I just gave the Presidential Decree a quick read, wondering if this was much ado about nothing and it only required logging of connections, not all the data. Actually, it is even worse. Not only does it require logging all data and making it available on demand to the government, it forbids service providers to use any technology that interferes with interception and decryption and imposes on them the burden of making whatever information is demanded available in the clear. If I understand it correctly, it is the ISP's responsibility to decrypt enciphered communications or to prevent encryption from being used in the first place.
But it is even worse than that. It forbids anonymous communications. Furthermore, it requires that everything having to do with this be kept secret, both what the ISPs do to carry out the decree and the fact that the government has intercepted communications.
The main justification given by the US for its refusal to join the civilized world and give up land mines is that they are needed in the DMZ. If robots replace land mines, will the US finally agree to the land mine ban?
The reason that Japan did not surrender immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima was that it took some time for the central government to realize what had happened. They learned fairly quickly that there had been a major air strike on Hiroshima, but the extent of the damage was not out of proportion to previous air raids on Japanese cities. US bombing had already caused a great deal of damage to major Japanese cities, including Tokyo. Incendiary bombing was very destructive since at the time most buildings were made of wood, bamboo, and paper. The Japanese only realized what had happened when they figured out that all of the damage was caused by a single bomb, which was not immediately obvious.
The police won't arrest someone or issue a ticket for a traffic violation that they haven't witnessed themselves, but at least in some jurisdictions if they get a credible report they will send a letter to the owner of the vehicle. Also, if the problem isn't just a one-off but something like someone driving wildly they will send a patrol car to check it out. I once pulled over and reported someone who was veering from one side of the road to the other to the RCMP. When I got home I found a message on my answering machine to the effect that they had pulled the guy over. It turned out that he wasn't drunk, just very sleepy, so they got him to check in to a motel.
I'm well aware of the fact that Canada is a constitutional monarchy. There is no conflict between being a constitutional monarchy and being a democracy.
Canada and most other constitutional monarchies are true democracies insofar as the monarch does not, and cannot without provoking a constitutional crisis, exert actual control. The Queen's actual powers are extremely limited. Beyond appointing the governor-general and the lieutenant-governors, she exercises power only in the very rare situations in which she refuses royal assent to legislation or where, no party having a clear majority, she decides who to ask to form the government. The queen does not, in practice, have the power to originate legislation or to act outside the framework of the law.
Be very careful where and how you claim that the Queen holds no authority over Canada. That notion is quite probably seditious.
Wrong. It is not sedition to make a correct statement, or even an incorrect statement, about the powers of the sovereign. Sedition requires the intent to change the government by force. This is not merely a general definition; it is the definition given in the Criminal Code of Canada.
But if you set the bitrate sufficiently high that you don't have to worry about distortion, you're getting close to the file size you would get with lossless compression. With the huge amounts of cheap storage and high network bandwidth we now have, for most purposes I see no point in messing around with lossy audio compression.
In Canada, as in any parliamentary system, the Prime Minister is chosen indirectly, by the party that forms the government. The head of state is of course the Queen, whose role is now entirely ceremonial. The facts that you have nothing to say about a purely ceremonial figure and that the Prime Minister is not directly elected does not make Canada any less a democracy.
It's true that pre-implementation specs are often way off, but it is certainly not impossible to do a reasonable job of writing up them up. I've used systems to which I didn't have source that worked very much as the manuals said they did. I wrote a good bit of code on HP Bobcats using the man pages for HP-UX, Starbase graphics, and whatever their window system (the interrupt-based one, not X) was called. I don't recall ever encountering a discrepancy. And software was hardly HP's strength.
As far as I can see, in theory, full and accurate specifications of the APIs and protocols ought to be sufficient to allow interoperability and prevent Microsoft from having an unfair advantage over competitors. The problem is that nobody trusts Microsoft to publish full and honest specs and adhere to them. They are known for having undocumented interfaces and for departing from standards. Forcing them to publish the source would let others determine the actual APIs and protocols by inspection, and we'd know whether the source they published was real because its behavior could be compared with that of Microsoft's binaries. However, this doesn't require that Microsoft license its source under the GPL. People can perfectly well implement Microsoft's APIs and protocols with their own code. What it does require, other than publishing the software with terms that do not prohibit use of the information gleaned in GPL-ed software, is freedom from patents.
Insofar as Microsoft has been convicted of monopolistic behavior, I don't think it has a choice if publishing source code under the GPL is the only way of adressing its improper behavior.
It's not like something that is insufficiently in line with capitalism is "cruel and unusual punishment". If Microsoft really doesn't want to publish its source, it seems to me that the only thing to do is to force them to stand behind their specs by imposing significant penalties for differences in behavior between their software and the specs. This could even be a way of diverting the efforts of some crackers - finding discrepancies would be a thrill, and could even be remunerative if a percentage of the fine were awarded as a bounty.
It's really too bad that we don't have access to the actual study. Without it it is hard to judge very much. I went to the Yankee Group web site and found their press release, which is a little bit more informative than the news item, but not much. Elsewhere on the Yankee Group site they reveal that the study will not be available until JUNE 2005.
Funny that they are issuing press releases now about a study that won't be released for two months. I wonder if that is so that they can have their impact now and defer the hard criticism?
Anyhow, there was an interesting bit in the YG press release:
However, Yankee Group's survey shows Linux gaining momentum as a complementary server presence in Windows networks. More than 50% of companies surveyed said they plan to install Linux in parallel with, or in addition to, existing Windows operating systems.
I think that this gives us a hint of what is going on. If MS Windows were really perceived as better than Linux, or even equal, the cost of making a change and general inertia would presumably result in little Linux adoption. The fact that the same businesses in which MS Windows has an overall reputation of being better than Linux are adding Linux or shifting partly to Linux suggests that there is actually a perception of Linux as better and/or cheaper. I suspect that what is going on is that the reputation questions were answered largely by managers with little firsthand technical knowledge, who have, however, been pushed by their technie subordinates to allow a shift in the direction of Linux.
Where on earth did you go to high school? Electrical Engineering in grade 11? Lots of high schools have electronics, but I've never heard of a high school electrical engineering course.
Hardly. It's true that the Greeks were not as interested in or successful at empire-building as the Romans, but they were hardly peaceful. Ever hear of the Persian wars? How about the conquests of Alexander? When they weren't fighting the Persians, they were engaged in constant warfare among themselves. There wasn't any such thing as "Greece" - there were a whole bunch of city states and petty kingdoms.
Nor were the Greeks as enlightened as TV history makes out. In "democratic" Athens at the height of its glory, only 1/4 of the adult population could vote: half the population was female, and women had hardly any rights, much less the vote. And half the population consisted of slaves, who had even fewer rights than women.
It's true that the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of Greece overshadowed those of Rome, but it isn't true that everything was great in Greece until the barbarous Romans took over.
Given North Korea's poor economy and technological backwardness, they're probably using FreeVMS.
And to please the Great Leader, they probably tell him it's pirated.:)
Many years ago at an organization I will not name
research staff were not supposed to run network cable because the union rules required that members of a particular union run all cable, even the cable in cable trays in the corridors. If you followed the rules, it would take a couple months for them to get to it and they'd screw it up. In order to get anything done, the research staff would organize fast, precisely timed "guerilla cable laying parties" between union shifts.
In this case, the union rules just had the effect of irritating people who were basically pro-union.
It isn't really clear to me from your post what the task is. Is it to translate the code itself, so that a programmer knowing only English can understand the variable names and so forth, or is it to localize the interface, that is, provide English messages and labels, use American format dates, and so forth?
The best thing that you can do is get a look at the code long before you leave for Japan. In my experience (which is mostly of research code written by electrical engineers and computer scientists) the code itself is written in the Roman alphabet and frequently uses primarily if not exclusively English identifiers. The comments, on the other hand, are often in Japanese written the usual way, encoded in Shift-JIS or EUC-JP.
If you're lucky and either are not tasked with translating the code itself or find that it is in English already, you only have to worry about the interface, and with luck you'll be able to figure out a lot of that without actually being able to read Japanese from the program logic and your knowledge of the tasks the program performs.
If you are actually expected to do extensive translation, you're in big trouble. It simply isn't reasonable to expect someone with no knowledge of Japanese to do this. Not only do you have to deal with an almost completely unfamiliar vocabulary, you have to deal with a very complex unfamiliar writing system and with a language that is grammatically very different from English. Translating from Japanese to English is not just a matter of looking up the words.
Anyhow, if you're going to have to try to deal with written Japanese, you can at least give yourself a head start. Get yourself a straightforward textbook that focusses on the grammar and basic vocabulary. Since your primary goal is NOT to learn to speak Japanese, the conversation oriented books for tourists and even those used in university courses aimed at developing speaking ability are not what you want. Try "Teach Yourself Japanese". It covers the basic grammar and basic vocabulary quite nicely, in romanization. Secondly, learn to read kana. In a short time, you aren't going to learn a sufficient number of Chinese characters to be useful, but you can learn kana, which will at least give you an idea what you are looking at.
If you are going to have to tackle unromanized
text, you need a way to look up words, and unless you have a terrific visual memory and linguistic skills, looking up Chinese characters in a regular dictionary as a raw novice is going to be terribly difficult and time consuming. Familiarize yourself with a tool that glosses the text for you andmake sure you'll have access to it. Try Japanese Reading Tool.
There are quite a few regular expression tools available, with different capabilities and purposes.
For the novice who doesn't want to learn more or doesn't have time, the best is probably txt2regex,
which walks you through the construction of the regexp and generates output for 20 different programs and languages. It is one of the few tools that I know of that isn't specialized for a particular language or program. My own tool,
Redet,
provides an interface to 29 regular expression implementations. It is aimed at people who know something about regular expressions or are willing to spend some time learning but helps out by providing palettes showing the notation for each program and a history system, so that you can first construct the pieces of a complex regexp, then assemble them. It also has features aimed at providing a search environment that may be useful for people who need no help constructing their regular expressions.
regex-coach
uses PERL-style regular expressions. Its particular virtue is that it can single-step through the match and show the parse tree, so it is useful if you want to understand the matching process in detail. Similar in that it helps to understand the implementation of regular expressions is re_graph,
which given a regular expression draws the corresponding finite state automaton.
A couple of nice tools aimed at Python users are
Kiki
and Kodos.
These and some other tools and libraries are listed on this page.
On the basis of checking out some web sites in Dutch, I think that "windows" has become a generic term in Dutch in its computer sense. See this Language Log post for the evidence.
A "real, live Romanian" is no doubt expert at speaking Romanian, but is not necessarily an authority of any sort on how closely Romanian resembles Latin. Furthermore, this sort of thing is a matter of national pride in some countries, which means that people believe all sorts of silly things. A majority of the Greeks that I have known were firmly convinced that ancient Greek was pronounced just like Modern Greek, in spite of the mass of evidence to the contrary, the fact that the language has obviously changed in other ways (which they know because they learn to read Ancient Greek in school), and the fact that every other language is known to change over time.
Hardly. Romanian is by no means "almost exactly Latin". For example, Latin had seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative - the last residual) while Rumanian has only three, and only a subset of feminine nouns distinguish all three, and then only in the singular. Latin did not have articles. Rumanian has articles attached to the end of nouns. As far as vocabulary is concerned, if anything Rumanian words resemble their Latin ancestors less than in languages like Italian and Spanish. Look at the loss of vowels in final syllables as seen in Latin campus becoming Rumanian camp, where the vowel (in a different quality) is retained in Italian campo. Rumanian has also borrowed quite a few words from Slavic languages. Rumanian is conservative in some respects, in retaining more of the case system, for example, than other Romance languages, but overall it cannot be said to be consistently more conservative, and it certainly isn't almost the same as Latin.
Oops, the suit is in a US court. That may mean that they are confident enough that this isn't fair use under US law that they didn't need the advantage of French law. It is also possible that they intend to argue that by virtue of being a party to the Berne Convention, the US is obligated to harmonize its law with that of the other signatories, and that in effect French law governs anyhow.
Fair Use is an aspect of US copyright law. The suit is under French law. Not all countries have a fair use exception in their copyright law. In particular, according to this law journal article:
the French copyright law limits the "economic rights" of authors in specifically enumerated cases but does not recognize a broad fair use privilege.
This is one area in which US law is better for the consumer than the law of many other countries.
Even if one accepts this argument, it doesn't justify the way most of the people held prisoner by the US are being treated, because most of them are certainly NOT terrorists. Aside from the fact that an unknown percentage seem to be innocent bystanders, most of the people captured in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo bay were Taliban SOLDIERS. I have no sympathy whatever for their cause, but they were part of an organized military force. Here
is a review of the Taliban forces as of October, 2001 by Jane's. They may not have been organized in quite the same way as most armies, but by any reasonable standard this was an organized military force, not a bunch of terrorists. However much we may dislike the Taliban, the fact is that they were the de facto government of Afghanistan and had armed forces, most of whom had nothing to do with terrorist operations.
I know nothing about this type of software, but hundreds of millions of dollars sounds like an awful lot. I gather that this is not the first attempt to develop such software, that it is a category that has been around for some time. Why is this not a relatively inexpensive matter of buying or licensing some off-the-shelf system and configuring it, rather the way people buy a database system and then set up their own record structures, specialized queries, and so forth? Can anyone explain why this would cost such an enormous amount?
Why do you attribute the expansion of personal computing to Microsoft? They aren't responsible for any relevant innovation. They had nothing to do with the developments that made the hardware cheap enough for ordinary people to own computers. They didn't invent the GUI, or even have much to do with improving it. They didn't create the first popular word processor. That was probably Wordstar, and then of course WordPerfect. They didn't have anything to do with the creation of the web, and it was Netscape that was the dominant browser when web usage was in its major growth spurt. It is true that most people have used Microsoft software, but I see no reason to believe that things would not have developed just as well and just as rapidly, if not more so, if Microsoft had not existed. There just isn't anything unique about Microsoft's technological innovation or vision.
Slashdot Mirror
I just gave the Presidential Decree a quick read, wondering if this was much ado about nothing and it only required logging of connections, not all the data. Actually, it is even worse. Not only does it require logging all data and making it available on demand to the government, it forbids service providers to use any technology that interferes with interception and decryption and imposes on them the burden of making whatever information is demanded available in the clear. If I understand it correctly, it is the ISP's responsibility to decrypt enciphered communications or to prevent encryption from being used in the first place.
But it is even worse than that. It forbids anonymous communications. Furthermore, it requires that everything having to do with this be kept secret, both what the ISPs do to carry out the decree and the fact that the government has intercepted communications.
The main justification given by the US for its refusal to join the civilized world and give up land mines is that they are needed in the DMZ. If robots replace land mines, will the US finally agree to the land mine ban?
The reason that Japan did not surrender immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima was that it took some time for the central government to realize what had happened. They learned fairly quickly that there had been a major air strike on Hiroshima, but the extent of the damage was not out of proportion to previous air raids on Japanese cities. US bombing had already caused a great deal of damage to major Japanese cities, including Tokyo. Incendiary bombing was very destructive since at the time most buildings were made of wood, bamboo, and paper. The Japanese only realized what had happened when they figured out that all of the damage was caused by a single bomb, which was not immediately obvious.
The police won't arrest someone or issue a ticket for a traffic violation that they haven't witnessed themselves, but at least in some jurisdictions if they get a credible report they will send a letter to the owner of the vehicle. Also, if the problem isn't just a one-off but something like someone driving wildly they will send a patrol car to check it out. I once pulled over and reported someone who was veering from one side of the road to the other to the RCMP. When I got home I found a message on my answering machine to the effect that they had pulled the guy over. It turned out that he wasn't drunk, just very sleepy, so they got him to check in to a motel.
I'm well aware of the fact that Canada is a constitutional monarchy. There is no conflict between being a constitutional monarchy and being a democracy. Canada and most other constitutional monarchies are true democracies insofar as the monarch does not, and cannot without provoking a constitutional crisis, exert actual control. The Queen's actual powers are extremely limited. Beyond appointing the governor-general and the lieutenant-governors, she exercises power only in the very rare situations in which she refuses royal assent to legislation or where, no party having a clear majority, she decides who to ask to form the government. The queen does not, in practice, have the power to originate legislation or to act outside the framework of the law.
Wrong. It is not sedition to make a correct statement, or even an incorrect statement, about the powers of the sovereign. Sedition requires the intent to change the government by force. This is not merely a general definition; it is the definition given in the Criminal Code of Canada.
A democracy need not be direct. Here's the first definition google produced. It is typical:
But if you set the bitrate sufficiently high that you don't have to worry about distortion, you're getting close to the file size you would get with lossless compression. With the huge amounts of cheap storage and high network bandwidth we now have, for most purposes I see no point in messing around with lossy audio compression.
In Canada, as in any parliamentary system, the Prime Minister is chosen indirectly, by the party that forms the government. The head of state is of course the Queen, whose role is now entirely ceremonial. The facts that you have nothing to say about a purely ceremonial figure and that the Prime Minister is not directly elected does not make Canada any less a democracy.
It's true that pre-implementation specs are often way off, but it is certainly not impossible to do a reasonable job of writing up them up. I've used systems to which I didn't have source that worked very much as the manuals said they did. I wrote a good bit of code on HP Bobcats using the man pages for HP-UX, Starbase graphics, and whatever their window system (the interrupt-based one, not X) was called. I don't recall ever encountering a discrepancy. And software was hardly HP's strength.
As far as I can see, in theory, full and accurate specifications of the APIs and protocols ought to be sufficient to allow interoperability and prevent Microsoft from having an unfair advantage over competitors. The problem is that nobody trusts Microsoft to publish full and honest specs and adhere to them. They are known for having undocumented interfaces and for departing from standards. Forcing them to publish the source would let others determine the actual APIs and protocols by inspection, and we'd know whether the source they published was real because its behavior could be compared with that of Microsoft's binaries. However, this doesn't require that Microsoft license its source under the GPL. People can perfectly well implement Microsoft's APIs and protocols with their own code. What it does require, other than publishing the software with terms that do not prohibit use of the information gleaned in GPL-ed software, is freedom from patents.
Insofar as Microsoft has been convicted of monopolistic behavior, I don't think it has a choice if publishing source code under the GPL is the only way of adressing its improper behavior. It's not like something that is insufficiently in line with capitalism is "cruel and unusual punishment". If Microsoft really doesn't want to publish its source, it seems to me that the only thing to do is to force them to stand behind their specs by imposing significant penalties for differences in behavior between their software and the specs. This could even be a way of diverting the efforts of some crackers - finding discrepancies would be a thrill, and could even be remunerative if a percentage of the fine were awarded as a bounty.
It's really too bad that we don't have access to the actual study. Without it it is hard to judge very much. I went to the Yankee Group web site and found their press release, which is a little bit more informative than the news item, but not much. Elsewhere on the Yankee Group site they reveal that the study will not be available until JUNE 2005. Funny that they are issuing press releases now about a study that won't be released for two months. I wonder if that is so that they can have their impact now and defer the hard criticism?
Anyhow, there was an interesting bit in the YG press release:
I think that this gives us a hint of what is going on. If MS Windows were really perceived as better than Linux, or even equal, the cost of making a change and general inertia would presumably result in little Linux adoption. The fact that the same businesses in which MS Windows has an overall reputation of being better than Linux are adding Linux or shifting partly to Linux suggests that there is actually a perception of Linux as better and/or cheaper. I suspect that what is going on is that the reputation questions were answered largely by managers with little firsthand technical knowledge, who have, however, been pushed by their technie subordinates to allow a shift in the direction of Linux.
Where on earth did you go to high school? Electrical Engineering in grade 11? Lots of high schools have electronics, but I've never heard of a high school electrical engineering course.
Hardly. It's true that the Greeks were not as interested in or successful at empire-building as the Romans, but they were hardly peaceful. Ever hear of the Persian wars? How about the conquests of Alexander? When they weren't fighting the Persians, they were engaged in constant warfare among themselves. There wasn't any such thing as "Greece" - there were a whole bunch of city states and petty kingdoms.
Nor were the Greeks as enlightened as TV history makes out. In "democratic" Athens at the height of its glory, only 1/4 of the adult population could vote: half the population was female, and women had hardly any rights, much less the vote. And half the population consisted of slaves, who had even fewer rights than women.
It's true that the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of Greece overshadowed those of Rome, but it isn't true that everything was great in Greece until the barbarous Romans took over.
Given North Korea's poor economy and technological backwardness, they're probably using FreeVMS. And to please the Great Leader, they probably tell him it's pirated. :)
Many years ago at an organization I will not name research staff were not supposed to run network cable because the union rules required that members of a particular union run all cable, even the cable in cable trays in the corridors. If you followed the rules, it would take a couple months for them to get to it and they'd screw it up. In order to get anything done, the research staff would organize fast, precisely timed "guerilla cable laying parties" between union shifts. In this case, the union rules just had the effect of irritating people who were basically pro-union.
It isn't really clear to me from your post what the task is. Is it to translate the code itself, so that a programmer knowing only English can understand the variable names and so forth, or is it to localize the interface, that is, provide English messages and labels, use American format dates, and so forth? The best thing that you can do is get a look at the code long before you leave for Japan. In my experience (which is mostly of research code written by electrical engineers and computer scientists) the code itself is written in the Roman alphabet and frequently uses primarily if not exclusively English identifiers. The comments, on the other hand, are often in Japanese written the usual way, encoded in Shift-JIS or EUC-JP. If you're lucky and either are not tasked with translating the code itself or find that it is in English already, you only have to worry about the interface, and with luck you'll be able to figure out a lot of that without actually being able to read Japanese from the program logic and your knowledge of the tasks the program performs.
If you are actually expected to do extensive translation, you're in big trouble. It simply isn't reasonable to expect someone with no knowledge of Japanese to do this. Not only do you have to deal with an almost completely unfamiliar vocabulary, you have to deal with a very complex unfamiliar writing system and with a language that is grammatically very different from English. Translating from Japanese to English is not just a matter of looking up the words.
Anyhow, if you're going to have to try to deal with written Japanese, you can at least give yourself a head start. Get yourself a straightforward textbook that focusses on the grammar and basic vocabulary. Since your primary goal is NOT to learn to speak Japanese, the conversation oriented books for tourists and even those used in university courses aimed at developing speaking ability are not what you want. Try "Teach Yourself Japanese". It covers the basic grammar and basic vocabulary quite nicely, in romanization. Secondly, learn to read kana. In a short time, you aren't going to learn a sufficient number of Chinese characters to be useful, but you can learn kana, which will at least give you an idea what you are looking at.
If you are going to have to tackle unromanized text, you need a way to look up words, and unless you have a terrific visual memory and linguistic skills, looking up Chinese characters in a regular dictionary as a raw novice is going to be terribly difficult and time consuming. Familiarize yourself with a tool that glosses the text for you andmake sure you'll have access to it. Try Japanese Reading Tool.
There are quite a few regular expression tools available, with different capabilities and purposes. For the novice who doesn't want to learn more or doesn't have time, the best is probably txt2regex, which walks you through the construction of the regexp and generates output for 20 different programs and languages. It is one of the few tools that I know of that isn't specialized for a particular language or program. My own tool, Redet, provides an interface to 29 regular expression implementations. It is aimed at people who know something about regular expressions or are willing to spend some time learning but helps out by providing palettes showing the notation for each program and a history system, so that you can first construct the pieces of a complex regexp, then assemble them. It also has features aimed at providing a search environment that may be useful for people who need no help constructing their regular expressions.
regex-coach uses PERL-style regular expressions. Its particular virtue is that it can single-step through the match and show the parse tree, so it is useful if you want to understand the matching process in detail. Similar in that it helps to understand the implementation of regular expressions is re_graph, which given a regular expression draws the corresponding finite state automaton.
A couple of nice tools aimed at Python users are Kiki and Kodos.
These and some other tools and libraries are listed on this page.
On the basis of checking out some web sites in Dutch, I think that "windows" has become a generic term in Dutch in its computer sense. See this Language Log post for the evidence.
A "real, live Romanian" is no doubt expert at speaking Romanian, but is not necessarily an authority of any sort on how closely Romanian resembles Latin. Furthermore, this sort of thing is a matter of national pride in some countries, which means that people believe all sorts of silly things. A majority of the Greeks that I have known were firmly convinced that ancient Greek was pronounced just like Modern Greek, in spite of the mass of evidence to the contrary, the fact that the language has obviously changed in other ways (which they know because they learn to read Ancient Greek in school), and the fact that every other language is known to change over time.
Hardly. Romanian is by no means "almost exactly Latin". For example, Latin had seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative - the last residual) while Rumanian has only three, and only a subset of feminine nouns distinguish all three, and then only in the singular. Latin did not have articles. Rumanian has articles attached to the end of nouns. As far as vocabulary is concerned, if anything Rumanian words resemble their Latin ancestors less than in languages like Italian and Spanish. Look at the loss of vowels in final syllables as seen in Latin campus becoming Rumanian camp, where the vowel (in a different quality) is retained in Italian campo. Rumanian has also borrowed quite a few words from Slavic languages. Rumanian is conservative in some respects, in retaining more of the case system, for example, than other Romance languages, but overall it cannot be said to be consistently more conservative, and it certainly isn't almost the same as Latin.
Oops, the suit is in a US court. That may mean that they are confident enough that this isn't fair use under US law that they didn't need the advantage of French law. It is also possible that they intend to argue that by virtue of being a party to the Berne Convention, the US is obligated to harmonize its law with that of the other signatories, and that in effect French law governs anyhow.
Fair Use is an aspect of US copyright law. The suit is under French law. Not all countries have a fair use exception in their copyright law. In particular, according to this law journal article:
This is one area in which US law is better for the consumer than the law of many other countries.Even if one accepts this argument, it doesn't justify the way most of the people held prisoner by the US are being treated, because most of them are certainly NOT terrorists. Aside from the fact that an unknown percentage seem to be innocent bystanders, most of the people captured in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo bay were Taliban SOLDIERS. I have no sympathy whatever for their cause, but they were part of an organized military force. Here is a review of the Taliban forces as of October, 2001 by Jane's. They may not have been organized in quite the same way as most armies, but by any reasonable standard this was an organized military force, not a bunch of terrorists. However much we may dislike the Taliban, the fact is that they were the de facto government of Afghanistan and had armed forces, most of whom had nothing to do with terrorist operations.
I know nothing about this type of software, but hundreds of millions of dollars sounds like an awful lot. I gather that this is not the first attempt to develop such software, that it is a category that has been around for some time. Why is this not a relatively inexpensive matter of buying or licensing some off-the-shelf system and configuring it, rather the way people buy a database system and then set up their own record structures, specialized queries, and so forth? Can anyone explain why this would cost such an enormous amount?
Why do you attribute the expansion of personal computing to Microsoft? They aren't responsible for any relevant innovation. They had nothing to do with the developments that made the hardware cheap enough for ordinary people to own computers. They didn't invent the GUI, or even have much to do with improving it. They didn't create the first popular word processor. That was probably Wordstar, and then of course WordPerfect. They didn't have anything to do with the creation of the web, and it was Netscape that was the dominant browser when web usage was in its major growth spurt. It is true that most people have used Microsoft software, but I see no reason to believe that things would not have developed just as well and just as rapidly, if not more so, if Microsoft had not existed. There just isn't anything unique about Microsoft's technological innovation or vision.