No, you are actually breaking a Licence Agreement. If you break Bill's licence agreement, his schysters come after you, to enforce the terms of the licence agreement.....
The breaking of copyright law is secondary to the initial act. The GPL is not a copyright, is is a licence agreement.
Only 120mph? Is that the best that the US can do? In the UK we have done only slightly better, we have been running regular 125mph trains, diesel-powered even, since 1974 (which held the world record for diesel for a long time, and maybe still do), the renewed West Coast Main Line is eventually supposed to support 140mph, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is a lot faster, and even then we rightly complain that our politicians have messed up, and given us something far short of what is normal in France or Japan.
In the US, with greater distance to cover than any of these countries, you really need speed. You should lobby your politicians, write letters of complaint to Amtrak, do whatever it takes, till you get such speeds as routine, everywhere, and 160 to 200mph on the longer distances. Rail is safer and more energy efficient than air transport, and on moderate distances quicker between city centres.
Get decent, reasonably cheap rail services, you will find the passengers will come... In the UK we have a particularly competent operating company (GNER) on the East Coast Main Line, London to Edinburgh is 4 hours will several stops in just over 400 miles, 100mph end to end overall. It is well-nigh impossible to beat that by air, although the plane will only be in the air for an hour. The train is far more comfortable, and if booked in advance on the internet, very much cheaper, and in daylight you even get a decent view out of the window, and coming soon, mobile internet as already discused on Slashdot.
These are electric trains, and they are capable of 140mph, but the track and overhead wiring would need to be improved first, which was intended once upon a time, but is not going to happen soon. But,the service is good enough for many people to commute from York, which is about half way to Edinburgh, and property prices in York doubled when the new trains were introduced, maybe about 15 years ago now.
I don't see why both the US and the UK should be left behind by Frogs and Japs, it is time it changed.
The big problem with a Maglev, and why they should not be build at all, ever, is that they are grossly inefficient compared to conventional rail, and are totally unsound when the effects on the environment are considered. You don't get something for nothing, you have a constant expenditure of energy to keep the thing floating above the track, as well as moving it.
There is not, never has been, and never will be any justification for this kind of folly, except maybe on a very small scale in amusement parks, where the environmental damage is minimal.
I don't know if they would be in any way comparable. The Chunnel lies entirely in chalk, which bores easily with a "relatively" cheap and simple machine. I don't know much about the geology of the area, but if there is hard volcanic rock involved, or fissures which will admit sea water, the cost rises enormously.
However as regards distance, and the cost of fitting out with track, signalling etc, they are not all that different. But railway track is only about 1M (UKP) per mile anyway, that is the cheapest part....
Of course I look forward to this happening, but to make best use of it they really need a high-speed rail link the full length of Africa, which would bring economic prosperity with it. But who could afford to fund it, and would politics allow it to be used anyway? Even a link along the south side of the Mediterranean, through to the Middle East, would be a political impossibility.
The $30m is only initial costs, geological surveys, etc, and that is what they seem to be going to do in 3 years, which is feasible. Multiply that by perhaps 1000 for the actual construction.
One thing in their favour is that the cost of land will be minimal, and probably planning regulations will be equally unobtrusive, unlike in the UK where more than half the cost of a project like this, and 5 to 10 years of lost productivity, is simply wasted in endless debate, planning enquiries, legal costs, etc. If the two governments concerned are able to agree, they should simply just sign a document and get on with it. The quicker it is built, the sooner it contributes to the economy, a fact of which the UK government remains in abysmal ignorance, where railways are concerned. They may teach us a lesson here.....
I wonder how that would compare to a well-known badly broken OS, where you can't even make some executable files, and dlls, RO without breaking everything. Keeping all the executable stuff in RO partitions has its attractions, if it is possible to work that way.
Taking this a step further, if it was not for the performance problem, could you not just put the executables on a CD (in a read-only drive of course), which could be updated only by having physical access, and a suitably equipped PC with writer to to the update.
Or, would this cause some undesireable effect as a result of configuring the OS to boot from CD?
Thinking a bit more, how about putting the lot in flash with the write disabled in hardware (keyswitch for example)? Would that achieve the same effect, or at least something useful?
What amazes me is that a bank, who are responsible to their shareholders and investors, abuses that responsibility by investing in what is clearly a fraudulent business with negligible tangible assets.
The shareholders should start a class action against the bank.
Thank you for clarifying that. I think the time interval is measured in nanoseconds, not 1 year, in other countries. Any prior art at all means no patent, and rightly so.
We may see the silly situation where they can get a patent in the US and nowhere else. Now it is not clear to me whether M$ will be going after webmasters, or suppliers of browsing software, or end users, but it will be a bit silly if the rest of the world can do what is illegal in the US. It may mean that web hosting moves elsewhere, or browser developmnet (world-wide anyway) simply gets abandoned within the US.
Really the US needs to get their patent laws in line with the rest of the world. This sort of thing only damages their own economy in the long term, and sustains the Convicted Monopolist, who is totally devoid of new ideas, for a bit longer.
If you don't like the misuse of the misuse of the word "hacker", what about inventing another term which correctly expresses the degree of competence, skill and professionalism involved?
A hacker would originally have been a person who does his carpentry with an axe, where more precise things like saws, planes and chisels are called for. You hack things with an axe or other crude cutting implement. Maybe he originally would have been a less than properly skiled surgeon also. Get rid of the work hack and you will boost your image in the eyes of the public. Leave it to mean parasites, script kiddies and vandals. Get a new name, with positive connotations. Then the public and the press may understand....
Good point. I always thought that you could not patent the thing at all, ever, if it had been published or used generally ("prior art") before applying for the patent. Maybe it is not so in the US.
Does anyone understand what part of it is not prior art?
Antartica is not theirs, by international treaty. He has as much right to be there as they do. Fair enough, they don't want to encourage tourism, and all the problems it would bring, but this kind of behaviour is simply pathetic.
There are usually other nations present at the pole, Russians for example. It would be highly embarassing for the US and the Kiwis if they were to help him out.... I wonder if his plane would run on vodka?
In any other situation, someone who diverted to a foreign airport unexpectedly, for legitimate reasons, would be supplied with fuel at the local rate, provided the pilot had means of payment. On occasions where the politics were adverse, the plane would be impounded of course, and it could get very nasty, but here we are talking about 2 civilised countries who are not at war.
I am amazed that some petty beaurocrat, presumably at the pole, found the matter worthy of his attention. Fortunately they did not refuse permission to land, a tactic often practiced in the Middle East, which can be tanatmount to murder.
Surely there is some sensible person at a high level who can override this stupid decision?
There is something VERY WRONG in the US. I am glad I don't have to live there.
The RIAA are parasitical as far as the well-being of society is concerned, it is irrelevant if they are ripped off by pirates or not. For far too long, far too much money has been made by far too few people turning out mediocre music etc. Time for a total change, the artists should simply make their products available for download on their own websites, using PayPal or similar to collect a reasonable fee. They would make more money, more prospective talent would get appreciated by the public, and the parasitical middlemen would go the way of the dinosaurs.
This sort of thing is dragging the US back towards the Dark Ages, and not taking account of modern technology. It is time that the RIAA was classed as a repressive organisation and outlawed. It is un-American and clearly Communist.
Very well put! In most countries, IANAL and I speak mainly for the UK, you can make any kind of licence agreement you like, as long as it does not infringe any criminal law or unreasonably take away the rights of others. Now IMHO the only thing the GPL takes away is the right to take away the rights of others..... Maybe because I am an engineer, NAL, it is very clear.
The Convicted Monopolist's licence agreements do appear to take away virtually all your rights, they are much more likely to fail in a UK court. AFAIK, they have not been tested in court yet, but we have had laws for the protection of consumers for years now, which are there to protect us from that sort of unfair and one-sided licence. I think M$ KNOW that these licences would fail in court, because there is always a clause that basically says that if any part of it fails in court, the rest still stands. The know that not all of it would stand up in court, they take away all your rights and say that the product might not work as advertised, and they are in no way liable if the product does not work at all. That is contrary to consumer laws in most civilised countries.
The GPL basically says "here are your rights, you must make these same rights available to others, and don't blame me if it doesn't work". It does not attempt to remove any legitimate freedom. I think that where CONSUMERS are concerned, the law in most countries relating to consumer protection would be entirely compatible with the GPL. For BUSINESS use, it is another thing altogether, businesses are allowed to be mean and nasty to each other, but not to consumers. (Maybe it is the opposite in the US, but I hope not.) So, the GPL might have weakness as a licence for business use, but the effect would be that if the GPL was deemed to be void, there would be no way of using the software, due to the copyright which applies in any case. So if the GPL failed in court, it would not allow Gates to base his next closed-source OS on the Linux kernel, but rather it would not allow anyone to use the code without the permission of the copyright holders (as typically named at the top of each source file).
Now, people who write OSS want it to be seen, and used, so that would not be enforced, usage of GPL code would continue, technically illegally, until a new licence was created, and agreed to by the copyright holders. The point is that the licence acts in one direction only, to ALLOW the software to be used, no licence means no use, because normal, clear-cut and easily enforecd COPYRIGHT still stands. There is no legal way of circumventing copyright in any country signatory to the relevant conventions, the copyright holder alone can determine who can copy, and under what conditions. He and he alone can revoke the use in the event of breach of licence.
If, say, Bill ripped off some GPL code, I doubt that the judge would even look at the GPL, the case would be over in a few minutes because he would only need to see the copyright headers in the files. The GPL is irrelevant to PREVENTING copying, it is only needed to ALLOW copying.
I must admit that it would be fun being in court if Eben Moglen was up against Boies.....
Connecting over a network is interoperability rather than linking. Otherwise I would go and access Bill's web site from Linux right now, and make the Convicted Monopolist subject to GPL.
If only......
The protocol has to be either published (not necessarily free) or obtained by reverse engineering to make it work of course, and reverse engineering for that purpose is specifically allowed by law in some countries.
It starts to get very complicated when you are running Linux on a desktop, and use CORBA or something like that to make a link from, say, a Windoze spreadsheet on a networked machine to your local word processor. I don't know if that can be done just yet, IIRC there was talk of even making OLE2 work. If it is possible, you might be comingling data containing proprietary algorithms or code with your free software, obviously it could happen in reverse also. IMHO there may be an area of potential difficulty in getting that sort of interoperability, if so, time to move on and stick with what is free and/or open....
Star Office or OpenOffice come to mind, also the up and coming Koffice, etc, as worthy competitors to M$, without all the potential legal hassle.
Technically that may be so, but the whole argument should be purely academic, as responsible people will publish on a web site under their control, to rid themselves of any possible problem. To do otherwise, even to invite the situation where you have to spend time answering requests by email or letter to supply source, is plain stupid. They are entitled to it if they ask, so just make it easy, save yourselves a lot of bother.
What is a TiVo anyway? I can't recall ever seeing one in the UK, maybe they don't work here, or we are too backward.
Quite so, and I think the point has been debated before. Now, a web site would surely constitute a "medium customarily used for software interchange", therefore so would a mirror site.
I think that the difficulty is that, having apparently complied with the GPL, if the webmaster of the mirror site closed it down or deleted the relevant files, then without your knowledge you would end up in breach of the GPL, because the ability to obtain source had gone. The only way to ensure that it exists is to take responsibility yourself, and in this day and age of easily available free hosting, it is an issue so trivial as to not be worth arguing about. Simply, if you have GPL code which you distribute, publish the source on YOUR web site, then no-one can complain.
But, this debate will run again, and again, and even again.......
An OpenFab would be quite something! If only the capital cost was thousands rather than billions.....
Of course, as you point out, anyone can get a foundry to process wafers for them, sadly the startup cost is far too high.....
I think technology will eventually make it possible, certainly there are foundries who can produce small quantity prototypes, but still too expensive. I anticipate a direct interface from the CAD system to laser or electron beam writing direct to the die, because as well as large-scale mass production, the need for customised things and one-offs will never go away, and some of these things really need to be small and power-efficient.
For digital things we have FPGAs now, they are sometimes but not always the answer, The real world is analogue, and the programmable analogue chips seen so far are quite frankly a bad joke. BTW I am an analogue designer, usually, so I might know.
We really need the capability to get direct from schematic, not forgetting simulation of course, to a chip, quickly, efficiently and cheaply, so that all the good ideas out there can actually be made.
Free software is not necessarily given away either, you are entitled to sell it. The freedom is in the source code.
I was just looking at data on a commercial FPGA today (I do some work occasionally...) and basically it was non-free because although the device and what it could do was well documented, the information needed to program it was missing, as is usually the case. That is simply the map between bits in the configuration memory and device routing. Without that you can't make free software to program the thing, even if you have a free implementation of a VHDL front end. It also prevents you from designing a clever new tool, which might be better than VHDL (Very Horrible Design Language!), often known as Ada for hardware. The problem is not the resemblance to Ada.....It is that representing hardware, with parallel paths, in something like a procedural language, is plain stupid.
If the manufacturers would content themselves with their core business of making silicon, and publish the data, their devices would then be open, and a proliferation of free tools would follow. Instead, they are basically in league with the software tool manufacturers and their high-price closed-source tools, which pushes the entry point for designing anything with a FPGA higher than most individuals would contemplate.
In the long term it retards progress. You can get free variants of some tools, with crippled performance.
At least he can't claim the Internet, as we all know that was Al Gore.
I jest, of course.....
The integrated circuit was first documented by a Major Dummer of the Royal Signals and Radio Establishment (or is it Royal Signals Research Establishment?) in the UK, although it is not quite clear if he was actually thinking of a hybrid or true monolithic. Sadly he was not in a position to actually make one. Same as Leonardo and is flying machines, except that most of those would not have worked.
Slashdot Mirror
And what have they learned, except how the terrible mess called an NTFS file system works?
There is far more in common with Unix, not necessarily the SCO variety, than with Windoze.
It is a small village in the north of Norway, with a railway station and not much else. It is probably frozen already.
The breaking of copyright law is secondary to the initial act. The GPL is not a copyright, is is a licence agreement.
One way to end their vile monopoly, by being convicted again, for breach of GPL, and having to disclose their source code.
Sorry to be pedantic, but Concorde has gone....
In the US, with greater distance to cover than any of these countries, you really need speed. You should lobby your politicians, write letters of complaint to Amtrak, do whatever it takes, till you get such speeds as routine, everywhere, and 160 to 200mph on the longer distances. Rail is safer and more energy efficient than air transport, and on moderate distances quicker between city centres.
Get decent, reasonably cheap rail services, you will find the passengers will come... In the UK we have a particularly competent operating company (GNER) on the East Coast Main Line, London to Edinburgh is 4 hours will several stops in just over 400 miles, 100mph end to end overall. It is well-nigh impossible to beat that by air, although the plane will only be in the air for an hour. The train is far more comfortable, and if booked in advance on the internet, very much cheaper, and in daylight you even get a decent view out of the window, and coming soon, mobile internet as already discused on Slashdot.
These are electric trains, and they are capable of 140mph, but the track and overhead wiring would need to be improved first, which was intended once upon a time, but is not going to happen soon. But,the service is good enough for many people to commute from York, which is about half way to Edinburgh, and property prices in York doubled when the new trains were introduced, maybe about 15 years ago now.
I don't see why both the US and the UK should be left behind by Frogs and Japs, it is time it changed.
There is not, never has been, and never will be any justification for this kind of folly, except maybe on a very small scale in amusement parks, where the environmental damage is minimal.
However as regards distance, and the cost of fitting out with track, signalling etc, they are not all that different. But railway track is only about 1M (UKP) per mile anyway, that is the cheapest part....
Of course I look forward to this happening, but to make best use of it they really need a high-speed rail link the full length of Africa, which would bring economic prosperity with it. But who could afford to fund it, and would politics allow it to be used anyway? Even a link along the south side of the Mediterranean, through to the Middle East, would be a political impossibility.
The $30m is only initial costs, geological surveys, etc, and that is what they seem to be going to do in 3 years, which is feasible. Multiply that by perhaps 1000 for the actual construction.
One thing in their favour is that the cost of land will be minimal, and probably planning regulations will be equally unobtrusive, unlike in the UK where more than half the cost of a project like this, and 5 to 10 years of lost productivity, is simply wasted in endless debate, planning enquiries, legal costs, etc. If the two governments concerned are able to agree, they should simply just sign a document and get on with it. The quicker it is built, the sooner it contributes to the economy, a fact of which the UK government remains in abysmal ignorance, where railways are concerned. They may teach us a lesson here.....
Taking this a step further, if it was not for the performance problem, could you not just put the executables on a CD (in a read-only drive of course), which could be updated only by having physical access, and a suitably equipped PC with writer to to the update.
Or, would this cause some undesireable effect as a result of configuring the OS to boot from CD?
Thinking a bit more, how about putting the lot in flash with the write disabled in hardware (keyswitch for example)? Would that achieve the same effect, or at least something useful?
The shareholders should start a class action against the bank.
We may see the silly situation where they can get a patent in the US and nowhere else. Now it is not clear to me whether M$ will be going after webmasters, or suppliers of browsing software, or end users, but it will be a bit silly if the rest of the world can do what is illegal in the US. It may mean that web hosting moves elsewhere, or browser developmnet (world-wide anyway) simply gets abandoned within the US.
Really the US needs to get their patent laws in line with the rest of the world. This sort of thing only damages their own economy in the long term, and sustains the Convicted Monopolist, who is totally devoid of new ideas, for a bit longer.
A hacker would originally have been a person who does his carpentry with an axe, where more precise things like saws, planes and chisels are called for. You hack things with an axe or other crude cutting implement. Maybe he originally would have been a less than properly skiled surgeon also. Get rid of the work hack and you will boost your image in the eyes of the public. Leave it to mean parasites, script kiddies and vandals. Get a new name, with positive connotations. Then the public and the press may understand....
You don't need any computers to forecast the number of SCO lawsuits. When this one is over, there will be no SCO.
Does anyone understand what part of it is not prior art?
There are usually other nations present at the pole, Russians for example. It would be highly embarassing for the US and the Kiwis if they were to help him out.... I wonder if his plane would run on vodka?
In any other situation, someone who diverted to a foreign airport unexpectedly, for legitimate reasons, would be supplied with fuel at the local rate, provided the pilot had means of payment. On occasions where the politics were adverse, the plane would be impounded of course, and it could get very nasty, but here we are talking about 2 civilised countries who are not at war.
I am amazed that some petty beaurocrat, presumably at the pole, found the matter worthy of his attention. Fortunately they did not refuse permission to land, a tactic often practiced in the Middle East, which can be tanatmount to murder.
Surely there is some sensible person at a high level who can override this stupid decision?
The RIAA are parasitical as far as the well-being of society is concerned, it is irrelevant if they are ripped off by pirates or not. For far too long, far too much money has been made by far too few people turning out mediocre music etc. Time for a total change, the artists should simply make their products available for download on their own websites, using PayPal or similar to collect a reasonable fee. They would make more money, more prospective talent would get appreciated by the public, and the parasitical middlemen would go the way of the dinosaurs.
This sort of thing is dragging the US back towards the Dark Ages, and not taking account of modern technology. It is time that the RIAA was classed as a repressive organisation and outlawed. It is un-American and clearly Communist.
The Convicted Monopolist's licence agreements do appear to take away virtually all your rights, they are much more likely to fail in a UK court. AFAIK, they have not been tested in court yet, but we have had laws for the protection of consumers for years now, which are there to protect us from that sort of unfair and one-sided licence. I think M$ KNOW that these licences would fail in court, because there is always a clause that basically says that if any part of it fails in court, the rest still stands. The know that not all of it would stand up in court, they take away all your rights and say that the product might not work as advertised, and they are in no way liable if the product does not work at all. That is contrary to consumer laws in most civilised countries.
The GPL basically says "here are your rights, you must make these same rights available to others, and don't blame me if it doesn't work". It does not attempt to remove any legitimate freedom. I think that where CONSUMERS are concerned, the law in most countries relating to consumer protection would be entirely compatible with the GPL. For BUSINESS use, it is another thing altogether, businesses are allowed to be mean and nasty to each other, but not to consumers. (Maybe it is the opposite in the US, but I hope not.) So, the GPL might have weakness as a licence for business use, but the effect would be that if the GPL was deemed to be void, there would be no way of using the software, due to the copyright which applies in any case. So if the GPL failed in court, it would not allow Gates to base his next closed-source OS on the Linux kernel, but rather it would not allow anyone to use the code without the permission of the copyright holders (as typically named at the top of each source file).
Now, people who write OSS want it to be seen, and used, so that would not be enforced, usage of GPL code would continue, technically illegally, until a new licence was created, and agreed to by the copyright holders. The point is that the licence acts in one direction only, to ALLOW the software to be used, no licence means no use, because normal, clear-cut and easily enforecd COPYRIGHT still stands. There is no legal way of circumventing copyright in any country signatory to the relevant conventions, the copyright holder alone can determine who can copy, and under what conditions. He and he alone can revoke the use in the event of breach of licence.
If, say, Bill ripped off some GPL code, I doubt that the judge would even look at the GPL, the case would be over in a few minutes because he would only need to see the copyright headers in the files. The GPL is irrelevant to PREVENTING copying, it is only needed to ALLOW copying.
I must admit that it would be fun being in court if Eben Moglen was up against Boies.....
If only......
The protocol has to be either published (not necessarily free) or obtained by reverse engineering to make it work of course, and reverse engineering for that purpose is specifically allowed by law in some countries.
It starts to get very complicated when you are running Linux on a desktop, and use CORBA or something like that to make a link from, say, a Windoze spreadsheet on a networked machine to your local word processor. I don't know if that can be done just yet, IIRC there was talk of even making OLE2 work. If it is possible, you might be comingling data containing proprietary algorithms or code with your free software, obviously it could happen in reverse also. IMHO there may be an area of potential difficulty in getting that sort of interoperability, if so, time to move on and stick with what is free and/or open....
Star Office or OpenOffice come to mind, also the up and coming Koffice, etc, as worthy competitors to M$, without all the potential legal hassle.
In one possible scenario, SCO becomes subject to GPL and that pathetic battle is over, with all of McBride's intellectual property now public.
That may be why they are trying to destroy the GPL, before it destroys them.
I do hope some hacker at M$ has saved himself a lot of time by copying some GPL code into Win XP!
What is a TiVo anyway? I can't recall ever seeing one in the UK, maybe they don't work here, or we are too backward.
I think that the difficulty is that, having apparently complied with the GPL, if the webmaster of the mirror site closed it down or deleted the relevant files, then without your knowledge you would end up in breach of the GPL, because the ability to obtain source had gone. The only way to ensure that it exists is to take responsibility yourself, and in this day and age of easily available free hosting, it is an issue so trivial as to not be worth arguing about. Simply, if you have GPL code which you distribute, publish the source on YOUR web site, then no-one can complain.
But, this debate will run again, and again, and even again.......
Of course, as you point out, anyone can get a foundry to process wafers for them, sadly the startup cost is far too high.....
I think technology will eventually make it possible, certainly there are foundries who can produce small quantity prototypes, but still too expensive. I anticipate a direct interface from the CAD system to laser or electron beam writing direct to the die, because as well as large-scale mass production, the need for customised things and one-offs will never go away, and some of these things really need to be small and power-efficient.
For digital things we have FPGAs now, they are sometimes but not always the answer, The real world is analogue, and the programmable analogue chips seen so far are quite frankly a bad joke. BTW I am an analogue designer, usually, so I might know.
We really need the capability to get direct from schematic, not forgetting simulation of course, to a chip, quickly, efficiently and cheaply, so that all the good ideas out there can actually be made.
You are right of course, who needs Bill's Bloatware?
I was just looking at data on a commercial FPGA today (I do some work occasionally...) and basically it was non-free because although the device and what it could do was well documented, the information needed to program it was missing, as is usually the case. That is simply the map between bits in the configuration memory and device routing. Without that you can't make free software to program the thing, even if you have a free implementation of a VHDL front end. It also prevents you from designing a clever new tool, which might be better than VHDL (Very Horrible Design Language!), often known as Ada for hardware. The problem is not the resemblance to Ada.....It is that representing hardware, with parallel paths, in something like a procedural language, is plain stupid.
If the manufacturers would content themselves with their core business of making silicon, and publish the data, their devices would then be open, and a proliferation of free tools would follow. Instead, they are basically in league with the software tool manufacturers and their high-price closed-source tools, which pushes the entry point for designing anything with a FPGA higher than most individuals would contemplate.
In the long term it retards progress. You can get free variants of some tools, with crippled performance.
Time it all changed, maybe this is now beginning.
I jest, of course.....
The integrated circuit was first documented by a Major Dummer of the Royal Signals and Radio Establishment (or is it Royal Signals Research Establishment?) in the UK, although it is not quite clear if he was actually thinking of a hybrid or true monolithic. Sadly he was not in a position to actually make one. Same as Leonardo and is flying machines, except that most of those would not have worked.