Why would prior art for anything show up simply because the patents were posted to the net for 180 days before granting? I can think of a zillion better things to do with *my* time than troll such a site looking for violations of my existing patents and/or things for which I hold no patent, but can demonstrate prior art.
FWIW, I strongly agree that software specific, business "method", math, and a few other types of patents should be categorically denied.
What a load. People who enjoy their work are more likely to take pride in the job at hand, and to *want* to do it correctly. Very important inputs for the productivity and quality equations.
Besides, if the army's job is just "killing people" I'd have to say they suck at it. Six billion people on this planet and they only manage to kill a few thousand a year. That's pretty shitty performance, imho. Thankfully, the army's job is defending our nation from attack. On that score I'd say they're doing damn fine work. Not including the settlement of the west and the Civil War, we're talking, at worst, two major attacks in 200 years: Pearl Harbor and the WTC/Pentagon bombings. And from what I can tell, a good majority of the members of the military like, and take great pride in, their work: defending the nation.
The average Hello World program is short, clear, and unambiguous, too. But frankly, as a user leaves me a little underwhelmed. I like programs that actually do something useful.
Similarly, the BSD license is short, clear, and unambiguous for a reason. It doesn't do much-- it's one step away from simply putting your software into the public domain. The GPL has all that extra wording to attempt to do something interesting: promote free software and provide developers with some feeling that their work won't be used to create proprietary software. Whether or not it does this (better than the BSD license) remains to be seen.
Why would systems involving national security be exempted?
First of all, there is no reason the work done for those systems has to be shared outside the specific agency or system using that software. GPL does not restrict private changes.
Second, security that depends on the secrecy of algorithms is flawed. Anyone can look up the patent for any lock sold in the US and get a diagram of how the lock works. Thinks this helps crack locks where either combinations, keys, or other types of private data are necessary to open the locks? I don't. And in many instances the weak point is not the lock, but the cable or door itself.
Now obviously the data stored on those systems should be protected as best it can. And personally, I trust open source software a lot more than I trust closed source software -- even under a "shared source" program. Especially in situations (like the DoD) where an agency can well afford to hire bright hackers to audit and modify the code being used. Do you suppose MS let's the Army rewrite any part of Windows they want before installing it in missile silos?
Moderators: how is this insightful? The original can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#LGPL with several format options, a discussion of why *not* to use it, and what to do in case of a violation. In any case, the FSF wrote the LPGL and they are the most likely source for a correct and up-to-date version of it.
If you really spend 320 hours on a contest submission from which you expect no other material benefits and have only a *chance* to win, I have to question your sanity.:)
OTOH, I think it is likely that no one would spend 320 hours on this project. I do think it's a lot more likely the average entry would get maybe 40-80 hours of work (assuming it was started from scratch, couple nights a week, a couple weekend binges). That makes the hourly rate closer to $200. Of course, there is still a possibility that you will make $0/hr if you don't win.
How many people do you think are actually going to enter this contest? I'd say they're lucky if they get 25 good entries. And I'm not suggesting that anyone quit their day job, I'm just saying: even if you worked at this full time the wage ain't that bad-- especially if you're a college kid or out of work.
When I used to help write software manuals, the books were often produced such that the cover had a flap on the right side that folded over the pages and provided a pseudo-spine. You then store the books on the shelf with the rings to the back and still be able to locate your book with no problems.
Not only that, but often when RMS says something like this he is saying the same thing a lot of people in the Free Software community are thinking. Miguel certainly took the statement seriously and wrote a great reply to this concern. Would he have done that if this was just a case of RMS ranting?
Personally I thought the bit about "programmer to use new compiler... news at 11" was damn funny because it so clearly showed how easy we let ourselves get bent out of shape over this stuff.
I trust you-- and you are thinking of http://oreilly.com/openbook/. They are still strong advocates for "open source", and they have released under free licenses when they go out of print. Still other books they have started out with the goal to have them released as open content of some sort. In any case, their books are incredibly good quality.
But if Larry is no longer being patronized by ORA, it does impact my willingness to buy their books (especially the Perl-specific ones). In spite of the non-free nature of the Perl books I've bought from ORA, I always considered them (in part) a donation towards further development of Perl.
Here's a better question: will the next versions of the Camel (for Perl 6) be licensed under the same terms as Perl itself? Or is the Perl community being asked to donate to fund development of a language which they will then have to buy proprietary books from O'Reilly to learn more about?
I know I'm being a zealous stickler, but here's a better essay on the topic than I could write: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html. And FWIW, I'm willing to pay *more* for a printed version of a Free book than I would be willing to pay for a non-Free version of same. Freedom is worth something.
So if Larry no longer has O'Reilly's patronage, can I safely assume it's time to stop buying their books? The fact that they directly supported this pillar of the Perl community was one good reason to overlook the incredibly proprietary way they publish books about Free Software (contrast "Programming Ruby" by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt, published by Addison-Wesley and available under a fairly Free license).
Have we got any serious evidence that the product activation thing is a serious problem or likely to become one, or is this largely rumor and innuendo?
And he's right (except in his usage of the word "angst"), why would you go through the trouble of replacing something that works, especially if you've already paid for it? You wouldn't. Why would you even want to upgrade the existing OS beyond security and bugfixes, when doing so is usually expensive and requires more/better/faster/newer harware, too?
The key here is "works". Mac OS pre-X and Windows 9x don't "work". They are notoriously unstable and not real friendly to the power user. Upgrading to either Windows 2000 or XP or Mac OS X can be very costly, since it usually requires a whole new computer. Whereas Linux these days can preserve that hardware and usually with better stability and *no* upgrade expense. So unfortunately, Linux is a great desktop replacement, but for outdated desktops. And it's not like Linux would be a bad choice if you could go to Best Buy or Fry's and pick up a system with Linux pre-loaded.
Yes, but they're also introducing fee levels that are lower than the typical dialup expense here in the US. Part of the attraction of broadband isn't necessarily the total available bandwidth, but the speed which individual events happen, i.e. you may only be online for 30 minutes a day, but it takes moments to check email and web sites load in reasonable amounts of time.
At least your companies are differentiating based on usage, where the majority of US subscribers are essentially subsidizing the heavier users.
Not to mention that we can assume that's $80 in Canadian dollars, since the article is bylined Toronto and appears in the online version of a Canadian daily. That $80 would work out to $50 in US dollars. About what I pay for AOL/TW's RoadRunner service right now.
Either way, that's a lot less information than most websites and ISPs have access to. IP addresses and packets are very specific about a whole lot of things, and most internet traffic is not encrypted and goes out over lots of wires. TiVo is just between the customer and TiVo.
This is a complete load of BS. Not to mention that this is an article about domain names (trademarks), and not copyrights, patents, or trade secrets, so your thesis is mostly irrelevant.
Product cost is extremely difficult to measure in a firm that produces more than one product and which engages in non-trivial research and development. Simply, you cannot measure products like this.
The correct level for this type of socio-economic analysis is the household and the firm. Firms have expenses, some of which they can link directly to a good sold (i.e. the cost of the raw materials) and some which are extremely fluid (i.e. the salary of the CEO). But unlike expenses, revenues usually have one type: sales. It is therefore extremely easy to assess the revenue a product/service generates, but because of the issue with cost analysis, accounting for profit is only truly possible at the firm level.
What I really don't understand is: what's your point? "Intellectual property" is supposedly good for workers, and therefore must be given priority protected legal status? Or are you saying we don't need to bother, since the workers are what's important because without them "intellectual property" is mostly useless anyhow?
Thank you for flaming. Or is it trolling? Who can tell... you kids mix this stuff up so much these days. I assume you'll sort that out right after you learn that it's spelled "site" and that capital letters don't help make your point.
SF's numbers are not there to do anything but provide some rough counts, i.e. amusement. As I pointed out at length, they contain no real information and therefore provide no real help in making security decisions. Security Focus will tell you the same thing--in fact someone from SF did so in this very discussion. Or don't you trust them on that?
Second, the word "haha" means that I'm making a joke. A joke means I'm not being serious. But what would you know? You run Windows at home. Your opinion is obviously suspect. It's also apparent why you're so easily upset. Hehe.
You can buy lots of TV series on tape or DVD. In fact, the video section at bn.com has many of the STNG shows, a season of the Sopranos, Ally McBeal, Dr. Who, Nova, and tons of other series. So there is some truth to the notion that P2P could help sales of offline video-- just not stuff that ins't available offline.
I wasn't criticizing Slashdot myself, just offering suggestions to those who are. The only way Slashdot can *not* Slashdot other sites is to have the actual content hosted here-- which means they either deal with the sites to mirror the content here, or they create content specifically for Slashdot. Linking to an off-site cache is a poor solution for everyone involved. The cache is often incomplete, the images are still served from the original server in many cases, the site doesn't get traffic it deserves, and the people hosting the cache shouldn't have to serve Slashdot's traffic either.
Sudden fame is a risk inherent in making a public web page. Slashdot isn't the only way to get a surge of traffic, after all. The only reason Slashdot should worry about it is that a discussion full of "well, the site is Slashdotted" is pretty unproductive.
I agree. The numbers from SF are purely for entertainment value only and the WinInformant site is Slashdotted (they must be running Windows, haha) so I have no idea what they said.
If you look at the SF numbers for any given distribution of GNU/Linux, they are smaller than the Windows numbers. Also, the numbers don't take into account things like severity, remote vs. local, whether the package affected is a core component of a functional server, package redundancy (one bug in four different FTP servers on GNU/Linux vs. four bugs in IIS is not delineated), popularity of the package to the platform is not discussed, etc etc.
And yes, I'm using IE to post this because Netscape seems to have proxy issues here at work, not because I want to.
Why would the owners of the web site prefer that thousands of people go visit someone else's mirror of their site? They then continue thinking no one has stopped by, and if they depend on click-thru or referrals for even meager compensation, they are practically assured of none if people are going to a cache rather than the real site. That a site would achieve instant popularity or get the kind of publicity that Slashdot brings is truly a blessing and a curse at the same time. As such, the Slashdot approach makes no more or less sense than mirroring.
A much better criticism, in my mind, would be to ask why Slashdot doesn't spend more energy getting actual stories rather than engaging in essentially mindless link promotion. And then one might ask why the majority of the Slashdot generated stories are the drivel of Jon Katz. There are a couple of editors who write decent stories, and once in a while a submission is actually more than a blurb... but I'm guessing Slashdot sees itself more as a recorder of interesting tidbits and a place to discuss those tidbits than a place where serious journalism occurs.
If that's so, then why is the government handing the airlines billions of dollars, and why is the National Guard overseeing airport security in many places? Besides, if the Constitution doesn't apply, wouldn't that make it a bit difficult for airport security to detain people (unlawful detainer/kidnapping) and to strip-search them (assault)? After all, normal citizens don't suddenly gain the rights to kidnap and assault people simply by getting others into their homes or places of business.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone did that, there would be no processing power left on the rest of the network to use, it would be consumed in full locally.
Um, cameras on the street are perfectly legal because that is not a private place. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy there.
The deal with cameras in malls is similar. Unless you are in the changing room or restroom, you are essentially in public.
Why would prior art for anything show up simply because the patents were posted to the net for 180 days before granting? I can think of a zillion better things to do with *my* time than troll such a site looking for violations of my existing patents and/or things for which I hold no patent, but can demonstrate prior art.
FWIW, I strongly agree that software specific, business "method", math, and a few other types of patents should be categorically denied.
What a load. People who enjoy their work are more likely to take pride in the job at hand, and to *want* to do it correctly. Very important inputs for the productivity and quality equations.
Besides, if the army's job is just "killing people" I'd have to say they suck at it. Six billion people on this planet and they only manage to kill a few thousand a year. That's pretty shitty performance, imho. Thankfully, the army's job is defending our nation from attack. On that score I'd say they're doing damn fine work. Not including the settlement of the west and the Civil War, we're talking, at worst, two major attacks in 200 years: Pearl Harbor and the WTC/Pentagon bombings. And from what I can tell, a good majority of the members of the military like, and take great pride in, their work: defending the nation.
The average Hello World program is short, clear, and unambiguous, too. But frankly, as a user leaves me a little underwhelmed. I like programs that actually do something useful.
Similarly, the BSD license is short, clear, and unambiguous for a reason. It doesn't do much-- it's one step away from simply putting your software into the public domain. The GPL has all that extra wording to attempt to do something interesting: promote free software and provide developers with some feeling that their work won't be used to create proprietary software. Whether or not it does this (better than the BSD license) remains to be seen.
Why would systems involving national security be exempted?
First of all, there is no reason the work done for those systems has to be shared outside the specific agency or system using that software. GPL does not restrict private changes.
Second, security that depends on the secrecy of algorithms is flawed. Anyone can look up the patent for any lock sold in the US and get a diagram of how the lock works. Thinks this helps crack locks where either combinations, keys, or other types of private data are necessary to open the locks? I don't. And in many instances the weak point is not the lock, but the cable or door itself.
Now obviously the data stored on those systems should be protected as best it can. And personally, I trust open source software a lot more than I trust closed source software -- even under a "shared source" program. Especially in situations (like the DoD) where an agency can well afford to hire bright hackers to audit and modify the code being used. Do you suppose MS let's the Army rewrite any part of Windows they want before installing it in missile silos?
Moderators: how is this insightful? The original can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#LGPL with several format options, a discussion of why *not* to use it, and what to do in case of a violation. In any case, the FSF wrote the LPGL and they are the most likely source for a correct and up-to-date version of it.
If you really spend 320 hours on a contest submission from which you expect no other material benefits and have only a *chance* to win, I have to question your sanity. :)
OTOH, I think it is likely that no one would spend 320 hours on this project. I do think it's a lot more likely the average entry would get maybe 40-80 hours of work (assuming it was started from scratch, couple nights a week, a couple weekend binges). That makes the hourly rate closer to $200. Of course, there is still a possibility that you will make $0/hr if you don't win.
How many people do you think are actually going to enter this contest? I'd say they're lucky if they get 25 good entries. And I'm not suggesting that anyone quit their day job, I'm just saying: even if you worked at this full time the wage ain't that bad-- especially if you're a college kid or out of work.
$10,000. 8 weeks til deadline. 40 hours per week.
That's 10000/(8*40) = $31.25 per hour.
Annualized that would be a salary of $65,000.
Even in IT, that's nothing to sneeze at. But I'd say the benefits of winning a contest like this go beyond the money.
When I used to help write software manuals, the books were often produced such that the cover had a flap on the right side that folded over the pages and provided a pseudo-spine. You then store the books on the shelf with the rings to the back and still be able to locate your book with no problems.
Not only that, but often when RMS says something like this he is saying the same thing a lot of people in the Free Software community are thinking. Miguel certainly took the statement seriously and wrote a great reply to this concern. Would he have done that if this was just a case of RMS ranting?
Personally I thought the bit about "programmer to use new compiler... news at 11" was damn funny because it so clearly showed how easy we let ourselves get bent out of shape over this stuff.
I trust you-- and you are thinking of http://oreilly.com/openbook/. They are still strong advocates for "open source", and they have released under free licenses when they go out of print. Still other books they have started out with the goal to have them released as open content of some sort. In any case, their books are incredibly good quality.
But if Larry is no longer being patronized by ORA, it does impact my willingness to buy their books (especially the Perl-specific ones). In spite of the non-free nature of the Perl books I've bought from ORA, I always considered them (in part) a donation towards further development of Perl.
Here's a better question: will the next versions of the Camel (for Perl 6) be licensed under the same terms as Perl itself? Or is the Perl community being asked to donate to fund development of a language which they will then have to buy proprietary books from O'Reilly to learn more about?
I know I'm being a zealous stickler, but here's a better essay on the topic than I could write: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html. And FWIW, I'm willing to pay *more* for a printed version of a Free book than I would be willing to pay for a non-Free version of same. Freedom is worth something.
So if Larry no longer has O'Reilly's patronage, can I safely assume it's time to stop buying their books? The fact that they directly supported this pillar of the Perl community was one good reason to overlook the incredibly proprietary way they publish books about Free Software (contrast "Programming Ruby" by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt, published by Addison-Wesley and available under a fairly Free license).
Have we got any serious evidence that the product activation thing is a serious problem or likely to become one, or is this largely rumor and innuendo?
And he's right (except in his usage of the word "angst"), why would you go through the trouble of replacing something that works, especially if you've already paid for it? You wouldn't. Why would you even want to upgrade the existing OS beyond security and bugfixes, when doing so is usually expensive and requires more/better/faster/newer harware, too?
The key here is "works". Mac OS pre-X and Windows 9x don't "work". They are notoriously unstable and not real friendly to the power user. Upgrading to either Windows 2000 or XP or Mac OS X can be very costly, since it usually requires a whole new computer. Whereas Linux these days can preserve that hardware and usually with better stability and *no* upgrade expense. So unfortunately, Linux is a great desktop replacement, but for outdated desktops. And it's not like Linux would be a bad choice if you could go to Best Buy or Fry's and pick up a system with Linux pre-loaded.
Yes, but they're also introducing fee levels that are lower than the typical dialup expense here in the US. Part of the attraction of broadband isn't necessarily the total available bandwidth, but the speed which individual events happen, i.e. you may only be online for 30 minutes a day, but it takes moments to check email and web sites load in reasonable amounts of time.
At least your companies are differentiating based on usage, where the majority of US subscribers are essentially subsidizing the heavier users.
Not to mention that we can assume that's $80 in Canadian dollars, since the article is bylined Toronto and appears in the online version of a Canadian daily. That $80 would work out to $50 in US dollars. About what I pay for AOL/TW's RoadRunner service right now.
Either way, that's a lot less information than most websites and ISPs have access to. IP addresses and packets are very specific about a whole lot of things, and most internet traffic is not encrypted and goes out over lots of wires. TiVo is just between the customer and TiVo.
This is a complete load of BS. Not to mention that this is an article about domain names (trademarks), and not copyrights, patents, or trade secrets, so your thesis is mostly irrelevant.
Product cost is extremely difficult to measure in a firm that produces more than one product and which engages in non-trivial research and development. Simply, you cannot measure products like this.
The correct level for this type of socio-economic analysis is the household and the firm. Firms have expenses, some of which they can link directly to a good sold (i.e. the cost of the raw materials) and some which are extremely fluid (i.e. the salary of the CEO). But unlike expenses, revenues usually have one type: sales. It is therefore extremely easy to assess the revenue a product/service generates, but because of the issue with cost analysis, accounting for profit is only truly possible at the firm level.
What I really don't understand is: what's your point? "Intellectual property" is supposedly good for workers, and therefore must be given priority protected legal status? Or are you saying we don't need to bother, since the workers are what's important because without them "intellectual property" is mostly useless anyhow?
Thank you for flaming. Or is it trolling? Who can tell... you kids mix this stuff up so much these days. I assume you'll sort that out right after you learn that it's spelled "site" and that capital letters don't help make your point.
SF's numbers are not there to do anything but provide some rough counts, i.e. amusement. As I pointed out at length, they contain no real information and therefore provide no real help in making security decisions. Security Focus will tell you the same thing--in fact someone from SF did so in this very discussion. Or don't you trust them on that?
Second, the word "haha" means that I'm making a joke. A joke means I'm not being serious. But what would you know? You run Windows at home. Your opinion is obviously suspect. It's also apparent why you're so easily upset. Hehe.
You can buy lots of TV series on tape or DVD. In fact, the video section at bn.com has many of the STNG shows, a season of the Sopranos, Ally McBeal, Dr. Who, Nova, and tons of other series. So there is some truth to the notion that P2P could help sales of offline video-- just not stuff that ins't available offline.
I wasn't criticizing Slashdot myself, just offering suggestions to those who are. The only way Slashdot can *not* Slashdot other sites is to have the actual content hosted here-- which means they either deal with the sites to mirror the content here, or they create content specifically for Slashdot. Linking to an off-site cache is a poor solution for everyone involved. The cache is often incomplete, the images are still served from the original server in many cases, the site doesn't get traffic it deserves, and the people hosting the cache shouldn't have to serve Slashdot's traffic either.
Sudden fame is a risk inherent in making a public web page. Slashdot isn't the only way to get a surge of traffic, after all. The only reason Slashdot should worry about it is that a discussion full of "well, the site is Slashdotted" is pretty unproductive.
I agree. The numbers from SF are purely for entertainment value only and the WinInformant site is Slashdotted (they must be running Windows, haha) so I have no idea what they said.
If you look at the SF numbers for any given distribution of GNU/Linux, they are smaller than the Windows numbers. Also, the numbers don't take into account things like severity, remote vs. local, whether the package affected is a core component of a functional server, package redundancy (one bug in four different FTP servers on GNU/Linux vs. four bugs in IIS is not delineated), popularity of the package to the platform is not discussed, etc etc.
And yes, I'm using IE to post this because Netscape seems to have proxy issues here at work, not because I want to.
Why would the owners of the web site prefer that thousands of people go visit someone else's mirror of their site? They then continue thinking no one has stopped by, and if they depend on click-thru or referrals for even meager compensation, they are practically assured of none if people are going to a cache rather than the real site. That a site would achieve instant popularity or get the kind of publicity that Slashdot brings is truly a blessing and a curse at the same time. As such, the Slashdot approach makes no more or less sense than mirroring.
A much better criticism, in my mind, would be to ask why Slashdot doesn't spend more energy getting actual stories rather than engaging in essentially mindless link promotion. And then one might ask why the majority of the Slashdot generated stories are the drivel of Jon Katz. There are a couple of editors who write decent stories, and once in a while a submission is actually more than a blurb... but I'm guessing Slashdot sees itself more as a recorder of interesting tidbits and a place to discuss those tidbits than a place where serious journalism occurs.
If that's so, then why is the government handing the airlines billions of dollars, and why is the National Guard overseeing airport security in many places? Besides, if the Constitution doesn't apply, wouldn't that make it a bit difficult for airport security to detain people (unlawful detainer/kidnapping) and to strip-search them (assault)? After all, normal citizens don't suddenly gain the rights to kidnap and assault people simply by getting others into their homes or places of business.