Congress basically repudiated support for a meaningful public domain with the 1976 Copyright Act and subsequent amendments, by making the term of Copyright last beyond a century ("70 years plus some life in being" or out to 120 years if copyright was owned by a corporation). The original Copyright Act of 1790 set a term of 14 years with the option to renew for an additional 14 years, ensuring the rapid development of a valuable public domain. Since 1977 additions to the public domain have slowed to a crawl. We will have to wait more than a century to see new contributions to it from contemporary sources. By then many out-of-print works long abandoned by their copyright owners because re-publication is uneconomical, will have disappeared altogether. If Congress were to set more reasonable limits on Copyright, projects like Google Books wouldn't have to proceed under the unsure cover of the Fair Use doctrine.
Lawyer I worked for in the early 90's demonstrated this to me. He'd been a detective with the NYPD and had this formula to validate SSN's. With a little work he'd figured out how to predict as well. No, I wasn't able to follow his math. This guy was one of those proverbial self taught geniuses who was able to do that kind of stuff in his head.
Requesting attorneys fees and costs from your opponent on a motion is pretty much standard practice. What will be interesting to see is if the defendants (Daimler/Chrysler) later move for sanctions under the local "frivolous claim" rule in their jurisdiction. These kinds of rules exist in the Federal courts (Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) and most states. It looks like Michigan has a similar rule in effect (MCR 2.625(A)(2), MCL 600.2591(2)). Nice thing about these kinds of provisions is that their sanctions can be directed against the attorneys as well as the parties. Sorry for not including links to the citations, but for obvious reasons I don't want to be responsible for the "slashdotting" of a particular Federal or state court website. Just Google it.
The Holy Grail of IT is to reduce bugets by lowering payroll. Because Windows is really easy to install and maintain, the sales pitch goes, you can hire less skilled (expensive) people to do the work. Problem is, Windows isn't so easy to install and maintain anymore, if it ever was. Even before Active Directory, keeping 4,000 or more Windows systems up to date with the latest patches was a challenge. AD introduces even greater complexity, requiring the admins that ride herd over it have *at least* the same skill level as their brother (or sister) UNIX admins (I'd argue they actually need to be *more* skilled). Of course EDS and others have stubbornly refused to recognize this, and so you have foobars like the one reported in the original article here.
While I respect Slackware's deicison, KDE is too busy for me (it has matured over the last couple of years). Gnome is nice and clean, but the dependancy tree for gtk is no better than qt. After using UNIX as my primary desktop for the last 3 years, I've personally settled on fvwm, a simple window manager, for both it's reliability and efficiency
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We've been running iPlanet/Sun Directory for 4 years and its been very reliable (not bad, given that my developers treat it like it's an RDMS and our write ops are way over what any sane admin would allow). I've also worked with OpenLDAP for a couple of years and have been impressed with the latest version's performance, but couldn't justify rebuilding a half dozen servers. The only problem right now is that Sun doesn't really support Linux, which is where we're consolidating most of our enterprise stuff. Now I'll have a viable alternative to consider. Can't wait to give it a try, there's this old Proliant 3000 in the data center...
Our 6,000+ users are still mostly on Win NT, with an IE build that *did not* implement the "web desktop" that became the default for Win 2K and Win XP. Even Microsoft knows the browser is their Achilles heel, that's why web browsing is disabled by default in Windows 2003 Server. Even if you switch to Mozilla or another browser, you're still dependant on the IE codebase for file browsing, which I blame for most of the worst lockups and core dumps in XP. Making the browser part of the O/S was the single worst design decision MS made. Ironically it was not done for engineering, but legal, reasons. While Netscape may have first proposed that "The Browser is the Operating System", MS made it a reality in an effort to avoid the court-ordered removal of its own browser from the base O/S. It's not just IE that's a problem. All browsers seem to have their own threshhold beyond which instability follows. In addition to my company build XP machine, I run a R-O-C-K S-O-L-I-D FreeBSD system under my desk. That system hasn't been rebooted in months. But I do have to kill -9 Mozilla quite frequently, usually after some idiotic web content causes its process to spin out of control. Fortunately, Mozilla is not my shell or my file browser (I have xterm for that), so I can continue working even when the "page du jour" throws my browser into a tailspin.
The chapter on spring guns came pretty early in my first year torts class. I think we all talked about it for at least the rest of the semester. Last time I heard anyone used that solution in real life was some poor guy in Miami who caught someone breaking into his store with one. From a public policy standpoint they probably should be illegal, but they still do have their charm. But seriously. Alarms, motion detectors and cameras are all really good ideas for protecting property -- and well within grasp of most geeks. For personal defense longarms are really the way to go. Handguns tend to be more dangerous to their owners than to others (even if you're ex-law enforcement). A shotgun is probably the safest for your neighbors for reasons mentioned elsewhere. If you're going to keep any kind of gun you owe it to everyone to target shoot regularly, to make sure you'll hit your target instead of someone in the living room across the street.
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Congress basically repudiated support for a meaningful public domain with the 1976 Copyright Act and subsequent amendments, by making the term of Copyright last beyond a century ("70 years plus some life in being" or out to 120 years if copyright was owned by a corporation). The original Copyright Act of 1790 set a term of 14 years with the option to renew for an additional 14 years, ensuring the rapid development of a valuable public domain. Since 1977 additions to the public domain have slowed to a crawl. We will have to wait more than a century to see new contributions to it from contemporary sources. By then many out-of-print works long abandoned by their copyright owners because re-publication is uneconomical, will have disappeared altogether. If Congress were to set more reasonable limits on Copyright, projects like Google Books wouldn't have to proceed under the unsure cover of the Fair Use doctrine.
"Once you figure out that the phone is designed by someone with no sense of logic, it's a lot easier."
Quote of the decade.
Lawyer I worked for in the early 90's demonstrated this to me. He'd been a detective with the NYPD and had this formula to validate SSN's. With a little work he'd figured out how to predict as well. No, I wasn't able to follow his math. This guy was one of those proverbial self taught geniuses who was able to do that kind of stuff in his head.
Cue the scary orchestra music.
Really good news.
Requesting attorneys fees and costs from your opponent on a motion is pretty much standard practice. What will be interesting to see is if the defendants (Daimler/Chrysler) later move for sanctions under the local "frivolous claim" rule in their jurisdiction. These kinds of rules exist in the Federal courts (Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) and most states. It looks like Michigan has a similar rule in effect (MCR 2.625(A)(2), MCL 600.2591(2)). Nice thing about these kinds of provisions is that their sanctions can be directed against the attorneys as well as the parties. Sorry for not including links to the citations, but for obvious reasons I don't want to be responsible for the "slashdotting" of a particular Federal or state court website. Just Google it.
The Holy Grail of IT is to reduce bugets by lowering payroll. Because Windows is really easy to install and maintain, the sales pitch goes, you can hire less skilled (expensive) people to do the work. Problem is, Windows isn't so easy to install and maintain anymore, if it ever was. Even before Active Directory, keeping 4,000 or more Windows systems up to date with the latest patches was a challenge. AD introduces even greater complexity, requiring the admins that ride herd over it have *at least* the same skill level as their brother (or sister) UNIX admins (I'd argue they actually need to be *more* skilled). Of course EDS and others have stubbornly refused to recognize this, and so you have foobars like the one reported in the original article here.
While I respect Slackware's deicison, KDE is too busy for me (it has matured over the last couple of years). Gnome is nice and clean, but the dependancy tree for gtk is no better than qt. After using UNIX as my primary desktop for the last 3 years, I've personally settled on fvwm, a simple window manager, for both it's reliability and efficiency .
We've been running iPlanet/Sun Directory for 4 years and its been very reliable (not bad, given that my developers treat it like it's an RDMS and our write ops are way over what any sane admin would allow). I've also worked with OpenLDAP for a couple of years and have been impressed with the latest version's performance, but couldn't justify rebuilding a half dozen servers. The only problem right now is that Sun doesn't really support Linux, which is where we're consolidating most of our enterprise stuff. Now I'll have a viable alternative to consider. Can't wait to give it a try, there's this old Proliant 3000 in the data center ...
Our 6,000+ users are still mostly on Win NT, with an IE build that *did not* implement the "web desktop" that became the default for Win 2K and Win XP. Even Microsoft knows the browser is their Achilles heel, that's why web browsing is disabled by default in Windows 2003 Server. Even if you switch to Mozilla or another browser, you're still dependant on the IE codebase for file browsing, which I blame for most of the worst lockups and core dumps in XP. Making the browser part of the O/S was the single worst design decision MS made. Ironically it was not done for engineering, but legal, reasons. While Netscape may have first proposed that "The Browser is the Operating System", MS made it a reality in an effort to avoid the court-ordered removal of its own browser from the base O/S. It's not just IE that's a problem. All browsers seem to have their own threshhold beyond which instability follows. In addition to my company build XP machine, I run a R-O-C-K S-O-L-I-D FreeBSD system under my desk. That system hasn't been rebooted in months. But I do have to kill -9 Mozilla quite frequently, usually after some idiotic web content causes its process to spin out of control. Fortunately, Mozilla is not my shell or my file browser (I have xterm for that), so I can continue working even when the "page du jour" throws my browser into a tailspin.
The chapter on spring guns came pretty early in my first year torts class. I think we all talked about it for at least the rest of the semester. Last time I heard anyone used that solution in real life was some poor guy in Miami who caught someone breaking into his store with one. From a public policy standpoint they probably should be illegal, but they still do have their charm. But seriously. Alarms, motion detectors and cameras are all really good ideas for protecting property -- and well within grasp of most geeks. For personal defense longarms are really the way to go. Handguns tend to be more dangerous to their owners than to others (even if you're ex-law enforcement). A shotgun is probably the safest for your neighbors for reasons mentioned elsewhere. If you're going to keep any kind of gun you owe it to everyone to target shoot regularly, to make sure you'll hit your target instead of someone in the living room across the street.