An unlicensed investigator is not allowed to investigate at all. You can ask a friend to check what your wife is doing when you're not at home, you can ask a licensed investigator, but if you hire an unlicensed investigator, he or she is breaking the law. In other words, the so-called "evidence" was found by someone who was breaking the law in doing so. That on its own is not the problem, if the evidence can be checked independently of how it was found. If an unlicensed investigator finds physical evidence, calls the police and the police checks the physical evidence, that's fine. But here, the evidence is the investigator saying "I downloaded this music from this computer". Since the investigator was already breaking the law, clearly anything he or she says cannot be trusted.
Hiring unlicensed investigators also means that the person suing cannot be trusted. In a civil court case, the judge goes by the weight of the evidence. If I can show that I am sued by a person who used illegal means to find evidence, that makes it more likely that the same person will be lying about other things as well.
The RIAA has the potential to make millions of dollars by restricting the redistribution of its music; thus, granting legal permission for unrestricted redistribution amounts to a multimillion dollar cost for any given song, even though the real cost of doing so is very small (thousands of dollars for electricity and an Internet connection).
I'll give you a very simple calculation.
Sony is right now valued at about $26 billion on the stock market. That includes everything. A small part of the company is their music business. I would estimate that they hold the rights to about two million songs. Even if we assume that these music rights make up 50 percent of the value of the company, that is 13 billion dollars or about $6500 per song.
I think Sony's shareholders should sue the company, because the make an awfully bad job at convincing the stock market of the value of their precious IP.
Here is one of the RIAA's claims: Indeed, the cost of an unrestricted license to distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted works for free on the Internet would be astronomical..
I think that could be checked with a simple call to Magnatune (www.magnatune.com).
The RIAA claims that the damages are much higher than 35 cents per song, because the song could potentially be downloaded by millions of people.
But that is a lie. Bandwidth is limited. For example, with a 10 GB upload allowance, I can upload a song with a typical size of 4 Megabyte only 2.500 times per month. But that is not the limit per song, that is the limit for _all_ songs.
I would also add that newspapers in the UK have been regularly adding CDs to their complete circulation. That is complete CDs packed full with music that was commercially produced and sold successfully have been distributed to say 2 million readers of the Daily Mail. As an example, I have a CD titled "Daily Mail - 20 Love Songs" (don't ask) containing the following songs:
Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Piece Of My Heart (Erma Franklin)
If You Don't Know Me By Now (Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes)
Me & Mrs Jones (Billy Paul)
It's Over (Roy Orbison)
The Most Beautiful Girl (Charlie Rich)
Always On My Mind (Willie Nelson)
Ain't No Sunshine (Bill Withers)
Love Really Hurts Without You (Billy Ocean)
After The Love Has Gone (Earth Wind & Fire)
I Left My Heart In San Francisco (Tony Bennett) ...
Eternal Flame (The Bangles)
These twenty songs have not been distributed to "potentially millions of downloaders", they have been distributed to two million real newspaper buyers!
I would really like to know how much the Daily Mail paid for this.
I think that not being allowed to speak freely about your company on your own time is a sign of a power imbalance.
Any company that has to censor its employees when they're at home is either dysfunctionally paranoid or has something to hide.
Anyone who believes that is either dysfunctionally paranoid or has something to hide.
I have information about my company that I only have as an insider, and I have information about my company that anybody her could have; there are plenty of press releases, reports, comments about them and their competition out there. For me, it would be very difficult to distinguish what is what and write a post that is entirely based on public information and not on inside information. Result: I can't do it. On the other hand, what is the problem? There are 499 Fortune 500 companies that I can freely post about, and exactly one that I can't. I don't feel particularly restricted.
But when I want to post using inside information, then I cannot post as a private citizen. I can only do that as an employee of my company. And then the rules of my company apply. And the rule is that I am not working for PR, and therefore don't post about the company.
By the way: If my company had something to hide, then company rules apply. Company rule is that if I know that anything the company does is illegal and unethical then I take the appropriate action. Posting on Slashdot is unlikely to be the "appropriate action", but stopping illegal or unethical actions at minimal damage to the company is.
I'm asking this in the full knowledge that someone will mod me down and call me names - but I'm ignorant on the topic:
Why do lesbians, gays, and bisexuals allow themselves to be lumped together with transgenders. To me, the layman, they seem like VERY different things. The first three are people who like to have relationships and sex in ways that aren't historically accepted. Fair enough, and I can get behind efforts to stop discriminating against these people.
The latter, at the extreme, cut off their genitalia. This is a group I have a little more trouble viewing as "normal". Or am I just too hung up on the extreme?
You are too hung up. You have a problem with it, so what do you think would the laws of a muslim country like Iran say about it? You'll be surprised: If someone wants to change their gender in Iran, they are considered to be ill. It is a medical health problem. As an ill person, you can expect that the state will help you. And that is what they do. And since nobody knows how to change a person's mind about these things, and it is known how to change a person's body, the body has to be changed. Which is interestingly exactly the same thing that happens in Germany, for the same reasons.
So it's not FUD. Mac users who are not savvy can certainly get malware. If you know what you're doing, and stay away from P2P or other downloads you can't identify as "good," you're fairly safe (more so than unpatched Windows, for sure). But you're not immortal, and this article is proof of it. Even if it is from a fearmonger with self-interest like Symantec.
Mac users who are not savvy didn't get this malware. It was users who were just clever enough to be a danger to themselves and their environment and not clever enough to be safe. They had to be savvy enough to download the software from a torrent. 90^ of users are not savvy enough to do this. 8% of the users know how to do it, but are savvy enough not to do it. There is the two percent in the middle that caused the problem.
Considering this is the first report I've ever seen of an OS X exploit in the wild, unpatched and under heavy use, while I've read article after articleabout Windows suffering the same problem over and over again, I think the smugness was slightly warranted.
It is not an exploit. This malware didn't appear on their computer without knowledge or against the will of the user. The users of these machine actively went to a torrent, actively downloaded what they thought was pirated software, clicked "Yes" when they were asked whether they really wanted to download an application, then clicked "Yes" again when they started it for the first time and were shown the time and web address of the download.
This was installed like any ordinary software. And any software that you install on any computer will do exactly what it is programmed to do, like happened here.
Microsoft has caught Apple with their pants down this time.
Quite the opposite. Think about: Apple can charge a lot more for an identical computer than Dell, and the only difference is the operating system. At least that is what the Microsoft adverts tell us. So the difference between the value of MacOS X and the value of Vista is (lots of dollars). Doesn't sound too good for Microsoft, does it?
In other words, I do think the law should protect you from being robbed and mugged, it should give you a title to enforce a contract you and another party willingly entered in, but why should the law protect or even reward someone for acting like a complete moron?
We need laws against robbery and being mugged not to protect strong people, but to protect people who are weaker and/or less well armed and less violent than the muggers. The laws are there to protect people who are physically weaker. I think it is quite sensible to also protect people who are mentally weaker. If the law protects me from a person who uses a gun or a knife or strong fists to convince me to hand other my money, why shouldn't the law protect me from a person who uses his brain and his smooth talking mouth to convince me from handing other my money?
I guess he just misinterpreted the phone conversation. It wouldn't make much sense to put the termination in writing and say something else. It makes much sense that the hosting company assured him that he had three months time to transfer his domains.
Phone conversations have the advantage/disadvantage that they leave no paper trail.
There is also a claim that the ISP didn't send them the details necessary to transfer the domain. Maybe they never asked for these details?
And that is likewise absurd. If a vendor says, "if you want a contract with us, you need to price your product at $X on the store shelf" - isn't that contractual law, and shouldn't the store be free to accept or refuse to sign the contract, and succeed or fail by their actions?
Let me explain just one of the problems: Let's say there are four stores in my town. All four stores want to sell a popular product. The manufacturer sells the product to each store. At that point, European law (and I think US law as well) wants the effects of competition to take effect: The four stores are supposed to compete with each other, by having better service, better advertising, or perhaps better prices than their competitors. That kind of competition is then beneficial for the consumer. But if the manufacturer signs contracts with each company telling them for how much they can sell the product, then there can be no price competition anymore. In other words, a contract between manufacturer and sellers about the pricing is anti-competitive.
Usually this kind of thing cannot happen anyway. If some small company tries to dictate to a store what the sale price of a product should be, the store will ask them to bugger off and will by somewhere else. This can usually only happen if the seller has a monopoly on their products. You may not have noticed, but in the US Microsoft sells the operating system for 90 percent of all computers. If there are four computer stores in my town, and three of them don't accept Microsoft's terms, then those three stores will go bankrupt.
For a short while, i listened to the radio on my way to work in the UK. Found a station which had some really nice music. The next day, they also had nice music. The third day, really nice music, but it was the same as on the first two days. After a week, I had enough. I swear they have one record "40 Greatest Hits of the 70's" and "40 Greatest Hits of the 80's" and that's it.
So yes, I could easily foresee an end to radio soon.
Why? Because Joel Tenenbaum had a good opportunity to get out of this whole mess when he was asked to settle for $4,000. That's $571 for each work specifically identified, and about $3.33 for each work that he was actually sharing (of course a settlement would not have excluded other copyright owners from independently filing suit).
And that, my friend, is exactly the problem. If the law threatens Mr. Tenenbaum with liability up to 180 million dollars, then he cannot afford the risk to defend his position in court. If I damage your car, and you claim that I caused $4000 damage and want me to pay, I have the choice of paying or going to court. But if I ask a lawyer and he tells me "you better pay the $4000, because losing a court case might cost you $180 million", then I have to pay, and can't afford losing everything over this. And that is what makes the excessive statutory damages unconstitutional: They take away people's right to have a case seen in court.
I _once_ in my life used the services of a lawyer, and what he told me was: When you go to court, you never know what happens. I have lost cases where I thought I should have won, and I won cases where I thought I should have lost. You just never know what happens. So if people are giving the choice of paying $4000 and losing everything, they have no choice.
I followed the link (not the one to the pathetic opinionated article, but the one to the short email message), and this is what seems to have happened: Apple told the W3C people that they have a patent that they believe might cover something that W3C is trying to standardize. So they have done exactly what Rambus _failed_ to do when they participated in memory standardisation, which since then has caused dozens of lawsuits over hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. This will not happen here because Apple disclosed their patent.
That email doesn't say in any way that Apple is doing anything inappropriate or is threatening anyone or refusing to give anyone a license. What is happening is a very simple process that W3C is prepared for: Apple was kind enough to inform them that there is a patent, so they will now look at the patent, which will or will not turn out to be relevant, and if it is relevant, something will be sorted out.
Now that fine article (or whatever the f in RTFA stands for) calls Apple "patent-lawsuit happy". So who exactly is Apple suing right now? Maybe the manufacturer of a new phone that is vastly outselling the iPhone, except that it doesn't do that quite yet, because it is not for sale right now, so not a single Palm Pre has been sold, and Apple hasn't sued them, because as long as Palm doesn't sell its phone there is nothing to sue them for?
Seriously: the EU and US should break off ties with Thailand until the nation gets real about political freedoms and human rights, and tourists should stay away.
What bullshit. I don't know everything about the laws of all the countries you mention, but lots of the things written here would be actionable against anyone in most of these countries. And in the USA, freedom of speech only applies as long as you say what people want to hear.
What is the percentage of citizens in prison in the USA and in Thailand?
Once they read about your invention, they would be legally obliged to disclose it to the patent office as prior art. So legally, they can't read it and then patent it. However since we are talking about patent trolls here, they can read it, write a patent application, don't tell the patent office about the prior art, forge papers demonstrating that they had the idea before you published it, and sue someone including yourself for the invention, and act very astonished if you show the prior art. Even with the prior art in someone's hands, it could cost them lots of money to defend against the case, even when they win. And whoever is sued might not know the prior art.
You could ask at the patent office, or someone here might know, how much it costs to _attempt_ to get a patent. In your situation, you don't need a patent. A failed patent application is good enough for you, because then it is prior art that is know to the patent office.
Re:Isn't it high time for a 80x86 cleanup?
on
Larrabee ISA Revealed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What I wonder is why they haven't attempted to release two versions: an x86 version, and a stripped down RISC version without the x86 decoder.
If you looked at what Intel has been doing recently, the RISC code that x86 is translated to has been slowly evolving. For example, sequences of compare + conditional branch become a single micro op. Instructions manipulating the stack are often combined or not executed at all. So what is the perfect RISC instruction set today isn't the perfect RISC instruction set tomorrow. And Intel's RISC instruction set would likely be quite different from AMD's.
Articles states that there's hardware support for transcendental functions, but the list of instructions doesn't include any. Anyone know what is/isn't supported in this line?
"Hardware support" doesn't mean "fully implemented in hardware".
What hardware support do you need for transcendental functions?
1. Bit fiddling operations to extract exponents from floating point numbers. Check.
2. Fused multiply-add for fast polynomial evaluation. Check.
3. Scatter/gather operations to use coefficients of different polynomials depending on the range of the operand. Check.
A website [diepresse.com] explaining the law (in german only, sorry, try a translator).
I was wrong though, it is based on the right to own a private copy (regardless of the source), not "Fair Use".
1. The article is about Austrian law, not German law.
2. According to the article, downloading a copy that is exclusively made for private use is legal.
3. The music industry doesn't agree with this, but the law does.
4. File sharing (downloading + allowing others to download) _is_ illegal.
5. It may make a difference if you _know_ that the source is illegal.
About the last point: I have seen software advertised like "pay $29 for this software, and you can download millions of songs for free". A person could reasonably assume that they are paying $29 for the right to download millions of songs, and that after paying the $29 the download is legal. Now we all know it isn't legal, but in Austrian law it might make a difference what you _know_. So downloading from a website that says "steal these songs, payback time for the RIAA", that would be illegal. Downloading from a website saying "Download all these free songs, completely legal", even though this is a lie, would be legal (in Austrian law).
And where do they get the money for lawyers, court costs etc? Especially when the suite is appealed and delayed for years
God, what a bunch of paranoid muppets. Do you really think that if any stupid blogger posts on his website "buy this guys application and then get a refund for lolz", then people will actually do it? What kind of bloody moron would buy something, then return it immediately, just because some stupid blogger says so? By the way, do you really think that when you buy an application on the iTunes store and try to get a refund, you will actually get one? Just try it. Good luck.
And what makes you think that any stupid blogger would want to do such a thing in the first place? Do you park your car on the road, where anyone could slash its tires? Do you eat any food in a restaurant, where the chef could have spit on it or worse? What if someone clones your license plate and drives through some red lights on purpose? Or breaks into your router and downloads stuff with your IP address? Get real, guys.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlicensed investigator?
An unlicensed investigator is not allowed to investigate at all. You can ask a friend to check what your wife is doing when you're not at home, you can ask a licensed investigator, but if you hire an unlicensed investigator, he or she is breaking the law. In other words, the so-called "evidence" was found by someone who was breaking the law in doing so. That on its own is not the problem, if the evidence can be checked independently of how it was found. If an unlicensed investigator finds physical evidence, calls the police and the police checks the physical evidence, that's fine. But here, the evidence is the investigator saying "I downloaded this music from this computer". Since the investigator was already breaking the law, clearly anything he or she says cannot be trusted.
Hiring unlicensed investigators also means that the person suing cannot be trusted. In a civil court case, the judge goes by the weight of the evidence. If I can show that I am sued by a person who used illegal means to find evidence, that makes it more likely that the same person will be lying about other things as well.
The RIAA has the potential to make millions of dollars by restricting the redistribution of its music; thus, granting legal permission for unrestricted redistribution amounts to a multimillion dollar cost for any given song, even though the real cost of doing so is very small (thousands of dollars for electricity and an Internet connection).
I'll give you a very simple calculation.
Sony is right now valued at about $26 billion on the stock market. That includes everything. A small part of the company is their music business. I would estimate that they hold the rights to about two million songs. Even if we assume that these music rights make up 50 percent of the value of the company, that is 13 billion dollars or about $6500 per song.
I think Sony's shareholders should sue the company, because the make an awfully bad job at convincing the stock market of the value of their precious IP.
Here is one of the RIAA's claims: Indeed, the cost of an unrestricted license to distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted works for free on the Internet would be astronomical.. I think that could be checked with a simple call to Magnatune (www.magnatune.com).
The RIAA claims that the damages are much higher than 35 cents per song, because the song could potentially be downloaded by millions of people.
...
But that is a lie. Bandwidth is limited. For example, with a 10 GB upload allowance, I can upload a song with a typical size of 4 Megabyte only 2.500 times per month. But that is not the limit per song, that is the limit for _all_ songs.
I would also add that newspapers in the UK have been regularly adding CDs to their complete circulation. That is complete CDs packed full with music that was commercially produced and sold successfully have been distributed to say 2 million readers of the Daily Mail. As an example, I have a CD titled "Daily Mail - 20 Love Songs" (don't ask) containing the following songs:
Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Piece Of My Heart (Erma Franklin)
If You Don't Know Me By Now (Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes)
Me & Mrs Jones (Billy Paul)
It's Over (Roy Orbison)
The Most Beautiful Girl (Charlie Rich)
Always On My Mind (Willie Nelson)
Ain't No Sunshine (Bill Withers)
Love Really Hurts Without You (Billy Ocean)
After The Love Has Gone (Earth Wind & Fire)
I Left My Heart In San Francisco (Tony Bennett)
Eternal Flame (The Bangles)
These twenty songs have not been distributed to "potentially millions of downloaders", they have been distributed to two million real newspaper buyers!
I would really like to know how much the Daily Mail paid for this.
I think that not being allowed to speak freely about your company on your own time is a sign of a power imbalance.
Any company that has to censor its employees when they're at home is either dysfunctionally paranoid or has something to hide.
Anyone who believes that is either dysfunctionally paranoid or has something to hide.
I have information about my company that I only have as an insider, and I have information about my company that anybody her could have; there are plenty of press releases, reports, comments about them and their competition out there. For me, it would be very difficult to distinguish what is what and write a post that is entirely based on public information and not on inside information. Result: I can't do it. On the other hand, what is the problem? There are 499 Fortune 500 companies that I can freely post about, and exactly one that I can't. I don't feel particularly restricted.
But when I want to post using inside information, then I cannot post as a private citizen. I can only do that as an employee of my company. And then the rules of my company apply. And the rule is that I am not working for PR, and therefore don't post about the company.
By the way: If my company had something to hide, then company rules apply. Company rule is that if I know that anything the company does is illegal and unethical then I take the appropriate action. Posting on Slashdot is unlikely to be the "appropriate action", but stopping illegal or unethical actions at minimal damage to the company is.
I'm asking this in the full knowledge that someone will mod me down and call me names - but I'm ignorant on the topic:
Why do lesbians, gays, and bisexuals allow themselves to be lumped together with transgenders. To me, the layman, they seem like VERY different things. The first three are people who like to have relationships and sex in ways that aren't historically accepted. Fair enough, and I can get behind efforts to stop discriminating against these people.
The latter, at the extreme, cut off their genitalia. This is a group I have a little more trouble viewing as "normal". Or am I just too hung up on the extreme?
You are too hung up. You have a problem with it, so what do you think would the laws of a muslim country like Iran say about it? You'll be surprised: If someone wants to change their gender in Iran, they are considered to be ill. It is a medical health problem. As an ill person, you can expect that the state will help you. And that is what they do. And since nobody knows how to change a person's mind about these things, and it is known how to change a person's body, the body has to be changed. Which is interestingly exactly the same thing that happens in Germany, for the same reasons.
So it's not FUD. Mac users who are not savvy can certainly get malware. If you know what you're doing, and stay away from P2P or other downloads you can't identify as "good," you're fairly safe (more so than unpatched Windows, for sure). But you're not immortal, and this article is proof of it. Even if it is from a fearmonger with self-interest like Symantec.
Mac users who are not savvy didn't get this malware. It was users who were just clever enough to be a danger to themselves and their environment and not clever enough to be safe. They had to be savvy enough to download the software from a torrent. 90^ of users are not savvy enough to do this. 8% of the users know how to do it, but are savvy enough not to do it. There is the two percent in the middle that caused the problem.
Considering this is the first report I've ever seen of an OS X exploit in the wild, unpatched and under heavy use, while I've read article after articleabout Windows suffering the same problem over and over again, I think the smugness was slightly warranted.
It is not an exploit. This malware didn't appear on their computer without knowledge or against the will of the user. The users of these machine actively went to a torrent, actively downloaded what they thought was pirated software, clicked "Yes" when they were asked whether they really wanted to download an application, then clicked "Yes" again when they started it for the first time and were shown the time and web address of the download.
This was installed like any ordinary software. And any software that you install on any computer will do exactly what it is programmed to do, like happened here.
Microsoft has caught Apple with their pants down this time.
Quite the opposite. Think about: Apple can charge a lot more for an identical computer than Dell, and the only difference is the operating system. At least that is what the Microsoft adverts tell us. So the difference between the value of MacOS X and the value of Vista is (lots of dollars). Doesn't sound too good for Microsoft, does it?
For about the worst pyramid scheme in history:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm
Result: 2000 people killed.
In other words, I do think the law should protect you from being robbed and mugged, it should give you a title to enforce a contract you and another party willingly entered in, but why should the law protect or even reward someone for acting like a complete moron?
We need laws against robbery and being mugged not to protect strong people, but to protect people who are weaker and/or less well armed and less violent than the muggers. The laws are there to protect people who are physically weaker. I think it is quite sensible to also protect people who are mentally weaker. If the law protects me from a person who uses a gun or a knife or strong fists to convince me to hand other my money, why shouldn't the law protect me from a person who uses his brain and his smooth talking mouth to convince me from handing other my money?
I guess he just misinterpreted the phone conversation. It wouldn't make much sense to put the termination in writing and say something else. It makes much sense that the hosting company assured him that he had three months time to transfer his domains.
Phone conversations have the advantage/disadvantage that they leave no paper trail.
There is also a claim that the ISP didn't send them the details necessary to transfer the domain. Maybe they never asked for these details?
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity...
In this case: Don't attribute to someone else's malice that which can be adequately explained by your own stupidity.
And that is likewise absurd. If a vendor says, "if you want a contract with us, you need to price your product at $X on the store shelf" - isn't that contractual law, and shouldn't the store be free to accept or refuse to sign the contract, and succeed or fail by their actions?
Let me explain just one of the problems: Let's say there are four stores in my town. All four stores want to sell a popular product. The manufacturer sells the product to each store. At that point, European law (and I think US law as well) wants the effects of competition to take effect: The four stores are supposed to compete with each other, by having better service, better advertising, or perhaps better prices than their competitors. That kind of competition is then beneficial for the consumer. But if the manufacturer signs contracts with each company telling them for how much they can sell the product, then there can be no price competition anymore. In other words, a contract between manufacturer and sellers about the pricing is anti-competitive.
Usually this kind of thing cannot happen anyway. If some small company tries to dictate to a store what the sale price of a product should be, the store will ask them to bugger off and will by somewhere else. This can usually only happen if the seller has a monopoly on their products. You may not have noticed, but in the US Microsoft sells the operating system for 90 percent of all computers. If there are four computer stores in my town, and three of them don't accept Microsoft's terms, then those three stores will go bankrupt.
You foresee an end to radio in the near future?
For a short while, i listened to the radio on my way to work in the UK. Found a station which had some really nice music. The next day, they also had nice music. The third day, really nice music, but it was the same as on the first two days. After a week, I had enough. I swear they have one record "40 Greatest Hits of the 70's" and "40 Greatest Hits of the 80's" and that's it.
So yes, I could easily foresee an end to radio soon.
Why? Because Joel Tenenbaum had a good opportunity to get out of this whole mess when he was asked to settle for $4,000. That's $571 for each work specifically identified, and about $3.33 for each work that he was actually sharing (of course a settlement would not have excluded other copyright owners from independently filing suit).
And that, my friend, is exactly the problem. If the law threatens Mr. Tenenbaum with liability up to 180 million dollars, then he cannot afford the risk to defend his position in court. If I damage your car, and you claim that I caused $4000 damage and want me to pay, I have the choice of paying or going to court. But if I ask a lawyer and he tells me "you better pay the $4000, because losing a court case might cost you $180 million", then I have to pay, and can't afford losing everything over this. And that is what makes the excessive statutory damages unconstitutional: They take away people's right to have a case seen in court.
I _once_ in my life used the services of a lawyer, and what he told me was: When you go to court, you never know what happens. I have lost cases where I thought I should have won, and I won cases where I thought I should have lost. You just never know what happens. So if people are giving the choice of paying $4000 and losing everything, they have no choice.
I followed the link (not the one to the pathetic opinionated article, but the one to the short email message), and this is what seems to have happened: Apple told the W3C people that they have a patent that they believe might cover something that W3C is trying to standardize. So they have done exactly what Rambus _failed_ to do when they participated in memory standardisation, which since then has caused dozens of lawsuits over hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. This will not happen here because Apple disclosed their patent.
That email doesn't say in any way that Apple is doing anything inappropriate or is threatening anyone or refusing to give anyone a license. What is happening is a very simple process that W3C is prepared for: Apple was kind enough to inform them that there is a patent, so they will now look at the patent, which will or will not turn out to be relevant, and if it is relevant, something will be sorted out.
Now that fine article (or whatever the f in RTFA stands for) calls Apple "patent-lawsuit happy". So who exactly is Apple suing right now? Maybe the manufacturer of a new phone that is vastly outselling the iPhone, except that it doesn't do that quite yet, because it is not for sale right now, so not a single Palm Pre has been sold, and Apple hasn't sued them, because as long as Palm doesn't sell its phone there is nothing to sue them for?
Seriously: the EU and US should break off ties with Thailand until the nation gets real about political freedoms and human rights, and tourists should stay away.
What bullshit. I don't know everything about the laws of all the countries you mention, but lots of the things written here would be actionable against anyone in most of these countries. And in the USA, freedom of speech only applies as long as you say what people want to hear.
What is the percentage of citizens in prison in the USA and in Thailand?
Once they read about your invention, they would be legally obliged to disclose it to the patent office as prior art. So legally, they can't read it and then patent it. However since we are talking about patent trolls here, they can read it, write a patent application, don't tell the patent office about the prior art, forge papers demonstrating that they had the idea before you published it, and sue someone including yourself for the invention, and act very astonished if you show the prior art. Even with the prior art in someone's hands, it could cost them lots of money to defend against the case, even when they win. And whoever is sued might not know the prior art.
You could ask at the patent office, or someone here might know, how much it costs to _attempt_ to get a patent. In your situation, you don't need a patent. A failed patent application is good enough for you, because then it is prior art that is know to the patent office.
What I wonder is why they haven't attempted to release two versions: an x86 version, and a stripped down RISC version without the x86 decoder.
If you looked at what Intel has been doing recently, the RISC code that x86 is translated to has been slowly evolving. For example, sequences of compare + conditional branch become a single micro op. Instructions manipulating the stack are often combined or not executed at all. So what is the perfect RISC instruction set today isn't the perfect RISC instruction set tomorrow. And Intel's RISC instruction set would likely be quite different from AMD's.
Articles states that there's hardware support for transcendental functions, but the list of instructions doesn't include any. Anyone know what is/isn't supported in this line?
"Hardware support" doesn't mean "fully implemented in hardware".
What hardware support do you need for transcendental functions?
1. Bit fiddling operations to extract exponents from floating point numbers. Check. 2. Fused multiply-add for fast polynomial evaluation. Check. 3. Scatter/gather operations to use coefficients of different polynomials depending on the range of the operand. Check.
A website [diepresse.com] explaining the law (in german only, sorry, try a translator).
I was wrong though, it is based on the right to own a private copy (regardless of the source), not "Fair Use".
1. The article is about Austrian law, not German law.
2. According to the article, downloading a copy that is exclusively made for private use is legal.
3. The music industry doesn't agree with this, but the law does.
4. File sharing (downloading + allowing others to download) _is_ illegal.
5. It may make a difference if you _know_ that the source is illegal.
About the last point: I have seen software advertised like "pay $29 for this software, and you can download millions of songs for free". A person could reasonably assume that they are paying $29 for the right to download millions of songs, and that after paying the $29 the download is legal. Now we all know it isn't legal, but in Austrian law it might make a difference what you _know_. So downloading from a website that says "steal these songs, payback time for the RIAA", that would be illegal. Downloading from a website saying "Download all these free songs, completely legal", even though this is a lie, would be legal (in Austrian law).
And speaking of music in German, putting H on the scale between A and C makes no sense whatsoever; what the hell is wrong with them?
So that you could use B - A - C - H in a piece of music.
You must be a Windows programmer :-(
Which country's court?
And where do they get the money for lawyers, court costs etc? Especially when the suite is appealed and delayed for years
God, what a bunch of paranoid muppets. Do you really think that if any stupid blogger posts on his website "buy this guys application and then get a refund for lolz", then people will actually do it? What kind of bloody moron would buy something, then return it immediately, just because some stupid blogger says so? By the way, do you really think that when you buy an application on the iTunes store and try to get a refund, you will actually get one? Just try it. Good luck.
And what makes you think that any stupid blogger would want to do such a thing in the first place? Do you park your car on the road, where anyone could slash its tires? Do you eat any food in a restaurant, where the chef could have spit on it or worse? What if someone clones your license plate and drives through some red lights on purpose? Or breaks into your router and downloads stuff with your IP address? Get real, guys.