There is also some security implications, the problem is that a program may make a wrong assumption about whether two different names mean the same file or not, and thus fail to protect a file. Not sure if there are real examples of this, but it is a problem. The solution is to make the test for whether two names are for different files as simple as possible, on Unix it is strcmp. On Windows and most other case-insensitive systems it is "all Unicode is case sensitive, only A-Z (and maybe the ISO-8859-1 characters) match case". On OS/X however they are using a full sting of Unicode normalization followed by elaborate tables to convert case, and it is pretty much impossible to duplicate the test without calling the system.
So why wouldn't you want to call the system? If you are given a string in an NSString, you call stringByStandardizingPath to remove things like/./ from a path, removing symlinks, creating a canonized string. To check if strings are the same filename, call a string compare function with the right parameters. And you can easily sort paths in the same order as the Finder would (like sorting numbers numerically).
The primary problem with case insensitivity is that it is impossible to fix the case of a filename in the obvious way (ie by using a single os mv call). You have to rename to a temporary file and rename back. Some programs such as svn really don't like this.
Works just fine in MacOS X (that is, the mv call). I think there was a bug in MacOS around 4 that they fixed in 1985 or 1986, where Rename wouldn't change the file name at all if it had been changed to an "identical" name.
So that is $9.5 million plus $1.5 million per year for Tennessee universities. Tennessee population is about 1/45th of the USA, so a similar program for the hole of the USA would be about $420 million initially plus $62 million per year to "reasonably attempt to prevent copyright infringement" at university campuses. May I say that is an awful lot of money to cover one industry. Wouldn't it be much more worthwhile to invest state money into the prevention of shoplifting, which is a real crime, and creates more damages.
Consider also, that this was a bench trial. Why the defendants didn't assert their right to a jury trial is beyond me, and may or may not have any relevance as to the veracity of NYCL's summary.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the purpose of a jury trial is to have the jury decide what the facts of a case are. Like if one side claimed that 10,000 copies of the book were sold, and the other side claimed it was only 200 copies, and if this mattered, then the jury would decide what the correct number is. In this case, the facts are clear: The defendant wrote this lexicon, and everyone agrees what words were used in the lexicon. These are the facts. Whether writing this lexicon using these words is copyright infringement or protected by fair use or no infringement at all, that would be a matter of law and for the judge to decide.
Actually, I'm not sure what else it could be used for. A patent on patent trolling can only be used against other patent trolls. If Halliburton wanted to be a patent troll, they wouldn't need a patent to do it. Besides, patent trolls typically don't have any other source of income that can be threatened by their "business", so Halliburton wouldn't really qualify.
It can be used for three purposes: If any patent troll attacks Haliburton, Haliburton may be able to counter sue on grounds of infringement of their patent-trolling patent. This will keep some patent trolls at bay. Second, if any patent troll sues anyone, Haliburton may sue them. I don't think this makes too much business sense. But thirdly, if any patent troll sues anyone, Haliburton can over a license to the company being sued which allows them to use the Haliburton patent and sue anyone who uses it without license. So if you are being sued, instead of paying one million for blackmail to get rid of the patent troll, or five million to defend yourself in court, you might be able to get away with paying Haliburton $200,000 for a license to their patent-trolling patent, and change the financial odds against the patent troll so they go away. That's $200,000 of free money for Haliburton.
I'd prefer to have car speed records for something that is remotely sensible, like 10 laps at Indianopolis, or 1 lap of the complete Nürburgring. Or something like: Start at an arbitrary point X, come to a complete halt at a point Y that is at least 10 miles away, move within 1 meter to the original point X, and stand still again.
I've wondered about the viability of an alternative blended version of "loser pays". Under such a scheme, the losing party would reimburse the winning party for their actual expenses but only up to the amount that the losing party spent. This may require fairly continuous disclosure of expenses by both parties to reduce "gaming the system".
That is how it is set up in Germany. First thing in court, you tell the judge how much money you want (or at how much money the case should be valued). Judge takes that number and looks up in a table how much plaintiff and defense can pay for their lawyers, and how much the court takes to handle the case. That will end up being the cost. At the end of the case, the judge checks how many percent of what the plaintiff wanted he was actually awarded, and cost are split up accordingly.
This avoids being sued for ridiculous amounts of money. If you sue me for $5bn and the judge decides I should pay $10,000, you will pay 99.999% of enormous cost for lawyers. If you sue me for $10,000 and the judge decides I should pay $10,000, I pay the complete cost for lawyers according to the judges tables - it won't be very expensive.
And the judge will stop the plaintiff if they try to drag a case on and on to the point where the court loses money. If you sue for $10,000, and the judge checked that court cost will be say $1215, that's where he will stop the plaintiff.
Apple is also fond of pointing out that Macs are not PCs. It is illegal for Ford to insist that it's engines can only be installed in a Ford manufactured automobile.... I'm just sayin.
On what basis would that be illegal for Ford to do? They don't insist on these terms because they don't care much what you do with their engine, but if they did care, what would make it illegal? As a concrete example, Ferrari sells Formula I racing engine to the Scuderia Toro Rosso team. Now McLaren might be willing to pay a generous amount of money to lay their hands on a Ferrari engine, and Ferrari would be quite unhappy about it. If the contract between Ferrari and Toro Rosso says that the engines cannot be sold on, do you seriously suggest that would be illegal?
Pystar could definitely make the argument that owners have the right to install the software on any machine that they like without regards to who built and sold the machine. And that as such they can be authorized to do the work for them. The argument that copyright law or any other existing law allows for that is somewhat absurd, otherwise Apple would be litigating.
Psystar could make that argument, but it would quite clearly be wrong. And Psystar might get authorisation to install MacOS X, but they better get that authorisation in written form. And somehow I doubt that a customer would be happy to be told "we can install MacOS X for you, but it is against Apple's EULA, so we have to get written authorisation from you, so if Apple tries to sue, it's you who is on the hook and not us".
If you want a pre-paid mobile phone without giving your name and without using violence, just go to the nearest school and offer some money to the kids.
If your case is strong enough, you will win. There are a lot of arguments against Apple, especially the anti-trust one. The right to produce a competing product is fairly important in a free market.
Who says Psystar doesn't have the right to produce a competing product? Apple doesn't deny Psystar's right to a competing product. They just deny Psystar's right to take MacOS X and install it on their computers in clear breach of the EULA, and they have precedent (Xerox' plain paper photocopiers) that even a clear monopoly is under no obligation at all to help its competitors.
Psystar can compete by installing Windows XP, or Windows Vista, or Linux, or they can buy up the remains of BeOS or AmigaOS. Or write their own operating system from scratch. If they wanted MacOS X, they should have offered more than Apple's $400 million when NeXT was for sale. They can even download Darwin and build a GUI on top of that. It's their business, they should come up with their own ideas to compete.
I think that both parties will benefit by a quiet deal that allows Psystar to sell their boxes; paying Apple a nice "per copy" price for OS-X. Apple does not want to litigate the "monopoly" argument; Psystar does not want to litigate "Breech of OS-X EULA". The nice think of a settlement is that it does not bind Apple to make the same deal with another white box maker.
There is no way that Psystar will get a license to ship with MacOS X. They have been pissing on Apple's shoes; so there will be no business between them. Apple has already replied to Psystar's idiotic "monopoly" arguments, citing about a dozen cases that say absolutely clearly a single product of a company cannot possibly constitute a meaningful "market", and therefore Apple cannot have a meaningful monopoly in the non-existing market of "MacOS X compatible computers".
This arbitration is something that the court can force on the companies; it cannot force them to agree on anything in arbitration.
At $0.99 a song, it would cost me around HALF A MILLION dollars to fill up my iPod, which cost less than $300.
Your maths is way off. The largest iPod could hold about 40,000 songs at 4 MB per song; the largest iPod currently sold holds 30,000. And yes, I would expect to pay substantially more for the actual music than for a little gadget that plays it.
I have a 320 GB hard drive on my MacBook. Any idea how much it would cost me to fill that 320 GB hard drive with software, when it is big enough to hold about 500 copies of Microsoft Office?
Isn't that the entire point though? No-one knows what the actual damages are. Not even the RIAA!
We could reasonably say that the actual damage for every download is about 70 cents. That is about the amount that you pay at the iTunes Store, minus the 30 percent that Apple keeps. (If you found a clever way to download music from the iTunes Store without paying, then the damage would be 99 cent per song).
Now we would need a reasonable estimate for the number of songs downloaded from one computer. As I understand it, with peer-to-peer file sharing networks, everyone is supposed to not only download, but also to upload in an equal amount. So on the average, one million downloaders are matched by one million uploaders, not by a single uploader. So on the average, every song that is made available for downloading from some computer will be downloaded once.
The total revenue from music sales in the USA is less than $10 billion. So if everyone stopped buying music right now and exclusively changed to downloading music from peer-to-peer networks, the total damage would be $10 billion. Actually a lot less, because that $10 billion revenue produces a lot of cost as well. A woman, very casual file sharer, was recently convicted to pay more than $200,000 in damages (although the case is going back to trial again). Just 50,000 such cases would pay for the total revenue of the music industry, and there are a lot more than 50,000 file sharers.
USB doesn't let you use the Mac in Target mode, turning it into an HD without needing any OS to boot. It's great for system recovery.
On the new MacBooks, you can remove the hard drive very, very easily. So if you are into repairing computers, just get an adapter that lets you plug in a naked hard drive (I found them for around £25). Apart from that, Time Machine is the end user's friend.
once the patent on that wheel navigator runs out. im surprised you can patent the thing, shows what i know about patents i guess.
If you can come up with a replacement in two seconds, then it shouldn't be patentable. If you can't figure out how to replace it, then it deserves a patent. (All very roughly speaking).
Because it's car insurance not life insurance. These features make no difference to the number of accidents, and no difference the amount of money required by insurance companies to pay for these accidents. They're there simply for your own safety, and do nothing for the well-being of the car.
As far as I know, security features can actually make accidents more expensive. If someone dies in an accident, that is bad for them, but quite cheap for the insurance. Same person with safety belt and airbag may spend six months in hospital fixing two completely crushed legs, which costs a lot more.
While there are a few situations I've been in where the ability to exceed 80 mph has been critical to safety (getting out from behind dangerous drivers on the freeway who are liable to cause a pileup, for instance), that's not the point.
I seriously doubt that being able to go faster than 80 mph ever helped you with safety. If the car in front of you is driven erratically, just keep some distance.
Gee, Judd. I wonder why that could be. Might have had something to do with the fact that your definition of "reason to this madness" consisted of abusively using multiple accounts to push your agenda, and launching vicious personal attacks against your opponents.
Come on, Judd. You've got to know you can't actually expect to come to a forum as well-traveled as Slashdot and get away with presenting half the facts like that.
I love how well prepared you are for this argument. Do you do anything else than hanging around on Wikipedia, fighting trolls and sockpuppet, and watching places like slashdot, in case the peasants try to fight back?
Now the facts are: Naked shorting has cost the US economy billions and billions of dollars. That may have been "POV" in Wkispeak (when I read some "Wikipedians" it really reminds me of Orwell), today it has been dramatically proven to be true. For a long, long time Wikipedia failed completely to create a neutral article about the subject, instead it allowed an interested and well-connected (within Wikipedia) party to manipulate the article. Shit happens. We could hope that Wikipedia learns from its failures, but the chances seem slim.
Maybe I'm just missing something but I don't see a decision. The preliminary ruling states that it's going to Dismiss in part, but not in whole the case.
However, it's missing key details, like will the plaintiff need to open his source code, will there be damages paid to the defendant due to the costs and burdens placed on him to defend a false complaint?
The appeals court cannot itself make decisions; but it can write down what decisions the lower court should make and why and send it back to the lower court. And the lower court better follow that friendly advice or else...
In this case the friendly advice of the appeals court is that taking code that is under an Open Source license, and redistributing it without following the terms of the license, is copyright infringement. And we recently learnt that the penalty for illegally copying 24 songs, each worth about $0.99, carries a penalty of $220,000. So I'd say that Mr. Jacobson has this pleasant Mr. Katzer firmly by the balls. Mr. Katzer is under no obligation to open his source code although only that might allow him to legally sell his software in the future; it won't fix any past copyright infringement. And this is obviously a case where in Mr. Jacobson's place I would go and try to inflict maximum damage.
Hey, allofmp3 could distribute mp3s for under 5 cents a song. Why does Apple need 6X that much for the exact same service? Especially with economies of scale!
The last time I checked (a long time ago) they charged 3 cents per MB, that is average 12 cent per song for lousy 128 Kbit MP3s, 24 cent for 256 KBit. They had lost of cost savings by not paying any lawyers to negotiate deals and sign deals with the record companies, lots of savings by not having different stores with different rules in twenty different countries, and they had lots of savings by only taking credit card payments for larger amounts. They were not advertising, they didn't do free concerts with excellent acts from time to time.
f I read this right, does that mean developers still can't publicly bitch about their apps being rejected from the store?
You have been reading an announcement about a change in the NDA. Whatever is in that announcement has no legal value whatsoever. Trying to search for a deep meaning in each word of this announcement is completely pointless. If you have a changed NDA in your hands, then whatever that changed NDA says is the new rules.
Also note that Apple _always_ puts all its own unreleased software under NDA. Therefore XCode 3.1 (which was and is needed for iPhone development) was under NDA until it was released a few weeks ago. So "unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released" is exactly what Apple has always said for many years, iPhone or no iPhone.
This has actually been discussed on Groklaw to the end.
The situation is actually quite simple: The good lawmakers of Virginia passed a law that prevents _anybody_ from using forged headers etc. etc. , including good folks who need anonymity for good reasons protected by the US constitution. Therefore, the law as it stands is illegal. Now a judge _can_ decide that a law is unconstitutional and therefore cannot be used in any court case; a judge can _not_ decide how to fix this law. Therefore it _must_ go back to the lawmakers who have to fix it; as long as it isn't fixed, it cannot be used to convict any spammers.
The article comes up with all these arguments why the court decision is wrong. What he ignores is that the judge doesn't have the power to do that analysis. The only thing the judge can do is to say that the law is constitutional or not. The article claims that there are methods others than those disallowed by the law that make anonymous free speech possible. But that is not for the judge to decide. The law clearly restricts free speech that is protected by the US constitution (while also correctly restricting the rights of spammers to their "speech"), and that is not allowed.
I wouldn't have guesses that you could preemptively sue someone who could sue you. Makes me see Jack Thompson from a different light, maybe he was just having fun with the legal system.
That's for example what happened between Linux and SCO in Germany with excellent effect.
SCO: We will sue all Linux users!
Linux: Sue or shut up.
Court: Sue or shut up. If you don't sue and repeat any claims, there will be a fine.
SCO: Mostly shuts up; from time to time SCO Germany messes up, links to files of SCO US, pays a fine.
You maybe need to do some more research - the car referred to is probably the Ford Fiesta EcoNetic. It gets 65mpg _US_, which is 76+mpg UK.
You're missing the point. Your first post said "65 mpg" which is meaningless if you don't tell what gallons you mean. Since _you_ gave the number which is meaningless without additional information, _I_ don't have to do any research at all.
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There is also some security implications, the problem is that a program may make a wrong assumption about whether two different names mean the same file or not, and thus fail to protect a file. Not sure if there are real examples of this, but it is a problem. The solution is to make the test for whether two names are for different files as simple as possible, on Unix it is strcmp. On Windows and most other case-insensitive systems it is "all Unicode is case sensitive, only A-Z (and maybe the ISO-8859-1 characters) match case". On OS/X however they are using a full sting of Unicode normalization followed by elaborate tables to convert case, and it is pretty much impossible to duplicate the test without calling the system.
So why wouldn't you want to call the system? If you are given a string in an NSString, you call stringByStandardizingPath to remove things like /./ from a path, removing symlinks, creating a canonized string. To check if strings are the same filename, call a string compare function with the right parameters. And you can easily sort paths in the same order as the Finder would (like sorting numbers numerically).
The primary problem with case insensitivity is that it is impossible to fix the case of a filename in the obvious way (ie by using a single os mv call). You have to rename to a temporary file and rename back. Some programs such as svn really don't like this.
Works just fine in MacOS X (that is, the mv call). I think there was a bug in MacOS around 4 that they fixed in 1985 or 1986, where Rename wouldn't change the file name at all if it had been changed to an "identical" name.
So that is $9.5 million plus $1.5 million per year for Tennessee universities. Tennessee population is about 1/45th of the USA, so a similar program for the hole of the USA would be about $420 million initially plus $62 million per year to "reasonably attempt to prevent copyright infringement" at university campuses. May I say that is an awful lot of money to cover one industry. Wouldn't it be much more worthwhile to invest state money into the prevention of shoplifting, which is a real crime, and creates more damages.
Consider also, that this was a bench trial. Why the defendants didn't assert their right to a jury trial is beyond me, and may or may not have any relevance as to the veracity of NYCL's summary.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the purpose of a jury trial is to have the jury decide what the facts of a case are. Like if one side claimed that 10,000 copies of the book were sold, and the other side claimed it was only 200 copies, and if this mattered, then the jury would decide what the correct number is. In this case, the facts are clear: The defendant wrote this lexicon, and everyone agrees what words were used in the lexicon. These are the facts. Whether writing this lexicon using these words is copyright infringement or protected by fair use or no infringement at all, that would be a matter of law and for the judge to decide.
Actually, I'm not sure what else it could be used for. A patent on patent trolling can only be used against other patent trolls. If Halliburton wanted to be a patent troll, they wouldn't need a patent to do it. Besides, patent trolls typically don't have any other source of income that can be threatened by their "business", so Halliburton wouldn't really qualify.
It can be used for three purposes: If any patent troll attacks Haliburton, Haliburton may be able to counter sue on grounds of infringement of their patent-trolling patent. This will keep some patent trolls at bay. Second, if any patent troll sues anyone, Haliburton may sue them. I don't think this makes too much business sense. But thirdly, if any patent troll sues anyone, Haliburton can over a license to the company being sued which allows them to use the Haliburton patent and sue anyone who uses it without license. So if you are being sued, instead of paying one million for blackmail to get rid of the patent troll, or five million to defend yourself in court, you might be able to get away with paying Haliburton $200,000 for a license to their patent-trolling patent, and change the financial odds against the patent troll so they go away. That's $200,000 of free money for Haliburton.
I'd prefer to have car speed records for something that is remotely sensible, like 10 laps at Indianopolis, or 1 lap of the complete Nürburgring. Or something like: Start at an arbitrary point X, come to a complete halt at a point Y that is at least 10 miles away, move within 1 meter to the original point X, and stand still again.
I've wondered about the viability of an alternative blended version of "loser pays". Under such a scheme, the losing party would reimburse the winning party for their actual expenses but only up to the amount that the losing party spent. This may require fairly continuous disclosure of expenses by both parties to reduce "gaming the system".
That is how it is set up in Germany. First thing in court, you tell the judge how much money you want (or at how much money the case should be valued). Judge takes that number and looks up in a table how much plaintiff and defense can pay for their lawyers, and how much the court takes to handle the case. That will end up being the cost. At the end of the case, the judge checks how many percent of what the plaintiff wanted he was actually awarded, and cost are split up accordingly.
This avoids being sued for ridiculous amounts of money. If you sue me for $5bn and the judge decides I should pay $10,000, you will pay 99.999% of enormous cost for lawyers. If you sue me for $10,000 and the judge decides I should pay $10,000, I pay the complete cost for lawyers according to the judges tables - it won't be very expensive.
And the judge will stop the plaintiff if they try to drag a case on and on to the point where the court loses money. If you sue for $10,000, and the judge checked that court cost will be say $1215, that's where he will stop the plaintiff.
Apple is also fond of pointing out that Macs are not PCs. It is illegal for Ford to insist that it's engines can only be installed in a Ford manufactured automobile.... I'm just sayin.
On what basis would that be illegal for Ford to do? They don't insist on these terms because they don't care much what you do with their engine, but if they did care, what would make it illegal? As a concrete example, Ferrari sells Formula I racing engine to the Scuderia Toro Rosso team. Now McLaren might be willing to pay a generous amount of money to lay their hands on a Ferrari engine, and Ferrari would be quite unhappy about it. If the contract between Ferrari and Toro Rosso says that the engines cannot be sold on, do you seriously suggest that would be illegal?
Pystar could definitely make the argument that owners have the right to install the software on any machine that they like without regards to who built and sold the machine. And that as such they can be authorized to do the work for them. The argument that copyright law or any other existing law allows for that is somewhat absurd, otherwise Apple would be litigating.
Psystar could make that argument, but it would quite clearly be wrong. And Psystar might get authorisation to install MacOS X, but they better get that authorisation in written form. And somehow I doubt that a customer would be happy to be told "we can install MacOS X for you, but it is against Apple's EULA, so we have to get written authorisation from you, so if Apple tries to sue, it's you who is on the hook and not us".
If you want a pre-paid mobile phone without giving your name and without using violence, just go to the nearest school and offer some money to the kids.
If your case is strong enough, you will win. There are a lot of arguments against Apple, especially the anti-trust one. The right to produce a competing product is fairly important in a free market.
Who says Psystar doesn't have the right to produce a competing product? Apple doesn't deny Psystar's right to a competing product. They just deny Psystar's right to take MacOS X and install it on their computers in clear breach of the EULA, and they have precedent (Xerox' plain paper photocopiers) that even a clear monopoly is under no obligation at all to help its competitors.
Psystar can compete by installing Windows XP, or Windows Vista, or Linux, or they can buy up the remains of BeOS or AmigaOS. Or write their own operating system from scratch. If they wanted MacOS X, they should have offered more than Apple's $400 million when NeXT was for sale. They can even download Darwin and build a GUI on top of that. It's their business, they should come up with their own ideas to compete.
I think that both parties will benefit by a quiet deal that allows Psystar to sell their boxes; paying Apple a nice "per copy" price for OS-X. Apple does not want to litigate the "monopoly" argument; Psystar does not want to litigate "Breech of OS-X EULA". The nice think of a settlement is that it does not bind Apple to make the same deal with another white box maker.
There is no way that Psystar will get a license to ship with MacOS X. They have been pissing on Apple's shoes; so there will be no business between them. Apple has already replied to Psystar's idiotic "monopoly" arguments, citing about a dozen cases that say absolutely clearly a single product of a company cannot possibly constitute a meaningful "market", and therefore Apple cannot have a meaningful monopoly in the non-existing market of "MacOS X compatible computers".
This arbitration is something that the court can force on the companies; it cannot force them to agree on anything in arbitration.
At $0.99 a song, it would cost me around HALF A MILLION dollars to fill up my iPod, which cost less than $300.
Your maths is way off. The largest iPod could hold about 40,000 songs at 4 MB per song; the largest iPod currently sold holds 30,000. And yes, I would expect to pay substantially more for the actual music than for a little gadget that plays it.
I have a 320 GB hard drive on my MacBook. Any idea how much it would cost me to fill that 320 GB hard drive with software, when it is big enough to hold about 500 copies of Microsoft Office?
Isn't that the entire point though? No-one knows what the actual damages are. Not even the RIAA!
We could reasonably say that the actual damage for every download is about 70 cents. That is about the amount that you pay at the iTunes Store, minus the 30 percent that Apple keeps. (If you found a clever way to download music from the iTunes Store without paying, then the damage would be 99 cent per song).
Now we would need a reasonable estimate for the number of songs downloaded from one computer. As I understand it, with peer-to-peer file sharing networks, everyone is supposed to not only download, but also to upload in an equal amount. So on the average, one million downloaders are matched by one million uploaders, not by a single uploader. So on the average, every song that is made available for downloading from some computer will be downloaded once.
The total revenue from music sales in the USA is less than $10 billion. So if everyone stopped buying music right now and exclusively changed to downloading music from peer-to-peer networks, the total damage would be $10 billion. Actually a lot less, because that $10 billion revenue produces a lot of cost as well. A woman, very casual file sharer, was recently convicted to pay more than $200,000 in damages (although the case is going back to trial again). Just 50,000 such cases would pay for the total revenue of the music industry, and there are a lot more than 50,000 file sharers.
USB doesn't let you use the Mac in Target mode, turning it into an HD without needing any OS to boot. It's great for system recovery.
On the new MacBooks, you can remove the hard drive very, very easily. So if you are into repairing computers, just get an adapter that lets you plug in a naked hard drive (I found them for around £25). Apart from that, Time Machine is the end user's friend.
once the patent on that wheel navigator runs out. im surprised you can patent the thing, shows what i know about patents i guess.
If you can come up with a replacement in two seconds, then it shouldn't be patentable. If you can't figure out how to replace it, then it deserves a patent. (All very roughly speaking).
Because it's car insurance not life insurance. These features make no difference to the number of accidents, and no difference the amount of money required by insurance companies to pay for these accidents. They're there simply for your own safety, and do nothing for the well-being of the car.
As far as I know, security features can actually make accidents more expensive. If someone dies in an accident, that is bad for them, but quite cheap for the insurance. Same person with safety belt and airbag may spend six months in hospital fixing two completely crushed legs, which costs a lot more.
While there are a few situations I've been in where the ability to exceed 80 mph has been critical to safety (getting out from behind dangerous drivers on the freeway who are liable to cause a pileup, for instance), that's not the point.
I seriously doubt that being able to go faster than 80 mph ever helped you with safety. If the car in front of you is driven erratically, just keep some distance.
Gee, Judd. I wonder why that could be. Might have had something to do with the fact that your definition of "reason to this madness" consisted of abusively using multiple accounts to push your agenda, and launching vicious personal attacks against your opponents.
Come on, Judd. You've got to know you can't actually expect to come to a forum as well-traveled as Slashdot and get away with presenting half the facts like that.
I love how well prepared you are for this argument. Do you do anything else than hanging around on Wikipedia, fighting trolls and sockpuppet, and watching places like slashdot, in case the peasants try to fight back?
Now the facts are: Naked shorting has cost the US economy billions and billions of dollars. That may have been "POV" in Wkispeak (when I read some "Wikipedians" it really reminds me of Orwell), today it has been dramatically proven to be true. For a long, long time Wikipedia failed completely to create a neutral article about the subject, instead it allowed an interested and well-connected (within Wikipedia) party to manipulate the article. Shit happens. We could hope that Wikipedia learns from its failures, but the chances seem slim.
Maybe I'm just missing something but I don't see a decision. The preliminary ruling states that it's going to Dismiss in part, but not in whole the case. However, it's missing key details, like will the plaintiff need to open his source code, will there be damages paid to the defendant due to the costs and burdens placed on him to defend a false complaint?
The appeals court cannot itself make decisions; but it can write down what decisions the lower court should make and why and send it back to the lower court. And the lower court better follow that friendly advice or else...
In this case the friendly advice of the appeals court is that taking code that is under an Open Source license, and redistributing it without following the terms of the license, is copyright infringement. And we recently learnt that the penalty for illegally copying 24 songs, each worth about $0.99, carries a penalty of $220,000. So I'd say that Mr. Jacobson has this pleasant Mr. Katzer firmly by the balls. Mr. Katzer is under no obligation to open his source code although only that might allow him to legally sell his software in the future; it won't fix any past copyright infringement. And this is obviously a case where in Mr. Jacobson's place I would go and try to inflict maximum damage.
Hey, allofmp3 could distribute mp3s for under 5 cents a song. Why does Apple need 6X that much for the exact same service? Especially with economies of scale!
The last time I checked (a long time ago) they charged 3 cents per MB, that is average 12 cent per song for lousy 128 Kbit MP3s, 24 cent for 256 KBit. They had lost of cost savings by not paying any lawyers to negotiate deals and sign deals with the record companies, lots of savings by not having different stores with different rules in twenty different countries, and they had lots of savings by only taking credit card payments for larger amounts. They were not advertising, they didn't do free concerts with excellent acts from time to time.
f I read this right, does that mean developers still can't publicly bitch about their apps being rejected from the store?
You have been reading an announcement about a change in the NDA. Whatever is in that announcement has no legal value whatsoever. Trying to search for a deep meaning in each word of this announcement is completely pointless. If you have a changed NDA in your hands, then whatever that changed NDA says is the new rules.
Also note that Apple _always_ puts all its own unreleased software under NDA. Therefore XCode 3.1 (which was and is needed for iPhone development) was under NDA until it was released a few weeks ago. So "unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released" is exactly what Apple has always said for many years, iPhone or no iPhone.
This has actually been discussed on Groklaw to the end.
The situation is actually quite simple: The good lawmakers of Virginia passed a law that prevents _anybody_ from using forged headers etc. etc. , including good folks who need anonymity for good reasons protected by the US constitution. Therefore, the law as it stands is illegal. Now a judge _can_ decide that a law is unconstitutional and therefore cannot be used in any court case; a judge can _not_ decide how to fix this law. Therefore it _must_ go back to the lawmakers who have to fix it; as long as it isn't fixed, it cannot be used to convict any spammers.
The article comes up with all these arguments why the court decision is wrong. What he ignores is that the judge doesn't have the power to do that analysis. The only thing the judge can do is to say that the law is constitutional or not. The article claims that there are methods others than those disallowed by the law that make anonymous free speech possible. But that is not for the judge to decide. The law clearly restricts free speech that is protected by the US constitution (while also correctly restricting the rights of spammers to their "speech"), and that is not allowed.
I wouldn't have guesses that you could preemptively sue someone who could sue you. Makes me see Jack Thompson from a different light, maybe he was just having fun with the legal system.
That's for example what happened between Linux and SCO in Germany with excellent effect.
SCO: We will sue all Linux users!
Linux: Sue or shut up.
Court: Sue or shut up. If you don't sue and repeat any claims, there will be a fine.
SCO: Mostly shuts up; from time to time SCO Germany messes up, links to files of SCO US, pays a fine.
You maybe need to do some more research - the car referred to is probably the Ford Fiesta EcoNetic. It gets 65mpg _US_, which is 76+mpg UK.
You're missing the point. Your first post said "65 mpg" which is meaningless if you don't tell what gallons you mean. Since _you_ gave the number which is meaningless without additional information, _I_ don't have to do any research at all.