Nice qualification, there, but... There is no question that this is an abuse. The images that BuckyBalls could have any claim to are publicly available anyway and the usage of the name is in reference to the product. So... There is no way that the company could have filed a takedown notice without perjuring themselves. And yes, it is perjury - a DMCA takedown notice is also a sworn affidavit that you have the legal right to actually file the notice. (ie: the video or music in question violates a copyright you hold or that you have been hired to enforce the copyright holders interests)

Further, the DMCA contains some strict prohibitions against mis-use and some nasty punishments in any case where it is mis-used. Since the people at Zen Magnets hold the copyright to the video, BuckyBalls (or their parent company) have no copyrights that are being infringed and hence have no legal standing to file a DMCA takedown notice on the video. QED: If the people at Zen Magnets handle this correctly, the "Goliath" of the "magnetic sphere" industry will feel the pain of having an idiot for a CEO.

The thing is that an FPS or a benchmark generally stress the entire card - testing the 3D rasterizers, the shaders, etc... all at the same time. With this problem - which Blizzard actually acknowledges - what is being stressed is one part of the card - the part that handles outputting a mostly static 2D image. The card, as a whole, might be designed to withstand abuse, but if the card has a single part being stressed hard, then it will likely violate its TDP and, in systems with poor airflow and cooling, cause the card to overheat and possibly "melt".

While I cannot see this "melting" being a problem for more than a small number of people it is likely that even some gamers that have designed their systems to run, say, Crysis, at more than 60fps could see problems. And there are a lot of people that have done that - the thing is that it might not be a problem for most people, but it will be enough of a problem for the "serious gamer" target audience for SC2. Anyway... You are correct in that most games run without caps - they don't need it because their inter-frame processing effectively caps them.

(*prepares to get modded into oblivion*)

That does not make my argument any less true. The argument was that claiming "but I thought it was valid" makes filing a false DMCA notice totally legal. If "but I didn't know it was illegal" made breaking the law okay, every criminal would do it.

And thinking about it, there is a well-defined range of DMCA notices that are perjury. Which just reinforces the widely held belief (I can't call it a fact as much as I'd love to) that the DMCA is a bad law. There is nothing that truly stops it from being mis-used - which, to me, would make it "unconstitutionally vague".

And there is no need for any other coverage, really. If you send out a DMCA takedown and do not hold copyright to the material you are demanding be taken down - and have not been authorized to "act on behalf of the copyright holder" - then by having filed the DMCA takedown notice you have perjured yourself.

It's not hard to understand - this does mean, however, that every bad DMCA Takedown is prosecutable under extremely well-known law.

"Ignorance of the law is no defense"

Basically... this means that sending any invalid DMCA notice is, in fact, a violation of the law - regardless of what the person that sent it might have thought or believed at the time they did it.

You have obviously never run into the quality of people I have. I quite regularly get calls from family, friends of family (and their friends, who I've done work for) to fix their windows machines. So while this isn't FUD, it isn't unique to Open-Source at all.

And the integration thing? It is happening all over the place. It used to be that Gnome used CORBA and KDE used DCOP to do things like provide application interfaces that could be hooked from other applications (to, say, be able to control your music-player from your IRC program) and also provide a sane place to find some system data. Now they both use DBUS. Which actually provides a lot more flexibility for the interfaces than DCOP or CORBA ever did... And it also ties into the 'hardware access layer' so that you can find information about all the hardware in the machine in one place.

But really... It sounds like you are calling for projects to merge so that there is less choice and more talent focused on individual projects. I hate to say it, but that will never occur

I see you took out the whole section where I covered the well documented cases of MS abusing its position in an attempt to force existing competitors out of a specific market (or out of business entirely) and to keep new competitors from entering that same market.

Oh, I see... You are trying to make the claim that because Dell and certain other OEM's now offer Linux that they didn't because it wasn't ready. Sorry, but you fail your history check - part of the US DoJ's case against MS was that they did things like threatened to revoke bulk-licensing deals if anything other than an MS OS was offered as an option for a new machine or required that every machine - regardless of whether or not it shipped with an MS OS installed - be counted when it came to calculating the price of the bulk-license. That is what kept Linux off of machines from major manufacturers.

I've run Linux on three different laptops now. All three of them were "new" when I purchased them. All three of them have had better battery life in Linux. One of them reported having 4+ hours available at full-charge in Windows, but would last maybe 2 hours - where in Linux it reports just shy of 3 hours and actually lasts just shy of 3 hours. So YMMV - this is why I suggest people not trust my anecdotal evidence without doing research and/or testing.

Last version of Windows that I actually ran in more than a VM was XP (Service Pack 2) and that one required me to reboot when I installed USB web-cam. No, it should not have required it, but it did.

I do no research to know if a device is supported by Linux. And no, this isn't because I have been using Linux for years. You make a statement about the driver CD... Well, I have never needed a "driver CD" for a piece of hardware in Linux. So your argument there is a non-starter.

Exactly. And when I purchased my current laptop from Dell and told them to include Linux on it, it magically works flawlessly. I am not, now, running the version of Linux that shipped on the machine - but it is still fully functional. So what, exactly, is your point?

I have to agree with you here. But Linux fails because it does not (and has never) tried to hide any of the power of the operating system from the user. It also was not designed by a small team with a single vision of what the OS should be.

I also have to agree with you on the 'Sane and Stable Driver API' bit. However... With the move to providing more and more interfaces for running drivers directly in user-space I am seeing a change here. And when those interfaces for running drivers completely in userspace are solid and complete, then I will agree with the Linux Kernel policy of "no stable driver ABI".

Really? Let me call your attention to Mac OSX. It is a Unix operating system - it has passed all tests and the people that control the UNIX trademark have given Apple the go-ahead to brand it as a 'Unix'. So I guess your contention that UNIX isn't a good base for a desktop OS is dead in the water.

About Haiku... I tried BeOS back in the final days before it died. I absolutely loved it. The P3-500 I was running it on ran like a Dog when running Windows (IIRC, I had 2k installed) and felt like a new machine when running BeOS. So I am hoping the Haiku can recapture all of that feeling. If I had a machine I could spare for it, I would actually give the current Alpha a try on bare-metal.

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The above post contains data from both third-party sources and anecdotal evidence. Do independent research and/or testing before trusting either.

So the fact that numerous people - myself included - use Linux every day for basic tasks doesn't make it usable? The fact that my somewhat technophobic and highly computer-illiterate father often borrows my linux laptop for browsing the web doesn't make it usable? That my sixty year-old mother has requested that, for any computer I build her, I make sure Linux is installed doesn't make it usable?

Linux TRIES to compete as a consumer product. What happens? Well... Back when the Pentium was new MS told OEM's one of two things - either 'we are going to charge you for a license for every computer you manufacture, regardless of whether it has our OS on it or not' or 'If you sell computers with any OS on it that we did not produce, you will lose the bulk-licensing price-cut we give you'. In other words they forced computer manufacturers to put MS created OS's on their machines - forcing any competition out of the market.(*)

And now MS has forced so much mis-information into the public mind that teachers confiscate copies of Linux install disks, claiming they are illegal... Best Buy employees are taught that Windows is the only way to go... The public is taught that a machine of a lower-price is better than a Mac - despite the fact that the Mac generally has a better processor, better video card, bigger hard drive and more RAM than the lower-price machine... MS basically does everything it can to keep the public from ever learning the truth about alternatives to its stranglehold on the OS market.

Yes, Linux has historically had problems handling new hardware. But these days it can run a wider range of hardware correctly than Windows can. I don't really even have to research things anymore - if I go to Wal-Mart, Best-Buy or any other big chain store and purchase a piece of hardware, it is almost certain to be supported by Linux. As an example... Two weeks ago I walked into the local Wal-Mart here, purchased a web-cam and an MP3 player without ever doing research about supported hardware or even looking for a "works with linux" stamp on the packaging. I get home and plug the web-cam in - and it works(**). I plug the MP3 players dongle into the device and into the laptop and it shows up. Everything fully supported. In Windows I'd have had to install the drivers and reboot before I could do anything.

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This post contains factual information from third parties as well as anecdotal evidence. You should not trust either before doing research and fact-checking.

HTML5 with its XML encoding was just a "convenient example". The specific example in question has NO bearing on the fact that the XML dialect with the features described in the patent is obvious. It is so obvious, in fact, that numerous word processors have supported the features in various forms in their binary file formats. What that means that including them in an XML version of the same type of file is plainly obvious. Not just obvious but so obvious you'd have to be completely brain-dead to NOT include them.

Or are you still going to try and argue that my point is wrong because I gave an example that you want to find fault with?

Sorry if you didn't manage to read my entire comment to understand what I was actually saying. What I was saying is "HTML5 and its XML encoding are blindingly obvious, just as the XML dialect covered by this patent is blindingly obvious" - ie: the USPTO's "obviousness test", which, apparently, the USPTO is not fit to apply to any patent on software or relating to software

(the "obviousness test" is simple - "is this obvious to someone skilled in the field ?")

You, apparently, have missed out and not read the actual claims of the patent. This patent covers any XML document which has an XSD definition and has:

• rendering hints via an element or property of an element
• a bookmarks element (of which two must be used to be valid)
• a comments element
• a 'text' element
• a 'style' element
• a 'font' element
• a formatting element
• a section element
• a table element
• an outline element
• a proofing element

And any variation of implementation on the above. It also covers the manipulation of a file meeting that description on any computer—whether or not it has the program that generated the file installed.

The thing is... this patent can be read as covering HTML5 in its XML embedding and it completely fails the "obviousness test". How does it fail that test? Because it is, simply, plainly obvious to "one skilled in the field". A lot of the above features have been proposed for ODF and are braindead to add to ODF or any other XML format. Additionally XML is used as a format for storing data simply because it is a well defined format and easily manipulated--so easily, in fact, that there is a complete language defined for manipulation and transformation of XML.

Where it really fails is that it is neither "new" nor "novel. If Netscape had tried to patent the specific version of HTML supported by, say, Navigator 4 there would be as big a backlash. It'd be similar to someone implementing an open spec - say ECMA-262 - and claiming a patent on it as "new" and "novel" because it has a specific set of system interface functions.

Or maybe you'd like a car analogy... In this case it would be like GM filing a patent on a car because their car has a specific feature set as a standard that a company has not put out as standard options before. I hope you now understand exactly why people are rather pissed about this patent.

Okay, I'll admit that I'd missed that completely when I was talking to the lawyers and reading the law for myself.

This may pass the test. From what I can tell, Wolfram Alpha is not a generic search engine that indexes content available on the web - it is, instead, an interface to a database of facts that were input by the Wolfram people. Since they most likely hold copyright to the input data, then the "mechanically generated translation" (ie: the results pages) of it retains the copyright of the original data.
 

General search engines that base their database off the results of spiders indexing the web cannot have their results pages independently copyright because it is a "mechanical translation" and therefore carries the copyright(s) of the original works. This holds true for the output of compilers and similar tools.
 

NOTE: IANAL and the above is based on numerous discussions I have had with lawyers and my own reading of the US Copyright statutes. So YMMV. Also note that the above only applies in the US - other countries copyright legislation may allow for the results of a "mechanical translation" to carry their own, independent copyrights.

There is an old saying - "Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach."

Not saying that there aren't professors out there who can do what they are teaching. What I'm getting at is you ran into one of the large number that actually fit the old saying perfectly.

RTFA. Go on, do it.

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Done? Now go and re-read the comments.

Oh, done already? Now tell me - where has anyone claimed that the author of TFA was a shill? What has happened here is the guy got in a bit of trouble over use of the Ubuntu trademarks. Rather than just admit that he had made a mistake, he decided to start spewing FUD about how trademarks are bad.

That act - and that act alone - is why he has been called a troll.

Actually, the whole 'Piracy' thing was speculated in the original article that the original summary linked to.

However... If you RTFA you'll find that AT&T and Verizon are claiming that the owners of the datacenters are committing the fraud. If this is about interconnect fees I can see it, but from TFA it looks like it's about some other type of fee and the two big companies went to the FBI with claims of it being a massive violation of the RICO statutes.

If TFA is to be trusted then they are trying to claim that the datacenter owners also own the companies that are defrauding them. The owner of one of the datacenters has vehemently denied this and states that the companies at fault are clients and the bills they owe the Telco's are not his responsibility. (which sounds logical enough to be true - though logic seems to have little to do with the majority of laws)

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And this post has probably blown what Karma I had...