No. That's why Edison was forced to go into partnership with Joseph Swan who beat him to it, forming the Swan Edison United Electric Light Co. (Ediswan). After Edison bought Swan out he re-wrote history to take the credit, as he normally did with other people's inventions.
There's not much Edison himself did invent other than FUD and the invention-as-slavery, your-thoughts-belong-to-us conditions which prevail to this day in the IP clauses of large companies.
I really meant what was the point of posing it here; where it was originally posted is obviously aimed at people that don't know anything about computers.
What is the point of posing this? We all know it's bullshit. The fat cunt that wrote it knew it was bullshit. The editors know it's bullshit. It's a nothing story.
"Microsoft say's it's great; competition is crap." Big deal.
I see cycles of RMS bashing, followed by swings towards recognition of his vision,
That's because generally what he says is true but he says it in a way that make him and everyone else on his side look like morons. If he would shut up he would be more productive despite the fact that what he says is true. It's a paradox that surfaces any time you have a brilliant and unlikeable person.
What CD are you talking about? The one with half a dozen obscure blues songs and a bit of Humphery Littleton? Oh, look! It doesn't exist.
You dickhead, the point of iTunes is the ability to buy single tracks. If I wanted whole CDs worth I'd buy them, since they're cheaper and higher quality. Only a retard would buy entire albums on iTunes, DRM or not.
What does this win us?
It wins us nothing, it just stops us losing. You know: losing the rights that we have to listen to a song anywhere and forever, regardless of future whims of hardware and firmware. Christ, why don't you just post all your money to the RIAA and be done with it, you grubbly little patsy.
If you think that then you don't understand why the RIAA has put all this effort into their legal department. It was all to stop the artists gaining the savings off the reduction in distribution costs. To do that, the RIAA has to control the new distribution channels, which is why Apple make very little on the music they sell but the artists make nothing more than they did before. The extra money has all gone to the record companies' shareholders.
What an iPod actually says is "I'm a sheep that pays to go 'bahhh'".
If it were capitalism, the executives would be subject to the same market forces as the employees, and wouldn't be able to get away with abuses like this.
If the market cared. It doesn't, so they can get away with it. If people boycotted movies the MPAA would be brought to its knees, if people didn't buy CDs the RIAA might have to bring in a fair system of royalties and prices. If shareholders cared about the Fanny Mae example, the share price would collapse as investors sold their shares. But the market doesn't by and large care about these things.
Capitalism is inherently unstable. It is based on the ability of greed to motivate. That greed is only answered by differential wealth (ie, being richer than your neighbour, not simply richer than you were yourself). Therefore all capitalist systems become a method of concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Coupled with this, the power of capital is the key to capitalism itself ("Money makes money"), so the concentration effect feeds back into itself: the rich are the very people that find it easier to become richer.
All this works by removing money from the people at the bottom of the pile, which is what we see at EA. It is pure capitalism and there is nothing surprising about it; capitalism tends automatically towards slavery, at which point the absolute maximum wealth has been extracted from the bottom layer of society. That's one of the reasons we need the government to regulate markets and even the market needs it since the ultimate end point of one huge company that owns everything is not actually good for capitalism either as it becomes stagnant.
Also, HP paid to use many of the patents from the patent portfolio, not caching
But did they know they should have? If Intel didn't tell them then isn't it still Intel's responsibility? Intel are the ones with full knowledge of how the processor works, much of which they will have wanted to protect as trade secrets. How is HP supposed to have found out that the patent was being violated? Tarot cards? It's simply not HP or Gateway's fault. End of story, in a world not run by idiots.
I can have four hundred stolen toasters in my posession that I bought off a homeless man; how can you prove that I *knew* they were stolen?
That's exactly why we have juries and the concept of "reasonable action", and "resonable doubt". And, we're not talking about a homeless person here: HP bought these processors off INTEL, for christ's sake! That's not the same thing at all.
It is impossible to apply the law as if it was a logically and mathematically perfect system, so we have humans to decide if in buying four hundred toasters off a homeless man it is reasonable to claim you had no reason to be concerned. I think I'd be dubious, just as I think I would need to see some documentation that proved that HP knew this patent was being violated, or at least worried about it.
If the users are smart, they would get indemnity from the suppliers that the products are not plagued with patent violations.
No, that is a stupid system. Users who have not been involved in a crime should not have to be indemnified against the actions of a supplier. Only a moron or a lawyer (same difference) would see that as a sensible way of doing things.
mean, in this case it's clear that HP et. al. has made a lot of money off of the affair.
Surely with a patent you charge a per item royalty, not a percentage of retail or whatever. In that case the issue is the number of units Intel made multiplied by the per item fee. It is in fact very easy to ascertain the amount owed. But perhaps I'm wrong about the fees, or maybe the system has changed since I looked at it years ago.
I think it has reached the point where the usefulness of patents in on a knife-edge. If they were scrapped there would be a huge potential for invention, but small inventors would have no hope. In the current system innovation is held back but small inventors have a little bit of protection. Which situation is better? Not much in it to me, but then I'm not an inventor. I am a programmer, though, and I can see only bad effects due to the nature of programming as a purely intellectual thing. It's one thing to patent a physical machine, patenting ideas is a foolish mistake.
The carpenter thing is fair enough as the grounds for injunctions to prevent the continued selling of the invention, but it is not grounds for shifting the liability onto the carpenters (or HP, in this case). The damage was caused by bad faith (or ignorance) on Intel's part and they are the primary and active violaters of the patent. HP is a victim, unless they knew the patent was being violated, in that they are going to have their business disrupted when and if the product is pulled.
Any way you look at it, Intel, and Intel alone is the party actively breaking the (totally outdated) law. It is not a workable solution to say that every reseller must know every patent so that they can check each item they resell. It is a very slightly better position to say that a manufacturer should know the patents in their field.
The basic problem with the patent system is that cases are heard in front of judges (ex lawyers) and made by lawyers. They have a vested interest in broadening the scope of patent law by establishing unreasonable case law. The broader patents are, the more work there is for patent lawyers and judges. History has shown that judges and lawyers have been the strongest advocates of allowing stupid and over-reaching patents.
But surely if the customer bought the product for resale in good faith the law can't be applied any more than I can be done for handling stolen goods which have somehow been sold through an legitimate retail outlet.
Intent to break the patent must be part of the legal requirement in any sane system...oh, I see
Did HP have anything to do with the design of the cache in the Pentium? If not, why are they paying anything? Surely it's up to Intel to pay royalties on patents they breached, not their customers. I particularly can't see any way Gateway could have been liable for this.
No, but it is capitalism. The problem is that the people capitalism works for are the people that can afford to buy the laws that they want, which make sure that capitalism works for them and not ordinary people who can't afford to do the same thing because capitalism doesn't wrok for them, so they don't have the money blah blah blah.
As you pointed out, anyone that complains gets the old mantra of "nobody owes you a living", which ignores the fact that that is exactly the principle that the people at the top of the pile work under: they think we all owe them a living. Look at Gates: literally born a millionaire, he spends his life telling elected governments what to do. Why? What do they owe him and his aristocratic friends? "Bugger all" is the truth, but tell that to Bill and he'd have a hissy fit and fill his nappy.
I think we should take a leaf from the Israelis and just do random executions to keep the bastards in line.
I know: it's pretty obvious that the police can beat the shit out of pretty well anyone they like on camera and get away with it. The idea of them shelling out for technology to hide their faces is a bit silly.
Unless you're going to be doing something you know is memory intensive (Photoshop),
Well, a lot of Mac people do just that. And iMovie or whatever it's called isn't likely to suffer from lots of RAM either. On a PC I'd agree with you, but on a Mac I think you're more likely to get the use out of it.
Can't hurt, and I can fit it myself (the mini is easy to open).
Well, yes. Just as it was important in the run up to invading Iraq to prevent the weapons inspectors being able to say "Nope, all clear here" by pulling them out a few weeks early, it's important in the run up to invading Iran to stop people reading about what is really going on in the country. That might interfere with Bush and Co.'s ongoing attempts to run America as a true terrorist state: one run by terrorising both its own citizens and those of every other country in the world. So far, they're doing a great job. Haven't actually made any progress on stopping the other terrorists, but then that's not something they care much about.
He can do anything he wants (within the law, of course) with his money.
I think you'll find that Bill's spent a good deal of energy on making sure the law ain't got nothing to do with what he does with his money or anything else. In a country where one dollar = one vote the only constraint on the rich is eachother.
See. This is why we should demand e-mail address portability.
You can: you go to netbenefit or some one else like that and say "I demand a domain of my own" and then you hook that up to an ISP and tell them "I demand that i have an email address on my domain." Anyone can do it and have been able to do so basically since DNS was invented. Why should you be able to take someone else's email address with you just because you've rented it for a couple of years?
so it shouldn't be too hard for e-mail right?
You know absolutely nothing about how this works, do you?
I keep 7 for me and give 3 to some charity. That makes me a good man, and it makes you a bad person for saying I shouldn't have stolen the 10 bucks in the first place.
That is the logic here, isn't it: that it doesn't matter who you shit on or how many people's lives you destroy as long as you use some of the money you made in the process to someone even worse off than your victims. I don't buy that any more than I buy the idea that the Free software movement isn't worth $75m per year in benefits to poor countries.
Gates was born into priviledge, has never had to work a day in his life if he didn't feel like it, and has devoted his professional life to preventing other people from using their talents to make an honest living. He is the reincarnation of all that America was supposed to stand against in the form of old George III. Fuck him and his dirty money. He was a bastard yesterday, and he's still a bastard today.
Story is bullshit, poster is bullshit, Gates is bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Google isn't very good anymore, is it?
TWW
No. That's why Edison was forced to go into partnership with Joseph Swan who beat him to it, forming the Swan Edison United Electric Light Co. (Ediswan). After Edison bought Swan out he re-wrote history to take the credit, as he normally did with other people's inventions.
There's not much Edison himself did invent other than FUD and the invention-as-slavery, your-thoughts-belong-to-us conditions which prevail to this day in the IP clauses of large companies.
TWW
TWW
"Microsoft say's it's great; competition is crap." Big deal.
TWW
That's because generally what he says is true but he says it in a way that make him and everyone else on his side look like morons. If he would shut up he would be more productive despite the fact that what he says is true. It's a paradox that surfaces any time you have a brilliant and unlikeable person.
TWW
You don't understand the concept of a legal contract, so perhaps you should choose not to talk shite about it.
TWW
And the connection with Peter "fight scenes" Jackson is?
TWW
What CD are you talking about? The one with half a dozen obscure blues songs and a bit of Humphery Littleton? Oh, look! It doesn't exist.
You dickhead, the point of iTunes is the ability to buy single tracks. If I wanted whole CDs worth I'd buy them, since they're cheaper and higher quality. Only a retard would buy entire albums on iTunes, DRM or not.
What does this win us?
It wins us nothing, it just stops us losing. You know: losing the rights that we have to listen to a song anywhere and forever, regardless of future whims of hardware and firmware. Christ, why don't you just post all your money to the RIAA and be done with it, you grubbly little patsy.
TWW
If you think that then you don't understand why the RIAA has put all this effort into their legal department. It was all to stop the artists gaining the savings off the reduction in distribution costs. To do that, the RIAA has to control the new distribution channels, which is why Apple make very little on the music they sell but the artists make nothing more than they did before. The extra money has all gone to the record companies' shareholders.
What an iPod actually says is "I'm a sheep that pays to go 'bahhh'".
TWW
If the market cared. It doesn't, so they can get away with it. If people boycotted movies the MPAA would be brought to its knees, if people didn't buy CDs the RIAA might have to bring in a fair system of royalties and prices. If shareholders cared about the Fanny Mae example, the share price would collapse as investors sold their shares. But the market doesn't by and large care about these things.
Capitalism is inherently unstable. It is based on the ability of greed to motivate. That greed is only answered by differential wealth (ie, being richer than your neighbour, not simply richer than you were yourself). Therefore all capitalist systems become a method of concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Coupled with this, the power of capital is the key to capitalism itself ("Money makes money"), so the concentration effect feeds back into itself: the rich are the very people that find it easier to become richer.
All this works by removing money from the people at the bottom of the pile, which is what we see at EA. It is pure capitalism and there is nothing surprising about it; capitalism tends automatically towards slavery, at which point the absolute maximum wealth has been extracted from the bottom layer of society. That's one of the reasons we need the government to regulate markets and even the market needs it since the ultimate end point of one huge company that owns everything is not actually good for capitalism either as it becomes stagnant.
TWW
TWW
But did they know they should have? If Intel didn't tell them then isn't it still Intel's responsibility? Intel are the ones with full knowledge of how the processor works, much of which they will have wanted to protect as trade secrets. How is HP supposed to have found out that the patent was being violated? Tarot cards? It's simply not HP or Gateway's fault. End of story, in a world not run by idiots.
TWW
That's exactly why we have juries and the concept of "reasonable action", and "resonable doubt". And, we're not talking about a homeless person here: HP bought these processors off INTEL, for christ's sake! That's not the same thing at all.
It is impossible to apply the law as if it was a logically and mathematically perfect system, so we have humans to decide if in buying four hundred toasters off a homeless man it is reasonable to claim you had no reason to be concerned. I think I'd be dubious, just as I think I would need to see some documentation that proved that HP knew this patent was being violated, or at least worried about it.
If the users are smart, they would get indemnity from the suppliers that the products are not plagued with patent violations.
No, that is a stupid system. Users who have not been involved in a crime should not have to be indemnified against the actions of a supplier. Only a moron or a lawyer (same difference) would see that as a sensible way of doing things.
TWW
Surely with a patent you charge a per item royalty, not a percentage of retail or whatever. In that case the issue is the number of units Intel made multiplied by the per item fee. It is in fact very easy to ascertain the amount owed. But perhaps I'm wrong about the fees, or maybe the system has changed since I looked at it years ago.
I think it has reached the point where the usefulness of patents in on a knife-edge. If they were scrapped there would be a huge potential for invention, but small inventors would have no hope. In the current system innovation is held back but small inventors have a little bit of protection. Which situation is better? Not much in it to me, but then I'm not an inventor. I am a programmer, though, and I can see only bad effects due to the nature of programming as a purely intellectual thing. It's one thing to patent a physical machine, patenting ideas is a foolish mistake.
TWW
Any way you look at it, Intel, and Intel alone is the party actively breaking the (totally outdated) law. It is not a workable solution to say that every reseller must know every patent so that they can check each item they resell. It is a very slightly better position to say that a manufacturer should know the patents in their field.
The basic problem with the patent system is that cases are heard in front of judges (ex lawyers) and made by lawyers. They have a vested interest in broadening the scope of patent law by establishing unreasonable case law. The broader patents are, the more work there is for patent lawyers and judges. History has shown that judges and lawyers have been the strongest advocates of allowing stupid and over-reaching patents.
TWW
But surely if the customer bought the product for resale in good faith the law can't be applied any more than I can be done for handling stolen goods which have somehow been sold through an legitimate retail outlet.
Intent to break the patent must be part of the legal requirement in any sane system...oh, I see
TWW
TWW
What does this mean?
TWW
No, but it is capitalism. The problem is that the people capitalism works for are the people that can afford to buy the laws that they want, which make sure that capitalism works for them and not ordinary people who can't afford to do the same thing because capitalism doesn't wrok for them, so they don't have the money blah blah blah.
As you pointed out, anyone that complains gets the old mantra of "nobody owes you a living", which ignores the fact that that is exactly the principle that the people at the top of the pile work under: they think we all owe them a living. Look at Gates: literally born a millionaire, he spends his life telling elected governments what to do. Why? What do they owe him and his aristocratic friends? "Bugger all" is the truth, but tell that to Bill and he'd have a hissy fit and fill his nappy.
I think we should take a leaf from the Israelis and just do random executions to keep the bastards in line.
TWW
I know: it's pretty obvious that the police can beat the shit out of pretty well anyone they like on camera and get away with it. The idea of them shelling out for technology to hide their faces is a bit silly.
Well, a lot of Mac people do just that. And iMovie or whatever it's called isn't likely to suffer from lots of RAM either. On a PC I'd agree with you, but on a Mac I think you're more likely to get the use out of it.
Can't hurt, and I can fit it myself (the mini is easy to open).
TWW
Well, yes. Just as it was important in the run up to invading Iraq to prevent the weapons inspectors being able to say "Nope, all clear here" by pulling them out a few weeks early, it's important in the run up to invading Iran to stop people reading about what is really going on in the country. That might interfere with Bush and Co.'s ongoing attempts to run America as a true terrorist state: one run by terrorising both its own citizens and those of every other country in the world. So far, they're doing a great job. Haven't actually made any progress on stopping the other terrorists, but then that's not something they care much about.
TWW
I think you'll find that Bill's spent a good deal of energy on making sure the law ain't got nothing to do with what he does with his money or anything else. In a country where one dollar = one vote the only constraint on the rich is eachother.
TWW
You can: you go to netbenefit or some one else like that and say "I demand a domain of my own" and then you hook that up to an ISP and tell them "I demand that i have an email address on my domain." Anyone can do it and have been able to do so basically since DNS was invented. Why should you be able to take someone else's email address with you just because you've rented it for a couple of years?
so it shouldn't be too hard for e-mail right?
You know absolutely nothing about how this works, do you?
TWW
That is the logic here, isn't it: that it doesn't matter who you shit on or how many people's lives you destroy as long as you use some of the money you made in the process to someone even worse off than your victims. I don't buy that any more than I buy the idea that the Free software movement isn't worth $75m per year in benefits to poor countries.
Gates was born into priviledge, has never had to work a day in his life if he didn't feel like it, and has devoted his professional life to preventing other people from using their talents to make an honest living. He is the reincarnation of all that America was supposed to stand against in the form of old George III. Fuck him and his dirty money. He was a bastard yesterday, and he's still a bastard today.
Story is bullshit, poster is bullshit, Gates is bullshit.
TWW