One of the topics on Slashdot that seems to generate the most ill-informed opinions is copyright law.
Here is a clue: Every objection or complaint that Slashdot readers have posted on this site was anticipated by the authors of the Constitution some 200+ years ago. These guys were REAL thinkers. These ideas have been tested time and again in both the courts and in commerce. Statutes governing Copyrights have been continually refined and updated to ensure fairness to both the author and end user.
If you want to see the careful balance in the law, READ the Constitution and the
case law that has come in front of the Supreme Court.
Now I don't claim to know what will happen when they are all withdrawing funds not adding to them.
It is a common misconception that when boomers retire they will sell all their stock. Won't happen, and the reason is that people now live 20-30 years after retirement. If you sell your stock when you retire you will lose out to inflation and you will not have enough money to sustain yourself at the end of your retirement. Another factor that is having a huge long term impact is the fact that the government is retiring bonds - with no government bonds to buy people are missing one of the key alternative investments so will have to put more of their moey into stocks.
The fact is that the stock market fluctuates. Get over it. Look at the long term trends (20 year time frame) stocks go up and down over the course of an economic cycle out of phase with interest rates. Interest rates have been going up, therefore stocks have been going down. In 1995, when interest rates went down, the market went up 40% in one year. The macro economic fact of life is that technology companies grow faster than the rest of the economy, so should be overweighted in your portfolio.
People who play the stock market with less than a 5 year time fram are gambling, period. There s no way to predict in advance what the market is going to do over a shorter period of time, so you are placing a wager whose outcome will depend on random fluctuations, just like any throw of the dice.
Quite frankly if you can't recoup your investment in 5 years for a software patent, I'd expect your idea to be out of date anyway.
If the idea is out of date, the fact that the patent hasn't expired is irrelevant. Nobody is using the idea anyway. OTOH, if you have a software idea that is still important after 20 years, it sounds to me like it is a pretty damn good idea and you should still be getting the benefits of coming up with it.
It's really simple in at least terms of electronic media. Authors would take whatever means needed to protect their inventions from copying. All software would become heavily copy protected with dongles etc. In this age of the internet you would have to connect to a license server run by the software publisher. All music would be heavily encrypted using mechanisms like those in the now defunct DVD rental player. This of course would drive up the costs of software considerably. Software would be sold under strict contracts that make current licenses look like child's play.
In terms of books and so forth the situation would be very grim. The main reason copyright laws were estabilished was to protect authors works from being pirated by publishers. Without this mechanism we would have no commercial authors - people who write for a living. There would still be books published for academic and similar reasons, but you would not find the Neal Stephenson's and Steven King's on the bookshelf.
I would agree that IE is the best if you want to view the most sites on the net. The problem I have with IE is that it is USELESS for developers to use in testing. IE autocorrects many serious HTML errors that SHOULD and DO break other browsers when they try to render pages. The result is that we have many web sites that are missing and tags or have other serious errors in thier HTML. These sites are NOT compliant with standards, either HTML or XHTML, and will NOT render in any browser other than IE.
The fact of the matter is IE IS HARMFUL to the adherence of standards on the web, and more so than Netscape because of it's lack of adherence to standards.
The original question was how does US law compare? In short, the US system grants longer patents, covers a lot more territory, and allows more broadness in it's patents.
In actuality the term of a US Patent is currently 20 years after application, which is exactly the same as European patents. In the US it used to be 17 years after issuance, however this was changed to correspond to international practice.
In Europe the main differences are 1). Life forms and software patents are not granted, and 2). The standards for innovation are tougher. As far as I know there is no practical difference in breadth of covereage.
Another big difference is the publication and review process. The rest of the world publishes applications after 18 months, and allows objections during the patenting process. The US is moving towards this model, and I expect in 5 years there will be very littel effective difference between Europe and the US.
Japan's patent system is REALLY screwed up - and is a big reason they do not do much fundamental R&D. In Jpan the scope of covereage of a patent is much narrower than in the US and Europe which results in a very bad situation where if you come out with an innovation you can find your patent 'surrounded' by your competition when they patent a legion of trivial variations on your basic work.
Most developed countries are signatories to the Berne Convention which sets international standards for IP Laws. Countries that are not generally are undeveloped third world nations that have economies that are barely keeping (or maybe not) their population alive.
The only really reliable backup I have ever seen is hard copy i.e. printout. Second choice is redundancy, i.e. two or three copies on separate floppies, zips or whatever.
If I was writing a dissertation I'd be sure to have a hard copy (refreshed say monthly) and a couple of magnetic or optical copies around just in case.
Unfortunately this posting describes retenitis pigmentosa, a relatively rare from of blindness. By far the most common is macular degeneration which occurs mostly in those 55 and older. The numbers of people affected by this disease are staggering; one in six in this age range experience the affects. The fact that this technology may be useful in cases of AMD is exciting news indeed - it has been estimated that as many as 10 million 'boomers' may go blind due to AMD.
The company I used to work for was the manufacturer of Gack! for Mattel. This stuff is made from guar, a natural polymer derived from a plant grown mostly in India using pretty much the same recipie as that for PVA slime outlined in the New Scientist article.
Many of these natural polymeric thickeners are used in food to improve the way it feels in your mouth. Prime places are in salad dressings, ice cream, doughnut fillings, etc.
Calling this stuff nanotechnology is a bit of a misnomer, though. The chemical structures of these most of these polymers are quite random, it is only on a statistical basis that you control their bulk properties. In nanotechnology you are trying to control the structure at a much deeper level.
Other areas of chemistry, such as self-assembly of surfactant films are where the real work that is forwarding nanotechnology is being done.
Even if they aren't able to completely imitate the hagfish, a technology like this might be able to be used in submarine warfare.
Nah. While this stuff does have amazing viscosifying powers, it doesn't have any real mechanical strength. A sub's propellers would curn it to shreds in no time.
One of the things that is a real stumbling block is that many of the drivers don't work properly or at all on an SMP machine. If you are like me and have a dual CPU box, wireless networking is very problematical. Another thing to watch out for is that while the Lucent drivers work fine in PCMIA mode, they fail if you try to use a Lucent card in the PCI slot adapter they sell.
While I think that you have some good arguments, a quick perusal of the Want Ads brings many of them into question, to wit:
A programmer who has been out of work and hasn't even bothered as much as to learn Perl or Java does not seem to be a very attractive candidate, simply because they don't seem very motivated or interested in the job.
The problem with this statement is that employers are requiring two years or more experience in the given technology. Saying that I took the time to study J2EE while I was unemployed is NOT going to get me a job. Even more egregious are the insane advertisements "require - 5 years programming experience with C#,.NET etc.) The fact is that employers are setting up criterea that CANNOT be met.
The argument for keeping foreign IT workers out of the US is that that would allow US workers to take those jobs, or at least increase demand and raise wages.
But that is illusory. If the foreign IT workers can't come here, they'll simply work for a subsidiary or contracting firm in Europe or Asia.
Nice theory, but it just doesn't work that way. IT companies who import workers have to pay MUCH higher wages in the US than they do abroad. The incentive to set up low wage programming shops has been IMMENSE for many years. There are in fact such shops, most notably in India. The problem is that there are tremendous communications difficulties that make development of a team impossible, and team building is perhaps the most critical element determining the success or failure of a programming project.
The real reason to object to the mass importation of H1B IT workers is that it is ruining the education system in this country, distorting the employment marketplace, and destroying the attractiveness of technical careers in the minds of the youth in this country. Who wants to become a computer programmer when you are going to be working in a group of expatriats? What is the potential for long term career advancement when you are in that sort of atmosphere? In reality is it any different than saying that you want to become a farm worker and compete with illegal immigrants in their labor market?
NO, it is not. The fact of the matter is that by importing large number of H1B workers into the US, we are surpressing the natural rise in wages that would occur in the presence of a real labor shortage. This rise in wages WOULD encourage companies to invest in training, spur US colleges and universities to expand their programs in the fields of interest and otherwise. What is happening instead is that Colleges and Universities OUTSIDE the US are expanding their IT programs in order to fill the needs of their students who wish to immigrate to the US.
It is my own opinion that the H1B program is the worst public policy imaginable, and policy makers in the US will rue the day this was passed.
The day you have half the driver support, half the functionality of the API, and anything close to a GUI besides that piece of shit XFree86, then you can talk about a complex OS. Look at QNX. That's a frickin OS. Don't compare your OS to Windows when it's apples to oranges.
Another clueless Windows astroturfer. Perhaps the Windows API has a bit more functionality than the Linux API, BUT I DOUBT IT. Perhaps the GUI is a but more polished, but we have a dozen to choose from, or none at all if we don't want one. But when Windows is just finishing off, a Linux distro is just getting warmed up - 30+ programming languages - any type of server capability you can imagine, THE FULL SOURCE CODE, tools for any imaginable task related to computers you might dream of ALL PART OF THE DISTROBUTION. The functionality of something like RedHat 7.0 is immeasurably greater than any version of Windows yet dreamt of. AND THE BUGS GET FIXED unlike those in Windows.
total cost of ownership (for a server solution) includes money spent on administration, and os repairs. Sometimes, this argument does have merit (for example, microsoft would argue that it takes less time to set up an NT box), though for a skilled linux/unix admin, linux should be quicker...
And if you have to do remote admin, Windows is the biggest pain in the rear end you can imagine.
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It was a good 20km away. would you walk that distance to just read a book?
Damn straight I would.
Comapre sapples with apples my American friend...that's $50 Canadian. That's about $33 US.
Well, I pay $30 US/mo for Cablevision's Optimum Online. It's real nice, too at 5 Mbs down and 1 Mbs up.
What you don't say in this $50/mo fee is what the taxes will be, whether it includes equipment rental, etc.
You've got an 'Interesting', without actually saying anything interesting.
As much as I would like, I don't moderate my own comments.
Can you explain what the problems with ACLs and audits are?
The added fine grained security management adds a lot more complexity to the process of validating that system is secure.
ACL sounds nice until you try to do a security audit on an ACL based system.
I didn't say it was good or efficient, merely that it can be done.
Do you care to back up your claims about his ethics?
Mr. Gingrich was fined $300,000 by a republican led House Ethics Committee.
He admitted these violations in a signed statement to the aforesaid committee on December 21, 1996.
In addition, Mr. Gingrich has been involved in a very public divorce case where he acknowledged concealing a 6-year long affair from his wife.
One of the topics on Slashdot that seems to generate the most ill-informed opinions is copyright law.
Here is a clue: Every objection or complaint that Slashdot readers have posted on this site was anticipated by the authors of the Constitution some 200+ years ago. These guys were REAL thinkers. These ideas have been tested time and again in both the courts and in commerce. Statutes governing Copyrights have been continually refined and updated to ensure fairness to both the author and end user.
If you want to see the careful balance in the law, READ the Constitution and the
case law that has come in front of the Supreme Court.
Now I don't claim to know what will happen when they are all withdrawing funds not adding to them.
It is a common misconception that when boomers retire they will sell all their stock. Won't happen, and the reason is that people now live 20-30 years after retirement. If you sell your stock when you retire you will lose out to inflation and you will not have enough money to sustain yourself at the end of your retirement. Another factor that is having a huge long term impact is the fact that the government is retiring bonds - with no government bonds to buy people are missing one of the key alternative investments so will have to put more of their moey into stocks.
The fact is that the stock market fluctuates. Get over it. Look at the long term trends (20 year time frame) stocks go up and down over the course of an economic cycle out of phase with interest rates. Interest rates have been going up, therefore stocks have been going down. In 1995, when interest rates went down, the market went up 40% in one year. The macro economic fact of life is that technology companies grow faster than the rest of the economy, so should be overweighted in your portfolio.
People who play the stock market with less than a 5 year time fram are gambling, period. There s no way to predict in advance what the market is going to do over a shorter period of time, so you are placing a wager whose outcome will depend on random fluctuations, just like any throw of the dice.
It's not hard to create a binary tree structure in a database without use of foriegn keys. Just make a parent and two child fields.
Quite frankly if you can't recoup your investment in 5 years for a software patent, I'd expect your idea to be out of date anyway.
If the idea is out of date, the fact that the patent hasn't expired is irrelevant. Nobody is using the idea anyway. OTOH, if you have a software idea that is still important after 20 years, it sounds to me like it is a pretty damn good idea and you should still be getting the benefits of coming up with it.
It's really simple in at least terms of electronic media. Authors would take whatever means needed to protect their inventions from copying. All software would become heavily copy protected with dongles etc. In this age of the internet you would have to connect to a license server run by the software publisher. All music would be heavily encrypted using mechanisms like those in the now defunct DVD rental player. This of course would drive up the costs of software considerably. Software would be sold under strict contracts that make current licenses look like child's play.
In terms of books and so forth the situation would be very grim. The main reason copyright laws were estabilished was to protect authors works from being pirated by publishers. Without this mechanism we would have no commercial authors - people who write for a living. There would still be books published for academic and similar reasons, but you would not find the Neal Stephenson's and Steven King's on the bookshelf.
Internet Exploder is simply the best you can get.
I would agree that IE is the best if you want to view the most sites on the net. The problem I have with IE is that it is USELESS for developers to use in testing. IE autocorrects many serious HTML errors that SHOULD and DO break other browsers when they try to render pages. The result is that we have many web sites that are missing and tags or have other serious errors in thier HTML. These sites are NOT compliant with standards, either HTML or XHTML, and will NOT render in any browser other than IE.
The fact of the matter is IE IS HARMFUL to the adherence of standards on the web, and more so than Netscape because of it's lack of adherence to standards.
Have you ever read or seen any of Gingrich's educational output?
Mr. Gingrich is an individual with a long history of a complete lack of ethics in both his personal and public life.
The original question was how does US law compare? In short, the US system grants longer patents, covers a lot more territory, and allows more broadness in it's patents.
In actuality the term of a US Patent is currently 20 years after application, which is exactly the same as European patents. In the US it used to be 17 years after issuance, however this was changed to correspond to international practice.
In Europe the main differences are 1). Life forms and software patents are not granted, and 2). The standards for innovation are tougher. As far as I know there is no practical difference in breadth of covereage.
Another big difference is the publication and review process. The rest of the world publishes applications after 18 months, and allows objections during the patenting process. The US is moving towards this model, and I expect in 5 years there will be very littel effective difference between Europe and the US.
Japan's patent system is REALLY screwed up - and is a big reason they do not do much fundamental R&D. In Jpan the scope of covereage of a patent is much narrower than in the US and Europe which results in a very bad situation where if you come out with an innovation you can find your patent 'surrounded' by your competition when they patent a legion of trivial variations on your basic work.
Most developed countries are signatories to the Berne Convention which sets international standards for IP Laws. Countries that are not generally are undeveloped third world nations that have economies that are barely keeping (or maybe not) their population alive.
The only really reliable backup I have ever seen is hard copy i.e. printout. Second choice is redundancy, i.e. two or three copies on separate floppies, zips or whatever.
If I was writing a dissertation I'd be sure to have a hard copy (refreshed say monthly) and a couple of magnetic or optical copies around just in case.
Unfortunately this posting describes retenitis pigmentosa, a relatively rare from of blindness. By far the most common is macular degeneration which occurs mostly in those 55 and older. The numbers of people affected by this disease are staggering; one in six in this age range experience the affects. The fact that this technology may be useful in cases of AMD is exciting news indeed - it has been estimated that as many as 10 million 'boomers' may go blind due to AMD.
The company I used to work for was the manufacturer of Gack! for Mattel. This stuff is made from guar, a natural polymer derived from a plant grown mostly in India using pretty much the same recipie as that for PVA slime outlined in the New Scientist article.
Many of these natural polymeric thickeners are used in food to improve the way it feels in your mouth. Prime places are in salad dressings, ice cream, doughnut fillings, etc.
Calling this stuff nanotechnology is a bit of a misnomer, though. The chemical structures of these most of these polymers are quite random, it is only on a statistical basis that you control their bulk properties. In nanotechnology you are trying to control the structure at a much deeper level.
Other areas of chemistry, such as self-assembly of surfactant films are where the real work that is forwarding nanotechnology is being done.
Even if they aren't able to completely imitate the hagfish, a technology like this might be able to be used in submarine warfare.
Nah. While this stuff does have amazing viscosifying powers, it doesn't have any real mechanical strength. A sub's propellers would curn it to shreds in no time.
One of the things that is a real stumbling block is that many of the drivers don't work properly or at all on an SMP machine. If you are like me and have a dual CPU box, wireless networking is very problematical. Another thing to watch out for is that while the Lucent drivers work fine in PCMIA mode, they fail if you try to use a Lucent card in the PCI slot adapter they sell.
While I think that you have some good arguments, a quick perusal of the Want Ads brings many of them into question, to wit:
.NET etc.) The fact is that employers are setting up criterea that CANNOT be met.
A programmer who has been out of work and hasn't even bothered as much as to learn Perl or Java does not seem to be a very attractive candidate, simply because they don't seem very motivated or interested in the job.
The problem with this statement is that employers are requiring two years or more experience in the given technology. Saying that I took the time to study J2EE while I was unemployed is NOT going to get me a job. Even more egregious are the insane advertisements "require - 5 years programming experience with C#,
The argument for keeping foreign IT workers out of the US is that that would allow US workers to take those jobs, or at least increase demand and raise wages.
But that is illusory. If the foreign IT workers can't come here, they'll simply work for a subsidiary or contracting firm in Europe or Asia.
Nice theory, but it just doesn't work that way. IT companies who import workers have to pay MUCH higher wages in the US than they do abroad. The incentive to set up low wage programming shops has been IMMENSE for many years. There are in fact such shops, most notably in India. The problem is that there are tremendous communications difficulties that make development of a team impossible, and team building is perhaps the most critical element determining the success or failure of a programming project.
The real reason to object to the mass importation of H1B IT workers is that it is ruining the education system in this country, distorting the employment marketplace, and destroying the attractiveness of technical careers in the minds of the youth in this country. Who wants to become a computer programmer when you are going to be working in a group of expatriats? What is the potential for long term career advancement when you are in that sort of atmosphere? In reality is it any different than saying that you want to become a farm worker and compete with illegal immigrants in their labor market?
NO, it is not. The fact of the matter is that by importing large number of H1B workers into the US, we are surpressing the natural rise in wages that would occur in the presence of a real labor shortage. This rise in wages WOULD encourage companies to invest in training, spur US colleges and universities to expand their programs in the fields of interest and otherwise. What is happening instead is that Colleges and Universities OUTSIDE the US are expanding their IT programs in order to fill the needs of their students who wish to immigrate to the US.
It is my own opinion that the H1B program is the worst public policy imaginable, and policy makers in the US will rue the day this was passed.
I don't care really, except that I should be given a CHIOCE! The last thing I want to hear is that you have to take it my way.
The day you have half the driver support, half the functionality of the API, and anything close to a GUI besides that piece of shit XFree86, then you can talk about a complex OS. Look at QNX. That's a frickin OS. Don't compare your OS to Windows when it's apples to oranges. Another clueless Windows astroturfer. Perhaps the Windows API has a bit more functionality than the Linux API, BUT I DOUBT IT. Perhaps the GUI is a but more polished, but we have a dozen to choose from, or none at all if we don't want one. But when Windows is just finishing off, a Linux distro is just getting warmed up - 30+ programming languages - any type of server capability you can imagine, THE FULL SOURCE CODE, tools for any imaginable task related to computers you might dream of ALL PART OF THE DISTROBUTION. The functionality of something like RedHat 7.0 is immeasurably greater than any version of Windows yet dreamt of. AND THE BUGS GET FIXED unlike those in Windows.
Titanium is a bitch to machine, form, weld, etc. so it will still be expensive to make titanium stuff compared to aluminum.
total cost of ownership (for a server solution) includes money spent on administration, and os repairs. Sometimes, this argument does have merit (for example, microsoft would argue that it takes less time to set up an NT box), though for a skilled linux/unix admin, linux should be quicker...
And if you have to do remote admin, Windows is the biggest pain in the rear end you can imagine.