Re:Linux written to compete with SCO?
on
SCO News Roundup
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· Score: 1
I am afraid that if you have a product that is not for sale that replaces a product that is for sale, you are in competition. The company that lost the revenue has suffered a finacial loss because of the loss of business. I don't think you have to make a profit to compete. A good intermediate example is the use of loss leaders or even dumping on markets to gain market share. A big company can undercut a product and actualy take a loss to gain market share. Here the advantage is future business or killing a competitor. In the case of an OSS project it is definitely in competition with commercial companies as they will loose existing or potential business to the free software.
Not saying that this is a bad thing. Viva la Open Source. But don't be confused that it is not in competition. Just look at entire countries now adopting Linux as a standard.
But then there are different styles of parenting. Some teach and punish. I think it is generally accepted that spare the rod and spoil the child has been out of cultural favor for about a century. It used to be acceptable behavior to whack students with canes or rulers giving physical punishment for anything that the teacher deemed an infraction.
It is one thing to say someone should not do something. It is a completely different matter to make it a matter of law, and a completely diffenent thing to make it civil or criminal law. The appropriateness of the punishment is another decision to be made if it is determained that it should even have a law against it.
Having the punishment fit the crime is a tenet of our constitution. Are you willing to send someone to one of our jails for 3 years because they had a file of a movie on their hard drive!! A movie that costs $8 to see in the theater or $20 to buy in CD just a few days or weeks later.
They say that that practice is costing the industry billions of dollars and yet they are consistantly breaking world records for the millions of dollars for first week revenues ($202 mil for the latest Matrix movie). So this is not a hardship.
We don't convict someone unless there is reasonable doubt. This legislation changes that and where the burden of proof is. That is a fundemental erosion of our civil liberties and constitutional protections.
This legislation is flawed and even worse mean and protective of someones profits over the life and liberty of the citizens. Copyright and patent law are civil law not criminal law for a reason. This makes a copyright infringment a criminal offense.
We used to throw people in jail for not paying a debt. Remember debtors prison. People in prison could not earn money to pay the debt, so either it was blackmail of their family or friends to come up with the money or they rotted in prison. It was a deterent sure but the prisons were overflowing with debtors. Being it debt is such a henous crime for sure, maybe we should re-establish that practice, so if you miss a payment, right to the slammer for hard time. Here the law was designed to protect people who loaned money and was part of there business model. They were able to marshal the legal system to threaten and help collect their debts. Many of us left Europe to get away from that nonsense. We set up our own system of self government to protect us from the large money interests. It seems we are slipping back down that slippery slope.
Write your Congressmen and Senators and tell them what you think.
Well if it weren't true that IP usually is under the control of a corporation like a publishing house or a recording studio or a movie production studio, or as in patents in corporate hands, then the idea that the IP is in the hands of the creator is mute. Movie production's IP which is the collective work of all the creative people who create the movie. Most of those people don't get benefit from the IP rights.
So we are talking about Big Business and their teams of lawyers that benefit from this type of legislation. You can't be thinking that this is legislation for the IP creator.
A good case in point is the IP rights fight that SCO is waging against Linux and the world. They are not the IP creators. IP has been commoditized and is sold on the open market. Look also at SBC's using ATT internet patents to try and extract royalties from web sites that have static navigation area's of pages (previous/. article)
The ideal is one thing, the ideal and original intent is often used by business to argue to maitain their own profits. Here we are talking about Jail time. We may have to line up the morality of the punishment next to the crime. What do you think is a reasonable thing. Aren't we reasonable people?
Here is a precedence that should not be set for unreasonable punishment for a small thing. I just saw an article that the Matrix just had the biggest opening gross $202 Million Cnn article. Do we need legislation to protect these people's profit? How much is enough.
I think there is a legal and moral principal that says that the punishment should fit the crime. Here if there is any crime it is the depriving of the artist of maybe a few dollars of revenue from a copy of hundreds of thousands of copies that are sold. Do you think that that is worth years of someones life. Or maybe we should make swearing a crime by act of congress and toss your sorry ass in jail for infraction of community standards. What do you think, your crime has been spread to millions of eyes rather than a single small file transfer. Which is the worse more far reaching infraction.
Re:Languages need novices, novices need good books
on
Bitter EJB
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· Score: 1
I totally agree that the Java envirionment is not as easy for Hello World as VB.
But, it there is a cost for device independence. A small cost I think, compared to say C++. Talk about needing to understand the world to get anything more than Hello World done in that envrionment.
The compromise of Strong Typing vs Pure OOPS I think was well done in Java. So you pay for that too.
I teach on the side and the hardest thing I find for the students is the requirement (not mine) to use C++. Java would make their lives much easier without sacrificing too much. Most will become Web developers or application programmers and not device driver or OS writers anyway.
True, Java has the possiblity to have the same crippling effect that any one language envirionment has on developer having the conceptual tools to re-form solutions in new and different ways. But then that has always been the provence of the top developers anyway. The rest are after productivity. And there Java has some nice feature for short term and long term, and resume building as well.
I am an advocate of the art of dumb programming. You can certainly clever your self into a corner or as we have seen with APL or Lotus 123 totally mis-use a Turing Complete language.
Then again good engineering is usually hidden from view and shows up with, "Thats easy, I could have done that" feelings, where the reality is much finer honed. Like the pitcher who knows exactly which pitch to pitch for a quick and effective result.
Re:Languages need novices, novices need good books
on
Bitter EJB
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· Score: 1
I went through that VB phase too. In those early days when OOPS was just getting more popular with C++ , I had been doing some teaching with Smalltalk as well.
It took awhile to realize (after coding 25% of an app) that the computation model of VB was anti-OOPs.
With the objects being forms. With data objects public and the associated fuctions private. That is the fields of a frame were public but the methods of those fields were private and not triggerable from outside pushing the buttons.
So to make things sane and OOPS you have codepages that were the OOPS interface to a forms, associating one code page (might be called something else its been a long time) with one form to have a semblance of a OOP design. VB at the time claimed to have inheritance but that was only for control groups and turned out to be empty marketing. It claimed to have polymorphism but that was only for variables that were control types, again marketing hype because of the limited nature of the exising facility. No encapsilation whatsoever. So you ended up doing the kinds of things we did prior to OOPs to get the benefits of OOPS.
It would not have been so bad if VB at the time had not been billed as a OOPS 4gl. That was the problem. If they had only had a clear concise description of the computation model used then us experienced programmer could have molded our solutions to the language. A little change in computation model or name visibility can strongly effect how you solve problems.
VB now has more features that are OOPS friendly as far as it goes.
So you (as I) having switched many times between models are more facile at doing that and understanding that.
Those "developers" that learn on a language that is not well explained can end up like I am sure you have seen with IBM Cobol programmers that learned on the job, crippled for life to think through problems in only one way.
It is good to cycle through a series of models to get a sense what can be done and to know what deficiencies to complain about, and how to code around them, not letting the language control you.
EJB's I think are off the map in terms of start up complexity and that is what they have to work on next. They are starting to address that with meta data in Java 1.5 but we need an EJB lite. That would be development scalable not just application scalable.
Maybe you should watch the Antiques Road show more often. Just think of the fortunes your throwing away. You only have to wait 50 - 100 years and convice someone that they want to collect it. But hey, what else are people going to spend their money on? Food? really how gauche.
Now if you can convert your old backups to good backwoods hooch.. well then you've got a good system with controlled obsolescence.
maybe with proper genenetic engineering we can just store the codes in the kernels directly. Just look at Indian Corn. You have a higher base than binary right off the bat.
You could re-use old typewritters as readers like all our old favorite Cartoons showed was possible (prior art here SCO and Microsoft, sorry)
I agree that currently we consider the lump the person even though there may ba multiple personalities involved.
If you get into copies then the DMCA (or son of DMCA) comes into play and we may have to re-define persons as Intellectual property.. If we get to that point we probably will be at a point where all that IP is owned by the State, certainly our ashes return to the State. It may make sense to start training as a copyright lawyer now and ride the wild bull.
Step 5 is the biggest issue. Certainly there is as much of the hardware that interepets as there is a factor due the current state of memories.
You can see that with changes in cognition, esp flattening of affect where all emotion is gone. One might argue that this is a different person because the persons reactions are very different.
If you met a person before and after a condtion like that you might judge that you were talking to two different persons.
Lets say you talk to them over teletype. We have the Turing Test revisited.
One might argue that astral projection and Ghosts are anecdotal evidence that there is a component of spirit above and beyond what is impressed in the neurons.
If you transported maybe your "spirit" would start to wander looking for the other half.. maybe the area around a transport point might be a really crowded scary place to be.
We have come such a long way. This country got its founding to a great extent (not entirely) from the civilian illegal combatants that harrassed the resident British forces. It seems ingenuous to glorify them then turn around and condem others for the same tactic. But maybe your people were around here when mine were fighting the British.
I think what the Government is doing on so many fronts is playing loose and free with the law for their own ends. This is very dangerous, very dangerous to us and our freedoms and what our people fought for so long ago.
I am reminded of that quote from movie "Beckett" where an advisor told the King's friend, Beckett, something like "always tell the King what he Should do but never what he Can do". It seems we have that problem now.
Where do you think traffic would be re-routed. Right now city planners close streets and turn them into one way and add stop signs and sometimes speed bumps because people choose alternate routes through residential areas (with kids present). This is not the answer because to make it work you would just create mini-expressway's as alternative routes which would have to have changes done to handle the added traffic and would have to be more protective of pedestrians.
Usually these types of routes designed for heavier through traffic, as you see in suburban areas, have very long lights which are tuned for the through traffic not the local "I am just going to the store down the street" traffic. That would chop up our nieghborhoods even more into seperate Islands of living. That I contend carries its own social impact as yet to be measures.
I think the best idea is to go Mass transit in the cities, stagger the work days, or foster at home work or small distributed work centers. But the major travel routes need to be channeled and our kids protected from that risk.
I suspect this group is actually part of the Looney Right. But then it just may be those "anti-flurons" coming from the Wifi that has turned them to the Looney Right. Bush probably could not gotten elected without massive conservative investment in Wifi installations in key States.
Ducking, that anti-fluoron just missed, thank god.
I am wondering if there is any party that should recieve an email or a call reguarding this issue. I don't know if the company, the patent office or some legistative person should be made aware that there is some feeling and opinion that this maybe be examined by the patent office as to its validity, and to whether the patent office is doing due diligence in this area. I know I plan on sending my Congressman a note.
I think it is clear from comments here and general knowledge that this patent was probably issued in error as there seems to be substantial prior art here.
Are there no penaties for requesting a patent on something that has prior art? Or is this an effective strategy to claim jump IP because of the cost for overturning someone elses patent. In the case of POWWOW, there may not be anyone with enough interest to persue it.
It may only come down to those effected, that would have to pay a licence fee . Then the econonimics might be that to pay the licence fee might be cheaper than the legal costs to fight the patent claim. It that is the case and people don't fight it on principle then the claim stands and the claim has been Jumped. I hope this is not the thinking here behind appying for the patent. But certainly they can't reasonably think that it was their original idea, can they?
Yes and ICQ had it at the time that Powwow went under. Which was, as I remember and was publicly stated, a community effort by a community in Colorado that wanted to build virtual communities, offer if free and they did, until they couldn't any more. They were I believe the first successful sophisticated free IM service out there. They are missed.
I think there is also Taxes and a body of law governing that are big differences.
The tax issue is definitily why States are looking into it as it is a loss of revenue stream for them, just as they have gone after Internet shoppers to pay State taxes (some states). This means potentially that they would have to find another tax to impose to keep their er. budgets up. Which is politically unpopular. It is easier to justify have an existing tax chase a scofflaw around, who knows you could be a hero.
The law governing would have to do with wire taps or equivelent. I would imagine many Law Enformement agencies would love VoIP because they probably would not be probably have to go to a Judge to get permission, at least till legal precedence is set up equating the two. If somone other than Law Enforement is caught listening in they probably would only be able to be prosecuted for fraud or maybe DMCA circomvention if there is any security build in. If not then I am not sure what charges could be brought if there wasn't a law covering it or monetary loss somewhere.
The consumer should be wary because there may not be protection from legal snooping or worse yet from hacking the conversations. Does anyone know what the user agreements are in these cases. Do the providers of VoIP have any agreement on privacy and security of conversations?
Lawers will love this controversy because there is all sorts of things that could go before the Courts both criminal and civil.
It occurs to me that there are regulations in place about securing conversations and not letting anyone listen in on those conversations with the Telcoms. It used to be that the Law Enforcement agencies had to get a court order to listen in. I think that those rules have been relaxed in some cases such that it is easier to obtain the court orders, or they can write their own (I think this is true about Treasury getting at banking records).
So the body of law that would effect the regulated telecommunications would be very different that those governing VOIP. You may only catch someone for fraud or maybe a DMCA circumvention if someone were tapping into your conversations.
Does anyone know what type of user aggrement the VOIP has about security and privacy, or are they all just listening in and recording and waiting to collect on blackmail later.
Excellent point about recycling existing CO2, maybe something revolving around biomass methane. I understand that currently steam seperation with methane is popular for hydrogen production, but this releases otherwise bound CO2.
God help us if they engineer a plant to do it. The Carey fireweed of the future. "The fields ablaze with the sound of engineering".
A example of a hopefull type of fix might be that of acetylene. Which as I understand it had some of the same problems with keeping at high presures in storage. But now the acetylene tanks have something like acetone acid in a cloth or something that absorbs the acetylene and it gets released at low presure. Making the storage and transport of it save and in common use. There may be a simple solution to a lot of problems.
The only problem with synthesis of gasoline type fuels is the same CO2 and other byproduct problem that would solve only one problem.. maybe the other answer is more work at home or near home centers to cut down the massive urban rush hour stampede.
Then there are those stories about the cars being converted to run on re-tasked fry oil. But having the suggestion of french fries pass me by in the street might blow my diet.
Another instance of where a standard regimented approach falls down as the best solution is in radio frequency circuits, esp high frequency ones. Where it turns out that random direction haywiring can be best because it reduced coupling between wires. Whereas if all the wiring is neat, canneled together, bundled, or on circuit boards layed out in straight parallel lines and all in the same plane can provide a nightmare of problems.
But then the strength and art of programming is in recognizing patterns and re-applying them to new situations.
All valid points about current state of the technology. The research is going into improving that technology, because oil will start to rise in price as demand rises world wide.
It is low energy/volume but with distributed storage we can have enough storage for needs.
Distributed systems, add stability to a system that, as we have seen recently, is not at all satisfactory for a modern technological society that requires a steady flow of energy.
The leak thing, well thats what duct tape is for, or some business just solving the problem. That should be just a current implementation issue not one that is inherent to fuel cells.
Automobile fires used to be much more common, dangerous in fact. What was that book "Dangerous at any speed". Just bad implimentations, or as we say leaning excersizes.
True Hydrogen is a storage medium but unlike oil, it is present everywhere people exist on earth, because we need water. With free energy resources such as wind, solar, hydro, and thermal energy, we can store up that energy locally (in you garage) at presures or densities that are not dangerous. With Distributed Generation technologies, which do exist, you can exchange energy with the grid which you can get back later when you need it.
Buckminster Fuller in his "Operating Manual for Space Ship Earth" (a tiny book but worth the read). Talks about constructing a global power grid to share generation between the daylight and nightime sides of the planet. This way you would not need to plan on peak production locally.
Or the other model is. Hook up to the power grid and generate hydrogen for your car to use. Essentially shorting out the gas stations. You can send energy back if the grid needed it. It may even work out that the cost of energy at off peak times would give a good differential such that you could turn a profit sending back energy at peak times. This is all predicated on efficiency increases of course. You waste some energy but you eliminate the polution and distribution costs of the gas.
Besides we will need all that petroleum for plastics, medicines and fertilizers with the populations growins as they are instead of burning it up to get us from here to there.
Diamler-Benz is working with Ballard Power Systems of Canada, a leader in fuel cell develompent to create fuel cells for their cars. They say they plan on producing 100,000 fuel-cell cars by the end of the decade. Whether these are purely Hydrogen or are hybrids is yet to be seen. But the automakers at least see the necessity of going in this direction. The cost of gas will make these technologies very attractive very quickly. Then we will see the economies of scale kick in.
If only the Oil Men in the White House would put more dollars into these techologies instead of into the oil fields of Iraq.
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I am afraid that if you have a product that is not for sale that replaces a product that is for sale, you are in competition. The company that lost the revenue has suffered a finacial loss because of the loss of business. I don't think you have to make a profit to compete. A good intermediate example is the use of loss leaders or even dumping on markets to gain market share. A big company can undercut a product and actualy take a loss to gain market share. Here the advantage is future business or killing a competitor. In the case of an OSS project it is definitely in competition with commercial companies as they will loose existing or potential business to the free software.
Not saying that this is a bad thing. Viva la Open Source. But don't be confused that it is not in competition. Just look at entire countries now adopting Linux as a standard.
But then there are different styles of parenting. Some teach and punish. I think it is generally accepted that spare the rod and spoil the child has been out of cultural favor for about a century. It used to be acceptable behavior to whack students with canes or rulers giving physical punishment for anything that the teacher deemed an infraction.
It is one thing to say someone should not do something. It is a completely different matter to make it a matter of law, and a completely diffenent thing to make it civil or criminal law. The appropriateness of the punishment is another decision to be made if it is determained that it should even have a law against it.
Having the punishment fit the crime is a tenet of our constitution. Are you willing to send someone to one of our jails for 3 years because they had a file of a movie on their hard drive!! A movie that costs $8 to see in the theater or $20 to buy in CD just a few days or weeks later.
They say that that practice is costing the industry billions of dollars and yet they are consistantly breaking world records for the millions of dollars for first week revenues ($202 mil for the latest Matrix movie). So this is not a hardship.
We don't convict someone unless there is reasonable doubt. This legislation changes that and where the burden of proof is. That is a fundemental erosion of our civil liberties and constitutional protections.
This legislation is flawed and even worse mean and protective of someones profits over the life and liberty of the citizens. Copyright and patent law are civil law not criminal law for a reason. This makes a copyright infringment a criminal offense.
We used to throw people in jail for not paying a debt. Remember debtors prison. People in prison could not earn money to pay the debt, so either it was blackmail of their family or friends to come up with the money or they rotted in prison. It was a deterent sure but the prisons were overflowing with debtors. Being it debt is such a henous crime for sure, maybe we should re-establish that practice, so if you miss a payment, right to the slammer for hard time. Here the law was designed to protect people who loaned money and was part of there business model. They were able to marshal the legal system to threaten and help collect their debts. Many of us left Europe to get away from that nonsense. We set up our own system of self government to protect us from the large money interests. It seems we are slipping back down that slippery slope.
Write your Congressmen and Senators and tell them what you think.
Well if it weren't true that IP usually is under the control of a corporation like a publishing house or a recording studio or a movie production studio, or as in patents in corporate hands, then the idea that the IP is in the hands of the creator is mute. Movie production's IP which is the collective work of all the creative people who create the movie. Most of those people don't get benefit from the IP rights.
/. article)
So we are talking about Big Business and their teams of lawyers that benefit from this type of legislation. You can't be thinking that this is legislation for the IP creator.
A good case in point is the IP rights fight that SCO is waging against Linux and the world. They are not the IP creators. IP has been commoditized and is sold on the open market. Look also at SBC's using ATT internet patents to try and extract royalties from web sites that have static navigation area's of pages (previous
The ideal is one thing, the ideal and original intent is often used by business to argue to maitain their own profits. Here we are talking about Jail time. We may have to line up the morality of the punishment next to the crime. What do you think is a reasonable thing. Aren't we reasonable people?
Here is a precedence that should not be set for unreasonable punishment for a small thing. I just saw an article that the Matrix just had the biggest opening gross $202 Million Cnn article. Do we need legislation to protect these people's profit? How much is enough.
I think there is a legal and moral principal that says that the punishment should fit the crime. Here if there is any crime it is the depriving of the artist of maybe a few dollars of revenue from a copy of hundreds of thousands of copies that are sold. Do you think that that is worth years of someones life. Or maybe we should make swearing a crime by act of congress and toss your sorry ass in jail for infraction of community standards. What do you think, your crime has been spread to millions of eyes rather than a single small file transfer. Which is the worse more far reaching infraction.
I totally agree that the Java envirionment is not as easy for Hello World as VB.
But, it there is a cost for device independence. A small cost I think, compared to say C++. Talk about needing to understand the world to get anything more than Hello World done in that envrionment.
The compromise of Strong Typing vs Pure OOPS I think was well done in Java. So you pay for that too.
I teach on the side and the hardest thing I find for the students is the requirement (not mine) to use C++. Java would make their lives much easier without sacrificing too much. Most will become Web developers or application programmers and not device driver or OS writers anyway.
True, Java has the possiblity to have the same crippling effect that any one language envirionment has on developer having the conceptual tools to re-form solutions in new and different ways. But then that has always been the provence of the top developers anyway. The rest are after productivity. And there Java has some nice feature for short term and long term, and resume building as well.
I am an advocate of the art of dumb programming. You can certainly clever your self into a corner or as we have seen with APL or Lotus 123 totally mis-use a Turing Complete language.
Then again good engineering is usually hidden from view and shows up with, "Thats easy, I could have done that" feelings, where the reality is much finer honed. Like the pitcher who knows exactly which pitch to pitch for a quick and effective result.
What exactly does New.Net do?
I went through that VB phase too. In those early days when OOPS was just getting more popular with C++ , I had been doing some teaching with Smalltalk as well.
It took awhile to realize (after coding 25% of an app) that the computation model of VB was anti-OOPs.
With the objects being forms. With data objects public and the associated fuctions private. That is the fields of a frame were public but the methods of those fields were private and not triggerable from outside pushing the buttons.
So to make things sane and OOPS you have codepages that were the OOPS interface to a forms, associating one code page (might be called something else its been a long time) with one form to have a semblance of a OOP design. VB at the time claimed to have inheritance but that was only for control groups and turned out to be empty marketing. It claimed to have polymorphism but that was only for variables that were control types, again marketing hype because of the limited nature of the exising facility. No encapsilation whatsoever. So you ended up doing the kinds of things we did prior to OOPs to get the benefits of OOPS.
It would not have been so bad if VB at the time had not been billed as a OOPS 4gl. That was the problem. If they had only had a clear concise description of the computation model used then us experienced programmer could have molded our solutions to the language. A little change in computation model or name visibility can strongly effect how you solve problems.
VB now has more features that are OOPS friendly as far as it goes.
So you (as I) having switched many times between models are more facile at doing that and understanding that.
Those "developers" that learn on a language that is not well explained can end up like I am sure you have seen with IBM Cobol programmers that learned on the job, crippled for life to think through problems in only one way.
It is good to cycle through a series of models to get a sense what can be done and to know what deficiencies to complain about, and how to code around them, not letting the language control you.
EJB's I think are off the map in terms of start up complexity and that is what they have to work on next. They are starting to address that with meta data in Java 1.5 but we need an EJB lite. That would be development scalable not just application scalable.
a directory by any other name is a folder.
Maybe you should watch the Antiques Road show more often. Just think of the fortunes your throwing away. You only have to wait 50 - 100 years and convice someone that they want to collect it. But hey, what else are people going to spend their money on? Food? really how gauche.
Now if you can convert your old backups to good backwoods hooch.. well then you've got a good system with controlled obsolescence.
maybe with proper genenetic engineering we can just store the codes in the kernels directly. Just look at Indian Corn. You have a higher base than binary right off the bat.
You could re-use old typewritters as readers like all our old favorite Cartoons showed was possible (prior art here SCO and Microsoft, sorry)
What a terrible thing, planned obsolescence of our information. Maybe that is what happened to Atlantis.
History records that the burning of the library at Alexandria was a horrible crime against the future of mankind.
Oh the horror of it.
We have been reduced to digging in ancient toilettes to scavange for information.
Yes I did mean flattening of affect.
I agree that currently we consider the lump the person even though there may ba multiple personalities involved.
If you get into copies then the DMCA (or son of DMCA) comes into play and we may have to re-define persons as Intellectual property.. If we get to that point we probably will be at a point where all that IP is owned by the State, certainly our ashes return to the State. It may make sense to start training as a copyright lawyer now and ride the wild bull.
Step 5 is the biggest issue. Certainly there is as much of the hardware that interepets as there is a factor due the current state of memories.
You can see that with changes in cognition, esp flattening of affect where all emotion is gone. One might argue that this is a different person because the persons reactions are very different.
If you met a person before and after a condtion like that you might judge that you were talking to two different persons.
Lets say you talk to them over teletype. We have the Turing Test revisited.
So who are we really?
One might argue that astral projection and Ghosts are anecdotal evidence that there is a component of spirit above and beyond what is impressed in the neurons.
If you transported maybe your "spirit" would start to wander looking for the other half.. maybe the area around a transport point might be a really crowded scary place to be.
Well Halloween is just around the corner..
We have come such a long way. This country got its founding to a great extent (not entirely) from the civilian illegal combatants that harrassed the resident British forces. It seems ingenuous to glorify them then turn around and condem others for the same tactic. But maybe your people were around here when mine were fighting the British.
I think what the Government is doing on so many fronts is playing loose and free with the law for their own ends. This is very dangerous, very dangerous to us and our freedoms and what our people fought for so long ago.
I am reminded of that quote from movie "Beckett" where an advisor told the King's friend, Beckett, something like "always tell the King what he Should do but never what he Can do". It seems we have that problem now.
Where do you think traffic would be re-routed. Right now city planners close streets and turn them into one way and add stop signs and sometimes speed bumps because people choose alternate routes through residential areas (with kids present). This is not the answer because to make it work you would just create mini-expressway's as alternative routes which would have to have changes done to handle the added traffic and would have to be more protective of pedestrians.
Usually these types of routes designed for heavier through traffic, as you see in suburban areas, have very long lights which are tuned for the through traffic not the local "I am just going to the store down the street" traffic. That would chop up our nieghborhoods even more into seperate Islands of living. That I contend carries its own social impact as yet to be measures.
I think the best idea is to go Mass transit in the cities, stagger the work days, or foster at home work or small distributed work centers. But the major travel routes need to be channeled and our kids protected from that risk.
I suspect this group is actually part of the Looney Right. But then it just may be those "anti-flurons" coming from the Wifi that has turned them to the Looney Right. Bush probably could not gotten elected without massive conservative investment in Wifi installations in key States.
Ducking, that anti-fluoron just missed, thank god.
...Duh....
I am wondering if there is any party that should recieve an email or a call reguarding this issue. I don't know if the company, the patent office or some legistative person should be made aware that there is some feeling and opinion that this maybe be examined by the patent office as to its validity, and to whether the patent office is doing due diligence in this area. I know I plan on sending my Congressman a note.
I think it is clear from comments here and general knowledge that this patent was probably issued in error as there seems to be substantial prior art here.
Are there no penaties for requesting a patent on something that has prior art? Or is this an effective strategy to claim jump IP because of the cost for overturning someone elses patent. In the case of POWWOW, there may not be anyone with enough interest to persue it.
It may only come down to those effected, that would have to pay a licence fee . Then the econonimics might be that to pay the licence fee might be cheaper than the legal costs to fight the patent claim. It that is the case and people don't fight it on principle then the claim stands and the claim has been Jumped. I hope this is not the thinking here behind appying for the patent. But certainly they can't reasonably think that it was their original idea, can they?
Yes and ICQ had it at the time that Powwow went under. Which was, as I remember and was publicly stated, a community effort by a community in Colorado that wanted to build virtual communities, offer if free and they did, until they couldn't any more. They were I believe the first successful sophisticated free IM service out there. They are missed.
Ahh.. those were the days.
I think there is also Taxes and a body of law governing that are big differences.
The tax issue is definitily why States are looking into it as it is a loss of revenue stream for them, just as they have gone after Internet shoppers to pay State taxes (some states). This means potentially that they would have to find another tax to impose to keep their er. budgets up. Which is politically unpopular. It is easier to justify have an existing tax chase a scofflaw around, who knows you could be a hero.
The law governing would have to do with wire taps or equivelent. I would imagine many Law Enformement agencies would love VoIP because they probably would not be probably have to go to a Judge to get permission, at least till legal precedence is set up equating the two. If somone other than Law Enforement is caught listening in they probably would only be able to be prosecuted for fraud or maybe DMCA circomvention if there is any security build in. If not then I am not sure what charges could be brought if there wasn't a law covering it or monetary loss somewhere.
The consumer should be wary because there may not be protection from legal snooping or worse yet from hacking the conversations. Does anyone know what the user agreements are in these cases. Do the providers of VoIP have any agreement on privacy and security of conversations?
Lawers will love this controversy because there is all sorts of things that could go before the Courts both criminal and civil.
It occurs to me that there are regulations in place about securing conversations and not letting anyone listen in on those conversations with the Telcoms. It used to be that the Law Enforcement agencies had to get a court order to listen in. I think that those rules have been relaxed in some cases such that it is easier to obtain the court orders, or they can write their own (I think this is true about Treasury getting at banking records).
So the body of law that would effect the regulated telecommunications would be very different that those governing VOIP. You may only catch someone for fraud or maybe a DMCA circumvention if someone were tapping into your conversations.
Does anyone know what type of user aggrement the VOIP has about security and privacy, or are they all just listening in and recording and waiting to collect on blackmail later.
Excellent point about recycling existing CO2, maybe something revolving around biomass methane. I understand that currently steam seperation with methane is popular for hydrogen production, but this releases otherwise bound CO2.
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God help us if they engineer a plant to do it. The Carey fireweed of the future. "The fields ablaze with the sound of engineering"
A example of a hopefull type of fix might be that of acetylene. Which as I understand it had some of the same problems with keeping at high presures in storage. But now the acetylene tanks have something like acetone acid in a cloth or something that absorbs the acetylene and it gets released at low presure. Making the storage and transport of it save and in common use. There may be a simple solution to a lot of problems.
The only problem with synthesis of gasoline type fuels is the same CO2 and other byproduct problem that would solve only one problem.. maybe the other answer is more work at home or near home centers to cut down the massive urban rush hour stampede.
Then there are those stories about the cars being converted to run on re-tasked fry oil. But having the suggestion of french fries pass me by in the street might blow my diet.
Another instance of where a standard regimented approach falls down as the best solution is in radio frequency circuits, esp high frequency ones. Where it turns out that random direction haywiring can be best because it reduced coupling between wires. Whereas if all the wiring is neat, canneled together, bundled, or on circuit boards layed out in straight parallel lines and all in the same plane can provide a nightmare of problems.
But then the strength and art of programming is in recognizing patterns and re-applying them to new situations.
All valid points about current state of the technology. The research is going into improving that technology, because oil will start to rise in price as demand rises world wide.
It is low energy/volume but with distributed storage we can have enough storage for needs.
Distributed systems, add stability to a system that, as we have seen recently, is not at all satisfactory for a modern technological society that requires a steady flow of energy.
The leak thing, well thats what duct tape is for, or some business just solving the problem. That should be just a current implementation issue not one that is inherent to fuel cells.
Automobile fires used to be much more common, dangerous in fact. What was that book "Dangerous at any speed". Just bad implimentations, or as we say leaning excersizes.
True Hydrogen is a storage medium but unlike oil, it is present everywhere people exist on earth, because we need water. With free energy resources such as wind, solar, hydro, and thermal energy, we can store up that energy locally (in you garage) at presures or densities that are not dangerous. With Distributed Generation technologies, which do exist, you can exchange energy with the grid which you can get back later when you need it.
Buckminster Fuller in his "Operating Manual for Space Ship Earth" (a tiny book but worth the read). Talks about constructing a global power grid to share generation between the daylight and nightime sides of the planet. This way you would not need to plan on peak production locally.
Or the other model is. Hook up to the power grid and generate hydrogen for your car to use. Essentially shorting out the gas stations. You can send energy back if the grid needed it. It may even work out that the cost of energy at off peak times would give a good differential such that you could turn a profit sending back energy at peak times. This is all predicated on efficiency increases of course. You waste some energy but you eliminate the polution and distribution costs of the gas.
Besides we will need all that petroleum for plastics, medicines and fertilizers with the populations growins as they are instead of burning it up to get us from here to there.
Diamler-Benz is working with Ballard Power Systems of Canada, a leader in fuel cell develompent to create fuel cells for their cars. They say they plan on producing 100,000 fuel-cell cars by the end of the decade. Whether these are purely Hydrogen or are hybrids is yet to be seen. But the automakers at least see the necessity of going in this direction. The cost of gas will make these technologies very attractive very quickly. Then we will see the economies of scale kick in.
If only the Oil Men in the White House would put more dollars into these techologies instead of into the oil fields of Iraq.