It's easy to blame MS for all their "security holes", but folks...these have been patched for a while now...
Well, yes a good sysadmin would apply the patches.
However not all the systems affected by Nimda are servers. Nimda also propagates by email, and over Windows shares. Are you expecting users to apply patches at the same level of diligence as a professional sysadmin?
In any case it is clear that Microsoft does bear a significant portion of the responsibility for the quality of their product regardless of the individuals who (mis)use it. And it seems to me that one could make a very good class action suit against Microsoft based on the lost time and bandwidth these worms have cost based on a negligence argument. After all, Microsoft has known about these flaws for months. What have they done to proactively inform their users about the defects in their software? Have they issued a recall? Send messages to their users via email?
As a sysadmin running a Linux site, I have NOT agreed to any shrinkwrap wavier of incedental or consequential damages Microsoft's software has caused me.
Between the Code Red and nimda incedents, my employer is out quite a few billable hours.
It sounds like the FBI is presenting ISPs with subpeonas, and the ISPs are not fighting them in court but are cooperating. Is this wrong in some way? If it were a case where someone had evidence that this was countervaling established precident or I'd be concerned. Buth there seems to be little evidence that there is any abuse at present.
Much more of a concern would be the call by Att. Gen. Ashcroft to rewrite wiretap laws.
IF YOU'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING ILLEGAL THEN YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT!!!
The government is perfectly capable of railroading people into financial ruin, or even the gas chamber given the right circumstances.
Remember Richard Jewel? Or how about all the Japanese that were sent to concentration camps during WWII?
Or all those criminal cases in LA that were thrown out because of falsified evidence by police officers? Or the problems NJ has had with racial profiling? Or the use of the IRS by Nixon to harrass people?
The fact is you had better be DAMN careful about what powers you grant the government.
However the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution places limits on what the government can do. If this measure indeed offers warrantless surveilance, the Supreme Court may well find that it contravenes the Fourth Amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
One of the points oft neglected is that US foreign policy in the Mideast is generally driven by it's need to import vast quantities of oil to feed what an economy that is the most wasteful consumer of energy in the world. Scientific American published an article as few years ago claiming that the real cost of oil in the US is something like $2 a gallon higher than appears at the pump if you factor in the defense costs necessary to maintain a dominant military presence in the Middle East.
Well, add to that the costs in human life and property lost to terrorism - in NY, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Africa.
Until we gat a sane energy policy that includes realization of the political, economic and environmental costs associated with the seemingly insane need for everyone to have gigantic SUV's in their driveway, we will continue to pay, and pay very dearly for our insane, unsustainable economic structure.
Agreed. If you want a quality product the best thing to do if get rid of your QA department and put the resources into building it right. All QA can do is tell you what the quality level of the product is, and any of the programmers who worked on the product already knows what the quality is.
One of the best ways to approach this is to point out cases where poor quality has hurt the bottom line - time spent on fixes, lost productivity tracking down bugs, etc. to your boss. There have been a number of approaches to the issue of quality management as a means of reducing costs. Research that aspect and use it.
With the spread of easy-to-install Linux systems, people with relatively little technical knowledge have installed Linux. These people are the ones most likely to fall for the trojan.
It is easy for a newbie to install Linux. Using a Linux box as your email client requires about 20x times more savvy.
Not to mention this virus requires active participation to spread, while Code Red did not.
There have been any number of studies on adult stem cells. They have shown:
1. Adult stem cells generally have some sort of genetic damage.
2. Not all tissue types contain isolatable adult stem cells.
3. The quantities available are minute compared to embryonic stem cells.
4. Adult stem cells are much shorter lived.
5. Adult stem cells are not pluripotent. Only embryonic stem cells can make all tissue types.
It has nothing to do with publicity or air time. Adult stem cells just do not have the same potential, which is why you don't see anyone proposing or funding research in that area.
There are two basic types of margins, gross margin and profit margin. Gross margin is the difference between selling price and manufacturing cost. Out of that must come sales, R&D, advertising, admonistration, etc. etc.. When all of that is done you have profit. Any company must have a gross margin in the 40% to 50% range to survive - normally a 50% gross margin gives you a 5-10% profit margin, which is where most companies operate.
Microsoft has a 40% PROFIT margin. Not even drug dealers get this. Microsoft's gross margin is in the 80-90% range.
This is the kind of comment that could only be made by a narrow-minded engineer who lacks any appreciation of the state of modern biology. The naivete expressed here is rather appalling.
It seems to me that the biologists have been the narrow minded ones. After all, wasn't it Wohler's urea synthesis that disproved the biologist's claims that organic compounds could only be produced by living organisms? Why isn't the synthetic production of self-assembled structures (wet nanotech) a modern analog to Wohler's synthesis?
But biology uses a very limited set of chemical elements (mainly C, H, O, N)
Bulk biology uses a limited set of chemical elements. However the most interesting bits, the enzymes use a far more diverse set of elements including iron, nickel, copper, phosphorus, zinc, and so on at their active center. Most metals have significant biological activity as well. If they didn't things like lead, arsenic and cadmium would be innocuous rather than poisons.
Nanomachines as scaled down miniatures of human scale machines is clearly very unlikely to materialize, for exactly the same scaling reasons that prevent us from having human size single cell organisms. Fundamental relationships between mass, surface area and linear dimensions are inescapable. These relationships govern the nature of physical structures of all sizes. Clearly at nanoscale the balance has shifted from a dominance of bulk properties to surface properties that are primarily chemical in nature. Anyone trying to translate an instrumentaility to nanoscale from human scale will fail miserably if they fail to account for the basic physics of scale.
Innovative nanomachines that make use of atomic scale forces are another thing altogether. As Whitesides correctly points out, this is the realm of chemistry and biology, not the mechanics of bulk materials.
I always thought that for something to be patented it had to be non obvious, and the product of creative thought.
Non-obvious, yes. More precisely unobvious to one with ordinary skill in the art.
Product of creative thought? No. Aside from the difficulty of coming up with a definition of something so metaphysical as 'creative thought', (an who can say this computer was not in fact engaging in such) there is specific language in the patent statutes that says the method of coming up with the patent is not to be considered when judging if the material is patentable. In other words, it's the result that counts, not how you got there. Sensibly pragmatic IMHO.
I think you have an interesting, but perhaps flawed proposal. I've got some comments on your arguments...
Patent holders can wait for competing markets to mature and then sell their patent (and subsequently their tax break) to the highest bidder for a much higher price than they could under the current system (only speculation as to possible profits is available now.)
I don't see this being universally or even reliably true. Under the current system the patent is potentially worth all the profit that can be generated in the context of a monopoly. This has to be MUCH higher than the potential for a tax break on the profits in a competitive environment. This loss of incentive will reduce R&D funding for commercial research, a very bad thing. In the case of foreign companies importing goods into the US, the value of a tax break in the US may in fact be zero.In fact many large companies already pay zero taxes for a variety of reasons.
People/companies could register patents without grinding research to a halt.
I'm not really sure what you are driving at here. Current patent law already includes an exemption for the use of patented technology in R&D.
Most IP lawyers won't oppose it since they get to keep their jobs.
Bodies of existing law will only need small adjustment. The method for registering, transferring, etc. can stay the same. Only the reward will change.
I don't see either of these as compelling arguments. We already have too many lawyers, and many think the existing patent system needs major overhaul.
Companies won't necessarily oppose it because their patents retain value, perhaps even more if it is a good and useful patent.
Depends on the company. You can bet the Pharmaceuticals will oppose it.
Congress will be very motivated to fix the patent office because not doing so is like throwing money out the window. Desire for tax breaks in the market will insure that.
Tax breaks reduce revenues to the government. That will clearly act to discourage Congress from passing this.
Patented technologies can be used as they were never intended perhaps accumulating far more market power/usefulness than if it was tied up in a monopoly
I think you have a misunderstanding of what a patent protects. A patent protects the application of a specific technology to solve a particular problem. Nothing in a patent rights grant prevents you from applying the same technology to a different problem and getting a patent on that new application.
Ordinary people are scared by companies patenting genes (as am I) and recognize the need for reform.
Perhaps, but this has nothing to do with your proposal that a patent should confer a tax credit rather than a monopoly. Whether genes are patentable is a separate policy question.
And most importantly it's simple to explain. Joe Sixpack gets it (I know him, I asked.)
Being simple to explain doesn't make it right. There are many complex, sophisticated ideas (i.e. relativistic mechanics) that replaced simplistic ideas (i.e. Geocentric Solar System) because they were right. Explainability to Joe is in fact probably a reason to mistrust an idea.
In this kind of system there would as many companies making the product as the market would support. An inventer could, (and should) wait to sell the rights until the market is nearly mature. That represents the bigest tax break for a company that sells the invented/derived product.
Another problem with your idea is that the inventor would only be able to sell the patent to one company. Under current law he can license it to as many people as he wants - his choice, his freedom to maximize his return. Your proposal to delay selling the patent is also a problem, because companies would be faced with a great deal of uncertainty as to whether they should exploit a given patent knowing that their competitor may end up with a tax break that gives him a competitve edge. The result is delayed commercialization of new ideas, and potentially delayed work on improving the new ideas.
When the companies can save a billion in tax breaks their offers should be a little more fair;)
And if the company is based in Japan, or pays very little taxes already an incentive that will reduce US taxes is worth very little.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to blame MS for all their "security holes", but folks...these have been patched for a while now...
Well, yes a good sysadmin would apply the patches.
However not all the systems affected by Nimda are servers. Nimda also propagates by email, and over Windows shares. Are you expecting users to apply patches at the same level of diligence as a professional sysadmin?
In any case it is clear that Microsoft does bear a significant portion of the responsibility for the quality of their product regardless of the individuals who (mis)use it. And it seems to me that one could make a very good class action suit against Microsoft based on the lost time and bandwidth these worms have cost based on a negligence argument. After all, Microsoft has known about these flaws for months. What have they done to proactively inform their users about the defects in their software? Have they issued a recall? Send messages to their users via email?
As a sysadmin running a Linux site, I have NOT agreed to any shrinkwrap wavier of incedental or consequential damages Microsoft's software has caused me.
Between the Code Red and nimda incedents, my employer is out quite a few billable hours.
most of them think they're so damn important that the government will want to spy on them.
The FBI kept files on many completely innocent citizens during the '60s just because they went out in public to protest the Vietnam War.
Including me.
It sounds like the FBI is presenting ISPs with subpeonas, and the ISPs are not fighting them in court but are cooperating. Is this wrong in some way? If it were a case where someone had evidence that this was countervaling established precident or I'd be concerned. Buth there seems to be little evidence that there is any abuse at present.
Much more of a concern would be the call by Att. Gen. Ashcroft to rewrite wiretap laws.
IF YOU'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING ILLEGAL THEN YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT!!!
The government is perfectly capable of railroading people into financial ruin, or even the gas chamber given the right circumstances.
Remember Richard Jewel? Or how about all the Japanese that were sent to concentration camps during WWII?
Or all those criminal cases in LA that were thrown out because of falsified evidence by police officers? Or the problems NJ has had with racial profiling? Or the use of the IRS by Nixon to harrass people?
The fact is you had better be DAMN careful about what powers you grant the government.
However the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution places limits on what the government can do. If this measure indeed offers warrantless surveilance, the Supreme Court may well find that it contravenes the Fourth Amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Give me a break. The CIA and FBI have been tracing mail for decades, at least.
During the 60's I used to get mail from relatives abroad that was open and then reclosed with tape for crying out loud.
These days with modern forensics it's trivial.
One of the points oft neglected is that US foreign policy in the Mideast is generally driven by it's need to import vast quantities of oil to feed what an economy that is the most wasteful consumer of energy in the world. Scientific American published an article as few years ago claiming that the real cost of oil in the US is something like $2 a gallon higher than appears at the pump if you factor in the defense costs necessary to maintain a dominant military presence in the Middle East.
Well, add to that the costs in human life and property lost to terrorism - in NY, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Africa.
Until we gat a sane energy policy that includes realization of the political, economic and environmental costs associated with the seemingly insane need for everyone to have gigantic SUV's in their driveway, we will continue to pay, and pay very dearly for our insane, unsustainable economic structure.
shortly after declaration of war against the US.
The Japanese declaration of war was not delivered until after the attack started.
In the case of today's events most of the likely culprits have already publicly declared war on the US.
Agreed. If you want a quality product the best thing to do if get rid of your QA department and put the resources into building it right. All QA can do is tell you what the quality level of the product is, and any of the programmers who worked on the product already knows what the quality is.
One of the best ways to approach this is to point out cases where poor quality has hurt the bottom line - time spent on fixes, lost productivity tracking down bugs, etc. to your boss. There have been a number of approaches to the issue of quality management as a means of reducing costs. Research that aspect and use it.
With the spread of easy-to-install Linux systems, people with relatively little technical knowledge have installed Linux. These people are the ones most likely to fall for the trojan.
It is easy for a newbie to install Linux. Using a Linux box as your email client requires about 20x times more savvy.
Not to mention this virus requires active participation to spread, while Code Red did not.
This is not a threat.
There have been any number of studies on adult stem cells. They have shown:
1. Adult stem cells generally have some sort of genetic damage.
2. Not all tissue types contain isolatable adult stem cells.
3. The quantities available are minute compared to embryonic stem cells.
4. Adult stem cells are much shorter lived.
5. Adult stem cells are not pluripotent. Only embryonic stem cells can make all tissue types.
It has nothing to do with publicity or air time. Adult stem cells just do not have the same potential, which is why you don't see anyone proposing or funding research in that area.
both sides seem to be deliberately ignoring the the fact that human embryos are not the only source of human stem cells.
Not. It is quite clear from research to date that embyonic stem cells are the most useful type.
I agree. Hawking is a great physicist. That does not make him an expert on AI or anything else outside his field.
There are in fact many people far better suited to talk about this issue.
There are two basic types of margins, gross margin and profit margin. Gross margin is the difference between selling price and manufacturing cost. Out of that must come sales, R&D, advertising, admonistration, etc. etc.. When all of that is done you have profit. Any company must have a gross margin in the 40% to 50% range to survive - normally a 50% gross margin gives you a 5-10% profit margin, which is where most companies operate.
Microsoft has a 40% PROFIT margin. Not even drug dealers get this. Microsoft's gross margin is in the 80-90% range.
Planets are in orbits set by Bode's Law. If it's not in such an orbit, it is not a planet.
Baloney. Bode's Law is has no theoretical justification, and fails to predict the existance of Neptune.
This is the kind of comment that could only be made by a narrow-minded engineer who lacks any appreciation of the state of modern biology. The naivete expressed here is rather appalling.
It seems to me that the biologists have been the narrow minded ones. After all, wasn't it Wohler's urea synthesis that disproved the biologist's claims that organic compounds could only be produced by living organisms? Why isn't the synthetic production of self-assembled structures (wet nanotech) a modern analog to Wohler's synthesis?
But biology uses a very limited set of chemical elements (mainly C, H, O, N)
Bulk biology uses a limited set of chemical elements. However the most interesting bits, the enzymes use a far more diverse set of elements including iron, nickel, copper, phosphorus, zinc, and so on at their active center. Most metals have significant biological activity as well. If they didn't things like lead, arsenic and cadmium would be innocuous rather than poisons.
Nanomachines as scaled down miniatures of human scale machines is clearly very unlikely to materialize, for exactly the same scaling reasons that prevent us from having human size single cell organisms. Fundamental relationships between mass, surface area and linear dimensions are inescapable. These relationships govern the nature of physical structures of all sizes. Clearly at nanoscale the balance has shifted from a dominance of bulk properties to surface properties that are primarily chemical in nature. Anyone trying to translate an instrumentaility to nanoscale from human scale will fail miserably if they fail to account for the basic physics of scale.
Innovative nanomachines that make use of atomic scale forces are another thing altogether. As Whitesides correctly points out, this is the realm of chemistry and biology, not the mechanics of bulk materials.
I always thought that for something to be patented it had to be non obvious, and the product of creative thought.
Non-obvious, yes. More precisely unobvious to one with ordinary skill in the art.
Product of creative thought? No. Aside from the difficulty of coming up with a definition of something so metaphysical as 'creative thought', (an who can say this computer was not in fact engaging in such) there is specific language in the patent statutes that says the method of coming up with the patent is not to be considered when judging if the material is patentable. In other words, it's the result that counts, not how you got there. Sensibly pragmatic IMHO.
And the MacOS doesn't have native mousewheel support, which makes FPS games blow!
MacOS X has native support for mousewheels, and up to 99 mouse buttons.
Must be a really slow news day.
What next? Big endian vs. little endian? Vi vs. Emacs?
Doctrine of Equivalents
StarOffice. It supports all MS-Office formats, it's free and aviable on most platforms (including Windows.)
I tried that. It doesn't reliebly open all MS-Documents,
I think you have an interesting, but perhaps flawed proposal. I've got some comments on your arguments...
;)
Patent holders can wait for competing markets to mature and then sell their patent (and subsequently their tax break) to the highest bidder for a much higher price than they could under the current system (only speculation as to possible profits is available now.)
I don't see this being universally or even reliably true. Under the current system the patent is potentially worth all the profit that can be generated in the context of a monopoly. This has to be MUCH higher than the potential for a tax break on the profits in a competitive environment. This loss of incentive will reduce R&D funding for commercial research, a very bad thing. In the case of foreign companies importing goods into the US, the value of a tax break in the US may in fact be zero.In fact many large companies already pay zero taxes for a variety of reasons.
People/companies could register patents without grinding research to a halt.
I'm not really sure what you are driving at here. Current patent law already includes an exemption for the use of patented technology in R&D.
Most IP lawyers won't oppose it since they get to keep their jobs.
Bodies of existing law will only need small adjustment. The method for registering, transferring, etc. can stay the same. Only the reward will change.
I don't see either of these as compelling arguments. We already have too many lawyers, and many think the existing patent system needs major overhaul.
Companies won't necessarily oppose it because their patents retain value, perhaps even more if it is a good and useful patent.
Depends on the company. You can bet the Pharmaceuticals will oppose it.
Congress will be very motivated to fix the patent office because not doing so is like throwing money out the window. Desire for tax breaks in the market will insure that.
Tax breaks reduce revenues to the government. That will clearly act to discourage Congress from passing this.
Patented technologies can be used as they were never intended perhaps accumulating far more market power/usefulness than if it was tied up in a monopoly
I think you have a misunderstanding of what a patent protects. A patent protects the application of a specific technology to solve a particular problem. Nothing in a patent rights grant prevents you from applying the same technology to a different problem and getting a patent on that new application.
Ordinary people are scared by companies patenting genes (as am I) and recognize the need for reform.
Perhaps, but this has nothing to do with your proposal that a patent should confer a tax credit rather than a monopoly. Whether genes are patentable is a separate policy question.
And most importantly it's simple to explain. Joe Sixpack gets it (I know him, I asked.)
Being simple to explain doesn't make it right. There are many complex, sophisticated ideas (i.e. relativistic mechanics) that replaced simplistic ideas (i.e. Geocentric Solar System) because they were right. Explainability to Joe is in fact probably a reason to mistrust an idea.
In this kind of system there would as many companies making the product as the market would support. An inventer could, (and should) wait to sell the rights until the market is nearly mature. That represents the bigest tax break for a company that sells the invented/derived product.
Another problem with your idea is that the inventor would only be able to sell the patent to one company. Under current law he can license it to as many people as he wants - his choice, his freedom to maximize his return. Your proposal to delay selling the patent is also a problem, because companies would be faced with a great deal of uncertainty as to whether they should exploit a given patent knowing that their competitor may end up with a tax break that gives him a competitve edge. The result is delayed commercialization of new ideas, and potentially delayed work on improving the new ideas.
When the companies can save a billion in tax breaks their offers should be a little more fair
And if the company is based in Japan, or pays very little taxes already an incentive that will reduce US taxes is worth very little.