Bringing outside code into a development project without the proper management authorisation is dangerous for the company receiving the code - they are legally liable even if they don't know about it.
Hell, I won't let people even bring in stuff they've coded at home prior to working for the company. It's just not worth the risk. In fact I had one developer once who did bring in stuff he coded at home and wrote in comments that it was OK for us to use it - I didn't find out until I saw the comments in his source code. Later we fired him for some pretty shocking insubordination to the CEO, and he turns around and says "Well I withdraw permission for you to use that code I brought in".
It all amounts to risk and headaches we can do without. What's more, the people who do this usually screw up the project by introducing redundant code which has functional equivalents already present. Then the next person comes along and complains it's too hard to figure out which version of "List" he's supposed to use.
Incidentally, if you are an employee, the company *does* own anything you do either on their time or as part of your assigned work (even if that's on your own time), absent a contract stating otherwise.
The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that "commercial speech" is afforded a lesser protection than political speech.
Are your denying that MAPS is in any sense political? In fact, it is in part an organised protest against practices that the community finds objectionable. Listing sites that use those practices so as to coordinate organised protests is in fact clearly political speech.
If we're crossing astronaughts and cosmonaughts, does that mean we get Castronaughts?
If we end up with Castronaughts, does this mean the space station will become the world's most expensive cigar shop, or that our old friend Fidel will sue for trademark infringement?
Earth is 5.97e24kg Mars is 6.42e23kg, and Titan is 1.25e23kg.
Titan has the largest atmosphere of any rocky planet in the Solar System - in fact despite the fact that Titan is around a fortieth the mass of Earth, its atmospheric pressure at the surface is 1.5 bars - that is, 1.5 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Since Titan is about a quarter of the mass of Mars, it is well within the realms of possibility for Mars to have an atmosphere with equivalent pressure to Earth, it just has to be a much larger atmosphere than Earth's.
Actually, the CO2 is poisonous to humans in concentrations of around 15%+, even if *all* the rest of the atmosphere were Oxygen. Mars' atmosphere is around 80%+ CO2, so we'd still have to get rid of a hell of a lot of CO2 to make the atmosphere not fatal.
You also need a lot of relatively inert, large molecule gas, like Nitrogen, to prevent explosions from getting out of control. Titan has a plentiful supply of Nitrogen, but Mars has practically none.
The problem with this is that there can be original, patent-worthy inventions without prior need and without prior art
I am not referring to "need" in the economic sense, but including any prior statement of value. The "need" that I am talking about is necessary for any invention to have value in itself.
To put it another way, every invention must have a purpose. The concept of that purpose arises no later than the invention itself, but usually arises earlier. The "prior need" test I am suggesting is a measure of the time period between the concept of the purpose, and the satisfaction of that purpose by an invention. If the time period is too small, the invention itself is obvious, and cannot be patented.
You might argue that there is some value in the concept of the purpose on some occasions, but the intent of patents was never to protect the concept of the purpose - the intent is to offer protection to the implementation only.
Not true. The concept of the telephone was already directly implied by the telegraph - that is, the problem is to transmit messages from one place to the next. To do so with sound is a clear improvement over doing so with Morse Code. There were 30 or 40 years (depending on who you believe) between the invention of the Telegraph and the invention of the Telephone, a more than ample gap. In fact, Bell's 1876 patent described the telephone as the "talking telegraph".
Even if we take a different standard, Bell came up with the concept of the telephone two years before he had a working model, so getting from the need to the reality involved significant amounts of research.
The concept of transmitting voice at a distance had already been used previously, with the "speaking telegraph", having been invented in 1848. While this wasn't an electrical device, the comparison with the electrical telegraph was already present in the name, and it clearly implied the need to transmit voice over a distance. These devices were still used on ocean vessels well into the 20th century!
In 1861, Reis created a device that transmitted voice over a distance via an electrical wire. The name of the device - "das Telefon". In 1868, Dolbear was already working on the telephone concept.
The Microphone was invented 50 years before the telephone by Wheatstone, who was heavily into the concept of electrical transmission of sound.
Gray began work on trying to devise a workable telephone in 1872 - two years before Bell came up with his idea.
So all in all, there was plenty of demonstrated need long before Bell succeeded in making a working telephone.
In any case, you may want to rethink the telephone as a good example of the benefits of the patent system. In as much as it was a device that transmitted sounds via electrical current, there was more than ample prior art! The patentable part of the invention was not in the concept, but in the specific implementation, and if the patent system had worked the way it should have, Gray and Edison would probably have won due to being better funded, having invented an equivalent device and having filed their patent application a mere 2 hours later!
And can just say about that stuff Dickinson said about going out and getting yourself a lawyer to sort out the legal problems: what a twat. Where the fuck does he think an average programmer is going to get that sort of cash from?
This is an ongoing and increasing problem with the legal system in general. They are almost making it so you have to have lawyers working for you just so you can live, but the cost of lawyers is too high for a typical person to afford.
The cost of justice is a major topic of debate internally in the law community as well. Believe it or not, there are honest lawyers out there who are as appalled with the cost of justice as we are, and want to do things to reduce those costs. Unfortunately, they are severely outnumbered because lawyers generally like their Armani Suits, BMWs and backyard swimming pools. What's more, Judges are lawyers, and most politicians are lawyers.
Putting on my politician's hat, this guy is playing lawyer-politics. If you read the interview carefully, you'll find he avoids answering the questions he's asked. Almost every answer he gives is an answer to a different question than the one that's asked - in some cases it's blatant, in others the question he answers is subtlely different.
I'm only up to page 4 so far, but the feeling Im coming away with is that Dickinson was engaged in an entirely separate and unrelated conversation to the one O'Reilly and the moderater were having.
Take, for example, O'Reilly's question of "How would you feel if a legal argument could be patented?" Dickinson avoids answering the question several times. He starts of saying "sure, if it meets the statutory requirements and is incorporated in software" - but the O'Reilly question asked about a theoretical change in statutory requirements. Dickinson then falls back on arguing that lawyers arguments are not patentable. At no stage did he answer that question, although he tried his best to appear to have answered it!
Dickinson is also adopting clearly partisan positions on the issue, and is commenting on issues he's clearly not up to speed on. His argument actually outlines a definition of "obvious" - he only considers things obvious if prior art exists! This ignores the fact that if there wasn't a prior need, then prior art cannot exist. Prior art is only a valid qualifier if you can also establish long standing prior need.
Perhaps this would be one way to fix the patent system. Make it a requirement to establish prior need dating back, say, the same amount of time as the patent will last. If there is no significant prior need, or if there is prior art, no patent can be granted.
As things are, Dickinson is claiming that if somebody arrives at a particular need first, arrives at an instant and obvious solution, and patents it, then the patent should be allowed because by his definiton it's not obvious (there is no prior art).
I'm pretty sure the Amazon One-Click patent will fail this test, because the patent itself is little more than a patent of that which is needed! In this case, once you have the need you have the "invention".
In Australia the courts don't generally question jurors the way they do in the US. Jurors are selected at random from a pool, and each side gets to make three challenges, but neither side is allowed to talk to the jurors. The challenges are made on the basis of appearance only.
Once selected, jurors are sworn in, and the trial gets underway.
While the principle is sound, the implimentation - people banding together in an effort to maintain individuality - is a paradox, both conceptually and in reality.
The guy who wrote TWIN is no longer with Willows (which is actually a subsidiary of Caldera) because they decided they didn't want to pay to maintain the thing anymore. He's moved to CodeWeavers, and has merged the code with WINE to create Twine.
You bet it's in our favor. The Internet is strongly shifting power back where it belongs - to the people. All of the events cited in this article are examples of corporates and governments reacting to this, because until now they have had the power, and they are afraid of losing it.
The corporates that will survive will be the ones that learn to accept and embrace this. The other ones with suffer long agony and eventually be acquired.
The governments will change, with politicians learning to embrace the net and to do what they're damned well told for once.
This is exactly the things I've been hinting at - the start of new revolution. They're not opposed to the web, or even to the technology. What they're deploring is the hype that appears to create money from thin air.
Let me put it clearly for you: NASDAQ is the biggest, baddest pyramid scheme on the planet.
The money that is being made on NASDAQ is coming from somewhere, and it's coming from moms and pops all over the world. It's going into dot-coms, many of which have never, and will never, have any genuine commercial value.
Part of the problem here is that you have everybody eying the wealth that appears to be getting created from thin air on NASDAQ, and thinking "I'd like some of that."
There is, however, a fundamental principle of economics. That is, if everybody suddenly tomorrow had ten million dollars, then ten million dollars suddenly wouldn't make you wealthy. All it would do is create sudden and serious inflation.
While we're not quite at that point, we are getting a ludicrous number of people being ludicrously wealthy, and that is simply unsustainable. The system is headed for a major breaking point.
The last global revolution was the industrial revolution. It created massive upheaval worldwide, and ushered in the age of capitalism. The coming revolution will happen for not dissimilar reasons, and will usher in a new economic paradigm to replace capitalism. And if that revolution becomes difficult, don't be surprised to see the other type of revolution, with guns.
The article says it was a decision by a suit to alter the tests to make it look like the parts would work. Sounds like the classic PHB problem to me. I guess even rocket scientests have to deal with that problem.
Another tangential aspect to this is there are lots of people who think the job they are capable of doing is beneath them, and try to get the higher paid job for which they don't have the skills.
This type tends to eventually do an MBA, and unfortunately gets put into a position managing geeks by somebody who made it into management through sales and thinks that MBA + some tech experience = competent tech manager.
We're starting to position geeks for entry into politics, but depending on their location this is going to take between 5 and 8 years around the world. Meanwhile, we have a number of the geeks who will go into politics working on lobbying.
Look at the leaders on issues like patents, spam and censorship, and you'll find among them many of our future geek politicians. They're not people who really wanted to get into politics - they're people who, like any good geek, will be saying "this needs to be done, so I'm damned well going to do it."
Will Unix finally die off, will it adapt as it did before, or will Unix find a way to remain the same trustworthy system it always has been?
Of course it will adapt. It always has before, largely because its design lends itself to ad-hoc adaptation better than any other OS. To get an idea of how well it's adapted, try finding a UNIX V7 or earlier to play with. You'll hardly recognise it. TCP/IP? Hah! Shadow passwords? You make me laugh. GUI? Gooey is what happens when you leave your Mars Bar in the sun too long. Edit those password files by hand with vi. Shadow passwords? Nope. Wait a few years and download the source code for that one from comp.sources.unix.
UNIX adapts well because it's so open and easily modified. Linux is the extreme case of this. Because people can adapt it themselves, they do.
Or, worded another way: It will adapt. Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated.
The part of the spam law that was deemed unconstitutional is that relating to people outside the state transmitting advertising into the state. That was always shaky on constitutional ground due the interstate commerce provisions.
This ruling appears to have nothing to do with whether spam (or indeed any of the defendant's actions, which included forgery) is OK or not - it is a technical ruling that says that the state of Washington cannot impose a law affecting interstate commerce.
State laws should be drafted with listed clauses stating that an offence is an offence if the spam is:
From a sender within the state to a recipient within the state;
From a sender within the state to a recipient outside of the state; or
From a sender outside the state to a recipient within the state.
The laws should also explicitly state that if any of these clauses is held to be unconstitutional, the remaining clauses would continue to have force. States should expect clause 3 to be thrown out, and shouldn't depend on clause 2 to survive either. Clause 1 should survive.
Slashdot Mirror
By amazing coincitence, Coronet is also the name of the capital city of Han Solo's home planet, Corellia.
The Galaxy had been at peace for several thousand years - if nobody's shooting at you, there's hardly going to be any battle scars are there?
Hell, I won't let people even bring in stuff they've coded at home prior to working for the company. It's just not worth the risk. In fact I had one developer once who did bring in stuff he coded at home and wrote in comments that it was OK for us to use it - I didn't find out until I saw the comments in his source code. Later we fired him for some pretty shocking insubordination to the CEO, and he turns around and says "Well I withdraw permission for you to use that code I brought in".
It all amounts to risk and headaches we can do without. What's more, the people who do this usually screw up the project by introducing redundant code which has functional equivalents already present. Then the next person comes along and complains it's too hard to figure out which version of "List" he's supposed to use.
Incidentally, if you are an employee, the company *does* own anything you do either on their time or as part of your assigned work (even if that's on your own time), absent a contract stating otherwise.
Just don't let anybody from Microsoft within a parsec of that thing - the last thing we need is for the Borg to get access to deflector control.
Are your denying that MAPS is in any sense political? In fact, it is in part an organised protest against practices that the community finds objectionable. Listing sites that use those practices so as to coordinate organised protests is in fact clearly political speech.
I for one would love to live on Mars. Even living on the Moon would be pretty cool.
If we end up with Castronaughts, does this mean the space station will become the world's most expensive cigar shop, or that our old friend Fidel will sue for trademark infringement?
You Bastards!
Titan has the largest atmosphere of any rocky planet in the Solar System - in fact despite the fact that Titan is around a fortieth the mass of Earth, its atmospheric pressure at the surface is 1.5 bars - that is, 1.5 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Since Titan is about a quarter of the mass of Mars, it is well within the realms of possibility for Mars to have an atmosphere with equivalent pressure to Earth, it just has to be a much larger atmosphere than Earth's.
You also need a lot of relatively inert, large molecule gas, like Nitrogen, to prevent explosions from getting out of control. Titan has a plentiful supply of Nitrogen, but Mars has practically none.
I am not referring to "need" in the economic sense, but including any prior statement of value. The "need" that I am talking about is necessary for any invention to have value in itself.
To put it another way, every invention must have a purpose. The concept of that purpose arises no later than the invention itself, but usually arises earlier. The "prior need" test I am suggesting is a measure of the time period between the concept of the purpose, and the satisfaction of that purpose by an invention. If the time period is too small, the invention itself is obvious, and cannot be patented.
You might argue that there is some value in the concept of the purpose on some occasions, but the intent of patents was never to protect the concept of the purpose - the intent is to offer protection to the implementation only.
Not true. The concept of the telephone was already directly implied by the telegraph - that is, the problem is to transmit messages from one place to the next. To do so with sound is a clear improvement over doing so with Morse Code. There were 30 or 40 years (depending on who you believe) between the invention of the Telegraph and the invention of the Telephone, a more than ample gap. In fact, Bell's 1876 patent described the telephone as the "talking telegraph".
Even if we take a different standard, Bell came up with the concept of the telephone two years before he had a working model, so getting from the need to the reality involved significant amounts of research.
The concept of transmitting voice at a distance had already been used previously, with the "speaking telegraph", having been invented in 1848. While this wasn't an electrical device, the comparison with the electrical telegraph was already present in the name, and it clearly implied the need to transmit voice over a distance. These devices were still used on ocean vessels well into the 20th century!
In 1861, Reis created a device that transmitted voice over a distance via an electrical wire. The name of the device - "das Telefon". In 1868, Dolbear was already working on the telephone concept.
The Microphone was invented 50 years before the telephone by Wheatstone, who was heavily into the concept of electrical transmission of sound.
Gray began work on trying to devise a workable telephone in 1872 - two years before Bell came up with his idea.
So all in all, there was plenty of demonstrated need long before Bell succeeded in making a working telephone.
In any case, you may want to rethink the telephone as a good example of the benefits of the patent system. In as much as it was a device that transmitted sounds via electrical current, there was more than ample prior art! The patentable part of the invention was not in the concept, but in the specific implementation, and if the patent system had worked the way it should have, Gray and Edison would probably have won due to being better funded, having invented an equivalent device and having filed their patent application a mere 2 hours later!
A good chronology can be found at http://www.das.ha rvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/pages/comm_chron1.html
This is an ongoing and increasing problem with the legal system in general. They are almost making it so you have to have lawyers working for you just so you can live, but the cost of lawyers is too high for a typical person to afford.
The cost of justice is a major topic of debate internally in the law community as well. Believe it or not, there are honest lawyers out there who are as appalled with the cost of justice as we are, and want to do things to reduce those costs. Unfortunately, they are severely outnumbered because lawyers generally like their Armani Suits, BMWs and backyard swimming pools. What's more, Judges are lawyers, and most politicians are lawyers.
I'm only up to page 4 so far, but the feeling Im coming away with is that Dickinson was engaged in an entirely separate and unrelated conversation to the one O'Reilly and the moderater were having.
Take, for example, O'Reilly's question of "How would you feel if a legal argument could be patented?" Dickinson avoids answering the question several times. He starts of saying "sure, if it meets the statutory requirements and is incorporated in software" - but the O'Reilly question asked about a theoretical change in statutory requirements. Dickinson then falls back on arguing that lawyers arguments are not patentable. At no stage did he answer that question, although he tried his best to appear to have answered it!
Dickinson is also adopting clearly partisan positions on the issue, and is commenting on issues he's clearly not up to speed on. His argument actually outlines a definition of "obvious" - he only considers things obvious if prior art exists! This ignores the fact that if there wasn't a prior need, then prior art cannot exist. Prior art is only a valid qualifier if you can also establish long standing prior need.
Perhaps this would be one way to fix the patent system. Make it a requirement to establish prior need dating back, say, the same amount of time as the patent will last. If there is no significant prior need, or if there is prior art, no patent can be granted.
As things are, Dickinson is claiming that if somebody arrives at a particular need first, arrives at an instant and obvious solution, and patents it, then the patent should be allowed because by his definiton it's not obvious (there is no prior art).
I'm pretty sure the Amazon One-Click patent will fail this test, because the patent itself is little more than a patent of that which is needed! In this case, once you have the need you have the "invention".
Once selected, jurors are sworn in, and the trial gets underway.
There are two responses on the CAUCE web site - one supporting HR 3113 and one withholding support from the as yet unnumbered senate companion bill.
Crowd: Yes, we are all individuals.
Lone Voice: I'm not.
While the principle is sound, the implimentation - people banding together in an effort to maintain individuality - is a paradox, both conceptually and in reality.
The guy who wrote TWIN is no longer with Willows (which is actually a subsidiary of Caldera) because they decided they didn't want to pay to maintain the thing anymore. He's moved to CodeWeavers, and has merged the code with WINE to create Twine.
The corporates that will survive will be the ones that learn to accept and embrace this. The other ones with suffer long agony and eventually be acquired.
The governments will change, with politicians learning to embrace the net and to do what they're damned well told for once.
Let me put it clearly for you: NASDAQ is the biggest, baddest pyramid scheme on the planet.
The money that is being made on NASDAQ is coming from somewhere, and it's coming from moms and pops all over the world. It's going into dot-coms, many of which have never, and will never, have any genuine commercial value.
Part of the problem here is that you have everybody eying the wealth that appears to be getting created from thin air on NASDAQ, and thinking "I'd like some of that."
There is, however, a fundamental principle of economics. That is, if everybody suddenly tomorrow had ten million dollars, then ten million dollars suddenly wouldn't make you wealthy. All it would do is create sudden and serious inflation.
While we're not quite at that point, we are getting a ludicrous number of people being ludicrously wealthy, and that is simply unsustainable. The system is headed for a major breaking point.
The last global revolution was the industrial revolution. It created massive upheaval worldwide, and ushered in the age of capitalism. The coming revolution will happen for not dissimilar reasons, and will usher in a new economic paradigm to replace capitalism. And if that revolution becomes difficult, don't be surprised to see the other type of revolution, with guns.
The article says it was a decision by a suit to alter the tests to make it look like the parts would work. Sounds like the classic PHB problem to me. I guess even rocket scientests have to deal with that problem.
This type tends to eventually do an MBA, and unfortunately gets put into a position managing geeks by somebody who made it into management through sales and thinks that MBA + some tech experience = competent tech manager.
Look at the leaders on issues like patents, spam and censorship, and you'll find among them many of our future geek politicians. They're not people who really wanted to get into politics - they're people who, like any good geek, will be saying "this needs to be done, so I'm damned well going to do it."
Of course it will adapt. It always has before, largely because its design lends itself to ad-hoc adaptation better than any other OS. To get an idea of how well it's adapted, try finding a UNIX V7 or earlier to play with. You'll hardly recognise it. TCP/IP? Hah! Shadow passwords? You make me laugh. GUI? Gooey is what happens when you leave your Mars Bar in the sun too long. Edit those password files by hand with vi. Shadow passwords? Nope. Wait a few years and download the source code for that one from comp.sources.unix.
UNIX adapts well because it's so open and easily modified. Linux is the extreme case of this. Because people can adapt it themselves, they do.
Or, worded another way: It will adapt. Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated.This ruling appears to have nothing to do with whether spam (or indeed any of the defendant's actions, which included forgery) is OK or not - it is a technical ruling that says that the state of Washington cannot impose a law affecting interstate commerce.
State laws should be drafted with listed clauses stating that an offence is an offence if the spam is:
The laws should also explicitly state that if any of these clauses is held to be unconstitutional, the remaining clauses would continue to have force. States should expect clause 3 to be thrown out, and shouldn't depend on clause 2 to survive either. Clause 1 should survive.