MS already releases a richer set of APIs than anything else. We don't need more APIs. Anything more that they would release would just lock the OS into backwards compatibility hell.
You have to have some room to fix things. Well defined and documented APIs are as much as can reasonably be asked for, and MS provides them.
I will point out that fair use is also not a "natural law" in the sense of being inevitable like laws against theft and murder.
Of course, in the past, creators of digital media have had various levels of control over how information is copied, starting with the rather difficult and expensive stone tablets, progressing through the ages up to easily copiable and unprotectable analog media, and moving on towards potentially impossible to copy digital media playable only on specific devices.
Frankly, given all the options, and the desire for people to be able to actually make a living creating information, I'm inclined to think that copyright *is* as inevitable as laws against theft and murder.
Ummm... those 32-bit compiled programs aren't exactly going to be making use of those extra general purpose registers, you know... register allocation is (mostly) done at compile time.
Funny... It only took me about 5 minutes to Google for www.totalrecorder.com, which appears to be a totally legitimate product that will rip any audio stream (though you have to buy it to record >40 seconds).
Unless Microsoft is successful with Palladium, *no* encoding scheme will be successful at stopping someone from replacing the audio driver with one that T's the data off to a file.
Even with Palladium, all it takes is for *one* person to hack their hardware to find their encryption keys and it all goes out the window (or Windows:-).
That's not his point. Labels could afford to offer to pay you much more per sale (and competition between labels would force them to do so) if they weren't losing so much money on advances to unsuccessful artists.
Large companies excel at generating a large quantity of innovation. They are the only ones that have the resources to do this. So Larry is right, "most" innovation comes from large companies.
However, the quality of innovation, in the sense of how revolutionary it is, seems to have historically much higher at small young companies. So Marc is right, "most" of the really spectacular innovations have come from small companies.
... on the other hand, it's a lot more accurate that/.ers tend to accept.
Here's an analogy that I think makes this entirely clear:
I go to a hotel that isn't full, and I'm very careful to leave everything exactly as it was when I arrived.
Is it "theft" if I leave without paying? I haven't taken anything that they could have used to make money anyway...
It's not exactly theft, no, but people treat it similarly. Why is music "theft" any different?
It isn't. When you make a copy of the music, federal law gives the company a right to charge for this. You owe them that money, regardless of how you made the copy. Failing to pay it is "theft" in the same way that failing to pay for your hotel room at a non-full hotel is "theft".
We have lots of different names for things that are somewhat equivilent to theft in our legal system. "Fraud", "theft of services", "copyright infringement", "blackmail", "extortion", even literally "piracy".
Calling it "copyright infringement" instead of "theft" doesn't really change much. It turns out that current law only makes copyright infringement a crime if you do it on a large scale, much like speeding isn't a "crime" in the sense that can get you thrown into jail unless you're really egregious. This is probably due to the small actual cost that either activity imposes on others.
Extremely petty theft is still theft, however, regardless of what term we choose to cloak it in.
In spite of what everyone wants to think about it (and in spite of the fact that it will never fly), this is essentially all that MS/Intel are trying to do with Palladium.
If CIS majors were smarter, you would have realized that what he meant was: "handwriting recognition that is good enough to be usable and not to piss many people off isn't possible for the reasonably forseeable future".
Ahh, but you may have noticed that they said "if (we) give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it". I.e. it's the *value* they are accusing people of stealing.
Whatever you think about this argument, this is a very different thing than saying that they think people are stealing the music. It puts a very different (and more accurate) spin on the issue.
What is claimed here is a very specific system for creating a catalog of preexisting items (i.e. a "list of everything") so that people can, instead of writing up a description of their item, find it in the big catalog and say "I have one of these, anyone interested".
Perhaps there's prior art for this (though I don't know of anything that's very similar), but it's certainly not a patent application for "selling stuff over the internet".
Geez... Give the guys some credit for thinking of a cool bit of technology (even if perhaps they aren't the first to think of this one... I reserve judgment on that)...
Yes, one could write ones own entire operating system on that floppy and boot from it. Nothing really can prevent that except for Trusted Computing or something like it.
An interesting thing to note, though, is that BIOS's trap Ctrl-Alt-Del specifically and jump to their reset vector, which adds another singificant layer of complexity to implementing such a hack. And it means that you can't just boot to DOS and run a program that looks like Windows... Of course, anything can be gotten around modulo hardware reset buttons... You can remap the reset vector to code of your choosing (if you're careful:-)...
So, in that sense, it does matter what key sequence you use. It's a legacy reason, but a reason nonetheless.
Even if you just count the top 400 wealthiest people (all of whom I expect this poster would complain about), that's 1/700,000. Even if only half of those people "earned" their money (or, to be fair, were 1 generation away from someone who "earned" the money), that's still something like 50 times more likely than winning the lottery.
If you count everyone that has 1 million dollars in assets, the probabilities are vastly, ridiculously, higher that they got there by earning their money than that of winning the lottery.
The lottery is nothing but a stupidity tax, which I wholeheartedly support, especially when it goes to fund education.
The point of voting for 3rd party candidates is not to create a new political party, nor is it to win that election. The point is to bring about the exact kinds of change you're talking about in this posting.
Compare the 1920s Socialist Party platform with that of modern day Democrats, and you will find that they are almost identical. This isn't a random occurance. It's happened many times.
Will you actually be surprised if the Democrats are even more Green next election cycle than they are now? After Gore tied Bush in Florida (and then lost on a technicality)?
The point of voting 3rd party is to change the agendas of the major parties. Do you think the Reform party accomplished nothing in that regard?
No one else seems to have noticed this, but looking at the "SAGE levels" of the respondents, the vast majority of them were IT managers (i.e. had other slaves working for them) or heads of the IT department.
The difference between software-as-expression and software as utility is as simple as this: nothing in patent law prevents you from expressing the idea that is patented, in whatever form you want. What is prohibited is making use of it in a way that infringes on the patented utility.
Another point I think is worth making is that I'm left quite uncomfortable by this particular diatribe against software patents. Here's why: I tried reading it while replacing each instance of "software" with "invention", and it makes almost as much sense.
Patents have always been on ideas, not necessarily incredibly narrow instantiations of the ideas. The difference that makes an idea patentable (vs. copyrightable) is whether it has utility. If an idea, even a broad idea, is new and inventive, you've always been able to get a patent on that broad invention. Historically these have been harder to enforce than narrow patents (and rightly so), but they've always been granted.
And, finally, prohibiting software patents makes all patents useless. We might as well prohibit all patents. Anything can be done in software on a sufficiently general-purpose machine. If I can't protect my "real" mechanical invention against someone doing the same thing, except partly in software, I can't protect my invention at all.
The complaints about bloat and slowness are perhaps relevant if you're writing a video driver or an embedded system.
Anyone writing software for a living for PCs or equivilent should remember the subject line. Any software you write for this kind of platform will spend 90%+ of its useful lifetime running on machines that are at least twice as fast as the one you developed it on.
Additionally, from a purely mercenary perspective, if we don't use up those cycles, no one will buy new computers, and Moore's law will succumb to apathy rather than technical limits (which I would consider to be a sad thing, both in the abstract and because a lot of us would be out of a job).
Uhhh, except Re:Treasure hunt, not scavenger hunt
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Geocaching Crackdown?
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Yes, but it's also true that a treasure hunt is searching for something valuable, whereas a scavenger hunt is searching for something just for the sake of finding it. The latter is a much better description of the "flavor" of caching.
I'd say that both terms are sufficiently accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to have some room to fix things. Well defined and documented APIs are as much as can reasonably be asked for, and MS provides them.
Now... file formats on the other hand...
If you look carefully at the map, the Earth is at the *bottom* of the Universe.
Why does this remind me of China keeping their space launch secret until it succeeded?
Of course, in the past, creators of digital media have had various levels of control over how information is copied, starting with the rather difficult and expensive stone tablets, progressing through the ages up to easily copiable and unprotectable analog media, and moving on towards potentially impossible to copy digital media playable only on specific devices.
Frankly, given all the options, and the desire for people to be able to actually make a living creating information, I'm inclined to think that copyright *is* as inevitable as laws against theft and murder.
Ummm... those 32-bit compiled programs aren't exactly going to be making use of those extra general purpose registers, you know... register allocation is (mostly) done at compile time.
You know the ones, where everyone starts off by standing up and saying "I'm Fred Jeebums, and I'm an alcoholic"...
Frankly, I don't think we need a 12-step program... A 32-bit program, on the other hand...
Unless Microsoft is successful with Palladium, *no* encoding scheme will be successful at stopping someone from replacing the audio driver with one that T's the data off to a file.
Even with Palladium, all it takes is for *one* person to hack their hardware to find their encryption keys and it all goes out the window (or Windows :-).
That's not his point. Labels could afford to offer to pay you much more per sale (and competition between labels would force them to do so) if they weren't losing so much money on advances to unsuccessful artists.
However, the quality of innovation, in the sense of how revolutionary it is, seems to have historically much higher at small young companies. So Marc is right, "most" of the really spectacular innovations have come from small companies.
Here's an analogy that I think makes this entirely clear:
I go to a hotel that isn't full, and I'm very careful to leave everything exactly as it was when I arrived.
Is it "theft" if I leave without paying? I haven't taken anything that they could have used to make money anyway...
It's not exactly theft, no, but people treat it similarly. Why is music "theft" any different?
It isn't. When you make a copy of the music, federal law gives the company a right to charge for this. You owe them that money, regardless of how you made the copy. Failing to pay it is "theft" in the same way that failing to pay for your hotel room at a non-full hotel is "theft".
We have lots of different names for things that are somewhat equivilent to theft in our legal system. "Fraud", "theft of services", "copyright infringement", "blackmail", "extortion", even literally "piracy".
Calling it "copyright infringement" instead of "theft" doesn't really change much. It turns out that current law only makes copyright infringement a crime if you do it on a large scale, much like speeding isn't a "crime" in the sense that can get you thrown into jail unless you're really egregious. This is probably due to the small actual cost that either activity imposes on others.
Extremely petty theft is still theft, however, regardless of what term we choose to cloak it in.
In spite of what everyone wants to think about it (and in spite of the fact that it will never fly), this is essentially all that MS/Intel are trying to do with Palladium.
If CIS majors were smarter, you would have realized that what he meant was: "handwriting recognition that is good enough to be usable and not to piss many people off isn't possible for the reasonably forseeable future".
Whatever you think about this argument, this is a very different thing than saying that they think people are stealing the music. It puts a very different (and more accurate) spin on the issue.
What is claimed here is a very specific system for creating a catalog of preexisting items (i.e. a "list of everything") so that people can, instead of writing up a description of their item, find it in the big catalog and say "I have one of these, anyone interested".
Perhaps there's prior art for this (though I don't know of anything that's very similar), but it's certainly not a patent application for "selling stuff over the internet".
Geez... Give the guys some credit for thinking of a cool bit of technology (even if perhaps they aren't the first to think of this one... I reserve judgment on that)...
Is it just me, or are Slashdot articles getting more and more like advertisements every day?
An interesting thing to note, though, is that BIOS's trap Ctrl-Alt-Del specifically and jump to their reset vector, which adds another singificant layer of complexity to implementing such a hack. And it means that you can't just boot to DOS and run a program that looks like Windows... Of course, anything can be gotten around modulo hardware reset buttons... You can remap the reset vector to code of your choosing (if you're careful :-)...
So, in that sense, it does matter what key sequence you use. It's a legacy reason, but a reason nonetheless.
IANAL, but in civil suits the standard of proof is "preponderance of evidence". You actually need to present a positive defence of some kind.
If you count everyone that has 1 million dollars in assets, the probabilities are vastly, ridiculously, higher that they got there by earning their money than that of winning the lottery.
The lottery is nothing but a stupidity tax, which I wholeheartedly support, especially when it goes to fund education.
Don't.
What are they going to do, fire you?
Compare the 1920s Socialist Party platform with that of modern day Democrats, and you will find that they are almost identical. This isn't a random occurance. It's happened many times.
Will you actually be surprised if the Democrats are even more Green next election cycle than they are now? After Gore tied Bush in Florida (and then lost on a technicality)?
The point of voting 3rd party is to change the agendas of the major parties. Do you think the Reform party accomplished nothing in that regard?
Kind of makes the salary averages useless, neh?
Another point I think is worth making is that I'm left quite uncomfortable by this particular diatribe against software patents. Here's why: I tried reading it while replacing each instance of "software" with "invention", and it makes almost as much sense.
Patents have always been on ideas, not necessarily incredibly narrow instantiations of the ideas. The difference that makes an idea patentable (vs. copyrightable) is whether it has utility. If an idea, even a broad idea, is new and inventive, you've always been able to get a patent on that broad invention. Historically these have been harder to enforce than narrow patents (and rightly so), but they've always been granted.
And, finally, prohibiting software patents makes all patents useless. We might as well prohibit all patents. Anything can be done in software on a sufficiently general-purpose machine. If I can't protect my "real" mechanical invention against someone doing the same thing, except partly in software, I can't protect my invention at all.
Anyone writing software for a living for PCs or equivilent should remember the subject line. Any software you write for this kind of platform will spend 90%+ of its useful lifetime running on machines that are at least twice as fast as the one you developed it on.
Additionally, from a purely mercenary perspective, if we don't use up those cycles, no one will buy new computers, and Moore's law will succumb to apathy rather than technical limits (which I would consider to be a sad thing, both in the abstract and because a lot of us would be out of a job).
I'd say that both terms are sufficiently accurate.
Before you post, make sure to read the actual claims at the USPTO site.
They haven't patented video on demand at all, in spite of all the description in the patent.
They've patented scrolling
What gives them the idea that these claims will hold up for even a minute is anybody's guess.
But besides that, the claims are quite narrow. An implementation that scrolled smoothly or 2 items at a time would completely avoid this patent.
Given that, it's clear that they went through quite a few rounds of "Ha! I bet you can't find that in the prior art" with the patent office.