It's true. Several instruction which are executed in one cycle on a G4, are cracked on the G5. Many instructions also have a longer latency on the G5. However, the G4 (until now) has a worse memory interface, which means that applications that process huge data sets are still slower clock for clock on a G4 than on a G5.
So claim 1 probably has no chance of being enforced whatsoever.
That's irrelevant. You can still (threaten to and actually) sue people over the fact that they violate the claim. Each claim is a separate monopoly that has been granted, and each claim must be individually struck down.
If one claim simply covers using hashes to determine whether two files are equal, then they did receive a state-mandated monopoly on that (regardless of how likely it is enforceable in court).
Your link is just about as shady as it gets. Look, it doesn't matter what patents IBM files.
It does matter that IBM is actively trying to expand the borders of patentable subject matter, and actively lobbying (both at patent offices and with politicians) to get the broken US system introduced in Europe.
Has IBM (in recent times) used it's patent portfolio to squash competition or to do generally evil things? No.
How many small European software companies do you think can play the patent game? Do you think IBM does not know this? IBM knows that no-one else can compete with them in the patent race, and even if someone else has a patent, they can get access to a cheap/free license because of the tons of patents they have.
See the remark at the top of page 4 of this testimony to the European Commission. That reference dates back to 1990, but there is no reason to assume that they stopped leveraging this competitive advantage while at the same time obtaining more and more patents, and starting to enforce their patents more actively from 1993 onwards (see slide 13, the curve does not flatten because R&D spending declines, but because patent license income goes up).
IBM has invented a good chunk of the technology out there today. The article mentions pursuing patent claims against Oracle, well, IBM invented the relational database!
Yes, and IBM tried to claim it invented case conversion using a lookup table (click on the patent number to get the pdf). Fortunately, there was prior art.
You also seem to assume that because someone did something first, they have a natural right to a monopoly on doing that. They don't. Patent law is a purely economical law which introduces artificial monopolies in the market. You only do that if you find out the market is running completely haywire due to the absence of such monopolies. IBM's early software work was not patented either, simply because there were no software patents. Did IBM suffer because of that? Of course not, they benefited a lot from he fact that the creators of VisiCalc hadn't patented "the database", even though they "invented" it.
Software patents are not necessary to keep the software market at large innovating or functioning correctly. Even enquiries by pro-swpat institutes like Max Planck and Fraunhofer show that competition is the main driving force to keep innovating. If you don't innovate, your competitor will and you lose.
Time to market and copyright give you a small lead time advantage, and the fact that the resulting monopolies are either fairly narrow but long (copyright) or broad but short (trade secret) means that the industry can keep moving at a high pace and does not require the high transaction costs associated with patents (and without requiring huge cross licensing deals between large companies).
A lot of companies exist and make lots of money based on technologies that IBM invented but did not pursue.
And IBM makes a lot of money on innovations from other people. Additionally, you don't hear about the individual cases where companies like IBM press other companies into paying for licenses, unless they go to court (which is only a very small fraction, who can fight IBM in court?). Companies also do not publicise that kind of things, since the fact that they have to pay 1% to 5% of their revenue on a product to IBM (or anyone else) is not good publicity.
Exactly because such cases are not publicised by anyone, there are
Many of the companies listed (IBM, etc.) actually DO innovate,
It's certainly true that IBM innovates.
and use the patent system the way it was intended
But this is at least an incomplete statement, unless you think the patent system was intended to get patents on case conversion using a lookup table (fwiw, that patent was not granted because it lacked novelty, but they did try to get it). You can find a couple more great patented (where the patents were granted) IBM inventions listed here, such as the ability for a web browser to have different user profiles with separate cookies.
At least the software patents from IBM are generally not particularly better than anyone else's. And unless you consider "patent everything you can so you can afterwards extract licensing money from everyone else" (and apart from that use the patents you have to force everyone else to give you access to their patents, so their patents become worthless in so far competing with you is concerned) as the way the patent system was intended to work, IBM is definitely not (only) using it as intended.
It don't understand the problem with that. Most blacklists based on spamvertized links (like surbl) are text-based, not IP-based. They should need any DNS lookups.
1 July 1998: IBM manages to push through patents on "computer programs that have a further technical effect beyond the normal physical interaction between a computer and a computer program" at the EPO (represented by Fritz Teufel, their head patent lawyer in Europe). An example of such a further technical effect is reducing the number of mouse clicks (as in Amazon One Click).
8 September 2000: Pension Benefits case: IBM manages to push through "program claims" (claims on computer programs on a carrier) at the EPO.
They are not just passive bystanders that are victims of the system, they are actively lobbying for ever expanding boundaries of patentability. You do not do that if you think you will not be able to extra more licensing money from others that way, or if you think you won't be able to leverage your huge patent portfolio to exercise control on the market.
They are playing the game by the rules that have been written
And IBM, for one, is pushing very hard to have those rules codified where they aren't yet. They're not innocent poor victims of the system at all. They are the system. They pushed to rules towards what they are today.
So what they end up with is not a valid JPEG file, I guess?
No, just like a zipped JPEG file is also not a valid JPEG file. Stuffit is an archiver, just like zip, rar, bzip2 and whatnot. It simply has to be possible to decompress the result back into the original file.
IBM is just playing games, they are lobbying heavily in favour of software patents in Europe. See e.g. this reaction from the nosoftwarepatents.com campaign.
How do they propose to prevent journalists/fans from simply using a digital camera to record it and them upload it shortly afterwards.
Maybe they borrowed the RIAA's night vision goggles.
My handy prediction - if a single thing goes wrong during his speech it'll be on the net the same day.
I doubt it has anything to do with Jobs being scared that something might go wrong. Not that nothing can go wrong or that it is even unlikely, but I don't see why that risk would be bigger this time than previous times.
If anything, it seems more likely to me that it's because Jobs is angry that the rumour sites stole his thunder.
Are you kidding me? No... the more people downloading/seeding an individual torrent, the faster it downloads. More files have nothing to do with anything.
You're right that more files don't have anything to do with it, but uploading (a single file) faster does give you (potentially) higher download speeds (for that same file).
In essence, every practise that improves privacy would be, if the reasoning is followed consistently.
Your never ending quest towards consistency is consistently what makes your arguments seem so unworldly from time to time. There are socially accepted boundaries between a certain degree of privacy and a certain degree of accountability (e.g., I think every ISP out there keeps track of which customer used which IP address at which time for quite a while).
But since those rules are not consistent over all societies or people, or even not necessarily persistent over time for one particular person, you refuse to take those into account or to accept them. That way you can keep arguing endlessly in your own logically consistent world, but it's an imaginary world. One I wouldn't want to live in at all, because it would be a world as if ruled by machines. No room for compassion, ethics or other things like that, because those are never logically consistent, since they are per definition based on irrational thinking.
Locking out all those things greatly simplifies the way you can look at the world, but almost completely disregards what makes us human, both the flaws and virtues.
I can't imagine there aren't any philosophers or SF-authors out there who haven't already written about such worlds, and I'm really curious whether any of those have thought it would result in a world you would want to live in.
If freenet is morally wrong, because people can abuse it, aren't ISPs morally wrong, because they provide services which makes it possible for Freenet to run?
If you think there is no substantive difference between supporting/using a common, generic communication infrastructure on the one hand, and actively partaking in trying to make traffic over such an infrastructure "untrackable" (without any control over what such traffic consists of) on the other hand, then so be it.
True. But the question remains if they think ISPs should feel morally/ethitically compelled to close their services?
ISP's are common carriers, and they log a whole lot of stuff (much more than even I would want, and they have to keep it for much longer than I would want as well). In case of FreeNet, you are helping disguising the origin of data, and that's not what an ISP does in any way.
Anonymous hotspots are a different matter, and once those get abused enough by spammers and the like, they will probably start introducing some form of authentication as well.
If I know Nike is using childlabor and think that is unethical, then am I not being unethical too, when I buy shoes of Nike. Or, do I then say: "well, *I* am not using childlabour, but Nike, so it's not an issue anymore."?
The latter case is indeed hypocritical. But there is a difference between actively attempting to disguise data and not cooperating (because you're unable or because you don't want to) to catch abusers, or by being a common carrier which takes due diligence to prevent/minimize abuse by being able to hold people accountable to a certain extent (which is not what you are doing when buying stuff from Nike if you know they use child labour).
It's a fact that there is a trade-off as far as absolute privacy is concerned if you want to be able to hold people accountable for what they do. If you do not want that be possible for the exchange of data under any circumstances (because the ultimate morality Oracle whom everyone agrees to be authoritative on all possible issues does not exist, and the fact that people can be held accountable can/is also abused), then you cannot make that trade-off, which is what FreeNet tries to do as far as I understand it.
I think the term 'actively' is misleading, in the sense that it is no more actively involved then an ISP.
Most people are not ISP's and do not want the take the responsibilities of being one.
As is the term 'in any way'. If you put tremendous effort and resources into it, you still could make out who send what.
After the fact? Or log the original source of all data that you traffic all the time?
So, publically available hotspots make it next to impossible to know who send what (provided you don't repeatedly use the same hotspot when under surveillance or something), so it could be argumented that those hotspots make it possible or at least more easy to engage in potentially abusive behaviour while making it more difficult to track them, right?
Which is why most people are not providers of public hotspots. I think this person perfectly described why people are entitled to not participate in FreeNet based on moral grounds, without being hypocritical for not arguing against the principle of common carriers.
So does running a proxy-server. And lot of ISP's run proxyservers.
FreeNet is akin to running an anonymous open-for-all non-logging proxy server. That's not what lots of ISP's run at all.
Cybercafees and even more so hotspots make it almost impossible to track any abusers; by the same reasoning, they should be forbidden.
Nobody is talking about forbidding anything here, only about actively participating in potentially abusive behaviour, without any way of ever helping law enforcement to track down the perpetrators.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true. Several instruction which are executed in one cycle on a G4, are cracked on the G5. Many instructions also have a longer latency on the G5. However, the G4 (until now) has a worse memory interface, which means that applications that process huge data sets are still slower clock for clock on a G4 than on a G5.
If one claim simply covers using hashes to determine whether two files are equal, then they did receive a state-mandated monopoly on that (regardless of how likely it is enforceable in court).
It does matter that IBM is actively trying to expand the borders of patentable subject matter, and actively lobbying (both at patent offices and with politicians) to get the broken US system introduced in Europe.
How many small European software companies do you think can play the patent game? Do you think IBM does not know this? IBM knows that no-one else can compete with them in the patent race, and even if someone else has a patent, they can get access to a cheap/free license because of the tons of patents they have.
See the remark at the top of page 4 of this testimony to the European Commission. That reference dates back to 1990, but there is no reason to assume that they stopped leveraging this competitive advantage while at the same time obtaining more and more patents, and starting to enforce their patents more actively from 1993 onwards (see slide 13, the curve does not flatten because R&D spending declines, but because patent license income goes up).
Yes, and IBM tried to claim it invented case conversion using a lookup table (click on the patent number to get the pdf). Fortunately, there was prior art.
You also seem to assume that because someone did something first, they have a natural right to a monopoly on doing that. They don't. Patent law is a purely economical law which introduces artificial monopolies in the market. You only do that if you find out the market is running completely haywire due to the absence of such monopolies. IBM's early software work was not patented either, simply because there were no software patents. Did IBM suffer because of that? Of course not, they benefited a lot from he fact that the creators of VisiCalc hadn't patented "the database", even though they "invented" it.
Software patents are not necessary to keep the software market at large innovating or functioning correctly. Even enquiries by pro-swpat institutes like Max Planck and Fraunhofer show that competition is the main driving force to keep innovating. If you don't innovate, your competitor will and you lose.
Time to market and copyright give you a small lead time advantage, and the fact that the resulting monopolies are either fairly narrow but long (copyright) or broad but short (trade secret) means that the industry can keep moving at a high pace and does not require the high transaction costs associated with patents (and without requiring huge cross licensing deals between large companies).
And IBM makes a lot of money on innovations from other people. Additionally, you don't hear about the individual cases where companies like IBM press other companies into paying for licenses, unless they go to court (which is only a very small fraction, who can fight IBM in court?). Companies also do not publicise that kind of things, since the fact that they have to pay 1% to 5% of their revenue on a product to IBM (or anyone else) is not good publicity.
Exactly because such cases are not publicised by anyone, there are
At least the software patents from IBM are generally not particularly better than anyone else's. And unless you consider "patent everything you can so you can afterwards extract licensing money from everyone else" (and apart from that use the patents you have to force everyone else to give you access to their patents, so their patents become worthless in so far competing with you is concerned) as the way the patent system was intended to work, IBM is definitely not (only) using it as intended.
It don't understand the problem with that. Most blacklists based on spamvertized links (like surbl) are text-based, not IP-based. They should need any DNS lookups.
- 18 November 1998: IBM kills study on software patents by the Whitehouse
- 1 July 1998: IBM manages to push through patents on "computer programs that have a further technical effect beyond the normal physical interaction between a computer and a computer program" at the EPO (represented by Fritz Teufel, their head patent lawyer in Europe). An example of such a further technical effect is reducing the number of mouse clicks (as in Amazon One Click).
-
8 September 2000: Pension Benefits case: IBM manages to push through "program claims" (claims on computer programs on a carrier) at the EPO.
-
30 October 2000: Fritz Teufel, IBM head patent lawyer, takes part in a German debate representing the pro software patents side (German article)
- IBM: $1.6 billion revenue from patent licensing in 2000.
They are not just passive bystanders that are victims of the system, they are actively lobbying for ever expanding boundaries of patentability. You do not do that if you think you will not be able to extra more licensing money from others that way, or if you think you won't be able to leverage your huge patent portfolio to exercise control on the market.Read this for a different perspective on that.
Now that you've posted your comment, you might want to read the story to get the answer.
Again incorrect. 16MB is even enough for Quartz Extreme. Tiger does need a 64MB card for CoreImage acceleration though.
IBM is just playing games, they are lobbying heavily in favour of software patents in Europe. See e.g. this reaction from the nosoftwarepatents.com campaign.
You might want to read this account for a more balanced picture. The broken patent system we have in the West is coming back to haunt us.
Not just that, China also owns about 40% of US debt.
They did so because they were either watching the video stream, or the satellite feed.
I don't know why. That's just how it is, if I remember correctly.
If anything, it seems more likely to me that it's because Jobs is angry that the rumour sites stole his thunder.
IIRC the wireless network in the keynote room is taken down for the duration of the keynote (at least it was on previous occasions).
But since those rules are not consistent over all societies or people, or even not necessarily persistent over time for one particular person, you refuse to take those into account or to accept them. That way you can keep arguing endlessly in your own logically consistent world, but it's an imaginary world. One I wouldn't want to live in at all, because it would be a world as if ruled by machines. No room for compassion, ethics or other things like that, because those are never logically consistent, since they are per definition based on irrational thinking.
Locking out all those things greatly simplifies the way you can look at the world, but almost completely disregards what makes us human, both the flaws and virtues.
I can't imagine there aren't any philosophers or SF-authors out there who haven't already written about such worlds, and I'm really curious whether any of those have thought it would result in a world you would want to live in.
Anonymous hotspots are a different matter, and once those get abused enough by spammers and the like, they will probably start introducing some form of authentication as well.
The latter case is indeed hypocritical. But there is a difference between actively attempting to disguise data and not cooperating (because you're unable or because you don't want to) to catch abusers, or by being a common carrier which takes due diligence to prevent/minimize abuse by being able to hold people accountable to a certain extent (which is not what you are doing when buying stuff from Nike if you know they use child labour).It's a fact that there is a trade-off as far as absolute privacy is concerned if you want to be able to hold people accountable for what they do. If you do not want that be possible for the exchange of data under any circumstances (because the ultimate morality Oracle whom everyone agrees to be authoritative on all possible issues does not exist, and the fact that people can be held accountable can/is also abused), then you cannot make that trade-off, which is what FreeNet tries to do as far as I understand it.