I'm impressed, I suppose, but we have to look deeper. For instance, on their site (www.linuxda.com), under "Software",
(and I have to admit, this is kind of funny), they have...
... a big blank page!
So I guess people haven't come lining up in advance to code for this new platform yet.
They say they've got a GUI and handwriting recognition and an SDK and so forth, which is nice. No talk about hotsync hardware, which I find interesting. They claim to have their demo up for downloading in 90 minutes, so fine, we can see the rest for ourselves then, but I have a few big questions...
How much of linux is there besides (presumably) some of the kernel? libs? shells? networking?
And, can they, and will they, do app-level compatibility with palmOS?
Re:Speculating about AI in this way is ignorant
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Unfortunately, I do not agree, exactly. I believe that what we consider to be "free choice" or "free will" is another issue on which a better understanding of the brain will prove revelatory. I will not go so far as to say that we do _not_ have free will - rather, I believe that we will discover that the question of whether we do or not is the wrong one.
I will go farther to say that I believe our machine consciousnesses will do what we make them to do, just as we do what evolution requires of a successful species.
Re:Speculating about AI in this way is ignorant
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Why indeed. Your questions are interesting, although I think you conflate two important and distinct things: a capacity to suffer and a capacity to "do wrong." It is provably impossible to avoid the latter. Attempting to avoid "bad" actions is a logical black hole. Even if you had an adequately rigorous definition of "good" and "bad" - which is also impossible - you would have no way of acting on it without being omniscient.
Speaking to the former point, however, you remind me a bit of David Pearce's thinking (which he calls the Hedonistic Imperative); if we can recreate consciousness, surely we can leave out the ability to suffer. I said to him, as I say to you, it may not be possible. And I mean, fundamentally, impossible. You are treading over interesting ground with respect to fundamental aspects of consciousness and subjective experience that we do not understand yet. If it were possible to systematically prevent suffering, however, I would tend to agree with him that by allowing suffering when we could choose not to, we would be cruel. Regardless, I am certain that we, as a people, would do it anyway.
I define the notion of "soul" as the idea that there is some agency beyond the brain which is responsible for our consciousness, our decisions, or our identity. I would hold that this has nothing to do with "good" and "evil," a dichotomy which is arbitrary and based, as much as we have a species-wide consensus on the subject, on our instincts, our genetic heritage.
Re:Speculating about AI in this way is ignorant
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Agreed.
Speculating about AI in this way is ignorant
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I am one of the most secular and optimistic people I know when it comes to machine intelligence.
I believe that the soul is sentimental superstition, and that the notion of human consciousness as somehow fundamentally "unique," "indomitable," or "unassailable" is insecure and adolescent. I have no doubt in my mind that we can and will make machines "in the likeness of a man's mind," and that these systems will, whether we grant it or not, be every bit as "human" in their thoughts as I am - they have my sympathy in advance.
We will, of course, learn a great deal of very important and revolutionary things about ourselves along the way. I believe human consciousness, not genetics or space, is our next great frontier, and we may see revolutionary developments there in our lifetimes. Cognitive science is a remarkably well-funded academic discipline, and has been the subject of massive and relatively quiet investment for several decades.
However, right now it's mired in very un-sexy pursuits, needling sea slugs and flies and mice, and we're still hammering away at nerve cell biology, chemistry, and physics. Pure theory of consciousness is pretty much at a standstill, after the great claims and great failures of the computer science-based AI folks, who showed pretty uniformly that, while they could do a lot of neat tricks, they had little fundamentally in common with the operation of human or animal intelligence, thereby at least giving us a slightly better definition of it.
And, in the meantime, we have "luminaries" who love to sit around in masturbatory celebration of what the future will be like, although this has the feeling to me a of a popular science magazine speculating about how we'll all travel around in air cars and eat food pills and vacation in space. It has nothing to do with the real implications of AI, and after the 100th or so run through the science media grinder, these tired old speculations are poor company whether they turn out to be true or not.
Interpersonal communication problems are the norm in every aspect of human endeavor. Someone who has trouble communicating, or more accurrately, trouble working well with other people can cause all kinds of trouble no matter what you're doing.
Egotistical and abrasive people who program might stand apart because programming is a discipline which tempts one to think of it in objective terms - that there might really be an up or a down, a "better" or "worse" solution... additionally, we tend to think of programmers as bricklayers; once it is clear to a bricklayer where the wall needs to be, he should be able to build it without incident, and joining his work with that of another craftsman should be straightforward.
I suppose a reporter might lately find it a stereotype well-developed enough to "report" on; the shortage of programming talent worldwide actually has given programmers more clout in their endeavors; mobility, stakes in their companies, etc. And of course, more ability to make spectacles of themselves without causing lightning to strike.
The annoyance of a newly minted ego, and the difficulty with which it is sometimes dispatched, coming somewhat out of left-field, as it were, must certainly disturb the established primma donnas of the workplace and the world, and those that observe them. Certainly, we must see this "phenomenon" in the context of the irrational, antisocial behavior we have come to expect from others; our "executive class," for instance - producers, managers, entrepeneurs, owners, landlords...
In winding up, though, I can't help but think that the particular experience of the programmer lends them to concern with organizations, structures, rules, and hierarchies, and because of this, they may be continually confronted with the derivative of the moment's annoyance, seeing its underlying, persistent and tantalizingly correctable causes, finding unique sources of frustration in them. The tendency to see one's life, or one's company, as a system, and to understand it with the particular rigor and clarity of the skillful architect, may frequently lead an engineer, quite unsuspecting, into frequent (and to the layman, inexplicable or antagonistic) conflict with those around them, unless or until their experience with people, and their understanding of human relationships, allows them to act on their feelings with more sophistication.
OK - research done with public money can result in patents for private corporations? You've got to be kidding me.
Who signed that one into law?
Don't tell me for a minute the corporations "deserve" it or are "entitled" to it. I even saw a comment by someone who said that because corporations "pay taxes" and "contribute" to public universities, they "deserve" to patent public intellectual work.
What a crock. Taxes buy you a lot, but they do not buy you the right to plop your private toll plaza on the brooklyn bridge. Or at least they didn't used to. Contributions to the institutions of higher education are philanthropy - or at least that's invariably what these large corporations' tax accountants tell us.
Patents are very delicate instrument for encouraging research and thought. They have been greviously abused in the past 50 years - beneficiaries of their protection would of course love to skew their protections much farther towards themselves than was originally intended, and they have succeeded smashingly, so that patents are as often a threat to innovation and scientific development as not.
I say as an executive at a corporation and a scientist, there is absolutely no reason why public research should result in private patents. Public research, _because it results in the free exchange of ideas and results_ is the heart and soul of scientific endeavor. When it doesn't, there is no point in maintaining the farce of calling it public.
You will of course be frightened by people who say stopping this practice will reduce research and hinder science, but this is, of course, bullshit. Good science happened before it, and will happen after it ends. Allowing patents to shut off whole lines of inquiry for the paltry benefit of a corporation's profits is the real, vast danger looming opposite that paper monster.
Rocket Guy not flying until at least next year...
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From his website, at the top of the "Updates" page:
"4/25/01 Due to increased demands on Rocket Guy's time by the media the launch will be delayed until May 2002."
Is it just me or does this sentence sound a little absurd? Demands on one's time by the media? More likely there's a simpler explanation...
Does it ever bother you, talking about patents like this, not having much more than the briefest acquaintance with patent law? Let alone economics?
Clearly, you have a bone to pick with Stallman, and that's fine - I've noticed his attitudes tend to make more enemies than friends these days, but by becoming caught up in a fight, you've missed both the point of what he's going after and what the fight over software patents is all about.
Patents (and copyrights, for that matter) last a long time. The time that intellectual property ownership "lasts" has lengthened steadily over the previous century. Basically, this is because we have a shamefully corrupt government, and whenever a large, powerful company or interest group (Disney, RIAA) saw its intellectual property monopoly was about to disappear, they simply exploited the cheaper alternative of bribing the legislature to extend the duration of the monopoly.
Now, we are the first generation of people who will be born, grown up and die, without seeing many intellectual property monopolies expire. Many will last over a century.
This is only one facet of the warping of intellectual property doctrine solely for the self-interest of the intellectual property monopolists. There are many others.
However, even if we set the clock back to 50 or a hundred years ago, when such things lasted for 20 years, or seven, or even less, it is still too long. These laws are, after all, meant to benefit society by rewarding inventors. Corporate art monopolists were unknown and undreamt of when those laws were drafted. Now, inventors/musicians/writers almost uniformly never see the profits of their labors - their employers/labels/publishers do - meanwhile, advances in transportation and information technology have created the possibility for human knowledge to advance at an unheard of rate - as well as enabling the payoff for an invention to come much more rapidly, and the point at which an artificial monopoly becomes onerous to arrive with equal haste.
Of course, even given all this, copyrights have a place in the modern world. Patents, perhaps, as well, although their role is hazier. Software patents, specifically, are a ridiculous farce - and have no place in the laws of any modern nation.
Your argument seems to center around the notion that effort put into making a piece of software must be protected, because it is too easy to reduce its worth by producing another, equivalent piece of software, and selling it for less, or, perhaps, giving it away for free. Your answer to this "problem" is to allow people to "patent" software - more accurately, to "own" a particular algorithm or programming technique - so that a potential competitor would be deprived of the opportunity to produce a cheaper alternative.
I hope you can already see how absurd this idea is, but in case you're really thick-headed, let me break it down for you. Capitalism (which is by no means an unimpeachable approach to organizing your society, but bear with me) dictates that competition will create an environment where no one can price gouge and where products and services will always improve - because if there is a way to do something better, faster, or cheaper, someone will always turn up and start doing it, since the market will reward them, right? Right?
Except that now Wordstar has a patent on word processing that they got in 1978, back before WYSIWYG, and we're all stuck with them unto the next generation, because no one else can write a word processor without violating one of their many patents, and they have no incentive to improve their technology (everyone is stuck with them, after all), let alone lower their prices ($5,000? $10,000? Hell, they can charge whatever they want! They own the patent on printer drivers! Or spell checking!)
The only reason this hasn't happened already, by the way, is because the idea of patenting software has always been viewed in our industry as totally absurd, until some opportunist tried it, some idiot at the patent office approved it, and some mongrel judge who never saw a computer in his life passed on it. Forgive me for not naming names. No matter, now we have patents on windows, pull-down menus, GIFs, and one click shopping. And we're just getting warmed up.
No, my benighted friend, when someone comes along and can afford to give away for free what you've worked so hard to charge money for, that's just markets. Consumers benefit, and in the long run, so do you, since your web browser is, after all, is much cheaper than it could have been. If it's possible to get something for free that was once, or is, available in the marketplace, that doesn't mean that you get to run to Washington and say "WE HAVE A GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO MAKE MILLIONS SELLING WORD PROCESSORS - COME PROTECT US FROM ALL THESE NASTY COMPETITORS PLEASE MR. GOVERNMENT" - it means that what your selling lost its value - and in fact, in some sense, it never had any value in the first place. Tough luck. As my friend's grandfather, who lives in Texas, is fond of saying, it's time to hunker down and eat some crow.
This is one side of the problem with software patents. The other side is, if you can believe it, even more serious.
Software patents make every piece of code ever written a ticking time bomb of intellectual property litigation.
Even if you assume that we have a patent office staffed with geniuses all gifted with eidetic memories, every programmer who ever writes a line of code must be familiar with the entire body of software patents in order to avoid patent liability. And they have to stay current, because there are thousands of new applications every day!
Unless you now want to profess your complete imbecility, you will agree with me that this is completely impossible, which therefore leaves us with the alternative: namely, that at any time, any piece of code you write can earn you a visit from a patent lawyer, who will say:
"Oh hey, you're violating my patent on commenting inside of curly brackets! That'll be $10,000 per slash mark, paid in full in 48 hours, or you have to stop publishing and destroy all your illegal materials immediately! Don't like it? Hope you have a few million to fight it in civil court, then!"
I'm not sure how this will play out, but my guess is that the only reason the invasive, ridiculous conditions of the existing, standard software license (espoused by the industry groups and, of course, Microsoft) is still around, is because they've never tried to seriously enforce the conditions of the license. Having software that forces you to purchase a new license or go through an extravagantly annoying transfer process just to switch machines, or that actively prevents transfer of ownership, has always been nothing more than bluster on your fine print - and largely without legal basis at that.
For them to push in this direction tells me that MS has been told some encouraging things by the incoming administration, in addition to being emboldened by the success of DMCA and UCITA. (shudder)
If they're serious about this, then they've just created a dramatic barrier to entry to Whistler, et al. Of course, if they see older alternatives are eating into their Whistler sales, they could stop selling new Win98/2000 licenses. People would then be in a nasty bind... but signs of strife that significant might send people scurrying to Apple and Linux in droves.
When push comes to shove, I'd guess Microsoft will realize that they've already become the richest fucks in the world via the old ("rampant piracy") system, and almost certainly back down from rocking the boat. See Intel and their CPUID fiasco.
An effort to force a massive and fundamental change in the way software is licensed and used would probably require an effort on the scale of a massive conspiracy. At the moment I don't give MS and Co. that much credit.
In the meantime, we have some more breathing room to discover a new intellectual property doctrine that actually works...
Myth: Implementation changes significantly more often than interfaces
This is the most stingingly correct point, in my opinion. In fact, in my experience, they change equally often at best. And in cases where code is actually meant to be reused - something which, by the way, some of my smartest friends have told me, after no small amount of experience over the years, never actually happens - its the interface that often proves more likely to need modification...
I love it when people get into the OOP/procedural debate. Especially when almost all of the time, it's a debate between C people and C++ people...
C - a language which is one dreadul kluge after another... preprocessors, function prototypes... and yeah, your code runs fast, but you'll wear your wrists out trying to do robust, verifiable programming, the dreadful excuse "API"... At the end of the day, you're still feeding text files into the chute and turning the crank. The whole thing makes me feel like I'm in the 1880's.
And then we have C++. Which has all of C's faults, with some additional syntax kluges thrown in to do "object oriented" code... while keeping C's superior style, apparently. So now in addition to everything else, I have to #IFNDEF SOMESHIT #DEFINE SOMESHIT blah blah #ENDIF. Fantastic, guys. Just make sure you get all of your libraries specified on the command line in the right order... Let alone the fact that when you do RTTI or exception handling the compiler gives you the distinct impression it's doing you a favor. Oh, you want a virtual method? I thought you just wanted to seem object oriented, not actually be it.
Java was a wonderful change from all this, because it simplified and organized the source and sanitized the compilation process. Simply having array bounds checking and garbage collection (let alone the vastly superior and standardized API) made development take up to half the time it would take in C++... and I _HATE_ the VM. I could care less about it. I just find myself amused when people driving horse carts around the back woods get pissed off about the speed limit being 120mph. Our development systems are primitive! OOP or not is a drop in the bucket. The real misunderstood tradeoffs are elsewhere entirely.
Who... by the way... have made a quiet killing extorting money from any company that attempts to make software which can generate GIF images. Yes, that means Adobe, that means Microsoft... they've all paid the ransom.
This does not in any way reduce the strength of the argument. The fact that they did not patent the entire file format, but rather only an essential piece (you can't make GIFs that are readable to most programs without LZW) is an even more eloquent example of how dangerous software patents are.
As for the rest, the reason Unisys owns that patent is because they own Compuserve, or what is left of it.
There's a simple reason why. Patents cost a lot of money and time and effort to get. Dealing with them is onerous except for the few large companies and organizations this blatantly corrupt process is intended to help out in the fist place.
Copyright covers plagiarism, which in the context of source code means I could be violating someone's copyright if I cut-and-paste their code and call it my own, use it for my own purposes, etc... without their permission, that is. And open source authors effectively give that permission to everyone, pending a few small details (GNU, for instance, has a number of preconditions - such as that you have to distribute the sourcecode yourself, etc.) Of course, I can read someone's code, learn from it, and write my own code that does the same thing. It may even be very similar, but that would be legal (again, there are a few caveats here, but that's basically the case). Even as a relative radical when it comes to intellectual property law, this pretty much seems fine to me.
Patents are much, much worse. Software patents enable Compuserve, for example, to patent a compression algorithm or a program that reads or writes a specific file format. Once such a patent is granted, it is illegal for me to write a program that uses that compression, or reads or writes data compatible with that format - no matter how I implement it.
The fun part is what people patent: Windows, pull down menus, command-line interfaces, GIFs (you've heard about the infamous GIF patent, of course!), one-click shopping, word processors that can right align text, you name it, the US Patent Office will grant it to you. I honestly don't think they even read them anymore. And if someone from the USPO wants to show up and self-righteously say "Oh yes we do read them" then... my God, that's even worse.
The reason you can tell the EU is going to have software patents is because their argument - that the USPO is the problem, not software patents themselves - is patently false. An obvious placation.
In a world with software patents, every programmer is likely to violate hundreds of patents throughout their career. There is no way they can know which, since they cannot read and remember the entire patent base, no matter how well-maintained. Every program is a ticking time bomb of patent litigation, as you never know when someone might turn up and say, "Hey! My grandfather patented that in 1986! That'll be 70% of your gross please, or get ready to spend $100-300 thousand defending yourself in court!"
Expect the comission to be subverted, and software patents to persist in Europe. Software patents are good for large, established players, and they are good for lawyers, two very powerful lobbies, here and across the pond. It would take a miracle for the collective interests involved to miss their mark.
There are much larger problems at hand in government's relationship to industry anyway (i.e. bribes seem to be de facto legal). Focus on solving those first, and then worry about details like patents.
"1. Solaris is certainly not going to be LESS stable than linux."
Clearly you have never used SolarisX86.
"2. There's probably not going to be more than a 10% performance difference either way."
See answer above.
"3. How could solaris be "[less] supported [than]" linux? By SUN? That's just silly"
Spoken like someone who has never had to wait on hold for Sun technical support (who they were paying through the nose), or eat dirt over a bug Sun has labeled "SORRYWEDONTFEELLIKEIT" in their bugbase...
Dont just naysay Linux. Especially if you've never even tried the competition or made a serious comparison. On MIPS, Solaris doesn't exist, and believe me, is very unlikely TO ever exist. That's probably a good thing. On X86, Solaris is a JOKE - with terrible app support and a really flakey, bloated kernel. Let's not even talk about security out of the box, let alone the awful way they've configured it or how INCREDIBLY expensive eveything is... let alone your precious "corporate support"... and, last but not least, Linux smokes Solaris on sparc hardware.
Solaris is the Windows of the Unix world. I have nothing against Sun, I love their hardware and I am a huge Java fan. But their Unix... blows.
Are you crazy? Why on earth would sales of Linux games be good, or even profitable? Aside from the hype factor, there's no reason to have believed it in the first place!
I love Linux. I've been using it professionally for years. I also play a lot of games. But I am the exception, not the rule. The rule in video games is the console market. 13 years old with a little higher than avg. disposable income, and no patience for a command line.
Linux may already be owning the server business on many fronts, and will certainly progress on all, but the "Linux game market" today is a curiousity dreamed up by wishful thinkers and zealots.
Linux makes sense for games when it's a platform for development (a surprising number of popular games were developed under Linux and then ported to Win32 for release) - after all, not having to reboot every time your code tries to spew on the memory or the GUI subsystem is a pretty big dev. advantage.
It may also make sense as a game platform generally, given a proper gaming interface... that is, none at all. If you took out shells,/etc, X, and login, and replaced them all with shiny opaque surfaces, you could have quite a nice, extensible foundation upon which to base, say, an X-Box killer... oops, no DirectX, no large developer base... too bad.
But is it anyone's loss if the gaming industry doesn't make money on Linux even in this decade... or perhaps, at all? As long as Linux is raising the bar on operating systems, whatever would-be monopolist that happens to be current will at least find themselves motivated enough to try (i.e. Win2k). In the meantime, video games will forever trend towards mass market, as an outlet eventually comparable to Hollywood in stature as well as in profits... and part of that is the future of the console: cheap, hot special purpose hardware subsidized by software royalties.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. Huhuh. Huhuhuh.
So I guess people haven't come lining up in advance to code for this new platform yet.
They say they've got a GUI and handwriting recognition and an SDK and so forth, which is nice. No talk about hotsync hardware, which I find interesting. They claim to have their demo up for downloading in 90 minutes, so fine, we can see the rest for ourselves then, but I have a few big questions...
How much of linux is there besides (presumably) some of the kernel? libs? shells? networking?
And, can they, and will they, do app-level compatibility with palmOS?
I will go farther to say that I believe our machine consciousnesses will do what we make them to do, just as we do what evolution requires of a successful species.
Speaking to the former point, however, you remind me a bit of David Pearce's thinking (which he calls the Hedonistic Imperative); if we can recreate consciousness, surely we can leave out the ability to suffer. I said to him, as I say to you, it may not be possible. And I mean, fundamentally, impossible. You are treading over interesting ground with respect to fundamental aspects of consciousness and subjective experience that we do not understand yet. If it were possible to systematically prevent suffering, however, I would tend to agree with him that by allowing suffering when we could choose not to, we would be cruel. Regardless, I am certain that we, as a people, would do it anyway.
I define the notion of "soul" as the idea that there is some agency beyond the brain which is responsible for our consciousness, our decisions, or our identity. I would hold that this has nothing to do with "good" and "evil," a dichotomy which is arbitrary and based, as much as we have a species-wide consensus on the subject, on our instincts, our genetic heritage.
Agreed.
I believe that the soul is sentimental superstition, and that the notion of human consciousness as somehow fundamentally "unique," "indomitable," or "unassailable" is insecure and adolescent. I have no doubt in my mind that we can and will make machines "in the likeness of a man's mind," and that these systems will, whether we grant it or not, be every bit as "human" in their thoughts as I am - they have my sympathy in advance.
We will, of course, learn a great deal of very important and revolutionary things about ourselves along the way. I believe human consciousness, not genetics or space, is our next great frontier, and we may see revolutionary developments there in our lifetimes. Cognitive science is a remarkably well-funded academic discipline, and has been the subject of massive and relatively quiet investment for several decades.
However, right now it's mired in very un-sexy pursuits, needling sea slugs and flies and mice, and we're still hammering away at nerve cell biology, chemistry, and physics. Pure theory of consciousness is pretty much at a standstill, after the great claims and great failures of the computer science-based AI folks, who showed pretty uniformly that, while they could do a lot of neat tricks, they had little fundamentally in common with the operation of human or animal intelligence, thereby at least giving us a slightly better definition of it.
And, in the meantime, we have "luminaries" who love to sit around in masturbatory celebration of what the future will be like, although this has the feeling to me a of a popular science magazine speculating about how we'll all travel around in air cars and eat food pills and vacation in space. It has nothing to do with the real implications of AI, and after the 100th or so run through the science media grinder, these tired old speculations are poor company whether they turn out to be true or not.
Egotistical and abrasive people who program might stand apart because programming is a discipline which tempts one to think of it in objective terms - that there might really be an up or a down, a "better" or "worse" solution... additionally, we tend to think of programmers as bricklayers; once it is clear to a bricklayer where the wall needs to be, he should be able to build it without incident, and joining his work with that of another craftsman should be straightforward.
I suppose a reporter might lately find it a stereotype well-developed enough to "report" on; the shortage of programming talent worldwide actually has given programmers more clout in their endeavors; mobility, stakes in their companies, etc. And of course, more ability to make spectacles of themselves without causing lightning to strike.
The annoyance of a newly minted ego, and the difficulty with which it is sometimes dispatched, coming somewhat out of left-field, as it were, must certainly disturb the established primma donnas of the workplace and the world, and those that observe them. Certainly, we must see this "phenomenon" in the context of the irrational, antisocial behavior we have come to expect from others; our "executive class," for instance - producers, managers, entrepeneurs, owners, landlords...
In winding up, though, I can't help but think that the particular experience of the programmer lends them to concern with organizations, structures, rules, and hierarchies, and because of this, they may be continually confronted with the derivative of the moment's annoyance, seeing its underlying, persistent and tantalizingly correctable causes, finding unique sources of frustration in them. The tendency to see one's life, or one's company, as a system, and to understand it with the particular rigor and clarity of the skillful architect, may frequently lead an engineer, quite unsuspecting, into frequent (and to the layman, inexplicable or antagonistic) conflict with those around them, unless or until their experience with people, and their understanding of human relationships, allows them to act on their feelings with more sophistication.
Who signed that one into law?
Don't tell me for a minute the corporations "deserve" it or are "entitled" to it. I even saw a comment by someone who said that because corporations "pay taxes" and "contribute" to public universities, they "deserve" to patent public intellectual work.
What a crock. Taxes buy you a lot, but they do not buy you the right to plop your private toll plaza on the brooklyn bridge. Or at least they didn't used to. Contributions to the institutions of higher education are philanthropy - or at least that's invariably what these large corporations' tax accountants tell us.
Patents are very delicate instrument for encouraging research and thought. They have been greviously abused in the past 50 years - beneficiaries of their protection would of course love to skew their protections much farther towards themselves than was originally intended, and they have succeeded smashingly, so that patents are as often a threat to innovation and scientific development as not.
I say as an executive at a corporation and a scientist, there is absolutely no reason why public research should result in private patents. Public research, _because it results in the free exchange of ideas and results_ is the heart and soul of scientific endeavor. When it doesn't, there is no point in maintaining the farce of calling it public.
You will of course be frightened by people who say stopping this practice will reduce research and hinder science, but this is, of course, bullshit. Good science happened before it, and will happen after it ends. Allowing patents to shut off whole lines of inquiry for the paltry benefit of a corporation's profits is the real, vast danger looming opposite that paper monster.
"4/25/01 Due to increased demands on Rocket Guy's time by the media the launch will be delayed until May 2002."
Is it just me or does this sentence sound a little absurd? Demands on one's time by the media? More likely there's a simpler explanation...
Does it ever bother you, talking about patents like this, not having much more than the briefest acquaintance with patent law? Let alone economics?
Clearly, you have a bone to pick with Stallman, and that's fine - I've noticed his attitudes tend to make more enemies than friends these days, but by becoming caught up in a fight, you've missed both the point of what he's going after and what the fight over software patents is all about.
Patents (and copyrights, for that matter) last a long time. The time that intellectual property ownership "lasts" has lengthened steadily over the previous century. Basically, this is because we have a shamefully corrupt government, and whenever a large, powerful company or interest group (Disney, RIAA) saw its intellectual property monopoly was about to disappear, they simply exploited the cheaper alternative of bribing the legislature to extend the duration of the monopoly.
Now, we are the first generation of people who will be born, grown up and die, without seeing many intellectual property monopolies expire. Many will last over a century.
This is only one facet of the warping of intellectual property doctrine solely for the self-interest of the intellectual property monopolists. There are many others.
However, even if we set the clock back to 50 or a hundred years ago, when such things lasted for 20 years, or seven, or even less, it is still too long. These laws are, after all, meant to benefit society by rewarding inventors. Corporate art monopolists were unknown and undreamt of when those laws were drafted. Now, inventors/musicians/writers almost uniformly never see the profits of their labors - their employers/labels/publishers do - meanwhile, advances in transportation and information technology have created the possibility for human knowledge to advance at an unheard of rate - as well as enabling the payoff for an invention to come much more rapidly, and the point at which an artificial monopoly becomes onerous to arrive with equal haste.
Of course, even given all this, copyrights have a place in the modern world. Patents, perhaps, as well, although their role is hazier. Software patents, specifically, are a ridiculous farce - and have no place in the laws of any modern nation.
Your argument seems to center around the notion that effort put into making a piece of software must be protected, because it is too easy to reduce its worth by producing another, equivalent piece of software, and selling it for less, or, perhaps, giving it away for free. Your answer to this "problem" is to allow people to "patent" software - more accurately, to "own" a particular algorithm or programming technique - so that a potential competitor would be deprived of the opportunity to produce a cheaper alternative.
I hope you can already see how absurd this idea is, but in case you're really thick-headed, let me break it down for you. Capitalism (which is by no means an unimpeachable approach to organizing your society, but bear with me) dictates that competition will create an environment where no one can price gouge and where products and services will always improve - because if there is a way to do something better, faster, or cheaper, someone will always turn up and start doing it, since the market will reward them, right? Right?
Except that now Wordstar has a patent on word processing that they got in 1978, back before WYSIWYG, and we're all stuck with them unto the next generation, because no one else can write a word processor without violating one of their many patents, and they have no incentive to improve their technology (everyone is stuck with them, after all), let alone lower their prices ($5,000? $10,000? Hell, they can charge whatever they want! They own the patent on printer drivers! Or spell checking!)
The only reason this hasn't happened already, by the way, is because the idea of patenting software has always been viewed in our industry as totally absurd, until some opportunist tried it, some idiot at the patent office approved it, and some mongrel judge who never saw a computer in his life passed on it. Forgive me for not naming names. No matter, now we have patents on windows, pull-down menus, GIFs, and one click shopping. And we're just getting warmed up.
No, my benighted friend, when someone comes along and can afford to give away for free what you've worked so hard to charge money for, that's just markets. Consumers benefit, and in the long run, so do you, since your web browser is, after all, is much cheaper than it could have been. If it's possible to get something for free that was once, or is, available in the marketplace, that doesn't mean that you get to run to Washington and say "WE HAVE A GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO MAKE MILLIONS SELLING WORD PROCESSORS - COME PROTECT US FROM ALL THESE NASTY COMPETITORS PLEASE MR. GOVERNMENT" - it means that what your selling lost its value - and in fact, in some sense, it never had any value in the first place. Tough luck. As my friend's grandfather, who lives in Texas, is fond of saying, it's time to hunker down and eat some crow.
This is one side of the problem with software patents. The other side is, if you can believe it, even more serious.
Software patents make every piece of code ever written a ticking time bomb of intellectual property litigation.
Even if you assume that we have a patent office staffed with geniuses all gifted with eidetic memories, every programmer who ever writes a line of code must be familiar with the entire body of software patents in order to avoid patent liability. And they have to stay current, because there are thousands of new applications every day!
Unless you now want to profess your complete imbecility, you will agree with me that this is completely impossible, which therefore leaves us with the alternative: namely, that at any time, any piece of code you write can earn you a visit from a patent lawyer, who will say:
"Oh hey, you're violating my patent on commenting inside of curly brackets! That'll be $10,000 per slash mark, paid in full in 48 hours, or you have to stop publishing and destroy all your illegal materials immediately! Don't like it? Hope you have a few million to fight it in civil court, then!"
Moron.
For them to push in this direction tells me that MS has been told some encouraging things by the incoming administration, in addition to being emboldened by the success of DMCA and UCITA. (shudder)
If they're serious about this, then they've just created a dramatic barrier to entry to Whistler, et al. Of course, if they see older alternatives are eating into their Whistler sales, they could stop selling new Win98/2000 licenses. People would then be in a nasty bind... but signs of strife that significant might send people scurrying to Apple and Linux in droves.
When push comes to shove, I'd guess Microsoft will realize that they've already become the richest fucks in the world via the old ("rampant piracy") system, and almost certainly back down from rocking the boat. See Intel and their CPUID fiasco.
An effort to force a massive and fundamental change in the way software is licensed and used would probably require an effort on the scale of a massive conspiracy. At the moment I don't give MS and Co. that much credit.
In the meantime, we have some more breathing room to discover a new intellectual property doctrine that actually works...
This is the most stingingly correct point, in my opinion. In fact, in my experience, they change equally often at best. And in cases where code is actually meant to be reused - something which, by the way, some of my smartest friends have told me, after no small amount of experience over the years, never actually happens - its the interface that often proves more likely to need modification...
C - a language which is one dreadul kluge after another... preprocessors, function prototypes... and yeah, your code runs fast, but you'll wear your wrists out trying to do robust, verifiable programming, the dreadful excuse "API"... At the end of the day, you're still feeding text files into the chute and turning the crank. The whole thing makes me feel like I'm in the 1880's.
And then we have C++. Which has all of C's faults, with some additional syntax kluges thrown in to do "object oriented" code... while keeping C's superior style, apparently. So now in addition to everything else, I have to #IFNDEF SOMESHIT #DEFINE SOMESHIT blah blah #ENDIF. Fantastic, guys. Just make sure you get all of your libraries specified on the command line in the right order... Let alone the fact that when you do RTTI or exception handling the compiler gives you the distinct impression it's doing you a favor. Oh, you want a virtual method? I thought you just wanted to seem object oriented, not actually be it.
Java was a wonderful change from all this, because it simplified and organized the source and sanitized the compilation process. Simply having array bounds checking and garbage collection (let alone the vastly superior and standardized API) made development take up to half the time it would take in C++... and I _HATE_ the VM. I could care less about it. I just find myself amused when people driving horse carts around the back woods get pissed off about the speed limit being 120mph. Our development systems are primitive! OOP or not is a drop in the bucket. The real misunderstood tradeoffs are elsewhere entirely.
Who... by the way... have made a quiet killing extorting money from any company that attempts to make software which can generate GIF images. Yes, that means Adobe, that means Microsoft... they've all paid the ransom.
No, Compuserve's customers were sold to AOL. Other of Compuserve's assets, i.e. the patent, were retained by Unisys.
As for the rest, the reason Unisys owns that patent is because they own Compuserve, or what is left of it.
I have two words for you. Sell Short.
There's a simple reason why. Patents cost a lot of money and time and effort to get. Dealing with them is onerous except for the few large companies and organizations this blatantly corrupt process is intended to help out in the fist place.
Patents are much, much worse. Software patents enable Compuserve, for example, to patent a compression algorithm or a program that reads or writes a specific file format. Once such a patent is granted, it is illegal for me to write a program that uses that compression, or reads or writes data compatible with that format - no matter how I implement it.
The fun part is what people patent: Windows, pull down menus, command-line interfaces, GIFs (you've heard about the infamous GIF patent, of course!), one-click shopping, word processors that can right align text, you name it, the US Patent Office will grant it to you. I honestly don't think they even read them anymore. And if someone from the USPO wants to show up and self-righteously say "Oh yes we do read them" then... my God, that's even worse.
The reason you can tell the EU is going to have software patents is because their argument - that the USPO is the problem, not software patents themselves - is patently false. An obvious placation.
In a world with software patents, every programmer is likely to violate hundreds of patents throughout their career. There is no way they can know which, since they cannot read and remember the entire patent base, no matter how well-maintained. Every program is a ticking time bomb of patent litigation, as you never know when someone might turn up and say, "Hey! My grandfather patented that in 1986! That'll be 70% of your gross please, or get ready to spend $100-300 thousand defending yourself in court!"
Enough said.
There are much larger problems at hand in government's relationship to industry anyway (i.e. bribes seem to be de facto legal). Focus on solving those first, and then worry about details like patents.
Where is the URL?!
Clearly you have never used SolarisX86.
"2. There's probably not going to be more than a 10% performance difference either way."
See answer above.
"3. How could solaris be "[less] supported [than]" linux? By SUN? That's just silly"
Spoken like someone who has never had to wait on hold for Sun technical support (who they were paying through the nose), or eat dirt over a bug Sun has labeled "SORRYWEDONTFEELLIKEIT" in their bugbase...
Dont just naysay Linux. Especially if you've never even tried the competition or made a serious comparison. On MIPS, Solaris doesn't exist, and believe me, is very unlikely TO ever exist. That's probably a good thing. On X86, Solaris is a JOKE - with terrible app support and a really flakey, bloated kernel. Let's not even talk about security out of the box, let alone the awful way they've configured it or how INCREDIBLY expensive eveything is... let alone your precious "corporate support"... and, last but not least, Linux smokes Solaris on sparc hardware.
Solaris is the Windows of the Unix world. I have nothing against Sun, I love their hardware and I am a huge Java fan. But their Unix... blows.
Put that in your crack pipe and smoke it.
Hemos, are you trolling us? -Dave
I love Linux. I've been using it professionally for years. I also play a lot of games. But I am the exception, not the rule. The rule in video games is the console market. 13 years old with a little higher than avg. disposable income, and no patience for a command line.
Linux may already be owning the server business on many fronts, and will certainly progress on all, but the "Linux game market" today is a curiousity dreamed up by wishful thinkers and zealots.
Linux makes sense for games when it's a platform for development (a surprising number of popular games were developed under Linux and then ported to Win32 for release) - after all, not having to reboot every time your code tries to spew on the memory or the GUI subsystem is a pretty big dev. advantage.
It may also make sense as a game platform generally, given a proper gaming interface... that is, none at all. If you took out shells, /etc, X, and login, and replaced them all with shiny opaque surfaces, you could have quite a nice, extensible foundation upon which to base, say, an X-Box killer... oops, no DirectX, no large developer base... too bad.
But is it anyone's loss if the gaming industry doesn't make money on Linux even in this decade... or perhaps, at all? As long as Linux is raising the bar on operating systems, whatever would-be monopolist that happens to be current will at least find themselves motivated enough to try (i.e. Win2k). In the meantime, video games will forever trend towards mass market, as an outlet eventually comparable to Hollywood in stature as well as in profits... and part of that is the future of the console: cheap, hot special purpose hardware subsidized by software royalties.
No, they won't. I wouldn't mind seeing Bertelsman, Newhouse, or B&N go out of style, though.