Harvard, naturally, has its own classification system, neither Dewey Decimal nor Library of Congress. (It switched to LC some time ago, but only for new acquisitions, so when I was a student, the collection was in two parts.) The leading theory when I was an undergrad was that the basis for ordering in the Harvard system was height of author.
They might go 1984-style on us and try to broaden the meaning gradually until it includes anything after a few generations.
They already have. The Bush Administration routinely lies about the Guantanamo detainees, characterizing them all as "terrorists". A few may actually be terrorists, but most have turned out to be either quite innocent or merely soldiers in the army opposing the one whose side the US took in the Afghan Civil War. I think that the US chose the right side, but that doesn't make every Taliban soldier into a terrorist.
Yes, the $150,000 is a maximum, and it is available only if the infringement is intentional. If the infringement is unintentional, the maximum is $30,000. An additional financial threat is that the court may award costs and attorneys' fees to the copyright holder. Statutory damages do not depend on actual losses - that is precisely what distinguishes them from actual damages. Critics have been arguing that the damages demanded in the RIAA suits are excessive in comparison to the value of the songs, but at least as far as the law is concerned, those arguments are beside the point. The very purpose of allowing the plaintiff to select statutory damages is to break the connection to actual damages. Congress may have made a bad choice of policy, and there is an argument that the statutory damages allowed are in at least some cases so excessive as to be unconstitutional, but as the law now stands, in the United States, a copyright holder unable to demonstrate significant actual damages still stands to receive substantial statutory damages.
The Copyright Act allows the copyright holder to choose between actual damages and statutory damages, which may be as much as $150,000 per infringement. Furthermore, it is not out of the question that punitive damages will be awarded if the infringement is intentional and egregious, which is arguably the case here. Traditionally, it has been assumed that punitive damages are not available for copyright infringement, but courts have awarded them in some recent cases.
There is a good chance that Lindows would have prevailed in the European cases if it had appealed. The decision in the Netherlands, for example, was based on the court's holding, without expert testimony, that "windows" was not a generic term in Dutch, which is empirically false. It is true that the Microsoft suits were more of a hassle than Lindows wanted to deal with, but it is far from clear that Lindows had an untenable legal position outside the US.
The Live Document site seems to be/.-ed, but if it uses the Microsoft logo etc. then that may well be deceptive and infringing. But that is different from the name being infringing.
Actually, Lindows won on the trademark issue, in the United States. See the Wikipedia article on Lindows. Microsoft finally offered to settle, and the Lindows people agreed since Microsoft had sued them in six countries and dealing with all the suits was such a hassle.
The fact that numerous other office suites with office in their name
exist is pretty good evidence that Microsoft can't claim a valid trademark.
They may be ready to challenge the validity of Microsoft's claim to Office
by itself as a trademark. While there is no question that Microsoft Office,
Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows, etc. are valid trademarks, the validity of Office, Word, Windows etc. is questionable since these are arguably generic terms that Microsoft cannot remove from the public domain.
There are quite a few other office suites with Office as part of their name, e.g. KOffice, Gnome Office, Xoom Office, Star Office.
Since when does OOXML have greater functionality than ODF? In any case, it isn't as if OOXML is a mature specification which people have lots of experience implementing. Rather, it is a rapidly cobbled together spec with which even Microsoft has little experience. If anything, it is ODF that is more mature.
How would OOXML help with interoperability for.doc? They aren't closely related. A spec for.doc would certainly help, but there's no reason to make it a standard.
Sorry, the OP is right. The quote is not from Einstein. It is from a letter of Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke dated 5 February 1675 (corresponding to 15 February 1676 in our calendar).
Sure, I understand why Microsoft wants OOXML to be a standard. My point is, I don't think that there is a reason for anyone else to make it a standard, even if it isn't broken.
Precisely. And why fix the problems? We already have a standard: ODF. Microsoft has yet to put forward a halfway persuasive argument as to why we need another. In some cases different standards meet different needs, but generally speaking having more than one standard is inefficient. Even if the problems are fixed, in the absence of a good reason for having multiple standards, the answer to Microsoft's proposal should be that they're too late.
Dillo is nice, but the lack of Unicode support really limits its usefulness for me and many other users. I still use ed for some tasks, so I appreciate a fast, simple, approach.
A simple way to get an intuitive understanding of why lossless audio compression is possible is to display an audio waveform at a resolution high enough that you can see individual samples. You will notice that adjacent samples are close to each other - the signal doesn't change very rapidly. That's due to the physical nature of music and speech and it is a way in which such signals differ from arbitrary signals. If you display white noise, for example, it won't have this property - samples not very far apart in time may have very different values. Now, given that adjacent values aren't very different, one simple way to compress audio is to replace the original signal with the differences between adjacent samples, which will usually be small in comparison to the sample values. For example,if the uncompressed audio has 16 bit resolution, you might use only one byte to represent the differences.
(This is a real compression technique, though in practice you need to provide for cases in which the differences are larger than what you can represent in the smaller number of bits you're using for most of them.)
Some prosecutors consider finality of judgment so important that they oppose freeing or even granting a new trial to people who have been shown by overwhelming evidence to be actually innocent. I've read interviews in which they say this.
In Imperial Chinese law the judge, who was also detective and prosecutor in a system somewhat like the current European system, would in fact suffer the penalty for the crime if he was shown to have falsely convicted a criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, tech support can also be clueless. I recently had a conversation with my ISP that went like this:
ISP: Now,you're using Windows, eh?
Me: No.
ISP: Oh, so you've got a Mac, eh?
Me: No. [pause] Linux.
ISP: Oh, we don't support Macs.
(Actually, the guy did in the end solve my problem, which was in the router.)
This must be what "electronic paper" is intended for.
Harvard, naturally, has its own classification system, neither Dewey Decimal nor Library of Congress. (It switched to LC some time ago, but only for new acquisitions, so when I was a student, the collection was in two parts.) The leading theory when I was an undergrad was that the basis for ordering in the Harvard system was height of author.
They already have. The Bush Administration routinely lies about the Guantanamo detainees, characterizing them all as "terrorists". A few may actually be terrorists, but most have turned out to be either quite innocent or merely soldiers in the army opposing the one whose side the US took in the Afghan Civil War. I think that the US chose the right side, but that doesn't make every Taliban soldier into a terrorist.
Using a snippet will generally satisfy a second fair use factor, namely detracting minimally from the market for the original work.
Yes, the $150,000 is a maximum, and it is available only if the infringement is intentional. If the infringement is unintentional, the maximum is $30,000. An additional financial threat is that the court may award costs and attorneys' fees to the copyright holder. Statutory damages do not depend on actual losses - that is precisely what distinguishes them from actual damages. Critics have been arguing that the damages demanded in the RIAA suits are excessive in comparison to the value of the songs, but at least as far as the law is concerned, those arguments are beside the point. The very purpose of allowing the plaintiff to select statutory damages is to break the connection to actual damages. Congress may have made a bad choice of policy, and there is an argument that the statutory damages allowed are in at least some cases so excessive as to be unconstitutional, but as the law now stands, in the United States, a copyright holder unable to demonstrate significant actual damages still stands to receive substantial statutory damages.
Those would be same ones who think that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church?
The Copyright Act allows the copyright holder to choose between actual damages and statutory damages, which may be as much as $150,000 per infringement. Furthermore, it is not out of the question that punitive damages will be awarded if the infringement is intentional and egregious, which is arguably the case here. Traditionally, it has been assumed that punitive damages are not available for copyright infringement, but courts have awarded them in some recent cases.
There is a good chance that Lindows would have prevailed in the European cases if it had appealed. The decision in the Netherlands, for example, was based on the court's holding, without expert testimony, that "windows" was not a generic term in Dutch, which is empirically false. It is true that the Microsoft suits were more of a hassle than Lindows wanted to deal with, but it is far from clear that Lindows had an untenable legal position outside the US.
I take it that zombies are a big problem in the UK then?
The Live Document site seems to be /.-ed, but if it uses the Microsoft logo etc. then that may well be deceptive and infringing. But that is different from the name being infringing.
Actually, Lindows won on the trademark issue, in the United States. See the Wikipedia article on Lindows. Microsoft finally offered to settle, and the Lindows people agreed since Microsoft had sued them in six countries and dealing with all the suits was such a hassle.
The fact that numerous other office suites with office in their name exist is pretty good evidence that Microsoft can't claim a valid trademark.
They may be ready to challenge the validity of Microsoft's claim to Office by itself as a trademark. While there is no question that Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows, etc. are valid trademarks, the validity of Office, Word, Windows etc. is questionable since these are arguably generic terms that Microsoft cannot remove from the public domain. There are quite a few other office suites with Office as part of their name, e.g. KOffice, Gnome Office, Xoom Office, Star Office.
Since when does OOXML have greater functionality than ODF? In any case, it isn't as if OOXML is a mature specification which people have lots of experience implementing. Rather, it is a rapidly cobbled together spec with which even Microsoft has little experience. If anything, it is ODF that is more mature.
How would OOXML help with interoperability for .doc? They aren't closely related. A spec for .doc would certainly help, but there's no reason to make it a standard.
Well, it wasn't so much plagiarised as already a figure of speech. It is Newton rather than Einstein who is known for it.
That should be "15 February 1675".
Sorry, the OP is right. The quote is not from Einstein. It is from a letter of Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke dated 5 February 1675 (corresponding to 15 February 1676 in our calendar).
Sure, I understand why Microsoft wants OOXML to be a standard. My point is, I don't think that there is a reason for anyone else to make it a standard, even if it isn't broken.
If Microsoft is going to use OOXML, having a specification would indeed be useful for interoperability. But why a standard?
Precisely. And why fix the problems? We already have a standard: ODF. Microsoft has yet to put forward a halfway persuasive argument as to why we need another. In some cases different standards meet different needs, but generally speaking having more than one standard is inefficient. Even if the problems are fixed, in the absence of a good reason for having multiple standards, the answer to Microsoft's proposal should be that they're too late.
Dillo is nice, but the lack of Unicode support really limits its usefulness for me and many other users. I still use ed for some tasks, so I appreciate a fast, simple, approach.
A simple way to get an intuitive understanding of why lossless audio compression is possible is to display an audio waveform at a resolution high enough that you can see individual samples. You will notice that adjacent samples are close to each other - the signal doesn't change very rapidly. That's due to the physical nature of music and speech and it is a way in which such signals differ from arbitrary signals. If you display white noise, for example, it won't have this property - samples not very far apart in time may have very different values. Now, given that adjacent values aren't very different, one simple way to compress audio is to replace the original signal with the differences between adjacent samples, which will usually be small in comparison to the sample values. For example,if the uncompressed audio has 16 bit resolution, you might use only one byte to represent the differences. (This is a real compression technique, though in practice you need to provide for cases in which the differences are larger than what you can represent in the smaller number of bits you're using for most of them.)
Some prosecutors consider finality of judgment so important that they oppose freeing or even granting a new trial to people who have been shown by overwhelming evidence to be actually innocent. I've read interviews in which they say this.
In Imperial Chinese law the judge, who was also detective and prosecutor in a system somewhat like the current European system, would in fact suffer the penalty for the crime if he was shown to have falsely convicted a criminal.