I don't think the Brits were cut off - it was rather the rest of the world! Remember the saying: "There is fog over the Channel, the poor continent got cut off."
The reasons for this are more than obvious: Didn't the Chinese adopt Linux as their OS of choice? Well, if you want to be able to read all the secret docs NSA grabs from the Chinese, you better run the same system;-)
You can't throw out the electoral votes because that would leave Florida's residents without an influence on the presidency, something that's out of their responsibility.
The cleanest thing is to revote in the whole of the US.
And while you're doing that, CNN and others shouldn't be allowed to do any reporting until the last polling station has closed.
There is this sort of smart card in Germany. It is issued as standard on all banking cards for a couple of years now. It's called electronic cash and is supposed to work like cash: anonymous per transaction.
You go to a cash or special bank machine and take money from your account onto the card. The account sheets will only show this transaction. The you can go to the grocer and pay by inserting your card in his reader and confirming by pressing a button. The reader won't read about your identity! It just gets information about how much money it gets off you and credits that to the grocer.
There is a clearing house that clears all these transactions and they should balance out to zero. You don't need to know any personal information. The cards don't need any online verification like credit cards and they even don't need a PIN because the intention was to make it simple like cash. As a result when you loose your smartcard you loose the electronic cash on it (like loosing a wallet) and anyone can spend it! But that keeps chips simple and cost down.
However, the system never took off in Germany. I don't know why - maybe the readers are too expensive? Maybe people want to see the cash in their wallets (although there are tiny readers that show you your credit). But it's anonymous and works on big scale - and that's what you asked for.
What surprised and amused me is the strength of Europe (and in there Germany) during the elections. The two candidates of Europe with the most votes both come from Germany. And the Germans made up most of the eligible European voters.
Europe proved to be much more involved in the process than North America. This is although the US defines itself as the place where the internet happens (and loves to think of itself as the worlds best democracy).
I'd like to see the per capita figure of voters for each country in order to find out which country has the most active online community. My guess would be that Europe has been underestimated in the past.
While you're surfing you can at any time drag and drop a link to a page that sucks from your standard browser to the web recycler. Upon emptying the bin, the information is transferred to an autonomous, distributed cracking system which results in unstoppable attack on the page and finally in removal from the web.
This ensures that all the pages that suck get removed to make space for better attempts.
By posting your patent to slashdot you pre-publish it. As a consequence, it's not new at the point of application by definition. So anything coming up in this contest can't be patented anymore.
However, you can still apply for the patent first and then post it to slashdot.
You probably would be allowed to compile (and use it non-commercially which implies not using it all if you had used it anyway and thus had bought it) but you wouldn't be able to compile it because you're probably not allowed to copy the source code for that purpose due to copyright restrictions.
Unfortunately, you would have to hire a solicitor in order to get a patent deleted - even if the invention obviously is not an invention.
I don't think it is enough to sent an email to the patent office pointing out that every ancient bibliography is nothing but a hyperlink and therefore hyperlinks can't be patented.
But again, this is a problem of the process and the offices/courts/admins and not of the patent itself.
Software patents are not neccessarily evil. They're actually a good thing. The discussion I've seen so far unfortunately misses the point. Why? Because a patent has two functions.
a) It ensures that the money invested in a commercial development (invention) can be earned back from the work before others just copy and paste. That by itself is fair and forms an incentive for inventing things.
It is important to keep in mind that this only applies for commercial activities. As long as you're not commercial, you don't have to care. Unfortunately, courts seem to regard everything as commercial. That's a problem.
The other problem is, that funny things are considered to be inventions. An invention by definition is something substantially new. Unfortunately, patent offices seem to consider things to be substantially new, that are more of a joke (click a single button instead of two to order the book). You wouldn't be able to do a PhD with that so why should that make a patent?
b) The second purpose of patents is to make them public. This is the point always missed. If you want to patent something, you will have to publicize it. That's the deal. The idea was, that others can learn from that and maybe develop something based on that.
This is actually what the whole open source community is demanding all the time: opening the source. So patenting e.g. Windows should mean, opening the source. You can't compile your own windows then (because the patent protects it), but you can see how MS has done it and finally write the nice software that really integrates. You even would be able to see, what backdoors are in there and how good security really is.
In order to not block markets and developments forever, patents expire. The time is quite long because when the laws where set up, most inventions were of mechanical nature, complicated machines and you needed many years to get your investment back. Not so with software! Since software is trivial to duplicate, the money for the investment comes back in much shorter time.
The logical consequence of all this is to allow patents for software, but adjust their expiry date. So make it running for a year and then the stuff becomes public domain. If a company doesn't like that, it can't patent. By adjusting the protected period to nowaday's needs, everyone is treated fairly. And then there is nothing evil in a patent.
As far as I know it is illegal in Germany to sell someone software but forbidding that someone to resell it. Once I've bought the software I can go and sell it second-hand. Didn't Microsoft just loose a big case concerning their OEM licenses that were resold?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the Brits were cut off - it was rather the rest of the world! Remember the saying: "There is fog over the Channel, the poor continent got cut off."
The reasons for this are more than obvious: Didn't the Chinese adopt Linux as their OS of choice? Well, if you want to be able to read all the secret docs NSA grabs from the Chinese, you better run the same system ;-)
You can't throw out the electoral votes because that would leave Florida's residents without an influence on the presidency, something that's out of their responsibility.
The cleanest thing is to revote in the whole of the US.
And while you're doing that, CNN and others shouldn't be allowed to do any reporting until the last polling station has closed.
There is this sort of smart card in Germany. It is issued as standard on all banking cards for a couple of years now. It's called electronic cash and is supposed to work like cash: anonymous per transaction.
You go to a cash or special bank machine and take money from your account onto the card. The account sheets will only show this transaction. The you can go to the grocer and pay by inserting your card in his reader and confirming by pressing a button. The reader won't read about your identity! It just gets information about how much money it gets off you and credits that to the grocer.
There is a clearing house that clears all these transactions and they should balance out to zero. You don't need to know any personal information. The cards don't need any online verification like credit cards and they even don't need a PIN because the intention was to make it simple like cash. As a result when you loose your smartcard you loose the electronic cash on it (like loosing a wallet) and anyone can spend it! But that keeps chips simple and cost down.
However, the system never took off in Germany. I don't know why - maybe the readers are too expensive? Maybe people want to see the cash in their wallets (although there are tiny readers that show you your credit). But it's anonymous and works on big scale - and that's what you asked for.
What surprised and amused me is the strength of Europe (and in there Germany) during the elections. The two candidates of Europe with the most votes both come from Germany. And the Germans made up most of the eligible European voters.
Europe proved to be much more involved in the process than North America. This is although the US defines itself as the place where the internet happens (and loves to think of itself as the worlds best democracy).
I'd like to see the per capita figure of voters for each country in order to find out which country has the most active online community. My guess would be that Europe has been underestimated in the past.
I'd like to patent the web recycler.
While you're surfing you can at any time drag and drop a link to a page that sucks from your standard browser to the web recycler. Upon emptying the bin, the information is transferred to an autonomous, distributed cracking system which results in unstoppable attack on the page and finally in removal from the web.
This ensures that all the pages that suck get removed to make space for better attempts.
hackers are no technical inventions. but you can trade mark it.
By posting your patent to slashdot you pre-publish it. As a consequence, it's not new at the point of application by definition. So anything coming up in this contest can't be patented anymore.
However, you can still apply for the patent first and then post it to slashdot.
the problem is not the patent but the expiry!
Hm, we should ask a patent-lawyer about this.
patrick!
I don't think it is enough to sent an email to the patent office pointing out that every ancient bibliography is nothing but a hyperlink and therefore hyperlinks can't be patented.
But again, this is a problem of the process and the offices/courts/admins and not of the patent itself.
patrick!
Do everything in internet years and the applicaton would have to be handled in say three month maximum.
patrick
a) It ensures that the money invested in a commercial development (invention) can be earned back from the work before others just copy and paste. That by itself is fair and forms an incentive for inventing things.
It is important to keep in mind that this only applies for commercial activities. As long as you're not commercial, you don't have to care. Unfortunately, courts seem to regard everything as commercial. That's a problem.
The other problem is, that funny things are considered to be inventions. An invention by definition is something substantially new. Unfortunately, patent offices seem to consider things to be substantially new, that are more of a joke (click a single button instead of two to order the book). You wouldn't be able to do a PhD with that so why should that make a patent?
b) The second purpose of patents is to make them public. This is the point always missed. If you want to patent something, you will have to publicize it. That's the deal. The idea was, that others can learn from that and maybe develop something based on that.
This is actually what the whole open source community is demanding all the time: opening the source. So patenting e.g. Windows should mean, opening the source. You can't compile your own windows then (because the patent protects it), but you can see how MS has done it and finally write the nice software that really integrates. You even would be able to see, what backdoors are in there and how good security really is.
In order to not block markets and developments forever, patents expire. The time is quite long because when the laws where set up, most inventions were of mechanical nature, complicated machines and you needed many years to get your investment back. Not so with software! Since software is trivial to duplicate, the money for the investment comes back in much shorter time.
The logical consequence of all this is to allow patents for software, but adjust their expiry date. So make it running for a year and then the stuff becomes public domain. If a company doesn't like that, it can't patent. By adjusting the protected period to nowaday's needs, everyone is treated fairly. And then there is nothing evil in a patent.
Just my humble opinion,
patrick!
As far as I know it is illegal in Germany to sell someone software but forbidding that someone to resell it. Once I've bought the software I can go and sell it second-hand. Didn't Microsoft just loose a big case concerning their OEM licenses that were resold?
you're missing the point: using encryption for private purposes will simply become illegal. France has seen this development already.