The internet is a dangerous place. People have been lulled into believing that this is not the case. Protecting your identity is your first line of defense against crazies and anyone else that wants to do you harm.
Allowing net.crazies as a tradeoff for enabling everyone to avoid the real ones.
A lot of the "OMG Privacy!" complaints fall away if you allow people to disassociate from their real identity.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. The problem with work-alikes is that people are prone to think that they actually work alike. The fact that something is different and actually looks it is really not such a bad thing.
The whole problem with the GNOME3 interfaces was never so much that those interfaces suck but that they sabotaged the GNOME2 one in the process.
The purpose of patents is to not create a mindless virtual land grab. Patents don't exist to create a new form of property. Patents exist to encourage the disclosure of useful things that would otherwise remain secret.
At the heart of any patent, there should be some trade secret.
> First, I think most of you are misunderstanding "novelty" as it relates to patents, by thinking that whatever invention is patented must be novel TODAY in order to be valid.
This "invention" wasn't novel in 1913, never mind now.
What is a troll? A troll in this case is a disfigured monster that jumps out at you when you are about to use something and demands payment for using that thing despite the fact that he doesn't own own it?
The twist here is that the troll has a bogus deed. That bogus deed doesn't really alter the basic morality of the situation.
It has legal force but it might as well be printed on toilet paper with crayon.
> There seems to be some idea that it's the dumb, uneducated public who believes piracy is wrong
You've go that ass backwards. It's only the "geeks" that understand that there might be a legal or moral issue here. It's much harder for the "dumb uneducated public" to understand why copying and sharing is wrong. Even people that are highly uptight religious types may be completely oblivious to the issues here.
No. The norm is actually that you have to tell a normal non-geek that copying is wrong.
It's not something that makes any sense in a conventional notion of value associated wtih scarcity.
> So if you can detect clearly enough that it is not original Rolex, selling counterfeit products is somehow okay?
It all depends on how you define the victim. Trademarks are supposed to protect from consumer confusion. If the consumer knows that they are getting a fake, then the consumer is no longer a victim. There is also no real trademark dilution.
So there really isn't a victim anywhere.
Any legal theory that doens't focus on the consumer being the victim is corrupt.
The real problem here is establishing intent. The alleged perpetrators here might be as much a victim as anyone else. When counterfeits are really good, should a reseller be forced to risk hard jail time just to resell something? Add in the whole nonsense of "region coding" and other attempts to expand copyrights by non-legal means, and you have a situation where the notion of a counterfeit doesn't mean anything anymore.
Windows is a legacy support platform. The old stuff doesn't just get jettisoned at the earliest opportunity because it's not shiny shiny enough. The platform as a whole is not under the tyrannical control of Microsoft to the same degree as Apple products. So people are much more free to use older equipment.
The user is in control.
I can choose to use 10 year old programs. Try that with the App Store model.
Are you seriously suggesting that Apple migrates their desktop machines to hardware that's about 10 years behind the curve in terms of performance when compared to x86?
You're an idiot. Debian doesn't distribute source to users.
It's all binaries wrapped around the best package manager on the planet. It's something that Apple can't even touch despite their best attempts to try and sort of copy it.
I did. The whole thing is nonsense. You don't have to enforce a single architecture to have common code. Neither do you need to have a virtual machine running the same bit-ness as the host operating system. This is just the usual kind of cluelessness that comes from a community that is proud of being stupid.
Anyone that doesn't want to mess with an array to handle a simple use case of having a lot of stuff.
It's not 1988 anymore. There's ton of multi-media content out there. You can buy it or you can create it yourself. As tech and formats continue to improve and the "problem" only gets bigger.
Not everyone is a passive couch potato content with an anemic iPad.
OTOH, the price difference makes even the less extreme cases of a 1TB or 500G drive problematic.
You have to wonder if it goes back even further than that. Do these techniques predate computer networks entirely? Were they being used for similar reasons in the phone networks that predated all of the computer networks?
Is this another example of adding "use a computer" to some old well established (even patented) method?
> while most legal people are not conversant in technology, all patent attorneys are - the proper scientific or engineering background is a requirement to sit for the patent bar exam.
You're effectively trying to claim that ANY engineer is qualified to be an expert witness on ANY engineering discipline.
There are many types of engineer. Pretty much any of them are going to be completely unqualified to deal with anything outside of the very narrow discipline they were trained in.
The fact that some guy has an EIT certificate says squat about whether or not he has any hope of understanding the relevant Cisco patents here.
Although it doesn't really matter so much because each side will argue whether or not the relevant legal principles apply.
> I don't see it that way... So people should be allowed to infringe patents and blame someone else?
This isn't patent infringement. This is using a product that infringes patents. It's a meaningful distinction and one that should have already been settled in favor of consumers a long time ago.
Patent infringement by "network configuration"?
Sounds like a feature of the device they bought from someone else.
> As soon as you make this an insurance problem (calculating and recovering loss) you change the pricing formulas for air travel. It becomes either unprofitable or unaffordable.
That is total bullshit. It's already an insurance problem and the airlines do fine. Airlines are already responsible for getting you safely from point A to point B in a flying Cathedral.
Securing the terminal is a cakewalk in comparison.
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The internet is a dangerous place. People have been lulled into believing that this is not the case. Protecting your identity is your first line of defense against crazies and anyone else that wants to do you harm.
Allowing net.crazies as a tradeoff for enabling everyone to avoid the real ones.
A lot of the "OMG Privacy!" complaints fall away if you allow people to disassociate from their real identity.
As long as no one can just take their ball and go home BSD style, then EVERYONE benefits. That's equality.
The "bitch mentality" of sabotaging others is really not necessary or appropriate.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. The problem with work-alikes is that people are prone to think that they actually work alike. The fact that something is different and actually looks it is really not such a bad thing.
The whole problem with the GNOME3 interfaces was never so much that those interfaces suck but that they sabotaged the GNOME2 one in the process.
It all depends on who you are talking about.
Expecting end users to "man up" is stupid and counterproductive.
Expecting the same of developers or sysadmins is not.
A developer on crutches is a liability. Same goes for sysadmins. Sooner or later you have to think for yourself and do for yourself.
The whole point of an IT professional is to deal with difficult stuff.
The OP is not an idiot. You're the idiot. So are all of you mindless X-hating morons rallying around Wayland.
Games need good driver support. They need better driver support than you get from some vendors. They need better cards than you get from some vendors.
NONE of is this in any way related to the nonsense of Wayland.
All Wayland does is reset things back 10 or 20 years in terms of driver maturity and vendor support.
I don't want Wayland because I don't want gaming or any other high performance GUI activity on Linux to suck.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater won't help me one bit.
Patents should be documentation for the rest of the industry.
Ultimately, ALL "intellectual property" is supposed to enter the public domain and become the fodder for the next generation of artists and inventors.
If the system is structured such that no one is willing or able to do patent searches, then the entire system serves no purpose.
Patents in the aggregate should be useful reference material and they're not.
The purpose of patents is to not create a mindless virtual land grab. Patents don't exist to create a new form of property. Patents exist to encourage the disclosure of useful things that would otherwise remain secret.
At the heart of any patent, there should be some trade secret.
There should be something worth keeping secret.
> First, I think most of you are misunderstanding "novelty" as it relates to patents, by thinking that whatever invention is patented must be novel TODAY in order to be valid.
This "invention" wasn't novel in 1913, never mind now.
What is a troll? A troll in this case is a disfigured monster that jumps out at you when you are about to use something and demands payment for using that thing despite the fact that he doesn't own own it?
The twist here is that the troll has a bogus deed. That bogus deed doesn't really alter the basic morality of the situation.
It has legal force but it might as well be printed on toilet paper with crayon.
> There seems to be some idea that it's the dumb, uneducated public who believes piracy is wrong
You've go that ass backwards. It's only the "geeks" that understand that there might be a legal or moral issue here. It's much harder for the "dumb uneducated public" to understand why copying and sharing is wrong. Even people that are highly uptight religious types may be completely oblivious to the issues here.
No. The norm is actually that you have to tell a normal non-geek that copying is wrong.
It's not something that makes any sense in a conventional notion of value associated wtih scarcity.
Traditionally, pirates didn't tolerate bootleggers. Copying and sharing stuff was OK but copy stuff and selling it was considered unacceptable.
It's one thing to "steal" a ZERO dollar sale and quite another to steal a $20 sale or even a $1 one.
In the latter, you are infact intercepting a paying customer. Some computable harm is being done.
> So if you can detect clearly enough that it is not original Rolex, selling counterfeit products is somehow okay?
It all depends on how you define the victim. Trademarks are supposed to protect from consumer confusion. If the consumer knows that they are getting a fake, then the consumer is no longer a victim. There is also no real trademark dilution.
So there really isn't a victim anywhere.
Any legal theory that doens't focus on the consumer being the victim is corrupt.
The real problem here is establishing intent. The alleged perpetrators here might be as much a victim as anyone else. When counterfeits are really good, should a reseller be forced to risk hard jail time just to resell something? Add in the whole nonsense of "region coding" and other attempts to expand copyrights by non-legal means, and you have a situation where the notion of a counterfeit doesn't mean anything anymore.
Windows is a legacy support platform. The old stuff doesn't just get jettisoned at the earliest opportunity because it's not shiny shiny enough. The platform as a whole is not under the tyrannical control of Microsoft to the same degree as Apple products. So people are much more free to use older equipment.
The user is in control.
I can choose to use 10 year old programs. Try that with the App Store model.
You're funny.
Are you seriously suggesting that Apple migrates their desktop machines to hardware that's about 10 years behind the curve in terms of performance when compared to x86?
Stop swimming in the kool-aid.
You're an idiot. Debian doesn't distribute source to users.
It's all binaries wrapped around the best package manager on the planet. It's something that Apple can't even touch despite their best attempts to try and sort of copy it.
I did. The whole thing is nonsense. You don't have to enforce a single architecture to have common code. Neither do you need to have a virtual machine running the same bit-ness as the host operating system. This is just the usual kind of cluelessness that comes from a community that is proud of being stupid.
Yeah. 64-bit BS.
>> A 4TB SDD is USD$29k.
>
> Not if your 4TB SSD is an array of 512GB SSDs.
For some reason I am reminded of the very first IBM hard drive.
> Who the hell needs 4TB in a single SSD?
Anyone that doesn't want to mess with an array to handle a simple use case of having a lot of stuff.
It's not 1988 anymore. There's ton of multi-media content out there. You can buy it or you can create it yourself. As tech and formats continue to improve and the "problem" only gets bigger.
Not everyone is a passive couch potato content with an anemic iPad.
OTOH, the price difference makes even the less extreme cases of a 1TB or 500G drive problematic.
What exactly are we in the West supposed to do about it really? Play globo-cop? Encourage our governments to meddle in the affairs of other countries?
Really? What's the point of being fixated on other people's business?
> Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population).
You mean people are most concerned about what's around them?
STOP THE PRESSES!
You have to wonder if it goes back even further than that. Do these techniques predate computer networks entirely? Were they being used for similar reasons in the phone networks that predated all of the computer networks?
Is this another example of adding "use a computer" to some old well established (even patented) method?
> while most legal people are not conversant in technology, all patent attorneys are - the proper scientific or engineering background is a requirement to sit for the patent bar exam.
You're effectively trying to claim that ANY engineer is qualified to be an expert witness on ANY engineering discipline.
There are many types of engineer. Pretty much any of them are going to be completely unqualified to deal with anything outside of the very narrow discipline they were trained in.
The fact that some guy has an EIT certificate says squat about whether or not he has any hope of understanding the relevant Cisco patents here.
Although it doesn't really matter so much because each side will argue whether or not the relevant legal principles apply.
> I don't see it that way... So people should be allowed to infringe patents and blame someone else?
This isn't patent infringement. This is using a product that infringes patents. It's a meaningful distinction and one that should have already been settled in favor of consumers a long time ago.
Patent infringement by "network configuration"?
Sounds like a feature of the device they bought from someone else.
> As soon as you make this an insurance problem (calculating and recovering loss) you change the pricing formulas for air travel. It becomes either unprofitable or unaffordable.
That is total bullshit. It's already an insurance problem and the airlines do fine. Airlines are already responsible for getting you safely from point A to point B in a flying Cathedral.
Securing the terminal is a cakewalk in comparison.