That's not what antitrust law is about, nor should it be. Abuse of monopoly power results in stealing money from consumers, and unemployment for competitors. We the People make commerce legal because we think it leads to a better life. We the People made monopolies illegal because it's a type of commerce that leads to a less good life. All of the companies that became famous monopolies did a lot for their industries. That says nothing about their monopoly practices nor their breaking of the law.
And, Microsoft will not be "torn down" or "burned". They will be forced to compete, with all of their assets still active in parts of the economy. Nothing is lost, except with a return to competition consumers will benefit from lower prices and faster innovation.
And could somebody moderate that pointer-to-Cringely piece down from 5 to 4? not only does it not say much, but the ensuing discussion in response is worth skipping.
I believe you when you say Microsoft's SMB is full of bugs, inconsistent, etc. But, whenever I plug Windows machines into a network, they can see each other and connect to each other. It takes me many hours to make Samba work in a new environment, and sometimes I never can get it to work, and with the next rev of my distro, back to zero again. Believe it or not, I find sendmail easier to configure than samba.
What is going on? I'm not alone because there are a number of people who consider me to be their expert and ask me to set it up for them. And, not everybody knows me. It's a shame to see all of your good work go to waste in so many instances. Does Microsoft work around their own bugs by trying lots of combinations till something works? Whatever it is, can Samba be made to get to work as effortlessly as does the buggier Microsoft version?
Once Samba is working, I like it a lot better. I suggested once, and they all laughed, but I'll suggest it again: it would be very cool to run Samba from a Windows machine instead of the native SMB. It's a much more powerful and flexible implementation: but, more than a little cranky.
what if nobody had invented an answering machine before?...it's still just 3 things stuck together
The distinction I would draw is whether the 3 things stuck together are doing something new or not: the ball in the mouse is just a ball, but it's doing a very un-ball-like thing (ok, sometimes I drag'em across the desk, but... ha ha) So, is an answering machine patentable? maybe a little piece having to do with answering the phone with a switch, maybe some of the "algorithms" (mechanical or otherwise) for juggling the tape... but I would pretty much think that once tape recording is invented, it's obvious that it can tape phone calls.
I realize I'm talking about a fuzzy standard, but I'm just moving the fuzzy line that will always exist. Here's how I think of obviousness: I don't think the idea "phone answering machine" is patentable on it's own (and I think the patent office agrees). So, if you as an engineer are given the task "build phone answering machine" and you think "tape recorder" and anyone would think "tape recorder", well that's obvious. If I tell you "the UI has too many clicks to buy a book" and you show me how you'd do one click using cookies, it's hard to imagine that how you did it would be anything but obvious. The idea is not patentable.
This wildcard DNS seems more clever than one-click ordering, but really only because it's weirder. The feature was sitting there, and the multihosting webservers are just sitting there. Here's one for you: let's patent one-click ordering using wildcard DNS! You see, all the technologies exist but we'd be combining them in a novel way, using no cookies! We could even use it for an affiliate bookstore program!
There's some similarity between engineers piecing together parts to build things and lawyers building their cases. They don't allow patents on novel legal defenses. Unfortunately, they seem to hold sway over the rest of us and they are as a rule stupider than engineers and they don't give us the same protection for our toolboxes that they give themselves. Oh, IANAL.
actually, I meant it as pure fiction, a satire, so I don't think the quoting rule would apply. I could tell it wasn't structured properly to be totally funny by Slashdot standards: Slashdot abhors subtlety, so I shoulda sprinkled in some smileys and not mixed in a serious point, but I was tired and in a hurry. Also, I was treading on thin ice mentioning one of Slashdot's heroes disparagingly, but I think it was a timely criticism so... sorry it sent you documenting the details of the seeming error.
I do maintain that it was clever just the same, but I won't hide behind the artist's excuse "if it made you angry, the art was working" because I was hoping to make you laugh. sorry.
how the fuck is your fucking web browser going to fucking know your fucking social security number and your fucking sexual preference?! IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DO THAT.
your browser does not generate cookies, servers do, so pull your opposable thumb from out of your ass, OR IS IT NOT POSSIBLE TO DO THAT?
And how would the server know? Well, have you followed the Doubleclick controversy? Do you have your own IP address, or do you share one with the rest of AOL? Because all of the cool people have their own IP address (I have 269 of them:), and when they go to Slashdot, and from there to somewhere else, read the story, back and post a comment... why, it does not take long to figure out who goes with which IP address if they're somewhat active. It's happening only rarely now, but all the records are accumulating, companies are merging... it's just not that far fetched.
Anyway, so the guy made a mistake. He's one out of thousands of people. If you've ever run a big mailing list or organized a big event (yeah, like your 10th birthday to infinity), you quickly come to realize that when 1000s of people are involved, just by probability alone a small number of perfectly intelligent people are going to miss the instructions, not see an obvious sign, etc. It's really no big deal. But when you make a big deal out of it when other people make a mistake, you then find yourself feeling especially humilated when you make a mistake yourself. Luckily, you still live with your mother and she can comfort you, but when you get big you'll realize that it's better to just explain things to people.
"...the devices are modelled
exactly on the way the human eye works, based on the work of thousands of previous researchers into how all human eyes function. 'It was remarkably easy to implement,' say the inventors, 'once others laid the groundwork.' Every aspect of the new devices are completely covered by freshly issued patents, there being no known prior examples of this science. Some novel aspects of these patents cover the many conceivable uses of the new eyes, especially in the area of e-commerce. 'We were blind to the possibilities,' wrote one of the inventors, 'but when we deliver eyeballs to a website, we expect to be compensated. And that's just to buy a book... wait till you try to read it: one-blink to accept the EULA. Tim was initially skeptical till he saw that the devices will require extensive 'in a nutshell' how-to books and he's already written an encouraging letter...'"
I share many of the sensibilities about intellectual property that you lay out, but I'm not sure if I draw the same conclusion. In the Amazon discussion someone pointed out the cotton gin as an example of "patentable, but obvious in retrospect". I see that, but it was an invention of something that didn't exist before. Think of the mouse pointing device: seems patentable: it has that "why didn't I think of this" feel of obviousness, but it is something that didn't exist before. And I don't mean that because it is a physical object. Compression or encryption algorithms: they are new things.
But this DNS trick, like Amazon and cookies and confirms, doesn't invent anything. The feature of the DNS they are using was invented by someone else. Cookies were invented by someone else. Am I rambling here? I'm just trying to explore the space. A few years ago, I heard about a patent that was something like "using a hard disk to store digitized telephone messages". I hear that and think, "give a patent to the hard disk guy, to the A/D guy, and to the telephone guy. But using technologies in combination to do what they were invented to do is not patentable, even if it's clever."
"Prior art" trumps anything, but obviousness on its own is enough if you can make the case. Here's the case: every UI designer has faced the issue of whether an extra confirmatory click should be necessary.
Confirm, Y/N? [click].
Amazon answered that question "no." Where is the patentability?
When you submit an article to Slashdot, you can click "submit" or "preview". They use cookies to identify you. If you submit an article/topic, you must preview first... Did they steal the idea from Amazon? So what if there is a purchase involved? an HTTP transaction == an HTTP transaction.
I read the patent. That's all that it says.
As to my suggestion that we are reading carefully crafted PR? We are. If you take out an insurance policy on your wife, and then she dies, people are suspicious. These two guys have a very large financial interest at stake. What they wrote is not exactly hard-hitting. Festooned with distracting fluff, there are about 3 lines about IP. You call it "thoughtful". That's a buzzword for Clinton-speak, fuzzy verbiage designed to distract. It reads like, "I'm not going to let them off the hook easily, I'm going to... let them off the hook as soon as I distract you." I could be wrong, of course. It could be totally sincere, in which case it would strike me as rather dimwitted.
well, we could quibble, but my example was pretty dumb anyway. It doesn't invalidate my point, but confirmation of an order is not the same as authentication.
oh, so you know why I believe what I believe? Look who is talking about throwing unfounded accusations around! Hypocrisy is fine in my book, but one should refrain from illustrating it in the same sentence as an accusation:)
Here's a better explanation just to clarify:
I am pro-patent, pro-trademark, pro-copyright, pro-property rights, pro-free market, pro capitalist... heck, I'm even pro-corporatist, to use that stupid neologism that's been floating around Slashdot. But I'm anti-bullshit. I like my capitalism straight up.
What you detected in my original post was not cynicism, it was disgust. I want the cynics to call Amazon on the bullshit so that I can be the one to defend intellectual property theory. But instead, apparently because we get to call them Tim and Jeff, everybody's turned into a pussycat. O'Reilly offered in his own public statements to help Amazon craft a response that would be publicly palatable. Then, matchy-matchy letters are published on the two websites the same day... they admit to long phone calls. You don't have to be a cynic to call that carefully crafted. I didn't have to make up their collusion.
And are you assuming that Bezos publishes letters like that without having his lawyers and PR people help? Such a course would risk a blunder and a huge shareholder lawsuit. And I know that not because I'm a cynic, but because I've actually studied corporate law at the graduate level. I suppose that makes me more academically successful than you so we should look askance at any objections you might have (your view, not mine).
The process that the patent describes was obvious to a practitioner. So what if they were the first to think of it? So what if Barnes & Noble copied them? Copying good ideas is not against the rules. Why don't Bezos and O'Reilly discuss the obviousness aspect? Because they are stupid? I don't think so. I think I'm being complimentary when I "accuse" them of being smart enough to think of it, and smart enough to leave it out of the discussion. And I'm smart enough not to let them.
Dear Patent Office, Barnes and Noble had a one-click-to-order-system, that fed into a one-click-to-confirm. They dropped the click to confirm. How can stopping doing something be considered patentable?
And furthermore, in a point that's been previously made, what computers do abstractly, and GUIs make more obvious to dumb users (the TB's of the world) is they allow real things to be virtualized. As soon as computers were invented we started getting metaphors for real life. They are all obvious to practitioners of the art. This one-click system is simply the "put it on my tab" system made virtual, just as the shopping cart metaphor before it. They are all obvious if you have a couple of synapses to rub together.
whether it is user enabled or not, security hazard or not, my point was that it had been thought of before, I dare say, thousands of times. that's what makes it non-patentable which is the topic of the thread. if you weren't so snotty, I wouldn't close by saying: nitwit.
of course you do. you were supposed to. Do you think the CEO of a gazillion dollar company posts letters on a website that he wrote by himself? Ha! Regularly, lawyers and marketing people are excoriated as clueless on Slashdot. This proves that they are not: they've written a nicey-nice little puff piece so all the saps in the world can say, "Hey, they feel our pain! Call off the boycott!"
Do you know how hard it would be to get the patent laws changed in this way? It would take far more lobbying and bags of cash (sprinkled internationally, I might add) than Amazon has, even if they did want to push the issue. He's calling for something he knows will never happen. His marketing people got the idea from the book, "How to look like a nice guy without actually being a nice guy." It's available on Amazon, I think.
All to draw attention away from the fact that what cookies do is match up the person with the browser with the session with the server. That's what cookies do. I've worked on dozens of projects that used cookies in this way. And, most every time, we had a discussion of when we should ask for the user's password again. We already knew who they were, but fearing cookie compromises and concerned about the user's security, we would decide on certain occasions to make the user prove who they were. At Amazon, they decided not to. They decided that the cookie was good enough. They decided to call this compromise of user security "one-click". But, isn't it obvious that "one-click" was obvious to anyone who thought about what cookies do?
This story has been posted here on slashdot for more than eight hours now, and look at my message number... I almost got a first post! Assuming that posting correlates with pageviews, do you think Salon has noticed the uptick in traffic? This might be the one case where a Smurf attack would make the victim feel better! Do you think there is any hope for Salon?:)
if the CIA is so bad, and if marketing propaganda is so powerful, how is it that you escape to dispense your pearls of wisdom for the rest of us to read? you must be a super-human to be able to resist the brainwashing and dodge the Man who is trying to take you down. I for one am glad that we have ubermenschen like you to save us. I mean, as we lose our freedoms, black people continue to have to sit in the back of the bus... oh wait, I mean, as we lose our freedoms, women increasingly have to stay home and raise children... oh wait, I mean, as we lose our freedoms, gay people have to closet themselves more and more... oh wait, I mean as we lose our freedoms, you can't get a job unless you cut your hair... oh wait, I mean, as we lose our freedoms, we have to sneak to the bad part of town to buy erotic material in brown paper bags... oh wait, I mean as we lose our freedoms, we are presented with less and less choice of what we can buy and eat... oh never mind.
anyway, I'm glad to see how successful you've been at stopping the Man from limiting my choices about everything from the important to the trivial.
Tim O: RMS? Could you help me out with a letter I'm writing to the... um er... EFF? What should I say about patents and stuff.
RMS: Dear EFF, Patents [voice rising] are [voice rising] very [shreiking] bad. Information wants to be free. It's a free speech issue.[/talking][/shrieking]
Tim O: thanks dude, good enough! [click]
[tap tap tap] s/good/bad/ [oops] s/good/bad/g [tap tap tap] s/[shrill]/[soothing]/g [oops] s/[shrill]/[soothing]/gi
RCPT TO:Jeff B My Dearest Friend, How's this?
Dear Community, Patents are very good. Information wants to be freely available with one click and a preregistered credit card. It's a free speech issue: Books are good, Amazon sells books, Amazon is good. soylent.isgreen, chew, swallow... red pill...
[connection lost before line could be traced]
Echelon is unable to determine identity of parties.
calling someone a "crackpot" and saying that they have a low probability of being correct? those statements are not vitriolic. they aren't even vituperative.
stepping beyond the bounds of gentlemanly conduct? huh? why don't you challenge him to a duel? That sort of a thing was quite popular in the century whereupon you came to develop your finely honed sense of honor and elocution. Odd Bodkins! Such a course of action us surely fully commensurate with this bounders transgression.
The gantlet has been thrown. Aye, what say ye then, knave?
Why would you want to put so much into analyzing nuclear explosions?
they're trying to find the optimal distances to heat the following foods for a light snack:
s'mores
toasted marshmallows, straight up
mac'n cheese
tea, Earl Grey, hot
the project got kicked off accidently when the French Echelon intercepted and misspelled this decrypt from the American Sec. of Defense: "the best way to heat these foods is unclear". The Spanish intercepted these French intercepts and are still pondering a suspicious code phrase: "noleche".
Or do you see both [patent and book-copyright] stemming from the same source?
sorry, my statement was meant to read as, "if I were not buying books from Amazon, but were downloading them instead, my Amazon boycott would be moot. (like my Microsoft boycott is: I run linux:)
Your other points/questions are interesting, but I'm too exhausted to take them up. Another day, though...
No, they wouldn't be a creditor unless they are extending you credit, like billing you in installments rather than all at once
You didn't really address the thrust of my comment. I don't want to quibble about who's a creditor and who is not, and you may be 100% knowlegeable and correct: my point was that the article says "third parties" will be barred from buying your data. I'm saying that it is not clear to me who is a third party.
The article was talking about selling the data to people with whom you have no relationship so they could mine the data for potential customers. I'm sure that your credit card agreement, and their agreement with your merchant, and contract law covering you and your merchant does not define your merchant as a mere "third party". So, my original point about the Psychics (that is how they do it, I've heard) are still valid:
unless we get very specific protections and regulations, we won't be sure who has access to our data. A ban on selling it to "cold spammers" is OK, but it's not enough.
Tigher regulations which still allow us to sign away our rights will probably be worthless too because there will be a "shrinkwrap" license on everything which does just that.
That's why I call for regulations which place burdens on data gatherers across the board. If my data is in your database, I think you must tell me. If my data is bought or sold, I think you must tell me. Any system that falls short will fail.
Apologies in advance for using the word "spam" and "shrinkwrap" in novel ways, but I'm trying to make a simple point in a few words to a smart audience, and I hope not to have to write yet another post to clarify clarify clarify.
SSN is that its a easy way to get a unique identifying number for their customer database
Good guess, but that's not what several have told me explicitly. They said they needed it to do a credit check. The Sprint salesman told me he would enter it, and do the credit check, and then immediately he would delete it. Do I believe him? I did... but then in a later customer support call I was asked "what are the last 4 digits..." Sigh.
It's an encouraging ruling and I think public perception has been going in the right direction on this stuff, but I'm sure this particular ruling is going to offer little privacy protection.
For example, I bet it would still be OK for a Hotline Psychic Friend to take your credit card, and then (now that they are a creditor, i.e. not a "third party") look up your personal info and say "I'm sensing that you've been on a vacation... I see palm trees..."
I think the right answer is disclosure. Anytime anybody buys or sells info about you, you get notified. Then, once we had an idea of how the data is flowing, we can make a judgement as to what we like and don't like. I don't think anything short of that will be good enough.
And, that probably won't be good enough either. I mean, as much as I try to keep my social security cat in the privacy bag, you can't buy a simple thing like a cell phone without forking it over. Why isn't just my credit card good enough? Probably it would be, but the Big Brother and the Phone Holding Companies know that they can get away with forcing disclosure. How about a "no requiring of information that's not necessary" regulation.
They call it "Maxima" but it really is a fork of macsyma
They call it Maxima but really it is a forked up name for...
macsyma, a symbolic math package BTW developed under "project mac". See? That's clever: project mac, math, symbols... clever. Can "Maxima" be improved? Well, here at least is a recursive acronym: MAXima Is MAcsyma. Nah, no good.
How about, "Maxima: where this derivative's name has a value equal to zero"
There is no need for an Amazon boycott: if O'Reilly put his money where is mouth is, he'd GPL the the content of the books and we could then download them instead of buying them from Amazon.
the law is that minority shareholder interests must be protected (i.e. minority shareholder value must be maximized). Now, if TOR is the largest shareholder and decisionmaker, he could credibly defend his position as being in the best interests longterm interest of all shareholders, but I'm simply making the point that shareholder lawsuits are independent of whether a company is public or not.
such lawsuits are, however, more rare because the number of such shareholders is much smaller and because they have less information about what goes on inside the company.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what antitrust law is about, nor should it be. Abuse of monopoly power results in stealing money from consumers, and unemployment for competitors. We the People make commerce legal because we think it leads to a better life. We the People made monopolies illegal because it's a type of commerce that leads to a less good life. All of the companies that became famous monopolies did a lot for their industries. That says nothing about their monopoly practices nor their breaking of the law.
And, Microsoft will not be "torn down" or "burned". They will be forced to compete, with all of their assets still active in parts of the economy. Nothing is lost, except with a return to competition consumers will benefit from lower prices and faster innovation.
And could somebody moderate that pointer-to-Cringely piece down from 5 to 4? not only does it not say much, but the ensuing discussion in response is worth skipping.
What is going on? I'm not alone because there are a number of people who consider me to be their expert and ask me to set it up for them. And, not everybody knows me. It's a shame to see all of your good work go to waste in so many instances. Does Microsoft work around their own bugs by trying lots of combinations till something works? Whatever it is, can Samba be made to get to work as effortlessly as does the buggier Microsoft version?
Once Samba is working, I like it a lot better. I suggested once, and they all laughed, but I'll suggest it again: it would be very cool to run Samba from a Windows machine instead of the native SMB. It's a much more powerful and flexible implementation: but, more than a little cranky.
The distinction I would draw is whether the 3 things stuck together are doing something new or not: the ball in the mouse is just a ball, but it's doing a very un-ball-like thing (ok, sometimes I drag'em across the desk, but... ha ha) So, is an answering machine patentable? maybe a little piece having to do with answering the phone with a switch, maybe some of the "algorithms" (mechanical or otherwise) for juggling the tape... but I would pretty much think that once tape recording is invented, it's obvious that it can tape phone calls.
I realize I'm talking about a fuzzy standard, but I'm just moving the fuzzy line that will always exist. Here's how I think of obviousness: I don't think the idea "phone answering machine" is patentable on it's own (and I think the patent office agrees). So, if you as an engineer are given the task "build phone answering machine" and you think "tape recorder" and anyone would think "tape recorder", well that's obvious. If I tell you "the UI has too many clicks to buy a book" and you show me how you'd do one click using cookies, it's hard to imagine that how you did it would be anything but obvious. The idea is not patentable.
This wildcard DNS seems more clever than one-click ordering, but really only because it's weirder. The feature was sitting there, and the multihosting webservers are just sitting there. Here's one for you: let's patent one-click ordering using wildcard DNS! You see, all the technologies exist but we'd be combining them in a novel way, using no cookies! We could even use it for an affiliate bookstore program!
There's some similarity between engineers piecing together parts to build things and lawyers building their cases. They don't allow patents on novel legal defenses. Unfortunately, they seem to hold sway over the rest of us and they are as a rule stupider than engineers and they don't give us the same protection for our toolboxes that they give themselves. Oh, IANAL.
I do maintain that it was clever just the same, but I won't hide behind the artist's excuse "if it made you angry, the art was working" because I was hoping to make you laugh. sorry.
your browser does not generate cookies, servers do, so pull your opposable thumb from out of your ass, OR IS IT NOT POSSIBLE TO DO THAT?
And how would the server know? Well, have you followed the Doubleclick controversy? Do you have your own IP address, or do you share one with the rest of AOL? Because all of the cool people have their own IP address (I have 269 of them :), and when they go to Slashdot, and from there to somewhere else, read the story, back and post a comment... why, it does not take long to figure out who goes with which IP address if they're somewhat active. It's happening only rarely now, but all the records are accumulating, companies are merging... it's just not that far fetched.
Anyway, so the guy made a mistake. He's one out of thousands of people. If you've ever run a big mailing list or organized a big event (yeah, like your 10th birthday to infinity), you quickly come to realize that when 1000s of people are involved, just by probability alone a small number of perfectly intelligent people are going to miss the instructions, not see an obvious sign, etc. It's really no big deal. But when you make a big deal out of it when other people make a mistake, you then find yourself feeling especially humilated when you make a mistake yourself. Luckily, you still live with your mother and she can comfort you, but when you get big you'll realize that it's better to just explain things to people.
But this DNS trick, like Amazon and cookies and confirms, doesn't invent anything. The feature of the DNS they are using was invented by someone else. Cookies were invented by someone else. Am I rambling here? I'm just trying to explore the space. A few years ago, I heard about a patent that was something like "using a hard disk to store digitized telephone messages". I hear that and think, "give a patent to the hard disk guy, to the A/D guy, and to the telephone guy. But using technologies in combination to do what they were invented to do is not patentable, even if it's clever."
When you submit an article to Slashdot, you can click "submit" or "preview". They use cookies to identify you. If you submit an article/topic, you must preview first... Did they steal the idea from Amazon? So what if there is a purchase involved? an HTTP transaction == an HTTP transaction.
I read the patent. That's all that it says.
As to my suggestion that we are reading carefully crafted PR? We are. If you take out an insurance policy on your wife, and then she dies, people are suspicious. These two guys have a very large financial interest at stake. What they wrote is not exactly hard-hitting. Festooned with distracting fluff, there are about 3 lines about IP. You call it "thoughtful". That's a buzzword for Clinton-speak, fuzzy verbiage designed to distract. It reads like, "I'm not going to let them off the hook easily, I'm going to ... let them off the hook as soon as I distract you." I could be wrong, of course. It could be totally sincere, in which case it would strike me as rather dimwitted.
well, we could quibble, but my example was pretty dumb anyway. It doesn't invalidate my point, but confirmation of an order is not the same as authentication.
oh, so you know why I believe what I believe? Look who is talking about throwing unfounded accusations around! Hypocrisy is fine in my book, but one should refrain from illustrating it in the same sentence as an accusation :)
Here's a better explanation just to clarify:
I am pro-patent, pro-trademark, pro-copyright, pro-property rights, pro-free market, pro capitalist... heck, I'm even pro-corporatist, to use that stupid neologism that's been floating around Slashdot. But I'm anti-bullshit. I like my capitalism straight up.
What you detected in my original post was not cynicism, it was disgust. I want the cynics to call Amazon on the bullshit so that I can be the one to defend intellectual property theory. But instead, apparently because we get to call them Tim and Jeff, everybody's turned into a pussycat. O'Reilly offered in his own public statements to help Amazon craft a response that would be publicly palatable. Then, matchy-matchy letters are published on the two websites the same day... they admit to long phone calls. You don't have to be a cynic to call that carefully crafted. I didn't have to make up their collusion.
And are you assuming that Bezos publishes letters like that without having his lawyers and PR people help? Such a course would risk a blunder and a huge shareholder lawsuit. And I know that not because I'm a cynic, but because I've actually studied corporate law at the graduate level. I suppose that makes me more academically successful than you so we should look askance at any objections you might have (your view, not mine).
The process that the patent describes was obvious to a practitioner. So what if they were the first to think of it? So what if Barnes & Noble copied them? Copying good ideas is not against the rules. Why don't Bezos and O'Reilly discuss the obviousness aspect? Because they are stupid? I don't think so. I think I'm being complimentary when I "accuse" them of being smart enough to think of it, and smart enough to leave it out of the discussion. And I'm smart enough not to let them.
Dear Patent Office, Barnes and Noble had a one-click-to-order-system, that fed into a one-click-to-confirm. They dropped the click to confirm. How can stopping doing something be considered patentable?
And furthermore, in a point that's been previously made, what computers do abstractly, and GUIs make more obvious to dumb users (the TB's of the world) is they allow real things to be virtualized. As soon as computers were invented we started getting metaphors for real life. They are all obvious to practitioners of the art. This one-click system is simply the "put it on my tab" system made virtual, just as the shopping cart metaphor before it. They are all obvious if you have a couple of synapses to rub together.
whether it is user enabled or not, security hazard or not, my point was that it had been thought of before, I dare say, thousands of times. that's what makes it non-patentable which is the topic of the thread. if you weren't so snotty, I wouldn't close by saying: nitwit.
of course you do. you were supposed to. Do you think the CEO of a gazillion dollar company posts letters on a website that he wrote by himself? Ha! Regularly, lawyers and marketing people are excoriated as clueless on Slashdot. This proves that they are not: they've written a nicey-nice little puff piece so all the saps in the world can say, "Hey, they feel our pain! Call off the boycott!"
Do you know how hard it would be to get the patent laws changed in this way? It would take far more lobbying and bags of cash (sprinkled internationally, I might add) than Amazon has, even if they did want to push the issue. He's calling for something he knows will never happen. His marketing people got the idea from the book, "How to look like a nice guy without actually being a nice guy." It's available on Amazon, I think.
All to draw attention away from the fact that what cookies do is match up the person with the browser with the session with the server. That's what cookies do. I've worked on dozens of projects that used cookies in this way. And, most every time, we had a discussion of when we should ask for the user's password again. We already knew who they were, but fearing cookie compromises and concerned about the user's security, we would decide on certain occasions to make the user prove who they were. At Amazon, they decided not to. They decided that the cookie was good enough. They decided to call this compromise of user security "one-click". But, isn't it obvious that "one-click" was obvious to anyone who thought about what cookies do?
This story has been posted here on slashdot for more than eight hours now, and look at my message number... I almost got a first post! Assuming that posting correlates with pageviews, do you think Salon has noticed the uptick in traffic? This might be the one case where a Smurf attack would make the victim feel better! Do you think there is any hope for Salon? :)
anyway, I'm glad to see how successful you've been at stopping the Man from limiting my choices about everything from the important to the trivial.
Jeff B: listen you little geek, post a total suck-up letter on your website, or I'm not selling your books.
Tim O: Oh, now I see your point about the intellectual property stuff, it's downright +1 Insightful. But what will I say?
Jeff B: Make it up, I don't care, just get it done.
Tim O: Yes, master.
[click] [bzzz][beep][last message repeated 9 times]
Tim O: RMS? Could you help me out with a letter I'm writing to the ... um er... EFF? What should I say about patents and stuff.
RMS: Dear EFF, Patents [voice rising] are [voice rising] very [shreiking] bad. Information wants to be free. It's a free speech issue.[/talking][/shrieking]
Tim O: thanks dude, good enough! [click]
[tap tap tap] s/good/bad/ [oops] s/good/bad/g [tap tap tap] s/[shrill]/[soothing]/g [oops] s/[shrill]/[soothing]/gi
RCPT TO:Jeff B
My Dearest Friend, How's this?
[connection lost before line could be traced]
Echelon is unable to determine identity of parties.
stepping beyond the bounds of gentlemanly conduct? huh? why don't you challenge him to a duel? That sort of a thing was quite popular in the century whereupon you came to develop your finely honed sense of honor and elocution. Odd Bodkins! Such a course of action us surely fully commensurate with this bounders transgression.
The gantlet has been thrown. Aye, what say ye then, knave?
Mhz only has any validity as a benchmark within an architecture. To compare across architectures, you must use bogomips!
they're trying to find the optimal distances to heat the following foods for a light snack:
the project got kicked off accidently when the French Echelon intercepted and misspelled this decrypt from the American Sec. of Defense: "the best way to heat these foods is unclear". The Spanish intercepted these French intercepts and are still pondering a suspicious code phrase: "noleche".
sorry, my statement was meant to read as, "if I were not buying books from Amazon, but were downloading them instead, my Amazon boycott would be moot. (like my Microsoft boycott is: I run linux :)
Your other points/questions are interesting, but I'm too exhausted to take them up. Another day, though...
You didn't really address the thrust of my comment. I don't want to quibble about who's a creditor and who is not, and you may be 100% knowlegeable and correct: my point was that the article says "third parties" will be barred from buying your data. I'm saying that it is not clear to me who is a third party.
The article was talking about selling the data to people with whom you have no relationship so they could mine the data for potential customers. I'm sure that your credit card agreement, and their agreement with your merchant, and contract law covering you and your merchant does not define your merchant as a mere "third party". So, my original point about the Psychics (that is how they do it, I've heard) are still valid:
That's why I call for regulations which place burdens on data gatherers across the board. If my data is in your database, I think you must tell me. If my data is bought or sold, I think you must tell me. Any system that falls short will fail.
Apologies in advance for using the word "spam" and "shrinkwrap" in novel ways, but I'm trying to make a simple point in a few words to a smart audience, and I hope not to have to write yet another post to clarify clarify clarify.
Good guess, but that's not what several have told me explicitly. They said they needed it to do a credit check. The Sprint salesman told me he would enter it, and do the credit check, and then immediately he would delete it. Do I believe him? I did... but then in a later customer support call I was asked "what are the last 4 digits..." Sigh.
For example, I bet it would still be OK for a Hotline Psychic Friend to take your credit card, and then (now that they are a creditor, i.e. not a "third party") look up your personal info and say "I'm sensing that you've been on a vacation... I see palm trees..."
I think the right answer is disclosure. Anytime anybody buys or sells info about you, you get notified. Then, once we had an idea of how the data is flowing, we can make a judgement as to what we like and don't like. I don't think anything short of that will be good enough.
And, that probably won't be good enough either. I mean, as much as I try to keep my social security cat in the privacy bag, you can't buy a simple thing like a cell phone without forking it over. Why isn't just my credit card good enough? Probably it would be, but the Big Brother and the Phone Holding Companies know that they can get away with forcing disclosure. How about a "no requiring of information that's not necessary" regulation.
They call it Maxima but really it is a forked up name for...
macsyma, a symbolic math package BTW developed under "project mac". See? That's clever: project mac, math, symbols... clever. Can "Maxima" be improved? Well, here at least is a recursive acronym: MAXima Is MAcsyma. Nah, no good.
How about, "Maxima: where this derivative's name has a value equal to zero"
There is no need for an Amazon boycott: if O'Reilly put his money where is mouth is, he'd GPL the the content of the books and we could then download them instead of buying them from Amazon.
such lawsuits are, however, more rare because the number of such shareholders is much smaller and because they have less information about what goes on inside the company.