It is not either/OR. So, they get the copyright too. Double whammy.
Bert
Or one step forward and two steps back. Copyright is both a positive right (it gives the author the right to distribute and sell his product under his own conditions) and a negative right (you can forbid others to do certain stuff with your copyrighted work). A single patent, which is a purely negative right (you only get to forbid others from doing stuff), from someone else can however completely undermine the positive rights conferred by copyright.
True. Still, I thought the animation of movement in e.g. Ratatouille, The Incredibles and even Corpse Bride was a lot better. Of course, none of them tried to be 100% realistic, but I really don't understand why they couldn't make the lion in the trailer move more fluently (like the rats in Ratatouille).
I saw the trailer (not the full preview, just the trailer), and I was not impressed by the animation. The way the lion-like thing moves is completely unnatural and it looks like it's made from plastic. The movements of the blue people was also off at various points. At several points I guess they got stuck in the uncanny valley.
If it were a game, I'd say it had great graphics. But as a film it was just not convincing to me.
Did you know that Africa could feed itself, and half the world if they simply stopped fighting. Went to modern farming techniques and stopped fighting?
The situation is actually far worse than that. E.g., fairly stable countries like Burkina Faso could easily generate more money than they need every year with their cotton production, if it weren't for
subsidies by the US and European Union to their own cotton producers that keep the price of cotton on the world market artificially low
"free" trade agreements that forbid Burkina Faso to locally process the cotton and turn it into higher margin finished products
If you ever have the opportunity, I'd strongly recommend you to watch Let's Make Money. Even if you think that you already have an idea about the kind of abuses that are going on, it really is an eye opener in many ways.
we tolerate so much BS for the sake of "children". They erode our rights - it's for the sake of the children.
No, lunatic and hardline control freaks erode our rights, along with people who don't think and just blindly follow the nonsense-machine as soon as they've heard some trigger keywords. When those control freaks can't use the "children" straw man argument, they will use terrorists, "values", democracy, tradition, your income, your freedom, or anything else that is largely irrelevant to the issue at hand but which will somehow make you naturally support their side.
Of course, maybe you are also in favour of getting rid of democracy, your income and your freedom so those arguments no longer can be used either to enlist anyone in contemporary crusades against the evil of the day.
I recall it's in the works of Locke that property rights and property owners are seen as fundamental to defining entitlement to democratic rights and privileges.
You're recalling only a third of Locke's theory. The other two thirds are that after you have reserved your property rights, there has to be "enough" and "good enough" of the same left for everyone else, and that you should never appropriate more than you can use. And arguably, patents fail in those aspects (ppt).
Could you please see this law in perspective for a moment: 1) This law requires the ISP to hold identification data for only 6 months - most ISPs keep it longer than that.
[ citation needed ] Before the data retention directive, this time was limited by the privacy directive. That one specifies that such data may only be kept as long as strictly necessary for billing and general administrative purposes.
Moreover, it's not just about identification data, but also about who emails/calls whom when and from where.
And collecting all of this data costs about £45.8m for the UK according UK government estimates.
2) The only way to have access to this data is to have a court order.
That depends on the Swedish proposed implementation (with which I'm not familiar). The data retention directive mandates nothing of the sort (which was one of the strong points of criticism against it).
in the end we just want our privacy and not make it impossible for police to do their jobs.
The point is that this directive is not required for the police to do their job reasonably well, and that the costs and privacy invasions of the directive are completely disproportionate compared to the potential gains in effectiveness for the police.
Now lobbyists only have to bribe a handful of central political bastards to affect the whole of Europe.
You apparently didn't follow the data retention directive farce at all. This was not brought about by "central political bastards", and the lobbyists were the various national governments. That directive was a wet dream of law enforcement agencies from all over Europe, and pushed through by the various national governments in the name of thinking of the terrorists and the children.
The rapporteur (Alexander Alvaro) of the directive in the European Parliament (EP) tried to tone it down, only to be backstabbed by the national governments (forming the EU Council of Ministers) that managed to pressure the large political groups in the EP behind his back to ignore his report and voting recommendations.
Alexander Alvaro was so disgusted with the whole circus that after the vote he had his name removed as rapporteur for the directive.
but patents like that are worthless, so what's the point? why bother patenting something that's clearly is not gonna hold up in any court?
Because every patent they collect can be added to their balance sheet (so they get better credit ratings, potentially higher stock value, etc). Of course, these patents are third-rate derivative assets whose value has little or no basis in reality, and at one point or another the patent bubble will burst. After all, as the financial markets recently discovered: you can't keep selling and trading hot air only based on valuations from accountants' and lawyers' wet dreams.
Why isn't this illegal - adding unrelated legislation to a ? Is there anywhere in the world why this practice is not permitted, or better yet, prosecuted?
The GP is confusing a bunch of things. First, the Council of Ministers threw out all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reached an Political Agreement on a shoddy text through backdoor maneuvering by Germany and the European Commission. That text would have turned the European Patent Office's practice of granting software patents into EU legislation.
A Political Agreement has no juridical nor legislative value, but it has never happened that a political agreement was later on annulled and that negotiations were reopened. So also in this case, even though the German, Dutch, Spanish and Danish parliaments afterwards passed motions asking to reopen the discussions, the Council's bureaucrats did not want to do that because it "would undermine the efficiency of the decision making process".
Anyway, once you have a Political Agreement (which is reached by the representatives of the ministries responsible for the matter at hand) and nobody "wants" to discuss it anymore, the agreement can be placed as an "A item" on any EU Council of Ministers meeting, since it only needs rubber stamping in that case. In the case of the Software Patents Directive, it appeared several times as an A item on the agenda of an Agriculture and Fisheries meeting (which is presumably where the GP's confusion stems from).
In principle, there would have been nothing wrong with that, but in this case there was no actual political agreement, and in particular Poland was very unhappy with the way it had been treated. So 4 times in a row, Poland either had this "A item" removed from the agenda (sometimes at the last minute, because the responsible Polish minister had to be informed that they were again trying to get it through at a meeting he had no business with), or turned it into a "B item", which means that it can't be rubber stamped but that they first have to talk a bit about it (which nobody wanted to do).
In the end it still did get approved, but that whole circus helped with in convincing the EU Parliament to table a resolution asking the Commission to restart the directive's process, and when the Commission refused to later on squarely reject it.
You can find some more of my thoughts on the Council's behaviour here.
Do the words "TraceMonkey" mean anything to the authors? It's the core Javascript engine of the upcoming revision of Firefox. And it is fast. Some benchmarks suggest that it is highly competitive with V8 (Chrome) and SquirrelFish (Safari).
(Speaking of which, isn't it a bit disingenous to compare Safari 4 BETA to the current version of Firefox? Why not compare the Firefox beta then?
There are no "single language" versions of Mac OS X system software updates (at least not until now). What you are talking about is the delta version of the update. All updates always update all languages.
The millionth prime is 15,485,863. This means that he considered ~5.5 million more numbers that start with a 1 (10 million - 15.5 million) than numbers that start with any other digit.
Or did everyone already forget ECHELON? Or does it only count if you actively break into other systems, rather than only intercept everyone's personal, business and political Internet communications?
And it would really surprise me if they didn't break into other systems yet. It's not like they first asked for public approval for ECHELON before starting to set up and use it.
What is wrong with [...] not fretting about whether it may benefit someone else as well (financially or otherwise)?
It puts economic power into the hands of exploitative people.
I really don't see any exploiting in this situation (in the pejorative sense).
There's nothing wrong with mutually beneficial relationships between individuals and businesses, but when businesses achieve direct economic advantages from free labor (i.e. without giving something back), then other businesses, who acknowledge the value of support and pay the people who support their product, are at a disadvantage.
If you really can't think outside such a narrow economic box, then consider this simply as another way in which corporations should try to get people to like them that much that they are willing to spend their time "for free" on supporting their products (feel free to ponder whether in that case it is still really for free, since the company may then have invested in getting those people to do that).
That's a rational reason for a productive use of time. This fool in the article is just working for a corporation for free. There is a difference.
He's working for other users for free, and enjoying it. Sure, it also benefits a corporation, but so what? I really don't see what's so foolish about it. What is wrong with doing something you like, purely for fun/gratification, and not fretting about whether it may benefit someone else as well (financially or otherwise)?
People who write and support programs they get nothing out of (be it fame or something more tangible) are just as silly as McMurry.
Yes, simple personal satisfaction is so overrated. Imagine that, people who can feel good by simply helping other people. If there isn't a DSM-IV classification for that, let's hope there will be one in DSM-V. What this world urgently needs is a healthy dose of selfish pricks, because today's society is really starting to feel like Hippie in the Land of the Flying Rainbow Unicorn Ponies.
No way should you ever do this. If it's worth doing then it's worth getting paid for doing it. And for each McMurry out there there is one less paid job at Verizon.
Exactly! I've heard there are even idiots who will write and support entire computer programs for free! No wonder we're in an economic crisis...
Not to downplay this event but I really wonder why we don't hear much about espionage from western countries ? Are they better at it (rather than using malware or commonly avaliable tools) ? I am sure the Chinese etc have equally vulnerable systems.
Western countries spy (also on each other) using stuff like ECHELON, mainly for industrial spionage purposes, and this fact is well-documented and public knowledge. See e.g. the European Parliament's ECHELON report (search for "Published cases").
Does this mean that the source code would be freely available, but that you couldn't use it without paying them?
And that if you'd look at it, you'd be liable for tripple damages in the US (due to willful infringement).
While at first sight this would seem to imply that that they'd better simply give the code to the people who license the patents and not bother with open source, there are some cases where the source could still be useful. E.g., in many European countries (where officially we don't have software patents, but in practice we do under the weasel name "patents on computer-implemented inventions"), there is an exception in patent law for, a.o., non-commercial use.
Still, it sounds more like Microsoft's "shared source" than like real open source.
First google result I found said that net revenue had increase 101% in the last year, although YT profits represent only 1-1.5% of googles total ad revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not either/OR. So, they get the copyright too. Double whammy.
Bert
Or one step forward and two steps back. Copyright is both a positive right (it gives the author the right to distribute and sell his product under his own conditions) and a negative right (you can forbid others to do certain stuff with your copyrighted work). A single patent, which is a purely negative right (you only get to forbid others from doing stuff), from someone else can however completely undermine the positive rights conferred by copyright.
True. Still, I thought the animation of movement in e.g. Ratatouille, The Incredibles and even Corpse Bride was a lot better. Of course, none of them tried to be 100% realistic, but I really don't understand why they couldn't make the lion in the trailer move more fluently (like the rats in Ratatouille).
I saw the trailer (not the full preview, just the trailer), and I was not impressed by the animation. The way the lion-like thing moves is completely unnatural and it looks like it's made from plastic. The movements of the blue people was also off at various points. At several points I guess they got stuck in the uncanny valley.
If it were a game, I'd say it had great graphics. But as a film it was just not convincing to me.
So you can pay a dog to do your homework?
No, only to eat it.
>
Did you know that Africa could feed itself, and half the world if they simply stopped fighting. Went to modern farming techniques and stopped fighting?
The situation is actually far worse than that. E.g., fairly stable countries like Burkina Faso could easily generate more money than they need every year with their cotton production, if it weren't for
If you ever have the opportunity, I'd strongly recommend you to watch Let's Make Money. Even if you think that you already have an idea about the kind of abuses that are going on, it really is an eye opener in many ways.
we tolerate so much BS for the sake of "children". They erode our rights - it's for the sake of the children.
No, lunatic and hardline control freaks erode our rights, along with people who don't think and just blindly follow the nonsense-machine as soon as they've heard some trigger keywords. When those control freaks can't use the "children" straw man argument, they will use terrorists, "values", democracy, tradition, your income, your freedom, or anything else that is largely irrelevant to the issue at hand but which will somehow make you naturally support their side.
Of course, maybe you are also in favour of getting rid of democracy, your income and your freedom so those arguments no longer can be used either to enlist anyone in contemporary crusades against the evil of the day.
You're recalling only a third of Locke's theory. The other two thirds are that after you have reserved your property rights, there has to be "enough" and "good enough" of the same left for everyone else, and that you should never appropriate more than you can use. And arguably, patents fail in those aspects (ppt).
The Telegraph will publish the uncensored versions over the coming days.
Could you please see this law in perspective for a moment:
1) This law requires the ISP to hold identification data for only 6 months - most ISPs keep it longer than that.
[ citation needed ] Before the data retention directive, this time was limited by the privacy directive. That one specifies that such data may only be kept as long as strictly necessary for billing and general administrative purposes.
Moreover, it's not just about identification data, but also about who emails/calls whom when and from where.
And collecting all of this data costs about £45.8m for the UK according UK government estimates.
2) The only way to have access to this data is to have a court order.
That depends on the Swedish proposed implementation (with which I'm not familiar). The data retention directive mandates nothing of the sort (which was one of the strong points of criticism against it).
in the end we just want our privacy and not make it impossible for police to do their jobs.
The point is that this directive is not required for the police to do their job reasonably well, and that the costs and privacy invasions of the directive are completely disproportionate compared to the potential gains in effectiveness for the police.
The Commission referred in its proposal to exactly one (yes 1) single study on this topic. That one concluded that it was not clear whether or not data retention would help a lot in investigations.
So the big complaints are: no demonstration of necessity, hugely disproportionate, major costs, big dangers of abuse and other negative effects. Of course, in addition to the way it was pushed through.
Is this the first time the EU has sued a member state for not passing a law?
No. Not by a long shot.
Now lobbyists only have to bribe a handful of central political bastards to affect the whole of Europe.
You apparently didn't follow the data retention directive farce at all. This was not brought about by "central political bastards", and the lobbyists were the various national governments. That directive was a wet dream of law enforcement agencies from all over Europe, and pushed through by the various national governments in the name of thinking of the terrorists and the children.
The rapporteur (Alexander Alvaro) of the directive in the European Parliament (EP) tried to tone it down, only to be backstabbed by the national governments (forming the EU Council of Ministers) that managed to pressure the large political groups in the EP behind his back to ignore his report and voting recommendations.
Alexander Alvaro was so disgusted with the whole circus that after the vote he had his name removed as rapporteur for the directive.
but patents like that are worthless, so what's the point? why bother patenting something that's clearly is not gonna hold up in any court?
Because every patent they collect can be added to their balance sheet (so they get better credit ratings, potentially higher stock value, etc). Of course, these patents are third-rate derivative assets whose value has little or no basis in reality, and at one point or another the patent bubble will burst. After all, as the financial markets recently discovered: you can't keep selling and trading hot air only based on valuations from accountants' and lawyers' wet dreams.
Why isn't this illegal - adding unrelated legislation to a ? Is there anywhere in the world why this practice is not permitted, or better yet, prosecuted?
The GP is confusing a bunch of things. First, the Council of Ministers threw out all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reached an Political Agreement on a shoddy text through backdoor maneuvering by Germany and the European Commission. That text would have turned the European Patent Office's practice of granting software patents into EU legislation.
A Political Agreement has no juridical nor legislative value, but it has never happened that a political agreement was later on annulled and that negotiations were reopened. So also in this case, even though the German, Dutch, Spanish and Danish parliaments afterwards passed motions asking to reopen the discussions, the Council's bureaucrats did not want to do that because it "would undermine the efficiency of the decision making process".
Anyway, once you have a Political Agreement (which is reached by the representatives of the ministries responsible for the matter at hand) and nobody "wants" to discuss it anymore, the agreement can be placed as an "A item" on any EU Council of Ministers meeting, since it only needs rubber stamping in that case. In the case of the Software Patents Directive, it appeared several times as an A item on the agenda of an Agriculture and Fisheries meeting (which is presumably where the GP's confusion stems from).
In principle, there would have been nothing wrong with that, but in this case there was no actual political agreement, and in particular Poland was very unhappy with the way it had been treated. So 4 times in a row, Poland either had this "A item" removed from the agenda (sometimes at the last minute, because the responsible Polish minister had to be informed that they were again trying to get it through at a meeting he had no business with), or turned it into a "B item", which means that it can't be rubber stamped but that they first have to talk a bit about it (which nobody wanted to do).
In the end it still did get approved, but that whole circus helped with in convincing the EU Parliament to table a resolution asking the Commission to restart the directive's process, and when the Commission refused to later on squarely reject it.
You can find some more of my thoughts on the Council's behaviour here.
Do the words "TraceMonkey" mean anything to the authors? It's the core Javascript engine of the upcoming revision of Firefox. And it is fast. Some benchmarks suggest that it is highly competitive with V8 (Chrome) and SquirrelFish (Safari).
(Speaking of which, isn't it a bit disingenous to compare Safari 4 BETA to the current version of Firefox? Why not compare the Firefox beta then?
They did, the results are in the article linked under "gap between Firefox and Chrome".
There are no "single language" versions of Mac OS X system software updates (at least not until now). What you are talking about is the delta version of the update. All updates always update all languages.
The millionth prime is 15,485,863. This means that he considered ~5.5 million more numbers that start with a 1 (10 million - 15.5 million) than numbers that start with any other digit.
I want FRAMEZZzzzzz...
Or did everyone already forget ECHELON? Or does it only count if you actively break into other systems, rather than only intercept everyone's personal, business and political Internet communications?
And it would really surprise me if they didn't break into other systems yet. It's not like they first asked for public approval for ECHELON before starting to set up and use it.
What is wrong with [...] not fretting about whether it may benefit someone else as well (financially or otherwise)?
It puts economic power into the hands of exploitative people.
I really don't see any exploiting in this situation (in the pejorative sense).
There's nothing wrong with mutually beneficial relationships between individuals and businesses, but when businesses achieve direct economic advantages from free labor (i.e. without giving something back), then other businesses, who acknowledge the value of support and pay the people who support their product, are at a disadvantage.
If you really can't think outside such a narrow economic box, then consider this simply as another way in which corporations should try to get people to like them that much that they are willing to spend their time "for free" on supporting their products (feel free to ponder whether in that case it is still really for free, since the company may then have invested in getting those people to do that).
That's a rational reason for a productive use of time. This fool in the article is just working for a corporation for free. There is a difference.
He's working for other users for free, and enjoying it. Sure, it also benefits a corporation, but so what? I really don't see what's so foolish about it. What is wrong with doing something you like, purely for fun/gratification, and not fretting about whether it may benefit someone else as well (financially or otherwise)?
People who write and support programs they get nothing out of (be it fame or something more tangible) are just as silly as McMurry.
Yes, simple personal satisfaction is so overrated. Imagine that, people who can feel good by simply helping other people. If there isn't a DSM-IV classification for that, let's hope there will be one in DSM-V. What this world urgently needs is a healthy dose of selfish pricks, because today's society is really starting to feel like Hippie in the Land of the Flying Rainbow Unicorn Ponies.
No way should you ever do this. If it's worth doing then it's worth getting paid for doing it. And for each McMurry out there there is one less paid job at Verizon.
Exactly! I've heard there are even idiots who will write and support entire computer programs for free! No wonder we're in an economic crisis...
Not to downplay this event but I really wonder why we don't hear much about espionage from western countries ? Are they better at it (rather than using malware or commonly avaliable tools) ? I am sure the Chinese etc have equally vulnerable systems.
Western countries spy (also on each other) using stuff like ECHELON, mainly for industrial spionage purposes, and this fact is well-documented and public knowledge. See e.g. the European Parliament's ECHELON report (search for "Published cases").
Does this mean that the source code would be freely available, but that you couldn't use it without paying them?
And that if you'd look at it, you'd be liable for tripple damages in the US (due to willful infringement).
While at first sight this would seem to imply that that they'd better simply give the code to the people who license the patents and not bother with open source, there are some cases where the source could still be useful. E.g., in many European countries (where officially we don't have software patents, but in practice we do under the weasel name "patents on computer-implemented inventions"), there is an exception in patent law for, a.o., non-commercial use.
Still, it sounds more like Microsoft's "shared source" than like real open source.
Citation please?
First google result I found said that net revenue had increase 101% in the last year, although YT profits represent only 1-1.5% of googles total ad revenue.
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/04/03/given-youtube-losses-should-google-buy-twitter/