That Mario game you had on your TI-85 was not an emulator, so not prior art. It was coded by a fan of Mario, doing it for fun. I'm pretty sure you can't emulate a z80 (on the Gameboy) on a z80 (the TI-85's).
You could have a pentium emulator on a Z80, just don't expect it to be fast. I had an 8086 emulator on my 8086, back in the day.
I'd bandy about flashy terms like "Turing complete" at this time in my post, but you get the idea.
What do you mean? Are you telling me all this time I'm spending studying patent practice and procedure at $800 per credit hour is wasted? If patent law didn't look to prior art during examination prior to granting a patent, why then did Nintendo cite numerous U.S. patents going back to 1984, a handful of EU and JP patents, and more journal articles, web pages, and patent applications than you can shake a stick at? As an inventor seeking a patent in the U.S., you have a duty to disclose all relevant prior art you are aware of until the application is granted or abandoned. Do you think they just want you to give them that information so they can find it easier if someone challenges the issuance of the patent later?
Nice to see you're into the whole "spirit of the law" thing. Most companies go for that whole "letter of the law" thing, though. They only cite prior art if they can't get away with not citing it; if the patent examiner is lazy, then well, hey, that's their problem.
Besides, you never refer to actual prior art as it existed in the real world, but only to patents. So if there's a patent on, let's say, the wheel, you make sure you cite it, and then go on to claim "but that's not what my patent is about, my patent is about the application of the wheel for use with internal combustion engines! See, that's never been patented before!"..
Patents that cite a lot of prior art and other patents were usually too broad to begin with, and sent back multiple times by some patent examiner for clarification WTF it is that's so unobvious that they're trying to patent.
As a little guy, yes, you're charged a lot of money by patent lawyers to go through all sorts of prior art searches; it's basically an insurance policy to make sure you end up with a usable patent, or if it's been patented before, you don't end up spending years and thousands of dollars in amending and defending your patent applications that get disapproved. Big corporations don't need that insurance, they can just game the system; send in 100 applications, and probabaly half will stick on the first try, and the rest you elaborate with lots and lots of prior art..
It could also be that you're just being reamed. $800/hr is a lot of money. If I was charging that, I'd make sure I'd tell you how important it was as well!
Actually, in the US it does make a difference what the source of the copy is, as mp3.com found out the hard way.
Here in The Netherlands, anything you download as a private person is legal; how about that for fair use? (Putting stuff up to be downloaded is a different game; that's where the dues should be paid (and they make it hard enough))
Just turning on filename completion is a nearly undocumented registry hack.
In NT4, but not in 2k/xp: start|run cmd click on the icon (or rightclick on cmd.exe's icon in the taskbar) defaults, options, autocomplete is right there, along with quick edit (xterm like copy+pasting).
Installing cygwin+bash is never a bad idea though.
They might be planning on "turning off" the older network as soon as the existing contracts of people with the older phones ends.
The T68 does 900/1800/1900 and the replacement does 850 and 1900. The 850 network is in addition to the 1900 one. Otherwise they wouldn't be getting any extra capacity.
As for replacing TDMA or CDMA with GSM, well that could happen, but when you hand out dual-band phones, you expand your network, not just shift it around. Otherwise the FCC might come and get those frequencies back from you and give them to a competitor, and you don't want that.
A neighbor could be one of the 9 registered sex offenders located in your immediate area. Find out who they are, where they live and see their photo.
We used a 3 mile radius from the center of your zip, your Member Map will pinpoint them exactly. With full membership you will be able to specify a full address and the radius.
That's for the zip-code 20500 (1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, DC.. Otherwise known as the White House).
Isn't this what small claims court is for? Seems open and shut enough to me. Not much sense for a business to pursue it further than that, given that a few hunderd bucks in lawyers' fees are easily spent.
Of course, after getting your money back in small claims court, set the cops loose on em for fencing.
So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...
It's naive to think ATI's competitors don't have a much better understanding of their hardware than whatever can be gleaned from their drivers' sources, especially if you consider that they can already reverse-engineer the binaries better than any random Joe, seeing as they have actual money to sink into it. And there's the thing about them making the same sort of hardware.
Having the source would greatly benefit the little people though. These cards will sometime go End-Of-Live, and the manufacturer won't support them.
Perhaps the source won't be released to hide the fact these "engineers - who know the hardware intimately" make code that is in fact cruddy at times, and that it contains bugs than random Open Source jockeys can fix.
Though it's likelier that the drivers simply contain patented/copyrighted stuff they sublicensed from third-parties that are paranoid about anyone seeing it.
Here's a quick test. Ask the user if they've ever heard of SpyBot or AdAware. If the answer is unsatisfactory, they've got spyware. That includes your mom.
5% is WAY low. Even I got infected (an app on tucows was listed as freeware, but turned out to be ad/spyware), even if you don't coun't cookies and GUIDs..
Did I mention that AOL Instant Messenger now comes with spyware? That re-installs itself? And adds "free.aol.com" to IE's "trusted zone" so new stuff installs *without a prompt or warning*.
As much of a "win" as this is for Linux, I really wonder what's in it for Macromedia. It's not as if flashy website developers won't have any windows and mac boxes around (if only to test what your sites look like on the platforms that determine the majority of your users' experiences); the people who are really into using these tools aren't likely to be the same people who are into compiling kernels and tweaking their mod_perl.. As some one else here noted; there's no photoshop for linux.
Of course, getting the MX tools working with Wine is a great step, and gives them instant cross-platormability, but I have a hunch things will stay at that level for a while..
I'm not so sure you can present evidence in court that was acquired illegally.
This e-mail in itself would not be permissible, as there is not a shred of authenticity attached to it, other than the claim that it is authentic.
However, IBM/Novell/Shareholders/etc. now had it "upon belief and information" that SCO is just a shill for Microsoft; if that is benificial to their case, they can call witnesses to grill them on this issue and subpoena the original e-mails to their hearts' contents.
The Audi A2, which actually is _in production_ (and has been for a couple of years) has a "locked" hood/bonnet too. There's just a small hatch where you can fill up washer fluid and cooling water.
That certainly explains why these pictures were never made.
But thanks for assuming that I committed fraud in regards to something I care very deeply about. Thanks further for assuming that I would be fucking stupid enough to announce it if I had.
Though you have to admire his civic spirit in thinking that one vote does count.
For America readers: most European governments are Parliamentary system, so the leader of the government is the leader of the party in power, and the party in power is the party with a majority (or plurality and a coalition) in the legislature. As such it's impossible to have a situation in which the legislature is controlled by one party and the executive is controlled by another party.
Well, YMMV in Europe. On a national level, in The Netherlands for instance, we have a bi-cameral parliament; the "first" House of parliament (which enjoys only vetoe-ing rights) is chosen indirectly via provincial elections. Most parliamentary states have some form of Senate, so while the Government usually enjoys the majority in the Commons/2nd House, the Senate's majority is often controlled by the Opposition.
It gets even more interesting for Germany, which has a Federal government, but the most interesting fact is that most of any EU country's legislation is basically thought up "in Brussels"; by the EU. There is a European parliament, but it has absolutely positively no power whatsoever!
This means than communal law (roughly equal to Federal law on interstate commerce) and harmonization of laws are concocted by the Ministers of the Governments of the member states, with no opposition whatsoever!
In effect, there is no difference between the legislative and executive powers at the Europe-wide level.
Also, the most powerful nations (Germany, France and, mostly for historical reasons, the UK) are now lobbying to get more votes in the executive than the smaller nations, so that they can "set the tone" more efficiently..
This is of course of the utmost boneheadedness.
On the national level though, a concept that you must realize is very important, is that of a "coalition". It's very rare for one party to have the majority in most European countries, due to proportional representation. Therefore, Government is usually composed of more than one party; for example, the current Government in The Netherlands is composed of 3 parties (the second biggest party isn't even in there). This usually leads to concessions being made early and often. It also helps along "duality" (where Parliament acts independent of Government), because members of parliament can ally with other parties' members. If their own party deserts them, there's often a place for them in the party slightly to the right or left, whichever way they were leaning. (In fact, a lot of senior carreer politicians switched affiliation very early in their carreer; though not too often of course).
I'm a teaching assistant (TA) at Harvard University, and I mark a lot of Java code as part of a job that supports my PhD studies. Code submitted to me with unit tests face an automatic 5 mark penalty, before i even begin marking.
And.. you don't want the students to know this? Or you don't want the professor to know this? Isn't the marking supposed to be at least somewhat transparant? Why else post anonymously?
Your points;
1) extra code is extra bloat; I'm sure it's entirely up to you to disregard any testing code delivered that was not required. Although, shouldn't you be testing their code to begin with (rather than *only* reviewing it - full marks for style, but it doesn't compile)?
2) too much documentation; well, yes, if every line is commented, that's too much documentation; javadoc on the other hand documents methods, not lines of codes; in fact, used correctly, it documents interfaces, not the implementation. Things like pre- and postconditions, race conditions, that sort of thing. Javadoc is great.
And javadoc is not just HTML; and it's right there "at the start of a function or method". (Java only comes with methods btw, mr.Harvard).
3) Unit tests are written with no extra skill than the code they test; this is usually true of any test; such is the nature of tests. Happily, it usually takes less effort to come up with tests than it does to come up with "perfect" code, which is why they're useful. For example; a parser should parse certain arbitrary documents in the specified grammar, and correctly at that, and not dump core. Coming up with the test-cases is easier than writing a parser.
Your argument might just as well be applied to a whole slew of other IT methodologies that students have to learn, like for instance coming up with Use Cases or UML Class Diagrams; in the real world these are useful tools for communication with others, in school you end up implementing the stuff you designed yourself; so what?
...if you're Amazon and you're talking about one click ordering, or RAMBUS if you're talking about royalties on DDR RAM, etc. Obviously, if you're not the one holding the patents then you're not so lucky. But if you are that guy then you're laughing all the way to the bank.
But everyone else gets screwed. That's fine as long as it encourages people to come up with new stuff, but it's bad in the long term; which is exactly why patents and copyrights should be for a limited time only. Your comment is like saying that inflation is good, because some people benefit from inflation (e.g. borrowers with a fixed interest rate, etc.) at the same rate that other people suffer. But in the long run, you don't want runaway inflation or runaway intellectual monopolies; because it destabalizes the economy, and breaks the fundamental quid-pro-quo of copyright/patent/trademark law.
Just to give an example; if you want to make an album full of samples (like the Beasty Boys' second album) these days.. well.. you can't! Because it would be too expensive to license all those 1 second samples, even though they have questionable artistic merit per se, and combining them into a new work is an artistic endeavor which results in a holistic new work. And that holds true even for those with pretty sweet record deals; record companies won't even crosslicense between their own artists. This is an enormous barrier-to-entry for sampling artists, which the established rightsholders don't care about because it's not their model of either business or art. And you can count on none of those copyrights expiring any time soon, because they're retroactively being renewed by paid-for laws.
I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.
The fees themselves, and the costs of contesting bad patents, and their running time, are as much of a problem as the USPTO's whoring for dimes. If applying for patents was really cheap, the FSF would hold hundreds of them; if contesting them was cheap and easy (just mail the USPTO some prior art or explain why it's trivial), most of the patents that come up on/. would be invalidated in a day. If e-online.intarweb patents had a running time of a year, we'd all pony up some one-click cash just fine, or we'd wait for it to expire.
None of this is true though; applying for a patent is costly, contesting one (either through the USPTO or the courts) is fiendishly complicated and costly, and patents run for years and years. The rubberstamping is little more than aiding and abetting.
When you work as a programmer, you get paid by the hour, you don't get royalties. So you're better off if the software you're making and getting paid for by the hour is open source. If the company folds (as even closed source companies do) you're an expert on the stuff you wrote yourself, and you can hack it somewhere else. If your employer can't make an open source business model work, fair enough, but if you're looking for one, you might as well go with one that doesn't need that "limited time" monopoly advantage going for it to make a buck, relying instead on things like expertise, service, craftmanship, trustworthiness etc.
It would be nice if ADSL were extended to allow a kind of "reverse bandwidth" command. This command could be used dynamically by the customer's [router's] IP stack, e.g. like this: "As long as there's nothing receive, allow maximal outbound bandwidth. As soon as content is received, reverse direction."
Something like that exists, and the shift between using channels for upstream or downstream is done at the ADSL level itself; it's called Rate-Adaptive DSL or RADSL. Unfortunately, a bias is built in here as well - downstream goes up to 512kbps and upstream only up to 256kbps. (Notice that those rates are well below regular ADSL (G.DMT) speeds).
It should be fairly trivial to implement such behavior in G.DMT hardware, but you'd be breaking the standard, and there might be some issues with crosstalk on your neighbours' lines; since you're transmitting on the very frequencies they're receiving on, and you'd have to be doing so at a rather high amplification (since the signal fades out over the lengt of the wire; attenuation), your transmit might drown out the signal they're trying to receive from the central office. Everyone using symmetrical rates would be a much better idea of course, but alas.
A patent was filed early 2001. The 'problem' is that soon after that, a company took a license on this technology, and required to keep confidentiality. This implies I can not show pictures, or give details or comments about the way this works.
DEVICE FOR STEERING A HELICOPTER, filed 24-03-2003, inventor Van de Rostyne, Alexander, number WO03080433; on this link, simply click on the number again to get access to 31 pages (each in one PDF document)..
The original link is slashdotted, but at least we can admire this guy's "secret" patent.
Re:Ugh, these aren't viruses...
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 1
I've given up on teaching people the distinction. Fortunately, end-users also make no distinction between malware (adware and spyware) and virusses, and are baffled that McAfee, Norton and their ilk don't detect them (antivir will find some malware, such as dialers). I hope the AV vendors will keep at this long enough to go out of business altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
That Mario game you had on your TI-85 was not an emulator, so not prior art. It was coded by a fan of Mario, doing it for fun. I'm pretty sure you can't emulate a z80 (on the Gameboy) on a z80 (the TI-85's).
You could have a pentium emulator on a Z80, just don't expect it to be fast. I had an 8086 emulator on my 8086, back in the day.
I'd bandy about flashy terms like "Turing complete" at this time in my post, but you get the idea.
What do you mean? Are you telling me all this time I'm spending studying patent practice and procedure at $800 per credit hour is wasted? If patent law didn't look to prior art during examination prior to granting a patent, why then did Nintendo cite numerous U.S. patents going back to 1984, a handful of EU and JP patents, and more journal articles, web pages, and patent applications than you can shake a stick at? As an inventor seeking a patent in the U.S., you have a duty to disclose all relevant prior art you are aware of until the application is granted or abandoned. Do you think they just want you to give them that information so they can find it easier if someone challenges the issuance of the patent later?
Nice to see you're into the whole "spirit of the law" thing. Most companies go for that whole "letter of the law" thing, though. They only cite prior art if they can't get away with not citing it; if the patent examiner is lazy, then well, hey, that's their problem.
Besides, you never refer to actual prior art as it existed in the real world, but only to patents. So if there's a patent on, let's say, the wheel, you make sure you cite it, and then go on to claim "but that's not what my patent is about, my patent is about the application of the wheel for use with internal combustion engines! See, that's never been patented before!"..
Patents that cite a lot of prior art and other patents were usually too broad to begin with, and sent back multiple times by some patent examiner for clarification WTF it is that's so unobvious that they're trying to patent.
As a little guy, yes, you're charged a lot of money by patent lawyers to go through all sorts of prior art searches; it's basically an insurance policy to make sure you end up with a usable patent, or if it's been patented before, you don't end up spending years and thousands of dollars in amending and defending your patent applications that get disapproved. Big corporations don't need that insurance, they can just game the system; send in 100 applications, and probabaly half will stick on the first try, and the rest you elaborate with lots and lots of prior art..
It could also be that you're just being reamed. $800/hr is a lot of money. If I was charging that, I'd make sure I'd tell you how important it was as well!
Bastard. You made me put my pinky to my mouth.
Actually, in the US it does make a difference what the source of the copy is, as mp3.com found out the hard way.
Here in The Netherlands, anything you download as a private person is legal; how about that for fair use? (Putting stuff up to be downloaded is a different game; that's where the dues should be paid (and they make it hard enough))
Just turning on filename completion is a nearly undocumented registry hack.
:
In NT4, but not in 2k/xp
start|run cmd
click on the icon (or rightclick on cmd.exe's icon in the taskbar) defaults, options, autocomplete is right there, along with quick edit (xterm like copy+pasting).
Installing cygwin+bash is never a bad idea though.
They might be planning on "turning off" the older network as soon as the existing contracts of people with the older phones ends.
The T68 does 900/1800/1900 and the replacement does 850 and 1900. The 850 network is in addition to the 1900 one. Otherwise they wouldn't be getting any extra capacity.
As for replacing TDMA or CDMA with GSM, well that could happen, but when you hand out dual-band phones, you expand your network, not just shift it around. Otherwise the FCC might come and get those frequencies back from you and give them to a competitor, and you don't want that.
From http://nationalalertregistry.com/
A neighbor could be one of the 9 registered sex offenders located in your immediate area. Find out who they are, where they live and see their photo.
We used a 3 mile radius from the center of your zip, your Member Map will pinpoint them exactly. With full membership you will be able to specify a full address and the radius.
That's for the zip-code 20500 (1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, DC.. Otherwise known as the White House).
Just so you know.
Isn't this what small claims court is for? Seems open and shut enough to me. Not much sense for a business to pursue it further than that, given that a few hunderd bucks in lawyers' fees are easily spent.
Of course, after getting your money back in small claims court, set the cops loose on em for fencing.
So what if the drivers are closed source? ATI cant and wont expose the low level details of their hardware's functionality to competitors. Whats the difference anyway? It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written? And by the way, Nvidia does not publish its source either...
It's naive to think ATI's competitors don't have a much better understanding of their hardware than whatever can be gleaned from their drivers' sources, especially if you consider that they can already reverse-engineer the binaries better than any random Joe, seeing as they have actual money to sink into it. And there's the thing about them making the same sort of hardware.
Having the source would greatly benefit the little people though. These cards will sometime go End-Of-Live, and the manufacturer won't support them.
Perhaps the source won't be released to hide the fact these "engineers - who know the hardware intimately" make code that is in fact cruddy at times, and that it contains bugs than random Open Source jockeys can fix.
Though it's likelier that the drivers simply contain patented/copyrighted stuff they sublicensed from third-parties that are paranoid about anyone seeing it.
Here's a quick test. Ask the user if they've ever heard of SpyBot or AdAware. If the answer is unsatisfactory, they've got spyware. That includes your mom.
5% is WAY low. Even I got infected (an app on tucows was listed as freeware, but turned out to be ad/spyware), even if you don't coun't cookies and GUIDs..
Did I mention that AOL Instant Messenger now comes with spyware? That re-installs itself? And adds "free.aol.com" to IE's "trusted zone" so new stuff installs *without a prompt or warning*.
As much of a "win" as this is for Linux, I really wonder what's in it for Macromedia. It's not as if flashy website developers won't have any windows and mac boxes around (if only to test what your sites look like on the platforms that determine the majority of your users' experiences); the people who are really into using these tools aren't likely to be the same people who are into compiling kernels and tweaking their mod_perl.. As some one else here noted; there's no photoshop for linux.
Of course, getting the MX tools working with Wine is a great step, and gives them instant cross-platormability, but I have a hunch things will stay at that level for a while..
I'm not so sure you can present evidence in court that was acquired illegally.
This e-mail in itself would not be permissible, as there is not a shred of authenticity attached to it, other than the claim that it is authentic.
However, IBM/Novell/Shareholders/etc. now had it "upon belief and information" that SCO is just a shill for Microsoft; if that is benificial to their case, they can call witnesses to grill them on this issue and subpoena the original e-mails to their hearts' contents.
The Audi A2, which actually is _in production_ (and has been for a couple of years) has a "locked" hood/bonnet too. There's just a small hatch where you can fill up washer fluid and cooling water .
That certainly explains why
these pictures were never made.
But thanks for assuming that I committed fraud in regards to something I care very deeply about. Thanks further for assuming that I would be fucking stupid enough to announce it if I had.
Though you have to admire his civic spirit in thinking that one vote does count.
For America readers: most European governments are Parliamentary system, so the leader of the government is the leader of the party in power, and the party in power is the party with a majority (or plurality and a coalition) in the legislature. As such it's impossible to have a situation in which the legislature is controlled by one party and the executive is controlled by another party.
Well, YMMV in Europe. On a national level, in The Netherlands for instance, we have a bi-cameral parliament; the "first" House of parliament (which enjoys only vetoe-ing rights) is chosen indirectly via provincial elections. Most parliamentary states have some form of Senate, so while the Government usually enjoys the majority in the Commons/2nd House, the Senate's majority is often controlled by the Opposition.
It gets even more interesting for Germany, which has a Federal government, but the most interesting fact is that most of any EU country's legislation is basically thought up "in Brussels"; by the EU. There is a European parliament, but it has absolutely positively no power whatsoever!
This means than communal law (roughly equal to Federal law on interstate commerce) and harmonization of laws are concocted by the Ministers of the Governments of the member states, with no opposition whatsoever!
In effect, there is no difference between the legislative and executive powers at the Europe-wide level.
Also, the most powerful nations (Germany, France and, mostly for historical reasons, the UK) are now lobbying to get more votes in the executive than the smaller nations, so that they can "set the tone" more efficiently..
This is of course of the utmost boneheadedness.
On the national level though, a concept that you must realize is very important, is that of a "coalition". It's very rare for one party to have the majority in most European countries, due to proportional representation. Therefore, Government is usually composed of more than one party; for example, the current Government in The Netherlands is composed of 3 parties (the second biggest party isn't even in there). This usually leads to concessions being made early and often. It also helps along "duality" (where Parliament acts independent of Government), because members of parliament can ally with other parties' members. If their own party deserts them, there's often a place for them in the party slightly to the right or left, whichever way they were leaning. (In fact, a lot of senior carreer politicians switched affiliation very early in their carreer; though not too often of course).
I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I'm a teaching assistant (TA) at Harvard University, and I mark a lot of Java code as part of a job that supports my PhD studies. Code submitted to me with unit tests face an automatic 5 mark penalty, before i even begin marking.
And.. you don't want the students to know this? Or you don't want the professor to know this? Isn't the marking supposed to be at least somewhat transparant? Why else post anonymously?
Your points;
1) extra code is extra bloat; I'm sure it's entirely up to you to disregard any testing code delivered that was not required. Although, shouldn't you be testing their code to begin with (rather than *only* reviewing it - full marks for style, but it doesn't compile)?
2) too much documentation; well, yes, if every line is commented, that's too much documentation; javadoc on the other hand documents methods, not lines of codes; in fact, used correctly, it documents interfaces, not the implementation. Things like pre- and postconditions, race conditions, that sort of thing. Javadoc is great.
And javadoc is not just HTML; and it's right there "at the start of a function or method". (Java only comes with methods btw, mr.Harvard).
3) Unit tests are written with no extra skill than the code they test; this is usually true of any test; such is the nature of tests. Happily, it usually takes less effort to come up with tests than it does to come up with "perfect" code, which is why they're useful. For example; a parser should parse certain arbitrary documents in the specified grammar, and correctly at that, and not dump core. Coming up with the test-cases is easier than writing a parser.
Your argument might just as well be applied to a whole slew of other IT methodologies that students have to learn, like for instance coming up with Use Cases or UML Class Diagrams; in the real world these are useful tools for communication with others, in school you end up implementing the stuff you designed yourself; so what?
It gets even funnier:
Coca-Cola's bottled water is from the mains
Where does Coke bottle the water? They don't ship it over from the US. They probably have a filtering and bottling plant down the street.
True, but the local bottlers must license the secret formula for water from Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, GA.
...if you're Amazon and you're talking about one click ordering, or RAMBUS if you're talking about royalties on DDR RAM, etc. Obviously, if you're not the one holding the patents then you're not so lucky. But if you are that guy then you're laughing all the way to the bank.
/. would be invalidated in a day. If e-online.intarweb patents had a running time of a year, we'd all pony up some one-click cash just fine, or we'd wait for it to expire.
But everyone else gets screwed. That's fine as long as it encourages people to come up with new stuff, but it's bad in the long term; which is exactly why patents and copyrights should be for a limited time only. Your comment is like saying that inflation is good, because some people benefit from inflation (e.g. borrowers with a fixed interest rate, etc.) at the same rate that other people suffer. But in the long run, you don't want runaway inflation or runaway intellectual monopolies; because it destabalizes the economy, and breaks the fundamental quid-pro-quo of copyright/patent/trademark law.
Just to give an example; if you want to make an album full of samples (like the Beasty Boys' second album) these days.. well.. you can't! Because it would be too expensive to license all those 1 second samples, even though they have questionable artistic merit per se, and combining them into a new work is an artistic endeavor which results in a holistic new work. And that holds true even for those with pretty sweet record deals; record companies won't even crosslicense between their own artists. This is an enormous barrier-to-entry for sampling artists, which the established rightsholders don't care about because it's not their model of either business or art. And you can count on none of those copyrights expiring any time soon, because they're retroactively being renewed by paid-for laws.
I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.
The fees themselves, and the costs of contesting bad patents, and their running time, are as much of a problem as the USPTO's whoring for dimes.
If applying for patents was really cheap, the FSF would hold hundreds of them; if contesting them was cheap and easy (just mail the USPTO some prior art or explain why it's trivial), most of the patents that come up on
None of this is true though; applying for a patent is costly, contesting one (either through the USPTO or the courts) is fiendishly complicated and costly, and patents run for years and years. The rubberstamping is little more than aiding and abetting.
If I had mod points, you'd get 'em for that one :-)
When you work as a programmer, you get paid by the hour, you don't get royalties. So you're better off if the software you're making and getting paid for by the hour is open source. If the company folds (as even closed source companies do) you're an expert on the stuff you wrote yourself, and you can hack it somewhere else. If your employer can't make an open source business model work, fair enough, but if you're looking for one, you might as well go with one that doesn't need that "limited time" monopoly advantage going for it to make a buck, relying instead on things like expertise, service, craftmanship, trustworthiness etc.
It would be nice if ADSL were extended to allow a kind of "reverse bandwidth" command. This command could be used dynamically by the customer's [router's] IP stack, e.g. like this: "As long as there's nothing receive, allow maximal outbound bandwidth. As soon as content is received, reverse direction."
Something like that exists, and the shift between using channels for upstream or downstream is done at the ADSL level itself; it's called Rate-Adaptive DSL or RADSL. Unfortunately, a bias is built in here as well - downstream goes up to 512kbps and upstream only up to 256kbps. (Notice that those rates are well below regular ADSL (G.DMT) speeds).
It should be fairly trivial to implement such behavior in G.DMT hardware, but you'd be breaking the standard, and there might be some issues with crosstalk on your neighbours' lines; since you're transmitting on the very frequencies they're receiving on, and you'd have to be doing so at a rather high amplification (since the signal fades out over the lengt of the wire; attenuation), your transmit might drown out the signal they're trying to receive from the central office. Everyone using symmetrical rates would be a much better idea of course, but alas.
Seems pretty secure
You gleaned that from the "100% tamper proof" specification I guess?
I'd have to guess, because there is no way to know for sure.
A patent was filed early 2001. The 'problem' is that soon after that, a company took a license on this technology, and required to keep confidentiality. This implies I can not show pictures, or give details or comments about the way this works.
European patent search
DEVICE FOR STEERING A HELICOPTER, filed 24-03-2003, inventor Van de Rostyne, Alexander, number WO03080433; on this link, simply click on the number again to get access to 31 pages (each in one PDF document)..
The original link is slashdotted, but at least we can admire this guy's "secret" patent.
I've given up on teaching people the distinction. Fortunately, end-users also make no distinction between malware (adware and spyware) and virusses, and are baffled that McAfee, Norton and their ilk don't detect them (antivir will find some malware, such as dialers). I hope the AV vendors will keep at this long enough to go out of business altogether.