The only problem is the size of the fine. Any fine large enough to be even a minor concern for a tech-giant like Apple or Microsoft would have to be larger than most people earn in a lifetime, and more than most smaller companies or individuals could risk. A fixed fine would be unworkable, and trying to scale fines to the income of the recipient can be a very complex task.
Except that their precedent then *becomes* the law. They still can't contradict it. It's a logical impossibility. What they can do is effectively retroactively change the meaning of a law, and if they do so in a way too blatant it'll annoy the legislators enough that they'll repeal or revise the law and try again.
Meyer wasn't just writing for profit. She has a personal investment: Her writing is an expression of her social and religious beliefs, and an allegorical argument for them. That doesn't make her a good writer, in part because her beliefs (That the rightful place of a woman is in the kitchen, doing as she is told by her male protector) are silly. But you can't fairly accuse her of being just in it for the money.
Dan Brown you can have though. That guy just makes conspiracy crap up because he knows it'll sell.
Attacked by who? Both the US and Europe have enough nuclear weapons to hand that anyone who tried to attack them directly wouldn't survive the attempt. What wars they are involved in are more political affairs, against insurgent groups or local dictators who pose no serious threat.
I read a few of those right-leaning websites, and while what you say does have a little truth to it, it overlooks the highly polarised nature of US politics.
Conservatives are not anti-environment. But liberals are pro-environment to a much greater extent than conservatives. Whatever one faction does, the other is all but obliged to oppose.
The bag laws are, mostly, a liberal cause. Therefore conservatives feel they must oppose them regardless of the actual merits or disadvantages. In the same way that many conservative publications ran a lot articles claiming that CFL lights cause brain damage and need a full HAZMAT suit to handle if broken: Energy efficiency standards are seen as a liberal cause, and therefore must be wrong.
I predict that within a week, at least one right-leaning website is going to be publishing a column using this to attack the idea of environmentalism and arguing that this proves liberalism endangers human lives.
Condense the human interest story down, and what you have isn't entirely surprising: It's the story of an inventor who has decent enough technical skills to invent, but not the business skill to successfully profit from his invention. He has a patent, yes - but the patent does him no good because it is narrow enough that an alternative technology came along.
I'm sure I'm legally simplifying the issue, but as best I can see his patent is for a mechanism that uses human power to wind up a clockwork mechanism to drive a compact dynamo. When batteries got more practical and cheaper, the 'clockwork' part was no longer needed. Now, if he were a businessman he would have made the patent as over-broad as he could and patented 'a mechanism for generating electrical energy from human input' or something like that, along with 'human powered radio,' 'human powered torch,' 'human powered general purpose charger' and so on.
People here might start looking for some middle ground: A way to legislate patents broad enough to protect lone inventors, but not so broad as to be useable. But this middle ground doesn't always exist. It doesn't in this case, because what he invented isn't really that great. All he did was take a hand-wound clockwork mechanism (Older than steam!) and connect it to a little dynamo (If Faraday patented that, it's expired). It doesn't exist in the more general case because, outside of some highly specialised areas*, most 'inventions' can be easily re-implemented using alternative designs - and the only way to stop that happening is to allow patents so broad they don't cover technology, but concepts. Putting us back in troll-friendly territory where we are today.
The problem isn't in the implimentation of patents. It's in the concept. It just doesn't work very well. A fundamentally flawed idea. Perhaps we need to get over this idea that the 'lone inventor' has a right to benefit from their work. It sounds great to our sense of fairness, but what it really comes down do is an exclusive right: There's a social cost to making patents half-way effective, and the innovation that results from giving inventors a financial incentive can be very easily outweighed by the innovation lost when small or medium entities are unable to enter the field at all because some sharp businessman realized he can file patents on things broad enough that they are impossible not to infringe** or trivial and numerous enough that they can be used to wage a financial war of attrition against any competitors***.
*Where the implementation is the invention, such as in drugs... and even then, a rival could probably find a similar molecule that shares the same or close-enough functional area.
**One of the ones in the h264 pool describes the concept of a program that accepts video input and outputs the video in encoded form. Not any internal implementation, or even clever maths. They patented the very idea of an encoder. It could probably be invalidated by prior art, but that's the point of a patent pool: There are so many, no-one could afford to fight them all.
*** Rounded corners, swipe to unlock.
It's far past when I should be sleeping on a normal night, and I was up until 5am last night playing Re-Volt with friends. I'm probably going to look over this rambling tomorrow and be unable to figure out what I was trying to say.
It's actually quite hard to spoof anything now. No domestic connection will forward packets that don't from from the designated IP address. You need to have access to either the LAN of a decently-sized corporation or the internal network of an ISP. Easy enough for skilled hackers to get, yes - they can compromise a device somewhere - but beyond the script kiddie.
It's to stop the script kiddies of the internet wasting your bandwidth and cluttering your logs with thousands upon thousands of rejection messages in their futile attempts to gain access. They can't get in, but their efforts are annoying.
Businesswise, it may well be. Office on iPad could make a lot of money, true. But a successful alternative to the iPad, controlled by MS with an MS app store? That's a lot more money. If Microsoft are to rival Apple they need ever advantage they can get, and Office exclusivity is a big advantage.
Actually, the series did address that (or it might have been in one of the novels, ask a real trekkie). In the TNG timeframe, medical tech would have been easily up to the task of growing replacement biological eyes and reconnecting them. Geordie could have had that done any time he wished. He took the visor out of choice, because it provided him with vision in some ways superior to natural which he considered made him a better engineer. Most usefully, it could image in the thermal infra-red, allowing him to see at a glance patterns of heat dissipation that others would need hand-held instrumentation to observe, and because he saw these every time he looked at any component he gained a far greater understanding of what 'normal' looked like and how to spot slight deviations from it - allowing him to recognise a near-failure component that any normally-sighted engineer wouldn't notice until it failed completly.
You have it right. The gene is naturally occuring, but the patent prevents any other company 'using' the gene in an artificial way. That includes interpreting mutations in BRCA1 as part of a test, or selecting a treatment based upon the results of that test.
Figure out the coding and feeding directly into the primary visual cortex is feasible. Tricky part is making an implant that can continue to function for many years without needing replacement.
You could probably solve part of that with ultracaps. Then the cell can run continually at cruising power, and the caps handle the acceleration peak. But even then, the shameful fact is that cars would need to get smaller, and small isn't marketable. People want a giant hulk of a car, even if it's just to do their daily commute, and unless gas prices get *much* higher that isn't going to change. Even here in Europe people have been spoilt by cheap fuel. Now they act as if it is their right to ignore how much it takes to fuel their status symbol.
It'd be perfect for a mobile phone cover replacement. A tablet case, though, may be too big for many models. As for durability, you could just make the case as thick as required, at the expense of making the tablet thicker too. An ugly repair.
I can answer that one: Copyright is a niche issue. The vast majority just don't care. In the public agenda, it's right at the bottom. The number of votes which might be won by taking a stace for less restrictive copyrights is just outweighed by the number of votes that might be gained from improved advertising and campaigning funded by donations from copyright industry representatives.
I've spoken to people at my local TV repair shop, and they expect to be out of business soon. Modern hardware isn't repairable. Even replaceable components aren't: They cited the flyback transformer as an example. A frequent failure in CRT displays, and easily replaceable: A little soldering, but that's all. Except that the newer CRTs (before everything went flat) needed calibrating for the exact value of resistance and inductance of the flyback, to compensate for slight variences between individual components even off the production line, and those calibration values are stored in an EPROM chip which cannot be so easily replaced, in a propritary format for which the manufacturer never released any tools or documentation, accessible usually by entering a secret handshake known only by the manufacturer via either a hidden serial port or the IR control interface. The flyback may be replaceable, but it won't do you any good. It's easier to just buy a whole new TV than to reverse-engineer one enough to repair it.
They also said that the battery is impossible to remove without destroying the back cover. Where will you get a replacement cover from? Better get your 3D printer ready. Even then, only a person of great skill could get to the battery without destroying other components in the process.
The engine, body and other car-ish stuff may be good for thirty years, but in five the in-car entertainment and cloudy navigation systems will be as obsolete an eight-track. Time to go out and buy a new car. Welcome to the upgrade cycle: The computer and smartphone industries got there long ago.
You're neglecting cultural aspects. People will continue to use cars, even when other means are more affortable and practical, because a car isn't just a means of transport. It's a symbol and statement of freedom: The power to go where you want, when you want, bound by no schedule and dependant on no-one. Less so in Europe than the US. Over there, owning their first car is one of the big rites of passage for teenagers.
Slashdot Mirror
Until your log filename turns into access_log_0213_expire.-.02132020
"deriving a file time to live for the file from the path name"
Sounds like an ugly hack to avoid modifying software to call the 'set expiration time' function.
In which case you get fired, and replaced with someone who at least tried to take the job seriously.
The only problem is the size of the fine. Any fine large enough to be even a minor concern for a tech-giant like Apple or Microsoft would have to be larger than most people earn in a lifetime, and more than most smaller companies or individuals could risk. A fixed fine would be unworkable, and trying to scale fines to the income of the recipient can be a very complex task.
Except that their precedent then *becomes* the law. They still can't contradict it. It's a logical impossibility. What they can do is effectively retroactively change the meaning of a law, and if they do so in a way too blatant it'll annoy the legislators enough that they'll repeal or revise the law and try again.
Meyer wasn't just writing for profit. She has a personal investment: Her writing is an expression of her social and religious beliefs, and an allegorical argument for them. That doesn't make her a good writer, in part because her beliefs (That the rightful place of a woman is in the kitchen, doing as she is told by her male protector) are silly. But you can't fairly accuse her of being just in it for the money.
Dan Brown you can have though. That guy just makes conspiracy crap up because he knows it'll sell.
Attacked by who? Both the US and Europe have enough nuclear weapons to hand that anyone who tried to attack them directly wouldn't survive the attempt. What wars they are involved in are more political affairs, against insurgent groups or local dictators who pose no serious threat.
I read a few of those right-leaning websites, and while what you say does have a little truth to it, it overlooks the highly polarised nature of US politics.
Conservatives are not anti-environment.
But liberals are pro-environment to a much greater extent than conservatives.
Whatever one faction does, the other is all but obliged to oppose.
The bag laws are, mostly, a liberal cause. Therefore conservatives feel they must oppose them regardless of the actual merits or disadvantages. In the same way that many conservative publications ran a lot articles claiming that CFL lights cause brain damage and need a full HAZMAT suit to handle if broken: Energy efficiency standards are seen as a liberal cause, and therefore must be wrong.
I predict that within a week, at least one right-leaning website is going to be publishing a column using this to attack the idea of environmentalism and arguing that this proves liberalism endangers human lives.
Condense the human interest story down, and what you have isn't entirely surprising: It's the story of an inventor who has decent enough technical skills to invent, but not the business skill to successfully profit from his invention. He has a patent, yes - but the patent does him no good because it is narrow enough that an alternative technology came along.
I'm sure I'm legally simplifying the issue, but as best I can see his patent is for a mechanism that uses human power to wind up a clockwork mechanism to drive a compact dynamo. When batteries got more practical and cheaper, the 'clockwork' part was no longer needed. Now, if he were a businessman he would have made the patent as over-broad as he could and patented 'a mechanism for generating electrical energy from human input' or something like that, along with 'human powered radio,' 'human powered torch,' 'human powered general purpose charger' and so on.
People here might start looking for some middle ground: A way to legislate patents broad enough to protect lone inventors, but not so broad as to be useable. But this middle ground doesn't always exist. It doesn't in this case, because what he invented isn't really that great. All he did was take a hand-wound clockwork mechanism (Older than steam!) and connect it to a little dynamo (If Faraday patented that, it's expired). It doesn't exist in the more general case because, outside of some highly specialised areas*, most 'inventions' can be easily re-implemented using alternative designs - and the only way to stop that happening is to allow patents so broad they don't cover technology, but concepts. Putting us back in troll-friendly territory where we are today.
The problem isn't in the implimentation of patents. It's in the concept. It just doesn't work very well. A fundamentally flawed idea. Perhaps we need to get over this idea that the 'lone inventor' has a right to benefit from their work. It sounds great to our sense of fairness, but what it really comes down do is an exclusive right: There's a social cost to making patents half-way effective, and the innovation that results from giving inventors a financial incentive can be very easily outweighed by the innovation lost when small or medium entities are unable to enter the field at all because some sharp businessman realized he can file patents on things broad enough that they are impossible not to infringe** or trivial and numerous enough that they can be used to wage a financial war of attrition against any competitors***.
*Where the implementation is the invention, such as in drugs... and even then, a rival could probably find a similar molecule that shares the same or close-enough functional area.
**One of the ones in the h264 pool describes the concept of a program that accepts video input and outputs the video in encoded form. Not any internal implementation, or even clever maths. They patented the very idea of an encoder. It could probably be invalidated by prior art, but that's the point of a patent pool: There are so many, no-one could afford to fight them all.
*** Rounded corners, swipe to unlock.
It's far past when I should be sleeping on a normal night, and I was up until 5am last night playing Re-Volt with friends. I'm probably going to look over this rambling tomorrow and be unable to figure out what I was trying to say.
There's the British system: The people vote, someone emerges on top, and none of us can figure out exactly what goes on in between.
It's actually quite hard to spoof anything now. No domestic connection will forward packets that don't from from the designated IP address. You need to have access to either the LAN of a decently-sized corporation or the internal network of an ISP. Easy enough for skilled hackers to get, yes - they can compromise a device somewhere - but beyond the script kiddie.
It's not for security.
It's to stop the script kiddies of the internet wasting your bandwidth and cluttering your logs with thousands upon thousands of rejection messages in their futile attempts to gain access. They can't get in, but their efforts are annoying.
Businesswise, it may well be. Office on iPad could make a lot of money, true. But a successful alternative to the iPad, controlled by MS with an MS app store? That's a lot more money. If Microsoft are to rival Apple they need ever advantage they can get, and Office exclusivity is a big advantage.
Actually, the series did address that (or it might have been in one of the novels, ask a real trekkie). In the TNG timeframe, medical tech would have been easily up to the task of growing replacement biological eyes and reconnecting them. Geordie could have had that done any time he wished. He took the visor out of choice, because it provided him with vision in some ways superior to natural which he considered made him a better engineer. Most usefully, it could image in the thermal infra-red, allowing him to see at a glance patterns of heat dissipation that others would need hand-held instrumentation to observe, and because he saw these every time he looked at any component he gained a far greater understanding of what 'normal' looked like and how to spot slight deviations from it - allowing him to recognise a near-failure component that any normally-sighted engineer wouldn't notice until it failed completly.
You have it right. The gene is naturally occuring, but the patent prevents any other company 'using' the gene in an artificial way. That includes interpreting mutations in BRCA1 as part of a test, or selecting a treatment based upon the results of that test.
Figure out the coding and feeding directly into the primary visual cortex is feasible. Tricky part is making an implant that can continue to function for many years without needing replacement.
You could probably solve part of that with ultracaps. Then the cell can run continually at cruising power, and the caps handle the acceleration peak. But even then, the shameful fact is that cars would need to get smaller, and small isn't marketable. People want a giant hulk of a car, even if it's just to do their daily commute, and unless gas prices get *much* higher that isn't going to change. Even here in Europe people have been spoilt by cheap fuel. Now they act as if it is their right to ignore how much it takes to fuel their status symbol.
I have. But it is one of the last, and struggling. I don't anticipate it being around forever.
It'd be perfect for a mobile phone cover replacement. A tablet case, though, may be too big for many models. As for durability, you could just make the case as thick as required, at the expense of making the tablet thicker too. An ugly repair.
I can answer that one: Copyright is a niche issue. The vast majority just don't care. In the public agenda, it's right at the bottom. The number of votes which might be won by taking a stace for less restrictive copyrights is just outweighed by the number of votes that might be gained from improved advertising and campaigning funded by donations from copyright industry representatives.
I've spoken to people at my local TV repair shop, and they expect to be out of business soon. Modern hardware isn't repairable. Even replaceable components aren't: They cited the flyback transformer as an example. A frequent failure in CRT displays, and easily replaceable: A little soldering, but that's all. Except that the newer CRTs (before everything went flat) needed calibrating for the exact value of resistance and inductance of the flyback, to compensate for slight variences between individual components even off the production line, and those calibration values are stored in an EPROM chip which cannot be so easily replaced, in a propritary format for which the manufacturer never released any tools or documentation, accessible usually by entering a secret handshake known only by the manufacturer via either a hidden serial port or the IR control interface. The flyback may be replaceable, but it won't do you any good. It's easier to just buy a whole new TV than to reverse-engineer one enough to repair it.
They also said that the battery is impossible to remove without destroying the back cover. Where will you get a replacement cover from? Better get your 3D printer ready. Even then, only a person of great skill could get to the battery without destroying other components in the process.
The engine, body and other car-ish stuff may be good for thirty years, but in five the in-car entertainment and cloudy navigation systems will be as obsolete an eight-track. Time to go out and buy a new car. Welcome to the upgrade cycle: The computer and smartphone industries got there long ago.
You're neglecting cultural aspects. People will continue to use cars, even when other means are more affortable and practical, because a car isn't just a means of transport. It's a symbol and statement of freedom: The power to go where you want, when you want, bound by no schedule and dependant on no-one. Less so in Europe than the US. Over there, owning their first car is one of the big rites of passage for teenagers.