Well, if a vendor or a coalition of vendors demands 10x the royalties for a possibly slightly superior technology, I'm not sure that being better should mean anything. Otherwise if every vendor started doing that for every piece of technology, we would suddenly have very expensive hardware.

Why do you think you need to be #1 in everything? Yeah, I know I'm going to be modded down as flamebait, probably rightly so, but still this needs to be said.

What makes you think you even can be #1 in everything? Now I realize you Americans tend to see yourselves as #1 in everything, or that's how it looks to the rest of the world, expect the few hot topics of the day where you grudgingly admit falling to "#2 place" (probably because you think it as "#1: Rest of the world; #2: America" so there is no third place) and which nobody remembers a week from now.

Seriously. You cannot compete and win in everything. You choose your specialty and excel in that. Then you spin that as the most important thing in the world so you can feed your overly nationalistic prides. That's what it looks like to the rest of the world. But even then you sometimes you have to make strategic changes to your areas of focus.

No, it's not like most other countries don't do that kind of chutzpah, but there's a difference in degree. It seems to have a strong correlation to all kind of flag-waving and pledges to the flag in classrooms. That too happens mainly 1) in African banana republics and 2) the USA. And the rest of the developed world cares more about case #2 because we have more dealings with you. Please, please grow up and realize that the world doesn't revolve around you. You cannot be #1 in everything. You are not that great and that much above everybody else, and that kind of arrogance only serves to annoy the rest of the civilized world.

And on Unix/Linux it's not really even a feature, it's something that naturally follows from the powerful "everything is a file" ideology. Optical drives show as more or less image files, and mounting them is not that different from mounting, well, image files (ISOs). I believe that has been supported since well before CDs and .ISOs. It's a testament to the power of the Unix philosophy that other operating systems actually need to separately support this.

That's just bullshit. A Linux distro is the party that provides the software to you. It's not "third party software". You report bugs to the distribution. You get updates from the distribution. The distribution does the stabilization and integration work to make everything work smoothly with all the other packages in the system. Granted, most of the packages have upstreams, but that doesn't make it "third party" software. The distribution is the gatekeeper. They make all the decisions on what the users get and what they don't. They configure, build and package the software. They often make significant changes to the software, for example keeping track of security bugs and backporting fixes to their stable releases. The upstreams cannot push upgrades (or malware) to users, but have to go through the distribution.

And if things break, if you get malware in a package, the distribution is the party that loses its reputation. They have a reputation to protect, unlike many third parties, which might want to get some extra revenue from people who click on ads to "optimize their IP address" or some such crap. That's why the packages from a distribution won't come with IE toolbars that are installed along with the package.

The distribution idea, to make a centralized party to act as a gatekeeper and to take the third parties out of the equation for a normal user, is the revolutionary idea that ensures a well-working ecosystem. It's far from being "just a collection of third-party software". And it's the one major thing that is so wrong in the Windows world and that makes Windows a ripe platform for malware and crappy software that doesn't work nicely with other crappy software.

It's nowhere near as confused as the ruling by a UK top court a few years ago about software patents.

A traditional argument for software patents has been that "look, it does have a physical effect - it makes electrons move in a certain way". The UK court ruled that algorithms are not patentable, unless the algorithm in question has an effect on the computer that makes it "a better computer", such as by "making more memory available for programs" or "making it run faster". Now I'm actually convinced that it wasn't a desperate decision by the court in order to keep software patents either: UK's response to an European Patent Office questionnaire about whether algorithms should be patentable largely repeated the conclusions of the court, and it's hard to say that it was a pro-SWPAT stance, although it certainly wasn't an anti-SWPAT stance. It was plainly and simply a confused stance which did not make any sense at all.

The grandparent didn't say "clock speed doubles". It said "processing power doubles". In the last few years those things have been very distinct, in some cases processing power increasing while clock speeds have actually become lower.

What I've been wondering (not that I'd hope to see it implemented) is why there are no bar codes in banknotes. Wouldn't that be a relatively cheap and low-tech way to enable rather widespread tracking?

Ah, the classic way of trying to misuse copyright to hide embarrassing facts about you. In most cases that got to courts it was eventually determined that most emails are not creative enough to warrant copyright protection, and the fact that your motive is to hide the facts, not protect the specific expression of those facts, also speaks against you. Plainly, that's not what copyright is for, and the courts don't usually sanction trying to use it for that. One factor against copyright in this particular case is that the message was highly fact (or allegation) rich and not some elaborate prose warranting copyright protection.

Moreover, you can only ever claim copyright on the expression, not the particular facts in the message. Even in the rare case where your message enjoyed copyright protection, nothing would prohibit the recipient from telling anyone about everything you said in the message in their own words.

Finally, one important factor against copyright infringement (and for fair use) is that the issues presented are of public importance and that the publication is not done for profit.

Publishing email sent by you may be rude, but that's really the extent of it.

No, they haven't. This has nothing to do with where the product was manufactured and everything to do with where it was first sold to the public. Therefore, once the product (the individual watch in this case) was first sold in the US with the permission of the rights holder, after that they can no longer control further sales. In this case the watch was never sold in the US with the rights holder's permission, so the first sale doctrine does not apply in the US.

All this applies regardless of where the watch was actually manufactured. It might have been manufactured in the US but never sold in the US with permission, and the situation would have been the same. So essentially it's not about first sale; it's about first sale in the US.

Xylitol is not an artificial sweetener.

Interesting post. I usually try to stay out of the religious discussion on slashdot, because, really, it's full of people who have heard some arguments against Bible and think they are experts on the subject even without having ever read it. Invariably none of them have heard of the rather clear distinction between moral law (that is supposed to be eternal) and the ritual law that forbade the Israeli from e.g. mixing separate materials in clothing in some ways, to remind them of their covenant with God - which the New Testament has made abundantly clear is not God's current covenant with people (there's a reason it's called the Old Covenant). But no, bashing the Bible with poor reasoning appears to be so fun that anyone should do it, regardless of whether they've ever read it. Come on, people, you can find better arguments against the Bible, they certainly do exist, and you can figure them out. Of course that might require, heavens forbid, actually researching stuff instead of just blindly bashing and repeating arguments invented by equally ignorant people.

But I'm not blaming you for all that. I get the feeling your post contains kind of authentic puzzlement about the behavior of us Christians. That's good. I think it deserves an answer. I'll do my best to explain in the hope that you find some kind of answer to your puzzlement in my words.

What you are wondering about is one quality that I believe truly sets Christianity apart from other monotheistic religions. What you describe is, I believe, actually quite close to Islam (and I'd say that Islam and Judaism are much closer to each other than either to Christianity). Islam teaches us thus, simplifying things a bit: If you can believe in God (Allah), that's undoubtedly good; but even if you can't, the most important thing is that you submit. The literal translation of the word "islam" is "submission" (and "muslim" = "one who submits"). This is reflected in popular muslim names like Abdullah, "slave of Allah".

The relationship of God to people, as reflected in the Old Testament, is somewhat like that, but my feeling is that it's not that strict in a sense. The emphasis, in any case, is on good deeds, and to an extent obeyance. Somewhat in contrast to Islam, the Old Testament still talks about God adopting Israel as its people, and giving them his good law because he knows, like a father setting limits to his daughter, that it's good to the people. Even in the OT, it's more of a parent-child relationship than master-slave. In the Old Testament, the child is the people of Israel.

In the New Testament, the death of Jesus changes things materially. It begins a New Covenant, replacing the old one that the people of Israel had broken so many times anyway. The death of Jesus provides a complete atonement of the sin of mankind. The Bible literally promises that to those who believe, all their sins are forgiven because of the blood of Jesus. In fact, this is a core tenet of Christianity: That every person, no matter how Christian, is a sinner, and repeatedly commits sin; that nothing they do themselves can redeem themselves. However the Bible also promises that we can leave all our sins to Jesus, and he will wash them away. It's not a matter of ego, as you say:

Indeed, it's hard to believe that God forgives all our transgressions, but that's what the Bible says about the matter. It also says that if the death of Jesus did not atone some of our sins, there would be no way to heaven for any of us. Yes, to a Christian life is a journey towards life less controlled by sin, but nobody will become so good that he would not need God to wash away his sins. This may seem like excusing doing anything at all, because we know we will be forgiven. That's half true - we know we will be forgiven, no matter whether our transgression is a hurting word said to a brother or a whole genocide.

That's where we get back to slavery and submission, but in a perhaps unexpected way. Remember, God's law is good for us humans, but we are incapable of following it because we are tarnished by sin. The NT turns the slavery thing on its head. We, the entire humanity, are born in sin, live in sin and die in sin. We're slaves to sin. We do bad things to others, ourselves and the nature even if we agree they are bad. There's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can strive to live better, getting rid of individual vices, but we're so rotten by sin that no matter how much dirt we peel off ourselves, we're still tarnished, slaves to sin. And because God is infinitely holy, i.e. cannot tolerate sin, anyone who sins is banished forever from the presence of God; there is no heaven for anyone who is slave to sin.

What the New Testament offers us is freedom from that slavery. In it God has offered to adopt us as his own children and heirs. He knows that we will still commit sin until we die, but he has offered to wash us clean and let us start anew every time we come to him. He has promised to love us and care for us like a father cares of his own children. The offered freedom is this: We no longer need to sin. We still stumble, because that's our nature, but the children of God know of something better, not found in themselves (because we're all rotten), but in God, who is fully free of any sin. We find ourselves doing what we know is wrong, but we know that we don't need to be slaves to that.

God's holiness is one of the often forgotten aspects of God amongst those who love to bash. God is infinitely holy, infinitely loving and infinitely merciful. There's no compromise there. Often people only talk about the love aspect and even then equate it to a Father giving his children everything they want. But uncompromising holiness, I think, is the reason why not everyone can go to Heaven. It's simply not possible for sin to enter heaven. Christ's death was a curious solution that allows uncompromising holiness to coexist with uncompromising love, because of the atoning blood paying for our sins that we could not pay for ourselves. Holiness demands full payment for sins. It's not so much God throwing bad people to Hell as it's that being where people are going, and God offering a way out of it, fully paid with an extreme sacrifice because we have nothing to pay with ourselves, to anyone who accepts the gift.

So, you see, the issue is not that we Christians need to constantly watch our words and deeds in the fear that we will be cast to Hell for them. We know we're forgiven. True, we can get occasionally get lost from the good path because of that freedom, and to most Christians life does seem to come in cycles where we find or at least feel ourselves closer to God at times and closer to this world and sin at others (but it's not feelings that matter - we can trust we're saved because it's promised in the Bible, no matter if we feel we deserve it). For many of us, the perceived unconditional love we get from God eventually drives us to try to live better, in the hope that we can love because we're loved ourselves.

I followed the two main DeCSS cases closely, reading all the legal documents produced, but it's been a while since then.

I wish you were right, but I'm afraid the same arguments that led to a permanent injunction in Universal v. Reimerdes in 2000 (and affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2001) against the defendants distributing DeCSS would quite easily be used against anyone distributing libdvdcss. In the US, that is.

I'm quite hopeful that using DMCA to suppress computer programs could eventually be declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court on the basis that computer programs are in fact pure speech (not unlike recipes) that computers only interpret automatically. But the defendants in the Reimerdes case dared not venture there, probably for a good reason - EFF, which represented Reimerdes, stated their belief that it's better to wait for a case in which the media industry has not succeeded in portraying the defendants as criminals and hackers just wanting to pirate movies (and it would be even better if one court had sided with them).

Nope. The law of the land is actually currently the 2008 decision of Federal Circuit of In re Bilski, which pretty much invalidated software patents. By the way, expect a Supreme Court ruling on that any day now (it's already overdue at more than 7 months).

The prohibition of playing a DVD has nothing to do with software patents (see DMCA).

Well, if you are talking about enforcing an EU judgment inside EU, you are talking about an entirely different animal altogether.

However your constant use of wrong basic legal terms (charges vs. claims, confusing plaintiff and defendant in some weird way, ...) suggests to me that if you have been a part to such proceedings, you certainly did not understand what was happening.

And contractual cases are a bit more nuanced obviously too, since you actually had a contract with the claiming party. Typically that would also include a choice of law clause. That would be a very valid case to enforce.

No. You are twisting the words beyond any reason. And clearly you don't know anything about what you are talking about. You claim to be some kind of expert in this, yet you clearly don't even know the difference between claims and charges.

As to the list:

(1) It should be fairly obvious to you that they do not have a place of business in US.

(2) I've read the actual papers of the case, although some years ago, and don't remember there being any counterclaims (unless you want to demonstrate your ignorance further by asserting that merely moving to federal court is a counterclaim).

(3) No, they did not. At every step they protested judgment.

(4) WTF? You admit it was remanded, yet you claim the judgment is final. You have no clue.

(5) "Obviously satisfied" is quite a clueless statement here. Even in the US you can get suits thrown out when the defendant demonstrates that they were not properly served.

I suggest you also read the examples in the document. They demonstrate quite nicely that enforcing a foreign judgment of a foreign state with which there is no treaty is nowhere near that automatic you claim. In each of the cases in that document, the claims that the party had requisite contacts were quite a bit stronger than in e360. In each of those cases there was a judgment in US court. And in each of those cases, the UK court refused to enforce.

There even was a case (US v. Inkley) where the US government seeked to enforce a default monetary judgment in a fraud case, where the defendant had been present and arrested in Florida, but the US government had stupidly let him leave the country. The judgment obtained was not enforceable in UK. How do you explain that if you think it's so automatic?

(Note that inside the EU it's quite a bit more automatic, since they have treaties on the subject. So a judgment in Spain would be much more easily enforceable in the UK than a judgment in US.)

The leading case on the foreign law enforcement judgment is Jimmy Wayne Adams and others v. Cape Industries plc and Capasco Limited [1990] 2 WLR 657. Steven Loble acted for the plaintiffs in that case which involved the common law enforcement of judgments obtained in Texas by 206 plaintiffs injured by asbestos. The judgments were obtained against the defendants in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Tyler Division and proceedings were brought in the High Court of Justice in London to enforce the judgments. The court declined to enforce the judgment for the following reasons:-

(1) The defendants were not present in the country of the foreign court when the proceedings were commenced;

(2) It would be contrary to natural justice/public policy to enforce the judgment on the grounds that there had been no proper judicial assessment of the damages.

Again, I suggest you go read the document which you refer to, since it by any honest reading doesn't support your position at all.