The first computer was designed by Charles Babbage
in 1882. Although he never built one, a unviersty did from his original 1822 designs in the early 90's and it DOES work.
I agree with your thesis statement, but not your solution.
Until I reached high-school age I was limited to 2 hours of non-PBS TV a day. Why? a few reasons. My mother rightly saw it as a passive form of enetrtainment that did nothing to stimulate development of eiterh mind or body.
MORE then that though, she only had two hours a day to monitor what I was watching. She made durn sure she knew what I was being told by the little black box so that she could "adjust" any messages I was recieving that she didn't approve of.
If you can't be with your child when they surf, turn OFF the damn computer and hand them a ball or a book.
Not for children, if children are to grow up to be competant adults they need to be taught to deal with the world. (There is a REAL street corner out there, too, you know.)
But for those who NEVER grow up... religous conservatives, right wing congressmen, and so on, this seems perfect. You know, those who can still be scared by words and ideas... THEY need a safe place to play.
Catseye
May the lord bless and keep Pat Robertson... far away from government.
Its perfectly consistant IF your midn isn't stuck in C mode.
try to forget what C taught yo uand coem at this fresh...
In ALL cases java passes the value of a variable.
Its just that one of those variable-tyoes is an
object-reference vairable. You are still passing the VALUE of the object reference.
Your problem is you are used to thinking in terms of pointers, not references. Every place in memory has a pointer address (even primative types) thus it is soemthing different from a variable value. But references only exist for objects and ARE a primative type on an euqal footing with the other primatives.
I'd go as redundant as possible. At a bear minimum whatevr yo uend up with, make sure you can store backups in a software agnostic form (SQL, XML, etc.)
It'd be pretty scary to find bad busg in your free system and have to either...
(A) Try to repair the damage to get your emdicl records back
or
(B) Be unable to move to a different solution if this proves unworkable.
As to how often to back up, the simple rule is "how much data are you willing to lose?"
Yes, its true comemrcial sofwtare can be as buggy as freeware and freeware can be as soldi as commercial sofwtare, but atleast with a commercial package you have somewhere to go for support in cases of missio ncritical failure. freeware its all up to you...
Just make them sign a contract saying they are independant consultantsd and spelling out exactly what they have agrred is "fair and just compensation" for their efforts (typicly, free access or other small perqs.)
Two individuals (and a corporation is leaglly an individual) can legally contract for any trade of value. As long as they aren't made to work in ways that make them look like employees its all fine. (MS got in trouble becvasue their "contractors" had all the restrictions of full employees.)
He says "'The layout of any website is "public domain" which is freely available to the public'
I can put down in print that elephants are orenge, it doesn't make it correct.
IANAL, and this does not consitute legal advice, but...
Graphic layout has a long history of protection under the copyright laws. In addition, there is a general idea udner copyright that the organizationb of information is a protected form of expression, where that organization is unique.
The question is, what do you want to do about it? Suing him would be expensive and unelss he's makign money from hsi site, or you can show that he somehow prevented you form makign money with yours, damages are going to be minimal.
OTOH if its just his statement that bothers you, giving legal advice without a license IS a crime (thus my disclaimer above). You might be able to force him to take it down by writing a letter of complaint to the bar association. If yo ucan figure out what state he's in, send it to the bar association in his state (and point them at how you figured that out.) Otherwise, you can send it to the bar in your state and hope they decide to investigate further.
M$ charges licensees per CPu shipped, whether they ship with Windows or not. Their clain is that this is to prevent piracy. Most of the industry however feels this is to make it unworkable for their licensees to ship alternate OSs as a reasonable option.
If/when the cout case is final and over, assumign M$ doesn't pull a suprise victory out of the hat, they will ahve to stop this. Til the, yo uand I over-pay because our industry is dominated by a monopoly. (Maybe you should see if there's a class action suit you can join, although M$ has pretty sucessfully defended themselves from consumer suits so far by using a precedent that says basicly that, if there is a middle man, you can only sue the middleman.)
Cease and desist letters can be serious, your ignoring them can set you up for nasty damages come the actual court case. You really need to get a laywer forth with to write a proper reply as to why you feel you are legally in the clear.
Now IS it illegal? The answer is its grey. I'm not a lawyer but I worked for one of the leaders in the field of online gaming and have heard the arguments. The strongest intellectual property argument I've heard has nothing to do with patent, so don't be misled by that-- it has to do with Copyright. Copyrights recognize not just the work, but the organization of the work, where that organization is considered significant. The argument is that a private protocol is a significant organization of information and thus protected under international copyright law.
You can argue about this back and forth as to whetehr it's right, but its up to the courts to decide the legality not us and the precedents are decidedly mixzed and unclear.
Now if you happen to live in oen of those "copyright free" piracy havens out there that aren't signatories to the international copyright law, its probably irellevent.
For thsoe in the SF bay area, our local PBS station (KTEH) has been showing England's RobotWars show-- this looks to be a pretty similar.
RobotWars admits they were inspired by the underground competitions that were (still are?) staged in this area. (They were underground,as I udnerstand, because insurance would have been prohibitively expensive had the real nature of the exhibitiosn been known before-hand.)
Robot Wars is narrated/officiated with great gusto by Craig Charles-- Lister from Red Dwarf. he really adds a lot of value to the show.
It greedy of someone to file a lawsuit over very real violations of their copyrights? AOL may or may not be the right target, but with the "if it ain't nailed down its mine" attitude toward MP3 piracy often espoused here, this just plain dumfounded me.
Can technology crerate a truer democracy? Surely. For the first time in American history we have the potentail for a true Atehnian Democracy. No parties, no representatives, just country wide votes on political issues. The technology is obviosuly here. There are many ways to do this, but one way would be to have rerpesentatvies of various factions debtae issues on a public TV network, and then let all interested members of society vote via the net. Thsoe that had no hoem computer or other web device could be given a "minitel" like device or allowed to vote via touch-tone.
Now WILL it happen? Ofcourse not. The first job of any beaurcracy is self-preservation. Furthermore I'm not even convicned it SHOULD happen. Contrary to what they teach you in high school, distance and communication were not the only consideratiosn when the representative system was set up by our founders. Though opinion was divided one contingent felt strongly that rule directly by the amsses would only lead to chaos and desintegration of an ordered society.
Alexander Hamilton said, "The masses are asses."
I've seen little to dispell that notion, personally.
IANAL but I've dicussed this general issue with a few...
As I understand it if AOL created a product whose sole and only purpose was illegal, they could indeed by potentially liable.
I doubt however thats proveable in the case og Gnutella. As I udnerstand it all AOL has to show is SOME legitimate users out there and they are reasonably safe.
As a secondary issue, it will be hard to collect anything in punative damages even if they win ebcause AOL is nto making any money themselves from Gnutella. They've even gone so far as to distance themselves from its creation so its not even a PR win (or loss).
I'm sorry, the game industry (before I got sane and got out.) I worked in or near it for 10 years
Some catagory is always being pronoucned "dead". 5 years ago it was RPGs. Look at all teh activity now. Any catagory that remains unchanged people gte broed of and it 'dies". (And yes, 1P shooters are abotu due for that dsitinction.) They stay "dead" until some group bucks this preception and comes otu witha new slant on it that "magicly" re-invigorates the genre.
This is an ongoing pattern. There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new twists and thats all people really want. (The 1P shooter really isn't new, its just a new twist on the basic 2D shooter.)
To really udnerstand the results you need to read Chris Rijk's article. There really isn't a lot of fluff there, it's all pretty much to the point. You can't understand an issue as complex as comparative peformance charcteristics from "soundbites" or annecdotes.
BUT if you want a soundbite, the soundbite is this...
There is no magic here. Java compiles to native code just as C or C++ does. At run-time however (when Java compiles) there is optimization information on what your program actually does that is not available at "build-time" when C++ compiles which thsu results in ebtter optimisation of the code.
Additionally Hotspot does "risky optimizations" because it can back them out if the guesses prove wrong. This is something a build-time compiler cannot do.
Finally, you can amke any code slow but ineffective/inappropriate programming. Most Java prgorammers are still very new to the language and how it works. It hasn't been around long enough for a body of practices to build up yet.
In that regard, I find this whole "java is slow" thing frankly ratehr amusing. If yo uwant to take a time-trip back 5 years, take any senatce with the words "java is slow" in it, and repalce the word "java" with the word C++
I've used Java3D for a commerical game proejct extensively and foudn no speed problems to date.
And why should putting it ontop of OI make it any faster?
As has been already posted and discussed, Java computational performance is a match for C+= today. (See Chris Rijk's excellently researched and analyzed article "Binaries v. Bytecodes" on www.aceshardware.com.)
Going to native code can actually slow down Java applications. For an explaination on why this is true, see the Native code section of the book "Java Platform Performance: Strategies and tactics."
Just thought someone should point out that in the Java word we have Java3D, a very very nice scene graph system, that's now in Version 2 with added features. (I wouldn't be suprised if I fodun otu the the J3D guys were inspired by some of inventor's ideas, seeing how long ivnetor has been around.)
J3D is portable across udnerlying 3D libraries. Currently there are version for both OpenGL and Direct3D.
"Until recently, we clung to the notion that some institutions -- journalism, politics, academe, art and culture -- stood somewhat outside of the marketplace"
I'm not sure where you've been but the Ivory Tower has been green for a long, long time.
When I was in school fifteen years ago the UW-Madison had something called the Wisconsin Alumni Reserach Foundation (or WARF.) WARF's sole purpose was to provide last stage funding for taking publicly funded absic research and turnign into privately UW-owned commercial processes and patents.
The public Universities have been turning a private buck on our public dollars for a long, long time. Welcome to life in the U$A.
In fact, modern Java VMs use far more complex garbage collection schemes. Hotspot is a combination of a generational collector and a train-algorithm collector.
Between this, the incorrect assertions about Java performance, and the questionable logic about pass by value (anyone consider the cost of COPYING all those objects?), frankly this author seems not to have the knowledge necessary to do his topic any justice.
P.S. The fastest system in the world is the one thats only on paper....
"Where are the Java bytecode-to-native compilers to make this a non-issue? "
The answer is, in Java. It's called a JIT and in fact does a better job compiling in many cases then a static compiler can due to the richness of information available to it at run-time.
This mistake is what's wrong with the article too- it's built on false prmise. Yo uand the article author both need to go read Chris Rijk's benchamrking report (Binareis v. Bytecodes) at www.aceshardware.com.
Okay, I've faced this a number of times. here are soem shrot-term and long-term solutions that have worked for me:
Short Term:
(1) Music, preferrably headphones. I have a set of "programming CDs" that I find help me a lot when I'm lackign focus. They give me a kind of "artifical energy" that keeps me going.
(2) Side Projects. one thing that can elad to thsi is boredom. A side off-hours programmign proejct helps me keep it all fresh.
Long term Solutions:
(1) Balance and enegry-management. How hard are you working? I've worked jobs where the company counted on me doing way over a reasonable 40 horus of work all the time. Most of us can put out 150% or even close to 200% for a short period of time, but it can;'t be a way of life. If you are doing those kidsn of exertions you MUST have periods where you (and management) allows you to drop to 30% output to recover. If they can't do that then they can't ask you to do the sprints. You can code as a sprinter, or a marathion runner, but anyoen who tries to sprint a marathon will hurt if not kill themselves.
(BTW, I eventually quit that job and found a more reasonable one. Something you might have to do.)
(2) Medication. This may NOt be your case, but some people have natural and severe swings of mood. This is particularly common in the toips of the intellectual and creative fields, and ours is both. A feeling of intense massive anti-inertia is a common symptom of Affective Disorder (what is sometimes called "Clinical Depression.") If you have these periods without a clear reason for being so exhausted, you might want to talk to a competant psychiatrist and have some tests run. If this IS your problem, its quite treatable today and there is no reason to suffer with it.
I must admit I only skimmed this article, but it seems to consist of exampels of absue of Ip either through the unreasonable streatching of the concept of IP or through governments not acting as the servents of the people they are or should be.
He states in his first few lines that IP was invented to encourage the creation of artistic works. (Actually that's copyright. Patent was created to safegaurd knowledge that was being lost to scoiety through inventor-secrecy.) He then fails to address the 300 years of artistic creation following the Statute of Anne (the first copyright law) but instead jumps straight into modern adn extreme examples of abuse-- some genuine and some only posited.
Frankly, if I were grading this for a poltiical philosophy class, I'd call it a C paper.
Slashdot Mirror
The first computer was designed by Charles Babbage
in 1882. Although he never built one, a unviersty did from his original 1822 designs in the early 90's and it DOES work.
This page has a nice summary:
http://www.maxmon.com/1822ad.htm
I agree with your thesis statement, but not your solution.
Until I reached high-school age I was limited to 2 hours of non-PBS TV a day. Why? a few reasons. My mother rightly saw it as a passive form of enetrtainment that did nothing to stimulate development of eiterh mind or body.
MORE then that though, she only had two hours a day to monitor what I was watching. She made durn sure she knew what I was being told by the little black box so that she could "adjust" any messages I was recieving that she didn't approve of.
If you can't be with your child when they surf, turn OFF the damn computer and hand them a ball or a book.
I think its a gREAT idea...
Not for children, if children are to grow up to be competant adults they need to be taught to deal with the world. (There is a REAL street corner out there, too, you know.)
But for those who NEVER grow up... religous conservatives, right wing congressmen, and so on, this seems perfect. You know, those who can still be scared by words and ideas... THEY need a safe place to play.
Catseye
May the lord bless and keep Pat Robertson... far away from government.
Its perfectly consistant IF your midn isn't stuck in C mode.
try to forget what C taught yo uand coem at this fresh...
In ALL cases java passes the value of a variable.
Its just that one of those variable-tyoes is an
object-reference vairable. You are still passing the VALUE of the object reference.
Your problem is you are used to thinking in terms of pointers, not references. Every place in memory has a pointer address (even primative types) thus it is soemthing different from a variable value. But references only exist for objects and ARE a primative type on an euqal footing with the other primatives.
A journal article mathematicly proved this in the 60s....
The tubes would burn out as fast as you replaced them.
The problem with prognostication is that it is based on today's knowledge and thus is always fallacious.
JK
I'd go as redundant as possible. At a bear minimum whatevr yo uend up with, make sure you can store backups in a software agnostic form (SQL, XML, etc.)
It'd be pretty scary to find bad busg in your free system and have to either...
(A) Try to repair the damage to get your emdicl records back
or
(B) Be unable to move to a different solution if this proves unworkable.
As to how often to back up, the simple rule is "how much data are you willing to lose?"
Yes, its true comemrcial sofwtare can be as buggy as freeware and freeware can be as soldi as commercial sofwtare, but atleast with a commercial package you have somewhere to go for support in cases of missio ncritical failure. freeware its all up to you...
IANAL,
But this is just silly.
Just make them sign a contract saying they are independant consultantsd and spelling out exactly what they have agrred is "fair and just compensation" for their efforts (typicly, free access or other small perqs.)
Two individuals (and a corporation is leaglly an individual) can legally contract for any trade of value. As long as they aren't made to work in ways that make them look like employees its all fine. (MS got in trouble becvasue their "contractors" had all the restrictions of full employees.)
He says "'The layout of any website is "public domain" which is freely available to the public'
I can put down in print that elephants are orenge, it doesn't make it correct.
IANAL, and this does not consitute legal advice, but...
Graphic layout has a long history of protection under the copyright laws. In addition, there is a general idea udner copyright that the organizationb of information is a protected form of expression, where that organization is unique.
The question is, what do you want to do about it? Suing him would be expensive and unelss he's makign money from hsi site, or you can show that he somehow prevented you form makign money with yours, damages are going to be minimal.
OTOH if its just his statement that bothers you, giving legal advice without a license IS a crime (thus my disclaimer above). You might be able to force him to take it down by writing a letter of complaint to the bar association. If yo ucan figure out what state he's in, send it to the bar association in his state (and point them at how you figured that out.) Otherwise, you can send it to the bar in your state and hope they decide to investigate further.
... fact.
M$ charges licensees per CPu shipped, whether they ship with Windows or not. Their clain is that this is to prevent piracy. Most of the industry however feels this is to make it unworkable for their licensees to ship alternate OSs as a reasonable option.
If/when the cout case is final and over, assumign M$ doesn't pull a suprise victory out of the hat, they will ahve to stop this. Til the, yo uand I over-pay because our industry is dominated by a monopoly. (Maybe you should see if there's a class action suit you can join, although M$ has pretty sucessfully defended themselves from consumer suits so far by using a precedent that says basicly that, if there is a middle man, you can only sue the middleman.)
IANAL, either.
Cease and desist letters can be serious, your ignoring them can set you up for nasty damages come the actual court case. You really need to get a laywer forth with to write a proper reply as to why you feel you are legally in the clear.
Now IS it illegal? The answer is its grey. I'm not a lawyer but I worked for one of the leaders in the field of online gaming and have heard the arguments. The strongest intellectual property argument I've heard has nothing to do with patent, so don't be misled by that-- it has to do with Copyright. Copyrights recognize not just the work, but the organization of the work, where that organization is considered significant. The argument is that a private protocol is a significant organization of information and thus protected under international copyright law.
You can argue about this back and forth as to whetehr it's right, but its up to the courts to decide the legality not us and the precedents are decidedly mixzed and unclear.
Now if you happen to live in oen of those "copyright free" piracy havens out there that aren't signatories to the international copyright law, its probably irellevent.
For thsoe in the SF bay area, our local PBS station (KTEH) has been showing England's RobotWars show-- this looks to be a pretty similar.
RobotWars admits they were inspired by the underground competitions that were (still are?) staged in this area. (They were underground,as I udnerstand, because insurance would have been prohibitively expensive had the real nature of the exhibitiosn been known before-hand.)
Robot Wars is narrated/officiated with great gusto by Craig Charles-- Lister from Red Dwarf. he really adds a lot of value to the show.
Slash-chutzpah never ceases to amaze me.
It greedy of someone to file a lawsuit over very real violations of their copyrights? AOL may or may not be the right target, but with the "if it ain't nailed down its mine" attitude toward MP3 piracy often espoused here, this just plain dumfounded me.
Can technology crerate a truer democracy? Surely. For the first time in American history we have the potentail for a true Atehnian Democracy. No parties, no representatives, just country wide votes on political issues. The technology is obviosuly here. There are many ways to do this, but one way would be to have rerpesentatvies of various factions debtae issues on a public TV network, and then let all interested members of society vote via the net. Thsoe that had no hoem computer or other web device could be given a "minitel" like device or allowed to vote via touch-tone.
Now WILL it happen? Ofcourse not. The first job of any beaurcracy is self-preservation. Furthermore I'm not even convicned it SHOULD happen. Contrary to what they teach you in high school, distance and communication were not the only consideratiosn when the representative system was set up by our founders. Though opinion was divided one contingent felt strongly that rule directly by the amsses would only lead to chaos and desintegration of an ordered society.
Alexander Hamilton said, "The masses are asses."
I've seen little to dispell that notion, personally.
IANAL but I've dicussed this general issue with a few...
As I understand it if AOL created a product whose sole and only purpose was illegal, they could indeed by potentially liable.
I doubt however thats proveable in the case og Gnutella. As I udnerstand it all AOL has to show is SOME legitimate users out there and they are reasonably safe.
As a secondary issue, it will be hard to collect anything in punative damages even if they win ebcause AOL is nto making any money themselves from Gnutella. They've even gone so far as to distance themselves from its creation so its not even a PR win (or loss).
I'm sorry, the game industry (before I got sane and got out.) I worked in or near it for 10 years
Some catagory is always being pronoucned "dead". 5 years ago it was RPGs. Look at all teh activity now. Any catagory that remains unchanged people gte broed of and it 'dies". (And yes, 1P shooters are abotu due for that dsitinction.) They stay "dead" until some group bucks this preception and comes otu witha new slant on it that "magicly" re-invigorates the genre.
This is an ongoing pattern. There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new twists and thats all people really want. (The 1P shooter really isn't new, its just a new twist on the basic 2D shooter.)
Look up the precedents, they're fairly obvious (armed booby-traps). Basicly, this thing fires at anyone and the owner is criminally and civily liable.
To really udnerstand the results you need to read Chris Rijk's article. There really isn't a lot of fluff there, it's all pretty much to the point. You can't understand an issue as complex as comparative peformance charcteristics from "soundbites" or annecdotes.
BUT if you want a soundbite, the soundbite is this...
There is no magic here. Java compiles to native code just as C or C++ does. At run-time however (when Java compiles) there is optimization information on what your program actually does that is not available at "build-time" when C++ compiles which thsu results in ebtter optimisation of the code.
Additionally Hotspot does "risky optimizations" because it can back them out if the guesses prove wrong. This is something a build-time compiler cannot do.
Finally, you can amke any code slow but ineffective/inappropriate programming. Most Java prgorammers are still very new to the language and how it works. It hasn't been around long enough for a body of practices to build up yet.
In that regard, I find this whole "java is slow" thing frankly ratehr amusing. If yo uwant to take a time-trip back 5 years, take any senatce with the words "java is slow" in it, and repalce the word "java" with the word C++
I've used Java3D for a commerical game proejct extensively and foudn no speed problems to date.
And why should putting it ontop of OI make it any faster?
As has been already posted and discussed, Java computational performance is a match for C+= today. (See Chris Rijk's excellently researched and analyzed article "Binaries v. Bytecodes" on www.aceshardware.com.)
Going to native code can actually slow down Java applications. For an explaination on why this is true, see the Native code section of the book "Java Platform Performance: Strategies and tactics."
Just thought someone should point out that in the Java word we have Java3D, a very very nice scene graph system, that's now in Version 2 with added features. (I wouldn't be suprised if I fodun otu the the J3D guys were inspired by some of inventor's ideas, seeing how long ivnetor has been around.)
J3D is portable across udnerlying 3D libraries. Currently there are version for both OpenGL and Direct3D.
"Until recently, we clung to the notion that some institutions -- journalism, politics, academe, art and culture -- stood somewhat outside of the marketplace"
I'm not sure where you've been but the Ivory Tower has been green for a long, long time.
When I was in school fifteen years ago the UW-Madison had something called the Wisconsin Alumni Reserach Foundation (or WARF.) WARF's sole purpose was to provide last stage funding for taking publicly funded absic research and turnign into privately UW-owned commercial processes and patents.
The public Universities have been turning a private buck on our public dollars for a long, long time. Welcome to life in the U$A.
>> (Warning: This could be considered a flame.)
In fact, modern Java VMs use far more complex garbage collection schemes. Hotspot is a combination of a generational collector and a train-algorithm collector.
Between this, the incorrect assertions about Java performance, and the questionable logic about pass by value (anyone consider the cost of COPYING all those objects?), frankly this author seems not to have the knowledge necessary to do his topic any justice.
P.S. The fastest system in the world is the one thats only on paper....
You ask:
"Where are the Java bytecode-to-native compilers to make this a non-issue? "
The answer is, in Java. It's called a JIT and in fact does a better job compiling in many cases then a static compiler can due to the richness of information available to it at run-time.
This mistake is what's wrong with the article too- it's built on false prmise. Yo uand the article author both need to go read Chris Rijk's benchamrking report (Binareis v. Bytecodes) at www.aceshardware.com.
Many of the classic arcade games (Asteroids, Defender, Joust, etc) had VERY simple logic.
;) )
If you are teaching in Java (something I'd higlhly recommend) the learnign curve for simple graphics is quite low.
Thats what got ME started-- writing games (though back then theyw er text on a 12cps teletype
Okay, I've faced this a number of times. here are soem shrot-term and long-term solutions that have worked for me:
Short Term:
(1) Music, preferrably headphones. I have a set of "programming CDs" that I find help me a lot when I'm lackign focus. They give me a kind of "artifical energy" that keeps me going.
(2) Side Projects. one thing that can elad to thsi is boredom. A side off-hours programmign proejct helps me keep it all fresh.
Long term Solutions:
(1) Balance and enegry-management. How hard are you working? I've worked jobs where the company counted on me doing way over a reasonable 40 horus of work all the time. Most of us can put out 150% or even close to 200% for a short period of time, but it can;'t be a way of life. If you are doing those kidsn of exertions you MUST have periods where you (and management) allows you to drop to 30% output to recover. If they can't do that then they can't ask you to do the sprints. You can code as a sprinter, or a marathion runner, but anyoen who tries to sprint a marathon will hurt if not kill themselves.
(BTW, I eventually quit that job and found a more reasonable one. Something you might have to do.)
(2) Medication. This may NOt be your case, but some people have natural and severe swings of mood. This is particularly common in the toips of the intellectual and creative fields, and ours is both. A feeling of intense massive anti-inertia is a common symptom of Affective Disorder (what is sometimes called "Clinical Depression.") If you have these periods without a clear reason for being so exhausted, you might want to talk to a competant psychiatrist and have some tests run. If this IS your problem, its quite treatable today and there is no reason to suffer with it.
Good luck.
I must admit I only skimmed this article, but it seems to consist of exampels of absue of Ip either through the unreasonable streatching of the concept of IP or through governments not acting as the servents of the people they are or should be.
He states in his first few lines that IP was invented to encourage the creation of artistic works. (Actually that's copyright. Patent was created to safegaurd knowledge that was being lost to scoiety through inventor-secrecy.) He then fails to address the 300 years of artistic creation following the Statute of Anne (the first copyright law) but instead jumps straight into modern adn extreme examples of abuse-- some genuine and some only posited.
Frankly, if I were grading this for a poltiical philosophy class, I'd call it a C paper.