I think there are multiple roles for OpenStreetMap to play, but one that came to my attention was mapping areas where Google, etc. haven't gone in order to help get food and power to people after a disaster.
I spent (too little) time voluntarily mapping out areas of Puerto Rico, through a well-coordinated effort to analyze and review satellite and aerial photos of less densely populated areas. This type of crowdsourcing is pretty cool...
Except for the EU one, you gave impressively terrible examples. The days of AOL, Windows 95, and PGP (and whether Microsoft Clients supported it or not) are drops in the bucket compared to things like:
- Social media - Online advertising, and Google in particular. The siren song of "free" software in exchange for giving up a significant amount of privacy - Credit bureaus (not that you have much choice)... many more
Does Google give businesses the ability to test updates and do a controlled rollout of patches for Chrome? Based on a cursory search of the web the answer seems to be "No", but I could be wrong...
Updates happen always and automatically even if the user doesn't have Administrative privileges.
Didn't see this mentioned, but at least in my area the retailers I've been to are rationing drives:
Fry's is limiting purchases to one drive per person, with prices that are higher but don't seem completely unreasonable.
A local company that used to be known as "Hard Drives Northwest" has a sign at the entrance that they aren't selling individual drives at this time, as they're reserving them for purchase of an entire system.
Given the circumstances this seems reasonable, and I'm even happy the market seems to be responding responsibly.
A bit off topic, but something that may have broad interest... I'm not at all a hard-core gamer, but gleefully recall being a little kid playing F/A-18 Interceptor and messing around: learning to land on the carrier, and going off-mission to shoot at buildings and do tricks like fly under and around the Golden Gate bridge.
I would love an Oblivion-style open world game where you fly various modern planes and fighter jets and can go off the primary mission to tackle side quests or just mess around. Even better if it's on Earth with some reasonable combination of 3D geometry and satellite imagery.
It would also be nice for the capabilities of the planes and fighter jets to resemble their real-world counterparts, but I care 0% about having the act of flying the plane itself be anything like the real world; simple game-like controls would be fine. Oh, and while I'm at it, ideally it's a modern game with good graphics.
Does anything like this exist? I've played various demos of flying-related games on my PC and XBox 360 and nothing has really clicked.
IETF also has items like RFC1149: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
In other words, there is no filter; it seems anyone can submit anything to the IETF. My main concern over the WebM "specification" is best summarized by by the great analysis at http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377:
The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code -- up to and including TODOs, "optimizations", and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it's precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There's no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone.
In other words, there is no real spec that could stand up to ISO-type scrutiny, ignoring all politics. They are attempting to make standard a specific implementation, with all its current quirks and flaws, and from what I've read it is now set in stone; even though they are posting an RFC (request for comments) they will not be changing the spec to address the known flaws.
No, it is not my preference that companies can do this. But at the same time I recognize that many of the web sites I visit on a regular basis need to make money somehow, even if they're only trying to cover the cost of their bandwidth.
Also, like I said, I'd rather see these kinds of ads than the horrible flashy blinky mortgage and weight loss scams and whatever else I seem to initially encounter on a "clean" machine.
Lately I've been pleased by the ads I get on most sites. After having recently shopped for a luxury car I got almost nothing but BMW, Infinti, Acura, etc. ads for months. None of which were intrusive. This Christmas I did some online shopping for some pajamas for the GF at Victoria's Secret and lo and behold now I'm greeted with Victoria's Secret models on a number of sites. Not only can I live with that, I can proclaim complete innocence when she's looking over my shoulder.
I even clicked through on a couple of the car ones while I was making up my mind, and afterwards as a bit of a reward for sites that host decent non-intrusive ads.
On the other hand, sites that have intersticials or Javascript pop-up/fly-overs that can't be blocked without disabling script, can DIAF. I have a bookmarklet that nukes most of them, otherwise I just immediately close the tab.
Therefore, I'm planning on making an eBook reader just to name it a McBook*. If enough heavyweight lawyers at McDonalds, Facebook, and Apple descend on me they may collapse into a black hole.
At least for some of us, it's not just basic arithemetic but having to spend tons of hours tracking down information that *could* be readily provided but, for some bizzare reason isn't. For example, have you ever had to deal with a ESPP in a company? Here's an example:
Fidelity will try to keep track of your wash sales and adjust the basis of your future sales accordingly. Unfortunately, that makes the record-keeping almost impossible. Firstly, adjusting the BASIS doesn't just change the basis price, it also changes the "effective" DATE of the purchase. So when you go to sell that March 31st stock, may get statements from Fidelity showing that you sold stock bought on "12/31/2009w" -- it's really your 3/31 stock but the basis has been adjusted due to your wash sale on April 5th. This can get extraordinarily confusing, because it means that neither the BASIS price nor purchase DATE for this set of shares corresponds to what was actually sold.
And that's a freakin' disaster, because as mentioned 3 sections ago, Fidelity fails to properly adjust the BASIS price of shares ESPP sales, meaning that you have to do it yourself. But since Fidelity has already "helpfully" changed the BASIS price and DATE to account for the WASH SALE, it can be virtually impossible to figure out WHICH shares were actually sold, meaning it's virtually impossible for you to properly adjust the BASIS to take into account the ORDINARY INCOME you recognized.
Oh, and keep in mind that the change of the BASIS DATE means that your later sale may be changed from a SHORT-TERM transaction to a LONG-TERM transaction. Confusing. Oh, and keep in mind that because you often will be buying and selling different-sized blocks of shares, a given sale will likely be split up into multiple transactions, each tracking a different wash sale.
I agree that a basic 1040 is easy, but there are tons of gotchas out there due to not only the legal complexity but also how your company and/or broker does their bookkeeping. Reverse solving to uncover lost data is a huge pain, especially if you're like some of us who opt-out of paper statements. Some of the critical information you need to know is just gone.
Of course, if you're one of those people who keeps a dozen filing cabinets and spends 30 minutes a day doing personal finance and bookkeeping, sure it's trivial. Most people aren't like that and shouldn't be required to be like that.
To be fair, my post was primarily addressing the "information should be free" crowd, particularly those who think that OSS is the only way to go and proprietary software is somehow evil. (These people also seem to be content stealing* movies and music). This isn't the same as the OSS community, although anecdotally there seems to be a lot of overlap.
So, would you be happy with a License to Tinker that doesn't allow an arbitrary company to legally take advantage of the R&D efforts of the people who created the product (software and/or hardware), but would still keep it fully open for your tinkering?
This wouldn't necessarily replace OSS software; there's nothing wrong with people deciding to release their work under the GPL or any other license. However, it does concern me when people think that all software MUST be released under such a license because this allows other companies to get a free ride (as in my Asus example) and profit off the original creators work. This also implies that the R&D process has no value, but the manufacturing process somehow does. I believe the net effect would be to discourage the creation process, leading to stagnation and exclusively promoting annoying business models such as ad-driven software.
* - The pedant who mentions that copyright violation is not a criminal act is an example of said person.:-)
When it comes to "information must be free", why do hardware vendors get a free pass? With OSS taken to its logical conclusion, a hardware vendor who bundles their product with open source software should be forced to document and share the schematics for the circuit boards and chips, the molds for the case, and so on.
If "research and development" has no value with software, surely it shouldn't for hardware either. Any company in the US, or Mexico, or China must be able to exactly clone the eeePC and undercut Asus with their own product. Since building the clone would incur near-zero R&D cost the clone's vendor should almost always be able to undercut Asus, even if inferior quality parts aren't used (which is also an option). The resulting competition would reduce prices, so the consumer wins!
Obviously this is written tongue-in-cheek, but really, what is the difference besides the low barrier to entry in writing software?
A threat model is about admitting we have a bad product, saying that fixing it properly is too hard/expensive so we will try and work out what the largest holes are and fix those first.
Do you mean to say that you are against looking for security weaknesses in a product's design during the design phase, with a focus on untrusted input and data crossing trust boundaries? Ahahahahaha. Hahahaha. *Snorgahah*. Haha. Knowing how much open source there is in use today, especially on the server, I sincerely hope that your attitude doesn't reflect that of the typical OSS developer.
Perhaps the worst (or best, depending on your perspective) thing about OSS advocates is that unlike Microsoft they fail to even recognize that they have a security problem. They're still in the denial stage.
Is the OSS community trying to trap Microsoft with GPL V3 with some kind of retroactive obligations? If so, this is an underhanded legal technique and should not be tolerated by the community any more than they tolerate potentially shady behavior by Microsoft.
The fastest way to the bottom is to lower yourselves to the worst that you perceive your competitors to be.
(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, and although some may perceive that I am biased, I'm a fan of both commercial and open source software. I'm a software developer who detests any kind of immoral politics or legal tricks and a believer that taking the higher ground is always the best approach.
If Alcatel-Lucent do own MP3 patents, then they can start to assert them whenever they want, and at whatever price they want... that is the (stupid) system.
Yeah, part of my response was venting against submarine patents. It's almost as if we need a form of adverse possession for patents, where if a company doesn't assert its patent rights after a reasonable period of time they lose the rights to offensively use that patent.
Submarine patents just remove too much choice on the part of the person or company supposedly infringing. It's one thing to steal IP, but quite another to (allegedly) license from the wrong or incomplete set of companies or to build something that may (or may not, depending on a jury that doesn't have the technical knowledge to make an informed decision) overlap with something that's already been patented. If a company says "well, I can license MP3 for XX% of the cost of my product, or I can do without and let 3rd parties fill in the gap or supply an alternative technology, it lets the laws of supply and demand work. If the licensing fees are reasonable the company buys the license and everybody is happy. Except the lawyers.
Even better, weeding out these types of abuses is better for both parties since it encourages the development of actual technology (as opposed to fluff) that others can license for less than the cost of re-inventing that technology or trying to find an alternative from scratch.
Oh, and while I'm on the soap box and speaking my personal opinion, if there is not at least a production quality reference implementation or a real product that implements the software patent, it shouldn't be granted. It's not like you can sit around thinking all day and patent a bunch of vague random shit without doing the "99% perspiration" part that it takes to produce technology that actually has value. This should be just like how people attempting to patent perpetual motion machines have to prove that they work.
So if A rents out B's house without permission for 1 dollar per month to C, then C should be able to pay B 1 dollar per month for the place, after the mistake (that it is B's house, not A's) is discovered?
It's more like: 'A' rents out a large community of apartments to 200 customers(http://www.mp3licensing.com/licensees/in dex.asp) for a decade or so for $750/month. Everybody in the world has long acknowledged that 'A' had the rights to rent out that property. Then, out of nowhere, 'B' steps in and claims to own part of the property because they once helped install the sidewalks and demands that tenants not only have to pay $62,000/month, but that they also must pay that for each month they had been living there.
If the tenant had known the rent was $62,000/month they never would have even remotely considered living there in the first place, especially when they had a rather nice vacation home in WMA on the side anyway.
The above figures were loosely crafted to reflect the money involved to give an idea of the magnitude of the discrepancy.
I'm a believer in IP, but not submarine patents and completely outrageous purported damages awarded by juries. This is true a hundred times over when the person or company tried in good faith co correctly license the IP in the first place!
Ok, so you're saying piracy is OK -- even though in this case 70% of the pirated software went to the US and other western countries -- because the western economy should subsidize China?
Given our current trade deficit that's even more laughable. Yes, the US is currently a service-based economy and China is mostly a manufacturing economy. Let's give away or let them steal all of our services and IP while buying all of their products. That makes *total* sense to me.
The good news is that the reality is that China doesn't want to just manufacture cheap goods. As they enter the world stage they are also taking steps to honor intellectual property. This benefits us both.
The true value of the software is much closer to the actual revenues that the pirates derive.
Then maybe the pirates should set up their own development shops, charge slightly more, and go for volume. Since AutoCAD as already mentioned; let's go with that. I'm pretty sure that a group of pirates could get together and build an application with the same quality and feature set of AutoCAD and sell it legally for $10 instead of selling an illegal copy on the street for $5. I mean, how hard could it be?
I mean, it's not like a few thousand person-years of development by people with BS/MS/PhD's and tons of talent, skill, and passion is worth anything, right?
(It's like all the world's sarcasm detectors silently cried out and died.)
Notice that this is a separate document from the EULA that is both more specific about exactly what data is ever sent and much more readable than the typical legalese found elsewhere.
Certainly Microsoft backed down rather quickly...perhaps they wanted to avoid even the appearance that were purposefully causing grief again.
Emphasis mine. Given that Microsoft is probably the most scrutinized company in the history of the world, I suspect that yes, they backed down to avoid even the slightest hint of potentially causing "grief". They are walking on eggshells.
"We will bind the (Windows) shell to the Internet Explorer, so that running any other browser is a jolting experience." - Brad Chase of Microsoft, 1995
Given the competitive situation in 1995 it's sort-of hard to argue with trying to make the integration an advantage of Windows, especially since most modern operating systems have (in one way or another) now followed suit. (Cue ex post facto "monopoly" statements here.)
Also, in Vista Microsoft actually went to the extent of reverting IE7 to being a standalone application, even though from what I've seen on the web people are actually disappointed that they can no long transparently jump between the file explorer and Internet Explorer.
The point was that something in the OS was degrading the performance of those alternatives. Based on how quickly MS has backed down, I'm guessing it was deliberate, or at least known and accepted.
If you think the OS was purposely degrading the performance of the alternatives you're so far off base that you strain credibility. There probably was degradation, but simply because I/O contention is unavoidable with multiple indexers (not to mention virus scanners) furiously trying to scan/index user files.
In fact, as described by http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues /2007/02/VistaKernel, Vista is the first version of Windows to support prioritized I/O, and according to the article the search indexing runs at "Very Low I/O priority" to minimize the impact on other applications.
Whenever you vote for something, there's one thing you should keep in mind: someday people with a different opinion will be in power. Therefore, before you grant powers to a government you may be favorable to, consider that a few years or decades later, those exact same powers may be used against you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are multiple roles for OpenStreetMap to play, but one that came to my attention was mapping areas where Google, etc. haven't gone in order to help get food and power to people after a disaster.
I spent (too little) time voluntarily mapping out areas of Puerto Rico, through a well-coordinated effort to analyze and review satellite and aerial photos of less densely populated areas. This type of crowdsourcing is pretty cool...
One of the sites to visit: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
Except for the EU one, you gave impressively terrible examples. The days of AOL, Windows 95, and PGP (and whether Microsoft Clients supported it or not) are drops in the bucket compared to things like:
- Social media ... many more
- Online advertising, and Google in particular. The siren song of "free" software in exchange for giving up a significant amount of privacy
- Credit bureaus (not that you have much choice)
dgatwood may be over-paranoid, but Lithium Ion batteries aren't to be messed with unless you enjoy dealing with thermal runaway.
Does Google give businesses the ability to test updates and do a controlled rollout of patches for Chrome? Based on a cursory search of the web the answer seems to be "No", but I could be wrong...
Updates happen always and automatically even if the user doesn't have Administrative privileges.
As a vehement non-smoker I think everybody should take these breaks.
Didn't see this mentioned, but at least in my area the retailers I've been to are rationing drives:
Fry's is limiting purchases to one drive per person, with prices that are higher but don't seem completely unreasonable.
A local company that used to be known as "Hard Drives Northwest" has a sign at the entrance that they aren't selling individual drives at this time, as they're reserving them for purchase of an entire system.
Given the circumstances this seems reasonable, and I'm even happy the market seems to be responding responsibly.
A bit off topic, but something that may have broad interest... I'm not at all a hard-core gamer, but gleefully recall being a little kid playing F/A-18 Interceptor and messing around: learning to land on the carrier, and going off-mission to shoot at buildings and do tricks like fly under and around the Golden Gate bridge.
I would love an Oblivion-style open world game where you fly various modern planes and fighter jets and can go off the primary mission to tackle side quests or just mess around. Even better if it's on Earth with some reasonable combination of 3D geometry and satellite imagery.
It would also be nice for the capabilities of the planes and fighter jets to resemble their real-world counterparts, but I care 0% about having the act of flying the plane itself be anything like the real world; simple game-like controls would be fine. Oh, and while I'm at it, ideally it's a modern game with good graphics.
Does anything like this exist? I've played various demos of flying-related games on my PC and XBox 360 and nothing has really clicked.
Why does /. fuck up under IE9. I want concrete standards compliance issues.
IETF also has items like RFC1149: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
In other words, there is no filter; it seems anyone can submit anything to the IETF. My main concern over the WebM "specification" is best summarized by by the great analysis at http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377:
In other words, there is no real spec that could stand up to ISO-type scrutiny, ignoring all politics. They are attempting to make standard a specific implementation, with all its current quirks and flaws, and from what I've read it is now set in stone; even though they are posting an RFC (request for comments) they will not be changing the spec to address the known flaws.
How is this good for anybody but Google?
Good question.
No, it is not my preference that companies can do this. But at the same time I recognize that many of the web sites I visit on a regular basis need to make money somehow, even if they're only trying to cover the cost of their bandwidth.
Also, like I said, I'd rather see these kinds of ads than the horrible flashy blinky mortgage and weight loss scams and whatever else I seem to initially encounter on a "clean" machine.
Lately I've been pleased by the ads I get on most sites. After having recently shopped for a luxury car I got almost nothing but BMW, Infinti, Acura, etc. ads for months. None of which were intrusive. This Christmas I did some online shopping for some pajamas for the GF at Victoria's Secret and lo and behold now I'm greeted with Victoria's Secret models on a number of sites. Not only can I live with that, I can proclaim complete innocence when she's looking over my shoulder.
I even clicked through on a couple of the car ones while I was making up my mind, and afterwards as a bit of a reward for sites that host decent non-intrusive ads.
On the other hand, sites that have intersticials or Javascript pop-up/fly-overs that can't be blocked without disabling script, can DIAF. I have a bookmarklet that nukes most of them, otherwise I just immediately close the tab.
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/25/mcdonalds-lawyers-italian-restaurant-name
Therefore, I'm planning on making an eBook reader just to name it a McBook*. If enough heavyweight lawyers at McDonalds, Facebook, and Apple descend on me they may collapse into a black hole.
* Pronounced "em cee book" of course.
At least for some of us, it's not just basic arithemetic but having to spend tons of hours tracking down information that *could* be readily provided but, for some bizzare reason isn't. For example, have you ever had to deal with a ESPP in a company? Here's an example:
Fidelity will try to keep track of your wash sales and adjust the basis of your future sales accordingly. Unfortunately, that makes the record-keeping almost impossible. Firstly, adjusting the BASIS doesn't just change the basis price, it also changes the "effective" DATE of the purchase. So when you go to sell that March 31st stock, may get statements from Fidelity showing that you sold stock bought on "12/31/2009w" -- it's really your 3/31 stock but the basis has been adjusted due to your wash sale on April 5th. This can get extraordinarily confusing, because it means that neither the BASIS price nor purchase DATE for this set of shares corresponds to what was actually sold.
And that's a freakin' disaster, because as mentioned 3 sections ago, Fidelity fails to properly adjust the BASIS price of shares ESPP sales, meaning that you have to do it yourself. But since Fidelity has already "helpfully" changed the BASIS price and DATE to account for the WASH SALE, it can be virtually impossible to figure out WHICH shares were actually sold, meaning it's virtually impossible for you to properly adjust the BASIS to take into account the ORDINARY INCOME you recognized.
Oh, and keep in mind that the change of the BASIS DATE means that your later sale may be changed from a SHORT-TERM transaction to a LONG-TERM transaction. Confusing.
Oh, and keep in mind that because you often will be buying and selling different-sized blocks of shares, a given sale will likely be split up into multiple transactions, each tracking a different wash sale.
From: http://www.ericlawrence.com/eric/show.asp?entry=4/2/2010%2012:20:00%20PM
I agree that a basic 1040 is easy, but there are tons of gotchas out there due to not only the legal complexity but also how your company and/or broker does their bookkeeping. Reverse solving to uncover lost data is a huge pain, especially if you're like some of us who opt-out of paper statements. Some of the critical information you need to know is just gone.
Of course, if you're one of those people who keeps a dozen filing cabinets and spends 30 minutes a day doing personal finance and bookkeeping, sure it's trivial. Most people aren't like that and shouldn't be required to be like that.
To be fair, my post was primarily addressing the "information should be free" crowd, particularly those who think that OSS is the only way to go and proprietary software is somehow evil. (These people also seem to be content stealing* movies and music). This isn't the same as the OSS community, although anecdotally there seems to be a lot of overlap.
:-)
So, would you be happy with a License to Tinker that doesn't allow an arbitrary company to legally take advantage of the R&D efforts of the people who created the product (software and/or hardware), but would still keep it fully open for your tinkering?
This wouldn't necessarily replace OSS software; there's nothing wrong with people deciding to release their work under the GPL or any other license. However, it does concern me when people think that all software MUST be released under such a license because this allows other companies to get a free ride (as in my Asus example) and profit off the original creators work. This also implies that the R&D process has no value, but the manufacturing process somehow does. I believe the net effect would be to discourage the creation process, leading to stagnation and exclusively promoting annoying business models such as ad-driven software.
* - The pedant who mentions that copyright violation is not a criminal act is an example of said person.
When it comes to "information must be free", why do hardware vendors get a free pass? With OSS taken to its logical conclusion, a hardware vendor who bundles their product with open source software should be forced to document and share the schematics for the circuit boards and chips, the molds for the case, and so on.
If "research and development" has no value with software, surely it shouldn't for hardware either. Any company in the US, or Mexico, or China must be able to exactly clone the eeePC and undercut Asus with their own product. Since building the clone would incur near-zero R&D cost the clone's vendor should almost always be able to undercut Asus, even if inferior quality parts aren't used (which is also an option). The resulting competition would reduce prices, so the consumer wins!
Obviously this is written tongue-in-cheek, but really, what is the difference besides the low barrier to entry in writing software?
A threat model is about admitting we have a bad product, saying that fixing it properly is too hard /expensive so we will try and work out what the largest holes are and fix those first.
Do you mean to say that you are against looking for security weaknesses in a product's design during the design phase, with a focus on untrusted input and data crossing trust boundaries? Ahahahahaha. Hahahaha. *Snorgahah*. Haha. Knowing how much open source there is in use today, especially on the server, I sincerely hope that your attitude doesn't reflect that of the typical OSS developer.
Perhaps the worst (or best, depending on your perspective) thing about OSS advocates is that unlike Microsoft they fail to even recognize that they have a security problem. They're still in the denial stage.
To me the question is this:
Is the OSS community trying to trap Microsoft with GPL V3 with some kind of retroactive obligations? If so, this is an underhanded legal technique and should not be tolerated by the community any more than they tolerate potentially shady behavior by Microsoft.
The fastest way to the bottom is to lower yourselves to the worst that you perceive your competitors to be.
(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, and although some may perceive that I am biased, I'm a fan of both commercial and open source software. I'm a software developer who detests any kind of immoral politics or legal tricks and a believer that taking the higher ground is always the best approach.
Yeah, part of my response was venting against submarine patents. It's almost as if we need a form of adverse possession for patents, where if a company doesn't assert its patent rights after a reasonable period of time they lose the rights to offensively use that patent.
Submarine patents just remove too much choice on the part of the person or company supposedly infringing. It's one thing to steal IP, but quite another to (allegedly) license from the wrong or incomplete set of companies or to build something that may (or may not, depending on a jury that doesn't have the technical knowledge to make an informed decision) overlap with something that's already been patented. If a company says "well, I can license MP3 for XX% of the cost of my product, or I can do without and let 3rd parties fill in the gap or supply an alternative technology, it lets the laws of supply and demand work. If the licensing fees are reasonable the company buys the license and everybody is happy. Except the lawyers.
Even better, weeding out these types of abuses is better for both parties since it encourages the development of actual technology (as opposed to fluff) that others can license for less than the cost of re-inventing that technology or trying to find an alternative from scratch.
Oh, and while I'm on the soap box and speaking my personal opinion, if there is not at least a production quality reference implementation or a real product that implements the software patent, it shouldn't be granted. It's not like you can sit around thinking all day and patent a bunch of vague random shit without doing the "99% perspiration" part that it takes to produce technology that actually has value. This should be just like how people attempting to patent perpetual motion machines have to prove that they work.
It's more like: 'A' rents out a large community of apartments to 200 customers(http://www.mp3licensing.com/licensees/in dex.asp) for a decade or so for $750/month. Everybody in the world has long acknowledged that 'A' had the rights to rent out that property. Then, out of nowhere, 'B' steps in and claims to own part of the property because they once helped install the sidewalks and demands that tenants not only have to pay $62,000/month, but that they also must pay that for each month they had been living there.
If the tenant had known the rent was $62,000/month they never would have even remotely considered living there in the first place, especially when they had a rather nice vacation home in WMA on the side anyway.
The above figures were loosely crafted to reflect the money involved to give an idea of the magnitude of the discrepancy.
I'm a believer in IP, but not submarine patents and completely outrageous purported damages awarded by juries. This is true a hundred times over when the person or company tried in good faith co correctly license the IP in the first place!
Ok, so you're saying piracy is OK -- even though in this case 70% of the pirated software went to the US and other western countries -- because the western economy should subsidize China?
Given our current trade deficit that's even more laughable. Yes, the US is currently a service-based economy and China is mostly a manufacturing economy. Let's give away or let them steal all of our services and IP while buying all of their products. That makes *total* sense to me.
The good news is that the reality is that China doesn't want to just manufacture cheap goods. As they enter the world stage they are also taking steps to honor intellectual property. This benefits us both.
Then maybe the pirates should set up their own development shops, charge slightly more, and go for volume. Since AutoCAD as already mentioned; let's go with that. I'm pretty sure that a group of pirates could get together and build an application with the same quality and feature set of AutoCAD and sell it legally for $10 instead of selling an illegal copy on the street for $5. I mean, how hard could it be?
I mean, it's not like a few thousand person-years of development by people with BS/MS/PhD's and tons of talent, skill, and passion is worth anything, right?
(It's like all the world's sarcasm detectors silently cried out and died.)
The link is buried in the article, so in case you didn't catch it: Windows Vista Privacy Statement
There's a short highlights page as well: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/privacy/vist artm.mspx.
Notice that this is a separate document from the EULA that is both more specific about exactly what data is ever sent and much more readable than the typical legalese found elsewhere.
Emphasis mine. Given that Microsoft is probably the most scrutinized company in the history of the world, I suspect that yes, they backed down to avoid even the slightest hint of potentially causing "grief". They are walking on eggshells.
Given the competitive situation in 1995 it's sort-of hard to argue with trying to make the integration an advantage of Windows, especially since most modern operating systems have (in one way or another) now followed suit. (Cue ex post facto "monopoly" statements here.)
Also, in Vista Microsoft actually went to the extent of reverting IE7 to being a standalone application, even though from what I've seen on the web people are actually disappointed that they can no long transparently jump between the file explorer and Internet Explorer.
If you think the OS was purposely degrading the performance of the alternatives you're so far off base that you strain credibility. There probably was degradation, but simply because I/O contention is unavoidable with multiple indexers (not to mention virus scanners) furiously trying to scan/index user files.
In fact, as described by http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues /2007/02/VistaKernel, Vista is the first version of Windows to support prioritized I/O, and according to the article the search indexing runs at "Very Low I/O priority" to minimize the impact on other applications.
Whenever you vote for something, there's one thing you should keep in mind: someday people with a different opinion will be in power. Therefore, before you grant powers to a government you may be favorable to, consider that a few years or decades later, those exact same powers may be used against you.