It's actually difficult to see this as creating less freedom. In fact, right in the/. summary it phrased it as "take away some of their copyright privileges". If copyright were abolished, for example, none of these changes would be necessary-- and abolishment of copyright woudld, of course, be less government more freedom. Now, if we were to scale back copyright to simply allow less control than it does now (which is what is proposed), that would still be less government more freedom than what is in place now.
Your example with Senator Bygbawls is the sort of trouble people get into with analogies-- they're generally wrong. I could supply a "better" one, but it wouldn't do any good. Let's simply look at the main issue:
Copyright, as it stands now, is overly restrictive of freedom. Any restriction on the power of copyright increases the freedom of the people, and decreases the power of corporations over the government, and hence the people.
Someone needs to write a perl script to take this story, and s/x/y/g the names and technologies, and then feed every company and technology into it.
I know it's been mentioned before, but there's something better-- it covers far more than just patent lawsuits. That's right, folks, the slashdot story generator.
For someone so insistent on the "facts", you've made up quite a fairy tale. Assuming you didn't intend this as mindless flamebait, allow me to mention a few things:
1) Several years ago, when the major players of JEDEC got together and finalised the SDRAM standard, and later the DDR SDRAM standard, Rambus provided key technology to make those standards possible. Rambus's whole stance is that they didn't drive the standard formation, and didn't bring their technology to the committee-- otherwise, according to the JEDEC agreement, they couldn't patent it.
2) I know how much you slashdoters hate Big Corporations. On the one hand, Rambus. On the other, Micron and Hyundai. Which side do you think is bigger?
3) I certainly hope our court system will do The Right Thing and smack Micron and Hundai with some major penalties to make up for their theft and corporate espionage. In fact,the only people alleging espionage are Micron and Hyundai. Rambus isn't alleging any theft-- they're simply saying SDRAM infringes on their patents. Micron and Hyundai, by comparison, allege that Rambus not only failed to disclose their patents, but attempted to steer the standards committee's discussion towards infringing their patents.
Here's a choice quote: "There are simply no grounds in either the plain language of the definition or in the legislative history for interpreting the term 'digital musical recording' to include songs fixed on computer hard drives."
Wow-- songs fixed on a hard drive are not digital musical recordings. Then what was the whole lawsuit about, anyway? My friend's a capella group recorded their last album to hard drive first-- if he'd known those weren't digital musical recordings, he probably would have paid that recording studio a lot less! Apparently, music is created during the transfer from a hard drive to a CD. Simply fascinating.
Only lawyers could come up with a situation where we're not storing music on our hard drives in the form of mp3's, and that non-music is infringing on the copyright held on musical works.
We've been working with a lot of Java and XML. Some of us have been looking into the XML resources available to C/C++, and they just aren't as good. I realize you can put a very good system together with them, but it's not nearly as clean or easy to use.
And while we haven't tested the Java version under all of those platforms-- we don't even have all of those in house-- it's worked just fine under every platform we've tested on, including Linux, Windows 98/NT/2000, and Mac.
And guess what-- the runtime was already installed on all of those machines. We didn't even have to recompile, we just copied it and ran it. And, finally, the Xerces Java implementation is also totally open source.
The telling point, though, is that we decided to rewrite a lot of the SAX parser module. From my experience with C++, doing the same thing in that language would certainly have broken compilation or execution on some platforms, and required some platform-specific code. But again, we just compiled it, copied it over, and ran it.
1) Bitch about something entirely within your power to change: Besides from the fact that I am getting sick and tired of endless 'YRO' stories on/....
2) Make a statement that is blatantly incorrect, but sounds enough like what a real poster would say that people think you're serious: They are living on University property, the campus cops can do what they like.
3) Repeat: if this country were going into totalitarian meltdown as the/. editors would have us believe, we wouldn't hear about it in the first place.
4) Add token hypocrisy, just to lock it in as flamebait for people who hadn't noticed yet: This site has such an undergraduate, holier than thou serious attitude, it gets my goat.
Bravo, bravo. Study up, kids-- you will seldom see such a textbook example. Moderators, take note-- anything less is simply a troll.
Agreed. Which is why mp3 or some similar format will easily replace CD's. More fit in less space, and you can easily download them off the net. Eventually, pop wireless networking into your car, and you can send your entire song collection from your home to the car sitting in your garage.
Convenience? How about having your entire music collection everywhere you go? Home, car, and work-- impossible with CD's, but an eventual certainty with mp3 and its brethren.
Therefore, if we are participating in a 'virtual' reality (which really has just as much validity as reality), then we are just percieving a different environment in which things behave according to different laws.
I think you're on, er, on to something. If all of these realities have equal validity, then it's in fact no worse/better to kill someone in one of these than in what we construe as "real life". We aren't simply playing at killing someone, we're killing someone in a different reality.
This is all well and good in Quake, where the person respawns. But what about Rainbow 6, where there is no respawning? Is this murder? Could I prosecute someone for that? Case law, the DMCA, and the EULA say yes.
With the Dreamcast set top unit, this will only become worse. So many realities downloadable in an instant, all wired up for multiplayer-- people are going to murder reality even faster than the original poster. Now that's a scary thought.
Because it's really fucking funny. I first read it without the mod, thought "what a load of crap". Then I read it after seeing the mod, read it with a sense of humor-- and it's hilarious.
Anyway, it seems the 9th Circuit gets overturned all the time, so I wouldn't get too hopeful about this being a positive sign.
The case seemed like a fairly ideal one for SCOTUS to take, and they refused to hear it-- that seems like a very good sign, actually. It's certainly possible that they didn't feel like hearing any more cases in that term or somesuch, but they had to be conscious that by refusing to hear it, they significantly strengthened the 9th Circuit's ruling.
Agreed. We have tried a lot of XP. Some has worked, some hasn't. We ditched what didn't work, but maybe it would work just fine for a different team or a different project.
We're working on a very GUI-intensive project. What didn't work at all was JUnit testing. Their tips on how to write tests for a GUI just don't work. We got Silk Test to do our regression testing, but that doesn't run very often and is a pain in the ass. We've gotten to the point where someone just has to do a daily test by hand to see what's broken, unfortunately.
Selective pair programming, OTOH, is awesome. We don't do it for everything, but for the tougher bits we throw two people on it. We crank out better code in much less time.
Other techniques have worked or not worked to varying extents. It's worth mentioning we have a larger team than the book is probably assuming. It's also worth mentioning that where we've deviated from Extreme without trying it out first, we're usually wrong.
Overall, XP is not a good book because it tells you exactly what to do. It's a good book because it tells you what to TRY, and you keep what works. The process improvements that result from the techniques that work are generally more than worth the time put into trying them out.
"'Though I'm not a lawyer....' It is clear that Mr. Emtage is not a lawyer."
You just don't get analysis that cuts that deep on the TV news.:) BTW, not flaming, your post was interesting, but that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
Copyright gives them the ability to control copying of a work, which has nothing to do at all with what is being said.
Sure it does. What if what I want to say just happens to be identical to, say, Tom Clancy's latest book. I decide to say that by posting it on my web site. If that's not prohibited, Clancy's right to exclusivity no longer exists. If it is prohibited, they've made a law restricting my freedom of speech.
If you go read the source code (the law its self) you'll grok it.
I did read the source code. I was quoting from an online copy of the Constitution.
Part of it, of course, is wishful thinking-- they really WANT to pass a particular law, and uphold it, and so they make up a rationale.
There are two other issues, however. First, Congress is given the power and responsibility to pass laws for particular purposes, such as "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States", and "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". This entirely contradicts the First Amendment, which would make much of that (especially the second quotation, about copyright) impossible. In fact, many amendments, taken to their logical extremes, would totally void much of the constitution, inclusing many of the other amendments.
Because of these contradictions, they have to make interpretations-- this is not under debate, because there are many well-recognized contradictions. But where you side on the interpretations is a large part of what political affiliation you might have. Your interpretation, of course, is Libertarian. I would guess that even the Libertarians (though I am not entirely familiar with their platforms), for the most part, agree with Justice Holmes, who stated: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. . . . The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
If you are interested in the history of the Constitution, from its creation to many of the interpretations of it, I highly recommend this FindLaw resource, which has an astonishing amount of content, decently organized.
First of all, not to complain or anything, but we still don't know enough about the natural universe to have any clue whether a billionth-of-a-second-long pulse of coherent light is natural or not.
Oh, no! I hope this experiment doesn't tell us more about the natural universe!
If my experience with the PS2 is any indication (buy PS2, realize all the games suck, buy Dreamcast, achieve happiness), I should be a lot more excited about Sega's next console than Sony's. Sony may know how to hype (how the hell did they figure out how to hype the PS3 before anyone has a PS2?), but Sega figured out how to release a good console with great games. Screw the hype-- I'm going with the one I enjoy more.
talented Canadian musicians - who will prosper on their own without government help - promptly pick up and move to greener pastures in the United States.
(See Alanis Morrissette, The Barenaked Ladies, Crash Test Dummies, Big Sugar, Maestro Fres Wes, SoulDecision, Choclair, Celine Dion, Sloan,... Paul Anka?)
Wow! Are you saying that if we put this tax into effect in the U.S., we might be able to drive Celine Dion back whence she came? That's the most convincing argument I've heard yet in favor!
If we made the tax really really high, could we pass back the boy bands?
"This is a landmark case because it tells other companies that the privacy promises you make while you're in business must be kept when you go out of business," said Dave Steer, spokesman for privacy seal-of-approval group TRUSTe.
Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that at all. It just means that's what happened in this case. Next time, it might not go the right way, and what we really need is a fix in the legislation. Encouragingly enough, the article also has this bit of information: Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in an interview that he would like to reform those laws this year to protect consumer privacy.
Keep an eye out for those bills. His statement implied there's something in the bankruptcy laws that allows this sort of thing to happen. So rather than just rail against all the bad legislation (which we should still do), it'd be nice to have some legislation that most/.'ers can really get behind. Here's to hoping for a future story: New Bill to Protect Customer Privacy. Write your senators and congressmen!
As for MS "redesigning" the USB port - while initially it sounds like an assinine thing to do, it actually does make sense (at least to me). Otherwise, folks are going to see the port and try plugging in all sorts of USB device, and become quite confused and frustrated when nothing happens.
I agree with most of you comment, except for that bit which sounds like you've been listening to a bit too much MS marketing. If they're making this box for the "average consumer", that sort of person isn't going to be closely examining the port and thinking about what they can put in it. When's the last time your mom looked at the S-video port on your VCR and the PS/2 port on the back of your computer and double-checked to make sure they were different? Probably never.
The real reason to change the port is to ensure that hardware manufacturers tailor their hardware at least a little to the X-Box. You could still say this is a good reason-- perhaps they won't try to pitch some PC joysticks that are totally unfit for XBox games as "XBox compatible". Whether that reasoning played more of a factor than straight up marketing is quite debatable.
I know it's popular on/. to be rabidly anti-patent, and to fly off the handle whenever patents like this are mentioned. But there are legitimate reasons for all this, which you'd realize if you thought, and of course RTFA.
First, the color-blindness thing. Remember, patents exist to encourage innovation, not retard it. Millions of people have been wastefully failing to see the red-green portion of the spectrum for thousands of years, for no marketable purpose whatsoever! Think about that for a minute-- it's not innovation, it's imitation. Here we have a good corporate citizen finally taking that trend and making it marketable. That's the whole point of capitalism! To all those people claiming "prior art", I say to Russia with all of you, you godammed communists-- get off the not seeing the red-green portion of the spectrum bandwagon, and wake up to the new economy.
As far as the software patent goes, it's hardly a patent at all-- it's a well-written patent of the sort of idea that has been patented for generations. Why, just look at the text of it: "wherein said embed text format is parsed by said browser to automatically invoke said executable application to execute on said client workstation in order to display said object and enable interactive processing of said object within a display area created at said first location within the portion of said first distributed hypermedia document being displayed in said first browser-controlled window." Genius. Sheer genius. Overly broad? Nay, I say. Here are the limiting statements: "A system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object." If that's not narrow, I'm not sure what is. Ambigious? Hardly. If you understand what I quoted above, you understand most of the patent-- and what could be simpler?
I know it's also popular to blame all this misunderstanding on lawyerese. I admit that even I couldn't understand this line: "running an application program in a computer". But most of the patent is easy to follow, and I encourage you to read it before these knee-jerk reactions. I really think it's all a big misunderstanding about these patents, and once people understand that their rights and thoughts don't count unless they have millions of dollars, it'll all go much more smoothly.
Continuing the stupid troll/flame war, since it seems to get people modded up, and if I don't Karma Whore soon I won't have my +1 bonus....
I sure hope your digital TV isn't at all interactive, because that'd mean it was covered by BT's patent on linking. "Oh, but that's different-- it's a corporation. You 'mericans have control over your government." What-- you don't have any control over the companies operating within your borders? Sure you do!
"Hey Americans, stand up to your government, stop being so whiny." Yes, we should. And you should stand up to all the stupid shit going on Europe. Do you? All of it? Of course not.
Let's stop the stupid flame wars (or at least put 'em at -1, so I don't have to read them WHEN I'M BROWSING AT 4, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD), because it's stupid, hypocritical, and unproductive. Let me stipulate that Americans are stupid, Europeans are stupid, and let's get on with it. Censorship is stupid, patents on hyperlinking are stupid, American TV sucks, the BBC sucks, oh, and I forgot, Canada sucks too. Get over it and say something intelligent.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually difficult to see this as creating less freedom. In fact, right in the /. summary it phrased it as "take away some of their copyright privileges". If copyright were abolished, for example, none of these changes would be necessary-- and abolishment of copyright woudld, of course, be less government more freedom. Now, if we were to scale back copyright to simply allow less control than it does now (which is what is proposed), that would still be less government more freedom than what is in place now.
Your example with Senator Bygbawls is the sort of trouble people get into with analogies-- they're generally wrong. I could supply a "better" one, but it wouldn't do any good. Let's simply look at the main issue:
Copyright, as it stands now, is overly restrictive of freedom. Any restriction on the power of copyright increases the freedom of the people, and decreases the power of corporations over the government, and hence the people.
Someone needs to write a perl script to take this story, and s/x/y/g the names and technologies, and then feed every company and technology into it.
I know it's been mentioned before, but there's something better-- it covers far more than just patent lawsuits. That's right, folks, the slashdot story generator.
For someone so insistent on the "facts", you've made up quite a fairy tale. Assuming you didn't intend this as mindless flamebait, allow me to mention a few things:
1) Several years ago, when the major players of JEDEC got together and finalised the SDRAM standard, and later the DDR SDRAM standard, Rambus provided key technology to make those standards possible. Rambus's whole stance is that they didn't drive the standard formation, and didn't bring their technology to the committee-- otherwise, according to the JEDEC agreement, they couldn't patent it.
2) I know how much you slashdoters hate Big Corporations. On the one hand, Rambus. On the other, Micron and Hyundai. Which side do you think is bigger?
3) I certainly hope our court system will do The Right Thing and smack Micron and Hundai with some major penalties to make up for their theft and corporate espionage. In fact,the only people alleging espionage are Micron and Hyundai. Rambus isn't alleging any theft-- they're simply saying SDRAM infringes on their patents. Micron and Hyundai, by comparison, allege that Rambus not only failed to disclose their patents, but attempted to steer the standards committee's discussion towards infringing their patents.
Here's a choice quote:
"There are simply no grounds in either the plain language of the definition or in the legislative history for interpreting the term 'digital musical recording' to include songs fixed on computer hard drives."
Wow-- songs fixed on a hard drive are not digital musical recordings. Then what was the whole lawsuit about, anyway? My friend's a capella group recorded their last album to hard drive first-- if he'd known those weren't digital musical recordings, he probably would have paid that recording studio a lot less! Apparently, music is created during the transfer from a hard drive to a CD. Simply fascinating.
Only lawyers could come up with a situation where we're not storing music on our hard drives in the form of mp3's, and that non-music is infringing on the copyright held on musical works.
We've been working with a lot of Java and XML. Some of us have been looking into the XML resources available to C/C++, and they just aren't as good. I realize you can put a very good system together with them, but it's not nearly as clean or easy to use.
And while we haven't tested the Java version under all of those platforms-- we don't even have all of those in house-- it's worked just fine under every platform we've tested on, including Linux, Windows 98/NT/2000, and Mac.
And guess what-- the runtime was already installed on all of those machines. We didn't even have to recompile, we just copied it and ran it. And, finally, the Xerces Java implementation is also totally open source.
The telling point, though, is that we decided to rewrite a lot of the SAX parser module. From my experience with C++, doing the same thing in that language would certainly have broken compilation or execution on some platforms, and required some platform-specific code. But again, we just compiled it, copied it over, and ran it.
Anatomy of flamebait, example 1.
/. ...
/. editors would have us believe, we wouldn't hear about it in the first place.
1) Bitch about something entirely within your power to change: Besides from the fact that I am getting sick and tired of endless 'YRO' stories on
2) Make a statement that is blatantly incorrect, but sounds enough like what a real poster would say that people think you're serious: They are living on University property, the campus cops can do what they like.
3) Repeat: if this country were going into totalitarian meltdown as the
4) Add token hypocrisy, just to lock it in as flamebait for people who hadn't noticed yet: This site has such an undergraduate, holier than thou serious attitude, it gets my goat.
Bravo, bravo. Study up, kids-- you will seldom see such a textbook example. Moderators, take note-- anything less is simply a troll.
The bottom line for consumers is convenience.
Agreed. Which is why mp3 or some similar format will easily replace CD's. More fit in less space, and you can easily download them off the net. Eventually, pop wireless networking into your car, and you can send your entire song collection from your home to the car sitting in your garage.
Convenience? How about having your entire music collection everywhere you go? Home, car, and work-- impossible with CD's, but an eventual certainty with mp3 and its brethren.
You've basically got it right. However, the question is: do you need to stop your UT killing sprees, or start some up in RL?
They're sure as hell not taking away my UT.
Therefore, if we are participating in a 'virtual' reality (which really has just as much validity as reality), then we are just percieving a different environment in which things behave according to different laws.
I think you're on, er, on to something. If all of these realities have equal validity, then it's in fact no worse/better to kill someone in one of these than in what we construe as "real life". We aren't simply playing at killing someone, we're killing someone in a different reality.
This is all well and good in Quake, where the person respawns. But what about Rainbow 6, where there is no respawning? Is this murder? Could I prosecute someone for that? Case law, the DMCA, and the EULA say yes.
With the Dreamcast set top unit, this will only become worse. So many realities downloadable in an instant, all wired up for multiplayer-- people are going to murder reality even faster than the original poster. Now that's a scary thought.
Because it's really fucking funny. I first read it without the mod, thought "what a load of crap". Then I read it after seeing the mod, read it with a sense of humor-- and it's hilarious.
Well, to each his own I suppose.
Anyway, it seems the 9th Circuit gets overturned all the time, so I wouldn't get too hopeful about this being a positive sign.
The case seemed like a fairly ideal one for SCOTUS to take, and they refused to hear it-- that seems like a very good sign, actually. It's certainly possible that they didn't feel like hearing any more cases in that term or somesuch, but they had to be conscious that by refusing to hear it, they significantly strengthened the 9th Circuit's ruling.
Agreed. We have tried a lot of XP. Some has worked, some hasn't. We ditched what didn't work, but maybe it would work just fine for a different team or a different project.
We're working on a very GUI-intensive project. What didn't work at all was JUnit testing. Their tips on how to write tests for a GUI just don't work. We got Silk Test to do our regression testing, but that doesn't run very often and is a pain in the ass. We've gotten to the point where someone just has to do a daily test by hand to see what's broken, unfortunately.
Selective pair programming, OTOH, is awesome. We don't do it for everything, but for the tougher bits we throw two people on it. We crank out better code in much less time.
Other techniques have worked or not worked to varying extents. It's worth mentioning we have a larger team than the book is probably assuming. It's also worth mentioning that where we've deviated from Extreme without trying it out first, we're usually wrong.
Overall, XP is not a good book because it tells you exactly what to do. It's a good book because it tells you what to TRY, and you keep what works. The process improvements that result from the techniques that work are generally more than worth the time put into trying them out.
Interesting passage from your analysis.
:) BTW, not flaming, your post was interesting, but that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
"'Though I'm not a lawyer....' It is clear that Mr. Emtage is not a lawyer."
You just don't get analysis that cuts that deep on the TV news.
Copyright gives them the ability to control copying of a work, which has nothing to do at all with what is being said.
Sure it does. What if what I want to say just happens to be identical to, say, Tom Clancy's latest book. I decide to say that by posting it on my web site. If that's not prohibited, Clancy's right to exclusivity no longer exists. If it is prohibited, they've made a law restricting my freedom of speech.
If you go read the source code (the law its self) you'll grok it.
I did read the source code. I was quoting from an online copy of the Constitution.
Part of it, of course, is wishful thinking-- they really WANT to pass a particular law, and uphold it, and so they make up a rationale.
There are two other issues, however. First, Congress is given the power and responsibility to pass laws for particular purposes, such as "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States", and "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". This entirely contradicts the First Amendment, which would make much of that (especially the second quotation, about copyright) impossible. In fact, many amendments, taken to their logical extremes, would totally void much of the constitution, inclusing many of the other amendments.
Because of these contradictions, they have to make interpretations-- this is not under debate, because there are many well-recognized contradictions. But where you side on the interpretations is a large part of what political affiliation you might have. Your interpretation, of course, is Libertarian. I would guess that even the Libertarians (though I am not entirely familiar with their platforms), for the most part, agree with Justice Holmes, who stated: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. . . . The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
If you are interested in the history of the Constitution, from its creation to many of the interpretations of it, I highly recommend this FindLaw resource, which has an astonishing amount of content, decently organized.
First of all, not to complain or anything, but we still don't know enough about the natural universe to have any clue whether a billionth-of-a-second-long pulse of coherent light is natural or not.
Oh, no! I hope this experiment doesn't tell us more about the natural universe!
If my experience with the PS2 is any indication (buy PS2, realize all the games suck, buy Dreamcast, achieve happiness), I should be a lot more excited about Sega's next console than Sony's. Sony may know how to hype (how the hell did they figure out how to hype the PS3 before anyone has a PS2?), but Sega figured out how to release a good console with great games. Screw the hype-- I'm going with the one I enjoy more.
talented Canadian musicians - who will prosper on their own without government help - promptly pick up and move to greener pastures in the United States. ... Paul Anka?)
(See Alanis Morrissette, The Barenaked Ladies, Crash Test Dummies, Big Sugar, Maestro Fres Wes, SoulDecision, Choclair, Celine Dion, Sloan,
Wow! Are you saying that if we put this tax into effect in the U.S., we might be able to drive Celine Dion back whence she came? That's the most convincing argument I've heard yet in favor!
If we made the tax really really high, could we pass back the boy bands?
Ya know, they're selling 'em on ebay now like something with real value-- you know, like an EQ account.
"This is a landmark case because it tells other companies that the privacy promises you make while you're in business must be kept when you go out of business," said Dave Steer, spokesman for privacy seal-of-approval group TRUSTe.
/.'ers can really get behind. Here's to hoping for a future story: New Bill to Protect Customer Privacy. Write your senators and congressmen!
Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that at all. It just means that's what happened in this case. Next time, it might not go the right way, and what we really need is a fix in the legislation. Encouragingly enough, the article also has this bit of information: Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in an interview that he would like to reform those laws this year to protect consumer privacy.
Keep an eye out for those bills. His statement implied there's something in the bankruptcy laws that allows this sort of thing to happen. So rather than just rail against all the bad legislation (which we should still do), it'd be nice to have some legislation that most
Sorry to burst your bubble...
I hate that phrase. You're not sorry at all. If you really felt bad about it, you probably wouldn't do it.
Yes, I'm glad you made the post. It was nicely informative. But you're still not sorry.
As for MS "redesigning" the USB port - while initially it sounds like an assinine thing to do, it actually does make sense (at least to me). Otherwise, folks are going to see the port and try plugging in all sorts of USB device, and become quite confused and frustrated when nothing happens.
I agree with most of you comment, except for that bit which sounds like you've been listening to a bit too much MS marketing. If they're making this box for the "average consumer", that sort of person isn't going to be closely examining the port and thinking about what they can put in it. When's the last time your mom looked at the S-video port on your VCR and the PS/2 port on the back of your computer and double-checked to make sure they were different? Probably never.
The real reason to change the port is to ensure that hardware manufacturers tailor their hardware at least a little to the X-Box. You could still say this is a good reason-- perhaps they won't try to pitch some PC joysticks that are totally unfit for XBox games as "XBox compatible". Whether that reasoning played more of a factor than straight up marketing is quite debatable.
I know it's popular on /. to be rabidly anti-patent, and to fly off the handle whenever patents like this are mentioned. But there are legitimate reasons for all this, which you'd realize if you thought, and of course RTFA.
First, the color-blindness thing. Remember, patents exist to encourage innovation, not retard it. Millions of people have been wastefully failing to see the red-green portion of the spectrum for thousands of years, for no marketable purpose whatsoever! Think about that for a minute-- it's not innovation, it's imitation. Here we have a good corporate citizen finally taking that trend and making it marketable. That's the whole point of capitalism! To all those people claiming "prior art", I say to Russia with all of you, you godammed communists-- get off the not seeing the red-green portion of the spectrum bandwagon, and wake up to the new economy.
As far as the software patent goes, it's hardly a patent at all-- it's a well-written patent of the sort of idea that has been patented for generations. Why, just look at the text of it: "wherein said embed text format is parsed by said browser to automatically invoke said executable application to execute on said client workstation in order to display said object and enable interactive processing of said object within a display area created at said first location within the portion of said first distributed hypermedia document being displayed in said first browser-controlled window." Genius. Sheer genius. Overly broad? Nay, I say. Here are the limiting statements: "A system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object." If that's not narrow, I'm not sure what is. Ambigious? Hardly. If you understand what I quoted above, you understand most of the patent-- and what could be simpler?
I know it's also popular to blame all this misunderstanding on lawyerese. I admit that even I couldn't understand this line: "running an application program in a computer". But most of the patent is easy to follow, and I encourage you to read it before these knee-jerk reactions. I really think it's all a big misunderstanding about these patents, and once people understand that their rights and thoughts don't count unless they have millions of dollars, it'll all go much more smoothly.
Continuing the stupid troll/flame war, since it seems to get people modded up, and if I don't Karma Whore soon I won't have my +1 bonus....
I sure hope your digital TV isn't at all interactive, because that'd mean it was covered by BT's patent on linking. "Oh, but that's different-- it's a corporation. You 'mericans have control over your government." What-- you don't have any control over the companies operating within your borders? Sure you do!
"Hey Americans, stand up to your government, stop being so whiny." Yes, we should. And you should stand up to all the stupid shit going on Europe. Do you? All of it? Of course not.
Let's stop the stupid flame wars (or at least put 'em at -1, so I don't have to read them WHEN I'M BROWSING AT 4, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD), because it's stupid, hypocritical, and unproductive. Let me stipulate that Americans are stupid, Europeans are stupid, and let's get on with it. Censorship is stupid, patents on hyperlinking are stupid, American TV sucks, the BBC sucks, oh, and I forgot, Canada sucks too. Get over it and say something intelligent.
Yeah, but didn't he mention that soon he'd have a Beowulf Cluster of them?