We all know that being better doesn't mean anything in this industry.
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
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.
Now they’ve said that this only applies if the product was made in the US. So if you buy something that was made outside the US, and the company who manufactured it claims that it is a copyrighted work, they have the right to control everyone who is allowed to sell it... which means you can’t sell it without their permission.
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.
Dyslexia means never having to say that you're ysror.