But what if I'm a legitimate stripclub from Timbuktu with the name Microsoft?
Does it still mean that despite my legality I cannot keep the domain name, although both deal in entirely different set of things?
It was my understanding that trademarks and copyrights are valid within the same domain (economic/business area of interest) - isn't that the reason why you have so many products that have the name Unix that have nothing to do with computers or software?
Just because someone has a company with that name, does that mean that my claims to that domain name in an entirely different profession is still invalidated?
Or is it the case of the one with the, "most lawyers" - a la "most cigarettes" syndrome that Neal Stephenson described?
Those who hold existing domain names are going to try and get the new ones with their domains. And cybersquatters and others are going to try and do the same thing.
Now, the interesting question would be, if I'm a porn site for petite teens, can I legally have the domain, www.microsoft.xxx?;-)
For a while I thought it was the Jefferson Lab - if am not mistaken, parts of it now belong to the Science Museum of Virginia - but then the JLab is still open so, can that be ruled out?
But yes, you're right - these days it is hard to find brain-farms, as you put it. However, this also raises the alarming question - an open economy/free-state like the US is finding it hard to have brainfarms, but how about a government agency in a country like, say, China? How hard would it be for China to force its scientists to work there at a brain farm? I can think of a quintillion advatages of such a large conglomeration of intellectual capital, so this could mean that the intellectual edge that the US has _may_ just be at a disadvantage.
The only thing that can help this again is the advent of a threat of war, or something like space-race.
The thing is that what business wants is not necessarily today's research - that is precisely my point. At this moment, sure, what MSR patents may not be quite important - but tomorrow, it could be the basis of a whole lot of things.
Microsoft has done some really really cutting edge work in Natural Language Processing, Graphics, Knowledge and Data Mining, HCI and Ubiquitous Computing - in fact, its hard to go without seeing atleast one or two publications by MSR in any respectable conference/journal that deals in these areas.
But - its not all out in the open - and thats what you should be worried about. Because Microsoft has NO need to bring it out in the open, until it has to. Hidden knowledge is more potent.
I'm not sure if this will produce the kind of innovative stuff that came out of Bell labs, but at least fundamental research is alive!
That is the problem - the kind of monolithic no-holds-barred and no-questions-asked environment that Bell Labs provided is gone - that is what the article sought to mention towards the end. Sure, you can do something at the Universities, but not at the scale that it happened at Bell Labs.
So, it really brings us back to the question - Is fundamental research really happening, or is all research now being funded solely based on what Wall Street wants?.
It looks more and more like the days of research for the sake of in and itself are slowly coming to an end.
As the article points out, a lot of people are also moving into the academia, not necessarily back into the industry. Perhaps they're happier working in academic environments - atleast that way, they get to have their knowledge and findings out in the open.
However, what the article fails to mention is that a lot of corporate researchers like this guy are increasingly looking at the industry as a means of getting their research done.
This is an issue not just with AT&T, but lots of other research labs out there. If you look at some of the top conferences on AI, Graphics and the like (SIGGRAPH for instance) - you have an alarmingly high percentage of people performing cutting edge work from Microsoft Research.
So, it does look like MS-R is becoming a destination for a lot of good researchers out there - however, the collective prowess of other places like IBM, Intel and Xerox might just be able to bring in a balance.
The good thing is that this brings money for research and researchers. The bad thing is that all the patents of tomorrow in a lot of the cool technologies will be 0wnzer0ed by MSFT - where would that lead OpenSource in terms of a future - if all the technology that is to come is patented?
I'm not discounting your point that having incentive helps motivate people to innovate.
But the truth is, most of the good stuff out there was not created by people looking for an incentive - it was created by people who _loved_ doing what they did, and hacked it to their advantage.
All of the world's greatest works, and greatest genuises never worked for money or incentive - that helped, sure, but it was not the goal. The purpose was to innovate for the love of the subject, for the very sake of innovation itself.
Look at Nikolas Tesla, or any of the really great inventors. Or physicsts and mathematicians. Or even musicians. The real good ones do not really care about the money - they do it because they love playing music - its their life, and its in their blood. Sure, a little incentive helps them move on, but with or without it they will do what they do simply because it gives them happiness.
Now, thats whats wrong with today's culture. People are not willing to do anything without compensation. We expect something in return. Look at the trash quality of music today - its only because the morons who are making it are interested only in making money and fame, and not music in itself. Why do so many patents exist? People are not willing to innovate because they love what they do, they are willing to innovate if they can profit and get something in return.
I feel that this is a very bad trend, and a very bad notion. If you notice where true innovation comes from, even today it is only from people who do not care about what they get in return - take Linus Torvalds for example. What he did was simply for the love of what he did best - nothing more.
Unless this attitude changes, and people accept that knowledge belongs to humanity - you may profit from it, but thats not the reason you should be doing it - we are fucked.
Hmm, the reason I said it was insightful was because C was originally designed for hardware level interaction - a little higher level of abstraction than asm, but with the same kinda power.
It was written for writing operating systems, drivers and the like - hence the kind of power that it came with. However, its a double edged sword - if not handled properly it will cause issues that the original poster mentioned.
However, by introducing a VM in between, you are defeating the very purpose for which C was designed with those seemingly flawed features.
You don't always need to know or understand what is it you are doing to be good at it.
Some of the greatest genuines in art and music were people who had a natural talent for things, but did not understand what they were doing.
Same goes for child prodigies and tonnes of other things.
I play Indian classical Violin, but I can play just about anything else by ear. No, I do not know or understand what I'm doing or how I'm doing, but I play by the ear. Hell, I may not even be able to produce the notes for what I'm playing without making a labourious effort - but I can still play it.
I do not know where people get the notion that you have to understand something to excel at it.
But if DARPA pulled out because of substandard results, they run the risk of being bad-mouthed, and perhaps even losing cred.
And the next time around they conduct something like this, not too many people would be willing to compete.
However, this lets DARPA see more entries - agreed, some crappy ones - but a lot of good ones which are good but would have otherwise not made it. Besides, its really too early to say anything, so lets see.
Although I do not question your methods, and I do realize that team-work is needed in real-life too, I'm quite against the concept of forcing people who are not socially comfortable into teams.
I've always felt comfortable working by myself - give me a task to do and I will do it well, and do not force me to get into teams, or do any of the teamwork stuff.
I cannot help it - trust me, I've tried hard to work with teams, but even in a team I really need to work with people who understand me - and that includes my social shortcomings. Unfortunately, that almost never happens in real life, and its a sore point for me and for many others like me.
And I question the submitters need to ask such a question - why should I learn social skills and sacrifice my other skills? It has been proven that gaining social skills often comes at the expense of your problem solving and other intellectual abilities.
Is it so hard to understand that some people work better all by themselves? That some people are loners, and thats the way they are wired? And yes, when it comes to it I get myself a girlfriend the way _I_ see fit - and trust me, I've found pleasant geek girls this way, and these are ones who accept me despite my shortcomings.
The submitter made it sound like having no social skills makes us deficient in someway. Perhaps it does, but hell it more than makes up for it in other ways. Why should the ones who are socially inept and deficient try and be socially pleasant and accomodating to others?
Now if the smarter ones were to demand that those who were socially better off learn to be more smart and learn to solve more problems, lets see how the world takes that. Lets see the world taking to people saying that your IQ skills are bad, you need to develop them else you will not be accepted into the community. They will cry wolf. Then why should the socially inept have to learn social skills?
Oh well, enough with the ranting already. Somethings never change with time, I guess. No matter how advanced we become as a civilization, we will always fall back as a society.
Looks like you have not read the article in full, its 15 days actually:-)
From the article -
Under state law, all merchants who deal in secondhand goods are required to hold those goods for 15 calendar days before selling them. The law is designed specifically to prevent the sale of stolen goods, and prevent situations like this.
Well, you cannot blame her for not reporting it to the authorities - usually you end up going to the authorities only as a last resort. You try and solve problems as best as you can before that with the company and if that does not work out, you see restitution.
But now that its out in the open, it may turn quite interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
You would have more lesbians :-p
But what if I'm a legitimate stripclub from Timbuktu with the name Microsoft?
Does it still mean that despite my legality I cannot keep the domain name, although both deal in entirely different set of things?
It was my understanding that trademarks and copyrights are valid within the same domain (economic/business area of interest) - isn't that the reason why you have so many products that have the name Unix that have nothing to do with computers or software?
Just because someone has a company with that name, does that mean that my claims to that domain name in an entirely different profession is still invalidated?
Or is it the case of the one with the, "most lawyers" - a la "most cigarettes" syndrome that Neal Stephenson described?
Simply put - more confusion.
;-)
Those who hold existing domain names are going to try and get the new ones with their domains. And cybersquatters and others are going to try and do the same thing.
Now, the interesting question would be, if I'm a porn site for petite teens, can I legally have the domain, www.microsoft.xxx?
Damn, how dumb of me. Checked out your site - now I know :)
For a while I thought it was the Jefferson Lab - if am not mistaken, parts of it now belong to the Science Museum of Virginia - but then the JLab is still open so, can that be ruled out?
But yes, you're right - these days it is hard to find brain-farms, as you put it. However, this also raises the alarming question - an open economy/free-state like the US is finding it hard to have brainfarms, but how about a government agency in a country like, say, China? How hard would it be for China to force its scientists to work there at a brain farm? I can think of a quintillion advatages of such a large conglomeration of intellectual capital, so this could mean that the intellectual edge that the US has _may_ just be at a disadvantage.
The only thing that can help this again is the advent of a threat of war, or something like space-race.
If you noticed, I had said Microsoft Research - not Microsoft itself.
:)
You don't have to believe me - look at Microsoft Research's Publications page - that should give you an idea
The thing is that what business wants is not necessarily today's research - that is precisely my point. At this moment, sure, what MSR patents may not be quite important - but tomorrow, it could be the basis of a whole lot of things.
Microsoft has done some really really cutting edge work in Natural Language Processing, Graphics, Knowledge and Data Mining, HCI and Ubiquitous Computing - in fact, its hard to go without seeing atleast one or two publications by MSR in any respectable conference/journal that deals in these areas.
But - its not all out in the open - and thats what you should be worried about. Because Microsoft has NO need to bring it out in the open, until it has to. Hidden knowledge is more potent.
Actually it has been going on both ways - people moving from the industry to the academia and from the academia to the industry.
Just as an example, think of Jerry Yang and David Filo, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy - just to mention a few - all these people could have remained in the academia but chose to go to the industry instead.
I'm not sure if this will produce the kind of innovative stuff that came out of Bell labs, but at least fundamental research is alive!
That is the problem - the kind of monolithic no-holds-barred and no-questions-asked environment that Bell Labs provided is gone - that is what the article sought to mention towards the end. Sure, you can do something at the Universities, but not at the scale that it happened at Bell Labs.
So, it really brings us back to the question - Is fundamental research really happening, or is all research now being funded solely based on what Wall Street wants?.
It looks more and more like the days of research for the sake of in and itself are slowly coming to an end.
As the article points out, a lot of people are also moving into the academia, not necessarily back into the industry. Perhaps they're happier working in academic environments - atleast that way, they get to have their knowledge and findings out in the open.
However, what the article fails to mention is that a lot of corporate researchers like this guy are increasingly looking at the industry as a means of getting their research done.
This is an issue not just with AT&T, but lots of other research labs out there. If you look at some of the top conferences on AI, Graphics and the like (SIGGRAPH for instance) - you have an alarmingly high percentage of people performing cutting edge work from Microsoft Research.
So, it does look like MS-R is becoming a destination for a lot of good researchers out there - however, the collective prowess of other places like IBM, Intel and Xerox might just be able to bring in a balance.
The good thing is that this brings money for research and researchers. The bad thing is that all the patents of tomorrow in a lot of the cool technologies will be 0wnzer0ed by MSFT - where would that lead OpenSource in terms of a future - if all the technology that is to come is patented?
Its a double edged sword.
That, sir, was a really well written comment. Thank you, I could not agree with you more.
Hats off - I just added you as a friend. Truly insightful.
Whew! I was afraid you'd say Bruce Campbell :-p
I'd look for it, but I'm busy working...
Whats that?
They will apparently send him after you if you tried accessing unauthorized parts of the server ;-)
If you are being mod-bombed, the best thing to do is mail Jamie or one of the Slashdot crew.
:)
They'll usually find the mod-bomber and undo all the damage
This has happened to me too, and it sucks.
You have no idea. ;-)
I'm not discounting your point that having incentive helps motivate people to innovate.
But the truth is, most of the good stuff out there was not created by people looking for an incentive - it was created by people who _loved_ doing what they did, and hacked it to their advantage.
All of the world's greatest works, and greatest genuises never worked for money or incentive - that helped, sure, but it was not the goal. The purpose was to innovate for the love of the subject, for the very sake of innovation itself.
Look at Nikolas Tesla, or any of the really great inventors. Or physicsts and mathematicians. Or even musicians. The real good ones do not really care about the money - they do it because they love playing music - its their life, and its in their blood. Sure, a little incentive helps them move on, but with or without it they will do what they do simply because it gives them happiness.
Now, thats whats wrong with today's culture. People are not willing to do anything without compensation. We expect something in return. Look at the trash quality of music today - its only because the morons who are making it are interested only in making money and fame, and not music in itself. Why do so many patents exist? People are not willing to innovate because they love what they do, they are willing to innovate if they can profit and get something in return.
I feel that this is a very bad trend, and a very bad notion. If you notice where true innovation comes from, even today it is only from people who do not care about what they get in return - take Linus Torvalds for example. What he did was simply for the love of what he did best - nothing more.
Unless this attitude changes, and people accept that knowledge belongs to humanity - you may profit from it, but thats not the reason you should be doing it - we are fucked.
Am sure we have enough pr0n around to test that ;-)
:-O
So other than all the cool thingys blah blah, imagine what this would do for the future of the pr0n industry!
*gasps*
Hmm, the reason I said it was insightful was because C was originally designed for hardware level interaction - a little higher level of abstraction than asm, but with the same kinda power.
:)
It was written for writing operating systems, drivers and the like - hence the kind of power that it came with. However, its a double edged sword - if not handled properly it will cause issues that the original poster mentioned.
However, by introducing a VM in between, you are defeating the very purpose for which C was designed with those seemingly flawed features.
Hence my remark of it being insightful!
That is one of the most insightful yet really funny comments I've ever read on Slashdot. Simply fabulous!
And oh, that rant was not directed at you - it was a general rant :)
And I just wanted to reply to the thread, and yours seemed to be the most relevant post.
You don't always need to know or understand what is it you are doing to be good at it.
Some of the greatest genuines in art and music were people who had a natural talent for things, but did not understand what they were doing.
Same goes for child prodigies and tonnes of other things.
I play Indian classical Violin, but I can play just about anything else by ear. No, I do not know or understand what I'm doing or how I'm doing, but I play by the ear. Hell, I may not even be able to produce the notes for what I'm playing without making a labourious effort - but I can still play it.
I do not know where people get the notion that you have to understand something to excel at it.
All of them? Not yet ;-)
But if DARPA pulled out because of substandard results, they run the risk of being bad-mouthed, and perhaps even losing cred.
And the next time around they conduct something like this, not too many people would be willing to compete.
However, this lets DARPA see more entries - agreed, some crappy ones - but a lot of good ones which are good but would have otherwise not made it. Besides, its really too early to say anything, so lets see.
Now you know why I complain even harder ;-) Makes it worse for me - social interaction being forced down the throat :-p
Although I do not question your methods, and I do realize that team-work is needed in real-life too, I'm quite against the concept of forcing people who are not socially comfortable into teams.
I've always felt comfortable working by myself - give me a task to do and I will do it well, and do not force me to get into teams, or do any of the teamwork stuff.
I cannot help it - trust me, I've tried hard to work with teams, but even in a team I really need to work with people who understand me - and that includes my social shortcomings. Unfortunately, that almost never happens in real life, and its a sore point for me and for many others like me.
And I question the submitters need to ask such a question - why should I learn social skills and sacrifice my other skills? It has been proven that gaining social skills often comes at the expense of your problem solving and other intellectual abilities.
Is it so hard to understand that some people work better all by themselves? That some people are loners, and thats the way they are wired? And yes, when it comes to it I get myself a girlfriend the way _I_ see fit - and trust me, I've found pleasant geek girls this way, and these are ones who accept me despite my shortcomings.
The submitter made it sound like having no social skills makes us deficient in someway. Perhaps it does, but hell it more than makes up for it in other ways. Why should the ones who are socially inept and deficient try and be socially pleasant and accomodating to others?
Now if the smarter ones were to demand that those who were socially better off learn to be more smart and learn to solve more problems, lets see how the world takes that. Lets see the world taking to people saying that your IQ skills are bad, you need to develop them else you will not be accepted into the community. They will cry wolf. Then why should the socially inept have to learn social skills?
Oh well, enough with the ranting already. Somethings never change with time, I guess. No matter how advanced we become as a civilization, we will always fall back as a society.
Looks like you have not read the article in full, its 15 days actually :-)
From the article -
Under state law, all merchants who deal in secondhand goods are required to hold those goods for 15 calendar days before selling them. The law is designed specifically to prevent the sale of stolen goods, and prevent situations like this.
Well, you cannot blame her for not reporting it to the authorities - usually you end up going to the authorities only as a last resort. You try and solve problems as best as you can before that with the company and if that does not work out, you see restitution.
But now that its out in the open, it may turn quite interesting.