Strange. For about three years after I moved into my first flat, I had no TV and, of course, no TV license. They never bothered me. No letters, no visits, nothing. The person who lived there before me had a license, so the address must have been on their records. Perhaps they concentrate their efforts on areas where they've found a lot of unlicensed TVs before?
"Phantom damages" perhaps refers to lost income, or opportunities that the business had to pass up because their computers were unusable. There was a story on Slashdot a while back about an electricity company not being able to accept payments from customers because they were infected with (I think) Nimda.
Another example: a customer asks a business to quote for some work. The business knows it would charge about $1 million, but can't produce a more detailed quote, because the computer that has the software to do that is infected. The customer goes elsewhere. Presto - the company just "lost" $1 million. They might not have won the deal anyway, but it seems obvious that, because of the virus (and the shitty OS that allowed itself to be infected), they never even stood a chance of winning. It's "phantom" damages because they never had the money in the first place. But saying that they never really lost anything doesn't make it any easier for them to bear.
Hear hear! I don't think I'll ever really understand people's desire to replace something simple that works well with something complicated that's prone to going wrong in hard-to-understand ways. Unless of course it's because easier to make sure you get the "right" result with an electronic system.
I think anyone who says that an electronic system gives results faster is missing the point. A politician, if he doesn't die or resign or get himself impeached, will be in office for 4 or 5 years. Does it really matter if you have to wait 4 or 5 days after the polls close to find out who won?
As I'm fond of saying to my colleagues, if you value fast results more than correct results, we can just replace all that counting and calculating with a pseudo-random number generator.
I was wondering whether it would be possible for Open Source API developers to place a clause in the license agreement prohibiting patents placed on software that use their API?
It would be possible, certainly, but I don't think it would be a good idea. Consider: the Oracle RDBMS runs on Linux. It needs to make calls to the Linux kernel API. Presumably, the Oracle corporation holds at least a few patents relating to their database system. If the kernel API is covered by a licence that forbids patented software from using it, Oracle is no longer allowed to run on Linux. Running one piece of software would prevent you from running another, which hardly seems desirable. It's bad enough when this happens now for purely technical reasons, without adding legal reasons as well.
Or do you mean that the API itself (or combinations of its parts) cannot be patented? The mere fact of its publication should prevent this: it should be prior art to any patent application. As we've seen, though, this doesn't always stop bad patents from being issued.
Combinations and sequences of the API's parts should automatically be prohibited as well. If your API has functions to perform A, B, C and D, then no-one is able to patent an API that does just A, B and C. Likewise, no-one can patent a function that performs (or calls) D, C and A in that order. Both of these should be obvious to one who has ordinary skill in the art. (Again, the patent office seems to have no idea of what's obvious and what isn't, but that's another matter.)
In the latter case, simply adding a clause to your licence that says "thou shalt not patent this" doesn't make it any more or less legal for anyone to try, because the question of what is and what isn't patentable isn't yours to decide. Many shops have signs that say, in effect, "don't steal our stuff." Would you therefore think it's OK to steal from a shop that didn't have such a sign? Would you try to use that as a defence in court?
The same thing happened to me (Mozilla 1.6). Before spitting out that error message, the page maxed out my CPU and hammered away at my swap partition for about a minute. If I hadn't already known what it was, this would've been a good clue that something dubious was going on.
Which also leads me to believe that it's not netblocks, but individual IP addresses.
I wish... I'm on a broadband connection at home, and Google doesn't want to talk to me. I've had my current IP address for at least 10 days, and it's been more than 24 hours since I searched Google for anything. This is a Linux box, so I very much doubt that MyDoom has sent any queries from my IP.
It might just be because I'm with ntlworld.com, strong contenders for Most Clueless ISP 2004.
[Word count needs]
three or four clicks to get, and it's automatically a count of the WHOLE document
I don't know if you've noticed, but the multi-tabbed dialogues in OOo remember which tab they displayed last. So if you don't switch between tabs, the next time you want a word count, you only need to do File, Properties.
I agree it's annoying that you can't get a word count for just part of the document. I often want to do this, so that I can tell how much I've written in the last day or week or however long. I usually resort to copying the relevant text into a new document and getting the word count of that!
An alternative is a StarBasic macro that counts the words in the current selection. Your remarks prompted me to try to find one, and a quick bit of Googling turned up this page. I've tried it out, and it seems to work. I still need to work out how to bind it to a key, but I only need to do that once.
Acronym overload strikes again... I thought of ABM as in anti-ballistic missile - someone fires a missile at you, and you launch another missile that intercepts it and blows it up before it can hit its target. A nice metaphor, but it's not how this system is supposed to work at all. Spam isn't like one big missile. It's millions of little ones. What would you do if someone was doing that to you in real life? Try to swat the missiles out of the sky? No, you'd find the launch sites and nuke them.
My girlfriend has a similar problem, except that she's from a different culture. (She's Irish, but has lived in Britain for many years.) She is "officially" called Brigid, and most of her paperwork has this name on it. Everyone calls her Breda, which is a kind of diminutive of Brigid. Most Irish people would know that these are forms of the same name, but not many British people do. This wouldn't be a problem, except that Breda is the name on her passport...
From a distance, English text in a text editor looks (or can be made to look) very much like source code. Hammer out the words when you've nothing better to do, mail it to yourself at home, clean it up and send it off to a publisher. You too could be paid to write a best-seller!
Of course, if there is an intellectual property rights agreement between you and your employer, you may find that they can fire you for doing this, or (worse) that the book's copyright belongs to them. If the book is successful, they might sue you for a share of the royalties.
I'm writing a book in this manner. I use my own PDA for it, so the book is neither stored on nor passes through any computer that the company controls. I write only during my lunch hour and when I'm travelling to and from work (I commute by train), so I'm never writing when I'm supposed to be working.
Judging only from my inbox, it would seem that spammers are more likely to use lists of known e-mail addresses than trying to guess valid usernames for a domain.
My experience so far has been the opposite. I got my own domain about four months ago and put my website there. So far, the only address at that domain that I've publicised on the web has been webmaster@. To date, this address has received only one spam. (To be fair, I think most spammers filter "webmaster" out - my old ISP let me use webmaster@username.domain. That was visible for about six years, and that got hardly any spam either. Other addresses that have been visible on the web have been spammed mercilessly, to the point where I've had to tell the server to drop anything sent to them.)
Anyway, my point was that within about a month of my domain being created, I started getting spam to sales@. A month after that, they started trying info@ as well. Seeing as I had never used those addresses in any way, and had no plans to use them, I felt no compunction in auto-forwarding them to uce@ftc.gov.
So, I use the catch-all address. I find it useful for the usual trick of telling any company that wants my address that it's company@my.domain. I don't have to do anything else to allow the mail through, but if I start getting spam to that address, I know who sold it (or who got hacked). This hasn't really been a problem for me, though. Maybe I'm just paranoid about giving out my address in the first place.
Is there really a market for anything that's been in intimate contact with a spammer? And even if someone was desperate enough to accept an organ from a spammer, the medical obstacles* would be too great to overcome.
Hey, I know - we could sell the organs to another spammer! Now, how to find one... well, we could start by sending an email to everybody in the... ohwaitnevermind.
(* obstacles such as: donor and recipient must have the same number of chromosomes)
An interesting idea, but how would you make sure that $evil_mega_corp couldn't buy Openpatents and then start suing the world and his dog for infringing on those patents that they'd donated in good faith?
Another reply says you should just publish what you would otherwise patent defensively, because it still counts as prior art, and then no-one can patent it. But that assumes that the Patent Office actually searches for prior art before granting a patent. If they did that, or did it properly, Openpatents would be unnecessary.
(Well I don't know WTF they're thinking of by restricting this patent to "limited resource computing devices" - but if it takes them 5 years to get the patent granted, by then, today's computers will count as having "limited resource[s]". Is this the latest fad in obvious patents? Have we run out of common activities to substitute into the sentence "An invention for doing X, but on the internet"? Is the template now "An invention for doing X, but on a Palm Pilot"? Anyway...)
In about 1994, I used a desktop publishing program called Serif PagePlus *. This had a toolbar at the side of the window, with buttons for things like placing text, importing graphics, drawing shapes and so on. If you pressed the button and let it go, the mouse pointer would start performing the function associated with that button. But if you pressed and held the button for a little while, a little palette would appear, with buttons related to the function of the main button. For instance, the "shape" button might draw rectangles by default. The palette would have buttons for drawing ellipses and lines. The nice thing was that if you clicked a button from the palette, that would then become the default function for the button on the toolbar.
So this would seem to knock down all the main claims of the patent in one go.
* My memory is a little hazy: it might have been another program from Serif.
Seconded - but define "IT" in such a way that the weasels can't just get around it by claiming that Dogbert's Zero-Click Shopping is really a business method (or anything other than a software invention, really).
AFAIK, modern camcorders don't use infrared for autofocus. They try to maximise high-frequency detail. That is, they look for changes in brightness and/or colour and try to get the sharpest possible edge between them. This is why they tend to hunt in low light - there aren't enough bright areas in the picture for the autofocus to tell whether the picture is in focus or not.
That said, camcorders are sensitive to near-infrared, so your suggestion of putting IR lights behind the screen would certainly interfere with the camcorder's picture. Then again, people who pay for (or at least watch) films that have been pirated with a camcorder evidently don't care about the camera panning around to follow the action, audience members walking in front of the screen, some idiot eating popcorn and yelling on their cellphone right next to the camera, so... will the addition of white dots all over the screen really have much of a deterrent effect?
I hope you have a spare System/370 lying around to run it... (look at the bottom of the linked-to page). On the bright side, it does run in 1 meg of RAM... or 0.5 meg if you discard the built-in spell-checker.
Anyone remember the Imatec patent lawsuit (dismissed) against Apple, seeking $1.1billion for ColorSync?
Intriguing. From the article you cited, that case has some remarkable parallels with the SCOX circus. Imatec filed their lawsuit after the technology they said was infringing had already been in use for at least five years. The court found that Imatec did not in fact own the patents they claimed to own, and even if they did own them, they were invalid anyway. Then again, if the damages are determined by the defendant's alleged profit, rather than the plaintiff's alleged harm, anyone who wants to bring this kind of bogus lawsuit has an incentive to wait as long as possible before suing, and to find a high-profile, deep-pocketed defendant, in the hope that the mark will settle quietly, rather than fight and risk being found guilty by the court of public opinion.
It's a pity this was a patent case, rather than contract/copyright/trade secret/whatever-the-hell-Darl-says-it-is-this-week . The laws are sufficiently different that any precedent it might have set is probably not useful against SCOX.
... then how many contractors are going to be willing to recommend Linux systems...
Couldn't this happen with any software, not just Linux? Linux seems dangerous to some at the moment, but I think that's only because no-one's currently trying to run a stock scam by claiming that they own large, under-specified chunks of Windows, MacOS or Solaris...
You nearly had me there, Taco. This is just the sort of thing that someone like Microsoft would try to foist on a government that's repeatedly shown itself to be less than clueful about IT matters. As such, I think it's quite a good April Fool - it's only just on the wrong side of being completely plausible.
The Techworld article and the "Lose-IT" website are tantalisingly vague. One suspicious detail is that lose-it.org.uk was registered on 12 March, while the Budget was not made public until 17 March. Either the owner had inside information (not entirely impossible) or he was planning to do something for 1 April.
Our government is trying to grok the internet, so they have various official documents available online. The complete text is
here, as a set of 14 PDFs. I haven't read the whole thing (what do you expect on Slashdot?!), but a search through each of them for "computer" and "software" turns up nothing that looks relevant.
Overall, then, nice try, thanks for playing, see you again next year.
What? An LCD with analog input is entirely missing the point. I know they exist, but I don't think they're the majority.
I wouldn't know about the majority, but the LCD I bought a few months ago has only an analogue input. This is a Philips 150B4, 15" at 1024*768 - maybe not exactly high end, but it fits nicely on the desk. The model above in that range, a 17", does have a DVI input.
The annoying thing is that the graphics card in my main machine, an ATi Radeon something-or-other, has a DVI output (only), and came with a big clunky adapter for plugging a VGA cable into it. I would definitely have gone for a monitor with a DVI input, except that this machine is plugged into a KVM switch with another machine that doesn't have a DVI output. Confused yet?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I vaguely remember that story, though I think it was "Poor Little Warrior!" by Brian Aldiss.
I think I speak for all (both?) Solaris desktop users when I say:
I don't have a Start button, you insensitive clod!
Strange. For about three years after I moved into my first flat, I had no TV and, of course, no TV license. They never bothered me. No letters, no visits, nothing. The person who lived there before me had a license, so the address must have been on their records. Perhaps they concentrate their efforts on areas where they've found a lot of unlicensed TVs before?
"Phantom damages" perhaps refers to lost income, or opportunities that the business had to pass up because their computers were unusable. There was a story on Slashdot a while back about an electricity company not being able to accept payments from customers because they were infected with (I think) Nimda.
Another example: a customer asks a business to quote for some work. The business knows it would charge about $1 million, but can't produce a more detailed quote, because the computer that has the software to do that is infected. The customer goes elsewhere. Presto - the company just "lost" $1 million. They might not have won the deal anyway, but it seems obvious that, because of the virus (and the shitty OS that allowed itself to be infected), they never even stood a chance of winning. It's "phantom" damages because they never had the money in the first place. But saying that they never really lost anything doesn't make it any easier for them to bear.
Hear hear! I don't think I'll ever really understand people's desire to replace something simple that works well with something complicated that's prone to going wrong in hard-to-understand ways. Unless of course it's because easier to make sure you get the "right" result with an electronic system.
I think anyone who says that an electronic system gives results faster is missing the point. A politician, if he doesn't die or resign or get himself impeached, will be in office for 4 or 5 years. Does it really matter if you have to wait 4 or 5 days after the polls close to find out who won?
As I'm fond of saying to my colleagues, if you value fast results more than correct results, we can just replace all that counting and calculating with a pseudo-random number generator.
It would be possible, certainly, but I don't think it would be a good idea. Consider: the Oracle RDBMS runs on Linux. It needs to make calls to the Linux kernel API. Presumably, the Oracle corporation holds at least a few patents relating to their database system. If the kernel API is covered by a licence that forbids patented software from using it, Oracle is no longer allowed to run on Linux. Running one piece of software would prevent you from running another, which hardly seems desirable. It's bad enough when this happens now for purely technical reasons, without adding legal reasons as well.
Or do you mean that the API itself (or combinations of its parts) cannot be patented? The mere fact of its publication should prevent this: it should be prior art to any patent application. As we've seen, though, this doesn't always stop bad patents from being issued.
Combinations and sequences of the API's parts should automatically be prohibited as well. If your API has functions to perform A, B, C and D, then no-one is able to patent an API that does just A, B and C. Likewise, no-one can patent a function that performs (or calls) D, C and A in that order. Both of these should be obvious to one who has ordinary skill in the art. (Again, the patent office seems to have no idea of what's obvious and what isn't, but that's another matter.)
In the latter case, simply adding a clause to your licence that says "thou shalt not patent this" doesn't make it any more or less legal for anyone to try, because the question of what is and what isn't patentable isn't yours to decide. Many shops have signs that say, in effect, "don't steal our stuff." Would you therefore think it's OK to steal from a shop that didn't have such a sign? Would you try to use that as a defence in court?
The same thing happened to me (Mozilla 1.6). Before spitting out that error message, the page maxed out my CPU and hammered away at my swap partition for about a minute. If I hadn't already known what it was, this would've been a good clue that something dubious was going on.
I'd forgotten about that. Thanks for reminding me. Google let me in again a couple of hours after my post above.
I wish... I'm on a broadband connection at home, and Google doesn't want to talk to me. I've had my current IP address for at least 10 days, and it's been more than 24 hours since I searched Google for anything. This is a Linux box, so I very much doubt that MyDoom has sent any queries from my IP.
It might just be because I'm with ntlworld.com, strong contenders for Most Clueless ISP 2004.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the multi-tabbed dialogues in OOo remember which tab they displayed last. So if you don't switch between tabs, the next time you want a word count, you only need to do File, Properties.
I agree it's annoying that you can't get a word count for just part of the document. I often want to do this, so that I can tell how much I've written in the last day or week or however long. I usually resort to copying the relevant text into a new document and getting the word count of that!
An alternative is a StarBasic macro that counts the words in the current selection. Your remarks prompted me to try to find one, and a quick bit of Googling turned up this page. I've tried it out, and it seems to work. I still need to work out how to bind it to a key, but I only need to do that once.
Acronym overload strikes again... I thought of ABM as in anti-ballistic missile - someone fires a missile at you, and you launch another missile that intercepts it and blows it up before it can hit its target. A nice metaphor, but it's not how this system is supposed to work at all. Spam isn't like one big missile. It's millions of little ones. What would you do if someone was doing that to you in real life? Try to swat the missiles out of the sky? No, you'd find the launch sites and nuke them.
My girlfriend has a similar problem, except that she's from a different culture. (She's Irish, but has lived in Britain for many years.) She is "officially" called Brigid, and most of her paperwork has this name on it. Everyone calls her Breda, which is a kind of diminutive of Brigid. Most Irish people would know that these are forms of the same name, but not many British people do. This wouldn't be a problem, except that Breda is the name on her passport...
From a distance, English text in a text editor looks (or can be made to look) very much like source code. Hammer out the words when you've nothing better to do, mail it to yourself at home, clean it up and send it off to a publisher. You too could be paid to write a best-seller!
Of course, if there is an intellectual property rights agreement between you and your employer, you may find that they can fire you for doing this, or (worse) that the book's copyright belongs to them. If the book is successful, they might sue you for a share of the royalties.
I'm writing a book in this manner. I use my own PDA for it, so the book is neither stored on nor passes through any computer that the company controls. I write only during my lunch hour and when I'm travelling to and from work (I commute by train), so I'm never writing when I'm supposed to be working.
My experience so far has been the opposite. I got my own domain about four months ago and put my website there. So far, the only address at that domain that I've publicised on the web has been webmaster@. To date, this address has received only one spam. (To be fair, I think most spammers filter "webmaster" out - my old ISP let me use webmaster@username.domain. That was visible for about six years, and that got hardly any spam either. Other addresses that have been visible on the web have been spammed mercilessly, to the point where I've had to tell the server to drop anything sent to them.)
Anyway, my point was that within about a month of my domain being created, I started getting spam to sales@. A month after that, they started trying info@ as well. Seeing as I had never used those addresses in any way, and had no plans to use them, I felt no compunction in auto-forwarding them to uce@ftc.gov.
So, I use the catch-all address. I find it useful for the usual trick of telling any company that wants my address that it's company@my.domain. I don't have to do anything else to allow the mail through, but if I start getting spam to that address, I know who sold it (or who got hacked). This hasn't really been a problem for me, though. Maybe I'm just paranoid about giving out my address in the first place.
Is there really a market for anything that's been in intimate contact with a spammer? And even if someone was desperate enough to accept an organ from a spammer, the medical obstacles* would be too great to overcome.
Hey, I know - we could sell the organs to another spammer! Now, how to find one... well, we could start by sending an email to everybody in the... ohwaitnevermind.
(* obstacles such as: donor and recipient must have the same number of chromosomes)
An interesting idea, but how would you make sure that $evil_mega_corp couldn't buy Openpatents and then start suing the world and his dog for infringing on those patents that they'd donated in good faith?
Another reply says you should just publish what you would otherwise patent defensively, because it still counts as prior art, and then no-one can patent it. But that assumes that the Patent Office actually searches for prior art before granting a patent. If they did that, or did it properly, Openpatents would be unnecessary.
I forget who said it, but...
"One of the main differences between sex for free and sex for money is that sex for free usually costs you a lot more in the long run."
...which sounds eerily like Microsoft's arguments that the TCO of Linux is higher than Windows...
(Well I don't know WTF they're thinking of by restricting this patent to "limited resource computing devices" - but if it takes them 5 years to get the patent granted, by then, today's computers will count as having "limited resource[s]". Is this the latest fad in obvious patents? Have we run out of common activities to substitute into the sentence "An invention for doing X, but on the internet"? Is the template now "An invention for doing X, but on a Palm Pilot"? Anyway...)
In about 1994, I used a desktop publishing program called Serif PagePlus *. This had a toolbar at the side of the window, with buttons for things like placing text, importing graphics, drawing shapes and so on. If you pressed the button and let it go, the mouse pointer would start performing the function associated with that button. But if you pressed and held the button for a little while, a little palette would appear, with buttons related to the function of the main button. For instance, the "shape" button might draw rectangles by default. The palette would have buttons for drawing ellipses and lines. The nice thing was that if you clicked a button from the palette, that would then become the default function for the button on the toolbar.
So this would seem to knock down all the main claims of the patent in one go.
* My memory is a little hazy: it might have been another program from Serif.
Seconded - but define "IT" in such a way that the weasels can't just get around it by claiming that Dogbert's Zero-Click Shopping is really a business method (or anything other than a software invention, really).
AFAIK, modern camcorders don't use infrared for autofocus. They try to maximise high-frequency detail. That is, they look for changes in brightness and/or colour and try to get the sharpest possible edge between them. This is why they tend to hunt in low light - there aren't enough bright areas in the picture for the autofocus to tell whether the picture is in focus or not.
That said, camcorders are sensitive to near-infrared, so your suggestion of putting IR lights behind the screen would certainly interfere with the camcorder's picture. Then again, people who pay for (or at least watch) films that have been pirated with a camcorder evidently don't care about the camera panning around to follow the action, audience members walking in front of the screen, some idiot eating popcorn and yelling on their cellphone right next to the camera, so... will the addition of white dots all over the screen really have much of a deterrent effect?
I hope you have a spare System/370 lying around to run it... (look at the bottom of the linked-to page). On the bright side, it does run in 1 meg of RAM... or 0.5 meg if you discard the built-in spell-checker.
Intriguing. From the article you cited, that case has some remarkable parallels with the SCOX circus. Imatec filed their lawsuit after the technology they said was infringing had already been in use for at least five years. The court found that Imatec did not in fact own the patents they claimed to own, and even if they did own them, they were invalid anyway. Then again, if the damages are determined by the defendant's alleged profit, rather than the plaintiff's alleged harm, anyone who wants to bring this kind of bogus lawsuit has an incentive to wait as long as possible before suing, and to find a high-profile, deep-pocketed defendant, in the hope that the mark will settle quietly, rather than fight and risk being found guilty by the court of public opinion.
It's a pity this was a patent case, rather than contract/copyright/trade secret/whatever-the-hell-Darl-says-it-is-this-week . The laws are sufficiently different that any precedent it might have set is probably not useful against SCOX.
Couldn't this happen with any software, not just Linux? Linux seems dangerous to some at the moment, but I think that's only because no-one's currently trying to run a stock scam by claiming that they own large, under-specified chunks of Windows, MacOS or Solaris...
You nearly had me there, Taco. This is just the sort of thing that someone like Microsoft would try to foist on a government that's repeatedly shown itself to be less than clueful about IT matters. As such, I think it's quite a good April Fool - it's only just on the wrong side of being completely plausible.
The Techworld article and the "Lose-IT" website are tantalisingly vague. One suspicious detail is that lose-it.org.uk was registered on 12 March, while the Budget was not made public until 17 March. Either the owner had inside information (not entirely impossible) or he was planning to do something for 1 April.
Our government is trying to grok the internet, so they have various official documents available online. The complete text is here, as a set of 14 PDFs. I haven't read the whole thing (what do you expect on Slashdot?!), but a search through each of them for "computer" and "software" turns up nothing that looks relevant.
Overall, then, nice try, thanks for playing, see you again next year.
What? An LCD with analog input is entirely missing the point. I know they exist, but I don't think they're the majority.
I wouldn't know about the majority, but the LCD I bought a few months ago has only an analogue input. This is a Philips 150B4, 15" at 1024*768 - maybe not exactly high end, but it fits nicely on the desk. The model above in that range, a 17", does have a DVI input.
The annoying thing is that the graphics card in my main machine, an ATi Radeon something-or-other, has a DVI output (only), and came with a big clunky adapter for plugging a VGA cable into it. I would definitely have gone for a monitor with a DVI input, except that this machine is plugged into a KVM switch with another machine that doesn't have a DVI output. Confused yet? ;-)