If Kirby 'did 90% of the work', then why was Spider-Man, with whom Kirby had no affiliation, such a success?
As far as I can see it, this statement is bullshit. According to that (well sourced) article, Kirby worked with Lee and Ditko to develop spider man, based on an idea from an unpublished story Lee had worked on with a fourth author, Joe Simon. Kirby is certainly credited with the art on the first spider man story. It's hard to say how much of the idea was Lee's, but it's quite clearly not entirely Lee's work.
And why is it that Kirby's solo creations, such as the New Gods, never approached even HALF of the success of his Lee-collaborations?
Because there's more to successfully producing and marketing a comic than just developing good characters and drawing quality artwork for it?
no doubt, Kirby had a big influence on early Marvel. But, it took his collaboration with Lee to bring out Kirby's true genius.
Undoubtedly Lee also contributed to the equation. The point is, though, how much did he contribute, and what?
Also... the work done was clearly work for hire. Kirby knew it, Stan knew it.
Doesn't matter. Since 1978, part of the deal in work-for-hire arrangements is that the creator gets to take the rights back if they want them (relevant legislation). Being creative industry professionals, I'm sure both Kirby and Lee knew this, as well.
We'll start to see some interesting things happening in 2013 when the window for making those claims opens, I'm sure.
If there is one thing I miss about my old C64, it's Elite. I lost many, many hours on that game. How they built such a large universe on such a small platform I'll never figure out.
It was all produced from a random number generator. Ian Bell has released C source code that's equivalent to the original 6502 assembly version, if you really want to know.
Re:There was a bug in the Spectrum version
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Elite Turns 25
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If you launched, then spun round and re-entered the dock hitting hyperspace at the same time, you appeared, docked, at your destination.
Saved all that tedious trading until you could buy lots of weapons etc.
That wasn't the only bug in the Spectrum version. It also let you save your game from the screen that appeared after you had died; if you did this, then reloaded it, you would appear inside the station in the system you died in, with full cargo etc.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
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Elite Turns 25
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That's why planetary exploration should be done by AIs loaded into high thrust nuclear rockets... as soon as we get AIs and high thrust nuclear rockets.
Even then, accelerating at 100g for 6 days is implausible, due to the fuel mass requirements. Even with just a 1kg payload, your fuel to accelerate it is going to weigh millions of tonnes.
This is why I prefer Elite's original solution to the problem, the jump drive: point in the right direction and engage a non-newtonian drive that stops working when you're too close to something else.
Manager's have too much other work? I disagree.The first order of business is to mange the people you are paid to manage. Either that, or get out of management.
The point is, though, that to completely and thoroughly evaluate the work of a single programmer is going to take nearly as much time as the programmer took to do that work. A single manager could do this for maybe 3 or 4 programmers. I don't know about where you work, but I've never seen anywhere with that high a ratio of managers to developers. Whether it's the first order of business or not doesn't make the impossible possible...
Again, unless we're talking an HPC application, I'm calling bullshit. I can't think of a language these days that won't produce sufficient performance for most applications. After all, the vast majority of performance for any application comes from the selection of appropriate algorithms/data structures.
We're still talking about more than an order of magnitude between the fastest languages and the slowest, plus potentially 2-3 times memory consumption. And if we're talking about a desktop application, you can't just say to throw more hardware at the problem, because somebody else is likely to have a solution that _doesn't_ require more hardware, and nobody's going to upgrade their systems (at a potentially huge cost if we're selling to a corporate environment) to use your solution rather than somebody else's.
The only time you can get away with shit like that is if you have a monopoly in the market area. And most people don't.
Unless that language isn't Turing complete, I'm gonna have to call bullshit, here.
There's more to a language than turing completeness. Others have already pointed out performance and resource consumption, but even that's just a drop in the ocean. You'll also have to consider developer-friendliness (try rewriting a project that's 1 million+ lines of high-level OO code with garbage collection in assembly language: you'll never finish the job), integration with other systems (sure, you *could* rewrite it in modula-3, but you'll never get it to talk to the Java RMI-based services that the rest of the company is running on), and platform portability (you could choose to write your code in VBA using Access, but good luck getting it to run on the solaris servers you need to deploy it on).
In the US, the truth is an absolute defense; if the defendant can prove that what they said/wrote is true, they're home free. In England, it's an allowable defense; judges commonly follow the precedent that no damages are awarded if the statements are proven true, but AIUI, there's nothing in the law to require that.
I see where you're coming from now. You're misunderstanding what the word 'allowable' means in this context: if a defence is allowable, that means that the defendent is allowed to pursue it and if they successfully show that the conditions attached to it are true then the case against them must be dismissed. The difference from an absolute defence is that in the case of an absolute defence, the court is required to consider whether it is true or not, whether or not the defendent produces evidence that it is a valid defence in their case, and can decide for the defendant merely because the plaintiff has failed to produce evidence that it is not.
For example, in the US, 'fair use' is an allowable defence against a charge of copyright infringement. It is assumed by the court that any copying is not fair use, unless the defendant produces a reasonable argument that it is.
In fact, the Wikipedia article on libel says that a charge can be brought if the statements are defamatory or harmful to a person's reputation, but avoids the word "false."
This is true. However there's a difference between bringing a case to court and the court deciding in your favour...
Apparently the programmer's boss is also a programmer, the artists boss an artist and they are expected to work together. So so SOOOO much better than the bureaucrats most of us get stuck with.
Yeah. You say that now. Then you'll get a job where your boss is a programmer, and it'll be like "Why haven't you finished that task yet? I could have done that in 2 hours, and you've been 6...", and no matter how much you argue about how long such a task takes, you'll never win, because he'll _know_ exactly where your time is going.
does the the IRC server push the aggregated message to all the clients as the patent covers
Yes. IRC pushes messages to clients that are subscribed to the channel. Nagle's algorithm, which is part of almost all TCP/IP stacks, aggregates multiple messages from the IRC server into a single packet in order to reduce overhead.
If you develop in Europe and sell in US, you are impacted by US patent laws.
Yes. But if I host a server in the UK, and let anyone anywhere in the world pay money and download software from it, am I selling in the US (and hence liable for patent infringement)? Or am I selling in the UK, and my US-based customers are importing into the US (and hence the customers are liable for any patent infringement, not me)?
I'm not familiar with WoW or EVE terminology, but is there any chance that this might be similar to a "room" in a MUD?
Yes. Or a channel in IRC (as the patent isn't phrased in terms of a game at all, but a general communication system).
The only thing is, every claim in it depends on updates from multiple sources being batched up and sent to clients in a single packet. I don't know enough about MUD software to be sure this was done. Nagle's algorithm makes it an obvious thing to do, and means it must have happened at least by accident, but did any MUDs intentionally do this? Or IRC servers?
If you read through the patent, it's basically the same as a mailing list that sends out digests. Trivial.
Actually, it's not *basically* the same. It's *exactly* the same. Almost every claim has prior art in standard mailing list management software that has existed practically forever.
I was thinking IRC + Nagle's algorithm as prior art, but I think you've hit the nail on the head there!
2. Server-group messaging system for interactive applications
Basically this one is about this: you have a server and X clients, and all clients are sending packets to all other clients. Think, an IRC channel, basically. So they propose that instead of dumbly routing between clients, the server aggregates the packets and sends the aggregates periodically.
C.f. Nagle's algorithm. An IRC server running on any TCP/IP stack developed more recently than around 1985 does everything described by claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18 and 19. IRC running over a VPN would also do everything in claim 14. I haven't read protocol level details of IRC, so I can't be sure whether it implements claim 5 and its dependents (I believe it doesn't), although I would say claim 5 is so obvious that it is clearly not patentable; there are plenty of preexisting network protocols that synchronize the state between different nodes in the network and avoid sending updates to a node that can be determined to already know the updated data (e.g. because it originated it).
The first problem is that a MMO only does that in a very loose sense. It sends the resulting status, rather than the bundled messages from all other players.
Yes, although the resulting status might well look very similar to the original messages. Consider if the original messages are from player x "move to 123,443" and player y "move to 116,151"; the notifications to player z may look like "player x moves to 123,443; player y moves to 116,151", which is close enough to the description that I would say it is covered. Also, look at claim 18 which is somewhat less specific about the contents of the messages sent by the server than the other claims.
However here comes the third problem: the patent was applied in 1999, a solid two years after UO which _did_ do just that.
You seem to have missed some relevant patents in your search. 5,822,523 is very similar to the second one you listed, but was filed in Jan '96, thus predating UO. Not sure that helps them, though.
I wrote: (although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, this does not necessarily follow)
This is not particularly clear. I should clarify it: although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, it does not necessarily follow that an item of high entropy is hot, or one of low entropy cold.
I think the fact that something is true may not enough if you could not be justified in making it public knowledge. For example, breach of trust or privacy. If I discovered that you and your S.O. were into hardcore BDSM, and I printed it in salacious detail in a gossip rag (with pictures) I suspect I would have defamed you even if it is true because I had no business making it public for profit.
There are privacy laws in the UK, but they are distinct from the defamation laws. You could be sued for invasion of privacy in such a case, I believe, but not (successfully) for libel.
The publisher could prove the statement to be true, it could be fair comment - so long as the opinion is based on true facts, [and] is genuinely held and not influenced by malice - or it could be protected by privilege
That is, if your intent is malicious or if the information is "privileged", then even truth isn't a defense against libel under the British system anymore.
You're misreading it. There are three defences:
- the statement is true - the statement is "fair comment" (i.e. it doesn't have to be shown to be true, but does have to be an opinion that is formed based on true facts, is genuinely held by the maker of the statement, and is not malicious) - or the statement is protected by privilege (e.g. it is made in parliament or in court).
Neither the conditions on what constitutes fair comment or any matters relating to privelege affect the validity of a defence of truth.
I think you've gotten things backwards here. If I sue somebody because they called me a murderer, it's not up to me to prove I'm not; it's up to them (if that's the defense they select) to prove either that I am, or that they had good reason to believe that I'd committed murder.
Well, yes.
My point is that that's exactly how the system should be, and yet that is what everyone is complaining about the system being in the UK... i.e. the person who made the statement must be able to prove it is at least a justifiable statement. From what everyone else has been saying, in the US it is up to the person who was libelled to prove the statement is false, but you are now denying this.
So, what exactly _is_ the difference that everyone is so worked up about?
Life doesn't even result in a localized reduction of entropy. Living organisms tend to have higher entropy than their surroundings. Thats why they give off heat.
You seem to be confused about what entropy is. Entropy is merely a description of the unlikeliness of a particular arrangement of matter; it is not intrinsically linked to its heat (although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, this does not necessarily follow).
What passes for a science education these days?
Well, I don't know. It's not as if I'm the only one who's suggested this notion. Consider the following:
"It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic [...] Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy -or, as you may say, produces positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. [...] Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists continually sucking orderliness from its environment."
(What Is Life?: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, Erwin Schrodinger, 1944)
Schrodinger seems to be saying something very similar there to what I said and you disagreed with, so I don't think it's anything wrong with my education.
Slashdot Mirror
First off we have no idea what his children intend to do with the money. They might keep it, or they might not, who knows?
Or even whether the money is the (only) reason they're doing it. For all we know, they might want creative control.
If Kirby 'did 90% of the work', then why was Spider-Man, with whom Kirby had no affiliation, such a success?
As far as I can see it, this statement is bullshit. According to that (well sourced) article, Kirby worked with Lee and Ditko to develop spider man, based on an idea from an unpublished story Lee had worked on with a fourth author, Joe Simon. Kirby is certainly credited with the art on the first spider man story. It's hard to say how much of the idea was Lee's, but it's quite clearly not entirely Lee's work.
And why is it that Kirby's solo creations, such as the New Gods, never approached even HALF of the success of his Lee-collaborations?
Because there's more to successfully producing and marketing a comic than just developing good characters and drawing quality artwork for it?
no doubt, Kirby had a big influence on early Marvel. But, it took his collaboration with Lee to bring out Kirby's true genius.
Undoubtedly Lee also contributed to the equation. The point is, though, how much did he contribute, and what?
Also... the work done was clearly work for hire. Kirby knew it, Stan knew it.
Doesn't matter. Since 1978, part of the deal in work-for-hire arrangements is that the creator gets to take the rights back if they want them (relevant legislation). Being creative industry professionals, I'm sure both Kirby and Lee knew this, as well.
We'll start to see some interesting things happening in 2013 when the window for making those claims opens, I'm sure.
If there is one thing I miss about my old C64, it's Elite. I lost many, many hours on that game. How they built such a large universe on such a small platform I'll never figure out.
It was all produced from a random number generator. Ian Bell has released C source code that's equivalent to the original 6502 assembly version, if you really want to know.
If you launched, then spun round and re-entered the dock hitting hyperspace at the same time, you appeared, docked, at your destination.
Saved all that tedious trading until you could buy lots of weapons etc.
That wasn't the only bug in the Spectrum version. It also let you save your game from the screen that appeared after you had died; if you did this, then reloaded it, you would appear inside the station in the system you died in, with full cargo etc.
That's why planetary exploration should be done by AIs loaded into high thrust nuclear rockets... as soon as we get AIs and high thrust nuclear rockets.
Even then, accelerating at 100g for 6 days is implausible, due to the fuel mass requirements. Even with just a 1kg payload, your fuel to accelerate it is going to weigh millions of tonnes.
This is why I prefer Elite's original solution to the problem, the jump drive: point in the right direction and engage a non-newtonian drive that stops working when you're too close to something else.
Hint: write an interpreter. You can even pick and choose your OO semantics if the original language's don't appeal.
Well, sure, but then you aren't really implementing it in assembly language are you?
I bet most of us could read everyone else's email at school...
Not convinced. Mine used Solaris's default maildrop security, which is pretty effective, and I think was fairly standard practice until recently.
Manager's have too much other work? I disagree.The first order of business is to mange the people you are paid to manage. Either that, or get out of management.
The point is, though, that to completely and thoroughly evaluate the work of a single programmer is going to take nearly as much time as the programmer took to do that work. A single manager could do this for maybe 3 or 4 programmers. I don't know about where you work, but I've never seen anywhere with that high a ratio of managers to developers. Whether it's the first order of business or not doesn't make the impossible possible...
Again, unless we're talking an HPC application, I'm calling bullshit. I can't think of a language these days that won't produce sufficient performance for most applications. After all, the vast majority of performance for any application comes from the selection of appropriate algorithms/data structures.
We're still talking about more than an order of magnitude between the fastest languages and the slowest, plus potentially 2-3 times memory consumption. And if we're talking about a desktop application, you can't just say to throw more hardware at the problem, because somebody else is likely to have a solution that _doesn't_ require more hardware, and nobody's going to upgrade their systems (at a potentially huge cost if we're selling to a corporate environment) to use your solution rather than somebody else's.
The only time you can get away with shit like that is if you have a monopoly in the market area. And most people don't.
Unless that language isn't Turing complete, I'm gonna have to call bullshit, here.
There's more to a language than turing completeness. Others have already pointed out performance and resource consumption, but even that's just a drop in the ocean. You'll also have to consider developer-friendliness (try rewriting a project that's 1 million+ lines of high-level OO code with garbage collection in assembly language: you'll never finish the job), integration with other systems (sure, you *could* rewrite it in modula-3, but you'll never get it to talk to the Java RMI-based services that the rest of the company is running on), and platform portability (you could choose to write your code in VBA using Access, but good luck getting it to run on the solaris servers you need to deploy it on).
In the US, the truth is an absolute defense; if the defendant can prove that what they said/wrote is true, they're home free. In England, it's an allowable defense; judges commonly follow the precedent that no damages are awarded if the statements are proven true, but AIUI, there's nothing in the law to require that.
I see where you're coming from now. You're misunderstanding what the word 'allowable' means in this context: if a defence is allowable, that means that the defendent is allowed to pursue it and if they successfully show that the conditions attached to it are true then the case against them must be dismissed. The difference from an absolute defence is that in the case of an absolute defence, the court is required to consider whether it is true or not, whether or not the defendent produces evidence that it is a valid defence in their case, and can decide for the defendant merely because the plaintiff has failed to produce evidence that it is not.
For example, in the US, 'fair use' is an allowable defence against a charge of copyright infringement. It is assumed by the court that any copying is not fair use, unless the defendant produces a reasonable argument that it is.
In fact, the Wikipedia article on libel says that a charge can be brought if the statements are defamatory or harmful to a person's reputation, but avoids the word "false."
This is true. However there's a difference between bringing a case to court and the court deciding in your favour...
Apparently the programmer's boss is also a programmer, the artists boss an artist and they are expected to work together. So so SOOOO much better than the bureaucrats most of us get stuck with.
Yeah. You say that now. Then you'll get a job where your boss is a programmer, and it'll be like "Why haven't you finished that task yet? I could have done that in 2 hours, and you've been 6...", and no matter how much you argue about how long such a task takes, you'll never win, because he'll _know_ exactly where your time is going.
does the the IRC server push the aggregated message to all the clients as the patent covers
Yes. IRC pushes messages to clients that are subscribed to the channel. Nagle's algorithm, which is part of almost all TCP/IP stacks, aggregates multiple messages from the IRC server into a single packet in order to reduce overhead.
If you develop in Europe and sell in US, you are impacted by US patent laws.
Yes. But if I host a server in the UK, and let anyone anywhere in the world pay money and download software from it, am I selling in the US (and hence liable for patent infringement)? Or am I selling in the UK, and my US-based customers are importing into the US (and hence the customers are liable for any patent infringement, not me)?
I'm not familiar with WoW or EVE terminology, but is there any chance that this might be similar to a "room" in a MUD?
Yes. Or a channel in IRC (as the patent isn't phrased in terms of a game at all, but a general communication system).
The only thing is, every claim in it depends on updates from multiple sources being batched up and sent to clients in a single packet. I don't know enough about MUD software to be sure this was done. Nagle's algorithm makes it an obvious thing to do, and means it must have happened at least by accident, but did any MUDs intentionally do this? Or IRC servers?
If you read through the patent, it's basically the same as a mailing list that sends out digests. Trivial.
Actually, it's not *basically* the same. It's *exactly* the same. Almost every claim has prior art in standard mailing list management software that has existed practically forever.
I was thinking IRC + Nagle's algorithm as prior art, but I think you've hit the nail on the head there!
2. Server-group messaging system for interactive applications
Basically this one is about this: you have a server and X clients, and all clients are sending packets to all other clients. Think, an IRC channel, basically. So they propose that instead of dumbly routing between clients, the server aggregates the packets and sends the aggregates periodically.
C.f. Nagle's algorithm. An IRC server running on any TCP/IP stack developed more recently than around 1985 does everything described by claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18 and 19. IRC running over a VPN would also do everything in claim 14. I haven't read protocol level details of IRC, so I can't be sure whether it implements claim 5 and its dependents (I believe it doesn't), although I would say claim 5 is so obvious that it is clearly not patentable; there are plenty of preexisting network protocols that synchronize the state between different nodes in the network and avoid sending updates to a node that can be determined to already know the updated data (e.g. because it originated it).
The first problem is that a MMO only does that in a very loose sense. It sends the resulting status, rather than the bundled messages from all other players.
Yes, although the resulting status might well look very similar to the original messages. Consider if the original messages are from player x "move to 123,443" and player y "move to 116,151"; the notifications to player z may look like "player x moves to 123,443; player y moves to 116,151", which is close enough to the description that I would say it is covered. Also, look at claim 18 which is somewhat less specific about the contents of the messages sent by the server than the other claims.
However here comes the third problem: the patent was applied in 1999, a solid two years after UO which _did_ do just that.
You seem to have missed some relevant patents in your search. 5,822,523 is very similar to the second one you listed, but was filed in Jan '96, thus predating UO. Not sure that helps them, though.
Did Schroedinger really write "fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy)" or did you add the parenthetical expression?
The paranthetical expression was in the original text.
I wrote: (although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, this does not necessarily follow)
This is not particularly clear. I should clarify it: although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, it does not necessarily follow that an item of high entropy is hot, or one of low entropy cold.
I think the fact that something is true may not enough if you could not be justified in making it public knowledge. For example, breach of trust or privacy. If I discovered that you and your S.O. were into hardcore BDSM, and I printed it in salacious detail in a gossip rag (with pictures) I suspect I would have defamed you even if it is true because I had no business making it public for profit.
There are privacy laws in the UK, but they are distinct from the defamation laws. You could be sued for invasion of privacy in such a case, I believe, but not (successfully) for libel.
You left out an important part:
The publisher could prove the statement to be true, it could be fair comment - so long as the opinion is based on true facts, [and] is genuinely held and not influenced by malice - or it could be protected by privilege
That is, if your intent is malicious or if the information is "privileged", then even truth isn't a defense against libel under the British system anymore.
You're misreading it. There are three defences:
- the statement is true
- the statement is "fair comment" (i.e. it doesn't have to be shown to be true, but does have to be an opinion that is formed based on true facts, is genuinely held by the maker of the statement, and is not malicious)
- or the statement is protected by privilege (e.g. it is made in parliament or in court).
Neither the conditions on what constitutes fair comment or any matters relating to privelege affect the validity of a defence of truth.
I think you've gotten things backwards here. If I sue somebody because they called me a murderer, it's not up to me to prove I'm not; it's up to them (if that's the defense they select) to prove either that I am, or that they had good reason to believe that I'd committed murder.
Well, yes.
My point is that that's exactly how the system should be, and yet that is what everyone is complaining about the system being in the UK... i.e. the person who made the statement must be able to prove it is at least a justifiable statement. From what everyone else has been saying, in the US it is up to the person who was libelled to prove the statement is false, but you are now denying this.
So, what exactly _is_ the difference that everyone is so worked up about?
Life doesn't even result in a localized reduction of entropy. Living organisms tend to have higher entropy than their surroundings. Thats why they give off heat.
You seem to be confused about what entropy is. Entropy is merely a description of the unlikeliness of a particular arrangement of matter; it is not intrinsically linked to its heat (although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, this does not necessarily follow).
What passes for a science education these days?
Well, I don't know. It's not as if I'm the only one who's suggested this notion. Consider the following:
"It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic [...] Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy -or, as you may say, produces positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. [...] Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists continually sucking orderliness from its environment."
(What Is Life?: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, Erwin Schrodinger, 1944)
Schrodinger seems to be saying something very similar there to what I said and you disagreed with, so I don't think it's anything wrong with my education.
Even if you use contemporary hardware. I fired up an old Win95 box a few months ago [...]
You have to use contemporary hardware. Win95 fails to boot if you have more than about 480MB, apparently.