So, software will never be rushed out to meet a deadline when the ponytails are in charge?
Presumably this means that customers for software projects will look over their wire-rimmed glasses, see that the person talking to them is wearing a sweat-stained Quake t-shirt rather than an Armani and suddenly be overcome with the milk of human kindness. No, no, dear boy, they will say, take all the time in the world over your project. Make sure it meets your full artistic vision. Take it easy. Play some QUake. Don't worry your head about that silly "penalty clause" -- we put that in when we were dealing with suits. Now that we know that the code-monkeys are in charge, we're happy to sit here with fifty container loads of oranges in an unrefrigerated warehouse, waiting for you to write our ordering system.
Bankers, too, will be infected with this Open Source Flower Child ethos. Hey, man, they will say, it's OK, man. Take a toke on this. Your software isn't ready yet? Because you were playing Quake? That's coooool, man. We'll just extend your loan facility by another month. We're not breadheads here.....
Software is rushed because bills need to be paid, and people cannot, typically, be convinced to part with cash unless something is delivered to them. That "something", so far in history, cannot be a sweaty Quake player's promise.
Bills will need to be paid on time, for the forseeable future. People are unlikely ever to provide the wherewithal to pay them without being given software. Therefore, from time to time, software will be rushed, and developed badly because of it.
in one debate (on FidoNet IIRC), someone suggested using the terms "stoats" and "weasels" instead. Unfortunately I could never remember which was supposed to be which.
Presumably, one kind was weaselly recognised, while the other was stoatally different?
The purpose is to allow other people to produce works based on the patented technology. This doesn't seem to be happening.
errrr... wasn't GIF based on the LZW algorithm? And in any case, the stimulation of development of other algorithms is definitely one of the means by which patents were intended to promote innovation.
At least LZW is in the public domain, so people can build on it. If you get rid of patents, then people will protect their intellectual policy using trade secrets. And that's a much worse state of affairs than the current.
Yes, it does have many problems. Asking people to pay a % of their litigation costs -- so, if I decide to launch a frivolous suit against a corporation, they have to dumb down their legal representation to whatever standard I choose to represent myself with? Effectively, this allows anyone to earn the wages of a lawyer by constantly filing suit. Unfortunately, time has proven over and over, all other things being equal, a large company has the resources and influence. to more effectively use such legal tools against the very people they are (were) meant to help.
Not true on both counts -- patent law was never meant to help "little people" against "big corporations". Secondly, when "little people" have a good, patentable idea, they tend to turn into "big corporations" quite fast, through the medium of "getting rich".
It also would be good if patents and copyrights could only be assigned to an individual, rather than a corporation (and only the original creator or inventor), and the patent/copyright holder would be able to grant or sell non-exclusive licenses to anyone they choose.
This would do serious violence to the actual process of invention in teams, sponsored by companies. If you plan on developing cancer in the next fifty years, you ought to hope that those companies with enough capital to invest in developing treatments have the incentive to do so. There are many good arguments for the abolition of intellectual property rights and, indeed, for socialism. But you appear to have threaded a path between them.
The moral of the story: patent law needs to be amended so that you must enforce it, or lose it.
You may be pleased to know that patent law has had this feature for many a long year (it's known as "no selective enforcement"). If you believe Unisys to be guilty of this, and you care enough about it, then I suggest you try to bust their patent. This is done by means of "litigation" in what we call a "court".
Since you clearly know not one tiny thing about intellectual property law, perhaps, as a service to the community, you'd be so kind as to post links here to your other ill-informed public pronouncements, so I can audit them for stupidity. I, a lawyer, have never written a line of code in my life, for the very good reason that I don't know anything about the subject. In future, perhaps IT geeks would display the same courtesy.
errrrmmm, you appear to be sending that letter, anonymously. (andy@lego isn't really any more ID than a telemarketer provides). What if the Government doesn't want to receive it? What should they be able to do to you?
Doesn't that suggest there's something just a little bit wrong with distinguishing between kinds of free speech?
Will laws be written to combat such behavior? Can such laws be written?
Such laws will, eventually be written. Such laws can, trivially, be written. (Soviet Russia had no telemarketing problem)
The question we ought to be asking is: when such laws are written, what other important freedoms will they be used to restrict?
Since slashdot readers are, it would seem, quite keen on sending large volumes of email to people with different views on intellectual property law to themselves, you ought to be wary about this. If Be, Corel, and the Holland, Michigan Public Library system were to have access to such a law, then there could be trouble for all concerned.
How inconvenient is it to deal with telemarketers? How inconvenient is it to live in a society with no free speech?
I'll answer the second question for you; for a lot of the people on slashdot, it would not be inconvenient at all. No regime in history has put people in jail for mindlessly parroting the party line.
What would happen, in the hypothetical case, where you litigated the GPL, and lost? Do you have a Plan B?
and
Have you ever thought of taking a more conciliatory attitude to things? Does the phrase "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" (I'm thinking of the "GNU/Linux" thing) have any resonance at all with you? Are there any things that you sort of care about, but not very much?
I'm running my own little IT law practice here, and I sure as hell can't walk into all those line numbers and start deleting things. So I have to trust it to someone else. And who do I trust? Some random "consultant", who'll probably put in a new back door of his own, plus a trojan to blackmail me with later? Or Microsoft, who for all their faults, know that they have to produce fixes for these things on a timely basis.
See, this is the "hobbyist mentality" which presumably explains why nobody I know uses Linux, et al. It's all fine for one guy running his personal homepage, and for a homepage, it may be the best you can get. But for someone who actually wants to do something with a computer, they don't have the option of spending valuable billable hours grovelling through code because someone wanted to call their competitors "weenies".
The article quite astutely points out something that's been bugging me for a while -- that open source software likes to pretend it's analogous to the concept of "peer review", whereas it's actually "review by any boob that can manage to do ftp:", which has no equivalent in the scientific community. Either back-door bugs are obvious as hell, in which case they could be picked up by review by ten people, max. Or they're not all that obvious after all.
Furthermore, the more people there are checking the source, the more there are out there introducing bugs, for the hell of it. Even if "Apache" is bug free, how can you tell that the disk you got passed by your third cousin who got it from his ex-boss who got it from "some guy" is?
It would seem far more useful to me if source was "open" in the sense that you could get a copy of the code on production of a reasonable description of what you planned to do with it, what improvement you wanted to make, plus at least two references from people who were prepared to establish your bona fides. Kind of like the criteria for getting a reader's ticket to a law library.
.... is that they would allow schoolchildren to avoid learning tedious and repetitive research skills of their own by posting all of their homework questions and assignments to "Ask Slashdot". Just think about it -- a new generation of slashdotters, all of whom had received all of their education and information, from slashdot! I reckon it would only take two or three generations before dissenting opinions had been completely removed from society, which would be double plus good.
knowing Linux makes you far more employable now, so what's it going to be like in 10 years?
I dunno, perhaps you'd better ask some of those FORTRAN programmers.
And in any case, know Linux makes you far more employable than whom? Than an illiterate tramp who can't stop pissing himself? yes, almost certainly so. Than an MSCE? Do me a favour. Linux advocacy is most effective when it doesn't slip into boosterism
It is very difficult to block (eventually client/sever firewalling will not be enough)
Oh wonderful, now you're even trying to subvert the legitimate desire of an employer that his time and bandwidth be used for business purposes rather than trading child porn and mp3z? I think you might want to rethink this: what possible legitimate application could there be for a program that subverts firewalls. Ex hypothesi, if you're being blocked by a firewall, you're working on someone else's computer, and doing something with it that they don't want you to do.
...): there are, however, certain of the more wild-eyed neo-liberals who one finds running about brandishing their copy of the Wealth of Nations
I'm sure you're aware, but others might not be, that Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is not a libertarian tract and actually has a quite sophisticated analysis of the need for regulation of big business in the public interest.
In fact, the context of the "Invisible Hand" passage makes it quite clear that Smith is referring to capitalist production by small, local producers, who consider themselves members of a community of interest. Applying it to multinational corporations is as bad a violence to Smith's theory as that suffered by some of Marx's
Hmmmmmm.... where's a good place to get analysis of the long term effects of a scientific research program -- oh yeh, from a bunch of science and technology geeks! Scientists are well-known for always thinking through the social and political implications of their work, which is why so many of them are clamouring to take responsibility for the consequences of pollution, genetically modified crops, eugenics, nuclear weapons, global warming, etc, etc. (that's sarcasm, by the way)
And slashdot? Yeah, that's the forum for people with well-thought out views about political and social issues. After all, spending all your time programming computers gives you a well-balanced view of the world, an appreciation for the difficult and complex nuances of human social relations, plus it gives you a load of spare time to think about things. And of course, slashdot readers are an incredibly representative sample of the population -- black, female, old, there's one of each, maybe more. Sure there are a few nutty knee-jerk libertarians out there, but in general they're swamped by the tide of reasonable, well thought-out debate.
Prepare to be swamped by a thousand links on the technological feasibility of nanotechnology, two thousand links to Bill Joy's speech, and precisely nothing of use to you in your essay. When you get an 'F' for failing to tackle any important issues whatsoever, do feel free to post to slashdot once more, and I will help to sue your school for causing emotional distress. Before long, your teacher will be strutting round the exercise yard, dealing crack, having knife-fights with other inmates, smoking blunts and pimping out his stable of bitches to the warders. And since he would almost certainly be sent to a minimum-security, white-collar prison, that kind of behaviour is going to stand out.
streetlawyer, abusing the privilege of posting at +2 since last week.
yeah, I know, I've been paying about as much attention to consistent character development over the last few weeks as the producers of the Simpsons. It all started with that April Fools' thing, which gave me unwarranted delusions of adequacy. Though thinking about it, even before that I was losing the plot a bit -- the idea of having Montoya move to the West Coast and become CEO of a tech startup was meant to tie in with a hoax "Ask Slashdot" story that got rejected, and I didn't really have any ideas about what to do.
So I decided to back off from things for a while. For the last week, I've only been posting silly jokes, plus a few ontopic things that I'd usually say under my "proper" identity. Although I was rather pleased with the revelation that streetlawyer is in the habit of extracting fellatio from his relatives in return for legal advice.
Daft thing is, I've had a few trolls modded up to +5, funny and found myself in possession of this +1 bonus, which I like, as it means I can be even more annoying. I think I'm gonna stay on holiday until my score reaches 50, to give a decent cushion, and then to start some serious, old-school, mental Noo Yawk abuse. God, it's desperately sad that a grown man would spend this much effort on something like this.
"Cushty" is Liverpudlian slang for "fine" -- I think it's a Yiddish borrowing. "La" is short for "lad", and is a form of address. You've obviously noticed that many UK references are sneaking out -- some people have asked why the streetlawyer always used to use the British spellings of words like "defence", "colour", etc. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Don't moderate this down. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no "-1, Unpatriotic" moderation. Also contrary to popular opinion, free speech is only one good thing among many, and should not be such a sacred cow. Property rights, for example, are a much stronger defence against government tyranny than the protection of the speech of people with nothing to say. There ought to be discussion on this issue, and that discussion should not be hampered by the refusal of some people to even consider part of the problem.
Ever noticed how the loudest advocates of free speech have never had an original thought in their life? Look at slashdot, for example. A hundred thousand people, all speaking miraculously with the same voice. I've never understood why the slashbots are so worried about "free speech". It's an undisputable fact that no government in history has put people in prison for mindlessly parroting the party line. You've nothing to fear.
(I note that the link is to the main page of canoe.ca, from which it is a bit of a search to locate the article)
As I said in the post that you scanned to minutely before accusing me of not having read something properly, the judgement almost certainly was that AOL had not made sufficient effort to shut the forum down and to remove existing copyrighted material. Hence its losing the case. This case will have turned on a lot of sophisticated legal argument and very specific facts which cannot be done justice in a short news piece, but the fact that AOL lost is at least prima facie evidence that they were in the wrong. In general, people with a good case, don't lose.
So every ISP has to go through everyone's home directories and be absolutely sure that there is nothing illegal or objectionable? So my local ISP that has 3000 customers and 1 sysadmin needs to start doing this hourly? That's rediculous.
Indeed, and that's why nobody requires it. But if I tell you that your server contains my copyrighted material, then you are obliged to either remove it, or meet me in court.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably this means that customers for software projects will look over their wire-rimmed glasses, see that the person talking to them is wearing a sweat-stained Quake t-shirt rather than an Armani and suddenly be overcome with the milk of human kindness. No, no, dear boy, they will say, take all the time in the world over your project. Make sure it meets your full artistic vision. Take it easy. Play some QUake. Don't worry your head about that silly "penalty clause" -- we put that in when we were dealing with suits. Now that we know that the code-monkeys are in charge, we're happy to sit here with fifty container loads of oranges in an unrefrigerated warehouse, waiting for you to write our ordering system.
Bankers, too, will be infected with this Open Source Flower Child ethos. Hey, man, they will say, it's OK, man. Take a toke on this. Your software isn't ready yet? Because you were playing Quake? That's coooool, man. We'll just extend your loan facility by another month. We're not breadheads here .....
Software is rushed because bills need to be paid, and people cannot, typically, be convinced to part with cash unless something is delivered to them. That "something", so far in history, cannot be a sweaty Quake player's promise.
Bills will need to be paid on time, for the forseeable future. People are unlikely ever to provide the wherewithal to pay them without being given software. Therefore, from time to time, software will be rushed, and developed badly because of it.
Presumably, one kind was weaselly recognised, while the other was stoatally different?
Or indeed, a Finn, refusing to join in with the dominant Indo-European system, and trying to cling to an antiquated Ural-Altaic language . . . . .
Jeezus, first they take the GNU out of Linux and now this. Double plus ungood for we unpersons.
--streetlawyer, abusing his (bizarrely assigned) +1 bonus since two weeks ago.
That's what "in the public domain" means in this context. As opposed to "a secret".
errrr... wasn't GIF based on the LZW algorithm? And in any case, the stimulation of development of other algorithms is definitely one of the means by which patents were intended to promote innovation.
At least LZW is in the public domain, so people can build on it. If you get rid of patents, then people will protect their intellectual policy using trade secrets. And that's a much worse state of affairs than the current.
Thank you for the first death threat I have received on this or any other Internet discussion forum.
Not true on both counts -- patent law was never meant to help "little people" against "big corporations". Secondly, when "little people" have a good, patentable idea, they tend to turn into "big corporations" quite fast, through the medium of "getting rich".
It also would be good if patents and copyrights could only be assigned to an individual, rather than a corporation (and only the original creator or inventor), and the patent/copyright holder would be able to grant or sell non-exclusive licenses to anyone they choose.
This would do serious violence to the actual process of invention in teams, sponsored by companies. If you plan on developing cancer in the next fifty years, you ought to hope that those companies with enough capital to invest in developing treatments have the incentive to do so. There are many good arguments for the abolition of intellectual property rights and, indeed, for socialism. But you appear to have threaded a path between them.
You may be pleased to know that patent law has had this feature for many a long year (it's known as "no selective enforcement"). If you believe Unisys to be guilty of this, and you care enough about it, then I suggest you try to bust their patent. This is done by means of "litigation" in what we call a "court".
Since you clearly know not one tiny thing about intellectual property law, perhaps, as a service to the community, you'd be so kind as to post links here to your other ill-informed public pronouncements, so I can audit them for stupidity. I, a lawyer, have never written a line of code in my life, for the very good reason that I don't know anything about the subject. In future, perhaps IT geeks would display the same courtesy.
Doesn't that suggest there's something just a little bit wrong with distinguishing between kinds of free speech?
Such laws will, eventually be written. Such laws can, trivially, be written. (Soviet Russia had no telemarketing problem)
The question we ought to be asking is: when such laws are written, what other important freedoms will they be used to restrict?
Since slashdot readers are, it would seem, quite keen on sending large volumes of email to people with different views on intellectual property law to themselves, you ought to be wary about this. If Be, Corel, and the Holland, Michigan Public Library system were to have access to such a law, then there could be trouble for all concerned.
How inconvenient is it to deal with telemarketers? How inconvenient is it to live in a society with no free speech?
I'll answer the second question for you; for a lot of the people on slashdot, it would not be inconvenient at all. No regime in history has put people in jail for mindlessly parroting the party line.
What would happen, in the hypothetical case, where you litigated the GPL, and lost? Do you have a Plan B?
and
Have you ever thought of taking a more conciliatory attitude to things? Does the phrase "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" (I'm thinking of the "GNU/Linux" thing) have any resonance at all with you? Are there any things that you sort of care about, but not very much?
I'm running my own little IT law practice here, and I sure as hell can't walk into all those line numbers and start deleting things. So I have to trust it to someone else. And who do I trust? Some random "consultant", who'll probably put in a new back door of his own, plus a trojan to blackmail me with later? Or Microsoft, who for all their faults, know that they have to produce fixes for these things on a timely basis.
See, this is the "hobbyist mentality" which presumably explains why nobody I know uses Linux, et al. It's all fine for one guy running his personal homepage, and for a homepage, it may be the best you can get. But for someone who actually wants to do something with a computer, they don't have the option of spending valuable billable hours grovelling through code because someone wanted to call their competitors "weenies".
The article quite astutely points out something that's been bugging me for a while -- that open source software likes to pretend it's analogous to the concept of "peer review", whereas it's actually "review by any boob that can manage to do ftp:", which has no equivalent in the scientific community. Either back-door bugs are obvious as hell, in which case they could be picked up by review by ten people, max. Or they're not all that obvious after all.
Furthermore, the more people there are checking the source, the more there are out there introducing bugs, for the hell of it. Even if "Apache" is bug free, how can you tell that the disk you got passed by your third cousin who got it from his ex-boss who got it from "some guy" is?
It would seem far more useful to me if source was "open" in the sense that you could get a copy of the code on production of a reasonable description of what you planned to do with it, what improvement you wanted to make, plus at least two references from people who were prepared to establish your bona fides. Kind of like the criteria for getting a reader's ticket to a law library.
I dunno, perhaps you'd better ask some of those FORTRAN programmers.
And in any case, know Linux makes you far more employable than whom? Than an illiterate tramp who can't stop pissing himself? yes, almost certainly so. Than an MSCE? Do me a favour. Linux advocacy is most effective when it doesn't slip into boosterism
Oh wonderful, now you're even trying to subvert the legitimate desire of an employer that his time and bandwidth be used for business purposes rather than trading child porn and mp3z? I think you might want to rethink this: what possible legitimate application could there be for a program that subverts firewalls. Ex hypothesi, if you're being blocked by a firewall, you're working on someone else's computer, and doing something with it that they don't want you to do.
well then let's all help by talking about her then.
Yeh, well, fuckit, if you can't trust L Ron Hubbard, who can you trust? I'm convinced.
I'm sure you're aware, but others might not be, that Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is not a libertarian tract and actually has a quite sophisticated analysis of the need for regulation of big business in the public interest.
In fact, the context of the "Invisible Hand" passage makes it quite clear that Smith is referring to capitalist production by small, local producers, who consider themselves members of a community of interest. Applying it to multinational corporations is as bad a violence to Smith's theory as that suffered by some of Marx's
And slashdot? Yeah, that's the forum for people with well-thought out views about political and social issues. After all, spending all your time programming computers gives you a well-balanced view of the world, an appreciation for the difficult and complex nuances of human social relations, plus it gives you a load of spare time to think about things. And of course, slashdot readers are an incredibly representative sample of the population -- black, female, old, there's one of each, maybe more. Sure there are a few nutty knee-jerk libertarians out there, but in general they're swamped by the tide of reasonable, well thought-out debate.
Prepare to be swamped by a thousand links on the technological feasibility of nanotechnology, two thousand links to Bill Joy's speech, and precisely nothing of use to you in your essay. When you get an 'F' for failing to tackle any important issues whatsoever, do feel free to post to slashdot once more, and I will help to sue your school for causing emotional distress. Before long, your teacher will be strutting round the exercise yard, dealing crack, having knife-fights with other inmates, smoking blunts and pimping out his stable of bitches to the warders. And since he would almost certainly be sent to a minimum-security, white-collar prison, that kind of behaviour is going to stand out.
streetlawyer, abusing the privilege of posting at +2 since last week.
yeah, I know, I've been paying about as much attention to consistent character development over the last few weeks as the producers of the Simpsons. It all started with that April Fools' thing, which gave me unwarranted delusions of adequacy. Though thinking about it, even before that I was losing the plot a bit -- the idea of having Montoya move to the West Coast and become CEO of a tech startup was meant to tie in with a hoax "Ask Slashdot" story that got rejected, and I didn't really have any ideas about what to do.
So I decided to back off from things for a while. For the last week, I've only been posting silly jokes, plus a few ontopic things that I'd usually say under my "proper" identity. Although I was rather pleased with the revelation that streetlawyer is in the habit of extracting fellatio from his relatives in return for legal advice.
Daft thing is, I've had a few trolls modded up to +5, funny and found myself in possession of this +1 bonus, which I like, as it means I can be even more annoying. I think I'm gonna stay on holiday until my score reaches 50, to give a decent cushion, and then to start some serious, old-school, mental Noo Yawk abuse. God, it's desperately sad that a grown man would spend this much effort on something like this.
"Cushty" is Liverpudlian slang for "fine" -- I think it's a Yiddish borrowing. "La" is short for "lad", and is a form of address. You've obviously noticed that many UK references are sneaking out -- some people have asked why the streetlawyer always used to use the British spellings of words like "defence", "colour", etc. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
jsm
Don't moderate this down. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no "-1, Unpatriotic" moderation. Also contrary to popular opinion, free speech is only one good thing among many, and should not be such a sacred cow. Property rights, for example, are a much stronger defence against government tyranny than the protection of the speech of people with nothing to say. There ought to be discussion on this issue, and that discussion should not be hampered by the refusal of some people to even consider part of the problem.
Ever noticed how the loudest advocates of free speech have never had an original thought in their life? Look at slashdot, for example. A hundred thousand people, all speaking miraculously with the same voice. I've never understood why the slashbots are so worried about "free speech". It's an undisputable fact that no government in history has put people in prison for mindlessly parroting the party line. You've nothing to fear.
(I note that the link is to the main page of canoe.ca, from which it is a bit of a search to locate the article)
As I said in the post that you scanned to minutely before accusing me of not having read something properly, the judgement almost certainly was that AOL had not made sufficient effort to shut the forum down and to remove existing copyrighted material. Hence its losing the case. This case will have turned on a lot of sophisticated legal argument and very specific facts which cannot be done justice in a short news piece, but the fact that AOL lost is at least prima facie evidence that they were in the wrong. In general, people with a good case, don't lose.
Indeed, and that's why nobody requires it. But if I tell you that your server contains my copyrighted material, then you are obliged to either remove it, or meet me in court.