Re:Cracking is a crime. Period.
on
One for the Kids
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· Score: 1
do you REALLY think those laws are a bad thing?
personally, I want the ability to sue someone who breaks into my computer. I won't do it, esp if they were benign, but that is besides the point.
If I break into my university's secure areas, I will face criminal sanction... why the hell should I not if I break into the secure computer systems that this campus has?
Too much parochialism here... We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
If your car is prone to breakdowns, that is NOT illegal...
If your car arbitrarily blows up, that is, but that is only because of Federal safety regulations (and some negligence law, but that is impossible to prove (almost))
the EULA protects software companies... even if the DOJ wanted to, this is not something they can do anything about, at least until they get rid of the EULA... We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
the DOJ is Socializing Children... and that's ok..
on
One for the Kids
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· Score: 2
Give that page credit, they are trying to achieve their mission in an intelligent manner...
Inculcating kids with the "right" behavior is a valid purpose for the department of justice... most of us do stop at red lights late at night when there are no cars nearby...
Granted the page does not get into the finer points that this article brought up, but telling a 5 year old "programmers are good, hackers are bad" is easier than saying "some hackers are good, some are bad"...
I doubt the DOJ thinks crackers are anything other than poor white people...
There is not that much that is highly objectionable there... I think the page did a fairly poor job, but Internet crime is not that page's focus anyway...
The arguements given are not intelligent, but what do you think a 5-year old will read, a list of do's and don'ts or a long persuasive thesis...
Don't forget that the main way that kids will come in contact with this page is NOT on their own, but their teachers/parents taking them there, and giving a guided tour... how many of you have been to this site on your own, its the last place I would point my browser, if it had not been for this article...
Yes the DOJ is trying to indocrinate, but so what? that is what it is there for... that is what the carrot side of crime prevention is all about...
(I am not saying its pretty, but its prettier than Waco, the stick side of law enforcement...)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
well it was very reproduceable, and that collision domain was not saturated at all (I tried this transfer several times as the OS crashed 100MB in each time... and in between transfering from one Sun to another on that domain I had no such problems, near 1MB/s (100x)
Not to say that that is the structural limitation of Macs, but they have severe issues... the crashing due to large transfers for example.. it could be an older version, but it was a G3.. what MACOS version that is I do not know, but as a fairly recent computer it is hard to believe that it is THAT outdated... We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Jobs can have his ideology (or to be nicer about it, vision of the future of computing)
Others can like it.
I was stating my objections to it.
I hardly think he is stupid, but I think he is running in the wrong direction... We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Actually I swear I received just that at work not more than 4 weeks ago... I have no idea why, as my Mac experiance basically is comprised of that day and elementary school long ago... We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Apple and Pixar are the same in that regard--they both deliver a product that has immense technology unerpinnings and yet they both strive to say you don't need to know anything about this techology in order to use it. In the case of Apple, we're going to make it easy as possible to use this.
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
(this is made more clear by the context of that quote, its on page 3)
And that summarizes why most of macOS's limitations are still here (absent macOS X, which I will address as proof-of-point) They still use co-operative multi-tasking, instead of pre-emptive, because they made an ideological decision before, and the developer community is not aware enough to yell about it (or Apple does not care, after all, their focus is the consumer, not the developer, as Steve Jobs would say)
Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...
the common user will (a) prob not notice until DSL becomes more common, and (b) prob not notice even then.. "oh it will take 20 minutes, ok let me go get some coffee"
Apple finally realized that to get consumers you need to get their workplace, and in order to do that, you need to have a server as well as a workstation. I think it is telling they brought in BSD... Not only can their product not work at that level, but they have no interest in developing one that can (MS at least used the OS/2 code they had written for IBM to make NT)
I guess I find Jobs frightening; his myopia regarding the industry does not manifest itself as simple ostrich-in-the-sand, which would have meant he would have gone out of business long ago, but rather he superimposes ideology on technology to such an extent as to be... well.. frightening...
Another quote: You said "corporate" and "technical" as if they go together. Technology has nothing to do with the corporate world. I don't see technology and the corporate world as being necessarily intertwined, any more than art and the corporate world are intertwined.
especially when we are talking about their TECHNOLOGY budgets!.. Jobs wants to take an appliance and make a social statement out of it, when it is an appliance, that ought to work as well as it can, not be a vehicle for social meaning...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
The world is getting weird... who accidentally hit Gateway with the cluestick?
Obviously this is a Good Thing (tm) for many reasons:
(1) Gateway selling Linux boxen means more corporate awareness and more Linux awareness at Gateway (a very Good Thing (tm), no more Winmodems!!! (hopefully)) (2) This means another Linux-corp is going to be rolling in dough, always good for those of us with Linux all over our resume;-) (3) the publicity on news.com means user-awareness (4) Persumably Gateway will actually sell some units of these, which means more *nix shops instead of NT shops (I do not think they will be stealing from existing *nix resellers, as if I am a biig *nix shop I go to Sun or IBM or HP, and if I am a Linux-shop and have been, prob already have a commerical relationship with VA or Penguin (or I roll my own;-)
Companies (in my limited experience) tend to stick to companies that they have bought from before... Hence most sales of Gateway's with this product line are likely to be existing customers of Gateway's who have been buying win* only up till now...
And damn that blue is cool looking;-) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
You are right, in terms of that the proportion of commercial software will go up, as it has no where to go but up... don't forget, however that the amount of OSD-compliant software will also rise, spurred on by the advance of the platform...
at worst, the platform mainstreams with a sizeable amount of both types, but I don't think that the future will hit that worst case, as even commercial ISVs are releasing some/all of their software under OSD licenses... not all of them, but many of them, and this is a concept that has been banished from this industry for some time now...
And then one can of course refuse to use non-OSD software, which then influences ISVs to make their products OSD-compliant or at very worst, compatible with the mainstream free product of that market, which is also a win for the community
The forcast is sunny skies ahead;-) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
keep in mind the wording, "they are hedging their bets WITH Linux"
most ISVs still consider Win* or an older Unix their primary platform, but they are becoming aware the Linux MAY replace said platforms, or at least become a relevant compeditor (in some markets it already is) and hence they are hedging their bets by porting some software to Linux... We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
I suppose this gives Linux even more credibility, but I think its primary benefit is that IBM is "actively promoting Linux as a viable, less-expensive alternative to Windows NT. " When folks see Linux as a pre-install option on IBM servers, Linux will move out of the many-awards-hot-news-topic arena into the many-sales-hot-product arena.
I really don't think we are there yet, but this is a good sign...
Of course, IBM is just finally recognizing that ANY *nix is better than forcing customers to use AIX;-) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
take off from higher latitude and you have to factor in many more variables into your launch window We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
If they actually leverage the power of Linux well, this could be very cool;
everyone reading this remembers the Coke machine in MIT that had its own IP, yes?
Imagine setting up your TV to automatically record the news IF AND ONLY IF you are not already at home...
Imagine being able to steal ALL the HBO movies into mpg files... (this would prob require some programming, but hey, thats why we are (most of us) CS majors
Imagine, sitting 100 miles away and checking the channel that your kids are watching...
The ultimate user-configured Vchip is inherent, and before all the 12-14 year olds on this board demoderate me, keep in mind that this IS a useful feature for the public at large
it will allow for EFFECTIVE programable functions (ie all those record-this-show-every-week)
and the best part of all this is, you do not inherently need to use those annoying on-TV menus, but can ssh (telnet) in or use some networked GUI app to do all this...
Since this is all opensource (alledgedly) we can probably work around any of the safe-guards they create to prevent mass copying, commercial exclusion, etc. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
well evidently Loki feels like they needed it, so they wrote it...
and now they have GPLed it.
This behvior is one that we _ought_ to be applauding, as they are at this point GPLing anything they can, legally... (the actual source of the games is owned by the various game studios, so Loki is stuck)
moreover this sets a precedence outside of Redhat et al, that GPLing is cool and ok for commercial ISVs, who need to keep SOME code proprietary (yes, I know, it would be nice if Adobe made all of its products GPLed, but that is not exactly likely...)
The last reason this is good is that it is more code... when redhat and the debian committee-in-charge sit down to create the spec for the.lsp (Linux Standard Package) format, they will have this code to look at, along with all the others, which cannot hurt (this code does far more than be a GUI, it does its own dependacy checks, etc... every new way that is implememnted is antoher way to look at when we finally move beyond this silly setup of having 3-4 packaging systems...) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
though I have to admit, my LUG is planning a distro variant to have a easy-to-install distro that automatically sets up various services to integrate with our campus (we are a university LUG) and apt is prob gonna be the back bone of getting security fixes out to the various newbies (yes that server will need ot be locked down, we know)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
no but these are for companies, the computers prebuilt + support offered means that companies can consider using them... that IS very important... We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
OTOH, apt etc make it easy for the newbies to see the breath of the software out there, and spreading ANYTHING but Redhat makes the "public" more aware of Linux as something that trancends a particular distro...
this is not meant to bash RH, but having ISVs not assume that a given user uses RH is of high value to us (the community at large) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
what are you looking for in terms of school choice? (I am not sure but I think GATECH is higher ranked than we are (though not by much, we are both top 15) but we have much more in the way of coop/internship/pt job opportunities in CS)
we have a kick ass LUG (not to assume you are a Linux-user, but...)
you end up strongly on a grad-school track coming out of UMCP... this does not inhibit you from getting a job, but you will probably have to learn most programming languages on your own (I think the current slate is C/C++, (Perl && Java || LISP && PROLOG) )
OTOH if you want to futz around with making your own compiler, come here; and if you want a good grounding in general algorithmic theory, our final Alg class (not req.) is renowned... (CMSC451)
anywho, email me if you have any questions...
-RS
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
I am another poster from the University Of Maryland College Park, and I can say that the only professor who has cared about stuff as trivial as that is not a CS professor (rather an EE professor who teaches EE majors programming)
Our CS dept (so far) has proven to be surprisingly enlightened; after the first 4 classes, you can write any program in any language that will compile/run on the CS development cluster! (The point being that students learn to find the tool that best fits each task, rather than buying into one language and limiting themselves)
The other nice thing, (a feature we share with UNC, UCBerkely, and a few others) is the local CS industry; working NASA was fun, and there are still orgs like the NSA (!), DOD (A friend of mine is the ass. sysad for AFRRI), UUnet/MCI, etc.. (MAEast is right here, so many uberISPs have offices here, so if you want a sysad job as opposed to a coding job its right here) We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
or Pax Bharathia (Indian) where space is controled by a democratic power that is not hypocritical.
what were the two countries to vote AGAINST the Treaty of Rome two summers ago, where the International Court for Human Rights was established - Libya and US
In order to prevent all R&D from ending up as a trade secret, the USG gives inventors legal "ownership" over a given invention/concept/etc in return for it being available to all, and eventually entering the public domain...
take the long view, if source is patented, it is (a) available for all to look at, but much more importantly (b) it will enter the public domain soon
the amount of time given is a problem, as 20years is 1/2 the age of the industry, but the concept is not
consider: without this it is very possible such basic ideas as the transistor would have remained trade secrets....
this is a BAD THING
yes somethings can be reverse-engineered, but that _IS_ reinventing the wheel, and in such a climate, the reverse-engineers would keep their new info secret...
high entry-to-market barriers are bad... even the computer industry is getting higher ones, but without patent law, those barriers would be astronomically high...
Slashdot Mirror
do you REALLY think those laws are a bad thing?
personally, I want the ability to sue someone who breaks into my computer. I won't do it, esp if they were benign, but that is besides the point.
If I break into my university's secure areas, I will face criminal sanction... why the hell should I not if I break into the secure computer systems that this campus has?
Too much parochialism here...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
If your car is prone to breakdowns, that is NOT illegal...
If your car arbitrarily blows up, that is, but that is only because of Federal safety regulations (and some negligence law, but that is impossible to prove (almost))
the EULA protects software companies... even if the DOJ wanted to, this is not something they can do anything about, at least until they get rid of the EULA...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Give that page credit, they are trying to achieve their mission in an intelligent manner...
Inculcating kids with the "right" behavior is a valid purpose for the department of justice... most of us do stop at red lights late at night when there are no cars nearby...
Granted the page does not get into the finer points that this article brought up, but telling a 5 year old "programmers are good, hackers are bad" is easier than saying "some hackers are good, some are bad"...
I doubt the DOJ thinks crackers are anything other than poor white people...
There is not that much that is highly objectionable there... I think the page did a fairly poor job, but Internet crime is not that page's focus anyway...
The arguements given are not intelligent, but what do you think a 5-year old will read, a list of do's and don'ts or a long persuasive thesis...
Don't forget that the main way that kids will come in contact with this page is NOT on their own, but their teachers/parents taking them there, and giving a guided tour... how many of you have been to this site on your own, its the last place I would point my browser, if it had not been for this article...
Yes the DOJ is trying to indocrinate, but so what? that is what it is there for... that is what the carrot side of crime prevention is all about...
(I am not saying its pretty, but its prettier than Waco, the stick side of law enforcement...)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
well it was very reproduceable, and that collision domain was not saturated at all (I tried this transfer several times as the OS crashed 100MB in each time... and in between transfering from one Sun to another on that domain I had no such problems, near 1MB/s
(100x)
Not to say that that is the structural limitation of Macs, but they have severe issues... the crashing due to large transfers for example.. it could be an older version, but it was a G3.. what MACOS version that is I do not know, but as a fairly recent computer it is hard to believe that it is THAT outdated...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
it was talking to a Sun Ultra10
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Jobs can have his ideology (or to be nicer about it, vision of the future of computing)
Others can like it.
I was stating my objections to it.
I hardly think he is stupid, but I think he is running in the wrong direction...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Actually I swear I received just that at work not more than 4 weeks ago... I have no idea why, as my Mac experiance basically is comprised of that day and elementary school long ago...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
From the article
... well.. frightening...
Apple and Pixar are the same in that regard--they both deliver a product that has immense technology unerpinnings and yet they both strive to say you don't need to know anything about this techology in order to use it. In the case of Apple, we're going to make it easy as possible to use this.
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
(this is made more clear by the context of that quote, its on page 3)
And that summarizes why most of macOS's limitations are still here (absent macOS X, which I will address as proof-of-point)
They still use co-operative multi-tasking, instead of pre-emptive, because they made an ideological decision before, and the developer community is not aware enough to yell about it (or Apple does not care, after all, their focus is the consumer, not the developer, as Steve Jobs would say)
Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...
the common user will (a) prob not notice until DSL becomes more common, and (b) prob not notice even then.. "oh it will take 20 minutes, ok let me go get some coffee"
Apple finally realized that to get consumers you need to get their workplace, and in order to do that, you need to have a server as well as a workstation. I think it is telling they brought in BSD... Not only can their product not work at that level, but they have no interest in developing one that can (MS at least used the OS/2 code they had written for IBM to make NT)
I guess I find Jobs frightening; his myopia regarding the industry does not manifest itself as simple ostrich-in-the-sand, which would have meant he would have gone out of business long ago, but rather he superimposes ideology on technology to such an extent as to be
Another quote:
You said "corporate" and "technical" as if they go together. Technology has nothing to do with the corporate world. I don't see technology and the corporate world as being necessarily intertwined, any more than art and the corporate world are intertwined.
especially when we are talking about their TECHNOLOGY budgets!.. Jobs wants to take an appliance and make a social statement out of it, when it is an appliance, that ought to work as well as it can, not be a vehicle for social meaning...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
The world is getting weird...
;-) ;-)
;-)
who accidentally hit Gateway with the cluestick?
Obviously this is a Good Thing (tm) for many reasons:
(1) Gateway selling Linux boxen means more corporate awareness and more Linux awareness at Gateway (a very Good Thing (tm), no more Winmodems!!! (hopefully))
(2) This means another Linux-corp is going to be rolling in dough, always good for those of us with Linux all over our resume
(3) the publicity on news.com means user-awareness
(4) Persumably Gateway will actually sell some units of these, which means more *nix shops instead of NT shops (I do not think they will be stealing from existing *nix resellers, as if I am a biig *nix shop I go to Sun or IBM or HP, and if I am a Linux-shop and have been, prob already have a commerical relationship with VA or Penguin (or I roll my own
Companies (in my limited experience) tend to stick to companies that they have bought from before... Hence most sales of Gateway's with this product line are likely to be existing customers of Gateway's who have been buying win* only up till now...
And damn that blue is cool looking
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
they are moving away from AIX to Monterey for the high-end, and AIX to Linux for the low end (low end meaning 8 cpu)
-RS
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
You are right, in terms of that the proportion of commercial software will go up, as it has no where to go but up...
;-)
don't forget, however that the amount of OSD-compliant software will also rise, spurred on by the advance of the platform...
at worst, the platform mainstreams with a sizeable amount of both types, but I don't think that the future will hit that worst case, as even commercial ISVs are releasing some/all of their software under OSD licenses... not all of them, but many of them, and this is a concept that has been banished from this industry for some time now...
And then one can of course refuse to use non-OSD software, which then influences ISVs to make their products OSD-compliant or at very worst, compatible with the mainstream free product of that market, which is also a win for the community
The forcast is sunny skies ahead
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
keep in mind the wording, "they are hedging their bets WITH Linux"
most ISVs still consider Win* or an older Unix their primary platform, but they are becoming aware the Linux MAY replace said platforms, or at least become a relevant compeditor (in some markets it already is) and hence they are hedging their bets by porting some software to Linux...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
I suppose this gives Linux even more credibility, but I think its primary benefit is that IBM is "actively promoting Linux as a viable, less-expensive alternative to Windows NT. " When folks see Linux as a pre-install option on IBM servers, Linux will move out of the many-awards-hot-news-topic arena into the many-sales-hot-product arena.
;-)
I really don't think we are there yet, but this is a good sign...
Of course, IBM is just finally recognizing that ANY *nix is better than forcing customers to use AIX
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
no its due to Florida's closeness to equator...
take off from higher latitude and you have to factor in many more variables into your launch window
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
If they actually leverage the power of Linux well, this could be very cool;
everyone reading this remembers the Coke machine in MIT that had its own IP, yes?
Imagine setting up your TV to automatically record the news IF AND ONLY IF you are not already at home...
Imagine being able to steal ALL the HBO movies into mpg files... (this would prob require some programming, but hey, thats why we are (most of us) CS majors
Imagine, sitting 100 miles away and checking the channel that your kids are watching...
The ultimate user-configured Vchip is inherent, and before all the 12-14 year olds on this board demoderate me, keep in mind that this IS a useful feature for the public at large
it will allow for EFFECTIVE programable functions (ie all those record-this-show-every-week)
and the best part of all this is, you do not inherently need to use those annoying on-TV menus, but can ssh (telnet) in or use some networked GUI app to do all this...
Since this is all opensource (alledgedly) we can probably work around any of the safe-guards they create to prevent mass copying, commercial exclusion, etc.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
well evidently Loki feels like they needed it, so they wrote it...
.lsp (Linux Standard Package) format, they will have this code to look at, along with all the others, which cannot hurt (this code does far more than be a GUI, it does its own dependacy checks, etc... every new way that is implememnted is antoher way to look at when we finally move beyond this silly setup of having 3-4 packaging systems...)
and now they have GPLed it.
This behvior is one that we _ought_ to be applauding, as they are at this point GPLing anything they can, legally... (the actual source of the games is owned by the various game studios, so Loki is stuck)
moreover this sets a precedence outside of Redhat et al, that GPLing is cool and ok for commercial ISVs, who need to keep SOME code proprietary (yes, I know, it would be nice if Adobe made all of its products GPLed, but that is not exactly likely...)
The last reason this is good is that it is more code... when redhat and the debian committee-in-charge sit down to create the spec for the
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
debian politics on the other hand ;-)
though I have to admit, my LUG is planning a distro variant to have a easy-to-install distro that automatically sets up various services to integrate with our campus (we are a university LUG) and apt is prob gonna be the back bone of getting security fixes out to the various newbies (yes that server will need ot be locked down, we know)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
no but these are for companies, the computers prebuilt + support offered means that companies can consider using them... that IS very important...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
OTOH, apt etc make it easy for the newbies to see the breath of the software out there, and spreading ANYTHING but Redhat makes the "public" more aware of Linux as something that trancends a particular distro...
this is not meant to bash RH, but having ISVs not assume that a given user uses RH is of high value to us (the community at large)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Another voice from UMCP;
what are you looking for in terms of school choice?
(I am not sure but I think GATECH is higher ranked than we are (though not by much, we are both top 15) but we have much more in the way of coop/internship/pt job opportunities in CS)
we have a kick ass LUG (not to assume you are a Linux-user, but...)
you end up strongly on a grad-school track coming out of UMCP... this does not inhibit you from getting a job, but you will probably have to learn most programming languages on your own (I think the current slate is C/C++, (Perl && Java || LISP && PROLOG) )
OTOH if you want to futz around with making your own compiler, come here; and if you want a good grounding in general algorithmic theory, our final Alg class (not req.) is renowned... (CMSC451)
anywho, email me if you have any questions...
-RS
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
I am another poster from the University Of Maryland College Park, and I can say that the only professor who has cared about stuff as trivial as that is not a CS professor (rather an EE professor who teaches EE majors programming)
Our CS dept (so far) has proven to be surprisingly enlightened; after the first 4 classes, you can write any program in any language that will compile/run on the CS development cluster!
(The point being that students learn to find the tool that best fits each task, rather than buying into one language and limiting themselves)
The other nice thing, (a feature we share with UNC, UCBerkely, and a few others) is the local CS industry; working NASA was fun, and there are still orgs like the NSA (!), DOD (A friend of mine is the ass. sysad for AFRRI), UUnet/MCI, etc.. (MAEast is right here, so many uberISPs have offices here, so if you want a sysad job as opposed to a coding job its right here)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
or Pax Bharathia (Indian) where space is controled by a democratic power that is not hypocritical.
what were the two countries to vote AGAINST the Treaty of Rome two summers ago, where the International Court for Human Rights was established - Libya and US
which country are YOU most comfortable with?
exactly but not the way you think...
In order to prevent all R&D from ending up as a trade secret, the USG gives inventors legal "ownership" over a given invention/concept/etc in return for it being available to all, and eventually entering the public domain...
take the long view, if source is patented, it is (a) available for all to look at, but much more importantly (b) it will enter the public domain soon
the amount of time given is a problem, as 20years is 1/2 the age of the industry, but the concept is not
consider: without this it is very possible such basic ideas as the transistor would have remained trade secrets....
this is a BAD THING
yes somethings can be reverse-engineered, but that _IS_ reinventing the wheel, and in such a climate, the reverse-engineers would keep their new info secret...
high entry-to-market barriers are bad... even the computer industry is getting higher ones, but without patent law, those barriers would be astronomically high...
-RS
what is MK-Ultra, I have heard of it before, somewhere....
why can't it be proprietary?