Software patents should be for 2 years, max. Give somebody the patent, let them profit exclusively from their idea for a couple of years, and then let anybody who wants to use it do so.
I would also submit that patents for hardware are all patents for ideas. Metal and plastic aren't what's protected by patents; it's the shape of the metal or plastic. Hardware patents protect the expression of ideas in physical substances. It's all about intellectual property.
I can see the some merits in the argument that people should benefit from their labor in creating software Agreed. But why should some programmers make $1E7 while others barely scrape by at $5E4, simply because EVERYBODY wants a copy of quake, but only two people want a copy of the real-time cotyledon metabolism simulator? I don't have an answer; I don't think the communist answer is realistic, but I think the purely capitalist answer is (in this case) grossly unfair.
But some things, like multi-million dollar movies, aren't going to happen unless the people who make them get a copyright
The threat of serious heavy legal action protects the film industry from mass copying today. However, it would be possible for the studios to use physical protection in place of legal protection. If Congress did away with copyrights tomorrow, the film industry would still make obscene amounts of money. Ticket prices would go up somewhat to pay for the armored cars and armed guards that would accompany every single reel of film. It would become publib knowledge that the guards had to physically protect every reel, so that stealing a reel of film would mean physically assaulting a guard, which means he would be defending himsel when he shot the thief. Insiders who tried to steal the film would quickly find that it's hard to swim when you're wearing concrete shoes.
Multi-billion dollar industries don't shrivel up and blow away simply because government stops subsidizing them. The only place I can see where they'd lose money would be in video. While that could be a substatntial loss, keep in mind that there is lots of money spent on film-making that is essentially wasted - did Lucas really need to spend millions Queen What's-her-face's dresses?
That was not the point of my post nor was it the point of the post I replied to. The point of my post was that RMS is denyine no one the right to say what they like and is not being hypocritical, as he is depriving no one of their freedoms.
RMS unreasonable? I never argued against that, because I don't think that any reasonable person can.
You addressed two examples and not the third...why? The third one dealt with a (hypothetical) project in which I was involved. RMS is involved in Linux (excuse me, GNUlix - they're like deer licks, only you use them for hunting water buffalo).
If I say "GNOT project", he has a right to object. If I say "Linux", he does not He has a right to object to anything he wants to, which is not the same thing as saying that it's reasonable for him to do so.
Don't confuse your rights with what is reasonable. Most efforts to deprive people of their rights are very reasonable. The whole notion of rights is to permit us to do that which others believe to be unreasonable.
The majority of systems in the world don't have a C/C++ compiler
Yup. Removing a compiler from a system is an important part of securing it. I would not have a compiler on any system that was not used for decelopment work.
Hi, I'm Dillon, and if you call me Harry, I will correct you. If you continue to call me Harry, I will feel disrespected me and I will tell you off. If you still insist on calling me Harry, I won't talk to you at all and will leave. Am I forcing you to call me Dillon? If you respond that my name is really Dillon and it would be silly to call me otherwise, I would disagree. "Dillon" is just a handle.
Suppose I wrote a book, "Gardening for Geeks", and went on TV to promote it. If the interviewer called my book "Dynamite for Dudes", I would correct her before answering questions; if she continued, I would let her know that if she didn't learn the name of the book very quickly I would no longer answer her questions, and if she persisted, I would walk off the set.
Suppose I'm interviewed about a charity project I'm involved in, "Blankets for Bums", and the interviewer keeps calling it "Booze for Bums". I would become upset rather quickly and ultimately refuse to be interviewed.
I am compelling no one in these hypothetical situations, though my behavior would be very analogous to RMS's. It's simply a fact that if you want to talk to someone, you should refrain from using language they object to. It's called freedom of association - I don't have to associate with you if I don't want to, and if you engage in behavior that makes me not want to talk to you or be around you, I am free to ignore you or leave.
The Apple III was not the Lisa, though one of the Macs was - I think it was the Mac II, or the Mac + or something. I remember being very impressed by the Lisa's features when it came out, but figured that for $10,000 it'd better do SOMETHING cool. I was an Apple II buff at the time, then got into Commodores, and only then into PCs. Anyway, I was surprised to read recently that Apple re-released the Lisa as one of their earlier Mac models. if anybody remembers exactly which, it'd be nice to know...
Anyway, the Apple III was IIRC a souped up Apple II, with 128k of RAM and targeted at business users.
OK, I was a bit too general there. However, I see supporting Java and OpenGL as merely trying to do what MS is not, like picking through the MS garbage heap to see what MS has pitched out. My real question is this - what has Apple stolen from Microsoft?
Now if the MacOS had just taken some cues from Win95 - like preemptive multi-tasking, or protected memory space. The GPFs you got in Windows were an indication that an application had done something bad and the OS knew about it. The MacOS would go on its happy way while applications overwrote each other and corrupted your documents and would never say a thing until the whole thing locked up.
...Dell is the company that did it. Dell is the company that has announced it; announcing and doing are two different things. Until I can plunk down my $ and get an iDell, they didn't do it.
Sheesh, why didn't Gateway do this? :) I quit working for Gateway about two months ago. One of the last semi-secret projects I saw was a collection of really off-beat cases. We're not talking beige with clear, colored plastic; we're talking psychedelic colors, wavy-shaped cases, multiple cases per system. My favorite was a two-piece fuschia system; one part housed the CPU, memory, etc. and one housed the drives. The monitor was separate as well.
I have no idea if that project will come to fruition, but I think the iMac's success, the increased consumer market penetration, and the proliferation of low-power, low-$ computers are commoditizing the home PC market. I see computers as becoming more and more like cars, with few important engineering differences but lots of cosmetic options to make your computer look cool and different from your neighbors.
So you're saying that the wintel market is willing to admit that it doesn't have a monopoly on good ideas, and that it is willing to look outside of its own boundaries to see what will be successful. Does Apple do this? Is Apple known for "stealing" other people's ideas? Or does Apple assume that it has the One True Way and that ideas from other markets are worthless? I tend to believe that Apple holds the latter idea, and I think that it is an element in Apple's marginalization.
You're talking about a contractual agreement between 3DFX and developers. If there is no agreement, no EULA, not even a legal notification of what they can and cannot do, then contract law can do nothing. However, intellectual property law could still hang them out to dry. Most books don't come with any sort of legal notice (except a copyright notice, which is legally completely unnecessary). It is still illegal to photocopy the whole thing without permission. It is also illegal to create a work derived from the book without permission.
IANAL (obviously), but if a developer downloads 3DFX's intellectal property, and uses it to create another product, I think that 3DFX could have a case for halting distribution. Not that it's right, or even smart, to pursue it.
When the PC BIOS was cloned, they had a pretty clever way of doing it. It was like this.
You divide your programmers into Group A and Group B and follow this process. 1. Group B studies an IBM BIOS function and determines its specifications. 2. Group B slides the specification under the door to Group A. 3. Group A codes a function to the given specs. 4. Group A stuffs the code under the door to Group B. 4. Group B compares the code from the IBM BIOS and the code from Group A. If there is any similarity, they slide a message under the door that says "Do it again, but do it differently!" (back to step 3) 5. If there is no similarity, they go on to the next function.
In this way, all Group A ever saw was what amounted to an API. Group B existed to make sure that they wrote code that was different from the original, and to serve as a buffer so that Group A could legitimately claime that they were not remotely influenced by the original code, and that their code was therefore not a derived work.
This would likely not have been defensible in court if IBM had patented its BIOS; we would just now be seeing the beginning of a clone market - if, that is, anyone wanted to clone 17-year-old PCs. I understand they make pretty good text terminals...
When a corporation commits an actual crime, it is not the whole corporation who did it. The corporation figures out which of its employees committed the crime and vomits them forth, along with incriminatory eveidence, for the justi^H^H^H^H^Hlegal system to devour. So the DA gets a scapegoat, the stockholders get their business.
For example, you say we dumped toxins in your front lawn? Here, it wasn't us, it was this manager and these two truck drivers. Here's a memo to prove it, and oh, by the way, here is our policy (ignore that wet ink!) that expressly forbids such behavior. It's not our fault, they were disobeying orders!
You're doubtless doing your tagline as a result of ZD's recent quotes of/. posts. IANAL, but I doubt its legal significance, as quoting someone generally falls under fair use.
I'm sorry, but that Courtney Love thing is so overblown. What's he supposed to say? "Hey, Ms. Love, I think your music sucks!"? He lied for the sake of politeness. If you have to say something, you often have to tell small polite lies, since it is socially unacceptable to be painfully honest about trivial things. In telling a small lie, he was essentially saying to Ms. Love "While I personally don't really like your music, I respect you enough not to insult you by saying so." I mean, come on! This is Tipper Gore's husband, the lady who practically wants to ban music entirely - did you ever really think that Al Gore was a fan of Courtney Love?
But isn't it true that Linux (or GNU/Linux or Gnulix or whatever) was the goal of the FSF? A completely free operating system? Linux looks like what RMS was advocating, Linux acts like what RMS was advocating, Linux appears (at least to me) to actually be what RMS was advocating. I would accuse the writer of over-generalizing, but not of being incorrect. Though your analysis the writer's intended meaning is more likely to be true than mine:)
This is common for someone who is considered a flight risk, which can happen anytime someone violates parole or misses a court appearance. My best friend in high school skipped bail on a traffic ticket and was later picked up (he was caught speeding again). He was not allowed to post bond and was held in jail until someone could down and paid the fine.
You know, for DECADES computer scientists created software without a computer. For example, they would write the code on paper, they would punch cards, and they would hand their cards to an operator who would feed it into the machine. Mitnick could, I'm sure, come up with something like this. If he can't physically touch a computer, he can have a typist work for him. If he can't have a job working within 50 feet of a computer, he can have a typist at the other end of a speakerphone, with a high-reolution closed-circuit TV trained on the screen the typist is working at. If he can't be employed to work on computers, he can be a janitor (wink, wink, nudge nudge). If he's really worth what some people here think he is, I think an employer would gladly go to the extra effort to hire him. I personally doubt that he's worth much today as a computer professional. His skills were state of the art when he was arrested but are badly out-of-date now.
I REALLY liked the last change. I'm not so sure about this one. (I hereby define "reputation" as "the default score of a person's posts".) I like the idea of comments being judged on their own merits, and not on the reputation of the person who posted them. Yet, I sort of like the idea of posters having a reputation, since people who posted intelligently in the past ARE more likely to do so in the future. But there are no guarantees - if a person with a high reputation posts something silly, it will still be way up there (if you order by score). Granted, it will probably be down where it belongs in a few days, but I want to read it now! NOT LATER! NOW NOW NOW! (kidding:)
It would be nice if there was some way to separate a writer's reputation from a post's score (defined as solely what the moderators did to the post, disregarding the writer's reputation) and sort accordingly, either by reputation OR by score. Or by reputation + score (current moderation scheme). Or by score - reputation (previous moderation). Or score * reputation * 0 (no moderation). Or score * reputation, or reputation * 5 + score, or score * 5 + reputation. Of course, these last few mean there should be no non-positive scores. It would allow you to do some pretty cool customization of your sorting if there were multiple criteria and you could come up with your own formula to sort based on those criteria. But now I'm getting kind of silly.
I think the point (well, mine, at least) is that he is NOT being denied the right to a speedy trial. He has waived that right. You can argue that it's injust or not right, but you can't reasonably argue that the govt has not given him the opportunity for a trail.
I think it is instantaneous; when I hit the "Submit" button, the next screen shows the posted comment (with the bit about how if it doesn't look right, you should have previewd) and it already has a score of 3.
If this is a feature, and not a bug, I don't know that I like it. I like to hear my own voice as well as anyone else, but I'm not sure it's good to evaluate my current comments on the basis of past ones. "Past returns are no predictor of future gains", as they say in the stock market.
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Bruce is afraid Eric might shoot him like I'm afraid you might shoot me. He was just looking for an excuse to make Eric look stupid.
Software patents should be for 2 years, max. Give somebody the patent, let them profit exclusively from their idea for a couple of years, and then let anybody who wants to use it do so.
I would also submit that patents for hardware are all patents for ideas. Metal and plastic aren't what's protected by patents; it's the shape of the metal or plastic. Hardware patents protect the expression of ideas in physical substances. It's all about intellectual property.
I can see the some merits in the argument that people should benefit from their labor in creating software
Agreed. But why should some programmers make $1E7 while others barely scrape by at $5E4, simply because EVERYBODY wants a copy of quake, but only two people want a copy of the real-time cotyledon metabolism simulator? I don't have an answer; I don't think the communist answer is realistic, but I think the purely capitalist answer is (in this case) grossly unfair.
But some things, like multi-million dollar movies, aren't going to happen unless the people who make them get a copyright
The threat of serious heavy legal action protects the film industry from mass copying today. However, it would be possible for the studios to use physical protection in place of legal protection. If Congress did away with copyrights tomorrow, the film industry would still make obscene amounts of money. Ticket prices would go up somewhat to pay for the armored cars and armed guards that would accompany every single reel of film. It would become publib knowledge that the guards had to physically protect every reel, so that stealing a reel of film would mean physically assaulting a guard, which means he would be defending himsel when he shot the thief. Insiders who tried to steal the film would quickly find that it's hard to swim when you're wearing concrete shoes.
Multi-billion dollar industries don't shrivel up and blow away simply because government stops subsidizing them. The only place I can see where they'd lose money would be in video. While that could be a substatntial loss, keep in mind that there is lots of money spent on film-making that is essentially wasted - did Lucas really need to spend millions Queen What's-her-face's dresses?
That was not the point of my post nor was it the point of the post I replied to. The point of my post was that RMS is denyine no one the right to say what they like and is not being hypocritical, as he is depriving no one of their freedoms.
RMS unreasonable? I never argued against that, because I don't think that any reasonable person can.
You addressed two examples and not the third...why? The third one dealt with a (hypothetical) project in which I was involved. RMS is involved in Linux (excuse me, GNUlix - they're like deer licks, only you use them for hunting water buffalo).
If I say "GNOT project", he has a right to object. If I say "Linux", he does not
He has a right to object to anything he wants to, which is not the same thing as saying that it's reasonable for him to do so.
Don't confuse your rights with what is reasonable. Most efforts to deprive people of their rights are very reasonable. The whole notion of rights is to permit us to do that which others believe to be unreasonable.
The majority of systems in the world don't have a C/C++ compiler
Yup. Removing a compiler from a system is an important part of securing it. I would not have a compiler on any system that was not used for decelopment work.
Hi, I'm Dillon, and if you call me Harry, I will correct you. If you continue to call me Harry, I will feel disrespected me and I will tell you off. If you still insist on calling me Harry, I won't talk to you at all and will leave. Am I forcing you to call me Dillon? If you respond that my name is really Dillon and it would be silly to call me otherwise, I would disagree. "Dillon" is just a handle.
Suppose I wrote a book, "Gardening for Geeks", and went on TV to promote it. If the interviewer called my book "Dynamite for Dudes", I would correct her before answering questions; if she continued, I would let her know that if she didn't learn the name of the book very quickly I would no longer answer her questions, and if she persisted, I would walk off the set.
Suppose I'm interviewed about a charity project I'm involved in, "Blankets for Bums", and the interviewer keeps calling it "Booze for Bums". I would become upset rather quickly and ultimately refuse to be interviewed.
I am compelling no one in these hypothetical situations, though my behavior would be very analogous to RMS's. It's simply a fact that if you want to talk to someone, you should refrain from using language they object to. It's called freedom of association - I don't have to associate with you if I don't want to, and if you engage in behavior that makes me not want to talk to you or be around you, I am free to ignore you or leave.
The Apple III was not the Lisa, though one of the Macs was - I think it was the Mac II, or the Mac + or something. I remember being very impressed by the Lisa's features when it came out, but figured that for $10,000 it'd better do SOMETHING cool. I was an Apple II buff at the time, then got into Commodores, and only then into PCs. Anyway, I was surprised to read recently that Apple re-released the Lisa as one of their earlier Mac models. if anybody remembers exactly which, it'd be nice to know...
Anyway, the Apple III was IIRC a souped up Apple II, with 128k of RAM and targeted at business users.
OK, I was a bit too general there. However, I see supporting Java and OpenGL as merely trying to do what MS is not, like picking through the MS garbage heap to see what MS has pitched out. My real question is this - what has Apple stolen from Microsoft?
Now if the MacOS had just taken some cues from Win95 - like preemptive multi-tasking, or protected memory space. The GPFs you got in Windows were an indication that an application had done something bad and the OS knew about it. The MacOS would go on its happy way while applications overwrote each other and corrupted your documents and would never say a thing until the whole thing locked up.
...Dell is the company that did it.
Dell is the company that has announced it; announcing and doing are two different things. Until I can plunk down my $ and get an iDell, they didn't do it.
Sheesh, why didn't Gateway do this?
:) I quit working for Gateway about two months ago. One of the last semi-secret projects I saw was a collection of really off-beat cases. We're not talking beige with clear, colored plastic; we're talking psychedelic colors, wavy-shaped cases, multiple cases per system. My favorite was a two-piece fuschia system; one part housed the CPU, memory, etc. and one housed the drives. The monitor was separate as well.
I have no idea if that project will come to fruition, but I think the iMac's success, the increased consumer market penetration, and the proliferation of low-power, low-$ computers are commoditizing the home PC market. I see computers as becoming more and more like cars, with few important engineering differences but lots of cosmetic options to make your computer look cool and different from your neighbors.
So you're saying that the wintel market is willing to admit that it doesn't have a monopoly on good ideas, and that it is willing to look outside of its own boundaries to see what will be successful. Does Apple do this? Is Apple known for "stealing" other people's ideas? Or does Apple assume that it has the One True Way and that ideas from other markets are worthless? I tend to believe that Apple holds the latter idea, and I think that it is an element in Apple's marginalization.
You're talking about a contractual agreement between 3DFX and developers. If there is no agreement, no EULA, not even a legal notification of what they can and cannot do, then contract law can do nothing. However, intellectual property law could still hang them out to dry. Most books don't come with any sort of legal notice (except a copyright notice, which is legally completely unnecessary). It is still illegal to photocopy the whole thing without permission. It is also illegal to create a work derived from the book without permission.
IANAL (obviously), but if a developer downloads 3DFX's intellectal property, and uses it to create another product, I think that 3DFX could have a case for halting distribution. Not that it's right, or even smart, to pursue it.
When the PC BIOS was cloned, they had a pretty clever way of doing it. It was like this.
You divide your programmers into Group A and Group B and follow this process.
1. Group B studies an IBM BIOS function and determines its specifications.
2. Group B slides the specification under the door to Group A.
3. Group A codes a function to the given specs. 4. Group A stuffs the code under the door to Group B.
4. Group B compares the code from the IBM BIOS and the code from Group A. If there is any similarity, they slide a message under the door that says "Do it again, but do it differently!" (back to step 3)
5. If there is no similarity, they go on to the next function.
In this way, all Group A ever saw was what amounted to an API. Group B existed to make sure that they wrote code that was different from the original, and to serve as a buffer so that Group A could legitimately claime that they were not remotely influenced by the original code, and that their code was therefore not a derived work.
This would likely not have been defensible in court if IBM had patented its BIOS; we would just now be seeing the beginning of a clone market - if, that is, anyone wanted to clone 17-year-old PCs. I understand they make pretty good text terminals...
When a corporation commits an actual crime, it is not the whole corporation who did it. The corporation figures out which of its employees committed the crime and vomits them forth, along with incriminatory eveidence, for the justi^H^H^H^H^Hlegal system to devour. So the DA gets a scapegoat, the stockholders get their business.
For example, you say we dumped toxins in your front lawn? Here, it wasn't us, it was this manager and these two truck drivers. Here's a memo to prove it, and oh, by the way, here is our policy (ignore that wet ink!) that expressly forbids such behavior. It's not our fault, they were disobeying orders!
You're doubtless doing your tagline as a result of ZD's recent quotes of /. posts. IANAL, but I doubt its legal significance, as quoting someone generally falls under fair use.
I'm sorry, but that Courtney Love thing is so overblown. What's he supposed to say? "Hey, Ms. Love, I think your music sucks!"? He lied for the sake of politeness. If you have to say something, you often have to tell small polite lies, since it is socially unacceptable to be painfully honest about trivial things. In telling a small lie, he was essentially saying to Ms. Love "While I personally don't really like your music, I respect you enough not to insult you by saying so." I mean, come on! This is Tipper Gore's husband, the lady who practically wants to ban music entirely - did you ever really think that Al Gore was a fan of Courtney Love?
But isn't it true that Linux (or GNU/Linux or Gnulix or whatever) was the goal of the FSF? A completely free operating system? Linux looks like what RMS was advocating, Linux acts like what RMS was advocating, Linux appears (at least to me) to actually be what RMS was advocating. I would accuse the writer of over-generalizing, but not of being incorrect. Though your analysis the writer's intended meaning is more likely to be true than mine :)
This is common for someone who is considered a flight risk, which can happen anytime someone violates parole or misses a court appearance. My best friend in high school skipped bail on a traffic ticket and was later picked up (he was caught speeding again). He was not allowed to post bond and was held in jail until someone could down and paid the fine.
You know, for DECADES computer scientists created software without a computer. For example, they would write the code on paper, they would punch cards, and they would hand their cards to an operator who would feed it into the machine. Mitnick could, I'm sure, come up with something like this. If he can't physically touch a computer, he can have a typist work for him. If he can't have a job working within 50 feet of a computer, he can have a typist at the other end of a speakerphone, with a high-reolution closed-circuit TV trained on the screen the typist is working at. If he can't be employed to work on computers, he can be a janitor (wink, wink, nudge nudge). If he's really worth what some people here think he is, I think an employer would gladly go to the extra effort to hire him. I personally doubt that he's worth much today as a computer professional. His skills were state of the art when he was arrested but are badly out-of-date now.
I REALLY liked the last change. I'm not so sure about this one. (I hereby define "reputation" as "the default score of a person's posts".) I like the idea of comments being judged on their own merits, and not on the reputation of the person who posted them. Yet, I sort of like the idea of posters having a reputation, since people who posted intelligently in the past ARE more likely to do so in the future. But there are no guarantees - if a person with a high reputation posts something silly, it will still be way up there (if you order by score). Granted, it will probably be down where it belongs in a few days, but I want to read it now! NOT LATER! NOW NOW NOW! (kidding :)
It would be nice if there was some way to separate a writer's reputation from a post's score (defined as solely what the moderators did to the post, disregarding the writer's reputation) and sort accordingly, either by reputation OR by score. Or by reputation + score (current moderation scheme). Or by score - reputation (previous moderation). Or score * reputation * 0 (no moderation). Or score * reputation, or reputation * 5 + score, or score * 5 + reputation. Of course, these last few mean there should be no non-positive scores. It would allow you to do some pretty cool customization of your sorting if there were multiple criteria and you could come up with your own formula to sort based on those criteria. But now I'm getting kind of silly.
I think the point (well, mine, at least) is that he is NOT being denied the right to a speedy trial. He has waived that right. You can argue that it's injust or not right, but you can't reasonably argue that the govt has not given him the opportunity for a trail.
I think it is instantaneous; when I hit the "Submit" button, the next screen shows the posted comment (with the bit about how if it doesn't look right, you should have previewd) and it already has a score of 3.
If this is a feature, and not a bug, I don't know that I like it. I like to hear my own voice as well as anyone else, but I'm not sure it's good to evaluate my current comments on the basis of past ones. "Past returns are no predictor of future gains", as they say in the stock market.
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