First, I'm nowhere near that old. And I don't care what my parents taught me, I know that people are becoming more cynical and less honest when I hear them say nothing's wrong with downloading music illegally to listen to it before you buy it. If the seller doesn't want to give you that opportunity, it's dishonest to do so. Yeah kids always stole some things, and there were always criminals, but now some middle-class software developers are teaching kids by example that it's ok to break the law when you don't like the deal that you've been offered.
Second, if you don't consider the need to reward and incentivize producers, you are tending away from capitalism and towards socialism or communism.
Third, you are making some of my points for me -- one of my points was that you have to think about rewarding producers or you're going to kill production. But if you only think about getting cheaper prices for consumers, and think that piracy can be good because it brings down consumer prices, you're NOT thinking about incentives for producers.
And I would prefer to have a house for free rather than pay for it, because I'd get a better deal! News flash: it's against the law. If you want to change the law, fine. If you fail to do so, have the decency to follow it.
This is all ridiculous. Ever heard of supply and demand? OF COURSE piracy is beneficial to consumers. It vastly increases the supply and reduces the real demand, so that companies have to reduce their price to compete with free illegal copies.
This is only half of the story though. We don't just care about what's beneficial to consumers, or we'd never have copyright in the first place. We care about producers too, because we know that the best way to get people to produce is to let them make money from their work.
If you all want to live in a communist country, where people believe that everyone will altruistically work for the benefit of the great motherland, you had better start looking hard, because there are only a couple of places left. People produce in the aggregate because of the benefit they gain. This is capitalism, and most countries now believe in the principle.
Once upon a time, people actually would NOT sneak in to see a movie if they didn't want to pay for it. They would have considered this dishonest. Even many of the poorest people during the depression would refuse to break a promise or act dishonestly. They had some INTEGRITY.
Slashdotters -- where is your integrity? Where is your will to be honest, to follow through on what you agree to, to do without something that it would be dishonest or illegal to take without paying for?
So the bargain is bad? The person with integrity simply says no.
actually, there were quite a few people outside the white house protesting.
this woman used press credentials (probably for shintangren (NTD?), the falungong media group) to get on the white house grounds, up on the camera stand, and then started screaming at the top of her lungs at president Hu when he started talking...
Bush indicated to Hu that he was ok, and he should go on.
The press guys tried to chill her out, but didn't restrain her.
Finally, secret service got up to the top of the platform and escorted her out. She's charged with disorderly conduct.
I don't think the administration did anything wrong here at all, since she snuck in under false pretenses and disrupted the media coverage of a major diplomatic event... and it was not a public area.
I think that for most people, "illegally getting something (or the enjoyment of something) without paying for it, when the owner has made it clear that it costs money" is close enough to theft to call it so in informal speech.
Eolas is making a good amount just from MS's infringement. Sure, they'd love to make money on a license too, but they also don't want people thinking that they refused to license to MS out of spite or something...
It's true that they want MS to pay for any license, but it's also true that MS could surely afford one, and simply are refusing to take one. MS chose to trade off the purchase of a license for an annoyance to their users... If I were they, I might choose to annoy my users less, especially if I had 50 bil in the bank...;)
First, your distinction is complete baloney, because there certainly are often damages when you infringe someone's intellectual property. They can be huge; otherwise, no one would ever actually litigate a patent infringement suit. There are real lost profits. Same thing with other IP.
My point in the previous post was that every property right is a right to exclude others from doing something that you have the right to. You can exclude others from walking on your land, using your identity, or claiming that their product is something it's not. Limitations on the rights of non-owners go hand-in-hand with the granting of property rights.
You could say the exact same thing about any other property right. The fact is that in many cases property rights in both tangible and intangible things lead to the ability to trade, which leads to huge gains in efficiency, and the success that is capitalism.
The debate should be whether such gains are obtained through patents or not. This is a difficult empirical question.
Chinese basically have no way to influence their government. They don't get to vote. We, on the other hand, have a legitimate government that we have a right to change through a designated system that tries to take into account many competing interests in our society.
I think the correct response for you, if you like supporting linux and OSS, is to do so without violating others' rights under the current law, or at least make a good faith effort to do so.
You can also work for change of the law, and develop support, and even market power, to enable you to make that change more likely.
Right. The patent system is similar in many respects to totalitarian or facist governments that censor their people and kill millions of jews. I forgot about that.
Your comment misses the point. It's not that you checked a couple of emails and then mostly paid attention.
The problem is that on the whole, people end up not really paying attention to a speaker, and distract others from paying attention.
Not to mention the fact that, I think, a speaker has a RIGHT to demand people's good faith effort to pay attention, or else why should they want to do all the preparation they've done and go to the effort of giving a talk or lecture? Doing other things tells the speaker that you don't respect their efforts enough to give them your attention. I would much rather simply ask those people to leave the talk.
People have lost their backbone for managing their own lives.
It's ok not to answer, and call back later. It's ok not to be available sometimes. It's ok to tell someone you're busy, or have plans, and can't accommodate their last-minute requests. It's ok to ask people to let you know about things a bit ahead of time.
Just to follow up on this as a 3rd year law student, the parent is essentially right. But.
Almost all law students use laptops now, and most take their exams on laptops, at least at my school. The game effect has hampered my attention in class sometimes, both when others play them and when I play them out of boredom. It is a problem. I think she's probably justified in barring laptops. I would, however, allow exceptions for those with handicaps, et sim.
The problem is that many students nowadays simply don't know how to take notes on paper, and can't write quickly or abbreviate sufficiently to get anything down of value.
I have found that I recall better and analyze and summarize better when I take notes on paper, but I usually fail to keep everything organized, and there's little time to re-copy notes for outlines or reorganization. Taking notes on my laptop allows me to keep everything organized and accessible. However, over the last couple of years, I've started to migrate more back towards paper for certain tasks. I have a paper organizer, a moleskine for ideas, and use paper to think.
Paper is good for processing, summarizing, and synthesizing disorganized information. Computers are good at working with organized information. If you have to take a load of disorganized information (cases) and organize it, though, paper seems to work much much better. I can't easily look at 5 or 10 cases at the same time, even on a 1600x1200 screen, especially when there's no organizing principle (I have to discover it).
I've found that I get much more done when I only take out my laptop for specific tasks, such as checking email, work/school sites, getting important info, doing legal research, and writing. Thinking, planning, reading, and organizing, however, I now do mostly on paper. It works much better for me. Sometimes I leave my laptop out, but closed and hibernated, and only open it when I need it. This seems to provide just enough distance to keep my use on track.
It has been very hard as a CS person to develop the proper balance between my paper/computer uses, but it's worth it to do so, because of the (possibly counterintuitive) gains one makes in efficiency by using the best tool for the task at hand. Oh yeah, and avoiding procrastination...;)
At least until they implement end-to-end hardware-supported trusted computing, with laws making it illegal to circumvent or produce analog peripherals.
I am not a lawyer, just a law student. This is not legal advice.
The nonobviousness requirement is a legal requirement that has a particular meaning in patent law. It's not the same as the ordinary words "not obvious".
Often people would take the words "not obvious" to mean "hard". But this is a mistake. For example, the term "non-increasing sequence" does not mean a decreasing sequence. It means a non-increasing sequence. Similarly, the term nonobvious simply means something not obvious, and doesn't mean it's necessarily very hard.
What it really means in terms of the law is that the invention would not be obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, sitting in a room at the time of invention, with all the then-existing relevant references in the world arrayed around him. In practical terms, to be obvious, all the elements of the invention must have been disclosed at the time of invention in some reference, and there must be shown some motivation or reason to combine disparate references to create the invention.
For instance, if one reference taught a razor, and another reference taught a harvester with three blades and blade-guards, without more the invention of a modern three-blade razor would not be obvious, because there is no motivation to combine those references. Now, if the razor reference had said "I looked at some farming technology in developing the razor", you might be able to say it's obvious.
One problem in evaluating obviousness is that courts often improperly evaluate obviousness in hindsight, while the proper consideration is whether it would have been obvious at the time of invention. But on the other hand, it is harder to prove obviousness than other invalidity arguments, because it involves multiple references, and requires a motivation to combine them.
Well, language changes. That is a fact. But I tend to think that we'd all do well to keep the change at a slow pace, except where necessary to express new ideas.
English is a protocol, and the more you change it, the less likely it is that your message will be correctly interpreted and understood.
One big reason is that I usually only use one computer at a time, with one monitor.
If I want to reference a book while I'm actually doing something on a computer, it's MUCH easier to have the book on paper. Although I could flip windows the whole time, or go use a humongous monitor rather than my laptop, it's just much more effective to have a book open while working -- I can see everything I'm _doing_ on the screen, and what I'm _referencing_ in the book. I only need to move my eyeballs to switch from one to the other.
Paper in general is much better at getting a broad view of the matter, because you can lay out lots of paper at once, something that would take many monitors to do electronically.
Now, if we get visor displays that can fling windows all over my field of vision, and keep them stationary in relation to my head movements, this might start to change.
Are you a native spanish speaker? I think you meant to say "right?" or "should you?" instead of "no?"...
This has been seeping into colloquial English for a while now, and it's one of my pet peeves. I apologize for my obsession, but hope you'll consider avoiding this construction...
Slashdot Mirror
First, I'm nowhere near that old. And I don't care what my parents taught me, I know that people are becoming more cynical and less honest when I hear them say nothing's wrong with downloading music illegally to listen to it before you buy it. If the seller doesn't want to give you that opportunity, it's dishonest to do so. Yeah kids always stole some things, and there were always criminals, but now some middle-class software developers are teaching kids by example that it's ok to break the law when you don't like the deal that you've been offered.
Second, if you don't consider the need to reward and incentivize producers, you are tending away from capitalism and towards socialism or communism.
Third, you are making some of my points for me -- one of my points was that you have to think about rewarding producers or you're going to kill production. But if you only think about getting cheaper prices for consumers, and think that piracy can be good because it brings down consumer prices, you're NOT thinking about incentives for producers.
And I would prefer to have a house for free rather than pay for it, because I'd get a better deal! News flash: it's against the law. If you want to change the law, fine. If you fail to do so, have the decency to follow it.
This is all ridiculous. Ever heard of supply and demand? OF COURSE piracy is beneficial to consumers. It vastly increases the supply and reduces the real demand, so that companies have to reduce their price to compete with free illegal copies.
This is only half of the story though. We don't just care about what's beneficial to consumers, or we'd never have copyright in the first place. We care about producers too, because we know that the best way to get people to produce is to let them make money from their work.
If you all want to live in a communist country, where people believe that everyone will altruistically work for the benefit of the great motherland, you had better start looking hard, because there are only a couple of places left. People produce in the aggregate because of the benefit they gain. This is capitalism, and most countries now believe in the principle.
Once upon a time, people actually would NOT sneak in to see a movie if they didn't want to pay for it. They would have considered this dishonest. Even many of the poorest people during the depression would refuse to break a promise or act dishonestly. They had some INTEGRITY.
Slashdotters -- where is your integrity? Where is your will to be honest, to follow through on what you agree to, to do without something that it would be dishonest or illegal to take without paying for?
So the bargain is bad? The person with integrity simply says no.
actually, there were quite a few people outside the white house protesting.
this woman used press credentials (probably for shintangren (NTD?), the falungong media group) to get on the white house grounds, up on the camera stand, and then started screaming at the top of her lungs at president Hu when he started talking...
Bush indicated to Hu that he was ok, and he should go on.
The press guys tried to chill her out, but didn't restrain her.
Finally, secret service got up to the top of the platform and escorted her out. She's charged with disorderly conduct.
I don't think the administration did anything wrong here at all, since she snuck in under false pretenses and disrupted the media coverage of a major diplomatic event... and it was not a public area.
how about animated advertisements that show explicit sexual acts, which appear all over the place on main pages?
people should at least have to be LOOKING for porn to run into this.
I think that for most people, "illegally getting something (or the enjoyment of something) without paying for it, when the owner has made it clear that it costs money" is close enough to theft to call it so in informal speech.
Eolas is making a good amount just from MS's infringement. Sure, they'd love to make money on a license too, but they also don't want people thinking that they refused to license to MS out of spite or something...
;)
It's true that they want MS to pay for any license, but it's also true that MS could surely afford one, and simply are refusing to take one. MS chose to trade off the purchase of a license for an annoyance to their users... If I were they, I might choose to annoy my users less, especially if I had 50 bil in the bank...
In jury trials, it's been found that the independent inventor wins nearly 75% of the time, while in bench trials the ratio is more like 50%.
In any case, I really doubt that many individuals could do anything in nanomedicine without the resources of a corporation or academic institution.
IIRC it mostly began in the late 1800's as a misguided attempt to prevent masturbation. Look it up; I'm not kidding.
I have to applaud you for this comment, and I agree 100%. I am in the same boat as you, and my son is not circumcised.
Parents should not be able to mutilate their male children by ignorantly checking a box or nodding to a nurse.
First, your distinction is complete baloney, because there certainly are often damages when you infringe someone's intellectual property. They can be huge; otherwise, no one would ever actually litigate a patent infringement suit. There are real lost profits. Same thing with other IP.
My point in the previous post was that every property right is a right to exclude others from doing something that you have the right to. You can exclude others from walking on your land, using your identity, or claiming that their product is something it's not. Limitations on the rights of non-owners go hand-in-hand with the granting of property rights.
You could say the exact same thing about any other property right. The fact is that in many cases property rights in both tangible and intangible things lead to the ability to trade, which leads to huge gains in efficiency, and the success that is capitalism.
The debate should be whether such gains are obtained through patents or not. This is a difficult empirical question.
I think that things have to get extremely bad before one should advocate anarchy, which is what you appear to be doing -- "laws be damned".
The patent system (need I even say such a thing?) is not quite as oppressive as slavery or the medieval church.
Chinese basically have no way to influence their government. They don't get to vote. We, on the other hand, have a legitimate government that we have a right to change through a designated system that tries to take into account many competing interests in our society.
I think the correct response for you, if you like supporting linux and OSS, is to do so without violating others' rights under the current law, or at least make a good faith effort to do so.
You can also work for change of the law, and develop support, and even market power, to enable you to make that change more likely.
Right. The patent system is similar in many respects to totalitarian or facist governments that censor their people and kill millions of jews. I forgot about that.
It's not impossible for Linux or Linux users to be in the wrong by, e.g., infringing MS's patents.
If there is infringement, regardless of MS's motives, they are justified in taking action to protect their patent rights.
Do you think Linux gets a free pass under the law, just because the developers are trying to do something nice?
Your comment misses the point. It's not that you checked a couple of emails and then mostly paid attention.
The problem is that on the whole, people end up not really paying attention to a speaker, and distract others from paying attention.
Not to mention the fact that, I think, a speaker has a RIGHT to demand people's good faith effort to pay attention, or else why should they want to do all the preparation they've done and go to the effort of giving a talk or lecture? Doing other things tells the speaker that you don't respect their efforts enough to give them your attention. I would much rather simply ask those people to leave the talk.
People have lost their backbone for managing their own lives.
It's ok not to answer, and call back later.
It's ok not to be available sometimes.
It's ok to tell someone you're busy, or have plans, and can't accommodate their last-minute requests.
It's ok to ask people to let you know about things a bit ahead of time.
Just to follow up on this as a 3rd year law student, the parent is essentially right. But.
;)
Almost all law students use laptops now, and most take their exams on laptops, at least at my school. The game effect has hampered my attention in class sometimes, both when others play them and when I play them out of boredom. It is a problem. I think she's probably justified in barring laptops. I would, however, allow exceptions for those with handicaps, et sim.
The problem is that many students nowadays simply don't know how to take notes on paper, and can't write quickly or abbreviate sufficiently to get anything down of value.
I have found that I recall better and analyze and summarize better when I take notes on paper, but I usually fail to keep everything organized, and there's little time to re-copy notes for outlines or reorganization. Taking notes on my laptop allows me to keep everything organized and accessible. However, over the last couple of years, I've started to migrate more back towards paper for certain tasks. I have a paper organizer, a moleskine for ideas, and use paper to think.
Paper is good for processing, summarizing, and synthesizing disorganized information. Computers are good at working with organized information. If you have to take a load of disorganized information (cases) and organize it, though, paper seems to work much much better. I can't easily look at 5 or 10 cases at the same time, even on a 1600x1200 screen, especially when there's no organizing principle (I have to discover it).
I've found that I get much more done when I only take out my laptop for specific tasks, such as checking email, work/school sites, getting important info, doing legal research, and writing. Thinking, planning, reading, and organizing, however, I now do mostly on paper. It works much better for me. Sometimes I leave my laptop out, but closed and hibernated, and only open it when I need it. This seems to provide just enough distance to keep my use on track.
It has been very hard as a CS person to develop the proper balance between my paper/computer uses, but it's worth it to do so, because of the (possibly counterintuitive) gains one makes in efficiency by using the best tool for the task at hand. Oh yeah, and avoiding procrastination...
"MS has no hope of ending piracy."
At least until they implement end-to-end hardware-supported trusted computing, with laws making it illegal to circumvent or produce analog peripherals.
I am not a lawyer, just a law student. This is not legal advice.
The nonobviousness requirement is a legal requirement that has a particular meaning in patent law. It's not the same as the ordinary words "not obvious".
Often people would take the words "not obvious" to mean "hard". But this is a mistake. For example, the term "non-increasing sequence" does not mean a decreasing sequence. It means a non-increasing sequence. Similarly, the term nonobvious simply means something not obvious, and doesn't mean it's necessarily very hard.
What it really means in terms of the law is that the invention would not be obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, sitting in a room at the time of invention, with all the then-existing relevant references in the world arrayed around him. In practical terms, to be obvious, all the elements of the invention must have been disclosed at the time of invention in some reference, and there must be shown some motivation or reason to combine disparate references to create the invention.
For instance, if one reference taught a razor, and another reference taught a harvester with three blades and blade-guards, without more the invention of a modern three-blade razor would not be obvious, because there is no motivation to combine those references. Now, if the razor reference had said "I looked at some farming technology in developing the razor", you might be able to say it's obvious.
One problem in evaluating obviousness is that courts often improperly evaluate obviousness in hindsight, while the proper consideration is whether it would have been obvious at the time of invention. But on the other hand, it is harder to prove obviousness than other invalidity arguments, because it involves multiple references, and requires a motivation to combine them.
Well, language changes. That is a fact. But I tend to think that we'd all do well to keep the change at a slow pace, except where necessary to express new ideas.
English is a protocol, and the more you change it, the less likely it is that your message will be correctly interpreted and understood.
One big reason is that I usually only use one computer at a time, with one monitor.
If I want to reference a book while I'm actually doing something on a computer, it's MUCH easier to have the book on paper. Although I could flip windows the whole time, or go use a humongous monitor rather than my laptop, it's just much more effective to have a book open while working -- I can see everything I'm _doing_ on the screen, and what I'm _referencing_ in the book. I only need to move my eyeballs to switch from one to the other.
Paper in general is much better at getting a broad view of the matter, because you can lay out lots of paper at once, something that would take many monitors to do electronically.
Now, if we get visor displays that can fling windows all over my field of vision, and keep them stationary in relation to my head movements, this might start to change.
Are you a native spanish speaker? I think you meant to say "right?" or "should you?" instead of "no?"...
This has been seeping into colloquial English for a while now, and it's one of my pet peeves. I apologize for my obsession, but hope you'll consider avoiding this construction...
Reminds me of the time I interviewed one of *those* sorts of programmers one time.
We asked him how long a string could be if it were represented, like in PASCAL, with a one-byte length indicator at the beginning.
He said 9 characters.
Because he thought it meant one _digit_. And he didn't even consider zero.
See, this is how incredibly skewed peoples' perception is when they use strings all the time that auto-convert to decimal representation... aggh.