In the U.S. we're supposed to be a beacon of freedom and tolerance. When we don't meet these ideals, they should be pointed out. In fact, people are doing us a favor for pointing out our flaws because it's possible we don't see them ourselves.
Let me use an analogy... If I have some food on the corner of mouth after I eat, I hope my friends will tell me about it, and not just ignore it because some guy down the hall spilled his entire meal on his tie.
People from around the world point out our flaws because we're disappointing them. After we did so much to liberate the world from tyranny in the 20th century, they want us to continue in the 21st. And if we don't meet that benchmark, then they want to tell us to get better.
Well, yes that would be fine as well. The main thing to do is allow these H1-B's to really get hired at prevailing rates. Take away the threat that they'll be sent back if they get fired and you reduce most of the incentive for the H1-B program to begin with.
And as a national issue, I'd rather have motivated technical people coming to the U.S.
What nobody wants (well, except big multi-nationals) is for really qualified people being lured to this country forced to work 80 hour weeks for $30K per year with the threat of deportment hanging over their head if they complain about conditions.
"no government or labor union is going to be able to change this, at least over a long term."
Define "long term" and then we can have a discussion.
Because in the "long term" so many things change that you may be completely right... or you might be completely wrong. Or the question may even be irrelevant.
We need a "secure delete" utility that doesn't overwrite with 0's. That's too obvious. A good secure delete will take random files and overwrite thus obscuring the damage.
It's a stupid legal interpretation, so we need a stupid utility to get around it.
"There is a very sizable - and often very vocal - minority who wouldn't know a good thought process if it smashed them in the face"
Maybe.
But in this case, it doesn't pass muster.
I do computer stuff for a living and if analyst came forward with a business process to handle credit card authorizations that simply authorized it with no audit trail and no means to verify anything about that authorization, you'd reject the design out of hand. You wouldn't even need to see the program specs, or source code or anything to know it's a bad design. You don't even have to ask a lot of questions. It's just a bad design....and the more the programmer/analysts would defend it, the more it would make you suspicious about what they're trying to pull. Because you don't have to be a Knuth, Schulman, Appleman, or Berners-Lee to see it.
So when Diebold has a system that raises questions *with everyone who sees it* and won't answer those questions, then it raises concerns about not only their veracity, but their motive.
And given the results of the 2000 presidential election and Diebold's refusal to address legitimate concerns leads to some very uncomfortable questions about their motives. The best case scenario is that Diebold's software engineers are incompetent. That's the best case.
SO I appreciate that there is a vocal minority who would trash anything, however, this isn't a minority of people questioning Diebold. Virtually everyone with a technical and business background is questioning these systems. And Diebold is noticably silent.
...this is the first step in regulating the internet, cell phones, games, movies etc. all in the name of "protecting children".
And let's be real here. Hillary is doing this for the same reason that her husband rebuked "Queen Latifah" [insert eye roll here]. It shows they're willing to "go against their base" to "do the right thing".
Because there is a significant minority of people in both color states that think that all this stuff is just horrible because of some random reason related to kids, gods, personal preferences. I mean, there are still a lot of people who think that if you stare at naked bodies too much it makes you into a serial murderer. They put video games into the same category.
Seriously...we laugh when we see a movie like "The Gods Must Be Crazy", but our modern society pretty much believes the same things as those aborigines. We just don't eat bugs. Well, as long as you don't count lobsters, we don't.
"Many businesses are still in a 'honeymoon' with Google and aren't yet seriously computing the performance of their clicks (how many clicks turn into sales)."
I'll try not to be Mr. Obvious here, but consider this: when companies buy time on TV, they have no idea how effective those ads are. What I mean is, they can see the ratings for the TV show and you can guess how many people saw those ads based on the ratings, but that is no guarantee anybody actually watched the commercial, and even if they did, you have no idea if people associate your product with that commercial, and even if you did, you have no idea how that translates into a sale.
But yet despite all those handicaps, companies still purchase TV, radio, and print ads.
For online advertising, google ads or anything like that... at least you can measure some sort of direct impact... the month before, I had X hits, this month I had Y clicks The month before I had $X in sales, this month I had $Y in sales. In both case, I can measure those numbers well enough to draw a conclusion pretty quickly about the effectiveness of the ad.
The comparison is not different than direct mail, email, or other ads... does my revenue increase more than the cost of the advertising. If it does, then it's good for me. If it doesn't, it's not good for me, stop advertising.
If you don't know the impact in 3 months, then shame on you for not paying attention. And that's really my point. Google has been around long enough for companies to draw a conclusion as to the effectiveness of those ads. Either they're effective, or companies are not willing to admit that Google isn't effective.
Actually, my "quota" was filled several years ago.
And to answer your next question, the sale disks go towards "free" disks.
I've only ever purchased 4 disks at full price ($16). The rest have been at $7, plus I still have 10 free ones available to me.
I'm not really cheerleading for Sony/BMG, I only brought the whole thing up to show that the myth that companies would lose money selling CD's at less than $10 is not demonstrated by the fact that Sony/BMG routinely sells CD's at around $7 shipped to customers.
1) The sales they have are $6-7 including shipping
2) BMG has at least gotten into the 1990's. They email their monthly choice and I decline on their web site. Still not free, but cheaper than sending letters back and forth
3) Their choice is better than a department/5-10, but not as good as a real record store.
4) I understand the business model, but if they can sell CD's out the door for $6-7 (right now the sale is $6 shipped), that suggests they could easily sell CD's retail for $10. I think if these guys dropped prices to under $10 retail, we wouldn't be having many discussions on piracy. But at $18? Yikes. That's an investment. The band better be really really really good to get $20 ($18 plus tax).
Although it occurs to me if these companies are all essentially patenting business processes in software that cover "wide" areas, then the damage will be limited to 17 years or so.
Still a long time, but like the CR/LF and XOR patents that IBM has, they've got to be expired by now.
"So even for the "cheap" model of production, you're looking at $10 CDs."
Impossible.
Sony BMG has once-a-month sales where they ship CD's to your house at $6-7 per disk. Presumably when I buy a $6 CD, Sony is not losing money, so it suggests the cost is significantly lower than you calculate.
"Perhaps because, in the olden days, you didn't have huge software corporations (Adobe, MS, Apple, Google, etc) that were able to take a look at your implementation and implement it themselves?"
Apple was pretty big through the 80's. IBM was really big for a long time. Lotus was big. Ashton-Tate was huge. Novell. Oracle. And before that, there were tons of mainframe companies (they generally included source with the product too).
No, the software industry was big and healthy and patentless before the mid-nineties.
Here's an interesting paragraph: "The Clinton administration appointed Bruce Lehman as Commissioner of the Patent and Trademark Office in 1994. Unlike his predecessors, Lehman was not a patent lawyer but the chief lobbyist for the Software Publishing Industry. In 1995, the PTO established some broad guidelines for examining and issuing software patents. The PTO interpreted the courts as requiring the PTO to grant software patents in a broad variety of circumstances. Note, that although the U.S. Congress has never legislated specifically that software is patentable, the broad description of patentable subject in the Patent Act of 1952 and the failure of Congress to change the law after the court decisions allowing software patents, has been interpreted as an indication of Congressional intent."
"but MY satellite radio [sirius.com] is assuredly almost CD-quality sound."
It most assuredly is not. It's not even close. The only station with half-way decent quality is the Classical Music station (Symphony). The sound on Sirius ranges from okay to just awful. XM strikes me as a bit better, but certainly nothing to boast about.
I love my Sirius, but that's because of content, not fidelity.
" along with Diane Peters from OSDL, Bruce Perens, lawyers from IBM and others got together at the USPTO last month to talk about ways to improve patent quality. No solutions yet, but some good discussion."
Why don't you get together to discuss the fact that most of the significant discoveries in computers, information and software fields came about before software patents.
And if you want to quibble with me, fine, but answer this: If software patents were important to drive innovation in the high-tech industry, then how did some many great pieces of software get written in the days before software patents?
Let's not pretend that software patents are an old, time-tested way of protecting software. They're not, they're less than 10 years old. So rather than accept a relatively recent ruling by a court (Not even a law from congress), why don't we do the right thing and stop software patents. The fact that the courts lowered the bar so that nonobviousness was no longer the primary determinant of whether a patent should be granted should be reason enough to get rid of them.
Name something... anything out there in the market that was only possible because of software patents. The idea of these patents isn't to make NTP rich simply because of knowing how to game the system, but to advance the state of the art. These patents aren't doing that; if anything, they're doing the opposite.
I'm opposed to coming together and working out an arrangement because it presupposes these patents are acceptable. They are not. Software patents are so tremendously wrong that I think they're something that have to be opposed on general principal.
"Sheesh, I seriously hope you develop some technology that you can't afford to develop. Then before you get funding,some company infringse upon it and make billions."
The trouble is, for every time you protect the little guy, there are many more examples of patent portfolio companies basically being a leech on progress and legitimate companies. Is it worth the cost for that one in a million example of protecting the lone inventor?
To me, your argument is the equivalent of saying "The lottery is a great thing because once a week somebody becomes rich".
I think when Comcast rolled this stuff out, the infrastructure was new and worked well. But unlike verizon, they don't really employee people to properly maintain this equipment and things are starting to fall apart. Maintenance is expensive.
The reason I say this is a few months ago, my TV picture on comcast got really fuzzy and poor. I called them, and the first thing they did was put a signal booster on the line coming in. That more or less fixed it. And in his truck the guy had dozens of these.
So they're essentailly putting a bandaid "booster" in customer premises to make up for problems in the infrastructure. That to me is a symptom of improper maintenance.
Almost a year ago when I got Vonage, it would never work consistently well with Comcast. When I switched to FIOS over the summer, magically it started working again.
However, my observation is that FIOS offered significantly higher bandwidth back (it's 5/2 as compared with 4/512k) which seems important for VoIP. Plus, I found Verizon's bandwidth to be more consistent. FIOS offers 5/2 and it *always* works that way. Comcast seemed more inconsistent.
In any event, Vonage never worked consistently well under Comcast and it works consistently well under Verizon FIOS. So it's not recent.
"Um, how is this person supposed to be notified of the emergency if his cell phone or pager cannot get a signal?"
We've had movie theaters a lot longer than we've had cell phones & pagers and the solution is the person on call must be in an area that he can receive the page/call.
That may mean in practice that you can't go to the theater when you're on call. But when you're in an airplane, you generally can't receive calls either. And if you go to the middle of a lot of places in the middle of nowhere you can't get a signal. The person on call must stay in an area that receives service.
That may mean in practice that if you are on call, you can't go to the movies, but so what?
Yahoo's service is like $60 for 12 months of this. You can't transfer to players (that's another $60), but I don't really care. I use it as a service to preview what I want to buy.
Plus now I can stream to my Roku from Yahoo, so I'm not investing big in it.
With apologies to Oscar Wilde, "The only thing worse than being indexed by Google is NOT being indexed by google".
What google ought to do is *not* index these authors; these guys really are so goofy they don't understand what a boon this will be to them for people to get to their book, read a few sentences and then jump over to an online bookstore and buy it. Instead, they'll have to be content with a few sales here and there. Then they can go to their guild meetings and bitch about how the country is becoming illiterate.
Its like they're so greedy for a nickel here that they can't see the 10 dollars that is coming tomorrow if they're just patient.
Slashdot Mirror
In the U.S. we're supposed to be a beacon of freedom and tolerance. When we don't meet these ideals, they should be pointed out. In fact, people are doing us a favor for pointing out our flaws because it's possible we don't see them ourselves.
Let me use an analogy... If I have some food on the corner of mouth after I eat, I hope my friends will tell me about it, and not just ignore it because some guy down the hall spilled his entire meal on his tie.
People from around the world point out our flaws because we're disappointing them. After we did so much to liberate the world from tyranny in the 20th century, they want us to continue in the 21st. And if we don't meet that benchmark, then they want to tell us to get better.
Well, yes that would be fine as well. The main thing to do is allow these H1-B's to really get hired at prevailing rates. Take away the threat that they'll be sent back if they get fired and you reduce most of the incentive for the H1-B program to begin with.
And as a national issue, I'd rather have motivated technical people coming to the U.S.
What nobody wants (well, except big multi-nationals) is for really qualified people being lured to this country forced to work 80 hour weeks for $30K per year with the threat of deportment hanging over their head if they complain about conditions.
"no government or labor union is going to be able to change this, at least over a long term."
Define "long term" and then we can have a discussion.
Because in the "long term" so many things change that you may be completely right... or you might be completely wrong. Or the question may even be irrelevant.
As soon as an H1-B is employed for a 90 days he/she gets their green card.
Voila. Problem solved.
Before you criticize, think about why this would be a terrific for everybody except companies who lie about why they want to import workers.
We need a "secure delete" utility that doesn't overwrite with 0's. That's too obvious. A good secure delete will take random files and overwrite thus obscuring the damage.
It's a stupid legal interpretation, so we need a stupid utility to get around it.
"There is a very sizable - and often very vocal - minority who wouldn't know a good thought process if it smashed them in the face"
...and the more the programmer/analysts would defend it, the more it would make you suspicious about what they're trying to pull. Because you don't have to be a Knuth, Schulman, Appleman, or Berners-Lee to see it.
Maybe.
But in this case, it doesn't pass muster.
I do computer stuff for a living and if analyst came forward with a business process to handle credit card authorizations that simply authorized it with no audit trail and no means to verify anything about that authorization, you'd reject the design out of hand. You wouldn't even need to see the program specs, or source code or anything to know it's a bad design. You don't even have to ask a lot of questions. It's just a bad design.
So when Diebold has a system that raises questions *with everyone who sees it* and won't answer those questions, then it raises concerns about not only their veracity, but their motive.
And given the results of the 2000 presidential election and Diebold's refusal to address legitimate concerns leads to some very uncomfortable questions about their motives. The best case scenario is that Diebold's software engineers are incompetent. That's the best case.
SO I appreciate that there is a vocal minority who would trash anything, however, this isn't a minority of people questioning Diebold. Virtually everyone with a technical and business background is questioning these systems. And Diebold is noticably silent.
...this is the first step in regulating the internet, cell phones, games, movies etc. all in the name of "protecting children".
And let's be real here. Hillary is doing this for the same reason that her husband rebuked "Queen Latifah" [insert eye roll here]. It shows they're willing to "go against their base" to "do the right thing".
Because there is a significant minority of people in both color states that think that all this stuff is just horrible because of some random reason related to kids, gods, personal preferences. I mean, there are still a lot of people who think that if you stare at naked bodies too much it makes you into a serial murderer. They put video games into the same category.
Seriously...we laugh when we see a movie like "The Gods Must Be Crazy", but our modern society pretty much believes the same things as those aborigines. We just don't eat bugs. Well, as long as you don't count lobsters, we don't.
"Many businesses are still in a 'honeymoon' with Google and aren't yet seriously computing the performance of their clicks (how many clicks turn into sales)."
I'll try not to be Mr. Obvious here, but consider this: when companies buy time on TV, they have no idea how effective those ads are. What I mean is, they can see the ratings for the TV show and you can guess how many people saw those ads based on the ratings, but that is no guarantee anybody actually watched the commercial, and even if they did, you have no idea if people associate your product with that commercial, and even if you did, you have no idea how that translates into a sale.
But yet despite all those handicaps, companies still purchase TV, radio, and print ads.
For online advertising, google ads or anything like that... at least you can measure some sort of direct impact... the month before, I had X hits, this month I had Y clicks The month before I had $X in sales, this month I had $Y in sales. In both case, I can measure those numbers well enough to draw a conclusion pretty quickly about the effectiveness of the ad.
The comparison is not different than direct mail, email, or other ads... does my revenue increase more than the cost of the advertising. If it does, then it's good for me. If it doesn't, it's not good for me, stop advertising.
If you don't know the impact in 3 months, then shame on you for not paying attention. And that's really my point. Google has been around long enough for companies to draw a conclusion as to the effectiveness of those ads. Either they're effective, or companies are not willing to admit that Google isn't effective.
Actually, my "quota" was filled several years ago.
And to answer your next question, the sale disks go towards "free" disks.
I've only ever purchased 4 disks at full price ($16). The rest have been at $7, plus I still have 10 free ones available to me.
I'm not really cheerleading for Sony/BMG, I only brought the whole thing up to show that the myth that companies would lose money selling CD's at less than $10 is not demonstrated by the fact that Sony/BMG routinely sells CD's at around $7 shipped to customers.
go to www.bmgmusic.com
1) The sales they have are $6-7 including shipping
2) BMG has at least gotten into the 1990's. They email their monthly choice and I decline on their web site. Still not free, but cheaper than sending letters back and forth
3) Their choice is better than a department/5-10, but not as good as a real record store.
4) I understand the business model, but if they can sell CD's out the door for $6-7 (right now the sale is $6 shipped), that suggests they could easily sell CD's retail for $10. I think if these guys dropped prices to under $10 retail, we wouldn't be having many discussions on piracy. But at $18? Yikes. That's an investment. The band better be really really really good to get $20 ($18 plus tax).
Well, I think we're violently agreeing.
Although it occurs to me if these companies are all essentially patenting business processes in software that cover "wide" areas, then the damage will be limited to 17 years or so.
Still a long time, but like the CR/LF and XOR patents that IBM has, they've got to be expired by now.
Read what I said again. All CD's are $6 right now shipped to your door.
All. Shipped. $6.
"So even for the "cheap" model of production, you're looking at $10 CDs."
Impossible.
Sony BMG has once-a-month sales where they ship CD's to your house at $6-7 per disk. Presumably when I buy a $6 CD, Sony is not losing money, so it suggests the cost is significantly lower than you calculate.
"Perhaps because, in the olden days, you didn't have huge software corporations (Adobe, MS, Apple, Google, etc) that were able to take a look at your implementation and implement it themselves?"
Apple was pretty big through the 80's. IBM was really big for a long time. Lotus was big. Ashton-Tate was huge. Novell. Oracle. And before that, there were tons of mainframe companies (they generally included source with the product too).
No, the software industry was big and healthy and patentless before the mid-nineties.
We'd have to read the patent, but it may be that the method of encoding is patented, but not particular software to do it.
e r_United_States_patent_law
There's a decent history of software patents in the U.S. here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_und
Here's an interesting paragraph:
"The Clinton administration appointed Bruce Lehman as Commissioner of the Patent and Trademark Office in 1994. Unlike his predecessors, Lehman was not a patent lawyer but the chief lobbyist for the Software Publishing Industry. In 1995, the PTO established some broad guidelines for examining and issuing software patents. The PTO interpreted the courts as requiring the PTO to grant software patents in a broad variety of circumstances. Note, that although the U.S. Congress has never legislated specifically that software is patentable, the broad description of patentable subject in the Patent Act of 1952 and the failure of Congress to change the law after the court decisions allowing software patents, has been interpreted as an indication of Congressional intent."
"but MY satellite radio [sirius.com] is assuredly almost CD-quality sound."
It most assuredly is not. It's not even close. The only station with half-way decent quality is the Classical Music station (Symphony). The sound on Sirius ranges from okay to just awful. XM strikes me as a bit better, but certainly nothing to boast about.
I love my Sirius, but that's because of content, not fidelity.
" along with Diane Peters from OSDL, Bruce Perens, lawyers from IBM and others got together at the USPTO last month to talk about ways to improve patent quality. No solutions yet, but some good discussion."
Why don't you get together to discuss the fact that most of the significant discoveries in computers, information and software fields came about before software patents.
And if you want to quibble with me, fine, but answer this: If software patents were important to drive innovation in the high-tech industry, then how did some many great pieces of software get written in the days before software patents?
Let's not pretend that software patents are an old, time-tested way of protecting software. They're not, they're less than 10 years old. So rather than accept a relatively recent ruling by a court (Not even a law from congress), why don't we do the right thing and stop software patents. The fact that the courts lowered the bar so that nonobviousness was no longer the primary determinant of whether a patent should be granted should be reason enough to get rid of them.
Name something... anything out there in the market that was only possible because of software patents. The idea of these patents isn't to make NTP rich simply because of knowing how to game the system, but to advance the state of the art. These patents aren't doing that; if anything, they're doing the opposite.
I'm opposed to coming together and working out an arrangement because it presupposes these patents are acceptable. They are not. Software patents are so tremendously wrong that I think they're something that have to be opposed on general principal.
"Sheesh, I seriously hope you develop some technology that you can't afford to develop. Then before you get funding,some company infringse upon it and make billions."
The trouble is, for every time you protect the little guy, there are many more examples of patent portfolio companies basically being a leech on progress and legitimate companies. Is it worth the cost for that one in a million example of protecting the lone inventor?
To me, your argument is the equivalent of saying "The lottery is a great thing because once a week somebody becomes rich".
The G3 laptops had fans in them. The G5 iMac has several (5?). Most laptops have at least one fan to cool the processor.
I think when Comcast rolled this stuff out, the infrastructure was new and worked well. But unlike verizon, they don't really employee people to properly maintain this equipment and things are starting to fall apart. Maintenance is expensive.
The reason I say this is a few months ago, my TV picture on comcast got really fuzzy and poor. I called them, and the first thing they did was put a signal booster on the line coming in. That more or less fixed it. And in his truck the guy had dozens of these.
So they're essentailly putting a bandaid "booster" in customer premises to make up for problems in the infrastructure. That to me is a symptom of improper maintenance.
Almost a year ago when I got Vonage, it would never work consistently well with Comcast. When I switched to FIOS over the summer, magically it started working again.
However, my observation is that FIOS offered significantly higher bandwidth back (it's 5/2 as compared with 4/512k) which seems important for VoIP. Plus, I found Verizon's bandwidth to be more consistent. FIOS offers 5/2 and it *always* works that way. Comcast seemed more inconsistent.
In any event, Vonage never worked consistently well under Comcast and it works consistently well under Verizon FIOS. So it's not recent.
"Um, how is this person supposed to be notified of the emergency if his cell phone or pager cannot get a signal?"
We've had movie theaters a lot longer than we've had cell phones & pagers and the solution is the person on call must be in an area that he can receive the page/call.
That may mean in practice that you can't go to the theater when you're on call. But when you're in an airplane, you generally can't receive calls either. And if you go to the middle of a lot of places in the middle of nowhere you can't get a signal. The person on call must stay in an area that receives service.
That may mean in practice that if you are on call, you can't go to the movies, but so what?
Yahoo's service is like $60 for 12 months of this. You can't transfer to players (that's another $60), but I don't really care. I use it as a service to preview what I want to buy.
Plus now I can stream to my Roku from Yahoo, so I'm not investing big in it.
With apologies to Oscar Wilde, "The only thing worse than being indexed by Google is NOT being indexed by google".
What google ought to do is *not* index these authors; these guys really are so goofy they don't understand what a boon this will be to them for people to get to their book, read a few sentences and then jump over to an online bookstore and buy it. Instead, they'll have to be content with a few sales here and there. Then they can go to their guild meetings and bitch about how the country is becoming illiterate.
Its like they're so greedy for a nickel here that they can't see the 10 dollars that is coming tomorrow if they're just patient.