The fact that Java is not free software rankles a bit too
Well, Tomcat is perfectly free.
As far as strong typing and strings, if you aren't using a strongly typed language you are doing a tremendous amount of debugging by hand that should be handled by your compiler. Also by disregarding Java you are also throwing away a tremendous body of web related libraries and frameworks, plus support facilities like JUnit and JMeter that are part of the Apache Jakarta project.
Finally, if you want the ultimate reason, do a job search and look at the number of Java positions vs. Perl positions.
Tell that to Bach, Shakespeare or any one else before probably 1900.
Yeah, 1900, right. Copyright law dates back 1700 and the statute of Anne. Bach lived during the time copyright laws were in effect. Much prior to that copyright didn't matter because the industrial revolution hadn't happened and nobody had an easy way to print anything.
Copyright law was established at the strat of the industrial revolution for the purpose of preventing publishing companies from just taking anything avaialable and printing it witout even putting the author's name on the works.
Has anyone thought clearly what the lapse of copyright law would do to authorship?
If copyright did not exist authors would be forced to use contract law and physical copy protection to protect their work. For example, commercial comuter programs would be sold with dongles as a matter of course. Whenever you bought a boo you would have to sign a contract [EULA] that control your use of the product.
For $2500, I can get a Athlon 2100+ system with a G4. Where are you going to find a laptop that can match that? The 3Dmark of a G4 TI 4400 can hit 10000, the G4 440 can only hit 5000.
Maybe not match it in every detail, but I can sure come close. I am waiting on delivery of a Compaq 2800T which I paid $2100 including taxes and delivery for. 1.6 GHz Pentium 4M, Radeon 7500 Mobile, SXVGA+ 15" screen, 24X CDR/DVD, 0.5GB RAM.
There is a A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.htm? i=1616 except for some situations that are VERY gpu intensive it matches up very well with a desktop.
The argument about GPU speed and heat disspation is going away - the Radeon 7500 has speed-step type features that keep the heat and pwer consumption in line.
And I can play ON THE WAY to the LAN party, or in the airpane, or the backyard.
True enough. Inventions occur through individuals solving problems.
and the worst place in the world for an inventive, brilliant, highly intelligent and competent person (like an inventor) is a stultifying, closed-minded, skeptical, gray, dull bureaucracy (like a big corporation).... What about Linux, for example? Come on. This can't be serious.
Yes, what about Linux? Linux is a good example of why your argument is wrong. Linux is not an invention - in fact it is a copy of an invention that occurred in a very large company.
You are making a grave error if you think all large corporations are gray, dull bureaucracies. Many large corporations in fact supply wonderful environments that spawn incredible creativity and technological progress by their employees. AT&T, for example - Bell Labs (transistor, laser, Information Science, UNIX etc. is a classic example of a corporate environment that was successful in spawning innovation). Other companies have gone through periods where they have succesfully fostered great creativity - DuPont and it's development of synthtic fibers, Texas Instruments and IC's, and so on.
The fact is that good corporations realize that invention can be a great contributor to their growth, and some of them actually grow through that route.
Oh, and individuals often have families to raise, so that a steady wage while they are doing their inventing can look pretty good.
When push comes to shove, all inventions boil down to one individual realizing the solution to a problem. Now it may or may not take a corporation to realize the invention, and bring it to market, but the fact is that teams are made up of individuals.
I am very happy with my cable ISP - it's been fast and reliable, and as such it has made me happy. If my provider were to decide that they needed to change the pricing structure in order to maintain the current level of service and make a fair profit, I would consider it a fair deal. I would much rather see that than attempts to degrade the service in order to save money.
Lawyers that represent clients in the wrong, are in the wrong themselves. No excuses.
There is an unfortunate level of ignorance present on slashdot regarding the role of a lawyer in society. The fact of the matter is that it is the job of a lawyer to be an advocate, that is to put forward the interests of his client. His opponent likewise has the same job. It is up to the judiciary and legal system to establish the guidelines for deciding the right and wrong in a case, NOT the lawyer. It is by this system that an individual gets his voice heard.
Perhaps many lawyers defend causes that you don't like, however the fact of the matter is that without this tension in the advesarial process we have for our legal system both sides of the case would not get fairly heard.
why you would want to run Windows 98 or ME over Windows 2000 anyway
Indeed, however there are perfectly good laptops out there that have severe problems running Win2k. I know, I own one:-(. II don't want to run Win98, I HAVE TO until I can afford a new laptop.
Patents have nothing to do with a true free market economy. They're actually intended to stifle the free market by giving a government-protected monopoly to the patent holder
The effect of a patent in an otherwise free market situation is not as absolute as you seem to think. Economic laws still apply - the patented invention must still deliver value equal to or exceeding it's cost. Competitors are free to develop alternative technologies to compete with the patented matter. Competitors may decide to use their own patent positions to barter, i.e. cross-license with the patentee. In some cases the patent holding company may end up being bought by another company.
One can see this happening in the pharmaceutical industry all the time - multiple patented drugs competing to treat the same disease. Sure, its a monopoly in the sense that any one drug is patented. But it seems that there is almost always one way to skin the cat.
Patents in fact encourage the development of multiple alternative technologies because you can't just go and copy the competition.
In that sense, public domain research would actually restore free market forces by allowing companies to freely compete on the best way to deliver the results of the basic research to the consumer.
Sorry, but I have a hard time with the idea that public domain research run by bureaucrats is going to be an effective alternative to our current system.
I think you have answered your own question here - these are not inventions by any reasonable description
The gene itself is not an invention, but testing for it certainly is. And it is this testing that is what is the commercially important aspect of the patent. The side effect of this is publication of some very important R&D.
What are the alternatives?
You neglected to mention public funded and publically owned research, and private endowments to research institutions. I think either of these are better than the illegimate patents.
Elimination of patents and reliance on publically funded R&D for technology development is perhaps THE WORST idea I have ever heard of for dealing with patent issues. This would result in essentially a centrally planned economy, something the we know from past experience is FAR less efficient than a free market economy. The result of this would be an flat out economic disaster.
Perhaps patents on genetic sequences are not legitimate because of the discovery vs. invention issue. But that can and should be fixed by far less radical means than your proposal. And in fact recent patentability guidelines from the USPTO have already put an end to patents on genetic sequences per se.
I think with strong patent protections science can't develop well. Same in software development.
Empirical evidence seems to refute your hypothesis. We have had patents since the 18th century, and by far the bulk of scientific progress has occured during over this period of time. Software development has become stronger as patent protections for software have become more widely practiced.
If patent holders do not develop the product, no one can.
Ah, but you see if the product is not at least invented no patent can exist, and if the product is not developed, no profit can be made from owning the patent. The fact of the matter is that it is very common for one company to bring an invention to patentability, and through licensing to another company profit from it's development. In fact that is one of the main mechanisms for commercialization of biotechnology.
What about human beings that are produced as a result of in vitor fertilization? They are "man-made" and not "naturally occuring." By the Supreme Court's definition, these people could be patented.
Patentability has more requirements than just being man-made. They have to show novelty and utility. The invention has to be 'non obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art". Presumably an ordinary test-tube baby would fail those criterea.
Change the standard procedure, and reject all patent applications by default. If the applicant can't make a good enough case as to why the patent should be granted, then the invention isn't worth patenting.
That is the standard proceedure.
And btw, why shouldn't the company that discovered the importance of the BRAC2 gene be rewarded for their work? What are the alternatives?
Two that I can see - either not funding the research becasue there is no way to recover the costs, or keeping the results as a trade secret and building a sealed box to run the test.
Do you think these outcomes are better than a patent that publishes the sequence?
IBM has contributed some important components to the Apache Jakarta and XML projects. They have also contributed the Eclipse IDE, and considerable code to the Linux kernel effort.
The only thing Moore's Law is driving is the number of transistors per given area. It doesn't drive CPU speed. It doesn't drive hard drive size. It doesn't drive software sales. It doesn't drive your salary or the size of your department.
Sure it does. The number of transistors per cm^2 drives CPU speed (voltage is related to device size via quantum mechanics). The lower the voltage, the lower the power dissipation, the faster the switching time. The more features per unit area, the more sophisticated the instruction processing can be. CPU performance IS *DIRECTLY* a result of feature size.
It doesn't drive hard drive size.
Hard drive capacity per dollar has actually been increasing FASTER than Moore's law.
It doesn't drive your salary or the size of your department.
Not directly perhaps, but it sure drives the number of applications that a computer can be economically used for. This translates directly to demand for software.
Computers are thousands of times more powerful than they were twenty years ago; do we really need more computers than we did back then?
That power, combined with falling costs is what makes computers useful in every increasing numbers of applications.
If computers had the same price/performance they did 20 years ago we would have maybe a million or so in the country rather than the hundreds of millions we now have.
Whatever the future brings, Moore's law is driving the growth of IT.
As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that red light cameras actually INCREASED the number of rear-end accidents by as much as 700+ percent in some areas (just about ALL intersections with cameras showed increases in rear-end accidents)!
That argument seriously impresses me. NOT! The individuals who are doing the rear-ending are probably guilty of speeding, tail-gating, yakking on the cell phone, and no doubt expecting the driver ahead of them to run the red light. Changing the law or it's enforcement to accomadate bad driving habits is not something that is going to improve traffic safety. Those doing the rear-ending should be thrown in the slammer, fined heavily, and lose their driving licenses.
If you start heading into an intersection with a yellow light and "miss the red" by one second or less (as over 75% of all 'violators' do), what, exactly, are you guilty of?
Breaking traffic laws. You probably speeded up too, in your attempt to 'beat the light'. The fact is that the yellow light is there to warn you that you should NOT be entering the intersection.
Did you just make the roads unsafe?
Probably. I have personally seen many accidents where it was apparent that two drivers, one making a left turn were trying to both "beat the light".
Also, a single photograph of your car in mid-intersection with a picture of a red light above it doesn't tell the whole story. The lights make absolutely no distinction of the rest of your driving behavior leading up to the incident.
They are not fining you for the rest of your (bad) driving behaviour, only the part that they have been able to record. No doubt if technology was better they would be going after other bad behaviuors as well.
THe fact is that this country kills 40,000+ people on the road each year. That is approximately equal to the total death toll of the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war triggered tremendous social upheaval, protests and outrage. Yet in comparison to the carnage on our highways, it was a minor event. The hypocracy is mind boggling.
Hmmm... the end result looks pretty much like justice to me. Perhaps it took a year, but it seems to me that a year is not that long a time for a civil case to run.
While the Aqua look is nice, it has and can be duplicated. The fact of the matter is that the real advantage is with the underlying rendering layer. There is no way an X based system is going to be able to present a look and feel of any design, no matter how good that is going to be able to compete with the flat out sophistication of Quartz.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Java is not free software rankles a bit too
Well, Tomcat is perfectly free.
As far as strong typing and strings, if you aren't using a strongly typed language you are doing a tremendous amount of debugging by hand that should be handled by your compiler. Also by disregarding Java you are also throwing away a tremendous body of web related libraries and frameworks, plus support facilities like JUnit and JMeter that are part of the Apache Jakarta project.
Finally, if you want the ultimate reason, do a job search and look at the number of Java positions vs. Perl positions.
I'm not sure how good dongles would work on systems with free kernels.
Without copyright law, DRM would be the rule. No commercial software would be available for systems that did not implement DRM.
Tell that to Bach, Shakespeare or any one else before probably 1900.
Yeah, 1900, right. Copyright law dates back 1700 and the statute of Anne. Bach lived during the time copyright laws were in effect. Much prior to that copyright didn't matter because the industrial revolution hadn't happened and nobody had an easy way to print anything.
Copyright law was established at the strat of the industrial revolution for the purpose of preventing publishing companies from just taking anything avaialable and printing it witout even putting the author's name on the works.
Has anyone thought clearly what the lapse of copyright law would do to authorship?
I don't think so.
If copyright did not exist
If copyright did not exist authors would be forced to use contract law and physical copy protection to protect their work. For example, commercial comuter programs would be sold with dongles as a matter of course. Whenever you bought a boo you would have to sign a contract [EULA] that control your use of the product.
Lawyers would have field day.
For $2500, I can get a Athlon 2100+ system with a G4. Where are you going to find a laptop that can match that? The 3Dmark of a G4 TI 4400 can hit 10000, the G4 440 can only hit 5000.? i=1616 except for some situations that are VERY gpu intensive it matches up very well with a desktop.
The argument about GPU speed and heat disspation is going away - the Radeon 7500 has speed-step type features that keep the heat and pwer consumption in line.
And I can play ON THE WAY to the LAN party, or in the airpane, or the backyard.
Maybe not match it in every detail, but I can sure come close. I am waiting on delivery of a Compaq 2800T which I paid $2100 including taxes and delivery for. 1.6 GHz Pentium 4M, Radeon 7500 Mobile, SXVGA+ 15" screen, 24X CDR/DVD, 0.5GB RAM. There is a A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.htm
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman.
does anyone think we'll reach a limit to the amount of data we'll need as individuals?.
Not bloody likely in my lifetime. When I can record a month or two of H3DTV on a hard disk THEN, MAYBE, I'll be satisfied.
Big corporations don't invent anything,
True enough. Inventions occur through individuals solving problems.
and the worst place in the world for an inventive, brilliant, highly intelligent and competent person (like an inventor) is a stultifying, closed-minded, skeptical, gray, dull bureaucracy (like a big corporation).... What about Linux, for example? Come on. This can't be serious.
Yes, what about Linux? Linux is a good example of why your argument is wrong. Linux is not an invention - in fact it is a copy of an invention that occurred in a very large company.
You are making a grave error if you think all large corporations are gray, dull bureaucracies. Many large corporations in fact supply wonderful environments that spawn incredible creativity and technological progress by their employees. AT&T, for example - Bell Labs (transistor, laser, Information Science, UNIX etc. is a classic example of a corporate environment that was successful in spawning innovation). Other companies have gone through periods where they have succesfully fostered great creativity - DuPont and it's development of synthtic fibers, Texas Instruments and IC's, and so on.
The fact is that good corporations realize that invention can be a great contributor to their growth, and some of them actually grow through that route.
Oh, and individuals often have families to raise, so that a steady wage while they are doing their inventing can look pretty good.
When push comes to shove, all inventions boil down to one individual realizing the solution to a problem. Now it may or may not take a corporation to realize the invention, and bring it to market, but the fact is that teams are made up of individuals.
I am very happy with my cable ISP - it's been fast and reliable, and as such it has made me happy. If my provider were to decide that they needed to change the pricing structure in order to maintain the current level of service and make a fair profit, I would consider it a fair deal. I would much rather see that than attempts to degrade the service in order to save money.
Lawyers that represent clients in the wrong, are in the wrong themselves. No excuses.
There is an unfortunate level of ignorance present on slashdot regarding the role of a lawyer in society. The fact of the matter is that it is the job of a lawyer to be an advocate, that is to put forward the interests of his client. His opponent likewise has the same job. It is up to the judiciary and legal system to establish the guidelines for deciding the right and wrong in a case, NOT the lawyer. It is by this system that an individual gets his voice heard.
Perhaps many lawyers defend causes that you don't like, however the fact of the matter is that without this tension in the advesarial process we have for our legal system both sides of the case would not get fairly heard.
why you would want to run Windows 98 or ME over Windows 2000 anyway
:-(. II don't want to run Win98, I HAVE TO until I can afford a new laptop.
Indeed, however there are perfectly good laptops out there that have severe problems running Win2k. I know, I own one
Patents have nothing to do with a true free market economy. They're actually intended to stifle the free market by giving a government-protected monopoly to the patent holder
The effect of a patent in an otherwise free market situation is not as absolute as you seem to think. Economic laws still apply - the patented invention must still deliver value equal to or exceeding it's cost. Competitors are free to develop alternative technologies to compete with the patented matter. Competitors may decide to use their own patent positions to barter, i.e. cross-license with the patentee. In some cases the patent holding company may end up being bought by another company.
One can see this happening in the pharmaceutical industry all the time - multiple patented drugs competing to treat the same disease. Sure, its a monopoly in the sense that any one drug is patented. But it seems that there is almost always one way to skin the cat.
Patents in fact encourage the development of multiple alternative technologies because you can't just go and copy the competition.
In that sense, public domain research would actually restore free market forces by allowing companies to freely compete on the best way to deliver the results of the basic research to the consumer.
Sorry, but I have a hard time with the idea that public domain research run by bureaucrats is going to be an effective alternative to our current system.
I think you have answered your own question here - these are not inventions by any reasonable description
The gene itself is not an invention, but testing for it certainly is. And it is this testing that is what is the commercially important aspect of the patent. The side effect of this is publication of some very important R&D.
What are the alternatives?
You neglected to mention public funded and publically owned research, and private endowments to research institutions. I think either of these are better than the illegimate patents.
Elimination of patents and reliance on publically funded R&D for technology development is perhaps THE WORST idea I have ever heard of for dealing with patent issues. This would result in essentially a centrally planned economy, something the we know from past experience is FAR less efficient than a free market economy. The result of this would be an flat out economic disaster.
Perhaps patents on genetic sequences are not legitimate because of the discovery vs. invention issue. But that can and should be fixed by far less radical means than your proposal. And in fact recent patentability guidelines from the USPTO have already put an end to patents on genetic sequences per se.
Sounds like somebody is running out of grant money.
I think with strong patent protections science can't develop well. Same in software development.
Empirical evidence seems to refute your hypothesis. We have had patents since the 18th century, and by far the bulk of scientific progress has occured during over this period of time. Software development has become stronger as patent protections for software have become more widely practiced.
If patent holders do not develop the product, no one can.
Ah, but you see if the product is not at least invented no patent can exist, and if the product is not developed, no profit can be made from owning the patent. The fact of the matter is that it is very common for one company to bring an invention to patentability, and through licensing to another company profit from it's development. In fact that is one of the main mechanisms for commercialization of biotechnology.
What about human beings that are produced as a result of in vitor fertilization? They are "man-made" and not "naturally occuring." By the Supreme Court's definition, these people could be patented.
Patentability has more requirements than just being man-made. They have to show novelty and utility. The invention has to be 'non obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art". Presumably an ordinary test-tube baby would fail those criterea.
Change the standard procedure, and reject all patent applications by default. If the applicant can't make a good enough case as to why the patent should be granted, then the invention isn't worth patenting.
That is the standard proceedure.
And btw, why shouldn't the company that discovered the importance of the BRAC2 gene be rewarded for their work? What are the alternatives?
Two that I can see - either not funding the research becasue there is no way to recover the costs, or keeping the results as a trade secret and building a sealed box to run the test.
Do you think these outcomes are better than a patent that publishes the sequence?
It's GUI is everey bit as intuitive (not that either are particulary so) as PS, and much more modern looking.
Anyone who believes that has not seen Photoshop 7 running on Mac OS X.
Major open-source components? Which?
IBM has contributed some important components to the Apache Jakarta and XML projects. They have also contributed the Eclipse IDE, and considerable code to the Linux kernel effort.
The only thing Moore's Law is driving is the number of transistors per given area. It doesn't drive CPU speed. It doesn't drive hard drive size. It doesn't drive software sales. It doesn't drive your salary or the size of your department.
Sure it does. The number of transistors per cm^2 drives CPU speed (voltage is related to device size via quantum mechanics). The lower the voltage, the lower the power dissipation, the faster the switching time. The more features per unit area, the more sophisticated the instruction processing can be. CPU performance IS *DIRECTLY* a result of feature size.
It doesn't drive hard drive size.
Hard drive capacity per dollar has actually been increasing FASTER than Moore's law.
It doesn't drive your salary or the size of your department.
Not directly perhaps, but it sure drives the number of applications that a computer can be economically used for. This translates directly to demand for software.
Computers are thousands of times more powerful than they were twenty years ago; do we really need more computers than we did back then?
That power, combined with falling costs is what makes computers useful in every increasing numbers of applications.
If computers had the same price/performance they did 20 years ago we would have maybe a million or so in the country rather than the hundreds of millions we now have.
Whatever the future brings, Moore's law is driving the growth of IT.
As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that red light cameras actually INCREASED the number of rear-end accidents by as much as 700+ percent in some areas (just about ALL intersections with cameras showed increases in rear-end accidents)!
That argument seriously impresses me. NOT! The individuals who are doing the rear-ending are probably guilty of speeding, tail-gating, yakking on the cell phone, and no doubt expecting the driver ahead of them to run the red light. Changing the law or it's enforcement to accomadate bad driving habits is not something that is going to improve traffic safety. Those doing the rear-ending should be thrown in the slammer, fined heavily, and lose their driving licenses.
If you start heading into an intersection with a yellow light and "miss the red" by one second or less (as over 75% of all 'violators' do), what, exactly, are you guilty of?
Breaking traffic laws. You probably speeded up too, in your attempt to 'beat the light'. The fact is that the yellow light is there to warn you that you should NOT be entering the intersection.
Did you just make the roads unsafe?
Probably. I have personally seen many accidents where it was apparent that two drivers, one making a left turn were trying to both "beat the light".
Also, a single photograph of your car in mid-intersection with a picture of a red light above it doesn't tell the whole story. The lights make absolutely no distinction of the rest of your driving behavior leading up to the incident.
They are not fining you for the rest of your (bad) driving behaviour, only the part that they have been able to record. No doubt if technology was better they would be going after other bad behaviuors as well.
THe fact is that this country kills 40,000+ people on the road each year. That is approximately equal to the total death toll of the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war triggered tremendous social upheaval, protests and outrage. Yet in comparison to the carnage on our highways, it was a minor event. The hypocracy is mind boggling.
Nah, you're confusing litigation with justice.
Hmmm... the end result looks pretty much like justice to me. Perhaps it took a year, but it seems to me that a year is not that long a time for a civil case to run.
I think that you are being unduly critical here.
Aqua shmaqua.
While the Aqua look is nice, it has and can be duplicated. The fact of the matter is that the real advantage is with the underlying rendering layer. There is no way an X based system is going to be able to present a look and feel of any design, no matter how good that is going to be able to compete with the flat out sophistication of Quartz.