The quotas are per patent examined and denied/accepted. So, there is no polarity. In fact, if anything, it is a lot easier to say "X anticipates Y, go away" than to approve a patent.
Surely it would help matters enormously if patents had to be written in English rather than impenetrable legalese?
Patents are legal documents. That is why they are written in legalese. And patent examiners speak legalese. It actually makes them more efficent as it becomes easier to reject a patent for prior art the fewer ways there are to express an idea.
And legalese, much like medical jargon, is a seperate language where words mean specific things. Unfortunately, while medicine stole from Latin, and is thus obvious, the Law stole from English. So many people think it is merely poor English, when in reality the words being used have very precise meanings.
6 years of Republicans with a majority in the Legislature, a Republican President, and a Conservative-biased Supreme court and none of their anti-choice/anti-gay legislature passed. I don't think they could get Hillary impeached.
But they would want to impeach Hillary. Just like the impeached Bill (although they didn't remove him.) Why would they want to pass anti-choice/anti-gay legislation?
one day they're allowed to listen in on your innocuous phone calls, the next they are dragging you out of bed and summarily executing you in the street for "conspiracy to undermine American/family values" (whatever those are...).
But what you don't understand is that there will be no need for a jury to determine if you are guilty. The government already tapped your phones and observed you, so they know you are. And there is no need for a judge to determine if evidence is admissible, because it is all legal under the "Terrorists are bad!!! Terrorists ->:'-( Act of 2008."
I'm not sure when people started trusting Oracle, MS, Sun, Apple, etc, more than Google.
(Speaking for all people who represent my views) we don't trust any of those companies. Well, to be fair, I trust MS/Apple not to access information on machines that are running their OSes, and Oracle not to access any database hosted on an Oracle system. Google is the opposite. They say "allow us access to X, and we will give you this software at no monetary cost." So I suppose that while I (dis)trust MS/Apple/Oracle as much as Google, MS/Apple/Oracle all claim not to do what Google expressly claims they will do.
When the technology shift happens, I would rather whomever is hosting my information gets cash by me and/or my healthcare providers, rather than helping themselves to the information as their compensation.
As far as Google never abusing information, and not having more, I think that the Google Books (or Google Print or somesuch) adventure proves you wrong. Google had the balls to violate the copyright of ennumerable authors. That alone gave it more information, and was a clear abuse.
And as for lying to you or misleading you, maybe they are upfront about what they will do. However, that makes their actions no less heinous. As an analogy, would you rather (in a dark alley) meet up with someone who says they will shoot you and does so, or someone who says they will not pick your pocket and does so. A few points to clarify about my example:
Yes, I'm associating violating my privacy and taking my personal information with attempted murder, and vaporware/shitty business practices with pickpocketing. I believe that the orders of magnitude of evil between the two examples holds.
Yes, if someone says they will shoot you, you can claim that you are forewarned and can shoot them first/defend yourself. I will hold that the equivelence of that action is not to do business with Google and allow they access to your personal information.
Yes, this last item is only here to make the list three long.
I've always heard that the reasoning is that Dartmouth's focus is on undergraduate education, as opposed to graduate education or pure research. Hence, calling it a college, while less technically accurate, was more accurate with regards to its choosen identity.
As far as his speeches being infantile. I have to disagree. He is principled and coherent.
Principled and coherent perhaps. I have looked at his speeches. And it is his positions that I am commenting on when I say that his level of sophistication is at what I would consider a five-year-old level. For instance, advocating a return to the gold standard is a juvenille position based on the need to have a shiny object to represent an abstract concept. Gold is just as arbitrary as silver or platinum. The only real difference is that gold is starting to (as of the past 50-ish years) have industrial uses. But so does tungsten (and platinum for that matter.) But there is nothing instrinsic that makes gold better than paper money except it's an older arbitrary standard. In fact, it is substaintially worse because of inflationary periods brought on by discovering new sources, difficulty regulating the money supply, etc.
Most of his other positions seem just as bad. A Ron Paul presidency, aside from being unable to affect any change, appeals to me about as much as putting a senile old man in power. Of course, both would be preferable to Rudy.
However, both are great reasons to vote for Ron Paul!
Ron Paul (or the federal government) has nothing to do with SWAT teams or 911 systems. It's a state issue. If anything, Ron Paul would oppose any federal aid to fix these systems to prevent this in the future.
Ron Paul is not going to win, which is good because his political speeches exhibit the sophistication of a 5-year-old.
It's an interesting question; so fair use extends to quotation. And if I were to quote a sentence from a book then nobody would contend that it wasn't fair-use of that material. Even if I were to tell you where that sentence lay within the text. If a million different people were willing to do this, then you would have the entire text of the book. Nobody distributed it - so who broke copyright?
The answer, as with all niftiness in the law, is it depends. If I stitch a bunch of true fair use quotes in my head, then no-one. If I copy and paste a bunch of fair use quotes in a scrapbook, I think the answer is me. However, what the publisher would probably contend in front of a jury is that you and the million different people colluded to distribute the book, and that all of you were guilty. Because while it may be fair use to tell me that the 1800th sentence of some book is "Is a rabbit really a rabbit?" for the purposes of criticism or parody or whatever, it is not fair use if a reasonable person can infer, that you knew it could be recombined to form the whole book.
This research applies anywhere in America (Fuck Yeah!). Specific workplaces in America (Fuck Yeah!) where it is especially appropriate are: McDonalds (Fuck Yeah!), WalMart (Fuck Yeah!), the Gap (Fuck Yeah!), NFL (Fuck Yeah!), (in) Slavery (Fuck Yeah!), StarBucks (Fuck Yeah!), DisneyWorld (Fuck Yeah!), Taco Bell (Fuck Yeah!), a Rodeo (Fuck Yeah!), and Bed Bath and Beyond (Fuck Yeah!).
You, sir, are an inspiration to all guys. Having met three-quarters of the women on the planet, and having gotten to know them so well that you know they are almost always irrational, that gives hope to the common man.
Just remember though, 47.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Sir, if you are going to mock his statistics, then at least do so properly. Obviously, 75% is an extrapolation from whatever sample he has. If he had met 75% of the world's women, and all the women he knew acted irrational 99% the time, the proper way to say it would be that 100% of women act irrationally 99% of the time.
However, based on GP's post, I find it amazing that the women around him are only aggrivated to irrationality by him 99% of the time. I assume that 25% of the women in his life are female relatives obliged to put up with him.
So if I tell you that in a certain file the byte at position 12243264 has value 245 then you are trying to claim that I've violated someones copyright. Whose, exactly? Do you have any idea how many different files that statement is true of?
That's why the courts look at what can be reasonably inferred. If you tell me that byte 12,243,264 is 245 (unsigned, obviously), aside from knowing you're talking about a fairly large file (A 10+ minute MP3 for instance), you haven't violated copyrights. However, if I knew that you were talking about an MP3 of "Like a Virgin," then you have to contend with fair use. The law doesn't follow the "every individual step I followed was legal, therefore the aggrigate is legal" mentality. If you e-mail me hundreds of thousands of times, that's not a violation. If you start your e-mails with specific words, that's not a violation. However, if you were to start each e-mail with the next word in a Stephen King novel, and thus transmit it all to me, King's lawyers can say "a reasonable person can infer that even though random subsets of the coorespondence is not a violation, in toto they are." And win.
What difference does it make if you have to pay 70 small taxes or one large tax? I imagine that the 40% sales tax number is aggregate. If so, it seems somewhat high, but I'm assuming in an attempt to overstate your case you are using the tax rate of luxery items. What is the sales tax on food? Also, is the sales tax the only tax levied or is there an income/property tax?
That is probably the best summation of what can go wrong with software patents I've heard in a while. I find nothing wrong with a guy who invents a more efficent algorithim getting compensated, but most patent applications are not "a specific method to solve the travelling salesman problem that happens to be O(n)," but instead "the concept of solving the travelling salesman problem in O(n), an example of which is given."
The situation that we have now is that random person C buys a copy of the song as a number (quite a big number, but just a number non-the-less). Person C now computes another smaller number which if interpreted in the right way sounds like the song. And he proceeds to distribute this number.
Any copyright claim assumes that Evil Company B owns the number computed by Person C. Any geek can see instantly that this is a fucked up situation. So take the GP's question again: how small can I make these portions of this number before Evil Company B doesn't own it?
Totally incorrect. Person C buys a copy of the song, which can also be translated into a number. Using a different translation method, it can be translated into a different number. If these were trapdoor algorithims, there may be no problem, but the numbers can also be transformed back into the music. And therein lies the problem. Transfering both the algorithim and the number allows people to recreate the song violating copyright. The algorithims are not only well known, but also clearly indicated in file-extension and/or meta-information. Hence, transmitting an MP3 file is a violation of copyright law. So, suppose some Madonna song (sorry for the old reference, but she's the latest artist I know of) happens to be a huge number that is usable as a public key when turned into an MP3. Well, you can use the public key all you like. You just cannot tell people that an MP3 player would interpert it as a Madonna song. I don't know what would happen if someone else did so, but I'd imagine the RIAA would try to prove collusion between the two of you.
But it's not "ooh, I relabeled the song file.3pm so if it happens to be an MP3 that's just coincidence." The law takes into account what a reasonable person could infer. And if any jackass on Kazaa knows what you are talking about, odds are so will the jury.
IANAL, use of any legal advice may result in negative consequences.
An ipod is easy enough for an idiot to use, it's not a badge of honor to be able to use one.
Right. Apple spent millions of dollars with very smart people so that idiots could use an iPod. iPod's dominate the MP3 market because of their ease-of-use. And most people's text messaging is a detriment to both learning proper English and being tech-savy. A tech-savy person can type well enough that typing out the full words is easier than learning a new acronym, for example.
Well, all my homemade pornography is labeled "Weezer - Buddy Holly music vid" etc. So my anti-piracy stance helps me yell at people who want to copy it.
Also, yes, since I post on Slashdot, you may safely assume I am the only one appearing in my homemade porn.
What Ms. Jones doesn't seem to realize is that competition between software companies is a good thing. It leads to more innovation and a better end-user experience (after all look at Microsoft Word. We had only one major office suite and we have the same interface for over 10 years with minimal changes between 98, 2000 and 2003. OOo comes along and despite its small marketshare it still provided the impetus for Office 2007 to actually make real changes to the interface. Same with IE).
While I will agree that adding tabs was probably inspired by FireFox's popularity, to claim that OOo would be a competitor to any software in terms of user interface makes me think that the stars in your eyes obscure the incredibly poor GUI. Not that older versions of MS office didn't have poor organization, but at least it was the poor organization I was used to.
A conservative approach will therefore recommend Google APIs. They are more seasoned, more tested, work on more browsers, and used successfully by far more organizations and businesses.
That might be true, but how is it relevant as a comparison of backwards compatibility?
Google APIs are consequently more stable and less likely to change.
Microsoft doesn't randomly revoke API access. So that would lead me to contend that Microsoft API's are more likely to be useful in the future, even if they change on occassion.
Slashdot Mirror
The quotas are per patent examined and denied/accepted. So, there is no polarity. In fact, if anything, it is a lot easier to say "X anticipates Y, go away" than to approve a patent.
Patents are legal documents. That is why they are written in legalese. And patent examiners speak legalese. It actually makes them more efficent as it becomes easier to reject a patent for prior art the fewer ways there are to express an idea.
And legalese, much like medical jargon, is a seperate language where words mean specific things. Unfortunately, while medicine stole from Latin, and is thus obvious, the Law stole from English. So many people think it is merely poor English, when in reality the words being used have very precise meanings.
IANAL
Hah, jokes on you. I wire my lights to push buttons!
I didn't think that the Congress could legislate away our 4th amendment rights.
But they would want to impeach Hillary. Just like the impeached Bill (although they didn't remove him.) Why would they want to pass anti-choice/anti-gay legislation?
But what you don't understand is that there will be no need for a jury to determine if you are guilty. The government already tapped your phones and observed you, so they know you are. And there is no need for a judge to determine if evidence is admissible, because it is all legal under the "Terrorists are bad!!! Terrorists -> :'-( Act of 2008."
(Speaking for all people who represent my views) we don't trust any of those companies. Well, to be fair, I trust MS/Apple not to access information on machines that are running their OSes, and Oracle not to access any database hosted on an Oracle system. Google is the opposite. They say "allow us access to X, and we will give you this software at no monetary cost." So I suppose that while I (dis)trust MS/Apple/Oracle as much as Google, MS/Apple/Oracle all claim not to do what Google expressly claims they will do.
When the technology shift happens, I would rather whomever is hosting my information gets cash by me and/or my healthcare providers, rather than helping themselves to the information as their compensation.
As far as Google never abusing information, and not having more, I think that the Google Books (or Google Print or somesuch) adventure proves you wrong. Google had the balls to violate the copyright of ennumerable authors. That alone gave it more information, and was a clear abuse.
And as for lying to you or misleading you, maybe they are upfront about what they will do. However, that makes their actions no less heinous. As an analogy, would you rather (in a dark alley) meet up with someone who says they will shoot you and does so, or someone who says they will not pick your pocket and does so. A few points to clarify about my example:
I've always heard that the reasoning is that Dartmouth's focus is on undergraduate education, as opposed to graduate education or pure research. Hence, calling it a college, while less technically accurate, was more accurate with regards to its choosen identity.
Principled and coherent perhaps. I have looked at his speeches. And it is his positions that I am commenting on when I say that his level of sophistication is at what I would consider a five-year-old level. For instance, advocating a return to the gold standard is a juvenille position based on the need to have a shiny object to represent an abstract concept. Gold is just as arbitrary as silver or platinum. The only real difference is that gold is starting to (as of the past 50-ish years) have industrial uses. But so does tungsten (and platinum for that matter.) But there is nothing instrinsic that makes gold better than paper money except it's an older arbitrary standard. In fact, it is substaintially worse because of inflationary periods brought on by discovering new sources, difficulty regulating the money supply, etc.
Most of his other positions seem just as bad. A Ron Paul presidency, aside from being unable to affect any change, appeals to me about as much as putting a senile old man in power. Of course, both would be preferable to Rudy.
In 1995, that advertisment makes a lot of sense, as not-for-profit copyright infringment was non-actionable.
IANAL
That study was published by Dartmouth College. Dartmouth University is an unrelated entity in Canada.
Ron Paul (or the federal government) has nothing to do with SWAT teams or 911 systems. It's a state issue. If anything, Ron Paul would oppose any federal aid to fix these systems to prevent this in the future.
Ron Paul is not going to win, which is good because his political speeches exhibit the sophistication of a 5-year-old.
The answer, as with all niftiness in the law, is it depends. If I stitch a bunch of true fair use quotes in my head, then no-one. If I copy and paste a bunch of fair use quotes in a scrapbook, I think the answer is me. However, what the publisher would probably contend in front of a jury is that you and the million different people colluded to distribute the book, and that all of you were guilty. Because while it may be fair use to tell me that the 1800th sentence of some book is "Is a rabbit really a rabbit?" for the purposes of criticism or parody or whatever, it is not fair use if a reasonable person can infer, that you knew it could be recombined to form the whole book.
This research applies anywhere in America (Fuck Yeah!). Specific workplaces in America (Fuck Yeah!) where it is especially appropriate are: McDonalds (Fuck Yeah!), WalMart (Fuck Yeah!), the Gap (Fuck Yeah!), NFL (Fuck Yeah!), (in) Slavery (Fuck Yeah!), StarBucks (Fuck Yeah!), DisneyWorld (Fuck Yeah!), Taco Bell (Fuck Yeah!), a Rodeo (Fuck Yeah!), and Bed Bath and Beyond (Fuck Yeah!).
Sir, if you are going to mock his statistics, then at least do so properly. Obviously, 75% is an extrapolation from whatever sample he has. If he had met 75% of the world's women, and all the women he knew acted irrational 99% the time, the proper way to say it would be that 100% of women act irrationally 99% of the time.
However, based on GP's post, I find it amazing that the women around him are only aggrivated to irrationality by him 99% of the time. I assume that 25% of the women in his life are female relatives obliged to put up with him.
That's why the courts look at what can be reasonably inferred. If you tell me that byte 12,243,264 is 245 (unsigned, obviously), aside from knowing you're talking about a fairly large file (A 10+ minute MP3 for instance), you haven't violated copyrights. However, if I knew that you were talking about an MP3 of "Like a Virgin," then you have to contend with fair use. The law doesn't follow the "every individual step I followed was legal, therefore the aggrigate is legal" mentality. If you e-mail me hundreds of thousands of times, that's not a violation. If you start your e-mails with specific words, that's not a violation. However, if you were to start each e-mail with the next word in a Stephen King novel, and thus transmit it all to me, King's lawyers can say "a reasonable person can infer that even though random subsets of the coorespondence is not a violation, in toto they are." And win.
IANAL.
What difference does it make if you have to pay 70 small taxes or one large tax? I imagine that the 40% sales tax number is aggregate. If so, it seems somewhat high, but I'm assuming in an attempt to overstate your case you are using the tax rate of luxery items. What is the sales tax on food? Also, is the sales tax the only tax levied or is there an income/property tax?
Whatever block, when played, exceeds the fair use standard. So it depends what you are doing with it, etc.
That is probably the best summation of what can go wrong with software patents I've heard in a while. I find nothing wrong with a guy who invents a more efficent algorithim getting compensated, but most patent applications are not "a specific method to solve the travelling salesman problem that happens to be O(n)," but instead "the concept of solving the travelling salesman problem in O(n), an example of which is given."
Distributed authorship for a book: bad
Distributed authorship for code: the only acceptable alternative
Help?
Totally incorrect. Person C buys a copy of the song, which can also be translated into a number. Using a different translation method, it can be translated into a different number. If these were trapdoor algorithims, there may be no problem, but the numbers can also be transformed back into the music. And therein lies the problem. Transfering both the algorithim and the number allows people to recreate the song violating copyright. The algorithims are not only well known, but also clearly indicated in file-extension and/or meta-information. Hence, transmitting an MP3 file is a violation of copyright law. So, suppose some Madonna song (sorry for the old reference, but she's the latest artist I know of) happens to be a huge number that is usable as a public key when turned into an MP3. Well, you can use the public key all you like. You just cannot tell people that an MP3 player would interpert it as a Madonna song. I don't know what would happen if someone else did so, but I'd imagine the RIAA would try to prove collusion between the two of you.
But it's not "ooh, I relabeled the song file .3pm so if it happens to be an MP3 that's just coincidence." The law takes into account what a reasonable person could infer. And if any jackass on Kazaa knows what you are talking about, odds are so will the jury.
IANAL, use of any legal advice may result in negative consequences.
Right. Apple spent millions of dollars with very smart people so that idiots could use an iPod. iPod's dominate the MP3 market because of their ease-of-use. And most people's text messaging is a detriment to both learning proper English and being tech-savy. A tech-savy person can type well enough that typing out the full words is easier than learning a new acronym, for example.
Well, all my homemade pornography is labeled "Weezer - Buddy Holly music vid" etc. So my anti-piracy stance helps me yell at people who want to copy it.
Also, yes, since I post on Slashdot, you may safely assume I am the only one appearing in my homemade porn.
While I will agree that adding tabs was probably inspired by FireFox's popularity, to claim that OOo would be a competitor to any software in terms of user interface makes me think that the stars in your eyes obscure the incredibly poor GUI. Not that older versions of MS office didn't have poor organization, but at least it was the poor organization I was used to.
That might be true, but how is it relevant as a comparison of backwards compatibility?
Microsoft doesn't randomly revoke API access. So that would lead me to contend that Microsoft API's are more likely to be useful in the future, even if they change on occassion.