I never said that only modern inventions require it. Don't put words into my mouth. But let's see if you'll put your money where your mouth is. Quantum physics. Nanotechnology. Bio-anything. You spend millions of dollars and expend enormous amounts of time, energy and resources into developing useful devices which utilize these fields of technology, and you release it to the world (let's say North America/Europe) without any kind of patent protection, and then you watch as the businesses with the resources to make use of your invention copy it and help you recoup the development costs.
Oh wait, that's right. It won't happen. You're not that stupid.
Don't let modern history blind you to the fact that the planet had been around of billions of years (and humans for several thousands) yet things were still invented. Inventions aren't a new idea.
Typical absurdity argument. I won't bother commenting past the fact that most of the things patents are useful for these days require enormous investment in time and equipment and materials, and that it's trivial to copy them once the hard work's been done, and with the world as small as it is these days you don't even have geographic separation in order to keep your market.
Go play ouside! Soccer,football,hockey, basketball, anything!
While I normally would agree with you -- this is a half hour at lunchtime. Not enough time to shower afterward, barely enough time to have a decent game. I don't know about you, but rushing from intense physical activity in hot weather outside to a desk inside an air-conditioned environment... You sweat, and you stink.
So either software gets copyrights OR pathents, NOT both, or the woman who writes the Harry Potter books ought to be able to patent stories about magical school kids. That's the only fair thing to do, you know.
I've argued about this earlier on this site and didn't seem to get many responses after the second round of rebuttals. Quite simply though, novels or stories are not instructions on creating a work; you simply cannot compare a story to an algorithm for something such as JPEG compression.
Abolishing software copyright doesn't work either. Patents protect the patent holder against competition so they may recoup their development costs. Copyright protects against... well copying of a work, whether that work be innovative or novel or it just be a specific but obvious way to doing something. They're different issues.
Please don't let the idiocy of the obvious patents make you blind to the necessity of patents, whether they be software, mechanical or biological.
Sure, but now I've got to carry both my PDA that work wants me to use with the goddamned "email only" unit (that still does email half-asseed well). Give me one unit that can do both, can run the apps we've already developed for Palm, and has a decent cell phone on it. A blackberry and a PDA are just too much bulk to carry around, as both need a decent screen size to be remotely useful.
They're slow, the screen sucks (no touchscreen either), the wheel-only interface blows and, oh yeah, did I mention they're slow? (based on using the older black and white ones, the newer colour ones and the shorter colour ones with bluetooth)
The treo 650... now that's hot. It's a real PDA that sits on the cell network, not a half-assed email client that tries to pretend to be a PDA. Lose the damn camera and it'd be damn near perfect.
You're an idiot. If it takes me a small personal fortune and a half a decade of work to refine and perfect a procedure for doing $foo, what is my motivation for doing it if as soon as I make my first widget $BIG_COMPANY can simply wave a pile of patents at me, making a fortune off of my hard work and research and investment?
You're running around in circles. If the frivolous and obvious patents didn't exist, there would be no frivilous and obvious patent portfolio to beat me over the head with. If a company has an innovative or novel idea and beat me to it, or even more realistically, I used their novel/innovative process to get to my novel/innovative process then they have every right to say "Pay me to use this." That's the whole idea. It's when they have a zillion patents covering anything from applying band-aids to papercuts and toilet paper to arseholes that things fall apart, and saying "throw everything out then" as a solution is stupid. You don't abolish fucking because you can get AIDS through its application.
Remember I am not against frivolous or obvious patents in any sector.
How in the hell did I manage to write that, with bold tags even, and fuck it up? I of course meant "Remember that I am against frivolous or obvious patents in any sector.
OT: Why doesn't/. tell me when I have replies that are at 0? Ugh. Thank you, anonymous poster, for pointing this out to me.
Sure, a novel isn't an idea, it's the end product, just as the end product of software is a computer game, a word processor or whatever - things which themselves cannot be patented. It's the software algorithms which are patented.
Generally speaking, patents do not cover products. Patents cover procedures, methods or specific implementations which are novel or innovative. I'm not sure I am following your train of thought here.
But a novel still has ideas and methods behind it, just as with software. If an author has a "clever or innovative idea for a product", where the "product" is a novel, such as a way of resolving a plot in a certain way, or a new genre, why shouldn't this be patented in the same way that software algorithms can be?
Again, I'm having difficulty understanding your train of thought. As impossible as it seems, discovering or developing a new plot device isn't quite a way of coming up with a better book. The value in a book lies in the ideas and the story which is expressed, not the paper or binding. In the same vein, software is not an expression of ideas or story; it's a procedure to end up with a given goal. As artsy-fartsy as you want to make it, software is still a "mechanical" procedure. You put stuff in, turn the crank, and more valuable stuff comes out. Pulp authors aside, this is not how books work.
For $BIG_COMPANY, they will only take on products that can sell many thousands of widgets. For you, the little ISV, selling a few hundred will make you very comfortable.
So I should be happy that my innovation will bring me mediocre profits and the large company can take my novel and unobvious procedure (which allows me to make mediocre profits) and ramp up without having to recover any research investment?
The fact that there is competition means that the market is healthy. For example, there are a billion auto-responders out there, and many charge $19US/month or less for service. The one I sell costs $200US/month because it is highly specialized.
Strawman. I'm not talking about specialization, I'm talking about a new algorithm or procedure for doing something that makes it economically viable to do so in the first place. Let's take an encryption method or even something physical, say anti-lock brakes. It takes years of research and testing and perfection. Without a protection in place there is no incentive to do this development, since someone else will just take the result of the hard work and copy it without the burden of recovering all the development costs.
Patents don't do crap except kill software dev market.
Nonsense. Your examples are contrived and ignore the entire issue I'm bringing up. Remember I am not against frivolous or obvious patents in any sector. But innovation that takes significant capital and time investments need to be protected or they will simply not happen, or happen at such a slow and random rate that they're essentially not happenning. These innovations happen everywhere, including software.
How many different types of programs are there? Infinite.
How many potential patents are there? Infinite.
Red herring. The same two sentences can be applied to mechanical design, electrical design, medical research, space research... anything.
Do you either try to search for a patent that covers what you want to do, or do you go ahead and ignore it, hoping you stay small enough to not get noticed? Hmm; the former takes...$$$$ and lots of time (forever) that you could be devoting to coding.
Again, what you have stated applies to any field of endeavour. This is not something that only happens with software. Software development has significantly lower entry costs than anything else, this is true, but it doesn't mean that it needs some kind of special protection against... well protection.:-)
Software Patents are used to stifle competition only and they should be abolished.
Wrong. Frivilous and obvious patents are used to stifle competition. It's really simple, at least to me. If I spend signficant time and energy and resources to develop something (hardware, software, medicine, anything), I should be able to recover those costs in exchange for making the process public. I can choose to keep it secret, but then my chances of recovering those costs are significantly reduced, too. Classic trade-off.
Worrying about competition is a waste of brain-cells.
I truly hope you never find yourself with some really interesting research and development work. You will go crazy trying to resolve these issues internally.:-)
What are you smoking? onboard network is still on the PCI bus, just like on-board controllers are. Now the on-board ethernet may be on a separate PCI bus (one server I have at the office here has *7* PCI busses) or it may be part of the chipset (yuck!) but don't be fooled, it's still on a PCI bus.
Patents (not just software patents) are about people wanting to restrict what engineers can do, by definition. They are pure evil. Other industries with patents AREN'T "okay". Most are dominated by cosy oligopolies of long-entrenched multinational corporations - Lockheed-Martin, Ingersoll-Rand, etc.
You're an idiot. If it takes me a small personal fortune and a half a decade of work to refine and perfect a procedure for doing $foo, what is my motivation for doing it if as soon as I make my first widget $BIG_COMPANY can simply take it and copy it, making a fortune off of my hard work and research and investment? Patents are supposed to prevent this, and it's a very very very good thing. The problem is that the patent system has become a whore's market, and they'll rubber-stamp practically anything in order to get the filing fees.
Patents are not evil or bad. It's the filing office and the total lack of management therein that has caused this mess.
Taking Stallman's example, why do you think that patent law has not been applied to novels?
Quite simply: a novel is not a set of instructions for a clever or innovative idea for a product. A novel is a story. Stallman actually tried using this as an argument?
I am not against software patents. I am, however, vehemently against patents of any kind which are describing methods and procedures that are trivial, broad and taken as common knowlege in their field of experience. I mean let's face it. JPEG compression is not something trivial or (when it was developed) common knowlege. The algorithm for it should be patentable. Patenting "a method for exchanging data between two businesses using internet protocols" is neither novel nor innovative. It's the latter type of patent in ALL INDUSTRIES that I am against.
The top picture's child is out of focus. I'd have picked the bottom photo as well; it's very sharp and clear. The top photo has the wood grain in amazing detail but the subject is not focused.
Privilege separation good. Hardened kernel, hardened input and output methods good. chroot jails bad. What a royal and total waste of time and energy.
Yeah it's marginally more secure but it's such a royal pain in the arse that it's just not worth in in my opinion. Make the apps harder and leave all my goddamn daemons in the main filesystem instead of a dozen balkanized filesystems. Ugh.
I realize security is like an onion; layers good. But this is one layer I will never deploy. If I am THAT concerned about my daemon's (lack) of security I will either put it on its own box with nothing else, or I will find another app. chroot is just a bad idea all around.
I realize that OpenSSH is from the OBSD camp. I never said OBSD made shit software, I'm saying I don't understand how it's "so much better" when (as far as I can tell) they just make the DEFAULT INSTALL better. The software (kernel, tools, etc.) are no better, just the packaging.
The merits of OpenBSD are obvious to anyone who looks closely at it. It's not the right OS for every application, nor does it claim to be. It's Free, Functional, and Secure - and that's exactly what it claims to be.
See this is what I never understood about the OBSD people. OBSD's ONLY claim to fame is that it's the most secure OUT OF THE BOX. Now I don't know about you but I've NEVER used a Linux system without some modification beyond the base install. How exactly is OBSD more secure than an equivalently configured Linux system? Is the kernel harder? Is the OpenSSH version in OBSD any different than the same in most Linux distros?
How, exactly, do I uninstall IE in XP Pro? I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I can't seem to. If I click on my MSN Messenger "you got mail" it uses IE to open up hotmail, not Firefox.
Unless you're Michael Jackson. Child molestation trial aside, you gotta admit that something isn't right about someone who hates his ancestry and skin colour so much that he'll go to such great lengths to change it.
But at least it would show it was purchased in the first place. This could be used to put together a better behavioural picture of what might be going on.
How? She'll buy whatever she thinks will keep the 'rents off her back and either, as the GP says, toss it in the trash or puke it into the toilet bowl. I fail to see how this helps identify the problem at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately this is the very kind of situation that software patents herald.
Bullshit -- Why do software patents make this any more likely than the existing physical entity patents?
I never said that only modern inventions require it. Don't put words into my mouth. But let's see if you'll put your money where your mouth is. Quantum physics. Nanotechnology. Bio-anything. You spend millions of dollars and expend enormous amounts of time, energy and resources into developing useful devices which utilize these fields of technology, and you release it to the world (let's say North America/Europe) without any kind of patent protection, and then you watch as the businesses with the resources to make use of your invention copy it and help you recoup the development costs.
Oh wait, that's right. It won't happen. You're not that stupid.
Don't let modern history blind you to the fact that the planet had been around of billions of years (and humans for several thousands) yet things were still invented. Inventions aren't a new idea.
Typical absurdity argument. I won't bother commenting past the fact that most of the things patents are useful for these days require enormous investment in time and equipment and materials, and that it's trivial to copy them once the hard work's been done, and with the world as small as it is these days you don't even have geographic separation in order to keep your market.
Nice try though.
Go play ouside! Soccer,football,hockey, basketball, anything!
While I normally would agree with you -- this is a half hour at lunchtime. Not enough time to shower afterward, barely enough time to have a decent game. I don't know about you, but rushing from intense physical activity in hot weather outside to a desk inside an air-conditioned environment... You sweat, and you stink.
So either software gets copyrights OR pathents, NOT both, or the woman who writes the Harry Potter books ought to be able to patent stories about magical school kids. That's the only fair thing to do, you know.
I've argued about this earlier on this site and didn't seem to get many responses after the second round of rebuttals. Quite simply though, novels or stories are not instructions on creating a work; you simply cannot compare a story to an algorithm for something such as JPEG compression.
Abolishing software copyright doesn't work either. Patents protect the patent holder against competition so they may recoup their development costs. Copyright protects against ... well copying of a work, whether that work be innovative or novel or it just be a specific but obvious way to doing something. They're different issues.
Please don't let the idiocy of the obvious patents make you blind to the necessity of patents, whether they be software, mechanical or biological.
I'm talking about Duke Nuk'em, Worms, Worms2, even the venerable Scorched Earth... surely they still work? They were a blast. :-)
Sure, but now I've got to carry both my PDA that work wants me to use with the goddamned "email only" unit (that still does email half-asseed well). Give me one unit that can do both, can run the apps we've already developed for Palm, and has a decent cell phone on it. A blackberry and a PDA are just too much bulk to carry around, as both need a decent screen size to be remotely useful.
They're slow, the screen sucks (no touchscreen either), the wheel-only interface blows and, oh yeah, did I mention they're slow? (based on using the older black and white ones, the newer colour ones and the shorter colour ones with bluetooth)
The treo 650... now that's hot. It's a real PDA that sits on the cell network, not a half-assed email client that tries to pretend to be a PDA. Lose the damn camera and it'd be damn near perfect.
You're an idiot. If it takes me a small personal fortune and a half a decade of work to refine and perfect a procedure for doing $foo, what is my motivation for doing it if as soon as I make my first widget $BIG_COMPANY can simply wave a pile of patents at me, making a fortune off of my hard work and research and investment?
You're running around in circles. If the frivolous and obvious patents didn't exist, there would be no frivilous and obvious patent portfolio to beat me over the head with. If a company has an innovative or novel idea and beat me to it, or even more realistically, I used their novel/innovative process to get to my novel/innovative process then they have every right to say "Pay me to use this." That's the whole idea. It's when they have a zillion patents covering anything from applying band-aids to papercuts and toilet paper to arseholes that things fall apart, and saying "throw everything out then" as a solution is stupid. You don't abolish fucking because you can get AIDS through its application.
Remember I am not against frivolous or obvious patents in any sector.
How in the hell did I manage to write that, with bold tags even, and fuck it up? I of course meant "Remember that I am against frivolous or obvious patents in any sector.
OT: Why doesn't /. tell me when I have replies that are at 0? Ugh. Thank you, anonymous poster, for pointing this out to me.
Chicagoogle... find all thing Chicago! : )
I personally like goocago better. :-)
Sure, a novel isn't an idea, it's the end product, just as the end product of software is a computer game, a word processor or whatever - things which themselves cannot be patented. It's the software algorithms which are patented.
Generally speaking, patents do not cover products. Patents cover procedures, methods or specific implementations which are novel or innovative. I'm not sure I am following your train of thought here.
But a novel still has ideas and methods behind it, just as with software. If an author has a "clever or innovative idea for a product", where the "product" is a novel, such as a way of resolving a plot in a certain way, or a new genre, why shouldn't this be patented in the same way that software algorithms can be?
Again, I'm having difficulty understanding your train of thought. As impossible as it seems, discovering or developing a new plot device isn't quite a way of coming up with a better book. The value in a book lies in the ideas and the story which is expressed, not the paper or binding. In the same vein, software is not an expression of ideas or story; it's a procedure to end up with a given goal. As artsy-fartsy as you want to make it, software is still a "mechanical" procedure. You put stuff in, turn the crank, and more valuable stuff comes out. Pulp authors aside, this is not how books work.
For $BIG_COMPANY, they will only take on products that can sell many thousands of widgets. For you, the little ISV, selling a few hundred will make you very comfortable.
So I should be happy that my innovation will bring me mediocre profits and the large company can take my novel and unobvious procedure (which allows me to make mediocre profits) and ramp up without having to recover any research investment?
The fact that there is competition means that the market is healthy. For example, there are a billion auto-responders out there, and many charge $19US/month or less for service. The one I sell costs $200US/month because it is highly specialized.
Strawman. I'm not talking about specialization, I'm talking about a new algorithm or procedure for doing something that makes it economically viable to do so in the first place. Let's take an encryption method or even something physical, say anti-lock brakes. It takes years of research and testing and perfection. Without a protection in place there is no incentive to do this development, since someone else will just take the result of the hard work and copy it without the burden of recovering all the development costs.
Patents don't do crap except kill software dev market.
Nonsense. Your examples are contrived and ignore the entire issue I'm bringing up. Remember I am not against frivolous or obvious patents in any sector. But innovation that takes significant capital and time investments need to be protected or they will simply not happen, or happen at such a slow and random rate that they're essentially not happenning. These innovations happen everywhere, including software.
How many different types of programs are there? Infinite. How many potential patents are there? Infinite.
Red herring. The same two sentences can be applied to mechanical design, electrical design, medical research, space research... anything.
Do you either try to search for a patent that covers what you want to do, or do you go ahead and ignore it, hoping you stay small enough to not get noticed? Hmm; the former takes...$$$$ and lots of time (forever) that you could be devoting to coding.
Again, what you have stated applies to any field of endeavour. This is not something that only happens with software. Software development has significantly lower entry costs than anything else, this is true, but it doesn't mean that it needs some kind of special protection against ... well protection. :-)
Software Patents are used to stifle competition only and they should be abolished.
Wrong. Frivilous and obvious patents are used to stifle competition. It's really simple, at least to me. If I spend signficant time and energy and resources to develop something (hardware, software, medicine, anything), I should be able to recover those costs in exchange for making the process public. I can choose to keep it secret, but then my chances of recovering those costs are significantly reduced, too. Classic trade-off.
Worrying about competition is a waste of brain-cells.
I truly hope you never find yourself with some really interesting research and development work. You will go crazy trying to resolve these issues internally. :-)
What are you smoking? onboard network is still on the PCI bus, just like on-board controllers are. Now the on-board ethernet may be on a separate PCI bus (one server I have at the office here has *7* PCI busses) or it may be part of the chipset (yuck!) but don't be fooled, it's still on a PCI bus.
Patents (not just software patents) are about people wanting to restrict what engineers can do, by definition. They are pure evil. Other industries with patents AREN'T "okay". Most are dominated by cosy oligopolies of long-entrenched multinational corporations - Lockheed-Martin, Ingersoll-Rand, etc.
You're an idiot. If it takes me a small personal fortune and a half a decade of work to refine and perfect a procedure for doing $foo, what is my motivation for doing it if as soon as I make my first widget $BIG_COMPANY can simply take it and copy it, making a fortune off of my hard work and research and investment? Patents are supposed to prevent this, and it's a very very very good thing. The problem is that the patent system has become a whore's market, and they'll rubber-stamp practically anything in order to get the filing fees.
Patents are not evil or bad. It's the filing office and the total lack of management therein that has caused this mess.
Taking Stallman's example, why do you think that patent law has not been applied to novels?
Quite simply: a novel is not a set of instructions for a clever or innovative idea for a product. A novel is a story. Stallman actually tried using this as an argument?
I am not against software patents. I am, however, vehemently against patents of any kind which are describing methods and procedures that are trivial, broad and taken as common knowlege in their field of experience. I mean let's face it. JPEG compression is not something trivial or (when it was developed) common knowlege. The algorithm for it should be patentable. Patenting "a method for exchanging data between two businesses using internet protocols" is neither novel nor innovative. It's the latter type of patent in ALL INDUSTRIES that I am against.
"two berries" ??
The top picture's child is out of focus. I'd have picked the bottom photo as well; it's very sharp and clear. The top photo has the wood grain in amazing detail but the subject is not focused.
Privilege separation good. Hardened kernel, hardened input and output methods good. chroot jails bad. What a royal and total waste of time and energy.
Yeah it's marginally more secure but it's such a royal pain in the arse that it's just not worth in in my opinion. Make the apps harder and leave all my goddamn daemons in the main filesystem instead of a dozen balkanized filesystems. Ugh.
I realize security is like an onion; layers good. But this is one layer I will never deploy. If I am THAT concerned about my daemon's (lack) of security I will either put it on its own box with nothing else, or I will find another app. chroot is just a bad idea all around.
I realize that OpenSSH is from the OBSD camp. I never said OBSD made shit software, I'm saying I don't understand how it's "so much better" when (as far as I can tell) they just make the DEFAULT INSTALL better. The software (kernel, tools, etc.) are no better, just the packaging.
The merits of OpenBSD are obvious to anyone who looks closely at it. It's not the right OS for every application, nor does it claim to be. It's Free, Functional, and Secure - and that's exactly what it claims to be.
See this is what I never understood about the OBSD people. OBSD's ONLY claim to fame is that it's the most secure OUT OF THE BOX. Now I don't know about you but I've NEVER used a Linux system without some modification beyond the base install. How exactly is OBSD more secure than an equivalently configured Linux system? Is the kernel harder? Is the OpenSSH version in OBSD any different than the same in most Linux distros?
How, exactly, do I uninstall IE in XP Pro? I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I can't seem to. If I click on my MSN Messenger "you got mail" it uses IE to open up hotmail, not Firefox.
Granted, one cannot choose to be black or white
Unless you're Michael Jackson. Child molestation trial aside, you gotta admit that something isn't right about someone who hates his ancestry and skin colour so much that he'll go to such great lengths to change it.
UIn the snow, uphill, BOTH WAYS!
What is 0.4523232323 as a fraction?
Well, it's easy; the answer's 45/100 + 23/9900, and from there it's regular simplification.
That's a neat trick!
But at least it would show it was purchased in the first place. This could be used to put together a better behavioural picture of what might be going on.
How? She'll buy whatever she thinks will keep the 'rents off her back and either, as the GP says, toss it in the trash or puke it into the toilet bowl. I fail to see how this helps identify the problem at all.