I agree! This should work with phone numbers too. You shouldn't have the right to claim phone numbers for yourself. I can choose to call myself 1-900-HOT-GRITS or (310)555-1212 and THE MARKET should decide who the calls should go to! Down with evil imperialist government and regulators.
Free enterprise should prevail. Thatis the way God intended it all to be!
Interesting that a large proportion of the posts on this thread are addressed to the issue of whether the article should have been posted or not. Does no one have any comments on the article itself?
I attended a talk about patents and patent laws while I was a summer intern at HP Labs. One of the things they said there was that they used patents mostly as a suit of things to trade with competitors challenging them. So, if IBM came to them and claimed to have a patent on something they were using, HP would counter with its own set of patents and hopefully be able to bury the whole thing.
They encouraged employees to seek as many patents as possible to make the companys position stronger when it dealt with competitors with patents.
Finally, and most important, the legislative history makes it abundantly clear that Section 1201(f) permits reverse engineering of copyrighted computer programs only and does not authorize circumvention of technological systems that control access to other copyrighted works, such as movies.21 In consequence, the reverse engineering exception does not apply.
So is he saying the copyright software/system is not a copyrighted piece of software? Is he saying the situation is different for hardware? Doesn't that seem to be a contradicion? Anyone care to expand on this?
IANAL but I believe what he's trying to say is that while reverse-engineering copyrighted material is legal, it's not the same thing as reverse-engineering a measure to prevent access to copyrighted material. He's not against reverse-engineering per se. He's just comparing this particular instance of reverse-engineering to the act of reverse engineering a key to a lock.
OH please, the "protesters" in Seattle were nothing but a bunch of crackheads who didn't have a frigging clue what they were protesting. The police showed remarkable restraint and did their best to allow the protesters and the conventioners to cohabitate. It was only when the demonstrations turned violent that the police were forced to use tear-gas, to protect property and the rights of the people who had travelled from all over the World to meet each other.
I was there. I know some of the people who were "protesting". The ones I spoke with didn't have a position on the subject that could stand up to more than 10 minutes of argument. It was mostly a bunch of kids whose parents pay for school and everything else who were bored and loved to pretend there was a cause to rebel against
This is not to say that there weren't people with legitimate causes they were protesting there. They were in the minority, though
Interestingly, if you read reports in newspapers in other countries, they allege that it was the US government which indirectly encouraged the protesters to make talks impossible because it was in US interests that very little negotiations take place.
Surely everyone knows that if you want to write a real flame signifying that you have utterly and completely lost an argument you must take the time to include a detailed explanation of why the target of your flame is so similar to Adolf Hitler in every way - instead you use weak insults like "ass-wipe" or calling him "Katzhole".
Ironic, though, how the poster ranted about Katz not checking his deleted items folder to include a direct quote and then proceeds to say he would have included Jon Katz's email if he hadn't deleted it.
We need to remember here that the only bottomline that matters (and should matter) to the government is How does this affect the consumer? We as Computer Science scholars have been traditionally (and correctly so) led to believe that the OS is what boots the computer. But the average user doesn't give a damn about this!. The average user wants the "OS" to be everything that makes his computer useful.
Let's face it - regardless of whether the tactics used and the justifications offered to include IE as part of the OS were justified/legal/ethical, the consumer has benefited from it. Think about it. With a browser as part of the package the consumer gets you are guaranteed: - A browser to surf the web with - which is what the vast majority of users care about - Other applications are guaranteed a browser to display help files with - this is much better than the old way where they wrote proprietary help-displays
So maybe MS should sell Windows but not call it an OS because it's not correct from a CS perspective - but forcing them to sell it in different parts is only going to hurt the vast majority of users who don't give a damn what computer scientists think
This is ridiculous. When companies hire people as contractors, they are fully aware of their situation - they are fully aware of what their responsibilities are and what they will get in return. It's not a case of breach of trust or a company lying about what it would pay.
We are not talking about illiterate migrant workers who are too poor to feed themselves if they are fired one day or too stupid to understand their contract. We are talking about people who make upwards of $50,000 a year and are highly skilled and highly sought after. These people had the option to seek permanent employment at MS or anywhere else if they felt they were being under-compensated or shafted.
We are in an industry where we as tech workers are in high demand and have the ability to command compensation often in excess of what we might deserve - hardly an industry where employee protection law has a place.
Maybe Ted Turner is a bigger man that Bill Gates is, but that is completely besides the point here. Don't pretend the donations never happened. If you do, that just makes you a fanatic who'll believe whatever version of the truth suits his ideology most - not someone whose opinion is one I'll take - regardless of whether it agrees with me or not.
I'm assuming that by your comments about charity you're refering to Bill Gates. Bill Gates donated 17 Billion dollars to charity over the past year. Yes, that's with a B. You're saying $100 million even compares to that? And are you implying that those charities, just because it's called the Bill Gates Fund is a way for him to channel the money back to himself and is not a "REAL charity"?
It's fine to hate a guy, to question where he got the money from, whether it's really his, whether it even matters to him, what his motivation for giving it away was, etc. but to be so blind in your hatred that you refuse to see that he actually did give the money away is just plain STUPID.
Blame your stores. The stores I go to you don't need an employees help to listen to music.
I said you didn't have to buy the CD in response to your statement that you had to pay $15 for a CD which only had 2 good songs on it. It's a simple principle: Does the cost justify the benefit to you? If it doesn't don't buy. Your argument is the intellectual equivalent of "I don't think that beach house in Malibu is worth $1 million and I don't want to pay that bastard that much money for it so I'll just squat there". When you grow up and go out into the wide world you will realize that many goods are priced beyond what they are worth to you. This is the point where you excercise your right to not buy.
Who are you trying to fool anyway? It's very obvious that some people would only pay for a CD if it is cheaper than the effort it takes for them to copy the song. Paying lobbyists off is scumbaggery but so is what you're doing. It doesn't make you any less of a scumbag in my eyes that there are other people acting like scumbags too.
Balderdash! You don't have to pay full price for a crappy CD. If you don't think the 2 good songs on the CD are worth $15, you don't have to buy it!
Have you ever actually left your momma's basement and wandered out to the big blue room? They have these stores called "Tower Records" (among others) where you can actually listen to the entire CD before you choose to buy it! Last time I was there no one interrupted or bothered me and I could take exactly as long as I wanted to. And these stores existed well before Napster so don't pretend they're doing this to remove that argument.
The build number you refer to is simply that: The number of the build that you are using. A product like Win2k, while being developed, is built, say everyday as features are added and bug fixes are made. These build numbers are sequenced so they can be refered to. Ultimately, a particular build is blessed as being fit to release and that is done. This has nothing to do with versioning.
Ok, reading was obviously not one of my strongest skills. What I should have said is your cousin has now achieved the same maturity level as the average reader of slashdot.
Congratulations! You have now achieved the exact same maturity level as the average reader of slashdot - which happens to be the same as that of your 4-year-old cousin.
I eagerly anticipate the day when you guys grow up.
Here's a way I came up with the other day: This millenium will be over when 2000 years are over, i.e. at the end of the year 2000. That's when the next one will start.
India lost a space rocket to a similar error in the late '80s or early '90s. The situation in this case was a sensor reading an external value and the software taking corrective action based upon that value. The value was supposed to be 0. However, they only reserved 3 digits for it and when the value read went below -99 to -100, it just got rid of the -ve sign and represented it as 100. Of course, the corrective action taken was the opposite of what should have been taken and the rocket crashed.
Union Carbide is responsible for the action or inaction of its staff. If a company chooses to hire "poorly educated workers" as you put it, that does not shift the blame. 6,000 people died - Union Carbide is NOT the victim in this case.
That doesn't make any sense. Whether the source for Windows was open or not does not change the liability in any way.
It is being sold to people who have neither the time, nor the motivation, nor the expertise to make anything of that source and hence the source being available is immaterial. The analogy with kit airplanes is not apt because the kit airplanes are put together by the people using them and regardless the manufacturer has the reponsibility to make sure that if the instructions were followed reasonably diligently, the aircraft should be in no danger of blowing up.
Now if you want to make up special cases just so you can sleep at night that's a different thing...
Slashdot Mirror
I agree! This should work with phone numbers too. You shouldn't have the right to claim phone numbers for yourself. I can choose to call myself 1-900-HOT-GRITS or (310)555-1212 and THE MARKET should decide who the calls should go to! Down with evil imperialist government and regulators.
Free enterprise should prevail. Thatis the way God intended it all to be!
Oh, and Gore invented the internet too.
Interesting that a large proportion of the posts on this thread are addressed to the issue of whether the article should have been posted or not. Does no one have any comments on the article itself?
I attended a talk about patents and patent laws while I was a summer intern at HP Labs. One of the things they said there was that they used patents mostly as a suit of things to trade with competitors challenging them. So, if IBM came to them and claimed to have a patent on something they were using, HP would counter with its own set of patents and hopefully be able to bury the whole thing.
They encouraged employees to seek as many patents as possible to make the companys position stronger when it dealt with competitors with patents.
We also need:
- "Poster on Crack"
- "Moderator on Crack" (that's meta-moderation for you)
because if I go up there and order a coke, I get a Coke, but I really wanted a Dr. Pepper
And then you wonder why people make fun of Southerners...
Finally, and most important, the legislative history makes it abundantly clear that Section 1201(f) permits reverse engineering of copyrighted computer programs only and does not authorize circumvention of technological systems that control access to other copyrighted works, such as movies.21 In consequence, the reverse engineering exception does not apply.
So is he saying the copyright software/system is not a copyrighted piece of software? Is he saying the situation is different for hardware? Doesn't that seem to be a contradicion? Anyone care to expand on this?
IANAL but I believe what he's trying to say is that while reverse-engineering copyrighted material is legal, it's not the same thing as reverse-engineering a measure to prevent access to copyrighted material. He's not against reverse-engineering per se. He's just comparing this particular instance of reverse-engineering to the act of reverse engineering a key to a lock.
No personal opinions expressed in the above.
OH please, the "protesters" in Seattle were nothing but a bunch of crackheads who didn't have a frigging clue what they were protesting. The police showed remarkable restraint and did their best to allow the protesters and the conventioners to cohabitate. It was only when the demonstrations turned violent that the police were forced to use tear-gas, to protect property and the rights of the people who had travelled from all over the World to meet each other.
I was there. I know some of the people who were "protesting". The ones I spoke with didn't have a position on the subject that could stand up to more than 10 minutes of argument. It was mostly a bunch of kids whose parents pay for school and everything else who were bored and loved to pretend there was a cause to rebel against
This is not to say that there weren't people with legitimate causes they were protesting there. They were in the minority, though
Interestingly, if you read reports in newspapers in other countries, they allege that it was the US government which indirectly encouraged the protesters to make talks impossible because it was in US interests that very little negotiations take place.
Surely everyone knows that if you want to write a real flame signifying that you have utterly and completely lost an argument you must take the time to include a detailed explanation of why the target of your flame is so similar to Adolf Hitler in every way - instead you use weak insults like "ass-wipe" or calling him "Katzhole".
Ironic, though, how the poster ranted about Katz not checking his deleted items folder to include a direct quote and then proceeds to say he would have included Jon Katz's email if he hadn't deleted it.
We need to remember here that the only bottomline that matters (and should matter) to the government is How does this affect the consumer? We as Computer Science scholars have been traditionally (and correctly so) led to believe that the OS is what boots the computer. But the average user doesn't give a damn about this!. The average user wants the "OS" to be everything that makes his computer useful.
Let's face it - regardless of whether the tactics used and the justifications offered to include IE as part of the OS were justified/legal/ethical, the consumer has benefited from it. Think about it. With a browser as part of the package the consumer gets you are guaranteed:
- A browser to surf the web with - which is what the vast majority of users care about
- Other applications are guaranteed a browser to display help files with - this is much better than the old way where they wrote proprietary help-displays
So maybe MS should sell Windows but not call it an OS because it's not correct from a CS perspective - but forcing them to sell it in different parts is only going to hurt the vast majority of users who don't give a damn what computer scientists think
This is ridiculous. When companies hire people as contractors, they are fully aware of their situation - they are fully aware of what their responsibilities are and what they will get in return. It's not a case of breach of trust or a company lying about what it would pay.
We are not talking about illiterate migrant workers who are too poor to feed themselves if they are fired one day or too stupid to understand their contract. We are talking about people who make upwards of $50,000 a year and are highly skilled and highly sought after. These people had the option to seek permanent employment at MS or anywhere else if they felt they were being under-compensated or shafted.
We are in an industry where we as tech workers are in high demand and have the ability to command compensation often in excess of what we might deserve - hardly an industry where employee protection law has a place.
.. and I was actually interested and wanted to check it out because it sounded good. Oh well, I guess I'll wait a few hours.
Maybe Ted Turner is a bigger man that Bill Gates is, but that is completely besides the point here. Don't pretend the donations never happened. If you do, that just makes you a fanatic who'll believe whatever version of the truth suits his ideology most - not someone whose opinion is one I'll take - regardless of whether it agrees with me or not.
I'm assuming that by your comments about charity you're refering to Bill Gates. Bill Gates donated 17 Billion dollars to charity over the past year. Yes, that's with a B. You're saying $100 million even compares to that? And are you implying that those charities, just because it's called the Bill Gates Fund is a way for him to channel the money back to himself and is not a "REAL charity"?
It's fine to hate a guy, to question where he got the money from, whether it's really his, whether it even matters to him, what his motivation for giving it away was, etc. but to be so blind in your hatred that you refuse to see that he actually did give the money away is just plain STUPID.
Blame your stores. The stores I go to you don't need an employees help to listen to music.
I said you didn't have to buy the CD in response to your statement that you had to pay $15 for a CD which only had 2 good songs on it. It's a simple principle: Does the cost justify the benefit to you? If it doesn't don't buy. Your argument is the intellectual equivalent of "I don't think that beach house in Malibu is worth $1 million and I don't want to pay that bastard that much money for it so I'll just squat there". When you grow up and go out into the wide world you will realize that many goods are priced beyond what they are worth to you. This is the point where you excercise your right to not buy.
Who are you trying to fool anyway? It's very obvious that some people would only pay for a CD if it is cheaper than the effort it takes for them to copy the song. Paying lobbyists off is scumbaggery but so is what you're doing. It doesn't make you any less of a scumbag in my eyes that there are other people acting like scumbags too.
Balderdash! You don't have to pay full price for a crappy CD. If you don't think the 2 good songs on the CD are worth $15, you don't have to buy it!
Have you ever actually left your momma's basement and wandered out to the big blue room? They have these stores called "Tower Records" (among others) where you can actually listen to the entire CD before you choose to buy it! Last time I was there no one interrupted or bothered me and I could take exactly as long as I wanted to. And these stores existed well before Napster so don't pretend they're doing this to remove that argument.
You mean you actually read what he wrote?? You're a brave man!
Man I wish I had some moderator points to assign to this post to rate it up.
The build number you refer to is simply that: The number of the build that you are using. A product like Win2k, while being developed, is built, say everyday as features are added and bug fixes are made. These build numbers are sequenced so they can be refered to. Ultimately, a particular build is blessed as being fit to release and that is done. This has nothing to do with versioning.
Ok, reading was obviously not one of my strongest skills. What I should have said is your cousin has now achieved the same maturity level as the average reader of slashdot.
Congratulations! You have now achieved the exact same maturity level as the average reader of slashdot - which happens to be the same as that of your 4-year-old cousin.
I eagerly anticipate the day when you guys grow up.
Here's a way I came up with the other day: This millenium will be over when 2000 years are over, i.e. at the end of the year 2000. That's when the next one will start.
India lost a space rocket to a similar error in the late '80s or early '90s. The situation in this case was a sensor reading an external value and the software taking corrective action based upon that value. The value was supposed to be 0. However, they only reserved 3 digits for it and when the value read went below -99 to -100, it just got rid of the -ve sign and represented it as 100. Of course, the corrective action taken was the opposite of what should have been taken and the rocket crashed.
Union Carbide is responsible for the action or inaction of its staff. If a company chooses to hire "poorly educated workers" as you put it, that does not shift the blame. 6,000 people died - Union Carbide is NOT the victim in this case.
Come on people. This is just sensationalist journalism. The entire story means nothing in the greater scheme of things.
That doesn't make any sense. Whether the source for Windows was open or not does not change the liability in any way.
It is being sold to people who have neither the time, nor the motivation, nor the expertise to make anything of that source and hence the source being available is immaterial. The analogy with kit airplanes is not apt because the kit airplanes are put together by the people using them and regardless the manufacturer has the reponsibility to make sure that if the instructions were followed reasonably diligently, the aircraft should be in no danger of blowing up.
Now if you want to make up special cases just so you can sleep at night that's a different thing...