The original intent was probably to "increase freedom" as you describe. Unfortunately, a major flaw has developed in the meantime. There is a huge disincentive to reviewing existing patents.
IANAL, blah blah. But this is my understanding of the current state of IP law. Anybody who knows better please correct me...
Let's say you have just invented some really cool and clever software technique. How do you know if it hasn't been done before?
Option 1: You drop 10 grand on a patent attorney to help you get a patent. If similar patents already exists, or if prior art exists, you are out of luck. You still gotta pay the attorney for his time. If you get the patent, you have to keep paying legal fees defend it, or you risk losing it.
Option 2: You could do some research on your own and look for patents similar to your idea. Maybe you find some similar ideas, but nothing exactly like yours. You're not worried about owning a patent, so you distribute your clever new software to the world. Much simpler, right?
Oops, you're not a patent attorney, are you? So you are not legally qualified to make determinations about whether you're infrining on any of those patents you researched. And since you did research it, you may now be liable for triple damages, because a claim could now be made that you were "willfully" infringing. Better get that patent attorney on the phone and start saving your pennies.
So by trying to protect yourself and making a legitimate effort to check into existing patents, you may have just screwed yourself. If you had never bothered to check, you still could be hit with damages, but by not knowing about existing patents, you save yourself the risk of getting hit with those triple damages.
So much for increasing freedom, allowing others to benefit from research and all that...
Although I can't find a source to link, it's my understanding that there was a $1000 limit on XFL betting in Las Vegas.
The gambling industry is not going to immediately embrace a sport created by the man behind the WWF. I mean, they barely even pretend that their matches aren't scripted any more.
Vince McMahon may be marketing it as "real football" with people who play "for the love of the game." But coming from a guy who has made a mint as a modern day P.T. Barnum, I have no doubt it's all about the money. If he can take what he learned in the WWF and parlay that into another mint with the XFL, he'll do it. And if scripting certain aspects of the game (or even the game itself) will make people watch, I'm sure he'll be more than happy to do that too.
If that's the route they end up going, then big time gambling will be out of the picture. Even casinos aren't going to get involved with knowingly taking bets on rigged games.
True, my site is commercial in nature, but it could just as easily have been set up as a non-profit, and I'd still have to pay the $199 to get into the appropriate category. Slashdot, Kuro5hin and the like are "commercial" too.
Yahoo's "Business and Economy" category, for example, includes such sub-categories as Business Libraries, Small Business Information, Statistics and Indicators, Taxes, Consumer Advocacy, Ethics and Responsibility, etc.
Many of these subcategories could easily fill up with incredibly useful non-commercial info if not for the $199 price tag. I could give similar examples in other "business" categories, but I think you get the idea.
Any service that charges $199.00 (non-refundable) to even consider adding your web site to their directory can hardly be considered something other than a "walled community."
They certainly have the right to charge for their services, but don't put them on a pedestal above the other big directories.
I doubt you'll be able to find many 'small time' sites (like mine) listed in Yahoo from this point forward.
In 1996 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) told the Girl Scouts of the USA that scout camps must start paying a licensing fee to sing any of the 4 million copyrighted songs that ASCAP controlled (Walker and Fagan). This included girl scout staples such as "Happy Birthday". Many camps went songless for months, until newspaper and talk show attention generated enough outrage that ASCAP was forced to say that they had no intention of prosecuting girl scout camps for violations of singing songs around the campfire. But in backing down, ASCAP still insisted that they still might prosecute camps for playing background music without a license. Though most citizens would bristle at ASCAP's attempts to charge the girl scouts, as a copyright holder the law is on their side, and the girl scouts' only defense would be fair use (but only as long as fair use remains a defense).
"Ecohacker Michael Markels claims he has a megafix for global warming: Supercharge the growth of ocean plankton with vitamin Fe and let a zillion CO2 scrubbers bloom."
Any problem can be solved with a clever hack. Er, right?
With web sites running always the same queries again and again, caching queries would gives incredible speed boost...
That might be an issue if performance were a problem. Most web sites built on MySQL get results plenty fast without having to cache things.
I'm sorry but full-featured transaction, foreign keys, caching, constraints, nested queries, etc. are what people expect their database to do, and they are very MISSION CRITITAL in many situations.
I don't think anybody is suggesting using MySQL to run your Fortune 500 company database. MySQL's niche is web sites. The web is inherently session-based. If you've got somebody entering data in a form, and they bail halfway through, you have no way to tell. How many web sites allow you to "unsubmit" a transaction? So transaction rollback isn't a big deal for a lot of applications. Likewise with foreign keys. If you're coding your site in such a way that foreign key violations are what tip you off to a data integrity problem, you need to do some more work.
MySQL is not Oracle. It's not PostgreSQL either. In many ways, that's a good thing. That's the great thing about competition: You can pick the tool that does what you need.
Well, I've got to think that it's only because spam doesn't work any more. Most Usenet newsgroups have been so innundated with spam (and address harvesters) that nobody wants to read or post there any more.
I don't think spam is going away any time soon. I hope it does, but I'm not holding my breath...
Your first point is definitely valid, but your second one is as much a design problem as a slow image server problem.
It's not that hard to build pages that load completely without having to wait for an ad to finish loading. Among other things, simply specifying dimensions on the image tag goes a long way toward letting the browser render the rest of the page while waiting for some slow ad.
Great points. I've struggled with that very issue myself. Personally, I've never seen advertising as a viable way of supporting my site, and I'm not willing to sell my registered users down the river by giving away their names, addresses, slice-n-dice demographics, etc.
The other problem with online advertising is good old-fashioned supply and demand. There are an enormous number of web sites willing to display banner ads. But since they're not effective, nobody wants to pay for them.
So, let's see... high supply, low demand. Anybody see a problem there?
But then again, I'm not really trying to make a buck. I never planned on getting rich from banner ads, or from any other aspect of my site. I did it for something to do. I was bored.
It would be nice to cover some of my legal expenses though... Live and learn. At least I've got something interesting to put on my resume.
I think one of the biggest reasons for language advocacy (/OS advocacy/DB advocacy/etc.) is that we have a vested interest in "our" language succeeding. Each of us has worked hard to learn the subtleties and intricacies of [language X], and if something else comes along that's better, we're suddenly newbies again. That hard-won expertise doesn't carry much weight if [language Y] makes it easy for "any idiot" to accomplish and/or understand what took you a week to figure out.
We start trying to come up with reasons why it's not really better: It doesn't give you enough control; it's not as efficient; it has fewer options...
PC vs. Mac. BSD vs. Mac. Mainframe vs. client-server. Command line vs. GUI. How many people were a little saddened to see MS-DOS fading into the mist, not because it was a great tool, but because they knew how to use it?
A language advocate needs [language X] to succeed, to be dominant, to be the best, because he has more status and more useful knowledge that way.
Why should we do e4's dirty work by thinking up business plans for him? He is running razorlist.com. Just another ratings site. Rating sites are lame, look what happened to deja.com. Think for your damn self!
Yes, this AC has hit it right on the head. This is all about getting all of you to write me a business plan so I can become fabulously rich. No, this isn't about me. I built something I thought might be useful. The cost of operating the site is minimal, and comes out of my pocket. If it becomes profitable great, if not, I've still learned a lot.
We're already seeing plenty of biased information, ethically shaky business models and conflicting interests because sites are desparate to find revenue. This does not make the Internet a Better Place. Think about how much free information is available online. Sometimes I think we take it for granted. What happens when sites start disappearing because they're too deep in the red, or the risk of litigation is too great? What happens when they stop doing your dirty work and providing free content? I'm not crazy about the direction things seem to be heading online, and I want to know what others think.
<OFFTOPIC> Let me ask you though, are ratings sites inherently lame, or are they lame because of bad business plans? A ratings site, at it's core, should be a mechanism that lets members of a community create a collective opinion -- let the best rise to the top and the worst fall to the bottom. Hmm, slashdot's moderation system does that too. And we all read these comments with moderation filtering turned off, since it's such a lame concept. Right? </OFFTOPIC>
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what constitutes libel, slander, defamation and such. Here are some excellent articles explaining these issues, particularly with respect to the Internet:
I'm not quite getting your point. I understand the part about big corporations underselling the smaller stores to drive them out of business, but how do inflated wholesale prices factor in? Say the wholesale prices drop by $1, presumably the big chains and the little guys both get them cheaper. What if the price drops by $5? Or let's make it extreme and drop the price by $10. As the wholesale price drops, the profits become a bigger part of the retail price. If it costs me a buck to get a CD and I can sell it for $3, there's a lot higher profit margin than buying for $11 and selling for $13. Less risk for the little guy, and even Best Buy can't drop the price below zero. Not for long at least....
Comparing this ISP to a newspaper isn't the best analogy, because a newspaper has editors who review and are responsible for the content of their newspaper. They are publishers.
A better analogy is to compare the ISP to a newsstand. They distribute content, but they do not review or edit any of it. They are merely distributors. Can a newssstand be sued for libel if they distribute a newspaper containing libelous information?
These apply to US law, but they do a good job of explaining libel, trade libel, slander and defamation, particularly with respect to the Internet and ISPs:
Of course that brings up an interesting question. Is Slashdot a publisher or a distributor? Does moderation constitue editorial control? By Slashdot, or by individual moderators? I'm so confused....
[First, my credentials: I'm an Oracle DBA by day and a MySQL developer on the side.]
In my experience, lack of transactions isn't a big deal in many cases, particularly for web-based applications. Much of the web is built around "stateless" sessions, so it's a good idea to open and close your database activities every time anyway. You can't very well leave an insert/update transaction hanging open while you wait for some web site visitor to hopefully click that "submit" button.
The other factor is that database updates happening on the web are user-oriented. This tends to decrease the likelihood of two people trying to update the same data. While I'm typing this, there are a thousand other people working on Slashdot postings at the same time, but the chances of us trying to update the same database record at the same time are, I would imagine, pretty slim.
There's no such thing as "rollback" on the web. In the cases where you need that kind of functionality, you can build it yourself without extreme effort.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, blah blah. But this is my understanding of the current state of IP law. Anybody who knows better please correct me...
Let's say you have just invented some really cool and clever software technique. How do you know if it hasn't been done before?
Option 1: You drop 10 grand on a patent attorney to help you get a patent. If similar patents already exists, or if prior art exists, you are out of luck. You still gotta pay the attorney for his time. If you get the patent, you have to keep paying legal fees defend it, or you risk losing it.
Option 2: You could do some research on your own and look for patents similar to your idea. Maybe you find some similar ideas, but nothing exactly like yours. You're not worried about owning a patent, so you distribute your clever new software to the world. Much simpler, right?
Oops, you're not a patent attorney, are you? So you are not legally qualified to make determinations about whether you're infrining on any of those patents you researched. And since you did research it, you may now be liable for triple damages, because a claim could now be made that you were "willfully" infringing. Better get that patent attorney on the phone and start saving your pennies.
So by trying to protect yourself and making a legitimate effort to check into existing patents, you may have just screwed yourself. If you had never bothered to check, you still could be hit with damages, but by not knowing about existing patents, you save yourself the risk of getting hit with those triple damages.
So much for increasing freedom, allowing others to benefit from research and all that...
The gambling industry is not going to immediately embrace a sport created by the man behind the WWF. I mean, they barely even pretend that their matches aren't scripted any more.
Vince McMahon may be marketing it as "real football" with people who play "for the love of the game." But coming from a guy who has made a mint as a modern day P.T. Barnum, I have no doubt it's all about the money. If he can take what he learned in the WWF and parlay that into another mint with the XFL, he'll do it. And if scripting certain aspects of the game (or even the game itself) will make people watch, I'm sure he'll be more than happy to do that too.
If that's the route they end up going, then big time gambling will be out of the picture. Even casinos aren't going to get involved with knowingly taking bets on rigged games.
Yahoo's "Business and Economy" category, for example, includes such sub-categories as Business Libraries, Small Business Information, Statistics and Indicators, Taxes, Consumer Advocacy, Ethics and Responsibility, etc.
Many of these subcategories could easily fill up with incredibly useful non-commercial info if not for the $199 price tag. I could give similar examples in other "business" categories, but I think you get the idea.
They certainly have the right to charge for their services, but don't put them on a pedestal above the other big directories.
I doubt you'll be able to find many 'small time' sites (like mine) listed in Yahoo from this point forward.
What about Stars! from Empire Interactive?
From http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/copyright 99.html:
From this article:
Any problem can be solved with a clever hack. Er, right?
That might be an issue if performance were a problem. Most web sites built on MySQL get results plenty fast without having to cache things.
I don't think anybody is suggesting using MySQL to run your Fortune 500 company database. MySQL's niche is web sites. The web is inherently session-based. If you've got somebody entering data in a form, and they bail halfway through, you have no way to tell. How many web sites allow you to "unsubmit" a transaction? So transaction rollback isn't a big deal for a lot of applications. Likewise with foreign keys. If you're coding your site in such a way that foreign key violations are what tip you off to a data integrity problem, you need to do some more work.
MySQL is not Oracle. It's not PostgreSQL either. In many ways, that's a good thing. That's the great thing about competition: You can pick the tool that does what you need.
A quick search on Google turned up plenty of examples, like this one.
Well, I've got to think that it's only because spam doesn't work any more. Most Usenet newsgroups have been so innundated with spam (and address harvesters) that nobody wants to read or post there any more.
I don't think spam is going away any time soon. I hope it does, but I'm not holding my breath...
It's not that hard to build pages that load completely without having to wait for an ad to finish loading. Among other things, simply specifying dimensions on the image tag goes a long way toward letting the browser render the rest of the page while waiting for some slow ad.
The other problem with online advertising is good old-fashioned supply and demand. There are an enormous number of web sites willing to display banner ads. But since they're not effective, nobody wants to pay for them.
So, let's see... high supply, low demand. Anybody see a problem there?
But then again, I'm not really trying to make a buck. I never planned on getting rich from banner ads, or from any other aspect of my site. I did it for something to do. I was bored.
It would be nice to cover some of my legal expenses though... Live and learn. At least I've got something interesting to put on my resume.
We start trying to come up with reasons why it's not really better: It doesn't give you enough control; it's not as efficient; it has fewer options...
PC vs. Mac. BSD vs. Mac. Mainframe vs. client-server. Command line vs. GUI. How many people were a little saddened to see MS-DOS fading into the mist, not because it was a great tool, but because they knew how to use it?
A language advocate needs [language X] to succeed, to be dominant, to be the best, because he has more status and more useful knowledge that way.
Bottom line, it's an ego thing.
Maybe Mir should get Florida's 25 electoral votes, and in the meantime we can crash Gore and Bush into the Pacific...
Yes, this AC has hit it right on the head. This is all about getting all of you to write me a business plan so I can become fabulously rich. No, this isn't about me. I built something I thought might be useful. The cost of operating the site is minimal, and comes out of my pocket. If it becomes profitable great, if not, I've still learned a lot.
We're already seeing plenty of biased information, ethically shaky business models and conflicting interests because sites are desparate to find revenue. This does not make the Internet a Better Place. Think about how much free information is available online. Sometimes I think we take it for granted. What happens when sites start disappearing because they're too deep in the red, or the risk of litigation is too great? What happens when they stop doing your dirty work and providing free content? I'm not crazy about the direction things seem to be heading online, and I want to know what others think.
<OFFTOPIC>
Let me ask you though, are ratings sites inherently lame, or are they lame because of bad business plans? A ratings site, at it's core, should be a mechanism that lets members of a community create a collective opinion -- let the best rise to the top and the worst fall to the bottom. Hmm, slashdot's moderation system does that too. And we all read these comments with moderation filtering turned off, since it's such a lame concept. Right?
</OFFTOPIC>
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what constitutes libel, slander, defamation and such. Here are some excellent articles explaining these issues, particularly with respect to the Internet:
I'm not quite getting your point. I understand the part about big corporations underselling the smaller stores to drive them out of business, but how do inflated wholesale prices factor in? Say the wholesale prices drop by $1, presumably the big chains and the little guys both get them cheaper. What if the price drops by $5? Or let's make it extreme and drop the price by $10. As the wholesale price drops, the profits become a bigger part of the retail price. If it costs me a buck to get a CD and I can sell it for $3, there's a lot higher profit margin than buying for $11 and selling for $13. Less risk for the little guy, and even Best Buy can't drop the price below zero. Not for long at least....
Comparing this ISP to a newspaper isn't the best analogy, because a newspaper has editors who review and are responsible for the content of their newspaper. They are publishers.
A better analogy is to compare the ISP to a newsstand. They distribute content, but they do not review or edit any of it. They are merely distributors. Can a newssstand be sued for libel if they distribute a newspaper containing libelous information?
These apply to US law, but they do a good job of explaining libel, trade libel, slander and defamation, particularly with respect to the Internet and ISPs:
Of course that brings up an interesting question. Is Slashdot a publisher or a distributor? Does moderation constitue editorial control? By Slashdot, or by individual moderators? I'm so confused....
[First, my credentials: I'm an Oracle DBA by day and a MySQL developer on the side.]
In my experience, lack of transactions isn't a big deal in many cases, particularly for web-based applications. Much of the web is built around "stateless" sessions, so it's a good idea to open and close your database activities every time anyway. You can't very well leave an insert/update transaction hanging open while you wait for some web site visitor to hopefully click that "submit" button.
The other factor is that database updates happening on the web are user-oriented. This tends to decrease the likelihood of two people trying to update the same data. While I'm typing this, there are a thousand other people working on Slashdot postings at the same time, but the chances of us trying to update the same database record at the same time are, I would imagine, pretty slim.
There's no such thing as "rollback" on the web. In the cases where you need that kind of functionality, you can build it yourself without extreme effort.