Eolas was originally spun off by a group of University of Cal. employees, and still enjoys close legal ties to the university. The corporation also lists as business associates the Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the University of Illinois. Eolas has been described as a one man band, with only one actual employee - in this case the man is:
"Founder Dr Mike Doyle was formerly director of the Academic Computer Center at UCSF and is an adjunct professor at two other universities."
(From The Register - March 4, 2005).
One of these adjunct professorships is: AP, Computer Science, DePaul University, Chicago.
(From Dr. Doyle's own website)
Eolas is apparently not publcly traded (Their website lists them as privately funded at present). In other words, while it has a contact point for venture capitalists interested, there is no general stock issued. This means (among many other things) Eolas has few or no restrictions on what it can list as its cental location for operations. Dr. Doyle may have incorporated under Ill. state law for any of a wide variety of reasons, i.e. lower cost than Ca., proximity to his more frequently occupied home address, or speed with which he expected an application to be processed.
Most companies that choose to incorporate under the laws of a state other than their physical own home choose one especially advantageous for them under corporate law. This is generally Connecticut . I can see why you and others are curious, as it is very hard to get any information on a small private corp. that it doesn't specifically release, but I'd just about bet that this is a straightforward decision in this case, and not something that indicates this lawsuit was long planned and the company somehow incorporated already planning to sue MS in a preferred venue.
(I am not a lwayer, and this is not legal advice for any person who thinks they face what may or may not be a similar situation)
One of the basic issues driving the airport case is the question of when ignorance of the law IS an excuse. The typical educated layman's answer is never - "Ignorance of the law is no excuse.". While that's generally good advice, real case law is slightly different. It sometimes involves a concept called scientier. The U.S. Supreme Court has defined "scientier" in one set of cases as: "a mental state embracing intent to deceive, manipulate, or defraud.". In various legal situations, it's definition is broader, but is generally about the intent of the accused.
Several scientier related cases have established that ignorance of a law can become an excuse - IF the ignorance is not the sole fault of the accused. One example of this would be a case where the state itself has put impediments in the way of learning what the law is, and another would be a case where there were substantial natural impediments.
There have been successful challenges at the highest levels (The Supremes basically), in cases where the impediment was natural: One classic case in the area is that of a bookstore (general , rather than "adult") owner, who was found not guilty of violating obscenity law on this principle. He displayed for sale copies of a Grove Press work that had made the state's banned list. However, the copies he recieved from his normal distributer had rather innocuous cover art and a title that was not particularly indicative of the type of work. The court ruled that his defense was sound - the law did not compel a normal person to go to the rediculous length of personally reading every book in a shipment of tens of thousands of copies, or paying thousands of dollars each year for the necessary (at that time) postage and labor to constantly check a lengthy inventory against a state list not made widely available, just to comply.
There are fewer good precidents for cases where the action of the state is involved, and fewer still that have made it to superior courts or the U.S. Supreme court. This looks to be a possible one.
Right now, there is a claim in Texas that holds some of the state laws on sexual conduct are invalid. It's based on the fact that an agency of the state government struck out specific references to those laws in the state's high school text books. The theory is that once one arm of the state acts to make it harder for a person to become educated about the law, the whole state government loses the normal claim that ignorance is no excuse.
This case hinges on the same claim. If it's really that hard to get to see an actual copy of the law involved, how can an individual who intends to comply with the law actually do it? A decision here will impact not just cases like the one in Texas, but may impact a lot of IRS/Tax law, as one of the claims frequently advanced there is that the law is literally too complicated to be understood.
But right now, cosmology is at a particular, historically characterizable point, when a lot of different speculations can theoretically be proved or disproved, but in practice we can't build the equipment. We could theoretically attain the enegrgies needed to show unification between the strong nuclear and electroweak forces, but we'd have to build a particle accelerator that stretches across Jupiter's orbit. We could theoretically pick which Superstring or "M" theories looked the most promising and throw out a thousand competitors, but we'll have to wait for 500 of those 18 month doublings under Moore's law before we can actually build a computer fast enough to process the data.
The Epicycle model didn't get questioned much, until it got so elaborate that it wasn't just 3 epicycles to explain Mars' apparent motion, it was 50 or so. The more we accumulated accurate observations, the more it became obvious Occam's Razor mattered. Eliptical orbits didn't look obviously simpler than a primitive version of the epicycle theory, but did look obviously simpler than its elaborated version.
This goes back to that pesky tangent on religion. When the gap between thoretically provable and practically provable gets large enough, what's the difference? "I'm not making a leap of faith here, it's a scientific prediction! It can be proved! No really! I just need the entire resources of the human race for the next 30,000 years at my personal beck and call, and I'll prove it!"
There's a lot of observed evidence that supports the claim physics, and particularly cosmology, is in the middle of one of those dreaded paradygm shifts. (Ha, got to use that overused word and actually need it - Mad props to Me!).
In other words, it would be very rash to conclude that our understanding of gravity is wrong, based solely on its predicting Dark Matter, but when you add in the evidence in other areas, the idea is starting to look just a trifle less rash.
The UN wasn't founded until Oct 24th 1945. Winston Churchill left office in late 45 when he lost against Atlee, reentered in the election of 51, and retired in 55 for health reasons.
Here's a section of Churchill's great speech on the Iron Curtain in 1946: If we adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations and walk forward in sedate and sober strength, seeking no one's land or treasure, seeking to lay no arbitrary control upon the thoughts of men, if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the high roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time but for a century to come.
From a speech at Wesminster in March 1946: A world organization has already been erected for the prime purpose of preventing war, UNO, the successor of the League of Nations, with the decisive addition of the United States and all that means, is already at work. We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel. Courts and magistrates may be set up but they cannot function without sheriffs and constables. The United Nations Organization must immediately begin to be equipped with an international armed force. In such a matter we can only go step by step, but we must begin now. I propose that each of the Powers and States should be invited to delegate a certain number of air squadrons to the service of the world organization.
I'm sure that Churchill is being quoted as having said a lot of things. That quote doesn't show up in his published sources under a basic search. If it really is one of Churchill's remarks, it still should be taken in context, i.e. a man who is advocating giving the UN more armed forces doesn't mean "whenever it's inconvenient", he really means "necessary".
As the article explains it (you do read the articles,don't you?). The.RAR has to be unpacked, to reveal a file with dual extensions - like "Pron.jpg.exe".
The user still has to be dumb enough to click on that.exe without running a virus scanner on it first. No one has made a.rar that somehow executes on its own.
The article expresses a fear that there are people out there in cluelessland that will think "Gee, I know I should scan.exe's that came packed in.zip's, but this came packed in another compression. Duuh! it must be safe!".
There may be three people on the whole planet who are actually at that particular mix of clueless and clueful states. The rest either still don't know the first thing about what a.rar or an.exe is, or they won't be fooled.
If a journalist tried to make us all afraid of the risk of terrorists that try to sneak through customs by disguising themselves as Mexican Banditos, complete with bandoleers of bullets, some people would probably buy that too.
The top 10% is always a highly motivated group that will seek to learn, whether the schools are any good or not. Practically, you could probably extend that to the top 1/3 or so - it's not like there's a sharp cutoff. At the other end, you have a bottom of at least 10% that is either utterly incapable of learning or has tremendous motivation problems.
All you can reasonably conclude from the top 10% doing well is either the teaching systems actually helped, or didn't matter one way or the other, or the systems sucked, but were unable to hinder these people enough to stop them from getting educated anyway. It's when you look at the next few tiers down, the students who were somewhat motivated, or showed progress at times but not others, or the students with blocks to learning that were small enough to be addressed by a time and money limited system, that you are starting to judge the teaching methods and the overall concepts driving a country's educational system.
How many older DOS boxes end up landfilled? There's some pretty environmentally unfriendly chemicals, such as lead in monitors, Poly-Chlorinated Bi-Phenyls or related compounds in power supply capacitors, and so on. Just about anything that gets a few more years use out of an old box for just the cost in electricity is a likely to be a good idea in that sense. It might even give the local society time enough to implement recycling or incineration for on all those old PC type hazardous materials.
Yes, depending on what else that box could handle, there may be better uses. Keeping a box networked to run protein folding models might be better, especially if it isn't adding much to the user's net access costs. I suppose it's possible even Seti at Home might work out. But coffee making (not popcorn, as others have pointed out), is still much better than junking the box while there's life left in it.
The method goes back to one of the space program's big successes. The first half of the Apollo project was very much a one step at a time program. We put one mission up with the whole major point just being to test if the CSM could turn around and dock with a LEM style hatch, and get set up in a configuration to go to the next stage of a moon mission, all done with a smaller booster than the Saturn V and never leaving earth's orbit.
Most of those early Apollo missions were about what's called "space science", meaning figuring out how to protect humans in space and still let them do other jobs, with those jobs to be determined later. Most of it didn't have a lot of any other science going on, although the general NASA rule was, (and mostly still is), if the astronauts aren't doing anything else at the moment, they can fill bags with vacuum samples, take photos out the window, or something.
NASA's new plan for the shuttle adds more "space science", as in using an inspection kit to check out the vehicle. From NASA's view, that's not dropping some science, it's doing more of one kind of science and having to do less of others. If you ask about "important experiments", they don't speak the same language you're using. You'll have to specify "important experiments that aren't space science" or most engineers and all the paper pushers will just blink at you. You've got two valid criticisms in your first paragraph, but speaking the lingo will help.
There's four major changes - 2 of them help spot problems, not fix them: 1. NASA launches only in daylight, so they have a better chance of photographing any damage that may happen. 2. The crew has a kit to help inspect the shuttle for damage.
Two changes actually reduce the risk of an accident: 1. The crew has a rudamentary repair kit, although NASA admits it's not as good as they had hoped for. 2. The main tank foam system has been redesigned. The biggest piece that it should be able to shed is supposed to be no bigger than a dinner roll, compared to the suitcase sized piece that hit Colombia.
What NASA hasn't done: 1. Gone back to a non-foamed tank design. 2. Found more ways to improve the range and scope of the repair kit, or else they haven't paid enough to implement every repair kit tool or patch they thought of.
What use are they?
There may or may not be patterns in the way Merseinne primes occur.
If there are any patterns in Merseinnes, we may need to find more examples than we had before we can find those patterns.
If we do find patterns, they may or may not help us find other patterns that apply to other types of large primes in more general ways.
There is no guarenteed use outside of abstract math, but there is at least a small possibility we could crack one of the really big problems in crypto starting from whatever patterns we might discover about Merseinnes.
We are spending a lot more on developing specific quantum computing applications that just may eventually lead to cracking that same problem. Given the relative budgets involved, if the Merseinne approach has even 1/1,000th of the chance of success it is still very cost effective (or we're spending way to much on quantum computing related crypto research).
I hear that you cant put it in densly populated water ways,
That's in itself a negative. There's always waste in transmitting power long distances. An energy source that is close to big cities is more ecologicaly sound, if only because it isn't wasting the part used in transmitting the rest. That can be 1/2 or more of all the power produced, in cases like TVA hydroelectric plants sending power 800 or 1,000 miles up and over to the north eastern seaboard.
If all the current waterways around cities like Boston or New York really have to be preserved for boats and we can't build these things close to them, then these systems have to be at least twice as good in every other respect than the alternatives, just to break even overall. Five or ten percent better just won't work, it's got to be at least twice just for starters.
Now if part of the coast near New York or Trenton could be taken out of use for pleasure boating, fishing, and at least small shipping, so wave enguines could be located as close as wind or nuclear or even fossil fuel plants theoretically could be, that's different. but then rebuilding that much infrastructure is itself a big down side.
It's not just a personal remark, it's an opinion on the Economist's overall quality, and at the same time, particularly the quality of this piece. The reviewer is saying that their work in this particular case is good enough to justify supporting their work in a more general way with his or her own money. That's a better recommendation for the original article than if he or she had said, "this article alone might not make me want to renew my subscription, but some other ones do", which would raise the question "Why aren't you discussing one of them then?".
He or she has given his or her reasons for choosing to discuss this article on Slashdot. Its subject is relevant here (in his or her opinion), and it's at least a very good article on the subject (again in his or her opinion). The original poster presumably considered both points in deciding to post, and not just the first one. The poster is thus trying to assure the readers he or she took some real efforts on their behalfs.
The article starts off supposed to be a review of a small form factor case. Most of the 'bragging features', like displaying which device failed a POST, only work with the recomended motherboard or maybe a few others, and there are some small form factor boards that will fit this case but won't let those features work. Someone shouhd have just started off writing a review that covers a bare bones system and not wasted time trying to just review the case and having to straddle the line.
Burned disks tend to age badly. Estimates are that you will lose about 1 disk in 10 after just two years, if you are like the avarge home media burner. Most will need recopied in four or five years at best. So if you hope to get the CD or DVD out again ten years down the road, better go with commercial media. That said, if you expect the disk to get scratched up in six months, or you get bored with the music in two, your incentives for buying a lasting one are non-existant anyway.
Here's to the RIAA - push ephemeral music for the I want it now generation, then wonder why people are moving to an ephemeral solution. The more you just want to play what's new! new! new!, the better burning your own looks.
Re:I think more people should read the ProCD case.
on
The Basics of EULAs
·
· Score: 1
Another example quoted was purchasing concert tickets. The terms of the concert may be no cameras, and it is enforcable. You agree to behave after the rules of the concert by being there, even though you didn't agree to those terms before purchasing the ticket.
Back starting about the 1920s, motion picture theater owners sought state laws to protect their abilty to sell food and bar patrons from bringing in food from outside, to control unruly patrons and so on. Most states adopted versions that also applied to live theatres, concert halls, and colluseums. Some states even extended these laws to amusement park rides and such. In general, these laws specify two exemptions to normal principle of contracts - you didn't actually sign anything, but you agreed just by buying a ticket & you didn't actually have all the rules quoted at you, let alone presented in writing.
The point is, a concert hall's no cameras policy usually does not rest on normal contract law alone, and so isn't necessarily something a judge should have cited as a contract law precident. It may even be a precident against - An indication that the states need to adopt special laws as they did before if similar clauses in EULAs are to be enforcable.
Thanks - I've been using spybot once a week for months and never noticed I can skin it to match all my other stuff. I'm running about two dozen apps I skinned myself in the same style, so if spybot is all that skinnable, I'm about to make it number 25. Now what was that about consistency? If I can really make this program look and work more like 24 others - that is consistency.
"Hello Consistency! Say, you're sure breathing hard!" "Yes Arti-(pant!) fakt, I just ran around the block to get back where I (pant! pant!) started."
I really do take consistency into account, and I'm just hoping spybot's one of the good skinable programs, and not one that is stubborn about only allowing limited tweaks that won't let me mimic similar functions in other programs consistently for my taste. If there is a good reason why spybot has a skinning mechanism, we have to assume we both mean by that it has one sufficient to the task, which it sounds like you don't know one way or the other, and I won't know either until I try skinning it. In the meantime, I can see some reasons why spybot might need skinability, but I can't prove spybot's programmer thought of those same reasons.
As just one, maybe spybot can be skinned so a less-than clueful user can't turn off the backup all entries before deleting function, by not allowing the less-than-clueful to change some settings. Now 'consistency' would say that we should use the windows standard feature and gray out some button text, but it might be more effective to make that button go away entirely for some users. If I had some sort of admin authority over spybot but had to support end users on a large scale basis, I might like that.
Oh, the first poster wanted across the board consistency for randomly selected other people, a.k.a. all windows users.
That's where we seem to disagree. I use my home network. I built it, I paid for it, I own it, I maintain it. If I want to make anything "just look cool", that's my business, and any request for a reasonable explanation turns into a request I explain why I should be allowed to have a right before someone will acknowledge I have it. If it's my stuff, sombeody else isn't the person who decides which choices I make with it are reasonable and well thought out and which are not. I'll give someone like you a bit of a reasonable explanation, both because you told me something useful (Thanks again), and as a courtesy in general, but can you explain to me, in a rational-and-well-thought-out-manner, why you seem to be thinking you are entitled to critique how well I have or haven't thought about what I do with my property? We all tend to do this every time we see a middle aged guy buy a sports car, but I think we owe people the benefit of a doubt, i.e. if many customers are asking for skinability, then we should assume at least some of them have some good reasons unless there's some positive evidence they haven't, not proceed from the opposite assumption.
If something I choose makes it harder for 100 milllion other people to come into my home and use my systems, so what, they weren't invited to come into my home at all. If I want to be determined about it, easier for me personally is all that counts. I may even want to make it deliberately harder for everyone else in the world to use my stuff, just to get a color combination that I like seeing for what may be hours at a time, or just because I want to make it tougher for little Bobby to delete a file he shouldn't be deleting. Anyone who wants to move or delete files on my systems had better at least be willing to learn where the controls have been moved first.
Now pragmatically, I'm one of the people who will criticize a given skin design for having hard to find functions, limited usability, or more style than substance. I don't want to produce skins only I would find useable. It's just that even if somebody does deliberately produce a design only a few people, or even just one would prefer, I don't think its meaningful to claim that makes that person irrational or unthinking.
You can certainly go bankrupt even if you did nothing wrong, if someone wants it really bad.
Right in one. For a company sueing a private individual, in a copyright case it would be pretty cost effective to file for a court order siezing PCs and such as evidence, or to seek a restraining injunction keeping the person from using computers during the course of the trial, and to encourage a judge to interpret that rule in a rather draconian manner. This was done to Kevin Mitnick, for one infamous example. How cheap is it to defend yourself when you can't personally touch so much as a pocket calculator to total up the financial damages claimed and compare them with your counterclaim? There you would be, personally, mentally able to research much of your defense yourself on the internet, but having to either hire someone else to do it or to take off time from work to travel physically and consult paper copies of lawbooks.
In some other areas, we've seen injunctions that forced a person to stop using their home, their business, or professional equipment. How far away is bankrupcy when you are still paying on a mortgage, having to rent somewhere else? Or your warehouse is padlocked? Or you're paying for a delivery truck you can't drive? Fortunately, its more of a stretch in a case involving file sharing than in most cases involving tangible goods, but it's by no means unlikely some judges would approve such an injunction.
Fileing a motion to delay is very cheap (In most states, a stock form can be used, a professional can do it for an hour's legal service charges, say $150 to $400, if the company doesn't have its own lawyers), and can cost the other party tens of thousands in a case where they can't use some of their assets.
In some of the dirtyest cases, litigants have blocked a person from doing business, delayed the trial repeatedly, and then brought the deplorable condition of the opponent's finances to the attention of human services, so that the opponent was stuck spending his remaining resources fighting having his kids taken away.
One of the dirtyest lawyers in my locale was just finally disbarred, basically for telling a woman dieing of cancer that she should settle immediately, or he would file enough liens against the estate that her high school age kids would never see a penny of their college education. He ended up on record for having said that, even if all the paperwork was baseless, he could "delay the will being probated by a good ten years, and how much would college cost by then?". By rumor, he pulled such tricks at least several times before getting caught. I'd say he fits that definition, "someone wants it really bad".
Doesn't this show how flawed the law is? If Bit Torrent was never intended to facilitate copyright violation, or it would have been much more decentralized, then what's the justification for a lawsuite against bittorrent?
Your point seems to show that all those tossing out metaphors such as "It's like sueing the auto maker for making the getaway car!" are actually right.
When can we expect judges to start chewing out litigants for wasting the court's time on rediculous claims and poppycock legal theories, and actually dismissing cases with prejudice?
1. If all the fiction you've read on the three laws is Asimov himself, try reading jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" (a.k.a "The Humanoids") or even its spinoffs such as "... And Searching Mind". If you end up agreeing that a program trying to translate the 3 laws into real instructions could result in a Humanoids type situation (where a robot culture won't let humans take any risks at all), as easily as the typical Asimovian one, you'll have a workable standard to judge this arguement, and most of the rest for the next 50 years as we "slide into the singularity".
2. C. S. Lewis, in a mere children's book - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - wrote: "..take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet." I'm not so worried about a genuine free willed AI wanting of itself to be seen as human or human equivalent, but something that isn't really at a human level being built, for another being's purposes, to fake only the more superficial aspects.
I don't consider that aspect of nethack superior. I once had a character that died, by falling through a trapdoor, down two levels, into a teleporter (down two more levels), into another trapdoor (down another level), to arrive at a cross intersection. Uh,oh! Something that looks like a vampire but wrong color to the east, something that looks like a floating eye but wrong color to the south. Go west. Turns out there were invisible monsters to both the west and north, and more invisible monsters behind in all directions. Character got paralyzed for (at a guess) 384 turns, drained simultaneously in every ability score, all life, all carried items, and had a half a dozen other causes of probably to guarenteed death inflicted simultaneously, all without a chance to even see most of what was doing it to him.
Yes, Nethack lets the player gain skill, but that's meaningless if you don't actually win a game via that increased skill but only because the random number generator finally gave you a 1 in 100 or worse winnable combination where applying that skill mattered.
A commercial game that did this would lose all their money on returns. It's no more acceptable just because it's freeware. You know that guy you quit playing D&D with because he kept killing off the entire party in the first 10 minutes? He was a jerk. He was a bully. The rest of the world figured that out.
Like it or not, if you tell 100 acquantences about Nethack, you just turned 98 off to free software, at least until they encounter a counter example. You can't understand why people don't listen to you about Firefox? Did you tell them about Nethack first?
The naming process really doesn't disappoint me. The commission allowed asteroid discoverers to assign names within certain limits, and ended up with a huge number of odd female names like Swedenborgia stuck on asteroids.
What I was poking a bit of fun at, is the press coverage of Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter got the "9" part right, and most of the coverage of this event (including here on/.) has missed giving the full name of the comet or the count of how many Don Machholz has discovered, or for that matter any account of who he is. To be fair, a lot of the S-L 9 coverage misspelled David Levy's name Levi, much like my own accidental misspelling, but then I'm just/.'ing, not writing here for pay. I half wish I could claim that I deliberately misspelled the name in imitation of the professionals who are making the same mistake in the popular press - I'd look witty instead of amateurish.
This is slashdot, everything is 100% Microsoft's fault.
Seriously, what percentage is reasonable to assign? I tend to install beta versions, freeware, and do lots of interface tweaking. When one of those screws up the machine, I usually figure its not Microsoft's fault at all (0%). That's easier to do when you are competent to edit the registry a bit, or at least to type scanreg/restore at a DOS prompt on older boxes. Most users aren't. Throwing blame matters more when you can't easily fix the problem.
What's expected of the user's where I break with the blame Microsoft first crowd. You would have to have about the above skill level to admin a single Linux box (or to install it in the first place), or to get real use out of the underlieing parts of OS-X. All PC like systems seem to require about that level, just in different spots.
What about 3rd party software that MS actually puts its 'seal of approval' on? If Microsoft approves of a program that handles DLL versioning poorly, or even one that wants to put all its DLL's in assorted subfolders of Windows, but not the System folder, then hide those folders, what percentage of the blame for the resulting problems seems reasonable? It's Microsoft's trademark these software creators are displaying on their packaging or websites. Has Microsoft allowed its trademark to be abused?
This (IMNSHO) is the real challenge for MS customer support - not reliability or security, but risking not having so much certified windows compatable 3rd party software out there, just so the more knowlegeable end user can be sure that what is out there really works with Windows.
Tell me, if I had said, "unlike lions (big carnivorous things) rabbits can't bite harder than a typical 2 year old.", would you have misquoted me to claim that I was saying lions can't bite any harder than 2 year old humans? Before you start throwing around terms such as "blind assertion", you need to learn to read.
Re: your earlier remarks - Dept. Interior patrols of much of the border are carefully scheduled and recorded in advance, as they are not matters of simply driving along a road for a normal day's work. Actual border hike patrols take place in some locations less than 1x/year, and in some cases are 2 weeks plus operations requiring planned reprovisions by airplane.
Slashdot Mirror
Eolas was originally spun off by a group of University of Cal. employees, and still enjoys close legal ties to the university. The corporation also lists as business associates the Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the University of Illinois.
Eolas has been described as a one man band, with only one actual employee - in this case the man is:
"Founder Dr Mike Doyle was formerly director of the Academic Computer Center at UCSF and is an adjunct professor at two other universities."
(From The Register - March 4, 2005).
One of these adjunct professorships is: AP, Computer Science, DePaul University, Chicago.
(From Dr. Doyle's own website)
Eolas is apparently not publcly traded (Their website lists them as privately funded at present). In other words, while it has a contact point for venture capitalists interested, there is no general stock issued. This means (among many other things) Eolas has few or no restrictions on what it can list as its cental location for operations. Dr. Doyle may have incorporated under Ill. state law for any of a wide variety of reasons, i.e. lower cost than Ca., proximity to his more frequently occupied home address, or speed with which he expected an application to be processed.
Most companies that choose to incorporate under the laws of a state other than their physical own home choose one especially advantageous for them under corporate law. This is generally Connecticut . I can see why you and others are curious, as it is very hard to get any information on a small private corp. that it doesn't specifically release, but I'd just about bet that this is a straightforward decision in this case, and not something that indicates this lawsuit was long planned and the company somehow incorporated already planning to sue MS in a preferred venue.
(I am not a lwayer, and this is not legal advice for any person who thinks they face what may or may not be a similar situation)
One of the basic issues driving the airport case is the question of when ignorance of the law IS an excuse. The typical educated layman's answer is never - "Ignorance of the law is no excuse.". While that's generally good advice, real case law is slightly different. It sometimes involves a concept called scientier. The U.S. Supreme Court has defined "scientier" in one set of cases as: "a mental state embracing intent to deceive, manipulate, or defraud.". In various legal situations, it's definition is broader, but is generally about the intent of the accused.
Several scientier related cases have established that ignorance of a law can become an excuse - IF the ignorance is not the sole fault of the accused. One example of this would be a case where the state itself has put impediments in the way of learning what the law is, and another would be a case where there were substantial natural impediments.
There have been successful challenges at the highest levels (The Supremes basically), in cases where the impediment was natural: One classic case in the area is that of a bookstore (general , rather than "adult") owner, who was found not guilty of violating obscenity law on this principle. He displayed for sale copies of a Grove Press work that had made the state's banned list. However, the copies he recieved from his normal distributer had rather innocuous cover art and a title that was not particularly indicative of the type of work. The court ruled that his defense was sound - the law did not compel a normal person to go to the rediculous length of personally reading every book in a shipment of tens of thousands of copies, or paying thousands of dollars each year for the necessary (at that time) postage and labor to constantly check a lengthy inventory against a state list not made widely available, just to comply.
There are fewer good precidents for cases where the action of the state is involved, and fewer still that have made it to superior courts or the U.S. Supreme court. This looks to be a possible one.
Right now, there is a claim in Texas that holds some of the state laws on sexual conduct are invalid. It's based on the fact that an agency of the state government struck out specific references to those laws in the state's high school text books. The theory is that once one arm of the state acts to make it harder for a person to become educated about the law, the whole state government loses the normal claim that ignorance is no excuse.
This case hinges on the same claim. If it's really that hard to get to see an actual copy of the law involved, how can an individual who intends to comply with the law actually do it? A decision here will impact not just cases like the one in Texas, but may impact a lot of IRS/Tax law, as one of the claims frequently advanced there is that the law is literally too complicated to be understood.
But right now, cosmology is at a particular, historically characterizable point, when a lot of different speculations can theoretically be proved or disproved, but in practice we can't build the equipment. We could theoretically attain the enegrgies needed to show unification between the strong nuclear and electroweak forces, but we'd have to build a particle accelerator that stretches across Jupiter's orbit. We could theoretically pick which Superstring or "M" theories looked the most promising and throw out a thousand competitors, but we'll have to wait for 500 of those 18 month doublings under Moore's law before we can actually build a computer fast enough to process the data.
The Epicycle model didn't get questioned much, until it got so elaborate that it wasn't just 3 epicycles to explain Mars' apparent motion, it was 50 or so. The more we accumulated accurate observations, the more it became obvious Occam's Razor mattered. Eliptical orbits didn't look obviously simpler than a primitive version of the epicycle theory, but did look obviously simpler than its elaborated version.
This goes back to that pesky tangent on religion. When the gap between thoretically provable and practically provable gets large enough, what's the difference? "I'm not making a leap of faith here, it's a scientific prediction! It can be proved! No really! I just need the entire resources of the human race for the next 30,000 years at my personal beck and call, and I'll prove it!"
There's a lot of observed evidence that supports the claim physics, and particularly cosmology, is in the middle of one of those dreaded paradygm shifts. (Ha, got to use that overused word and actually need it - Mad props to Me!).
In other words, it would be very rash to conclude that our understanding of gravity is wrong, based solely on its predicting Dark Matter, but when you add in the evidence in other areas, the idea is starting to look just a trifle less rash.
The UN wasn't founded until Oct 24th 1945. Winston Churchill left office in late 45 when he lost against Atlee, reentered in the election of 51, and retired in 55 for health reasons.
Here's a section of Churchill's great speech on the Iron Curtain in 1946:
If we adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations and walk forward in sedate and sober strength, seeking no one's land or treasure, seeking to lay no arbitrary control upon the thoughts of men, if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the high roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time but for a century to come.
From a speech at Wesminster in March 1946:
A world organization has already been erected for the prime purpose of preventing war, UNO, the successor of the League of Nations, with the decisive addition of the United States and all that means, is already at work. We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.
Courts and magistrates may be set up but they cannot function without sheriffs and constables. The United Nations Organization must immediately begin to be equipped with an international armed force. In such a matter we can only go step by step, but we must begin now. I propose that each of the Powers and States should be invited to delegate a certain number of air squadrons to the service of the world organization.
I'm sure that Churchill is being quoted as having said a lot of things. That quote doesn't show up in his published sources under a basic search. If it really is one of Churchill's remarks, it still should be taken in context, i.e. a man who is advocating giving the UN more armed forces doesn't mean "whenever it's inconvenient", he really means "necessary".
As the article explains it (you do read the articles ,don't you?). The .RAR has to be unpacked, to reveal a file with dual extensions - like "Pron.jpg.exe". .exe without running a virus scanner on it first. No one has made a .rar that somehow executes on its own. .exe's that came packed in .zip's, but this came packed in another compression. Duuh! it must be safe!". .rar or an .exe is, or they won't be fooled.
The user still has to be dumb enough to click on that
The article expresses a fear that there are people out there in cluelessland that will think "Gee, I know I should scan
There may be three people on the whole planet who are actually at that particular mix of clueless and clueful states. The rest either still don't know the first thing about what a
If a journalist tried to make us all afraid of the risk of terrorists that try to sneak through customs by disguising themselves as Mexican Banditos, complete with bandoleers of bullets, some people would probably buy that too.
The top 10% is always a highly motivated group that will seek to learn, whether the schools are any good or not. Practically, you could probably extend that to the top 1/3 or so - it's not like there's a sharp cutoff. At the other end, you have a bottom of at least 10% that is either utterly incapable of learning or has tremendous motivation problems.
All you can reasonably conclude from the top 10% doing well is either the teaching systems actually helped, or didn't matter one way or the other, or the systems sucked, but were unable to hinder these people enough to stop them from getting educated anyway. It's when you look at the next few tiers down, the students who were somewhat motivated, or showed progress at times but not others, or the students with blocks to learning that were small enough to be addressed by a time and money limited system, that you are starting to judge the teaching methods and the overall concepts driving a country's educational system.
How many older DOS boxes end up landfilled? There's some pretty environmentally unfriendly chemicals, such as lead in monitors, Poly-Chlorinated Bi-Phenyls or related compounds in power supply capacitors, and so on. Just about anything that gets a few more years use out of an old box for just the cost in electricity is a likely to be a good idea in that sense. It might even give the local society time enough to implement recycling or incineration for on all those old PC type hazardous materials.
Yes, depending on what else that box could handle, there may be better uses. Keeping a box networked to run protein folding models might be better, especially if it isn't adding much to the user's net access costs. I suppose it's possible even Seti at Home might work out. But coffee making (not popcorn, as others have pointed out), is still much better than junking the box while there's life left in it.
The method goes back to one of the space program's big successes. The first half of the Apollo project was very much a one step at a time program. We put one mission up with the whole major point just being to test if the CSM could turn around and dock with a LEM style hatch, and get set up in a configuration to go to the next stage of a moon mission, all done with a smaller booster than the Saturn V and never leaving earth's orbit.
Most of those early Apollo missions were about what's called "space science", meaning figuring out how to protect humans in space and still let them do other jobs, with those jobs to be determined later. Most of it didn't have a lot of any other science going on, although the general NASA rule was, (and mostly still is), if the astronauts aren't doing anything else at the moment, they can fill bags with vacuum samples, take photos out the window, or something.
NASA's new plan for the shuttle adds more "space science", as in using an inspection kit to check out the vehicle. From NASA's view, that's not dropping some science, it's doing more of one kind of science and having to do less of others. If you ask about "important experiments", they don't speak the same language you're using. You'll have to specify "important experiments that aren't space science" or most engineers and all the paper pushers will just blink at you. You've got two valid criticisms in your first paragraph, but speaking the lingo will help.
For starters, try:w s/1107178933995_11?hub=SciTech
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNe
There's four major changes - 2 of them help spot problems, not fix them:
1. NASA launches only in daylight, so they have a better chance of photographing any damage that may happen.
2. The crew has a kit to help inspect the shuttle for damage.
Two changes actually reduce the risk of an accident:
1. The crew has a rudamentary repair kit, although NASA admits it's not as good as they had hoped for.
2. The main tank foam system has been redesigned. The biggest piece that it should be able to shed is supposed to be no bigger than a dinner roll, compared to the suitcase sized piece that hit Colombia.
What NASA hasn't done: 1. Gone back to a non-foamed tank design. 2. Found more ways to improve the range and scope of the repair kit, or else they haven't paid enough to implement every repair kit tool or patch they thought of.
I've found the trick, but it's too large to include in the margin of this little box Slashdot gives me. :-)
What use are they?
There may or may not be patterns in the way Merseinne primes occur.
If there are any patterns in Merseinnes, we may need to find more examples than we had before we can find those patterns.
If we do find patterns, they may or may not help us find other patterns that apply to other types of large primes in more general ways.
There is no guarenteed use outside of abstract math, but there is at least a small possibility we could crack one of the really big problems in crypto starting from whatever patterns we might discover about Merseinnes.
We are spending a lot more on developing specific quantum computing applications that just may eventually lead to cracking that same problem. Given the relative budgets involved, if the Merseinne approach has even 1/1,000th of the chance of success it is still very cost effective (or we're spending way to much on quantum computing related crypto research).
we can answer David Bowie's question.
Uhm, Was that "Why am I so f*ing strange?"?
I hear that you cant put it in densly populated water ways,
That's in itself a negative. There's always waste in transmitting power long distances. An energy source that is close to big cities is more ecologicaly sound, if only because it isn't wasting the part used in transmitting the rest. That can be 1/2 or more of all the power produced, in cases like TVA hydroelectric plants sending power 800 or 1,000 miles up and over to the north eastern seaboard.
If all the current waterways around cities like Boston or New York really have to be preserved for boats and we can't build these things close to them, then these systems have to be at least twice as good in every other respect than the alternatives, just to break even overall. Five or ten percent better just won't work, it's got to be at least twice just for starters.
Now if part of the coast near New York or Trenton could be taken out of use for pleasure boating, fishing, and at least small shipping, so wave enguines could be located as close as wind or nuclear or even fossil fuel plants theoretically could be, that's different. but then rebuilding that much infrastructure is itself a big down side.
It's not just a personal remark, it's an opinion on the Economist's overall quality, and at the same time, particularly the quality of this piece. The reviewer is saying that their work in this particular case is good enough to justify supporting their work in a more general way with his or her own money. That's a better recommendation for the original article than if he or she had said, "this article alone might not make me want to renew my subscription, but some other ones do", which would raise the question "Why aren't you discussing one of them then?".
He or she has given his or her reasons for choosing to discuss this article on Slashdot. Its subject is relevant here (in his or her opinion), and it's at least a very good article on the subject (again in his or her opinion). The original poster presumably considered both points in deciding to post, and not just the first one. The poster is thus trying to assure the readers he or she took some real efforts on their behalfs.
The article starts off supposed to be a review of a small form factor case. Most of the 'bragging features', like displaying which device failed a POST, only work with the recomended motherboard or maybe a few others, and there are some small form factor boards that will fit this case but won't let those features work. Someone shouhd have just started off writing a review that covers a bare bones system and not wasted time trying to just review the case and having to straddle the line.
Burned disks tend to age badly. Estimates are that you will lose about 1 disk in 10 after just two years, if you are like the avarge home media burner. Most will need recopied in four or five years at best. So if you hope to get the CD or DVD out again ten years down the road, better go with commercial media. That said, if you expect the disk to get scratched up in six months, or you get bored with the music in two, your incentives for buying a lasting one are non-existant anyway.
Here's to the RIAA - push ephemeral music for the I want it now generation, then wonder why people are moving to an ephemeral solution. The more you just want to play what's new! new! new!, the better burning your own looks.
Another example quoted was purchasing concert tickets. The terms of the concert may be no cameras, and it is enforcable. You agree to behave after the rules of the concert by being there, even though you didn't agree to those terms before purchasing the ticket.
Back starting about the 1920s, motion picture theater owners sought state laws to protect their abilty to sell food and bar patrons from bringing in food from outside, to control unruly patrons and so on. Most states adopted versions that also applied to live theatres, concert halls, and colluseums. Some states even extended these laws to amusement park rides and such. In general, these laws specify two exemptions to normal principle of contracts - you didn't actually sign anything, but you agreed just by buying a ticket & you didn't actually have all the rules quoted at you, let alone presented in writing.
The point is, a concert hall's no cameras policy usually does not rest on normal contract law alone, and so isn't necessarily something a judge should have cited as a contract law precident. It may even be a precident against - An indication that the states need to adopt special laws as they did before if similar clauses in EULAs are to be enforcable.
Thanks - I've been using spybot once a week for months and never noticed I can skin it to match all my other stuff. I'm running about two dozen apps I skinned myself in the same style, so if spybot is all that skinnable, I'm about to make it number 25. Now what was that about consistency? If I can really make this program look and work more like 24 others - that is consistency.
"Hello Consistency! Say, you're sure breathing hard!"
"Yes Arti-(pant!) fakt, I just ran around the block to get back where I (pant! pant!) started."
I really do take consistency into account, and I'm just hoping spybot's one of the good skinable programs, and not one that is stubborn about only allowing limited tweaks that won't let me mimic similar functions in other programs consistently for my taste.
If there is a good reason why spybot has a skinning mechanism, we have to assume we both mean by that it has one sufficient to the task, which it sounds like you don't know one way or the other, and I won't know either until I try skinning it. In the meantime, I can see some reasons why spybot might need skinability, but I can't prove spybot's programmer thought of those same reasons.
As just one, maybe spybot can be skinned so a less-than clueful user can't turn off the backup all entries before deleting function, by not allowing the less-than-clueful to change some settings. Now 'consistency' would say that we should use the windows standard feature and gray out some button text, but it might be more effective to make that button go away entirely for some users. If I had some sort of admin authority over spybot but had to support end users on a large scale basis, I might like that.
Oh, the first poster wanted across the board consistency for randomly selected other people, a.k.a. all windows users.
That's where we seem to disagree. I use my home network. I built it, I paid for it, I own it, I maintain it. If I want to make anything "just look cool", that's my business, and any request for a reasonable explanation turns into a request I explain why I should be allowed to have a right before someone will acknowledge I have it. If it's my stuff, sombeody else isn't the person who decides which choices I make with it are reasonable and well thought out and which are not. I'll give someone like you a bit of a reasonable explanation, both because you told me something useful (Thanks again), and as a courtesy in general, but can you explain to me, in a rational-and-well-thought-out-manner, why you seem to be thinking you are entitled to critique how well I have or haven't thought about what I do with my property? We all tend to do this every time we see a middle aged guy buy a sports car, but I think we owe people the benefit of a doubt, i.e. if many customers are asking for skinability, then we should assume at least some of them have some good reasons unless there's some positive evidence they haven't, not proceed from the opposite assumption.
If something I choose makes it harder for 100 milllion other people to come into my home and use my systems, so what, they weren't invited to come into my home at all. If I want to be determined about it, easier for me personally is all that counts. I may even want to make it deliberately harder for everyone else in the world to use my stuff, just to get a color combination that I like seeing for what may be hours at a time, or just because I want to make it tougher for little Bobby to delete a file he shouldn't be deleting. Anyone who wants to move or delete files on my systems had better at least be willing to learn where the controls have been moved first.
Now pragmatically, I'm one of the people who will criticize a given skin design for having hard to find functions, limited usability, or more style than substance. I don't want to produce skins only I would find useable. It's just that even if somebody does deliberately produce a design only a few people, or even just one would prefer, I don't think its meaningful to claim that makes that person irrational or unthinking.
You can certainly go bankrupt even if you did nothing wrong, if someone wants it really bad.
Right in one. For a company sueing a private individual, in a copyright case it would be pretty cost effective to file for a court order siezing PCs and such as evidence, or to seek a restraining injunction keeping the person from using computers during the course of the trial, and to encourage a judge to interpret that rule in a rather draconian manner. This was done to Kevin Mitnick, for one infamous example. How cheap is it to defend yourself when you can't personally touch so much as a pocket calculator to total up the financial damages claimed and compare them with your counterclaim? There you would be, personally, mentally able to research much of your defense yourself on the internet, but having to either hire someone else to do it or to take off time from work to travel physically and consult paper copies of lawbooks.
In some other areas, we've seen injunctions that forced a person to stop using their home, their business, or professional equipment. How far away is bankrupcy when you are still paying on a mortgage, having to rent somewhere else? Or your warehouse is padlocked? Or you're paying for a delivery truck you can't drive? Fortunately, its more of a stretch in a case involving file sharing than in most cases involving tangible goods, but it's by no means unlikely some judges would approve such an injunction.
Fileing a motion to delay is very cheap (In most states, a stock form can be used, a professional can do it for an hour's legal service charges, say $150 to $400, if the company doesn't have its own lawyers), and can cost the other party tens of thousands in a case where they can't use some of their assets.
In some of the dirtyest cases, litigants have blocked a person from doing business, delayed the trial repeatedly, and then brought the deplorable condition of the opponent's finances to the attention of human services, so that the opponent was stuck spending his remaining resources fighting having his kids taken away.
One of the dirtyest lawyers in my locale was just finally disbarred, basically for telling a woman dieing of cancer that she should settle immediately, or he would file enough liens against the estate that her high school age kids would never see a penny of their college education. He ended up on record for having said that, even if all the paperwork was baseless, he could "delay the will being probated by a good ten years, and how much would college cost by then?". By rumor, he pulled such tricks at least several times before getting caught. I'd say he fits that definition, "someone wants it really bad".
Doesn't this show how flawed the law is? If Bit Torrent was never intended to facilitate copyright violation, or it would have been much more decentralized, then what's the justification for a lawsuite against bittorrent?
Your point seems to show that all those tossing out metaphors such as "It's like sueing the auto maker for making the getaway car!" are actually right.
When can we expect judges to start chewing out litigants for wasting the court's time on rediculous claims and poppycock legal theories, and actually dismissing cases with prejudice?
Two literary references apply strongly.
1. If all the fiction you've read on the three laws is Asimov himself, try reading jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" (a.k.a "The Humanoids") or even its spinoffs such as "... And Searching Mind". If you end up agreeing that a program trying to translate the 3 laws into real instructions could result in a Humanoids type situation (where a robot culture won't let humans take any risks at all), as easily as the typical Asimovian one, you'll have a workable standard to judge this arguement, and most of the rest for the next 50 years as we "slide into the singularity".
2. C. S. Lewis, in a mere children's book - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - wrote: "..take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet." I'm not so worried about a genuine free willed AI wanting of itself to be seen as human or human equivalent, but something that isn't really at a human level being built, for another being's purposes, to fake only the more superficial aspects.
I don't consider that aspect of nethack superior.
I once had a character that died, by falling through a trapdoor, down two levels, into a teleporter (down two more levels), into another trapdoor (down another level), to arrive at a cross intersection. Uh,oh! Something that looks like a vampire but wrong color to the east, something that looks like a floating eye but wrong color to the south. Go west. Turns out there were invisible monsters to both the west and north, and more invisible monsters behind in all directions. Character got paralyzed for (at a guess) 384 turns, drained simultaneously in every ability score, all life, all carried items, and had a half a dozen other causes of probably to guarenteed death inflicted simultaneously, all without a chance to even see most of what was doing it to him.
Yes, Nethack lets the player gain skill, but that's meaningless if you don't actually win a game via that increased skill but only because the random number generator finally gave you a 1 in 100 or worse winnable combination where applying that skill mattered.
A commercial game that did this would lose all their money on returns. It's no more acceptable just because it's freeware. You know that guy you quit playing D&D with because he kept killing off the entire party in the first 10 minutes? He was a jerk. He was a bully. The rest of the world figured that out.
Like it or not, if you tell 100 acquantences about Nethack, you just turned 98 off to free software, at least until they encounter a counter example. You can't understand why people don't listen to you about Firefox? Did you tell them about Nethack first?
The naming process really doesn't disappoint me. The commission allowed asteroid discoverers to assign names within certain limits, and ended up with a huge number of odd female names like Swedenborgia stuck on asteroids. /.) has missed giving the full name of the comet or the count of how many Don Machholz has discovered, or for that matter any account of who he is. To be fair, a lot of the S-L 9 coverage misspelled David Levy's name Levi, much like my own accidental misspelling, but then I'm just /.'ing, not writing here for pay. I half wish I could claim that I deliberately misspelled the name in imitation of the professionals who are making the same mistake in the popular press - I'd look witty instead of amateurish.
What I was poking a bit of fun at, is the press coverage of Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter got the "9" part right, and most of the coverage of this event (including here on
This is slashdot, everything is 100% Microsoft's fault.
/restore at a DOS prompt on older boxes. Most users aren't. Throwing blame matters more when you can't easily fix the problem.
Seriously, what percentage is reasonable to assign? I tend to install beta versions, freeware, and do lots of interface tweaking. When one of those screws up the machine, I usually figure its not Microsoft's fault at all (0%). That's easier to do when you are competent to edit the registry a bit, or at least to type scanreg
What's expected of the user's where I break with the blame Microsoft first crowd. You would have to have about the above skill level to admin a single Linux box (or to install it in the first place), or to get real use out of the underlieing parts of OS-X. All PC like systems seem to require about that level, just in different spots.
What about 3rd party software that MS actually puts its 'seal of approval' on? If Microsoft approves of a program that handles DLL versioning poorly, or even one that wants to put all its DLL's in assorted subfolders of Windows, but not the System folder, then hide those folders, what percentage of the blame for the resulting problems seems reasonable? It's Microsoft's trademark these software creators are displaying on their packaging or websites. Has Microsoft allowed its trademark to be abused?
This (IMNSHO) is the real challenge for MS customer support - not reliability or security, but risking not having so much certified windows compatable 3rd party software out there, just so the more knowlegeable end user can be sure that what is out there really works with Windows.
Tell me, if I had said, "unlike lions (big carnivorous things) rabbits can't bite harder than a typical 2 year old.", would you have misquoted me to claim that I was saying lions can't bite any harder than 2 year old humans? Before you start throwing around terms such as "blind assertion", you need to learn to read.
Re: your earlier remarks - Dept. Interior patrols of much of the border are carefully scheduled and recorded in advance, as they are not matters of simply driving along a road for a normal day's work. Actual border hike patrols take place in some locations less than 1x/year, and in some cases are 2 weeks plus operations requiring planned reprovisions by airplane.