Posts by Tom 13

Re: you won't be able to see in the evening,

I realize you missed the sarcasm, but that was sort of his point.

BTW: You might not be able to see at night, but I will. Stocked up on the old reliable stuff before it all got bought out. And you laughed about my underground bunker.

Oh, and that knowledge comes from an odd patent situation with an OEM supplier I once worked for. They had a patent for something in the US. Somebody in France saw the idea, made a trivial change and patent it in France. Our company tried to overturn the French patent but lost. So when we sold our stuff in France, we had to pay the patent fee even though the idea originated with us, but there was no fee for us outside of France. This was all pre-EU, so I am going back quite a bit.

Re: They buy them. From people like Philips, Cree etc.

Doubtful.

If they did, that's the sort of thing that would be resolved by sending documentation that their parts are being purchased from a manufacturer who pays the royalty. (Not much point in Cree et al. paying for the patent rights if they can't sell an unencumbered product.)

More likely the Chinese vendor supplying the parts to another Chinese vendor aren't paying the patent fees. Because since it's a US patent, they aren't subject to them and it's all legal inside China. But once it enters the US, it is a whole different story. At that point, the outfit receiving the imports becomes liable.

Re: would there be any infraction?

Yes. If I happen to live near the border of say Canada and I go to Canada and buy stolen goods from a guy who crosses the border into the US to steal them, I'm still liable for receiving stolen goods if the US guy finds them in my domicile.

Now the penalty for the infraction might vary depending on how involved the target company was in the infraction. If they just specified LEDs and there is a non-infiringing LED which was available that might be a lower penalty than specifying the LEDs in such a way that only non-infringing LEDs would meet the requirements. Also, part of the usual process for filing these complaints is for the lawyer of the plaintiff to send an official letter to the defendant before filing charges. If the offense was inadvertent it allows both parties to work out a good faith agreement to pay the license fees without getting the courts involved.

Personally, since LEDs have been around since the Dark Ages when I was in high school, I think this one stinks, but it looks like it comports with current law. Of course I may be missing some detail in the patent which makes it new and relevant.

Re: the usual snarky tone that there is something amiss.

There is something amiss and it deserves the usual snarky tone.

MS engineered their software for ease of use at the expense of security. Despite many remakes and PR efforts that remains at the heart of their exploit issues. The *nix kernels are even bigger targets because in the server world they run most of it on the Really Good Stuf (TM). And in theory* because the code is out there you ought to be able to hack it more easily. But the number of critical flaws in the *nix kernel are lower precisely because unlike MS, their kernel is ONLY a kernel, not a mishmash of everything from the kernel through the applications.

*In practice the many eyeballs seems to negate theory, but the meme persists.

Re: those who are "known to the authorities"

Part of what Snowden's release is alleged to tell us is that the NSA keeps the raw internet traffic as well. Which means it ought to searchable for the traffic that generates the attacks. And since the attack was against a legitimate commercial website, the government of Ecuador should be able to request US assistance in locating the perpetrators of those attacks. At which point the US authorities ought to be able to generate a search warrant to find the data. Continue as necessary until the perp is located in meat space as well as cyberspace.

Of course this all assumes Snowden was telling the truth about how the data is collected, stored, and accessed as well as how much data is collected. If any of that is wrong, all bets are off.

Re: will get a much lighter sentence than Snowden

1) Has he stolen and revealed state secrets from the state in which he was a citizen?

2) Has he subsequently fled to competitor nations to seek asylum?

If the answer to both of the questions is 'No' then they are different crimes with different guidelines and should be tried in accordance with those guidelines. So long as the courts adhere to the guidelines the sentences are fair, regardless of the total time served.

That being said, yes this character should be caught and jailed. Just like Snowden and Bradley and Assange.

Re: rounding up supporters of the former government

The way I read it, they were rounding up the leaders of a government that for good and sufficient reason had lost the support of the people.*

But rant on anyway.

*Is this a dangerous path? Certainly. Does this increase the odds of Egypt devolving into some sort of military dicatorship? Again, certainly. But I'm doubtful the other path was any less dangerous.

Re: Perhaps a better question. How does this compare with the *models* of behavior

You do know that well before Copernicus and Kepler they had very complex and reasonably accurate models that predicted where the planets would be don't you? Models are significantly less than worthless if you don't have good science behind them.

Granted if the model doesn't at least predict the science behind it is wrong which is your major point, but just because the model is predictive doesn't mean the philosophy behind it is correct. Moreover, I think Galileo et al prove the extent to which some with a vested interest in certain philosophical ideas are will to go to preserve their belief systems.

Re: Go and look at some science history

Don't need to. I learned the memes about the Muslims saving science for us in the Dark ages back in school. Unfortunately for those memes I can also see the state of the world today, which is the practical experiment in the outcomes of the differing world views of the two religions. And much as you clueless Europeans and your American counterparts have an ism akin to antisemitism, the result is that science flourishes wherever you have Christianity while it diminishes where Islamism holds sway.

Re: worrying about it is a problem for these guys

SEP fields only work in Douglas Adams stories.

And here we have the proof that warmists know nothing about science:

summers are longer

Re: why?

Yes actually making the inquiries would have been as foolish as what he did. But there are ways to plan that sort of thing.

Re: even with modern technology.

Technology has never been the problem with organizing government. It has always been the people it is intended to govern. If the people will not mitigate their own evil intentions by obtaining morality through religion, those intentions will flow through and find expression in the government as well.

Re: have a real-life experiment in town square democracy

Your real life experiment looks to me like replay of the French Revolution(s). And while I would like to see the current despot deposed, have no confidence that his replacement will be any better than the one just removed. And even though at this point it certainly looks to me like the military is (thankfully) acting on the will of the people, I do not hold great hope that it will end any better than the French ones did.

Re: Americans still don't get to elect their presidents directly

Speed was part of the reason, but not the only one. The US Constitution has always been directed at protecting as large a portion of the minorities as possible and as recognized by the cultural norms of the time. One of the great compromises in passing the constitution was adopting the exact method of Presidential election. If done strictly by popular vote it would have given too much power to the large states. If done as one vote per state (the EU model) it gave the small states too much power. Instead it was combined into an electoral college where each state had a fixed number of votes plus a number of votes based on the size of its population. Usually this means if you win the popular vote you will win the general election, but if you trample too much on the small states you will get a President who did not win the popular vote.

Re: was to prevent the nation from becoming a democracy?

I know you are responding to a different Tom (who is a twit and got a down vote on his post from me) but given that the founders generally equated democracy as it was then understood with mob rule, there is a sense in which this is correct. Where the twit went off the rails was in implying the real purpose was to institute a regime without restraints on its power, untethered to any conception of morality, and bound only by the ambitions of those who could manipulate it to obtain ever greater power. The form of Republican government the founders attempted to engineer was one in which the evils of mob rule could be constrained while maintaining as tight a connection to the people's moral authority as possible. That we have subsequently ignored their warnings and cautions about the perils of democracy degenerating into mob rule is our own fault and not theirs.

Re: valid case for asylum.

I'll be honest, I'd like to see him brought back, tried, then properly shot.

But setting that aside for the moment, let's look tactically at the question. He doesn't necessarily need asylum per se. What he needs is to stay alive, and a place from which to do so. This should actually be fairly easy to achieve. As I noted in my opening statement, I want him shot. Being shot is the standard outcome for his type of treason. Therefore all he really needs is to be in a country that won't extradite if there's a chance he'd face the death penalty. Regardless of how much I hate the lying SOB in charge of our country, one thing I can count on is him not backing down if he's been personally offended, and on this one he's decided he was personally offended. So he'll never take the death penalty off the table to get the extradition. So once Snowden is in a non-death penalty country it is a stalemate. And those states are generally willing to issue asylum for cases that would otherwise be legitimate criminal cases. If he can't find one, that tells you there are other issues in play. Probably that regardless of how much flack we're catching for spying on world+dog at the moment, the truth is world+dog is doing it too or at least benefiting from what we've done. And if he stays on the loose that inconvenient truth might just leak too.

Is this an amoral bastage analysis? Yes it is. So is the world. Deal with it.

Re: calls from the US state dept it took

I doubt it was from the US government. Those would have been more likely to encourage them to take him, no matter what leverage they thought they were attempting to apply. More likely an EU country that realized it had as much to fear as the US. UK would be at the top of the list except everybody knows they're at the top of the list so it would be stupid of them to do so. Although it could have been Russia. Snowden is mostly used up and now they need to dispose of the body without being seen to be disposing of the body.

Re: The Romans would have understood.

The Romans would have put him to the sword without a second thought.

Re: What exactly did Snowden think was going to happen?

He expected he'd be hailed as hero and welcomed back to a ticker tape parade. There was no thought involved. Typical Progressive behavior pattern.

Re: All the world is a stage

Assange didn't embarrass The Big 0 personally, Snowden did. Snowden should have paid a bit more attention to the IRS TEA Party scandal before honking of the new Leroy Brown.

Re: but reality doesn't comply with the fantasies of those who set licensing policies.

Here, here!

I don't personally operate at the SME contractor level anymore, but was a low level tech for one for a number of years. Even from the money grubbing perspective this decision doesn't make sense. Yes it might net them a few bucks over the very short term, but somewhere between a year and three out it has to hit them hard. You've pointed out real problems for businesses trying to build test environments. Another issue is that MS, more than any else out there, depends on "amateurs" who can't afford to pay extortionate training rates spending time working with the software to work up to "professional" levels and then delivering that service.

Re: Now is the time? [@ Trevor_Pott

Sound to me like a user issue, not a Thunderbird one.

I easily configured mine for top quoting with my signature under the reply. All my mail comes into a single folder from which I sort it into storage folders. So on the rare occasion of a completely new install, a single click fixes the date order. Given that I frequently opt to sort on other fields this really isn't an issue. And none of my changes has ever been reconfigured on upgrade. I can't say the same thing for all the MS updates I've done, although they are much improved on that point.

I suspect that if I could be arsed to look through the documentation I could write a script to deploy it with a different set of defaults, but it's never been sufficiently troublesome to spend the time.

Re: we no longer need an Exchange server -- all good.

The Microsoft Exchange-Outlook pairing of products was the only one I ever liked, circa 2003. It fully integrated Mail, Calendar, faxing and voicemail for our company. Even today GMail can't touch it. We've recently moved our government organization from an ancient unix system to GMail. Yes, it solved the mail "storage" issue, but the calendaring issues are horrible even compared to the inferior Oracle system we had been using.

If MS solved the problem of people using mail as their primary document storage mechanism, even the problem of "ginourmous sized" mailboxes would go away.

That said, it sounds like MS has already started sabotaging that product pairing.

Re: You don't know how valuable a service that is.

Actually, they do - that's why they are replacing it with a more expensive option.

But they've miscalculated on your ability to pay for it.

Re: Farmville

That's not new. In fact ages ago when I was playing for some things you needed to check in every 2 hours.

Re: In real life terms: No

Accountant terms are the only ones that matter. Partly because as we all know, no Hollywood blockbuster has ever made a dime. Same games are played by other corporations. Overstate losses in one division to offset profits in another. Especially if you can do things like rake in the cash on developer tools in a different division.

Re: Show them you mean it

You need to keep up on your intel:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/washington/19felt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!

The truth is Nixon was axed because he pulled us out of Vietnam. The Progressives never forgave him for that. By their count, a few more years and we would have been ready for harvesting. The machines Nixon used for the taping were installed by Kennedy. Nixon just figured they'd be an easy way for historians to judge him after he was dead and gone. The break-in and pilfering of the debate papers at the Watergate hotel was standard (if badly managed) political intrigue. Same shit happens today only we call it by different names - Palin's private email, Gingrich's phone call in Florida about legislative strategy, and The Big 0's crack about bitter gun clingers.

Re: America is in a downward spiral (financially and socially IMO).

I don't get why you lot are whinging about this all the time. You finally got what you wanted: a European style leader of the US doing European style things and most importantly, knocking the world's first hyperpower down to a size where you lot aren't afraid of us. Why are you surprised when he adopts the rest of your characteristics? If you want better out of us, let us elect a real American next time instead of a wanna-be-a-European American.

@SuperTim

When looking to trademark a product, if the primary term is already overcrowded you start to look for synonyms or related terms. Clouds are most certainly in the sky so 'sky' as part of the artificial name you create for your product is a logical step, and it is descriptive. The root problem here is that MS shouldn't be able to own 'Windows' as a trademark and the satellite/broadcasting company shouldn't be able to own 'Sky.' 'Skye' maybe, but certainly not 'Sky.'