Nah. It will just be replaced by something worse. Do you think shrink wrap licenses are bad now? Imagine a world in which you have to sign a license to use every form of commercial technology you use. Want to buy a tube of toothpaste? It will come with a shrinkwrap license that states that you have to agree not to reverse engineer, duplicate, analyze or even try to produce your own toothpaste.
Patents exist because they are an improvement on a system where everything is held as a trade secret. Thow them out and you will create a nightmare.
Part of the reason is that software development is so hard is that change and design are not managed correctly. In the old school engineering disciplines introducing change after construction begins is obviously a disaster in terms of budget and delivery. Deciding that you want a 6 lane tunnel under the Hudson River after you have a 4 lane tunnel half built obviously introduces MAJOR costs. Software, not being similarly physical appears much easier to change, and requirements are constantly shifting becuase of this perception. In response to this we see all sorts of development models (Agile etc.) that are purported to let the application evolve along with changing requirements.
This is utter crap.
Software change introduces costs just the way changing a half constructed bridge does. But management does not have the experience to realize this. A half assed program that sort of runs is accepted as the norm today because that's what everyone is used to. But a bridge that has an reliability factor of 99.99% (1 car in 10,000 going over the bridge ends up in the water) is NOT what people expect, and if they got it there would be holy hell to pay.
The other part of the reason is that engineering is a hueristic discipline. Yes there is all sorts of math and so on, but the real core is a collection of rules people learn the hard way. How long did it take to learn to build tall buildings after the invention of concrete? Centuries. Now you have a brand new tech and think all of a sudden you are going to be able to tackle large construction projects without misteps? LOL. It takes time to learn how to build anything this complex. Pull a van Winkle and come back in a century or two. Betcha then software development will be a lot more cut and dry.
Net Neutrality is about charging providers and users for various quality of service levels. That is AT&T would charge Google extra for a guaranteed premium latency and packet loss level.
Right now there are plenty of prioritization and traffic shaping mechanisms in place - and for good reason. Different applications have different quality requirements. VOIP or interactive video require packet drop rates and jitter levels much lower than FTP or HTTP. What net neutrality gives is that everbody's VOIP is treated the same as everyone else's.
Communications providers don't want to provide QoS guarantees because under net neutrality they have no way to recover the cost of doing so. They operate on very thin margins right now, and have no business case for providing these additional services.
CRT projection still has the best picture quality in terms of contrast ratio, color accuracy and absolute black level. If you don't mind the downsides in terms of size and fiddling to get convergence right it can be a bargain. The size issue is driving these sets out of the market, so I expect them to disappear in a few years, but there are a lot of good things to say about them.
Second to CRT in PQ / price is the LCOS (not LCD) projection sets. Sony probably has the best offering followed by JVC. Much better form factor than the CRTs, works in more varied lighting.
I haven't looked at LCD flat panels recently, but I think that I'd prefer plasma because of the better blacks.
My personal choice was the Sony LCoS (their trade name is SXRD).
One immediate application would be in high speed (> 100 terabit/sec) routers. Right now the transport is photonic, and the switching can be done using MEMS. But because of lack of buffere for photons the classification has to be done electronically.
James Clerk Maxwell discovered the natural laws that made building radio equipment feasible. This was the real original work. Hertz, Marconi, Tesla - they ALL did the same thing, apply Maxwell's work. None of them 'invented' radio, radio is a natural phenomena. What they did was to build apparatus that produced radio waves in a controlled manner using the principles laid out by Maxwell.
There are a lot of scientists who have noted that finding new, safe effective drugs is becoming a lot harder - as the small molecule combinations are becoming exhausted and the large molecule drugs have not achieved success like people had hoped. Increasingly the new drugs that are introduced are relatively small improvements even when they are based on new chemistries.
Drug patents have existed for over a century, during this period of time there have been great waves of introduction of useful medicines, all driven by advances in sciences. The patent system didn't seem to inhibit the introduction of these drugs.
This report tries to draw a conclusion based on the correlation between drug patents and an apparent drying up of the new drug pipeline, and then state that it is cause and effect. Correlation of course does not prove causality, and in fact I wonder if you take a longer term view of what has happened in the drug industry if the correlation actually exists.
It is this warped incentive that needs to be fixed.
It is easy to point a finger at some issue like you describe, anybody can do that. But the question is HOW. A drug company is first and foremost a commercial enterprise. It would be silly for such an organization to pursue development of drugs like antibiotics and vaccines that bring all of the long and expensive developmnet and testing process with them, along with the legal liabilities, and then return no money.
Unltimately a lot of this situation is due to government regulatory impact on the drug industry. The only way to solve it is by changes in the way government regulates the drug industry.
You should have mentioned electric hot water heaters and air conditioning. By far my biggest electrical consumer is A/C (I have gas heat and hot water).
Not according to any generally accepted definition I have ever seen.
Here are a few from an internet search:
* A set of action guidelines or rules that results from the actions or lack of actions of governmental entities.
www.cdc.gov/genomics/gtesting/ACCE/FBR/CF/CFGlossa ry2.htm
* Related to the social or legislative ramifications of government policies. The corollary glossary term "political aspects" is customarily applied to the process of arriving at those policies.
lib.ucr.edu/depts/acquisitions/YBP%20NSP%20GLOSSAR Y%20EXTERNAL%20revised6-02.php
* Is whatever governments choose to do or not to do (Thomas Dye 1992: 2). Such a definition covers government action, inaction, decisions and non-decisions as it implies a very deliberate choice between alternatives (see Hall and Jenkins 1995).
www.stile.coventry.ac.uk/cbs/staff/beech/BOTM/Glos sary.htm
Of course there is a software sownload - the Flash conponents that implement the softphone are most definitely software. Not only that they are obviously interacting directly with the network in some manner.
The author makes a statement in his article that gold layer DVD's are not feasible. In actuality they are offered by Misui / MAM-A in a couple of different grades. I'd much rather use them than Taiyo Yuden for important data.
Instrumentation doesn't help if there is an ice storm and everything is out for several days. Plus something could go wrong with the high tech solution.
What you want is to make sure the pipes can't freeze because there is no water in them. Blow out the pipes with an air compressor, drain the water heater and toilets, put antifreeze in everything that might hold water (sink traps etc.)
I can see the utility of lossy compression for portable audio, but I would never buy my music in such a format. Starting with CD's you can rip it to whatever lossy format you want, and if you have a good stereo setup the lossless form is still available.
If you really don't like your SD content, why do you have a TV at all?
While I don't particularly enjoy standard network fare I enjoy movies and sporting events. A good baseball game or film is surely enhanced by presentation on a large screen HDTV.
What a pantload this guy is. Sales of HDTV's to consumer illustrate quite strongly that they are willing to pay for HD content. People like me who have HDTV's avoid watching SD because of the poor picture quality.
Many cable and stellite companies charge extra for HD channels - and people pay up. So if he wants to charge delivery companies extra for HD programming, well there is your friggen business case, on a silver platter.
After that, it follows fairly simply that the standard for unobviousness should be pretty high, and that demonstrating obviousness should be fairly easy.
One of the reforms that I would back is a revision of the standard of obviousness which is set by current patent law to be pretty low - i.e. "obvious to one with ordinary skill in the art".
To me the case under litigation SHOULD fall into that classification. When I was pursuing patents as an inventor I'd always be looking to have some unexpected synergistic benefit from combining two or more other inventions before considering that I had something worth patenting. And if I wasn't capable of this the patent examiner would generally reject my application besed on it being anticipated by combining the materials in two other references.
So I don't hold with either the idea that this brake pedal should be patentable, OR with the idea that making it unpatentable would lead to a revolution in the patent system.
Why then can't anyone connect to my port 80, and why can't I connect to port 25 of anyone other than my ISP's mail server?
A. Cause your provider doesn't want you running a web server without paying more. He also doesn't want IIS virii flooding his network. B. Cause your provider doesn't want spam from botnets flooding his network.
These are ISP policies and have nothing to do with charging $$$ to prioritize data from a particular source over the common internet core. If you don't like them you can find another ISP. Your options as far as what happens to your data once it leaves the ISP are far more limited.
I already connect at much lower speed than Google. Probably, it is because I pay a lot less for my connection...
Right. But network neutrality means that once Google's packets get on the core network they don't have priority over packets from mi's Web Search at algebra.com
Leaf node access is very different from what happens on the internet core.
Yeah, peoples have been exposed to microwave rads from fairly high power radars since WWII. Nobody seems to be coming down with cancer. Microwaves have been available since when, about 1965? No reports of cancers there either.
Not to mention that people working in the radio industry have been exposed to this stuff since about 1920 or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. It will just be replaced by something worse. Do you think shrink wrap licenses are bad now? Imagine a world in which you have to sign a license to use every form of commercial technology you use. Want to buy a tube of toothpaste? It will come with a shrinkwrap license that states that you have to agree not to reverse engineer, duplicate, analyze or even try to produce your own toothpaste.
Patents exist because they are an improvement on a system where everything is held as a trade secret. Thow them out and you will create a nightmare.
Eaaasssyyy. Just set your MX record to 127.0.0.1!
You will never get a bounce.
Part of the reason is that software development is so hard is that change and design are not managed correctly. In the old school engineering disciplines introducing change after construction begins is obviously a disaster in terms of budget and delivery. Deciding that you want a 6 lane tunnel under the Hudson River after you have a 4 lane tunnel half built obviously introduces MAJOR costs. Software, not being similarly physical appears much easier to change, and requirements are constantly shifting becuase of this perception. In response to this we see all sorts of development models (Agile etc.) that are purported to let the application evolve along with changing requirements.
This is utter crap.
Software change introduces costs just the way changing a half constructed bridge does. But management does not have the experience to realize this. A half assed program that sort of runs is accepted as the norm today because that's what everyone is used to. But a bridge that has an reliability factor of 99.99% (1 car in 10,000 going over the bridge ends up in the water) is NOT what people expect, and if they got it there would be holy hell to pay.
The other part of the reason is that engineering is a hueristic discipline. Yes there is all sorts of math and so on, but the real core is a collection of rules people learn the hard way. How long did it take to learn to build tall buildings after the invention of concrete? Centuries. Now you have a brand new tech and think all of a sudden you are going to be able to tackle large construction projects without misteps? LOL. It takes time to learn how to build anything this complex. Pull a van Winkle and come back in a century or two. Betcha then software development will be a lot more cut and dry.
Net Neutrality is about charging providers and users for various quality of service levels. That is AT&T would charge Google extra for a guaranteed premium latency and packet loss level.
Right now there are plenty of prioritization and traffic shaping mechanisms in place - and for good reason. Different applications have different quality requirements. VOIP or interactive video require packet drop rates and jitter levels much lower than FTP or HTTP. What net neutrality gives is that everbody's VOIP is treated the same as everyone else's.
Communications providers don't want to provide QoS guarantees because under net neutrality they have no way to recover the cost of doing so. They operate on very thin margins right now, and have no business case for providing these additional services.
Dancing with the French can be bad too. The combination is a marriage made in hell.
CRT projection still has the best picture quality in terms of contrast ratio, color accuracy and absolute black level. If you don't mind the downsides in terms of size and fiddling to get convergence right it can be a bargain. The size issue is driving these sets out of the market, so I expect them to disappear in a few years, but there are a lot of good things to say about them.
Second to CRT in PQ / price is the LCOS (not LCD) projection sets. Sony probably has the best offering followed by JVC. Much better form factor than the CRTs, works in more varied lighting.
I haven't looked at LCD flat panels recently, but I think that I'd prefer plasma because of the better blacks.
My personal choice was the Sony LCoS (their trade name is SXRD).
One immediate application would be in high speed (> 100 terabit/sec) routers. Right now the transport is photonic, and the switching can be done using MEMS. But because of lack of buffere for photons the classification has to be done electronically.
James Clerk Maxwell discovered the natural laws that made building radio equipment feasible. This was the real original work. Hertz, Marconi, Tesla - they ALL did the same thing, apply Maxwell's work. None of them 'invented' radio, radio is a natural phenomena. What they did was to build apparatus that produced radio waves in a controlled manner using the principles laid out by Maxwell.
Yeah, but this is getting up there with your frontside bus bandwidth.
There are a lot of scientists who have noted that finding new, safe effective drugs is becoming a lot harder - as the small molecule combinations are becoming exhausted and the large molecule drugs have not achieved success like people had hoped. Increasingly the new drugs that are introduced are relatively small improvements even when they are based on new chemistries.
Drug patents have existed for over a century, during this period of time there have been great waves of introduction of useful medicines, all driven by advances in sciences. The patent system didn't seem to inhibit the introduction of these drugs.
This report tries to draw a conclusion based on the correlation between drug patents and an apparent drying up of the new drug pipeline, and then state that it is cause and effect. Correlation of course does not prove causality, and in fact I wonder if you take a longer term view of what has happened in the drug industry if the correlation actually exists.
It is this warped incentive that needs to be fixed.
It is easy to point a finger at some issue like you describe, anybody can do that. But the question is HOW. A drug company is first and foremost a commercial enterprise. It would be silly for such an organization to pursue development of drugs like antibiotics and vaccines that bring all of the long and expensive developmnet and testing process with them, along with the legal liabilities, and then return no money.
Unltimately a lot of this situation is due to government regulatory impact on the drug industry. The only way to solve it is by changes in the way government regulates the drug industry.
You should have mentioned electric hot water heaters and air conditioning. By far my biggest electrical consumer is A/C (I have gas heat and hot water).
A public policy is a moral stance.
a ry2.htm
R Y%20EXTERNAL%20revised6-02.php
s sary.htm
Not according to any generally accepted definition I have ever seen.
Here are a few from an internet search:
* A set of action guidelines or rules that results from the actions or lack of actions of governmental entities.
www.cdc.gov/genomics/gtesting/ACCE/FBR/CF/CFGloss
* Related to the social or legislative ramifications of government policies. The corollary glossary term "political aspects" is customarily applied to the process of arriving at those policies.
lib.ucr.edu/depts/acquisitions/YBP%20NSP%20GLOSSA
* Is whatever governments choose to do or not to do (Thomas Dye 1992: 2). Such a definition covers government action, inaction, decisions and non-decisions as it implies a very deliberate choice between alternatives (see Hall and Jenkins 1995).
www.stile.coventry.ac.uk/cbs/staff/beech/BOTM/Glo
Of course there is a software sownload - the Flash conponents that implement the softphone are most definitely software. Not only that they are obviously interacting directly with the network in some manner.
I should be able to sell my pennies as copper if I want, because I'm not perpetrating a fraud or violating any public policy.
So why isn't breaking a regulation against melting coins down a violation of public policy?
The author makes a statement in his article that gold layer DVD's are not feasible. In actuality they are offered by Misui / MAM-A in a couple of different grades. I'd much rather use them than Taiyo Yuden for important data.
Instrumentation doesn't help if there is an ice storm and everything is out for several days. Plus something could go wrong with the high tech solution.
What you want is to make sure the pipes can't freeze because there is no water in them. Blow out the pipes with an air compressor, drain the water heater and toilets, put antifreeze in everything that might hold water (sink traps etc.)
I can see the utility of lossy compression for portable audio, but I would never buy my music in such a format. Starting with CD's you can rip it to whatever lossy format you want, and if you have a good stereo setup the lossless form is still available.
I practice safe ripping.
Tell me again why I need HD?
If you really don't like your SD content, why do you have a TV at all?
While I don't particularly enjoy standard network fare I enjoy movies and sporting events. A good baseball game or film is surely enhanced by presentation on a large screen HDTV.
What a pantload this guy is. Sales of HDTV's to consumer illustrate quite strongly that they are willing to pay for HD content. People like me who have HDTV's avoid watching SD because of the poor picture quality.
Many cable and stellite companies charge extra for HD channels - and people pay up. So if he wants to charge delivery companies extra for HD programming, well there is your friggen business case, on a silver platter.
DOH.
After that, it follows fairly simply that the standard for unobviousness should be pretty high, and that demonstrating obviousness should be fairly easy.
One of the reforms that I would back is a revision of the standard of obviousness which is set by current patent law to be pretty low - i.e. "obvious to one with ordinary skill in the art".
To me the case under litigation SHOULD fall into that classification. When I was pursuing patents as an inventor I'd always be looking to have some unexpected synergistic benefit from combining two or more other inventions before considering that I had something worth patenting. And if I wasn't capable of this the patent examiner would generally reject my application besed on it being anticipated by combining the materials in two other references.
So I don't hold with either the idea that this brake pedal should be patentable, OR with the idea that making it unpatentable would lead to a revolution in the patent system.
So let's hope SCOTUS rules his way.
So, why are steering wheels patented?
Please supply patent numbers so we can determine the answer to your question.
Why then can't anyone connect to my port 80, and why can't I connect to port 25 of anyone other than my ISP's mail server?
A. Cause your provider doesn't want you running a web server without paying more. He also doesn't want IIS virii flooding his network.
B. Cause your provider doesn't want spam from botnets flooding his network.
These are ISP policies and have nothing to do with charging $$$ to prioritize data from a particular source over the common internet core. If you don't like them you can find another ISP. Your options as far as what happens to your data once it leaves the ISP are far more limited.
I already connect at much lower speed than Google. Probably, it is because I pay a lot less for my connection...
Right. But network neutrality means that once Google's packets get on the core network they don't have priority over packets from mi's Web Search at algebra.com
Leaf node access is very different from what happens on the internet core.
Yeah, peoples have been exposed to microwave rads from fairly high power radars since WWII. Nobody seems to be coming down with cancer. Microwaves have been available since when, about 1965? No reports of cancers there either.
Not to mention that people working in the radio industry have been exposed to this stuff since about 1920 or so.
This is utter rot and ignorance at work.