I inquired as to the NVidia driver similarly and my message is still there. Further, a search of the Apple forums yields a number of articles with regard to the bug.
I don't know why your message disappeared, but your assumption doesn't seem to be valid.
Well, seeing as how they've only gotten as far as the keynote and it was 90 minutes long just talking about 2 products, I'm guessing that the less sensational additions/modifications to the Apple product line will trickle out through the rest of MacWorld.
I'd expect some minor upgrades to most of the Mac line, maybe a new Cinema display, the regular updates to iLife and iWork (probably adding-in a spreadsheet), and maybe a few minor accessory/peripheral things. They've got 4 days to announce new products, the keynote serves to set the tone and direction for the event.
I'm still thinking about buying an Apple product (computer). The more I read up on them (including reading the Mac API docs on the developer's site), the more I'm impressed (and I'm pretty cynical to begin with).
If the software was well-written, it would be platform independent. There's no excuse in this day an age for anything other than system software and utilities to be platform-dependent. Platform independence was hard years ago, but not today. Not only do you have Mac and Linux (particularly on the server side) gaining market share (and Windows slowly decreasing), but you increasingly have situations outside the US where government mandates preclude the use of Windows for many purposes.
You company is reducing it's potential customer base.
I work for a big biotech company and we definitely give preference to vendors that are platform agnostic. Research users are given a choice of Mac or Windows platform, so we've got 1:4 Windows Mac at the desktop with all computational chemists and biologists have an additional Linux workstation. We no longer purchase applications that require Windows servers. We no longer purchase apps that are of general interest to research unless they support at least Mac and Windows. Linux is preferred for instrumentation control. All compute-intensive, modelling, and simulation software is expected to run on Linux. All web-apps have to work with Firefox on Windows/Mac/Linux.
There's some historical reasons for those positions (UNIX and its variants is more or less the exclusive platform for modern biology and chemistry, for example), but I see similar situations appearing in other fields where Linux and Mac are dominating in academia today.
"Failure to build adequate systems to protect copyright owners could also add to the risk of legal action against the site."
Huh? I assume by copyright "owners" they mean copyright "holders". I don't think there's ever been any claim that any holder has ever been put at risk by YouTube. It's possible that copyrights might be infringed via YouTube, but that hardly amounts to a risk to the holder of that copyright.
Why should YouTube waste the CPU cycles in a futile attempt to seek out copyrighted material? First, they are not legally obligated to. It's up to the holder to complain if there's an issue and THEN it is YouTube's responsibility to take it down.
How can YouTube possibly mechanically identify infringement? Pretty much all of the content on YouTube is copyrighted, including all the stupid videos of people falling off chairs or dog's chasing remote-controlled cars. There's no property inherent to the video itself that can identify the content is infringing unless it's identical to known content that the copyright holder has indicated would be infringing. Further, technically the content isn't technically infringing until so adjudicated in court (infringement is decided on a case-by-case basis). So what are they supposed to do, piss away millions trying to appease an industry group that their clients despise so that they can make their product less appealing despite the fact that they have no legal obligation to do so? Dumb.
Read through the list, and you find all the 6 other 9 are Linux-based products or who where selected in part because of the quality of their Linux support. Among Vista's features that put in it the top 10:
"...brings new features and capabilities to solution providers that in turn promise new revenue generation dialogues with end users."
"...an OS that brings enhanced stability to the desktop should shepherd a plethora of upgrades and opportunities for the channel through the coming year."
So, apparently, it's so good that people will want to spend lots of money on software to make it do what they want. Fantastic.
The best way to detect a rootkit: post-install, hash the installed file-system files and kernel and save the results on a CD-R. Periodically, check to see if the hashes have changed. If so, you know where the problem lies.
Therein lies a problem. Evolution is not taught as a fact, it's taught as a theory - in the scientific sense of the term. Science deals with theories and models that can be used to describe and predict natural phenomenon. Scientists don't generally assert that anything is a "fact" in the absolute sense, because doing so would imply that a model is so complete and perfect that it couldn't be further refined or characterized. Natural selection is a theory because it presents a coherent model of a natural phenomenon which predicts observations that can be empirically tested so as to falsify (disprove) it.
The modern understanding of evolution is not limited to Darwin's "natural selection" (those of you paying attention in science class would know that), but is has nonetheless remained a theory for lack of any empirical falsification (disproval), and because it quite accurately and precisely predicts observations.
Further, "creationism" isn't a scientific theory nor does it purport to be. It further doesn't refute natural selection in any way, in only addresses the start condition (initial instance of life on earth), as opposed to the physiological changes of populations over time. If creationism were science, then one would have to accept a priori that it (like all other models) is incomplete and requires refinement via empirical methods (the definition of science, after all). If you go down that route, you ultimately end up with the same model as evolution and affirm natural selection but with a lingering untestable hypothesis about the cause of events that lead to it. In the end, the exercise gives you the same functional result (which you can use to produce food and drugs), but also something that does nothing to further the spiritual and theological aspect of it.
"Creationism" is an important theological concept in the understanding of mankind's spiritual and cosmological significance in the universe; it's part of the fundamental definition of the relationship of God and Man. However, it's not science. It was never intended to be science. It need not be affirmed by science in order to be valid. It represents a theological model, not a scientific one.
Correction: the other proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures, not theories (scientific or otherwise).
Further, Darwin proposed natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. That hypotheses has well withstood credible scrutiny and attempts to disprove it, and so is considered a theory (mind you, the modern understanding of the theory is quite more involved than Darwin would have imagined).
Darwin never created a theory for the origin of life.
I understand what you are saying. However, I'd go one further and say that, ideally, the package ought to be able to have sub-packages inside it that are optionally installed.
If you could have bundle packages, you could install just the application and request the devel stuff if you wanted. Better yet, if you were packaging software for sale, you could include all the dependency packages in your application package and install whatever bits were missing.
I'd also add that the REAL reason RPM is not as convenient as dpkg has absolutely nothing to do with RPM itself. The big deal is that each RPM-based distribution uses its own naming conventions for packages and the dpkg-based distributions adhere to a more coherent convention. The problem is that RPM notes dependencies based on package names (and virtual package names), so if one system requires gcc4, but you have gcc-4 installed, despiet being the same thing the system sees them as different. On Mandrake you might need a 'libwidget' package whereas the library might be included in the RedHat 'widget' package.
The insanity is a result of naming conventions.
I'd also add that adding a repository ought to be as simple as clicking on a link on a web page. This is not an RPM/dpkg issue, it's one for Yast/Aptitude/etc.
Potable water might be difficult to come by, but water is not. There's no reason that you have to use water that's ready drinkable - as a matter of fact, you would almost certainly use non-potable water for this particular purpose.
The article is bogus, in part because it presumes that you would burn fossil fuel to generate electricity, to electrolyze water. Yes, that's not an efficient process, and no, it's not the only process we have and far from the most efficient. A wide range of bacteria, can be used to produce H2 -- all you need is a good source of crappy (literally) water -- and we've got that in abundance.
SAMBA isn't a good example. Not only is it reverse-engineered, but Microsoft's file and printer sharing technology is licensed from IBM (who holds the approriate patents).
Now, if on the other hand you develop a new camera and use flash memory formatted with FAT and using filenames longer than 8 characters with a 3 character extension, well then you'd have to be loony because they'll be all over you for crazy stuff like that.
The fact of the matter is that many of these games run atop a more generalized engine. The game itself is pretty much platform independent at this point. The traditional notion of "porting" a game doesn't apply. Rather, its whether or not one ought to port the underlying engine.
It depends on the engine, of course, but it's much more straight-forward than one would think in many cases (unless it's hopelessly wedded to DirectX without any abstraction at all). Thankfully, that's not too often the case any more. It's frequent that the same engine has been ported to multiple platforms and has all sorts of abstraction. Were this not the case, you wouldn't see the same game coming out for the Wii, PS3, and Windows at the same time, for example.
The economics here are much different. Porting the engine means that all games built atop that engine will be available for the target platform.
So, what they are basically saying here isn't really the issue of porting the game, it's getting retailers to take orders for it in boxed form. Porting would have a one-time cost that wouldn't be so much, but why bother if EB isn't going to stock it because they'll sell 1-2 copies per store? The boxes don't print themselves, and you don't want to stick every platform on the same CD or DVD...
The point was, of course, that case law already exists that stipulates that the copier is the provider, not the recipient. It has been argued that reading from disk into memory is a copy, to the point that the act of moving from one chip to another is a copy at each stage. Those arguments have already been heard and decided. Semantically speaking, point-to-point transmission is copying, receipt is not. Point-to-many transmission (multicast) is broadcasting (more or less, that's less settled). In the US, at least, downloading is not copying, but upload is (for the purpose of copyright considerations, anyway).
wrt "Similarly, the cost of a file sharer's damages would be greater than someone who simply downloaded the same song for personal listening."
It should be noted that in the US, one couldn't sue someone that simply downloaded the song. Obtaining a copy is not infringement, copying is. Case-law has already pretty much covered that the upload portion of the equation is infringing, but the download is not (nor is serializing the download from RAM to disk).
Also a point of interest with regard to calculating damages for infringement: copyright does not purport to support the making of money off copyrighted materials. The amount of damages (or lack thereof) or whether or not the infringer got financial benefit is immaterial. The testimony regarding revenue loss as a result of the infringement is basically a victim impact statement. Damages for infringement are at the discretion of the judge or jury and have certain statutory limits. If a record company loses a million dollars (and could prove it) as the result of infringement, it doesn't mean that they will get (or are due) a million dollars. Likewise, if the same company suffers no tangible monetary loss, they can still sue and receive damages.
People very often operate on the false assumption that "damages" in infringement claims are related to estimated financial loss of the rights holder. Copyright intentionally doesn't work that way. Keep in mind that the work has no owner; the only instrument here is a contract (copyright) bestowing limited monopoly rights on copies and derivatives of a work to a single party. It is the responsibility of the rights holder to argue that the accused infringer was subject to and then broke the terms of that contract (entered into by their representative, the state). Its then the court's responsibility to assess the seriousness of the infringement and seek a reasonable remedy (which isn't necessarily limited to monetary damages).
Well, this happened in Japan, not the US, so I don't know how their laws apply. However, here in the US, that the infringement took place in a business or that the infringer received some sort of financial benefit is completely irrelevent. Neither factor would necessarily be considered in deciding if the activity was infringing or in the assessment of damages. Further, in the US you don't get arrested for infringement as it's not a crime but a tort (basically, a contract violation).
Had this happened in the US, even today, there's a pretty good chance he'd receive a simple slap on the wrist and be told not to do it again -- that is if the court didn't outright decide it to be fair use. People sing "Happy Birthday" all the time in the US, even at some businesses, and you don't hear too much about Time-Warner (holders of the copyright on the song) shaking people down for it (though some restaurants, for example, are aware of the possibility and avoid using the song in recognition of customer birthdays).
"Happy Birthday" is a good example of a song that if TW went after you following a single performance, the court would probably decide it fair use or at least do little more than ask you not to do it again. Most people learn the song as a young child and few people are aware that it's a copyrighted work and, as such, its performance of it is protected.
This statement from the article betrays a certain ignorance of the author: "There's a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility - it's what people want."
Whereas Microsoft spends virtually no time on hardware compatibility of any sort. Instead, they largely ignore the problem and make it the responsibility of the individual hardware vendor. Hence the huge variation in the quality of drivers for devices, their stability, and their feature support under Windows (add to that it can be quite tricky to port drivers between the various major revisions of Windows).
That's quite different from the case with Linux, where the kernel developers focus a large amount of time on hardware support. Rather than vendors supplying individual drivers for products, the kernel looks at devices as instances of chipsets and hardware APIs. Driver quality goes through a very predictable cycle of creation, maturation, and stabilization and drivers evolve to a very high standard of quality whose uniformity ought to be the envy of Microsoft.
Linux supports quite a bit of hardware at the OS level, yet Windows does not. It is true that if a new piece of hardware comes out, a driver my not be immediately available, and hardware from hostile vendors might evolve slower, but generally speaking, most hardware "just works" in a way Microsoft has never been able to accomplish. Hardware that may be suspect is easy to characterize: does it say "Designed for Windows" on the box, or is it a niche device? If so, how long has it been on the market? If less than 9 months, Google to see if it has Linux support -- that's basically it.
This is not new with Microsoft's Viral Infection and Spyware Transmission Architecture (aka, 'VISTA'). If you look back at the older MS EULAs, the same language exists, particularly with regard to benchmarking. There are other stipulations to: you cannot write negative reviews of products or Microsoft, you are not allowed to use remote access tools other than Windows Terminal Services / RDP, can't use their products in medical or weapons systems, you must submit to license audits, etc.
As if anyone ever pays any attention to the EULA -- and therein lies a problem for them (and everyone else). The EULA has not only gotten long and complex, but they are regularly and completely disregarded out of hand by, quite literally, everyone. The fact that they are universally ignored, coupled with their general failure to attempt to enforce the EULA most of the time, and terms that may not be generally legal or binding. If they ever did try and get the EULA enforced, it'd be pretty hard to get a court to be terribly sympathetic (particularly since they are increasingly dubious of click-wrapped software licenses).
Since several already beat me to the antibiotics being for bacteria and not viruses, I'll have to add:
If the theory is that the industrial farming of livestock leads to cross-species infection, then there's not a lot to indicate that. Bird flu is a particularly good example, seeing as how the H5N1 strain mentioned originated in poultry from pre-industrial style farms in southeast Asia. All of the cases outside of that region have been detected in wild birds. Crossing species has only been reported among people in those areas where there's protracted contact with the birds.
The referenced site overstates the virulence of the H5N1 flu as well.
Antibiotics don't select for strains of the virus, and strictly speaking neither do vaccinations.
Animal products being fed to the same species can be a problem for prion-based disorders, but that represents a very situation that produces a toxin, not a virulent disease.
As far as treatment for it, that's easy. There's only two: vaccination, and transfusion of blood from someone that's already had it. Other than that, you just treat the symptoms and hope for the best.
SGI is late to the table to become a patent troll. If there's any lesson to be learned in the past 5 years in the tech world it's that a business plan built around litigation is no plan at all (unless you are a law firm, then you're basically printing your own money).
It's a shame too, SGI was a great company with some very good products too.
However, I would point out that it's not unexpected. One of the reasons that vendors of video cards don't provide hardware programming specs or open source drivers for their products has been for fear of litigation. It's been a prevalent rumor for years that many vendors feel that their products potentially run afoul of a bunch of patents and that's why they are so cagey with letting people understand how to program for their products and to get the best performance out of them. If SGI wins in this suit, expect a horrible blood-letting in the graphics adapter business and prices for premium technology to go up across the board.
Microsoft is a large company with considerable development resources. Right now, MS is shipping IE7 which, among other things implements most of the CSS2 standards (provided the site sets DOCTYPE properly specifically for IE) pretty much correctly (with a few notable exceptions). However, the implementation comes 8 years after the standards were settled and IE7 still doesn't have the richer feature set and plugins that other popular browsers do.
Do programmers at Microsoft find it demoralizing to work on a product that's a loss-leader and a continuing disappointment to both users and developers when their fewer and less-well-funded open-source counterparts consistently exceed them in quality, features, and reliability?
The organisms are chemoautotrophs. Similar organisms have been recognized in various environments for quiet some time. Chemoautotrophs that use sulfur as a final electron acceptor have been known for quite some time. These are notable mainly for their location, which isn't particularly rich in accessible carbon.
No need to fake the certificate, just tweak WGA to check versus a bogus certificate, or check a bogus creddential against the valid certificate. Either event will flag the system as invalid and the functionality will disable appropriately.
Faking the certificate would only be necessary for falsifying updates and so on. I'm actually surprised you haven't seen more malware through auto-update attacks for Windows, though I suspect those clever enough to do it are perhaps clever enough not to have that detected. It's decidedly trickier than fooling WGA into thinking a machine has an invalid copy of the OS.
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I inquired as to the NVidia driver similarly and my message is still there. Further, a search of the Apple forums yields a number of articles with regard to the bug.
I don't know why your message disappeared, but your assumption doesn't seem to be valid.
Well, seeing as how they've only gotten as far as the keynote and it was 90 minutes long just talking about 2 products, I'm guessing that the less sensational additions/modifications to the Apple product line will trickle out through the rest of MacWorld.
I'd expect some minor upgrades to most of the Mac line, maybe a new Cinema display, the regular updates to iLife and iWork (probably adding-in a spreadsheet), and maybe a few minor accessory/peripheral things. They've got 4 days to announce new products, the keynote serves to set the tone and direction for the event.
I'm still thinking about buying an Apple product (computer). The more I read up on them (including reading the Mac API docs on the developer's site), the more I'm impressed (and I'm pretty cynical to begin with).
If the software was well-written, it would be platform independent. There's no excuse in this day an age for anything other than system software and utilities to be platform-dependent. Platform independence was hard years ago, but not today. Not only do you have Mac and Linux (particularly on the server side) gaining market share (and Windows slowly decreasing), but you increasingly have situations outside the US where government mandates preclude the use of Windows for many purposes.
You company is reducing it's potential customer base.
I work for a big biotech company and we definitely give preference to vendors that are platform agnostic. Research users are given a choice of Mac or Windows platform, so we've got 1:4 Windows Mac at the desktop with all computational chemists and biologists have an additional Linux workstation. We no longer purchase applications that require Windows servers. We no longer purchase apps that are of general interest to research unless they support at least Mac and Windows. Linux is preferred for instrumentation control. All compute-intensive, modelling, and simulation software is expected to run on Linux. All web-apps have to work with Firefox on Windows/Mac/Linux.
There's some historical reasons for those positions (UNIX and its variants is more or less the exclusive platform for modern biology and chemistry, for example), but I see similar situations appearing in other fields where Linux and Mac are dominating in academia today.
Huh? I assume by copyright "owners" they mean copyright "holders". I don't think there's ever been any claim that any holder has ever been put at risk by YouTube. It's possible that copyrights might be infringed via YouTube, but that hardly amounts to a risk to the holder of that copyright.
Why should YouTube waste the CPU cycles in a futile attempt to seek out copyrighted material? First, they are not legally obligated to. It's up to the holder to complain if there's an issue and THEN it is YouTube's responsibility to take it down.
How can YouTube possibly mechanically identify infringement? Pretty much all of the content on YouTube is copyrighted, including all the stupid videos of people falling off chairs or dog's chasing remote-controlled cars. There's no property inherent to the video itself that can identify the content is infringing unless it's identical to known content that the copyright holder has indicated would be infringing. Further, technically the content isn't technically infringing until so adjudicated in court (infringement is decided on a case-by-case basis). So what are they supposed to do, piss away millions trying to appease an industry group that their clients despise so that they can make their product less appealing despite the fact that they have no legal obligation to do so? Dumb.
Read through the list, and you find all the 6 other 9 are Linux-based products or who where selected in part because of the quality of their Linux support. Among Vista's features that put in it the top 10:
"...brings new features and capabilities to solution providers that in turn promise new revenue generation dialogues with end users."
"...an OS that brings enhanced stability to the desktop should shepherd a plethora of upgrades and opportunities for the channel through the coming year."
So, apparently, it's so good that people will want to spend lots of money on software to make it do what they want. Fantastic.
The best way to detect a rootkit: post-install, hash the installed file-system files and kernel and save the results on a CD-R. Periodically, check to see if the hashes have changed. If so, you know where the problem lies.
Therein lies a problem. Evolution is not taught as a fact, it's taught as a theory - in the scientific sense of the term. Science deals with theories and models that can be used to describe and predict natural phenomenon. Scientists don't generally assert that anything is a "fact" in the absolute sense, because doing so would imply that a model is so complete and perfect that it couldn't be further refined or characterized. Natural selection is a theory because it presents a coherent model of a natural phenomenon which predicts observations that can be empirically tested so as to falsify (disprove) it.
The modern understanding of evolution is not limited to Darwin's "natural selection" (those of you paying attention in science class would know that), but is has nonetheless remained a theory for lack of any empirical falsification (disproval), and because it quite accurately and precisely predicts observations.
Further, "creationism" isn't a scientific theory nor does it purport to be. It further doesn't refute natural selection in any way, in only addresses the start condition (initial instance of life on earth), as opposed to the physiological changes of populations over time. If creationism were science, then one would have to accept a priori that it (like all other models) is incomplete and requires refinement via empirical methods (the definition of science, after all). If you go down that route, you ultimately end up with the same model as evolution and affirm natural selection but with a lingering untestable hypothesis about the cause of events that lead to it. In the end, the exercise gives you the same functional result (which you can use to produce food and drugs), but also something that does nothing to further the spiritual and theological aspect of it.
"Creationism" is an important theological concept in the understanding of mankind's spiritual and cosmological significance in the universe; it's part of the fundamental definition of the relationship of God and Man. However, it's not science. It was never intended to be science. It need not be affirmed by science in order to be valid. It represents a theological model, not a scientific one.
Acetyl-CoA + 3NAD+ + FAD + GDP + Pi + 2H2O + CoA-SH -> 2CoA-SH + 3NADH + 3H+ + FADH2 + GTP + 2CO2 + H2O
We biologists are geeks too, of course. We just do things the hard way (the long, hard, wet, and salty way -- if you like).
Correction: the other proposals for the development of life on earth are conjectures, not theories (scientific or otherwise). Further, Darwin proposed natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. That hypotheses has well withstood credible scrutiny and attempts to disprove it, and so is considered a theory (mind you, the modern understanding of the theory is quite more involved than Darwin would have imagined). Darwin never created a theory for the origin of life.
I understand what you are saying. However, I'd go one further and say that, ideally, the package ought to be able to have sub-packages inside it that are optionally installed.
If you could have bundle packages, you could install just the application and request the devel stuff if you wanted. Better yet, if you were packaging software for sale, you could include all the dependency packages in your application package and install whatever bits were missing.
I'd also add that the REAL reason RPM is not as convenient as dpkg has absolutely nothing to do with RPM itself. The big deal is that each RPM-based distribution uses its own naming conventions for packages and the dpkg-based distributions adhere to a more coherent convention. The problem is that RPM notes dependencies based on package names (and virtual package names), so if one system requires gcc4, but you have gcc-4 installed, despiet being the same thing the system sees them as different. On Mandrake you might need a 'libwidget' package whereas the library might be included in the RedHat 'widget' package.
The insanity is a result of naming conventions.
I'd also add that adding a repository ought to be as simple as clicking on a link on a web page. This is not an RPM/dpkg issue, it's one for Yast/Aptitude/etc.
Potable water might be difficult to come by, but water is not. There's no reason that you have to use water that's ready drinkable - as a matter of fact, you would almost certainly use non-potable water for this particular purpose.
The article is bogus, in part because it presumes that you would burn fossil fuel to generate electricity, to electrolyze water. Yes, that's not an efficient process, and no, it's not the only process we have and far from the most efficient. A wide range of bacteria, can be used to produce H2 -- all you need is a good source of crappy (literally) water -- and we've got that in abundance.
SAMBA isn't a good example. Not only is it reverse-engineered, but Microsoft's file and printer sharing technology is licensed from IBM (who holds the approriate patents).
Now, if on the other hand you develop a new camera and use flash memory formatted with FAT and using filenames longer than 8 characters with a 3 character extension, well then you'd have to be loony because they'll be all over you for crazy stuff like that.
The fact of the matter is that many of these games run atop a more generalized engine. The game itself is pretty much platform independent at this point. The traditional notion of "porting" a game doesn't apply. Rather, its whether or not one ought to port the underlying engine.
It depends on the engine, of course, but it's much more straight-forward than one would think in many cases (unless it's hopelessly wedded to DirectX without any abstraction at all). Thankfully, that's not too often the case any more. It's frequent that the same engine has been ported to multiple platforms and has all sorts of abstraction. Were this not the case, you wouldn't see the same game coming out for the Wii, PS3, and Windows at the same time, for example.
The economics here are much different. Porting the engine means that all games built atop that engine will be available for the target platform.
So, what they are basically saying here isn't really the issue of porting the game, it's getting retailers to take orders for it in boxed form. Porting would have a one-time cost that wouldn't be so much, but why bother if EB isn't going to stock it because they'll sell 1-2 copies per store? The boxes don't print themselves, and you don't want to stick every platform on the same CD or DVD...
The point was, of course, that case law already exists that stipulates that the copier is the provider, not the recipient. It has been argued that reading from disk into memory is a copy, to the point that the act of moving from one chip to another is a copy at each stage. Those arguments have already been heard and decided. Semantically speaking, point-to-point transmission is copying, receipt is not. Point-to-many transmission (multicast) is broadcasting (more or less, that's less settled). In the US, at least, downloading is not copying, but upload is (for the purpose of copyright considerations, anyway).
wrt "Similarly, the cost of a file sharer's damages would be greater than someone who simply downloaded the same song for personal listening."
It should be noted that in the US, one couldn't sue someone that simply downloaded the song. Obtaining a copy is not infringement, copying is. Case-law has already pretty much covered that the upload portion of the equation is infringing, but the download is not (nor is serializing the download from RAM to disk).
Also a point of interest with regard to calculating damages for infringement: copyright does not purport to support the making of money off copyrighted materials. The amount of damages (or lack thereof) or whether or not the infringer got financial benefit is immaterial. The testimony regarding revenue loss as a result of the infringement is basically a victim impact statement. Damages for infringement are at the discretion of the judge or jury and have certain statutory limits. If a record company loses a million dollars (and could prove it) as the result of infringement, it doesn't mean that they will get (or are due) a million dollars. Likewise, if the same company suffers no tangible monetary loss, they can still sue and receive damages.
People very often operate on the false assumption that "damages" in infringement claims are related to estimated financial loss of the rights holder. Copyright intentionally doesn't work that way. Keep in mind that the work has no owner; the only instrument here is a contract (copyright) bestowing limited monopoly rights on copies and derivatives of a work to a single party. It is the responsibility of the rights holder to argue that the accused infringer was subject to and then broke the terms of that contract (entered into by their representative, the state). Its then the court's responsibility to assess the seriousness of the infringement and seek a reasonable remedy (which isn't necessarily limited to monetary damages).
Well, this happened in Japan, not the US, so I don't know how their laws apply. However, here in the US, that the infringement took place in a business or that the infringer received some sort of financial benefit is completely irrelevent. Neither factor would necessarily be considered in deciding if the activity was infringing or in the assessment of damages. Further, in the US you don't get arrested for infringement as it's not a crime but a tort (basically, a contract violation).
Had this happened in the US, even today, there's a pretty good chance he'd receive a simple slap on the wrist and be told not to do it again -- that is if the court didn't outright decide it to be fair use. People sing "Happy Birthday" all the time in the US, even at some businesses, and you don't hear too much about Time-Warner (holders of the copyright on the song) shaking people down for it (though some restaurants, for example, are aware of the possibility and avoid using the song in recognition of customer birthdays).
"Happy Birthday" is a good example of a song that if TW went after you following a single performance, the court would probably decide it fair use or at least do little more than ask you not to do it again. Most people learn the song as a young child and few people are aware that it's a copyrighted work and, as such, its performance of it is protected.
This statement from the article betrays a certain ignorance of the author: "There's a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility - it's what people want."
Whereas Microsoft spends virtually no time on hardware compatibility of any sort. Instead, they largely ignore the problem and make it the responsibility of the individual hardware vendor. Hence the huge variation in the quality of drivers for devices, their stability, and their feature support under Windows (add to that it can be quite tricky to port drivers between the various major revisions of Windows).
That's quite different from the case with Linux, where the kernel developers focus a large amount of time on hardware support. Rather than vendors supplying individual drivers for products, the kernel looks at devices as instances of chipsets and hardware APIs. Driver quality goes through a very predictable cycle of creation, maturation, and stabilization and drivers evolve to a very high standard of quality whose uniformity ought to be the envy of Microsoft.
Linux supports quite a bit of hardware at the OS level, yet Windows does not. It is true that if a new piece of hardware comes out, a driver my not be immediately available, and hardware from hostile vendors might evolve slower, but generally speaking, most hardware "just works" in a way Microsoft has never been able to accomplish. Hardware that may be suspect is easy to characterize: does it say "Designed for Windows" on the box, or is it a niche device? If so, how long has it been on the market? If less than 9 months, Google to see if it has Linux support -- that's basically it.
... or, at the very least the Ellison's.
This is not new with Microsoft's Viral Infection and Spyware Transmission Architecture (aka, 'VISTA'). If you look back at the older MS EULAs, the same language exists, particularly with regard to benchmarking. There are other stipulations to: you cannot write negative reviews of products or Microsoft, you are not allowed to use remote access tools other than Windows Terminal Services / RDP, can't use their products in medical or weapons systems, you must submit to license audits, etc.
As if anyone ever pays any attention to the EULA -- and therein lies a problem for them (and everyone else). The EULA has not only gotten long and complex, but they are regularly and completely disregarded out of hand by, quite literally, everyone. The fact that they are universally ignored, coupled with their general failure to attempt to enforce the EULA most of the time, and terms that may not be generally legal or binding. If they ever did try and get the EULA enforced, it'd be pretty hard to get a court to be terribly sympathetic (particularly since they are increasingly dubious of click-wrapped software licenses).
Since several already beat me to the antibiotics being for bacteria and not viruses, I'll have to add:
If the theory is that the industrial farming of livestock leads to cross-species infection, then there's not a lot to indicate that. Bird flu is a particularly good example, seeing as how the H5N1 strain mentioned originated in poultry from pre-industrial style farms in southeast Asia. All of the cases outside of that region have been detected in wild birds. Crossing species has only been reported among people in those areas where there's protracted contact with the birds.
The referenced site overstates the virulence of the H5N1 flu as well.
Antibiotics don't select for strains of the virus, and strictly speaking neither do vaccinations.
Animal products being fed to the same species can be a problem for prion-based disorders, but that represents a very situation that produces a toxin, not a virulent disease.
As far as treatment for it, that's easy. There's only two: vaccination, and transfusion of blood from someone that's already had it. Other than that, you just treat the symptoms and hope for the best.
SGI is late to the table to become a patent troll. If there's any lesson to be learned in the past 5 years in the tech world it's that a business plan built around litigation is no plan at all (unless you are a law firm, then you're basically printing your own money).
It's a shame too, SGI was a great company with some very good products too.
However, I would point out that it's not unexpected. One of the reasons that vendors of video cards don't provide hardware programming specs or open source drivers for their products has been for fear of litigation. It's been a prevalent rumor for years that many vendors feel that their products potentially run afoul of a bunch of patents and that's why they are so cagey with letting people understand how to program for their products and to get the best performance out of them. If SGI wins in this suit, expect a horrible blood-letting in the graphics adapter business and prices for premium technology to go up across the board.
Microsoft is a large company with considerable development resources. Right now, MS is shipping IE7 which, among other things implements most of the CSS2 standards (provided the site sets DOCTYPE properly specifically for IE) pretty much correctly (with a few notable exceptions). However, the implementation comes 8 years after the standards were settled and IE7 still doesn't have the richer feature set and plugins that other popular browsers do.
Do programmers at Microsoft find it demoralizing to work on a product that's a loss-leader and a continuing disappointment to both users and developers when their fewer and less-well-funded open-source counterparts consistently exceed them in quality, features, and reliability?
I have already patented a business method for abusing the patent system in this fashion. It's time to pay up, boys!
The organisms are chemoautotrophs. Similar organisms have been recognized in various environments for quiet some time. Chemoautotrophs that use sulfur as a final electron acceptor have been known for quite some time. These are notable mainly for their location, which isn't particularly rich in accessible carbon.
No need to fake the certificate, just tweak WGA to check versus a bogus certificate, or check a bogus creddential against the valid certificate. Either event will flag the system as invalid and the functionality will disable appropriately.
Faking the certificate would only be necessary for falsifying updates and so on. I'm actually surprised you haven't seen more malware through auto-update attacks for Windows, though I suspect those clever enough to do it are perhaps clever enough not to have that detected. It's decidedly trickier than fooling WGA into thinking a machine has an invalid copy of the OS.