Ok smartass, what's the phone number of the restaurant?
Yeah - also what if I'm somewhere and want to find a great Japanese restaurant in the area - who do I call then? (Not the restaurant I don't even know yet, I suppose...) Also many humans are not all that great in giving directions over the phone - in most cases I'm actually better off with a good map...
So what? People are buying Zunes too. You wouldn't say people are flocking to those, would you?
No, but I know how the market has reacted to both these products, and so do you. So what's your point there?
The smartphones are a tiny tiny fraction of the market.
That's correct, but I have to assume that you at least read the title of this article "Dvorak Says gPhone is Doomed" and know that we are discussing in that context. The market for smart phones is huge, that it's a subset of an even larger market is not particularly interesting in that given context.
If I sell auto-windows and I offer you a free dinner at some restaurant if you use my service, is that "bribery"?
No, but if I hire someone to purchase auto-windows for my business, and he's buying an inferior product for a higher price because you paid him - then you've bribed him.
If you offer a lower price to the party who pays you are not bribing anyone, if you offer the money to a third person, then you are paying a bribe.
Ok, so the argument is this: the guy (A) taking a bribe harms his employer (X), so what he's doing is wrong. However the poor innocent business man (B) who offers the bribe just wants to sell his product, so he's doing nothing wrong.
Sorry, this makes no sense. The guy (B) offering the bribe is conspiring with the employee (A) of company (X) in order to profit from selling his inferior product at a higher price. A can not act alone, he always needs B. There is no conceivable benefit to society by making B's actions legal. Unless we are commited into making our economy less efficient, and our system of government more corrupt it's not a sensible course of action. As for the morality of B: he's enabling and persuading A to commit a crime, and he knows he's doing it - that's not moral.
I'm not a fan of Apple and won't get an iPhone for myself, but people are buying those, right? So "public has not been flocking to smartphones" - yeah if you live under a rock somewhere that may be true...
The single biggest problem I have with this bogus lawsuit is this: it's the government suing the government
It's annoying because it ought to be avoidable. On the other hand, if there is supposed to be some balance between state and federal power, and if there is a conflict in that balance - what other mechanism would there be to force a resolution? Of course, if the federal government agrees that they've not fulfilled their obligations, they can much reduce the costs by fixing the problem now. It seems like in this particular case they are clearly in the wrong, so I don't see the need to wait for a court decision.
Well when it comes down to it: it's boiling water. Some beverages are made with it - for tea it's a must IMO for coffee it should be close, at least. Yes, handling boiling water is a little bit dangerous - I have a kitchen and occassionally boil water there. Yes, burning yourself with hot water must really hurt, I sympathize. However I don't want any company to be punished for serving hot drinks. I want to be able to continue buying hot drinks - and I'm ok with the minute risk that comes with it. Sometimes if you make a mistake you hurt yourself. That's no reason for everybody to be treated like a little child - if you need that much protection, maybe you should hire a guardian and pay for him yourself?
But they are talking of combining 16 chips of 64Gbit which gets you 128 GByte. Of course, they are just saying "businesses can create a 128GB flash storage device". Which, while true, doesn't really mean anything apart from "you can use multiple chips in the same device".
I guess for MP3 players and the like - it would get the smaller form factor flash players into the same storage range as hard drive players have currently. I'd buy that if the price is ok.
This predefines Burma having this software as objectionable.
Of course it is - what the Burmese government does to it's people is well known. Any one of us could see what selling this software to them would mean.
Look at the facts before us: (1) the market was free (2) Burma was able to buy the software.
If markets being free was sufficient to prevent Burma to get the software, then it wouldn't have happened. Of course it's easy to make this argument after the fact - that's because it's already happened. What's not easy - and not rational - is to claim now that (1) is sufficient to prevent (2) - we already have proof to the contrary.
burmese constitution if any allow for cencorship of its people
You do realize that Burma is a violent oppressive dictatorship, right? Almost by definition the courts provide no recourse for the people, and whether the constitution was dictatorially shaped to remove the rights of the Burmese people, or whether it officially has them but are ignored in practice... this has no moral implication whatsoever.
[...] where the people of western countrys think that all countries have the same protections we do.
That's silly - of course they don't have the same protections - that's why we feel the moral obligation that we should act. That's a precondition for your "market" theory as well: if the people didn't feel that moral obligation, there is no way they would shape their buying decisions accordingly.
if I sell you a pitchfork and you stab someone with it, have I committed murder?
Depends - if a known murderer comes to you and asks for the most suitable pitchfork to stab a person with... Well you are not technically a murderer maybe, but your acts are immoral to the extreme.
Shouldn't we clear this up first, before going after software that can not be used by people to kill people quite as directly as guns?
That's a false dichotomy - there is no reason you can't do both, outlawing the software sales doesn't hinder your efforts to prevent them from getting weapons.
How can any company with a shred of ethics or morality excuse the sale of their filtering product?
Oh that's easy:
1 - the market must be free, the business man's only obligation is to grow the wealth of the shareholders. If it's immoral, then society should take care of making it illegal.
2 - the free market will solve all the world's problems, so we can not legislate anything.
3 - if the market does demonstratably not solve a problem, well then it's because people didn't sufficiently care about it.
Neat, no? You can do whatever you want, and feel great about it - there is just nothing else you could possibly do, but strive to put more money in your own pockets. Even if it can be shown that doesn't work for society, it's still not your fault.
Well to be honest, unless we're at war with them (or they're at war with one of our allies), no, selling stuff to them shouldn't be illegal.
Why not? Please can you explain the benefit why that should remain legal?
But that's the proper response in that case: don't do business with someone who's business practices you find disagreeable, don't legislate them out of existence...
Again - can you please explain the benefit of that?
Let the market deal with it; if people care about the people in Burma, they won't do business with a company supporting that government.
Neither me, nor anyone else on earth has enough time to evaluate the business practices of every single company they buy goods from, and of the suppliers of every single company they buy goods. The amount of information required to make such decisions in every aspect of live is ridiculously large.
Let's look at the facts here: if the market would solve these problems, the Burmese government would not have this software. They do, and that means that the market is not going to solve the problem. If you want you can blame the public at large for not caring enough about Burma - rather than those who don't have enough morals not to sell them the stuff in the first place. This doesn't really matter - regardless of the reason - fact is the market has provably not solved the problem. Why would you expect different results in the future?
I don't follow your logic. Your complaint is that (in your perception) Greenpeace is not making as many appeals to evil dictatorships as they do to democratic governments. Let's assume that's true for the sake of the argument. Why would you think that's a valid complaint? It would appear that democratic governments by definition can be influenced by the will of the people and are therefore more susceptible to moral appeals. If the political leaders themselves are not - at least the population is, and the leaders have to cave to public opinion at least some of the time. Evil dictatorships by definition are not moral, hence moral appeals to them would appear to be rather unlikely to have an effect. Similarly per definition as dictatorships the opinion of the population is less relevant to them.
So your complaint would be essentially, that Greenpeace is not engaging in something which has not the remotest chance of success. Now does Greenpeace claim to be a fair judge of everyone's environmental record - or does it claim to be a group of environmental activists who want to change things according to their own agenda? If it was the first, then you'd have a point. I don't think that applies, though.
The fascinating thing about playing Pong, was just that it was possible. It's only really interesting feature was that it was new. Playing it then was great, unexpected, fascinating. Today it's boring. Unlike e.g. Tetris which still makes a nice puzzle, Pong is not a good game on it's own. (Of course, that doesn't take anything away from the technical achievement of making it.)
But the filing date of that earlier application is Mar. 3, 2004 - so presumably that's the date which is relevant for prior art. If they have used this before they filed the patent, doesn't this count as publishing it, and thus makes the application invalid?
Well, it should also be considered that demand for air travel is growing. So while it's CO2 contribution is not so great yet, it will be more significant in the future.
They don't do it *yet*. I don't think you'll be able to codify this in such a way that it isn't easily circumvented. They could just try to sell it to a few companies who don't use something like that already, then sue the ones who do. For this to be an improvement you would need to come up with a watertight solution.
The problem is that it's the fundamentals of the patent system which are broken, not the specifics. There are tons of patents which might apply to certain products, but the fact is that reading them would not help when you wanted to design something - hence granting them was wrong in the first place. Patents are typically useless accumulations of legal language describing trivial ideas which have been implemented elsewhere long ago. Unless you fix that, you won't fix the problem of patent trolls, either.
One of the justifications of the patent system is that an engineer could file one on his invention and could get a reward for his work in that way. This doesn't work if you need a whole manufacturing setup just to file a patent for your idea. I don't like the whole patent system either, especially not the mockery which the patent office has made of it - but I don't see this modification to be workable.
Of course, this situation of a company solely litigating patents is the chink in the "defensive patent" armour which so many companies think protects them.
Regarding the investigation - I think this was mainly about reviewing the information security policies of all state agencies. Regarding the punishment - I speculate that the review found that the same policies were present in many state agencies. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to punish the one guy who got unlucky, when he wasn't doing anything differently from all the others.
One thing worth pointing out, is that Jerry Miller is not the intern who lost the data. Instead he bears responsibility for the policy which led to the intern having to take the tape home. It certainly makes sense that the punishment should be applied to him, and not to the intern. Likewise it makes sense that they identified the policy as the problem, instead of the actual theft.
I have the same experience you have - taking home backup tapes is a standard way in the industry to make sure backups are safe. It's not a stupid idea as such - however due to the risk of theft, it should not be done with data which is as sensitive as in this incident.
I think the state was doing the right thing here: They focussed not on blaming the individual responsible, but on preventing things like that in the future. They took a reasonable period of time to review their procedures instead of a quick PR-driven rush job. And they kept things in proportion - the guy had some responsibility, but it was a mistake not a crime. There is no reason to get rid of an otherwise good employee.
I know some people are going to claim they would never make a mistake like this - however from my experience in the industry, I know that privacy policy problems like these are par for the course.
It's the judge's job to handle this, if the guy is found and brought to court. If the picture is a major piece of evidence he may order the source code (or the sequence of actions they executed in photoshop) to be examined. I suspect though that the picture would only be used as a way to track this person. As a starting point to gather more information, not as acutal evidence in court.
[...] go back to vinyl [...] every audiophile will tell you that any digitisation utterly ruins the quality.
For a long time you could buy LPs and CDs in the store. First the CD section was small - a specialty section, then it grew. For a while both media were occupying equal shares of the store, then LP became the specialty section, and finally the LPs disappeared. You can come up with all sorts of conspiracy scenarios, I'm sure - but this seems just like normal market behaviour to me. The size of the LP section is related to the share of customers who want to buy LPs. By going back to that antiquated technology you'd capture exactly that share of the market which is still using it. I'd have a hard look at the sales numbers for iPods in comparison to the numbers for LP players instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - also what if I'm somewhere and want to find a great Japanese restaurant in the area - who do I call then? (Not the restaurant I don't even know yet, I suppose...) Also many humans are not all that great in giving directions over the phone - in most cases I'm actually better off with a good map...
No, but I know how the market has reacted to both these products, and so do you. So what's your point there?
The smartphones are a tiny tiny fraction of the market.
That's correct, but I have to assume that you at least read the title of this article "Dvorak Says gPhone is Doomed" and know that we are discussing in that context. The market for smart phones is huge, that it's a subset of an even larger market is not particularly interesting in that given context.
No, but if I hire someone to purchase auto-windows for my business, and he's buying an inferior product for a higher price because you paid him - then you've bribed him.
If you offer a lower price to the party who pays you are not bribing anyone, if you offer the money to a third person, then you are paying a bribe.
Sorry, this makes no sense. The guy (B) offering the bribe is conspiring with the employee (A) of company (X) in order to profit from selling his inferior product at a higher price. A can not act alone, he always needs B. There is no conceivable benefit to society by making B's actions legal. Unless we are commited into making our economy less efficient, and our system of government more corrupt it's not a sensible course of action. As for the morality of B: he's enabling and persuading A to commit a crime, and he knows he's doing it - that's not moral.
I'm not a fan of Apple and won't get an iPhone for myself, but people are buying those, right? So "public has not been flocking to smartphones" - yeah if you live under a rock somewhere that may be true...
I think these days format wars are no longer resolved. Instead hybrids will come out which can handle whatever format you throw at them.
It's annoying because it ought to be avoidable. On the other hand, if there is supposed to be some balance between state and federal power, and if there is a conflict in that balance - what other mechanism would there be to force a resolution? Of course, if the federal government agrees that they've not fulfilled their obligations, they can much reduce the costs by fixing the problem now. It seems like in this particular case they are clearly in the wrong, so I don't see the need to wait for a court decision.
Well when it comes down to it: it's boiling water. Some beverages are made with it - for tea it's a must IMO for coffee it should be close, at least. Yes, handling boiling water is a little bit dangerous - I have a kitchen and occassionally boil water there. Yes, burning yourself with hot water must really hurt, I sympathize. However I don't want any company to be punished for serving hot drinks. I want to be able to continue buying hot drinks - and I'm ok with the minute risk that comes with it. Sometimes if you make a mistake you hurt yourself. That's no reason for everybody to be treated like a little child - if you need that much protection, maybe you should hire a guardian and pay for him yourself?
But they are talking of combining 16 chips of 64Gbit which gets you 128 GByte. Of course, they are just saying "businesses can create a 128GB flash storage device". Which, while true, doesn't really mean anything apart from "you can use multiple chips in the same device".
I guess for MP3 players and the like - it would get the smaller form factor flash players into the same storage range as hard drive players have currently. I'd buy that if the price is ok.
Of course it is - what the Burmese government does to it's people is well known. Any one of us could see what selling this software to them would mean.
Look at the facts before us: (1) the market was free (2) Burma was able to buy the software. If markets being free was sufficient to prevent Burma to get the software, then it wouldn't have happened. Of course it's easy to make this argument after the fact - that's because it's already happened. What's not easy - and not rational - is to claim now that (1) is sufficient to prevent (2) - we already have proof to the contrary.
burmese constitution if any allow for cencorship of its people
You do realize that Burma is a violent oppressive dictatorship, right? Almost by definition the courts provide no recourse for the people, and whether the constitution was dictatorially shaped to remove the rights of the Burmese people, or whether it officially has them but are ignored in practice ... this has no moral implication whatsoever.
[...] where the people of western countrys think that all countries have the same protections we do.
That's silly - of course they don't have the same protections - that's why we feel the moral obligation that we should act. That's a precondition for your "market" theory as well: if the people didn't feel that moral obligation, there is no way they would shape their buying decisions accordingly.
if I sell you a pitchfork and you stab someone with it, have I committed murder?
Depends - if a known murderer comes to you and asks for the most suitable pitchfork to stab a person with... Well you are not technically a murderer maybe, but your acts are immoral to the extreme.
That's a false dichotomy - there is no reason you can't do both, outlawing the software sales doesn't hinder your efforts to prevent them from getting weapons.
Oh that's easy:
1 - the market must be free, the business man's only obligation is to grow the wealth of the shareholders. If it's immoral, then society should take care of making it illegal.
2 - the free market will solve all the world's problems, so we can not legislate anything.
3 - if the market does demonstratably not solve a problem, well then it's because people didn't sufficiently care about it.
Neat, no? You can do whatever you want, and feel great about it - there is just nothing else you could possibly do, but strive to put more money in your own pockets. Even if it can be shown that doesn't work for society, it's still not your fault.
Why not? Please can you explain the benefit why that should remain legal?
But that's the proper response in that case: don't do business with someone who's business practices you find disagreeable, don't legislate them out of existence...
Again - can you please explain the benefit of that?
Let the market deal with it; if people care about the people in Burma, they won't do business with a company supporting that government.
Neither me, nor anyone else on earth has enough time to evaluate the business practices of every single company they buy goods from, and of the suppliers of every single company they buy goods. The amount of information required to make such decisions in every aspect of live is ridiculously large.
Let's look at the facts here: if the market would solve these problems, the Burmese government would not have this software. They do, and that means that the market is not going to solve the problem. If you want you can blame the public at large for not caring enough about Burma - rather than those who don't have enough morals not to sell them the stuff in the first place. This doesn't really matter - regardless of the reason - fact is the market has provably not solved the problem. Why would you expect different results in the future?
So your complaint would be essentially, that Greenpeace is not engaging in something which has not the remotest chance of success. Now does Greenpeace claim to be a fair judge of everyone's environmental record - or does it claim to be a group of environmental activists who want to change things according to their own agenda? If it was the first, then you'd have a point. I don't think that applies, though.
The fascinating thing about playing Pong, was just that it was possible. It's only really interesting feature was that it was new. Playing it then was great, unexpected, fascinating. Today it's boring. Unlike e.g. Tetris which still makes a nice puzzle, Pong is not a good game on it's own. (Of course, that doesn't take anything away from the technical achievement of making it.)
But the filing date of that earlier application is Mar. 3, 2004 - so presumably that's the date which is relevant for prior art. If they have used this before they filed the patent, doesn't this count as publishing it, and thus makes the application invalid?
On the patent the filing date is given as "Mar., 2004". So I presume prior art needs to predate that date.
Well, it should also be considered that demand for air travel is growing. So while it's CO2 contribution is not so great yet, it will be more significant in the future.
The problem is that it's the fundamentals of the patent system which are broken, not the specifics. There are tons of patents which might apply to certain products, but the fact is that reading them would not help when you wanted to design something - hence granting them was wrong in the first place. Patents are typically useless accumulations of legal language describing trivial ideas which have been implemented elsewhere long ago. Unless you fix that, you won't fix the problem of patent trolls, either.
Of course, this situation of a company solely litigating patents is the chink in the "defensive patent" armour which so many companies think protects them.
Regarding the investigation - I think this was mainly about reviewing the information security policies of all state agencies. Regarding the punishment - I speculate that the review found that the same policies were present in many state agencies. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to punish the one guy who got unlucky, when he wasn't doing anything differently from all the others.
Not that hard. ;-) The article referenced in the slashdot summary, contains a link to further information about the actual incident:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9025263
One thing worth pointing out, is that Jerry Miller is not the intern who lost the data. Instead he bears responsibility for the policy which led to the intern having to take the tape home. It certainly makes sense that the punishment should be applied to him, and not to the intern. Likewise it makes sense that they identified the policy as the problem, instead of the actual theft.
I have the same experience you have - taking home backup tapes is a standard way in the industry to make sure backups are safe. It's not a stupid idea as such - however due to the risk of theft, it should not be done with data which is as sensitive as in this incident.
I think the state was doing the right thing here: They focussed not on blaming the individual responsible, but on preventing things like that in the future. They took a reasonable period of time to review their procedures instead of a quick PR-driven rush job. And they kept things in proportion - the guy had some responsibility, but it was a mistake not a crime. There is no reason to get rid of an otherwise good employee.
I know some people are going to claim they would never make a mistake like this - however from my experience in the industry, I know that privacy policy problems like these are par for the course.
It's the judge's job to handle this, if the guy is found and brought to court. If the picture is a major piece of evidence he may order the source code (or the sequence of actions they executed in photoshop) to be examined. I suspect though that the picture would only be used as a way to track this person. As a starting point to gather more information, not as acutal evidence in court.
For a long time you could buy LPs and CDs in the store. First the CD section was small - a specialty section, then it grew. For a while both media were occupying equal shares of the store, then LP became the specialty section, and finally the LPs disappeared. You can come up with all sorts of conspiracy scenarios, I'm sure - but this seems just like normal market behaviour to me. The size of the LP section is related to the share of customers who want to buy LPs. By going back to that antiquated technology you'd capture exactly that share of the market which is still using it. I'd have a hard look at the sales numbers for iPods in comparison to the numbers for LP players instead.