looks pretty unlikely.
This could be a case where a single patent is appropriate. At this point, we don't know if it uses some existing patents or some processes that have already become public, or both, so legally, it might be that only some elements should get seperate patents.
If you believe that software patents should be allowed at all, then arguably the software as a whole may be subject to a patent, but it's much more likely that only some portions of it are.
Remember, patents require some element of "not being obvious". This particular design wasn't obvious before the fact to you, or me either, but is that supposed to be obvious to a lay-person, an EE, or a specialist in medical related electronic hardware that we're talking about?
So, you've never heard "free as in speech, not as in beer?".
... I thought that was a freedom for the betterment of mankind, or some such garbage rhetoric?
...ahem... hall rental, you're upset about it?
... etc.
Freedom of association...
Now
Now that someone is charging you for the
What does one type of free have to do with the other? You can sell software based on free software, charge money for it if you like, or give your contributions away too.* So if someone takes your work, and lies, claiming they did it and you didn't, that's OK if no money is involved, and only becomes criminal if they are charging for it, right? Free in one sense is free in all senses, or none, right? Since either case implies a contradiction, there are no freedoms anywhere, right?
What you seem to be argueing is:
There's no such thing as freedom of worship, churches pass collection plates.
There's no freedom of travel, airline tickets cost money.
There's no freedom of speech, unless you own a TV station.
The GPL gives people some freedoms they do not otherwise have under law - more legal freedom than they have otherwise. You're complaining that it doesn't give all possible freedoms under all conditions, even freedoms that contradict each other. I'm not sure if you're even taking a position on the GPL as a matter of law - It's more like you have a problem with the very way reality itself is constructed, and think contract law can change reality.
*the details depend on the exact liscence, naturally. GPL'ed software is not the only free software out there.
(I am SO not a lawyer.)
This crime actually involves two seperate considerations:
1 CherryOS apparently is in violation of current copyright law.
1b. This violation aledgedly came about in part through breaking a contract (1 or more examples of the GPL). That's a civil matter, not a criminal one, so the GPL violations themselves definitely aren't theft in just about anyone's book.
2. In this particular case, the copyright violation was intended to lead to CherryOS getting paid money for someone else's work. That work was generally being given away, but with conditions. It is argueably worth money, and is being given away out of the goodness of the creator's hearts, rather than because it is worthless. Accepting the contract conditions was itself a form of payment that was also demonstratably worth money, simply because it costs many entities complying employee time and server space to make their own revisions avaiable. It can be argued reasonably that such type of profiting from other people's work without compensation is theft.
This is one perfect example of how copyright vioaltion by itself isn't theft. In this case, copyright violation was a tool that was used to attempt a theft. Contract violation was also a tool, but there are few people indeed arguing that all contract violations are criminal or, more particularly, the type of crime we call theft.
CherryOS could have violated a copyright on something without taking anything of real value. They could have used a 5 year old kid's refrigerator drawing without permission, and it could be widely apparent that no customer was buying their code because they wanted to get that drawing, and there would still be a technical violation of copyright.
CherryOS could have also tried to take the value of someone else's work by breaking a contract, without there being any copyright on the work involved. If CherryOS failed to pay the power company for electricty used, does there need to be a copyright on the electron flow before we call it theft? If copyright violation is theft, then we are essentially arguing that two thefts of the same item occurred, one by copyright violation, and the other by contract violation.
Is he upset that his lawyer (whom he did not pay) did not get to speak to lawyer at the RIAA? Doesn't the RIAA have the right to handle their case the way they want do?
;-)
Of course they have a right to let non-lawyer emploees handle assembling case records, fielding calls from opponent lawyers, and so on. The US has a legal right to send its troops into battle armed with nothing more than sharpened sticks and trash can lids,* but what does it say about the balance of power if we were fighting any foe where that would work?
Letting non-lawyers handle pre-trial relations with opposed lawyers is generally considered just as dumb as going into court without lawyers at all. It's suicidal - UNLESS you have such OVERWHELMING POWER THAT YOU OWN THE LEGAL SYSTEM. If I were a shareholder in any RIAA related company, I'd be asking what the hell they were doing, taking risks like that - OR - I'd know there were solid bribes and blackmail in place to let them get away with such apparent foolish risk taking.
You are welcome to draw your own conclusions as to why the RIAA client corps aren't getting upset about the non-lawyer involvement. Maybe most of them just aren't watching all that closely and in a few months we'll start seeing some investors making a (IMHO much needed) reassesment of the RIAA's strategy, or maybe this should be all the proof anyone needs that the whole thing is about power and not justice.
* Actually, I'm not sure the Geneva convention allows sharpened sticks, unless they are sterilized regularly.
One of the best comments I ever saw was along the lines of "Last Names are sorted into 27 groups, including "Mc".". It probably should have been more verbose, for as it turned out, an overseas developer still had no idea why that was being done and ignored it when modifying part of the code until the local prevalence of Scottish surnames was explained to him. Once someone who understood it read it though, both problem and solution became obvious.
... People love particular episodes, or particular dialog or plotlines or characters. So what's going to happen if the fans get another episode of Enterprise, and it's a "bad" episode? How will you feel if you paid to get more episodes, and that actor or actress you hoped would get some really good character development gets a lot of wooden lines and writing that seems to go totally against the character as already envisioned? What if you were hoping to see more Ferengi, and Paramount turns out three episodes with nary a Feringi in sight?
Right now, the fanbase is making a promise it can't keep - "Here's money! Give us Trek, and none of these thousands of investors will nit-pick about where that money went afterwards!".
Professionals in Hollywood know that, if you add more and more investors in a project, there will inevitably be more who complain later. With tens of thousands involved, this adds greatly to the uncertainty of the project. Anyone acting in it, or writng the scripts or even just doing the special effects becomes worried that they will get extra helpings of blame if it doesn't work out. At this point, the fanbase is asking a lot of people to take exceptional risks with their careers for little or no upside. Maybe Rick Berman deserves that, but do all the others involved? Again, maybe a few of the executives have already taken a negative impact on their future in Hollywood, and should, in 'fairness' have to seize on a chance to prove they could do better, even if the odds are against them, but Hollywood doesn't seem to be saying "You'll never work in this town again." to those execs, and it has a nasty tendency to say that to other people. Those other people are probably responsible for the parts of Enterprise somebody actually loves.
Lawrence V. Texas was found in favor of Lawrence. Since it would obviously be Lawrence that would have raised the issue of scientier if it had come up, if I had been referencing Lawrence, I would still have posted a claim that L. v. Texas was a possible precident to this one and not vice versa. I freely admit that I'm not an expert on law, but I'm also not dumb enough to think that a case decided in 2003 will be influenced by a case decided (we hope) by the end of 2005, instead of influencing the latter case. See, 2003 happened before 2005. It's called causality, and believe it or not, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand it.
Texas has had at least one legal challenge over textbooks every year since well before the turn of the millennium. There are over 20 such cases over the last 15 years. This is largely because Texas is very populous, and what they buy influences what's available for many other states to buy. Right now, there is one established case in process over the changes made by the Texas school boards in Nov of 2004, re. teaching of Evolution, and that's the case I was referring to. As it turns out, it looks like another Nov 2004 decision by the same school boards, re. Contraception Education, may also result in a challenge including the same grounds (that references to the established state laws were stricken). This, however, has some questions of standing on one of the parties seeking to file (Planned Parenthood), so I don't want to imply it will even necessarily get to a formal motion.