Because INS processing takes so long, people can't realistically take jobs in the US on immigrant visas.
Therefore, they come on H1B visas and apply for their green cards while here.
Everybody understood that, and it used to work fine.
In fact, few people would bother coming to the US on an H1B at all if it were strictly a temporary visa rather than as a normal stage in getting a green card.
Unfortunately, over the last two years, INS processing has slowed down more than tenfold (!). As a result, people who had an expectation of being able to get their green card in time now face deportation because the INS didn't finish processing their green card application before their H1B ran out.
So, the problem isn't that people knew that their visa was temporary, but that the INS fails to process green card applications in a timely manner.
This caught everybody by surprise: visa holders, consulates, and immigration attorneys.
But I agree to this degree: while in the past, H1B visa holders could expect a fairly painless transition to a green card, that is clearly not the case anymore.
People who are considering coming to the US now should expect that the situation with the INS will further deteriorate.
I think that makes the US considerably less attractive to skilled immigrants.
Long ago, the intent was that high tech workers with special skills would directly apply for green cards. Those would be processed quickly, and the qualified workers could start their jobs in the US after a fairly short time.
But applying for a green card from outside the US was risky, because if it got denied, people would face all sorts of problems traveling to the US on business or for pleasure later. Furthermore, green card processing became slower and more cumbersome so that it became less feasible to apply for a greencard when starting a job.
Most employers and employees therefore had to start taking a different approach: they would apply for H1B visas first and then apply for a green card while the employee was working on the H1B.
That approach worked fine for a while. However, over the last few years, INS processing has become so inefficient that it can take three or four years to process a green card. If the H1B visa expires before the green card application has been mostly processed, the employees face deportation. Because the INS processing times skyrocketed so suddenly, many employees were caught by surprise: they thought that two years would be ample time to get their green card application through and were planning for that, and then were left without enough time to complete their application.
Because of the baroque nature of US immigration law, there are no exemptions. Once the H1B has run out, people have to leave the country. There is no other status to convert to.
US immigration law is also rife with other outdated rules and bizarre notions. For example, it talks a lot about "intent": you can't travel on a visitor's visa if you have some "intent" to immigrate. Family reunification (even of more distant relatives) is preferred over any kind of skilled immigration. And dual citizenship is recognized by the US only if a US citizen acquires another citizenship, but the US still expects immigrants to renounce any former citizenship (although in practice, that isn't enforced much anymore). The immigration procedures themselves are a bizarre mix of rules and questions pertaining to 19th century immigration by boat, puritan notions of "good moral character", McCarthy-era concerns about communism, and modern day concerns about terrorism.
Perhaps the most important problem is that even if the delays are the INS's fault (as they usually are), the applicants are not protected from deportation. If the INS sits on someone's application for two years and their current visa expires, that person is subject to deportation.
Altogether, I don't consider the US very welcoming to skilled immigrants anymore.
In addition to visa issues and processing delays, there are numerous other problems immigrants face in the US.
For example, immigrants must pay full taxes but cannot take advantage of the social safety net (such as it is) and entitlements they have paid for.
Legal protections for immigrants are also limited in some important ways.
And even after becoming citizens, naturalized citizens are always potentially subject to denaturalization, in which the INS can challenge and reverse the naturalization process until the day an immigrant dies. The statute of limitations for denaturalization was abolished about 10 years ago, another instance of what looks like a fairly hostile attitude towards immigrants.
In a social and business sense, Americans are very welcoming to immigrants and foreigners, and that makes this country a special place to live and work.
And the US will probably always remain attractive to immigrants from economically disadvantaged countries.
But the US government and the US Congress have become so hostile to immigrants and foreigners that I think anybody coming from another first world country should very carefully weigh the tradeoffs involved.
If the US wants to continue to be attractive skilled workers from Europe, Japan, and Australia, US immigration law will need a major overhaul.
That's not quite what I meant by "function". The dependency is still on something called "smtp-daemon". If something with that name is there but it doesn't function in the way that the package expects, it's completely undefined what happens. Maybe the user will get an error message at some point, or maybe his mail will just disappear. Depending on a package called "smtp-daemon" or on a file called "/usr/lib/sendmail" both is error prone.
I don't see anything that can be done with Debian packages that can't be done easily with RPM.
When it comes to limitations, both packages share them. Both of them only specify dependencies by name, rather than by function. That makes it impossible to assure that a particular installation is actually working or how to fix it if it isn't.
Neither of them requires test cases to test an installation.
And both systems allow arbitrary install/deinstall scripts, making it impossible to write general tools that analyze automatically what happens during package install/deinstall.
Rather than spending time making one more like the other, we should stick with what we have and worry about the next generation packaging tool, which will probably have to be started from scratch.
I'm sorry, but I just don't feel Linux has much to say to Mac OS X in terms of design and taste.
Neither do I (did I say anything like that?). But the comparison by the author was not between Linux and MacOS X, the comparison was between UNIX and MacOS X. UNIX (meaning, what the systems research lab at Bell Labs developed) was consistent, well designed, and clean.
UNIX started from scratch and developed a few novel paradigms that worked well for its user base at the time. If only Apple had done the same with their next generation OS. Instead, Apple did what they have always done: get a bunch of technology from other companies and market the hell out of it. Yes, it is still better than Windows NT, but that doesn't make it much less disappointing. For true innovation, we'll apparently have to look elsewhere.
A lumbering dump truck to the Mac's zippy
roadster, Unix is the pug-ugly workhorse that
delivers more Web pages, routes more mail,
and gets more done than any other computer
operating system in existence.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the analogy.
In terms of size and performance, UNIX installations can be small and nimble compared to MacOS X, which has to support a lot more "stuff".
In terms of software architecture, MacOS is a mess and a dumping ground of legacy technologies: microkernel, UNIX personality, Objective-C, Java, MacOS ROMs, etc.; no design or taste there.
In terms of appearance, there are plenty of pretty UNIX GUI interfaces.
MacOS X, with its consumer market share, may be an OK compromise for people who want UNIX reliability and some kind of consumer-oriented system. But I don't think people have been holding their breath for this; MacOS X isn't salvation for the UNIX users of the world, it's salavation for Apple: without it, the company would not have a competitive product at all. This way, they at least have a chance against NT and Linux.
How can billions of research spending not make it into products at Microsoft? Well, if you worked in industrial research, it the answer ought to be fairly obvious. Probably the same way they didn't make it into products at AT&T or Xerox. And those companies have been at it for decades rather than just a few years, like Microsoft (Microsoft didn't use to spend billions on research).
As for all the other stuff, I'm not in the Linux vs. Windows mindset like you seem to be. As I said, I think both Linux and Windows are outdated and old technology and both have copied liberally from their predecessors. But Linux doesn't pretend to do anything else, nor does Linux cost an arm and a leg. My point is not that Microsoft is necessarily worse, my point is that they are technologically at best no better than the rest, but they sure are a lot more expensive and a lot more proprietary, and they try to lock you into their world.
There is no question that SDMI is hackable: the technology cannot work in general, and people will sooner or later circumvent it. However, it can work well enough in practice to be a big nuisance for fair use.
Finding the particular bugs in their system for the chance of $10k is not worth it. Anybody with the skill to do that can get standard consulting rates, which start at $200/h at the low end, which translates into at most 50h of consulting. Their offer is an insult. These companies are about to make a capital investment of billions of dollars; once the thing is on the market and the media are pressed, it cannot easily be taken back.
I think we should let them deploy the system as is rather than help them make it even more of a nuisance. Making it tougher to copy is not in the consumer's interest, and it doesn't even help the music companies (even if they think it does).
Closed source applications do not constitute prior art for purposes of patentability. Only published or otherwise disclosed methods constitute prior art. I wouldn't even be surprised if open source applications are not necessarily considered prior art in all situations.
It is therefore vitally important that if you want something from getting patented by someone else, you publish it or disclose it. That applies no matter whether you want to use the method for proprietary or for open source purposes. The best thing to do is probably to make a disclosure directly to the patent office, in addition to publishing on USENET and (if you can) in some forum that is archived on paper.
And if you are with a commercial entity in the habit of patenting stuff, consider disclosing instead: it's much cheaper, quicker, and requires less time, and it protects you against infringement claims by others just as well as a patent.
Unlike the physical world, where making secure homes and cars is very expensive and very difficult, computers are neither hard nor expensive to secure if you pick the right tools.
If companies can avoid responsibility for making their systems secure, they won't bother. They'll keep using outdated software and intrinsically insecure infrastructure. If there is a break-in, they just point the finger at the guy who broke in. The consumer is still at a high risk from the theft of their data, but the company is free and clear.
Yes, breaking into someone's computer system is wrong and should be punishable in serious cases. But more important is that companies should face stiff fines and criminal charges if they expose personal or private data through insufficient security. On balance, companies don't have to be protected from crackers--they can easily protect themselves if they have half a clue. People need to be protected from companies that venture out into the Internet without the technical competency to protect their customers' data.
I find it a highly unlikely contention that M-NET is the first public access UNIX systems. I remember public access UNIX systems in the early 80's. And, incidentally, they weren't protected by computer trespassing laws.
From what has transpired so far, I'd stay away from M-NET. I'd worry that they might misinterpret even more benign activity as "trespassing". What they should have done is learned their lesson, made their system more secure, and left it at that. There was no need to get the police involved.
As for MS just copying everything and no money on research? HA! They spend
BILLIONS a year on R&D.
They are now spending billions of dollars on research because they have so much disposable cash. They didn't use to. None of their major current product lines are based in any interesting way on the results of their research, and whether they ever will remains an open question.
Gates's attitudes towards research spending were widely reported in the press in the early 90's; you can dig it up yourself. If you were in research at the time, that was a big deal.
Please don't tell me you are naive enough to actually think/suggest that other
companies don't engage in copying or stealing other's works and/or looks and
feels.
I didn't say Microsoft was any worse than other big companies. I took issue with your claims that Microsoft got to their current position through innovation. Nonsense. Microsoft is a succesful business because of hardball business tactics, quite a bit of luck, some questionable practices, and excellent marketing.
Technologically, what they are selling is largely still behind what was state-of-the-art in research labs in the 1980's (but, then, so are Linux and MacOS; the industry as a whole has stagnated).
ALL I've tried to say is, report the news accurately and without obvious blatant
bias and/or outright FUD. That's all.
No, that's not "ALL" you tried to say. The story was clearly inaccurate, as I pointed out myself. But you also went off on a lengthy exposition about Microsoft's supposed innovations and software skills. That's where you are just as wrong as the original story was.
Face it, Microsoft is a big company, no better and no worse than other big companies. Claiming that Microsoft makes high-quality, innovative software is like claiming that MacDonald's makes high-quality, innovative cuisine. In reality, both make cheap products for the masses; the good stuff clearly happens elsewhere.
Just because Paul screwed up on this one (Netscape does the same thing) doesn't justify the rest of your argument.
Gates is not a borg and MS isn't a huge death cube from a billion light years away -
it's just a hugely successful company that started out much MUCH smaller than any of the current linux companies who
rode the wave and sucked down millions/billions in IPO and VC moneys from the unwise. MS came outta a dream of two
people without any cash - kinda like Apple. They worked hard and played hard ball to get where they are.
Microsoft's success stories have mostly been achieved by copying products and ideas from other companies like Apple, Lotus, Sun, Bell Labs, IBM, and others. What they have been been "working hard" on is cloning other people's software. Gates even used to brag about the fact that he didn't have to spend any money on research--he'd just copy Apple (now that hardly anybody else is left, they have to do their own R&D). And Microsoft's pyramid-scheme-like stock option plans and accounting practices put many money-burning startups to shame--Microsoft is not the enormously successful and profitable company you seem to think they are.
No, Microsoft is not the "Borg cube", but they are generally not an innovative company either, and they have engaged, and continue to engage, in a lot of questionable business practices.
And, coming back to the core of this story, Microsoft clearly puts a low priority on security, quality, professionalism, safety, and privacy. The fact that Netscape isn't much better is irrelevant. Microsoft is not a startup anymore, and neither are they a fly-by-night company in the Arizona desert anymore. They are the market leader, one of the biggest US corporations, and in that position, they ought to behave responsibly in all these areas. If they don't, it's completely justifiable to take them to task. You see, with billions in revenue comes a lot of responsibility and exposure.
You can add any amount of grain to your digital photos if you like it for artistic reasons, and end up with pictures that are just like those you get from film.
No, I'm not referring to "low light" (CCD low-light performance can be made as good, or better than, film). Film gives you lower resolution when the contrast is lower, no matter how much light there is to take the picture. This is a consequence of how film represents different shades of gray. Look at the resolution ratings for film: you'll always find several different values.
Besides, I'm not saying that CCD's are perfect. All I'm saying is that CCD and film resolutions aren't directly comparable. Unless you spend all your time imaging high contrast test targets, film resolution is not very relevant.
Yes, digital cameras count each color pixel as one pixel. But that doesn't mean they have 1/3 the resolution. What you get out of a digital camera is a high resolution b/w picture (close to the stated resolution of the camera) together with a low resolution color channel. This matches the characteristics of the human eye much better than what chemical processes give you.
Unless it is part of your job function you are probably under no obligation to do the prior art searchers for your employer. And you should realize that any prior art you cite in the patent strengthens the patent (since a court will assume that the patent examiner took the prior art you cited into account).
The problem with CMOS sensors is their noise and limited sensitivity. Maybe those can be addressed, but until they are, many people will probably prefer CCD's. You only need very high resolution for very high blow-ups that people are going to press their noses against. For home and press uses, the primary drivers of digital photography, current CCD resolutions are more than adequate, and CCDs give you better quality and are usable under a wider range of lighting conditions.
its well accepted that scanning 35mm negatives or slides is about 10megapixels in resolution.
Yes, it takes about that many pixels to get all the information out of a 35mm negative, but the inference that a 35mm negative corresponds to a 10 megapixel digital photo is wrong.
Even with perfect negatives, as you increase scanning resultion beyond a certain point, you still get more information out of the negative, but you also image a lot of film artifacts (grain, etc.). In different words, even with ideal equipment and excellent film, only some specific images (contrast ranges, etc.) will give you that kind of resolution.
Film creates images by creating globs of silver or globs of color. That allows them to have high resolution, but if you look closely, the tonality goes because all you get is a randomly shaped glob. Digital cameras and scanners aren't subject to the same constraints as film. They actually measure a continuous range of intensities at every pixel and give you full tonality down to the pixel level.
I think that current 2-3 megapixel cameras are about equivalent to film-based photography with P/S cameras and "regular" film. And once you get beyond 4-6 megapixels, you are moving into territory that's better than 35mm ever was.
You may find the following links interesting; they point to a history of the monopoly game, another game that started out pretty much in the public domain and then was captured by a big corporation:
The situation is not at all symmetric: there is a big difference between people adapting and improving games non-commercially and a company claiming proprietary rights to them.
You seem to find nothing surprising about the notion that games can be owned by a corporation. Well, that's actually a rather new-fangled idea. For thousands of years, games have been non-proprietary. People experimented with them, tweaked the rules, and improved the game play. That's why games like chess, checkers, and go now are so exquisitely balanced and playable. Games are, in a sense, the original open source application. And the high quality game play of games like Nethack (unmatched by Diablo or other commercial games, IMO) are recent examples.
Games are an important part of our cultural heritage. They seem closer to language than to inventions. The idea that they should be protected by patents (which, for practical purposes, don't seem to expire for games) to me is very much something that can be challenged.
As an aside, the arrival of computers created an entirely new genre of games: large scale simulation games (war games, economic games, etc). Those simply weren't feasible before, and there were genuine pioneers in that area that were at best inspired. And, no, Diplomacy isn't a real precursor to those games.
With my CC, I have to dispute charges in writing and reissue takes more than just a day; what bank are you using?
People have gotten into problems over misuse of their credit cards, mostly when it happens on a significant scale and they don't notice for a while (as part of an identity theft). That can cause problems with your credit rating: you can dispute and explain all you want, for the lender, you still are less attractive than someone who hasn't had those kinds of issues.
Another problem with canceling credit cards is that they often have ongoing charges (ISP, on-line bookstore, etc.) on them, and all that needs to be changed as well.
It ought to be the merchant's problem, but it isn't. It is the consumer who has to deal with the false charges, the damage to his credit rating, and going without a credit card for a while. In fact, the liability of merchants and credit card companies for causing the consumer harm through their credit-related actions seems pretty limited.
Ease of use is not the driving force behind successful computer design. The driving force is clearly ease of selling. Ease of selling means long feature lists on the boxes, and it means that new users should be able to set down in front of a computer an make something interesting (though not necessarily useful) happen quickly--a good "out of box experience". Once they are committed to one particular OS, they won't bother going through the trouble again, so it doesn't really matter much how good the system is for the experienced user.
Now, compare that to something like non-GUI UNIX. You can do excellent desktop publishing with it, edit things very efficiently, move among applications quickly, and deal with large amounts of data. But before you can do all that, you have to spend a couple of months learning a good text editor, learning some of the command line tools, learn some scripting language, and learn a text formatting language. That kind of stuff doesn't sell, in particular in a culture that demands instant satisfaction and that believes that democratizing technology means that you don't need any experience and anybody can be a "professional" by just buying the right computer (or camera).
But why worry about it? People who buy stuff that's easy to sell may not use their systems very effectively, but at least they drive down the cost for the components that other people use.
I would be curious to know where Hasbro actually got the rights to Asteroids. Asteroids seems awfully close to MIT's Spacewar. And it seems that many other companies got or are getting their basic gameplay ideas from open source efforts and non-proprietary games. Diablo is basically rogue/hack with real-time and nice graphics. Alpha Centauri and Civilization are variations on a number of old multiplayer conquest games. The various space conquest games are based on a number of single and multiplayer "Trek" games for UNIX (imagine using that name in the trademark obsessed 00's). Wolfenstein 3D and others have precursors in Mazewar. One of few remaining commercially unexplored free games was robot war games, where players program their own robots and put them into competition, sometimes even used for teaching programming; that frontier has also been broken now, with a commercial PC version with nifty 3D graphics.
So, it seems to me that game companies are making proprietary games out of non-proprietary, often open source, games. They add a lot of graphics, modify the gameplay somewhat (often dumbing it down for the masses), and do a pretty good job at packaging. When the original inventor of a free game does that, I don't have a problem with it, but most of these companies are generations away from the original inventors.
Should they get the kind of eternal protection that game patents give for that? I think not. Their slick, commercial implementation of ideas deserves copyright protection (and, at that, it should probably be more limited than current copyright). In the give-and-take of ideas between non-proprietary and proprietary games, IMO, commercial game companies have been doing a lot more taking than giving.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, over the last two years, INS processing has slowed down more than tenfold (!). As a result, people who had an expectation of being able to get their green card in time now face deportation because the INS didn't finish processing their green card application before their H1B ran out.
So, the problem isn't that people knew that their visa was temporary, but that the INS fails to process green card applications in a timely manner. This caught everybody by surprise: visa holders, consulates, and immigration attorneys.
But I agree to this degree: while in the past, H1B visa holders could expect a fairly painless transition to a green card, that is clearly not the case anymore. People who are considering coming to the US now should expect that the situation with the INS will further deteriorate. I think that makes the US considerably less attractive to skilled immigrants.
Most employers and employees therefore had to start taking a different approach: they would apply for H1B visas first and then apply for a green card while the employee was working on the H1B. That approach worked fine for a while. However, over the last few years, INS processing has become so inefficient that it can take three or four years to process a green card. If the H1B visa expires before the green card application has been mostly processed, the employees face deportation. Because the INS processing times skyrocketed so suddenly, many employees were caught by surprise: they thought that two years would be ample time to get their green card application through and were planning for that, and then were left without enough time to complete their application. Because of the baroque nature of US immigration law, there are no exemptions. Once the H1B has run out, people have to leave the country. There is no other status to convert to.
US immigration law is also rife with other outdated rules and bizarre notions. For example, it talks a lot about "intent": you can't travel on a visitor's visa if you have some "intent" to immigrate. Family reunification (even of more distant relatives) is preferred over any kind of skilled immigration. And dual citizenship is recognized by the US only if a US citizen acquires another citizenship, but the US still expects immigrants to renounce any former citizenship (although in practice, that isn't enforced much anymore). The immigration procedures themselves are a bizarre mix of rules and questions pertaining to 19th century immigration by boat, puritan notions of "good moral character", McCarthy-era concerns about communism, and modern day concerns about terrorism.
Perhaps the most important problem is that even if the delays are the INS's fault (as they usually are), the applicants are not protected from deportation. If the INS sits on someone's application for two years and their current visa expires, that person is subject to deportation.
Altogether, I don't consider the US very welcoming to skilled immigrants anymore. In addition to visa issues and processing delays, there are numerous other problems immigrants face in the US. For example, immigrants must pay full taxes but cannot take advantage of the social safety net (such as it is) and entitlements they have paid for. Legal protections for immigrants are also limited in some important ways. And even after becoming citizens, naturalized citizens are always potentially subject to denaturalization, in which the INS can challenge and reverse the naturalization process until the day an immigrant dies. The statute of limitations for denaturalization was abolished about 10 years ago, another instance of what looks like a fairly hostile attitude towards immigrants.
In a social and business sense, Americans are very welcoming to immigrants and foreigners, and that makes this country a special place to live and work. And the US will probably always remain attractive to immigrants from economically disadvantaged countries. But the US government and the US Congress have become so hostile to immigrants and foreigners that I think anybody coming from another first world country should very carefully weigh the tradeoffs involved. If the US wants to continue to be attractive skilled workers from Europe, Japan, and Australia, US immigration law will need a major overhaul.
That's not quite what I meant by "function". The dependency is still on something called "smtp-daemon". If something with that name is there but it doesn't function in the way that the package expects, it's completely undefined what happens. Maybe the user will get an error message at some point, or maybe his mail will just disappear. Depending on a package called "smtp-daemon" or on a file called "/usr/lib/sendmail" both is error prone.
When it comes to limitations, both packages share them. Both of them only specify dependencies by name, rather than by function. That makes it impossible to assure that a particular installation is actually working or how to fix it if it isn't.
Neither of them requires test cases to test an installation.
And both systems allow arbitrary install/deinstall scripts, making it impossible to write general tools that analyze automatically what happens during package install/deinstall.
Rather than spending time making one more like the other, we should stick with what we have and worry about the next generation packaging tool, which will probably have to be started from scratch.
Neither do I (did I say anything like that?). But the comparison by the author was not between Linux and MacOS X, the comparison was between UNIX and MacOS X. UNIX (meaning, what the systems research lab at Bell Labs developed) was consistent, well designed, and clean.
UNIX started from scratch and developed a few novel paradigms that worked well for its user base at the time. If only Apple had done the same with their next generation OS. Instead, Apple did what they have always done: get a bunch of technology from other companies and market the hell out of it. Yes, it is still better than Windows NT, but that doesn't make it much less disappointing. For true innovation, we'll apparently have to look elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the analogy.
In terms of size and performance, UNIX installations can be small and nimble compared to MacOS X, which has to support a lot more "stuff".
In terms of software architecture, MacOS is a mess and a dumping ground of legacy technologies: microkernel, UNIX personality, Objective-C, Java, MacOS ROMs, etc.; no design or taste there.
In terms of appearance, there are plenty of pretty UNIX GUI interfaces.
MacOS X, with its consumer market share, may be an OK compromise for people who want UNIX reliability and some kind of consumer-oriented system. But I don't think people have been holding their breath for this; MacOS X isn't salvation for the UNIX users of the world, it's salavation for Apple: without it, the company would not have a competitive product at all. This way, they at least have a chance against NT and Linux.
As for all the other stuff, I'm not in the Linux vs. Windows mindset like you seem to be. As I said, I think both Linux and Windows are outdated and old technology and both have copied liberally from their predecessors. But Linux doesn't pretend to do anything else, nor does Linux cost an arm and a leg. My point is not that Microsoft is necessarily worse, my point is that they are technologically at best no better than the rest, but they sure are a lot more expensive and a lot more proprietary, and they try to lock you into their world.
Finding the particular bugs in their system for the chance of $10k is not worth it. Anybody with the skill to do that can get standard consulting rates, which start at $200/h at the low end, which translates into at most 50h of consulting. Their offer is an insult. These companies are about to make a capital investment of billions of dollars; once the thing is on the market and the media are pressed, it cannot easily be taken back.
I think we should let them deploy the system as is rather than help them make it even more of a nuisance. Making it tougher to copy is not in the consumer's interest, and it doesn't even help the music companies (even if they think it does).
It is therefore vitally important that if you want something from getting patented by someone else, you publish it or disclose it. That applies no matter whether you want to use the method for proprietary or for open source purposes. The best thing to do is probably to make a disclosure directly to the patent office, in addition to publishing on USENET and (if you can) in some forum that is archived on paper.
And if you are with a commercial entity in the habit of patenting stuff, consider disclosing instead: it's much cheaper, quicker, and requires less time, and it protects you against infringement claims by others just as well as a patent.
If companies can avoid responsibility for making their systems secure, they won't bother. They'll keep using outdated software and intrinsically insecure infrastructure. If there is a break-in, they just point the finger at the guy who broke in. The consumer is still at a high risk from the theft of their data, but the company is free and clear.
Yes, breaking into someone's computer system is wrong and should be punishable in serious cases. But more important is that companies should face stiff fines and criminal charges if they expose personal or private data through insufficient security. On balance, companies don't have to be protected from crackers--they can easily protect themselves if they have half a clue. People need to be protected from companies that venture out into the Internet without the technical competency to protect their customers' data.
From what has transpired so far, I'd stay away from M-NET. I'd worry that they might misinterpret even more benign activity as "trespassing". What they should have done is learned their lesson, made their system more secure, and left it at that. There was no need to get the police involved.
They are now spending billions of dollars on research because they have so much disposable cash. They didn't use to. None of their major current product lines are based in any interesting way on the results of their research, and whether they ever will remains an open question.
Gates's attitudes towards research spending were widely reported in the press in the early 90's; you can dig it up yourself. If you were in research at the time, that was a big deal.
I didn't say Microsoft was any worse than other big companies. I took issue with your claims that Microsoft got to their current position through innovation. Nonsense. Microsoft is a succesful business because of hardball business tactics, quite a bit of luck, some questionable practices, and excellent marketing.
Technologically, what they are selling is largely still behind what was state-of-the-art in research labs in the 1980's (but, then, so are Linux and MacOS; the industry as a whole has stagnated).
No, that's not "ALL" you tried to say. The story was clearly inaccurate, as I pointed out myself. But you also went off on a lengthy exposition about Microsoft's supposed innovations and software skills. That's where you are just as wrong as the original story was.
Face it, Microsoft is a big company, no better and no worse than other big companies. Claiming that Microsoft makes high-quality, innovative software is like claiming that MacDonald's makes high-quality, innovative cuisine. In reality, both make cheap products for the masses; the good stuff clearly happens elsewhere.
Microsoft's success stories have mostly been achieved by copying products and ideas from other companies like Apple, Lotus, Sun, Bell Labs, IBM, and others. What they have been been "working hard" on is cloning other people's software. Gates even used to brag about the fact that he didn't have to spend any money on research--he'd just copy Apple (now that hardly anybody else is left, they have to do their own R&D). And Microsoft's pyramid-scheme-like stock option plans and accounting practices put many money-burning startups to shame--Microsoft is not the enormously successful and profitable company you seem to think they are.
No, Microsoft is not the "Borg cube", but they are generally not an innovative company either, and they have engaged, and continue to engage, in a lot of questionable business practices.
And, coming back to the core of this story, Microsoft clearly puts a low priority on security, quality, professionalism, safety, and privacy. The fact that Netscape isn't much better is irrelevant. Microsoft is not a startup anymore, and neither are they a fly-by-night company in the Arizona desert anymore. They are the market leader, one of the biggest US corporations, and in that position, they ought to behave responsibly in all these areas. If they don't, it's completely justifiable to take them to task. You see, with billions in revenue comes a lot of responsibility and exposure.
You can add any amount of grain to your digital photos if you like it for artistic reasons, and end up with pictures that are just like those you get from film.
Besides, I'm not saying that CCD's are perfect. All I'm saying is that CCD and film resolutions aren't directly comparable. Unless you spend all your time imaging high contrast test targets, film resolution is not very relevant.
Yes, digital cameras count each color pixel as one pixel. But that doesn't mean they have 1/3 the resolution. What you get out of a digital camera is a high resolution b/w picture (close to the stated resolution of the camera) together with a low resolution color channel. This matches the characteristics of the human eye much better than what chemical processes give you.
Unless it is part of your job function you are probably under no obligation to do the prior art searchers for your employer. And you should realize that any prior art you cite in the patent strengthens the patent (since a court will assume that the patent examiner took the prior art you cited into account).
The problem with CMOS sensors is their noise and limited sensitivity. Maybe those can be addressed, but until they are, many people will probably prefer CCD's. You only need very high resolution for very high blow-ups that people are going to press their noses against. For home and press uses, the primary drivers of digital photography, current CCD resolutions are more than adequate, and CCDs give you better quality and are usable under a wider range of lighting conditions.
Yes, it takes about that many pixels to get all the information out of a 35mm negative, but the inference that a 35mm negative corresponds to a 10 megapixel digital photo is wrong.
Even with perfect negatives, as you increase scanning resultion beyond a certain point, you still get more information out of the negative, but you also image a lot of film artifacts (grain, etc.). In different words, even with ideal equipment and excellent film, only some specific images (contrast ranges, etc.) will give you that kind of resolution.
Film creates images by creating globs of silver or globs of color. That allows them to have high resolution, but if you look closely, the tonality goes because all you get is a randomly shaped glob. Digital cameras and scanners aren't subject to the same constraints as film. They actually measure a continuous range of intensities at every pixel and give you full tonality down to the pixel level.
I think that current 2-3 megapixel cameras are about equivalent to film-based photography with P/S cameras and "regular" film. And once you get beyond 4-6 megapixels, you are moving into territory that's better than 35mm ever was.
You seem to find nothing surprising about the notion that games can be owned by a corporation. Well, that's actually a rather new-fangled idea. For thousands of years, games have been non-proprietary. People experimented with them, tweaked the rules, and improved the game play. That's why games like chess, checkers, and go now are so exquisitely balanced and playable. Games are, in a sense, the original open source application. And the high quality game play of games like Nethack (unmatched by Diablo or other commercial games, IMO) are recent examples.
Games are an important part of our cultural heritage. They seem closer to language than to inventions. The idea that they should be protected by patents (which, for practical purposes, don't seem to expire for games) to me is very much something that can be challenged.
As an aside, the arrival of computers created an entirely new genre of games: large scale simulation games (war games, economic games, etc). Those simply weren't feasible before, and there were genuine pioneers in that area that were at best inspired. And, no, Diplomacy isn't a real precursor to those games.
People have gotten into problems over misuse of their credit cards, mostly when it happens on a significant scale and they don't notice for a while (as part of an identity theft). That can cause problems with your credit rating: you can dispute and explain all you want, for the lender, you still are less attractive than someone who hasn't had those kinds of issues.
Another problem with canceling credit cards is that they often have ongoing charges (ISP, on-line bookstore, etc.) on them, and all that needs to be changed as well.
It ought to be the merchant's problem, but it isn't. It is the consumer who has to deal with the false charges, the damage to his credit rating, and going without a credit card for a while. In fact, the liability of merchants and credit card companies for causing the consumer harm through their credit-related actions seems pretty limited.
Now, compare that to something like non-GUI UNIX. You can do excellent desktop publishing with it, edit things very efficiently, move among applications quickly, and deal with large amounts of data. But before you can do all that, you have to spend a couple of months learning a good text editor, learning some of the command line tools, learn some scripting language, and learn a text formatting language. That kind of stuff doesn't sell, in particular in a culture that demands instant satisfaction and that believes that democratizing technology means that you don't need any experience and anybody can be a "professional" by just buying the right computer (or camera).
But why worry about it? People who buy stuff that's easy to sell may not use their systems very effectively, but at least they drive down the cost for the components that other people use.
So, it seems to me that game companies are making proprietary games out of non-proprietary, often open source, games. They add a lot of graphics, modify the gameplay somewhat (often dumbing it down for the masses), and do a pretty good job at packaging. When the original inventor of a free game does that, I don't have a problem with it, but most of these companies are generations away from the original inventors.
Should they get the kind of eternal protection that game patents give for that? I think not. Their slick, commercial implementation of ideas deserves copyright protection (and, at that, it should probably be more limited than current copyright). In the give-and-take of ideas between non-proprietary and proprietary games, IMO, commercial game companies have been doing a lot more taking than giving.