While it is true that a patent involves disclosure, the fact remains that the information that has been patented is locked down, only to be used by the "owner" and those licensed.
It's a bargin considering the alternative which was widely practiced before the development of the patent - no publication, non-disclosure contracts and licenses forbidding any public use.
The truth of the matter is that a good IP legal system actually promotes the free flow of information by insuring that those who create it can disclose their ideas and work without losing it.
Weakness in IP laws is not a threat to the free flow of information at all. Stronger IP laws would be a threat to the free flow of information since, after all, at the heart of the very notion of "intellectual property" lies implied limitations in transmission and reproduction of information. Intellectual property is the antithesis of the free flow of information IMHO.
In the case of patents this is clearly not true. In order to be granted a patent the inventor MUST disclose an invention by filing a description of it with the Patent Office which then makes it available publically via a number of means. The very concept of a patent is a contract between the government and inventor in which the exchange is full disclosure of the invention in exchange for a limited time monopoly on the practice of the invention. The alternative is the trade secret where the inventor keeps the invention secret as long as he can.
In the case of copyrights the situation is somewhat different. A copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. So Einstien can write an article explaining relativity which is copyrighted - this prevents someone from copying the article, but NOT from disseminating the idea of relativity. The basic reason for copyrights dates back to problems authors had in getting paid for their work - most authors don't own printing presses - and without copyrights there is no incentive for a publisher to pay an author one cent.
The problem with weak IP laws is that without legal protection authors and inventors have to resort to other means to ensure that they get paid for their work. In the case of inventors it means keeping their inventions secret through licenses and other contracts, and not disclosing anything in publications. This is the reason that patents were instituted in the first place. Patents are a major factor in opening up the free flow of technical information.
In the case of copyrights were are clearly seeing the effects of the digital age - the failure to have enforceable copyright laws is pushing authors and publishers to use technological methods to limit copying of their work. This unfortunately will have negative effects on the use of copyrighted materials by legitimate owners.
Read the constitution. Not a word about any concept related to "Intellectual Property". It's not a constitutional principle.
Wrong.
US Constitution Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Both LaTeX and HTML suffer from the fact that they are evolving standards. You would have to also pick a version, and face the fact there might come a day when there is a loss of backwards compatability.
I think the best idea is something that is extra simple, and unlikely to change in the future; that is ASCII.
even if R&D is kept more secret, there are enough people out there and enough open research, that useful things would most likely be invented
The problem with that theory is that patent law was developed explicitly to solve problems in 18th century England caused by companies keeping the results of their work secret. We have already seen the problems, and cured them. No reason to go back down that road.
I think that those folks who advocate the elimination of intellectual property rights should think carefully about the results.
A lot of the impetus behind copy protection of this sort is due to the problems that companies are having with out and out piracy on the internet and in countries that do not do anything to enforce IP rights. When the legal systems fail to protect IP, companies are forced to take other measures to protect their businesses.
The unfortunate side effect is the demise of 'fair-use' in the sense of home copying and viewing.
I know that this may not be a popular view on slashdot, but if you were a creative content author, I think you might have a rather different opinion.
This sort of action (and keeping technologies secret) are in fact are a large part of why the Constitution has support for IP laws written into it. The fact that these IP laws are not sufficient to protect IP authors in this day and age is a very real threat to the free flow of information and the economic incentives to create content.
And the basic reasearch that this applied research was based upon was most likely funded by grants from the NSF, NIH or any of several other TLAs in the US government.
Basic research in no way gives you a drug that can be admistered to the general population with any degree of assurance of safety or effectiveness. All it does is increase the knowledge of the mechanisms in place. Commercialization of that knowledge to the point where you can take it in the form of a pill is a 10-15 years long process that may well cost a BILLION dollars. No private organization would undertake this effort without assurance of being able to recoup their investment.
The work of the NIH is of course crucial to the process, because it provides the seed. However it is not sufficient. If you look at the real numbers the percentage of the funds that the NIH contributes to the overall process of developing a new drug is no more than 1%.
It sounds to me like this poor kid is getting a totally one-dimensional education.
I think it's silly to be teaching a 9-year old, prodigy or not, stuff like Java or any other applied technology, no matter how bright. These topics are transient, and will have little value 10 years from now. Teach him art,languages, literature, mathematics, history, economics and the sciences (at of course a level appropriate to his talents). Don't worry about the applied topics - he will choose those when he decides what he wants to do. Your job is to give him a solid foundation to generalize from.
I've seen a lot of mention of the use of headphones as a way of combating distracting noise with music.
The problem with this, as outlined in Peopleware is that music engages the creative centers of the brain, resulting in work that is measurably less creative than if the work was conducted in a quiet environment.
My feeling with war rooms is that it is likely they work for short term projects where the quality and creativity of the result is not that important. Otherwise they are inappropriate.
This tension between academic and commercial R&D is not new; any scientist doing work for a corporation is going to run into the issue that his work is owned be an organization with a profit motive, and that he does not have the right to freely publish his work.
Even the concept of free publication by academics is disapearing - universities now want to review all publications for potential patentability - some schools now garner very considerable income from licensing ideas developed as part of academic research.
Patents were developed to encourage publishing - they allow disclosure and at the same time protect the commercial rights of the publisher. However patents are not scientific literature.
What Science is doing is very interesting - they are recognizing that the value of publication of some works outweighs the issues of mere procedural restrictions on the location of a database. How this will work out is very interesting, not only because of its impact on this particular field, but also for the whole corporate-academic dynamic.
What is so new or surprising about this? Mac owners have been hacking the Mac user interface since the day it came out. Many of the features on the classical Mac user interface started out as user hacks (clocks, hierarchal menus, etc). The fact that users are hacking at Mac OS X is the best news I could imagine - the big fear in the Mac community was that the interface would be 'unhackable' so that the creative energy of the Mac community would be locked out.
Thankfully this is not so, and as a result I expect to see some really cool additional features added to Aqua by Apple that start out as user hacks.
While I am a big fan of LaTeX, and have used it for some very large projects, I think that the author of this proposal has missed the important difference between LaTeX and HTML. HTML is a page level tool, while LaTeX is a document level tool. It is devlish to try to control layout of an individual page in LaTeX, but fairly easy in HTML.
The problem with HTML is that it is too blunt a tool for many tastes, and as a result people would like a method that gives finer control. That method exists, and is called Postscript. In my opinion the web should go the route of Postscript and PDF....
Well, Arno Pendias (Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of cosmic background radiation) is a HELL of a lot bigger name than any of the computer folks, and he still works part time at Bell Labs.
It appears to me that the reason that she left is that she thought she was ready, and she found an employer that agreed. When you didn't agree, she had no choice but to leave. I don't know anybody who would stay under these circumstances.
I expect she'll ultimately do very well there because she's a fast learner
So you are saying that she could do the job after a break-in period? Maybe she really was ready for the new challenge.
The bottom line for us out of this affair was that our company will still pay for education, but we have now added a 1-year requirement
So now you will find that far fewer of your employees will consider taking additional training. Is that what you really want?
We do this hoping that we can use the skills the employee gains to benefit the company.
That's fine as far as it goes. But you are structuring this to be completely one-sided for the company's benefit. People do things out of their own self-interest, and if you don't offer a carrot to the employee too you aren't going to benefit from training programs.
I can't seen how requiring a 1-year contract for training is going to be a long-run winner for a company. Perhaps the company can tie down the newly skilled employee at their current pay, but the employee is sure going to resent this arrangement, and fly the coop as soon as the contract is up, or perhaps bite the bullet and leave even sooner. Then the company is going to be back in the same boat all over again. In addition there are going to be employees that just flat refuse to sign the contract - and these folks will not get the training the company needs to be competitive.
The only way that is going to work is if the company bites the bullet and pays a fair price for the new skills.
zebra muscles in the Great Lakes, introduced to prey upon some 'bad guy' or other, and now taking over the niche of native clams and muscles
Zebra mussels are an accidental import, coming over attached to ship bottoms.
In any case, none of your examples have anything to do with the food chain.
Given that the problem of malnutrition is not the result of a lack of resources in the world, but of a flawed distrobution system
Commonly held, but erroneous. It takes resources to move food, resources that sustenance economies do not posses.
rather than inventing one more expensive, monopoly-controlled food source and peddling it to the world's poorest countries
Sigh. Did you even read the article? Golden rice is not more expensive, and the plan is to provide free to third world farmers.
Re:Moderate this up! (was -- Re:Netfuture issue #1
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 2
I'd say moderate this one down. It is the WORST sort of analysis - first it tries to label something perjoratively i.e. 'Frankenfoods' and then tries to apply an analysis that is irrelevant i.e. malnourishment occurs in contries with agricultural surpluses - with the small missing fact that this material is not addressing a caloric malnourishment issue, but rather a dietary deficiency.
It's time we start to read such articles critcally, and think carefully about how and what they say, even if we have political misgivings about the other side. It does no good to put forth specious arguments.
Re:Harmless and beneficial? Maybe not!
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 2
Even 20 years ago, the thought that nature would come up with resistances to almost all our antibiotics was regarded as almost unthinkable, yet here we are with strains of TB, malaria and E.Coli with just one or even no antibiotics which are effective against them.
Well, you are right in part regarding acquired immunity to antibiotics, however there are some problems with your details. Malaria is a parasite that has never been effectively treatable with antibiotics. Some strains of E-Coli are actually beneficial as anyone who has been dosed by tetracycline will attest.
My caveats against Golden rice, are that whilst it will be almost certainly effective in the short term, it will add several million people to the hungry nations of the world and 10 years or so later we will have to come up with something new.
Golden rice is addressing a fundamental dietary need that is not going to go away. Perhaps it will result in an increse in population, however that is yet to be proven. In many poor countries large families are a response to high infant mortality rates. When a country achieves better economic conditions, family size tends to decline.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is true that a patent involves disclosure, the fact remains that the information that has been patented is locked down, only to be used by the "owner" and those licensed.
It's a bargin considering the alternative which was widely practiced before the development of the patent - no publication, non-disclosure contracts and licenses forbidding any public use.
The truth of the matter is that a good IP legal system actually promotes the free flow of information by insuring that those who create it can disclose their ideas and work without losing it.
The radio stations around here have been saying that CTHD is subtitled. Is this true?
Yeah, a sop to those who don't speak Mandarin.
Weakness in IP laws is not a threat to the free flow of information at all. Stronger IP laws would be a threat to the free flow of information since, after all, at the heart of the very notion of "intellectual property" lies implied limitations in transmission and reproduction of information. Intellectual property is the antithesis of the free flow of information IMHO.
In the case of patents this is clearly not true. In order to be granted a patent the inventor MUST disclose an invention by filing a description of it with the Patent Office which then makes it available publically via a number of means. The very concept of a patent is a contract between the government and inventor in which the exchange is full disclosure of the invention in exchange for a limited time monopoly on the practice of the invention. The alternative is the trade secret where the inventor keeps the invention secret as long as he can.
In the case of copyrights the situation is somewhat different. A copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. So Einstien can write an article explaining relativity which is copyrighted - this prevents someone from copying the article, but NOT from disseminating the idea of relativity. The basic reason for copyrights dates back to problems authors had in getting paid for their work - most authors don't own printing presses - and without copyrights there is no incentive for a publisher to pay an author one cent.
The problem with weak IP laws is that without legal protection authors and inventors have to resort to other means to ensure that they get paid for their work. In the case of inventors it means keeping their inventions secret through licenses and other contracts, and not disclosing anything in publications. This is the reason that patents were instituted in the first place. Patents are a major factor in opening up the free flow of technical information.
In the case of copyrights were are clearly seeing the effects of the digital age - the failure to have enforceable copyright laws is pushing authors and publishers to use technological methods to limit copying of their work. This unfortunately will have negative effects on the use of copyrighted materials by legitimate owners.
Read the constitution. Not a word about any concept related to "Intellectual Property". It's not a constitutional principle.
Wrong.
US Constitution Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Both LaTeX and HTML suffer from the fact that they are evolving standards. You would have to also pick a version, and face the fact there might come a day when there is a loss of backwards compatability.
I think the best idea is something that is extra simple, and unlikely to change in the future; that is ASCII.
I suspect cable is cheaper here; i pay $26.90 (in american dollars) / month.
It's about the same here - I pay $29/mo.
even if R&D is kept more secret, there are enough people out there and enough open research, that useful things would most likely be invented
The problem with that theory is that patent law was developed explicitly to solve problems in 18th century England caused by companies keeping the results of their work secret. We have already seen the problems, and cured them. No reason to go back down that road.
I think that those folks who advocate the elimination of intellectual property rights should think carefully about the results.
A lot of the impetus behind copy protection of this sort is due to the problems that companies are having with out and out piracy on the internet and in countries that do not do anything to enforce IP rights. When the legal systems fail to protect IP, companies are forced to take other measures to protect their businesses.
The unfortunate side effect is the demise of 'fair-use' in the sense of home copying and viewing.
I know that this may not be a popular view on slashdot, but if you were a creative content author, I think you might have a rather different opinion.
This sort of action (and keeping technologies secret) are in fact are a large part of why the Constitution has support for IP laws written into it. The fact that these IP laws are not sufficient to protect IP authors in this day and age is a very real threat to the free flow of information and the economic incentives to create content.
And the basic reasearch that this applied research was based upon was most likely funded by grants from the NSF, NIH or any of several other TLAs in the US government.
Basic research in no way gives you a drug that can be admistered to the general population with any degree of assurance of safety or effectiveness. All it does is increase the knowledge of the mechanisms in place. Commercialization of that knowledge to the point where you can take it in the form of a pill is a 10-15 years long process that may well cost a BILLION dollars. No private organization would undertake this effort without assurance of being able to recoup their investment.
The work of the NIH is of course crucial to the process, because it provides the seed. However it is not sufficient. If you look at the real numbers the percentage of the funds that the NIH contributes to the overall process of developing a new drug is no more than 1%.
imagine if the patent office declared all currently registered patents to expire as of right now.
That would bring an immediate end to almost all corporate funding of research and development. No new drugs, forget about Moore's Law, etc.
Well, yes except I don't know why we need XML as an intermediate.
It sounds to me like this poor kid is getting a totally one-dimensional education.
I think it's silly to be teaching a 9-year old, prodigy or not, stuff like Java or any other applied technology, no matter how bright. These topics are transient, and will have little value 10 years from now. Teach him art,languages, literature, mathematics, history, economics and the sciences (at of course a level appropriate to his talents). Don't worry about the applied topics - he will choose those when he decides what he wants to do. Your job is to give him a solid foundation to generalize from.
I've seen a lot of mention of the use of headphones as a way of combating distracting noise with music.
The problem with this, as outlined in Peopleware is that music engages the creative centers of the brain, resulting in work that is measurably less creative than if the work was conducted in a quiet environment.
My feeling with war rooms is that it is likely they work for short term projects where the quality and creativity of the result is not that important. Otherwise they are inappropriate.
and go see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
This tension between academic and commercial R&D is not new; any scientist doing work for a corporation is going to run into the issue that his work is owned be an organization with a profit motive, and that he does not have the right to freely publish his work.
Even the concept of free publication by academics is disapearing - universities now want to review all publications for potential patentability - some schools now garner very considerable income from licensing ideas developed as part of academic research.
Patents were developed to encourage publishing - they allow disclosure and at the same time protect the commercial rights of the publisher. However patents are not scientific literature.
What Science is doing is very interesting - they are recognizing that the value of publication of some works outweighs the issues of mere procedural restrictions on the location of a database. How this will work out is very interesting, not only because of its impact on this particular field, but also for the whole corporate-academic dynamic.
And these people are scientists...
And obviously you are not. DNA sequence lengths are measured in base pair. A megabase is a segment that is 10^6 base pairs in length.
What is so new or surprising about this? Mac owners have been hacking the Mac user interface since the day it came out. Many of the features on the classical Mac user interface started out as user hacks (clocks, hierarchal menus, etc). The fact that users are hacking at Mac OS X is the best news I could imagine - the big fear in the Mac community was that the interface would be 'unhackable' so that the creative energy of the Mac community would be locked out.
Thankfully this is not so, and as a result I expect to see some really cool additional features added to Aqua by Apple that start out as user hacks.
While I am a big fan of LaTeX, and have used it for some very large projects, I think that the author of this proposal has missed the important difference between LaTeX and HTML. HTML is a page level tool, while LaTeX is a document level tool. It is devlish to try to control layout of an individual page in LaTeX, but fairly easy in HTML.
The problem with HTML is that it is too blunt a tool for many tastes, and as a result people would like a method that gives finer control. That method exists, and is called Postscript. In my opinion the web should go the route of Postscript and PDF....
Considering that bwk is a Princeton Ph.D I am sure that he has published in refereed journals.
There is also that little fact of a National Medal of Technology.
In fact if you look at his bibliography page, you will see that he has 89 publications, many of which appear to be in refereed journals.
Well, Arno Pendias (Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of cosmic background radiation) is a HELL of a lot bigger name than any of the computer folks, and he still works part time at Bell Labs.
Did I think she was ready for the job she took?
It appears to me that the reason that she left is that she thought she was ready, and she found an employer that agreed. When you didn't agree, she had no choice but to leave. I don't know anybody who would stay under these circumstances.
I expect she'll ultimately do very well there because she's a fast learner
So you are saying that she could do the job after a break-in period? Maybe she really was ready for the new challenge.
The bottom line for us out of this affair was that our company will still pay for education, but we have now added a 1-year requirement
So now you will find that far fewer of your employees will consider taking additional training. Is that what you really want?
We do this hoping that we can use the skills the employee gains to benefit the company.
That's fine as far as it goes. But you are structuring this to be completely one-sided for the company's benefit. People do things out of their own self-interest, and if you don't offer a carrot to the employee too you aren't going to benefit from training programs.
I can't seen how requiring a 1-year contract for training is going to be a long-run winner for a company. Perhaps the company can tie down the newly skilled employee at their current pay, but the employee is sure going to resent this arrangement, and fly the coop as soon as the contract is up, or perhaps bite the bullet and leave even sooner. Then the company is going to be back in the same boat all over again. In addition there are going to be employees that just flat refuse to sign the contract - and these folks will not get the training the company needs to be competitive.
The only way that is going to work is if the company bites the bullet and pays a fair price for the new skills.
zebra muscles in the Great Lakes, introduced to prey upon some 'bad guy' or other, and now taking over the niche of native clams and muscles
Zebra mussels are an accidental import, coming over attached to ship bottoms.
In any case, none of your examples have anything to do with the food chain.
Given that the problem of malnutrition is not the result of a lack of resources in the world, but of a flawed distrobution system
Commonly held, but erroneous. It takes resources to move food, resources that sustenance economies do not posses.
rather than inventing one more expensive, monopoly-controlled food source and peddling it to the world's poorest countries
Sigh. Did you even read the article? Golden rice is not more expensive, and the plan is to provide free to third world farmers.
I'd say moderate this one down. It is the WORST sort of analysis - first it tries to label something perjoratively i.e. 'Frankenfoods' and then tries to apply an analysis that is irrelevant i.e. malnourishment occurs in contries with agricultural surpluses - with the small missing fact that this material is not addressing a caloric malnourishment issue, but rather a dietary deficiency.
It's time we start to read such articles critcally, and think carefully about how and what they say, even if we have political misgivings about the other side. It does no good to put forth specious arguments.
Even 20 years ago, the thought that nature would come up with resistances to almost all our antibiotics was regarded as almost unthinkable, yet here we are with strains of TB, malaria and E.Coli with just one or even no antibiotics which are effective against them.
Well, you are right in part regarding acquired immunity to antibiotics, however there are some problems with your details. Malaria is a parasite that has never been effectively treatable with antibiotics. Some strains of E-Coli are actually beneficial as anyone who has been dosed by tetracycline will attest.
My caveats against Golden rice, are that whilst it will be almost certainly effective in the short term, it will add several million people to the hungry nations of the world and 10 years or so later we will have to come up with something new.
Golden rice is addressing a fundamental dietary need that is not going to go away. Perhaps it will result in an increse in population, however that is yet to be proven. In many poor countries large families are a response to high infant mortality rates. When a country achieves better economic conditions, family size tends to decline.