My gutt tells me there isn't enough money in the OSS community to protect customers from Microsoft
That's not really the question; the question is whether there is enough of a combination of money and legitimate grounds in the community to replace the litigation threat that spawned the Novell-MS deal with a reactive threat to discourage more such deals.
The Zeroth Law might play a role here, though.
Not, of course, that Asimov's Laws are likely to constrain real-world robots any more than they do real-world humans.
Someone's been reading a bit too much Asimov. A better question is, under what possible set of circumstances would ANYONE market a product that would want to behave indepently from it's owners wishes?
Not everything people create is created out of the desire to "market" a "product".
If the technology exists to create sentient beings from scratch, whether the nature of the technology is biological, electronic, or something else, someone will do it, out of the desire to create, to "play God" if you will.
Both Data, and the Voyager holo-doctor were assumed to be essentially uncopiable for the most part on several occasions. In reality, we can see no reason that a strong AI couldn't be simply copied without adverse effects.
Since we have no idea of how strong AI could be acheived, we have no idea of whether or not it would be copyable. Certainly, we have no basis for assuming a strong AI, if it can be acheived at all (which I personally think it likely can), would be any more subject to nondestructive copying than, say, human intelligence.
So? The comment about the mail was in response to your claims about the difficulty of getting to the capitol, which might remotely have something to do with the practicality of exercising the right of petition (if one overlooks things like mail), but certainly has nothing to do with the right of assembly, which can be exercised anywhere people can gather.
Why is the RIAA trying to sue someone in another country.
Because the RIAA thinks their legal rights are being violated.
The US has no jurisdiction.
The US, as do most soveriegn nations, exercises jurisdiction over violations of its laws wherever in the universe they may occur. It may, by its own law, restrict the territorial applicability of its laws, and, of course, successful litigants may have trouble executing judgements against foreign actors, but that's a different issue.
Anyhow, Americans didn't start this, we're just copying the British (not the last paragraph of the article.)
Are you saying that the states would have been within their rights, under the federal constitution to establish official religions and to outlaw the practice of others before the 14th amendment?
Not only am I saying that, but several states had official religions at the time of ratification of the Bill of Rights, and continued to maintain them with no trouble with the first amendment around for decades; the last state religions in the US were eliminated in, IIRC, the 1820s.
Some states, of course, had guarantees of freedom of religion, to a greater or lesser extent than in the US Constitution, in their own state Constitutions (including some of those with state religions, IIRC; protections similar to the free exercise clause were more common than those similar to the establishment clause.)
In the 1700s, most people didn't have the means or resources to go to the nation's capitol. It would have been extremely difficult to just get to their state capitol.
Yes, so? They had mail in the 1700s. And other ways of petitioning governments without going to their capitol. Plus, having a right doesn't mean that "most people" have the means to exercise it effectively.
What crimes did the Federal government have to investigate in the 1700s?
Quite a few. Customs violations would be, IIRC, the first criminal laws enacted by the First Congress, within the first month or two the Congress was active in 1789.
Are you saying that state governments were permitted to force people to testify against themselves, charge them twice with the same crime, or execute them without due process of law before the 14th amendment?
Yes, probably not (double jeopardy protection had, IIRC, been widely established prior to the Constitution, though occasionally violated), and probably not (again, most states had their own constitutional due process protections, the amendment existed because so that the same limits would apply to the feds.)
The founders knew that the vast majority of trials would be held by the states, it's nonsensical to think that they would go to the efford to protect the rights of people only in the smallest possible number of trials.
States had their own protections; like many provisions of the bill of rights, the protections here were to guarantee that the same (or at least similar; the states were not identical) rules limited the feds as already limited states in their own Constitutions. They were afraid of a central authority that might abuse rights locally well-established. There'd been something a tiff resulting from that a few years in their past...
Then again, if you think that "the people" refers to "the individual states of the union", then maybe your understanding is sufficiently lacking to think just about anything.
Since I've never said anything like that, maybe you should pay attention before tossing out gratuitous insults.
Could a state have imposed a quadrillion dollar bail for a misdemeanor before the 14th amendment was added?
Probably not, for reasons discussed for previous limits. Again, you are simply repeatedly demonstrating your ignorance of the purpose and context of the Bill of Rights.
This is one of those things that is "true, but simplified to the point of being misleading"; even under the so-called "objective" approach to interpretation, usages in trade, the course of dealing between the parties, and all kinds of other things that would to anyone but a lawyer be considered evidence of subjective intent rather than objective meaning of the words will be considered in determining intent.
There is an essential difference between a threat of litigation from Microsoft, and a similar threat from any grassroots community. MS has the cash on hand to fund litigation until they've emptied the pockets of nearly any opponent - they can file motion after motion which you must reply to or face the very real possibility that the judge will summarily rule in MS's favor (since you failed to respond). The resulting legal bills are extremely cost-prohibitive.
OTOH, a diverse pool of litigants can have the same effect in aggregate by filing lawsuit after lawsuit to which you must respond or risk summary judgement, further, prevailing on a particular issue of against one does not guarantee prevailing on the same issue against another. (Or, when the claims are common, they can institute a common action and pool resources.) And its a lot harder to make a deal with a diverse pool to completely remove the threat of litigation once its perceived in the marketplace and becomes a drag on your product.
Can the Samba team do that? Samba is released under the GPL, and even though Novell may be violating the intent of the GPL it's not violating the actual license agreement itself.
I'm not sure that's the case; certainly, Allison's position sounds as if it is that the deal violates at least the spirit and possibly the letter of the license. Certainly, a high profile group of suppliers of GPL software included in Novell's Linux offerings raising the specter of litigation and license violations over the deal would undermine the primary purpose and destroy the value of the deal, which was, after all, to help Novell sell its commercial Linux products by removing uncertainty associated with them stemming from the specter of litigation over the IP violations.
If there is a cloud of GPL-related potential litigation seen surrounding Novell, all its done is traded one potential source of litigation for many potential sources of litigation.
No, I haven't. What I've done is have some understanding of the history and context of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The 1st specifically applies to Congress, while the 2nd applies to "the people".
Again, your missing the forest while looking at the trees. The entire Constitution applies to define what actions the federal government may and may not take, except where it explicitly applies against the states.
Even if you take the ridiculous position that "the people" means "the states",
The position is not that "the people" means "the states", but that the actor against whom the restriction applies is the federal government, not the states.
the 14th extends that right to individuals, as well. If the 14th transfers rights (like speech) to the people, clearly it must transfer the right to keep and bear arms.
Why must it make that right applicable against the states? It doesn't do so for the right to jury trial in civil cases created by the 7th amendment or the right to be free of prosecution for capital or "infamous" crimes except by indictment in the 5th. And neither of those are founded on an explicit statement of purpose based on state interest as the RKBA in the 2nd is.
It's for everyone: if companies are forced to sell where wouldn't sell, this would affect the prices and quality of service for everyone.
Yes. For instance, it would positively affect the quality of service for people who, with local monopolies given the choice, will receive no service at all.
There are cases where even "evil monopolists" should be left to do certain aspects of their business without regulators messing in it.
A local franchise decision is a granting of exclusive rights by a public body; why should that public body not be allowed to condition such a grant based on the interests of its constituents?
And that "position" is obviously politically motivated.
Its a political issue. Any position on it is, unquestionably, politically motivated.
None of the other occurances of "the people" is intended to confer a collective right
Every one of the other instances of "the people" in the Bill of Rights was intended to, and does, confer a right only enforceable against the federal government, or, IOW, a right which belongs largely to the states in that the power to act in the way it prohibits was reserved to them. Some, but not all, of the rights in the Bill of Rights were later applied against the states through the 14th Amendment.
Not true. The 4th, 5th, 6th & 8th amendments are clearly aimed at state/local governments. And the 7th is most likely directed towards a lower level of government than federal.
You are clearly ignorant of the history of the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular. All of those were aimed directly and solely at the federal government, they were based on reservations the states had in ratifying the Constitution without guarantees that the new federal government would not repeat the encroachments that had provoked the revolution. While certainly many people at the time would want similar rules to apply to their state governments, the federal Constitution was not the vehicle for that, state constitutions were (in fact, several of the state Constitutions already had similar protections and formed the model for some of those provisions in the federal Constitution.)
The 7th Amendment, in particular, was not only not aimed at lower governments, its not even among the provisions applied to state governments later through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. If you have a right to trial by jury in civil cases (other than federal cases), it derives from state law, and probably kicks in at a much higher level than $20.
Basically, the ACLU's position is that the government needed to guarantee its own right to be armed and put it into the bill of rights no less.
This is inaccurate, because it presents "the government" as a single entity. The entirety of the Bill of Rights was crafted as guarantees against the federal government (including, but not limited to, the 2nd Amendment.) The ACLU position (and that of many others) is that the 2nd amendment was a guarantee against federal regulation that would take the ability to maintain an armed militia away from the states and thereby jeopardize the security and independence of the states.
There was a period when the results from scanned books were always mixed in with web results, and then it abruptly changed.
Since they are a different kind of result, the use of OneBox is consistent with the rest of the Google interface—if you use the web search, you get web results in the main, but if there are particularly appropriate results by some more limited algorithm in one of the other databases, you also may get a handful of those in the OneBox area immediately after the sponsored links, and before the main resutls.
I think they're just trying to reduce their legal exposure in this lawsuit -- if fewer people use it, then the damages are smaller if they lose.
I think its far more likely that they made the Book Search a specialized search that presented its results the same way other specialized searches do through OneBox for consistency and because of the reasonable idea that people choosing to use the web search engine want web results primarily.
I'm a kind of baffled why people are talking about starting up new projects or Open Sourcing (tm) google's prject (whatever that means...).
"Open sourcing" Google's project, as others have used the term in the thread, would seem to mean providing, at least, an open API so that different collections could federate easily, and perhaps providing an Open Source implementation of some of parts of that API, as well.
Project Gutenburg is open and non proprietary (ASCII text) and has been for quite a while.
Project Gutenberg isn't a full-text search system delivering scanned images of printed works.
While it is has some conceptual relation to the system at issue, it doesn't fill exactly the same role.
I get three Google Books hits from the original search without using books.google.com, just off the main google engine. Now, Google search results aren't particularly consistent (refreshing the search will sometimes change the results, and frequently cause sponsored links and OneBox results to disappear, as will, IIRC, doing multiple different searches in rapid succession).
Regular Google search: Search terms 'book math'. Book results come up as a special heading after sponsored links and before regular results.
As far as I can tell, the results returned by books.google.com and google.com are disjoint sets.
They clearly aren't disjoint, but are instead overlapping (particularly, the book results returned by the main search engine are a proper subset of those that would be returned using the main book search page); I think this is typical of the way Google presents "OneBox" results, where it uses services other than the prime database in a more limited way than if you used the service directly.
At any rate, that it is possible to get results from the book database without making any special effort to use it just by using the main google search engine makes it pretty far from Google actively concealing the service.
Part of the fallout from the lawsuit has been that Google has done everything it could to hide from users the fact that the service even exists.
Its on the short list "More" link on the Google search page, and results from it are brought up without special request for certain searches on the main web search engine (apparently, any with the word "book" that get hits, though I'm not certain of that.)
That's hardly Google doing "everything it could to hide from users the fact that the service even exists".
That seems perfectly reasonable to me, assuming they do have a search warrant to look at that other person's computer.
No, what they usually have is the consent of the other person, who doesn't care about your privacy. Additionally, there usually is no practical remedy if the person whose privacy is violated isn't the one that the evidence is used against, as the principal remedy for illegally seized evidence (exclusion at trial) can only be invoked by the person whose rights are violated. Evidenced seized in violation of someone else's rights won't be excluded.
So we'll never max out the resources of the PS3??? The PS3 owners playing "Full Auto 2" and "Fight Night 3" (and "Tiger Woods PGA 07" - as if anyone actually bought the PS3 to play golf) would suggest otherwise.
Its quite possible that the problems with those titles are due to lack of development experience with the console and not using its resources well; certainly, problems from that were notable in several early PS2 titles.
Presumably, because SOAP doesn't make them any money, where AJAX, with the TOS they have, will, by generating ad views.
The SOAP API was always one of those things everyone should have known would either go away (if it wasn't successful in the right way to create a commercial market, maybe micropayment supported) or become non-free (if it was successful enough). With Google not too long ago announcing that they would be looking at the number of offerings they had, one had to expect that things like the SOAP service that had no tie to generating revenue would be at risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, anyway, all the new instances will be below the legal voting age.
The Zeroth Law might play a role here, though. Not, of course, that Asimov's Laws are likely to constrain real-world robots any more than they do real-world humans.
Not everything people create is created out of the desire to "market" a "product".
If the technology exists to create sentient beings from scratch, whether the nature of the technology is biological, electronic, or something else, someone will do it, out of the desire to create, to "play God" if you will.
Since we have no idea of how strong AI could be acheived, we have no idea of whether or not it would be copyable. Certainly, we have no basis for assuming a strong AI, if it can be acheived at all (which I personally think it likely can), would be any more subject to nondestructive copying than, say, human intelligence.
So? The comment about the mail was in response to your claims about the difficulty of getting to the capitol, which might remotely have something to do with the practicality of exercising the right of petition (if one overlooks things like mail), but certainly has nothing to do with the right of assembly, which can be exercised anywhere people can gather.
Because the RIAA thinks their legal rights are being violated.
The US, as do most soveriegn nations, exercises jurisdiction over violations of its laws wherever in the universe they may occur. It may, by its own law, restrict the territorial applicability of its laws, and, of course, successful litigants may have trouble executing judgements against foreign actors, but that's a different issue.
Anyhow, Americans didn't start this, we're just copying the British (not the last paragraph of the article.)
Not only am I saying that, but several states had official religions at the time of ratification of the Bill of Rights, and continued to maintain them with no trouble with the first amendment around for decades; the last state religions in the US were eliminated in, IIRC, the 1820s.
Some states, of course, had guarantees of freedom of religion, to a greater or lesser extent than in the US Constitution, in their own state Constitutions (including some of those with state religions, IIRC; protections similar to the free exercise clause were more common than those similar to the establishment clause.)
Yes, so? They had mail in the 1700s. And other ways of petitioning governments without going to their capitol. Plus, having a right doesn't mean that "most people" have the means to exercise it effectively.
Quite a few. Customs violations would be, IIRC, the first criminal laws enacted by the First Congress, within the first month or two the Congress was active in 1789.
Yes, probably not (double jeopardy protection had, IIRC, been widely established prior to the Constitution, though occasionally violated), and probably not (again, most states had their own constitutional due process protections, the amendment existed because so that the same limits would apply to the feds.)
States had their own protections; like many provisions of the bill of rights, the protections here were to guarantee that the same (or at least similar; the states were not identical) rules limited the feds as already limited states in their own Constitutions. They were afraid of a central authority that might abuse rights locally well-established. There'd been something a tiff resulting from that a few years in their past...
Since I've never said anything like that, maybe you should pay attention before tossing out gratuitous insults.
Probably not, for reasons discussed for previous limits. Again, you are simply repeatedly demonstrating your ignorance of the purpose and context of the Bill of Rights.
This is one of those things that is "true, but simplified to the point of being misleading"; even under the so-called "objective" approach to interpretation, usages in trade, the course of dealing between the parties, and all kinds of other things that would to anyone but a lawyer be considered evidence of subjective intent rather than objective meaning of the words will be considered in determining intent.
OTOH, a diverse pool of litigants can have the same effect in aggregate by filing lawsuit after lawsuit to which you must respond or risk summary judgement, further, prevailing on a particular issue of against one does not guarantee prevailing on the same issue against another. (Or, when the claims are common, they can institute a common action and pool resources.) And its a lot harder to make a deal with a diverse pool to completely remove the threat of litigation once its perceived in the marketplace and becomes a drag on your product.
I'm not sure that's the case; certainly, Allison's position sounds as if it is that the deal violates at least the spirit and possibly the letter of the license. Certainly, a high profile group of suppliers of GPL software included in Novell's Linux offerings raising the specter of litigation and license violations over the deal would undermine the primary purpose and destroy the value of the deal, which was, after all, to help Novell sell its commercial Linux products by removing uncertainty associated with them stemming from the specter of litigation over the IP violations.
If there is a cloud of GPL-related potential litigation seen surrounding Novell, all its done is traded one potential source of litigation for many potential sources of litigation.
No, I haven't. What I've done is have some understanding of the history and context of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Again, your missing the forest while looking at the trees. The entire Constitution applies to define what actions the federal government may and may not take, except where it explicitly applies against the states.
The position is not that "the people" means "the states", but that the actor against whom the restriction applies is the federal government, not the states.
Why must it make that right applicable against the states? It doesn't do so for the right to jury trial in civil cases created by the 7th amendment or the right to be free of prosecution for capital or "infamous" crimes except by indictment in the 5th. And neither of those are founded on an explicit statement of purpose based on state interest as the RKBA in the 2nd is.
Its a political issue. Any position on it is, unquestionably, politically motivated.
Every one of the other instances of "the people" in the Bill of Rights was intended to, and does, confer a right only enforceable against the federal government, or, IOW, a right which belongs largely to the states in that the power to act in the way it prohibits was reserved to them. Some, but not all, of the rights in the Bill of Rights were later applied against the states through the 14th Amendment.
You are clearly ignorant of the history of the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular. All of those were aimed directly and solely at the federal government, they were based on reservations the states had in ratifying the Constitution without guarantees that the new federal government would not repeat the encroachments that had provoked the revolution. While certainly many people at the time would want similar rules to apply to their state governments, the federal Constitution was not the vehicle for that, state constitutions were (in fact, several of the state Constitutions already had similar protections and formed the model for some of those provisions in the federal Constitution.)
The 7th Amendment, in particular, was not only not aimed at lower governments, its not even among the provisions applied to state governments later through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. If you have a right to trial by jury in civil cases (other than federal cases), it derives from state law, and probably kicks in at a much higher level than $20.
This is inaccurate, because it presents "the government" as a single entity. The entirety of the Bill of Rights was crafted as guarantees against the federal government (including, but not limited to, the 2nd Amendment.) The ACLU position (and that of many others) is that the 2nd amendment was a guarantee against federal regulation that would take the ability to maintain an armed militia away from the states and thereby jeopardize the security and independence of the states.
Since they are a different kind of result, the use of OneBox is consistent with the rest of the Google interface—if you use the web search, you get web results in the main, but if there are particularly appropriate results by some more limited algorithm in one of the other databases, you also may get a handful of those in the OneBox area immediately after the sponsored links, and before the main resutls.
I think its far more likely that they made the Book Search a specialized search that presented its results the same way other specialized searches do through OneBox for consistency and because of the reasonable idea that people choosing to use the web search engine want web results primarily.
"Open sourcing" Google's project, as others have used the term in the thread, would seem to mean providing, at least, an open API so that different collections could federate easily, and perhaps providing an Open Source implementation of some of parts of that API, as well.
Project Gutenberg isn't a full-text search system delivering scanned images of printed works.
While it is has some conceptual relation to the system at issue, it doesn't fill exactly the same role.
I get three Google Books hits from the original search without using books.google.com, just off the main google engine. Now, Google search results aren't particularly consistent (refreshing the search will sometimes change the results, and frequently cause sponsored links and OneBox results to disappear, as will, IIRC, doing multiple different searches in rapid succession).
They clearly aren't disjoint, but are instead overlapping (particularly, the book results returned by the main search engine are a proper subset of those that would be returned using the main book search page); I think this is typical of the way Google presents "OneBox" results, where it uses services other than the prime database in a more limited way than if you used the service directly.
At any rate, that it is possible to get results from the book database without making any special effort to use it just by using the main google search engine makes it pretty far from Google actively concealing the service.
Its on the short list "More" link on the Google search page, and results from it are brought up without special request for certain searches on the main web search engine (apparently, any with the word "book" that get hits, though I'm not certain of that.)
That's hardly Google doing "everything it could to hide from users the fact that the service even exists".
Sadly, no, the US is not the only country with "such a strict view on drinking", several countries have much stricter views (e.g., Saudi Arabia.)
No, what they usually have is the consent of the other person, who doesn't care about your privacy. Additionally, there usually is no practical remedy if the person whose privacy is violated isn't the one that the evidence is used against, as the principal remedy for illegally seized evidence (exclusion at trial) can only be invoked by the person whose rights are violated. Evidenced seized in violation of someone else's rights won't be excluded.
Its quite possible that the problems with those titles are due to lack of development experience with the console and not using its resources well; certainly, problems from that were notable in several early PS2 titles.
Presumably, because SOAP doesn't make them any money, where AJAX, with the TOS they have, will, by generating ad views.
The SOAP API was always one of those things everyone should have known would either go away (if it wasn't successful in the right way to create a commercial market, maybe micropayment supported) or become non-free (if it was successful enough). With Google not too long ago announcing that they would be looking at the number of offerings they had, one had to expect that things like the SOAP service that had no tie to generating revenue would be at risk.