There are numerous and grave consequences if corporations control the food supply. As it stands, they already control a large part of the production. However, if the global seed supply falls under the dominion of a cartel of entities whose sole purpose is profit - we're all royally screwed. This is something which is going on right now mostly in third world countries which rely on terms set by the world bank.
I propose a reasonable compromise: no product meant for eventual human consumption can be patented.
That way, people are free to explore the science of growing crops for industrial purposes, such as stronger fibers for lighter materials, or growing drugs and keep their 'intellectual property.' At the same time, it will help slow down the corporate exploitation of the whole human population.
The RIAA and SDMI are acting like the church in the dark ages. In the old days, attempting to perform research or disseminate scientific ideas led to excommunication or death. Today, the corporations sue you out of existence.
Back in 1999, there were a few panoramic software companies popping up. The nice thing about the development of it is that the math is pretty simple. We had a java applet panoramic image viewer that ran reasonably fast (>10fps) on pentium machines. Figuring out the math took a couple of days, and optimization only took a few weeks.
The tougher part of the problem is of course the image creation, which we used a specialized 3d rasterization pipeline to accomplish. I'm even named on a patent for some of the technology we used.
"Their lives and jobs are going to be frustrating -- people protect themselves from frustration by deciding not to care. When this happens, it's bad for those people and for society as a whole."
Personally, I feel RMS touches on an important issue here. People don't care because dollars are traded for loss of emotional attachment. Everything is a tradeoff, and when businessmen speak, they don't worry about the non-dollar tradeoffs - which are slowly de-humanizing mainstream culture.
Napster is in fact providing two valuable services which require a fair amount of computing power.
The first service is a real-time search engine which adds and drops hundreds of users a minute.
Imagine what it would be like to only be able to browse songs user per user for the 100,000 or so logged in at any particular point in time.
The second service is a connection service - the very definition of middle man.
These restrictions are arbitrary, needless, and will probably eventually run mp3.com out of business. Since they already have a rip of my CDs, it's not like they're using a log of server space to record that I have 25, 100, or even 10,000 of them. A simple database insert will record everything necessary.
The other restriction of periodically proving your ownership makes it even more useless since you lose all the portability of mp3s. Might as well use Napster or myplay.
On a more serious note, it seems Amazon.com has finally found its economic niche -- bringing down the entire global internet economy through frivolous patents and lawsuits. It's too bad it won't actually ever make them profitable. The sooner this company dies, the better.
Though we'll all rejoice when Amazon goes under, however, they will be liquidated to pay off some of their debt. Part of the assets liquidated will include intellectual property. Their silly patents are witus until they are either:
Slashdot Mirror
There are numerous and grave consequences if corporations control the food supply. As it stands, they already control a large part of the production. However, if the global seed supply falls under the dominion of a cartel of entities whose sole purpose is profit - we're all royally screwed. This is something which is going on right now mostly in third world countries which rely on terms set by the world bank.
I propose a reasonable compromise: no product meant for eventual human consumption can be patented.
That way, people are free to explore the science of growing crops for industrial purposes, such as stronger fibers for lighter materials, or growing drugs and keep their 'intellectual property.' At the same time, it will help slow down the corporate exploitation of the whole human population.
The RIAA and SDMI are acting like the church in the dark ages. In the old days, attempting to perform research or disseminate scientific ideas led to excommunication or death. Today, the corporations sue you out of existence.
Back in 1999, there were a few panoramic software companies popping up. The nice thing about the development of it is that the math is pretty simple. We had a java applet panoramic image viewer that ran reasonably fast (>10fps) on pentium machines. Figuring out the math took a couple of days, and optimization only took a few weeks.
The tougher part of the problem is of course the image creation, which we used a specialized 3d rasterization pipeline to accomplish. I'm even named on a patent for some of the technology we used.
Personally, I feel RMS touches on an important issue here. People don't care because dollars are traded for loss of emotional attachment. Everything is a tradeoff, and when businessmen speak, they don't worry about the non-dollar tradeoffs - which are slowly de-humanizing mainstream culture.
Not true.
Napster is in fact providing two valuable services which require a fair amount of computing power. The first service is a real-time search engine which adds and drops hundreds of users a minute. Imagine what it would be like to only be able to browse songs user per user for the 100,000 or so logged in at any particular point in time. The second service is a connection service - the very definition of middle man.
These restrictions are arbitrary, needless, and will probably eventually run mp3.com out of business. Since they already have a rip of my CDs, it's not like they're using a log of server space to record that I have 25, 100, or even 10,000 of them. A simple database insert will record everything necessary.
The other restriction of periodically proving your ownership makes it even more useless since you lose all the portability of mp3s. Might as well use Napster or myplay.
Check out my mix.