Not surprising information for any slashdotter who had been, you know, paying attention.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's letter to Declan McCullagh defending Gore, who was primarily responsible for spreading the "invented the internet" meme via articles in Wired, dates from 2000 and is here:
(as much as the internet can the invention of anyone, it's the invention of Cerf and Kahn, who invented TCP/IP).
As they say, a lie can go around the world and back while the truth is lacing up its boots. McCullagh, whose libertarian sympathies were never much of a secret, never apologized for his role in smearing Gore. He's now chief political correspondent for CNET.
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that there's a reasonable certainty that someone who has an iPhone has an internet connection. Maybe, you know, on the iPhone itself.
As far as availability of popular stuff, it's true you don't get stuff from the big 4, but there's plenty of popular music not put out by them (Matador and Merge are fairly substantial labels and on eMusic). What have I gotten from them recently?
- Paul McCartney/Memory Almost Full - The Arcade Fire/Neon Bible and Funeral - Spoon/Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Gimme Fiction - The Decemberists/Picaresque and Her Majesty - Cat Power/The Greatest and You Are Free - Camera Obscura/Let's Get Out Of This Country - The National/Boxer - Stars/In Our Bedroom and Do You Trust Your Friends - Interpol/Antics and Turn Out The Bright Lights - Neko Case/Fox Confessor - Of Montreal/Hissing Fauna and Satanic Panic - New Pornographers/Twin Cinema and Electric Version
These aren't for the most part Top 40 acts, but ain't complete unknowns either.
Well, the specific definition of Fair Use is in legislation, but it has its basis in the Constitution. A Copyright statute without a Fair Use provision would probably run afoul of Constitutional protections on free speech; one of the effects of the copyright monopoly is to constrain others from expressing themselves in manners too similar to the protected work. So it's not entirely inaccurate to claim a Constitutional basis for Fair Use.
This guy has a higher-quality copy of the original exploit video, where he points out something pretty suspicious: though Maynor states they are using the unnamed third-party Wi-Fi card, the few seconds where the output of ifconfig is displayed indicate that the IP address they mention (192.168.1.50) is in fact attached to the internal Airport card (en1).
I beg to differ. The specific sections I quoted above seem to explicitly claim that I need their permission to modify the software in the first place, not just redistribute it. I understand the obvious right of a copyright holder to restrict redistribution of derived works, but this would seem to go far beyond that.
Reread the sections I posted, and remember that the use of "or" in a legal prohibition means that any one of the listed actions are prohibited.
You may not propagate, modify or sublicense the Program except as
expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to
propagate, modify or sublicense the Program is void, and any copyright
holder may terminate your rights under this License at any time after
having notified you of the violation by any reasonable means within 60
days of any occurrence....
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive a copy of
the Program. However, nothing else grants you permission to propagate or
modify the Program or any covered works. These actions infringe copyright
if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating
the Program (or any covered work), you indicate your acceptance of this
License to do so, and all its terms and conditions.
Under what theory of copyright law is a copyright owner allowed to restrict modification of the work? AFAIK, a copyright holder can only restrict copying of the work or derived works, but cannot restrict the creation of such derived works. I don't need FSF's permission to modify its source any more than I need a book publisher's permission to write notes on the margins.
This is a dangerous precedent; if such a clause were to be upheld, it would make any modifications of a copyrighted work subject to similar prohibitions without requiring redistribution. Freedom to tinker would be history.
That clearly depends on your definition of "perfectly good."
We're now at several iterations later (Proj Builder -> Xcode -> several revisions of Xcode) and Xcode, though it is vastly improved, still suffers substantially in head-to-head comparisons with Codewarrior (let alone Visual Studio) for products of substance (it can't even reliably figure out whether a subproject needs rebuilding unless you're forcing all your projects on a given box to build into the same directory). There are many of us moving to Xcode now because we *have to*, but I assure you, we ain't all liking it.
That being said, MW/Freescale certainly wasn't selling Codewarrior. An embedded CPU manufacturer needs a quality development environment to go along with their chipsets.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It is also incorrect that you have the right to commit libel, since it is not protected by the First Amendment. You have the ability, but that's something else altogether; if you had the right to do so, you couldn't be punished for it.
It could also be argued that Wikipedia is indeed, like your newspaper, purporting to be accurate by calling itself an encyclopedia. I think most people would, in general, rank encyclopedias higher on the credibility scale than newspapers.
If you reread the article, you will see that Seigenthaler is not advocating any specific actions; he is primarily describing a problem with the system, and advocating general principles for a solution (basically, the ability to trace back libel to contributors). That being said, he already has a solution: he can sue. As the article points out, BellSouth cannot release the subscriber information to him without a lawsuit because of privacy laws, and this strikes me as the correct balance; if he wants the name, he needs to sue and subpoena.
I'll also agree that with bcrowell above that part of the solution could be restricting Wikipedia editing privileges to logged-in users, which still provides pseudonymity. Wales is quoted in the article as having lots of problems with abusive content from anonymous users in the first place.
Christopher Lydon was the host on WBUR/NPR's "The Connection", one of the best radio interview/talk shows around. He left after a dispute with WBUR and spent some time at the Harvard Berkman Center, where he met Dave Winer and became a pioneer in podcasting by running a podcast interview show. His interviews are all available from his Berkman blog and they're consistently excellent (the breadth of the interviewees is substantial, including people such as Doc Searle, Paul Krugman, Larry Lessig, Jeffrey Sachs, Howard Dean, David Weinberger).
His company, Open Source Media, and the radio show are both very much inspired by open source values (e.g., openness, cooperation and sharing):
- All content is Creative Commons licensed (compare to OSM's obnoxious TOS). - They actively interact with their audience through blogging. - They involving the audience in show production (read How this works).
It doesn't seem like an unreasonable translation of the open source ethos to radio and media production within what's feasible.
I think his trademark case is pretty solid; he has a live registered mark (meaning the examiners have accepted it so they have the benefit of the doubt if someone claims it's not trademarkable) on Open Source as applied to a radio show and commentary website, and prior use of the trade name Open Source Media. The potential for confusion (the big criteria in TM issues) is substantial. OSM LLC, meanwhile uses all kinds of weaselly wording to handwave around the fact that they use the phrase "Open Source Media" as an alternate name for the operation everywhere while implying they're just "OSM" so that makes them not really infringing (if I started RH LLC but had the name "Red Hat" plastered all over my site and press releases, do you think I could be in a bit of a bind?).
I have no dog in this fight (except as a longtime fan of The Connection, which is not the same without Lydon), but there is really no contest IMO.
Jeez, guys, come on. This is a geek site. You'd expect more of a clue.
It has been the case for quite a while that a Mac OS X application built against a particular set of headers and stub libs will only run against those libs or newer. This means that if you build against the 10.3.9 headers (either by building against the system headers under 10.3.9 or against the 10.3.9 SDK), your code will not run in 10.3.8.
It has also been the case that the XCode install provided by Apple only provides SDK for the newest dot-releases of the OS (e.g. the current XCode installer has SDKs for 10.2.8 and 10.3.9 and no other of the 10.2.x and 10.3.x releases).
When launching applications, hard drive speed is the limiting factor
Not in the current release of OS X; the main limiting factor is the system's ability to quickly resolve the symbols in shared libraries that the app links in. This is why prebinding - the step the Installer executes when it reads "optimizing system performance", which involves locating those symbols and and mapping them into the app's code address space ahead of time - is important.
Also, AFAIK, when an app launches, the entire app code isn'tl loaded in RAM. Instead, the VM system is used to file-map the code on disk into RAM, but it may not actually load until it executes. Again, another factor why disk speed isn't as critical for launch performance as one might think.
It is a standard principle of contract law that in the case of a contract dispute any vagueness in the contract must be interpreted against the party that drafted the contract, in this case the FSF or the license grantor.
This is a nontrivial factor.
Re:If I have to hear one more thing about The Well
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The WELL might not be as important or unique as it once was, and it may be true that it gets more press than it deserves, and it is true that at times it may be insular and navel-gazingly self-contratulatory, but to dismissively lump it in as one more BBS is completely unfair and even deeply ignorant.
Companies have been able to copyright collections of facts like phone numbers so why not?
Actually, that's not the case. The applicable case is Feist vs Rural Telephone, where the Supremes ruled that copyright protection required creativity and facts are only discovered, that "sweat of the brow" (in assembling a compilation of facts) doesn't confer copyright protection, and thus simple collections of facts such as a phonebook aren't copyrightable.
Except that they have one big problem: even if whatever you develop is indeed patentable, if you make it public *before* filing, you have only 1 year after publication to file for the patent and otherwised you hosed. This is in the US; in Europe, just the act of publication makes the invention not patentable.
The patent was filed in 1999, and the "patented method" had been documented extensively in the CDDB technical documentation for years before.
This is an awfully fragile patent.
To use the term "double taxation" wrt the estate tax is a common misconception, and inaccurate.
When the person who earned the money in the first place earned it, it got taxed. That person is never taxed again on it. However, when other people receive money from that estate, they do get taxed. But it's not the same person getting the income, so it's not "double taxation."
Put it another way, why should income one gets as inheritance be preferentially taxed to income one earns? At the bottom, even if it may feel kinda like your money because it's your parents, it isn't: it's theirs. You as the inheritor are getting something you didn't have before. Why shouldn't it be taxed?
Additionally, there's also a massive windfall when it comes to inheritance: the base value for purposes of capital-gains tax calculation is reset at death. That means that if your dad bought rode CSCO for a 100x return but never sold it, then you never have to pay cap-gains on that 100x ride.
Gore proposes targeted estate-tax relief: not taxing estates up to $5M, easing up on family-owned businesses and farms (so they need not get sold to pay the estate tax on the death of the owner), etc. Bush's proposal to flat-out get rid of it is downright irresponsible.
Fun read, and interesting results on the actual tests, but really, these people haven't thought this through. Look at this paragraph:
In other words: There are no shared colors between high color (15- or 16-bit) and true color (24-bit) depths. 24-bit is the full palette, and this is the palette we use with design programs such as Photoshop. 8-bit is a subset of that 24-bit palette. The old 216-websafe palette is a subset of the 8-bit palette, identified for browser and operating system compatibility. But the 15-bit and 16-bit palettes are not subsets of the 24-bit palette; they are entirely distinct palettes. So no matter which color you choose when you're designing (excluding black and white), you cannot choose a color that exists both in the 24-bit palette and in either the 15- or 16-bit palettes.
Of course, that isn't true. For simplicity, I'll stick to the 15-bit palette in this argument, but it applies equally to 16 bits, where one component (usually green since it carries more luma) gets an extra bit.
It is true that it is potentially hard to determine which color at the 24-bits of resolution corresponds to the 15-bit representation; that is vastly different from their statement that there are no colors in common between 24 and 15 bits (5 bits per component).
Part of it is that they assume they're in an ideal (almost analog) world, where they ask the magic box in front of them to put a pixel in the screen in a particular color and the machine will give them exactly that. They think, for example, that if they ask for the 15-bit color 00000/00000/00001 (RGB), they'll get a pixel on the screen which has 0.39216% of blue and no red nor green. Of course, whether that happens depends on the hardware, and in any hardware with 8-bit-per-component DAC (most if almost all), that simply won't be the case. That blue component will be extended to 8 bits (somehow, see below), a color with a perfect match in the 24-bit palette, which they claim does not exist.
When you expand a 5-bit value into 8 bits, you basically append 3 bits at the bottom; the question is what to append. Neither all zeroes nor all ones will work, since you want 00000 to expand to 00000000 and 11111 to expand to 11111111. The simplest answer is straightforward: you expand by taking the 3 most significant bits of the 5 bit number and appending those. You can also use look-up tables, or other more complex methods. But at the end of the day, in lots if not all of cases, you end up with an 8-bit-per-component 24-bit value, derived directly from the 15-bit value.
The sad thing is, a fair bit of the rest of the article derives from this incredibily basic misunderstanding, and their tests and conclusions do seem interesting even if their reasoning is broken.
But spooky, really; these people are Senior Designers at Razorfish? Yowza.
Reproducing the abstract is easily arguable as fair-use, since, as per the four fair-use criteria:
- Purpose and Character of Use: while for a commercial purpose, it's final purpose is the properly authorized sale of the final work (if what they say about only reselling ones with permission is true).
- Nature of the Protected Work: the work is a published academic work, reproduction of which is more likely to be thought
It's a small portion of the whole work.
- Amount and Substantiality of Use: the abstract is a relatively small portion of the entire work.
- Impact of Use on Potential Market: the reproduction of the abstract has little effect on the market for the work as a whole.
The article is perfectly fine within what it was ostensibly going to address: the problems and issues of having having MacOS intertwined with UNIX.
Most of the issues you mention are emulation issues - handled inside "Classic", which is old MacOS 9 (complete with separate system image and boot sequence) running as a separate process, with no UNIX visible to the apps. Not only are such questions beyond the scope of the article, but they are particularly uninteresting given that Classic is basically old MAE (that thing Apple sold eons ago that allowed you to run MacOS inside a window on your Sun) on steroids. New Mac apps talk to "Carbon", a cleaned-up version of the APIs with none of that gunk in there, which are full UNIX processes with all the niceties (eg PMPM) that entails.
Beyond those, the text config files are there, but modified to use NetInfo (XML-based config files and a GUI over them). And yes, it's BSD, with a Mach kernel.
I mean, really, all those questions are thoroughly answered in Apple's developer documentation; go to the Mac OS X Developer Site and start reading. To have talks like this cover topics which are handily dealt with by RTFM would be a total waste.
It was hotter because most of their customers wanted it that way!
Matters not; a liquid at 180 degrees Fahrenheit can give you serious full-depth (al through every skin layers) burns in less than five seconds of contact. It's one thing to serve coffee hot; it's another altogether to serve it so hot it's actually dangerous, particularly when it's served in a drive through and thus the company has reason to believe it will be drank in a moving vehicle with greater chance of spillage (even though this wasn't the case in this particular instance).
Beyond that, the fact McDonalds had had already lots of complaints and had done nothing about them except for settling out of court points towards negligence. If it happens once, it's an accident; if it happens lots of times and McD does squat about it, it is not.
The other part of the story, which the post neglects to tell, is that the woman originally went to McD and only wanted reimbursement for medical expenses ($20k or so). McD refused altogether, and this outraged the jury into giving the woman the punitive award.
Now, what is a punitive award? It is, as the name implies, intended to punish and deter similar behavior in the future; because of its very nature, the size of such an award maps not only to the offense committed but also to the defendant's ability to pay. It's supposed to hurt. If the defendant can just shurg the award off because of deep pockets, then it's no deterrent. Thus the magnitude of the punitive award.
It's easy to spout off without knowing the facts; the facts make it clear the decision was appropriate and correct, even though big-mouthed know-nothings blast it because they're uninformed.
As I read this, DoubleClick et. al do not violate this patent. The patent requires that the tracking is done by transmitting the "unique identification code" (stored in the cookie) to a second server with a second and distinct domain name from the first.
DoubleClick et. al. do their tracking by transmitting their cookies to servers with the same domain name as the original cookie by embedding an ad stored on their domain in the target page.
If that were the case, then only newly-released movies would be region-coded. However, virtually every disc released by a major US studio is region coded.
Slashdot Mirror
Not surprising information for any slashdotter who had been, you know, paying attention.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's letter to Declan McCullagh defending Gore, who was primarily responsible for spreading the "invented the internet" meme via articles in Wired, dates from 2000 and is here:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html
(as much as the internet can the invention of anyone, it's the invention of Cerf and Kahn, who invented TCP/IP).
As they say, a lie can go around the world and back while the truth is lacing up its boots. McCullagh, whose libertarian sympathies were never much of a secret, never apologized for his role in smearing Gore. He's now chief political correspondent for CNET.
>But not everyone has internet connection
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that there's a reasonable certainty that someone who has an iPhone has an internet connection. Maybe, you know, on the iPhone itself.
You're mistaken about not being able to see the catalog:
http://www.emusic.com/browse/all.html
As far as availability of popular stuff, it's true you don't get stuff from the big 4, but there's plenty of popular music not put out by them (Matador and Merge are fairly substantial labels and on eMusic). What have I gotten from them recently?
- Paul McCartney/Memory Almost Full
- The Arcade Fire/Neon Bible and Funeral
- Spoon/Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Gimme Fiction
- The Decemberists/Picaresque and Her Majesty
- Cat Power/The Greatest and You Are Free
- Camera Obscura/Let's Get Out Of This Country
- The National/Boxer
- Stars/In Our Bedroom and Do You Trust Your Friends
- Interpol/Antics and Turn Out The Bright Lights
- Neko Case/Fox Confessor
- Of Montreal/Hissing Fauna and Satanic Panic
- New Pornographers/Twin Cinema and Electric Version
These aren't for the most part Top 40 acts, but ain't complete unknowns either.
Well, the specific definition of Fair Use is in legislation, but it has its basis in the Constitution. A Copyright statute without a Fair Use provision would probably run afoul of Constitutional protections on free speech; one of the effects of the copyright monopoly is to constrain others from expressing themselves in manners too similar to the protected work. So it's not entirely inaccurate to claim a Constitutional basis for Fair Use.
This guy has a higher-quality copy of the original exploit video, where he points out something pretty suspicious: though Maynor states they are using the unnamed third-party Wi-Fi card, the few seconds where the output of ifconfig is displayed indicate that the IP address they mention (192.168.1.50) is in fact attached to the internal Airport card (en1).
I beg to differ. The specific sections I quoted above seem to explicitly claim that I need their permission to modify the software in the first place, not just redistribute it. I understand the obvious right of a copyright holder to restrict redistribution of derived works, but this would seem to go far beyond that.
Reread the sections I posted, and remember that the use of "or" in a legal prohibition means that any one of the listed actions are prohibited.
These sections seem off, and even dangerous:
Under what theory of copyright law is a copyright owner allowed to restrict modification of the work? AFAIK, a copyright holder can only restrict copying of the work or derived works, but cannot restrict the creation of such derived works. I don't need FSF's permission to modify its source any more than I need a book publisher's permission to write notes on the margins.
This is a dangerous precedent; if such a clause were to be upheld, it would make any modifications of a copyrighted work subject to similar prohibitions without requiring redistribution. Freedom to tinker would be history.
Am I totally misreading this?
That clearly depends on your definition of "perfectly good."
We're now at several iterations later (Proj Builder -> Xcode -> several revisions of Xcode) and Xcode, though it is vastly improved, still suffers substantially in head-to-head comparisons with Codewarrior (let alone Visual Studio) for products of substance (it can't even reliably figure out whether a subproject needs rebuilding unless you're forcing all your projects on a given box to build into the same directory). There are many of us moving to Xcode now because we *have to*, but I assure you, we ain't all liking it.
That being said, MW/Freescale certainly wasn't selling Codewarrior. An embedded CPU manufacturer needs a quality development environment to go along with their chipsets.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It is also incorrect that you have the right to commit libel, since it is not protected by the First Amendment. You have the ability, but that's something else altogether; if you had the right to do so, you couldn't be punished for it.
It could also be argued that Wikipedia is indeed, like your newspaper, purporting to be accurate by calling itself an encyclopedia. I think most people would, in general, rank encyclopedias higher on the credibility scale than newspapers.
If you reread the article, you will see that Seigenthaler is not advocating any specific actions; he is primarily describing a problem with the system, and advocating general principles for a solution (basically, the ability to trace back libel to contributors). That being said, he already has a solution: he can sue. As the article points out, BellSouth cannot release the subscriber information to him without a lawsuit because of privacy laws, and this strikes me as the correct balance; if he wants the name, he needs to sue and subpoena.
I'll also agree that with bcrowell above that part of the solution could be restricting Wikipedia editing privileges to logged-in users, which still provides pseudonymity. Wales is quoted in the article as having lots of problems with abusive content from anonymous users in the first place.
Christopher Lydon was the host on WBUR/NPR's "The Connection", one of the best radio interview/talk shows around. He left after a dispute with WBUR and spent some time at the Harvard Berkman Center, where he met Dave Winer and became a pioneer in podcasting by running a podcast interview show. His interviews are all available from his Berkman blog and they're consistently excellent (the breadth of the interviewees is substantial, including people such as Doc Searle, Paul Krugman, Larry Lessig, Jeffrey Sachs, Howard Dean, David Weinberger).
His company, Open Source Media, and the radio show are both very much inspired by open source values (e.g., openness, cooperation and sharing):
- All content is Creative Commons licensed (compare to OSM's obnoxious TOS).
- They actively interact with their audience through blogging.
- They involving the audience in show production (read How this works).
It doesn't seem like an unreasonable translation of the open source ethos to radio and media production within what's feasible.
I think his trademark case is pretty solid; he has a live registered mark (meaning the examiners have accepted it so they have the benefit of the doubt if someone claims it's not trademarkable) on Open Source as applied to a radio show and commentary website, and prior use of the trade name Open Source Media. The potential for confusion (the big criteria in TM issues) is substantial. OSM LLC, meanwhile uses all kinds of weaselly wording to handwave around the fact that they use the phrase "Open Source Media" as an alternate name for the operation everywhere while implying they're just "OSM" so that makes them not really infringing (if I started RH LLC but had the name "Red Hat" plastered all over my site and press releases, do you think I could be in a bit of a bind?).
I have no dog in this fight (except as a longtime fan of The Connection, which is not the same without Lydon), but there is really no contest IMO.
Jeez, guys, come on. This is a geek site. You'd expect more of a clue.
r Tools/Conceptual/cross_development/index.html for more info.
It has been the case for quite a while that a Mac OS X application built against a particular set of headers and stub libs will only run against those libs or newer. This means that if you build against the 10.3.9 headers (either by building against the system headers under 10.3.9 or against the 10.3.9 SDK), your code will not run in 10.3.8.
It has also been the case that the XCode install provided by Apple only provides SDK for the newest dot-releases of the OS (e.g. the current XCode installer has SDKs for 10.2.8 and 10.3.9 and no other of the 10.2.x and 10.3.x releases).
See Apple's Cross-Development Programming Guide at http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Develope
This is no intentional crippling. It's just how XCode works. No conspiracy here, move along.
Not in the current release of OS X; the main limiting factor is the system's ability to quickly resolve the symbols in shared libraries that the app links in. This is why prebinding - the step the Installer executes when it reads "optimizing system performance", which involves locating those symbols and and mapping them into the app's code address space ahead of time - is important.
Also, AFAIK, when an app launches, the entire app code isn'tl loaded in RAM. Instead, the VM system is used to file-map the code on disk into RAM, but it may not actually load until it executes. Again, another factor why disk speed isn't as critical for launch performance as one might think.
It is a standard principle of contract law that in the case of a contract dispute any vagueness in the contract must be interpreted against the party that drafted the contract, in this case the FSF or the license grantor.
This is a nontrivial factor.
The WELL might not be as important or unique as it once was, and it may be true that it gets more press than it deserves, and it is true that at times it may be insular and navel-gazingly self-contratulatory, but to dismissively lump it in as one more BBS is completely unfair and even deeply ignorant.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was organized and founded at the WELL. The annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences were started and are still ran at the WELL. Wired Magazine was partially organized on the WELL. The infamous and frauduluent cyberporn Time cover story that made passage of the CDA a foregone conclusion was systematically demolished and exposed and opposition organized at the WELL. And these are just the most salient examples.
Actually, that's not the case. The applicable case is Feist vs Rural Telephone, where the Supremes ruled that copyright protection required creativity and facts are only discovered, that "sweat of the brow" (in assembling a compilation of facts) doesn't confer copyright protection, and thus simple collections of facts such as a phonebook aren't copyrightable.
See this page for more info.
fatwallet is in the right, but unfortunately they don't have the resources to fight this.
MIT Technology Licensing Office Guide
Actual facts are often useful in these discussions. See:
The terms don't seem altogether unreasonable to me.
Except that they have one big problem: even if whatever you develop is indeed patentable, if you make it public *before* filing, you have only 1 year after publication to file for the patent and otherwised you hosed. This is in the US; in Europe, just the act of publication makes the invention not patentable. The patent was filed in 1999, and the "patented method" had been documented extensively in the CDDB technical documentation for years before. This is an awfully fragile patent.
To use the term "double taxation" wrt the estate tax is a common misconception, and inaccurate.
When the person who earned the money in the first place earned it, it got taxed. That person is never taxed again on it. However, when other people receive money from that estate, they do get taxed. But it's not the same person getting the income, so it's not "double taxation."
Put it another way, why should income one gets as inheritance be preferentially taxed to income one earns? At the bottom, even if it may feel kinda like your money because it's your parents, it isn't: it's theirs. You as the inheritor are getting something you didn't have before. Why shouldn't it be taxed?
Additionally, there's also a massive windfall when it comes to inheritance: the base value for purposes of capital-gains tax calculation is reset at death. That means that if your dad bought rode CSCO for a 100x return but never sold it, then you never have to pay cap-gains on that 100x ride.
Gore proposes targeted estate-tax relief: not taxing estates up to $5M, easing up on family-owned businesses and farms (so they need not get sold to pay the estate tax on the death of the owner), etc. Bush's proposal to flat-out get rid of it is downright irresponsible.
Fun read, and interesting results on the actual tests, but really, these people haven't thought this through. Look at this paragraph:
In other words: There are no shared colors between high color (15- or 16-bit) and true color (24-bit) depths. 24-bit is the full palette, and this is the palette we use with design programs such as Photoshop. 8-bit is a subset of that 24-bit palette. The old 216-websafe palette is a subset of the 8-bit palette, identified for browser and operating system compatibility. But the 15-bit and 16-bit palettes are not subsets of the 24-bit palette; they are entirely distinct palettes. So no matter which color you choose when you're designing (excluding black and white), you cannot choose a color that exists both in the 24-bit palette and in either the 15- or 16-bit palettes.
Of course, that isn't true. For simplicity, I'll stick to the 15-bit palette in this argument, but it applies equally to 16 bits, where one component (usually green since it carries more luma) gets an extra bit.
It is true that it is potentially hard to determine which color at the 24-bits of resolution corresponds to the 15-bit representation; that is vastly different from their statement that there are no colors in common between 24 and 15 bits (5 bits per component).
Part of it is that they assume they're in an ideal (almost analog) world, where they ask the magic box in front of them to put a pixel in the screen in a particular color and the machine will give them exactly that. They think, for example, that if they ask for the 15-bit color 00000/00000/00001 (RGB), they'll get a pixel on the screen which has 0.39216% of blue and no red nor green. Of course, whether that happens depends on the hardware, and in any hardware with 8-bit-per-component DAC (most if almost all), that simply won't be the case. That blue component will be extended to 8 bits (somehow, see below), a color with a perfect match in the 24-bit palette, which they claim does not exist.
When you expand a 5-bit value into 8 bits, you basically append 3 bits at the bottom; the question is what to append. Neither all zeroes nor all ones will work, since you want 00000 to expand to 00000000 and 11111 to expand to 11111111. The simplest answer is straightforward: you expand by taking the 3 most significant bits of the 5 bit number and appending those. You can also use look-up tables, or other more complex methods. But at the end of the day, in lots if not all of cases, you end up with an 8-bit-per-component 24-bit value, derived directly from the 15-bit value.
The sad thing is, a fair bit of the rest of the article derives from this incredibily basic misunderstanding, and their tests and conclusions do seem interesting even if their reasoning is broken.
But spooky, really; these people are Senior Designers at Razorfish? Yowza.
Reproducing the abstract is easily arguable as fair-use, since, as per the four fair-use criteria:
- Purpose and Character of Use: while for a commercial purpose, it's final purpose is the properly authorized sale of the final work (if what they say about only reselling ones with permission is true).
- Nature of the Protected Work: the work is a published academic work, reproduction of which is more likely to be thought It's a small portion of the whole work.
- Amount and Substantiality of Use: the abstract is a relatively small portion of the entire work.
- Impact of Use on Potential Market: the reproduction of the abstract has little effect on the market for the work as a whole.
Thus, I wouldn't call the abstracts "stolen."
Most of the issues you mention are emulation issues - handled inside "Classic", which is old MacOS 9 (complete with separate system image and boot sequence) running as a separate process, with no UNIX visible to the apps. Not only are such questions beyond the scope of the article, but they are particularly uninteresting given that Classic is basically old MAE (that thing Apple sold eons ago that allowed you to run MacOS inside a window on your Sun) on steroids. New Mac apps talk to "Carbon", a cleaned-up version of the APIs with none of that gunk in there, which are full UNIX processes with all the niceties (eg PMPM) that entails.
Beyond those, the text config files are there, but modified to use NetInfo (XML-based config files and a GUI over them). And yes, it's BSD, with a Mach kernel.
I mean, really, all those questions are thoroughly answered in Apple's developer documentation; go to the Mac OS X Developer Site and start reading. To have talks like this cover topics which are handily dealt with by RTFM would be a total waste.
Matters not; a liquid at 180 degrees Fahrenheit can give you serious full-depth (al through every skin layers) burns in less than five seconds of contact. It's one thing to serve coffee hot; it's another altogether to serve it so hot it's actually dangerous, particularly when it's served in a drive through and thus the company has reason to believe it will be drank in a moving vehicle with greater chance of spillage (even though this wasn't the case in this particular instance).
Beyond that, the fact McDonalds had had already lots of complaints and had done nothing about them except for settling out of court points towards negligence. If it happens once, it's an accident; if it happens lots of times and McD does squat about it, it is not.
The other part of the story, which the post neglects to tell, is that the woman originally went to McD and only wanted reimbursement for medical expenses ($20k or so). McD refused altogether, and this outraged the jury into giving the woman the punitive award.
Now, what is a punitive award? It is, as the name implies, intended to punish and deter similar behavior in the future; because of its very nature, the size of such an award maps not only to the offense committed but also to the defendant's ability to pay. It's supposed to hurt. If the defendant can just shurg the award off because of deep pockets, then it's no deterrent. Thus the magnitude of the punitive award.
It's easy to spout off without knowing the facts; the facts make it clear the decision was appropriate and correct, even though big-mouthed know-nothings blast it because they're uninformed.
As I read this, DoubleClick et. al do not violate this patent. The patent requires that the tracking is done by transmitting the "unique identification code" (stored in the cookie) to a second server with a second and distinct domain name from the first.
DoubleClick et. al. do their tracking by transmitting their cookies to servers with the same domain name as the original cookie by embedding an ad stored on their domain in the target page.
Different process altogether.
If that were the case, then only newly-released movies would be region-coded. However, virtually every disc released by a major US studio is region coded.