This would allow you to return the 'written' status to the OS much faster,...
This may be my inexperience showing, but why would such a suggestion enable you to return the 'written' status to the OS any faster than it currently is? If a write request comes in for less than the free cache space, can't you just return "written" almost immediately? If the cache is full, how does this idea fix the problem that you're bounded by the rate at which that cache can be flushed?
Or are you suggesting that you the Seagate Momentus XT was your idea?
...and use the flash as a cache for 'hot' portions of the drive.
Note that the article is a blog post on ksplice.com (Ksplice is a service that provides kernel updates without having to reboot... we've seen mention of this on Slashdot before.)
Yes, my first instinct would also be to reboot and try again. And I'm going to take a wild guess that the author (Nelson Elhage) had that thought too. But Elhage is the main engineer behind Ksplice, and his business focuses on improving Linux's performance between reboots.
This tells me three things: (1) He has a business interest to try, as much as possible, to avoid rebooting without determining the root cause, (2) He's really good at it, and (3) He's rooting for hardware problem:-)
This sentence from the article's introduction suggests to me that this is what is going on:
I spent about half an hour digging to discover what had gone wrong, and eventually determined, conclusively, that my problem was a single undetected flipped bit in RAM.
PatPending probably didn't miss the joke. Joke or not, the Opera link would have been a really good way to prove prior art if it were posted before the filing date.
Gender specificity aside, there are some weak people out there. Sometimes they get beaten up, and sometimes it's not their fault (they didn't start / strongly provoke it). Odds are, one or more of your close relatives fits that bill, and (call it kin selection if it helps) you might be more inclined to help them once they're in trouble. That's all that the grandparent was going for (I think).
"Help my dad! He's trying to disagree with the PTC, and he needs a platform!"
Err, wait, you said the word would be required to be covered up with $#*!, so let's deal with that... CBS also has a television show called "Big Bang Theory". They could have called it "Big $#*! Theory", even though the $#*! would not have been required. I think "requires to be covered up with $#*!" might be a bit much.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I find patents on pharmaceutical products, specifically, to be rather legitimate, though I agree with you generally about patents on incremental steps in innovation and ideas that don't have the novelty to justify a temporary monopoly. Drug companies use that specific form of IP law to justify spending millions of dollars on research:
This is not a complicated economic and legal argument for intellectual property protection. It is a plain, pragmatic argument for results. We need new medications for the future. We will need them as much, or more, than we do today. Therefore, we must have continued innovation. We must encourage and protect that innovation... And Aids is a disease that is always new - due to the constant evolution of the virus - and requires new solutions. Where will these come from if we hobble the patent system that drives innovation?
For those that don't know, patents on drugs are necessary for the innovator(s) for motivation, and the previous quote is just one example of the industry (pro-patent) hawking it loud and proud. It costs exorbitant amounts of money in R&D to the company to put a new drug on the market. Other companies can reverse-engineer that drug and produce non-trademarked bioequivalent substances ("generic drugs") at a fraction of the cost to the innovator.
Without patent protection, a drug manufacturer is economically disadvantaged by innovating: R&D is a large fixed cost that only the innovator pays, so why do it? Under the patent system, you receive a significant economical advantage for a time by coming up with a "killer" product (and the privileged of society that have the economic means to consume your product at your price also benefit...), and when your protection is up, society receives the advantage of being able to make use of those innovations at approximately the marginal cost of manufacturing the product.
I believe that this is a prime example of a large industry that claims that "a patent is the only motivation for invention". I imagine that there are other industries out there that have similar claims.
Patents on software, on the other hand, are ridiculous. I don't think any software patent can simultaneously be specific enough that an isolated coder couldn't come up with the same idea and broad enough to afford more protection than copyright. In perspective, I could probably (invariably?) sit around writing some code and, in the process, use some algorithms that violate some patents somewhere. You don't just come up with a complete chemical formulation, years of clinical trials, and regulatory approval for a patented drug.
Then how are they still using torrent files? It would not be possible without one...
I could download Avatar.torrent from thepiratebay.org (or wherever) and host it on my webspace without running a BitTorrent tracker. I could also run some server-side scripts to make sure that the file uses the OpenBitTorrent tracker. On the same token, TPB can host.torrent files received from wherever and run those same scripts on each one without running a tracker themselves, then host those.torrent files. To the best of my knowledge, that's what they do now.
I hope I'm not feeding a troll... the rest of your points don't sound trollish to me.
When one is attacked by what seems like several ninja, it is difficult for one to be sure that it was not just one ninja running really fast. In fact, because of special relativity, it is actually impossible to determine in a single reference frame whether simultaneous ninja attacks were indeed perpetrated by a single ninja or several. Claims of ninja attacks were often inaccurate, with people saying "Some ninjas attacked John today at the supermarket - I guess we should inform his family," when they really meant "A ninja attacked John today at the supermarket - I guess we should inform his family."
Families of victims eventually realized that they didn't even know whether their loved one was killed by a single ninja or several. It was simply not possible, given the laws of physics. So, for simplicity, people would just understand "He got attacked by ninja" to mean either the singular or plural form of the word, with the ambiguity either irrelevant or disambiguated using context.
At the time, all other Japanese nouns did have separate plural forms in hyojungo, the "standard" Japanese dialect. Because this created an inconsistency, hyojungo was formally modified to follow the precedent set by "ninja". In support of this, ninja erased all official records that there ever was a distinction between plural and singular nouns in Japanese.
Since it's still in "preview" mode, it may be that optimizations are still forthcoming. If I recall correctly, Wave tried to load all the content in the wave at once, instead of as I scrolled down. There was plenty of room for laziness improvements.
One such improvement may be rolling up replies to a message thread so that I don't have to load what code Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum are documenting further up in the wave while I spam the bottom with pictures of LOLcats.
Yeah - they used Flash to display documents, so I never got to use the site. Since they're moving (moved?) content distribution to HTML5, that sentiment might be reversed now. Scribd documents show up relatively frequently in my Google searches; I may have to start training my eyes to stop avoiding links to scribd.com.
little cock suckers like you, who think they can produce reams of laws and rules... "i decree that anyone who agrees to my terms, should pay me 10 million if they break those terms".
a) That doesn't really relate to my post (grandparent).
b) My post (grandparent) was not intended to be interpreted as "I support the RIAA's efforts to recover their losses", as it sounds like you have taken it, (though grammar and clarity issues distort your message) but simply as an argument for the point that the Eighth Amendment does not apply to this case.
You're right, I was mistaken. Though the value of the songs should play a significant role in determining the damages, the court indeed does have the final word.
Whether or not the statutory damages for willful infringement are punitive determines whether this case has an 8th Amendment argument. It appears very unambiguous, however, that Title 17,504 is constitutional if and only if the damages are not punitive.
Yes, it would appear that my argument hinges on the assumption that the statutory damages are not "punitive damages". I have dug around about this issue, and I found this quote from a case that I cannot find with a quick Google search, but which is cross-referenced in other scholarly sources (Leutwyler v. Royal Hashemite Court of Jordan, 184 F. Supp. 2d 303, 308 (S.D.N.Y. 2001)):
"The language is clear, unambiguous, and exclusive: these are the alternatives available to a copyright plaintiff, and punitive damages are not provided by either of them."
(referring to the actual and statutory damages that Title 17,504 provides for)
Whether or not the statutory damages for willful infringement are punitive determines whether this case has an 8th Amendment argument. It appears very unambiguous, however, that Title 17,504 is constitutional if and only if the damages are punitive.
Considering that Title 17,504 (c)(1) uses the language "...recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages..." ("recover" being the operative word), I lean towards "not punitive", but that is opinion.
Having reviewed Title 17, Chapter 5, Ã504 (c) (2) (link), I readjust my example: I would grudgingly expect a judge to award me no less than $150,000, assuming that the infringement was proven willful.
These are not fines, they are damages awarded to the plaintiff.
Please refer to BFI, INC. V. KELCO DISPOSAL, INC., 492 U. S. 257 (1989) (link). One of the holdings of that case was:
The Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment does not apply to punitive damages awards in cases between private parties; it does not constrain such an award when the government neither has prosecuted the action nor has any right to recover a share of the damages awarded."
In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.
Thus, in a case of willful infringement, the statutory damages are just that: damages awarded to the plaintiff, in a case between private parties.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
<ianal>
I wish this were true. However, the Amendments to the United States Constitution limit the power of the State. The RIAA made a claim that the value of their foregone earnings is $1.92 million, and after that amount was deemed "accurate", the judge simply awarded that amount in accordance with the claim.
It's akin to this: Imagine I come up with some awesome, kickass software-product-to-end-all-software-products. This product is so awesome, I sell it for $1.92 million per license, and one of the terms of that license is that it only applies to the end user who purchased the product. Then, that user gives the bits to a friend, and that friend uses it. I now have a valid claim of $1.92 million against that other guy, and would expect a judge to award me no less than $1.92 million, assuming that I can prove somehow that the $1.92 million is the value of the software, probably by showing evidence that other customers are purchasing it at that price. A contrived example, but it should help to show why the Eighth Amendment does not apply to civil cases.
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This would allow you to return the 'written' status to the OS much faster, ...
This may be my inexperience showing, but why would such a suggestion enable you to return the 'written' status to the OS any faster than it currently is? If a write request comes in for less than the free cache space, can't you just return "written" almost immediately?
If the cache is full, how does this idea fix the problem that you're bounded by the rate at which that cache can be flushed?
Or are you suggesting that you the Seagate Momentus XT was your idea?
...and use the flash as a cache for 'hot' portions of the drive.
I think someone's beaten you to it.
Or are you suggesting that Windows Vista was your idea?
Why do you assume that homosexual couples cannot raise a family / children?
Should a homosexual couple raising adopted children not get the same benefits that a heterosexual couple raising adopted children get?
"Jim never has a problem with reception at home..."
No, increase the budget instead: give perks to employees that deny patents like this.
Can't you combine OpenID with OpenPGP? A malicious OpenID host would then have to have your OpenPGP private key in order to spoof.
OpenID says who you are.
OpenPGP proves it.
OpenPGP would disappoint you?
Note that the article is a blog post on ksplice.com (Ksplice is a service that provides kernel updates without having to reboot... we've seen mention of this on Slashdot before.)
Yes, my first instinct would also be to reboot and try again. And I'm going to take a wild guess that the author (Nelson Elhage) had that thought too.
But Elhage is the main engineer behind Ksplice, and his business focuses on improving Linux's performance between reboots.
This tells me three things: :-)
(1) He has a business interest to try, as much as possible, to avoid rebooting without determining the root cause,
(2) He's really good at it, and
(3) He's rooting for hardware problem
This sentence from the article's introduction suggests to me that this is what is going on:
I spent about half an hour digging to discover what had gone wrong, and eventually determined, conclusively, that my problem was a single undetected flipped bit in RAM.
I guess that this shows that you have to... mind your P's and Q's when writing a program!
Newer games bundle the update on the disc and require you to install them before playing.
PatPending probably didn't miss the joke. Joke or not, the Opera link would have been a really good way to prove prior art if it were posted before the filing date.
Gender specificity aside, there are some weak people out there. Sometimes they get beaten up, and sometimes it's not their fault (they didn't start / strongly provoke it). Odds are, one or more of your close relatives fits that bill, and (call it kin selection if it helps) you might be more inclined to help them once they're in trouble. That's all that the grandparent was going for (I think).
"Help my dad! He's trying to disagree with the PTC, and he needs a platform!"
Err, wait, you said the word would be required to be covered up with $#*!, so let's deal with that...
CBS also has a television show called "Big Bang Theory". They could have called it "Big $#*! Theory", even though the $#*! would not have been required. I think "requires to be covered up with $#*!" might be a bit much.
I find patents on pharmaceutical products, specifically, to be rather legitimate, though I agree with you generally about patents on incremental steps in innovation and ideas that don't have the novelty to justify a temporary monopoly.
Drug companies use that specific form of IP law to justify spending millions of dollars on research:
This is not a complicated economic and legal argument for intellectual property protection. It is a plain, pragmatic argument for results. We need new medications for the future. We will need them as much, or more, than we do today. Therefore, we must have continued innovation. We must encourage and protect that innovation...
And Aids is a disease that is always new - due to the constant evolution of the virus - and requires new solutions. Where will these come from if we hobble the patent system that drives innovation?
(source)
For those that don't know, patents on drugs are necessary for the innovator(s) for motivation, and the previous quote is just one example of the industry (pro-patent) hawking it loud and proud. It costs exorbitant amounts of money in R&D to the company to put a new drug on the market. Other companies can reverse-engineer that drug and produce non-trademarked bioequivalent substances ("generic drugs") at a fraction of the cost to the innovator.
Without patent protection, a drug manufacturer is economically disadvantaged by innovating: R&D is a large fixed cost that only the innovator pays, so why do it?
Under the patent system, you receive a significant economical advantage for a time by coming up with a "killer" product (and the privileged of society that have the economic means to consume your product at your price also benefit...), and when your protection is up, society receives the advantage of being able to make use of those innovations at approximately the marginal cost of manufacturing the product.
I believe that this is a prime example of a large industry that claims that "a patent is the only motivation for invention". I imagine that there are other industries out there that have similar claims.
Patents on software, on the other hand, are ridiculous. I don't think any software patent can simultaneously be specific enough that an isolated coder couldn't come up with the same idea and broad enough to afford more protection than copyright.
In perspective, I could probably (invariably?) sit around writing some code and, in the process, use some algorithms that violate some patents somewhere. You don't just come up with a complete chemical formulation, years of clinical trials, and regulatory approval for a patented drug.
Pirate bay tracker has been offline for ages now.
Then how are they still using torrent files? It would not be possible without one...
I could download Avatar.torrent from thepiratebay.org (or wherever) and host it on my webspace without running a BitTorrent tracker. I could also run some server-side scripts to make sure that the file uses the OpenBitTorrent tracker. .torrent files received from wherever and run those same scripts on each one without running a tracker themselves, then host those .torrent files. To the best of my knowledge, that's what they do now.
On the same token, TPB can host
I hope I'm not feeding a troll... the rest of your points don't sound trollish to me.
Do torrent sites publish the hash in the HTML page?
Some do. From that page:
Info Hash: 00cef2dedd7f667a767e47f03916a6bd0b0c28d4
Yes, and there's a little history behind it:
When one is attacked by what seems like several ninja, it is difficult for one to be sure that it was not just one ninja running really fast. In fact, because of special relativity, it is actually impossible to determine in a single reference frame whether simultaneous ninja attacks were indeed perpetrated by a single ninja or several. Claims of ninja attacks were often inaccurate, with people saying "Some ninjas attacked John today at the supermarket - I guess we should inform his family," when they really meant "A ninja attacked John today at the supermarket - I guess we should inform his family."
Families of victims eventually realized that they didn't even know whether their loved one was killed by a single ninja or several. It was simply not possible, given the laws of physics. So, for simplicity, people would just understand "He got attacked by ninja" to mean either the singular or plural form of the word, with the ambiguity either irrelevant or disambiguated using context.
At the time, all other Japanese nouns did have separate plural forms in hyojungo, the "standard" Japanese dialect. Because this created an inconsistency, hyojungo was formally modified to follow the precedent set by "ninja". In support of this, ninja erased all official records that there ever was a distinction between plural and singular nouns in Japanese.
Since it's still in "preview" mode, it may be that optimizations are still forthcoming. If I recall correctly, Wave tried to load all the content in the wave at once, instead of as I scrolled down. There was plenty of room for laziness improvements.
One such improvement may be rolling up replies to a message thread so that I don't have to load what code Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum are documenting further up in the wave while I spam the bottom with pictures of LOLcats.
Yeah - they used Flash to display documents, so I never got to use the site. Since they're moving (moved?) content distribution to HTML5, that sentiment might be reversed now.
Scribd documents show up relatively frequently in my Google searches; I may have to start training my eyes to stop avoiding links to scribd.com.
little cock suckers like you, who think they can produce reams of laws and rules... "i decree that anyone who agrees to my terms, should pay me 10 million if they break those terms".
a) That doesn't really relate to my post (grandparent).
b) My post (grandparent) was not intended to be interpreted as "I support the RIAA's efforts to recover their losses", as it sounds like you have taken it, (though grammar and clarity issues distort your message) but simply as an argument for the point that the Eighth Amendment does not apply to this case.
You're right, I was mistaken. Though the value of the songs should play a significant role in determining the damages, the court indeed does have the final word.
Whether or not the statutory damages for willful infringement are punitive determines whether this case has an 8th Amendment argument. It appears very unambiguous, however, that Title 17,504 is constitutional if and only if the damages are not punitive.
Fixed.
"The language is clear, unambiguous, and exclusive: these are the alternatives available to a copyright plaintiff, and punitive damages are not provided by either of them."
(referring to the actual and statutory damages that Title 17,504 provides for)
Whether or not the statutory damages for willful infringement are punitive determines whether this case has an 8th Amendment argument. It appears very unambiguous, however, that Title 17,504 is constitutional if and only if the damages are punitive.
Considering that Title 17,504 (c)(1) uses the language "...recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages..." ("recover" being the operative word), I lean towards "not punitive", but that is opinion.
Having reviewed Title 17, Chapter 5, Ã504 (c) (2) (link), I readjust my example: I would grudgingly expect a judge to award me no less than $150,000, assuming that the infringement was proven willful.
These are not fines, they are damages awarded to the plaintiff.
Please refer to BFI, INC. V. KELCO DISPOSAL, INC., 492 U. S. 257 (1989) (link). One of the holdings of that case was:
The Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment does not apply to punitive damages awards in cases between private parties; it does not constrain such an award when the government neither has prosecuted the action nor has any right to recover a share of the damages awarded."
Title 17, Chapter 5, Â504 (c) (2) (link) states:
In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.
Thus, in a case of willful infringement, the statutory damages are just that: damages awarded to the plaintiff, in a case between private parties.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
<ianal>
I wish this were true. However, the Amendments to the United States Constitution limit the power of the State. The RIAA made a claim that the value of their foregone earnings is $1.92 million, and after that amount was deemed "accurate", the judge simply awarded that amount in accordance with the claim.
It's akin to this: Imagine I come up with some awesome, kickass software-product-to-end-all-software-products. This product is so awesome, I sell it for $1.92 million per license, and one of the terms of that license is that it only applies to the end user who purchased the product. Then, that user gives the bits to a friend, and that friend uses it. I now have a valid claim of $1.92 million against that other guy, and would expect a judge to award me no less than $1.92 million, assuming that I can prove somehow that the $1.92 million is the value of the software, probably by showing evidence that other customers are purchasing it at that price. A contrived example, but it should help to show why the Eighth Amendment does not apply to civil cases.
</ianal>