The Dutch people would be horrified at the prospect of that degree of home invasion by the authorities
Then please explain how we have the Dutch authorities working hand-in-hand with the DEA conducting raids complete with 17 search warrants.
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/pr112200. ht m
I bet the real story is just like the wiretaps - Dutch citizens are brainwashed that their country is free when in fact the rate of government intrusion into their lives is much higher than they realize.
The fact that the wiretap rate in the Netherlands is 100 times higher than the US per capita really should be a warning that you may need to rethink your assumptions.
Given that the US also has a population more than 15 times that of the Netherlands that means somebody living there is more than 100 times more likely to be wiretapped than in the US.
That seems to be pretty incongruous for a country that prides itself on the personal freedoms of its citizens.
Take the advice of someone who just changed jobs--answering ads never (well, almost never) works anyway.
Almost never... I did get my current job that way. While it's no nirvana it has been steady work through tough times. And since we are a small company these job sites do offer us a way to get in front of a lot of candidates - although I do admit that most of the resumes we get don't come close to meeting the job requirements and go straight into the trash.
"Wanted: Tech professionals needed at top companies now [zdnet.com]"
Yeah, that is an excellent link - to Dice.com, a job site that is in Chapter 11 bankrupty. Good thing, too. Their jobs are always the same, and their site is as buggy as all get out.
Not to mention the huge amounts of Helium produced - what do we do with that, vent it into the atmosphere? In the future we may all sound like chipmunks!
Not to worry. The average atomic velocity of He at room temperature exceeds escape velocity - it will simply blow off into space.
They don't like to mention how many hundreds of tons of material would be made radioactive by the heavy neutron bombardment from hydrogen reactors.
Fusion reactors do not generate high level radioactive waste that must be isolated for geological lengths of time in the way fission reactors do. The radioactive by products from a fusion reactor are low level and with short half-lives (less than 100 years). The short half-life makes in place storage of the irradiated structural components quite feasible - they don't need to be transported etc.
In addition a fusion reactor is fail safe - there is no danger of a meltdown or similar event.
The real attraction of fusion is that it is potentially extremely scalable. Alternative energy sources like solar, wind, etc. are attractive within the near term framework of reducing greenhouse gases over the next decade or two. Ultimately however it is hard to imagine how these dilute, funtamentally limited sources of energy will supply what is needed for strong economic growth into the next century, or a world population that exceeds 10 billions.
Why would Google(*) want to stop this use of the name?
Under trademark law if your trademark becomes a generic word you lose the right to that trademark. Google could lose the right to prevent their competitors from using a button labelled "google" for the search button.
Some words that started out as trademarks that are now not trademarks are aspirin, cellophane, nylon, thermos and escalator.
Slashdot is THE WORST site for patent information on the internet. This particular patent has version control as only a minor component of the patented art.
Claim 1 reads:
A system for file management for files containing website content comprising:
a work area configured to allow a user to create and maintain web content to be displayed on a website, the work area being a file system having read and write operations to enable a user to edit virtual representations of files having web content that is located in the work area; and
a staging area adapted to receive and integrate the web content submitted from the work area when the web content of the work area does not conflict with other web content submitted to the staging area and configured to retain versions of web content submitted from the work area.
I don't know what kind of wacky tabbacy Taco and his buddies are smoking, but this is a web content management system that implements a file system. Sure, it has version control, but that is only a small part of the entire package.
Come on guys, how about trying for some credibility and getting somebody who actually knows a little bit about patents to vet these articles????
There have been a number of studies of this very issue, and the general result has been that Java/C++ coders take about 2x longer to write a similar program than Perl coders do. What they get for the additional time spent on the code is generally a faster running program with better modularization.
Ice is certainly a big candidate, along with space junk and some sort of human error (forgot the glue, etc.).
One thing to keep in mind is that the heat shield tiles are ceramic. Ceramics have some very undesirable physical properties - while the are strong in compression, they are not elastic. This means that they cannot adsorb much kinetic energy before mechanical failure.
I am sure having a few little patents are going to give the little company any chance against Merkh's many thousand ones... NOT.
I am sorry, but despite your obvious vision that patent law only protects large companies, the truth is something very different. There are many cases where small companies are quite successful in bringing infringement suits agains large companies. In the sotware field Microsoft has gotten nailed by both Stacker and ZoomRacks. Nor do you need a million dollars to go to trial - it is quite possible to find patent law firms that will bring infringement cases on a contingency basis.
The law also says that the invention has to be new and nontrivial, but we know how seriously the Patent Office takes this.
Actually the patent law says that the invention has to be novel and unobvious. The obvious definition breaks down to very low barrier to "obvious to one with ordinary skill in the art" so actually it is not much of a legal restriction at all. The novel barrier is somewhat trickier because it requires the patent office to make a search of the prior art. They do, but often it is not as thorough a search as one might like, so we end up with a lot of patents that have prior art. Prior art attacks are often used to invalidate patents. The patent office takes this very seriously; for example if you are an inventor and know about prior art, and don't disclose it to the patent office, you can be prosecuted for patent fraud.
Get real and think why we have the laws we have. If patents were ACTUALLY protecting "the little guy"... we wouldn't have them
Now you are off on some sore of irrationally cynical reverie. Many of the most fundamental laws that we currently protect the little guy quite strongly. Look at what product liability laws have done to bring companies like Firestone, Johns-Manville etc. to bankruptcy. Not to mention what is going on with WalMart and the sex discrimination suit that is dogging them.
The very article that you refer to claiming that the Watt patent slowed the adoption of the steam engine proves that in fact patents were enforced. Here's a clue - don't make a claim in an argument, then cite a reference that refutes your claim.
the crucial idea of standardized, division of labor on an assembly line was not patented
The idea of a standardization and workflow process with division of labor predates the industrial revoultion by by several thousand years. The pyramids in Egypt were built by an assembly line that quarried and moved blocks of stone from quarries to the contruction site.
I am sure that they will be very successful going up against Merkh's sales, manufacturing and marketing resources. NOT.
Nowadays it isn't required to fully explain the inner workings of the invention in the patent, and that's a trick very used in software patents.
Oh really? When was that law changed? The fact is that one of the attacks you can use on a patent's validity is to challenge the patent's 'full disclosure'.
Prior to patents companies just kept thier innovations secret or tied them up in very onerous license agreements.
-- They Still Do
What a wonderful comment. The fact is, and I bet you know it, is that trade secrets are ONLY used if a patent cannot be obtained for some reason or another.
Correlation doesn't imply causation.
Correlation does imply causation - what it doesn't do is PROVE causation.
What about education, church-state separation, *free commerce*
And which of these were unique to or even present in 17th and 18th century England at the onset of the industrial revolution???? None that I can see.
check this writing [ucla.edu] of the same authors that expains James Watt could actually have delayed industrial revolution 30 years because of his mighty patent power
That article is overstated to the point where it's arguments are laughable, and for several obvious reasons. First, while the seperate condensor was an important advance, it did not immediately allow Watt to produce a practical steam engine. It took Watt and Boulton many years of further work to develop the design. In addition, since the Watt design requires high pressure operation there were great safety concerns that slowed its acceptance. This accounts in large part for the slow penetration of this engine into the market. Further, the Watt patent did nothing to stop the use of the Newcomen engine from being used as an alternative. Nor did the presence of the Watt patent do anything to slow actual innovation - all a patent does is prevent people from selling your invention - it DOES NOT prevent others from developing improvements that can be sold when your patent expires. Clearly these authors are grossly the effects of the Watt patent. The immediate introduction of other designs on to the market at the expiration of the Watt patent clearly shows that the Watt patent did not stop the progress of innovation during the time it was in effect.
It is because the elimination of such strong laws giving an individual or corporation ownership of an idea would in effect help bridge the gap between rich and poor.
Do you really think so? What would publishing houses pay authors for their work if there were no copyright laws? $0.00 is what. And what chance would a small biotech firm have against Merkh after they brought their drug to market? The history is there - read it.
The problem with advocation of disassembly of the patent and copyright system is that nobody has got a proposal accounts for the issue of trade secrets. Prior to patents companies just kept thier innovations secret or tied them up in very onerous license agreements. The big win for patents is that they force disclosure in return for the monopoly right.
Also, since we have the rather amazing correlation between the advent of the patent system and the onset of the industrial revolution any claim that the patent system harms innovation has got to explain how techology and quality of life have advanced far more in the 300 years since the development of IP rights than it did in the 5000 years between the invention of agriculture and the development of the concept of the patent.
The decade of wisdom and the ability to discriminate between wheat and chaff. The decade that listens to Hayden, Bach, Gutrie, Basie, Ma and Copeland and not to Devo, Spears and Hip-Hop.
Have you heard the new New York Dolls album?
In order to respond to your message I downloaded some demo clips from Amazon. All I can say is that they are a pox on Western Culture. It will take me days to recover from that assault on my senses.
To say the Chinese are failing miserably suggests you don't listen to that much music or you have a Euro / US bias.
You really should take a chill pill. The issue here is whether or no the current state of the music business in China is harming the ability of Chinese artists (NOT those who are aping western pop culture) to produce works and recordings that will become available to real music lovers, not vapid bubble gum popping blue jean wearing green haired 13-year old Chinese girls swooning over songs sung in English by the latest Chinese Boy Band.
It is very hard for me to see how instant piracy is going to do anything but harm to real Chinese music.
The British when they arrived in India decided Hindustani music was out of tune, when in reality the shiruti's were more advanced intonation than used in the western well tempered scale. Shed your colonialism.
I am not an 18th Century British colonialist. The fact is that Hindustani music is quite popular in the West since the 1950s. You really need a reality check, buddy.
To be honest I don't listen to pop music at all. It's the auditory equivalent of "My Mother the Car". I am far more interested in music as art - and from what I've seen here China is failing miserably in producing anything that I would want to listen to.
I couldn't give a rat's behind whether or not the latest Devo album cost $2 or $20. But I do care if the music industry and where it is headed is going to make it impossible for me to get a DVD-Audio recording of the works of somebody who actualy making a real contribution music.
The prediction that the music industry is heading towards the current situation in China does not please me at all.
How many times are you going to repost the same link to the same flawed theory?
Once. And please tell me how it is flawed. Negative absolute temperature was first rigorously described in 1956, and has been the subject of a lot of confirmed research since. The author of this first article was Norman Ramsey who later won a Nobel Prize for the invention of the MASER, the predecessor of the LASER. Som have called the MASER the modt important invention of the 20th Century. Ramsey is also famous for seminal work in NMR chemical shifts, etc.
Here are some DIFFERENT links on the same topic:
http://boojum.hut.fi/~pjh/nuclearmagnetism.htm http://newton.umsl.edu/infophys/p1more.html http: //fangio.magnet.fsu.edu/~vlad/pr100/100yrs/ht ml/chap/fs2_13054.htm (link to pdf on page) http://www.maxwellian.demon.co.uk/art/esa/n egkelvi n/negkelvin.html http://www.nobel.se/physics/laur eates/1989/ramsey- autobio.html
Slashdot Mirror
£26 billion dollars ?????
I knew we were allies with the brits, but isn't this getting carried away?
The Dutch people would be horrified at the prospect of that degree of home invasion by the authorities
. ht m
Then please explain how we have the Dutch authorities working hand-in-hand with the DEA conducting raids complete with 17 search warrants.
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/pr112200
I bet the real story is just like the wiretaps - Dutch citizens are brainwashed that their country is free when in fact the rate of government intrusion into their lives is much higher than they realize.
The fact that the wiretap rate in the Netherlands is 100 times higher than the US per capita really should be a warning that you may need to rethink your assumptions.
Canadian equivalant for the Netherlands, anyway?
Finland, eh?
I've seen reports in a variety of places that wiretaps are far more prevalent in Europe than the US.
s ys tems.com/msg02595.html
I also remember a flap last year caused by the Dutch goverment requiring all ISPs to install wiretaps.
The following is an article discussing some of the Dutch wiretaps issues:
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@wasabi
If I were a European citizen I would be asking some question of my government.
Given that the US also has a population more than 15 times that of the Netherlands that means somebody living there is more than 100 times more likely to be wiretapped than in the US.
That seems to be pretty incongruous for a country that prides itself on the personal freedoms of its citizens.
Take the advice of someone who just changed jobs--answering ads never (well, almost never) works anyway.
Almost never... I did get my current job that way. While it's no nirvana it has been steady work through tough times. And since we are a small company these job sites do offer us a way to get in front of a lot of candidates - although I do admit that most of the resumes we get don't come close to meeting the job requirements and go straight into the trash.
"Wanted: Tech professionals needed at top companies now [zdnet.com]"
Yeah, that is an excellent link - to Dice.com, a job site that is in Chapter 11 bankrupty. Good thing, too. Their jobs are always the same, and their site is as buggy as all get out.
Not to mention the huge amounts of Helium produced - what do we do with that, vent it into the atmosphere? In the future we may all sound like chipmunks!
Not to worry. The average atomic velocity of He at room temperature exceeds escape velocity - it will simply blow off into space.
They don't like to mention how many hundreds of tons of material would be made radioactive by the heavy neutron bombardment from hydrogen reactors.
Fusion reactors do not generate high level radioactive waste that must be isolated for geological lengths of time in the way fission reactors do. The radioactive by products from a fusion reactor are low level and with short half-lives (less than 100 years). The short half-life makes in place storage of the irradiated structural components quite feasible - they don't need to be transported etc.
In addition a fusion reactor is fail safe - there is no danger of a meltdown or similar event.
The real attraction of fusion is that it is potentially extremely scalable. Alternative energy sources like solar, wind, etc. are attractive within the near term framework of reducing greenhouse gases over the next decade or two. Ultimately however it is hard to imagine how these dilute, funtamentally limited sources of energy will supply what is needed for strong economic growth into the next century, or a world population that exceeds 10 billions.
you can't claim proprietary rights to a verb.
BALDERDASH. There are plenty of trademarks that are verbs. Foe example Excel is trademarked in a variety of contexts.
Why would Google(*) want to stop this use of the name?
Under trademark law if your trademark becomes a generic word you lose the right to that trademark. Google could lose the right to prevent their competitors from using a button labelled "google" for the search button.
Some words that started out as trademarks that are now not trademarks are aspirin, cellophane, nylon, thermos and escalator.
Slashdot is THE WORST site for patent information on the internet. This particular patent has version control as only a minor component of the patented art.
Claim 1 reads:
A system for file management for files containing website content comprising:
a work area configured to allow a user to create and maintain web content to be displayed on a website, the work area being a file system having read and write operations to enable a user to edit virtual representations of files having web content that is located in the work area; and
a staging area adapted to receive and integrate the web content submitted from the work area when the web content of the work area does not conflict with other web content submitted to the staging area and configured to retain versions of web content submitted from the work area.
I don't know what kind of wacky tabbacy Taco and his buddies are smoking, but this is a web content management system that implements a file system. Sure, it has version control, but that is only a small part of the entire package.
Come on guys, how about trying for some credibility and getting somebody who actually knows a little bit about patents to vet these articles????
With Python, you can get right to programming and forget about the crazy syntax rules in C++ and Java.
Actually I find Python's use of whitespace as part of its syntax totally offputting. IMHO Java's syntax is far more natural.
Agreed....
There have been a number of studies of this very issue, and the general result has been that Java/C++ coders take about 2x longer to write a similar program than Perl coders do. What they get for the additional time spent on the code is generally a faster running program with better modularization.
You pays your money and makes your choice.
Ice is certainly a big candidate, along with space junk and some sort of human error (forgot the glue, etc.).
One thing to keep in mind is that the heat shield tiles are ceramic. Ceramics have some very undesirable physical properties - while the are strong in compression, they are not elastic. This means that they cannot adsorb much kinetic energy before mechanical failure.
I am sure having a few little patents are going to give the little company any chance against Merkh's many thousand ones... NOT.
... we wouldn't have them
I am sorry, but despite your obvious vision that patent law only protects large companies, the truth is something very different. There are many cases where small companies are quite successful in bringing infringement suits agains large companies. In the sotware field Microsoft has gotten nailed by both Stacker and ZoomRacks. Nor do you need a million dollars to go to trial - it is quite possible to find patent law firms that will bring infringement cases on a contingency basis.
The law also says that the invention has to be new and nontrivial, but we know how seriously the Patent Office takes this.
Actually the patent law says that the invention has to be novel and unobvious. The obvious definition breaks down to very low barrier to "obvious to one with ordinary skill in the art" so actually it is not much of a legal restriction at all. The novel barrier is somewhat trickier because it requires the patent office to make a search of the prior art. They do, but often it is not as thorough a search as one might like, so we end up with a lot of patents that have prior art. Prior art attacks are often used to invalidate patents. The patent office takes this very seriously; for example if you are an inventor and know about prior art, and don't disclose it to the patent office, you can be prosecuted for patent fraud.
Get real and think why we have the laws we have. If patents were ACTUALLY protecting "the little guy"
Now you are off on some sore of irrationally cynical reverie. Many of the most fundamental laws that we currently protect the little guy quite strongly. Look at what product liability laws have done to bring companies like Firestone, Johns-Manville etc. to bankruptcy. Not to mention what is going on with WalMart and the sex discrimination suit that is dogging them.
Patents were not enforced
The very article that you refer to claiming that the Watt patent slowed the adoption of the steam engine proves that in fact patents were enforced. Here's a clue - don't make a claim in an argument, then cite a reference that refutes your claim.
the crucial idea of standardized, division of labor on an assembly line was not patented
The idea of a standardization and workflow process with division of labor predates the industrial revoultion by by several thousand years. The pyramids in Egypt were built by an assembly line that quarried and moved blocks of stone from quarries to the contruction site.
The small company could also sell Merkh's drugs.
I am sure that they will be very successful going up against Merkh's sales, manufacturing and marketing resources. NOT.
Nowadays it isn't required to fully explain the inner workings of the invention in the patent, and that's a trick very used in software patents.
Oh really? When was that law changed? The fact is that one of the attacks you can use on a patent's validity is to challenge the patent's 'full disclosure'.
Prior to patents companies just kept thier innovations secret or tied them up in very onerous license agreements.
-- They Still Do
What a wonderful comment. The fact is, and I bet you know it, is that trade secrets are ONLY used if a patent cannot be obtained for some reason or another.
Correlation doesn't imply causation.
Correlation does imply causation - what it doesn't do is PROVE causation.
What about education, church-state separation, *free commerce*
And which of these were unique to or even present in 17th and 18th century England at the onset of the industrial revolution???? None that I can see.
check this writing [ucla.edu] of the same authors that expains James Watt could actually have delayed industrial revolution 30 years because of his mighty patent power
That article is overstated to the point where it's arguments are laughable, and for several obvious reasons. First, while the seperate condensor was an important advance, it did not immediately allow Watt to produce a practical steam engine. It took Watt and Boulton many years of further work to develop the design. In addition, since the Watt design requires high pressure operation there were great safety concerns that slowed its acceptance. This accounts in large part for the slow penetration of this engine into the market. Further, the Watt patent did nothing to stop the use of the Newcomen engine from being used as an alternative. Nor did the presence of the Watt patent do anything to slow actual innovation - all a patent does is prevent people from selling your invention - it DOES NOT prevent others from developing improvements that can be sold when your patent expires. Clearly these authors are grossly the effects of the Watt patent. The immediate introduction of other designs on to the market at the expiration of the Watt patent clearly shows that the Watt patent did not stop the progress of innovation during the time it was in effect.
The more articles like this you see, the more money you will make when Apple gets hot again.
It is because the elimination of such strong laws giving an individual or corporation ownership of an idea would in effect help bridge the gap between rich and poor.
Do you really think so? What would publishing houses pay authors for their work if there were no copyright laws? $0.00 is what. And what chance would a small biotech firm have against Merkh after they brought their drug to market? The history is there - read it.
The problem with advocation of disassembly of the patent and copyright system is that nobody has got a proposal accounts for the issue of trade secrets. Prior to patents companies just kept thier innovations secret or tied them up in very onerous license agreements. The big win for patents is that they force disclosure in return for the monopoly right.
Also, since we have the rather amazing correlation between the advent of the patent system and the onset of the industrial revolution any claim that the patent system harms innovation has got to explain how techology and quality of life have advanced far more in the 300 years since the development of IP rights than it did in the 5000 years between the invention of agriculture and the development of the concept of the patent.
What decade are you living in?
The decade of wisdom and the ability to discriminate between wheat and chaff. The decade that listens to Hayden, Bach, Gutrie, Basie, Ma and Copeland and not to Devo, Spears and Hip-Hop.
Have you heard the new New York Dolls album?
In order to respond to your message I downloaded some demo clips from Amazon. All I can say is that they are a pox on Western Culture. It will take me days to recover from that assault on my senses.
Have you listened to Chinese classical music?
Yes, I have.
To say the Chinese are failing miserably suggests you don't listen to that much music or you have a Euro / US bias.
You really should take a chill pill. The issue here is whether or no the current state of the music business in China is harming the ability of Chinese artists (NOT those who are aping western pop culture) to produce works and recordings that will become available to real music lovers, not vapid bubble gum popping blue jean wearing green haired 13-year old Chinese girls swooning over songs sung in English by the latest Chinese Boy Band.
It is very hard for me to see how instant piracy is going to do anything but harm to real Chinese music.
The British when they arrived in India decided Hindustani music was out of tune, when in reality the shiruti's were more advanced intonation than used in the western well tempered scale. Shed your colonialism.
I am not an 18th Century British colonialist. The fact is that Hindustani music is quite popular in the West since the 1950s. You really need a reality check, buddy.
To be honest I don't listen to pop music at all. It's the auditory equivalent of "My Mother the Car". I am far more interested in music as art - and from what I've seen here China is failing miserably in producing anything that I would want to listen to.
I couldn't give a rat's behind whether or not the latest Devo album cost $2 or $20. But I do care if the music industry and where it is headed is going to make it impossible for me to get a DVD-Audio recording of the works of somebody who actualy making a real contribution music.
The prediction that the music industry is heading towards the current situation in China does not please me at all.
How many times are you going to repost the same link to the same flawed theory?
http://newton.umsl.edu/infophys/p1more.html: //fangio.magnet.fsu.edu/~vlad/pr100/100yrs/ht ml/chap/fs2_13054.htm (link to pdf on page)n egkelvi n/negkelvin.htmlr eates/1989/ramsey- autobio.html
Once. And please tell me how it is flawed. Negative absolute temperature was first rigorously described in 1956, and has been the subject of a lot of confirmed research since. The author of this first article was Norman Ramsey who later won a Nobel Prize for the invention of the MASER, the predecessor of the LASER. Som have called the MASER the modt important invention of the 20th Century. Ramsey is also famous for seminal work in NMR chemical shifts, etc.
Here are some DIFFERENT links on the same topic:
http://boojum.hut.fi/~pjh/nuclearmagnetism.htm
http
http://www.maxwellian.demon.co.uk/art/esa/
http://www.nobel.se/physics/lau
Microsoft has lost many cases like this in the past, going back a long time. One of the most famous was the Stacker disk compression patent.
Since they have such an outrageous profit margin it has had only marginal effect on their business.