I think you underestimate the ability of the Chinese to develope technology themselves and you overestimate the capacity of the US to control knowledge. It may be expedient and cheaper for China to obtain space technology through espionage, but they certainly have the resources to generate that information themselves.
I think you also overestimate the ability of the US to go it alone. In many fields, the majority of scientists and engineers in the US are foreign born. They come here because the US government lets them, because some places in the US are nice to live, because a lot of their colleagues came here before, because the standard of living is pretty good for them, and because the US government still has some of the most generous government funding for research and development in the world.
Furthermore, the US space program is based on a vigorous exchange of ideas with other countries, often even joint projects. The little bit of information the Chinese may have wrested from some US contractors probably pales in comparison. The only difference is that the US has branded that exchange of ideas "espionage" in the case of China, while it is completely acceptable when it happens, say, between a French contractor and a US space company.
Restrictions on what information can be shared with China may well make sense from a military point of view. But underestimating the Chinese or overestimating the US are both dangerous mistakes and will likely lead to poor policy decisions in the US in the future.
Who says we want anything "for free" from Sun? All I want is for them to stop publishing under SCSL. If they want to keep their source locked up without publishing it, I think that's perfectly fine.
But, to me, publishing under SCSL looks like a pretty direct and deliberate attack by Sun on true open source Java and UNIX kernel efforts, because it takes away the motivation of many people to develop open source versions of their software without promoting anything other than Sun's business. Sun is still within their rights to do that, of course, but I think the open source community is justified in criticizing them for it.
(Incidentally, look for "contamination clauses" in their source code licenses; in the past, if you looked at their sources, you were prohibited from contributing to a clone.)
BSD can already handle it, check out the Juniper Networks M40. Its FreeBSD based, and can already handle a terabit, pretty snazzy stuff.
That's a pretty misleading statement. The M40 uses ASICs to route packets directly, so the OS kernel isn't involved most of the time. Also, the M40 doesnt's seem to run a standard BSD kernel.
More generally, let's please get over this notion that every OS needs to be best at everything. Making one OS do everything is Bill Gates's obsession and is, in a large part, responsible for the bloat and complexity of that operating system. If Win2k wants to become a backbone router with a Win32 GUI, an incompatible CORBA clone at its heart, and a built-in relational database, good for it, and good luck to the programmers at Microsoft.
I'm pretty happy with Linux network performance the way it is. I'm sure Linux will keep pace with the performance of standard networking hardware and software.
I had the same experience as another poster: UPS claimed they had a signature as proof of delivery for a package that clearly hadn't been delivered. Apparently, "getting confused" about digitized signatures is commonplace at UPS.
Signing on paper is not an option. Their mandatory system of digitized signatures raises a lot of privacy and evidentiary red flags.
Also, UPS has done some pretty bad things to computer equipment I have had shipped through them over the years.
So, I just say "no" to UPS and ask vendors for an alternative. USPS is usually a better deal, and FedEx is more reliable in my experience.
The interest of retailers may be to see boxed versions, but I would think that the interest of the software company's executives would be to make as much money for their company as possible.
Since many people running Linux are well connected, why not make the software availabe for on-line purchase?
Of course, boxed versions and retail space have some positive effect on public perception and are desirable from that point of view for making people aware that Linux is good at gaming. But that seems to me like a separate issue from whether the gaming company itself makes money off the product.
I am using a BlackBox at home and a big BlackBox switch at work for a bunch of web servers. They both work fine, and the video quality is excellent at 1280x1024 (I haven't tested higher resolution). The smaller of the two (a BlackBox ServSwitch Jr.) has a fixed key sequence for switching which you may rarely hit accidentally, but I didn't find this to be a problem in practice. A nice touch is that the switch draws its power from the computers connected to it.
I suspect that other switches in the same price category will work similarly well.
Make sure you get descent video cables. Cables that bundle video, keyboard, and mouse together are a big convenience.
I had a Belkin before and both its keyboard emulation and its video quality left a lot to be desired; I returned it to the dealer after a week.
For evaluation of the video, I recommend running in the highest bandwidth video mode your video card will support (say, 1600x1200 at a fast refresh rate). For evaluation of the keyboard switch, try power cycling machines in various combinations. Also, if it matters to you, try playing some FPS games and see whether the key sequences of the switch are a problem and whether it locks up under that kind of usage.
There is nothing environmentally clean about fusion. While the reaction itself does not produce anything radioactive, the container and reactor itself become so contaminated that the whole process is probably as messy as fission.
To me, this looks like a last gasp effort by the old defense establishment to avoid obsolescence and irrelevance, and perhaps to squeeze out a bit more dual use research. I hope we won't waste more time or money on that kind of research.
We have an excellent fusion generator in the sky. It uses gravitational confinement and works at a safe distance. Research into how to take better advantage of it is likely to be more successful. We can make incremental progress without hoping for big breakthroughs. And with the expenditures and subsidies invested in the nuclear industry, we could easily establish a thriving solar and hydrogen-based energy infrastructure.
Mozilla is striving hard to catch up with complex and messy standards like style sheets, style sheet languages, JavaScript etc.
The complexity of those standards makes it clearly hard for anyone other than a large software development organization to implement them, something that is surely desirable from Microsoft's point of view. Many of those standards are of little or no benefit to end users, but simply allow marketers to push content at consumers that is ever more flashy. There is little widespread practical experience with components like style sheets, and the experience we have with components like JavaScript tell us that it's pretty much the worst scripting language in existence.
Furthermore, the complexity of those new standards also makes it hard for authors to produce web pages, at least unless they buy an bunch of expensive tools from Microsoft or other vendors. To me, that takes away from the original mission of the Web.
So, I'm wondering who is actually setting the agenda and why Mozilla is struggling so hard trying to keep up with an agenda that other people are setting. Is IE5/NS5 really where we want to go? Whatever happened to making it easy to share information and giving everybody access?
I'd be concerned that the medical records are on-line and accessible in the first place. Who knows who your company may decide it is OK to give access to? And how am I ever going to find out?
As for security, if you must do this, you could use cross-out password lists, challenge-response with a piece of hardware, or a smartcard. My Swiss bank uses cross-out password lists. It's mostly US banks that seem to believe that security doesn't matter much.
Most of the peripherals we now take for granted (sound, 3D graphics, SCSI, etc.) started out as expansion boards. Closing the mainstream PC architecture will destroy the market for such expansion boards, even if a few high end machines keep a bus. On the other hand, PCI isn't really all that fast anymroe anyway, so something had to change.
I think a priori, this is not a good change as far as hardware is concerned. But something good may yet come from it: the bottleneck that going to USB and FireWire for expansion causes may finally propel the PC industry towards a more distributed and parallel architecture. In a USB/FireWire-only world, a novel piece of 3D graphics simply has to include its own general purpose processor that handles communications back to the PC.
Whatever its effect on hardware, this should be great news for Linux and other non-Microsoft operating systems. It looks to me that drivers for USB and FireWire-based devices ought to port much more easily between different operating systems. Many of them can actually even run in user mode. Configuration and resource allocation should also get simpler.
A good patent attorney can do lots and lots of useful things with your patent (in particular, when a patent is borderline and needs some good legal support), but a good patent attorney is also going to be very expensive. I suspect that unless you have a killer application on your hand, it's probably not worth it, but that's a decision you have to make for yourself.
Whether you go with an attorney or do it yourself, I found the book "Patent It Yourself" by Pressman (Nolo Press) very useful.
Also consider simply making a disclosure to the patent office (you may also want to publish it in other venues, although that isn't necessary). That defends you against future infringement claims if someone else applies for a patent on the same invention after your disclosure, and it's very cheap.
Any prior art that is listed is automatically presumed to have been considered by the patent office, and it is much more difficult to challenge a patent on the basis of prior art that is actually cited in the patent.
So on the whole, it's probably best for patent applicants to put in references to any related work they know about: the PTO will probably not check anyway or engage in detailed analyses, but it will make it that much more difficult to challenge the patent on the basis of prior art.
Far from solving the energy crisis, if the earth contains vast amounts of hydrocarbons, that would be scary indeed. There is only a very limited amount of hydrocarbons that can be burned or released into the air without causing a runaway greenhouse effect that would kill most surface life very quickly.
In fact, it sounds like he is claiming that there are more than enough hydrocarbons to use up all the oxygen on the surface when burned. If a volcanic eruption (or humans) caused that to be released, the end result would be something like Venus: an atmosphere very high in carbon dioxide and with extremely high temperatures. Who knows, maybe that's just what happened to Venus.
Investment professionals understand what "fully diluted" means, but as long as the stock keeps going up in the short term, why should they care? They figure that things will keep going OK, and if the market gets jittery, they can get out fairly quickly (even if that's delusional).
While it has been proposed to change accounting procedures so that these real expenses are accounted for, what may be needed instead is to force investors to make investments for the long term (high taxation of short-term investments would be one approach). I think investment professionals would be a bit more cautious about Microsoft if they had to make a firm commitment even just for a year or two.
Of course, it's not going to happen. To me, it looks like Microsoft (and many other companies) are continuing to do the equivalent of printing money and creating inflation that is accounted for nowhere. I don't see much real value that corresponds to the paper value that is represented by their stock. At some point, there is a good chance that it will all collapse, and I suppose then we will get reforms.
I am near sighted enough that I can't really function without some kind of vision correction. Yet I ski, dive, hike, run, and participate in other sports. I'm hard pressed to think of any sport where wearing glasses is a problem. In fact, most sports really require wearing goggles anyway, and having prescription goggles makes sure you don't forget to put them on. And even for nerdier activities, like labwork, while no substitute for safety goggles, my glasses have protected my eyes more than once.
If you don't like the cosmetics of glasses (but if you don't, why are you reading "News for Nerds"?), get disposable one-day contact lenses. They are very comfortable, trivial to deal with, and seem to be quite safe.
In the real world, identical trademarks coexist because they are distinguished by geographic region or field of use.
It seems to me that if there is a dispute over some trademark and both parties have a claim to the trademark in some domain, they should both be required to disambiguate and neither should retain the plain name.
So, instead of a dispute over "apple.com", both the record company and the computer company might have to pick more specific domains: "apple-computer.com" and "apple-records.com", with "apple.com" unassigned or possibly a directory of companies with "apple" in their name.
Sometimes, the distinguishing identifier would not (just) be the product but the geographic area. In tat case, the ".us" could be used, or it could get added to the domain name: "acme-paints-nyc.com", or "acme-paints.nyc.ny.us".
The key point is that neither party in a dispute should own the ambiguous domain name and both should be required to disambiguate. Note also that this does not require any technical or administrative infrastructure; the disambiguated domain names don't need to be in a hierarchy or follow any particular naming convention, they simply must distinguish the disputed trademarks clearly.
If you make all cookies per-session, you get almost all the benefits of cookies without the long-term tracking.
How do you do that? I run a Perl script nightly on Windows and UNIX that removes all cookies that I don't want. An even simpler approach is to make your cookies file read-only (edit it beforehand and leave in it only the cookies you like) or replace it with an empty directory (no persistent cookies at all).
Why should you be concerned about long-term tracking? I think it will only be a matter of time until life insurance, credit card companies, employers, and health insurance companies use your purchasing and browsing data to assign you to risk groups. And all of that will happen with automated data mining techniques, so there will be little cause to claim discrimination if the neural network classifier doesn't like you. It's not that I'm a particularly high risk to insurers, I just don't want to feel that my health insurance company is looking over my shoulder every time I order a pizza with extra cheese.
With per-session cookies, advertisers get some data, but they can't correlate it easily with personal information. That seems like a good compromise to me.
I doubt Linux would have made it if it hadn't been open source. Yes, Linux was free and the "bazaar model" of development has its advantages. But even more important to me and many other users is issues of direction, long-term support, and training.
If a closed source company makes the wrong technology bets, the users are stuck with it. For example, Microsoft may bet the house on MFC and COM, and their users have no choice. Their developers have to re-train, re-tool, and rewrite their code. In an open source world, if some development path doesn't meet the needs of the users, it will simply be abandoned. The needs of most users are met because a certain fraction of any large user community will have developers in it that are sufficiently motivated to pick up the torch.
And if a closed source company makes a real blunder, they go out of business and their product generally becomes poorly supported or disappears entirely. Then, I'm stuck with a lot of software written to proprietary APIs and with a lot of learning and training time invested in a system that doesn't exist anymore. That's a big risk for long term software projects.
The difference between closed source systems and open source systems is quite analogous to the difference between central economic planning and a free market. It's ironic that Microsoft, the company that is often held up as the icon of free market success, is actually a huge, centrally planned enterprise, with all the inefficiencies and risks that that implies, both for the company and the customers that depend on it.
So, no, if Linux weren't open source, I wouldn't be using it, and I believe neither would many other people. And (Sun take notice) I think whether something is open source or not should be determined by whether any user can take the source and make a new branch off the existing development, since that, to me, is the essence of open source.
If you don't like Amazon's behavior, let them know don't buy from them. I canceled my account and am going to shop for books elsewhere.
I view Amazon's behavior as being rather similar to a neighborhood polluter: their emissions may be under the legal limit, but they are still a nuisance; would you buy from them and support them? (Actually, from an economic point of view, bad patents and the lawsuits they engender are quite similar to pollution as well.)
you're right: lack of technology isn't the problem
on
Rise of the Nanobots
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Or what about "synthesizing food to stop world hunger"? The major cause of famines is not lack of FOOD, but lack of MONEY.
I think it's overpopulation and poor distribution. But generally, I agree: famines and other ills are social and political problems; we already have the technology to make our world a "garden of Eden".
The software industry was able to do without because opportunities were so huge and nothing was established at the start. Other industries live and die on patents. Biotech startups don't get funding without a patent review. Large consortia like Unipol are formed for the sole purpose of exploiting patent positions. Huge companies like UOP exist based on one thing - selling patented technology that they develop.
So? The fact that patents support large consortia and oligopolies is not intrinsically an argument in their favor.
In fact, many people would argue that patents lead to a concentration of power in large companies and consortia, and that that is, in fact, an overall undesirable outcome; to many it appears that a vibrant, innovative free market economy depends on the existence a large number of nimble, small players, not a few lumbering giants locked up in huge consortia.
It's pretty obvious that in the presence of patents, rational economic agents will take advantage of them (and, hence, investors will require them). That says nothing about the economic or social desirability of patent protection.
Life forms in the form of plant patents have been around far longer than genetic engineeering. I don't know when the first plant patent was issued, but I bet it was in the 19th century to somebody like George Washington Carver.
The US Plant Patent Act was established in 1930 and had very limited scope (only asexual reproduction, among others); if you know of references to any earlier plant patent protection in the US, please let us know.
It only appears that way to people who haven't studied the history of technology.
If you are implying that you have, why don't you start to apply some of that knowledge and experience to this discussion?
The way patents are used in the late 90's is nothing like the way patents have been used over the previous 200 years. We are now facing patents on life forms, patents on business models, and patents on algorithms. Quite apart from the question whether such patents are within the scope of the current patent system or represent its intent, the economic effects of such patents are completely different from hardware patents, due to the different cost structures of those businesses.
Patent law is also being used very differently. Patent law is being used to tie up small startups in knots and patent licensing fees are calculated to be just below the cost where it would be profitable for a competitor to actually defend themselves in court. And the amount of work and the cost related to writing and applying for patents has increased enormously.
And I think you overestimate the importance of patents in the technology business in the US. All of the current big software companies grew up in an environment where software patents didn't exist for practical purposes. And even for hardware, most innovations weren't patented, and those that were often weren't enforced or enforcable (with a significant number of highly publicized exceptions, of course).
Maybe the way patents are used in the 90's is defensible from an economic and policy point of view (although I have grave doubts). But one thing is clear: even if the letter of the law hasn't changed much, from a practical point of view, this is nothing like the patent system we have had for the past 200 years. It isn't even anything like the patent system that we have had until the 90's. So, past successes and failures are not a guide to whether this system will work.
In an economic sense, bad patents are similar to pollution: they allow companies to impose costs on society ("externalities") for their own profit. The costs invalid patents impose are unnecessary litigation, unnecessary design work-arounds, and substandard competing products.
The pollution analogy suggests that one effective way of curbing patents may be to let vendors know that you are on to them and prefer to buy from the least serious offender.
For example, I consider Amazon's patent on one-click ordering a blatant attempt to increase the cost of doing business for other web merchants through a frivolous patent. I canceled my account, let them know about it, and will order elsewhere now.
You probably prefer buying from companies that try to keep your environment clean. Try to apply the same standard to your intellectual environment and avoid companies that pollute the patent space as much as possible.
What Amazon is, in effect, telling you in their press release is that they intend to make shopping on other sites either more cumbersome (no one-click ordering) or more expensive (license fees) for you.
I wouldn't buy from a company that pollutes my street, so why would I buy from a company that pollutes my intellectual environment with what I consider unreasonable, bad patents? I'll start buying my books elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you also overestimate the ability of the US to go it alone. In many fields, the majority of scientists and engineers in the US are foreign born. They come here because the US government lets them, because some places in the US are nice to live, because a lot of their colleagues came here before, because the standard of living is pretty good for them, and because the US government still has some of the most generous government funding for research and development in the world.
Furthermore, the US space program is based on a vigorous exchange of ideas with other countries, often even joint projects. The little bit of information the Chinese may have wrested from some US contractors probably pales in comparison. The only difference is that the US has branded that exchange of ideas "espionage" in the case of China, while it is completely acceptable when it happens, say, between a French contractor and a US space company.
Restrictions on what information can be shared with China may well make sense from a military point of view. But underestimating the Chinese or overestimating the US are both dangerous mistakes and will likely lead to poor policy decisions in the US in the future.
But, to me, publishing under SCSL looks like a pretty direct and deliberate attack by Sun on true open source Java and UNIX kernel efforts, because it takes away the motivation of many people to develop open source versions of their software without promoting anything other than Sun's business. Sun is still within their rights to do that, of course, but I think the open source community is justified in criticizing them for it.
(Incidentally, look for "contamination clauses" in their source code licenses; in the past, if you looked at their sources, you were prohibited from contributing to a clone.)
That's a pretty misleading statement. The M40 uses ASICs to route packets directly, so the OS kernel isn't involved most of the time. Also, the M40 doesnt's seem to run a standard BSD kernel.
More generally, let's please get over this notion that every OS needs to be best at everything. Making one OS do everything is Bill Gates's obsession and is, in a large part, responsible for the bloat and complexity of that operating system. If Win2k wants to become a backbone router with a Win32 GUI, an incompatible CORBA clone at its heart, and a built-in relational database, good for it, and good luck to the programmers at Microsoft.
I'm pretty happy with Linux network performance the way it is. I'm sure Linux will keep pace with the performance of standard networking hardware and software.
Signing on paper is not an option. Their mandatory system of digitized signatures raises a lot of privacy and evidentiary red flags.
Also, UPS has done some pretty bad things to computer equipment I have had shipped through them over the years.
So, I just say "no" to UPS and ask vendors for an alternative. USPS is usually a better deal, and FedEx is more reliable in my experience.
Since many people running Linux are well connected, why not make the software availabe for on-line purchase?
Of course, boxed versions and retail space have some positive effect on public perception and are desirable from that point of view for making people aware that Linux is good at gaming. But that seems to me like a separate issue from whether the gaming company itself makes money off the product.
I suspect that other switches in the same price category will work similarly well.
Make sure you get descent video cables. Cables that bundle video, keyboard, and mouse together are a big convenience.
I had a Belkin before and both its keyboard emulation and its video quality left a lot to be desired; I returned it to the dealer after a week.
For evaluation of the video, I recommend running in the highest bandwidth video mode your video card will support (say, 1600x1200 at a fast refresh rate). For evaluation of the keyboard switch, try power cycling machines in various combinations. Also, if it matters to you, try playing some FPS games and see whether the key sequences of the switch are a problem and whether it locks up under that kind of usage.
To me, this looks like a last gasp effort by the old defense establishment to avoid obsolescence and irrelevance, and perhaps to squeeze out a bit more dual use research. I hope we won't waste more time or money on that kind of research.
We have an excellent fusion generator in the sky. It uses gravitational confinement and works at a safe distance. Research into how to take better advantage of it is likely to be more successful. We can make incremental progress without hoping for big breakthroughs. And with the expenditures and subsidies invested in the nuclear industry, we could easily establish a thriving solar and hydrogen-based energy infrastructure.
The complexity of those standards makes it clearly hard for anyone other than a large software development organization to implement them, something that is surely desirable from Microsoft's point of view. Many of those standards are of little or no benefit to end users, but simply allow marketers to push content at consumers that is ever more flashy. There is little widespread practical experience with components like style sheets, and the experience we have with components like JavaScript tell us that it's pretty much the worst scripting language in existence.
Furthermore, the complexity of those new standards also makes it hard for authors to produce web pages, at least unless they buy an bunch of expensive tools from Microsoft or other vendors. To me, that takes away from the original mission of the Web.
So, I'm wondering who is actually setting the agenda and why Mozilla is struggling so hard trying to keep up with an agenda that other people are setting. Is IE5/NS5 really where we want to go? Whatever happened to making it easy to share information and giving everybody access?
As for security, if you must do this, you could use cross-out password lists, challenge-response with a piece of hardware, or a smartcard. My Swiss bank uses cross-out password lists. It's mostly US banks that seem to believe that security doesn't matter much.
I think a priori, this is not a good change as far as hardware is concerned. But something good may yet come from it: the bottleneck that going to USB and FireWire for expansion causes may finally propel the PC industry towards a more distributed and parallel architecture. In a USB/FireWire-only world, a novel piece of 3D graphics simply has to include its own general purpose processor that handles communications back to the PC.
Whatever its effect on hardware, this should be great news for Linux and other non-Microsoft operating systems. It looks to me that drivers for USB and FireWire-based devices ought to port much more easily between different operating systems. Many of them can actually even run in user mode. Configuration and resource allocation should also get simpler.
Whether you go with an attorney or do it yourself, I found the book "Patent It Yourself" by Pressman (Nolo Press) very useful.
Also consider simply making a disclosure to the patent office (you may also want to publish it in other venues, although that isn't necessary). That defends you against future infringement claims if someone else applies for a patent on the same invention after your disclosure, and it's very cheap.
So on the whole, it's probably best for patent applicants to put in references to any related work they know about: the PTO will probably not check anyway or engage in detailed analyses, but it will make it that much more difficult to challenge the patent on the basis of prior art.
In fact, it sounds like he is claiming that there are more than enough hydrocarbons to use up all the oxygen on the surface when burned. If a volcanic eruption (or humans) caused that to be released, the end result would be something like Venus: an atmosphere very high in carbon dioxide and with extremely high temperatures. Who knows, maybe that's just what happened to Venus.
While it has been proposed to change accounting procedures so that these real expenses are accounted for, what may be needed instead is to force investors to make investments for the long term (high taxation of short-term investments would be one approach). I think investment professionals would be a bit more cautious about Microsoft if they had to make a firm commitment even just for a year or two.
Of course, it's not going to happen. To me, it looks like Microsoft (and many other companies) are continuing to do the equivalent of printing money and creating inflation that is accounted for nowhere. I don't see much real value that corresponds to the paper value that is represented by their stock. At some point, there is a good chance that it will all collapse, and I suppose then we will get reforms.
If you don't like the cosmetics of glasses (but if you don't, why are you reading "News for Nerds"?), get disposable one-day contact lenses. They are very comfortable, trivial to deal with, and seem to be quite safe.
It seems to me that if there is a dispute over some trademark and both parties have a claim to the trademark in some domain, they should both be required to disambiguate and neither should retain the plain name.
So, instead of a dispute over "apple.com", both the record company and the computer company might have to pick more specific domains: "apple-computer.com" and "apple-records.com", with "apple.com" unassigned or possibly a directory of companies with "apple" in their name.
Sometimes, the distinguishing identifier would not (just) be the product but the geographic area. In tat case, the ".us" could be used, or it could get added to the domain name: "acme-paints-nyc.com", or "acme-paints.nyc.ny.us".
The key point is that neither party in a dispute should own the ambiguous domain name and both should be required to disambiguate. Note also that this does not require any technical or administrative infrastructure; the disambiguated domain names don't need to be in a hierarchy or follow any particular naming convention, they simply must distinguish the disputed trademarks clearly.
How do you do that? I run a Perl script nightly on Windows and UNIX that removes all cookies that I don't want. An even simpler approach is to make your cookies file read-only (edit it beforehand and leave in it only the cookies you like) or replace it with an empty directory (no persistent cookies at all).
Why should you be concerned about long-term tracking? I think it will only be a matter of time until life insurance, credit card companies, employers, and health insurance companies use your purchasing and browsing data to assign you to risk groups. And all of that will happen with automated data mining techniques, so there will be little cause to claim discrimination if the neural network classifier doesn't like you. It's not that I'm a particularly high risk to insurers, I just don't want to feel that my health insurance company is looking over my shoulder every time I order a pizza with extra cheese.
With per-session cookies, advertisers get some data, but they can't correlate it easily with personal information. That seems like a good compromise to me.
If a closed source company makes the wrong technology bets, the users are stuck with it. For example, Microsoft may bet the house on MFC and COM, and their users have no choice. Their developers have to re-train, re-tool, and rewrite their code. In an open source world, if some development path doesn't meet the needs of the users, it will simply be abandoned. The needs of most users are met because a certain fraction of any large user community will have developers in it that are sufficiently motivated to pick up the torch.
And if a closed source company makes a real blunder, they go out of business and their product generally becomes poorly supported or disappears entirely. Then, I'm stuck with a lot of software written to proprietary APIs and with a lot of learning and training time invested in a system that doesn't exist anymore. That's a big risk for long term software projects.
The difference between closed source systems and open source systems is quite analogous to the difference between central economic planning and a free market. It's ironic that Microsoft, the company that is often held up as the icon of free market success, is actually a huge, centrally planned enterprise, with all the inefficiencies and risks that that implies, both for the company and the customers that depend on it.
So, no, if Linux weren't open source, I wouldn't be using it, and I believe neither would many other people. And (Sun take notice) I think whether something is open source or not should be determined by whether any user can take the source and make a new branch off the existing development, since that, to me, is the essence of open source.
I view Amazon's behavior as being rather similar to a neighborhood polluter: their emissions may be under the legal limit, but they are still a nuisance; would you buy from them and support them? (Actually, from an economic point of view, bad patents and the lawsuits they engender are quite similar to pollution as well.)
I think it's overpopulation and poor distribution. But generally, I agree: famines and other ills are social and political problems; we already have the technology to make our world a "garden of Eden".
So? The fact that patents support large consortia and oligopolies is not intrinsically an argument in their favor.
In fact, many people would argue that patents lead to a concentration of power in large companies and consortia, and that that is, in fact, an overall undesirable outcome; to many it appears that a vibrant, innovative free market economy depends on the existence a large number of nimble, small players, not a few lumbering giants locked up in huge consortia.
It's pretty obvious that in the presence of patents, rational economic agents will take advantage of them (and, hence, investors will require them). That says nothing about the economic or social desirability of patent protection.
Life forms in the form of plant patents have been around far longer than genetic engineeering. I don't know when the first plant patent was issued, but I bet it was in the 19th century to somebody like George Washington Carver.
The US Plant Patent Act was established in 1930 and had very limited scope (only asexual reproduction, among others); if you know of references to any earlier plant patent protection in the US, please let us know.
It only appears that way to people who haven't studied the history of technology.
If you are implying that you have, why don't you start to apply some of that knowledge and experience to this discussion?
For defensive uses, it's much cheaper, faster, and pretty much as effective to use disclosure.
Patent law is also being used very differently. Patent law is being used to tie up small startups in knots and patent licensing fees are calculated to be just below the cost where it would be profitable for a competitor to actually defend themselves in court. And the amount of work and the cost related to writing and applying for patents has increased enormously.
And I think you overestimate the importance of patents in the technology business in the US. All of the current big software companies grew up in an environment where software patents didn't exist for practical purposes. And even for hardware, most innovations weren't patented, and those that were often weren't enforced or enforcable (with a significant number of highly publicized exceptions, of course).
Maybe the way patents are used in the 90's is defensible from an economic and policy point of view (although I have grave doubts). But one thing is clear: even if the letter of the law hasn't changed much, from a practical point of view, this is nothing like the patent system we have had for the past 200 years. It isn't even anything like the patent system that we have had until the 90's. So, past successes and failures are not a guide to whether this system will work.
The pollution analogy suggests that one effective way of curbing patents may be to let vendors know that you are on to them and prefer to buy from the least serious offender.
For example, I consider Amazon's patent on one-click ordering a blatant attempt to increase the cost of doing business for other web merchants through a frivolous patent. I canceled my account, let them know about it, and will order elsewhere now.
You probably prefer buying from companies that try to keep your environment clean. Try to apply the same standard to your intellectual environment and avoid companies that pollute the patent space as much as possible.
I wouldn't buy from a company that pollutes my street, so why would I buy from a company that pollutes my intellectual environment with what I consider unreasonable, bad patents? I'll start buying my books elsewhere.