also 19 bucks an hour is alot of money to most entry level people i know
Wow, so you know entry level people with years of experience? What do they do, keep reliving the same year over and over? Were they burger flippers who just happened to one day go "Oh! I can design a better burger flipper using 30 different CAD programs in my spare time!" And who knows how they're trying to pawn off the drive through window as proven industry helpdesk experience.
Try RTF Job Posting, then you'll start to see why everyone is complaining about this stuff.
Nothing in the FCC order says anything about who can and can't put a BF into their video. All it talks about is how the video players have to respond to the BF. The order has no effect whatsoever on the ability of consumers to create HDTV video.
This is true, at least for now. What people don't see when they look at the future of DRM is that as soon as they get the chance, the big-name players are going to say "hey feds, everyone recording a song/movie/book/whatever surely must be copying our work, so really, everything that any consumer records really needs to be locked down."
And then they win. Your $500 camcorder comes with the flag on. For $25000 more you can get the "pro" model with it off. Your garage band? To distribute what you record to your PC will take a $250/file fee, and having it sent to the RIAA for analysis (read, their chance to rip off your lyrics, then come back after N'stink performs your song to sue you) which will take about a month. Or you can rent a "supervised" studio to record in, where you pay $250/hr for the room and $250/hr for the RIAA chum to make sure you're not playing someone else's tune.
Of course, that will last about one month, until some nice little mother tries to email Grandma with Baby's First Steps (hey, for all the computer knows, its a ShakeyCam rip of the matrix).
You mean for lazy employees who don't observe due diligence or the proposal process and just go with whatever looks good, its a hinderance. For everyone else, they look at the facts, narrow it down to a few choices based on input from outside, then analyze the pros and cons of each of the remaining sources, and make a final proposal, which is then reviewed and either approved or declined. Too bad theres so few of the latter, might have saved a number of.bombs who spent their money on lear jets rather than producing a profit.
Hey, reply and let me know where you found those. After hunting around to replace the POS terminal where we work ($80/mo "rent"+$20/mo insurance+% depending on card type but around 2.5%) with a computer and a CC "wedge" we could only find ones like authorize.net with a monthly charge, plus % of each transaction.
Perhaps a better analogy would be if the maid hid the books in the closet, then filled the dustcovers with blank paper and put them back on the shelf. You'd never know what you were missing until you tried to read one.
Of course, you'd then fire the maid, tell the maid you'd never employ her again, and tell everyone you know not to employ her, then dig the books back out of the closet and return them to your bookshelf.
Thats funny, I must have missed the "enforce our political views on your child" setting in the configuration. All I see is where I can either allow all sites in a particular category or not.
And lets say parents start releasing the Weapon category because they believe that censoring laws people have written is wrong. What keeps Symantec from moving it to the Porn category or some other category parents are less likely to enable their kids to view?
Huh? How is objecting to a law that unsuccessfully attempts to prohibit objectionable content while requiring tax payer money be spent to achive that end and objecting to a program that fails miserably at allowing parents to control said content (by design, in this case, unless you're an anti-gun parent who couldn't care less if pro-gun legislation sites get censored while anti-gun legislation sites somehow slip under the radar) make the poster a hypocrite?
but really the kernel is NOT what's holding up the success of linux on the desktop.
Exactly. Which is why Linus doesn't talk about the problems or future in the desktop arena. The KDE developers, Gnome developers, and distributions are responsibile for getting the kernel into the desktop and presenting it to the users of the system, not Linus.
Amusingly enough my boss's wife (an OB doctor) got an email saying that her credit card was charged to cover up her child pornography web site and asked for a credit card number and expiration date. Given that her clinic's website doesn't have any child porn (not even the stupid "baby in the bathtub" kind that only scaremongers and D.A.s call child porn - every baby picture on the site was fully clothed), and the fact that it was asking for her CC# even though it claimed she was already charged, she showed it to me for laughs then deleted it.
The only way I'd have even believed this was "evidence" would be if it was checked out before the loved one died. And then only if it wasn't checked out in tandem with obtaining the insurance in the first place (I'd certainly want to know about collecting on the policy when I buy a policy).
I most definately wouldn't want the cops storming my house and arresting me for checking out that book, and using it as evidence in an attempted murder case or something.
Microsoft has come a long way
on
Microsoft's new CLI
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For a long time, the windows command line was a joke. It was basically DOS-in-a-box, capable of running programs, and that was about it. Sure, you had net.exe and a few tools borrowed from the unix world.
Recently, Microsoft has actually begun to produce command line tools for system operations, controlling your services, networks, policies, and registry from the command prompt. But they still have a long way to go, these features are poorly documented (the policy editor's help lists a subset of all the policies you can edit with it. The KB article on it basically is a copy-paste of the help message, with explanations of the policynames provided), typically cryptic, and still don't provide the full set of features.
They may have come a long way, but they have a long way to go. And remember, this is just playing catchup.
Just remember, in order to do anything "interesting", the hijacker must turn their back on the passengers.
If we're going to rule out handguns, consider the idea of issuing knives to every able-bodied person boarding. Then the hijackers wouldn't have this advantage. (well, so they'd have two boxcutters, if they had snuck one on as well as picked one up at the boarding gate). They'd have to have more than half the plane full of terrorists to have the advantage of numbers, and a considerable number of them to have the advantage based on training or luck.
Is the patriot act the same thing as the thing in Quantananmo?
No, Guantanamo Bay is a US Navy base in Cuba where the US detained "terrorists" and "unlawful combatants" without a trial before and during the Afghanistan War. These people have since been moved "elsewhere" (read: out of the public eye).
I'll leave the gun control issue alone, there are people who can argue it better than I, but just remember that in the US, if they did take the guns away from the people, they sure as hell wouldn't take them from the cops, and all I have to do is turn on the TV any given day and I'll eventually hear a story about this cop or that cop going bad or someone getting beaten and someone just happening to catch it on videotape.
are the french really as unpopular in america as trans-atlantic tv makes out?
That one's hard to say. Sure, a lot of people got upset and started calling names, but a lot of people didn't care or were already seeing through the rhetoric our own government was spewing. A month ago or so, there was a letter to the editor in the paper which was basically like a person apologizing to the French for getting swept up in the propoganda when all France really wanted was the truth, and evidence to back it up.
Movies and TV are fine for entertainment (why are foreign films and shows so interesting? I'd almost never turn on my TV if it wasn't for BBC America), just remember that thats all they are. The internet is a vast news source, just remember that there are very biased views out there, and people who aren't above lying in their news stories and lying in their assessment of other sources.
"Musicians look so poor when I see them on television"
I think you missed the other point of this sarcastic stab... are the real musicians going to see a cent of this money? Or is the RIAA going to keep it all for their lawyers and themselves?
All the privately held guns in the US couldn't stop a military attack by the federal government, if the government really were so inclined to attack its own citizens.
Odd, all the privately held guns in Iraq seem to be doing a pretty good job of stymieing US military takeover over there. Also odd is that you imply that one person with a gun is powerless, and yet "a single individual's ability to wreak widespread havoc has been increased million-fold." Pick a story and stick to it.
The only thing that could have stopped those two airplanes successfully is if the proper surveillance structure were in place to notice that strange things were a'brew.
If every member of the plane was armed with a boxcutter, who would have the upper hand? Unless the terrorists managed to outnumber able-bodied non-terrorists capable of wielding a box-cutter, I think the terrorists would never have pulled it off. In fact, even without the box cutters, I think an outright hijacking will never succeed again (witness the number of cases recently where "disturbances" on planes have turned into a matter of crowd participation). Now that Americans know what happens when their plane is hijacked, they aren't going to put up with it happening again, even if it takes a small mob to keep a guy from setting fire to his shoe.
You know, its pretty sad when dead white men speak better than our own president. You think on that for a while, and ask yourself whether or not changing times has made wisdom and intelligence obsolete.
I'm a patriot, and I support your right to say what you believe and your post's parent's right to say what they believe.
I also support my own right to say what a load of crap this all is. If you kill people, you commit a crime. If you commit a crime, you are caught. If you are caught, you are put through a trial. If you are found guilty, you are punished. This is The Way Things Worked around here for over two centuries. It works quite well, and does a fair job of preventing innocent people from going to jail, and making sure that I don't go to jail because some cop is having a bad day because he got two fewer sprinkles than his buddy on his morning doughnut and decides to take it out on some random guy.
And then we had Guantanamo. Trial? Guilt? Well, we can assume they had one, and weren't just there because they cut some FBI agent off in traffic that morning. Or maybe they forgot to pay the corrupt cop their protection fee? Yeah, you know, corruption, that thing that humans do because they are not perfect and they are corruptible. Even the cops. Even the FBI. Throwing foreign people into camps like that made me afraid to leave the country. Imagine if another country started treating American citizens like that! If that wasn't bad enough, throw in secret "detentions" of citizens. Citizens. Yes, that guy at Intel who gave money to the wrong party? He was a Citizen of the United States. And he was "detained" in jail for weeks without being charged or tried. No access to a lawyer. Welcome to America, your citizenship means NOTHING now.
We don't have to leave our own country to go hunt monsters. We have them right here, destroying what people fought and died for, the right to call oneself American, with privileges and rights as an American.
Are you still all right with your pretty little Patriot Act? Well, how would you feel when you've been in solitary confinement for two weeks, without even been told what you did wrong. "I'm a good person, I'd never be arrested" you say. Sure. And all those people found Innocent by a jury just happend to get away? Every last one of them "beat" the legal system? They're all actually guilty as hell, they just used their eeevil Satan-powered witchcraft to beguile the minds of the jurors?
Or maybe errors happen. Man, it would really suck to be stripped of your citizenship and executed for being a terrorist, while elsewhere some guy is scratching your SSN off a list of SSNs they bought off the internet. But no, you get no public trial, you get no defense lawyer, if you're lucky you get told what you're going to be tried for, if these "secret trials" are trials at all, and not just three ring circuses.
So yeah. The US has some serious problems right now, and the Patriot Act is merely the tip of the iceburg.
I was on the jury of a murder trial that included just such evidence
And what did that evidence tell you? "Oh my god! that person read Stephen King, he MUST be a murderer?!"
What can one possibly read that would be so important to a case that the fact the person had read it had to be entered into evidence? Did they not have any other evidence? "Yeah, we were at a loss and we had exhausted all our leads, so we took a trip to the library and picked up this guy reading an Agatha Christie book about a guy who got stabbed in the back, and well, our stiff got stabbed in the back, so ladies and gentlement of the jury, ignore the wookie and find this man guilty."
In all seriousness, name ONE thing that can be learned from a book that makes it "interesting" to the law enforcement. How to kill a person? CSI is a faster teacher. How to make this poison or that poison? Look under your sink.
And finally, did the FBI have a case against this man, and then got these library records to back it up? Or were the library records their entire case until they pulled more evidence up? If it was the latter, what is to keep them from arresting everyone who checks out a murder mystery at least for conspiracy to commit murder? "They checked out the book, they must have been thinking about killing someone.
I'm assuming that no money can be accepted for consultation, modification, documentation, assistance, etc. of the Free Software either. Otherwise it's really not a hobby, is it?
So do you want to live in your world of fluffy white clouds and pretty ideals flapping along like butterflies, or do you want to join us here in the real world? I'm sure in your world you have the psychic power to remove the corruption and influence of corporations in the blink of the eye, but back here we have to face the fact that they're not just going to vanish from the face of the Earth to make our lives happier.
Are companies going to just roll over and let us pass legislation to allow us to devalue their patents? They'd never stand for allowing active competition from free-as-in-beer software against their own product. They'd also never stand for someone else profiting off of their unused patent. They would probably claim that they would be making that money if only they had enough capital to get to market blah blah blah.
Ok, clearly in the case of government, we can't punish the people who screwed up in the first place, so how about we just pay the clerks who process the patents a flat rate with no commission? I don't understand your perspective on this, but I guess thats because in my experience in the private sector, when someone fucks up they are either fined or thrown in jail. For instance, if I'm working at a landfill and sign for waste that turns out to be federally listed hazardous waste, I personally am out probably half a million dollars, which I can start paying off after I get out of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, and the company has even bigger problems than just losing an employee. I guess government workers just can't be held to that standard of accuracy what with all their vacation time and protection from being arbitrarially fired (in case the firing might be politically motivated).
The other thing that needs to happen is the re-enacting the requirement that a working model of the invention MUST be demonstrated as part of the patent application
Sadly, this will never happen as the patent system now stands because how do you prototype a "business process".
The only change in this field that I can think of that would have better than a snowball's chance in Hell would be to establish a software patent class, with fitting restrictions for software:
1 - a software program cannot infringe on any patent other than a software patent. Only a software program can infringe on a software patent. For purpose of "software" we will consider the algorithm controlling a device, whether the algorithm is implemented in shrink-wrapped boxware, firmware, burned into an fpga, or implemented strictly in chip form.
2 - a working prototype with source (insert mumbo jumbo to make sure its in some kind of standard language, and not a "made up" language) This source would be similar to the "claims" section of the patent. If someone patents a certain algorithm for performing X, then if someone can demonstrate they performed X with a different algorithm, they're non-infringing. Bonus points to anyone who convinces the USPTO to require a language supporting mathematical proving of algorithmic correctness.
3 - A patent duration that better recognizes the software development live cycle. Say, 3 years with one three year extension. (This roughly matches the life span of windows 95 technology, if we are to believe Microsoft)
4 - Finally, since everyone with existing business method patents will be left out in the cold due to rule 1, a one-way process for moving an existing patent into the software class, with the above requirements, with a maximum of 6 years of effectiveness from the patent's date (in other words, if the patent is more than 6 years old, don't even bother).
As much as people hate and revile software patents, properly designed and controlled legislation can produce an outcome palatable to both superbigmegacorp and to us. As it stands, we can shout and cry against software patents, while we turn our back on the fact that they're already there and are being incredibly abused.
What's to stop a company like Amazon having their employees file the application as individuals and then signing it over or exclusively licensing it to the company.
Well, the easy solution would be to declare it impossible for nonintelligent entities to posses intellectual property. The company can make use of its employee's resources, and can license out its employees services (the patent), but the company cannot own the patent itself. As an added bonus, the inventors who make the company work have guaranteed themself a job, at least for the duration of the patent. You can even throw in a phrase along the lines of giving the company a perpetual (but non-exclusive) license to the patent, so that people can't blackmail a company just about to roll out its flagship company by threatening to leave and taking the patent with them. And say if microsoft fired you, you could take your patent and set up a competitve product elsewhere.
As helpful as this is, there are better changes that could be made that would further improve the system:
First, when the USPTO screws up in awarding the patent, the USPTO should cover the cost of fixing it. As it stands, if I have prior art for a patent, I have to pay them to fix what they screwed up. It should be modified so that overturning a patent is free. (Really, they should dock the commission of the person who signed the patent). They could request that you post a bond for the fees until they have decided (with it to remain in bond if you appeal). Furthermore, this process should be made as simple as possible, and not require legal assistance.
Second, the hobbyist exemption should be expanded and clarified with respect to Free software. While an outright exemption would lead to much rejoicing, a more realistic exemption would be for cases where 1: no money is accepted for the software and 2: the patent holder does not have a competing product on the market. This protects Free Software from submarine patenters who produce nothing but lawsuits, while still appeasing companies who feel threatened by open source by protecting them from direct competition.
If the carriers instead charged by usage for the shared part of their network
Go to college. Take networking 101. See why the entire concept of charging for bandwidth usage is flawed.
Here's the gist of it:
If the other end doesn't get your packet, you send it again.
So, if the cable modem drops packets, who pays for those packets? How is the ISP going to prove that a given packet made it through their network? How do you know that the ISP isn't dropping every other packet intentionally to double your bandwidth usage? What happens when someone uses a DDoS against your machine? If you incited it? If you just had the bad luck of being assigned the address of the guy who incited it by the DHCP server?
Theres a reason for the PS/2 ports. See, a PS/2 mouse prevents your AMD system from crashing. Don't believe me? Read AMD's errata for the AMD 768 PDF Here and look at issue #10.
I discovered this from a post on the LKML when I was trying to diagnose strange crashes that occurred when doing IO-intensive stuff. I actually thought it was a bug in the kernel IDE driver for the 768. Sure enough, I plugged in an old dying ps/2 mouse and could write 2 GB of data to the drive without a problem, when it normally would have locked up hard with no errors somewhere between 900 and 1100MB.
How are you presenting this to the user? If this is a random 50/50 chance of getting a page with a demo, then someone else already analyzed why that case makes it seem like the no-demo version is more popular.
Lets say you give the users a choice: "Download and Try then Buy" or "Buy"... if you've already downloaded and tried it, which are you going to click on when you decide you want to buy it? Probably the buy link, unless you loved the demo so much you're wanting to download it agian.
The only way really to track whats going on would be through the use of eeeevil session cookies, or more likely, persistant cookies with a long lifespan so that a person could download a demo then come back a month later with the fact they downloaded the demo still available. Then randomness or link wording and whatnot aren't brought into play.
Slashdot Mirror
When this kind of data is released, it cuts into the ability of a business to price things appropriately to the demand.
If the truth hurts your company, its time to get a new company. Sorry, but them's the breaks.
also 19 bucks an hour is alot of money to most entry level people i know
Wow, so you know entry level people with years of experience? What do they do, keep reliving the same year over and over? Were they burger flippers who just happened to one day go "Oh! I can design a better burger flipper using 30 different CAD programs in my spare time!" And who knows how they're trying to pawn off the drive through window as proven industry helpdesk experience.
Try RTF Job Posting, then you'll start to see why everyone is complaining about this stuff.
Nothing in the FCC order says anything about who can and can't put a BF into their video. All it talks about is how the video players have to respond to the BF. The order has no effect whatsoever on the ability of consumers to create HDTV video.
This is true, at least for now. What people don't see when they look at the future of DRM is that as soon as they get the chance, the big-name players are going to say "hey feds, everyone recording a song/movie/book/whatever surely must be copying our work, so really, everything that any consumer records really needs to be locked down."
And then they win. Your $500 camcorder comes with the flag on. For $25000 more you can get the "pro" model with it off. Your garage band? To distribute what you record to your PC will take a $250/file fee, and having it sent to the RIAA for analysis (read, their chance to rip off your lyrics, then come back after N'stink performs your song to sue you) which will take about a month. Or you can rent a "supervised" studio to record in, where you pay $250/hr for the room and $250/hr for the RIAA chum to make sure you're not playing someone else's tune.
Of course, that will last about one month, until some nice little mother tries to email Grandma with Baby's First Steps (hey, for all the computer knows, its a ShakeyCam rip of the matrix).
for business its a hindrance..
.bombs who spent their money on lear jets rather than producing a profit.
You mean for lazy employees who don't observe due diligence or the proposal process and just go with whatever looks good, its a hinderance. For everyone else, they look at the facts, narrow it down to a few choices based on input from outside, then analyze the pros and cons of each of the remaining sources, and make a final proposal, which is then reviewed and either approved or declined. Too bad theres so few of the latter, might have saved a number of
Hey, reply and let me know where you found those. After hunting around to replace the POS terminal where we work ($80/mo "rent"+$20/mo insurance+% depending on card type but around 2.5%) with a computer and a CC "wedge" we could only find ones like authorize.net with a monthly charge, plus % of each transaction.
Perhaps a better analogy would be if the maid hid the books in the closet, then filled the dustcovers with blank paper and put them back on the shelf. You'd never know what you were missing until you tried to read one.
Of course, you'd then fire the maid, tell the maid you'd never employ her again, and tell everyone you know not to employ her, then dig the books back out of the closet and return them to your bookshelf.
Thats funny, I must have missed the "enforce our political views on your child" setting in the configuration. All I see is where I can either allow all sites in a particular category or not.
And lets say parents start releasing the Weapon category because they believe that censoring laws people have written is wrong. What keeps Symantec from moving it to the Porn category or some other category parents are less likely to enable their kids to view?
Huh? How is objecting to a law that unsuccessfully attempts to prohibit objectionable content while requiring tax payer money be spent to achive that end and objecting to a program that fails miserably at allowing parents to control said content (by design, in this case, unless you're an anti-gun parent who couldn't care less if pro-gun legislation sites get censored while anti-gun legislation sites somehow slip under the radar) make the poster a hypocrite?
but really the kernel is NOT what's holding up the success of linux on the desktop.
Exactly. Which is why Linus doesn't talk about the problems or future in the desktop arena. The KDE developers, Gnome developers, and distributions are responsibile for getting the kernel into the desktop and presenting it to the users of the system, not Linus.
Amusingly enough my boss's wife (an OB doctor) got an email saying that her credit card was charged to cover up her child pornography web site and asked for a credit card number and expiration date. Given that her clinic's website doesn't have any child porn (not even the stupid "baby in the bathtub" kind that only scaremongers and D.A.s call child porn - every baby picture on the site was fully clothed), and the fact that it was asking for her CC# even though it claimed she was already charged, she showed it to me for laughs then deleted it.
The only way I'd have even believed this was "evidence" would be if it was checked out before the loved one died. And then only if it wasn't checked out in tandem with obtaining the insurance in the first place (I'd certainly want to know about collecting on the policy when I buy a policy).
I most definately wouldn't want the cops storming my house and arresting me for checking out that book, and using it as evidence in an attempted murder case or something.
For a long time, the windows command line was a joke. It was basically DOS-in-a-box, capable of running programs, and that was about it. Sure, you had net.exe and a few tools borrowed from the unix world.
Recently, Microsoft has actually begun to produce command line tools for system operations, controlling your services, networks, policies, and registry from the command prompt. But they still have a long way to go, these features are poorly documented (the policy editor's help lists a subset of all the policies you can edit with it. The KB article on it basically is a copy-paste of the help message, with explanations of the policynames provided), typically cryptic, and still don't provide the full set of features.
They may have come a long way, but they have a long way to go. And remember, this is just playing catchup.
Just remember, in order to do anything "interesting", the hijacker must turn their back on the passengers.
If we're going to rule out handguns, consider the idea of issuing knives to every able-bodied person boarding. Then the hijackers wouldn't have this advantage. (well, so they'd have two boxcutters, if they had snuck one on as well as picked one up at the boarding gate). They'd have to have more than half the plane full of terrorists to have the advantage of numbers, and a considerable number of them to have the advantage based on training or luck.
Is the patriot act the same thing as the thing in Quantananmo?
No, Guantanamo Bay is a US Navy base in Cuba where the US detained "terrorists" and "unlawful combatants" without a trial before and during the Afghanistan War. These people have since been moved "elsewhere" (read: out of the public eye).
I'll leave the gun control issue alone, there are people who can argue it better than I, but just remember that in the US, if they did take the guns away from the people, they sure as hell wouldn't take them from the cops, and all I have to do is turn on the TV any given day and I'll eventually hear a story about this cop or that cop going bad or someone getting beaten and someone just happening to catch it on videotape.
are the french really as unpopular in america as trans-atlantic tv makes out?
That one's hard to say. Sure, a lot of people got upset and started calling names, but a lot of people didn't care or were already seeing through the rhetoric our own government was spewing. A month ago or so, there was a letter to the editor in the paper which was basically like a person apologizing to the French for getting swept up in the propoganda when all France really wanted was the truth, and evidence to back it up.
Movies and TV are fine for entertainment (why are foreign films and shows so interesting? I'd almost never turn on my TV if it wasn't for BBC America), just remember that thats all they are. The internet is a vast news source, just remember that there are very biased views out there, and people who aren't above lying in their news stories and lying in their assessment of other sources.
"Musicians look so poor when I see them on television"
I think you missed the other point of this sarcastic stab... are the real musicians going to see a cent of this money? Or is the RIAA going to keep it all for their lawyers and themselves?
All the privately held guns in the US couldn't stop a military attack by the federal government, if the government really were so inclined to attack its own citizens.
Odd, all the privately held guns in Iraq seem to be doing a pretty good job of stymieing US military takeover over there. Also odd is that you imply that one person with a gun is powerless, and yet "a single individual's ability to wreak widespread havoc has been increased million-fold." Pick a story and stick to it.
The only thing that could have stopped those two airplanes successfully is if the proper surveillance structure were in place to notice that strange things were a'brew.
If every member of the plane was armed with a boxcutter, who would have the upper hand? Unless the terrorists managed to outnumber able-bodied non-terrorists capable of wielding a box-cutter, I think the terrorists would never have pulled it off. In fact, even without the box cutters, I think an outright hijacking will never succeed again (witness the number of cases recently where "disturbances" on planes have turned into a matter of crowd participation). Now that Americans know what happens when their plane is hijacked, they aren't going to put up with it happening again, even if it takes a small mob to keep a guy from setting fire to his shoe.
You know, its pretty sad when dead white men speak better than our own president. You think on that for a while, and ask yourself whether or not changing times has made wisdom and intelligence obsolete.
I'm a patriot, and I support your right to say what you believe and your post's parent's right to say what they believe.
I also support my own right to say what a load of crap this all is. If you kill people, you commit a crime. If you commit a crime, you are caught. If you are caught, you are put through a trial. If you are found guilty, you are punished. This is The Way Things Worked around here for over two centuries. It works quite well, and does a fair job of preventing innocent people from going to jail, and making sure that I don't go to jail because some cop is having a bad day because he got two fewer sprinkles than his buddy on his morning doughnut and decides to take it out on some random guy.
And then we had Guantanamo. Trial? Guilt? Well, we can assume they had one, and weren't just there because they cut some FBI agent off in traffic that morning. Or maybe they forgot to pay the corrupt cop their protection fee? Yeah, you know, corruption, that thing that humans do because they are not perfect and they are corruptible. Even the cops. Even the FBI. Throwing foreign people into camps like that made me afraid to leave the country. Imagine if another country started treating American citizens like that! If that wasn't bad enough, throw in secret "detentions" of citizens. Citizens. Yes, that guy at Intel who gave money to the wrong party? He was a Citizen of the United States. And he was "detained" in jail for weeks without being charged or tried. No access to a lawyer. Welcome to America, your citizenship means NOTHING now.
We don't have to leave our own country to go hunt monsters. We have them right here, destroying what people fought and died for, the right to call oneself American, with privileges and rights as an American.
Are you still all right with your pretty little Patriot Act? Well, how would you feel when you've been in solitary confinement for two weeks, without even been told what you did wrong. "I'm a good person, I'd never be arrested" you say. Sure. And all those people found Innocent by a jury just happend to get away? Every last one of them "beat" the legal system? They're all actually guilty as hell, they just used their eeevil Satan-powered witchcraft to beguile the minds of the jurors?
Or maybe errors happen. Man, it would really suck to be stripped of your citizenship and executed for being a terrorist, while elsewhere some guy is scratching your SSN off a list of SSNs they bought off the internet. But no, you get no public trial, you get no defense lawyer, if you're lucky you get told what you're going to be tried for, if these "secret trials" are trials at all, and not just three ring circuses.
So yeah. The US has some serious problems right now, and the Patriot Act is merely the tip of the iceburg.
I was on the jury of a murder trial that included just such evidence
And what did that evidence tell you? "Oh my god! that person read Stephen King, he MUST be a murderer?!"
What can one possibly read that would be so important to a case that the fact the person had read it had to be entered into evidence? Did they not have any other evidence? "Yeah, we were at a loss and we had exhausted all our leads, so we took a trip to the library and picked up this guy reading an Agatha Christie book about a guy who got stabbed in the back, and well, our stiff got stabbed in the back, so ladies and gentlement of the jury, ignore the wookie and find this man guilty."
In all seriousness, name ONE thing that can be learned from a book that makes it "interesting" to the law enforcement. How to kill a person? CSI is a faster teacher. How to make this poison or that poison? Look under your sink.
And finally, did the FBI have a case against this man, and then got these library records to back it up? Or were the library records their entire case until they pulled more evidence up? If it was the latter, what is to keep them from arresting everyone who checks out a murder mystery at least for conspiracy to commit murder? "They checked out the book, they must have been thinking about killing someone.
I'm assuming that no money can be accepted for consultation, modification, documentation, assistance, etc. of the Free Software either. Otherwise it's really not a hobby, is it?
So do you want to live in your world of fluffy white clouds and pretty ideals flapping along like butterflies, or do you want to join us here in the real world? I'm sure in your world you have the psychic power to remove the corruption and influence of corporations in the blink of the eye, but back here we have to face the fact that they're not just going to vanish from the face of the Earth to make our lives happier.
Are companies going to just roll over and let us pass legislation to allow us to devalue their patents? They'd never stand for allowing active competition from free-as-in-beer software against their own product. They'd also never stand for someone else profiting off of their unused patent. They would probably claim that they would be making that money if only they had enough capital to get to market blah blah blah.
Ok, clearly in the case of government, we can't punish the people who screwed up in the first place, so how about we just pay the clerks who process the patents a flat rate with no commission? I don't understand your perspective on this, but I guess thats because in my experience in the private sector, when someone fucks up they are either fined or thrown in jail. For instance, if I'm working at a landfill and sign for waste that turns out to be federally listed hazardous waste, I personally am out probably half a million dollars, which I can start paying off after I get out of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, and the company has even bigger problems than just losing an employee. I guess government workers just can't be held to that standard of accuracy what with all their vacation time and protection from being arbitrarially fired (in case the firing might be politically motivated).
The other thing that needs to happen is the re-enacting the requirement that a working model of the invention MUST be demonstrated as part of the patent application
Sadly, this will never happen as the patent system now stands because how do you prototype a "business process".
The only change in this field that I can think of that would have better than a snowball's chance in Hell would be to establish a software patent class, with fitting restrictions for software:
1 - a software program cannot infringe on any patent other than a software patent. Only a software program can infringe on a software patent. For purpose of "software" we will consider the algorithm controlling a device, whether the algorithm is implemented in shrink-wrapped boxware, firmware, burned into an fpga, or implemented strictly in chip form.
2 - a working prototype with source (insert mumbo jumbo to make sure its in some kind of standard language, and not a "made up" language) This source would be similar to the "claims" section of the patent. If someone patents a certain algorithm for performing X, then if someone can demonstrate they performed X with a different algorithm, they're non-infringing. Bonus points to anyone who convinces the USPTO to require a language supporting mathematical proving of algorithmic correctness.
3 - A patent duration that better recognizes the software development live cycle. Say, 3 years with one three year extension. (This roughly matches the life span of windows 95 technology, if we are to believe Microsoft)
4 - Finally, since everyone with existing business method patents will be left out in the cold due to rule 1, a one-way process for moving an existing patent into the software class, with the above requirements, with a maximum of 6 years of effectiveness from the patent's date (in other words, if the patent is more than 6 years old, don't even bother).
As much as people hate and revile software patents, properly designed and controlled legislation can produce an outcome palatable to both superbigmegacorp and to us. As it stands, we can shout and cry against software patents, while we turn our back on the fact that they're already there and are being incredibly abused.
What's to stop a company like Amazon having their employees file the application as individuals and then signing it over or exclusively licensing it to the company.
Well, the easy solution would be to declare it impossible for nonintelligent entities to posses intellectual property. The company can make use of its employee's resources, and can license out its employees services (the patent), but the company cannot own the patent itself. As an added bonus, the inventors who make the company work have guaranteed themself a job, at least for the duration of the patent. You can even throw in a phrase along the lines of giving the company a perpetual (but non-exclusive) license to the patent, so that people can't blackmail a company just about to roll out its flagship company by threatening to leave and taking the patent with them. And say if microsoft fired you, you could take your patent and set up a competitve product elsewhere.
As helpful as this is, there are better changes that could be made that would further improve the system:
First, when the USPTO screws up in awarding the patent, the USPTO should cover the cost of fixing it. As it stands, if I have prior art for a patent, I have to pay them to fix what they screwed up. It should be modified so that overturning a patent is free. (Really, they should dock the commission of the person who signed the patent). They could request that you post a bond for the fees until they have decided (with it to remain in bond if you appeal). Furthermore, this process should be made as simple as possible, and not require legal assistance.
Second, the hobbyist exemption should be expanded and clarified with respect to Free software. While an outright exemption would lead to much rejoicing, a more realistic exemption would be for cases where 1: no money is accepted for the software and 2: the patent holder does not have a competing product on the market. This protects Free Software from submarine patenters who produce nothing but lawsuits, while still appeasing companies who feel threatened by open source by protecting them from direct competition.
If the carriers instead charged by usage for the shared part of their network
Go to college. Take networking 101. See why the entire concept of charging for bandwidth usage is flawed.
Here's the gist of it:
If the other end doesn't get your packet, you send it again.
So, if the cable modem drops packets, who pays for those packets? How is the ISP going to prove that a given packet made it through their network? How do you know that the ISP isn't dropping every other packet intentionally to double your bandwidth usage? What happens when someone uses a DDoS against your machine? If you incited it? If you just had the bad luck of being assigned the address of the guy who incited it by the DHCP server?
Theres a reason for the PS/2 ports. See, a PS/2 mouse prevents your AMD system from crashing. Don't believe me? Read AMD's errata for the AMD 768 PDF Here and look at issue #10.
I discovered this from a post on the LKML when I was trying to diagnose strange crashes that occurred when doing IO-intensive stuff. I actually thought it was a bug in the kernel IDE driver for the 768. Sure enough, I plugged in an old dying ps/2 mouse and could write 2 GB of data to the drive without a problem, when it normally would have locked up hard with no errors somewhere between 900 and 1100MB.
How are you presenting this to the user? If this is a random 50/50 chance of getting a page with a demo, then someone else already analyzed why that case makes it seem like the no-demo version is more popular.
Lets say you give the users a choice: "Download and Try then Buy" or "Buy"... if you've already downloaded and tried it, which are you going to click on when you decide you want to buy it? Probably the buy link, unless you loved the demo so much you're wanting to download it agian.
The only way really to track whats going on would be through the use of eeeevil session cookies, or more likely, persistant cookies with a long lifespan so that a person could download a demo then come back a month later with the fact they downloaded the demo still available. Then randomness or link wording and whatnot aren't brought into play.