Anyone having spent that much effort creating a network - and succeeding - would become paranoid and protective of it. I challenge anyone to invest so much in any project and then happily see it messed up by people who are less competent.
However the situation is still messed up, the City should never have allowed one person to take on so much responsibility, and at the first sign that he was becoming indispensable, they should have moved him to another project.
If someone is essential for a project, replace him as soon as you can...
In fact the whole story is a good case study for outsourcing - a small, competent network firm would have done as good a job, and treated the incompetent managers simply as clients, not bosses.
The blame lies squarely with the City, not Childs.
Very few web/2.0 apps are open source, and while this makes a nice buzzword it hides the truth: the real revolution in software development, still not practiced in many corporates, is the competitive, open, standards based approach used by open source teams.
You cannot do "incremental releases" to products used in critical systems (the risk is too high) but you can make the technology transparent, easy to understand, easy to contribute to, and based on clear standards.
Totally unscientific survey: my 4-year old daughter prefers to browse YouTube than television. Admittedly she tends to follow pop videos. But she prefers the mouse to the TV remote.
If it's true that people use YouTube to watch clips from TV programs, then Viacom are even stupider than I thought...
But stupid or not, this seems to be the start of the TV industry joining the music and movie and telecoms businesses in attacking the open Internet.
I wonder what kind of Internet my daughter will have when she grows up.
Well, SouthParkStudios.com proves this. But Viacom is not interested in looking for new business models. They are looking to protect their existing business models, and YouTube hurts these.
The thing is, it's not sharing clips that hurts Viacom's business. That probably helps, free publicity for programs.
What hurts Viacom is user-generated content: eyeballs going to watch stuff that is produced totally outside the normal distribution model.
So Viacom is not IMO trying to protect its copyrighted content. What it wants to do is scare people who use YouTube into thinking "my personal data ain't safe", to create a chilling effect that will stop user-created content.
Imagine if Viacom had been infiltrated by Scientologists and they could now get access to logs of who uploaded, and who watched, videos by Anonymous. It's not likely but the mere idea this could happen will drive some people away, fracture the community, and make passive TV watching seem safer again.
OTOH, Viacom, not being an Internet company, does not realize that this kind of attack on a community always has the exact opposite effect.
So the result will be a hundred new video sharing sites, and a much more difficult situation for Viacom, both for copyright takedowns, and for competition to their programming.
The previous study had the same basic flaw: they asked the Piraha to count objects that they never normally had to deal with (it was batteries, I think).
What westerners often forget is that many cultures have different numbering systems for different types of things.
If they asked instead, "how many children do you have", or "how many people are there in that hut", they would most likely discover (shock! horror!) that the Piraha count people exactly as you or I. (If we know the individuals we can count up to 10 or so, if we don't, we count up to five or six, then switch to "many").
These experiments look designed to prove something bogus, namely that counting is not an innate skill.
1. the Hop-On 1800 lowers costs by removing basic functionality such as a display. I'm assuming the costs will fall for an equivalent product, i.e. what would be a basic cheap cell phone today. 2. You cannot actually buy the Hop-On 1800 anywhere, this is still vapourware. Will it be available for $10 any time soon? Remember the EEE PC, promised at $200 and currently at about $350-$600.
This is just the generalization of Moore's Law, caused by the standardized technology curve where costs fall to zero.
I call this the "half-life rule" of technology, where the half-life is usually about 18 months: the cost of any technology will halve every 18 months. What remains in the end is raw materials, shipping, marketing.
Since the cost of the Internet is falling constantly, its per-dollar capacity is doubling every 18 months.
A corollary: Wikipedia's budget is 60% spent on hardware, and this sum is constant over the years, yet Wikipedia's content doubles every... 18 months or so. Moore's Law working in both directions, so we have more or less infinite expansion at a constant cost.
Obviously the expansion is not infinite, because costs do not actually fall to zero and at a certain stage marketing, shipping, and usage costs outweigh production and account for 99.999% of the final cost.
But still, this is hardly news unless people are shocked to learn that technology gets cheaper over time.
While I'm ranting about people being surprised at the obvious, note that we can predict the cost of technology in the future, quite accurately, by applying the half-life rule to the production costs any given product, subtracting the fixed costs.
So for example I can predict that cell phones will be disposable (costing under $10) within four years.
Sun-Tzu's book was in many ways similar, explaining how to conduct war, but the difference seems to be that 2,500 years ago in China there was no pretense of democratic government, and perhaps also the tactics described in that book were more successful.
The cynicism of this counterinsurgency manual, and willingness to use ordinary people as material for war, is quite stunning.
Don't be silly. Self-interest motivates us all, in all case, not just on Slashdot.
Freedom and privacy only conflict if you do not understand them.
Freedom is the capacity to do interesting things with other people. Privacy is the right to own your own information (and enforce this with physical exclusion). They do not conflict. Freedom means consent on both sides. Being allowed to murder at random is not freedom. Being allowed to meet on the street corner is freedom. See the difference?
It's not just that the boundaries may not be crossed. It's that (a) we own what sits on our side of the boundary and (b) we have the right to set the conditions for reuse/sharing of that stuff. Privacy is a form of property and violations of privacy are a form of theft.
I've written this up as a definition on the Devil's Wiki:
Privacy: A form of personal property owned by an individual or a group, and covering data, information, or knowledge held by that group. Privacy laws provide legal protection for that property, and specifically, allow the owner to receive a fair economic return for its sharing and reuse. Abuses of privacy are infringements on that property without due compensation, often by more powerful groups (e.g. governments), or by theft (e.g. by spies).
No doubt it was beaten together. My bet is he'll land a good job somewhere doing more research into social dynamics and this particular project will never be released. And then someone will get frustrated and remake it as open source, and there will be a whole community of plug in visualizers and the FOSS community will go through a couple of years of visualizing everything until it gets as boring as fractals.
Maybe I'm wrong. But "I'll release the code once it's cleaned up" usually means "please don't bother me with requests for code, I'm on something really neat right now."
Of course the first thing I wanted to do was try the visualizer on my open source projects but... it's not open source.
Pretty, but somewhat useless. The idea is nice and would make a cool presentation on any FOSS project web page, but if it's not open source(d) it'll die.
There is a standard, well developed way to determine if a ballot has been rigged. Tampering with e-voting machines is just the most modern technique, in the past people have stuffed ballot boxes or simply lied about the results. Easy stuff.
So, standard solution: ask the people as they leave the polling station.
This is called an "exit poll" and it's remarkably accurate. Except of course in the last couple of elections in the USA, where the exit polls utterly failed, especially in districts that had new shiny e-voting machines with no paper trail.
OK, since I'm one of the founders, I'm biased. But free and open source software needs free and open standards and the Digital Standards Organization is the only international network set-up specifically to defend and promote free and open digital standards.
Coincidentally, on the day we signed the Hague Declaration, Microsoft announced they would support ODF in Office.
Luckily, Digistan does not want your money, just your support. Sign the Hague Declaration online, and help us by getting involved.
Patent are there to help the patent holder, regardless of size. They make it easier for the little guy to get into or start a market. Patents help the patent holder if and only if (a) they can afford to defend them in court, which costs upwards of $1m and (b) they do not themselves infringe on other patents.
Given these two conditions, patents most definitely do NOT make it easier for the little guy to get into or start a market. Oh, unless by "little guys" you include well-funded patent trolls, who definitely love the current patent system.
What they do, very effectively, is stop competition in markets. This is the patent system working fine, if you are against the kind of change most people would consider "good": lower prices, wider choice, higher quality.
In most industries the cost of entry is pretty high anyway so the barriers that patents create don't show so much. In software the cost of entry is close to zero, so the barriers that software patents create are so high as to be infinite to the vast majority of potential "little guys".
You need to do better than say "it's working".
What exactly does that mean? Can you point to a single economic study (not paid for by a large patent holder or a patent office) that proves this?
I really don't want to offend you, but we live either in a world of belief or of evidence. We choose. My world is one of evidence. You will convince me of the truth of the cure when I see it reproduced elsewhere, and tested as one does, excluding all possible explanations.
However, your story may be true, this does not change that fact that in order to save one secret from extinction, we allow a powerful elite to control - to slow down, and to tax - the rate of progress in every interesting field of technology.
Any argument for/against the patent system must be based on economic benefits for the cost of the monopolies in question.
Funny enough the patent admirers never seem to be able to produce economic studies, just polemics. Even if patents were economically neutral, they would not be defensible because they are obviously not free. They have to create a benefit. This benefit must be demonstrable. Show, for example, and industry with no patents and then how it responds better with patents. Software perhaps? Uhm, no. Patents totally mess up software development. Any other?
No, I am not confusing use with purpose. The patent industry has a long record of hiding its true purpose under layers of lies. Thus the WTO, meant to promote global free trade, includes TRIPS, a framework that pushes the patent monopoly culture. How bizarre is that?
This is an old tradition that dates back to 1790 and earlier. Just because people claim that the patent system used to work and has recently "gone bad" does not make such claims true.
The patent industry has largely rewritten its own history. In fact free trade economists have understood very well that the granting of monopolies on ideas never, ever promotes innovation, since the 18th century. The Economist magazine was founded as part of an anti-patent pro-free trade movement in the UK that succeeded in getting the whole patent system reformed (shorter terms, mandatory licensing, etc.) for a decade or so, until the patent establishment struck back.
Almost every solution to patent excesses that people propose today (except perhaps wiki-based prior art searches, which I find particularly stupid, since they just allow claimants to get stronger, more poisonous patents) has been proposed and tried in the past. And has been killed, thanks to the power and political connections, and propaganda machines, of the patent industry.
People who seriously claim that patents protect inventions, not ideas, should realize this is a game of semantics. The very term "invention" is used by the patent industry to mean "patent".
Patents protect ideas, in all domains. The idea of an electric light bulb with a filament in a noble gas. The idea of using frequency modulation to send radio waves. The idea of exercising a cat using a laser pointer.
As I said, people who defend the patent system on any grounds except "it makes a small minority very rich by taxing progress" are either liars, or ignorant. Period.
The one justification I can find for not banning all patents is that all those greedy people need to be busy with something, or they'll be running guns, selling crack, or whatever.
Sorry for being harsh. People who defend corrupt systems, no matter how ancient, irritate me.
Developing an onnovative new drug costs a LOT of money. Uhm, developing any product at all costs a lot of money. That does not mean patents promote innovation. Good lord, developing software is extraordinarily costly. Still, I invest in it because people will then give me even more money. Asprin, not patented, makes a lot of money.
Also, that village doctor story... well, he says it works, but how can anyone test it? It's a very flimsy proof that we need a patent system. There are millions of village doctors who have "secret" recipes, and the usual thing is, it's bogus. Real doctors tend to actually care about saving lives, and tend to share their knowledge. That's also how they learn in the first place.
Someone's grandfather "invented" a miracle cure? Nah, it's a poor story, highly unlikely, and even if true, so rare that it does not justify the massive abuses that the patenting of medical areas (one example) allows.
I'd much rather a few secret cures (if this is true, which I severely doubt) are lost than entire areas of medicine - malaria, breast cancer, etc. etc. - are patented, causing the end of research in those areas and the illness and death of tens, hundreds of millions.
Patents in medicine kill many, many people, don't misunderstand that. Oh, yes, but we can give some firm a monopoly on Viagra. Big deal.
As for the 12 years... well, drug companies are expert in greenfielding their patents, so they can last much longer than 20 years. Keep patenting small incremental innovations...
No, this is a myth. New ideas get shared because they are very hard to keep secret. Patents do not promote disclosure of ideas that can be kept secret, they protect ideas that will inevitably be shared or reinvented in any case.
And since patented ideas cannot be reused or expanded on, patents reduce the sharing and reuse of knowledge, they do not promote it. Overall, patents are very harmful for technological progress. This is why, e.g. oil companies collect patents on solar power, and telecoms firms collect patents on VoIP.
The real purpose of patents is to make money for patent holders, patent experts, and patent lawyers. Anyone who says differently is lying or ignorant. Period.
Anyone who has run a technology business - and I've run several - knows that innovation comes from putting customers together with products, or simply from speaking to potential customers and asking "what do you want?"
Customers will pay for innovative products, and simple competition between businesses to get that money will drive aggressive innovation. First to the market gets the money, if there is a fair market.
This does not need patents. Innovation happened for many thousands of years without them.
The problem is that innovative businesses have no guarantee of security. Once the market exists, they can lose their customers as easily as they got them. Obviously this annoys people, and when those people have money and political power, they make laws to stop this happening.
Note that the patent system does not help the innovative process. No-one innovated because they could get patents. They innovate and if they are able to afford the patents and the heavy legal burdens and extra risk, they may buy them. But if there are no patents in a domain, people will innovate regardless.
And in domains with no patents, innovation is demonstrably faster, for the obvious reason that there are fewer barriers.
It is a cute game but don't fall into the trap of thinking investment depends on protection. Investment depends on owning the results of ones work. Copyright, trademark, and design rights cover that. Patents don't, they own the market for everyone's work in that specific area.
There is a fundamental difference between protection of a work or an investment, and exclusion from a market. It is the same difference as private ownership of a house (where free access and competition of access has negative effects, as anyone who's been burgled knows) and private ownership of roads (where exclusion means people can't trade and move).
All property is a political construction. That does make all property equally valid economically and socially.
The arguments for and against software patents are old and boring, so I wrote a devil's advocate defense of software patents a few months back.
In fact most of the arguments for software patents are based on 150-year old arguments that protection from competition is the best way to push innovation.
The arguments were bogus in 1820 and they are bogus today.
Innovation does not need protection from competition, it needs as much competition as possible, in the most free market possible.
This guy stood up to the patent mafia and told what was happening. The system is corrupt. It does not promote innovation. It promotes lawsuits and settlements, and the lawyers get richer.
Troll Tracker did a public service by documenting these scum. We need to know.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone having spent that much effort creating a network - and succeeding - would become paranoid and protective of it. I challenge anyone to invest so much in any project and then happily see it messed up by people who are less competent.
However the situation is still messed up, the City should never have allowed one person to take on so much responsibility, and at the first sign that he was becoming indispensable, they should have moved him to another project.
If someone is essential for a project, replace him as soon as you can...
In fact the whole story is a good case study for outsourcing - a small, competent network firm would have done as good a job, and treated the incompetent managers simply as clients, not bosses.
The blame lies squarely with the City, not Childs.
Very few web/2.0 apps are open source, and while this makes a nice buzzword it hides the truth: the real revolution in software development, still not practiced in many corporates, is the competitive, open, standards based approach used by open source teams.
You cannot do "incremental releases" to products used in critical systems (the risk is too high) but you can make the technology transparent, easy to understand, easy to contribute to, and based on clear standards.
Totally unscientific survey: my 4-year old daughter prefers to browse YouTube than television. Admittedly she tends to follow pop videos. But she prefers the mouse to the TV remote.
If it's true that people use YouTube to watch clips from TV programs, then Viacom are even stupider than I thought...
But stupid or not, this seems to be the start of the TV industry joining the music and movie and telecoms businesses in attacking the open Internet.
I wonder what kind of Internet my daughter will have when she grows up.
Well, SouthParkStudios.com proves this. But Viacom is not interested in looking for new business models. They are looking to protect their existing business models, and YouTube hurts these.
The thing is, it's not sharing clips that hurts Viacom's business. That probably helps, free publicity for programs.
What hurts Viacom is user-generated content: eyeballs going to watch stuff that is produced totally outside the normal distribution model.
So Viacom is not IMO trying to protect its copyrighted content. What it wants to do is scare people who use YouTube into thinking "my personal data ain't safe", to create a chilling effect that will stop user-created content.
Imagine if Viacom had been infiltrated by Scientologists and they could now get access to logs of who uploaded, and who watched, videos by Anonymous. It's not likely but the mere idea this could happen will drive some people away, fracture the community, and make passive TV watching seem safer again.
OTOH, Viacom, not being an Internet company, does not realize that this kind of attack on a community always has the exact opposite effect.
So the result will be a hundred new video sharing sites, and a much more difficult situation for Viacom, both for copyright takedowns, and for competition to their programming.
The previous study had the same basic flaw: they asked the Piraha to count objects that they never normally had to deal with (it was batteries, I think).
What westerners often forget is that many cultures have different numbering systems for different types of things.
If they asked instead, "how many children do you have", or "how many people are there in that hut", they would most likely discover (shock! horror!) that the Piraha count people exactly as you or I. (If we know the individuals we can count up to 10 or so, if we don't, we count up to five or six, then switch to "many").
These experiments look designed to prove something bogus, namely that counting is not an innate skill.
... as fast as they can from a life working for the state?
Maybe working on the coolest free software project somewhere?
Two things:
1. the Hop-On 1800 lowers costs by removing basic functionality such as a display. I'm assuming the costs will fall for an equivalent product, i.e. what would be a basic cheap cell phone today.
2. You cannot actually buy the Hop-On 1800 anywhere, this is still vapourware. Will it be available for $10 any time soon? Remember the EEE PC, promised at $200 and currently at about $350-$600.
This is just the generalization of Moore's Law, caused by the standardized technology curve where costs fall to zero.
I call this the "half-life rule" of technology, where the half-life is usually about 18 months: the cost of any technology will halve every 18 months. What remains in the end is raw materials, shipping, marketing.
Since the cost of the Internet is falling constantly, its per-dollar capacity is doubling every 18 months.
A corollary: Wikipedia's budget is 60% spent on hardware, and this sum is constant over the years, yet Wikipedia's content doubles every... 18 months or so. Moore's Law working in both directions, so we have more or less infinite expansion at a constant cost.
Obviously the expansion is not infinite, because costs do not actually fall to zero and at a certain stage marketing, shipping, and usage costs outweigh production and account for 99.999% of the final cost.
But still, this is hardly news unless people are shocked to learn that technology gets cheaper over time.
While I'm ranting about people being surprised at the obvious, note that we can predict the cost of technology in the future, quite accurately, by applying the half-life rule to the production costs any given product, subtracting the fixed costs.
So for example I can predict that cell phones will be disposable (costing under $10) within four years.
Sun-Tzu's book was in many ways similar, explaining how to conduct war, but the difference seems to be that 2,500 years ago in China there was no pretense of democratic government, and perhaps also the tactics described in that book were more successful.
The cynicism of this counterinsurgency manual, and willingness to use ordinary people as material for war, is quite stunning.
Don't be silly. Self-interest motivates us all, in all case, not just on Slashdot.
Freedom and privacy only conflict if you do not understand them.
Freedom is the capacity to do interesting things with other people. Privacy is the right to own your own information (and enforce this with physical exclusion). They do not conflict. Freedom means consent on both sides. Being allowed to murder at random is not freedom. Being allowed to meet on the street corner is freedom. See the difference?
It's not just that the boundaries may not be crossed. It's that (a) we own what sits on our side of the boundary and (b) we have the right to set the conditions for reuse/sharing of that stuff. Privacy is a form of property and violations of privacy are a form of theft.
I've written this up as a definition on the Devil's Wiki:
Privacy: A form of personal property owned by an individual or a group, and covering data, information, or knowledge held by that group. Privacy laws provide legal protection for that property, and specifically, allow the owner to receive a fair economic return for its sharing and reuse. Abuses of privacy are infringements on that property without due compensation, often by more powerful groups (e.g. governments), or by theft (e.g. by spies).
No doubt it was beaten together. My bet is he'll land a good job somewhere doing more research into social dynamics and this particular project will never be released. And then someone will get frustrated and remake it as open source, and there will be a whole community of plug in visualizers and the FOSS community will go through a couple of years of visualizing everything until it gets as boring as fractals.
Maybe I'm wrong. But "I'll release the code once it's cleaned up" usually means "please don't bother me with requests for code, I'm on something really neat right now."
Of course the first thing I wanted to do was try the visualizer on my open source projects but... it's not open source.
Pretty, but somewhat useless. The idea is nice and would make a cool presentation on any FOSS project web page, but if it's not open source(d) it'll die.
There is a standard, well developed way to determine if a ballot has been rigged. Tampering with e-voting machines is just the most modern technique, in the past people have stuffed ballot boxes or simply lied about the results. Easy stuff.
So, standard solution: ask the people as they leave the polling station.
This is called an "exit poll" and it's remarkably accurate. Except of course in the last couple of elections in the USA, where the exit polls utterly failed, especially in districts that had new shiny e-voting machines with no paper trail.
OK, since I'm one of the founders, I'm biased. But free and open source software needs free and open standards and the Digital Standards Organization is the only international network set-up specifically to defend and promote free and open digital standards.
Coincidentally, on the day we signed the Hague Declaration, Microsoft announced they would support ODF in Office.
Luckily, Digistan does not want your money, just your support. Sign the Hague Declaration online, and help us by getting involved.
First person to make a "good" BotNet where you can join and get protection for a low, low monthly subscription, makes a killing.
BotNets are obviously the only way to fight BotNets.
Given these two conditions, patents most definitely do NOT make it easier for the little guy to get into or start a market. Oh, unless by "little guys" you include well-funded patent trolls, who definitely love the current patent system.
What they do, very effectively, is stop competition in markets. This is the patent system working fine, if you are against the kind of change most people would consider "good": lower prices, wider choice, higher quality.
In most industries the cost of entry is pretty high anyway so the barriers that patents create don't show so much. In software the cost of entry is close to zero, so the barriers that software patents create are so high as to be infinite to the vast majority of potential "little guys".
You need to do better than say "it's working".
What exactly does that mean? Can you point to a single economic study (not paid for by a large patent holder or a patent office) that proves this?
Once again, patents protect the innovative small company from brutal and unwarranted aggression by larger out-dated firms who...
Hang on. Seagate. Right.
Oh, this must be one of those very rare cases where patents don't act in the interests of society.
I really don't want to offend you, but we live either in a world of belief or of evidence. We choose. My world is one of evidence. You will convince me of the truth of the cure when I see it reproduced elsewhere, and tested as one does, excluding all possible explanations.
However, your story may be true, this does not change that fact that in order to save one secret from extinction, we allow a powerful elite to control - to slow down, and to tax - the rate of progress in every interesting field of technology.
Any argument for/against the patent system must be based on economic benefits for the cost of the monopolies in question.
Funny enough the patent admirers never seem to be able to produce economic studies, just polemics. Even if patents were economically neutral, they would not be defensible because they are obviously not free. They have to create a benefit. This benefit must be demonstrable. Show, for example, and industry with no patents and then how it responds better with patents. Software perhaps? Uhm, no. Patents totally mess up software development. Any other?
Where... is... the... meat?
No, I am not confusing use with purpose. The patent industry has a long record of hiding its true purpose under layers of lies. Thus the WTO, meant to promote global free trade, includes TRIPS, a framework that pushes the patent monopoly culture. How bizarre is that?
This is an old tradition that dates back to 1790 and earlier. Just because people claim that the patent system used to work and has recently "gone bad" does not make such claims true.
The patent industry has largely rewritten its own history. In fact free trade economists have understood very well that the granting of monopolies on ideas never, ever promotes innovation, since the 18th century. The Economist magazine was founded as part of an anti-patent pro-free trade movement in the UK that succeeded in getting the whole patent system reformed (shorter terms, mandatory licensing, etc.) for a decade or so, until the patent establishment struck back.
Almost every solution to patent excesses that people propose today (except perhaps wiki-based prior art searches, which I find particularly stupid, since they just allow claimants to get stronger, more poisonous patents) has been proposed and tried in the past. And has been killed, thanks to the power and political connections, and propaganda machines, of the patent industry.
People who seriously claim that patents protect inventions, not ideas, should realize this is a game of semantics. The very term "invention" is used by the patent industry to mean "patent".
Patents protect ideas, in all domains. The idea of an electric light bulb with a filament in a noble gas. The idea of using frequency modulation to send radio waves. The idea of exercising a cat using a laser pointer.
As I said, people who defend the patent system on any grounds except "it makes a small minority very rich by taxing progress" are either liars, or ignorant. Period.
The one justification I can find for not banning all patents is that all those greedy people need to be busy with something, or they'll be running guns, selling crack, or whatever.
Sorry for being harsh. People who defend corrupt systems, no matter how ancient, irritate me.
Also, that village doctor story... well, he says it works, but how can anyone test it? It's a very flimsy proof that we need a patent system. There are millions of village doctors who have "secret" recipes, and the usual thing is, it's bogus. Real doctors tend to actually care about saving lives, and tend to share their knowledge. That's also how they learn in the first place.
Someone's grandfather "invented" a miracle cure? Nah, it's a poor story, highly unlikely, and even if true, so rare that it does not justify the massive abuses that the patenting of medical areas (one example) allows.
I'd much rather a few secret cures (if this is true, which I severely doubt) are lost than entire areas of medicine - malaria, breast cancer, etc. etc. - are patented, causing the end of research in those areas and the illness and death of tens, hundreds of millions.
Patents in medicine kill many, many people, don't misunderstand that. Oh, yes, but we can give some firm a monopoly on Viagra. Big deal.
As for the 12 years... well, drug companies are expert in greenfielding their patents, so they can last much longer than 20 years. Keep patenting small incremental innovations...
Not convinced, sorry.
No, this is a myth. New ideas get shared because they are very hard to keep secret. Patents do not promote disclosure of ideas that can be kept secret, they protect ideas that will inevitably be shared or reinvented in any case.
And since patented ideas cannot be reused or expanded on, patents reduce the sharing and reuse of knowledge, they do not promote it. Overall, patents are very harmful for technological progress. This is why, e.g. oil companies collect patents on solar power, and telecoms firms collect patents on VoIP.
The real purpose of patents is to make money for patent holders, patent experts, and patent lawyers. Anyone who says differently is lying or ignorant. Period.
Anyone who has run a technology business - and I've run several - knows that innovation comes from putting customers together with products, or simply from speaking to potential customers and asking "what do you want?"
Customers will pay for innovative products, and simple competition between businesses to get that money will drive aggressive innovation. First to the market gets the money, if there is a fair market.
This does not need patents. Innovation happened for many thousands of years without them.
The problem is that innovative businesses have no guarantee of security. Once the market exists, they can lose their customers as easily as they got them. Obviously this annoys people, and when those people have money and political power, they make laws to stop this happening.
Note that the patent system does not help the innovative process. No-one innovated because they could get patents. They innovate and if they are able to afford the patents and the heavy legal burdens and extra risk, they may buy them. But if there are no patents in a domain, people will innovate regardless.
And in domains with no patents, innovation is demonstrably faster, for the obvious reason that there are fewer barriers.
It is a cute game but don't fall into the trap of thinking investment depends on protection. Investment depends on owning the results of ones work. Copyright, trademark, and design rights cover that. Patents don't, they own the market for everyone's work in that specific area.
There is a fundamental difference between protection of a work or an investment, and exclusion from a market. It is the same difference as private ownership of a house (where free access and competition of access has negative effects, as anyone who's been burgled knows) and private ownership of roads (where exclusion means people can't trade and move).
All property is a political construction. That does make all property equally valid economically and socially.
The arguments for and against software patents are old and boring, so I wrote a devil's advocate defense of software patents a few months back.
In fact most of the arguments for software patents are based on 150-year old arguments that protection from competition is the best way to push innovation.
The arguments were bogus in 1820 and they are bogus today.
Innovation does not need protection from competition, it needs as much competition as possible, in the most free market possible.
Kill software patents!
This guy stood up to the patent mafia and told what was happening. The system is corrupt. It does not promote innovation. It promotes lawsuits and settlements, and the lawyers get richer.
Troll Tracker did a public service by documenting these scum. We need to know.
Cisco are doing good by supporting him. Thanks.