Excuse me, this article by Paul Rubens is just a rant/flamebait, isn't it?
After all, why should someone offering "computer repair" be restricted to offering a physical repair, and why not checking for spyware, etc. as well?
I'm also missing interesting details in the article that would help me to mend my evil ways should I venture to become an "amateur computer repairman" !
Also, you get what you pay for - if you want repairs as cheap as possible, you end up with people with a limited repertoire, not with a costly team of experts.
But be careful not to allow "panning", since then you violate claim 1 of the patent. Basically you can have quaternions just allow you to have a sitting duck in 3D.
There is a reason I made the comparision. Speeding by a few km/h is officially considered something that is "prosecuted" by fining the offender.
The slashdot article made that statement that prosecution of illegal file spreading would stop, while it is a criminal prosecution, not just a fine.
Regardless of which side of the fence you sit in this dispute about illegal sharing, the statement propagated by slashdot does not make sense.
You point out why it doesn't make sense if you consider illegal filesharing a non-criminal activity, but when you believe it should be punished, then just stopping prosecution completely doesn't make sense either, because one has to wonder why the instrument of fines like for speeding are not being considered.
This sounds like you would like to ban all these beginnings of genetic engineering on humans.
I think it is eventually pointless to block such developments; for one, well-off families had a history of selecting some one "well-bred" as a partner for their offspring even before, so it is not like this type of activity is something completely new - and wouldn't banning it just make it so that only the super-rich would eventually be able to pay for "clandestine" genetic engineering.
Another reason why it is pointless to ban it is that it starts with small steps, all of which are quite acceptable or even seem necessary. (I won't mention these, since I would sound like the Pope's council of bishops.)
I'd rather think this technology should be open-source, and there should be a method to guarantee diversity so that the flow of normal evolution doesn't completely stop. E.g. people should be aware that e.g. simply increasing the firing rate of neurons by making several genetic modifcations at once might lead to very smart, but autistic or sociopathic people.
In yet another critical test case, prosecutors say that anything less than a prison sentence would make future prosecutions of people exceeding the speed limit by 16 km/h(10mph) unlikely.
I agree, sort of, that the design could be better, but even the best design has problems handling situations when all players converge in one place, like the central market place, for example to stage a demonstration for better servers and software;-)
It seems to me what is being overlooked here is that this requires every single website to have a content rating.
This opens the door not only to greatly increased revenue for content rating systems that charge for use of tags, but also to further filtering once the public decides that gaming or science education is a bad thing.
And actually the safest thing for Utah ISP to do would be to automatically label every website that did not have a rating with a default rating of "racist monkey lesbian snuff sex site".
Yes, all is correct what you say, but that doesn't change that there is no expiry of a trademark and no mechanism intended to invalidate it.
For example Coca Cola could be considered a pretty established and respectable drink in the western world - if you order Coca Cola in the restaurant, they will bring you the kind of cola they have, because Coca Cola has become a generic term - however that does not mean that any other company is allowed to sell "Coca Cola".
To look back to the article, this means the trademark on scrabble extends any IP protection, which the original scrabble game might have had, to an infinite time span, which is somewhat unfair, considering that some people see scrabble as a standard part of their life.
You wouldn't put up if a company had the trademark to "bread" (the kind you eat) either. So my point is, this is why this/. news is interesting.
I'm not sure this is so bad because you can just call the game 'literaxx' or so, and that name might get more popular, but then that name gets trademarked by someone else, etc.
I guess there would be less trouble if all versions of games included the name of the company or creator, like in 'Sid Meier''s Civilization'.
Well, since you mention Pepsi Cola vs Coca Cola - I always wondered why Pepsi got away with using a similar name - I guess there must have been variants of "Cola" out there when Coca Cola entered the business.
Imagine chess had been invented in our times, and trademarked, then no-one could use the word "chess" to sell a chess set. It is kind of worrying that common culturals stock can become 0wn3d by big business this way. Just consider that the workaround would be to privately rename every game: "Uh, chess? We call it 'wuyallix' here."
If you were trolling, I fell for it. If you were being straight up, you're an idiot.
Well, at least I am straight.
My site visiting behaviour does not match yours:
Either I will be heavily procrastinating, in that case I will visit most sites anyway even without RSS preview, or I will be working under a spell of concentration, in which case no site will be able to distract me, except maybe the one or two sites which I know to have fresh quality content every day, and there would be no benefit in having these mixed in with the rest.
I also can't find the RSS option in my localized version of yahoo, and I wonder whether you are really talking about syndication where you can select standard RSS only, which also has the benefit that the RSS information can be cached by the server.
Yea, we really need RSS, because it is much too much effort to click on the bookmark to slashdot or other fav' sites to get to the news.
Not to mention the scaling problem by folk's browsers requesting RSS content even when they don't read it. Much like running your TV while doing something else.
I mean RSS is great for cross-site syndication, but it is not really cool for personal access.
The letters came with a warning what you should do if you had opened them, and one US bio-scientist was AWOL at the time, so I think it can be safely assumed the idea was to scare the US government into investing more money into counterterrorism, especially biologic weapons research.
Maybe the guy simply wanted more money invested, or wanted to support the PATRIOT act.
The letters became really scary only when it was discovered that mail workers could be affected by the powder escaping out of the letters in transit.
If the they ever release the code, they have to stick to the GPL, notewithstanding their patents.
Essentially, their patent, or most of it, is void - the GPL explicitly states that patents don't get you off your duty to follow the GPL, though in theory, by buying a license from every single writer of the GPL'ed code, they could work around that.
I also wonder if the code has already been released, since that would make it much harder to patent.
I also wonder whether that agreement about owning all your IP in the contract is valid at all, since you cannot give away something that you don't have, like removing the code from the GPL after it has been released.
Also, such an agreement is not concise, since it doesn't detail what exactly you sign over with the agreement. With such broadness, it might be void, since the object of the contract is unknown.
Like, they can't possibly own the thoughts you wrote down in grammar school.
Well, the mathematics of feedback control theory surely do something, even if not physically at first. But I suppose if you are going to patent something physically using this, then you will often leave out most physical details, especially out of the base claim 1, and it would be your duty as a patent lawyer towards the client to make claim 1 as broad as possible.
So it is my perception that claim 1 will often not include much palpable "physical" stuff anyway.
This would not be as bad, if the whole patent would fall if claim 1 would be disputed succesfully, but I believe that the court will then let the patent owner get away with a succesful patent on claim 2+. I just can't get myself to understand this, because the complete invention is built on a chain of claims, and if claim 1 crumbles, it seems to me that the whole chain should fall.
Not in the US. Only the first inventor can get a patent, and then he has to undertake the step of getting it within a fairly narrow timeframe.
That is the theory. However there is no way that the patent office can check whether this is the first time the idea appeared. Of course, it seems you are a lawyer - you just define someone who doesn't patent or publish his invention as a non-inventor. Of course I can't really argue against such a circuitous definition/argument pair, I can only disagree with such a basis.
However some examples: For example, Microssoft's ISNOT patent application certainly doesn't describe something new. But that is an too easy target. Take the Segway patent. I looked at it, it is a pretty good patent, specific, with details and meat. However, even with such a patent I cannot help but wonder whether all the smart parts in that patent are not just a straightforward application of the known mathematics of feedback control theory. Of course, there is still work involved here, but nothing that some math students wouldn't have solved as exercises between 4am and breakfast.
Today, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and the patent office allows everyone to patent small extensions to these giants achievements, just because they are new. To close, there also si no way that you can accurately define or measure what non-obviousness means. You can only find out what is new.
I agree with MS on how business should be conducted on patents on stuff that gets invented as easily as software. Unlike document copyright, where the first publisher of a sequence of words is the copyright holder as if this was an inalienable right, a patent is given just to the one who expends the time and money to patent it and uphold the patent. Following this logic, it should be easy to patent - especially as patents are sooo important for the economy. You do not want to hurt the economy, do you?
Patent application fees serve some critical purposes:
1. They weed out non-serious applicants.
They do NOT weed out non-serious applicants with money. Granted, a symbolic once-only fee of between 20$-40$ might be necessary just to stop "spammers" but that, and the work involved in writing a patent application, is enough to stop applicants. Even now, most of the cost is not in writing, but in other legal costs anyway. Also, a well-funded company does not need to make use of a patent to pay for the fees, since to a well funded company, the patent fees are small money('peanuts'). Even if the patent is useful, it might just sit and wait till it gets bought or till it can sue someone for licensing fees.
Licensing fees would not be a problem if patents as they exist today did really only cover the exact steps in detail to make something work - however they often also cover completely different or more advanced stuff. Actually, a patent should have only one claim. Having several claims has completely undefined semantics until tested in court.
2. They can fund the PTO
When arguing for patents, it's being said that patents serve the good of all by providing economical support for progress. If that is so, then there is no need to punish patent holders by huge fees and taxes, and since the PTO performs an important public service, the public should pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't "Marketing are good." a completely valid sentence when talking about your company's department of marketing ?
Excuse me, this article by Paul Rubens is just a rant/flamebait, isn't it?
After all, why should someone offering "computer repair" be restricted to offering a physical repair, and why not checking for spyware, etc. as well?
I'm also missing interesting details in the article that would help me to mend my evil ways should I venture to become an "amateur computer repairman" !
Also, you get what you pay for - if you want repairs as cheap as possible, you end up with people with a limited repertoire, not with a costly team of experts.
Hehe quaternions :-)
But be careful not to allow "panning", since then you violate claim 1 of the patent. Basically you can have quaternions just allow you to have a sitting duck in 3D.
Something that would make sense would be cooperating with a big canadian software company, since Canadians speak french too.
The rest has been said by others, I've nothing to add.
There is a reason I made the comparision. Speeding by a few km/h is officially considered something that is "prosecuted" by fining the offender.
The slashdot article made that statement that prosecution of illegal file spreading would stop, while it is a criminal prosecution, not just a fine.
Regardless of which side of the fence you sit in this dispute about illegal sharing, the statement propagated by slashdot does not make sense.
You point out why it doesn't make sense if you consider illegal filesharing a non-criminal activity, but when you believe it should be punished, then just stopping prosecution completely doesn't make sense either, because one has to wonder why the instrument of fines like for speeding are not being considered.
This sounds like you would like to ban all these beginnings of genetic engineering on humans.
I think it is eventually pointless to block such developments; for one, well-off families had a history of selecting some one "well-bred" as a partner for their offspring even before, so it is not like this type of activity is something completely new - and wouldn't banning it just make it so that only the super-rich would eventually be able to pay for "clandestine" genetic engineering.
Another reason why it is pointless to ban it is that it starts with small steps, all of which are quite acceptable or even seem necessary. (I won't mention these, since I would sound like the Pope's council of bishops.)
I'd rather think this technology should be open-source, and there should be a method to guarantee diversity so that the flow of normal evolution doesn't completely stop. E.g. people should be aware that e.g. simply increasing the firing rate of neurons by making several genetic modifcations at once might lead to very smart, but autistic or sociopathic people.
In yet another critical test case, prosecutors say that anything less than a prison sentence would make future prosecutions of people exceeding the speed limit by 16 km/h(10mph) unlikely.
I agree, sort of, that the design could be better, but even the best design has problems handling situations when all players converge in one place, like the central market place, for example to stage a demonstration for better servers and software ;-)
It seems to me what is being overlooked here is that this requires every single website to have a content rating.
This opens the door not only to greatly increased revenue for content rating systems that charge for use of tags, but also to further filtering once the public decides that gaming or science education is a bad thing.
And actually the safest thing for Utah ISP to do would be to automatically label every website that did not have a rating with a default rating of "racist monkey lesbian snuff sex site".
Yes, all is correct what you say, but that doesn't change that there is no expiry of a trademark and no mechanism intended to invalidate it.
/. news is interesting.
For example Coca Cola could be considered a pretty established and respectable drink in the western world - if you order Coca Cola in the restaurant, they will bring you the kind of cola they have, because Coca Cola has become a generic term - however that does not mean that any other company is allowed to sell "Coca Cola".
To look back to the article, this means the trademark on scrabble extends any IP protection, which the original scrabble game might have had, to an infinite time span, which is somewhat unfair, considering that some people see scrabble as a standard part of their life.
You wouldn't put up if a company had the trademark to "bread" (the kind you eat) either. So my point is, this is why this
I'm not sure this is so bad because you can just call the game 'literaxx' or so, and that name might get more popular, but then that name gets trademarked by someone else, etc.
I guess there would be less trouble if all versions of games included the name of the company or creator, like in 'Sid Meier''s Civilization'.
So this means that there are no warez on P2P servers unless planted by agent provocateurs?
..
Now I can sleep undisturbed again, knowing all is well
Well, since you mention Pepsi Cola vs Coca Cola - I always wondered why Pepsi got away with using a similar name - I guess there must have been variants of "Cola" out there when Coca Cola entered the business.
Imagine chess had been invented in our times, and trademarked, then no-one could use the word "chess" to sell a chess set. It is kind of worrying that common culturals stock can become 0wn3d by big business this way. Just consider that the workaround would be to privately rename every game: "Uh, chess? We call it 'wuyallix' here."
If you were trolling, I fell for it. If you were being straight up, you're an idiot.
Well, at least I am straight.My site visiting behaviour does not match yours:
Either I will be heavily procrastinating, in that case I will visit most sites anyway even without RSS preview, or I will be working under a spell of concentration, in which case no site will be able to distract me, except maybe the one or two sites which I know to have fresh quality content every day, and there would be no benefit in having these mixed in with the rest.
I also can't find the RSS option in my localized version of yahoo, and I wonder whether you are really talking about syndication where you can select standard RSS only, which also has the benefit that the RSS information can be cached by the server.
I heard that is why doctors that have to sign lots of receipts use such a simple signature: to use the real one for contracts.
I don't completely buy that, I think its mostly lazyness or a degeneration of neurons like a scatman.
Yea, we really need RSS, because it is much too much effort to click on the bookmark to slashdot or other fav' sites to get to the news.
Not to mention the scaling problem by folk's browsers requesting RSS content even when they don't read it. Much like running your TV while doing something else.
I mean RSS is great for cross-site syndication, but it is not really cool for personal access.
The letters came with a warning what you should do if you had opened them, and one US bio-scientist was AWOL at the time, so I think it can be safely assumed the idea was to scare the US government into investing more money into counterterrorism, especially biologic weapons research.
Maybe the guy simply wanted more money invested, or wanted to support the PATRIOT act.
The letters became really scary only when it was discovered that mail workers could be affected by the powder escaping out of the letters in transit.
If the they ever release the code, they have to stick to the GPL, notewithstanding their patents.
Essentially, their patent, or most of it, is void - the GPL explicitly states that patents don't get you off your duty to follow the GPL, though in theory, by buying a license from every single writer of the GPL'ed code, they could work around that.
I also wonder if the code has already been released, since that would make it much harder to patent.
I also wonder whether that agreement about owning all your IP in the contract is valid at all, since you cannot give away something that you don't have, like removing the code from the GPL after it has been released.
Also, such an agreement is not concise, since it doesn't detail what exactly you sign over with the agreement. With such broadness, it might be void, since the object of the contract is unknown.
Like, they can't possibly own the thoughts you wrote down in grammar school.
Well, the mathematics of feedback control theory surely do something, even if not physically at first. But I suppose if you are going to patent something physically using this, then you will often leave out most physical details, especially out of the base claim 1, and it would be your duty as a patent lawyer towards the client to make claim 1 as broad as possible.
So it is my perception that claim 1 will often not include much palpable "physical" stuff anyway.
This would not be as bad, if the whole patent would fall if claim 1 would be disputed succesfully, but I believe that the court will then let the patent owner get away with a succesful patent on claim 2+. I just can't get myself to understand this, because the complete invention is built on a chain of claims, and if claim 1 crumbles, it seems to me that the whole chain should fall.
Not in the US. Only the first inventor can get a patent, and then he has to undertake the step of getting it within a fairly narrow timeframe.
That is the theory. However there is no way that the patent office can check whether this is the first time the idea appeared. Of course, it seems you are a lawyer - you just define someone who doesn't patent or publish his invention as a non-inventor. Of course I can't really argue against such a circuitous definition/argument pair, I can only disagree with such a basis.However some examples: For example, Microssoft's ISNOT patent application certainly doesn't describe something new. But that is an too easy target. Take the Segway patent. I looked at it, it is a pretty good patent, specific, with details and meat. However, even with such a patent I cannot help but wonder whether all the smart parts in that patent are not just a straightforward application of the known mathematics of feedback control theory. Of course, there is still work involved here, but nothing that some math students wouldn't have solved as exercises between 4am and breakfast.
Today, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and the patent office allows everyone to patent small extensions to these giants achievements, just because they are new. To close, there also si no way that you can accurately define or measure what non-obviousness means. You can only find out what is new.Patent application fees serve some critical purposes:
1. They weed out non-serious applicants.
They do NOT weed out non-serious applicants with money. Granted, a symbolic once-only fee of between 20$-40$ might be necessary just to stop "spammers" but that, and the work involved in writing a patent application, is enough to stop applicants. Even now, most of the cost is not in writing, but in other legal costs anyway. Also, a well-funded company does not need to make use of a patent to pay for the fees, since to a well funded company, the patent fees are small money('peanuts'). Even if the patent is useful, it might just sit and wait till it gets bought or till it can sue someone for licensing fees.Licensing fees would not be a problem if patents as they exist today did really only cover the exact steps in detail to make something work - however they often also cover completely different or more advanced stuff. Actually, a patent should have only one claim. Having several claims has completely undefined semantics until tested in court.
2. They can fund the PTO
When arguing for patents, it's being said that patents serve the good of all by providing economical support for progress. If that is so, then there is no need to punish patent holders by huge fees and taxes, and since the PTO performs an important public service, the public should pay for it.Ok, so the Deep Space Network time costs some dollars to run, but will that network operate cheaper when it is idle and not rented? Probably not.
Sometimes, only the variable costs should be considered, not the fixed costs that will just turn up elsewhere.
You might have to do port knocking to get in ..
*knock
*knock
What you are proposing sound like you could be helped by starting a demon which autostarts the needed gnome demons ;-)
..
Another demon, but maybe you#d like this one
Republic of Rome by Avalon Hill is an excellent game.
It offers real interaction and diplomacy even rows between players, much unlike other games where you simply plow along.
You -can- rotate in one dimension - it would just mean to multiply by -1.
..
A pretty boring rotation, but well