I'm sorry, but this just doesn't make sense. It can't be right.
Nope, the way the case works the licesne fee sets the maximum damages in the case that they took you to court.
What they choose to charge for their license has little to do with what they could win in court. If it were the upper limit, no one would ever buy a license. There are penalties for copyright infringement beyond merely paying for the license -- that's why it's so expensive to get caught using pirated or unlicensed software, no? If not, and the "true" license is the legal claim price and most people pay a discounted price up front then which price is the $699 license?
It is unlikely that SCO can claim any damages because the plaintif in any tort is required to mitigate their damages. In other words someone drops a cigarette near your house, you watch the cigarette set fire to your lawn, your deck and you do nothing to try to stop it even though you are sitting next to a fire extinguisher. The person who dropped the ciggarett asks to use the fire extinguisher, you refuse. No you cannot claim the cost of rebuilding the house as damages.
Aren't informational torts different? It's one thing to burn down someone's house -- that deprives them of a house. With copyright infringement, though, I can steal from you without you losing anything other than potential income -- you would make less money rather than lose it. Likewise, putting out a small fire on a carpet will stop my house from burning down while posting the code that has been stolen on a webpage comes with no such guaranty. In fact, in the case of copyright theft, it would be logical to know that the thief knows what was stolen, and they are obliged to fix the problem. Copyright theft on the scale being described by SCO in their press releases would not be accidental. On top of that, though, they may feel that disclosing which parts of linux contains their stolen IP would reduce the value of that IP. If I have, say, a grease fire and all I have to fight fire is water then you can't blame me for not throwing water on the fire...
That being said, the statute of limitations for civil suits is normally only a year or two after the date of discovery (this varies based on what kind of suit it is, of course)... I wonder when SCO discovered their stolen code or that IBM stole it...
Let's say NASA came to the conclusion a UFO crashed there.
Some people would not believe it. Some would think the revelation was a conspiracy. Many others would just grip their bibles and squeeze their eyes shut.
Is it just me, or does it seem odd to anyone else that the same people who believe that NASA faked the moon landing also believe that NASA is covering up actual evidence of a UFO?
Why do they believe that NASA would tell the truth about UFO's (under FOIA) but that they would lie for years about the space program?
Hopefully the progress on fission in lighter elements should reduce the need for this. We can for example build a reactor that induces fission in Magnesium 24 to create 2 atoms of Nitrogen 14, which, as everybody knows, is perfectly harmless.
That wouldn't work, though, would it? Fusion and fission are antagonistic, so in a reaction where fusion produces net energy, fission requires net energy input. The midpoint where fusion becomes a net energy loss and fission a net energy gain is up around iron. If you fissioned Mg24 you'd have to put more energy in than you got back out, at least for the nuclear side of the reaction. As best i can tell, Mg24 also won't split into 2 N14's. If you have a link to this process somewhere reputable i'll eat my words, but as best i can tell this is junk science.
Parent is stupid, troll, or both. please mod down.
My contention is that total cost v. total benefit should be the primary consideration. So, consider a situation where a MS product would win; it's then ridiculous to say that if all factors were considered, MS should be banned for just this reason.
Some benefits are binary. If a system doesn't work but costs half as much, you don't buy it. Massachusetts decided that one benefit it wanted was access to the sourcecode of any software that they purchased. When yet another devastating worm infests every MS box connected to the internet and microsoft ignores it for a few weeks before releasing a patch, or releases a patch that causes new problems, MA wants to be able to fix the problem themselves. Self-reliance is an immeasurably valuable benefit to open source and microsoft normally doesn't offer it.
As an example, what if I was hiring at my company and you interviewed. Afterwards I informed you that I had a blanket no people named "commodore" policy, but otherwise you were far and away the best candidate. You're welcome to have the position, as long as you don't mind changing your name.
This is moronic. A person's name means very little to anyone else. The ability to modify source in the event of a bug or the ability to support internally should the vendor terminate support is of vital importance. not a big deal, you say? MSFT has terminated support for win98 and no doubt winME will lose support shortly. the government no doubt wants computers and software that will be supported for more than 3 years after purchase...
I hope you'll agree that this situation is ridiculous: If I've decided you're the best candidate, why should a quality that DOESN'T detract from you being the best candidate disqualify you.
But closed source does detract from the value of a software product. Just because most because you don't fix the bugs in (say) MSFT powerpoint doesn't mean that another client, say a state with hundreds of thousands of users, would want to be able to fix it themselves. If you don't get this you're just obtuse.
This situation mirros what's going on here exactly (now read this carefully, because I'm sure this analogy will be under attack). Once it's been decided on a playing field that considers ALL factors that an MS solution is best, it should be used. Holding one criteria against it, in the face of an overall superior product is ridiculous.
1) where is the analogy in the above paragraph?
2) Why do you want to consider all factors except the openness of the source?
3) Why do you assume that you know the Costs/Benefits of MA better than MA does?
MA is making a decision as to the level of support they require, and they consider the availability of source code to be a bare necessity. They know more about what makes an "overall superior" product for their purposes than you do.
The point is, I'm not saying MA should only use MS. What they should do, is genuinely choose the best product for each application. Open Source and Open Standards should def. be considerations, but not THE consideration.
MSFT hasn't been excluded from anything. They can still make bids, they just have to give their source. It really doesn't make sense for companies to hide their source any more anyway as it's easy to acquire and use unlicensed software without the source. Closed source undermines legitimate uses while doing little to impede illegitimate ones.
More importantly, though, the bad PR comes as a result of the press release issued by the plaintiff's attorney on filing, not when the judge allows the case or when the jury returns a decision... Cases at trial are pretty boring to the general public, after all, and are pretty hard to cover compared to the ready-to-print press releases that any competent attorney would hand out on filing a suit like this. Even if the suit gets thrown out the next day, the damage is done, and if it does get thrown out and that makes it to the news, the vast majority of americans who know nothing about the law would assume it was thrown out because of Verizon/SBC's big money/big lawyers/big bribes and hurt their public image regardless...
Re:Patented -- cannot sell or MAKE
on
Build Your Own Segway
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· Score: 2, Informative
Try again, building it is perfectly legal, profiting from it (financially) is not. Remember that the intent of a patent is to protect ones rights for commercial exploitation of a given method or device.
Wrong. The only power granted by a patent is the power to prevent others from practicing the art described by the patent. There is no distinction between personal or commercial practice, it is just much harder to make a case for damages against a private practitioner. It's copyrights that explicitly prohibit reproduction for commercial use, though few folks here know the difference between patents and copyrights anyway.
um... did he just confess to innumerable counts of fraud? If I'm not mistaken, lying to someone to obtain something of value for something of significantly lesser value is fraud, though I'd have to look at Florida's statutes to know for sure... I doubt federal statutes would be involved, as though he used the telephone he did so within the state. IANAL, though, FWIW.
In my opinion, the lawyers involved on SCO's side should all be disbarred at the end of the case. They are either incompetent, or knowingly grossly misrepresenting copyright and contract law.
First off, it's the SCO executives that are causing all of these problems, not their lawyers. Lawyers are bound by their code of ethics to advance the interests of their clients to the greatest extent allowed by the law. So long as SCO's lawyers are giving SCO sound legal advice (such as "Don't do this, you'll lose") I have no problem with them and neither should you. Furthermore, as I understand the way the legal system works, SCO's lawyers can't be sued for filing a frivolous lawsuit on SCO's behalf. If you think about it, you'll agree that this is a key component to a working legal system. If (for example) the Mechanized Frog Corporation cuts off my arm and I want to sue them because, hey, I don't have an arm then I need to be able to find a laywer to represent me. If the MFC can just use their lawyers to sue any lawyer I hire out of business then I effectively have no legal protections, which is bad.
example expoit code = giving away the plutonium and that would be illegal
Hm... i'm not sure whether giving away plutonium would be illegal. Rather, it's not legal to own in the first place, so i doubt giving it away would get you in more trouble than having it in the first place.
Anyway, code is merely instructions. the end user would still need equipment which you do not provide and even if you provide a full uncompiled virus, would require several malicious acts to take it from instructions to a weapon. I mean you almost certainly have the materials necessary to manufacture a musket in your house, and if I told you how to do it, and you did it, and killed someone, then it's you who gets to wear stripes... Me, I may be liable, but i'm not criminally responsible, and I shouldn't be. you can't make information illegal without changing the constitution and code, while it can be quickly turned into an executable which is arguably a thing rather than information, code is still just information.
But is it still illegal if you were to build an example nuclear weapon using lead instead of plutonium? Who is to blame if the example is taken and the lead replaced with plutonium?
I see a big fat legal grey line here...
No grey line. If someone steals my gun and kills someone with it, i'm not responsible. If I build a nuclear weapon and use plutonium and whatnot and set it up so that a single button has to be pressed to set it off, and someone steals it, takes it to Las Vegas, and sets it off, then I am guilty of no crime (well, the posession of a fissionable mass of plutonium is illegal, IIRC, but that's another matter entirely). That doesn't mean i can't be sued, but there's nothing illegal there. You may think it SHOULD be otherwise. I disagree with that notion and, for the moment, the law errs widely on the side of personal freedom.
You know, there are a lot of laws in the style of "let's make make our voters have the perception we are doing a good thing while doing bad things".
Should I mention any?
I wonder what would happen if they used up all of the "good" acronyms? Like what happens when PATRIOT and GOODLAW and RE-ELECT are all taken? Is some sort of NEA funding bill going to get stuck with being called the POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS act? You figure there are a limited number of sensical acronyms, after all.
Why does it seem that every single proposed or actual law targeted at "cybercrime" puts absurd limitations on legitimate research while having absolutely no effect on the criminals?
Most of the laws targeted at any kind of crime tends to undermine legitimate uses of materials and technologies while doing little or nothing to diminish the same resources from being used by criminal elements. Guns/Drugs/WMD's/etc -- if it is made, or can be made, a determined criminal can obtain it and use it for ill.
Perhaps it's the only remotely intelligent thing that Reagan ever said, but "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns"...
um... no. I could write a full set of instructions detailing how to go from uranium ore to a working plutonium-based fissile nuclear weapon and be within my rights. moreover, if someone takes what I wrote and uses it to blow up Las Vegas, I will not be jailed or prosecuted for anything connected with that crime. I may be liable in a civil court for any actions directly facilitated by my speech, but my actions would be in no way illegal. Why should it be any different with computers?
The left wing in this country have suceeded in creating an environment where no one is held accountable for the consequences of their decisions. The lamest of excuses, like "I saw it in a video game," or "I ate too many twinkies" are sucessfully used to deflect blame onto third parties.
First off, this has nothing to do with left or right. second, neither of your excuses accurately characterizes the situations you intended to reference. In this case, the game (GTA3) has a system for incentivizing violence. The players aren't getting points/ammo/advancement for killing evil monsters, but for killing innocent bystanders. A more accurate summary of this would be "I did it because, through a system of contextual incentive, the game taught me that I would be rewarded for such acts of violence." Why is it that the same people who think that computers can be used as a learning aid also dismiss out of hand the notion that a child learned something from a computer?
As for the twinkie defense, that was a result of a rather unusual chemical imbalance in the perpetrator of the crime combined with eating (if i recall correctly) 30 twinkies in a very short period. Was he temporarily insane? almost certainly. Was it just a convenient excuse? No. He was actually insane. He had no idea what he was doing. It's not like he killed someone then went back in time and forcefed himself 30 twinkies. There's a difference between the reason that a crime occured and an excuse for committing it. Unless you want to classify self-defense as just another left-wing excuse, you don't have a foot to stand on here.
If a video game can influence someone to do something so horrible, what does that say about how their parents have raised them?
If you concede the video game's influence, then the parental involvement doesn't matter. The video game manufacturers know that when they produce these games, the target market is teenagers and parents won't be there every step of the way saying "now, junior, you know raping that prostitute is wrong, don't you?" If the game could concievably influence a player, regardless of parental practices, then the manufacturer is liable. If a local karate school rewarded pupils who used their skills to mug old ladies it would be shut down/held liable -- why should this video game be any different?
The sad sick truth of this story is that Sony is being sued not because it is responsible for this in any way, but because it has deep pockets and is likely to settle out of court because it will cost them MORE money to fight it.
If i'm not mistaken, sony had to grant permission for GTA3 to be on their console and gets a cut of the profits from the sale of the game. Effectively, Sony and Take Two are in a partnership in the production, distribution, and sale of this dangerous product. Suing sony makes perfect legal sense -- their deep pockets have little to do with their being named in the suit, though if they had shallow pockets they probably would have been left out (like the kids' parents). There's an important distinction there.
The only people who win in a case like this are lawywers, and they do so at the expense of society itself. Jack Thompson should be disbarred for filing a frivilous lawsuit.
well, the plaintiffs would also win, except their loss exceeds any amount of money the court could award. Does society suffer? obviously not. If this helps curb the production and distribution of a dangerous product and prevents a single subsequent act of voilence, then society wins. Likewise, if this goes to trial and it is proven that the instructive aspects of the game had nothing to do with the crime in question, then society also wins. The only person who could realistically expect to "lose" is you, who may have to pay an extra $.50 on top of the ridiculous margins for your next game. It seems to me that you're confusing society for your own need to feed your video game addiction. This is far from a
this shows a serious lack of the consequences of their actions, not any sort of thing that GTA will help or hinder.
Actually, the lawsuit is saying that GTA did, in fact, hinder the kids' understanding of the consequences of their actions. GTA actively rewards its players for unnecessary, gratuitous violence. The argument that this system of rewards could skew these children's abilities to distinguish right from wrong is a valid one, and apparently the DA and forensic psychiatrist agreed with it (you know that 16 year-old would have faced charges as an adult otherwise). There are plenty of studies showing successful behavior modification as a result of such reward systems -- there's a major field of study dedicated to such systems and their effectiveness (called behaviorism). Not only is this not a frivolous lawsuit, but if it goes to trial and the plaintiff's attorneys don't suck, i'd put money on a victory.
I know it's fashionable here at slashdot to pretend that videogames have no effect on your life while at the same time many of us spend thousands of dollars every year to upgrade our systems and maximize our ability to kill pixel monsters over the internet. Could the same system of incentives that leads us to buy an insanely expensive processor/video card in order to get a shot off an instant quicker also act as an incentive, in those with undeveloped systems of moral reasoning, to commit real acts of violence?
It's also big here to talk about taking responsibility for one's own actions, and that's nice. the kids here are being punished. but why do you then absolve from responsibility a company that made billions of dollars on a system that incentivized the violence that these boys committed. If i gave a 5 year-old a piece of candy every time he shot a life-like manikin and then put him on the street with a gun would i not be responsible if he shot someone? I should be. If I market a product that effectively does the same thing, would i not also be responsible? More importantly, do I have a responsibility to not market a product that could do such a thing? In the united states, the law says I have a responsibility to not market such a product or pay the consequences.
These companies knew the rules when they published their games and they made a handsome profit doing it. Would you change the law because something that you enjoy killed someone else? If so, then i hope the next time your car is found to have a defective gas tank, or your computer is found to be a fire hazard, or your baby's food is found to be toxic with certain common medications, that you write to your senator and tell them to absolve megacorporations of these negligent actions as well. Heaven forbid we should have any consumer protections at all. I for one would be overjoyed if the antibiotics I just payed $100 for were really just snake oil.
As native, fluent speakers tend to be more adept at this "skill" than those less experienced in the dark arts of deciphering written english, I would think at least one possibility is as a form of real-time field encryption. The sender would not have to exchange keys with any of the intendend recipients, and as long as the instructions/information was highly time-dependent the intended recipients could make use of it before any non-native english speaker could decipher it...
For example, say there was a coup in some country and the new leaders were going to line any americans they found up against the wall. If the american embassy ran the following message across all local television broadcasts:
"Acmarien ctiienzs, you are in gvare dnegar. Rproet to the ebassmy at ocne!"
it would inform any americans watching to GTFO without allerting many of those charged with finding and detaining americans.
It should be noted that a patent is valid so long as there is no prior art prior to the date of invention. If Eolas invented this in 1985 and maintained their patent rights while working towards a filing and didn't file until 1994, it wouldn't matter if someone did the same in 1993. The american patent system doesn't use the filing date as an important benchmark for anything other than the start of the patent. In fact, there's one patent loophole that was closed around the time of this filing that allowed an "inventor" to keep pushing back his filing date indefinitely by "updating" the process or product being patented. That flaw has been fixed, but for the next ten years or so we will still feel the effects.
Microsoft (and its lawyers) are smart folks. It's unlikely that there was some rival application in plain view that would establish itself as prior art that microsoft didn't try to drag in as a way of avoiding a $.521Bn judgement.
When this standard is in place and a company, say, microsoft, releases an operating system that they claim is secure but is not and does not follow the standard accepted for security by the rest of the industry, and its security fails as a result of this noncompliance, could microsoft then be sued for damages?
But anything that goes up the cable still has to be accelerated to orbital angular velocity, doesn't it?
I'm sure the answer is out there, but exactly how do we do this? Because any force that is applied between payload and cable to accelerate the payload along it is parallel to the cable, whereas the force needed to produce the angular velocity is normal to it. Someone who hasn't forgotten physics please explain.
When you go up a normal elevator, you speed up as well. This isn't somehow a special case just because the elevator is a lot taller. The key to accelerating the elevator perpendicularly to the the cable is just going slow enough so that the magnitude of the acceleration is small. you'd probably also have the largest part of the cable parallel to the rotation of the earth so that you could move the elevator car as quickly as possible. Once the load reaches 36000 km, though, it already has orbital velocity and can move freely away from the cable under its own power.
It's important to remember that F=ma, so you can control the force on a body that is accelerating a mass by controlling the acceleration. It is probably this which limits the capacity of these elevators, but I've never really looked seriously into them.
I'm a materials scientist and i'm afraid i don't entirely share the optimism that some have for the properties of very large nanotube structures. A nanotube a few millimeters long is much less likely to have a defect than a nanotube a few hundred kilometers longs, and a single defect could greatly reduce the strength of these structures. I doubt there would be much plastic deformation, so you'd end up snapping the tube at the defect. turning the material into a textile (ribbon) would greatly reduce this effect, but the expense is overall strength and the nanotubes still break, but the ribbon holds together. the end result of this is you would have a 1m wide ribbon that was really only as strong as a.7m wide ribbon, for example, both for the purposes of supporting load and for the purposes of supporting its own weight.
I've also read (above) that these lab-grown millimeter/centimeter length nanotubes have a UTS (as i understand what was written) of 72 GPa. The writer of that post also said that putting them in a rope should improve that, but i'm afraid that person does not know of what he is talking... A gigapascal is 10^9 N/m^2, and if you string two of these guys in parallel you should get the same reading. the only way that could not be the case is if the nanotubes are already defect-rich on that scale, making the idea of a 100,000 low-defect nanotube rather ludicrous. Either way, i find these plans for a nanotube structure highly dubious. my intuition tells me that nanotubes will evaporate into so much hype, and be a very effective reinforcing material but little more. Glass is also very strong at small length-scales and useful as a reinforcement, but it is very weak in larger samples. Any structure is only as strong as its largest material defect will allow...
You're mileage may vary, but every writer i've worked with or studied under has seen a significant reduction in quality and output while teaching. I know about this first-hand, and even these "reduced teaching expectations" are significant. My university brings them on part-time (so no tenure -- most of them aren't technically professors) and pays them moderately well. it's not nearly well enough, though, and by the time a writer writes enough good books to be considered for a position at my university they don't really need the part-time pay. Generally, writers start teaching when they want to stop writing. I think it was Hemmingway who first expressed that sentiment, though, so it may not be entirely accurate (rather, it's doubtful that any institution would have allowed him a position as he would quickly use it for a drunken encounter with the coeds, so he may have been speaking out of spite)...
As for Delaney (you keep mentioning him), I 1)would like to know what you like so much about him, as I've read some of his stuff and haven't found it terribly compelling and 2) would like to know why he hasn't written any fiction, as best i can tell, since 1996. Maybe he has and I just can't find it, but i've looked around a bit. that would seem to support my contention that having a full-time academic position and being a productive artist are not necessarily coincident events. I think his output dropped precipitously after he started teaching at UMass in 1988 because he couldn't spend as much time on his own writing, but that might just be me reading into the data. You also leave open the problem of initiation -- if you have to be in academia to support yourself as a writer, and you can't get into academia unless you're already a well-respected and multiply-published author, then there will cease to be new authors if the ability to publish is stripped away.
Yes - in exactly the same way that the difference between a mugging and a murder is one of degree, and the terms shouldn't be confused for exactly the same reason "mugger" and "murderer" shouldn't be confused.
Okay, you're being obtuse. If in the process of mugging someone you also kill them, then you're both a murderer and a mugger. you don't cease to be a mugger because you killed the guy. Censorship is information control. Period. The mechanism behind that information control can be in the form of direct governmental action, indirect governmental action, or independent action.
Censor: One who is empowered to examine manuscripts before they are committed to the press, and to forbid their publication if they contain anything obnoxious
(http://dict.die.net/censor/)
athena% webster censorship
cen.sor.ship \'sen(t)-s*r-.ship\ n 1: the institution, system, or practice
of censoring or censors
If I control the press (or am the press) I can act as a censor. If I have a gun and shoot everyone who disagrees with me, i am also a censor. The violence of the latter act should in no way lessen in your mind the information control being practiced in the former act. Indeed, the former is far more effective because, in a mass media environment such as our own, no one would know that it was happening. Someone could be a censor without even knowing it because, in a world of disinformation, the truth may appear to be a lie. It's entirely possible to create a system that automatically censors itself with no malice aforethought -- indeed the move towards using focus groups to determine how to present the news and what to report on the news could be just that.
and no, i'm not living in a cave with a tin-foil hat, but your views are too simplistic. If you believe most of what you read in the newspaper, then you haven't read enough books. I'd guess you were about a hundred years behind the times, but that's just a guess.
Slashdot Mirror
soylent gas is people!
What they choose to charge for their license has little to do with what they could win in court. If it were the upper limit, no one would ever buy a license. There are penalties for copyright infringement beyond merely paying for the license -- that's why it's so expensive to get caught using pirated or unlicensed software, no? If not, and the "true" license is the legal claim price and most people pay a discounted price up front then which price is the $699 license?
Aren't informational torts different? It's one thing to burn down someone's house -- that deprives them of a house. With copyright infringement, though, I can steal from you without you losing anything other than potential income -- you would make less money rather than lose it. Likewise, putting out a small fire on a carpet will stop my house from burning down while posting the code that has been stolen on a webpage comes with no such guaranty. In fact, in the case of copyright theft, it would be logical to know that the thief knows what was stolen, and they are obliged to fix the problem. Copyright theft on the scale being described by SCO in their press releases would not be accidental. On top of that, though, they may feel that disclosing which parts of linux contains their stolen IP would reduce the value of that IP. If I have, say, a grease fire and all I have to fight fire is water then you can't blame me for not throwing water on the fire...
That being said, the statute of limitations for civil suits is normally only a year or two after the date of discovery (this varies based on what kind of suit it is, of course)... I wonder when SCO discovered their stolen code or that IBM stole it...
They do? Or are "they" just a muddled conglomeration of people you don't like?
Of course not. "They" are a muddled agglomeration of people I don't like. get it right.
Is it just me, or does it seem odd to anyone else that the same people who believe that NASA faked the moon landing also believe that NASA is covering up actual evidence of a UFO?
Why do they believe that NASA would tell the truth about UFO's (under FOIA) but that they would lie for years about the space program?
Hopefully the progress on fission in lighter elements should reduce the need for this. We can for example build a reactor that induces fission in Magnesium 24 to create 2 atoms of Nitrogen 14, which, as everybody knows, is perfectly harmless.
That wouldn't work, though, would it? Fusion and fission are antagonistic, so in a reaction where fusion produces net energy, fission requires net energy input. The midpoint where fusion becomes a net energy loss and fission a net energy gain is up around iron. If you fissioned Mg24 you'd have to put more energy in than you got back out, at least for the nuclear side of the reaction. As best i can tell, Mg24 also won't split into 2 N14's. If you have a link to this process somewhere reputable i'll eat my words, but as best i can tell this is junk science.
Parent is stupid, troll, or both. please mod down.
My contention is that total cost v. total benefit should be the primary consideration. So, consider a situation where a MS product would win; it's then ridiculous to say that if all factors were considered, MS should be banned for just this reason.
Some benefits are binary. If a system doesn't work but costs half as much, you don't buy it. Massachusetts decided that one benefit it wanted was access to the sourcecode of any software that they purchased. When yet another devastating worm infests every MS box connected to the internet and microsoft ignores it for a few weeks before releasing a patch, or releases a patch that causes new problems, MA wants to be able to fix the problem themselves. Self-reliance is an immeasurably valuable benefit to open source and microsoft normally doesn't offer it.
As an example, what if I was hiring at my company and you interviewed. Afterwards I informed you that I had a blanket no people named "commodore" policy, but otherwise you were far and away the best candidate. You're welcome to have the position, as long as you don't mind changing your name.
This is moronic. A person's name means very little to anyone else. The ability to modify source in the event of a bug or the ability to support internally should the vendor terminate support is of vital importance. not a big deal, you say? MSFT has terminated support for win98 and no doubt winME will lose support shortly. the government no doubt wants computers and software that will be supported for more than 3 years after purchase...
I hope you'll agree that this situation is ridiculous: If I've decided you're the best candidate, why should a quality that DOESN'T detract from you being the best candidate disqualify you.
But closed source does detract from the value of a software product. Just because most because you don't fix the bugs in (say) MSFT powerpoint doesn't mean that another client, say a state with hundreds of thousands of users, would want to be able to fix it themselves. If you don't get this you're just obtuse.
This situation mirros what's going on here exactly (now read this carefully, because I'm sure this analogy will be under attack). Once it's been decided on a playing field that considers ALL factors that an MS solution is best, it should be used. Holding one criteria against it, in the face of an overall superior product is ridiculous.
1) where is the analogy in the above paragraph?
2) Why do you want to consider all factors except the openness of the source?
3) Why do you assume that you know the Costs/Benefits of MA better than MA does?
MA is making a decision as to the level of support they require, and they consider the availability of source code to be a bare necessity. They know more about what makes an "overall superior" product for their purposes than you do.
The point is, I'm not saying MA should only use MS. What they should do, is genuinely choose the best product for each application. Open Source and Open Standards should def. be considerations, but not THE consideration.
MSFT hasn't been excluded from anything. They can still make bids, they just have to give their source. It really doesn't make sense for companies to hide their source any more anyway as it's easy to acquire and use unlicensed software without the source. Closed source undermines legitimate uses while doing little to impede illegitimate ones.
More importantly, though, the bad PR comes as a result of the press release issued by the plaintiff's attorney on filing, not when the judge allows the case or when the jury returns a decision... Cases at trial are pretty boring to the general public, after all, and are pretty hard to cover compared to the ready-to-print press releases that any competent attorney would hand out on filing a suit like this. Even if the suit gets thrown out the next day, the damage is done, and if it does get thrown out and that makes it to the news, the vast majority of americans who know nothing about the law would assume it was thrown out because of Verizon/SBC's big money/big lawyers/big bribes and hurt their public image regardless...
Try again, building it is perfectly legal, profiting from it (financially) is not. Remember that the intent of a patent is to protect ones rights for commercial exploitation of a given method or device.
Wrong. The only power granted by a patent is the power to prevent others from practicing the art described by the patent. There is no distinction between personal or commercial practice, it is just much harder to make a case for damages against a private practitioner. It's copyrights that explicitly prohibit reproduction for commercial use, though few folks here know the difference between patents and copyrights anyway.
um... did he just confess to innumerable counts of fraud? If I'm not mistaken, lying to someone to obtain something of value for something of significantly lesser value is fraud, though I'd have to look at Florida's statutes to know for sure... I doubt federal statutes would be involved, as though he used the telephone he did so within the state. IANAL, though, FWIW.
In my opinion, the lawyers involved on SCO's side should all be disbarred at the end of the case. They are either incompetent, or knowingly grossly misrepresenting copyright and contract law.
First off, it's the SCO executives that are causing all of these problems, not their lawyers. Lawyers are bound by their code of ethics to advance the interests of their clients to the greatest extent allowed by the law. So long as SCO's lawyers are giving SCO sound legal advice (such as "Don't do this, you'll lose") I have no problem with them and neither should you. Furthermore, as I understand the way the legal system works, SCO's lawyers can't be sued for filing a frivolous lawsuit on SCO's behalf. If you think about it, you'll agree that this is a key component to a working legal system. If (for example) the Mechanized Frog Corporation cuts off my arm and I want to sue them because, hey, I don't have an arm then I need to be able to find a laywer to represent me. If the MFC can just use their lawyers to sue any lawyer I hire out of business then I effectively have no legal protections, which is bad.
example expoit code = giving away the plutonium and that would be illegal Hm... i'm not sure whether giving away plutonium would be illegal. Rather, it's not legal to own in the first place, so i doubt giving it away would get you in more trouble than having it in the first place.
Anyway, code is merely instructions. the end user would still need equipment which you do not provide and even if you provide a full uncompiled virus, would require several malicious acts to take it from instructions to a weapon. I mean you almost certainly have the materials necessary to manufacture a musket in your house, and if I told you how to do it, and you did it, and killed someone, then it's you who gets to wear stripes... Me, I may be liable, but i'm not criminally responsible, and I shouldn't be. you can't make information illegal without changing the constitution and code, while it can be quickly turned into an executable which is arguably a thing rather than information, code is still just information.
But is it still illegal if you were to build an example nuclear weapon using lead instead of plutonium? Who is to blame if the example is taken and the lead replaced with plutonium?
I see a big fat legal grey line here...
No grey line. If someone steals my gun and kills someone with it, i'm not responsible. If I build a nuclear weapon and use plutonium and whatnot and set it up so that a single button has to be pressed to set it off, and someone steals it, takes it to Las Vegas, and sets it off, then I am guilty of no crime (well, the posession of a fissionable mass of plutonium is illegal, IIRC, but that's another matter entirely). That doesn't mean i can't be sued, but there's nothing illegal there. You may think it SHOULD be otherwise. I disagree with that notion and, for the moment, the law errs widely on the side of personal freedom.
You know, there are a lot of laws in the style of "let's make make our voters have the perception we are doing a good thing while doing bad things". Should I mention any?
I wonder what would happen if they used up all of the "good" acronyms? Like what happens when PATRIOT and GOODLAW and RE-ELECT are all taken? Is some sort of NEA funding bill going to get stuck with being called the POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS act? You figure there are a limited number of sensical acronyms, after all.
Why does it seem that every single proposed or actual law targeted at "cybercrime" puts absurd limitations on legitimate research while having absolutely no effect on the criminals?
Most of the laws targeted at any kind of crime tends to undermine legitimate uses of materials and technologies while doing little or nothing to diminish the same resources from being used by criminal elements. Guns/Drugs/WMD's/etc -- if it is made, or can be made, a determined criminal can obtain it and use it for ill.
Perhaps it's the only remotely intelligent thing that Reagan ever said, but "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns"...
um... no. I could write a full set of instructions detailing how to go from uranium ore to a working plutonium-based fissile nuclear weapon and be within my rights. moreover, if someone takes what I wrote and uses it to blow up Las Vegas, I will not be jailed or prosecuted for anything connected with that crime. I may be liable in a civil court for any actions directly facilitated by my speech, but my actions would be in no way illegal. Why should it be any different with computers?
The left wing in this country have suceeded in creating an environment where no one is held accountable for the consequences of their decisions. The lamest of excuses, like "I saw it in a video game," or "I ate too many twinkies" are sucessfully used to deflect blame onto third parties.
First off, this has nothing to do with left or right. second, neither of your excuses accurately characterizes the situations you intended to reference. In this case, the game (GTA3) has a system for incentivizing violence. The players aren't getting points/ammo/advancement for killing evil monsters, but for killing innocent bystanders. A more accurate summary of this would be "I did it because, through a system of contextual incentive, the game taught me that I would be rewarded for such acts of violence." Why is it that the same people who think that computers can be used as a learning aid also dismiss out of hand the notion that a child learned something from a computer?
As for the twinkie defense, that was a result of a rather unusual chemical imbalance in the perpetrator of the crime combined with eating (if i recall correctly) 30 twinkies in a very short period. Was he temporarily insane? almost certainly. Was it just a convenient excuse? No. He was actually insane. He had no idea what he was doing. It's not like he killed someone then went back in time and forcefed himself 30 twinkies. There's a difference between the reason that a crime occured and an excuse for committing it. Unless you want to classify self-defense as just another left-wing excuse, you don't have a foot to stand on here.
If a video game can influence someone to do something so horrible, what does that say about how their parents have raised them?
If you concede the video game's influence, then the parental involvement doesn't matter. The video game manufacturers know that when they produce these games, the target market is teenagers and parents won't be there every step of the way saying "now, junior, you know raping that prostitute is wrong, don't you?" If the game could concievably influence a player, regardless of parental practices, then the manufacturer is liable. If a local karate school rewarded pupils who used their skills to mug old ladies it would be shut down/held liable -- why should this video game be any different?
The sad sick truth of this story is that Sony is being sued not because it is responsible for this in any way, but because it has deep pockets and is likely to settle out of court because it will cost them MORE money to fight it.
If i'm not mistaken, sony had to grant permission for GTA3 to be on their console and gets a cut of the profits from the sale of the game. Effectively, Sony and Take Two are in a partnership in the production, distribution, and sale of this dangerous product. Suing sony makes perfect legal sense -- their deep pockets have little to do with their being named in the suit, though if they had shallow pockets they probably would have been left out (like the kids' parents). There's an important distinction there.
The only people who win in a case like this are lawywers, and they do so at the expense of society itself. Jack Thompson should be disbarred for filing a frivilous lawsuit.
well, the plaintiffs would also win, except their loss exceeds any amount of money the court could award. Does society suffer? obviously not. If this helps curb the production and distribution of a dangerous product and prevents a single subsequent act of voilence, then society wins. Likewise, if this goes to trial and it is proven that the instructive aspects of the game had nothing to do with the crime in question, then society also wins. The only person who could realistically expect to "lose" is you, who may have to pay an extra $.50 on top of the ridiculous margins for your next game. It seems to me that you're confusing society for your own need to feed your video game addiction. This is far from a
this shows a serious lack of the consequences of their actions, not any sort of thing that GTA will help or hinder.
Actually, the lawsuit is saying that GTA did, in fact, hinder the kids' understanding of the consequences of their actions. GTA actively rewards its players for unnecessary, gratuitous violence. The argument that this system of rewards could skew these children's abilities to distinguish right from wrong is a valid one, and apparently the DA and forensic psychiatrist agreed with it (you know that 16 year-old would have faced charges as an adult otherwise). There are plenty of studies showing successful behavior modification as a result of such reward systems -- there's a major field of study dedicated to such systems and their effectiveness (called behaviorism). Not only is this not a frivolous lawsuit, but if it goes to trial and the plaintiff's attorneys don't suck, i'd put money on a victory.
I know it's fashionable here at slashdot to pretend that videogames have no effect on your life while at the same time many of us spend thousands of dollars every year to upgrade our systems and maximize our ability to kill pixel monsters over the internet. Could the same system of incentives that leads us to buy an insanely expensive processor/video card in order to get a shot off an instant quicker also act as an incentive, in those with undeveloped systems of moral reasoning, to commit real acts of violence?
It's also big here to talk about taking responsibility for one's own actions, and that's nice. the kids here are being punished. but why do you then absolve from responsibility a company that made billions of dollars on a system that incentivized the violence that these boys committed. If i gave a 5 year-old a piece of candy every time he shot a life-like manikin and then put him on the street with a gun would i not be responsible if he shot someone? I should be. If I market a product that effectively does the same thing, would i not also be responsible? More importantly, do I have a responsibility to not market a product that could do such a thing? In the united states, the law says I have a responsibility to not market such a product or pay the consequences.
These companies knew the rules when they published their games and they made a handsome profit doing it. Would you change the law because something that you enjoy killed someone else? If so, then i hope the next time your car is found to have a defective gas tank, or your computer is found to be a fire hazard, or your baby's food is found to be toxic with certain common medications, that you write to your senator and tell them to absolve megacorporations of these negligent actions as well. Heaven forbid we should have any consumer protections at all. I for one would be overjoyed if the antibiotics I just payed $100 for were really just snake oil.
As native, fluent speakers tend to be more adept at this "skill" than those less experienced in the dark arts of deciphering written english, I would think at least one possibility is as a form of real-time field encryption. The sender would not have to exchange keys with any of the intendend recipients, and as long as the instructions/information was highly time-dependent the intended recipients could make use of it before any non-native english speaker could decipher it...
For example, say there was a coup in some country and the new leaders were going to line any americans they found up against the wall. If the american embassy ran the following message across all local television broadcasts:
"Acmarien ctiienzs, you are in gvare dnegar. Rproet to the ebassmy at ocne!"
it would inform any americans watching to GTFO without allerting many of those charged with finding and detaining americans.
It should be noted that a patent is valid so long as there is no prior art prior to the date of invention. If Eolas invented this in 1985 and maintained their patent rights while working towards a filing and didn't file until 1994, it wouldn't matter if someone did the same in 1993. The american patent system doesn't use the filing date as an important benchmark for anything other than the start of the patent. In fact, there's one patent loophole that was closed around the time of this filing that allowed an "inventor" to keep pushing back his filing date indefinitely by "updating" the process or product being patented. That flaw has been fixed, but for the next ten years or so we will still feel the effects.
Microsoft (and its lawyers) are smart folks. It's unlikely that there was some rival application in plain view that would establish itself as prior art that microsoft didn't try to drag in as a way of avoiding a $.521Bn judgement.
When this standard is in place and a company, say, microsoft, releases an operating system that they claim is secure but is not and does not follow the standard accepted for security by the rest of the industry, and its security fails as a result of this noncompliance, could microsoft then be sued for damages?
But anything that goes up the cable still has to be accelerated to orbital angular velocity, doesn't it?
.7m wide ribbon, for example, both for the purposes of supporting load and for the purposes of supporting its own weight.
I'm sure the answer is out there, but exactly how do we do this? Because any force that is applied between payload and cable to accelerate the payload along it is parallel to the cable, whereas the force needed to produce the angular velocity is normal to it. Someone who hasn't forgotten physics please explain.
When you go up a normal elevator, you speed up as well. This isn't somehow a special case just because the elevator is a lot taller. The key to accelerating the elevator perpendicularly to the the cable is just going slow enough so that the magnitude of the acceleration is small. you'd probably also have the largest part of the cable parallel to the rotation of the earth so that you could move the elevator car as quickly as possible. Once the load reaches 36000 km, though, it already has orbital velocity and can move freely away from the cable under its own power.
It's important to remember that F=ma, so you can control the force on a body that is accelerating a mass by controlling the acceleration. It is probably this which limits the capacity of these elevators, but I've never really looked seriously into them.
I'm a materials scientist and i'm afraid i don't entirely share the optimism that some have for the properties of very large nanotube structures. A nanotube a few millimeters long is much less likely to have a defect than a nanotube a few hundred kilometers longs, and a single defect could greatly reduce the strength of these structures. I doubt there would be much plastic deformation, so you'd end up snapping the tube at the defect. turning the material into a textile (ribbon) would greatly reduce this effect, but the expense is overall strength and the nanotubes still break, but the ribbon holds together. the end result of this is you would have a 1m wide ribbon that was really only as strong as a
I've also read (above) that these lab-grown millimeter/centimeter length nanotubes have a UTS (as i understand what was written) of 72 GPa. The writer of that post also said that putting them in a rope should improve that, but i'm afraid that person does not know of what he is talking... A gigapascal is 10^9 N/m^2, and if you string two of these guys in parallel you should get the same reading. the only way that could not be the case is if the nanotubes are already defect-rich on that scale, making the idea of a 100,000 low-defect nanotube rather ludicrous. Either way, i find these plans for a nanotube structure highly dubious. my intuition tells me that nanotubes will evaporate into so much hype, and be a very effective reinforcing material but little more. Glass is also very strong at small length-scales and useful as a reinforcement, but it is very weak in larger samples. Any structure is only as strong as its largest material defect will allow...
Dali describes Walt Disney as one of America's greatest surrealists.
Would the same still be true regarding disney's contemporary political positions?
someone who discovers a way to get to "5" by adding 1+4, or subtracting 4 from 7 should not be found to be infringing on my patent
7-4=5?
That's new, and non-obvious, but is it useful?
You're mileage may vary, but every writer i've worked with or studied under has seen a significant reduction in quality and output while teaching. I know about this first-hand, and even these "reduced teaching expectations" are significant. My university brings them on part-time (so no tenure -- most of them aren't technically professors) and pays them moderately well. it's not nearly well enough, though, and by the time a writer writes enough good books to be considered for a position at my university they don't really need the part-time pay. Generally, writers start teaching when they want to stop writing. I think it was Hemmingway who first expressed that sentiment, though, so it may not be entirely accurate (rather, it's doubtful that any institution would have allowed him a position as he would quickly use it for a drunken encounter with the coeds, so he may have been speaking out of spite)...
As for Delaney (you keep mentioning him), I 1)would like to know what you like so much about him, as I've read some of his stuff and haven't found it terribly compelling and 2) would like to know why he hasn't written any fiction, as best i can tell, since 1996. Maybe he has and I just can't find it, but i've looked around a bit. that would seem to support my contention that having a full-time academic position and being a productive artist are not necessarily coincident events. I think his output dropped precipitously after he started teaching at UMass in 1988 because he couldn't spend as much time on his own writing, but that might just be me reading into the data. You also leave open the problem of initiation -- if you have to be in academia to support yourself as a writer, and you can't get into academia unless you're already a well-respected and multiply-published author, then there will cease to be new authors if the ability to publish is stripped away.
Okay, you're being obtuse. If in the process of mugging someone you also kill them, then you're both a murderer and a mugger. you don't cease to be a mugger because you killed the guy. Censorship is information control. Period. The mechanism behind that information control can be in the form of direct governmental action, indirect governmental action, or independent action. (http://dict.die.net/censor/)
If I control the press (or am the press) I can act as a censor. If I have a gun and shoot everyone who disagrees with me, i am also a censor. The violence of the latter act should in no way lessen in your mind the information control being practiced in the former act. Indeed, the former is far more effective because, in a mass media environment such as our own, no one would know that it was happening. Someone could be a censor without even knowing it because, in a world of disinformation, the truth may appear to be a lie. It's entirely possible to create a system that automatically censors itself with no malice aforethought -- indeed the move towards using focus groups to determine how to present the news and what to report on the news could be just that.
and no, i'm not living in a cave with a tin-foil hat, but your views are too simplistic. If you believe most of what you read in the newspaper, then you haven't read enough books. I'd guess you were about a hundred years behind the times, but that's just a guess.