ROFL. If I had moderator points, I would moderate the parent as funny. Lets break this down, one by one.
1) Stock price is a reflection of the merits of a company's products
No, stock price is a reflection of the perceived future value of the stock price. It rarely has to do with the merits of a company's products, and more to do with 1) investor perception 2) the effectiveness of the IR dept. 3) the number of contacts the company has in the large brokerages.
2) IP is the company's property which it owns and invested in to get in the first place.
No, IP is the weight (in kilograms) of the company's trademark, copyright, and patent porfolio. The bigger this number, the more likely it is to survive a patent infringment (or other IP) lawsuit. If it is sufficiently large, not only will the company survive the lawsuit, it will most likely emerge with a much larger number thanks to out of court settled IP/patent swaps/licensing agreements.
3) Market dominance, or rather, market share, is a reflection of how good their products are
Here is where I nearly spewed my Coke(TM) all over my keyboard. I don't think I even have to comment on this bit of naivete.
Ultimately, nothing matters. 99.9999% of the things that occupy your day to day thoughts really don't amount to anything. In my opinion, this makes the things that don't matter much more important than the things you do. "The less meaning, the more meaning", if you are into that "and then he was enlightened" type koan crap.
The French have a word for that other existentialist/nihilistic crap, but I don't know how to spell it. Ultimately it doesn't matter.
Theft is depriving me of the thing YOU stole, not the *potential* loss of value of something I already own.
And people HAVE been arguing that one is less morally offensive than the other for as long as copyright laws have existed in this country. You clearly read/. regularly, so I am somewhat taken aback that this suprises you. People have already pointed out that "losses" due to *potential* sales not happening are completely bogus. You know this, I know this. Just because somebody got something for less than *you* sell it for does not mean they would have paid for it had they not had the opportunity to get if for less. And it doesn't mean they "STOLE" the price difference from your pocket. If price competition is "theft", why bother with a capitalist economy at all?
Information has the unique property that you *can* copy it without "destroying" the original. Why not harness this property, rather than make it look like a limited good?
The purpose of an economy is to distribute a limited good fairly and equitably as possible. Information is NOT a limited material resource. At worst, it is a common good (in the economic infrastructure sense), and at best it is a completely unlimited resource. In both cases, it has zero mariginal cost.
In short, the following is a valid *opinion*: "Copying information is not as morally offensive than stealing my physical property, or depriving me of my freedoms."
You may argue that this opinion is false, but you certainly can't tell me it is NOT a topic for debate.
Are you unaware that our founding fathers debated this topic as well?
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
The right of ownership doesn't end when you cross over from atoms to bits. That same right of ownership and property is what keeps me from taking the Linux source and making my own proprietary kernel. If someone did that, the Slashdot population would be shitting kittens for weeks and threatening to hang the company by their gonads
I am sick and tired of this completely retarded meme.
The purpose of the GPL is NOT to prevent people from making money from your code. In fact, feel free to take ANY of the GPL'd code i've written and attempt to resell it.
The purpose of the GPL is to make sure *I* (and everybody else) can use my code any way they please, DESPITE the fact that you a) use it and b) resell it. e.g. YOU can't copyright it. YOU cant patent it. YOU can't prevent me from giving away my (or anyone elses) GPL'd code.
And some of us DO believe the right of ownership ends when you cross from atoms to bits. YOU know that. I know that. So why are you even prefacing your argument with that statement, when you KNOW most of the readers here will immediately dismiss it offhand, thus completely invalidating your rant?
The GREAT thing about bits is that they CAN be copied perfectly, verbatim, at no cost, and without the degradation of the original bits. Why not harness that property rather than mindlessly hack it until it LOOKS like an artificial scarcity?
I bet/. would be up in arms, if MS could be proven to use open source code in one of their products in violation of the license.
Yes, but only because MS would resell your code, copyright it as their own, prevent EVERYBODY else from using your code in their projects, and then reap the profits. Even if your fictional "Open Source" code is BSD and not GPL, this is wrong (and illegal).
Dolby is being held to a different standard because there IS a different standard. And when you say stuff like "It is entirely their perogative, [sic] to control who can use it", you are assuming the reader agrees that this is a fundamental right. Many of us happen to think government enforced monopolies are bad, no matter what.
And even if you ARE a DMCA moderate who thinks the "circumvention" clause is hunky dory, since when is AC3 a copy control device?
I am assuming you think UNISYS has the god-given right to prevent you from viewing.gifs, and Frauenhofer has the god-given right to prevent you from encoding/decoding MP3s. It maybe LEGALLY fine, but in my eyes morally bankrupt.
The security flaw was exposed to the public (not kept secret), and a patch was released & made available a full month before the main CR outbreak. They did everything they reasonably should have.
Except that IIS still runs with admin priveledges. Nice try though.
Crucify the next virus writer (or other random, innocent hacker) they manage to catch and pass more inane laws that have no other effect but to make your life as a programmer even more difficult. Microsoft will hailed as the "hero" in the case, them being the underdogs against a sea of malicious open source hackers, when they release a patch that closes the script kiddie hole of the week, but not much else. 3rd party vendors will scramble to create more useless server side "personal firewall" applications that filter ONLY traffic based on *OLD* infection methods. No attempt will be made to make IIS itself less of a security risk. No reporting of IIS cgi-child processes running with admin level permissions will be made. Releasing the results of virus related research will become illegal. Discussing possible future vulerabilties will become illegal. Using any "hacker" operating system (e.g. not made by Microsoft) will become illegal. Using the word "virus" or "worm" anywhere on the Internet will earn you a visit from the FBI (after all, if you are innocent, you have nothing to hide). That small inconvenience of having all of your "computer related" possessions confiscated (including your home and car) and yourself thrown in jail w/o bail is insigificant when compared to the amount of viruses prevented from spreading.
$ telnet x.x.x.x 80
Trying x.x.x.x...
Connected to x.x.x.x.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET/scripts/root.exe
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2001 05:51:06 GMT
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-1999 Microsoft Corp.
c:\inetpub\scripts>
$ telnet x.x.x.x 80
Trying x.x.x.x...
Connected to x.x.x.x.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET/scripts/root.exe HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2001 05:51:06 GMT
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-1999 Microsoft Corp.
c:\inetpub\scripts>
Fine. But you still haven't addressed why we need to LEGISLATE this particular topic. Breaking marriage vows is immoral, and wrong. But why a law? To what end? Do we really want to see more of this circus polluting our airwaves all week? I am sick of tired of pundit after pundit droning endlessly about Levy, Lewinsky et. al. It is ALL we see on the evening news because it tittilates the masses. If you have traveled as much as you say you have, you know that the U.S. is unique in its obsession with the sex lives of its politicians. Sure, the U.K. tabloids may drone on and on about the royal family's antics, but rarely does it monopolize EVERY single major news outlet for months and months on end.
People sleep around. Its wrong. If you think somebody who does it isn't fit to hold office, fine. Don't vote for them. But don't subject ME to the month long feeding frenzy that invariably involves these scandals. Politicians do MUCH worse on a daily basis, and we NEVER hear about it because we are too busy obsessing about some young thing in tight pants.
There is an enormous difference between thinking something is WRONG and thinking there needs to be legislation to make it illegal. This is the point I was making, not that breaking wedding vows was "ok"
Are you saying such a bill is NEEDED? What you do in your bedroom is none of my goddamn business. You going to make cheating at Max Payne illegal too? How about lying? Should that be illegal? How many more freedoms are you willing to deny Americans in the name of your Puritanical psychosis?
It is people like you who make it impossible for the media to carry a meaningful story other than
"CHANDRA LEVY: STILL MISSING" and "CONDIT 2001: PENIS WATCH".
I could give a RATS ass about any of that crap, and yet that is ALL we see on the evening news, day in and day out, while more important issues get completely ignored. Do you read? Do you travel? Do you get outside? Do you speak other languages? Have you visited any country outside your own? Any STATE outside your own?
You do realize that mistresses and concubines have existed for thousands (probably tens of thousands) of years, and yet we Americans seem to be the only ones who bitch about it constantly. You are in dire need of a reality check. Look outside your window, buddy. The world is much larger than the tiny town you grew up in, you poor, deluded, sad, ignorant little man.
Actually, isn't the opposite more interesting?
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 2
Is using the PI digit generators more random than using rand()?
The "debate" that old laws may not cover new technology was settled a long time ago in a variety of contexts. The law is a surprisingly adaptable tool. Good laws speak to core concepts of human action and interaction and it is up to courts to fit the innumerable factual scenarios they see into an existing legal framework.
For example, the US Supreme Court held that any human creation under the sun is patentable as long as it meets the statutory requirements of novelty, usefulness, and unobviousness. Thus, the creations of nanotechnology, like biotech and computer software are patentable. (Believe it or not, there was a serious question as to whether software was patentable until recently - it still is not in most countries).
As for the specific uses of nanotech-created devices, I think that people will find that new devices fit nicely into the old legal boxes. This is not to say there will not be argument over which box it should go in, but it will most assuredly be fit into some box.
This has GOT to be a troll, or the most amazing display of cluelessness I have EVER witnessed on Slashdot.
1) You use patents as an example of a "good" outcome of the "useful" tool of law wrt technology.
2) You assume the reader thinks there is NO serious question as to whether software should be patentable.
2a) You ALSO assume the reader then agrees software should be patentable.
3) You ask then ask (based on these premises) the reader to have faith that our legal system is capable of producing GOOD laws regarding technology, despite reams of evidence to the contrary (do I even have to MENTION the DMCA?)
Mr. Gates was too busy sending letters to hobbiests complaining about code theft to do any actual work.
Paul Allen was the smart one; he's the one that did most of the BASIC programming, AND the cloning of CPM into MSDOS.
Gates was his BUISINESS partner, charged with making sure they would make money. Gates himself is incapable of any real contributions to software, other than to rip off other's work and peddle it as his own.
Want proof? Tell me if this reads more like the work of a HACKER or the work of a pathetic, money grubbing, whiney, "we have the God given right to make a profit anyway we want" PHB:
Quote:
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
1) because solaris runs like a dog on old hardware
2) because the stuff in/bin on a solaris machine is absolute garbage (e.g./bin/cp always dereferences soft links,/bin/tar doesn't understand -z or -j,/bin/sh is almost unusable as an interactive shell,/bin/cc.. well I think I can just stop there)
2a)/bin with even moderately up to date/opt/gnu/bin alternatives is such an utter pain.
3) no apt-get (see 2a);)
The only down side to sparclinux that i can see is NIS+ client support is a bit of a pain to get running.
Does this protection technique affect regular cd walkman/car players that have electronic skip protection, e.g. the ones that "pre buffer" the CD into large memories...
Yes. The choice of words was intentionally ironic. Fortunatly, A/Cs have trouble with reading comprehension, let alone literary concepts, so it went below their radar. I am happy that you at least caught it;)
Too bad your cognitive skills are on the fritz again.
Patents make things harder for companies to ADVANCE technologically.
Fortunately, companies don't care about that. What they DO care about is making tons of money, and the patent system is VERY good about facilitating this. Espicially if it involves not having to do expensive things like research unless absolutely necessary.
Companies (especially large ones) just LOVE the patent system and the patent portfolio wars it inspires. The bigger their portfolio, the more a company supports it.. being a patent house is much more profitable than being a technology house. A room full of lawyers can create a hundred times more wealth than a room full of pesky research scientists.
Next time, if you are going to troll, try to not look like a total idiot. It will help your cause. Trust me.
It happens to be alot better suited for many tasks than Windows. Shrug. I use/develop on it more than any other OS. YMMV.
BTW. Getting useful "newbie" information from Slashdot is pretty unlikely, especially if you aren't a programmer to begin with. My advice: don't worry about it; you need it about as much as a car salesman needs a laser guided mitre box.
Slashdot Mirror
ROFL. If I had moderator points, I would moderate the parent as funny. Lets break this down, one by one.
1) Stock price is a reflection of the merits of a company's products
No, stock price is a reflection of the perceived future value of the stock price. It rarely has to do with the merits of a company's products, and more to do with 1) investor perception 2) the effectiveness of the IR dept. 3) the number of contacts the company has in the large brokerages.
2) IP is the company's property which it owns and invested in to get in the first place.
No, IP is the weight (in kilograms) of the company's trademark, copyright, and patent porfolio. The bigger this number, the more likely it is to survive a patent infringment (or other IP) lawsuit. If it is sufficiently large, not only will the company survive the lawsuit, it will most likely emerge with a much larger number thanks to out of court settled IP/patent swaps/licensing agreements.
3) Market dominance, or rather, market share, is a reflection of how good their products are
Here is where I nearly spewed my Coke(TM) all over my keyboard. I don't think I even have to comment on this bit of naivete.
You need to get outside a bit more, sonny.
Lighten up.
Ultimately, nothing matters. 99.9999% of the things that occupy your day to day thoughts really don't amount to anything. In my opinion, this makes the things that don't matter much more important than the things you do. "The less meaning, the more meaning", if you are into that "and then he was enlightened" type koan crap.
The French have a word for that other existentialist/nihilistic crap, but I don't know how to spell it. Ultimately it doesn't matter.
And people HAVE been arguing that one is less morally offensive than the other for as long as copyright laws have existed in this country. You clearly read
Information has the unique property that you *can* copy it without "destroying" the original. Why not harness this property, rather than make it look like a limited good?
The purpose of an economy is to distribute a limited good fairly and equitably as possible. Information is NOT a limited material resource. At worst, it is a common good (in the economic infrastructure sense), and at best it is a completely unlimited resource. In both cases, it has zero mariginal cost.
In short, the following is a valid *opinion*: "Copying information is not as morally offensive than stealing my physical property, or depriving me of my freedoms."
You may argue that this opinion is false, but you certainly can't tell me it is NOT a topic for debate.
Are you unaware that our founding fathers debated this topic as well?
The right of ownership doesn't end when you cross over from atoms to bits. That same right of ownership and property is what keeps me from taking the Linux source and making my own proprietary kernel. If someone did that, the Slashdot population would be shitting kittens for weeks and threatening to hang the company by their gonads
I am sick and tired of this completely retarded meme.
The purpose of the GPL is NOT to prevent people from making money from your code. In fact, feel free to take ANY of the GPL'd code i've written and attempt to resell it.
The purpose of the GPL is to make sure *I* (and everybody else) can use my code any way they please, DESPITE the fact that you a) use it and b) resell it. e.g. YOU can't copyright it. YOU cant patent it. YOU can't prevent me from giving away my (or anyone elses) GPL'd code.
And some of us DO believe the right of ownership ends when you cross from atoms to bits. YOU know that. I know that. So why are you even prefacing your argument with that statement, when you KNOW most of the readers here will immediately dismiss it offhand, thus completely invalidating your rant?
The GREAT thing about bits is that they CAN be copied perfectly, verbatim, at no cost, and without the degradation of the original bits. Why not harness that property rather than mindlessly hack it until it LOOKS like an artificial scarcity?
I bet /. would be up in arms, if MS could be proven to use open source code in one of their products in violation of the license.
.gifs, and Frauenhofer has the god-given right to prevent you from encoding/decoding MP3s. It maybe LEGALLY fine, but in my eyes morally bankrupt.
Yes, but only because MS would resell your code, copyright it as their own, prevent EVERYBODY else from using your code in their projects, and then reap the profits. Even if your fictional "Open Source" code is BSD and not GPL, this is wrong (and illegal).
Dolby is being held to a different standard because there IS a different standard. And when you say stuff like "It is entirely their perogative, [sic] to control who can use it", you are assuming the reader agrees that this is a fundamental right. Many of us happen to think government enforced monopolies are bad, no matter what.
And even if you ARE a DMCA moderate who thinks the "circumvention" clause is hunky dory, since when is AC3 a copy control device?
I am assuming you think UNISYS has the god-given right to prevent you from viewing
The security flaw was exposed to the public (not kept secret), and a patch was released & made available a full month before the main CR outbreak. They did everything they reasonably should have.
Except that IIS still runs with admin priveledges. Nice try though.
None of the above.
I vote for
Crucify the next virus writer (or other random, innocent hacker) they manage to catch and pass more inane laws that have no other effect but to make your life as a programmer even more difficult. Microsoft will hailed as the "hero" in the case, them being the underdogs against a sea of malicious open source hackers, when they release a patch that closes the script kiddie hole of the week, but not much else. 3rd party vendors will scramble to create more useless server side "personal firewall" applications that filter ONLY traffic based on *OLD* infection methods. No attempt will be made to make IIS itself less of a security risk. No reporting of IIS cgi-child processes running with admin level permissions will be made. Releasing the results of virus related research will become illegal. Discussing possible future vulerabilties will become illegal. Using any "hacker" operating system (e.g. not made by Microsoft) will become illegal. Using the word "virus" or "worm" anywhere on the Internet will earn you a visit from the FBI (after all, if you are innocent, you have nothing to hide). That small inconvenience of having all of your "computer related" possessions confiscated (including your home and car) and yourself thrown in jail w/o bail is insigificant when compared to the amount of viruses prevented from spreading.
GET
tried that. Unfortunately, you need cygwin wget. Is there an explorer.exe equivalent to wget?
If somebody had deep linked versions of these via ftp, we could write a white hat worm easily.
t ch/q300972/NT4/EN-US/Q300972i.exe
0 00platform/Patch/q300972/NT5/EN-US/Q300972_W2K_SP3 _x86_en.EXE
Anybody have ftp deep link equivalents of:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/winntsp/Pa
Writing a worm to wget those would be a bitch, but ftp comes installed on all NT boxen... so its easy
and
href="http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2
$ telnet x.x.x.x 80
Trying x.x.x.x...
Connected to x.x.x.x.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2001 05:51:06 GMT
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-1999 Microsoft Corp.
c:\inetpub\scripts>
$ telnet x.x.x.x 80
Trying x.x.x.x...
Connected to x.x.x.x.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2001 05:51:06 GMT
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-1999 Microsoft Corp.
c:\inetpub\scripts>
Game over man, game over.
Fine. But you still haven't addressed why we need to LEGISLATE this particular topic. Breaking marriage vows is immoral, and wrong. But why a law? To what end? Do we really want to see more of this circus polluting our airwaves all week? I am sick of tired of pundit after pundit droning endlessly about Levy, Lewinsky et. al. It is ALL we see on the evening news because it tittilates the masses. If you have traveled as much as you say you have, you know that the U.S. is unique in its obsession with the sex lives of its politicians. Sure, the U.K. tabloids may drone on and on about the royal family's antics, but rarely does it monopolize EVERY single major news outlet for months and months on end.
People sleep around. Its wrong. If you think somebody who does it isn't fit to hold office, fine. Don't vote for them. But don't subject ME to the month long feeding frenzy that invariably involves these scandals. Politicians do MUCH worse on a daily basis, and we NEVER hear about it because we are too busy obsessing about some young thing in tight pants.
There is an enormous difference between thinking something is WRONG and thinking there needs to be legislation to make it illegal. This is the point I was making, not that breaking wedding vows was "ok"
It used to be that a vow actually meant something.
Yes, and LAWS are not needed to enforce VOWS, you clueless fuck. The LAST thing we need is more big government watching our every moves.
Are you saying such a bill is NEEDED? What you do in your bedroom is none of my goddamn business. You going to make cheating at Max Payne illegal too? How about lying? Should that be illegal? How many more freedoms are you willing to deny Americans in the name of your Puritanical psychosis?
It is people like you who make it impossible for the media to carry a meaningful story other than
"CHANDRA LEVY: STILL MISSING" and "CONDIT 2001: PENIS WATCH".
I could give a RATS ass about any of that crap, and yet that is ALL we see on the evening news, day in and day out, while more important issues get completely ignored. Do you read? Do you travel? Do you get outside? Do you speak other languages? Have you visited any country outside your own? Any STATE outside your own?
You do realize that mistresses and concubines have existed for thousands (probably tens of thousands) of years, and yet we Americans seem to be the only ones who bitch about it constantly. You are in dire need of a reality check. Look outside your window, buddy. The world is much larger than the tiny town you grew up in, you poor, deluded, sad, ignorant little man.
Is using the PI digit generators more random than using rand()?
The "debate" that old laws may not cover new technology was settled a long time ago in a variety of contexts. The law is a surprisingly adaptable tool. Good laws speak to core concepts of human action and interaction and it is up to courts to fit the innumerable factual scenarios they see into an existing legal framework.
/. much, do you?
For example, the US Supreme Court held that any human creation under the sun is patentable as long as it meets the statutory requirements of novelty, usefulness, and unobviousness. Thus, the creations of nanotechnology, like biotech and computer software are patentable. (Believe it or not, there was a serious question as to whether software was patentable until recently - it still is not in most countries).
As for the specific uses of nanotech-created devices, I think that people will find that new devices fit nicely into the old legal boxes. This is not to say there will not be argument over which box it should go in, but it will most assuredly be fit into some box.
This has GOT to be a troll, or the most amazing display of cluelessness I have EVER witnessed on Slashdot.
1) You use patents as an example of a "good" outcome of the "useful" tool of law wrt technology.
2) You assume the reader thinks there is NO serious question as to whether software should be patentable.
2a) You ALSO assume the reader then agrees software should be patentable.
3) You ask then ask (based on these premises) the reader to have faith that our legal system is capable of producing GOOD laws regarding technology, despite reams of evidence to the contrary (do I even have to MENTION the DMCA?)
You don't read
Either that, or I have been horribly trolled.
What about a copy stored in ram?
Mr. Gates was too busy sending letters to hobbiests complaining about code theft to do any actual work.
Paul Allen was the smart one; he's the one that did most of the BASIC programming, AND the cloning of CPM into MSDOS.
Gates was his BUISINESS partner, charged with making sure they would make money. Gates himself is incapable of any real contributions to software, other than to rip off other's work and peddle it as his own.
Want proof? Tell me if this reads more like the work of a HACKER or the work of a pathetic, money grubbing, whiney, "we have the God given right to make a profit anyway we want" PHB:
Quote:
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
Mr. Gates was too busy sending letters to hobbiests complaining about code theft to do any actual work.
1) because solaris runs like a dog on old hardware /bin on a solaris machine is absolute garbage (e.g. /bin/cp always dereferences soft links, /bin/tar doesn't understand -z or -j, /bin/sh is almost unusable as an interactive shell, /bin/cc .. well I think I can just stop there)
/bin with even moderately up to date /opt/gnu/bin alternatives is such an utter pain.
;)
2) because the stuff in
2a)
3) no apt-get (see 2a)
The only down side to sparclinux that i can see is NIS+ client support is a bit of a pain to get running.
Does this protection technique affect regular cd walkman/car players that have electronic skip protection, e.g. the ones that "pre buffer" the CD into large memories...
Yes. The choice of words was intentionally ironic. Fortunatly, A/Cs have trouble with reading comprehension, let alone literary concepts, so it went below their radar. I am happy that you at least caught it ;)
Too bad your cognitive skills are on the fritz again.
Patents make things harder for companies to ADVANCE technologically.
Fortunately, companies don't care about that. What they DO care about is making tons of money, and the patent system is VERY good about facilitating this. Espicially if it involves not having to do expensive things like research unless absolutely necessary.
Companies (especially large ones) just LOVE the patent system and the patent portfolio wars it inspires. The bigger their portfolio, the more a company supports it.. being a patent house is much more profitable than being a technology house. A room full of lawyers can create a hundred times more wealth than a room full of pesky research scientists.
Next time, if you are going to troll, try to not look like a total idiot. It will help your cause. Trust me.
It happens to be alot better suited for many tasks than Windows. Shrug. I use/develop on it more than any other OS. YMMV.
BTW. Getting useful "newbie" information from Slashdot is pretty unlikely, especially if you aren't a programmer to begin with. My advice: don't worry about it; you need it about as much as a car salesman needs a laser guided mitre box.