On second thoughts, who do the developers of the VLC app think they are, submitting an app to a store knowing full well that the licensing terms of that store would violate their own licensing terms.
Whether that is the case or not is very much debatable. Apple quite clearly says that if you download third party applications through their store, any license agreement is between you and the developer. Apple provides a free download service, and that service is limited. That has nothing to do with the license agreement between you and the developer.
As interpreted (by me) from the horse's mouth [fsf.org]: the appStore licence says you can only install the software on 5 approved devices, whereas of course the GPL specifically prohibits that type of restriction. Plus, the appStore licence says, "The Usage Rules shall govern your rights with respect to the Products, in addition to any other terms or rules that may have been established between you and another party." That means, the software author cannot undercut the appStore restrictions with a less restrictive licence such as the GPL, even if they want to.
Here is what the app store _actually_ says:
"You acknowledge that: you are purchasing the license to each Third-Party Product from the third-party licensor of that Third-Party Product (the "Application Provider"); Apple is acting as agent for the Application Provider in providing each such Third-Party Product to you; and Apple is not a party to the license between you and the Application Provider with respect to that Third-Party Product. The Application Provider of each Third-Party Product is solely responsible for that Third-Party Product, the content therein, any warranties to the extent that such warranties have not been disclaimed, and any claims that you or any other party may have relating to that Third-Party Product."
So for GPL licensed software, Apple just provides a downloading service to the end user; there is no software license agreement between you and Apple at all. Apple limits what Apple will do for the end user: They are willing to put copies onto five computers owned by one person, but not six. That doesn't limit what the end user is allowed to do. They don't get any further assistance from Apple, so making more copies is a bit more complicated (involves downloading the software, modifying it as you like, recompiling it, possible for another device), but Apple is _not_ restricting what they allow you to do. And you only have to jump through these hoops if you decide to be an ass; if you want to give the same software to all your iPhone owning friends, just tell them where to find it on the store.
There is a little bit of subtleness: Apple sells software licenses on behalf of third parties, and that is what the end user pays for, not the application itself. As GPL allows charging for the software, but not for the license, you can't publish GPL licensed software through the AppStore unless it is free as in free bear.
I was a Mac user until recently, and an Apple II user before I started with Macs. But lately, I just absolutely refuse to use anything with their brand on it because of this precise behavior.
What behaviour? You mean the behaviour of a developer who is so desparate to defend user's freedom that he even prevents them from using the software in the first place?
What would be really fun would be to take the guy to court to get a declaratory judgement that publishing a GPL licensed application on the app store is _not_ in violation of the GPL and therefore not copyright infringement.
DRM is an end user annoyance that ultimately doesn't stop piracy. Perhaps someone decided it would be good to be less annoying.
Here's what Apple does: If you download app X onto Macintosh Y then it comes with an unforgeable receipt that says "app X is allowed to run on Macintosh Y". Free apps do nothing if they don't care about being copied. If you care, you check: 1. Is there a receipt. 2. Is it a valid receipt. 3. Is it a valid receipt for this Macintosh. 4. Is it a valid receipt for this application. If one of these four steps fails then the app should exit.
If an app ignores step 3. then obviously the app with the receipt can be freely copied. If an app ignores step 4. then the hack is possible: Download an app with a valid receipt, put the app you want to copy together with the receipt. That step has to be repeated for every Macintosh.
To put this into perspective, the iTunes store sells about 10 million songs or so without copy protection. So maybe we should trust users to be honest. Plus I think what the non-purchaser of the app has to do is enough (1) to make it very clear that they are doing something illegal, (2) to make sure that lots of people would never manage to do it, and (3) turn this from plain copyright infringement into a DMCA violation with much harsher penalties.
As I understand it, Apple requires [scribd.com] that applications in the Mac App Store MUST NOT "require license keys or implement their own copy protection" or "present a license screen at launch". Furthermore, Apple rejects applications "containing 'rental' content or services that expire after a limited time". This appears to rule out any application designed solely to connect to a proprietary network, such as a Netflix player or any MMORPG client.
Just adding: There is, however, Apple sample code available that lets the developer check with a few lines of code whether the application is running on the Macintosh on which it was downloaded. Apparently you can download on more than one Macintosh, but you cannot take an app from one Macintosh to another if the developer doesn't want it. Yes, the developer would _not_ require license keys, and would _not_ implement _their own_ copy protection.
Furthermore, Apple rejects applications "containing 'rental' content or services that expire after a limited time". This appears to rule out any application designed solely to connect to a proprietary network, such as a Netflix player or any MMORPG client.
I think a Netflix player wouldn't _contain_ any rental content. The way I interpret it, an app that gives you free access to all Netflix movies for a month would not be accepted. But an app that lets you rent Netflix movies for a month, where the app itself works forever, that should be accepted.
Right now, MSFT is trading at an 11.86 P/E ration and Google at a 24.21, but MSFT despite all the ill will I personally have against them, has done a better job over time maintaining its income and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
You'd have to be an idiot to think that APPL is genuinely worth about double what MSFT is.
You would, for two reasons: First, APPL hasn't been trading for many many years. You are confusing an apparently defunct oil company with a computer manufacturer. Second, AAPL would have to increase its market caps by another 60 percent before they are worth double what MSFT is.
On the other hand, unlike Microsoft, Apple isn't _maintaining_ its income, it is growing at an enormous rate year after year. It's not that long ago that Apple passed Dell in market caps, and now they could easily buy Dell with cash on hand with plenty left. Since then they have passed Microsoft in market caps, this quarter they will pass them in revenue (unless they have done that already), and passing Microsoft in profits is quite near. Sometime in 2012 is my guess, maybe earlier if predictions of 50 million iPads sold are anywhere near reality.
Exxon Mobil's 2010 profits of $19 Billion on $285 Billion in revenue [cnn.com] completely dwarf Apple's 2010 profit of $6 billion on $36 billion in revenue [cnn.com]. Granted Apple has a higher profit margin than Exxon Mobil, but in 2009 [cnn.com] Exxon Mobil's profits were greater than Apple's revenue.
Your numbers are _not_ 2010 numbers. You are comparing 2009 numbers. Maybe the fact that Apple's profit is now $14bn on $64bn revenue explains the share price.
Apple has been sitting at (or around?) 4-5 billion in revenue for the better part of this last decade.
65 billion in the last year, and that is counting Christmas 2009, not Christmas 2010.
If you were right, with revenues about 15 times less than the actually are, and no growth in ten years, then AAPL would be worth maybe $15. Since your numbers are wrong, AAPL is right where it belongs.
nobody cares since the people buying these won't care about playing Black Ops at the highest settings. i sat out the Steam sale this year because almost every game is available for the X-Box 360 and PS3. I just want a laptop to play Civ 4 once in a while and store all my photos and music. and Sandy Bridge seems to spank Apple's laptops in a lot of areas now
The problem is that the integrated graphics just barely keeps up with the MacBook graphics at lowest resolution because of the advanced CPU, but once the resolution is increased, Sandy Bridge integrated graphics gets slaughtered by the lowly NVidia 320 in the MacBook.
What I find strange is that anyone would try to repair an LCD screen at all. I have had a few defective electric devices in the past few years, but not once did anyone try to do any repairs. In every case, I went to the store, they took my defective item, and told me to get a replacement from their shelves, or refunded the money, or in one case with an item with extended warranty, gave me the original purchase price towards a new item. In your case, if you received the purchase price of a 2007 LCD screen towards purchase of a new screen, you'd probably get a much better screen now. The defective items go straight back to the manufacturer, as far as I know. (This is all in the UK. ).
Only logical explanation is that they didn't actually have any intention to fix the problem, but were trying to make you give up and go away.
The FBI agents impersonating 13 yr old girls looking for sex
1. It is only "impersonating" if the person exists, not if it is a non-existent person.
2. It is not "impersonating" if you write on behalf of another person, which the FBI does if this is a real person.
3. Going to jail for a crime that you committed does not count as "harm".
The FBI would obviously be in trouble if they used the identity of a real 13 year old girl without the parents' consent.
Unfortunately, pretending to be somebody else for the purposes of parody could be seen as a form of either fraud or harm, without the person doing the impersonation intending to do so.
Well, the law says "impersonation with the _intent_ to harm, defraud etc.". I think this is quite clear: Parody that is seen as harmful but wasn't intended to harm doesn't fall under the law because the law asks for _intent_. Actually harm that wasn't intended doesn't fall under "impersonation with the intent to harm". Intending to harm but failing to do so falls squarely under the law, because that is clearly "impersonation with _intent_ to harm". On the other hand, if you impersonate somone with the intent of splitting him up with his girlfriend, and you were too retarded to think that would harm both persons involved, that won't protect you.
But on the other hand, if the impersonation is done with intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud, why can't we just prosecute people for fraud, criminal intimidation, or whatnot?
I don't get it. All the time these slashdotters moan and moan about how the law and how judges don't understand the Internet. And here we have a law that comes from understanding the Internet, and that that the Internet has opened new ways that didn't exist before to harm others, and people complain again. Is it because it threatens some slash=dotters favorite phantasies about getting others into trouble by doing illegal things while pretending to be them?
When we have laws that threaten people with punishment for certain actions, there are multiple reasons for these laws: The most important are punishment, and deterrent by inducing fear of punishment. But another reason is to state clearly what is acceptable and what is not. In this case, the law makes clear that such impersonation is not some harmless bit of fun, or a harmless prank, but a crime.
And you didn't read this properly, obviously. What is punishable is impersonation with _intent_ to harm. In other words, the impersonation is punishable even when the intent to harm failed. Say you impersonate a husband sending e-mails to a non-existing lover to split up his marriage. This can now be punished, even if you didn't succeed in your goal. The impersonation is also punishable if the intend to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud succeeded, but only to a degree where the harm, intimidation, threatening or defrauding itself wouldn't lead to punishment.
There's no reason why iOS have to send the genuine UDIDs to the app developer. If the app requests a UDID for the device, iOS should generate a key that is unique for that device AND THAT DEVELOPER.
That's mostly missing the point. If the application talks to a server and tells it that ID (which it shouldn't in the first place) then the server will recognise you under that id, from that application. They don't know which phone, or your name, but they know it is the same person and that is all that counts. What you say would only help if multiple apps on your phone talk to the same server.
But... isn't it the obligation of the person who gave YOU the code to provide the source? So if a company sells tablet to X, with offer for source, then X gives object code to Y, it seems it's X's obligation to give Y the source code, not the company. At the very least, the company may not have the resources to give it to everyone X gives the object code to, only to X.
Both. "A company" has to give the source code to anyone who receives the object code, which includes X and everyone that X gives the object code to and everyone those people pass the source code on to. X for the same reasons has to give the source code to anyone they gave the object code to and so on. If I buy a tablet from X and give the object code to you, then "the company", X, and I, all three have the obligation to give you the source code.
You need money to sue someone. FOSS idealists have none, and big companies with vested interest in FOSS software that could afford the legal costs know better than to hurt their own kind. That's why everybody and their dogs trample on the GPL with zero fear of legal actions.
With GPL v.3, if the software used implements any patents and you got a patent license through the GPL, then a GPL violation is now both copyright infringement and patent infringement. So things could get very nasty. And the low fear of legal actions doesn't come from "FOSS idealists having no money", it comes from "FOSS idealists being nice and not pressing for maximum damages".
Somehow less than the penalty for "making available" 24 songs. The moral of the story: If you're going to commit a crime, commit the biggest crime you possibly can!
The problem is that the law ask for the number of copyrighted items that were copied, not for the value of those items, and not for the number of copies made. Psystar who was convicted for making about 750 illegal copies of MacOS X was convicted for copying _one_ copyrighted work, 1/24th of Jammi whatshername. The number of copies is only relevant if the copyright owner goes for actual damages. Let's say if a record company sold a million copies of a CD without having the copyright. So to compare the cases, you would have to find out how many different games this man copied. And then a song that I could download legally for $0.79 and a game that I could download legally for $49 are still treated the same.
Right... Without DRM, but with a watermark (in other words, if you download a Miley Cyrus song and share it, anyone else who gets access to it can track it back to you)
That being said, I have a lot of trouble getting upset over the fact that purchased content is watermarked. As long as I'm not distributing the content, who cares?
There are of course all kind of conspiracy theories around, but the fact is that two things are different in your downloaded files than in my downloaded files: The Quicktime atom for "creation date" which is - guess what - set to the time when we each download the file, and there is information so that _your_ downloaded file will turn up in the "Purchased" section in iTunes on your computer. This is not a watermark at all. It's just iTunes not carefully removing forensic evidence that could be used against you.
If anyone cared there would be an anonymiser app for this.
Sarah Palin is not dumb. She is reasonably smart and articulate, and might do an OK job as President, if she does like all good Presidents in history have done and let teams of smarter people do analysis work for her.
I have two visions here. One is the movie "Drop Dead Gorgeous", where Kirstie Alley plays the role of Sarah Palin. Only difference is that Kirstie Alley is an actor who brilliantly plays a stupid and ruthless woman who will literally kill to move obstacles out of her way, whereas Palin is a natural in the role. The other is Stephen King's "The Dead Zone", where the hero tries to assasinate the new president, who he knows will destroy civilisation as we know it.
IANAL, but seeing as how the CPTN combines the patent portfolios four of the largest and most litigious technology firms and appears to exist to exclude certain competition from the market by using intellectual property, couldn't they be charged with a Section 1 violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for operating as a cartel?
They can't, because apparently CPTN is a German company. Your idea that this company was set up to hurt Google is at this point pure supposition. At this time it is just as likely that we have here four companies who thought it would be cheaper to pay $450 million for a lot of patents, just $112.5 million each, rather than letting them fall into the hands of a patent troll who immediately runs to their favourite court in texas.
Since Novell was a company that was actually doing business, there is a good chance that say EMC's developers figured out long ago that EMC is infringing on a few of Novell's patents, while Novell is also infringing on a few of EMC's patent, so they had talks on some higher level and decided that between EMC and Novell, the cheapest way to proceed would be to just ignore this infringement. But whatever patent troll would buy the patents would _not_ be infringing on anyone else's patents because patent trolls don't produce anything, so EMC would now have to make sure these patents cannot be used against them. Apple, Oracle, Microsoft might be in the same boat.
Reposted because of stupid less equal:
The mathematics behind RSA is actually quite simple.
Fermat's Little Theorem from 1640 states that when p is a prime and 1 lessequal x lessthan p then x^(p-1) = 1 modulo p.
Leibniz wrote an unpublished proof around 1683.
Now let p be a prime of the form 3k-1 and take any x, 1 lessequal x lessthan p.
If we calculate y = x^(2k-1) modulo p then y^3 = x modulo p:
y^3 = x^((2k-1)*3) = x^(6k-3) = x^(2p-1) = x^(p-1) * x^(p-1) * x. x^(p-1) = 1 modulo p, so y^3 = x modulo p.
Similar, when p and q are both primes of the form 3k-1, then we can solve y^3 = x modulo pq - but only if p and q are known.
If p and q are large, then y^3 modulo pq can be easily calculated, but y^3 = x modulo p can only be solved if p and q are known.
That's all the maths you need for RSA, and Leibniz knew all the required mathematics in the late 17th century. However, performing the arithmetic operations for this would have been completely impossible before the second half of the 20th century.
It took eons before humanity had the right mathematics to make RSA possible, but that work is all done now.
The mathematics behind RSA is actually quite simple.
Fermat's Little Theorem from 1640 states that when p is a prime and 1
Now let p be a prime of the form 3k-1 and take any x, 1
That's all the maths you need for RSA, and Leibniz knew all the required mathematics in the late 17th century. However, performing the arithmetic operations for this would have been completely impossible before the second half of the 20th century.
Slashdot Mirror
On second thoughts, who do the developers of the VLC app think they are, submitting an app to a store knowing full well that the licensing terms of that store would violate their own licensing terms.
Whether that is the case or not is very much debatable. Apple quite clearly says that if you download third party applications through their store, any license agreement is between you and the developer. Apple provides a free download service, and that service is limited. That has nothing to do with the license agreement between you and the developer.
As interpreted (by me) from the horse's mouth [fsf.org]: the appStore licence says you can only install the software on 5 approved devices, whereas of course the GPL specifically prohibits that type of restriction. Plus, the appStore licence says, "The Usage Rules shall govern your rights with respect to the Products, in addition to any other terms or rules that may have been established between you and another party." That means, the software author cannot undercut the appStore restrictions with a less restrictive licence such as the GPL, even if they want to.
Here is what the app store _actually_ says:
"You acknowledge that: you are purchasing the license to each Third-Party Product from the third-party licensor of that Third-Party Product (the "Application Provider"); Apple is acting as agent for the Application Provider in providing each such Third-Party Product to you; and Apple is not a party to the license between you and the Application Provider with respect to that Third-Party Product. The Application Provider of each Third-Party Product is solely responsible for that Third-Party Product, the content therein, any warranties to the extent that such warranties have not been disclaimed, and any claims that you or any other party may have relating to that Third-Party Product."
So for GPL licensed software, Apple just provides a downloading service to the end user; there is no software license agreement between you and Apple at all. Apple limits what Apple will do for the end user: They are willing to put copies onto five computers owned by one person, but not six. That doesn't limit what the end user is allowed to do. They don't get any further assistance from Apple, so making more copies is a bit more complicated (involves downloading the software, modifying it as you like, recompiling it, possible for another device), but Apple is _not_ restricting what they allow you to do. And you only have to jump through these hoops if you decide to be an ass; if you want to give the same software to all your iPhone owning friends, just tell them where to find it on the store.
There is a little bit of subtleness: Apple sells software licenses on behalf of third parties, and that is what the end user pays for, not the application itself. As GPL allows charging for the software, but not for the license, you can't publish GPL licensed software through the AppStore unless it is free as in free bear.
I was a Mac user until recently, and an Apple II user before I started with Macs. But lately, I just absolutely refuse to use anything with their brand on it because of this precise behavior.
What behaviour? You mean the behaviour of a developer who is so desparate to defend user's freedom that he even prevents them from using the software in the first place?
What would be really fun would be to take the guy to court to get a declaratory judgement that publishing a GPL licensed application on the app store is _not_ in violation of the GPL and therefore not copyright infringement.
DRM is an end user annoyance that ultimately doesn't stop piracy. Perhaps someone decided it would be good to be less annoying.
Here's what Apple does: If you download app X onto Macintosh Y then it comes with an unforgeable receipt that says "app X is allowed to run on Macintosh Y". Free apps do nothing if they don't care about being copied. If you care, you check: 1. Is there a receipt. 2. Is it a valid receipt. 3. Is it a valid receipt for this Macintosh. 4. Is it a valid receipt for this application. If one of these four steps fails then the app should exit.
If an app ignores step 3. then obviously the app with the receipt can be freely copied. If an app ignores step 4. then the hack is possible: Download an app with a valid receipt, put the app you want to copy together with the receipt. That step has to be repeated for every Macintosh.
To put this into perspective, the iTunes store sells about 10 million songs or so without copy protection. So maybe we should trust users to be honest. Plus I think what the non-purchaser of the app has to do is enough (1) to make it very clear that they are doing something illegal, (2) to make sure that lots of people would never manage to do it, and (3) turn this from plain copyright infringement into a DMCA violation with much harsher penalties.
My four year old Intel-Mac doesn't have the required specs.
It has. You are just too cheap to spend $29 on Snow Leopard.
As I understand it, Apple requires [scribd.com] that applications in the Mac App Store MUST NOT "require license keys or implement their own copy protection" or "present a license screen at launch". Furthermore, Apple rejects applications "containing 'rental' content or services that expire after a limited time". This appears to rule out any application designed solely to connect to a proprietary network, such as a Netflix player or any MMORPG client.
Just adding: There is, however, Apple sample code available that lets the developer check with a few lines of code whether the application is running on the Macintosh on which it was downloaded. Apparently you can download on more than one Macintosh, but you cannot take an app from one Macintosh to another if the developer doesn't want it. Yes, the developer would _not_ require license keys, and would _not_ implement _their own_ copy protection.
Furthermore, Apple rejects applications "containing 'rental' content or services that expire after a limited time". This appears to rule out any application designed solely to connect to a proprietary network, such as a Netflix player or any MMORPG client.
I think a Netflix player wouldn't _contain_ any rental content. The way I interpret it, an app that gives you free access to all Netflix movies for a month would not be accepted. But an app that lets you rent Netflix movies for a month, where the app itself works forever, that should be accepted.
Right now, MSFT is trading at an 11.86 P/E ration and Google at a 24.21, but MSFT despite all the ill will I personally have against them, has done a better job over time maintaining its income and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
You'd have to be an idiot to think that APPL is genuinely worth about double what MSFT is.
You would, for two reasons: First, APPL hasn't been trading for many many years. You are confusing an apparently defunct oil company with a computer manufacturer. Second, AAPL would have to increase its market caps by another 60 percent before they are worth double what MSFT is.
On the other hand, unlike Microsoft, Apple isn't _maintaining_ its income, it is growing at an enormous rate year after year. It's not that long ago that Apple passed Dell in market caps, and now they could easily buy Dell with cash on hand with plenty left. Since then they have passed Microsoft in market caps, this quarter they will pass them in revenue (unless they have done that already), and passing Microsoft in profits is quite near. Sometime in 2012 is my guess, maybe earlier if predictions of 50 million iPads sold are anywhere near reality.
Exxon Mobil's 2010 profits of $19 Billion on $285 Billion in revenue [cnn.com] completely dwarf Apple's 2010 profit of $6 billion on $36 billion in revenue [cnn.com]. Granted Apple has a higher profit margin than Exxon Mobil, but in 2009 [cnn.com] Exxon Mobil's profits were greater than Apple's revenue.
Your numbers are _not_ 2010 numbers. You are comparing 2009 numbers. Maybe the fact that Apple's profit is now $14bn on $64bn revenue explains the share price.
Apple has been sitting at (or around?) 4-5 billion in revenue for the better part of this last decade.
65 billion in the last year, and that is counting Christmas 2009, not Christmas 2010.
If you were right, with revenues about 15 times less than the actually are, and no growth in ten years, then AAPL would be worth maybe $15. Since your numbers are wrong, AAPL is right where it belongs.
nobody cares since the people buying these won't care about playing Black Ops at the highest settings. i sat out the Steam sale this year because almost every game is available for the X-Box 360 and PS3. I just want a laptop to play Civ 4 once in a while and store all my photos and music. and Sandy Bridge seems to spank Apple's laptops in a lot of areas now
The problem is that the integrated graphics just barely keeps up with the MacBook graphics at lowest resolution because of the advanced CPU, but once the resolution is increased, Sandy Bridge integrated graphics gets slaughtered by the lowly NVidia 320 in the MacBook.
What I find strange is that anyone would try to repair an LCD screen at all. I have had a few defective electric devices in the past few years, but not once did anyone try to do any repairs. In every case, I went to the store, they took my defective item, and told me to get a replacement from their shelves, or refunded the money, or in one case with an item with extended warranty, gave me the original purchase price towards a new item. In your case, if you received the purchase price of a 2007 LCD screen towards purchase of a new screen, you'd probably get a much better screen now. The defective items go straight back to the manufacturer, as far as I know. (This is all in the UK. ).
Only logical explanation is that they didn't actually have any intention to fix the problem, but were trying to make you give up and go away.
The FBI agents impersonating 13 yr old girls looking for sex
1. It is only "impersonating" if the person exists, not if it is a non-existent person.
2. It is not "impersonating" if you write on behalf of another person, which the FBI does if this is a real person.
3. Going to jail for a crime that you committed does not count as "harm".
The FBI would obviously be in trouble if they used the identity of a real 13 year old girl without the parents' consent.
Unfortunately, pretending to be somebody else for the purposes of parody could be seen as a form of either fraud or harm, without the person doing the impersonation intending to do so.
Well, the law says "impersonation with the _intent_ to harm, defraud etc.". I think this is quite clear: Parody that is seen as harmful but wasn't intended to harm doesn't fall under the law because the law asks for _intent_. Actually harm that wasn't intended doesn't fall under "impersonation with the intent to harm". Intending to harm but failing to do so falls squarely under the law, because that is clearly "impersonation with _intent_ to harm". On the other hand, if you impersonate somone with the intent of splitting him up with his girlfriend, and you were too retarded to think that would harm both persons involved, that won't protect you.
But on the other hand, if the impersonation is done with intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud, why can't we just prosecute people for fraud, criminal intimidation, or whatnot?
I don't get it. All the time these slashdotters moan and moan about how the law and how judges don't understand the Internet. And here we have a law that comes from understanding the Internet, and that that the Internet has opened new ways that didn't exist before to harm others, and people complain again. Is it because it threatens some slash=dotters favorite phantasies about getting others into trouble by doing illegal things while pretending to be them?
When we have laws that threaten people with punishment for certain actions, there are multiple reasons for these laws: The most important are punishment, and deterrent by inducing fear of punishment. But another reason is to state clearly what is acceptable and what is not. In this case, the law makes clear that such impersonation is not some harmless bit of fun, or a harmless prank, but a crime.
And you didn't read this properly, obviously. What is punishable is impersonation with _intent_ to harm. In other words, the impersonation is punishable even when the intent to harm failed. Say you impersonate a husband sending e-mails to a non-existing lover to split up his marriage. This can now be punished, even if you didn't succeed in your goal. The impersonation is also punishable if the intend to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud succeeded, but only to a degree where the harm, intimidation, threatening or defrauding itself wouldn't lead to punishment.
The point is that the iOS time routines are unreliable. You need a redundant clock/alarm that doesn't run on iOS.
I am sure you can give us an example where the iOS time routines don't work as advertised.
There's no reason why iOS have to send the genuine UDIDs to the app developer. If the app requests a UDID for the device, iOS should generate a key that is unique for that device AND THAT DEVELOPER.
That's mostly missing the point. If the application talks to a server and tells it that ID (which it shouldn't in the first place) then the server will recognise you under that id, from that application. They don't know which phone, or your name, but they know it is the same person and that is all that counts. What you say would only help if multiple apps on your phone talk to the same server.
But... isn't it the obligation of the person who gave YOU the code to provide the source? So if a company sells tablet to X, with offer for source, then X gives object code to Y, it seems it's X's obligation to give Y the source code, not the company. At the very least, the company may not have the resources to give it to everyone X gives the object code to, only to X.
Both. "A company" has to give the source code to anyone who receives the object code, which includes X and everyone that X gives the object code to and everyone those people pass the source code on to. X for the same reasons has to give the source code to anyone they gave the object code to and so on. If I buy a tablet from X and give the object code to you, then "the company", X, and I, all three have the obligation to give you the source code.
You need money to sue someone. FOSS idealists have none, and big companies with vested interest in FOSS software that could afford the legal costs know better than to hurt their own kind. That's why everybody and their dogs trample on the GPL with zero fear of legal actions.
With GPL v.3, if the software used implements any patents and you got a patent license through the GPL, then a GPL violation is now both copyright infringement and patent infringement. So things could get very nasty. And the low fear of legal actions doesn't come from "FOSS idealists having no money", it comes from "FOSS idealists being nice and not pressing for maximum damages".
Somehow less than the penalty for "making available" 24 songs. The moral of the story: If you're going to commit a crime, commit the biggest crime you possibly can!
The problem is that the law ask for the number of copyrighted items that were copied, not for the value of those items, and not for the number of copies made. Psystar who was convicted for making about 750 illegal copies of MacOS X was convicted for copying _one_ copyrighted work, 1/24th of Jammi whatshername. The number of copies is only relevant if the copyright owner goes for actual damages. Let's say if a record company sold a million copies of a CD without having the copyright. So to compare the cases, you would have to find out how many different games this man copied. And then a song that I could download legally for $0.79 and a game that I could download legally for $49 are still treated the same.
Right... Without DRM, but with a watermark (in other words, if you download a Miley Cyrus song and share it, anyone else who gets access to it can track it back to you) That being said, I have a lot of trouble getting upset over the fact that purchased content is watermarked. As long as I'm not distributing the content, who cares?
There are of course all kind of conspiracy theories around, but the fact is that two things are different in your downloaded files than in my downloaded files: The Quicktime atom for "creation date" which is - guess what - set to the time when we each download the file, and there is information so that _your_ downloaded file will turn up in the "Purchased" section in iTunes on your computer. This is not a watermark at all. It's just iTunes not carefully removing forensic evidence that could be used against you.
If anyone cared there would be an anonymiser app for this.
Sarah Palin is not dumb. She is reasonably smart and articulate, and might do an OK job as President, if she does like all good Presidents in history have done and let teams of smarter people do analysis work for her.
I have two visions here. One is the movie "Drop Dead Gorgeous", where Kirstie Alley plays the role of Sarah Palin. Only difference is that Kirstie Alley is an actor who brilliantly plays a stupid and ruthless woman who will literally kill to move obstacles out of her way, whereas Palin is a natural in the role. The other is Stephen King's "The Dead Zone", where the hero tries to assasinate the new president, who he knows will destroy civilisation as we know it.
That woman is dumb and dangerous.
IANAL, but seeing as how the CPTN combines the patent portfolios four of the largest and most litigious technology firms and appears to exist to exclude certain competition from the market by using intellectual property, couldn't they be charged with a Section 1 violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for operating as a cartel?
They can't, because apparently CPTN is a German company. Your idea that this company was set up to hurt Google is at this point pure supposition. At this time it is just as likely that we have here four companies who thought it would be cheaper to pay $450 million for a lot of patents, just $112.5 million each, rather than letting them fall into the hands of a patent troll who immediately runs to their favourite court in texas.
Since Novell was a company that was actually doing business, there is a good chance that say EMC's developers figured out long ago that EMC is infringing on a few of Novell's patents, while Novell is also infringing on a few of EMC's patent, so they had talks on some higher level and decided that between EMC and Novell, the cheapest way to proceed would be to just ignore this infringement. But whatever patent troll would buy the patents would _not_ be infringing on anyone else's patents because patent trolls don't produce anything, so EMC would now have to make sure these patents cannot be used against them. Apple, Oracle, Microsoft might be in the same boat.
What can the German court do?
It seems that the company that Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle formed to buy these patents is registered in Germany.
Reposted because of stupid less equal:
The mathematics behind RSA is actually quite simple.
Fermat's Little Theorem from 1640 states that when p is a prime and 1 lessequal x lessthan p then x^(p-1) = 1 modulo p.
Leibniz wrote an unpublished proof around 1683.
Now let p be a prime of the form 3k-1 and take any x, 1 lessequal x lessthan p.
If we calculate y = x^(2k-1) modulo p then y^3 = x modulo p:
y^3 = x^((2k-1)*3) = x^(6k-3) = x^(2p-1) = x^(p-1) * x^(p-1) * x. x^(p-1) = 1 modulo p, so y^3 = x modulo p.
Similar, when p and q are both primes of the form 3k-1, then we can solve y^3 = x modulo pq - but only if p and q are known.
If p and q are large, then y^3 modulo pq can be easily calculated, but y^3 = x modulo p can only be solved if p and q are known.
That's all the maths you need for RSA, and Leibniz knew all the required mathematics in the late 17th century. However, performing the arithmetic operations for this would have been completely impossible before the second half of the 20th century.
It took eons before humanity had the right mathematics to make RSA possible, but that work is all done now.
The mathematics behind RSA is actually quite simple.
Fermat's Little Theorem from 1640 states that when p is a prime and 1
Now let p be a prime of the form 3k-1 and take any x, 1
That's all the maths you need for RSA, and Leibniz knew all the required mathematics in the late 17th century. However, performing the arithmetic operations for this would have been completely impossible before the second half of the 20th century.