So there have been 150,000-300,000 software patents granted since 1998? Or is that merely when the appeals process for the lower court ruling ended?
The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country. They can look at previous patents (there were none, initially), they can look at journals, but there is no viable way to prove lack of previous invention and use in someone's in-house code development. There are just too many programmers doing too much work.
With 150-300k software patents out there, with some high fraction non-novel or obvious to experts in the field, programming has become a minefield.. even things that were nominally novel due to context, like writing software to do an old function on the Internet, are being locked away, and by companies that themselves benefited tremendously due to the use of software techniques developed and shared freely before software patentability.
How does anyone but Microsoft benefit by Microsoft patenting a wide swath of approaches to reducing Spam? Microsoft gained many tens of billions of dollars of additional revenue due to the surge in PC sales brought about by the widespread adoption of the Internet, yet they and others are now putting roadblocks up as fast as they can to control any further elaboration of the Internet, or competition in providing compatible services on it.
How can this possibly be defended?
Without software patents, the large established companies will tell the small startups with valid new inventions to go fuck themselves rather than meeting them at the bargaining table. "Thanks for the idea, now go fuckoff while we create copycat products and use our sales force to crush you out of existence."
And this is opposed to current practice, where a small startup with a valid invention is granted a software patent. They go to market with their product, only to find Microsoft (say) decides to clone their product and enter the market. They sue Microsoft. Microsoft then says, "oh, maybe we do violate your patent. Trouble is, you violate 70 of our software patents. You will now give us a license to your patent, or we will shut down your product."
Small inventors and small startup companies do not get protection from patents unless they produce nothing that can be attacked on patent grounds. That leaves small companies to register for patents, get the patent, and then sue to license the patents to the big boys.
Should it be the case that only the big companies can write software? I think not. But that's what we're looking at today.
The plastic packaging for a razor blade is a material good that has non-zero fixed and marginal costs. To make and distribute plastic packaging for a razor blade requires the creation of a factory, and the cost of materials and distribution for each package produced.
While software does have considerable fixed costs, they do not equal the cost of a factory. One person with one computer + time = software. And once the software is made, it literally costs nothing to make as many copies as anyone could ever want.
As a result of this, the number of people who want or need to make plastic packaging for razors is very small.. really only those people who are selling razors. But the number of people who may need or want to create software, whether it be for individual, in-house, or freely shared use, is vast. The number of people potentially locked out by a software patent, then, is much higher than in the razor case.
Why don't we have patents on literary plot devices? Why don't we have patents on speeches, or even on talking about a particular subject? Because the monopoly grant in those cases is extremely expensive, and retards the flow of communications and ideas in the society.
If we were talking about 10,000 software patents, rather than 150,000-300,000 software patents, it might not be so bad. If experienced developers were responsible for judging the obviousness of a software patent application, it might not be so bad.
But it is 150,000-300,000 software patents, and experience developers do not make those calls. Patent clerks harassed by well-paid lawyers do. And as a result, it is all but impossible to write any substantial software in the United States without trespassing on someone's patent claim.
But software is more difficult than that. Any significant software product may take tens or hundreds of man-years to develop.. and may trespass against hundreds of software patents.
In that case, even if the software patents weren't there, it would take tens or hundreds of man-years to develop a competitive product. Don't believe me? Okay, go look at the MySQL source code read it, and then make a product that does the same thing without literally copying software modules. Ready? Set?
The fact is, due to those hundreds of software patents, you can't legally write that software. Due to the hundreds of thousands of software patents, almost no one is capable of writing any sort of substantial product without arguably trespassing on someone's patent.
Take into account as well that the vast majority of software is written by the organization that intends to use it, in-house. There is 50 years of such development that has gone on, yet the USPTO feels perfectly happy to grant a patent on a software technique so long as there are no patents on file covering that area. This results in a vast corpus of junk patents, and programmers have to simply hope that they don't stumble over them, or be prepared to pay millions to defend against a patent suit.
Microsoft can afford that, since they collect monopoly rent on their software. Sun can afford that, since they sell hardware to subsidize their software development. Joe company or Joe individual cannot.
Is it appropriate that it should all but be illegal for an individual or small company to produce software? Is that good for the economy? Individuals and small companies have unique problems that need solving, after all.. why can't they be allowed to solve them?
Proof of such diversity would be the transversal from one species to something completely different without any in-betweens. Why no in-between micro-changes? Because there's no evidence -for- such changes in the fossil records, at all. There is absolutely no "evidence" for the biological diversity on Earth when using the Evolutionary method.
Right!
Except, there is.
We can see species gradating one into the other with varying degrees of granularity in the natural world. Bacteria don't get terribly picky about who has what genes, and as you say, even plants can hybridize across our intuitive notion of species. Other people have pointed out the phenomenon of ring species, where Great Britain maintains two species of gulls, incapable or disinterested in mating one with the other, but which turn out to be gradually related if you follow the range of one species to the west. One species of gull in Great Britain is capable of mating with a close relative to the west, which is capable of mating with a close relative a bit further west, and so forth, until the ring stretches back around the planet and we find the end of the ring of inter-compatibility is that second species. Micro-changes in space, rather than time.
Even if we did not have the spectacular example of ring species to point to, it is very clear that animals differ in many cases by region, and the wider the separation, the wider the difference among species. This was, in fact, one of Charles Darwin's main points of argumentation when he wrote his books.
What skeptics of the fossil record seem not to realize is just how rare it is that a fossil forms. I have read (but cannot at the moment find) a statement that perhaps one species in a thousand has fossilized so that we may find an instance of it in the geologic record. If we are missing 99.9% of all species in the geologic record, it is not at all surprising that we might not see a *perfectly* smooth continuum of change looking at the rocks.
Yet, given the resolution of the rocks, we do after all see a very smooth pattern, enough so that we can form a picture of the story of life over time that is consistently corroborated with a variety of technical dating methods, from radiological processes to magnetic field variations to depth of rock to the evidences of tectonic uplift and subduction.
Everything we know about evolution coheres strongly with the natural world as it is observed. So much so that evolution through natural selection is the only theory of the history of life on our planet that anyone without a religious motivation takes seriously.
I applaud you for being skeptical upon being told something that you find incredible, but rather than jumping to the ignorant assumption that the evidence for it doesn't exist, why not study the matter for yourself?
Philosophical argumentation is not evidence, sorry. 150 years of research by 100's of thousands of researchers, comprising the entirety of modern biology, has provided abundant evidence for evolution.
How is what Apple is doing any different from Lexmark trying to make their printers reject any ink jet cartridges that aren't digitally signed by Lexmark? On what grounds does Apple have the right to exclude competitors from providing copy protected files for use with iPod?
As I replied in the sibling post to yours, unless some can demonstrate that Real violated a patent, or unless Apple made iPod customers sign a contract declaring that they agreed not to use protected files provided by anyone but Apple on the iPod, Apple has no legal basis to bar Real from doing what it did.
Now, Apple evidently has found a technical basis for identifying Real-sourced files and excluding them through their control over the iPod's firmware on the devices owned by their customers (and did the customers get told Apple was breaking the compatibility they paid money to Real in anticipation of when they were given the option to receive the new firmware? No?). Apple did it because it could do it, but all this talk of 'maybe it was an accident that it stopped working with Real files' is utterly naive. Apple is treating the iPods out there as if they owned them, and they do not. The customers own the iPods, and what the customers legally do with them is their business.
And Real would be entitled to sue, on my theory.
This is about Real trying to strong arm Apple into supporting their own crappy, proprietary format, not about some poor company that sold files that Apple said would work, and then broke them.
What crappy, proprietary format is that? Real was selling files that worked on the iPod using Apple's protection scheme. Does Fairplay become a crappy, proprietary format when Real started using it?
Because Real ILLEGALLY cracked Apple's DRM? That seems reason enough for me.
Oh. Wow. Illegally, really? Which laws did they break? They are not circumventing a content protection device to get access to content, they are putting unlicensed content protection bits around the content.
Are the unlicensed content protection bits patented, then? They must be, right? Otherwise, traditional reverse engineering doctrine for compatibility would seem to make that sort of thing a-ok. Copyright wouldn't prohibit this, certainly. Trade Secret? Unless Real beat someone within Apple with a rubber hose to extract the information on how to do this, there's no trade secret issues involved.
Unless you know something I don't, Real ILLEGALLY cracked Apple's DRM in the same way that Shell ILLEGALLY cracked Standard Oil's petroleum formulation so that they could make their gasoline compatible with cars that ran on Standard Oil gasonline.
If the firmware update was intended to break Real's hack, why did they not release it for all players, instead of about half of them? Most likely, this is just Real's hack breaking, which is not surprising since it is an unsupported format masquerading as Apple's licensed files.
I remember reading about how Intellivision had hacked the Intellivision 2 to try and prevent competitors such as Coleco from selling games to work on their console. Mattel actually tried to hide what they had done, for fear that they would be sued for anticompetitive practices.
It's just the same thing with Apple. They've got a nice little bundling deal going, and they don't want Real to be able to sell music to work on it without making the files wholly unprotected, which the RIAA could never accept. I don't see any reason why Real wouldn't be in a position to sue over it.
I'm no scientician, but if you burn organic fuels, they release CO2 the same way fossil fuels do...the same way that burning wood or anything else releases CO2. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding...are you suggesting that the crops grown for fuel will pull in enough atmospheric carbon to offset the cost of burning it? I'm not sure that I'm inclined to believe that based solely on antecdotal evidence. Can you post any links?
Growing plants take their carbon from the air. If you burn one year's crops, you've returned much of their carbon to the air. Next year's crop, if similarly sized, will pull it back out of the air.
We're just running a rather large current carbon sequestration deficit, as we're burning the sequestered carbon from hundreds of thousands of years, far faster than it can be absorbed by the biosphere.
The article actually focuses on Sulfur Dioxide production, not Carbon Dioxide. Volcanos do produce CO2, but the article states that one coal plant in Washington State produces 28 times more CO2 than does Mt. St. Helens.
I was going to waste my time with a lengthy informative response, but it doesn't belong on slashdot, and it certainly would be meaningful considering my audiance (you).
Meaningless, you mean? I'm disappointed, I'd be fascinated to read good information on the topic.
You did leave yourself open for it, though, by making the claims you did without providing any context.
Further, you claim that human activity is fantastically insignificant compared with other truly awesome forces at work. To the extent that my admittedly meager knowledge allows, I can't agree. Certainly, there have been enormous changes over the last 60 million years, but those changes took an enormous amount of time to occur.
Today, humans are driving changes at an almost entirely unprecedented pace. In the last 20,000 years, the planet has seen one of its biggest historical extinction events, with humans upending ecosystems around the planet. We're not a cretaceous-boundary meteor, certainly, but then we're also not done yet changing the planet.
We've doubled the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in a matter of decades, and I think you under-credit the magnitude of that change, given the short timespan over which it has occured. There are comparatively few other events in the planet's known history which have brought about such rapid and significant change.
Again, CO2 levels have fallen so much that grasses have evolved to supplant trees. Declining C02 levels will eventually cause the trees to die at which point only fossilization will prevent them from giving up their CO2 to the wrong end of the carbon cycle. Controling sulfates, nitrates, and partical emissions would seem to be far more important than controling CO2, which the Earth has shown itself as quite adept at dealing with.
Oh! Heh, I get it now.
Um, you are joking, right? The evolution of grasses was some 60 million years ago. Even if CO2 levels were much higher 60 million years ago, it's clear that the climate was significantly different that far back, yes? We're not worried about climate changes that will make the planet sterile or some such shite, we're worried about things on a more human scale.
Oh wait, I thought this was the 1970s, when temperature measurements since the 1940s had showed a gradual cooling trend. Now I mean the scientific evidence clearly indicates that manmade atmospheric pollution will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, thus causing "global warming." Sorry about that. Well whichever is true, man is evil and so is economic production, so let's put a stop to it.
So a scientist has changed his position in the face of additional data? We know a great deal more about a lot of things now than we did 30 or 40 years ago. What hasn't changed is that we're conducting a rather unprecedented (at least in many millions of years) experiment in high speed changes to the composition of our atmosphere.
Whether man (or economic production) is evil, he (and it) are certainly pumping a whole hell of a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. The biology of the planet may be rather slower to evolve to changing conditions than our technological and cultural evolution is able to effect such changes. Any sudden changes of our climate (in either direction), such as may be caused by a significant change in our atmosphere's composition, may have extraordinary costs that we may have reason to prefer to avoid.
But that's okay, it's all about liberals wishing to overturn glorious capitalism, and after they lost the cold war, even!
Why do you assume that most climatological scientists are ignorant of such issues?
By the by, volcanos typically do not put out significant amounts of Carbon Dioxide, at least not when compared with current human activity. Read the link posted at the top of this story.
It's everyone, not just wealthy corporate folk that don't want to decrease their profit margin. In fact, they won't decrease their profit margin. They'll keep earning the same amount of money and to cope with higher costs they will just move those factories into exempt countries and take the jobs of the average Joe with them.
In fact I would think IBM is more of a concern than linux persee.
Oh, not true, I promise you. Remember when IBM was going it alone with OS/2? It was a joke, despite the product having some very significant technical strengths. Linux is important because millions of people, tens of thousands of businesses, and scores of governments think it's important.
Add in the fact that Linux undercuts Microsoft on price, the fact that it (along with the freely implementable IETF and W3C internet and web standards) frees people from Microsoft's network effects monopoly prison, and the fact that people get to choose how their own computers work without paying Microsoft for the lesser privilege of serfdom, and you've got a social movement to seriously rival Microsoft's commercial dominance.
Don't ever kid yourself that IBM is making Linux. Linux is the leverage that IBM needs to remain relevant against the terrible power of a network effects driven monopolist like Microsoft. And it's not just IBM.. all of the PC manufacturers here and abroad benefit from Linux interrupting Microsoft's pattern of claiming all profits in the PC world to itself.
In materials that leaked out of Microsoft during the federal cases against it, Microsoft strategists explained that their greatest worry was that a Compaq or an HP might simply decide to spend an amount equivalent to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Microsoft charged them per year and put it towards the development of a free alternative commodity OS in free conjunction with the other industry players, freezing out Microsoft and taking back the industry's profits.
IBM alone couldn't do this. Compaq or Dell alone certainly couldn't do this. What was required to make that happen was a commodity operating system that would not threaten any hardware vendor in the way that OS/2 did IBM's competitors, and which everyone could trust to be equally accessible to them all.
Linus did that, because of his programming skill, because of his use of Richard Stallman's GPL, and because of his management and social skills.
Linus and his followers have overturned a many hundred billion dollar industry, and he deserves as much recognition as can be given to him for that.
This is asinine. I know Jonathan was very precise in his language, being careful to circumscribe his 'cathedral' comments to the kernel.org official version of Linux, but there is so much work that's going on in Linux all around those versions, it makes his comment deceptive in view of the larger picture.
How many versions are there of the Linux kernel in use? Thousands, I'm sure. I've personally produced a handful of them (integrating Snare into several Red Hat kernels). How many distinguishable versions of Java are there out there? A few dozen?
Linux is canonically a bazaar, because everyone has the right to produce their own variant for their own needs. The fact that the code is GPL'ed means that the mainline kernel (that mythical 'cathedral' led by Linus Torvalds) can adopt the changes if they are well implemented and suitable for ubiquitization, and that those folks producing the variants can incorporate anything from the Linus-blessed kernel.
Hey, I like Java just fine. I've spent years producing free software on top of it, and I'm duly appreciative, but I don't pretend that Java is anywhere near as much a Bazaar as Linux is. If it were, there are a whole bunch of bugs on the Java Bug Database that would not have lingered for the last seven years, I can assure you.
Microsoft itself, for instance, became a success by giving people what they didn't know they needed, or by filling a void that no one realised was there.
<harshing on Microsoft>
Really? When was this? Bill Gates and Paul Allen did a good turn with BASIC back on the Altair, but they were copying the innovation of John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz in doing so. DOS was a rip of CP/M. Windows was an attempt to block VisiCorp's VISION and Digital Research's GEM, not to mention IBM's TopView, Quarterdeck's DESQ/View or, say, the Lisa and Macintosh. Flight Simulator came from Bruce Artwick's subLogic. Word came after dozens of other Word Processors. Excel was Microsoft's second attempt at a spreadsheet app after Multimate, which in turn was after Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3.
The web browser? Tim Berners Lee and Marc Andreesen's team at NCSA, among others. Powerpoint? Purchased from an outside developer. Visio? Purchased from an outside developer. FoxPro? Purchased from an outside developer. C#/.NET? Closely imitative of Java, without all of that icky non-Windows-bound aspirations.
I'm rather looking forward to seeing Microsoft become a success by giving people what they didn't know they needed, myself. Microsoft Bob surely wasn't it.
So your thesis is that Apache is attacked all the time, and all of us Unix/Linux,Windows systems administrators running it are just covering it up to save our asses?
Asylum was incredible. I played it on a 16k cassette Model I, and was amazed at the complexity the game had in it for its small size. Absolutely huge maps, full sentence parser, suspense, mystery.. best game ever on the Model I.
Clinton signed a bill in 96 or so that made large scale distribution of copyrighted works a criminal offense, even if the infringer was not profiting for doing so in monetary terms. It was one of the early copyright counter-offensives against the BBS/file trading scene.
Slashdot Mirror
So there have been 150,000-300,000 software patents granted since 1998? Or is that merely when the appeals process for the lower court ruling ended? The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country. They can look at previous patents (there were none, initially), they can look at journals, but there is no viable way to prove lack of previous invention and use in someone's in-house code development. There are just too many programmers doing too much work. With 150-300k software patents out there, with some high fraction non-novel or obvious to experts in the field, programming has become a minefield.. even things that were nominally novel due to context, like writing software to do an old function on the Internet, are being locked away, and by companies that themselves benefited tremendously due to the use of software techniques developed and shared freely before software patentability. How does anyone but Microsoft benefit by Microsoft patenting a wide swath of approaches to reducing Spam? Microsoft gained many tens of billions of dollars of additional revenue due to the surge in PC sales brought about by the widespread adoption of the Internet, yet they and others are now putting roadblocks up as fast as they can to control any further elaboration of the Internet, or competition in providing compatible services on it. How can this possibly be defended?
Without software patents, the large established companies will tell the small startups with valid new inventions to go fuck themselves rather than meeting them at the bargaining table. "Thanks for the idea, now go fuckoff while we create copycat products and use our sales force to crush you out of existence."
And this is opposed to current practice, where a small startup with a valid invention is granted a software patent. They go to market with their product, only to find Microsoft (say) decides to clone their product and enter the market. They sue Microsoft. Microsoft then says, "oh, maybe we do violate your patent. Trouble is, you violate 70 of our software patents. You will now give us a license to your patent, or we will shut down your product." Small inventors and small startup companies do not get protection from patents unless they produce nothing that can be attacked on patent grounds. That leaves small companies to register for patents, get the patent, and then sue to license the patents to the big boys. Should it be the case that only the big companies can write software? I think not. But that's what we're looking at today.
The plastic packaging for a razor blade is a material good that has non-zero fixed and marginal costs. To make and distribute plastic packaging for a razor blade requires the creation of a factory, and the cost of materials and distribution for each package produced.
While software does have considerable fixed costs, they do not equal the cost of a factory. One person with one computer + time = software. And once the software is made, it literally costs nothing to make as many copies as anyone could ever want.
As a result of this, the number of people who want or need to make plastic packaging for razors is very small.. really only those people who are selling razors. But the number of people who may need or want to create software, whether it be for individual, in-house, or freely shared use, is vast. The number of people potentially locked out by a software patent, then, is much higher than in the razor case.
Why don't we have patents on literary plot devices? Why don't we have patents on speeches, or even on talking about a particular subject? Because the monopoly grant in those cases is extremely expensive, and retards the flow of communications and ideas in the society.
If we were talking about 10,000 software patents, rather than 150,000-300,000 software patents, it might not be so bad. If experienced developers were responsible for judging the obviousness of a software patent application, it might not be so bad.
But it is 150,000-300,000 software patents, and experience developers do not make those calls. Patent clerks harassed by well-paid lawyers do. And as a result, it is all but impossible to write any substantial software in the United States without trespassing on someone's patent claim.
But software is more difficult than that. Any significant software product may take tens or hundreds of man-years to develop.. and may trespass against hundreds of software patents.
In that case, even if the software patents weren't there, it would take tens or hundreds of man-years to develop a competitive product. Don't believe me? Okay, go look at the MySQL source code read it, and then make a product that does the same thing without literally copying software modules. Ready? Set?
The fact is, due to those hundreds of software patents, you can't legally write that software. Due to the hundreds of thousands of software patents, almost no one is capable of writing any sort of substantial product without arguably trespassing on someone's patent.
Take into account as well that the vast majority of software is written by the organization that intends to use it, in-house. There is 50 years of such development that has gone on, yet the USPTO feels perfectly happy to grant a patent on a software technique so long as there are no patents on file covering that area. This results in a vast corpus of junk patents, and programmers have to simply hope that they don't stumble over them, or be prepared to pay millions to defend against a patent suit.
Microsoft can afford that, since they collect monopoly rent on their software. Sun can afford that, since they sell hardware to subsidize their software development. Joe company or Joe individual cannot.
Is it appropriate that it should all but be illegal for an individual or small company to produce software? Is that good for the economy? Individuals and small companies have unique problems that need solving, after all.. why can't they be allowed to solve them?
I'm not sure what the original citation is, but Andrew Sullivan claims over 30 prisoners died at the hands of American interrogators.
On what basis do you claim that OO is not compatible with MS-Office?
I guarantee you that it's from LJ users, not Slashdot users. Among my circle of acquaintances, the LJ/Slashdot ratio is about 20-1.
Proof of such diversity would be the transversal from one species to something completely different without any in-betweens. Why no in-between micro-changes? Because there's no evidence -for- such changes in the fossil records, at all. There is absolutely no "evidence" for the biological diversity on Earth when using the Evolutionary method.
Right!
Except, there is.
We can see species gradating one into the other with varying degrees of granularity in the natural world. Bacteria don't get terribly picky about who has what genes, and as you say, even plants can hybridize across our intuitive notion of species. Other people have pointed out the phenomenon of ring species, where Great Britain maintains two species of gulls, incapable or disinterested in mating one with the other, but which turn out to be gradually related if you follow the range of one species to the west. One species of gull in Great Britain is capable of mating with a close relative to the west, which is capable of mating with a close relative a bit further west, and so forth, until the ring stretches back around the planet and we find the end of the ring of inter-compatibility is that second species. Micro-changes in space, rather than time.
Even if we did not have the spectacular example of ring species to point to, it is very clear that animals differ in many cases by region, and the wider the separation, the wider the difference among species. This was, in fact, one of Charles Darwin's main points of argumentation when he wrote his books.
What skeptics of the fossil record seem not to realize is just how rare it is that a fossil forms. I have read (but cannot at the moment find) a statement that perhaps one species in a thousand has fossilized so that we may find an instance of it in the geologic record. If we are missing 99.9% of all species in the geologic record, it is not at all surprising that we might not see a *perfectly* smooth continuum of change looking at the rocks.
Yet, given the resolution of the rocks, we do after all see a very smooth pattern, enough so that we can form a picture of the story of life over time that is consistently corroborated with a variety of technical dating methods, from radiological processes to magnetic field variations to depth of rock to the evidences of tectonic uplift and subduction.
Everything we know about evolution coheres strongly with the natural world as it is observed. So much so that evolution through natural selection is the only theory of the history of life on our planet that anyone without a religious motivation takes seriously.
I applaud you for being skeptical upon being told something that you find incredible, but rather than jumping to the ignorant assumption that the evidence for it doesn't exist, why not study the matter for yourself?
Philosophical argumentation is not evidence, sorry. 150 years of research by 100's of thousands of researchers, comprising the entirety of modern biology, has provided abundant evidence for evolution.
Jesus.
How is what Apple is doing any different from Lexmark trying to make their printers reject any ink jet cartridges that aren't digitally signed by Lexmark? On what grounds does Apple have the right to exclude competitors from providing copy protected files for use with iPod?
As I replied in the sibling post to yours, unless some can demonstrate that Real violated a patent, or unless Apple made iPod customers sign a contract declaring that they agreed not to use protected files provided by anyone but Apple on the iPod, Apple has no legal basis to bar Real from doing what it did.
Now, Apple evidently has found a technical basis for identifying Real-sourced files and excluding them through their control over the iPod's firmware on the devices owned by their customers (and did the customers get told Apple was breaking the compatibility they paid money to Real in anticipation of when they were given the option to receive the new firmware? No?). Apple did it because it could do it, but all this talk of 'maybe it was an accident that it stopped working with Real files' is utterly naive. Apple is treating the iPods out there as if they owned them, and they do not. The customers own the iPods, and what the customers legally do with them is their business.
And Real would be entitled to sue, on my theory.
This is about Real trying to strong arm Apple into supporting their own crappy, proprietary format, not about some poor company that sold files that Apple said would work, and then broke them.
What crappy, proprietary format is that? Real was selling files that worked on the iPod using Apple's protection scheme. Does Fairplay become a crappy, proprietary format when Real started using it?
Because Real ILLEGALLY cracked Apple's DRM? That seems reason enough for me.
Oh. Wow. Illegally, really? Which laws did they break? They are not circumventing a content protection device to get access to content, they are putting unlicensed content protection bits around the content.
Are the unlicensed content protection bits patented, then? They must be, right? Otherwise, traditional reverse engineering doctrine for compatibility would seem to make that sort of thing a-ok. Copyright wouldn't prohibit this, certainly. Trade Secret? Unless Real beat someone within Apple with a rubber hose to extract the information on how to do this, there's no trade secret issues involved.
Unless you know something I don't, Real ILLEGALLY cracked Apple's DRM in the same way that Shell ILLEGALLY cracked Standard Oil's petroleum formulation so that they could make their gasoline compatible with cars that ran on Standard Oil gasonline.
If the firmware update was intended to break Real's hack, why did they not release it for all players, instead of about half of them? Most likely, this is just Real's hack breaking, which is not surprising since it is an unsupported format masquerading as Apple's licensed files.
Uh-huh. Just like Microsoft's Windows 3.1 beta accidentally broke when running on top of DRDOS back in 1991, right?
I remember reading about how Intellivision had hacked the Intellivision 2 to try and prevent competitors such as Coleco from selling games to work on their console. Mattel actually tried to hide what they had done, for fear that they would be sued for anticompetitive practices.
It's just the same thing with Apple. They've got a nice little bundling deal going, and they don't want Real to be able to sell music to work on it without making the files wholly unprotected, which the RIAA could never accept. I don't see any reason why Real wouldn't be in a position to sue over it.
I'm no scientician, but if you burn organic fuels, they release CO2 the same way fossil fuels do...the same way that burning wood or anything else releases CO2. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding...are you suggesting that the crops grown for fuel will pull in enough atmospheric carbon to offset the cost of burning it? I'm not sure that I'm inclined to believe that based solely on antecdotal evidence. Can you post any links?
Growing plants take their carbon from the air. If you burn one year's crops, you've returned much of their carbon to the air. Next year's crop, if similarly sized, will pull it back out of the air.
We're just running a rather large current carbon sequestration deficit, as we're burning the sequestered carbon from hundreds of thousands of years, far faster than it can be absorbed by the biosphere.
The article actually focuses on Sulfur Dioxide production, not Carbon Dioxide. Volcanos do produce CO2, but the article states that one coal plant in Washington State produces 28 times more CO2 than does Mt. St. Helens.
I was going to waste my time with a lengthy informative response, but it doesn't belong on slashdot, and it certainly would be meaningful considering my audiance (you).
Meaningless, you mean? I'm disappointed, I'd be fascinated to read good information on the topic.
You did leave yourself open for it, though, by making the claims you did without providing any context.
Further, you claim that human activity is fantastically insignificant compared with other truly awesome forces at work. To the extent that my admittedly meager knowledge allows, I can't agree. Certainly, there have been enormous changes over the last 60 million years, but those changes took an enormous amount of time to occur.
Today, humans are driving changes at an almost entirely unprecedented pace. In the last 20,000 years, the planet has seen one of its biggest historical extinction events, with humans upending ecosystems around the planet. We're not a cretaceous-boundary meteor, certainly, but then we're also not done yet changing the planet.
We've doubled the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in a matter of decades, and I think you under-credit the magnitude of that change, given the short timespan over which it has occured. There are comparatively few other events in the planet's known history which have brought about such rapid and significant change.
Again, CO2 levels have fallen so much that grasses have evolved to supplant trees. Declining C02 levels will eventually cause the trees to die at which point only fossilization will prevent them from giving up their CO2 to the wrong end of the carbon cycle. Controling sulfates, nitrates, and partical emissions would seem to be far more important than controling CO2, which the Earth has shown itself as quite adept at dealing with.
Oh! Heh, I get it now.
Um, you are joking, right? The evolution of grasses was some 60 million years ago. Even if CO2 levels were much higher 60 million years ago, it's clear that the climate was significantly different that far back, yes? We're not worried about climate changes that will make the planet sterile or some such shite, we're worried about things on a more human scale.
First class troll, nicely done.
Oh wait, I thought this was the 1970s, when temperature measurements since the 1940s had showed a gradual cooling trend. Now I mean the scientific evidence clearly indicates that manmade atmospheric pollution will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, thus causing "global warming." Sorry about that. Well whichever is true, man is evil and so is economic production, so let's put a stop to it.
So a scientist has changed his position in the face of additional data? We know a great deal more about a lot of things now than we did 30 or 40 years ago. What hasn't changed is that we're conducting a rather unprecedented (at least in many millions of years) experiment in high speed changes to the composition of our atmosphere.
Whether man (or economic production) is evil, he (and it) are certainly pumping a whole hell of a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. The biology of the planet may be rather slower to evolve to changing conditions than our technological and cultural evolution is able to effect such changes. Any sudden changes of our climate (in either direction), such as may be caused by a significant change in our atmosphere's composition, may have extraordinary costs that we may have reason to prefer to avoid.
But that's okay, it's all about liberals wishing to overturn glorious capitalism, and after they lost the cold war, even!
Why do you assume that most climatological scientists are ignorant of such issues?
By the by, volcanos typically do not put out significant amounts of Carbon Dioxide, at least not when compared with current human activity. Read the link posted at the top of this story.
It's everyone, not just wealthy corporate folk that don't want to decrease their profit margin. In fact, they won't decrease their profit margin. They'll keep earning the same amount of money and to cope with higher costs they will just move those factories into exempt countries and take the jobs of the average Joe with them.
And this differs from the current situation how?
In fact I would think IBM is more of a concern than linux persee.
Oh, not true, I promise you. Remember when IBM was going it alone with OS/2? It was a joke, despite the product having some very significant technical strengths. Linux is important because millions of people, tens of thousands of businesses, and scores of governments think it's important.
Add in the fact that Linux undercuts Microsoft on price, the fact that it (along with the freely implementable IETF and W3C internet and web standards) frees people from Microsoft's network effects monopoly prison, and the fact that people get to choose how their own computers work without paying Microsoft for the lesser privilege of serfdom, and you've got a social movement to seriously rival Microsoft's commercial dominance.
Don't ever kid yourself that IBM is making Linux. Linux is the leverage that IBM needs to remain relevant against the terrible power of a network effects driven monopolist like Microsoft. And it's not just IBM.. all of the PC manufacturers here and abroad benefit from Linux interrupting Microsoft's pattern of claiming all profits in the PC world to itself.
In materials that leaked out of Microsoft during the federal cases against it, Microsoft strategists explained that their greatest worry was that a Compaq or an HP might simply decide to spend an amount equivalent to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Microsoft charged them per year and put it towards the development of a free alternative commodity OS in free conjunction with the other industry players, freezing out Microsoft and taking back the industry's profits.
IBM alone couldn't do this. Compaq or Dell alone certainly couldn't do this. What was required to make that happen was a commodity operating system that would not threaten any hardware vendor in the way that OS/2 did IBM's competitors, and which everyone could trust to be equally accessible to them all.
Linus did that, because of his programming skill, because of his use of Richard Stallman's GPL, and because of his management and social skills.
Linus and his followers have overturned a many hundred billion dollar industry, and he deserves as much recognition as can be given to him for that.
This is asinine. I know Jonathan was very precise in his language, being careful to circumscribe his 'cathedral' comments to the kernel.org official version of Linux, but there is so much work that's going on in Linux all around those versions, it makes his comment deceptive in view of the larger picture.
How many versions are there of the Linux kernel in use? Thousands, I'm sure. I've personally produced a handful of them (integrating Snare into several Red Hat kernels). How many distinguishable versions of Java are there out there? A few dozen?
Linux is canonically a bazaar, because everyone has the right to produce their own variant for their own needs. The fact that the code is GPL'ed means that the mainline kernel (that mythical 'cathedral' led by Linus Torvalds) can adopt the changes if they are well implemented and suitable for ubiquitization, and that those folks producing the variants can incorporate anything from the Linus-blessed kernel.
Hey, I like Java just fine. I've spent years producing free software on top of it, and I'm duly appreciative, but I don't pretend that Java is anywhere near as much a Bazaar as Linux is. If it were, there are a whole bunch of bugs on the Java Bug Database that would not have lingered for the last seven years, I can assure you.
Microsoft itself, for instance, became a success by giving people what they didn't know they needed, or by filling a void that no one realised was there.
<harshing on Microsoft>
Really? When was this? Bill Gates and Paul Allen did a good turn with BASIC back on the Altair, but they were copying the innovation of John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz in doing so. DOS was a rip of CP/M. Windows was an attempt to block VisiCorp's VISION and Digital Research's GEM, not to mention IBM's TopView, Quarterdeck's DESQ/View or, say, the Lisa and Macintosh. Flight Simulator came from Bruce Artwick's subLogic. Word came after dozens of other Word Processors. Excel was Microsoft's second attempt at a spreadsheet app after Multimate, which in turn was after Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3.
The web browser? Tim Berners Lee and Marc Andreesen's team at NCSA, among others. Powerpoint? Purchased from an outside developer. Visio? Purchased from an outside developer. FoxPro? Purchased from an outside developer. C#/.NET? Closely imitative of Java, without all of that icky non-Windows-bound aspirations.
I'm rather looking forward to seeing Microsoft become a success by giving people what they didn't know they needed, myself. Microsoft Bob surely wasn't it.
</harshing on Microsoft>
So your thesis is that Apache is attacked all the time, and all of us Unix/Linux,Windows systems administrators running it are just covering it up to save our asses?
<Dr.Evil>Riiiiight.</Dr.Evil>
Asylum was incredible. I played it on a 16k cassette Model I, and was amazed at the complexity the game had in it for its small size. Absolutely huge maps, full sentence parser, suspense, mystery.. best game ever on the Model I.
Clinton signed a bill in 96 or so that made large scale distribution of copyrighted works a criminal offense, even if the infringer was not profiting for doing so in monetary terms. It was one of the early copyright counter-offensives against the BBS/file trading scene.