You've fallen for the trap of equating Zionism as a political movement, with Semitism as a religious movement. The distinction is significant because few, if any individuals here who oppose Israel's actions also oppose Judaism.
It is possible and reasonable to oppose any system of government that selectively grants political and human rights based largely on religious affiliation, without opposing whichever religion that may be. In that regard, state sanctioned repression of religion is also wrong in Canada (provinces that fund a parallel Catholic school system but no other religious school systems; historic "residential school" system that systematically eradicated First Nations religion and culture), Iraq (anyone who shared Saddam Hussein's branch of Islam is now systematically disadvantaged), Tibet (citizens share work, lifestyle and customary gods with the rest of China, except for formal religious practices), and formerly in Northern Ireland where a historic religion-based map making exercise on Britain's part also disenfranchised a great number of people and resulted in decades of sectarian violence and terrorism.
Even though it's tempting to turn a blind eye to the religious-based violence in Israel due to the unfortunate Nazi experience, it is because of such travesties that we must not allow any state to selectively disadvantage portions of its own people based on religion or ethnicity.
Let's hope that we do not follow an analogous path of technological or economic map making and exclusion based on well-meaning dogma.
"Most of the submissions are identified as having been made by named individuals and organisations. Only a few - including the one shown to be bearing traces of Google's DNA - are listed as either "[name withheld]" or "Anonymous".
The ACCC is able to categorise submissions as anonymous if the submitter can argue that there are commercial-in-confidence reason not to reveal their identity."
It is not necessary to obtain a runtime version of the entire game, only whatever keys/secrets the TPM is used to protect. With a little work, that secret will provide the outsider with arbitrary access to whatever the game runtime has access to.
Contemplate MMIO with or without JESD206 for a moment...
I've not had to use Eclipse in some time now, so please forgive a simple question: What is it about Eclipse's current modules/packaging/customization/business logic that makes the choice of distribution necessary? Is it no longer as simple as just installing plugins?
> why couldn't someone else "accidentally" broadcast that 134.17.0.0/16 route? That would take it out for a large portion of the network.
Because they could get around that by announcing two/17s instead. Someone could announce that entire space as/24s, but that someone would get de-peered fairly quickly for causing much route flap.
> if the originating servers can't make as many outgoing connections (because the return packets are mis-routed back), then it'll take a bit of work to find the few botnet machines able to communicate back
Most botnets are tiered P2P with shielding. Blocking such with routing tricks with any kind of precision or accuracy would increase the size of routing tables by at least an order of magnitude or two.
From this perspective, notspam may be the killer app that makes IPv6 finally take off...
As another poster states, Buddhism and many of the other Indian and Far East religions would be up there for integrity and non-greed. I would have said Taoism which has less legacy in the stack and enables somewhat more open implementation and criticism. Many of the tribal animism religious frameworks lack the interfaces to express greed.
Depending on how one defines truth, lies or superstition, all of the major religions could be viewed as being deficient in the scientistic sense of cause and effect. I would argue that the sanctioned availability and relative accessibility of the entire runtime documentation set to the lay practitioner, combined with the freedom to implement appropriately localized versions without impediment from the issuing bureaucracy, would provide sufficient conditions for a religion to be considered truthful in practice.
This is just waiting for someone to build a file system which stores information within file and directory names only. Depending on how they count data storage usage, this might allow one to have large amounts of storage without using any at all.
There's no need to raise the prices, just the initial commitment. $100 per domain name, which includes 10 to 20 years of registration, would be reasonable, and would also keep domain names from dropping in the first place (but at the increased risk of having their admin/billing/technical contacts become incorrect). Having been on this Internet thing for ages now, I find far fewer compelling technical reasons for domain names to expire than business (recurring revenue) reasons.
It makes sense that Apple warranty won't cover non-Apple hardware, like random new compatible SODIMMs. However, through three generations of Apple laptops, I've never had Apple refuse service due to swapping/inserting user-servicable components.
On the other hand, I've also had to clean up after a friend received Apple repair "service" in a former Soviet Bloc country, where the only Apple authorized repair tech in the country "went on vacation" during the repair and the friend left with a laptop and some ESD bags containing most of the components that weren't screwed on to the metal iBook chasis. The warranty remained valid after that experience though.
You may proceed secure in the knowledge that you are correct about a point of nomenclature on which no one else's argument or discourse rests, or you may open your mind to any one of the more sophisticated views of our environment expressed in this thread, which, unlike your contribution, enlighten the reader about the topic of this story.
If you choose the latter course, have a look at any of the sexy papers on low-dimensional molecular metals from the various groups around Osaka in the last year or so, or at least read Boldyrev's (not unrelated) papers from around 2001 on aluminum-copper (and later -lithium) molecules.
The distinction that you try to make is only absolute within the simplest interpretations of chemistry (such as that taught in grade school). The fundamentals of inorganic chemistry teach that chunks of metal, like the conductor in a signal cable, are composed of highly rigid lattices of atoms in at least one regular pattern. In impure or poorly formed lumps of metal, the patterns are sustained for fewer repetitions and more interfaces between individual lattice regions and impurities, and between adjacent lattice of different alignments or patterns. Electrons flowing straight through the lump of metal tend to pass more efficiently through individual lattices than between lattices due to the increased probably that a nucleus will be in the way of an electron when it crosses a physical lattice boundary. In some applications, it may be more convenient to treat a current running through a lump of metal as a long series of valence electron displacements along adjacent atoms than to treat the current as the same group of electrons entering and leaving the lump of metal.
For these and related reasons pertaining to crystal structure, much work has been focused on drawing silicon and refining ingots of increasing purity for semi-conductor production.
I have no idea how decreasing internal resistance and possibly capacitance of the cable would qualitatively affect sound output, but there is strong scientific evidence that lumps of metal with those properties can pass quantitatively better signal than a poorly formed lump of metal. I also have no idea how the cables mentioned in the story are internally structured.
In any case, the AC post to which you respond (along with this post) are reasonably big picture accurate in as far as no/minimal inaccessible jargon has been used.
Installing and using are two completely different phases of the operating system's lifecycle on a workstation. The willingness or ability to fire and forget an operating system says noting about the effectiveness of the installation *for the user*.
Having provided Linux, Windows and OS X desktop support, the size of the range of common configuration and compatibility annoyances is approximately the same on all platforms, with different weaknesses all around that get exposed as users explore their environments.
From the ISP's perspective, it is extremely wasteful of resources NOT to make a configuration change on their end for a known issue that they know will be experienced by a growing number of users. Support time currently spent repeatedly discovering and explaining to customers that their service is not compatible with Vista is better spent troubleshooting genuine issues.
If this is a taxpayer-funded project, it is almost a violation of public trust not to mitigate a known issue that perpetually generates costs and makes the funded service unavailable to a large portion of potential users, especially when the cost of the fix the issue is on the order of a couple thousand euros and some bruised egos.
First, on the one hand, you state that Scientists can starve as far as journal publishers are concerned, on the other, you state that Reviewers, too, get nothing, with respect to clearing papers for publications. You also ask "If no one can figure out exactly what you did and how, they won't be able to figure out whether their patent was violated, right?" So, what motivation would unpaid reviewers have to greenlight faulty publications, when a significant part of their role is to ensure reproducibility of results?
Second, you correctly state "More publication = more recognition" and a main thrust of your argument that copyrights and patents provides the owners with exclusivity to information. And yet you ask "How does withholding info boost egos and careers?" Being the leader in a research field translates into grants and funding. Sharing your information too openly risks competing labs becoming more successful. As with the music publishers, it comes down to money.
Third, I'm still confused about your trade secrets argument. Why would an organization want to publish something they want to keep secret in the first place? And what do paid placement articles and journals have to do with faults in the copyright regime?
Finally, you're right. I don't pay $10 per page. I pay close to nothing because I can access almost every article ever published through inter-library loans at the local university for the cost of photocopies and delivery. The average researcher with some kind of university degree can also access this service from their almar mater for the low, low price of approximately $25 per year for the cost of maintaining the library account. In many cities of significant size, you might even be able to walk to the local university library, find the articles on-line or in the print archives, and print them for $0.05 per page. Yes, this sucks for the three people in the world conducting pioneering research, in the middle of nowhere, without anyone on their team with a university degree, without access to colleagues in the field with access to a university, and without an extra $2,000 a year to spare, but that's not a corner case I'm too concerned about since the solution is as simple as finding a friend.
> If there wasn't any copyright law to violate, then we could copy and communicate whatever we please. No one would get hurt. All the supposed damages from copyright violations are hypothetical.
See O'Reilly Media, Inc. whose profits on earlier copyrighted works allowed them to expand their scope to the point where profits from protected later works allowed them to re-issue their earlier works to the public for free.
> People dying because life saving medical techniques, in addition to all the other delays, are being held up until publication
"[A]ll the other delays" before publication are in large part review, fact-checking and making sure that the material is easily understood by others.
> and registering of copyrights and the making of some determination about the patentability.
Patents are NOT copyrights. Practices and techniques would almost certainly be protected by patents rather than copyrights. Also, copyright would protect your particular description of a technique, but neither a copyright nor patent would prevent anyone else from also describing that technique.
> Doctors discouraged from discussing ideas among themselves for fear of letting slip something that could become "valuable" intellectual property.
Because the medical profession is like any other, where egos and careers need to be boosted.
> Publicly funded research being locked up under copyright in very expensive, privately held journals ($10 or more for a 10 page article?!).
$1 per page _FOR A HARD COPY REPRINT_ is not a significant barrier to entry for most entities who can afford the $100,000s worth of kit to make use of and extend the research. Most researchers subscribe to journals of interest through their institutions, which reduces the cost and also provides access to the journals' electronic archives.
> And not being indexed thanks to the absurdities of trying to figure out appropriate fees for and legalities of such usages (witness the troubles Google Book Search has had).
PubMed is free to search and indexes the vast majority of human life sciences articles. Abstracts for all published articles in journals of repute are free to search, and published and indexed very widely. You may argue that the quality of abstracts has been in decline recently due to keyword stuffing, or that the 10-20 searchable fields of metadata for each article are insufficient, but those are not copyright issues.
> Or crucial details kept quiet for fear of someone popping up who smells a chance to score off a lawsuit or the threat of a lawsuit.
I don't understand your point here. I think you're trying to generate a tort out of plagiarism under copyright, but in the reputable academic and scientific community of which you speak, there are much more effective social and professional mechanisms. See Hwang Woo-suk re: stem cells.
> Or being bought, "NDAd", and buried by some organization that wants to eliminate some competition.
NDAs tend to protect trade secrets, a different class of "intellectual property". Your organization's security and HR practices are close to woefully broken if the organization is resorting to a claim of copyright infringement to prevent secret sauce from leaking. Also, you can't compel competition to sign NDAs under regular circumstances.
> Even if doctors have the money (and they surely do) to buy the articles, they can't learn of the existence of relevant research because they can't search it, or discuss their work with their fellows.
Doctors can and do visit http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed just as easily as the rest of us to find new articles, and they have the ability to read. Asshole doctors who don't share because of career or ego are not an issue resolvable through copyright reform.
> Maybe copyright is hypothetically keeping artists from starving. Copyright is also hypothetically ki
From the article (and not mentioned at all in the summary for some reason):
'These URI issues are complicated, even for software developers. Mozilla Corp. initially thought that Larholm's bug needed Internet Explorer in order to be triggered, but this assessment turned out to be wrong, and two weeks later the Firefox team was forced to patch the same problem. "If an organization like Mozilla is having issues with understanding how a URI handler increases the scope and the attack surface of their applications, think about how hard it is for a small development shop," McFetters said.
Microsoft is working to educate users and developers about these security issues, but there's only so much that it can do, said Mark Griesi, a security program manager with Microsoft.'
Can anyone who actually works in a news room say how they verify things normally?
In real news, it ideally works like a web of trust: 1) We use more than one source for each story first to get contrasting or concurring opinions on a subject, but also to establish at least the plausability of what each of the other sources has told us. Experts are more than happy to point out and provide evidence that another source is a kook. 2) We find the contact information for interviewees through reliable sources, such as published directories, an organization's switchboard, others whom we trust, or from previous third-party publications or interviews. 3) For submitted items, we still go through 1) and 2) as part of research and to fill in the story. We will also ask the submitting organization or source for the names of some other people from another organization who would be able to verify or comment on the story. The source from the other organization(s) is also vetted via 1) and/or 2). 4) We often also ask others in the same or competing newsroom, the news wire, or search the archives for a previous reference to the source or the story.
If a completely new source or story can't be vetted through any of the above methods, it will likely receive less or no attention on the basis that it's either not important to a significant number of people, that it can't be verified, or that there is more important news deserving coverage.
No, the only way to get rid of the problem is to make it expensive though platform diversity. Making the user aware of the problem and making it cost the user time and trouble is the first step.
That also makes it difficult to develop and test legitimate software. It's already a pain to correctly do QA on all of the half-dozen or so major workstation platforms out there now.
I for one haven't made the switch because of the GPL. It's complicated and even when a thread about it comes up on/. everyone's got an opinion on what's allowed and there's never any full consensus.
Meanwhile with the Windows Platform SDK, I know anything I link to is safe and I don't have to worry about restrictions about redistributing anything, so long as the end user's copy of Windows has everything installed.
If I drop the terse legalese of the EULA for the terse legalese of GPL, what have I won, really? BSD is free without any strings attached. I don't have to worry about my builds or what I link to or have any worries beyond, gasp, actually coding. Closed but complete is not necessarily a bad thing for non-technical end users, nor is open as in libre for developers or users.
You are correct though.. A significant portion (likely somewhere between most and almost all) of the people on the Internet where someone is labeled as a fan boy are simply people trying to correct information that is factually incorrect. It does not mean the poster is mentally ill, a zealot, insecure or anything else. It simply means they were interested in injecting facts in a discussion on the Internet. Unfortunately for them, most people on the Internet are not interested in facts... Why is this post about fan boys and psychology moderated offtopic for a story entitled "The Psychology of Fanboys"? Redundant, perhaps, because most of the points have been articulated elsewhere in the story but certainly not off-topic.
I would disagree with your assessment that most people on the Internet are not interested in facts. They are very much interested in facts, with a bias toward promoting the ones that agree with their current position or understanding with respect to the topic at hand.
Translation: The point that planning and being able to plan for changes in IT infrastructure is desirable in general has been lost on you.
It's no secret that consumer Dells are like SPAM (it's a x86 computer, but the specific components which go into any particular batch can be highly variable). However, with non-trivial workstations like Optiplexes and above, it's easy to ask and pay for consistency in the product.
Generalizing toward the business need a bit, and to point out the silliness of the other G5/Madden comment, continuity and reliability of supply obviously has deeper consequences than hardware acquisition alone. AMD and Intel both offer some CPUs and other components with absurdly long (10-15 year) availability so that customers can feel safe investing in designs and embedded infrastructures wrapping those components. Continuity of support and roadmaps are critically important when mass upgrading/deploying deeply interdependent hardware/software pieces with regulatory influences (think video cards and openGL in CAD, RTOS in health care, data storage and retention for accounting/infrastructure networks), or when you need to decide if it is worthwhile to acquire a product (and to train support staff and users) if its replacement with 3x the power is due to be released Y months.
In real IT and business shops, a reliable roadmap is a requirement of any product of which you plan to buy and support thousands of units. Architecture switches and products going end of life in 18 months matters a lot if you're working with a 3-year roll-out plan, especially if there are complex platform dependencies.
Corporate policy pertains to things surrounding predictable inputs and desired outputs. If the continued availability of a product line is unpredictable, my policies are suddenly less valuable and the business risk of going with that product has increased. For that reason, suppliers like Dell have multiple product tracks, with the consumer version having no promises of configuration or support security, and the corporate version being available in the presently available standard configuration for 18 to 36 months into the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You've fallen for the trap of equating Zionism as a political movement, with Semitism as a religious movement. The distinction is significant because few, if any individuals here who oppose Israel's actions also oppose Judaism.
It is possible and reasonable to oppose any system of government that selectively grants political and human rights based largely on religious affiliation, without opposing whichever religion that may be. In that regard, state sanctioned repression of religion is also wrong in Canada (provinces that fund a parallel Catholic school system but no other religious school systems; historic "residential school" system that systematically eradicated First Nations religion and culture), Iraq (anyone who shared Saddam Hussein's branch of Islam is now systematically disadvantaged), Tibet (citizens share work, lifestyle and customary gods with the rest of China, except for formal religious practices), and formerly in Northern Ireland where a historic religion-based map making exercise on Britain's part also disenfranchised a great number of people and resulted in decades of sectarian violence and terrorism.
Even though it's tempting to turn a blind eye to the religious-based violence in Israel due to the unfortunate Nazi experience, it is because of such travesties that we must not allow any state to selectively disadvantage portions of its own people based on religion or ethnicity.
Let's hope that we do not follow an analogous path of technological or economic map making and exclusion based on well-meaning dogma.
I think you are correct. From TFA:
"Most of the submissions are identified as having been made by named individuals and organisations. Only a few - including the one shown to be bearing traces of Google's DNA - are listed as either "[name withheld]" or "Anonymous".
The ACCC is able to categorise submissions as anonymous if the submitter can argue that there are commercial-in-confidence reason not to reveal their identity."
It is not necessary to obtain a runtime version of the entire game, only whatever keys/secrets the TPM is used to protect. With a little work, that secret will provide the outsider with arbitrary access to whatever the game runtime has access to.
Contemplate MMIO with or without JESD206 for a moment...
I've not had to use Eclipse in some time now, so please forgive a simple question: What is it about Eclipse's current modules/packaging/customization/business logic that makes the choice of distribution necessary? Is it no longer as simple as just installing plugins?
> why couldn't someone else "accidentally" broadcast that 134.17.0.0/16 route? That would take it out for a large portion of the network.
/17s instead. Someone could announce that entire space as /24s, but that someone would get de-peered fairly quickly for causing much route flap.
Because they could get around that by announcing two
> if the originating servers can't make as many outgoing connections (because the return packets are mis-routed back), then it'll take a bit of work to find the few botnet machines able to communicate back
Most botnets are tiered P2P with shielding. Blocking such with routing tricks with any kind of precision or accuracy would increase the size of routing tables by at least an order of magnitude or two.
From this perspective, notspam may be the killer app that makes IPv6 finally take off...
As another poster states, Buddhism and many of the other Indian and Far East religions would be up there for integrity and non-greed. I would have said Taoism which has less legacy in the stack and enables somewhat more open implementation and criticism. Many of the tribal animism religious frameworks lack the interfaces to express greed.
Depending on how one defines truth, lies or superstition, all of the major religions could be viewed as being deficient in the scientistic sense of cause and effect. I would argue that the sanctioned availability and relative accessibility of the entire runtime documentation set to the lay practitioner, combined with the freedom to implement appropriately localized versions without impediment from the issuing bureaucracy, would provide sufficient conditions for a religion to be considered truthful in practice.
This is just waiting for someone to build a file system which stores information within file and directory names only. Depending on how they count data storage usage, this might allow one to have large amounts of storage without using any at all.
See: http://www.geocities.com/patchnpuki/other/compression.htm
There's no need to raise the prices, just the initial commitment. $100 per domain name, which includes 10 to 20 years of registration, would be reasonable, and would also keep domain names from dropping in the first place (but at the increased risk of having their admin/billing/technical contacts become incorrect). Having been on this Internet thing for ages now, I find far fewer compelling technical reasons for domain names to expire than business (recurring revenue) reasons.
I have been trolled... etc.
Yes... but not by anyone in this thread.
In Canada, at least, this isn't a problem.
It makes sense that Apple warranty won't cover non-Apple hardware, like random new compatible SODIMMs. However, through three generations of Apple laptops, I've never had Apple refuse service due to swapping/inserting user-servicable components.
On the other hand, I've also had to clean up after a friend received Apple repair "service" in a former Soviet Bloc country, where the only Apple authorized repair tech in the country "went on vacation" during the repair and the friend left with a laptop and some ESD bags containing most of the components that weren't screwed on to the metal iBook chasis. The warranty remained valid after that experience though.
You may proceed secure in the knowledge that you are correct about a point of nomenclature on which no one else's argument or discourse rests, or you may open your mind to any one of the more sophisticated views of our environment expressed in this thread, which, unlike your contribution, enlighten the reader about the topic of this story.
If you choose the latter course, have a look at any of the sexy papers on low-dimensional molecular metals from the various groups around Osaka in the last year or so, or at least read Boldyrev's (not unrelated) papers from around 2001 on aluminum-copper (and later -lithium) molecules.
Here's a nice Indian paper from 2005 with diagrams about aromatic metal molecules, along with some tables of values about their properties: http://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0511/0511441.pdf
The distinction that you try to make is only absolute within the simplest interpretations of chemistry (such as that taught in grade school). The fundamentals of inorganic chemistry teach that chunks of metal, like the conductor in a signal cable, are composed of highly rigid lattices of atoms in at least one regular pattern. In impure or poorly formed lumps of metal, the patterns are sustained for fewer repetitions and more interfaces between individual lattice regions and impurities, and between adjacent lattice of different alignments or patterns. Electrons flowing straight through the lump of metal tend to pass more efficiently through individual lattices than between lattices due to the increased probably that a nucleus will be in the way of an electron when it crosses a physical lattice boundary. In some applications, it may be more convenient to treat a current running through a lump of metal as a long series of valence electron displacements along adjacent atoms than to treat the current as the same group of electrons entering and leaving the lump of metal.
For these and related reasons pertaining to crystal structure, much work has been focused on drawing silicon and refining ingots of increasing purity for semi-conductor production.
I have no idea how decreasing internal resistance and possibly capacitance of the cable would qualitatively affect sound output, but there is strong scientific evidence that lumps of metal with those properties can pass quantitatively better signal than a poorly formed lump of metal. I also have no idea how the cables mentioned in the story are internally structured.
In any case, the AC post to which you respond (along with this post) are reasonably big picture accurate in as far as no/minimal inaccessible jargon has been used.
Installing and using are two completely different phases of the operating system's lifecycle on a workstation. The willingness or ability to fire and forget an operating system says noting about the effectiveness of the installation *for the user*.
Having provided Linux, Windows and OS X desktop support, the size of the range of common configuration and compatibility annoyances is approximately the same on all platforms, with different weaknesses all around that get exposed as users explore their environments.
From the ISP's perspective, it is extremely wasteful of resources NOT to make a configuration change on their end for a known issue that they know will be experienced by a growing number of users. Support time currently spent repeatedly discovering and explaining to customers that their service is not compatible with Vista is better spent troubleshooting genuine issues.
If this is a taxpayer-funded project, it is almost a violation of public trust not to mitigate a known issue that perpetually generates costs and makes the funded service unavailable to a large portion of potential users, especially when the cost of the fix the issue is on the order of a couple thousand euros and some bruised egos.
Your position seems... conflicted.
First, on the one hand, you state that Scientists can starve as far as journal publishers are concerned, on the other, you state that Reviewers, too, get nothing, with respect to clearing papers for publications. You also ask "If no one can figure out exactly what you did and how, they won't be able to figure out whether their patent was violated, right?" So, what motivation would unpaid reviewers have to greenlight faulty publications, when a significant part of their role is to ensure reproducibility of results?
Second, you correctly state "More publication = more recognition" and a main thrust of your argument that copyrights and patents provides the owners with exclusivity to information. And yet you ask "How does withholding info boost egos and careers?" Being the leader in a research field translates into grants and funding. Sharing your information too openly risks competing labs becoming more successful. As with the music publishers, it comes down to money.
Third, I'm still confused about your trade secrets argument. Why would an organization want to publish something they want to keep secret in the first place? And what do paid placement articles and journals have to do with faults in the copyright regime?
Finally, you're right. I don't pay $10 per page. I pay close to nothing because I can access almost every article ever published through inter-library loans at the local university for the cost of photocopies and delivery. The average researcher with some kind of university degree can also access this service from their almar mater for the low, low price of approximately $25 per year for the cost of maintaining the library account. In many cities of significant size, you might even be able to walk to the local university library, find the articles on-line or in the print archives, and print them for $0.05 per page. Yes, this sucks for the three people in the world conducting pioneering research, in the middle of nowhere, without anyone on their team with a university degree, without access to colleagues in the field with access to a university, and without an extra $2,000 a year to spare, but that's not a corner case I'm too concerned about since the solution is as simple as finding a friend.
> If there wasn't any copyright law to violate, then we could copy and communicate whatever we please. No one would get hurt. All the supposed damages from copyright violations are hypothetical.
See O'Reilly Media, Inc. whose profits on earlier copyrighted works allowed them to expand their scope to the point where profits from protected later works allowed them to re-issue their earlier works to the public for free.
> People dying because life saving medical techniques, in addition to all the other delays, are being held up until publication
"[A]ll the other delays" before publication are in large part review, fact-checking and making sure that the material is easily understood by others.
> and registering of copyrights and the making of some determination about the patentability.
Patents are NOT copyrights. Practices and techniques would almost certainly be protected by patents rather than copyrights. Also, copyright would protect your particular description of a technique, but neither a copyright nor patent would prevent anyone else from also describing that technique.
> Doctors discouraged from discussing ideas among themselves for fear of letting slip something that could become "valuable" intellectual property.
Because the medical profession is like any other, where egos and careers need to be boosted.
> Publicly funded research being locked up under copyright in very expensive, privately held journals ($10 or more for a 10 page article?!).
$1 per page _FOR A HARD COPY REPRINT_ is not a significant barrier to entry for most entities who can afford the $100,000s worth of kit to make use of and extend the research. Most researchers subscribe to journals of interest through their institutions, which reduces the cost and also provides access to the journals' electronic archives.
> And not being indexed thanks to the absurdities of trying to figure out appropriate fees for and legalities of such usages (witness the troubles Google Book Search has had).
PubMed is free to search and indexes the vast majority of human life sciences articles. Abstracts for all published articles in journals of repute are free to search, and published and indexed very widely. You may argue that the quality of abstracts has been in decline recently due to keyword stuffing, or that the 10-20 searchable fields of metadata for each article are insufficient, but those are not copyright issues.
> Or crucial details kept quiet for fear of someone popping up who smells a chance to score off a lawsuit or the threat of a lawsuit.
I don't understand your point here. I think you're trying to generate a tort out of plagiarism under copyright, but in the reputable academic and scientific community of which you speak, there are much more effective social and professional mechanisms. See Hwang Woo-suk re: stem cells.
> Or being bought, "NDAd", and buried by some organization that wants to eliminate some competition.
NDAs tend to protect trade secrets, a different class of "intellectual property". Your organization's security and HR practices are close to woefully broken if the organization is resorting to a claim of copyright infringement to prevent secret sauce from leaking. Also, you can't compel competition to sign NDAs under regular circumstances.
> Even if doctors have the money (and they surely do) to buy the articles, they can't learn of the existence of relevant research because they can't search it, or discuss their work with their fellows.
Doctors can and do visit http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed just as easily as the rest of us to find new articles, and they have the ability to read. Asshole doctors who don't share because of career or ego are not an issue resolvable through copyright reform.
> Maybe copyright is hypothetically keeping artists from starving. Copyright is also hypothetically ki
From the article (and not mentioned at all in the summary for some reason):
'These URI issues are complicated, even for software developers. Mozilla Corp. initially thought that Larholm's bug needed Internet Explorer in order to be triggered, but this assessment turned out to be wrong, and two weeks later the Firefox team was forced to patch the same problem. "If an organization like Mozilla is having issues with understanding how a URI handler increases the scope and the attack surface of their applications, think about how hard it is for a small development shop," McFetters said.
Microsoft is working to educate users and developers about these security issues, but there's only so much that it can do, said Mark Griesi, a security program manager with Microsoft.'
Can anyone who actually works in a news room say how they verify things normally?
In real news, it ideally works like a web of trust:
1) We use more than one source for each story first to get contrasting or concurring opinions on a subject, but also to establish at least the plausability of what each of the other sources has told us. Experts are more than happy to point out and provide evidence that another source is a kook.
2) We find the contact information for interviewees through reliable sources, such as published directories, an organization's switchboard, others whom we trust, or from previous third-party publications or interviews.
3) For submitted items, we still go through 1) and 2) as part of research and to fill in the story. We will also ask the submitting organization or source for the names of some other people from another organization who would be able to verify or comment on the story. The source from the other organization(s) is also vetted via 1) and/or 2).
4) We often also ask others in the same or competing newsroom, the news wire, or search the archives for a previous reference to the source or the story.
If a completely new source or story can't be vetted through any of the above methods, it will likely receive less or no attention on the basis that it's either not important to a significant number of people, that it can't be verified, or that there is more important news deserving coverage.
4.2.2.1-4.2.2.6. Anycasted for speedy access.
No, the only way to get rid of the problem is to make it expensive though platform diversity. Making the user aware of the problem and making it cost the user time and trouble is the first step.
That also makes it difficult to develop and test legitimate software. It's already a pain to correctly do QA on all of the half-dozen or so major workstation platforms out there now.
Meanwhile with the Windows Platform SDK, I know anything I link to is safe and I don't have to worry about restrictions about redistributing anything, so long as the end user's copy of Windows has everything installed.
If I drop the terse legalese of the EULA for the terse legalese of GPL, what have I won, really? BSD is free without any strings attached. I don't have to worry about my builds or what I link to or have any worries beyond, gasp, actually coding. Closed but complete is not necessarily a bad thing for non-technical end users, nor is open as in libre for developers or users.
I would disagree with your assessment that most people on the Internet are not interested in facts. They are very much interested in facts, with a bias toward promoting the ones that agree with their current position or understanding with respect to the topic at hand.
Translation: The point that planning and being able to plan for changes in IT infrastructure is desirable in general has been lost on you.
It's no secret that consumer Dells are like SPAM (it's a x86 computer, but the specific components which go into any particular batch can be highly variable). However, with non-trivial workstations like Optiplexes and above, it's easy to ask and pay for consistency in the product.
Generalizing toward the business need a bit, and to point out the silliness of the other G5/Madden comment, continuity and reliability of supply obviously has deeper consequences than hardware acquisition alone. AMD and Intel both offer some CPUs and other components with absurdly long (10-15 year) availability so that customers can feel safe investing in designs and embedded infrastructures wrapping those components. Continuity of support and roadmaps are critically important when mass upgrading/deploying deeply interdependent hardware/software pieces with regulatory influences (think video cards and openGL in CAD, RTOS in health care, data storage and retention for accounting/infrastructure networks), or when you need to decide if it is worthwhile to acquire a product (and to train support staff and users) if its replacement with 3x the power is due to be released Y months.
In real IT and business shops, a reliable roadmap is a requirement of any product of which you plan to buy and support thousands of units. Architecture switches and products going end of life in 18 months matters a lot if you're working with a 3-year roll-out plan, especially if there are complex platform dependencies.
Corporate policy pertains to things surrounding predictable inputs and desired outputs. If the continued availability of a product line is unpredictable, my policies are suddenly less valuable and the business risk of going with that product has increased. For that reason, suppliers like Dell have multiple product tracks, with the consumer version having no promises of configuration or support security, and the corporate version being available in the presently available standard configuration for 18 to 36 months into the future.
That is how secrecy could hurt sales.
No: Print Screen.