Do you not think that your.sig seems to advocate moving programmers from people with equivalent status to brewery owners, to people with equivalent status to late night taxi drivers? Don't you think that this might be just a little bit of a harmful side effect of free software?
This is actually a fair summary of Chomsky -- at least, everything I've seen by him (and particularly, his "destruction" of Skinner) basically boils down to not much more than this.
In any case, this is only potentially true for Einstein in the case of his work on the photoelectric effect. Special and general relativity were conceived as a world-famous, extremely prominent physicist.
There are (currently) 7 different software options in 7 different languages (including C, Perl, and Java) for the Linux-based Mindstorms owner."
Yup, seven different projects for Lego Mindstorms, but no window manager that works. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, in a nutshell, the reason why Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and Bazaar" is wrong. Although we could actually have worked this out ourselves with a bit of thought -- how many real life bazaars have ever actually built anything larger than a hep of camel shit?
tabbed widgets, not tabbed palettes. The tabbed widget is noted as prior art in the Adobe patent, for heaven's sake. Adobe innovated by allowing you to take the tabs, pull them off the widget and them reassemble them into new, customisable widgets. That's the innovation.
I blame Taco for screwing this up in his headline. But you are equally culpable for believing what you want to be true, rather than looking for what actually is true.
I thought it was well known that Kurt Cobain basically got involved in playing the "mullet game" with some guys from Mudhoney. The rules are simple -- if someone with a mullet likes your band, you have to kill yourself.
Well, if you had actually read the patent, rather than skimming the first line, you'd have seen that it is actually very specific about the kind of selection indicator which is being patented. The title is to indicate that the patent is for a UI device, rather than, say, an electronic masturbation machine (patent 1176342, IIRC). There is no mention of "tabs" because "tab" is too generic and loose a word to ever be part of a patent, but anyone practiced in reading these things can parse it that way.
IAAFL, and this patent looks pretty kosher. The palette idea was new and non-obvious, the prior art was disclosed and other industry players have respected it. Go Adobe. And my opinion is in no way tainted by my oft-stated desire to find the man who invented Flash and Shockwave and break his arms and legs with breezeblocks.
I assume what they mean by tabbed widgets are the tabs that everyone uses in any GUI toolkit
When you ASSUME, you make an ASS of U and ME, I'm afraid. Malda has done his usual fantastic journalistic job of confusing the generic "tabbed widgets" with "tabbed palettes", where separate tabs can be dragged apart from the parent widget and combined to create a new customised widget. It's his fault more than yours, but in fact the patent is much more sensible and defensible than most.
Great to see the patent system at work. Now we the public can understand how all these amazing things would work, since we'd never possibly think of them ourselves.
Well, in that case, why don't you think of something new and become a billionaire? Of had you had the monstrous misfortune to be born just after all the obivious things had been patented?
All the things you mention were designed, by designers. They're obvious once you see them (they're designed to be obvious -- that's the whole purpose). They're not obvious when you're sitting down, looking at a list of requirements and trying to make something usable.
Paper is obvious. Glue is obvious. Post-it Notes are not obvious. People had been gluing pieces of paper to things for centuries before the post-it was invented.
If you don't like patents, come up with some arguments against them. Don't just pretend that things that nobody in fact did come up with, were things that anybody could have come up with.
Hey, fuck, Larry's a right guy, I guess. He used to lecture us on Torts when I was at HLS (or as we in the law biz call it "fucken Hah-vud"). The man had a few problems; his attitude to hip-flasks in the lecture hall seemed a touch abstemious, and his views on cocaine marked him out as an outright prohibitionist. But he could light his farts with the best of 'em, and he swung a mean fucken bar-stool on the annual law school outing to New Haven. He may have turned into a fag when he moved out West; I myself tend to find my ass wiggling slightly if I have to go much further out than New Greenperndt, but you can't blame that on a guy.
Anyways, the fucken ICANN needs a good lawyer on the board, as does every company in the fucken world. Only lawyers understand Tha Law, man. And, as the Holy Bible says "Those lesser breeds without the law, they are fucked".
Nope, I'm afraid you're sadly wrong; FreeNet's Ian Clarke condoned its distribution in an interview, claiming that it was a consequence of FreeNet which he was willing to tolerate, and he was defended in this by a number of the very same Slashbots who have stormed this thread with anti-spam diatribes.
No advertiser is "sending you anything". They are making their files available on the Gnutella network. They happen to be improving the visibility of their files by exploiting the network protocols, but that's their perogative; if you're going to say that "the rules of the game" are against that, then you'd better have a snappy explanation about why the rules of the game don't rule out child porn.
In what way is putting files on a network and making them available for search engines "PUSH" media? In the words of a favourite slashdot phrase "They'll be arresting the search engines next!!!"
First, drug patents are in fact not recognised; chemical compounds cannot be patented. Drug patents tend to take the form "A machine...", specifying the process for synthesising and purifying the compound of interest. Drug companies can and have in the past sold rival patented medicines in which the active compounds were chemically identical.
Machines are different precisely because they are specific physical objects which are not generalisable to allow the patent holder to lay claims to vast swathes of human knowledge. The patent holder can make enough of a return on his machine to compensate him for development and to encourage him (or her) not to keep it secret, and that's all. Patent law works for machines. It doesn't work for things which aren't machines, which is why we have copyright law for artistic works and trademark law for distinctive commercial marks.
In the context of computer programs, which are neither machines, artistic works nor commercial marks, we clearly need a different IP regime. I don't believe that "anything goes" is the best regime, and will only be convinced otherwise when I see a significant "open source" effort which isn't a clone of something produced elsewhere. But whatever that regime, it is unlikely to be then the best model for machines.
There are a lot of good books on this subject; some of which are only slightly longer than this series of books. I really recommend you read one.
You have this *exactly* back to front. Patent law (which is a subset of intellectual property law, btw, the two are not synonyms) covers designs for physical objects, not ideas. The only way in which software or algorithm patents manage to get through is by patenting "A system composed of a computer and software, where the software...." -- a clear abuse of the system, IMO. Patent law works well for physical objects, as a compromise between intellectual freedom and the "promotion of the useful arts".
Note also that patent law on physical objects does not prevent innovators from studying and improving their design -- the whole point of patents is to bring intellectual property into the public domain and avoid the alternative, which is trade secrets. You can study a patented mousetrap, improve the design, and patent your improvement, so long as you declare the original mousetrap as prior art and pay appropriate licensing fees if you market your invention.
You probably ought to do a bit more research before publishing articles in the press.
Slashdot Mirror
Look up into the stars, gaze upon our infinite glittering universe and reflect that, it is just possible, that somebody cares.
apparently the lameness filter requires you to type some text here.
I dunno, a stale pizza, a box of tissues and a copy of Quake would be close enough for most purposes.
Do you not think that your .sig seems to advocate moving programmers from people with equivalent status to brewery owners, to people with equivalent status to late night taxi drivers? Don't you think that this might be just a little bit of a harmful side effect of free software?
This is actually a fair summary of Chomsky -- at least, everything I've seen by him (and particularly, his "destruction" of Skinner) basically boils down to not much more than this.
In any case, this is only potentially true for Einstein in the case of his work on the photoelectric effect. Special and general relativity were conceived as a world-famous, extremely prominent physicist.
Yup, seven different projects for Lego Mindstorms, but no window manager that works. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, in a nutshell, the reason why Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and Bazaar" is wrong. Although we could actually have worked this out ourselves with a bit of thought -- how many real life bazaars have ever actually built anything larger than a hep of camel shit?
lack of talent.
I blame Taco for screwing this up in his headline. But you are equally culpable for believing what you want to be true, rather than looking for what actually is true.
I thought it was well known that Kurt Cobain basically got involved in playing the "mullet game" with some guys from Mudhoney. The rules are simple -- if someone with a mullet likes your band, you have to kill yourself.
IAAFL, and this patent looks pretty kosher. The palette idea was new and non-obvious, the prior art was disclosed and other industry players have respected it. Go Adobe. And my opinion is in no way tainted by my oft-stated desire to find the man who invented Flash and Shockwave and break his arms and legs with breezeblocks.
When you ASSUME, you make an ASS of U and ME, I'm afraid. Malda has done his usual fantastic journalistic job of confusing the generic "tabbed widgets" with "tabbed palettes", where separate tabs can be dragged apart from the parent widget and combined to create a new customised widget. It's his fault more than yours, but in fact the patent is much more sensible and defensible than most.
Well, in that case, why don't you think of something new and become a billionaire? Of had you had the monstrous misfortune to be born just after all the obivious things had been patented?
All the things you mention were designed, by designers. They're obvious once you see them (they're designed to be obvious -- that's the whole purpose). They're not obvious when you're sitting down, looking at a list of requirements and trying to make something usable.
Paper is obvious. Glue is obvious. Post-it Notes are not obvious. People had been gluing pieces of paper to things for centuries before the post-it was invented.
If you don't like patents, come up with some arguments against them. Don't just pretend that things that nobody in fact did come up with, were things that anybody could have come up with.
Anyways, the fucken ICANN needs a good lawyer on the board, as does every company in the fucken world. Only lawyers understand Tha Law, man. And, as the Holy Bible says "Those lesser breeds without the law, they are fucked".
Larry L for president. Hip Hurray Hahvud!
Don't you think that's just a little bit of a callous attitude?
You don't know the half of it ....
Nope, I'm afraid you're sadly wrong; FreeNet's Ian Clarke condoned its distribution in an interview, claiming that it was a consequence of FreeNet which he was willing to tolerate, and he was defended in this by a number of the very same Slashbots who have stormed this thread with anti-spam diatribes.
In what way is putting files on a network and making them available for search engines "PUSH" media? In the words of a favourite slashdot phrase "They'll be arresting the search engines next!!!"
Machines are different precisely because they are specific physical objects which are not generalisable to allow the patent holder to lay claims to vast swathes of human knowledge. The patent holder can make enough of a return on his machine to compensate him for development and to encourage him (or her) not to keep it secret, and that's all. Patent law works for machines. It doesn't work for things which aren't machines, which is why we have copyright law for artistic works and trademark law for distinctive commercial marks.
In the context of computer programs, which are neither machines, artistic works nor commercial marks, we clearly need a different IP regime. I don't believe that "anything goes" is the best regime, and will only be convinced otherwise when I see a significant "open source" effort which isn't a clone of something produced elsewhere. But whatever that regime, it is unlikely to be then the best model for machines.
There are a lot of good books on this subject; some of which are only slightly longer than this series of books. I really recommend you read one.
I knew you wouldn't disappoint me.
C'mon, moderators, make the satire complete! Do your duty!
streeetlawya, abusing the +1 bonus since 1999
Stolen software -- INFORMATION MUST BE FREE!!!!
Stolen music -- INFORMATION MUST BE FREE!!!!
Stolen movies -- INFORMATION MUST BE FREE!!!!
Bomb-making instructions -- INFORMATION MUST BE FREE!!!!
but legal commercial advertisements? -- CENSOR THEM!!! CUT THEM OUT OF THE NETWORK!! FILTER THEM!!! CENSOR!!! CENSOR!! BASTARDS!!
Come on, isn't it just a little bit hypocritical?
You have this *exactly* back to front. Patent law (which is a subset of intellectual property law, btw, the two are not synonyms) covers designs for physical objects, not ideas. The only way in which software or algorithm patents manage to get through is by patenting "A system composed of a computer and software, where the software ...." -- a clear abuse of the system, IMO. Patent law works well for physical objects, as a compromise between intellectual freedom and the "promotion of the useful arts".
Note also that patent law on physical objects does not prevent innovators from studying and improving their design -- the whole point of patents is to bring intellectual property into the public domain and avoid the alternative, which is trade secrets. You can study a patented mousetrap, improve the design, and patent your improvement, so long as you declare the original mousetrap as prior art and pay appropriate licensing fees if you market your invention.
You probably ought to do a bit more research before publishing articles in the press.
1. What's that got to do with solar panels? and
2. What's that got to do with solar panels?
All I'm saying is that any objection to protection on intellectual property in non-physical data doesn't necessarily translate to physical items.