UPI (United Press Interplanetary) - Amateur astronomers report monitoring two spacecraft obviously orignating from outside the Mars local orbit crashing into the atmosphere and landing near the remote town of Marswell, New Olympus. UMAF (United Mars Air Force) spokesmen claim to have retrieved the debris, and have issued a press release claiming that the phenomena were in fact due to two weather balloons released at high altitude during some test flights. This account is hotly disputed by three Marswell residents claiming to have reached the impact site before the UMAF.
In an interview, local resident "Creepy" Pbtbtwzxk told this reporter that the capsules had strange markings on the exterior surface resembling markings found on other artifacts previously recovered by MUFOS (Mars Unidentified Flying Object Society) which have been the subject of several denials of authenticity by the UMAF. Pbtbtwzxk, waving all six blue tentacles stated emphatically that "The UMAF knows what is going on, but they are trying to keep it secret from the honest citizens of the United States of Canopis."
Meanwhile several other residents of Marswell are in the process of constructing a small meseum and gifte shoppee to commemorate this mysterious event.
---30----
Re:"Real Keyboard" looks like an original Mac kbd
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There are adb/usb adaptors, so I don't think this is an obstacle.
Re:"Real Keyboard" looks like an original Mac kbd
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Interface Zen
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but I still like the Sun 5 unix kbd better...
My favorite keyboard for layout and feel is not the current or first Mac keyboards, which were crap, but the model they originally sold with the Mac II in 1987, the 'Apple Extended Keyboard' or 'Saratoga' aka 'Keyboard of The Gods'. That sucker was huge, but it has exactly the right feel - great tactile feedback, short key throw and no clicky noise, and a hell of a lot of attention to detail including a concave shape to bring all the keys a little closer together. I still use mine with my G3 - it's too bad I never was able to find a PC keyboard as well laid out or constructed.
Well, one way to handle something like this is start gathering and making information available on the gatherers. The problems with this sort of snooping arise because there is an imbalance present. You may not have any privacy, but if they don't either the tendency to misue the information would be in fact tempered by knowledge that reciprocal misuse could be just as painful.
There is an interesting and comprehesive discussion of this concept in David Brin's 'The Transparent Society'.
Where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique? You can gain no monetary income since it is patented by another. In fact, your impovement will be added onto thier own for thier profit.
Well, firstly a patent is not like a copyright, the patent holder has no right to derivate works i.e. improvements. You can in fact develop improvements and sell them back to the original patent holder, or perhaps cross-license them. It's quite common to do this actually. If you make an improvement it DOES NOT become part of the original patent.
What benefits are there from publication? Several actually.
1). The original patent holder knows that his invention is 'out there' and the clock is ticking. If he wants to keep his business advantage he had better invent improvements. A drug I take every day is in fact the result of such an improvement.
2). Competitors who want to remain in the hunt have to develop alternatives to the published technology. By publishing you avoid wasted R&D like reverse engineering (reinventing the wheel) or reinvention of the same technology from scratch. You end up with multiple competing technologies from which the market can pick the best.
3). Once the patent expires there is no restraint on practicing improvements you develop. The expired fully published patent becomes the basis for the new technological wave. One key thing to remember is that patents have a very finite life, while the publication is irrevocable.
4). On publication academic R&D has something to work from. Quite often developments in science follow a technological invention; i.e. how DOES high temperature superconductivity work anyway? With the publication, the researcher is free to examine the technology - patents cover only commercial use; research does not infringe on the patent. It also does not follow at all that an improved high temperature superconducter arising from science triggered by the orignal invention will be covered at all by the technology disclosed in the first patent.
5). The author of the patent, now that his invention is protected and publish has incentive to further publish results (i.e. to enhance his scientific standing etc.) free of commercial concerns. These additional publications further add to the technological corpus.
I am sure there are others as well; these are just the ones that occurred to me as I am typing.
I think that this is a good book to introduce folks to a variety of the ways of doing things under Linux. But don't kid yourself - it is only scratching the surface of the various topics it covers.
Based on this book you are not likely to be able to program much beyond a few simple utilities that make use of the most basic features of a given programming environment.
The good news is that if you really are unfamiliar with the topics it covers, this book lays out the sign posts needed for you to get started in learning the topics it covers. I bought it for that purpose, and I am pretty happy with it.
Re:History is repleat: Patents stifle development
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Actually, history offers much stronger support of my contention than it does of yours (recall, for example, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper
The inventor of the intermittant windshield wiper is now a very rich man. It took a while, but he was successful in pursuing his case. This example, in fact is a good argument in favor of the patent system.
Another example is any industry in countries which have a, shall we say, less than optimal (in the West's eyes) enforcement policy of patents. Those industries produce and improve upon products, despite the fact that their improvements will also be "stolen" and copied by others. Odd, that these industries thrive so well without any significant "protection" through patents, isn't it?
Yes, let's look at these nations. Malaysia. Indonesia. Pakistan. China. They way these countries improve their internal technologies is by sending their best and brightest to western graduate schools and by reading western literature or hiring western experts as consultants. It is clearly in their interest to ignore patents because they in fact have nothing to lose and much to gain through importing technologies from the west. No single nation with a strong technology infrastructure is without a good patent system. The fact is that the nations without a good patent system have no significant home developed technologies.
you are very incorrect to imply that the patenting system actually encourages technological development, and that it would not occur without it.
Where did I say that innovation would not occur without patents? It clearly would. However without patents the innovation would be kept secret either by legal means or by obfuscation rather than be published. THIS PUBLICATION IS THE KEY TO INCREASING SPEED OF TECHNOLOGY PROGRESS. Without the patent system this publication would not take place.
Whether or not a patent is issued, a company will produce a product if it feels it can make a profit on it. It will do so, even knowing that foreign competitors will copy and sell the product,
True enough - BUT the DEVELOPMENT of new products is usually colored by the issue of patentability. XYZ Inc. is NOT going to sink $500 million in R&D into an improved Frammis if it thought that it would be quickly copied and give no advantage in the market. Product profitability in fact is what drives many R&D efforts, and without the assurance of exclusivity the profits necessary to justify the development costs are just not there. Without patents industrial R&D spending would decline in the US to 20% of it's current levels. It would be in fact a total unmitigated disaster to technological progress any this country that abandoned patents.
With modern reverse engineering techniques
Modern reverse engineering techniques do not prevent companies from maintaining secrets in a number of ways. For example, in the chemical and the software industries many products are sold accompanied by licenses that prevent the buyer from applying these techniques to the product they purchase. The is in fact kept secret by these legal mechanisms. In addition modern reverse engineering techniques are far from omniscient. They do not determine the manufacturing process, only the end result. A large percentage of the most valuable patents cover such processes, which are often key to achieving high purity or low cost. This process are in fact easy to keep secret because they are practiced only by the manufacturer. Trying to reconstruct the process used from an analysis of the final material can be essentially impossible.
In order to obtain a patent you must disclose the best way known to implement your invention. Consider how much R&D effort would be wasted in reverse engineering and re-invention of technology without this publication of these results within the patent framework.
No, the FACT of the matter is that patent systems have a 300 year long record of success in stimulating technological development. You can argue all you want, but what you are proposing is counter to all historical evidence and would lead to a near-total evisceration of all industrial technological research and development.
Re:Trading Exponential Progress for Short Term Pro
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The larger picture (much slower technological growth, squandering of the intellectual capacity of humankind by limiting what we're allowed to invent because of patents which have already closed off access to the concepts and ideas, etc.) means little when the primary, indeed in most cases the only, goal is immediate profit. It is here that the profit motive truly does break down and begin to cause significant harm to society as a whole.
Nicely worded, but completely wrong. The alternative to patents is for corporate entities or individuals to keep all of their internal research as secret as possible to prevent competitor's copying their work. This practice of keeping everything possible a close secret is in fact what patent law was designed to abolish in the early 18th century. The key thing to remember about patents is that a patent is a contract between the inventor and the government; the government grants an exclusive right to practice an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for the full and public disclosure of the invention.
In addition to the disclosure requirements patent laws have specific exemptions allowing the subject matter inventions to be used for research purposes free of infringement. Thus patents STIMULATE new research by encouraging the free flow of information. In addition requirements that patents be applied for in a 'timely' fashion results in relatively QUICK publication of the invention.
Patents were in fact devised for the purpose of enabling research and development through the free flow of information that would otherwise be kept secret for commercial reasons. In fact Research and Development is aided tremendously by the existence of a good patent system by both insuring publication of the technology, and by insuring the inventor (or the organization funding the inventor) obtains economic benefits from the development of new technologies.
In general I think that world-wide agreement on what constitutes a patentable invention is a good thing. In Europe for example there are provisions that allow people to contest a patent before it is issued (something that would kill a lot of the stuff with obvious prior art that gets issued in the US).
Of course the stuff about genes is dubious public policy, but I think that patenting genes in the long run isn't going to make much difference. It is going to take a long time to go from a gene to a product based on that gene, and patents have a 20 year lifetime. After the patent is up, it's all back in the public domain.
Patent terms are much more of an issue in software where things are developed much more quickly than in biotech.
To me any time the journalists become the story there is something wrong. Either the journalists have an over-inflated ego, or they are not covering the story in a professional and comprehensive manner. Clearly to have three stories in a short period of time where/. itself is the main issue of the story ought to trigger a careful reassesment of the editorial policy (if any) of the publication.
I would strongly urge Rob et al to do a little research on what constitutes sound editorial policies. Slashdot's long term growth and reputation could be adversely affected without some care in this area.
It seems to me that the Corel EULA has problems in addition to the 'minor' business. In particular this little gem:
B. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS:
All right, title and interest in the Software Programs, including source code, documentation, appearance, structure and organization, are held by Corel Corporation, Corel Corporation Limited, and others and are protected by copyright and other laws.
How can Corel just paste in something like this? They don't own any such rights to the bulk of what constitutes Corel Linux. To pass through something like seems to me to be an indication of total lack of clue.
It seems to me that instead of a lot of wringing of the hands the Aussies should be doing some letter writing, demonstratating, getting referrenda on the ballots, bringing court cases to impune the constitutionality of these measures and otherwise creating a big malodorous stink right where it will be smelled the best.
I grew up in the 60's and let me tell you, it is quite possible for citizens to have a big impact on government.
What are you waiting for? If you do not take political action you have only yourselves to blame for how you are governed.
Oh, aand if you need ideas on how this works, grab a copy of Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobediance" and give it a careful read.
No, I agree more with the original post, though I think he/she is a bit extreme. Linux API documentation and knowledgebase management is indeed disorganized compared to Microsoft's MSDN.
Yes, but the availability of source code is a powerful countervailing factor. Microsoft is famous for giving the developers incomplete API specifications and then releasing their own appplications which have performance made possible only through the use of undocumented system calls. The result in user space is applications from ISV's that use undocumented API calls merely to be competitive. This leads to upgrade incompatability issues.
Having open source is the ultimate insurance of complete knowledge of the OS. Microsoft can have the fanciest 'Knowledge Base' imaginable, but if they choose to make some os functions 'undocumented' this Knowedge Base is in fact corrupt and untrustable.
If Linux gets an "LDN" sort of system going, it would definitely be a good thing.
Design of a real LDN would be I think nearly impossible given the nature of Linux development.
Yeah and those insiders will gradually divest their interest in Red Hat until they are no longer majority shareholders.
The majority of Microsoft stock is STILL owned by insiders. The fact is that this divesting could take decades, if it EVER occurs. Some public companies have been majority owned by decendants of the founders for generations.
What is needed is less federal involvment, more control turned over to the states and less bureaucracy.
That is an interesting theory and commonly stated theory in this forum, but one that has very little basis in evidence to support that it would make things better.
The states so far seem to be doing a very poor job of keeping politics out of the classroom. Look at the mess with the teaching of evolution. Just based on this issue alone I would be in favor of totally REMOVING the states from having any control over the education system.
The fact of the matter is that the countries that are doing very well in these international standardized tests of factual knowledge have far MORE centralization than we do in the US. France, for example scores very well in these sorts of tests. Their education system is so centralized and rigidly controlled that at least until recently you could count on exactly the same material being taught in EVERY French classroom on exactly the same day at exactly the same time.
Personally I have a great deal of mistrust of the commonly accepted statement that our schools are performing very badly. US students do poorly compared to the rest of the world in regurgitating factual material, true. But when they are tested on things like creative writing and problem solving skills, they are in fact equal to or even the best in the world. I have heard educators in other countries complain that the rigidity of their educational system, in particular rules on what factual material the students must know, combined with competitive college entrance examinations that are the SOLE determinats of acceptance to college prevents them from developing the reasoning skills that they consider to also be important.
What is the bottom line? I think if that the American schools were to be doing as badly as people think, we would see the difference in the productivity of our adult workers. But the fact is that the American worker is the most productive in the world. To me there is a real contradiction here.
I think people that are blasting the American education system have in part been taken in by the news media in the US who are want to try to build an impression that something is disasterously wrong when in fact the question is not at all that clear.
If you were to believe the news media on the Y2K issue, you would have taken all of your money out of the bank 3 times this year, have a generator and 6 months worth of food and medicine in you basement. It will be interesting to see what happens Jan 1 when in fact the disruptions are very minor to non-existant. Will the media acknowledge their propensity to shout the sky is falling after we get just a whimper this New Years day?
The basic problems with the US education system have to do with attitudes of the parents, NOT failures in the formal school system. Everyone has noted that the money spent on schools in the US is very high; and in fact teacher educational requirements in the US are quite high too. Why is it in fact that this money does not deliver the desired result? The process has been studied and benchmarked to a fair-thee-well so if it were a problem with the process it would have been found by now.
This money is in fact wasted if the parents fail in their job to deliver a kid willing to learn to school.
The sad fact is that PARENTS are unwilling to accept any responsibility for the performance of their children in school, yet in fact they have FAR FAR more influence than teachers do. When Johnny can't find Canada on a map, the reason is because his PARENTS didn't treat learning achievement as important in the upbringing of the child.
The American media likes to trumpet low standardized test scores as evidence of the schools failing. Baloney. If you look at the DISTRIBUTION of test scores you will immediately see that the top 10-20% of American students perform equal to or better than the top percentiles in any other country in the world. If schools were incompetent this would not happen. These students were taught by their parents that learning is important.
Those that do not achieve are students whose parents have failed to do their part.
"..a company that has a profit motive that is owned by the public."
I have heard the shareholder/profit motive as motivation chnage attitudes towards Open Source - to become the next Microsoft slam against RedHat so many times that it sounds like it must be fact.
RedHat only sold a small percentage of the company in the IPO.
Bob Young and the original founders still own something like 80% of the company stock. The same people that determined company policies before the IPO determine company policies now. Public ownership doesn't affect their ability to do what they want to in terms of open source one bit.
It seems to me that the first electronic switch, the triode, invented by Lee DeForest has to be the greatest hack of all time. After the triode, all of electronics has been incremental improvements.
Folks running ISPs and services like Alibris really should pay attention to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. People sending mail, using cell phones and so forth actually DO have some privacy rights. It basically gives carriers the right to debug their services, but anyone disclosing or reading content like Alibris may have been in the absence of a court order is breaking the law.
While there is no rational expectation of Internet privacy because of the open nature of Internet protocols, it isn't a wide open free-for-all either.
The problem with is that the threshold for granting them is pathetically low. (See this patent on refrigerator magnets.)
While I agree with your premise that the threshold for patents is too low in the US (I like the European Patent Office criterea better), one has to wonder whether the particular invention you cited is in fact a good example of something that does not deserve a patent. It seems to me that having a magnetic sheet with attached perforated tags which could be printed with various forms of advertising is in fact a fairly useful idea, and one I haven't seen in use, either.
I have seen a lot of ideas that may look trivial actually turn up to be EXTREMELY valuable. The Post-It, for example. What is that except a piece of paper with some glue on it? Is that, on the face of it, any different in simplicity than a refrigerator magnet with fly strips? Yet it has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars to 3M and is generally considered to be one of the most innovating approaches to using a product (a weak glue) in an unexpected way that has come along in recent memory.
The fact of it is that the BEST ideas are simple - the ones that you look at and say 'why didn't I think of that!', not the complex Rube Goldbergs that we are all too often saddled with in our technological society.
Yes, STW is intuitively obvious to the casual observer once you have the Wiley proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
I will leave the details as an exercise for the student.
Leaving aside the question of does the definition of "scientist" include "mathematician"
No. All scientists need to be mathematicians to some extent, but the reverse is not true. Science includes the formal consideration of experimental evidence as part of a model building process, but mathematics can be a purely abstract endeavor without an empirical component.
Slashdot Mirror
UPI (United Press Interplanetary) - Amateur astronomers report monitoring two spacecraft obviously orignating from outside the Mars local orbit crashing into the atmosphere and landing near the remote town of Marswell, New Olympus. UMAF (United Mars Air Force) spokesmen claim to have retrieved the debris, and have issued a press release claiming that the phenomena were in fact due to two weather balloons released at high altitude during some test flights. This account is hotly disputed by three Marswell residents claiming to have reached the impact site before the UMAF.
In an interview, local resident "Creepy" Pbtbtwzxk told this reporter that the capsules had strange markings on the exterior surface resembling markings found on other artifacts previously recovered by MUFOS (Mars Unidentified Flying Object Society) which have been the subject of several denials of authenticity by the UMAF. Pbtbtwzxk, waving all six blue tentacles stated emphatically that "The UMAF knows what is going on, but they are trying to keep it secret from the honest citizens of the United States of Canopis."
Meanwhile several other residents of Marswell are in the process of constructing a small meseum and gifte shoppee to commemorate this mysterious event.
---30----
There are adb/usb adaptors, so I don't think this is an obstacle.
but I still like the Sun 5 unix kbd better...
My favorite keyboard for layout and feel is not the current or first Mac keyboards, which were crap, but the model they originally sold with the Mac II in 1987, the 'Apple Extended Keyboard' or 'Saratoga' aka 'Keyboard of The Gods'. That sucker was huge, but it has exactly the right feel - great tactile feedback, short key throw and no clicky noise, and a hell of a lot of attention to detail including a concave shape to bring all the keys a little closer together. I still use mine with my G3 - it's too bad I never was able to find a PC keyboard as well laid out or constructed.
Well, one way to handle something like this is start gathering and making information available on the gatherers. The problems with this sort of snooping arise because there is an imbalance present. You may not have any privacy, but if they don't either the tendency to misue the information would be in fact tempered by knowledge that reciprocal misuse could be just as painful.
There is an interesting and comprehesive discussion of this concept in David Brin's 'The Transparent Society'.
Where is the incentive to improve on a published, patented idea/technique? You can gain no monetary income since it is patented by another. In fact, your impovement will be added onto thier own for thier profit.
Well, firstly a patent is not like a copyright, the patent holder has no right to derivate works i.e. improvements. You can in fact develop improvements and sell them back to the original patent holder, or perhaps cross-license them. It's quite common to do this actually. If you make an improvement it DOES NOT become part of the original patent.
What benefits are there from publication? Several actually.
1). The original patent holder knows that his invention is 'out there' and the clock is ticking. If he wants to keep his business advantage he had better invent improvements. A drug I take every day is in fact the result of such an improvement.
2). Competitors who want to remain in the hunt have to develop alternatives to the published technology. By publishing you avoid wasted R&D like reverse engineering (reinventing the wheel) or reinvention of the same technology from scratch. You end up with multiple competing technologies from which the market can pick the best.
3). Once the patent expires there is no restraint on practicing improvements you develop. The expired fully published patent becomes the basis for the new technological wave. One key thing to remember is that patents have a very finite life, while the publication is irrevocable.
4). On publication academic R&D has something to work from. Quite often developments in science follow a technological invention; i.e. how DOES high temperature superconductivity work anyway? With the publication, the researcher is free to examine the technology - patents cover only commercial use; research does not infringe on the patent. It also does not follow at all that an improved high temperature superconducter arising from science triggered by the orignal invention will be covered at all by the technology disclosed in the first patent.
5). The author of the patent, now that his invention is protected and publish has incentive to further publish results (i.e. to enhance his scientific standing etc.) free of commercial concerns. These additional publications further add to the technological corpus.
I am sure there are others as well; these are just the ones that occurred to me as I am typing.
I think this is highly unlikely. Corel's business is about 0.2% Linux and 99.8% software for Windows. There is no fit here at all.
I think this is highly unlikely. Corel's business in about 2% Linux and 98% software for Windows. There is no fit here at all.
I think that this is a good book to introduce folks to a variety of the ways of doing things under Linux. But don't kid yourself - it is only scratching the surface of the various topics it covers.
Based on this book you are not likely to be able to program much beyond a few simple utilities that make use of the most basic features of a given programming environment.
The good news is that if you really are unfamiliar with the topics it covers, this book lays out the sign posts needed for you to get started in learning the topics it covers. I bought it for that purpose, and I am pretty happy with it.
Actually, history offers much stronger support of my contention than it does of yours (recall, for example, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper
The inventor of the intermittant windshield wiper is now a very rich man. It took a while, but he was successful in pursuing his case. This example, in fact is a good argument in favor of the patent system.
Another example is any industry in countries which have a, shall we say, less than optimal (in the West's eyes) enforcement policy of patents. Those industries produce and improve upon products, despite the fact that their improvements will also be "stolen" and copied by others. Odd, that these industries thrive so well without any significant "protection" through patents, isn't it?
Yes, let's look at these nations. Malaysia. Indonesia. Pakistan. China. They way these countries improve their internal technologies is by sending their best and brightest to western graduate schools and by reading western literature or hiring western experts as consultants. It is clearly in their interest to ignore patents because they in fact have nothing to lose and much to gain through importing technologies from the west. No single nation with a strong technology infrastructure is without a good patent system. The fact is that the nations without a good patent system have no significant home developed technologies.
you are very incorrect to imply that the patenting system actually encourages technological development, and that it would not occur without it.
Where did I say that innovation would not occur without patents? It clearly would. However without patents the innovation would be kept secret either by legal means or by obfuscation rather than be published. THIS PUBLICATION IS THE KEY TO INCREASING SPEED OF TECHNOLOGY PROGRESS. Without the patent system this publication would not take place.
Whether or not a patent is issued, a company will produce a product if it feels it can make a profit on it. It will do so, even knowing that foreign competitors will copy and sell the product,
True enough - BUT the DEVELOPMENT of new products is usually colored by the issue of patentability. XYZ Inc. is NOT going to sink $500 million in R&D into an improved Frammis if it thought that it would be quickly copied and give no advantage in the market. Product profitability in fact is what drives many R&D efforts, and without the assurance of exclusivity the profits necessary to justify the development costs are just not there. Without patents industrial R&D spending would decline in the US to 20% of it's current levels. It would be in fact a total unmitigated disaster to technological progress any this country that abandoned patents.
With modern reverse engineering techniques
Modern reverse engineering techniques do not prevent companies from maintaining secrets in a number of ways. For example, in the chemical and the software industries many products are sold accompanied by licenses that prevent the buyer from applying these techniques to the product they purchase. The is in fact kept secret by these legal mechanisms.
In addition modern reverse engineering techniques are far from omniscient. They do not determine the manufacturing process, only the end result. A large percentage of the most valuable patents cover such processes, which are often key to achieving high purity or low cost. This process are in fact easy to keep secret because they are practiced only by the manufacturer. Trying to reconstruct the process used from an analysis of the final material can be essentially impossible.
In order to obtain a patent you must disclose the best way known to implement your invention. Consider how much R&D effort would be wasted in reverse engineering and re-invention of technology without this publication of these results within the patent framework.
No, the FACT of the matter is that patent systems have a 300 year long record of success in stimulating technological development. You can argue all you want, but what you are proposing is counter to all historical evidence and would lead to a near-total evisceration of all industrial technological research and development.
The larger picture (much slower technological growth, squandering of the intellectual capacity of humankind by limiting what we're allowed to invent because of patents which have already closed off access to the concepts and ideas, etc.) means little when the primary, indeed in most cases the only, goal is immediate profit. It is here that the profit motive truly does break down and begin to cause significant harm to society as a whole.
Nicely worded, but completely wrong. The alternative to patents is for corporate entities or individuals to keep all of their internal research as secret as possible to prevent competitor's copying their work. This practice of keeping everything possible a close secret is in fact what patent law was designed to abolish in the early 18th century. The key thing to remember about patents is that a patent is a contract between the inventor and the government; the government grants an exclusive right to practice an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for the full and public disclosure of the invention.
In addition to the disclosure requirements patent laws have specific exemptions allowing the subject matter inventions to be used for research purposes free of infringement. Thus patents STIMULATE new research by encouraging the free flow of information. In addition requirements that patents be applied for in a 'timely' fashion results in relatively QUICK publication of the invention.
Patents were in fact devised for the purpose of enabling research and development through the free flow of information that would otherwise be kept secret for commercial reasons. In fact Research and Development is aided tremendously by the existence of a good patent system by both insuring publication of the technology, and by insuring the inventor (or the organization funding the inventor) obtains economic benefits from the development of new technologies.
In general I think that world-wide agreement on what constitutes a patentable invention is a good thing. In Europe for example there are provisions that allow people to contest a patent before it is issued (something that would kill a lot of the stuff with obvious prior art that gets issued in the US).
Of course the stuff about genes is dubious public policy, but I think that patenting genes in the long run isn't going to make much difference. It is going to take a long time to go from a gene to a product based on that gene, and patents have a 20 year lifetime. After the patent is up, it's all back in the public domain.
Patent terms are much more of an issue in software where things are developed much more quickly than in biotech.
To me any time the journalists become the story there is something wrong. Either the journalists have an over-inflated ego, or they are not covering the story in a professional and comprehensive manner. Clearly to have three stories in a short period of time where /. itself is the main issue of the story ought to trigger a careful reassesment of the editorial policy (if any) of the publication.
I would strongly urge Rob et al to do a little research on what constitutes sound editorial policies. Slashdot's long term growth and reputation could be adversely affected without some care in this area.
The usenet can do all they can, only better.
I agree in part. The problem is that all the really good web sites also have user contributions/feedback so such a mechanism is clearly needed.
It seems to me that the Corel EULA has problems in addition to the 'minor' business. In particular this little gem:
B. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS:
All right, title and interest in the Software Programs, including source code, documentation, appearance, structure and organization, are held by Corel Corporation, Corel Corporation Limited, and others and are protected by copyright and other laws.
How can Corel just paste in something like this? They don't own any such rights to the bulk of what constitutes Corel Linux. To pass through something like seems to me to be an indication of total lack of clue.
It seems to me that instead of a lot of wringing of the hands the Aussies should be doing some letter writing, demonstratating, getting referrenda on the ballots, bringing court cases to impune the constitutionality of these measures and otherwise creating a big malodorous stink right where it will be smelled the best.
I grew up in the 60's and let me tell you, it is quite possible for citizens to have a big impact on government.
What are you waiting for? If you do not take political action you have only yourselves to blame for how you are governed.
Oh, aand if you need ideas on how this works, grab a copy of Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobediance" and give it a careful read.
No, I agree more with the original post, though I think he/she is a bit extreme. Linux API documentation and knowledgebase management is indeed disorganized compared to Microsoft's MSDN.
Yes, but the availability of source code is a powerful countervailing factor. Microsoft is famous for giving the developers incomplete API specifications and then releasing their own appplications which have performance made possible only through the use of undocumented system calls. The result in user space is applications from ISV's that use undocumented API calls merely to be competitive. This leads to upgrade incompatability issues.
Having open source is the ultimate insurance of complete knowledge of the OS. Microsoft can have the fanciest 'Knowledge Base' imaginable, but if they choose to make some os functions 'undocumented' this Knowedge Base is in fact corrupt and untrustable.
If Linux gets an "LDN" sort of system going, it would definitely be a good thing.
Design of a real LDN would be I think nearly impossible given the nature of Linux development.
Yeah and those insiders will gradually divest their interest in Red Hat until they are no longer majority shareholders.
The majority of Microsoft stock is STILL owned by insiders. The fact is that this divesting could take decades, if it EVER occurs. Some public companies have been majority owned by decendants of the founders for generations.
What is needed is less federal involvment, more control turned over to the states and less bureaucracy.
That is an interesting theory and commonly stated theory in this forum, but one that has very little basis in evidence to support that it would make things better.
The states so far seem to be doing a very poor job of keeping politics out of the classroom. Look at the mess with the teaching of evolution. Just based on this issue alone I would be in favor of totally REMOVING the states from having any control over the education system.
The fact of the matter is that the countries that are doing very well in these international standardized tests of factual knowledge have far MORE centralization than we do in the US. France, for example scores very well in these sorts of tests. Their education system is so centralized and rigidly controlled that at least until recently you could count on exactly the same material being taught in EVERY French classroom on exactly the same day at exactly the same time.
Personally I have a great deal of mistrust of the commonly accepted statement that our schools are performing very badly. US students do poorly compared to the rest of the world in regurgitating factual material, true. But when they are tested on things like creative writing and problem solving skills, they are in fact equal to or even the best in the world. I have heard educators in other countries complain that the rigidity of their educational system, in particular rules on what factual material the students must know, combined with competitive college entrance examinations that are the SOLE determinats of acceptance to college prevents them from developing the reasoning skills that they consider to also be important.
What is the bottom line? I think if that the American schools were to be doing as badly as people think, we would see the difference in the productivity of our adult workers. But the fact is that the American worker is the most productive in the world. To me there is a real contradiction here.
I think people that are blasting the American education system have in part been taken in by the news media in the US who are want to try to build an impression that something is disasterously wrong when in fact the question is not at all that clear.
If you were to believe the news media on the Y2K issue, you would have taken all of your money out of the bank 3 times this year, have a generator and 6 months worth of food and medicine in you basement. It will be interesting to see what happens Jan 1 when in fact the disruptions are very minor to non-existant. Will the media acknowledge their propensity to shout the sky is falling after we get just a whimper this New Years day?
The basic problems with the US education system have to do with attitudes of the parents, NOT failures in the formal school system. Everyone has noted that the money spent on schools in the US is very high; and in fact teacher educational requirements in the US are quite high too. Why is it in fact that this money does not deliver the desired result? The process has been studied and benchmarked to a fair-thee-well so if it were a problem with the process it would have been found by now.
This money is in fact wasted if the parents fail in their job to deliver a kid willing to learn to school.
The sad fact is that PARENTS are unwilling to accept any responsibility for the performance of their children in school, yet in fact they have FAR FAR more influence than teachers do. When Johnny can't find Canada on a map, the reason is because his PARENTS didn't treat learning achievement as important in the upbringing of the child.
The American media likes to trumpet low standardized test scores as evidence of the schools failing. Baloney. If you look at the DISTRIBUTION of test scores you will immediately see that the top 10-20% of American students perform equal to or better than the top percentiles in any other country in the world. If schools were incompetent this would not happen. These students were taught by their parents that learning is important.
Those that do not achieve are students whose parents have failed to do their part.
..but isn't the scrapping of the right to jury trial being done to bring us in line with the rest of the EU?
It seems to me that if I was British I would be quite upset about this just from a historical basis. After all, wasn't that part of the Magna Carta?
You stated the problem in your first paragraph.
"..a company that has a profit motive that is owned by the public."
I have heard the shareholder/profit motive as motivation chnage attitudes towards Open Source - to become the next Microsoft slam against RedHat so many times that it sounds like it must be fact.
RedHat only sold a small percentage of the company in the IPO.
Bob Young and the original founders still own something like 80% of the company stock. The same people that determined company policies before the IPO determine company policies now. Public ownership doesn't affect their ability to do what they want to in terms of open source one bit.
It seems to me that the first electronic switch, the triode, invented by Lee DeForest has to be the greatest hack of all time. After the triode, all of electronics has been incremental improvements.
Folks running ISPs and services like Alibris really should pay attention to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. People sending mail, using cell phones and so forth actually DO have some privacy rights. It basically gives carriers the right to debug their services, but anyone disclosing or reading content like Alibris may have been in the absence of a court order is breaking the law.
While there is no rational expectation of Internet privacy because of the open nature of Internet protocols, it isn't a wide open free-for-all either.
The problem with is that the threshold for granting them is pathetically low. (See this patent on refrigerator magnets.)
While I agree with your premise that the threshold for patents is too low in the US (I like the European Patent Office criterea better), one has to wonder whether the particular invention you cited is in fact a good example of something that does not deserve a patent. It seems to me that having a magnetic sheet with attached perforated tags which could be printed with various forms of advertising is in fact a fairly useful idea, and one I haven't seen in use, either.
I have seen a lot of ideas that may look trivial actually turn up to be EXTREMELY valuable. The Post-It, for example. What is that except a piece of paper with some glue on it? Is that, on the face of it, any different in simplicity than a refrigerator magnet with fly strips? Yet it has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars to 3M and is generally considered to be one of the most innovating approaches to using a product (a weak glue) in an unexpected way that has come along in recent memory.
The fact of it is that the BEST ideas are simple - the ones that you look at and say 'why didn't I think of that!', not the complex Rube Goldbergs that we are all too often saddled with in our technological society.
I thought STW was automatic once we had Fermat.
Yes, STW is intuitively obvious to the casual observer once you have the Wiley proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
I will leave the details as an exercise for the student.
Leaving aside the question of does the definition of "scientist" include "mathematician"
No. All scientists need to be mathematicians to some extent, but the reverse is not true. Science includes the formal consideration of experimental evidence as part of a model building process, but mathematics can be a purely abstract endeavor without an empirical component.