I'm not a lawyer but as I read the Patriot Act, it seems to me had he done this in the us and had it been deemed an "act of terrorism" he could be subject to the death penalty.
They whole point is which patents? Be specific. Excactly what code is it that Linux has incorporated that belongs to M$.
Like it has been said earlier, the community would be more then happy to remove it once we know what it is! (especially given M$'s record on quality, it's code that probably needs to be replaced anyway)
You know this kind of reminds me of the situation in Wartime France.
The Resistance would setup radios and the Gestapo would DF them and then it would become a cat and mouse game between the two. Eventually the resistance won.
Two things come to mind. The bloggers in Burma could take a lesson from History. The tactics used by the French Resistance may prove useful to the Burmese Bloggers today.
The other thing that comes to mind is that money spent on satelite uplinks for the democrats in Burma probably does more to promote democracy then M1 tanks in Baghdad. Anny chance that some org is collecting $$ to buy the equip and donate it to ppl in Burma?
To strain your analogy, there happen to be an awful lot of "edsel mechanics" out there.
To be fair to the "edsel mechanics", quite often they are not "edsel mechanics" by choice. For some unfathomable reason, the corporate world is in love with M$ and quite often the poor techie finds himself forced to work on edsels rather then jags.
What comes to mind is the 802.11 wireless standards debates in IEEE. Another example might be the current debate going on regarding HD-DVD.
You can bet that companies like Motorola and Sony are doing everything they can to persuade their business partners to vote their way.
The difference between them and M$ is that they are:
- Better at the politics than M$
- Better at the engineering than M$
There are two aspects here:
- M$ behavior in the ISO voting
-- Blatant and stupid - what ever made them think they would get away with it
- M$ piss poor engineering
-- Stephane Rodriguez has a great article where he demonstrates (at least to my satisfaction) that OOXML is irretrievably broken. You can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and it's time M$ learned that.
What struck me while I was writing this response is that Motorola and Sony have been around a lot longer then M$. Maybe its time that M$ grows out of its corporate adolescence. They don't own the playground, can't own the playground and never will be able to own the playground.
Their only alternative is to learn to play nicely and it's about time that they learned that. Everyone would benefit.
ISO has been around for a long long time and I'm sure that this isn't the first time that one particular vendor has tried to influence a vote on a standard to reflect it's own parochial position.
It seems to me that, by and large, standards organizations like ISO have done a pretty good job of keeping their communities free from this kind of bias. What usually happens is that some other large gorilla in the community opposes the position and throws his weight onto the opposite side of the issue.
Let's not generate our own version of FUD here (Oh, M$ is trying to steal the election so ISO is not doing its job, lets replace/modify ISO). Simply point out what tis going on and let the community respond.
I was thinking of putting together some technical podcasts and wanted to Jazz it up a bit with 5 - 10 sec introductory clip.
Being a law abiding individual, I looked into getting a license. What a nightmare! there are restrictions on how often the clip could be played, how many ppl could listen to the clip, etc. In addition to that, there were reporting requirements (I would have to report to the Licensee how many ppl listened to a given clip in a month).
And then there was the expense. For me to acquire an individual license was going to cost thousands of dollars. Some fancy googling and I found a site where I could, in effect, 'share' a licsense for $20 per month but that would only entitle me to 5,000 listener hours (which, of course, I would have to report).
Forget it. Too expensive and too much effort.
Just one real world example of how the lack of a rational fair use policy killed a project
Instead of generating a lot of FUD why don't the CT folks view this as an opportunity?
insert a sniffer, track these bozo's back to their machines and listen in to their cyber-converstaions?
That way they might even develop some real intelligence (I know that seems to be an oxymoron where these folks are concerned) rather then get everyone upset that MMO's might be some kind of surrogate training camp for terrs.
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I'm not a lawyer but as I read the Patriot Act, it seems to me had he done this in the us and had it been deemed an "act of terrorism" he could be subject to the death penalty.
Don't you mean censorship ?
They whole point is which patents? Be specific. Excactly what code is it that Linux has incorporated that belongs to M$.
Like it has been said earlier, the community would be more then happy to remove it once we know what it is! (especially given M$'s record on quality, it's code that probably needs to be replaced anyway)
You know this kind of reminds me of the situation in Wartime France.
The Resistance would setup radios and the Gestapo would DF them and then it would become a cat and mouse game between the two. Eventually the resistance won.
Two things come to mind. The bloggers in Burma could take a lesson from History. The tactics used by the French Resistance may prove useful to the Burmese Bloggers today.
The other thing that comes to mind is that money spent on satelite uplinks for the democrats in Burma probably does more to promote democracy then M1 tanks in Baghdad. Anny chance that some org is collecting $$ to buy the equip and donate it to ppl in Burma?
To strain your analogy, there happen to be an awful lot of "edsel mechanics" out there.
To be fair to the "edsel mechanics", quite often they are not "edsel mechanics" by choice. For some unfathomable reason, the corporate world is in love with M$ and quite often the poor techie finds himself forced to work on edsels rather then jags.
What comes to mind is the 802.11 wireless standards debates in IEEE. Another example might be the current debate going on regarding HD-DVD.
You can bet that companies like Motorola and Sony are doing everything they can to persuade their business partners to vote their way.
The difference between them and M$ is that they are:
- Better at the politics than M$
- Better at the engineering than M$
There are two aspects here:
- M$ behavior in the ISO voting
-- Blatant and stupid - what ever made them think they would get away with it
- M$ piss poor engineering
-- Stephane Rodriguez has a great article where he demonstrates (at least to my satisfaction) that OOXML is irretrievably broken. You can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and it's time M$ learned that.
What struck me while I was writing this response is that Motorola and Sony have been around a lot longer then M$. Maybe its time that M$ grows out of its corporate adolescence. They don't own the playground, can't own the playground and never will be able to own the playground.
Their only alternative is to learn to play nicely and it's about time that they learned that. Everyone would benefit.
ISO has been around for a long long time and I'm sure that this isn't the first time that one particular vendor has tried to influence a vote on a standard to reflect it's own parochial position.
It seems to me that, by and large, standards organizations like ISO have done a pretty good job of keeping their communities free from this kind of bias. What usually happens is that some other large gorilla in the community opposes the position and throws his weight onto the opposite side of the issue.
Let's not generate our own version of FUD here (Oh, M$ is trying to steal the election so ISO is not doing its job, lets replace/modify ISO). Simply point out what tis going on and let the community respond.
I was thinking of putting together some technical podcasts and wanted to Jazz it up a bit with 5 - 10 sec introductory clip.
Being a law abiding individual, I looked into getting a license. What a nightmare! there are restrictions on how often the clip could be played, how many ppl could listen to the clip, etc. In addition to that, there were reporting requirements (I would have to report to the Licensee how many ppl listened to a given clip in a month).
And then there was the expense. For me to acquire an individual license was going to cost thousands of dollars. Some fancy googling and I found a site where I could, in effect, 'share' a licsense for $20 per month but that would only entitle me to 5,000 listener hours (which, of course, I would have to report).
Forget it. Too expensive and too much effort.
Just one real world example of how the lack of a rational fair use policy killed a project
Instead of generating a lot of FUD why don't the CT folks view this as an opportunity? insert a sniffer, track these bozo's back to their machines and listen in to their cyber-converstaions? That way they might even develop some real intelligence (I know that seems to be an oxymoron where these folks are concerned) rather then get everyone upset that MMO's might be some kind of surrogate training camp for terrs.