The EULA actually says that there is no license if the record is sold to the public for less than $1. I think that means that the restriction applies only to the first retail sale. Subsequent purchases are not restricted - buying the record used for 50 cents is perfectly alright.
Where in the Constitution is there a guarantee of jury trial in civil cases?
Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 guarantees a right to trial by jury only in criminal cases.
It is true that it is harder for a public figure to win a case for defamation, but it is not true that anything short of advocating criminal acts against him goes. The real standard is that a public figure must demonstrate "actual malice" on the part of the defendant. "Actual malice" in this context does not mean what you might think. The defendant is said to have acted with actual malice if he knew that his statement was false or made it with reckless disregard as to its truth. The governing case is Times vs. Sullivan (1964).
In any case, it isn't clear that this is the appropriate standard in this case. Kaplan sued for tortious interference, not for defamation, didn't he?
No doubt a full-fledged OS is not necessary. I assume that the situation is that some companies are lazy and are basically putting some DB software on top of MS Windows. (Wasn't there something in one of the Diebold stories about the votes being tallied in Excell or in an Access database?)
No, I'm not being overly pedantic. First, the great majority of functions in glibc are not by any stretch of the imagination system calls. Functions dealing with character handling, strings and arrays, character encodings, locales, searching and sorting, pattern matching, trignometry, random numbers, and cryptography, for example, are not system calls. Second, yes, glibc has been expanded, in its capacity as a portability library, to include functions like low-level i/o that are normally system calls. The ones in glibc, however, are not system calls. Glibc runs entirely in user space and when it does system-call like things, it calls the real system calls.
Couching something as an opinion does not protect you if what you claim is actually a matter of fact, but a statement that really is merely opinion is indeed not actionable. That's black letter law.
It sounds like the rating algorithm isn't very good, but I don't see how this guy can win a suit for defamation. In US law, only false claims of FACT are actionable. If the web site stated that a lawyer had received a reprimand from the bar association when he had not, that would be defamatory. If it said he had cheated a client or bribed a juror and he had not, that would be defamatory. But saying: "This guy is a jackass" or "This guy is a poor lawyer" is not actionable because these are opinions.
I'm not sure what can be made of the use of a poor algorithm. If they disclose the algorithm and say "Here is what we get when we plug in the data we have", so long as the data is accurate and they apply the algorithm correctly, they aren't making any false claims of fact. Ethically, it seems like there should be a penalty if they persist in using an algorithm that demonstrably does not produce output that is reasonably related to what people generally take to be valid measures of lawyer quality and if they deceive people into thinking that it is valid, but I'm not sure how this can be addressed legally. I think you'd have to argue that there is an objective definition of lawyer quality of which the algorithm gives a false view.
I don't know if defamation has ever been proven on such a basis.
Where do you get the idea that glibc contains system calls?
glibc contains things like trig functions and regular expression matching, which are not system calls.
The diagrams are nice and for the most part the text is okay, but there is one glaring error that should have been edited out before this was published:
There is also the GNU C Library (glibc). This provides the system call interface that connects to the kernel and provides the mechanism to transition between the user-space application and the kernel.
This is false and could be very confusing for readers who don't already know about the structure of Linux. The diagram gets it right.
Not so. It doesn't use the word patent, but it certainly does mention what we now call patent law.
Article I, Section 8:
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It is true that most of the story of Lilith is in Jewish folk sources and the Talmud, but she is mentioned in Isaiah 34:14 (disregard the King James mis-translation as "screech owl"). She is also mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Song for a Sage (4Q510-511)).
It simply isn't true that this is just a commercial dispute between Sun and Microsoft. ODF was developed by the Open Document Foundation based on work by Sun and standardized by OASIS. The members of the OASIS technical committee are listed here.
You'll notice that they include not only people from Sun, IBM, and the Open Document Foundation, but representatives from Adobe, Novell, Duke University, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, Intel, Ars Aperta, and others.
The differences between Microsoft's proposed open standard OpenXML and IBM/Sun's ODF standard in terms of functionality they're virtually interchangable.
Actually, this is not true. A striking example is the fact that Microsoft Word 2007 uses an equation editor that generates Microsoft's own new equation description language which is not compatible with MathML and cannot be translated into ODF or even into other Microsoft formats except as graphics. As a result, Science magazine is refusing to accept manuscripts containing math generated by Microsoft's new equation editor. Here are Science's
instructions to authors.
You mistakenly present the situation as symmetric. It isn't. We only need one document standard, and we already have it. ODF is already an ISO standard and implemented by numerous products from a variety of sources. OOXML, on the other hand, is a Johnnie-come-lately, and is not a standard in any real sense. It is not an ISO standard and is not in use by anyone other than Microsoft. Furthermore, since it is not truly open, it simply doesn't meet the criteria. Thus, if Microsoft decides that it wants to join the rest of the world in supporting the open standard, it needs to add support for ODF. On the other hand, there is no reason for anyone else to adopt OOXML. There are, nonetheless, converters between the two formats.
You're missing the point. ODF doesn't require legislation to be successful as a format for those who are motivated to use an open format. Legislation is required to ensure that documents issued by governments use open formats such as ODF. In the absence of such legislation, we will continue to see governments produce documents in closed formats such as Microsoft's.
The crucial difference between ODF and OOXML is not one licensing. The problem is that ODF is truly open, while OOXML references a number of proprietary specifications. In short, OOXML is not actually open. The one place in which licensing comes in is that Microsoft only disclaims patents on the open parts of OOXML. Some aspects of OOXML are therefore not only closed but potentially subject to patent restrictions.
A secondary, though important, difference between ODF and OOXML is that ODF builds on a superior set of standard technologies, while OOXML incorporates all sorts of old Microsoft cruft.
While it is true that a contract may be oral rather than written, it is equally true that a contract can only be formed by the agreement of both parties. Since Dell did not present its proposal to require arbitration prior to sale, the purchaser never agreed to it and no contract was formed.
This situation is different from the typical dispute about software EULAs because, so the legal theory goes, software is not sold but licensed. The computer hardware, however, IS sold, and no terms presented subsequent to sale can possibly be binding on the purchaser.
Which current leaders of Western democracies have rigged elections, had their opponents beaten up, and caused massive starvation? Even the Bush/Gore fiasco wasn't election rigging in the usual sense.
In any case, so what if they did? That doesn't make Mugabe any better.
Sorry, wrong. Mugabe turned into a tinpot dictator, rigging elections, having his opponents beaten up, etc. He tries to look like an advocate of the common people, but in place of a realistic land redistribution program he has encouraged thugs to take over and destroy productive farms. Zimbabwe now has food shortages due entirely to Mugabe and his buddies. He really did go bad.
The projects I listed are not minor projects carefully chosen for not being reimplementations of proprietary software, they are each among the premier
programs of their kind, and in the case of the first bunch, very widely used.
A number of them, such as gcc and emacs, are among the older FOSS projects.
It is true that in recent years, with the push to make Linux an alternative to MS Windows on the desktop, there have been a large number of clones of Windows programs, but that is not the core of FOSS. The core consists really of software of two types: (a) pieces of Unix, some of which are clones of software that was once proprietary, but many of which have never been proprietary (since they were developed at Berkeley or wherever); (b) software written to scratch an itch. For example, most computer music software has been non-commercial since day one.
You can generate pdf from Tex output by using dvips followed by ps2pdf and from groff output by using ps2pdf. OpenOffice.org Writer can export pdf directly.
Every serious TeX user that I have known keeps a personal copy of
any non-standard packages, as I do. I have often printed out documents
that I wrote 20 years ago with no more difficulty than changing/usr2/poser/bin/tex to/home/poser/bin/tex in the include statements.
People who use Latex rather than raw Tex generally have an even easier time of it as they are less likely to be using unusual macro packages.
Slashdot Mirror
For normal geeks, 3 a.m. IS at night. The only people for whom 3 a.m. is in the morning are monks and marines.
The EULA actually says that there is no license if the record is sold to the public for less than $1. I think that means that the restriction applies only to the first retail sale. Subsequent purchases are not restricted - buying the record used for 50 cents is perfectly alright.
Oops, typo. That's Article III of course, not II.
Where in the Constitution is there a guarantee of jury trial in civil cases? Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 guarantees a right to trial by jury only in criminal cases.
It is true that it is harder for a public figure to win a case for defamation, but it is not true that anything short of advocating criminal acts against him goes. The real standard is that a public figure must demonstrate "actual malice" on the part of the defendant. "Actual malice" in this context does not mean what you might think. The defendant is said to have acted with actual malice if he knew that his statement was false or made it with reckless disregard as to its truth. The governing case is Times vs. Sullivan (1964).
In any case, it isn't clear that this is the appropriate standard in this case. Kaplan sued for tortious interference, not for defamation, didn't he?
No doubt a full-fledged OS is not necessary. I assume that the situation is that some companies are lazy and are basically putting some DB software on top of MS Windows. (Wasn't there something in one of the Diebold stories about the votes being tallied in Excell or in an Access database?)
No, I'm not being overly pedantic. First, the great majority of functions in glibc are not by any stretch of the imagination system calls. Functions dealing with character handling, strings and arrays, character encodings, locales, searching and sorting, pattern matching, trignometry, random numbers, and cryptography, for example, are not system calls. Second, yes, glibc has been expanded, in its capacity as a portability library, to include functions like low-level i/o that are normally system calls. The ones in glibc, however, are not system calls. Glibc runs entirely in user space and when it does system-call like things, it calls the real system calls.
Couching something as an opinion does not protect you if what you claim is actually a matter of fact, but a statement that really is merely opinion is indeed not actionable. That's black letter law.
It sounds like the rating algorithm isn't very good, but I don't see how this guy can win a suit for defamation. In US law, only false claims of FACT are actionable. If the web site stated that a lawyer had received a reprimand from the bar association when he had not, that would be defamatory. If it said he had cheated a client or bribed a juror and he had not, that would be defamatory. But saying: "This guy is a jackass" or "This guy is a poor lawyer" is not actionable because these are opinions.
I'm not sure what can be made of the use of a poor algorithm. If they disclose the algorithm and say "Here is what we get when we plug in the data we have", so long as the data is accurate and they apply the algorithm correctly, they aren't making any false claims of fact. Ethically, it seems like there should be a penalty if they persist in using an algorithm that demonstrably does not produce output that is reasonably related to what people generally take to be valid measures of lawyer quality and if they deceive people into thinking that it is valid, but I'm not sure how this can be addressed legally. I think you'd have to argue that there is an objective definition of lawyer quality of which the algorithm gives a false view. I don't know if defamation has ever been proven on such a basis.
Where do you get the idea that glibc contains system calls? glibc contains things like trig functions and regular expression matching, which are not system calls.
The diagrams are nice and for the most part the text is okay, but there is one glaring error that should have been edited out before this was published:
This is false and could be very confusing for readers who don't already know about the structure of Linux. The diagram gets it right.
Not so. It doesn't use the word patent, but it certainly does mention what we now call patent law. Article I, Section 8:
It is true that most of the story of Lilith is in Jewish folk sources and the Talmud, but she is mentioned in Isaiah 34:14 (disregard the King James mis-translation as "screech owl"). She is also mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Song for a Sage (4Q510-511)).
Indeed. And the fundies don't like to talk about the scriptural sources for Lilith, Adam's first wife.
It simply isn't true that this is just a commercial dispute between Sun and Microsoft. ODF was developed by the Open Document Foundation based on work by Sun and standardized by OASIS. The members of the OASIS technical committee are listed here. You'll notice that they include not only people from Sun, IBM, and the Open Document Foundation, but representatives from Adobe, Novell, Duke University, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, Intel, Ars Aperta, and others.
Actually, this is not true. A striking example is the fact that Microsoft Word 2007 uses an equation editor that generates Microsoft's own new equation description language which is not compatible with MathML and cannot be translated into ODF or even into other Microsoft formats except as graphics. As a result, Science magazine is refusing to accept manuscripts containing math generated by Microsoft's new equation editor. Here are Science's instructions to authors.
You mistakenly present the situation as symmetric. It isn't. We only need one document standard, and we already have it. ODF is already an ISO standard and implemented by numerous products from a variety of sources. OOXML, on the other hand, is a Johnnie-come-lately, and is not a standard in any real sense. It is not an ISO standard and is not in use by anyone other than Microsoft. Furthermore, since it is not truly open, it simply doesn't meet the criteria. Thus, if Microsoft decides that it wants to join the rest of the world in supporting the open standard, it needs to add support for ODF. On the other hand, there is no reason for anyone else to adopt OOXML. There are, nonetheless, converters between the two formats.
You're missing the point. ODF doesn't require legislation to be successful as a format for those who are motivated to use an open format. Legislation is required to ensure that documents issued by governments use open formats such as ODF. In the absence of such legislation, we will continue to see governments produce documents in closed formats such as Microsoft's.
The crucial difference between ODF and OOXML is not one licensing. The problem is that ODF is truly open, while OOXML references a number of proprietary specifications. In short, OOXML is not actually open. The one place in which licensing comes in is that Microsoft only disclaims patents on the open parts of OOXML. Some aspects of OOXML are therefore not only closed but potentially subject to patent restrictions.
A secondary, though important, difference between ODF and OOXML is that ODF builds on a superior set of standard technologies, while OOXML incorporates all sorts of old Microsoft cruft.
While it is true that a contract may be oral rather than written, it is equally true that a contract can only be formed by the agreement of both parties. Since Dell did not present its proposal to require arbitration prior to sale, the purchaser never agreed to it and no contract was formed.
This situation is different from the typical dispute about software EULAs because, so the legal theory goes, software is not sold but licensed. The computer hardware, however, IS sold, and no terms presented subsequent to sale can possibly be binding on the purchaser.
Which current leaders of Western democracies have rigged elections, had their opponents beaten up, and caused massive starvation? Even the Bush/Gore fiasco wasn't election rigging in the usual sense. In any case, so what if they did? That doesn't make Mugabe any better.
Sorry, wrong. Mugabe turned into a tinpot dictator, rigging elections, having his opponents beaten up, etc. He tries to look like an advocate of the common people, but in place of a realistic land redistribution program he has encouraged thugs to take over and destroy productive farms. Zimbabwe now has food shortages due entirely to Mugabe and his buddies. He really did go bad.
The projects I listed are not minor projects carefully chosen for not being reimplementations of proprietary software, they are each among the premier programs of their kind, and in the case of the first bunch, very widely used. A number of them, such as gcc and emacs, are among the older FOSS projects. It is true that in recent years, with the push to make Linux an alternative to MS Windows on the desktop, there have been a large number of clones of Windows programs, but that is not the core of FOSS. The core consists really of software of two types: (a) pieces of Unix, some of which are clones of software that was once proprietary, but many of which have never been proprietary (since they were developed at Berkeley or wherever); (b) software written to scratch an itch. For example, most computer music software has been non-commercial since day one.
You can generate pdf from Tex output by using dvips followed by ps2pdf and from groff output by using ps2pdf. OpenOffice.org Writer can export pdf directly.
Every serious TeX user that I have known keeps a personal copy of any non-standard packages, as I do. I have often printed out documents that I wrote 20 years ago with no more difficulty than changing /usr2/poser/bin/tex to /home/poser/bin/tex in the include statements.
People who use Latex rather than raw Tex generally have an even easier time of it as they are less likely to be using unusual macro packages.
Please let us know of what commercial products the following OSS projects are mere reimplementations: