If there was no possibly of penalty to the lawyers for abusing the rules of the court then there would be no reason for them not to do so all the time (perhaps as part of a "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" strategy, or to overload the court and buy themselves more time).
Mary Magdeline was not a prostitute. Nowhere in the bible is she called a prostitute, instead it was just common tradition dating back to the early Catholic church when they began their demonisation of woman and sex. Back in the 60s I believe it was the common tradition was official revoked by the Pope.
So according to the bible and the modern Catholic church Mary Magdeline was not a prostitute.
You've tried to paint copyright restrictions as communistic, but unlimited copyright is not consistant with a society of maximised individual freedom (classical liberalism). Once you put an idea out into the world, whether it be a software algorithm, a story, a song or painting, that idea now exists in the minds of other people.
There are many copyrighted ideas that exist in my mind, such as songs I could recite, stories I could re-tell, or pieces of art that I could recreate given enough skill. Copyright restricts my freedom as an individual; it says that I have no right to use these ideas that now exist in my mind or in my posession.
We as a society recognise that if we demand our rightful individual freedom then artists will suffer for it, and that this will hurt us because the existing artists will stop creating art, and future artists will be discouraged from creating anything in the first place. Because of this, we as a society agree to grant artists a limited monopoly on their ideas, we agree to let them limit our personal freedom, so that they may profit from their ideas.
This is an ideal solution because it benefits the artist, in that they can profit from their ideas, and it benefits society in that artists are encouraged to create art so that they may profit (or at least survive). We only grant a limited compensation because this is best for society (it means artists must keep creating more art) and because we are only willing to allow our personal freedom to be oppressed for a limited time.
The perpetual extension of copyright and the general corruption of the intellectual property concept means that the balance has shifted away from equal individual/artist benefit to a scenario of heavy artist benefit with little individual/society benefit (and it's not even the artists who benefit, it's their corporate masters). We as a society of individuals agreed to the oppression of our personal freedom because we recognised the benefit it would give us, and now that benefit has been taken away. The artists (or their corporate masters) have broken the deal first, and so we damn them for it.
We, the individuals who comprise society, are the ones who have balanced individual freedom (NO copyright) with social conscience (SOME copyright). It is you "artists" who call for unlimited copyright who oppose true freedom.
Actually, philosophers have had the theories, but time-travel sci-fi is, like most sci-fi, just a futuristic take on one philosophical idea or another.
The "new" model is actually called the "B theory" of time and isn't new at all (although this scientific explanation of it is I guess). The B theory is that every instance in time exists somewhere and it is always "now" in that instance, so there is no real past, present or future. In the B theory if you were to go back in time you would merely fulfil the events that happen in that instance of time, always as the way they were intended.
So if you went back in an attempt to kill the parents of the bully who harassed you in school you would find out that your attempts failed, and that they didn't change your "present" at all. In fact, they would have helped created your present. A good example of this theory in effect is the sci-fi series "Andromeda", which follows the B theory of time in its time-travel episodes. A more well known example is the movie 12 Monkeys.
Star Trek on the other hand follows the multiple futures theory, whereby if you go back in time and change something you actually from that point on move down a different branch of time into an alternate future. The Butterfly Effect is another movie example of this.
The problem with the B theory of time is that it requires a deterministic universe, which is an unpleasant who isn't a materialist (ie. you believe you're made up of more than just matter). Of course the alternate timeline theory also has its own problems in that regard, wherein if you can exist in multiple timelines then which one is really you and where is your soul? If you're a materialist then no worries:p.
My own theory on the matter is that time is nothing more than a human construct. Matter changes, and one change takes place before another, and we measure the order in which these changes occur and call that 'time'.
Have no patents would do more harm to small companies than flawed patents.
Any small company that invented something new would have no way to protect that invention against a billion dollar company just copying their idea and using brute force to beat them in the market place. You might develop a product and do an initial test run of 1000 units in your city, a huge company would see that it's a good idea and launch a million units nationwide before you've raised the money for your second run.
The problem with the patent system is that it was developed in a time when huge multinational billion dollar corporations with immense marketpower and political influence weren't really imagined of.
What we need is to first of all enforce the rules of patents, that they apply only to genuine non-obvious inventions (and not to discoveries or obvious things). We then need a better system of establishing the existance of prior art (the sheer volume and breadth of patents make it infeasible for the existing departments to properly examine prior art exhaustively in every case).
Okay, but ideally people shouldn't leave their cd duplicator and a pile of blanks on the side of the road, and others shouldn't stop and use it.
Content creation and copyright needs to be a balance. If there is no content ownership then it becomes hard for content owners to make a living - an author would release a new book, and within a day a hundred other publishers copy it and release their own versions, while even more would OCR scan it and stick it online. The author ends up making none or little money and has to get another job and can't support himself to write a second book, and other aspiring authors see his situation and get discouraged from writing themselves (no matter how much someone loves their art, they still need to eat, and they could create a lot more art if they didn't have to work a regular 9 to 5 job to support themselves).
So we as society make an agreement not to replicate their content for a limited time so that they can make money, which hopefully they will use to support themselves and make more content and thus enrich all of humanity. In return we stress that the agreement is limited, and that after it the content will revert to its rightful place in the public domain so that it is available and preserved for humanity to benefit from forever.
Admitantly "they" have broken the deal first, by extending copyright to rediculous durations and setting the bar for patents absurdly low. How do we respond to that in a way that will restore the balance? Infringing on the copyright of existing content by distribution is unlikely to achieve that.
The most that's likely to happen is that the industries will continue to fight tooth and nail to keep things their way until new systems start from the ground up (online distribution publishers with no ties to the existing organisations). If you want to accelerate that process don't download or distribute RIAA/etc copyrighted content, but rather download and pay for independant content from online legal distributors. Low sales and high illegal download rates lets the RIAA plead their case, low sales combined with low download rates leaves them with no excuses.
Can you, in lets say
a day, read and understand any given patent (in your field of expertise) and all of its references, search for prior art (which you can prove was created before the application date and is significantly in common with the patent idea to classify as prior art), and prove to a quality acceptable in a court of law that the patent's idea is not original?
Yes, I did the math, and I think its insufficient time. Repost when you've got your day-long analysis of a typical patent (as another reply to my post states, we're talking hundreds of pages of legalese for the patent itself, plus all its references) ready.
Here is Amazon's one-click patent. It's actually rather short, though it does have a lot of references. See if you can prove it unworthy of a patent in a day of analysis. Keep in mind the patent was granted four years ago and still stands, and that two years ago BountyQuest gave in on anyone finding prior art.
They get over 300,000 patent applications a year, so it'd require a hell of a lot of experts to properly analyse each one. The USPTO site claims they have 6000 employees, half of which are examiners.
Can you, in lets say a day, read and understand any given patent (in your field of expertise) and all of its references, search for prior art (which you can prove was created before the application date and is significantly in common with the patent idea to classify as prior art), and prove to a quality acceptable in a court of law that the patent's idea is not original?
Take one-click-shopping for example. Could you find and verify proof that there exists prior art (the results of a quick google aren't proof), or that the technology is obvious ("it's OBVIOUS to any coder!!!" isn't proof)?
For the record I think the US patent system is a mess, I lament the steps my own country (Australia) takes towards the American way, I have a big problem with the current structure of IP in general (or rather the corruption of it), and while I don't have a solid stance on how software IP should be handled I certainly don't like what's going on at the moment. But opinions and righteous indignation stated on/. mean nothing, it's just preaching to the choir, the physical reality of the situation is that the current system is in place because big money likes it how it is, and politicians have no reason to change it until voter pressure arises or a big donator starts lobbying.
Perhaps the most vocal slashdotters on this topic should join together, write a clear and concise statement/s on intellectual property as it relates to software (or the patent system as a whole), focussing on benefit to business, creators and the public as well as the original intent of the system, and then deliver it to all relevant politicians/officials. Perhaps include with it a list of all registered voters from/. and various other communities who are in support of the statement and will vote for any politician who will work towards making the changes it suggests.
"Here is a list of X thousand voters in your region who will vote against you because of your damaging actions regarding IP" is the easiest way to get a politicians attention short of a large donation.
The USPTO must get a huge number of patent applications, both in software and all other fields. You can't really expect them to hire experts to analyse every request for "obviousness", search for prior art, and basically judge each application.
Even if they were to do that, do you think corporations would just go "oh, okay, you think it's not innovative, fair enough". They'd sue, claiming the analyst was biased, incompetent, or just plain wrong. I'm sure Amazon could easily find a few "experts" to claim one-click shopping was innovative and worthy of a patent.
The current system is at least somewhat workable. Anyone can get any patent they want, then if they try and enforce it the victim has the option to dispute it and go to court, where they could bring up prior art or their own experts to point out the obviousness of the patent. Of course that'd be very hard for small fish to do against these big powerhouse corporations with as many patents as they have lawyers, but that's a flaw in the American legal system as a whole in its current state, not the patent system specifically.
Without Trinity, Neo would've died in the first movie, and without Trinity, Neo would have elected to go to the Source (thus destroying the current incarnation of Zion and rebooting the Matrix into v7.0).
The Architect said "While the other experienced this in a very general way, your experience is far more specific, vis-a-vis love." They've never hidden that the special thing about Neo is Trinity. Without her is an inevitable statistical anomoly, with her he is willing to push himself further than any previous One.
It's conceivable that Neo in and of himself is no more special than any previous One, they simply lacked a motivation to push themselves as far as he has. That only covers his powers within the Matrix though, his abilities as they have extended into the real world are nothing more than the accidental result of his stumbling onto an interesting way to kill Agents.
In the Enter The Matrix game defeating a bonus level results in a discussion with the Oracle in which she tells you that Neo is actually half in, half out of the Matrix (assumedly the part of him that is inside Smith is the part that's still in the Matrix). This is the explanation for how he still has a connection to the machines (when he disables the Sentinels) even when he is not physically connected to the Matrix. It's also supported by Smith's words to Neo before the Neo vs 100 Smiths fight, where he talks about their connection.
Personally I like this idea much more than the Matrix-within-a-Matrix idea, or a Neo-is-a-machine idea. They've spent two movies building this mythology, using the word "believe" a thousand times, referencing religion and philosophy and prophecies in an often heavy-handed manner, and the idea that they're suddenly going to turn around and say "it's all physical, there is no mysticism surrounding Neo, no hope, nothing but a cold truth devoid of humanity" (which is what the "it's all a simulation inside a greater Matrix", "Neo is a machine", etc theories suggest) doesn't seem likely, and also isn't appealing at all.
Neo is not simply the One like the five before him. The purpose of the Agents is to forestall the appearance of the One for as long as possible, and Agent Smith achieved that when he killed Neo. Everything was at it was supposed to be. Then Neo resurrected, thanks to the love of Trinity, which was something that no One has ever done before, something that was impossible according to Smith. He then killed Smith, or rather liberated him into something never before seen, another impossibility. Now he has resurrected Trinity as she did him, controlled the Matrix with more power than ever before seen (as he flew to save Trinity), chosen the path no other One had chosen and which the machines never expected him to choose, and controlled the machines from the physical world. Neo is something new, a true One, and his difference stems from his love for Trinity.
With any luck this will make the big companies realise that they can't just force their desires onto us all without any consequences. RIAA had this coming and I hope it costs them big.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that device actually a phone? All the other features look pretty cool, but it seems to be just an internet device and not a regular phone?
If there was no possibly of penalty to the lawyers for abusing the rules of the court then there would be no reason for them not to do so all the time (perhaps as part of a "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" strategy, or to overload the court and buy themselves more time).
All those quotes say that for peace you should be prepared for war.
They don't say that for peace you should wage war.
Mary Magdeline was not a prostitute. Nowhere in the bible is she called a prostitute, instead it was just common tradition dating back to the early Catholic church when they began their demonisation of woman and sex. Back in the 60s I believe it was the common tradition was official revoked by the Pope.
So according to the bible and the modern Catholic church Mary Magdeline was not a prostitute.
You've tried to paint copyright restrictions as communistic, but unlimited copyright is not consistant with a society of maximised individual freedom (classical liberalism). Once you put an idea out into the world, whether it be a software algorithm, a story, a song or painting, that idea now exists in the minds of other people.
There are many copyrighted ideas that exist in my mind, such as songs I could recite, stories I could re-tell, or pieces of art that I could recreate given enough skill. Copyright restricts my freedom as an individual; it says that I have no right to use these ideas that now exist in my mind or in my posession.
We as a society recognise that if we demand our rightful individual freedom then artists will suffer for it, and that this will hurt us because the existing artists will stop creating art, and future artists will be discouraged from creating anything in the first place. Because of this, we as a society agree to grant artists a limited monopoly on their ideas, we agree to let them limit our personal freedom, so that they may profit from their ideas.
This is an ideal solution because it benefits the artist, in that they can profit from their ideas, and it benefits society in that artists are encouraged to create art so that they may profit (or at least survive). We only grant a limited compensation because this is best for society (it means artists must keep creating more art) and because we are only willing to allow our personal freedom to be oppressed for a limited time.
The perpetual extension of copyright and the general corruption of the intellectual property concept means that the balance has shifted away from equal individual/artist benefit to a scenario of heavy artist benefit with little individual/society benefit (and it's not even the artists who benefit, it's their corporate masters). We as a society of individuals agreed to the oppression of our personal freedom because we recognised the benefit it would give us, and now that benefit has been taken away. The artists (or their corporate masters) have broken the deal first, and so we damn them for it.
We, the individuals who comprise society, are the ones who have balanced individual freedom (NO copyright) with social conscience (SOME copyright). It is you "artists" who call for unlimited copyright who oppose true freedom.
Actually, philosophers have had the theories, but time-travel sci-fi is, like most sci-fi, just a futuristic take on one philosophical idea or another.
:p.
The "new" model is actually called the "B theory" of time and isn't new at all (although this scientific explanation of it is I guess). The B theory is that every instance in time exists somewhere and it is always "now" in that instance, so there is no real past, present or future. In the B theory if you were to go back in time you would merely fulfil the events that happen in that instance of time, always as the way they were intended.
So if you went back in an attempt to kill the parents of the bully who harassed you in school you would find out that your attempts failed, and that they didn't change your "present" at all. In fact, they would have helped created your present. A good example of this theory in effect is the sci-fi series "Andromeda", which follows the B theory of time in its time-travel episodes. A more well known example is the movie 12 Monkeys.
Star Trek on the other hand follows the multiple futures theory, whereby if you go back in time and change something you actually from that point on move down a different branch of time into an alternate future. The Butterfly Effect is another movie example of this.
The problem with the B theory of time is that it requires a deterministic universe, which is an unpleasant who isn't a materialist (ie. you believe you're made up of more than just matter). Of course the alternate timeline theory also has its own problems in that regard, wherein if you can exist in multiple timelines then which one is really you and where is your soul? If you're a materialist then no worries
My own theory on the matter is that time is nothing more than a human construct. Matter changes, and one change takes place before another, and we measure the order in which these changes occur and call that 'time'.
Have no patents would do more harm to small companies than flawed patents.
Any small company that invented something new would have no way to protect that invention against a billion dollar company just copying their idea and using brute force to beat them in the market place. You might develop a product and do an initial test run of 1000 units in your city, a huge company would see that it's a good idea and launch a million units nationwide before you've raised the money for your second run.
The problem with the patent system is that it was developed in a time when huge multinational billion dollar corporations with immense marketpower and political influence weren't really imagined of.
What we need is to first of all enforce the rules of patents, that they apply only to genuine non-obvious inventions (and not to discoveries or obvious things). We then need a better system of establishing the existance of prior art (the sheer volume and breadth of patents make it infeasible for the existing departments to properly examine prior art exhaustively in every case).
Okay, but ideally people shouldn't leave their cd duplicator and a pile of blanks on the side of the road, and others shouldn't stop and use it.
Content creation and copyright needs to be a balance. If there is no content ownership then it becomes hard for content owners to make a living - an author would release a new book, and within a day a hundred other publishers copy it and release their own versions, while even more would OCR scan it and stick it online. The author ends up making none or little money and has to get another job and can't support himself to write a second book, and other aspiring authors see his situation and get discouraged from writing themselves (no matter how much someone loves their art, they still need to eat, and they could create a lot more art if they didn't have to work a regular 9 to 5 job to support themselves).
So we as society make an agreement not to replicate their content for a limited time so that they can make money, which hopefully they will use to support themselves and make more content and thus enrich all of humanity. In return we stress that the agreement is limited, and that after it the content will revert to its rightful place in the public domain so that it is available and preserved for humanity to benefit from forever.
Admitantly "they" have broken the deal first, by extending copyright to rediculous durations and setting the bar for patents absurdly low. How do we respond to that in a way that will restore the balance? Infringing on the copyright of existing content by distribution is unlikely to achieve that.
The most that's likely to happen is that the industries will continue to fight tooth and nail to keep things their way until new systems start from the ground up (online distribution publishers with no ties to the existing organisations). If you want to accelerate that process don't download or distribute RIAA/etc copyrighted content, but rather download and pay for independant content from online legal distributors. Low sales and high illegal download rates lets the RIAA plead their case, low sales combined with low download rates leaves them with no excuses.
On the other hand, on the internet people seem to loose the ability to spell certain words no matter how angry the grammar nazis fell about it.
Nary has a day gone by without me seeing those two words misspelt.
Yes, I did the math, and I think its insufficient time. Repost when you've got your day-long analysis of a typical patent (as another reply to my post states, we're talking hundreds of pages of legalese for the patent itself, plus all its references) ready.
Here is Amazon's one-click patent. It's actually rather short, though it does have a lot of references. See if you can prove it unworthy of a patent in a day of analysis. Keep in mind the patent was granted four years ago and still stands, and that two years ago BountyQuest gave in on anyone finding prior art.
They get over 300,000 patent applications a year, so it'd require a hell of a lot of experts to properly analyse each one. The USPTO site claims they have 6000 employees, half of which are examiners.
/. mean nothing, it's just preaching to the choir, the physical reality of the situation is that the current system is in place because big money likes it how it is, and politicians have no reason to change it until voter pressure arises or a big donator starts lobbying.
/. and various other communities who are in support of the statement and will vote for any politician who will work towards making the changes it suggests.
Can you, in lets say a day, read and understand any given patent (in your field of expertise) and all of its references, search for prior art (which you can prove was created before the application date and is significantly in common with the patent idea to classify as prior art), and prove to a quality acceptable in a court of law that the patent's idea is not original?
Take one-click-shopping for example. Could you find and verify proof that there exists prior art (the results of a quick google aren't proof), or that the technology is obvious ("it's OBVIOUS to any coder!!!" isn't proof)?
For the record I think the US patent system is a mess, I lament the steps my own country (Australia) takes towards the American way, I have a big problem with the current structure of IP in general (or rather the corruption of it), and while I don't have a solid stance on how software IP should be handled I certainly don't like what's going on at the moment. But opinions and righteous indignation stated on
Perhaps the most vocal slashdotters on this topic should join together, write a clear and concise statement/s on intellectual property as it relates to software (or the patent system as a whole), focussing on benefit to business, creators and the public as well as the original intent of the system, and then deliver it to all relevant politicians/officials. Perhaps include with it a list of all registered voters from
"Here is a list of X thousand voters in your region who will vote against you because of your damaging actions regarding IP" is the easiest way to get a politicians attention short of a large donation.
The USPTO must get a huge number of patent applications, both in software and all other fields. You can't really expect them to hire experts to analyse every request for "obviousness", search for prior art, and basically judge each application.
Even if they were to do that, do you think corporations would just go "oh, okay, you think it's not innovative, fair enough". They'd sue, claiming the analyst was biased, incompetent, or just plain wrong. I'm sure Amazon could easily find a few "experts" to claim one-click shopping was innovative and worthy of a patent.
The current system is at least somewhat workable. Anyone can get any patent they want, then if they try and enforce it the victim has the option to dispute it and go to court, where they could bring up prior art or their own experts to point out the obviousness of the patent.
Of course that'd be very hard for small fish to do against these big powerhouse corporations with as many patents as they have lawyers, but that's a flaw in the American legal system as a whole in its current state, not the patent system specifically.
Would you really expect anything different?
Without Trinity, Neo would've died in the first movie, and without Trinity, Neo would have elected to go to the Source (thus destroying the current incarnation of Zion and rebooting the Matrix into v7.0).
The Architect said "While the other experienced this in a very general way, your experience is far more specific, vis-a-vis love." They've never hidden that the special thing about Neo is Trinity. Without her is an inevitable statistical anomoly, with her he is willing to push himself further than any previous One.
It's conceivable that Neo in and of himself is no more special than any previous One, they simply lacked a motivation to push themselves as far as he has. That only covers his powers within the Matrix though, his abilities as they have extended into the real world are nothing more than the accidental result of his stumbling onto an interesting way to kill Agents.
Spoilers
In the Enter The Matrix game defeating a bonus level results in a discussion with the Oracle in which she tells you that Neo is actually half in, half out of the Matrix (assumedly the part of him that is inside Smith is the part that's still in the Matrix). This is the explanation for how he still has a connection to the machines (when he disables the Sentinels) even when he is not physically connected to the Matrix. It's also supported by Smith's words to Neo before the Neo vs 100 Smiths fight, where he talks about their connection.
Personally I like this idea much more than the Matrix-within-a-Matrix idea, or a Neo-is-a-machine idea. They've spent two movies building this mythology, using the word "believe" a thousand times, referencing religion and philosophy and prophecies in an often heavy-handed manner, and the idea that they're suddenly going to turn around and say "it's all physical, there is no mysticism surrounding Neo, no hope, nothing but a cold truth devoid of humanity" (which is what the "it's all a simulation inside a greater Matrix", "Neo is a machine", etc theories suggest) doesn't seem likely, and also isn't appealing at all.
Neo is not simply the One like the five before him. The purpose of the Agents is to forestall the appearance of the One for as long as possible, and Agent Smith achieved that when he killed Neo. Everything was at it was supposed to be. Then Neo resurrected, thanks to the love of Trinity, which was something that no One has ever done before, something that was impossible according to Smith. He then killed Smith, or rather liberated him into something never before seen, another impossibility. Now he has resurrected Trinity as she did him, controlled the Matrix with more power than ever before seen (as he flew to save Trinity), chosen the path no other One had chosen and which the machines never expected him to choose, and controlled the machines from the physical world.
Neo is something new, a true One, and his difference stems from his love for Trinity.
With any luck this will make the big companies realise that they can't just force their desires onto us all without any consequences. RIAA had this coming and I hope it costs them big.