Comment Re:Missing option (Score 1) 272
You fool, that's not pot! You've smoked the psilocybin!
You fool, that's not pot! You've smoked the psilocybin!
"I see no freely licensed BSD systems before 1993."
That's because of the legal issues with AT&T. Linus has been quoted as saying that if BSD UNIX had been available at the time, he probably wouldn't have written Linux.
So one could argue that the existence of Linux owes more to AT&T than just the creation of UNIX.
You obviously missed the part about "being able to tinker with everything".
The windows 7 source code is not available to be tinkered with.
So windows 7 and really any proprietary software does not meet the basic mission requirements.
You evidently don't know how big the Moon is, or how much momentum is in its orbit around the Earth. Indeed, the Moon doesn't quite orbit the Earth, but rather the Moon and the Earth orbit one another around a center quite a ways away from the Earth's center. Or you just don't know how much energy can be produced by a nuke plant - a very tiny amount compared to what's needed to push the Moon out of orbit into the Earth in any appreciable amount of time.
But if you want to keep carrying on about some fact free paranoia, that's your business. Lunacy, but your business.
There is a difference between observing users and listening to users. The way to do usability testing is to watch lots of users work with the product and pay attention to the most common problems they have, but not necessarily to listen to what they say. If they say "I don't understand feature X", then fine. If they say "You know what would make this better, you should add feature Y", then you should probably ignore them. Users know what they hate, and they sometimes know what they don't understand, but they hardly every know how to design good software.
TFA is absolutely correct that the developer should watch and stay quiet during the process. (If you've ever been a developer in this situation, you know how incredibly painful and incredibly useful it is.) But the goal of the testing process isn't for the user to give you solutions, it is for the user to shine a spotlight on the problems. Once the problems are clearly understood, the developers (and designers) have to go back to work to figure out solutions.
If Americans did not understand the resources and secrets that their government is sharing with Seoul, it does not bode well for the American democracy...
I'm sorry, are you suggesting there's something that does bode well for American democracy these days??
Sadly, the modern American brain contains a short circuit that associates any mention of "Korea" with images of "puppet sex". Adding "South" to "Korea" doesn't overcome this effect. It's all Kim Jong Il territory to US. Amuhrrikuh, fuck yeah.
If you develop in Europe and sell in US, you are impacted by US patent laws.
There are also international treaties about patent, so if you fill a patent in your country, you have a year to fill it in another country. This is well known by companies, to use this to gain one additional year of protection.
Software patents are not supposed to be valid in Europe, but they are filled anyway just in case. An invention with both hardware and software parts can be patented, so the distinction on software patent and usual patent is not so clear.
b) The woman for opening it and infecting the computer?
Yes, for abject stupidity.
That depends on how well the executable was disguised.
It depends on whether it launched when she opened the e-mail. It depends on the content and header of the e-mail itself.
It depends on the security of her home computer. Her own e-mail program or browser. The protection provided by her ISP.
Think it through.
Imagine yourself as the specific target of a malicious attachment. Crafted by someone who knew you well. Who "thinks geek."
I received an e-mail once from a respected open source project that linked directly to the Windows executable. Something I'd never seen from Microsoft.
I can patent a method of using IRC to arrange the delivery of baked goods and that would be a valid patent (actually, it's probably already patented).
No idea whether it would be valid legally because the patent office is out with the fairies but it shouldn't be valid. That's just a particular instance of the use of IRC which is a general purpose communication medium. Because it is a general purpose communication medium no patent for a specific instance of that communication should be possible. An "instance of" relation not a "use of" relation. An "instance of" relation should never be patentable because there is always prior art.
The patent office, and you to some degree, seem to be confused about the difference between words and ideas (is a file system a database?), whether ideas are the same and different (are two shades of the color orange the same or different?) and whether one idea is contained by another (is using a car to move something different from using a vehicle to move something?). The patent office doesn't seem to understand even simple concepts like Venn diagrams and the fact that words and meanings have varying overlaps and relationships. Specifically, patenting something simply because somebody has renamed and reduced the coverage of an existing concept should not be possible.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
"Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- A. Brilliant