I don't know that a "free speech presumption" exists in the states.
New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan. Now you know.
But there has never been a free ride for the irresponsible, the reckless and the malign.
No, in the U.S., the irresponsible do have a free ride. If they publish something that's false about a public figure, they're clear, as long as they didn't doubt its truth when they published it. Even if five minutes of routine fact-checking would have let them know it was false, they're still not liable.
To put it another way Redhat's value is almost entirely in it's customer and employee goodwill. Both of those are things that are easilly lost in the SNAFUs that follow a typical merger.
An excellent point, and a very good reason for people to avoid attempting a hostile takeover of the company.
I suppose it's certainly more profitable to take other people's work and package it up, but what does that offer to a buyer?
1) Assuming by buyer you mean "end consumer":
Nobody asks, when they buy a copy of a board game, who invented the game or who made this copy. They worry about price, and how much enjoyment they will get out of it, and such. If they like chess more than Risk, they'll buy chess, even though nobody has a copyright on it. If you point out they could make their own chess set instead of buying one, they'll point out that they'd rather buy one than spend the time and effort, thanks. If they'd rather spend the time and effort, they'd have already started making their own.
So, go ask the buyers of Red Hat product what value they're getting. Buyers don't generally give a damn who did the work, as long as they're getting something they value for their money.
2) Assuming by "buyer" you mean "stock purchaser":
The reason for business is to make money, not to own technology. Since the buyer of the stock is interested in making money, he buys stock in companies that make money, and doesn't in companies that don't. He only cares about a company having unique technology insofar as the unique technology allows the company to make money. The same applies to every other feature of the company.
The reason to buy Red Hat, then, is that you expect Red Hat to make lots of money. The reason to not buy Sun is that you expect Sun will not. This applies whether you're buying just one share, or buying the whole company.
Very, very occasionally, a company with marketable technology will have utterly miserable, incompetent management. In those cases, there may be a realizable profit if you buy the mismanaged company or their technology and put new, competent people in charge. In general, this very rarely happens. Like pretty much anything, quality of management follows a bell-curve distribution, and you'll usually swap managers in the middle of the curve with experience for new managers in the middle of the curve who then have to learn new stuff.
Certainly, tree farms are rows of monoculture. But basically all farms are rows of monoculture. Reducing tree farms will not result in the addition of very much forest; it will mostly result in a farm that raises a different crop.
Apple won't take over the desktop market for the simple reason that Apple won't sell business desktops. Apple is a high-margin elite-brand seller. If they started pumping out low-margin beige econoboxes for the business desktop market, first, they'd wreck their brand image. Second, they'd kill profits, because plenty of home Mac users would buy the low-margin business line OS X units instead of high-margin units. Apple can take market share from Microsoft, sure, but it can't drive Microsoft from the business desktop without abandoning its Jobs-era successful, highly-profitable business model. OS X's potential threat to Microsoft is restricted because OS X is harnessed to fulfill Apple's needs.
Linux, on the other hand, is not owned by one business with one business's concerns. If a Red Hat abandons a market, an Ubuntu pops up. Linux accordingly competes (perhaps badly) with Windows everywhere Windows can be put, and will continue to do so no matter what decisions any individual Linux business makes.
Microsoft still has a massive network-effect supported 90%-or-so share of desktop OSes and something huge on office suites. Even the relative disaster of Vista hasn't dented them more than marginally. Further, Microsoft has a repeated historical pattern of abusing this power.
Google has a 70% share of online advertising, a business where it's the next thing to trivial to switch suppliers on, whether you buy them or sell them.
But, hey, because all the buzz is around Google, not Microsoft, let's ignore the company that actually has and has used monopolistic power. Real antitrust is boring; let's be trendy instead.
Varney is a moron, and Obama is a moron for nominating her.
Isn't one of the hugest factors in the Fermi Paradox the "Great Silence" aka that if life in the universe is so abundant why don't we hear their radio transmissions?
Well, you know, except that the actual Fermi Paradox is about why we haven't seen their spaceships or probes. It's Hart's variant that asks about radio transmissions. Even after you explain away Hart, Fermi's is still there.
Plenty of companies have entered the x86 market without licenses from Intel or AMD over the years, including Cyrix (now owned by VIA Technologies), IDT Centaur (now owned by VIA Technologies), and Transmeta (now owned by Novafora). Every single time the entrant had any litigation with Intel, it wound up with a settlement and still making x86 chips. Nvidia has enough of its own patents, enough cross-license deals, and enough money to fight in court that the same pattern will hold again.
If the FOSS readers could just read my PDFs today, I'd be much happier. As it is, I've got four neither Evince nor Xpdf can handle, which leaves me stuck with Adobe Reader.
Since Peter the Great, Russia has alternated between two states:
1) Importing foreign expertise from the West with the hope that it will cure its backwardness. 2) Blustering that it doesn't need foreign expertise from the West, that it isn't backwards, that it's the full equal of the West.
During those three hundred-plus years, it never caught up with Britain, France, Germany, or Italy, while places like the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have gone from well behind Russia to well ahead of it. Russia has spent three hundred years proving that it is a country of limited capacities and overweening pride.
So, this is entirely expected. It's entirely in the centuries-demonstrated Russian character to strut and bluster about being an advanced, developed country. It doesn't seem to have actually helped Russia become an equal with the West, of course.
But for the LHC, arguably there is no accurate prior because nothing in that energy range has ever been done before
How many natural events involving hadrons in LHC+ energy ranges do you need?
99% of cosmic rays are made of hadrons (mostly protons and helium nuclei, but heavier nuclei are known), and they regularly collide with other objects made of hadrons (most of the mass of the visible universe) at LHC-plus energies.
Want me to worry about the LHC? Tell me when a cosmic ray collision has turned the Sun into a black hole or strange matter or new Big Bang or whatever your LHC disaster scenario is.
[coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A malicious
security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such
as a directory lister, archiver, game, or (in one notorious 1990 case
on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! See {back door},
{virus}, {worm}, {phage}, {mockingbird}.
The project was branched off, but the code wasn't. The "Netscape 5" code, an evolutionary extension of the Netscape line, was worked on for about a year, and then abandoned as unfixable. Mozilla had both a from-scratch new rendering engine (NGLayout) and a from-scratch new cross-platform front end (replacing the separate Windows, Mac, and *nix front ends).
Your source code created by disassembly itself isn't covered by copyright . . . but it's easy to make sure the law declares that it's a derivative of a copyrighted work, and so distribution violates copyright.
It's not the sort of thing I can see easily getting passed, because its aim is too obvious. But it flows from the general idea that copyleft is just as dependent as copyright on the law recognizing the rights of creators to control their works.
Imagine, for a moment, that various $BIG_COMPANIES decide they want to be able to use code from free software in their products without a fuss, while still keeping protection for their own code.
So, what they do is approach various national governments, WIPO, etc., and have copyright protection removed from source code.
The companies then sit back with the fact that their binary code is still copyright protected, and their source code is safely hidden under "trade secret" protections . . . but the source code of free software is neither copyrighted nor secret. So the companies can take the known, non-copyrighted source code from free software, and combine it with their secret source code to make their copyrighted binary blobs . . .
You actually thought during-campaign policy advisors are anything more than window dressing?
Policy proposals during a campaign are focused on only one thing -- winning votes. (Sometimes indirectly, to win donations so that you can win votes.) Accordingly, they are not crafted by policy advisors, but by political consultants. As a consequence, policy advisors are not chosen by the candidate for their policy advice; they are selected by the political consultants to attract votes (and donations).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know that a "free speech presumption" exists in the states.
New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan. Now you know.
But there has never been a free ride for the irresponsible, the reckless and the malign.
No, in the U.S., the irresponsible do have a free ride. If they publish something that's false about a public figure, they're clear, as long as they didn't doubt its truth when they published it. Even if five minutes of routine fact-checking would have let them know it was false, they're still not liable.
To put it another way Redhat's value is almost entirely in it's customer and employee goodwill. Both of those are things that are easilly lost in the SNAFUs that follow a typical merger.
An excellent point, and a very good reason for people to avoid attempting a hostile takeover of the company.
1) Assuming by buyer you mean "end consumer":
Nobody asks, when they buy a copy of a board game, who invented the game or who made this copy. They worry about price, and how much enjoyment they will get out of it, and such. If they like chess more than Risk, they'll buy chess, even though nobody has a copyright on it. If you point out they could make their own chess set instead of buying one, they'll point out that they'd rather buy one than spend the time and effort, thanks. If they'd rather spend the time and effort, they'd have already started making their own.
So, go ask the buyers of Red Hat product what value they're getting. Buyers don't generally give a damn who did the work, as long as they're getting something they value for their money.
2) Assuming by "buyer" you mean "stock purchaser":
The reason for business is to make money, not to own technology. Since the buyer of the stock is interested in making money, he buys stock in companies that make money, and doesn't in companies that don't. He only cares about a company having unique technology insofar as the unique technology allows the company to make money. The same applies to every other feature of the company.
The reason to buy Red Hat, then, is that you expect Red Hat to make lots of money. The reason to not buy Sun is that you expect Sun will not. This applies whether you're buying just one share, or buying the whole company.
Very, very occasionally, a company with marketable technology will have utterly miserable, incompetent management. In those cases, there may be a realizable profit if you buy the mismanaged company or their technology and put new, competent people in charge. In general, this very rarely happens. Like pretty much anything, quality of management follows a bell-curve distribution, and you'll usually swap managers in the middle of the curve with experience for new managers in the middle of the curve who then have to learn new stuff.
Well, that's only to be expected. The British never partitioned Poland.
TFA syas that they're planning on making it possible to reapply. The DTV2009 site doesn't seem to have it as an option yet, though.
Tell me, if they announced an intention to do a SPARC core, would you assume they meant a 32-bit version? How about POWER?
x86 is just as 64-bit as they are.
and the "gravitationally round" bit won't work either because it would eliminate lots of objects that we would like to call moons
Meh. It's time to suck it up.
The Solar System has eight planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune), eighteen moons (Luna, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Iapetus, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, and Triton), sixteen known dwarf planets (Hygiea, Vesta, Ceres, Pallas, Orcus, Pluto, Charon, Ixion, Varuna, (55636) 2002 TX300, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, (55565) 2002 AW197, Eris, and Sedna), and countless minor bodies here, there, and everywhere.
Certainly, tree farms are rows of monoculture. But basically all farms are rows of monoculture. Reducing tree farms will not result in the addition of very much forest; it will mostly result in a farm that raises a different crop.
Apple won't take over the desktop market for the simple reason that Apple won't sell business desktops. Apple is a high-margin elite-brand seller. If they started pumping out low-margin beige econoboxes for the business desktop market, first, they'd wreck their brand image. Second, they'd kill profits, because plenty of home Mac users would buy the low-margin business line OS X units instead of high-margin units. Apple can take market share from Microsoft, sure, but it can't drive Microsoft from the business desktop without abandoning its Jobs-era successful, highly-profitable business model. OS X's potential threat to Microsoft is restricted because OS X is harnessed to fulfill Apple's needs.
Linux, on the other hand, is not owned by one business with one business's concerns. If a Red Hat abandons a market, an Ubuntu pops up. Linux accordingly competes (perhaps badly) with Windows everywhere Windows can be put, and will continue to do so no matter what decisions any individual Linux business makes.
Microsoft still has a massive network-effect supported 90%-or-so share of desktop OSes and something huge on office suites. Even the relative disaster of Vista hasn't dented them more than marginally. Further, Microsoft has a repeated historical pattern of abusing this power.
Google has a 70% share of online advertising, a business where it's the next thing to trivial to switch suppliers on, whether you buy them or sell them.
But, hey, because all the buzz is around Google, not Microsoft, let's ignore the company that actually has and has used monopolistic power. Real antitrust is boring; let's be trendy instead.
Varney is a moron, and Obama is a moron for nominating her.
And yes, C-level's love biometric stuff because they don't have to remember passwords.
They should just all get Ident-i-Eeze cards.
Isn't one of the hugest factors in the Fermi Paradox the "Great Silence" aka that if life in the universe is so abundant why don't we hear their radio transmissions?
Well, you know, except that the actual Fermi Paradox is about why we haven't seen their spaceships or probes. It's Hart's variant that asks about radio transmissions. Even after you explain away Hart, Fermi's is still there.
Plenty of companies have entered the x86 market without licenses from Intel or AMD over the years, including Cyrix (now owned by VIA Technologies), IDT Centaur (now owned by VIA Technologies), and Transmeta (now owned by Novafora). Every single time the entrant had any litigation with Intel, it wound up with a settlement and still making x86 chips. Nvidia has enough of its own patents, enough cross-license deals, and enough money to fight in court that the same pattern will hold again.
The Producer is said to be "DeWM 1.0" for all four, and all four are supposedly PDF-1.4.
The Creator is different in each case: Adobe Acrobat 6.0, Adobe Acrobat 7.0, Adobe In Design CS 3.0.1, and Acrobat Capture 3.0.
The index does show up in the three that have indexes, but "The document contains no pages" according to Evince.
If the FOSS readers could just read my PDFs today, I'd be much happier. As it is, I've got four neither Evince nor Xpdf can handle, which leaves me stuck with Adobe Reader.
Since Peter the Great, Russia has alternated between two states:
1) Importing foreign expertise from the West with the hope that it will cure its backwardness.
2) Blustering that it doesn't need foreign expertise from the West, that it isn't backwards, that it's the full equal of the West.
During those three hundred-plus years, it never caught up with Britain, France, Germany, or Italy, while places like the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have gone from well behind Russia to well ahead of it. Russia has spent three hundred years proving that it is a country of limited capacities and overweening pride.
So, this is entirely expected. It's entirely in the centuries-demonstrated Russian character to strut and bluster about being an advanced, developed country. It doesn't seem to have actually helped Russia become an equal with the West, of course.
But for the LHC, arguably there is no accurate prior because nothing in that energy range has ever been done before
How many natural events involving hadrons in LHC+ energy ranges do you need?
99% of cosmic rays are made of hadrons (mostly protons and helium nuclei, but heavier nuclei are known), and they regularly collide with other objects made of hadrons (most of the mass of the visible universe) at LHC-plus energies.
Want me to worry about the LHC? Tell me when a cosmic ray collision has turned the Sun into a black hole or strange matter or new Big Bang or whatever your LHC disaster scenario is.
Would that be a virus or a worm?
Um, it would be a Trojan Horse.
Trojan horse: n.
[coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A malicious
security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such
as a directory lister, archiver, game, or (in one notorious 1990 case
on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! See {back door},
{virus}, {worm}, {phage}, {mockingbird}.
There is a naked picture of Linus Torvalds secretly encoded in the Linux sources.
Hmm? Sir, you really need to have your eyes examined. Linus doesn't have labia piercings.
The project was branched off, but the code wasn't. The "Netscape 5" code, an evolutionary extension of the Netscape line, was worked on for about a year, and then abandoned as unfixable. Mozilla had both a from-scratch new rendering engine (NGLayout) and a from-scratch new cross-platform front end (replacing the separate Windows, Mac, and *nix front ends).
The only body that has the right to say something is unconstitutional is the Supreme Court
Oh? Where exactly does the Constitution say that?
Well, you've got a cite from the Federalist papers, right?
Okay, something from St. George Tucker's edition of Blackstone's Commentaries?
Huh. Private correspondence by one of the Founding Fathers?
No?
Hmmm.
Your source code created by disassembly itself isn't covered by copyright . . . but it's easy to make sure the law declares that it's a derivative of a copyrighted work, and so distribution violates copyright.
It's not the sort of thing I can see easily getting passed, because its aim is too obvious. But it flows from the general idea that copyleft is just as dependent as copyright on the law recognizing the rights of creators to control their works.
Oh, my.
Imagine, for a moment, that various $BIG_COMPANIES decide they want to be able to use code from free software in their products without a fuss, while still keeping protection for their own code.
So, what they do is approach various national governments, WIPO, etc., and have copyright protection removed from source code.
The companies then sit back with the fact that their binary code is still copyright protected, and their source code is safely hidden under "trade secret" protections . . . but the source code of free software is neither copyrighted nor secret. So the companies can take the known, non-copyrighted source code from free software, and combine it with their secret source code to make their copyrighted binary blobs . . .
Heh heh heh.
You actually thought during-campaign policy advisors are anything more than window dressing?
Policy proposals during a campaign are focused on only one thing -- winning votes. (Sometimes indirectly, to win donations so that you can win votes.) Accordingly, they are not crafted by policy advisors, but by political consultants. As a consequence, policy advisors are not chosen by the candidate for their policy advice; they are selected by the political consultants to attract votes (and donations).
Nobody skipped two. It's called IE Tab, it's an extension for Firefox.