GIMP is not a pro-quality graphics editor. Anyone who has worked with Photoshop professionally will be VERY unhappy if they are told they have to use GIMP.
Getting 300 different systems to support by accident is a fuckup of the greatest magnitude.
The fuckup is to put in place a management structure that is inflexible. Cases where you have a centralized organization managing all desktop systems results in slow responce times to changing business needs, service aimed at the lowest common denominator and high costs because of the insistence on use of certain types of systems because that is all they know or are willing to learn, and users who are frustrated becasue they are not allowed to make use of thier abilities and creativity. I've seen it all -
1. Organizations geared to servicing the accountant, manager and secretary. Fuck the users who actually know something and could be 10x more productive with a non-standard system.
2. Organizations that require 3 years and $5 million to roll out a new application that I could do on Linux/PHP/Mysql in 4 days.
3. 90% failure rate in 're-engineering' projects that have costed tens of millions of dollars.
4. Complete cover-my-ass always buy Microsoft even if it is obvious that there are far better answers.
5. Complete lack of communications with end users - service techs that are under orders not to talk to end users while doing service calls.
6. Outsource everything to third parties who are running mega-service centers aimed at processing customer help requests in 30 sec or less and who cares if the customer is really helped.
This kind of mentality results in users who are not ALLOWED to use any creativity of initiative in using their computers to solve business problems. Companies who shut of their employees in this manner quickly find that their best employees go to work elsewhere.
Building a scalable organization is an interesting problem. As an organization gets larger it beccomes harder and harder to manage. Creating a CTO or CIO runs the danger of creating a turf-dom that the CTO/CIO will feel obliged to defend with idiocy like "Thou shalt only use Winblows 2.1 and Microsoft Powerpoint".
But clearly there has to be some decision making process regarding technology standards associated with shared service like network operations and centralized data needed by accounting etc.
I think the answer is to make technology operations a service organization with a scope restricted to only systems shared amoung business units. After all, in a business organization the purpose of technology is to serve the business.
I think that the key principles are:
1. Push as much decision making down into the organization as possible.
2. Minimize the number of rules.
3. Build cross functional organizational elements that are responsible for the success of a business operation.
A centralized CTO is fine, so long as he can't say "You must buy only Comcrap Presarios which we then preload our special locked down image of OS/2 that everyone has to use".
The drag caused by these is greater than the energy they put out (see the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
All the second law says is that the entropy of a closed system doing irreversible work is increasing. A raft with one of these things hanging in the ocean is NOT a closed system.
Back when I was a grad student (early 70's) one of the students in my department developed a device that we called a collagen engine that worked on the same princlple. Collagen is a natural polymer that contracts is salt water, and expands in fresh water (simply taking advantage in the difference of chemical potential between water in both systems) much like the synthetic polymer described here. With this contraction, and winding the collagen fiber around a couple of tapered spindles it is possible to turn the contraction into mechanical work (which could be used to drive just about anything).
In the middle of the ocean the power source is obviously fresh water, which will gradually become contaminated by salt. When the concentration of salt in the fresh water equals that of ocean water there is no potential energy left that can be converted to kinetic energy, and the machine stops.
This doesnt include all the international terrorist attacks, which could probably be considered a small invasion.
Occaional commando activity, landings on remote, frozen uninhabited (except by artic birds) island territories, shipping raids near the coastline, pirate activity, a rare bombing run or two as part of a sneak attack, and some Islamic fundamentalist farting in the general direction of North America hardly constitute anything approaching a real invasion.
"'Very little is known about the War of 1812, Eric Nicol wrote nearly 30 years ago, "because the Americans lost it."
And if you read the whole story attached to the link rather than engaging in highly selective quoting from the reference to a rather tongue-in-cheek comic book you will see that it refers to books titled variously "The War of 1812: The War that Both Sides Won" and others.
There is in fact NO evidence in your link that points to the preposterous idea that Canada defeated the US in the war of 1812.
And this is untrue for all other countries in the world? When was the last time Britain was invaded or conquered?
Parts of Britain (Ireland) has suffered from serious famines and the near depopulation during this time period. This sparked the mass immigration of Irish to the US.
It's really hard to quantify what 'freedom' means in any objective sense, however I would propose that there are some imporatant measures:
1. Rate of unemployment. How free are you if you cannot tell your boss to "take this job and shove it"? Unemployment rates in most of the rest of the world are double at least what they are in the US. This is both a huge quality of life and personal freedom issue.
2. How free are you to spend the money you earn as you see fit? The US has the lowest overall taxation rates in the western world.
3. If you come up with a new idea, how free are you to try to exploit it? Despite the perception on this forum that the US is dominated by large corporations, the fact is that the US is by far the world leader in the creation of new, small businesses. It is known for a fact that almost all the US employment and economic growth comes from the establishment and growth of such small business.
4. What is the level of opportunity? In the US it is the best in the world. I have many friends who immigrated to the US because of the simple fact that they believe that hard work is rewarded best in America.
There is a REASON that 80% of Nobel prizes are awarded to people working in the US.
5. How does the Constitution shape up? While the US constitution may have a few flaws (the lack explicity guarantee of privacy is perhaps the worst), it is also one of the few constitutions that such strong guarantees of freedom of the press and of freedom of speech.
6. What is the stability of the nation? The US is the oldest Republic in the world. How can you be safer?
7. What is the level of the diversity, and how dynamic is the culture? In many places on earth people from diverse cultures do not get to participate fully in society. While the US may not be without problems in this area, there is a city not too far north of where I live where there are there over 100 languages spoken. The cultural fusion that has gone on in the US over the years denotes a freedom of expression beyond that of any other nation. This result dominates the creative media (music, TV, film) to the extent that many other nations must pass laws to prevent their own culture from being overrun.
8. Social ossification. In much of Europe there is a real stratification in society. This is just not a factor in the US. The US society is much more of a meritocracy - which is why we have a sharecropper's son as our president. What measure of freedom does that imply?
Do you really mean that? What led you to believe that this ever was the case?
I really have trouble grasping this US sense of patriotism.
Over the past 180+ years the US has never been invaded or conquered, the government has been stable, and the standard of living has been consistently very high compared to the rest of the world. We have had waves of immigration from every part of the world by people seeking refuge from tyranny and famine. The US is the oldest true Republic on the face of the earth.
Clearly this would make one believe that it has been consistently a good place to live.
I would be very careful when considering the level of freedoms in other countries.
While the US does in fact have a lot of bad law that does not protect it's citizens properly (and the lack of a right to privacy in our Constitution is a real flaw), we also have a lot of things that work very well compared to other nations.
One example is that our economic system is much less socialistic than many countries. The implication of this is much lower tax rates than other developed countries (isn't having to give a large portion of your income to the government a big loss of freedom?) and a resultingly more robust employment picture. It seems to me that having the freedom to take another job anytime you want is a VERY big deal. Another aspect of this is the US is by far the most entrprenural contry in the world - it is much easier to start your own company here than anywhere else.
Other areas that I think are very important are stronger local vs. federal governments and a real guarantee of freedom of speach and the press - missing in most other western nations.
There are proxy servers (like Junkbuster) that will run on Windows. They will allow you to block cookies very easily (and IMO much more flexibly than Mozilla will allow). Of course then again you could just put Mozilla on W2K:)
Better yet are shell scripts that filter out your cookies after they have been saved to disk. That way you can use a cookie-requiring site, and come back the next day with no tracking info.
You have hit upon one of the key limitations to the advancement of civilizations. Ultimately this is why science fiction writers have speculated on structures like Ringworlds and Dyson spheres - ways to allow for dissipation of immense amounts of waste heat.
Re:I have two reservations about hot fusion resear
on
The Quest For Fusion
·
· Score: 2
and they haven't even reached break-even yet.
Actually that is not correct - several of the protype machines have reached or exceeded break-even. The issues of radioactivity are important, but you have to remember that the induced radioactivity is not as severe a problem by a long shot as that of spent fuel.
Another interesting benefit of this technology is that if there is a failure you can easily turn it off. There is no problem with potential thermal runaway, or accidental critcality events like the one that occurred in Japan this year.
Cost is perhaps the biggest long term issue - but the potential impact of the technology is so great that we are foolish to not be spending more on it.
If you want to talk about the average person, you have to be very careful. The average person is a sustenance farmer in China who has no access to electricity, and does not own a telephone. The biggest things that have affected his life are programs of mass immunization, education in basic health care and sanitation, and better flood and land management practices.
And yes, these have occurred in the past 50 years, not in the time prior to 1950.
It is apparent that some authors consider only those things that they have day to day direct contact with. Any depth of knowledge as to the technological underpinnings of a society seems to have escaped the purview of a modern liberal arts education.
The fact of the matter is that the discoveries of the past 50 well surpass those of the previous 50. Where would modern society be without the laser and the IC? Not to mention the incredible impact the previously unknown field of molecular biology is having on medicine as well as politics. The advances in the field of chemistry have been equally rapid. NMR, GC-MS, polymer science etc. have had a huge impact on modern life.
Not only that, but many of the inventions the cited (automobile, sanitation, lightbulb, etc. were made BEFORE 1900. In some cases CENTURIES before! The ROMANS had indoor pumbing fer crissakes).
Not only that, but it refers to failures in urban planning in the US as evidence of lack of innovation. We, I think if he were to travel on the high speed rail systems of Europe or Japan, he might realize these problems are POLITICAL, not technological.
His argument regarding productivity is nonsense too. Look at the percentage of farm workers in 1950 vs. today. Or the average standard of living. Bullocks I say!
The fact is that this article misses the point completely. Modern technology has surpassed the obvious day of the stinking, belching machine, and moved on to the much more rewarding realm of the molecule. Scientific advances come in the form of fabrics with undreamed of mechanical properties (Aramid etc), drugs that work at an extrodinary level of sophistication, instruments that can image the processes occurring in the body in 3D with molecular discrimination level without using damaging radiation, etc.
HELL, the first world wide satellite television broadcast included the Beatles singing "All you need is Love". Now we bounce signals around the globe without even considering the magic involved.
Of all the articles I have seen posted on/. this has to be the biggest, stinkingest crock of all.
"Web Development with Java Server Pages" by Duane K. Fields, Mark A. Kolb.
This provides a much clearer description of the technology, and some interesting discussion of architecture as well. My only complaint with this is that it does not cover servlets as deeply as it should - so get Core Servlets too.
Ethiopian farmers now have to pay royalties to an american company if they want to sell their coffee on the american market. (It is an american patent, and not valid in Europe)
I'll have to challenge the factual veracity of this - as far as I can tell through performing patent searches there is no such US Patent. Please cite the patent number.
As far as I can see there are only two genetic engineering patents covering Arabica coffee - one a tissue culture method for reproducing clones, and the other a method of introducing new genetic material. Nothing regarding a patent on a gene conferring disease resistance.
Eitherways, people who really love what they do would not do it for money...
This theory is absolute, total nonsense. If you want to encourage creative works, compensation is required.
You cannot obtain the tools necessary for modern research and development without spending considerable sums of money. A good electron microscope may cost a million dollars. Other tools are equally costly. Lab space is not rent free, nor are the test tubes, vacuum ovens or the benches within. The computers required for data analysis, or the electricity requred to run them are likewise not free.
People may well choose a profession based on what they enjoy doing, but the fact is that you need a roof over your head, and food on the table. Savings for retirement, and a college education for your children are nice too. Not to mention being able to pay for medical care.
If I am faced with a choice between a profession that I love that pays nothing, and a profession that I merely like, but will provide well for my children surely I will choose the latter for I love my family very well indeed.
Perhaps you will get some works - those which can be performed by an individual working in his spare time in an unheated cave. But surely you will NOT get the benefits of works that require any significant investment.
Biological information can now be claimed as intellectual property. US courts have ruled that genetic sequences can be patented, even when the sequences are found "in nature," so long as some artificial means are involved in isolating them. This has led companies to race to take out patents on numerous genetic codes. In some cases, patents have been granted covering all transgenic forms of an entire species, such as soybeans or cotton, causing enormous controversy and sometimes reversals on appeal. One consequence is that transnational corporations are patenting genetic materials found in Third World plants and animals, so that some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
that have been freely available to them for centuries.
This article is intellectually corrupt. It is full of factual assertions that do not hold up under any sort of scrutiny. For example the statement "some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
that have been freely available to them for centuries" is absurd on the face of it. The cases where "third world organisms" have become subject of patents have resulted in the sale of IMPROVED versions of the plant materials, not the native forms.
It would seem to me that slashdot's editors have gone over the deep end on this issue by posting this sort of manifesto repeatedly. At the very least we should see some articles allowed that make the case FOR IP.
Again, I don't consider ideas to be flowing freely if I am not allowed to apply them.
Perhaps, but history has shown quite vividly that without patent protection ideas flow much less freely than they do with patent protection. You may feel that you would rather reinvent something than be restricted in the art you might practice, but I can surely tell you that as a practicing scientist and inventor that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before - thus having to reinvent the work of others is a large impediment to the progress of technology, and a huge waste of resources. Many times in my career I have developed products by starting with documentation in the form of expired patents authored by my competitors, or literature that has been published given the freedom of patent protection of the commercial implementation of the work described - documents that would be unavailable under your proposal.
Personally I do not think that the US administers it's patent program at all well - the European system (higher requirements for originality, no software patents, provisions for protest, publication of applications etc.) seems much better to me. But questioning the need for patents at all is MUCH different than complaining about the implementation of the system.
It seeems to me that this is just another reason to go with open source. No need to worry about copy protection if you are using open source - so your data is free from the worries of such systems.
We should stop bellyaching and realize that these sorts of systems will just drive more people to use free (as libre) software.
Slashdot Mirror
GIMP is not a pro-quality graphics editor. Anyone who has worked with Photoshop professionally will be VERY unhappy if they are told they have to use GIMP.
Getting 300 different systems to support by accident is a fuckup of the greatest magnitude.
The fuckup is to put in place a management structure that is inflexible. Cases where you have a centralized organization managing all desktop systems results in slow responce times to changing business needs, service aimed at the lowest common denominator and high costs because of the insistence on use of certain types of systems because that is all they know or are willing to learn, and users who are frustrated becasue they are not allowed to make use of thier abilities and creativity. I've seen it all -
1. Organizations geared to servicing the accountant, manager and secretary. Fuck the users who actually know something and could be 10x more productive with a non-standard system.
2. Organizations that require 3 years and $5 million to roll out a new application that I could do on Linux/PHP/Mysql in 4 days.
3. 90% failure rate in 're-engineering' projects that have costed tens of millions of dollars.
4. Complete cover-my-ass always buy Microsoft even if it is obvious that there are far better answers.
5. Complete lack of communications with end users - service techs that are under orders not to talk to end users while doing service calls.
6. Outsource everything to third parties who are running mega-service centers aimed at processing customer help requests in 30 sec or less and who cares if the customer is really helped.
This kind of mentality results in users who are not ALLOWED to use any creativity of initiative in using their computers to solve business problems. Companies who shut of their employees in this manner quickly find that their best employees go to work elsewhere.
Building a scalable organization is an interesting problem. As an organization gets larger it beccomes harder and harder to manage. Creating a CTO or CIO runs the danger of creating a turf-dom that the CTO/CIO will feel obliged to defend with idiocy like "Thou shalt only use Winblows 2.1 and Microsoft Powerpoint".
But clearly there has to be some decision making process regarding technology standards associated with shared service like network operations and centralized data needed by accounting etc.
I think the answer is to make technology operations a service organization with a scope restricted to only systems shared amoung business units. After all, in a business organization the purpose of technology is to serve the business.
I think that the key principles are:
1. Push as much decision making down into the organization as possible.
2. Minimize the number of rules.
3. Build cross functional organizational elements that are responsible for the success of a business operation.
A centralized CTO is fine, so long as he can't say "You must buy only Comcrap Presarios which we then preload our special locked down image of OS/2 that everyone has to use".
The drag caused by these is greater than the energy they put out (see the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
All the second law says is that the entropy of a closed system doing irreversible work is increasing. A raft with one of these things hanging in the ocean is NOT a closed system.
Back when I was a grad student (early 70's) one of the students in my department developed a device that we called a collagen engine that worked on the same princlple. Collagen is a natural polymer that contracts is salt water, and expands in fresh water (simply taking advantage in the difference of chemical potential between water in both systems) much like the synthetic polymer described here. With this contraction, and winding the collagen fiber around a couple of tapered spindles it is possible to turn the contraction into mechanical work (which could be used to drive just about anything).
In the middle of the ocean the power source is obviously fresh water, which will gradually become contaminated by salt. When the concentration of salt in the fresh water equals that of ocean water there is no potential energy left that can be converted to kinetic energy, and the machine stops.
This doesnt include all the international terrorist attacks, which could probably be considered a small invasion.
Occaional commando activity, landings on remote, frozen uninhabited (except by artic birds) island territories, shipping raids near the coastline, pirate activity, a rare bombing run or two as part of a sneak attack, and some Islamic fundamentalist farting in the general direction of North America hardly constitute anything approaching a real invasion.
"'Very little is known about the War of 1812, Eric Nicol wrote nearly 30 years ago, "because the Americans lost it."
And if you read the whole story attached to the link rather than engaging in highly selective quoting from the reference to a rather tongue-in-cheek comic book you will see that it refers to books titled variously "The War of 1812: The War that Both Sides Won" and others.
There is in fact NO evidence in your link that points to the preposterous idea that Canada defeated the US in the war of 1812.
I'm not saying its not a good place. I was bothered by calling it the "best" place.
What is best may depend considerably on the individual.
Allow me to point out the War of 1812, which America came dangerously close to losing to *drum roll please* Canada.
A. The US was in no danger of being defeated by Cananda.
B. This was more than 180 years ago,
And this is untrue for all other countries in the world? When was the last time Britain was invaded or conquered?
Parts of Britain (Ireland) has suffered from serious famines and the near depopulation during this time period. This sparked the mass immigration of Irish to the US.
It's really hard to quantify what 'freedom' means in any objective sense, however I would propose that there are some imporatant measures:
1. Rate of unemployment. How free are you if you cannot tell your boss to "take this job and shove it"? Unemployment rates in most of the rest of the world are double at least what they are in the US. This is both a huge quality of life and personal freedom issue.
2. How free are you to spend the money you earn as you see fit? The US has the lowest overall taxation rates in the western world.
3. If you come up with a new idea, how free are you to try to exploit it? Despite the perception on this forum that the US is dominated by large corporations, the fact is that the US is by far the world leader in the creation of new, small businesses. It is known for a fact that almost all the US employment and economic growth comes from the establishment and growth of such small business.
4. What is the level of opportunity? In the US it is the best in the world. I have many friends who immigrated to the US because of the simple fact that they believe that hard work is rewarded best in America.
There is a REASON that 80% of Nobel prizes are awarded to people working in the US.
5. How does the Constitution shape up? While the US constitution may have a few flaws (the lack explicity guarantee of privacy is perhaps the worst), it is also one of the few constitutions that such strong guarantees of freedom of the press and of freedom of speech.
6. What is the stability of the nation? The US is the oldest Republic in the world. How can you be safer?
7. What is the level of the diversity, and how dynamic is the culture? In many places on earth people from diverse cultures do not get to participate fully in society. While the US may not be without problems in this area, there is a city not too far north of where I live where there are there over 100 languages spoken. The cultural fusion that has gone on in the US over the years denotes a freedom of expression beyond that of any other nation. This result dominates the creative media (music, TV, film) to the extent that many other nations must pass laws to prevent their own culture from being overrun.
8. Social ossification. In much of Europe there is a real stratification in society. This is just not a factor in the US. The US society is much more of a meritocracy - which is why we have a sharecropper's son as our president. What measure of freedom does that imply?
Do you really mean that? What led you to believe that this ever was the case?
I really have trouble grasping this US sense of patriotism.
Over the past 180+ years the US has never been invaded or conquered, the government has been stable, and the standard of living has been consistently very high compared to the rest of the world. We have had waves of immigration from every part of the world by people seeking refuge from tyranny and famine. The US is the oldest true Republic on the face of the earth.
Clearly this would make one believe that it has been consistently a good place to live.
I would be very careful when considering the level of freedoms in other countries. While the US does in fact have a lot of bad law that does not protect it's citizens properly (and the lack of a right to privacy in our Constitution is a real flaw), we also have a lot of things that work very well compared to other nations. One example is that our economic system is much less socialistic than many countries. The implication of this is much lower tax rates than other developed countries (isn't having to give a large portion of your income to the government a big loss of freedom?) and a resultingly more robust employment picture. It seems to me that having the freedom to take another job anytime you want is a VERY big deal. Another aspect of this is the US is by far the most entrprenural contry in the world - it is much easier to start your own company here than anywhere else. Other areas that I think are very important are stronger local vs. federal governments and a real guarantee of freedom of speach and the press - missing in most other western nations.
There are proxy servers (like Junkbuster) that will run on Windows. They will allow you to block cookies very easily (and IMO much more flexibly than Mozilla will allow). Of course then again you could just put Mozilla on W2K :)
Better yet are shell scripts that filter out your cookies after they have been saved to disk. That way you can use a cookie-requiring site, and come back the next day with no tracking info.
You have hit upon one of the key limitations to the advancement of civilizations. Ultimately this is why science fiction writers have speculated on structures like Ringworlds and Dyson spheres - ways to allow for dissipation of immense amounts of waste heat.
and they haven't even reached break-even yet.
Actually that is not correct - several of the protype machines have reached or exceeded break-even. The issues of radioactivity are important, but you have to remember that the induced radioactivity is not as severe a problem by a long shot as that of spent fuel.
Another interesting benefit of this technology is that if there is a failure you can easily turn it off. There is no problem with potential thermal runaway, or accidental critcality events like the one that occurred in Japan this year.
Cost is perhaps the biggest long term issue - but the potential impact of the technology is so great that we are foolish to not be spending more on it.
This article is about the average person.
If you want to talk about the average person, you have to be very careful. The average person is a sustenance farmer in China who has no access to electricity, and does not own a telephone. The biggest things that have affected his life are programs of mass immunization, education in basic health care and sanitation, and better flood and land management practices.
And yes, these have occurred in the past 50 years, not in the time prior to 1950.
It is apparent that some authors consider only those things that they have day to day direct contact with. Any depth of knowledge as to the technological underpinnings of a society seems to have escaped the purview of a modern liberal arts education.
/. this has to be the biggest, stinkingest crock of all.
The fact of the matter is that the discoveries of the past 50 well surpass those of the previous 50. Where would modern society be without the laser and the IC? Not to mention the incredible impact the previously unknown field of molecular biology is having on medicine as well as politics. The advances in the field of chemistry have been equally rapid. NMR, GC-MS, polymer science etc. have had a huge impact on modern life.
Not only that, but many of the inventions the cited (automobile, sanitation, lightbulb, etc. were made BEFORE 1900. In some cases CENTURIES before! The ROMANS had indoor pumbing fer crissakes).
Not only that, but it refers to failures in urban planning in the US as evidence of lack of innovation. We, I think if he were to travel on the high speed rail systems of Europe or Japan, he might realize these problems are POLITICAL, not technological.
His argument regarding productivity is nonsense too. Look at the percentage of farm workers in 1950 vs. today. Or the average standard of living. Bullocks I say!
The fact is that this article misses the point completely. Modern technology has surpassed the obvious day of the stinking, belching machine, and moved on to the much more rewarding realm of the molecule. Scientific advances come in the form of fabrics with undreamed of mechanical properties (Aramid etc), drugs that work at an extrodinary level of sophistication, instruments that can image the processes occurring in the body in 3D with molecular discrimination level without using damaging radiation, etc.
HELL, the first world wide satellite television broadcast included the Beatles singing "All you need is Love". Now we bounce signals around the globe without even considering the magic involved.
Of all the articles I have seen posted on
If/when this gets implemented how long do you think it will take for some bright lad to circumvent it.
Could be short, or it could take a LOOONNGGG time, depending on the quality of the implementation.
The big deal is that under the DCMA, whoever does the cracking, and distribution of the crack is going to get thier pants sued off.
And imaging processing in publishing and the music and video industries seem to be doing just fine.
I'd guess you have never tried to push a video clip through a Sorensen CODEC.
As an alternative to Core Servlets I'd recommend:
"Web Development with Java Server Pages" by Duane K. Fields, Mark A. Kolb.
This provides a much clearer description of the technology, and some interesting discussion of architecture as well. My only complaint with this is that it does not cover servlets as deeply as it should - so get Core Servlets too.
Ethiopian farmers now have to pay royalties to an american company if they want to sell their coffee on the american market. (It is an american patent, and not valid in Europe)
I'll have to challenge the factual veracity of this - as far as I can tell through performing patent searches there is no such US Patent. Please cite the patent number.
As far as I can see there are only two genetic engineering patents covering Arabica coffee - one a tissue culture method for reproducing clones, and the other a method of introducing new genetic material. Nothing regarding a patent on a gene conferring disease resistance.
Eitherways, people who really love what they do would not do it for money...
This theory is absolute, total nonsense. If you want to encourage creative works, compensation is required.
You cannot obtain the tools necessary for modern research and development without spending considerable sums of money. A good electron microscope may cost a million dollars. Other tools are equally costly. Lab space is not rent free, nor are the test tubes, vacuum ovens or the benches within. The computers required for data analysis, or the electricity requred to run them are likewise not free.
People may well choose a profession based on what they enjoy doing, but the fact is that you need a roof over your head, and food on the table. Savings for retirement, and a college education for your children are nice too. Not to mention being able to pay for medical care.
If I am faced with a choice between a profession that I love that pays nothing, and a profession that I merely like, but will provide well for my children surely I will choose the latter for I love my family very well indeed.
Perhaps you will get some works - those which can be performed by an individual working in his spare time in an unheated cave. But surely you will NOT get the benefits of works that require any significant investment.
Biological information can now be claimed as intellectual property. US courts have ruled that genetic sequences can be patented, even when the sequences are found "in nature," so long as some artificial means are involved in isolating them. This has led companies to race to take out patents on numerous genetic codes. In some cases, patents have been granted covering all transgenic forms of an entire species, such as soybeans or cotton, causing enormous controversy and sometimes reversals on appeal. One consequence is that transnational corporations are patenting genetic materials found in Third World plants and animals, so that some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
that have been freely available to them for centuries.
This article is intellectually corrupt. It is full of factual assertions that do not hold up under any sort of scrutiny. For example the statement "some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
that have been freely available to them for centuries" is absurd on the face of it. The cases where "third world organisms" have become subject of patents have resulted in the sale of IMPROVED versions of the plant materials, not the native forms.
It would seem to me that slashdot's editors have gone over the deep end on this issue by posting this sort of manifesto repeatedly. At the very least we should see some articles allowed that make the case FOR IP.
Again, I don't consider ideas to be flowing freely if I am not allowed to apply them.
Perhaps, but history has shown quite vividly that without patent protection ideas flow much less freely than they do with patent protection. You may feel that you would rather reinvent something than be restricted in the art you might practice, but I can surely tell you that as a practicing scientist and inventor that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before - thus having to reinvent the work of others is a large impediment to the progress of technology, and a huge waste of resources. Many times in my career I have developed products by starting with documentation in the form of expired patents authored by my competitors, or literature that has been published given the freedom of patent protection of the commercial implementation of the work described - documents that would be unavailable under your proposal.
Personally I do not think that the US administers it's patent program at all well - the European system (higher requirements for originality, no software patents, provisions for protest, publication of applications etc.) seems much better to me. But questioning the need for patents at all is MUCH different than complaining about the implementation of the system.
It seeems to me that this is just another reason to go with open source. No need to worry about copy protection if you are using open source - so your data is free from the worries of such systems.
We should stop bellyaching and realize that these sorts of systems will just drive more people to use free (as libre) software.