But it's not any random software company. It's Microsoft, which try to push their software stack to small to big enterprises. Their software stack is IIS,.NET, ASP.NET and MSSQL. And now they are admintting that their software stack can be replaced by the plain old Php with plain old MySQL server.
Space was not only a blogging platform, it was an advertisement for their software. If that was any random software company with ditches their own software and go with an open source solution I would not write that down.
Microsoft own words are "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms..." and not "it's not profitable and we are need to think of the stakeholders". As I said, MS try to push their software stack really hard against the establish Linux,Apache,Php,MySQL and here they are admitting that "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms...". How many Man-Hours and money have they invested in Spaces?
Wow. The most profitable I.T. company, the I.T. company that suppose to be the number one software company in the world, which have monopoly on operation systems and in the office market, officially admitting that their IIS, MSSQL,.NET and ASP.NET crap can't compete with Wordpress, an Open Source CMS system, running on plain old PHP and a MySQL database.
Mustn't that be a blow to all the Microsoft's chills and so called I.T. consultants that are trying in masses to convince small business and enterprise users to buy in to the ASP.NET stuff, that is suppose to be so enterprise ready and suppose to scale so well on the Microsoft IIS server? How are they going to convince anyone if Microsoft itself says "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms..." with their ASP.NET and IIS Server 7.0 (which on live.com is running)?
From Slashdot: The attackers behind the recent Stuxnet worm attack used four different zero-day security vulnerabilities to burrow into — and spread around — Microsoft's Windows operating system, according to a startling disclosure from Microsoft. Two of the four vulnerabilities are still unpatched.
Servers you right using Windows for anything critical. Are they waiting one month for a fix as the rest of the Windows users?
Now you see why the "music industry" is pressing for longer and more restrictive copyright laws. It has nothing to do with the artists and everything with to maintain the music publisher's monopoly over works. No wonder, copyright was invented by the publisher to maintain their printing monopoly. Look it up in the history books beginning with the Stationers' Company and the Statute of Anne.
In Germany the service of gasoline pumping is outlawed because of the health issue. If you pumping gas for 20 or more years 12 hours a day you will get very costly health issues. But if the customers pumping, they are pumping maybe once in a week, they will not notice anything.
Nice backwards thinking, USA. But on the other hand, most of you don't have health insurance anyway, so the service guy will die with 50 anyway.
I lot of people trust Steam and other DRM stuff. The most people are back in the 1990s, as you call it. Just take it as what could happen with the other DRM'd stuff out there and how good GOG is for not having any DRM.
At least with GOG you could have backup your purchased stuff and use it long after GOG is gone, which with the most software you buy you cannot (as long as you don't want to be a horrible pirat and or hacker, be raided by the FBI and go to prison for 15 years).
Technically it's not an IIS bug, true. But why is only the IIS affected and not the more used Apache? Actually, why is it always the IIS and almost never the Apache? You should think that a hacker would target the most used webserver to hack as many websites as he/she can.
There are 197 results, but half of them are posted on a wordpress blog about something else. This search yields 347 results which are all IIS vulnerabilities, my favorite one is 500 Thousand MS Web Servers Hacked . A search for the same with Apache is useless, because Slashdot have a menu with an "Apache" item. The Slashdot's own search against "Apache vulnerability" only yields one reacent item Serious Apache Exploit Discovered, which only affects Windows servers. And the next is from 2008 Mystery Malware Affecting Linux/Apache Web Servers which "[exploit] vulnerabilities in QuickTime, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows". So I don't know why it's affects Linux.
Please give me an example, where half a million websites are affected with Apache. While Apache is the most run webserver on the whole internet there is only the IIS server which is taken down which such big numbers. Why?
Like online defragmentation? Like a complete check of 64GB and more in under 3 seconds? Like the ability to delete files that are in use or otherwise blocked (like a stupid application or a virus)?
but important things like GPU scheduling so that the OS controls the GPU and application usage and allows for non-graphical GPU processing without worry that games or the application UIs will suffer, stall, and fail to render.
I run games and 3D effects on my laptop all the time and there are no issues what-so-ever with UIs or whatever.
Linux had a huge chnace here and instead demonstrated what many of us find all too often, for an old kernel model, and an old OS model, and an old graphical protocol, it is not a mature OS for the mainstream. Good concepts, but dated, and too many bandaids to try to bring these to modern computing effectively.
Right, that is why Linux is now number one in servers and embedded devices, also number one in super computers and widely used for 3D effects in moves. That's also why the NYSE switched to Linux. Look around, Linux is now used everywhere except for the desktop and there is mostly because there are missing applications (and missing pre-installations).
Facts are, Linux is not only a viable alternative to Windows, it's more secure (no viruses), it's use less resources (you can run it in a 256MB RAM machine, with under 1GB of HDD space), it's more suited for terminals and virtualization, there are multiple vendors which to choose for support.
The really only thing what users are complaining is the lack of applications, like Photoshop, MS Office, etc. Just look at the other countries and communities that are using Linux very successful and are not only more secure but paying less. Nobody would use Windows for anything, if Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook/Exchange would run on Linux. Windows is just a play system to run your games on, real work is done mostly with Linux.
No, the original intent was to keep the state given monopoly to publish books.
The government wanted to abolish the Stationers' Company a relict of the former government that had the monopoly on printing and publishing books (and to censor the books as well). But the publisher lobbied the government under the disguise to protect the authors for a copyright law because they had older works and the money to buy the copyright of new works to publish them. The authors didn't had any choice to sell the copyright because the publisher were the only one with the printing presses, which were quite expensive. This new copyright law was later just taken over in the US constitution.
As I told before, the copyright was invented by the publisher for the publisher. Furthermore, there is no evidence what so ever that a copyright actually promotes the creation of new works. Last, the vast majority of creators don't see any cent out of copyright.
If the dollar is saved, so the business already created over 6,000 new jobs and generated billions in GDP and tax revenue. Each dollar saved will be spend or do they think they are burning the saved money? The BSA and RIAA/MPAA/GEMA really thinks that the money not spend on licenses or music is just wasted.
430 child pornography sites. You got to be kidding me. That like what, 0.000000000000001% of the websites worldwide? And for a hand full of sites they have to filter 100% of the traffic and spend millions of Australian $ for it?
How about a total filter on the catholic church, after all there are 10% of Catholic Priests Were Pedophiles. How about spend more money to protect real children in Australia? There was 5,591 sexual abuse and 11,789 physical abuse in 2008. There were 339,454 notifications but only 162,259 investigations, that's only 48% coverage. How about dropping this stupid filter and spend more money on protecting real children, living in Australia right now?
But what will happened is that Australia is going to spend millions to block 430 child pornography sites but then they have to cut spending on education and on child protection services.
But until then, artists need to eat. I'm not saying that the current means of achieving that is equitable or fair, but it sorta-kinda works, in that works of art are produced and that you don't see masses of dying artists on the 9 o'clock news.
How does it "sorta-kinda works" if the creator of music get's 1% of the sale of the CD? Right now the vast majority of creators don't see anything from copyright. Sure, if you get famous like the Beatles or Rolling Stones you get rich. But how many bands are actually rich? 1% or 2% of the bands out there. The rest are getting no cent out of copyright.
We have a kind of Replicator now, why 80% to 90% of the worlds population must still starve, because a book is more expensive then what they are making in a month? Why we are not releasing all works, abolish copyright? Only because of the 1% to 2% of creators that are getting rich or because of the RIAA/MPAA/GEMA and other organizations that are making billions without creating new works?
I'm not talking about the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the big bands and not about Hollywood. I'm talking about ever body else, the 99% of the creators out there.
But please, go to your local bands and just ask them how much money they make from selling CDs and if they are worse of if people are downloading their songs for free. Proof me wrong.
You missed my point. Don't you think the stuff that today games do are pretty math intensive? But the math is so fast done because we have specialized hardware for it.
So I ask, when we have the hardware to do ray-tracing like we have the hardware now to do triangles? When will ray-tracing become the mainstream? Because I think that the future is in ray-tracing (maybe I'm wrong).
> You really don't have the right to give all of the internet a copy of that Hannah Montana song.
Why not? Really, why not? The people who like to buy the Hannah Montana song will buy it anyway and the people who don't know what it is will maybe download it but they are certainly not going to go to the shop and buy it. Also the people who know who Hannah Montana is will either spend the money or not. Me putting a copy of the songs in the internet will not change their behavior in any way.
For ages we had copied songs, books, art, ideas. But because now we have the technology to copy it for free someone like you come and tell me it's somewhat immoral to do it.
Yes, I'm all for content creators having the right to monetize their work, too. But once I bought a copy of the work nobody can say me it's immoral to give copies of the copy to other people. As long as I don't tell that's my work, as long as I give credit to the original creator there is nothing immoral to it. And I'm not sorry, but the time where you can just create one work and get rich by selling copies of it is over. Like the train made the horse chariot obsolete, so made the internet this business model obsolete. Why should I pay you for something which costs you next to nothing? Here is the government that acts immoral and criminalize a whole population class just to please the 1% that are famous and making some cash out of copyright. If anything, the government should act on the behalf of the 99% of the creators, who don't ever sell 1000 CDs or more then 5000 books and on the millions of torrent users which are only trying to utilize the new technology.
Copyright is only 200 years old and it was the big publisher who invented the copyright, not the content creators. In addition, there is no proof that a copyright actually benefit the creation of works. If anything, the opposite is true. A society where works and ideas are freely usable, which out the tax of the copyright monopoly, will have far more creativity and welfare. Music, art and ideas are never born out of itself, music, art and ideas are always build on top of older music, art and ideas.
We have invented the perfect copy machine, why shouldn't we use it? It's like in Star Trek someone invents the Replicator but the government outlaws it to protect obsolete business models.
Everybody agrees that ray tracing is just awesome and I at least think it's the future of 3D computer graphics. But there is only one big 3D hardware vendor left, AMD is more a CPU vendor that tries to get into the 3D market because Intel is too big in the CPUs market. Intel only have small on-board graphic chips. Will we see ray-tracing from Nvidia anytime soon?
I sure hope that maybe Intel or AMD try to take over the 3D computer graphics market with their CPU know-how (ray-tracing is using mostly the CPU). But I really don't hope to see ray-tracing in laptops or desktops in the next 50 years to be mainstream. Nvidia and ATI all focused on triangles and ray-tracing is like an new beginning. http://caustic.com/ is really a step in the right direction with their OpenRL SDK.
Why would you buy that? Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. are all free and you don't need to buy a Windows server to run it. They also talk you into bying MSSQL server, where just MySQL or PostgreSQL are free.
No wonder it's so expensive, it runs on the most expensive software out there. Windows Server 2003 and Oracle-Application-Server-10g/10.1.3.0.0 Oracle-HTTP-Server. . But the side is all wrong in FF3. The menu is in the middle of the side and the content is under the menu blob. Maybe next time they just using a Linux server with a custom Drupal or Wordpress.
Why the government always needs a site to be build from scratch? There are 100 open source CMS systems out there, where you have a) localization, b) forum, c) uploads, d) content management, etc, etc, all already developed. Just spend £1000 on a nice theme and another £3000 on customizing it. I don't think the side will have 10,000,000 visitors per day where you need an Oracle HTTP server with an Oracle DB and a highly specialized website.
They are so insecure that they must compare their product to the iPhone and, worst, hire dancers to dance in the street for their product. As one of the biggest software company you would expect them to set standards but they are only ride the "me, too" train. Like first Zune, the "me, too" iPod, now the WM7, the "me, too" iPhone and Android.
There is no study, no evidence, nowhere, that says that a patent system promote inventions. Please prove me wrong and cite one study that says clearly that a limited monopoly promotes inventions.
But there are many studies that suggests that it's really the opposite is true. There is even now a labor experiment with a patent model that clearly proofs (in the boundaries of the model) that a system with no patents at all not only produce more inventions but the whole wealth of the participants are much bigger. Called The Patent Game
Can we please at least get rid of the patents that are clearly harmful to a whole industry, like software patents and gene patents?
The reality is that we do grant too many software patents, but it's not a flaw with granting patents on software per se.
Yes it is. As it's a general flaw to granting patents on math and on algorithms. Software is math and algorithms, it's as simple as that. The only difference is that software is calculated with a computer. Why we don't patent math? Answer me that. Because math are the fundamental principles that every invention needs, no inventions are possible if you patent an mathematical algorithm. It's like patent iron or copper. Why are we panting software? Because it runs on a computer, a general purpose device to calculate mathematical algorithms. Why we don't patent mathematical algorithms that are "run" on paper with a calculator? It's the same but the one thing gets patents, the paper and calculator thing gets no patents.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's not any random software company. It's Microsoft, which try to push their software stack to small to big enterprises. Their software stack is IIS, .NET, ASP.NET and MSSQL. And now they are admintting that their software stack can be replaced by the plain old Php with plain old MySQL server.
Space was not only a blogging platform, it was an advertisement for their software. If that was any random software company with ditches their own software and go with an open source solution I would not write that down.
Microsoft own words are "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms ..." and not "it's not profitable and we are need to think of the stakeholders". As I said, MS try to push their software stack really hard against the establish Linux,Apache,Php,MySQL and here they are admitting that "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms ...". How many Man-Hours and money have they invested in Spaces?
Wow. The most profitable I.T. company, the I.T. company that suppose to be the number one software company in the world, which have monopoly on operation systems and in the office market, officially admitting that their IIS, MSSQL, .NET and ASP.NET crap can't compete with Wordpress, an Open Source CMS system, running on plain old PHP and a MySQL database.
Mustn't that be a blow to all the Microsoft's chills and so called I.T. consultants that are trying in masses to convince small business and enterprise users to buy in to the ASP.NET stuff, that is suppose to be so enterprise ready and suppose to scale so well on the Microsoft IIS server? How are they going to convince anyone if Microsoft itself says "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms ..." with their ASP.NET and IIS Server 7.0 (which on live.com is running)?
From Slashdot: The attackers behind the recent Stuxnet worm attack used four different zero-day security vulnerabilities to burrow into — and spread around — Microsoft's Windows operating system, according to a startling disclosure from Microsoft. Two of the four vulnerabilities are still unpatched.
Servers you right using Windows for anything critical. Are they waiting one month for a fix as the rest of the Windows users?
Now you see why the "music industry" is pressing for longer and more restrictive copyright laws. It has nothing to do with the artists and everything with to maintain the music publisher's monopoly over works. No wonder, copyright was invented by the publisher to maintain their printing monopoly. Look it up in the history books beginning with the Stationers' Company and the Statute of Anne.
In Germany the service of gasoline pumping is outlawed because of the health issue. If you pumping gas for 20 or more years 12 hours a day you will get very costly health issues. But if the customers pumping, they are pumping maybe once in a week, they will not notice anything.
Nice backwards thinking, USA. But on the other hand, most of you don't have health insurance anyway, so the service guy will die with 50 anyway.
I lot of people trust Steam and other DRM stuff. The most people are back in the 1990s, as you call it. Just take it as what could happen with the other DRM'd stuff out there and how good GOG is for not having any DRM.
At least with GOG you could have backup your purchased stuff and use it long after GOG is gone, which with the most software you buy you cannot (as long as you don't want to be a horrible pirat and or hacker, be raided by the FBI and go to prison for 15 years).
Technically it's not an IIS bug, true. But why is only the IIS affected and not the more used Apache? Actually, why is it always the IIS and almost never the Apache? You should think that a hacker would target the most used webserver to hack as many websites as he/she can.
There are 197 results, but half of them are posted on a wordpress blog about something else. This search yields 347 results which are all IIS vulnerabilities, my favorite one is 500 Thousand MS Web Servers Hacked . A search for the same with Apache is useless, because Slashdot have a menu with an "Apache" item. The Slashdot's own search against "Apache vulnerability" only yields one reacent item Serious Apache Exploit Discovered, which only affects Windows servers. And the next is from 2008 Mystery Malware Affecting Linux/Apache Web Servers which "[exploit] vulnerabilities in QuickTime, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows". So I don't know why it's affects Linux.
Please give me an example, where half a million websites are affected with Apache. While Apache is the most run webserver on the whole internet there is only the IIS server which is taken down which such big numbers. Why?
Well, I'm reading /. Don't know if /. is filtering in this way.
It's a SQL injection attack, but why it's not done on the fast majority of web servern out there that are running Apache/Php?
Hmmm.
Experts say that the bug, which will be discussed in detail at the Ekoparty conference in Argentina this week, affects millions of Web applications.
For some reasons I trust the experts. Is there a reason why this kind of attacks are only done on IIS/ASP.NET? Some time ago there was another exploit According to Google over *114.000 different pages have been infected.
Is there a reason why I never read anything about Apache or the other webservers and languages/frameworks?
Windows fanboy here?
NTFS still is offering features
Like online defragmentation? Like a complete check of 64GB and more in under 3 seconds? Like the ability to delete files that are in use or otherwise blocked (like a stupid application or a virus)?
but important things like GPU scheduling so that the OS controls the GPU and application usage and allows for non-graphical GPU processing without worry that games or the application UIs will suffer, stall, and fail to render.
I run games and 3D effects on my laptop all the time and there are no issues what-so-ever with UIs or whatever.
Linux had a huge chnace here and instead demonstrated what many of us find all too often, for an old kernel model, and an old OS model, and an old graphical protocol, it is not a mature OS for the mainstream. Good concepts, but dated, and too many bandaids to try to bring these to modern computing effectively.
Right, that is why Linux is now number one in servers and embedded devices, also number one in super computers and widely used for 3D effects in moves. That's also why the NYSE switched to Linux. Look around, Linux is now used everywhere except for the desktop and there is mostly because there are missing applications (and missing pre-installations).
Facts are, Linux is not only a viable alternative to Windows, it's more secure (no viruses), it's use less resources (you can run it in a 256MB RAM machine, with under 1GB of HDD space), it's more suited for terminals and virtualization, there are multiple vendors which to choose for support.
The really only thing what users are complaining is the lack of applications, like Photoshop, MS Office, etc. Just look at the other countries and communities that are using Linux very successful and are not only more secure but paying less. Nobody would use Windows for anything, if Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook/Exchange would run on Linux. Windows is just a play system to run your games on, real work is done mostly with Linux.
The government wanted to abolish the Stationers' Company a relict of the former government that had the monopoly on printing and publishing books (and to censor the books as well). But the publisher lobbied the government under the disguise to protect the authors for a copyright law because they had older works and the money to buy the copyright of new works to publish them. The authors didn't had any choice to sell the copyright because the publisher were the only one with the printing presses, which were quite expensive. This new copyright law was later just taken over in the US constitution.
As I told before, the copyright was invented by the publisher for the publisher. Furthermore, there is no evidence what so ever that a copyright actually promotes the creation of new works. Last, the vast majority of creators don't see any cent out of copyright.
Don't believe me? Go inform yourself.
If the dollar is saved, so the business already created over 6,000 new jobs and generated billions in GDP and tax revenue. Each dollar saved will be spend or do they think they are burning the saved money? The BSA and RIAA/MPAA/GEMA really thinks that the money not spend on licenses or music is just wasted.
430 child pornography sites. You got to be kidding me. That like what, 0.000000000000001% of the websites worldwide? And for a hand full of sites they have to filter 100% of the traffic and spend millions of Australian $ for it?
How about a total filter on the catholic church, after all there are 10% of Catholic Priests Were Pedophiles. How about spend more money to protect real children in Australia? There was 5,591 sexual abuse and 11,789 physical abuse in 2008. There were 339,454 notifications but only 162,259 investigations, that's only 48% coverage. How about dropping this stupid filter and spend more money on protecting real children, living in Australia right now?
But what will happened is that Australia is going to spend millions to block 430 child pornography sites but then they have to cut spending on education and on child protection services.
[...] is the content encryption scheme that protects data, typically movies, as they pass across a DVI or an HDMI cable
Protect the data, typically movies, from the legitimate customer and locks him out of his rights of a backup copy and his right of format shifting.
But until then, artists need to eat. I'm not saying that the current means of achieving that is equitable or fair, but it sorta-kinda works, in that works of art are produced and that you don't see masses of dying artists on the 9 o'clock news.
How does it "sorta-kinda works" if the creator of music get's 1% of the sale of the CD? Right now the vast majority of creators don't see anything from copyright. Sure, if you get famous like the Beatles or Rolling Stones you get rich. But how many bands are actually rich? 1% or 2% of the bands out there. The rest are getting no cent out of copyright.
We have a kind of Replicator now, why 80% to 90% of the worlds population must still starve, because a book is more expensive then what they are making in a month? Why we are not releasing all works, abolish copyright? Only because of the 1% to 2% of creators that are getting rich or because of the RIAA/MPAA/GEMA and other organizations that are making billions without creating new works?
I'm not talking about the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the big bands and not about Hollywood. I'm talking about ever body else, the 99% of the creators out there.
But please, go to your local bands and just ask them how much money they make from selling CDs and if they are worse of if people are downloading their songs for free. Proof me wrong.
Please inform yourself: The Surprising History of Copyright; http://questioncopyright.org/
You missed my point. Don't you think the stuff that today games do are pretty math intensive? But the math is so fast done because we have specialized hardware for it.
So I ask, when we have the hardware to do ray-tracing like we have the hardware now to do triangles? When will ray-tracing become the mainstream? Because I think that the future is in ray-tracing (maybe I'm wrong).
> You really don't have the right to give all of the internet a copy of that Hannah Montana song.
Why not? Really, why not? The people who like to buy the Hannah Montana song will buy it anyway and the people who don't know what it is will maybe download it but they are certainly not going to go to the shop and buy it. Also the people who know who Hannah Montana is will either spend the money or not. Me putting a copy of the songs in the internet will not change their behavior in any way.
For ages we had copied songs, books, art, ideas. But because now we have the technology to copy it for free someone like you come and tell me it's somewhat immoral to do it.
Yes, I'm all for content creators having the right to monetize their work, too. But once I bought a copy of the work nobody can say me it's immoral to give copies of the copy to other people. As long as I don't tell that's my work, as long as I give credit to the original creator there is nothing immoral to it. And I'm not sorry, but the time where you can just create one work and get rich by selling copies of it is over. Like the train made the horse chariot obsolete, so made the internet this business model obsolete. Why should I pay you for something which costs you next to nothing? Here is the government that acts immoral and criminalize a whole population class just to please the 1% that are famous and making some cash out of copyright. If anything, the government should act on the behalf of the 99% of the creators, who don't ever sell 1000 CDs or more then 5000 books and on the millions of torrent users which are only trying to utilize the new technology.
Copyright is only 200 years old and it was the big publisher who invented the copyright, not the content creators. In addition, there is no proof that a copyright actually benefit the creation of works. If anything, the opposite is true. A society where works and ideas are freely usable, which out the tax of the copyright monopoly, will have far more creativity and welfare. Music, art and ideas are never born out of itself, music, art and ideas are always build on top of older music, art and ideas.
We have invented the perfect copy machine, why shouldn't we use it? It's like in Star Trek someone invents the Replicator but the government outlaws it to protect obsolete business models.
What about the techdemo from caustic? Is that under the category "awesome"?
Everybody agrees that ray tracing is just awesome and I at least think it's the future of 3D computer graphics. But there is only one big 3D hardware vendor left, AMD is more a CPU vendor that tries to get into the 3D market because Intel is too big in the CPUs market. Intel only have small on-board graphic chips. Will we see ray-tracing from Nvidia anytime soon?
I sure hope that maybe Intel or AMD try to take over the 3D computer graphics market with their CPU know-how (ray-tracing is using mostly the CPU). But I really don't hope to see ray-tracing in laptops or desktops in the next 50 years to be mainstream. Nvidia and ATI all focused on triangles and ray-tracing is like an new beginning. http://caustic.com/ is really a step in the right direction with their OpenRL SDK.
Why would you buy that? Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. are all free and you don't need to buy a Windows server to run it. They also talk you into bying MSSQL server, where just MySQL or PostgreSQL are free.
Why the government always needs a site to be build from scratch? There are 100 open source CMS systems out there, where you have a) localization, b) forum, c) uploads, d) content management, etc, etc, all already developed. Just spend £1000 on a nice theme and another £3000 on customizing it. I don't think the side will have 10,000,000 visitors per day where you need an Oracle HTTP server with an Oracle DB and a highly specialized website.
They are so insecure that they must compare their product to the iPhone and, worst, hire dancers to dance in the street for their product. As one of the biggest software company you would expect them to set standards but they are only ride the "me, too" train. Like first Zune, the "me, too" iPod, now the WM7, the "me, too" iPhone and Android.
But there are many studies that suggests that it's really the opposite is true. There is even now a labor experiment with a patent model that clearly proofs (in the boundaries of the model) that a system with no patents at all not only produce more inventions but the whole wealth of the participants are much bigger. Called The Patent Game
Can we please at least get rid of the patents that are clearly harmful to a whole industry, like software patents and gene patents?
The reality is that we do grant too many software patents, but it's not a flaw with granting patents on software per se.
Yes it is. As it's a general flaw to granting patents on math and on algorithms. Software is math and algorithms, it's as simple as that. The only difference is that software is calculated with a computer. Why we don't patent math? Answer me that. Because math are the fundamental principles that every invention needs, no inventions are possible if you patent an mathematical algorithm. It's like patent iron or copper. Why are we panting software? Because it runs on a computer, a general purpose device to calculate mathematical algorithms. Why we don't patent mathematical algorithms that are "run" on paper with a calculator? It's the same but the one thing gets patents, the paper and calculator thing gets no patents.