3) That anyone who has a valid patent, Google has a more damaging counter patent(s) and thus they'll have to back down.
This is where GPL v3.0 enters the game. Most people are quite Ok with the h.264 patents, except that you can't write a codec that is GPL v3.0 licensed, because you can't have GPL v.3.0 code that implements a patented invention, unless you have a patent license that covers the code and any GPL licensed copies or derivatives.
If someone has a valid patent that WebM is infringing on, and is convinced by threats from Google not to sue, that doesn't make a difference - the code would be infringing and cannot be distributed under GPL v3.0.
Before you compare European and US cars, always remember that a US gallon is less than a UK gallon by about 20 percent. A US car at 50mpg is exactly the same as a UK car at 60mpg.
The real question is will the market bear the new regulations? Americans as a nation have obviously NOT demanded higher MPG ratings from their cars or there would be no need for the regulation. How much more will each vehicle cost to use the higher technology needed to achieve the standards? By setting the standards the government may have artificially increased the market price and will thus affect supply and demand. I'm all for environmental policies, but outside of the academic towers, the real world still intervenes and economics will affect well intentioned government mandates.
This doesn't have to cost much at all, quite the opposite.
Your mileage depends on many things: The efficiency of the engine, the weight of the vehicle, how much energy is wasted on accelerating and braking, how much is wasted due to going at an inefficient (high) speed or due to choosing the wrong gear. A huge factor is weight. Some people think a heavier car is safer. It isn't; the only thing that is safer in an accident is having a car that is heavier than the other car. Halve the weight of every car, and you safe a lot of money on fuel, a lot of money on building the car, and you don't lose any safety. Then try to make traffic run smoother. My mileage is quite bad when I'm stuck in a traffic jam. So improving traffic saves time, nerves, and improves the mileage.
Rupe and his minions have been terrorizing politicians and celebrities for many years. Now that he's in trouble where it looks like it's going to stick, is it any wonder at all that nobody at all is interested in stepping up to help him out? All the worms have turned; Rupe's only real hope is that an even bigger scandal or event will divert everyone's attention.
Murdoch controlled newspapers, and that made politicians, especially in the UK, fear him. What were they supposed to do if newspapers attacked them everywhere? Complain "no, I didn't do it, it was evil Murdoch who is behind that"? They would have been laughed at. But now, if a Murdoch newspaper were to attack a politician for disagreeing with Murdock, same complaint "no, I didn't do it, it was evil Murdoch who is behind that"! And this time the public would say "absolutely, I am sure this good politician did do nothing wrong, must have done something to upset evil Murdoch".
_That_ is not going to go away. He may be able to continue printing newspapers. But the power is gone.
You mean false negatives? According to the description, they take a photo of you, then check that the person leaving with your flight ticket is actually you. A "false positive" would be a different person leaving with your ticket, but wrongly identified as you and accepted. A false negative would be you leaving legitimately but not recognised as matching your own photo. Very easy to have a living person check that you are the right person.
What open standards, sure Apple wants HTML5, but they've also patented part of the specification and aren't releasing those patents as is required by the W3C.
See, that is how Slashdotters go apeshit and post nonsense.
Apple hasn't patented part of the HTML5 specification. Apple has answered a request by the W3C to tell them what patents they own that they think might be in the way of the planned HTML5 spec, and they found two patents that might be infringed by the planned specification. W3C is now looking for prior art, because prior art to a patent can be freely used, and then they plan to adapt the specification so that it supports the capabilities it was supposed to support, but so that an implementation only needs to use the prior art, and not what Apple added in their patent.
A patent troll would obviously _not_ have told anyone about those patents, but would have waited until the spec is written and implementations are out, which would then infringe on the patent.
This is just like what the Ogg Vorbis developers are so proud off: They checked what patents are there and then developed a Codec that doesn't require use of any of those patents. So imagine that instead of having to search for patents, the developers could have asked Apple and others: "We want to create a new audio codec that isn't patent encumbered and this is our plan how it should work. Do you have any patents that you think would be in the way?" They would have been happy about any information Apple (and others) would have given them.
Poor developers, putting effort, time and money in creating something original and functional, only to get sued by some bigcorp lawyer shmuck...
Not a "bigcorp lawyer shmuck". We are talking about Lodsys here which is a one man company. Which is in more trouble than these poor UK developers because they are themselves now being sued by server "bigcorp lawyers".
It says "the articles, photographs and graphic representations", not links. Links it seems would still be permitted.
Google has just lost a court case about "articles, photographs etc.". It is very understandable that they would now want to be on the cautious side, and avoid being sued again. So in Google's place, I wouldn't show any links without explicit permission. And I would still be very cautious about misunderstandings, so I don't think I would show _anything_ unless I had permission from these newspapers to show _everything_ without restrictions.
Not Apple, it was Nokia who did it first on a phone. And it's annoying as hell. It can be disabled (a must for sanity), but then you get warnings all the time about the "orientation lock". You see, I'm secure with my orientation and please get the hell away from trying to get me to change it.
So you are saying that Nokia invented a method to change the orientation of a screen in a way that is usually not what the user intended and is annoying. I'd assume that you and many others would have wished that they changed it in the way you intended, and if it would have been obvious, then Nokia would have done it.
A very good argument that Apple is doing something that isn't obvious, if it works well. If it doesn't work well, then any method that works well is not covered by the patent. In that case any phone maker has double reason to change the orientation using a method that works well: It makes the customers happy, and it avoids patent infringement.
The question is, shouldn't a patent be awarded only for something non-trivial even for experts in that field ? I mean this is hardly a genius work. You write a function that depends on the values of the accelerometer and voila you get the proper orientation! What am I missing here?
Probably everything that is patented.
Write this function, and then make it work correctly when the iPad is lying on a flat table. Make it change orientation when I rotate the iPad by 90 degrees in front of me, but not when I move it in front of my wife (rotating it by 90 degrees in the process). Make it work when I use the iPad in bed. When I lie sideways and hold it that way. And so on.
If those previous models did rely on accelerometers, how does one exactly go about challenging this ruling and show prior art?
It seems very unlikely that for example the Radius screen relied on accelerometers. Much more likely just a mechanical switch that registers when you rotated the screen while the stand stays on the table. If you picked up the monitor and laid it on the table sideways, it wouldn't work. If you attached the monitor to a vertical wall, it would always show the wrong orientation.
There's the problem that FOSS has painted itself into a corner with GPL 3.0 and patents. If you license code that implements a patented invention under GPL 3.0 you have to give everyone using the source code a license to use the patent. Problem is: You have to give everyone a license to use the patent for any use of the software.
So if Apple has a patent and allows everyone to use it to implement HTML5 for free, and you write code to implement HTML5 using that patent, that is fine. But if you wanted to license it under GPL 3.0, you could do that only if you convince Apple to allow use of the patent for _anything_ derived from that code. And you will likely not get that permission.
You could license the code under GPL 2.2. Anyone can then take your code and change it, as long as they use it to implement HTML5. If they use it for something else, that would patent infringement.
So if I steal someone's camera and take photos on it, can I legally require that they return the photos to me once they reclaim their camera? can I stop them publishing the photos even though I took them on their camera?
The Unabomber tried something like that. Claimed the police had no right to publish letters he had written. I would think that publishing letters in order to catch a murderer falls under fair use. Trying to catch the thief would likely fall under fair use.
Seems to me that if the photographer properly and adequately reimbursed the monkeys then the paper would have purchased said portraits by contract from the monkeys.
You can't form a contract with a monkey. Therefore you cannot get the copyrights for a work created by a monkey. And lastly, a DMCA takedown notice by a person who doesn't have the copyright is a criminal matter.
You are having a laugh, right? "Paid Microsoft mouth piece" is a lot more accurate. Whatever happens at any Microsoft competitor, this guy will put a negative spin on it.
The whole point of patents is to encourage people to share their "secret formula" rather than keep a trade secret that dies with the company/inventor. There is no need for software patents, as anyone with a debugger can see what your "secret formula" is. All you are doing at that point is protecting the interests of the patent holder, which does not exactly benefit society.
If I can't figure it out without debugging someone's code then it probably deserves the patent. In software patents, that would be exceedingly rare.
This is the kind of thing that can make women feel uncomfortable. It's tough for men to understand typically, but it's belittling. The reaction a woman often gets when they complain about these things is very dismissive, which makes the whole thing much worse.
It's the kind of thing that will make almost any woman very angry, and will make any decent men think that you are a jerk. If you think it's tough for men to understand, then you haven't reached the "man" stage in your life yet.
No there isn't. Just because YOU don't see this as having fun with names doesn't mean the author didn't. 'Having fun with names' and 'Having fun with names that I approve of' are not the same thing. 'Having fun with names' and 'using names that aren't offensive' are also not the same thing.
Thing is, I have the right to have an opinion of people based on their actions. And my strong believe is that whoever came up with these names is a tosser, and if I met them, I would treat them as such. You don't want to be associated with them, you certainly wouldn't offer them a job, and you wouldn't trust any software written by a tosser.
A little known fact about encryption is that it's impossible to prove which password is "correct" unless checksums are used. For example, ASE-256 uses a key length of 256 bits, which means there are 2^256 or 1.15792089Ã--10^77 possible keys. Given any encrypted file, there are 1.15792089Ã--10^77 ways of decrypting it. Depending on the password, it might come out as the complete works William Shakespeare, child pornography, complete gibberish, or your original files. As long as checksums are not embedded in the encryption system, it's impossible to prove that you provided a "wrong" password.
You would be right if the encrypted hard drive had a size of 256 bits only. And there will be some key that decrypts the first 16 bytes of your hard drive to the first 16 letters in "Romeo and Juliet". For 32 bytes, no way.
How do I prevent them from adding anything to the system after it is in their possession.
Your question is completely illogical. There is an encrypted file on your drive, and the police assumes it is incriminating. What prevents them from replacing the file with one that has your wedding day as the password, and contains faked incriminating evidence?
If they are willing to break the law to nail you, there is nothing you can do.
How is allowing the defendant to keep the password private a meaningful concession? The password has no value if the hard drive has been decrypted.
Because the contents of your hard drive has no fifth amendment protection, but your password has (possibly). So you are allowed to keep everything that is protected by the fifth amendment, but you have to disclose what is not protected. If the protected data has very little value to you and the prosecution compared to the unprotected data, that is not their fault.
A similar situation would be if you had information hidden inside your pacemaker. You have no right to keep that information secret, but you have the right that nobody opens your body to find the information. In this case, if the court or police finds no way of getting the unprotected information without violating your protected rights, you win.
If you set up your hard drive so that it could only be decrypted if the judge himself entered the password (and not you), your data would be safe.
Managers asking you to work more than 40 hours a week for longer time are idiots. It is proven that an employee working 60 hours a week for six weeks doesn't do more work than an employee working 40 hours a week. The only difference is that after six years, you have a very unhappy and tired employee instead of a happy employee who is fit to work.
If you are too good for code reviews, you should still do it. It will teach your reviewers how to write better code. Yeah, that's why you should.
I once ran into a really excellent programmer, much more clever than I am. Where I would compare a pointer to NULL by writing "if (p == NULL)" he really preferred "if (! p)" because it demonstrated his superior intelligence.
One day he changed, for no good reason, a line "if (p != NULL)" to "if (! p)" and checked it in. Unlike every other programmer in the company, without a code review because he was an excellent programmer who didn't need code reviews.
That line of code was only ever executed in a graphics device driver if the machine awoke from being put to sleep, at a time when no debugger was present yet. And due to some interesting circumstances, it only crashed the machine if another major code change that another programmer checked in a week later was present. And only if the machine was put to sleep for some time between 35 and 40 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
3) That anyone who has a valid patent, Google has a more damaging counter patent(s) and thus they'll have to back down.
This is where GPL v3.0 enters the game. Most people are quite Ok with the h.264 patents, except that you can't write a codec that is GPL v3.0 licensed, because you can't have GPL v.3.0 code that implements a patented invention, unless you have a patent license that covers the code and any GPL licensed copies or derivatives.
If someone has a valid patent that WebM is infringing on, and is convinced by threats from Google not to sue, that doesn't make a difference - the code would be infringing and cannot be distributed under GPL v3.0.
Before you compare European and US cars, always remember that a US gallon is less than a UK gallon by about 20 percent. A US car at 50mpg is exactly the same as a UK car at 60mpg.
The real question is will the market bear the new regulations? Americans as a nation have obviously NOT demanded higher MPG ratings from their cars or there would be no need for the regulation. How much more will each vehicle cost to use the higher technology needed to achieve the standards? By setting the standards the government may have artificially increased the market price and will thus affect supply and demand. I'm all for environmental policies, but outside of the academic towers, the real world still intervenes and economics will affect well intentioned government mandates.
This doesn't have to cost much at all, quite the opposite.
Your mileage depends on many things: The efficiency of the engine, the weight of the vehicle, how much energy is wasted on accelerating and braking, how much is wasted due to going at an inefficient (high) speed or due to choosing the wrong gear. A huge factor is weight. Some people think a heavier car is safer. It isn't; the only thing that is safer in an accident is having a car that is heavier than the other car. Halve the weight of every car, and you safe a lot of money on fuel, a lot of money on building the car, and you don't lose any safety. Then try to make traffic run smoother. My mileage is quite bad when I'm stuck in a traffic jam. So improving traffic saves time, nerves, and improves the mileage.
Rupe and his minions have been terrorizing politicians and celebrities for many years. Now that he's in trouble where it looks like it's going to stick, is it any wonder at all that nobody at all is interested in stepping up to help him out? All the worms have turned; Rupe's only real hope is that an even bigger scandal or event will divert everyone's attention.
Murdoch controlled newspapers, and that made politicians, especially in the UK, fear him. What were they supposed to do if newspapers attacked them everywhere? Complain "no, I didn't do it, it was evil Murdoch who is behind that"? They would have been laughed at. But now, if a Murdoch newspaper were to attack a politician for disagreeing with Murdock, same complaint "no, I didn't do it, it was evil Murdoch who is behind that"! And this time the public would say "absolutely, I am sure this good politician did do nothing wrong, must have done something to upset evil Murdoch".
_That_ is not going to go away. He may be able to continue printing newspapers. But the power is gone.
I think you'll have tons of false positive
You mean false negatives? According to the description, they take a photo of you, then check that the person leaving with your flight ticket is actually you. A "false positive" would be a different person leaving with your ticket, but wrongly identified as you and accepted. A false negative would be you leaving legitimately but not recognised as matching your own photo. Very easy to have a living person check that you are the right person.
What open standards, sure Apple wants HTML5, but they've also patented part of the specification and aren't releasing those patents as is required by the W3C.
See, that is how Slashdotters go apeshit and post nonsense.
Apple hasn't patented part of the HTML5 specification. Apple has answered a request by the W3C to tell them what patents they own that they think might be in the way of the planned HTML5 spec, and they found two patents that might be infringed by the planned specification. W3C is now looking for prior art, because prior art to a patent can be freely used, and then they plan to adapt the specification so that it supports the capabilities it was supposed to support, but so that an implementation only needs to use the prior art, and not what Apple added in their patent.
A patent troll would obviously _not_ have told anyone about those patents, but would have waited until the spec is written and implementations are out, which would then infringe on the patent.
This is just like what the Ogg Vorbis developers are so proud off: They checked what patents are there and then developed a Codec that doesn't require use of any of those patents. So imagine that instead of having to search for patents, the developers could have asked Apple and others: "We want to create a new audio codec that isn't patent encumbered and this is our plan how it should work. Do you have any patents that you think would be in the way?" They would have been happy about any information Apple (and others) would have given them.
Poor developers, putting effort, time and money in creating something original and functional, only to get sued by some bigcorp lawyer shmuck ...
Not a "bigcorp lawyer shmuck". We are talking about Lodsys here which is a one man company. Which is in more trouble than these poor UK developers because they are themselves now being sued by server "bigcorp lawyers".
It says "the articles, photographs and graphic representations", not links. Links it seems would still be permitted.
Google has just lost a court case about "articles, photographs etc.". It is very understandable that they would now want to be on the cautious side, and avoid being sued again. So in Google's place, I wouldn't show any links without explicit permission. And I would still be very cautious about misunderstandings, so I don't think I would show _anything_ unless I had permission from these newspapers to show _everything_ without restrictions.
But the experts _didn't_ come up with this, or did they? At least none of the armchair experts here came up with it.
Not Apple, it was Nokia who did it first on a phone. And it's annoying as hell. It can be disabled (a must for sanity), but then you get warnings all the time about the "orientation lock". You see, I'm secure with my orientation and please get the hell away from trying to get me to change it.
So you are saying that Nokia invented a method to change the orientation of a screen in a way that is usually not what the user intended and is annoying. I'd assume that you and many others would have wished that they changed it in the way you intended, and if it would have been obvious, then Nokia would have done it.
A very good argument that Apple is doing something that isn't obvious, if it works well. If it doesn't work well, then any method that works well is not covered by the patent. In that case any phone maker has double reason to change the orientation using a method that works well: It makes the customers happy, and it avoids patent infringement.
The question is, shouldn't a patent be awarded only for something non-trivial even for experts in that field ? I mean this is hardly a genius work. You write a function that depends on the values of the accelerometer and voila you get the proper orientation! What am I missing here?
Probably everything that is patented.
Write this function, and then make it work correctly when the iPad is lying on a flat table. Make it change orientation when I rotate the iPad by 90 degrees in front of me, but not when I move it in front of my wife (rotating it by 90 degrees in the process). Make it work when I use the iPad in bed. When I lie sideways and hold it that way. And so on.
If those previous models did rely on accelerometers, how does one exactly go about challenging this ruling and show prior art?
It seems very unlikely that for example the Radius screen relied on accelerometers. Much more likely just a mechanical switch that registers when you rotated the screen while the stand stays on the table. If you picked up the monitor and laid it on the table sideways, it wouldn't work. If you attached the monitor to a vertical wall, it would always show the wrong orientation.
"We are poor, we can't afford to buy cheap things. "
My MacBook is now over five years old and going strong. And it hasn't slowed down one bit in these years.
There's the problem that FOSS has painted itself into a corner with GPL 3.0 and patents. If you license code that implements a patented invention under GPL 3.0 you have to give everyone using the source code a license to use the patent. Problem is: You have to give everyone a license to use the patent for any use of the software.
So if Apple has a patent and allows everyone to use it to implement HTML5 for free, and you write code to implement HTML5 using that patent, that is fine. But if you wanted to license it under GPL 3.0, you could do that only if you convince Apple to allow use of the patent for _anything_ derived from that code. And you will likely not get that permission.
You could license the code under GPL 2.2. Anyone can then take your code and change it, as long as they use it to implement HTML5. If they use it for something else, that would patent infringement.
So if I steal someone's camera and take photos on it, can I legally require that they return the photos to me once they reclaim their camera? can I stop them publishing the photos even though I took them on their camera?
The Unabomber tried something like that. Claimed the police had no right to publish letters he had written. I would think that publishing letters in order to catch a murderer falls under fair use. Trying to catch the thief would likely fall under fair use.
Seems to me that if the photographer properly and adequately reimbursed the monkeys then the paper would have purchased said portraits by contract from the monkeys.
You can't form a contract with a monkey. Therefore you cannot get the copyrights for a work created by a monkey. And lastly, a DMCA takedown notice by a person who doesn't have the copyright is a criminal matter.
You are having a laugh, right? "Paid Microsoft mouth piece" is a lot more accurate. Whatever happens at any Microsoft competitor, this guy will put a negative spin on it.
The whole point of patents is to encourage people to share their "secret formula" rather than keep a trade secret that dies with the company/inventor. There is no need for software patents, as anyone with a debugger can see what your "secret formula" is. All you are doing at that point is protecting the interests of the patent holder, which does not exactly benefit society.
If I can't figure it out without debugging someone's code then it probably deserves the patent. In software patents, that would be exceedingly rare.
This is the kind of thing that can make women feel uncomfortable. It's tough for men to understand typically, but it's belittling. The reaction a woman often gets when they complain about these things is very dismissive, which makes the whole thing much worse.
It's the kind of thing that will make almost any woman very angry, and will make any decent men think that you are a jerk. If you think it's tough for men to understand, then you haven't reached the "man" stage in your life yet.
No there isn't. Just because YOU don't see this as having fun with names doesn't mean the author didn't. 'Having fun with names' and 'Having fun with names that I approve of' are not the same thing. 'Having fun with names' and 'using names that aren't offensive' are also not the same thing.
Thing is, I have the right to have an opinion of people based on their actions. And my strong believe is that whoever came up with these names is a tosser, and if I met them, I would treat them as such. You don't want to be associated with them, you certainly wouldn't offer them a job, and you wouldn't trust any software written by a tosser.
A little known fact about encryption is that it's impossible to prove which password is "correct" unless checksums are used. For example, ASE-256 uses a key length of 256 bits, which means there are 2^256 or 1.15792089Ã--10^77 possible keys. Given any encrypted file, there are 1.15792089Ã--10^77 ways of decrypting it. Depending on the password, it might come out as the complete works William Shakespeare, child pornography, complete gibberish, or your original files. As long as checksums are not embedded in the encryption system, it's impossible to prove that you provided a "wrong" password.
You would be right if the encrypted hard drive had a size of 256 bits only. And there will be some key that decrypts the first 16 bytes of your hard drive to the first 16 letters in "Romeo and Juliet". For 32 bytes, no way.
How do I prevent them from adding anything to the system after it is in their possession.
Your question is completely illogical. There is an encrypted file on your drive, and the police assumes it is incriminating. What prevents them from replacing the file with one that has your wedding day as the password, and contains faked incriminating evidence?
If they are willing to break the law to nail you, there is nothing you can do.
How is allowing the defendant to keep the password private a meaningful concession? The password has no value if the hard drive has been decrypted.
Because the contents of your hard drive has no fifth amendment protection, but your password has (possibly). So you are allowed to keep everything that is protected by the fifth amendment, but you have to disclose what is not protected. If the protected data has very little value to you and the prosecution compared to the unprotected data, that is not their fault.
A similar situation would be if you had information hidden inside your pacemaker. You have no right to keep that information secret, but you have the right that nobody opens your body to find the information. In this case, if the court or police finds no way of getting the unprotected information without violating your protected rights, you win.
If you set up your hard drive so that it could only be decrypted if the judge himself entered the password (and not you), your data would be safe.
Managers asking you to work more than 40 hours a week for longer time are idiots. It is proven that an employee working 60 hours a week for six weeks doesn't do more work than an employee working 40 hours a week. The only difference is that after six years, you have a very unhappy and tired employee instead of a happy employee who is fit to work.
If you are too good for code reviews, you should still do it. It will teach your reviewers how to write better code. Yeah, that's why you should.
I once ran into a really excellent programmer, much more clever than I am. Where I would compare a pointer to NULL by writing "if (p == NULL)" he really preferred "if (! p)" because it demonstrated his superior intelligence.
One day he changed, for no good reason, a line "if (p != NULL)" to "if (! p)" and checked it in. Unlike every other programmer in the company, without a code review because he was an excellent programmer who didn't need code reviews.
That line of code was only ever executed in a graphics device driver if the machine awoke from being put to sleep, at a time when no debugger was present yet. And due to some interesting circumstances, it only crashed the machine if another major code change that another programmer checked in a week later was present. And only if the machine was put to sleep for some time between 35 and 40 seconds.
I could have killed him.