Therefore, because public libraries are owned and funded by the public, the public has some say as to what does and doesn't happen in *their* libraries.
To follow this reasoning, since the public pays for parks, if the majority of people want to censor someone promoting a certain political view in a park, they should be allowed to.
My point is that if a majority of the population wants some law that does not inhibit the rights of someone else (there are other places than the library to surf the net that have no filtering)
And could you point to one that is free? Your solution allows freedom for the rich, but not for the poor.
but I don't agree that these parents and others that want the filtering are out to deny us of constitutional freedoms
Would you please explain to me what constitutional freedoms you believe we do have? I always thought that the point of the Bill of Rights was to preserve certain rights even when--nay, especially when--the majority doesn't like it that I'm excercising those rights.
The core issue is that the ACLU and ALA (American Library Association) believe that a 5 year old boy has a constitutional right to access, view, and distribute pornography, extremism, et al,
No, the core issue is that filtering opponents believe that a 17-year-old cannot be forbidden to view material that some soulless corporation has decided is offensive to some people.
You make the common mistake of believing that children have no rights at all.
It is also on the higher shelves, so that little hands cannot reach it.
Do you mean to suggest that whether or not one is allowed to purchase adult material should be based on height? So a tall 10-year-old can purchase Playboy, but not a short one?
Why then, should my 3 y.o. son be able to have access on the computer at the library what he cannot access in published form?
Are you saying that if filters were in place, you would be completely comfortable allowing your 3-year-old son to surf the web unsupervised? For your son's sake, I hope you are not that ignorant.
? Is the State now responsible not only for the children's physical well-being, but moral and spiritual as well?
Exqueeze me? Isn't it the filtering proponents who want to make the state the arbiter of morality?
I merely wish to have safeguards in place to be able to allow my child in a public library without fear of him being exposed to material that he is neither ready for yet, nor healthy for him.
An excellent point, and one I agree with. This is why the solution some have proposed of "turn the monitors towards a librarian's desk" is a bad one. Some people just don't care and will look at pr0n anyway, potentially subjecting others to it, whether they wish to see it or not. Instead, privacy screens are a much better solution, so that people walking by are not inadvertently exposed to things which they feel are harmful. (And even if pornography isn't an issue, privacy screens are an excellent idea purely from a privacy standpoint. Some libraries even have privacy screens even on the terminals which are used only for searching the library catalog--an excellent idea, IMO.)
. I don't understand why people freak out about adding these "censor" programs to the library as long as adults would have the option of having them disabled when they use the terminal.
To paraphrase Martin Niemoller:
First they took intellectual freedom away from children; I did not object, because I was not a child...
Without copyright on software, EvilMegaCorp could take your free source code, alter it, and then sell the binaries without releasing the altered source code.
This is what GPL seeks to avoid, and it would be ineffective without copyright.
he was talking about Amazon attempting to copyright ideas that software is based on
He was indeed talking about that, and that's where his (and your) error lies.
I'll repeat myself for your benefit. Lots of/.ers are pissed at Amazon for patenting one-click shopping. Not for copyrighting it. There's a world of difference.
Personally I think code would feel much better under copyright than under intellectual property.
I think you mean "...under copyright than under patents." Copyrights, patents, and trademarks all fall into the broader category of intellectual property.
And actually, code is copyrightable, and generally is copyrighted. The difference between copyright protection and patent protection is that copyright only covers the particular code. You might write another program that does the same thing, but the source code looks very different, and you would not be violating copyright. You might well be violating a software patent, which protects whatever is specified in the patent claims, and would usually be written as "A data processing system (that's patentese for software) that does A and B and C." Regardless of what the source looks like.
As other/.ers have pointed out in other threads, without copyright on software, the GPL would not be effective.
Well, another article from Katz, and time for another round of Katz-bashing. I'll start:
...Amazon's efforts to copyright software...
Software has been copyrightable pretty much as long as it's been around, and I haven't heard anyone complaining about it, since a copyright on software only protects the particularly code that's copyrighted.
Sure, lots of/.ers don't know the difference between patents and copyright, but that doesn't make it excusable for an alleged journalist writing a feature article. Nolo.com has a good primer here.
Which is a very good reason why the U.S. should switch to a "first-to-file" system, rather than its current "first-to-invent" system--just like the rest of the world already has.
It's not an issue of whether the invention is described in fiction or non-fiction. In order to be prior art, the invention must both be published and actually created ("reduced to practice", in legal jargon). The reason Clarke's description of geosynchronous satellites is not prior art is not that it was described in a work of fiction; it was that Clarke had not actually produced any geosynchronous satellites.
If you have a thought, maybe a plan, that could *really* work, maybe you should contact the proper authorities(maybe the EFF or something) privately.
Any half-way decent chess player knows that you should always make the move that improves your position the most, even if your opponent knows what you are doing. Never play by simply hoping that you're opponent won't see what you're planning. It may get you a quick victory once in a great while, but most of the time it will get you burned.
I'd suggest the same applies here: If you have a plan that could really work, it will work even if Time-Warner knows about it.
I thought patents had to be for non-obvious implementations of ideas?
Yes, but the point is that since the original poster won't tell us what patent she's trying to invalidate, we have no way of knowing whether the patent is obvious or not.
She's told us what sort of prior art she thinks will invalidate the patent in question, but who knows whether that's what's actually patented or not, and whether what she describes will actually invalidate the patent in question.
Depends on the lawyer. If you just open the phone book and pick a patent lawyer at random, then no, he won't have the technical expertise to find prior art. But many patent lawyers specialize in a particular field of science/engineering and do have technical backgrounds in their area.
Actually, in many cases, the searching is done not by the attorney emself but by a professional patent/literature searcher. The same caveats regarding field of specialization applies to them.
It does not have to have been in common use. However, it has to have been "published", that is, available to the general public. For example, something that was developed in-house in 1988, but not revealed to the public until 1995, would not constitute prior art in this case.
Basically, our schools are teaching that humans became humans from, effectively from mutations that started from single-celled organisms. So, the same thing that causes cancer in humans today brought about life as we know it?
Ah, by "the same thing" you meant mutations, not bacteria! For some reason, I thought you meant bacteria by "the same thing" the first several times I read that, which I hope explains my earlier post. I just now realized what you meant. My apologies.
Anyway, why not? You pretty much acknowledge in one of your other posts in this thread (I'm assuming all the AC posts in this thread are by the same AC) that some mutations are beneficial, while others are deleterious. So the fact that some mutations improve a species, while others cause cancer hardly seems to be a problem.
A few errors in your biology. There are several types of point mutations...
A very good summary of different types of mutations, but how does that relate to the argument at hand? Some mutations are beneficial, and some are deleterious. No evolutionary biologist denies that. How does that affect DG's argument? It makes little difference if there are many more deleterious mutations than beneficial ones, since the beneficial ones will tend to be propagated, while the deleterious ones will tend to die out.
Also, remember that just because you have a particular mutation does NOT mean that your offspring will have that mutation.
Fair enough, but again, how does that affect DG's argument? No one ever said that every beneficial mutation was guaranteed to be passed on to future generations. DG wrote:
If a mutation that breeds true and produces a structural change provides the mutated organism with a survival advantage, then that organism is more likely to breed and produce similarly altered offspring.
Note: "more likely to", not "guaranteed to".
Then there's the whole eukaryotic-prokaryotic debate: which came first? My intro biochemistry book, Stryer, which btw is used at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, the top bio schools in teh country, stated that prokaryotes are probably derived from eukaryotes... exactly the opposite of what the A.P. curriculum stated.
Now that's very interesting, because I was under the impression that it was pretty well established that prokaryotes preceded eukaryotes. I have a copy of Stryer myself (not with me at the moment, unfortunately--it's at home, and I'm not) and I'd be interested to know where in it he says that.
We all have two kidneys. They are around the abdomen. I wouldn't expect this much similarity if the only requirements of existance were a) random selection and b) survival. People with only one kidney would still survive. How come there aren't any?
Who knows? Maybe I havn't got a clue. I'm no biology expert.
It's not so much a question of biology as of the math behind it.
Consider our ancestors: living in caves (or whatever other shelter they can find), frequently encountering wild, vicious animals--it would not be uncommon for them to sustain severe injuries. (Actually, the argument should be applied not just to our human ancestors, but to our animal ancestors much farther back since the kidneys evolved long before humanity. In any case, the basic idea is the same.)
In some of those injuries, a kidney may be severely damaged, perhaps to the point of being non-functional. A person with two kidneys who sustains an injury of this sort still has one good kidney, and may survive. A person with only one kidney who sustains this sort of injury dies.
"So what?" you may ask. "That sort of injury won't be that common, and will only kill a small percentage of the one-kidney people. The one-kidney people will still survive." Well, yes, it may not make that much difference in one generation. Consider two populations, identical in all ways except that one has only one kidney per person, and the other has two. After one generation, maybe the one-kidney population has only 1% fewer people than the two-kidney population. But as more generations pass, the selective pressure adds up. If there's a 1% reduction each generation in the one-kidney population, as compared to the two-kidney population, then after 70 generations or so (not 100--exponential growth and all) there will be twice as many two-kidney people as one-kidney people. As more generations pass, the ratio of two-kidneys to one-kidneys increases.
Now, the ecosystem can only support so many people (at least before the rise of technology as we know it today!) If you get too many people, they'll be fighting for the same resources, and some will die due to starvation, etc. So this force keeps the total population--one-kidneys plus two-kidneys--in check. Perhaps the one-kidneys would not have had a problem surviving on their own, with no competition; but in competition with the two-kidneys, their numbers decrease, due to the increasing ratio of two-kidneys and the overall limits on population. Eventually, the numbers dwindle until there are none left.
As to the broader question, why don't we see other variations with kidneys? Why don't we see people with kidneys up in their chests? I don't know. Perhaps there's some evolutionary pressure I'm not seeing which would cause that to be a disadvantage. Perhaps the mutation never arose.
We don't know every last detail about how humans evolved.
(Side note: many creationists often like to point this out as if it were a weakness of evolution. They delight in asking, "How did X evolve? How did Y evolve? How did Z evolve?" until they find one that evolutionary biologists can't explain, then point to that as evidence against evolution. They fail to note that a) being unable to imagine how something arose through evolution is not the same as proving something could not have arisen through evolution; the latter would scuttle evolution as a theory, but the former does not; and b) in science, it is considered a strength, not a weakness, to admit when you don't know something.)
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To follow this reasoning, since the public pays for parks, if the majority of people want to censor someone promoting a certain political view in a park, they should be allowed to.
My point is that if a majority of the population wants some law that does not inhibit the rights of someone else (there are other places than the library to surf the net that have no filtering)
And could you point to one that is free? Your solution allows freedom for the rich, but not for the poor.
but I don't agree that these parents and others that want the filtering are out to deny us of constitutional freedoms
Would you please explain to me what constitutional freedoms you believe we do have? I always thought that the point of the Bill of Rights was to preserve certain rights even when--nay, especially when--the majority doesn't like it that I'm excercising those rights.
No, the core issue is that filtering opponents believe that a 17-year-old cannot be forbidden to view material that some soulless corporation has decided is offensive to some people.
You make the common mistake of believing that children have no rights at all.
It is also on the higher shelves, so that little hands cannot reach it.
Do you mean to suggest that whether or not one is allowed to purchase adult material should be based on height? So a tall 10-year-old can purchase Playboy, but not a short one?
Why then, should my 3 y.o. son be able to have access on the computer at the library what he cannot access in published form?
Are you saying that if filters were in place, you would be completely comfortable allowing your 3-year-old son to surf the web unsupervised? For your son's sake, I hope you are not that ignorant.
? Is the State now responsible not only for the children's physical well-being, but moral and spiritual as well?
Exqueeze me? Isn't it the filtering proponents who want to make the state the arbiter of morality?
I merely wish to have safeguards in place to be able to allow my child in a public library without fear of him being exposed to material that he is neither ready for yet, nor healthy for him.
An excellent point, and one I agree with. This is why the solution some have proposed of "turn the monitors towards a librarian's desk" is a bad one. Some people just don't care and will look at pr0n anyway, potentially subjecting others to it, whether they wish to see it or not. Instead, privacy screens are a much better solution, so that people walking by are not inadvertently exposed to things which they feel are harmful. (And even if pornography isn't an issue, privacy screens are an excellent idea purely from a privacy standpoint. Some libraries even have privacy screens even on the terminals which are used only for searching the library catalog--an excellent idea, IMO.)
Yes, in making the assumption that minors have no First Amendment rights at all.
Lesser rights than adults, yes. But not none.
To paraphrase Martin Niemoller:
First they took intellectual freedom away from children; I did not object, because I was not a child...
No. In theory, patents are supposed to protect both the little guy and large companies.
This is what GPL seeks to avoid, and it would be ineffective without copyright.
He was indeed talking about that, and that's where his (and your) error lies.
I'll repeat myself for your benefit. Lots of /.ers are pissed at Amazon for patenting one-click shopping. Not for copyrighting it. There's a world of difference.
Stop posting just to hear yourself talk.
Physician, heal thyself.
I think you mean "...under copyright than under patents." Copyrights, patents, and trademarks all fall into the broader category of intellectual property.
And actually, code is copyrightable, and generally is copyrighted. The difference between copyright protection and patent protection is that copyright only covers the particular code. You might write another program that does the same thing, but the source code looks very different, and you would not be violating copyright. You might well be violating a software patent, which protects whatever is specified in the patent claims, and would usually be written as "A data processing system (that's patentese for software) that does A and B and C." Regardless of what the source looks like.
As other /.ers have pointed out in other threads, without copyright on software, the GPL would not be effective.
Software has been copyrightable pretty much as long as it's been around, and I haven't heard anyone complaining about it, since a copyright on software only protects the particularly code that's copyrighted.
Sure, lots of /.ers don't know the difference between patents and copyright, but that doesn't make it excusable for an alleged journalist writing a feature article. Nolo.com has a good primer here.
Likewise, "With all due respect, ..." usually means "I have no respect for you at all."
Do it. Sometimes the best way to get rid of a bad law is to abuse it and then draw attention to the abuse.
Which is a very good reason why the U.S. should switch to a "first-to-file" system, rather than its current "first-to-invent" system--just like the rest of the world already has.
It's not an issue of whether the invention is described in fiction or non-fiction. In order to be prior art, the invention must both be published and actually created ("reduced to practice", in legal jargon). The reason Clarke's description of geosynchronous satellites is not prior art is not that it was described in a work of fiction; it was that Clarke had not actually produced any geosynchronous satellites.
You mean like this one?
No, because "in a publishable format" != "published". Published, as in available to the public. Something must be published to be prior art.
Also see Thalia's post for more information.
Some information on Research Disclosure is here.
If the service is that bad, there won't be a "next time."
Any half-way decent chess player knows that you should always make the move that improves your position the most, even if your opponent knows what you are doing. Never play by simply hoping that you're opponent won't see what you're planning. It may get you a quick victory once in a great while, but most of the time it will get you burned.
I'd suggest the same applies here: If you have a plan that could really work, it will work even if Time-Warner knows about it.
Yes, but the point is that since the original poster won't tell us what patent she's trying to invalidate, we have no way of knowing whether the patent is obvious or not.
She's told us what sort of prior art she thinks will invalidate the patent in question, but who knows whether that's what's actually patented or not, and whether what she describes will actually invalidate the patent in question.
Actually, in many cases, the searching is done not by the attorney emself but by a professional patent/literature searcher. The same caveats regarding field of specialization applies to them.
It does not have to have been in common use. However, it has to have been "published", that is, available to the general public. For example, something that was developed in-house in 1988, but not revealed to the public until 1995, would not constitute prior art in this case.
Ah, by "the same thing" you meant mutations, not bacteria! For some reason, I thought you meant bacteria by "the same thing" the first several times I read that, which I hope explains my earlier post. I just now realized what you meant. My apologies.
Anyway, why not? You pretty much acknowledge in one of your other posts in this thread (I'm assuming all the AC posts in this thread are by the same AC) that some mutations are beneficial, while others are deleterious. So the fact that some mutations improve a species, while others cause cancer hardly seems to be a problem.
A very good summary of different types of mutations, but how does that relate to the argument at hand? Some mutations are beneficial, and some are deleterious. No evolutionary biologist denies that. How does that affect DG's argument? It makes little difference if there are many more deleterious mutations than beneficial ones, since the beneficial ones will tend to be propagated, while the deleterious ones will tend to die out.
Also, remember that just because you have a particular mutation does NOT mean that your offspring will have that mutation.
Fair enough, but again, how does that affect DG's argument? No one ever said that every beneficial mutation was guaranteed to be passed on to future generations. DG wrote:
Note: "more likely to", not "guaranteed to".Then there's the whole eukaryotic-prokaryotic debate: which came first? My intro biochemistry book, Stryer, which btw is used at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, the top bio schools in teh country, stated that prokaryotes are probably derived from eukaryotes... exactly the opposite of what the A.P. curriculum stated.
Now that's very interesting, because I was under the impression that it was pretty well established that prokaryotes preceded eukaryotes. I have a copy of Stryer myself (not with me at the moment, unfortunately--it's at home, and I'm not) and I'd be interested to know where in it he says that.
Who knows? Maybe I havn't got a clue. I'm no biology expert.
It's not so much a question of biology as of the math behind it.
Consider our ancestors: living in caves (or whatever other shelter they can find), frequently encountering wild, vicious animals--it would not be uncommon for them to sustain severe injuries. (Actually, the argument should be applied not just to our human ancestors, but to our animal ancestors much farther back since the kidneys evolved long before humanity. In any case, the basic idea is the same.)
In some of those injuries, a kidney may be severely damaged, perhaps to the point of being non-functional. A person with two kidneys who sustains an injury of this sort still has one good kidney, and may survive. A person with only one kidney who sustains this sort of injury dies.
"So what?" you may ask. "That sort of injury won't be that common, and will only kill a small percentage of the one-kidney people. The one-kidney people will still survive." Well, yes, it may not make that much difference in one generation. Consider two populations, identical in all ways except that one has only one kidney per person, and the other has two. After one generation, maybe the one-kidney population has only 1% fewer people than the two-kidney population. But as more generations pass, the selective pressure adds up. If there's a 1% reduction each generation in the one-kidney population, as compared to the two-kidney population, then after 70 generations or so (not 100--exponential growth and all) there will be twice as many two-kidney people as one-kidney people. As more generations pass, the ratio of two-kidneys to one-kidneys increases.
Now, the ecosystem can only support so many people (at least before the rise of technology as we know it today!) If you get too many people, they'll be fighting for the same resources, and some will die due to starvation, etc. So this force keeps the total population--one-kidneys plus two-kidneys--in check. Perhaps the one-kidneys would not have had a problem surviving on their own, with no competition; but in competition with the two-kidneys, their numbers decrease, due to the increasing ratio of two-kidneys and the overall limits on population. Eventually, the numbers dwindle until there are none left.
As to the broader question, why don't we see other variations with kidneys? Why don't we see people with kidneys up in their chests? I don't know. Perhaps there's some evolutionary pressure I'm not seeing which would cause that to be a disadvantage. Perhaps the mutation never arose. We don't know every last detail about how humans evolved.
(Side note: many creationists often like to point this out as if it were a weakness of evolution. They delight in asking, "How did X evolve? How did Y evolve? How did Z evolve?" until they find one that evolutionary biologists can't explain, then point to that as evidence against evolution. They fail to note that a) being unable to imagine how something arose through evolution is not the same as proving something could not have arisen through evolution; the latter would scuttle evolution as a theory, but the former does not; and b) in science, it is considered a strength, not a weakness, to admit when you don't know something.)