It pains me to see people supporting capitalism with their foot so firmly embedded in their mouth. They were not fired for organizing a sick out. They were not fired at all (well, they probably will be, but that's beside the point). The point is that their computers are being search for information about the sick-out because organizing a sick-out is illegal.
A consistent capitalist would have to maintain that outlawing sick-outs is only different in degree from slavery. (Both are instances of forcing someone to work against his will.)
1. We don't think the government has the (moral) authority to make a sick-out illegal. Do these people have contracts that say their employment is not at-will? If not, then the government has no business sticking it's nose in.
2. It sounds awfully similar to the church of scientology seizing computers with the assistance of various law enforcement agencies, which was clearly a free speech issue, and also a due process issue -- is the standard procedure to have the f-ing PLAINTIFF seize and inspect the defendents computer?
I seem to recall that you can be required to produce your passphrase if subpoenaed. This makes some sense, because otherwise it would leave a big gaping hole for companies to hide behind. "Well, sure we'll provide you with those documents about possible insider trading. Oh, did I fail to mention they are encrypted?"
On the other hand, you can make a good case that this falls under the 5th amendment protection against self incrimination.
The constitution does not prohibit seisure of evidence with a warrant, and common law definitely permits it; but is it really evidence before they decrypt it? That is, is subpoenaing a passphrase the same thing as saying, "tell us where you buried the body or we'll throw you in jail", which is prohibited by the 5th amendment.
I don't know if which I think is more "correct" from the two conflicting views. I hesitate to say that it should be decided on the grounds of what is preferable in most cases, because I think there might be a clear reason one interpretation should be preferred, but I just haven't figured out what that reason is.
I wonder when we are going to start seeing subsets of the internet partition themselves off and only deal with other sites the implement certain policies (for example, contractual agreements regarding penalties from spam coming from your domain, failure to block impossible packets and so on).
It could be done pretty cheaply during the changeover to IPv6. Just use the first byte to indicate what level of security (or bitwise OR of different security features) the host network guarantees. Then you could just block, for example, any mail coming from someone who didn't guarantee they could track down the original author (whic implies that they have enforced similar rules on their relaying).
One place patent law has to be modified is making it totally clear that companies have to act in a reasonable time frame from when they first learn of possible violations. Unisys waited like 6 years before they started enforcing LZW. Can anyone guess why? Would GIF have caught on as a standard if a license had been required at the beginning? No way. Would anyone support GIF today if not for the popularity it gained while Unisys conveniently failed to notice the growing popularity of it's patented technology.
The whole thing with a killer app is that it isn't something that has been done before. Visicalc wasn't a good spreadsheet. Visicalc was a visual calculator that people invented the term spreadsheet to describe. I think we've had them for long enough to know that PIMs are not the killer app that will drive portable computing. It's unlikely anyone will know what the killer app is until they happen to see it on a friends PDA and run out to buy a PDA the next day.
I personally would not carry a PDA right now even if one was given to me. I don't like carrying junk around. I have a Nixxo Platinum pager because I don't like a big motorolla on my belt. I carry a Sharp non-programmable scientific calculator because it takes less space in my backpack than my HP, even though my HP would be more useful for the math class I'm taking.
Even if I could have a laptop the size of a paperback, I probably wouldn't carry it unless it had voice recognition and really good integration with my desktop (I'm really picky about keyboards. The only ones I like right now are the the ones dell ships.)
One of the problems with the patent office is that there is no penalty for trying to trademark or patent something that isn't eligible. There should at least be some really hefty fine, like 10% of the revenues you would have gained from having a US government monopoly on someone else's idea.
Everyone who is even considering whether the consumer would be better off if Microsoft is regulated/broken up/forced to open source windows is completely missing the point. Microsoft should be allowed to develop, license, and market it's products in any way it pleases(*) NOT because it is what is best for the consumer, but because of the precident it would set. Whether it is best for the consumers is irrelevant. It is probably the case that forcing Microsoft to open source windows would have a positive short term effect on consumers. But imagine software 5 years from now. No one will be interested in writing software that needs to be extremely widely used to be useful. Look at Acrobat, Real Player, ICQ -- all of these need to be widely used before they are of significant benefit to the consumer (what use was it to the first person to get on ICQ?). If Microsoft is punished for succeeding at what everyone else tried to do, people will be more reluctant to enter these markets.
It's similar to someone suggesting forcing biotech companies to sell their drugs at a reasonable price. In the short term it sounds like a good idea, but in the long term all it means is that you aren't going to have any new drugs.
The United States heavily taxes what are called "Windfall Profits", which just means really high returns on investment. Never mind that someone may have invested in 10 extremely risky businesses, 9 of them went belly-up, and only one returned "windfall profits". The effect is that even if the expected return given the risk is really good, people won't make the investment, because in the 1 in 100 chance the company does make money, it will all be taken in the form of taxes.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. And once the government starts thinking it needs to keep an eye on software developers, you can kiss innovation and profits goodbye.
--Kevin
* I said "any way it pleases", but I would exclude a few clearly monopolistic practices: prohibiting computer manufacturers from including non-microsoft software (Word Perfect installed on a Windows machine, some computers sold with linux instead) as a condition of their licensing; and also tying of sales in a way that putting one product (e.g. windows) on a computer is more expense if you don't also put another product on the computer (e.g. IIS).
You have a very good point. I got turned on a electronic music a few months back, and it this had been, say, 3 years ago, I probably would have bought some albums. As it is, I'm streaming the Electronica Trip channel from Green Witch right now. Why would I buy an album when I can chose what type of music I want to hear, and hear it without commercials?
Sorry, just driving me nuts, everyone saying Jon Johansen "reverse engineered DeCSS". DeCSS was the outcome of reverse engineering CSS, the Content Scrambling System. Using terminology correctly helps to make you look like you know what you're talking about.
My first guess is that Jon Johansen is probably not in as serious of trouble as he would be if he were an adult or if it was in the US, since from what I have heard, minors aren't routinely tried as adults in Europe. Does anyone know for sure?
As far as "someone's going to pay" I think there is a pretty simple solution -- round up the MPAA & associates' expert witnesses who made connections between DeCSS and copying DVDs and throw them in jail for perjury. Since DeCSS is of absolutely no use in making a copy of a DVD, anyone who said otherwise in court (and knew they were blowing smoke up the courts ass) can be put away.
You might be interested in reading David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom, or Vernor Vinge's Peacewar science fiction stories for an illustration of why anarchy != chaos. You can have a stable society without a government.
(Don't really want to argue it, just wanted to provide pointers to the arguments).
Well, I was hoping there would be someone left in the race with a chance of winning that I could vote for. Internet Censorship is a fairly small issue, but it's one that will be decided in the next four years, so it matters who gets in now. Given Bush's fascist attitudes on abortion and same sex marriage, and the ominous-sounding "faith based initiatives", I don't think I could go for him either.
Looks like I'll have to throw my vote away on whichever of the libertarians gets nominated.
Does "mob rule" bring a pleasant image to mind? Was it a totalitarian state that convicted Socrates of corrupting the youth?
Democracy just means that there are more people telling you how to live your life.
Liberty is being left alone to live your life as you see fit.
California voters approved a law (prop 187) which would essentially require presenting an ID card for *anything*. Signing up for school? Bring your papers. I really don't like being governed by people who have no understanding of economics, but that's what democracy means.
I'm not advocating monarchy, or dictatorship, or anything like that. I'm advocating stripping the government of power so that there is very little there to be abused.
In situations like with Schroedinger's Cat, is the cat in one of the end states and we are merely unaware of which state it is in, or is the cat in fact in neither state until someone looks at it?
If the cat isn't in a definte state until someone looks at it, what is special about a person looking at it? If another animal observed it, would this collapse the possibilities? If the janitor who is locked in the building until morning observes it, do the possibilites collapse when he sees it, or only when he can go outside and tell people? What if an intelligent computer observes it? In short, why the priveledged role of a single human observer?
What do you mean "should be"? If you mean, "would be expected to be", I would wholeheartedly agree, but suggest you say what you mean more clearly. It's very easy to read your statement as a call for people to make it the case that the internet is equal for both men and women. Of course, you can't make it equal for men and women unless you know who everyone is, so you'd have to keep track of who's a man and who's a woman.
But if you do that, then it's not level. The key to equality on the internet is that you can't tell who is a man or a woman. I happen to use my real first name, which is identifiably male for most english speakers. I sometimes use names that aren't identifiable re gender.
Quite often it happens that you can guess someone's gender based on word choice and phrasing. Sometimes you guess because "no guy would be interested in that" or something. But this is nearly impossible in doing actual business.
Preserve the anomynity and you will have an area for complete equity. But remember: "the promise of america is equal opportunaty, not equal outcomes" (bill clinton quote, if you can believe it). Women (even feminazis) don't seem to have a problem with saying that women tend to have better taste for design and art type stuff (for example). I suspect that it will come out that men are (on average) more attracted to programming and related fields, and I suspect that feminazis will take this as proof that "the system is unjust".
But who cares? If they could code, they'd have better things to do than scream about the system being unjust.
The dell cases aren't that bad, but they need to put some sort of markings about how you are supposed to open them on the case or in the documentation. We use dell at work, and it wasn't until the third or fourth case that I managed to add a drive without breaking *any* of the plastic. (and I have no trouble working on clones, or macs, or cars, so it isn't me)
Once you figure it out, though, it's pretty convenient.
No one has been able to disprove the existence of tachyons because tachyons are meaningless. The "theory" of tachyons doesn't make any verifyable predictions; the universe appears the same whether tachyons exist or not. Or if there is an invisible pink elephant behind you.
Check out Ayer's Language Truth and Logic, or any of the other logical positivists.
Regarding FTL, I'd say it's grasping at straws to say it might be possible. Relativity breaks down on extremely small scales, but I'm guessing you wouldn't be satisfied with accellerating a single proton past the speed of light for millionth of a second.
The key difference between relativity and previous theories is that relativity made a large number of predictions about things which people had never observed -- gravitational lensing and slowing of time near a large mass are two that come to mind. All of these predictions which have been tested have been found valid. This suggests that relativity is a good guess as to what is "really" happening, rather than an approximation to a set of observations.
It's like giving someone a series of 1,2,3 and asking them to give the formula for the rest of the series. Newton says "they increase by one", relativity says it's a sequence of primes. When we see the next numbers are 5 and 7, we can be confident that the sixth is 11.
I could never even get the tone stress system in japanese, which is much less complicated than chinese (and doesn't carry as much meaning).
German is an easy language. Sure, there's irregularities, but they occur frequently enough that you learn them, rather than hiding them away in teh corner like english so that you only see them once in a blue moon. Of course, the syntax causes occasional buffer overruns, but even native speakers have trouble with that.
On somethign actually on topic, it's funny that linuxtech.com.uy has a page explaining what is meant by "Software Libre", as if there could be any confusion in a language with words for both "libre" and "gratuité" (sorry, only read spanish, don't write it).
Windows is a registered trademark, at least in the US, probably in every country with a trademark office (and MS is busy setting up the trademark offices for the rest of the world, I'm sure).
I would guess that the reasoning is that even though "Windows" is a common term, it isn't a common term referring to computer software. You probably couldn't trademark "Operating System" as the name for your OS, or "Windows" as the name of your glass company, or Apple as the name of your fruit distribution company, but Apple as the name of a computer company is fine.
Area of business is a key point in trademark disputes. Apple Corps (Apple Core?) sued Apple Computer for using the name Apple in relation to some sort of music software, because they are a music company. If I start, for example, Penguin Software, Penguin Books wouldn't have a claim against me for trademark infringment. If I planned on starting up a computer press after the company was larger, Penguin would be a bad choice for a name, because then Penguin books would have a claim against me, and I wouldn't be able to use "Penguin" in relation to books. (yes, there is a bookshelf next to this computer.)
If you mean the way Kleenex and Xerox are tryign to avoid being diluted, I don't think this would apply to Linux, unless people started using Linux to refer to, e.g. freebsd. Linux is definitely trademarkable, in my opinion, but it shouldn't be granted to LinuxTech in Uruguay, because it isn't *their* trademark.
okay, people, I'll go meta-moderate, just in case I get this one, but why is a post that:
1. incorrectly states someone is trying to "copyright" (not trademark) Linux and 2. Advocates attempting a DOS against them
Moderated up as insightful? It's not really a troll, it's not really redundant, or anything, but plese, don't moderate this crap UP so that it appears at the top of the comments.
The page didn't even render right in NS4.7. Text was covered with graphics. Does anyeone have a link to the actual text of H.R.1907, or a discussion by someone who doesn't make Principia Discordia look like a serious work of literature?
For some reason, everyone is always the smallest of the big guys. I just watched the keynote, and Jobs said MacOS is the second most widely used OS. In fact, he said, it's one of only two widely used OSs. I'm guessing the difference between NT and MacOS, or between Unix and MacOS is a lot smaller than the difference between MacOS and Windows.
Everyone else who is doing open source development (netscape, sun, red hat) isn't a "major computer company", I guess.
Maybe something like if you post with the +1 bonus, and get moderated down, you lose double the Karma, on the theory that you should be more careful about what you post when you are using the bonus (I use my bonus about half the time). Or perhaps getting two moderations down on something posted with +1 will drop you back to 24 points so you can't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
It pains me to see people supporting capitalism with their foot so firmly embedded in their mouth. They were not fired for organizing a sick out. They were not fired at all (well, they probably will be, but that's beside the point). The point is that their computers are being search for information about the sick-out because organizing a sick-out is illegal.
A consistent capitalist would have to maintain that outlawing sick-outs is only different in degree from slavery. (Both are instances of forcing someone to work against his will.)
--Kevin
I think we're all pissed because:
1. We don't think the government has the (moral) authority to make a sick-out illegal. Do these people have contracts that say their employment is not at-will? If not, then the government has no business sticking it's nose in.
2. It sounds awfully similar to the church of scientology seizing computers with the assistance of various law enforcement agencies, which was clearly a free speech issue, and also a due process issue -- is the standard procedure to have the f-ing PLAINTIFF seize and inspect the defendents computer?
--Kevin
I seem to recall that you can be required to produce your passphrase if subpoenaed. This makes some sense, because otherwise it would leave a big gaping hole for companies to hide behind. "Well, sure we'll provide you with those documents about possible insider trading. Oh, did I fail to mention they are encrypted?"
On the other hand, you can make a good case that this falls under the 5th amendment protection against self incrimination.
The constitution does not prohibit seisure of evidence with a warrant, and common law definitely permits it; but is it really evidence before they decrypt it? That is, is subpoenaing a passphrase the same thing as saying, "tell us where you buried the body or we'll throw you in jail", which is prohibited by the 5th amendment.
I don't know if which I think is more "correct" from the two conflicting views. I hesitate to say that it should be decided on the grounds of what is preferable in most cases, because I think there might be a clear reason one interpretation should be preferred, but I just haven't figured out what that reason is.
--Kevin
I wonder when we are going to start seeing subsets of the internet partition themselves off and only deal with other sites the implement certain policies (for example, contractual agreements regarding penalties from spam coming from your domain, failure to block impossible packets and so on).
It could be done pretty cheaply during the changeover to IPv6. Just use the first byte to indicate what level of security (or bitwise OR of different security features) the host network guarantees. Then you could just block, for example, any mail coming from someone who didn't guarantee they could track down the original author (whic implies that they have enforced similar rules on their relaying).
--Kevin
Why is the proxy blocking mp3.com? Is the RIAA leaning on the university?
One place patent law has to be modified is making it totally clear that companies have to act in a reasonable time frame from when they first learn of possible violations. Unisys waited like 6 years before they started enforcing LZW. Can anyone guess why? Would GIF have caught on as a standard if a license had been required at the beginning? No way. Would anyone support GIF today if not for the popularity it gained while Unisys conveniently failed to notice the growing popularity of it's patented technology.
--Kevin
The whole thing with a killer app is that it isn't something that has been done before. Visicalc wasn't a good spreadsheet. Visicalc was a visual calculator that people invented the term spreadsheet to describe. I think we've had them for long enough to know that PIMs are not the killer app that will drive portable computing. It's unlikely anyone will know what the killer app is until they happen to see it on a friends PDA and run out to buy a PDA the next day.
I personally would not carry a PDA right now even if one was given to me. I don't like carrying junk around. I have a Nixxo Platinum pager because I don't like a big motorolla on my belt. I carry a Sharp non-programmable scientific calculator because it takes less space in my backpack than my HP, even though my HP would be more useful for the math class I'm taking.
Even if I could have a laptop the size of a paperback, I probably wouldn't carry it unless it had voice recognition and really good integration with my desktop (I'm really picky about keyboards. The only ones I like right now are the the ones dell ships.)
--Kevin
One of the problems with the patent office is that there is no penalty for trying to trademark or patent something that isn't eligible. There should at least be some really hefty fine, like 10% of the revenues you would have gained from having a US government monopoly on someone else's idea.
--Kevin
Everyone who is even considering whether the consumer would be better off if Microsoft is regulated/broken up/forced to open source windows is completely missing the point. Microsoft should be allowed to develop, license, and market it's products in any way it pleases(*) NOT because it is what is best for the consumer, but because of the precident it would set. Whether it is best for the consumers is irrelevant. It is probably the case that forcing Microsoft to open source windows would have a positive short term effect on consumers. But imagine software 5 years from now. No one will be interested in writing software that needs to be extremely widely used to be useful. Look at Acrobat, Real Player, ICQ -- all of these need to be widely used before they are of significant benefit to the consumer (what use was it to the first person to get on ICQ?). If Microsoft is punished for succeeding at what everyone else tried to do, people will be more reluctant to enter these markets.
It's similar to someone suggesting forcing biotech companies to sell their drugs at a reasonable price. In the short term it sounds like a good idea, but in the long term all it means is that you aren't going to have any new drugs.
The United States heavily taxes what are called "Windfall Profits", which just means really high returns on investment. Never mind that someone may have invested in 10 extremely risky businesses, 9 of them went belly-up, and only one returned "windfall profits". The effect is that even if the expected return given the risk is really good, people won't make the investment, because in the 1 in 100 chance the company does make money, it will all be taken in the form of taxes.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. And once the government starts thinking it needs to keep an eye on software developers, you can kiss innovation and profits goodbye.
--Kevin
* I said "any way it pleases", but I would exclude a few clearly monopolistic practices: prohibiting computer manufacturers from including non-microsoft software (Word Perfect installed on a Windows machine, some computers sold with linux instead) as a condition of their licensing; and also tying of sales in a way that putting one product (e.g. windows) on a computer is more expense if you don't also put another product on the computer (e.g. IIS).
You have a very good point. I got turned on a electronic music a few months back, and it this had been, say, 3 years ago, I probably would have bought some albums. As it is, I'm streaming the Electronica Trip channel from Green Witch right now. Why would I buy an album when I can chose what type of music I want to hear, and hear it without commercials?
--Kevin
Sorry, just driving me nuts, everyone saying Jon Johansen "reverse engineered DeCSS". DeCSS was the outcome of reverse engineering CSS, the Content Scrambling System. Using terminology correctly helps to make you look like you know what you're talking about.
My first guess is that Jon Johansen is probably not in as serious of trouble as he would be if he were an adult or if it was in the US, since from what I have heard, minors aren't routinely tried as adults in Europe. Does anyone know for sure?
As far as "someone's going to pay" I think there is a pretty simple solution -- round up the MPAA & associates' expert witnesses who made connections between DeCSS and copying DVDs and throw them in jail for perjury. Since DeCSS is of absolutely no use in making a copy of a DVD, anyone who said otherwise in court (and knew they were blowing smoke up the courts ass) can be put away.
--Kevin
You might be interested in reading David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom, or Vernor Vinge's Peacewar science fiction stories for an illustration of why anarchy != chaos. You can have a stable society without a government.
(Don't really want to argue it, just wanted to provide pointers to the arguments).
Well, I was hoping there would be someone left in the race with a chance of winning that I could vote for. Internet Censorship is a fairly small issue, but it's one that will be decided in the next four years, so it matters who gets in now. Given Bush's fascist attitudes on abortion and same sex marriage, and the ominous-sounding "faith based initiatives", I don't think I could go for him either.
Looks like I'll have to throw my vote away on whichever of the libertarians gets nominated.
Democracy != Liberty
Does "mob rule" bring a pleasant image to mind? Was it a totalitarian state that convicted Socrates of corrupting the youth?
Democracy just means that there are more people telling you how to live your life.
Liberty is being left alone to live your life as you see fit.
California voters approved a law (prop 187) which would essentially require presenting an ID card for *anything*. Signing up for school? Bring your papers. I really don't like being governed by people who have no understanding of economics, but that's what democracy means.
I'm not advocating monarchy, or dictatorship, or anything like that. I'm advocating stripping the government of power so that there is very little there to be abused.
--kevin
In situations like with Schroedinger's Cat, is the cat in one of the end states and we are merely unaware of which state it is in, or is the cat in fact in neither state until someone looks at it?
If the cat isn't in a definte state until someone looks at it, what is special about a person looking at it? If another animal observed it, would this collapse the possibilities? If the janitor who is locked in the building until morning observes it, do the possibilites collapse when he sees it, or only when he can go outside and tell people? What if an intelligent computer observes it? In short, why the priveledged role of a single human observer?
--Kevin
"or at least should be"
What do you mean "should be"? If you mean, "would be expected to be", I would wholeheartedly agree, but suggest you say what you mean more clearly. It's very easy to read your statement as a call for people to make it the case that the internet is equal for both men and women. Of course, you can't make it equal for men and women unless you know who everyone is, so you'd have to keep track of who's a man and who's a woman.
But if you do that, then it's not level. The key to equality on the internet is that you can't tell who is a man or a woman. I happen to use my real first name, which is identifiably male for most english speakers. I sometimes use names that aren't identifiable re gender.
Quite often it happens that you can guess someone's gender based on word choice and phrasing. Sometimes you guess because "no guy would be interested in that" or something. But this is nearly impossible in doing actual business.
Preserve the anomynity and you will have an area for complete equity. But remember: "the promise of america is equal opportunaty, not equal outcomes" (bill clinton quote, if you can believe it). Women (even feminazis) don't seem to have a problem with saying that women tend to have better taste for design and art type stuff (for example). I suspect that it will come out that men are (on average) more attracted to programming and related fields, and I suspect that feminazis will take this as proof that "the system is unjust".
But who cares? If they could code, they'd have better things to do than scream about the system being unjust.
The dell cases aren't that bad, but they need to put some sort of markings about how you are supposed to open them on the case or in the documentation. We use dell at work, and it wasn't until the third or fourth case that I managed to add a drive without breaking *any* of the plastic. (and I have no trouble working on clones, or macs, or cars, so it isn't me)
Once you figure it out, though, it's pretty convenient.
--Kevin
No one has been able to disprove the existence of tachyons because tachyons are meaningless. The "theory" of tachyons doesn't make any verifyable predictions; the universe appears the same whether tachyons exist or not. Or if there is an invisible pink elephant behind you.
Check out Ayer's Language Truth and Logic, or any of the other logical positivists.
Regarding FTL, I'd say it's grasping at straws to say it might be possible. Relativity breaks down on extremely small scales, but I'm guessing you wouldn't be satisfied with accellerating a single proton past the speed of light for millionth of a second.
The key difference between relativity and previous theories is that relativity made a large number of predictions about things which people had never observed -- gravitational lensing and slowing of time near a large mass are two that come to mind. All of these predictions which have been tested have been found valid. This suggests that relativity is a good guess as to what is "really" happening, rather than an approximation to a set of observations.
It's like giving someone a series of 1,2,3 and asking them to give the formula for the rest of the series. Newton says "they increase by one", relativity says it's a sequence of primes. When we see the next numbers are 5 and 7, we can be confident that the sixth is 11.
--kevin
I could never even get the tone stress system in japanese, which is much less complicated than chinese (and doesn't carry as much meaning).
German is an easy language. Sure, there's irregularities, but they occur frequently enough that you learn them, rather than hiding them away in teh corner like english so that you only see them once in a blue moon. Of course, the syntax causes occasional buffer overruns, but even native speakers have trouble with that.
On somethign actually on topic, it's funny that linuxtech.com.uy has a page explaining what is meant by "Software Libre", as if there could be any confusion in a language with words for both "libre" and "gratuité" (sorry, only read spanish, don't write it).
--Kevin
Windows is a registered trademark, at least in the US, probably in every country with a trademark office (and MS is busy setting up the trademark offices for the rest of the world, I'm sure).
I would guess that the reasoning is that even though "Windows" is a common term, it isn't a common term referring to computer software. You probably couldn't trademark "Operating System" as the name for your OS, or "Windows" as the name of your glass company, or Apple as the name of your fruit distribution company, but Apple as the name of a computer company is fine.
Area of business is a key point in trademark disputes. Apple Corps (Apple Core?) sued Apple Computer for using the name Apple in relation to some sort of music software, because they are a music company. If I start, for example, Penguin Software, Penguin Books wouldn't have a claim against me for trademark infringment. If I planned on starting up a computer press after the company was larger, Penguin would be a bad choice for a name, because then Penguin books would have a claim against me, and I wouldn't be able to use "Penguin" in relation to books. (yes, there is a bookshelf next to this computer.)
If you mean the way Kleenex and Xerox are tryign to avoid being diluted, I don't think this would apply to Linux, unless people started using Linux to refer to, e.g. freebsd. Linux is definitely trademarkable, in my opinion, but it shouldn't be granted to LinuxTech in Uruguay, because it isn't *their* trademark.
--Kevin
okay, people, I'll go meta-moderate, just in case I get this one, but why is a post that:
1. incorrectly states someone is trying to "copyright" (not trademark) Linux
and
2. Advocates attempting a DOS against them
Moderated up as insightful? It's not really a troll, it's not really redundant, or anything, but plese, don't moderate this crap UP so that it appears at the top of the comments.
--Kevin
(sorry for being off topic)
The page didn't even render right in NS4.7. Text was covered with graphics. Does anyeone have a link to the actual text of H.R.1907, or a discussion by someone who doesn't make Principia Discordia look like a serious work of literature?
--Kevin
For some reason, everyone is always the smallest of the big guys. I just watched the keynote, and Jobs said MacOS is the second most widely used OS. In fact, he said, it's one of only two widely used OSs. I'm guessing the difference between NT and MacOS, or between Unix and MacOS is a lot smaller than the difference between MacOS and Windows.
Everyone else who is doing open source development (netscape, sun, red hat) isn't a "major computer company", I guess.
--Kevin
Maybe something like if you post with the +1 bonus, and get moderated down, you lose double the Karma, on the theory that you should be more careful about what you post when you are using the bonus (I use my bonus about half the time). Or perhaps getting two moderations down on something posted with +1 will drop you back to 24 points so you can't use it.
--kevin