I keep seeing this assertion, but never any evidence.
A functional programming is no more or less descriptive than C++.
Check out e.g. "Four-fold Increase in Productivity and Quality" (pdf link). Erlang is freely available. Regarding C++ vs. functional programming being 'less descriptive' there's Haskell vs. Ada vs. C++ vs. Awk vs...., An Experiment in Software Prototyping Productivity(PS link). Now that doesn't directly address your question about what the compiler can do, there's about a metric ton of stuff about the higher level optimisations you can do with a declarative language compared to a messy one such as C++; riddled with aliasing problems etc. I haven't got any links handy, but some googling should turn them up (you could start by checking out Urban Boquist's, now quite old, PhD thesis). Plese note though that the Erlang references demonstrate that even while they may be slower on micro benchmarks, they always win in the end. Much like C beat out assembler in the eighties.
Your argument basically boils down to "the languages under discussion are all turing complete". While that's true, that's not really what we're saying. We're saying that given a declarative language the potential (and nowadays practice) for optimisation is much improved compared to e.g. Fortran or C.
Cell phones only use enough power to make contact with their cell. If the cell is 20 feet away its going to put out a lot less signal than if the cell is 20 miles away.
That's incidentally the "real" reason to put pico bases on air planes. Allowing mobiles to connect to the network directly wreaks havoc with the network as that's not dimensioned to allow a single mobile to see dozens of cells at the same time, taking up "space" (i.e. bandwidth and added interference) in all of them.
The mobile cell based networks work on the principle that a single mobile will only see a handfull of cells at the same time. A 747 flying over a metropolitan area would potentially swamp the network of that area given the max range of e.g. GSM at ca 20km and typical flying altitudes of around 10km.
I utterly fail to see a point. Before there wasn't any free tool chain. Now there is. Are you saying that there was such a pressing need to write other free software in the eighties that the free software community wasn't served by the efforts spent on tools then?
Look, I was there. The internet wasn't in such a state that it allowed much in the way of cooperation (there wasn't any cooperation yet at least). I say he got his priorities straight.
OK, so just because being fired isn't as bad as being fined it's not OK for the government to go through your mail without good reason, but it would be OK for a company?
So by your token, the government would have more power when going after lesser crime; it'd be OK to tap your phone if they're only investigating parking tickets, but not OK if they're investigating drug trafficing? Much less consequence in the first place, right? I fail to see the logic in that argument.
I cannot go through your e-mail in your home because it is stored on a disk that you own, and in a place that either belongs to, or is rented to you.
OK, so I loan a coat to you. Since it's still mine, it would be perfectly OK for me to go through your pockets as soon as you hang it on a rack somewhere. It's my coat after all, isn't it? No, the thing here is clearly whether you can reasonably have an expectation of privacy or not. In the US you don't, in much of the rest of the world you do. Some form of "common sense ownership" argument doesn't factor into it.
Becuase governments have a monopoly on the use of force. Corporations don't.
No, they have an oligopoly. Same shit. In either case; I don't have a choice.
In either case, I don't buy it. Let's rephrase: "If you're not allowed to do some things to me (such as going through my mail) why should a corporation?"
As for the company breaking into your desk, if they had a valid reason to suspect you had something in there you were not allowed to have(a gun, an illegal substance, whatever) you bet they'll break it down.
"Allowed to have", in the context of the discussion here that can only mean something that is not illegal per se, as there are laws pertaining to what you can and cannot do then, but something that's not allowed on company premises but legal to have non the less. As I said, where I'm from they can break into it all they like, but they'd be commiting a fellony in the process.
As for the folder marked private on the company network, it is *their* network. I'd love to see the law that prohibits the company, and more specifically those individuals within the company that have access rights to that section of the network, from looking what's in it.
Sure you want the second chapter (andra avdelningen) 9:th paragraph "Intrång i förvar" (breaking into storage). If it's email straight off then it's probably the 8:th that's more applicable "Brytande av brevhemlighet" (breaking the secrecy of letters and messages).
Look, they're not allowed to record your converstations in the office (see paragraph 9a) why should they be allowed to rifle through your desk? And when it comes to the recording I'm sure the US legislation is not that different from ours. If you're OK with them going through your wallet then why not subject to a strip search right away?
Look, if you want to be an indentured servant, there's nothing I can do to persuade you otherwise. To claim that that's just fine and dandy is a bit much. If the government isn't allowed to do something to its citizens (and in my country the government/courts can never claim that someone waived their rights as there is no way to do that), why should corporations?
I wasn't saying that employees become slaves when they are working. I ws just saying that when you are at work the company has paid for the hardware, the bnadwidth, and the equipment I am using. They have a right to restrict my use of the internet to what they feel is appros.
But that doesn't stop there as that's not the only thing they've paid for. For example, why should they let you use their toilets crapping out food you didn't buy in their caffeteria? It's their plumbing after all, right? If you want to crap out the competitors food you can do it on your own damn time, using your own damn toilet! Doesn't sound so reasonable anymore, does it?
Myself, I come from a country where we don't just limit the power of the state but also corporations. The state cannot collect whatever information for whatever purposes but neither can anybody else. If I mark a folder "private" on the company network then it's for all intents and purposes no business of the company, same as they couldn't break into my desk and rifle through my wallet "Just because I was using company resources to store it there."
No, the priorities are different. For a long shot, he'd consider it more important to create a free tool to do the task well, than to just do it with a non-free tool.
Yes. Let's not forget that this is the man who, seeing the need for free software, first started to write the compiler with which to build free software. A more "reasonable" person might have said that "Ah, the development tool chain isn't that important, it's the code that actually gets work done that is. Let's depend on a proprietary compiler for now, after all, the interface to it (i.e. the language) is portable and consistent between vendors".
But not Stallman. He's not one to back down from difficulty. As a result we now have a very capable free tool chain (gcc, gdb, glibc, gmake, flex, bison etc).
but my reading suggests that sshd will accept certs fine, but if they're not presented it will fallback to password mode. Is my understanding correct? I'd rather have it not ask for passwords at all. Any pointers?
On a UNIX ssh server (Open/Fsecure) look into the "PasswordAuthentication" parameter in sshd_config. Setting this to "no" will prevent password authentication to proceed. Check with '-v' to ssh; it will tell you what authentication methods that can proceed. Haven't played with a Windows sshd server version in a while so I don't know about that. I'd be surprised if it didn't allow the same parameter to be set though.
Re:EMR from high tension power lines?
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Quantum Wires
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We're already using DC for high power long haul transmission as it's more economical to do so in many cases. It's really the voltage that provides the saving. The reason we use AC is that it could easily be stepped up (and down again) to the required voltages by use of a transformer. Today we can do that using e.g. power semiconductors (or generate and use high voltage directly). So, they've already beat you to it, no carbon nano-tubes necessary.:-)
There it goes...I have been saying it all along. Sun has always been untrustworthy.
No, that doesn't even factor into it. Sun has always been a commercial entity though, and that very much factors into it. It's like this: it's a lot easier to "do the right thing" when you're feeling well and good and the money's pooring in. You don't have to lose a lot in doing so, in fact, you don't even have to risk losing a lot. So the Sun in summer is a lot different than the Sun we have now, hanging on the ropes, not noing what's going to happen and what place the future holds for it.
I even remember a small company in Santa Cruz that wasn't all bad as companies go. They are now. All the old people (and their spirit) are gone, and left is a bunch of vultures in charge of what was once SCO. If you think an SCO with nothing to lose is bad, you haven't seen a Sun with nothing to lose. Pray the day never comes.
I guess my view is this: I knew and liked the old Sun very much. I fondly remember staying up all night in front of the old 3/50 workstations my first year at University, basking in the cold light from the BW huge 19 inch monitor. I'd hate for a once great company like that to spend its twilight as another SCO. I'm not saying it would break my heart, but it would sadden me to see them go like that.
P.S. And take it from someone who does security research. NFS is crap. Really.:-)
As I've said, I can't vouch for the accuracy of translation, and I know the site has a bias, but it has links to the original Swedish articles.
Well, being from Sweden I can put your mind at rest. It's severely overdramatized (albeit competently done, e.g. the ambulance personel said that people had been spitting at them, not attacking them with clubs and stones).
You have to take the background into account. In Sweden we have a death rate due to violent crime of about 1 per 100k inhabitants and year. Compare that to the US for example, which is around 8 per 100k (if memory serves). So when the local police commander says "we are not in control of the (particular) situation" it means something quite different. He's much more 'in control' of that situation in Rosengård than a watch commander in South Central LA would be by comparison. Even one that claimed to have the situation well in hand by his standards.
It's like this. With the down turn of the economy in the past years we've seen youth gangs develop in Sweden. We've never had any youth gangs before, so of course we're outraged and society's reeling with the readjustment of having to deal with a situation that previously only existed as imported american cops and robbers shows on TV. (It's quite clear that's where most of the current gangs got their ideas from).
Also, and here one should be firm, while there are now the beginnings of segregation and gettoisation in Sweden, something we've never had before, it's got nothing to do with Islam, and everything to do with poverty and disenfranchisement. Race or religion does not enter into it at all.
So, in summary, while I don't like the current state of affairs, the trend, or the failures of our social policies, the situation is really bad only from our own very spoilt perspective. I've lived in the very worst parts of Göteborg (second largest city) and while you had to look after your bicycle, it's a complete and utter breeze compared to many places in the US I've visited. I constantly remind myself and other Swedes who go to the US that "Remember that you're not street smart, you're not at all used to the level of attention one has to give ones own security in the US". From a perspective of crime, Sweden (and the rest of the nordic countries) are about as bad as Japan! And we remove our shoes indoors to prove it.:-)
P.S. And the sources chosen, far from being paragons of the best Swedish journalism, are actually tabloids. They're not the Sun, I'll grant them that, but tabloids all the same.
umm, Dell is the one solidly in bed with Intel. Dell doesn't even OFFER a PC with anything except an Intel CPU, and I don't think it's available in the bigger systems either.
I was rather thinking of the whole Itanic disaster and how HP gave up PA-risc in exchange for cooperation from Intel. While Dell is a good customer of Intel's, they could change to AMD with little trouble. Hence I would say that Intel is in bed with Dell more than Dell is in bed with Intel. As Dell has a credible threat of changing supplier Intel has to be nice to them. Dell doesn't have to be nice to Intel. I belive HP is in a weaker situation (i.e. more dependent) with Intel than Dell is, hence Dell would come out better.
I don't actually know (and couldn't be bothered to find out) if HP still does Itanic systems (where there is no second source supplier) so maybe my argument is moot these days?
well.. would 'privacy' really have helped all that much?
the dog pointed the house as the place where the firestarter went, too.
Well, I'm hoping at least that had that been all the police had to go on then they wouldn't have actually charged someone. There were after all several possible suspects in the building and since one of them could be (erroneously) found out to have lied only through the Safeway card, without the Safeway card, who would they have charged? The whole family? A random member? Surely not. He was nailed because his name was on the card.
In the court of public opinion there is of course a substantial difference between 'The cops don't have any real idea as to who set the house on fire' and 'The cops have charged a suspect and the case is going to trial.' No smoke without fire and all that (kind of apt in this particular case).
This sounds like a method for legal framing:
Just fool someone into using, selling, or importing a device, and then prosecute them for either a) or b).
Well, in theory; perhaps. However, there's a few good faith statues. If you're infringing someone's patent and you don't know about it (and it's reasonable you don't), then the injured party won't be awarded much in the way of damages for the stuff you sold before you were told that you were infringing the patent.
That's why every little bit of plastic you buy is stamped with 'patents no. x,y,z apply' or 'pats. pending' or words to that effect. If it does then an infringer can't claim he didn't know there were patents. The law doesn't require you to do a patent search. Which incidentally is why there is reason not to do one. If you don't then it's easier to claim ignorance.
Note that an exit strategy at the point where someone claims infringement is to redesign, or get out altoghether, so your entrapper might not end up with any money in the end.
I think it has reached the point where the usefulness of patents in on a knife-edge. If they were scrapped there would be a huge potential for invention, but small inventors would have no hope.
Well, that could/should be true, but in practice I wonder if that's the case. I know of several small inventors who have been ripped of royally by larger corporations (see the on-going saga of Swedish inventor Håkan Lantz for example). Large corporations have time, money and lawyers; which smaller operators don't. So I'm not so sure. In the case of software I would say that patents are only useful for keeping the smaller operators off the market, whether the patents make sense in and of themselves or not.
The carpenter thing is fair enough as the grounds for injunctions to prevent the continued selling of the invention, but it is not grounds for shifting the liability onto the carpenters (or HP, in this case). The damage was caused by bad faith (or ignorance) on Intel's part and they are the primary and active violaters of the patent. HP is a victim, unless they knew the patent was being violated, in that they are going to have their business disrupted when and if the product is pulled.
Well, if you're saying that if Intergraph was fair they would go after Intel, then I'd be inclined to agree. It's difficult to write a law that would make that happen though. The principle of shared (I don't know the legal term in English) responsibility is that any party to the agreement can be hit for the whole sum, they dont' have to share the responsibility equally. There's good reason for this as it might be difficult to ascertain who has made what money, some of the parties may disapear etc. I mean, in this case it's clear that HP et. al. has made a lot of money off of the affair.
Now of course, knowing this, corporations don't buy stuff from suppliers without clauses that indemify them from this sort of thing (for a fee naturally) and hence Dell etc. came out better than they were before (or at least didn't suffer much). It may not be in HP's best interest to squeese Intel however, even though the law certainly allows for that.
Now, personally, I think patents can have a net positive effect on society as a whole, but the system needs serious reform. The problem now is that they're too much like lottery tickets (i.e. they cost next to nothing, with potentially huge windfalls), rather than letters of insurance, which they were originally. One way of making the cost of patents more in line with their value would be to shorten the rediculously long patent times that we have today. I would even allow software patents if they were allowed to run, say a year and a half, instead of the sixteen to twenty years that we have today. With shorter run times the value of patents would decline, and hence we would see fewer applications for them, and less frivolous patents as well.
P.S. And of course, as you say, you won't see any pressure to reform from patent attorneys. They're not likely to derail their own gravy train, now are they?
So, by my reading, this does NOT mean the end-user is liable. I was not the importer or the OEM.
I'm replying again, as I've come up with a good model for thinking about why the end user should be liable.
The idea behind patents is to serve as a deterrent to try and make money off of your idea at the deteriment of you making money off of it. (And in return for that protection we expect you to tell us how the thing works so that we'll be able to duplicate it once the patent runs out).
Now, think that you've invented a new sort of water wheel that you intend to manufacture and sell to millers. However, reading the patent the local carpenter is hired by the local miller to build him a water wheel. Being dirt poor, the local carpenter accepts for a very reasonable fee. You can't compete with it. Every other miller does the same, as carpenters are easy to get a hold of. Now, in order for the patent to be a workable deterrent to this sort of thing happening you have to be able to go after the one actually making the money in this situation, i.e. the miller. You could sue carpenters till the cows come home and not make a dime, all the while the millers who haven't built anything, sold anything related to the patent, etc. etc, but still makes the money off of your invention, is untouchable.
Hence patents makes it possible to go after the (commercial) user of a patented device, as he might be the one making the buck.
It should of course be noted that I'm not that impressed with the current value of patents to society as, they haven't been overhauled for quite some time, and we often see abuse of the intent of the patent system these days, rather than 'use'.
No, it clearly says, 'use'... 'or sell', not 'and sell'.
Or do you mean 'operative' as in 'most important'? I haven't really said anything else, see my other posts in this thread. Of course intergraph isn't going to go after end users, the money isn't in it. That's not saying that they couldn't.
This assumes while in the patent process you cannot release your product to the market. Remember you can label your product as "patent pending" and release it to the market. So again, how do you protect a companies ROI if they do not have a patent?
Sure you can, but with todays fierce financial competition you'd better make your money back fast or you wont have investors. Take the SKF example. The company wanted a 22% ROI and their money back within two (count them: two) years. Otherwise the product wasn't deemed viable. So it's not a question of the state protecting SKF, they themselves don't want that kind of protection as that doesn't make financial sense.
The problem here I think is that there are patents and there are patents. Companies try to provide solutions to customers problems (i.e. fill a need). There are typically many ways of filling that need. The more broad and far reaching your patent is, the more difficult it is to make it stick (as there's likely to be more prior art). Thus, the only patents that are going to cost money to a large corporation are the ones that can be designed around (fairly easily). The overbroad ones can be fought in court successfully (and cheaply, $1-$2 million is often quoted), and hence don't enter into the equation.
Take one example from my own industry. Nokia in the early nineties patented the way of reducing stand by power consumption in mobile phone by reducing the cpu frequency. That stuck (as it was narrow application to the mobile phone problem). As such it gave Nokia a short lived advantage in stand by time, over the rest of the market. The competition scrambled to meet the same targets, in Ericsson's case by researching battery technology. It only took a year or so before they were up to the same stand by time as the current Nokia phones, and hence Nokia's invention (I use that loosely) had been neutralised. When the patent expired however, Nokia found themselves distanced by the competition, as they hadn't researched battery technology and hence when the competition could start to lower their clock frequency (from a position of strength), they had substantially better stand by times. It was Nokia's turn to scramble.
So, in general, patent or no patent, your competition will have closed the gap in two years at the latest. Hence SKF:s stance that if you haven't made back your money in two years, you're in trouble. No need for a 16-20 year patent in that case, the economy has changed since these figures were set down.
So, releasing a clone takes time and other business pressures makes that time the golden hour in which to make back your money. If you cannot, you're not going to get funding, as there are other investements that will have a better payoff.
I would say that that is true even in the pharmaceutical industry. The research money spent on Losec was made back in an instant, and the rest of the patent time is just gravy. Not pure gravy however, as the competition saw that there was money to be made here and came up with alternatives.
No, the problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn't the patent situation. It's the fact that the cost-benefit to society is different from the cost-benefit to the companies, and hence competitive capitalism (or whatever you'd call it) isn't a good model for the research into potentially useful pharmaceutical substances. Compare, it's in societies best interest to find a cure rather than a treatment (given that the cost benefit is in it, which it often is), but it's in the best interest of the industry to find a treatement, not a cure. Compare Losec, which is a treatment, not a cure.
So, by my reading, this does NOT mean the end-user is liable. I was not the importer or the OEM.
Well, at least the text isn't clear about that. From my understanding, patents are really far reaching enough that, yes, in theory as a user of patented technology the holder can in fact sue you. Whether you had any hand in the manufacture or not.
This isn't often done however, as the money often isn't in it, and that some courts have taken the view that 'why aren't you going after someone higher in the food chain first?', c.f. brown bagging farmers (who seem to get nailed only if there's bad faith involved). Courts like intent (or unforgivable negligence) as a general idea, even if the law doesn't ask for it per se. It would be unreasonable to assume that you had either just by running a Pentium based computer.
Under your model, of no patents, what are you going to do to protect a company that spends millions of dollars and other resources (time) from the company that just waits to copy the idea?
My first engineering job was at the research laboratory of SKF, so I know a thing or two about patents as they apply to mechanical engineering. Even then (this was in 1993) SKF was largely doing away with their patent section, on the grounds that you didn't actually patent what you were researching any longer, as that would just tell your competition what you were up to. This enables said competiton to lay a 'patent minefield' i.e. to get a few quick patents in to block your progress, while they gear up their own research to be able to follow (or even beat) you to market.
Hence the battle cry was: "Short time to market". Not patents. With a short time to market you'll make your investement back before your competition is out of the starting blocks. And whey they get going, you've already run ahead, refining your offer, and (more importantly) got a grip (not to say lock) on the market. It's much more difficult to switch supplier once you've got going, than it is to go with the competition in the first place.
I saw this happening before my very eyes as I was there. That was the period where SKF just made their CARB rolling bearing public after much secrecy. The CARB idea was not encumbered with any patents, in that case as the idea was from the thirties and the patents had already expired before the means of producing them were available. But the pundits said that it was still doubtful if they would have spent much effort in that area even if it hadn't.
If HP didn't know then HP should go after intel for their loses. If they came after me I would go after intel because I certainly check all possible patents concerning the pentium processor!
The article says that Dell did exactly that. And that the settlement they got from Intel covered their settlement with Intergraph and then some.
I guess Intel can't risk pissing off Dell, as they could threaten to say "fuck it, we're going AMD from here on" HP, being more in bed with Intel, might have contracts and agreements (not to mention other business reasons) not to do that however.
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Check out e.g. "Four-fold Increase in Productivity and Quality" (pdf link). Erlang is freely available. Regarding C++ vs. functional programming being 'less descriptive' there's Haskell vs. Ada vs. C++ vs. Awk vs. ..., An Experiment in Software Prototyping Productivity(PS link). Now that doesn't directly address your question about what the compiler can do, there's about a metric ton of stuff about the higher level optimisations you can do with a declarative language compared to a messy one such as C++; riddled with aliasing problems etc. I haven't got any links handy, but some googling should turn them up (you could start by checking out Urban Boquist's, now quite old, PhD thesis). Plese note though that the Erlang references demonstrate that even while they may be slower on micro benchmarks, they always win in the end. Much like C beat out assembler in the eighties.
Your argument basically boils down to "the languages under discussion are all turing complete". While that's true, that's not really what we're saying. We're saying that given a declarative language the potential (and nowadays practice) for optimisation is much improved compared to e.g. Fortran or C.
That's incidentally the "real" reason to put pico bases on air planes. Allowing mobiles to connect to the network directly wreaks havoc with the network as that's not dimensioned to allow a single mobile to see dozens of cells at the same time, taking up "space" (i.e. bandwidth and added interference) in all of them.
The mobile cell based networks work on the principle that a single mobile will only see a handfull of cells at the same time. A 747 flying over a metropolitan area would potentially swamp the network of that area given the max range of e.g. GSM at ca 20km and typical flying altitudes of around 10km.
I utterly fail to see a point. Before there wasn't any free tool chain. Now there is. Are you saying that there was such a pressing need to write other free software in the eighties that the free software community wasn't served by the efforts spent on tools then?
Look, I was there. The internet wasn't in such a state that it allowed much in the way of cooperation (there wasn't any cooperation yet at least). I say he got his priorities straight.
OK, so just because being fired isn't as bad as being fined it's not OK for the government to go through your mail without good reason, but it would be OK for a company?
So by your token, the government would have more power when going after lesser crime; it'd be OK to tap your phone if they're only investigating parking tickets, but not OK if they're investigating drug trafficing? Much less consequence in the first place, right? I fail to see the logic in that argument.
OK, so I loan a coat to you. Since it's still mine, it would be perfectly OK for me to go through your pockets as soon as you hang it on a rack somewhere. It's my coat after all, isn't it? No, the thing here is clearly whether you can reasonably have an expectation of privacy or not. In the US you don't, in much of the rest of the world you do. Some form of "common sense ownership" argument doesn't factor into it.
No, they have an oligopoly. Same shit. In either case; I don't have a choice.
In either case, I don't buy it. Let's rephrase: "If you're not allowed to do some things to me (such as going through my mail) why should a corporation?"
"Allowed to have", in the context of the discussion here that can only mean something that is not illegal per se, as there are laws pertaining to what you can and cannot do then, but something that's not allowed on company premises but legal to have non the less. As I said, where I'm from they can break into it all they like, but they'd be commiting a fellony in the process.
Sure you want the second chapter (andra avdelningen) 9:th paragraph "Intrång i förvar" (breaking into storage). If it's email straight off then it's probably the 8:th that's more applicable "Brytande av brevhemlighet" (breaking the secrecy of letters and messages).
Look, they're not allowed to record your converstations in the office (see paragraph 9a) why should they be allowed to rifle through your desk? And when it comes to the recording I'm sure the US legislation is not that different from ours. If you're OK with them going through your wallet then why not subject to a strip search right away?
Look, if you want to be an indentured servant, there's nothing I can do to persuade you otherwise. To claim that that's just fine and dandy is a bit much. If the government isn't allowed to do something to its citizens (and in my country the government/courts can never claim that someone waived their rights as there is no way to do that), why should corporations?
But that doesn't stop there as that's not the only thing they've paid for. For example, why should they let you use their toilets crapping out food you didn't buy in their caffeteria? It's their plumbing after all, right? If you want to crap out the competitors food you can do it on your own damn time, using your own damn toilet! Doesn't sound so reasonable anymore, does it?
Myself, I come from a country where we don't just limit the power of the state but also corporations. The state cannot collect whatever information for whatever purposes but neither can anybody else. If I mark a folder "private" on the company network then it's for all intents and purposes no business of the company, same as they couldn't break into my desk and rifle through my wallet "Just because I was using company resources to store it there."
Indeed I did. And quite a few others.
Yes. Let's not forget that this is the man who, seeing the need for free software, first started to write the compiler with which to build free software. A more "reasonable" person might have said that "Ah, the development tool chain isn't that important, it's the code that actually gets work done that is. Let's depend on a proprietary compiler for now, after all, the interface to it (i.e. the language) is portable and consistent between vendors".
But not Stallman. He's not one to back down from difficulty. As a result we now have a very capable free tool chain (gcc, gdb, glibc, gmake, flex, bison etc).
I'd say he's got his priorities straight.
On a UNIX ssh server (Open/Fsecure) look into the "PasswordAuthentication" parameter in sshd_config. Setting this to "no" will prevent password authentication to proceed. Check with '-v' to ssh; it will tell you what authentication methods that can proceed. Haven't played with a Windows sshd server version in a while so I don't know about that. I'd be surprised if it didn't allow the same parameter to be set though.
We're already using DC for high power long haul transmission as it's more economical to do so in many cases. It's really the voltage that provides the saving. The reason we use AC is that it could easily be stepped up (and down again) to the required voltages by use of a transformer. Today we can do that using e.g. power semiconductors (or generate and use high voltage directly). So, they've already beat you to it, no carbon nano-tubes necessary. :-)
No, that doesn't even factor into it. Sun has always been a commercial entity though, and that very much factors into it. It's like this: it's a lot easier to "do the right thing" when you're feeling well and good and the money's pooring in. You don't have to lose a lot in doing so, in fact, you don't even have to risk losing a lot. So the Sun in summer is a lot different than the Sun we have now, hanging on the ropes, not noing what's going to happen and what place the future holds for it.
I even remember a small company in Santa Cruz that wasn't all bad as companies go. They are now. All the old people (and their spirit) are gone, and left is a bunch of vultures in charge of what was once SCO. If you think an SCO with nothing to lose is bad, you haven't seen a Sun with nothing to lose. Pray the day never comes.
I guess my view is this: I knew and liked the old Sun very much. I fondly remember staying up all night in front of the old 3/50 workstations my first year at University, basking in the cold light from the BW huge 19 inch monitor. I'd hate for a once great company like that to spend its twilight as another SCO. I'm not saying it would break my heart, but it would sadden me to see them go like that.
P.S. And take it from someone who does security research. NFS is crap. Really. :-)
Well, being from Sweden I can put your mind at rest. It's severely overdramatized (albeit competently done, e.g. the ambulance personel said that people had been spitting at them, not attacking them with clubs and stones).
You have to take the background into account. In Sweden we have a death rate due to violent crime of about 1 per 100k inhabitants and year. Compare that to the US for example, which is around 8 per 100k (if memory serves). So when the local police commander says "we are not in control of the (particular) situation" it means something quite different. He's much more 'in control' of that situation in Rosengård than a watch commander in South Central LA would be by comparison. Even one that claimed to have the situation well in hand by his standards.
It's like this. With the down turn of the economy in the past years we've seen youth gangs develop in Sweden. We've never had any youth gangs before, so of course we're outraged and society's reeling with the readjustment of having to deal with a situation that previously only existed as imported american cops and robbers shows on TV. (It's quite clear that's where most of the current gangs got their ideas from).
Also, and here one should be firm, while there are now the beginnings of segregation and gettoisation in Sweden, something we've never had before, it's got nothing to do with Islam, and everything to do with poverty and disenfranchisement. Race or religion does not enter into it at all.
So, in summary, while I don't like the current state of affairs, the trend, or the failures of our social policies, the situation is really bad only from our own very spoilt perspective. I've lived in the very worst parts of Göteborg (second largest city) and while you had to look after your bicycle, it's a complete and utter breeze compared to many places in the US I've visited. I constantly remind myself and other Swedes who go to the US that "Remember that you're not street smart, you're not at all used to the level of attention one has to give ones own security in the US". From a perspective of crime, Sweden (and the rest of the nordic countries) are about as bad as Japan! And we remove our shoes indoors to prove it. :-)
P.S. And the sources chosen, far from being paragons of the best Swedish journalism, are actually tabloids. They're not the Sun, I'll grant them that, but tabloids all the same.
I was rather thinking of the whole Itanic disaster and how HP gave up PA-risc in exchange for cooperation from Intel. While Dell is a good customer of Intel's, they could change to AMD with little trouble. Hence I would say that Intel is in bed with Dell more than Dell is in bed with Intel. As Dell has a credible threat of changing supplier Intel has to be nice to them. Dell doesn't have to be nice to Intel. I belive HP is in a weaker situation (i.e. more dependent) with Intel than Dell is, hence Dell would come out better.
I don't actually know (and couldn't be bothered to find out) if HP still does Itanic systems (where there is no second source supplier) so maybe my argument is moot these days?
Well, I'm hoping at least that had that been all the police had to go on then they wouldn't have actually charged someone. There were after all several possible suspects in the building and since one of them could be (erroneously) found out to have lied only through the Safeway card, without the Safeway card, who would they have charged? The whole family? A random member? Surely not. He was nailed because his name was on the card.
In the court of public opinion there is of course a substantial difference between 'The cops don't have any real idea as to who set the house on fire' and 'The cops have charged a suspect and the case is going to trial.' No smoke without fire and all that (kind of apt in this particular case).
Well, in theory; perhaps. However, there's a few good faith statues. If you're infringing someone's patent and you don't know about it (and it's reasonable you don't), then the injured party won't be awarded much in the way of damages for the stuff you sold before you were told that you were infringing the patent.
That's why every little bit of plastic you buy is stamped with 'patents no. x,y,z apply' or 'pats. pending' or words to that effect. If it does then an infringer can't claim he didn't know there were patents. The law doesn't require you to do a patent search. Which incidentally is why there is reason not to do one. If you don't then it's easier to claim ignorance.
Note that an exit strategy at the point where someone claims infringement is to redesign, or get out altoghether, so your entrapper might not end up with any money in the end.
Well, that could/should be true, but in practice I wonder if that's the case. I know of several small inventors who have been ripped of royally by larger corporations (see the on-going saga of Swedish inventor Håkan Lantz for example). Large corporations have time, money and lawyers; which smaller operators don't. So I'm not so sure. In the case of software I would say that patents are only useful for keeping the smaller operators off the market, whether the patents make sense in and of themselves or not.
Well, if you're saying that if Intergraph was fair they would go after Intel, then I'd be inclined to agree. It's difficult to write a law that would make that happen though. The principle of shared (I don't know the legal term in English) responsibility is that any party to the agreement can be hit for the whole sum, they dont' have to share the responsibility equally. There's good reason for this as it might be difficult to ascertain who has made what money, some of the parties may disapear etc. I mean, in this case it's clear that HP et. al. has made a lot of money off of the affair.
Now of course, knowing this, corporations don't buy stuff from suppliers without clauses that indemify them from this sort of thing (for a fee naturally) and hence Dell etc. came out better than they were before (or at least didn't suffer much). It may not be in HP's best interest to squeese Intel however, even though the law certainly allows for that.
Now, personally, I think patents can have a net positive effect on society as a whole, but the system needs serious reform. The problem now is that they're too much like lottery tickets (i.e. they cost next to nothing, with potentially huge windfalls), rather than letters of insurance, which they were originally. One way of making the cost of patents more in line with their value would be to shorten the rediculously long patent times that we have today. I would even allow software patents if they were allowed to run, say a year and a half, instead of the sixteen to twenty years that we have today. With shorter run times the value of patents would decline, and hence we would see fewer applications for them, and less frivolous patents as well.
P.S. And of course, as you say, you won't see any pressure to reform from patent attorneys. They're not likely to derail their own gravy train, now are they?
I'm replying again, as I've come up with a good model for thinking about why the end user should be liable.
The idea behind patents is to serve as a deterrent to try and make money off of your idea at the deteriment of you making money off of it. (And in return for that protection we expect you to tell us how the thing works so that we'll be able to duplicate it once the patent runs out).
Now, think that you've invented a new sort of water wheel that you intend to manufacture and sell to millers. However, reading the patent the local carpenter is hired by the local miller to build him a water wheel. Being dirt poor, the local carpenter accepts for a very reasonable fee. You can't compete with it. Every other miller does the same, as carpenters are easy to get a hold of. Now, in order for the patent to be a workable deterrent to this sort of thing happening you have to be able to go after the one actually making the money in this situation, i.e. the miller. You could sue carpenters till the cows come home and not make a dime, all the while the millers who haven't built anything, sold anything related to the patent, etc. etc, but still makes the money off of your invention, is untouchable.
Hence patents makes it possible to go after the (commercial) user of a patented device, as he might be the one making the buck.
It should of course be noted that I'm not that impressed with the current value of patents to society as, they haven't been overhauled for quite some time, and we often see abuse of the intent of the patent system these days, rather than 'use'.
No, it clearly says, 'use' ... 'or sell', not 'and sell'.
Or do you mean 'operative' as in 'most important'? I haven't really said anything else, see my other posts in this thread. Of course intergraph isn't going to go after end users, the money isn't in it. That's not saying that they couldn't.
Sure you can, but with todays fierce financial competition you'd better make your money back fast or you wont have investors. Take the SKF example. The company wanted a 22% ROI and their money back within two (count them: two) years. Otherwise the product wasn't deemed viable. So it's not a question of the state protecting SKF, they themselves don't want that kind of protection as that doesn't make financial sense.
The problem here I think is that there are patents and there are patents. Companies try to provide solutions to customers problems (i.e. fill a need). There are typically many ways of filling that need. The more broad and far reaching your patent is, the more difficult it is to make it stick (as there's likely to be more prior art). Thus, the only patents that are going to cost money to a large corporation are the ones that can be designed around (fairly easily). The overbroad ones can be fought in court successfully (and cheaply, $1-$2 million is often quoted), and hence don't enter into the equation.
Take one example from my own industry. Nokia in the early nineties patented the way of reducing stand by power consumption in mobile phone by reducing the cpu frequency. That stuck (as it was narrow application to the mobile phone problem). As such it gave Nokia a short lived advantage in stand by time, over the rest of the market. The competition scrambled to meet the same targets, in Ericsson's case by researching battery technology. It only took a year or so before they were up to the same stand by time as the current Nokia phones, and hence Nokia's invention (I use that loosely) had been neutralised. When the patent expired however, Nokia found themselves distanced by the competition, as they hadn't researched battery technology and hence when the competition could start to lower their clock frequency (from a position of strength), they had substantially better stand by times. It was Nokia's turn to scramble.
So, in general, patent or no patent, your competition will have closed the gap in two years at the latest. Hence SKF:s stance that if you haven't made back your money in two years, you're in trouble. No need for a 16-20 year patent in that case, the economy has changed since these figures were set down.
So, releasing a clone takes time and other business pressures makes that time the golden hour in which to make back your money. If you cannot, you're not going to get funding, as there are other investements that will have a better payoff.
I would say that that is true even in the pharmaceutical industry. The research money spent on Losec was made back in an instant, and the rest of the patent time is just gravy. Not pure gravy however, as the competition saw that there was money to be made here and came up with alternatives.
No, the problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn't the patent situation. It's the fact that the cost-benefit to society is different from the cost-benefit to the companies, and hence competitive capitalism (or whatever you'd call it) isn't a good model for the research into potentially useful pharmaceutical substances. Compare, it's in societies best interest to find a cure rather than a treatment (given that the cost benefit is in it, which it often is), but it's in the best interest of the industry to find a treatement, not a cure. Compare Losec, which is a treatment, not a cure.
Well, at least the text isn't clear about that. From my understanding, patents are really far reaching enough that, yes, in theory as a user of patented technology the holder can in fact sue you. Whether you had any hand in the manufacture or not.
This isn't often done however, as the money often isn't in it, and that some courts have taken the view that 'why aren't you going after someone higher in the food chain first?', c.f. brown bagging farmers (who seem to get nailed only if there's bad faith involved). Courts like intent (or unforgivable negligence) as a general idea, even if the law doesn't ask for it per se. It would be unreasonable to assume that you had either just by running a Pentium based computer.
That's not to say couldn't happen though.
My first engineering job was at the research laboratory of SKF, so I know a thing or two about patents as they apply to mechanical engineering. Even then (this was in 1993) SKF was largely doing away with their patent section, on the grounds that you didn't actually patent what you were researching any longer, as that would just tell your competition what you were up to. This enables said competiton to lay a 'patent minefield' i.e. to get a few quick patents in to block your progress, while they gear up their own research to be able to follow (or even beat) you to market.
Hence the battle cry was: "Short time to market". Not patents. With a short time to market you'll make your investement back before your competition is out of the starting blocks. And whey they get going, you've already run ahead, refining your offer, and (more importantly) got a grip (not to say lock) on the market. It's much more difficult to switch supplier once you've got going, than it is to go with the competition in the first place.
I saw this happening before my very eyes as I was there. That was the period where SKF just made their CARB rolling bearing public after much secrecy. The CARB idea was not encumbered with any patents, in that case as the idea was from the thirties and the patents had already expired before the means of producing them were available. But the pundits said that it was still doubtful if they would have spent much effort in that area even if it hadn't.
The article says that Dell did exactly that. And that the settlement they got from Intel covered their settlement with Intergraph and then some.
I guess Intel can't risk pissing off Dell, as they could threaten to say "fuck it, we're going AMD from here on" HP, being more in bed with Intel, might have contracts and agreements (not to mention other business reasons) not to do that however.
See, we'll make a patent attorney of you yet. :-) (Not that I am).