Now, this is clearly all rubbish, because small business's do come up with a lot of the inovative idea and they do secure valid patents on those ideas.
And multinationals do use their bank of trivial patents to force small companies to 'cross license'. So there's no real protection for small companies.
Much as I do love to whore for karma, my time is precious - you'll have to come up with better than that to continue the trolling.
Let's say I start a computer software company here in England, and my product includes a feature that is the subject of some silly United States patent. Can I freely market that
product everywhere but the United States without fear of being chased by the patent owners lawyers?
Well, the US lawyers will immediately come and claim for infringement, but they have to argue it in a US court, and if you don't have a US revenue stream they're not likely to get much from you.
If so, and I then decide I do want to sell into the United States, can my "license fee" then only apply to copies sold in the United States?
It's up to the patent owner. They have the monopoly, only they can grant you use of their patent. They can demand three camels per copy sold if they really want. They might even refuse to license you, and can demand that all copies of your product in the USA be siezed if you ignore them anyway. Perhaps this could affect UK shops who are owned and supplied by US companies.
i'm in the business of making money from my code, so i like being able to protect my product and my I.P This decusion makes it
almost imposible to do that now, and that can only damage the growing IT market across the EU.
An excellent troll. You're conveniently forgetting many things - firstly, that copyrights protect your ideas from 'theft' in the largest respect. Secondly, that pure mathematical algorithims are still patentable - unlike in America.
While you might moan about 'protection', you'll find that most patent holders are large multinational corporations like IBM. How fair is it to find that you infringe some vague patent of theirs? How fair is it if you publish an innovative image processing method in a journal, then someone else patents your idea, and tries to charge you because the patent office is too fucking lazy to read the appropriate journals?
How can you dare innovate in a market based on fear, uncertainty and doubt - at any time, some IP company with no products of their own comes to sue you because you inadvertently stepped on a patent landmine? Does your product have multitasking? That's illegally patented in the EU. So are CGI scripts on a Web server. So is hardware emulation used for software testing. Breaking down pathnames into directories and files is patented!
There is no doubt in my mind that software patents cause more harm than good. The copyright law, contract law and trade secret law is sufficient protection for software. Using patents on software is an abuse of the patent process.
And how the heck does it figure out what the "foreground" and "background" components are, anyway?
As it only works on scans of paper documents, "background" is bland paper-texture, perhaps coloured. You can easily use an edge-detection filter to work out which is which.
You'll be pleased to hear that from about 1998 (MacOS 8) onwards, single-clicking on the Apple (or any menu heading at all) leaves the menu open until you single-click again on the item you want.
However, it also supports click-and-drag to select the menu item.
Might I also add that KDE/Gnome could do with stealing Apple's GUI ideas, not Microsoft's, because Apple gave up on ugly grey rectangles and years ago.
You mean like the Amiga keyboard's ROM, from ~15 years ago?
Well, the Amiga's keyboard actually had a little CPU (about as powerful as the C64's main processor) with an onboard ROM, but if you open up your PC/Mac keyboard today, you'll still find a keyboard processor chip. Without it, you'd need a cable with about 20 wires in it to connect your keyboard.
I challenge anyone who advocates software patents in the previous story to read this list of illegally granted patents and explain why a 20+ year exclusive ownership of a broad field of innovation is good.
Smart-asses are saying "but it's just an option to only run signed apps". So, we can conclude that Microsoft's security policy is this:
Only run signed executables. (too strict)
Run absolutely any executable. (too lax)
I somehow doubt this is how it would work. At minimum, I would expect to see the Java sandbox security model in place, where the user can choose what's OK and what's not, for different levels of trust.
Sure, it's nice to have a 'flash/non-flash' option on the first screen, but that means doing two websites. How many corps want to pay for that?
What a great idea. Perhaps someone could tell
them that people visiting want nicely presented information, not text flying about the place and fading in and out.
Make one website, with NO FLASH. Unless you're a Flash animator showing off your work, you don't need Flash, or Shockwave at all.
Re:Britain's history of amateur games development
on
Playstation 2 Basic?
·
· Score: 1
I like nitpicking:
Teenagers learnt
how to program in their bedrooms on computers they got from Santa, then grew up to found and work at companies like Psygnosis, Codemasters, Silicon Dreams,
Eidos, Ocean, Rare, etc.
Santa didn't give you a computer. Your parents/guardians did.
Eidos doesn't employ programmers, or any game people at all. It's a cigar-chomping game publisher. Core Design are the authors of Tomb Raider et al, and even then they used to be the Amiga demo group "Anarchy".
[Say NO! to GOTO!]
While in general, I agree with that as a rule of thumb, there are some places where using a goto is better than not using one.
One such place is exception handling, where I imagine 99% of gotos in C code exist. Exception handling is a noble, structured programming element, but C doesn't have it.
Structured programmers emulate this useful
construct with goto and occasionally longjmp(), although it
doesn't quite work as well as a stack-based exception handling mechanism.
...and to think, I was only trying for the hip and cool way to say "GOTO considered harmful".
The Polish tax official obviously thought that Linux and StarOffice were at least as good as MS-Windows and Office. As you going to dispute his good judgement? So they were worth as much, and should be taxed as much.
I think you're missing something... governments only collect tax when you earn or spend money. Shares, paintings, CDs, can all change in value while you own them, but the government can't tax you for that, they can only tax you when you sell those items and earn money for them.
Another tricky situation is trying to define legal terms of 'value'. For example, a bible has a high moral value but not a great monetary value, unless it's made of gold and stuff. Similarly, a fine painting can be worth $40000 to one person (as art) and $300 (the price of the materials) to another. The government can't charge anyone tax on their thoughts, only if someone pays $40000 to transfer ownership can the government intervene.
you'll soon realize that the people who dress the smartest and shout the loudest, no matter how illogical or invalid their arguments are, will do extremely well. Those who try logic and persuasion will find themselves at the bottom of the corporate food chain.
Corporations, maybe. But public government goes something like this:
Corporate sponsors get friendly with elected representatives. It's always them. They have a vested interest in government because it lets them turn money into power.
Corporate sponsors persuade government to support XYZ.
Government supports XYZ.
Government tries to implement XYZ when the coast is clear.
Newspapers with an agenda against XYZ write about it.
People who read these papers are obviously against XYZ; they tsk and write to representatives. They are ignored.
Some gimp throws a publicity stunt.
This is NEWS!!! WOW!!! How did this happen! all the papers write and TVs broadcast.
The sheep of this world now know about XYZ. They either care or don't care. It depends on how it affects them right now. They don't care about the long term.
If enough people dislike it, XYZ is postponed until it's politically quiet again; Back to step 4. Otherwise, it goes through anyway; the men with money have to be kept happy.
x86 is a totally fscked-up CISC instruction set
from the 1970s, only hardware emulators (ie Pentium, Celeron, Athlon, Duron, etc) are any good at running it. x86 software emulation is
useless, which is why people want open source - at least, then, they can compile it for a modern processor.
Re:You are not a walking patent, no
on
Squatting On Life
·
· Score: 5
These patents are here to protect the investments of the genetics companies who have been researching into genetic engineering and gene therapy. It doesn't come cheap, why shouldn't they patent their findings?
No, you'll actually find that companies are patenting particular sequences without knowing what they do. Patents are not there to give someone a monopoly for the hell of it, patents are meant to add knowledge to the public domain, by offering the the inventor a limited monopoly for it. If they want a monopoly, they should have to tell us what the genes do first. This is just typical of how corrupt the patent system has become; companies expect to get outright monopolies based on overbroad patent applications. The idea of 'inventing' something and having that protected has long gone.
I would go so far as to say this is a good thing in many ways. It stops unscrupulous cowboy genetic's companies messing around with a set of genes in say, maize, and creating some sort of super-weed. At least this way, only the people who actually know what they are doing can apply their findings to genetic engineering.
More rot. Only governments can demand scientists stop messing with genetics. A patent doesn't stop you from doing something, it just passes control to the patent holder, Mr Drug Company. Do you think they give a rat's ass about gene splicing? Not if they can make money off it.
The other bit I don't like is that these patent monopolies will destroy the research community. It's no longer collaborative research within the scientific community, it's private hands-off-this-is-mine greed driven research.
As other posters have said, people should expect to be monitored in public libraries.
If phone companies gave out logs, they'd have to remove the 'private information', as this library did. They'd have to remove all the ids of users doing the dialling, and all ex-directory dialled numbers. Remember, no user names, ids or passwords were given out in these logs. Its only value to advertisers is to work out the most visited web sites, which are probably yahoo, altavista - they knew that anyway.
It seems that copyright is designed to promote progress - it does this by offering creators control and private ownership over their work, so they may use their intellectual work to reward themselves. Therefore, if copyright went away, the main loss would be 'revenue' from charging people money for access to the work.
What really needs to go is money, because that's how many people see reward (although that's not always the case). Money is just an advancement of bartering, because people are fickle and want to make sure 'they got the best deal' - they can't accept that whatever they do in their community is OK. Similarly, politics and people having control over others had to be invented because people were afraid of anarchy.
We have copyright and money and other materialistic concerns because we're not societally advanced enough to do without them. That's my humble opinion.
While it seems so much easier to 'hack' than, say, a Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Tivo or otherwise (I mean, it boots a normal ISO CD-ROM, has no lockout mechanisms, and you can even look at file://localhost/ in the browser), it's still cool to see people making more out of the $199 box than they get as default. But then, I want to do more than surf the 'net with a PC, so I'm stuck into paying more for things like 3D cards, TV recievers, 30Gb HDs, etc...
There's actually this site called afterlife.org which offers to mirror important web-sites should the actual webmaster become dead. Whether you believe in spiritual afterlife or not, your webpages can live on!
Wrong on two counts. Copyright law does not exist "to give creators their due recognition", but "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Secondly, the copyrighted work's license (unless it's GPL or something) will not allow you to advertise offer copies to other people, which is what a web site saying "downloadz here" actually is.
The word/intellectual property/trademark "Amiga" stopped having anything to do with the Commodore Amiga range of computers after about 1996.
Basically, the Amiga community split into two breeds - those who really like the CBM Amiga computer, its demos, games, music, etc, and the raving loonies who thought "The Amiga Must Live On!" and continued to buy Amiga pamph^H^H^H^H^Hmagazines detailing purchase after purchase of the Amiga name. Nowadays, Amiga means "any 'next generation' hardware and software that involves multimedia", which in all fairness this new development environment offers. It seems that Taos outlived the 1980s 'transputer' fad which it was designed for, and found a new vaporware hardware platform to run on.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, this is clearly all rubbish, because small business's do come up with a lot of the inovative idea and they do secure valid patents on those ideas.
And multinationals do use their bank of trivial patents to force small companies to 'cross license'. So there's no real protection for small companies.
Much as I do love to whore for karma, my time is precious - you'll have to come up with better than that to continue the trolling.
Let's say I start a computer software company here in England, and my product includes a feature that is the subject of some silly United States patent. Can I freely market that product everywhere but the United States without fear of being chased by the patent owners lawyers?
Well, the US lawyers will immediately come and claim for infringement, but they have to argue it in a US court, and if you don't have a US revenue stream they're not likely to get much from you.
If so, and I then decide I do want to sell into the United States, can my "license fee" then only apply to copies sold in the United States?
It's up to the patent owner. They have the monopoly, only they can grant you use of their patent. They can demand three camels per copy sold if they really want. They might even refuse to license you, and can demand that all copies of your product in the USA be siezed if you ignore them anyway. Perhaps this could affect UK shops who are owned and supplied by US companies.
i'm in the business of making money from my code, so i like being able to protect my product and my I.P This decusion makes it almost imposible to do that now, and that can only damage the growing IT market across the EU.
An excellent troll. You're conveniently forgetting many things - firstly, that copyrights protect your ideas from 'theft' in the largest respect. Secondly, that pure mathematical algorithims are still patentable - unlike in America.
While you might moan about 'protection', you'll find that most patent holders are large multinational corporations like IBM. How fair is it to find that you infringe some vague patent of theirs? How fair is it if you publish an innovative image processing method in a journal, then someone else patents your idea, and tries to charge you because the patent office is too fucking lazy to read the appropriate journals?
How can you dare innovate in a market based on fear, uncertainty and doubt - at any time, some IP company with no products of their own comes to sue you because you inadvertently stepped on a patent landmine? Does your product have multitasking? That's illegally patented in the EU. So are CGI scripts on a Web server. So is hardware emulation used for software testing. Breaking down pathnames into directories and files is patented!
There is no doubt in my mind that software patents cause more harm than good. The copyright law, contract law and trade secret law is sufficient protection for software. Using patents on software is an abuse of the patent process.
And how the heck does it figure out what the "foreground" and "background" components are, anyway?
As it only works on scans of paper documents, "background" is bland paper-texture, perhaps coloured. You can easily use an edge-detection filter to work out which is which.
You'll be pleased to hear that from about 1998 (MacOS 8) onwards, single-clicking on the Apple (or any menu heading at all) leaves the menu open until you single-click again on the item you want. However, it also supports click-and-drag to select the menu item.
Might I also add that KDE/Gnome could do with stealing Apple's GUI ideas, not Microsoft's, because Apple gave up on ugly grey rectangles and years ago.
You mean like the Amiga keyboard's ROM, from ~15 years ago?
Well, the Amiga's keyboard actually had a little CPU (about as powerful as the C64's main processor) with an onboard ROM, but if you open up your PC/Mac keyboard today, you'll still find a keyboard processor chip. Without it, you'd need a cable with about 20 wires in it to connect your keyboard.
I challenge anyone who advocates software patents in the previous story to read this list of illegally granted patents and explain why a 20+ year exclusive ownership of a broad field of innovation is good.
- Only run signed executables. (too strict)
- Run absolutely any executable. (too lax)
I somehow doubt this is how it would work. At minimum, I would expect to see the Java sandbox security model in place, where the user can choose what's OK and what's not, for different levels of trust.Sure, it's nice to have a 'flash/non-flash' option on the first screen, but that means doing two websites. How many corps want to pay for that?
What a great idea. Perhaps someone could tell them that people visiting want nicely presented information, not text flying about the place and fading in and out.
Make one website, with NO FLASH. Unless you're a Flash animator showing off your work, you don't need Flash, or Shockwave at all.
Teenagers learnt how to program in their bedrooms on computers they got from Santa, then grew up to found and work at companies like Psygnosis, Codemasters, Silicon Dreams, Eidos, Ocean, Rare, etc.
[Say NO! to GOTO!]
...and to think, I was only trying for the hip and cool way to say "GOTO considered harmful".
While in general, I agree with that as a rule of thumb, there are some places where using a goto is better than not using one.
One such place is exception handling, where I imagine 99% of gotos in C code exist. Exception handling is a noble, structured programming element, but C doesn't have it. Structured programmers emulate this useful construct with goto and occasionally longjmp(), although it doesn't quite work as well as a stack-based exception handling mechanism.
Hey kids! Just say NO! to GOTO!
The Polish tax official obviously thought that Linux and StarOffice were at least as good as MS-Windows and Office. As you going to dispute his good judgement? So they were worth as much, and should be taxed as much.
I think you're missing something... governments only collect tax when you earn or spend money. Shares, paintings, CDs, can all change in value while you own them, but the government can't tax you for that, they can only tax you when you sell those items and earn money for them.
Another tricky situation is trying to define legal terms of 'value'. For example, a bible has a high moral value but not a great monetary value, unless it's made of gold and stuff. Similarly, a fine painting can be worth $40000 to one person (as art) and $300 (the price of the materials) to another. The government can't charge anyone tax on their thoughts, only if someone pays $40000 to transfer ownership can the government intervene.
Corporations, maybe. But public government goes something like this:
I find the hacking game clients far more exciting than using them to play the game.
x86 is a totally fscked-up CISC instruction set from the 1970s, only hardware emulators (ie Pentium, Celeron, Athlon, Duron, etc) are any good at running it. x86 software emulation is useless, which is why people want open source - at least, then, they can compile it for a modern processor.
These patents are here to protect the investments of the genetics companies who have been researching into genetic engineering and gene therapy. It doesn't come cheap, why shouldn't they patent their findings?
No, you'll actually find that companies are patenting particular sequences without knowing what they do. Patents are not there to give someone a monopoly for the hell of it, patents are meant to add knowledge to the public domain, by offering the the inventor a limited monopoly for it. If they want a monopoly, they should have to tell us what the genes do first. This is just typical of how corrupt the patent system has become; companies expect to get outright monopolies based on overbroad patent applications. The idea of 'inventing' something and having that protected has long gone. I would go so far as to say this is a good thing in many ways. It stops unscrupulous cowboy genetic's companies messing around with a set of genes in say, maize, and creating some sort of super-weed. At least this way, only the people who actually know what they are doing can apply their findings to genetic engineering.
More rot. Only governments can demand scientists stop messing with genetics. A patent doesn't stop you from doing something, it just passes control to the patent holder, Mr Drug Company. Do you think they give a rat's ass about gene splicing? Not if they can make money off it.
The other bit I don't like is that these patent monopolies will destroy the research community. It's no longer collaborative research within the scientific community, it's private hands-off-this-is-mine greed driven research.
or evil monkeys.
It seems that copyright is designed to promote progress - it does this by offering creators control and private ownership over their work, so they may use their intellectual work to reward themselves. Therefore, if copyright went away, the main loss would be 'revenue' from charging people money for access to the work.
What really needs to go is money, because that's how many people see reward (although that's not always the case). Money is just an advancement of bartering, because people are fickle and want to make sure 'they got the best deal' - they can't accept that whatever they do in their community is OK. Similarly, politics and people having control over others had to be invented because people were afraid of anarchy.
We have copyright and money and other materialistic concerns because we're not societally advanced enough to do without them. That's my humble opinion.
While it seems so much easier to 'hack' than, say, a Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Tivo or otherwise (I mean, it boots a normal ISO CD-ROM, has no lockout mechanisms, and you can even look at file://localhost/ in the browser), it's still cool to see people making more out of the $199 box than they get as default. But then, I want to do more than surf the 'net with a PC, so I'm stuck into paying more for things like 3D cards, TV recievers, 30Gb HDs, etc...
There's actually this site called afterlife.org which offers to mirror important web-sites should the actual webmaster become dead. Whether you believe in spiritual afterlife or not, your webpages can live on!
Wrong on two counts. Copyright law does not exist "to give creators their due recognition", but "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Secondly, the copyrighted work's license (unless it's GPL or something) will not allow you to advertise offer copies to other people, which is what a web site saying "downloadz here" actually is.
Lazarus are dead, and will stay dead. There are better Amiga sites out there now, like Warlock's ADF vault and Amiga back2roots.
The word/intellectual property/trademark "Amiga" stopped having anything to do with the Commodore Amiga range of computers after about 1996.
Basically, the Amiga community split into two breeds - those who really like the CBM Amiga computer, its demos, games, music, etc, and the raving loonies who thought "The Amiga Must Live On!" and continued to buy Amiga pamph^H^H^H^H^Hmagazines detailing purchase after purchase of the Amiga name. Nowadays, Amiga means "any 'next generation' hardware and software that involves multimedia", which in all fairness this new development environment offers. It seems that Taos outlived the 1980s 'transputer' fad which it was designed for, and found a new vaporware hardware platform to run on.