Love for their OS?:) And here I thought it was just a sense of smug moral superiority to make up for some fundamental insecurity on the part of the linux/mac/amiga/whatever zealot. =)
I'm neither an American, nor do I support a lot of their foreign policy. But what a load of bullshit.:)
If Iraqi children are dying (and those numbers are very questionable, they are released by the Iraqi ministry of propoganda) then it is Saddam's fault. Instead of using his food for oil exchange to buy things his people need he's used it trying to sneak various items into his country to use to build more weapons.
Your comments re: Israel are just plain idiotic. France, Pakistan, India and lots of other countries have nuclear weapons and the US doesn't say anything about them either because its unlikely those countries will use those weapons against the US or her allies or provide them to terrorist groups.
Your comments about UN inspectors are also utter trash... the last few UN inspectors may have been pulled out prior to the US cruise missile strikes... but those strikes were caused by Iraqi attacks on UN aircraft in the no-fly zone (which was imposed to keep Saddam from GASSING HIS OWN PEOPLE IN NORTHERN IRAQ) and the fact that Saddam had not allowed the inspectors to inspect anything in months.
If you went to the download section of SuSE's support center you would notice the SuSE KDE service which offers fresh SuSE RPM's of the latest versions of KDE.
http://www.suse.de/en/private/download/index.htm l
Go to the section titled 'LinuKS: SuSE Linux KDE Service'. Enjoy.
You've left out a lot here - including the cost of environmentals of setting up a room that can handle this (probably easily a million think about how much heat 1024 machines produces, and how much power they need), the services for cabling, wiring, racking, testing 1024 nodes, which probably easily runs many hundreds of thousands. Just the cost of cables alone runs in the thousands for this kind of project. (You do -not- want to cheap out on your cabling on a cluster...) The article doesn't say they are using gigabit, either. If they are using Myrinet, think $1000 per node for a Myrinet card (2 GB/s). Then think $50,000 for each 128 port Myrinet switch. Then think $60-70/meter for cable. Even if they are using gigE they probably are not using Cisco, Cisco is not used as commonly in performance networks like this one. More popular are Foundry & Extreme Networks.
Add in also that you have left out storage. Given that they have 2.1TB of memory on the compute nodes, its likely they have 10TB+ of usable storage, so assuming they are using RAID (seems a safe assumption) that means 15-20TB+ of physical storage capacity. High end RAID controllers & enclosures are expensive, as are 15000 rpm Ultra 320 hard disks. (Fiber channel isn't any cheaper, either...) If they want reliability at the minimum storage nodes & management nodes will need UPS's... ouch. I doubt this cluster is costing them under three million, and could be as much as five. And there's probably expenses that have slipped my mind...:)
Freespace 2 did right what Wing commander 3 onwards did wrong. The voice acting, writing and storyline were excellent and engaging, they created an enormous sense of tension. The fairly small video clips included in the briefing were also very good.
The in-mission voice acting was not as good as the briefings, but still adequate. What I'd like to see is a game with a much wider range of com-chatter so you aren't hearing the same in game chatter all the time. Even 10 different "I need help" phrases instead of 2 or 3 would be a big start, and its not like disk space is an issue these days.
The game dynamics are important, but so is the storyline/atmosphere in order to make a truly excellent game.
But just think, now they can include even more useless audio so you can get all the insightful commentary about how cameraman #3's use of crack-cocaine influenced the making of the movie.
Everyone who wanted to pirate Blizzard games already had the bnet code anyway. The only people who were hurt by this legislative crap was the Blizzard fans who were using the code to run their own servers to play their legitimately purchased games.
Oh, and people were playing Warcraft 3 beta early. The company lost... oh wait, the company didn't lost ANYTHING because of this other than building better anticipation for the actual release of the game. Cry me a river blizzard.
Another problem with that is that users who are forced to create complex passwords and change them regularly will simply resort to writing those passwords down somewhere. A little human engineering and boom, your system is cracked just as if they had used a simple password. The only way around this I can think of is using a SecurID type one time password system where the user needs to have a key fob with them to access the system...
Amen to that. I use gamecopyworld all the time, not because I copy games (I own all the games I play) but because the copy protection mechanisms piss me off. I own a 30 gig hard disk, why can't I play the games without the idiotic "insert CD 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6" etc. bullshit.
Basically copyprotection as it currently exists only inconveniences genuine purchasers of a product, which annoys me a lot. I also reinstalled Diablo II recently, which I bought, but found that though I still had my original cd key, Install CD and Cinematics CD, my "play cd" was missing, but I had a burned backup still. Of course a burned backup won't let you play the game so you need to crack it... and cracks for the most recent patches are hard to come by... Very annoying.
Also many cd-keys are distributed seperately from the game media. I don't keep the game cases or documentation generally, or it gets lost easily. I keep the game cd's in cd folders. When I can peel off the cd-key and stick it on the actual game-media, I do so, or use a magic marker to write it on the disc... but again, this stuff all gets cracked within days of the game being released, I don't see what this kind of copyprotection accomplishes other than annoying legitimate users!
Buy it. It will probably cost you less than $20 in a bargain bin, maybe only $10. It's an excellent game, probably one of the most underrated games from the year it came out.
What made Freespace 2 such a great game to me though was not really the engine - the graphics weren't overly impressive, even for when it was released. But the storyline, musical score, voice acting and well designed single player missions. The storyline was extremely engaging, and the voice acting during the briefing sequences is above every other game I have yet played. Admiral Petrarch SOUNDS LIKE AN ADMIRAL. Not like some programmer-geek trying to sound like an admiral. Same with all of your commanding officers. In-flight voice acting (other pilots) was only so-so. The musical score was similarly excellent and very mood setting. Although a fan made game would be great, I'd really like to see Volition be given a chance to make a third... But that looks unlikely from what I've read.:/
To me gameplay and story are way more important than flashy graphics. (Thoguh flashy graphics help naturally.:))
Both Mozilla and Galeon continue to have 2 stupid problems that really annoy me.
1) When I hit 'back' it doesn't take me to the part of the page I went forward from, but to the top of the page. This is -extremely- irritating when reading a long document. Galeon's tabbed web browsing somewhat helps the problem by letting me open links easily in a new tab, but this is still very annoying.
2) Both Moz and Galeon hang if they can't contact a DNS server, or if the DNS server takes a long time to perform the lookup. They unfreeze again, but this can be several minutes sometimes, this is another really annoying bug.
Konqueror has neither of these problems despite having only a fraction of the development time.
I wrote the RHCE 7.2 cert recently. My basic impression was, if you have hands on experience administering linux or another UNIX writing the RHCE will not be a problem. If you only took the in class material, and haven't tinkered on your own, you will likely get into deep trouble on this exam. Unlike a pure multiple choice exan, there is problem solving involved both in the debug and in the server setup portions of this exam. People who just crammed the material from the books will not do well on this test.
That being said, having been using linux about 6 years now, for a number of those as my primary desktop OS, I took the exam after basically sleeping through the 4 day "crash course" and got very close to perfect.
I was pleased that this exam was not overly focused on Redhats linux distribution. A few multiple choice questions were about RH specific tools, but even if you get these wrong you will still do fine on the cert. And in the debug and install portions they don't make you solve the problems any particular way. You are given a set of criteria and told to "do it" however you choose to make it happen.
There are coca-cola ads on the electronic billboards in blade runner as I recall. I think rumours of coca-cola going out of business are greatly exaggerated.:)
I used Galeon for quite a while, and I'll agree its got a lot of great features. A few quibbles, however. Every browser I have ever used under linux except Konqueror and Opera will hang if it can't do a dns lookup - until the lookup is completed or has failed. (If you mistyped a URL, your DNS is down etc this means a several minute wait.) This includes the latest version of galeon I tried up to 1.0.3. Of course this problem plagues mozilla, netscape navigator & communicator under linux as well. What gives? If a page isn't working, or my dns is down I should be able to hit 'stop' and expect it to stop and accept my input again instantly. Instead, the app stops painting and just sits there and hangs for several minutes. Usually I end up killing it so I can open up new instances and get on with my work. Every netscape derived browser seems to exhibit this behavior.
I really would think by now that there would be a way to fix this behavior. Anyone got any suggestions?
I remember hearing some years back that Intel was thinking of or had committed resources to make open source contributions to GCC for IA64. Does anyone have any more details / information about that?
Its only "semi" realtime (the game pauses to let you give orders, then there is a round as your units carry out the orders in realtime), but if you want a good strategy game try "COMBAT MISSION: BEYOND OVERLORD". (Do a search on it, they have a web site. In fact I don't think the game is available through retail outlets.) This game was designed by a retired general. I used to work for DoD and although I'm not military myself many of my friends were, and swear up and down that this is the best squad based strategy they have ever tried.
The graphics are nothing to write home about compared to modern games, but there is a lot of strategy involved if thats what your into.
Before giving up on fantasy entirely, try 'The Lions of Al-Rassan' or 'Tigana' by Guy Gavriel Kay. I also enjoyed 'Sailing to Sarantium' and 'Lord of Emperors', but they are much slower books, and so if you don't have some historical interest in the period their centered around (Byzantine empire) you may not find them all that engrossing.
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
Biggest problem, IMHO, is the plethora of different tools with every different distribution for administration, each of which seem to do some things well, and most things poorly. (Linuxconf showed potential, but I have yet to get it to work 100% of the time on either clean Mandrake 7.x or Redhat 7.x installs... I always end up having to edit the config files myself.) Some of these tools are usually also difficult to locate because I haven't found either distribution to have a good reference guide. Documentation tends to be oriented towards a total newcomer. That's fine, but I'm not a total newcomer, but nor am I a know-it-all-I-WROTE-this-software guru. A guide to system administration that documented all the adminning tools would help a lot of distributions.
Regards,
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
I haven't seen this mentioned yet. What about updates? I'm not about to shell out $15 to get a pre-built.deb of a handful of packages I want from a new version of the distribution. That would end up costing me as much as a license for Windows (take your pick as to which) if not more, especially given the 'development' status of a lot of good Gnome & KDE apps. I may run Mandrake 7, but I have packages from Mandrake 7.1 and 7.2 installed when I needed specific upgrades.
(Note how I don't mean package updates within the same version as in the/updates directory available for Red Hat and Mandrake and probably other distributions... They almost certainly have a mechanism for this. I mean upgrades as in packages that are updated between release versions.)
Yes, downloading the source of the packages I want and compiling it myself is still an option. But I have better things to do with my time. In short, why would I use this distribution when I can use others that allow me to download packages from newer releases of their distribution?
I don't contest their right to do what they want with their distribution, but, I can't see too many people going for this especially given the frequency of releases for most distributions I've seen.
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
Hmm. Electronic books. No printing fees. So, the stages are down to content creation, editing, layout, electronic distribution.
Ask any author besides Michael Crighton how much they get paid for their work. Diddly, for the most part. Editing and layout can be a reasonable amount of work/expense, but the fact of the matter is the actual printing press side of books is still a significant expense.
If these guys are planning on publishing books electronically, I don't suppose they were considering passing along some of the savings to the consumer/libraries? I mean, after all I'm not getting as much when I receive a bunch of bytes as when I receive a bound paper/hard back. With journals you have indexing/search capabilities, but that isn't much of a value-add for a novel. What's that, publishers are charging _more_ for electronic versions of books? For some reason sympathy for publishers is not exactly welling up inside me.
Publishers do render a real service both to authors and readers, I don't object to their being paid for it, but I don't see how the 'electronic revolution' is a big threat to them. When people check things out of the library, they still want to get something on paper. Unless libraries suddenly build their own printing presses their still going to have to buy these paper copies from publishers. The only exception to this is electronic journals, and these have been licensed per seat ever since they were invented.
You have no idea how much fun it is trying to complete a biology research project along with 2000 other undergrads and finding out the library has only enough licenses for thirty computers to access the electronic bio journals at once.:(
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
When selecting my new portable music device I gave minidiscs very careful consideration, and finally elected to go with an mp3 player. All of your points were valid, but there is one thing that made my decision for me: I hate having to spend hours to put together a custom disk. Now that all my CD's are ripped to mp3 I can make myself a custom playlist on my mp3 player in minutes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I am aware, this isn't possible with minidisc, you need to make recordings the old fashioned way. Sloooooow.
Also, if I'm on a trip chances are I'll have my laptop with me to serve as a base station for my mp3 player. Need new tunes? Just boot it up and upload new selections. I can have 4-5 gigs available that way, even if the player only holds 64 megs.
I also jog/run quite a bit, and I'm afraid I just don't trust mechanical media however buffered to work uninterrupted while being subjected to consistent jarring.
If none of these things bother you though, minidisc probably is the right way to go.
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
> First, it is not the PATENT that counts, it is
> the legal system behind it. It has always been
> true that it is easy to get a patent, the hard
> part is making it stand up in the courts. So
> when you parade the evil patents, you really
> should be looking at the damages.
And I would say this is fundamentally flawed, it instantly closes out small businesses and individuals who don't have the money for an extended court battle. Filed a bad patent? Only another well financed company can challenge it. I don't see how you can endorse a system which has to use the legal system as quality control. If the patents were properly evaluated when they were filed it would save a lot of money on lawyers and courts, and help make things a little easier for small businesses and entrepreuners. Furthermore, the chances of finding a judge who understands technology well enough that they wouldn't be bamboozled by a clever defence of a bad patent are not good.
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
Slashdot Mirror
Love for their OS? :) And here I thought it was just a sense of smug moral superiority to make up for some fundamental insecurity on the part of the linux/mac/amiga/whatever zealot. =)
I'm neither an American, nor do I support a lot of their foreign policy. But what a load of bullshit. :)
If Iraqi children are dying (and those numbers are very questionable, they are released by the Iraqi ministry of propoganda) then it is Saddam's fault. Instead of using his food for oil exchange to buy things his people need he's used it trying to sneak various items into his country to use to build more weapons.
Your comments re: Israel are just plain idiotic. France, Pakistan, India and lots of other countries have nuclear weapons and the US doesn't say anything about them either because its unlikely those countries will use those weapons against the US or her allies or provide them to terrorist groups.
Your comments about UN inspectors are also utter trash... the last few UN inspectors may have been pulled out prior to the US cruise missile strikes... but those strikes were caused by Iraqi attacks on UN aircraft in the no-fly zone (which was imposed to keep Saddam from GASSING HIS OWN PEOPLE IN NORTHERN IRAQ) and the fact that Saddam had not allowed the inspectors to inspect anything in months.
If you went to the download section of SuSE's support center you would notice the SuSE KDE service which offers fresh SuSE RPM's of the latest versions of KDE.
m l
http://www.suse.de/en/private/download/index.ht
Go to the section titled 'LinuKS: SuSE Linux KDE Service'. Enjoy.
You've left out a lot here - including the cost of environmentals of setting up a room that can handle this (probably easily a million think about how much heat 1024 machines produces, and how much power they need), the services for cabling, wiring, racking, testing 1024 nodes, which probably easily runs many hundreds of thousands. Just the cost of cables alone runs in the thousands for this kind of project. (You do -not- want to cheap out on your cabling on a cluster...) The article doesn't say they are using gigabit, either. If they are using Myrinet, think $1000 per node for a Myrinet card (2 GB/s). Then think $50,000 for each 128 port Myrinet switch. Then think $60-70/meter for cable. Even if they are using gigE they probably are not using Cisco, Cisco is not used as commonly in performance networks like this one. More popular are Foundry & Extreme Networks.
:)
Add in also that you have left out storage. Given that they have 2.1TB of memory on the compute nodes, its likely they have 10TB+ of usable storage, so assuming they are using RAID (seems a safe assumption) that means 15-20TB+ of physical storage capacity. High end RAID controllers & enclosures are expensive, as are 15000 rpm Ultra 320 hard disks. (Fiber channel isn't any cheaper, either...) If they want reliability at the minimum storage nodes & management nodes will need UPS's... ouch. I doubt this cluster is costing them under three million, and could be as much as five. And there's probably expenses that have slipped my mind...
Freespace 2 did right what Wing commander 3 onwards did wrong. The voice acting, writing and storyline were excellent and engaging, they created an enormous sense of tension. The fairly small video clips included in the briefing were also very good.
The in-mission voice acting was not as good as the briefings, but still adequate. What I'd like to see is a game with a much wider range of com-chatter so you aren't hearing the same in game chatter all the time. Even 10 different "I need help" phrases instead of 2 or 3 would be a big start, and its not like disk space is an issue these days.
The game dynamics are important, but so is the storyline/atmosphere in order to make a truly excellent game.
But just think, now they can include even more useless audio so you can get all the insightful commentary about how cameraman #3's use of crack-cocaine influenced the making of the movie.
Actually, they can only bill people from the province of Ontario. So if you are from out of province or the US, use the 407 all you want, its free.
The sad thing is I suspect most pet psychologists (and pet psychics) are doing quite well for themselves.
Bullshit.
Everyone who wanted to pirate Blizzard games already had the bnet code anyway. The only people who were hurt by this legislative crap was the Blizzard fans who were using the code to run their own servers to play their legitimately purchased games.
Oh, and people were playing Warcraft 3 beta early. The company lost... oh wait, the company didn't lost ANYTHING because of this other than building better anticipation for the actual release of the game. Cry me a river blizzard.
Another problem with that is that users who are forced to create complex passwords and change them regularly will simply resort to writing those passwords down somewhere. A little human engineering and boom, your system is cracked just as if they had used a simple password. The only way around this I can think of is using a SecurID type one time password system where the user needs to have a key fob with them to access the system...
Amen to that. I use gamecopyworld all the time, not because I copy games (I own all the games I play) but because the copy protection mechanisms piss me off. I own a 30 gig hard disk, why can't I play the games without the idiotic "insert CD 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6" etc. bullshit.
Basically copyprotection as it currently exists only inconveniences genuine purchasers of a product, which annoys me a lot. I also reinstalled Diablo II recently, which I bought, but found that though I still had my original cd key, Install CD and Cinematics CD, my "play cd" was missing, but I had a burned backup still. Of course a burned backup won't let you play the game so you need to crack it... and cracks for the most recent patches are hard to come by... Very annoying.
Also many cd-keys are distributed seperately from the game media. I don't keep the game cases or documentation generally, or it gets lost easily. I keep the game cd's in cd folders. When I can peel off the cd-key and stick it on the actual game-media, I do so, or use a magic marker to write it on the disc... but again, this stuff all gets cracked within days of the game being released, I don't see what this kind of copyprotection accomplishes other than annoying legitimate users!
Buy it. It will probably cost you less than $20 in a bargain bin, maybe only $10. It's an excellent game, probably one of the most underrated games from the year it came out.
What made Freespace 2 such a great game to me though was not really the engine - the graphics weren't overly impressive, even for when it was released. But the storyline, musical score, voice acting and well designed single player missions. The storyline was extremely engaging, and the voice acting during the briefing sequences is above every other game I have yet played. Admiral Petrarch SOUNDS LIKE AN ADMIRAL. Not like some programmer-geek trying to sound like an admiral. Same with all of your commanding officers. In-flight voice acting (other pilots) was only so-so. The musical score was similarly excellent and very mood setting. Although a fan made game would be great, I'd really like to see Volition be given a chance to make a third... But that looks unlikely from what I've read. :/
:))
To me gameplay and story are way more important than flashy graphics. (Thoguh flashy graphics help naturally.
Both Mozilla and Galeon continue to have 2 stupid problems that really annoy me.
1) When I hit 'back' it doesn't take me to the part of the page I went forward from, but to the top of the page. This is -extremely- irritating when reading a long document. Galeon's tabbed web browsing somewhat helps the problem by letting me open links easily in a new tab, but this is still very annoying.
2) Both Moz and Galeon hang if they can't contact a DNS server, or if the DNS server takes a long time to perform the lookup. They unfreeze again, but this can be several minutes sometimes, this is another really annoying bug.
Konqueror has neither of these problems despite having only a fraction of the development time.
I wrote the RHCE 7.2 cert recently. My basic impression was, if you have hands on experience administering linux or another UNIX writing the RHCE will not be a problem. If you only took the in class material, and haven't tinkered on your own, you will likely get into deep trouble on this exam. Unlike a pure multiple choice exan, there is problem solving involved both in the debug and in the server setup portions of this exam. People who just crammed the material from the books will not do well on this test.
That being said, having been using linux about 6 years now, for a number of those as my primary desktop OS, I took the exam after basically sleeping through the 4 day "crash course" and got very close to perfect.
I was pleased that this exam was not overly focused on Redhats linux distribution. A few multiple choice questions were about RH specific tools, but even if you get these wrong you will still do fine on the cert. And in the debug and install portions they don't make you solve the problems any particular way. You are given a set of criteria and told to "do it" however you choose to make it happen.
YMMV.
There are coca-cola ads on the electronic billboards in blade runner as I recall. I think rumours of coca-cola going out of business are greatly exaggerated. :)
I used Galeon for quite a while, and I'll agree its got a lot of great features. A few quibbles, however. Every browser I have ever used under linux except Konqueror and Opera will hang if it can't do a dns lookup - until the lookup is completed or has failed. (If you mistyped a URL, your DNS is down etc this means a several minute wait.) This includes the latest version of galeon I tried up to 1.0.3. Of course this problem plagues mozilla, netscape navigator & communicator under linux as well. What gives? If a page isn't working, or my dns is down I should be able to hit 'stop' and expect it to stop and accept my input again instantly. Instead, the app stops painting and just sits there and hangs for several minutes. Usually I end up killing it so I can open up new instances and get on with my work. Every netscape derived browser seems to exhibit this behavior.
I really would think by now that there would be a way to fix this behavior. Anyone got any suggestions?
I remember hearing some years back that Intel was thinking of or had committed resources to make open source contributions to GCC for IA64. Does anyone have any more details / information about that?
Its only "semi" realtime (the game pauses to let you give orders, then there is a round as your units carry out the orders in realtime), but if you want a good strategy game try "COMBAT MISSION: BEYOND OVERLORD". (Do a search on it, they have a web site. In fact I don't think the game is available through retail outlets.) This game was designed by a retired general. I used to work for DoD and although I'm not military myself many of my friends were, and swear up and down that this is the best squad based strategy they have ever tried.
The graphics are nothing to write home about compared to modern games, but there is a lot of strategy involved if thats what your into.
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
(Note how I don't mean package updates within the same version as in the
Yes, downloading the source of the packages I want and compiling it myself is still an option. But I have better things to do with my time. In short, why would I use this distribution when I can use others that allow me to download packages from newer releases of their distribution?
I don't contest their right to do what they want with their distribution, but, I can't see too many people going for this especially given the frequency of releases for most distributions I've seen.
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
Ask any author besides Michael Crighton how much they get paid for their work. Diddly, for the most part. Editing and layout can be a reasonable amount of work/expense, but the fact of the matter is the actual printing press side of books is still a significant expense.
If these guys are planning on publishing books electronically, I don't suppose they were considering passing along some of the savings to the consumer/libraries? I mean, after all I'm not getting as much when I receive a bunch of bytes as when I receive a bound paper/hard back. With journals you have indexing/search capabilities, but that isn't much of a value-add for a novel. What's that, publishers are charging _more_ for electronic versions of books? For some reason sympathy for publishers is not exactly welling up inside me.
Publishers do render a real service both to authors and readers, I don't object to their being paid for it, but I don't see how the 'electronic revolution' is a big threat to them. When people check things out of the library, they still want to get something on paper. Unless libraries suddenly build their own printing presses their still going to have to buy these paper copies from publishers. The only exception to this is electronic journals, and these have been licensed per seat ever since they were invented.
You have no idea how much fun it is trying to complete a biology research project along with 2000 other undergrads and finding out the library has only enough licenses for thirty computers to access the electronic bio journals at once.
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
Also, if I'm on a trip chances are I'll have my laptop with me to serve as a base station for my mp3 player. Need new tunes? Just boot it up and upload new selections. I can have 4-5 gigs available that way, even if the player only holds 64 megs.
I also jog/run quite a bit, and I'm afraid I just don't trust mechanical media however buffered to work uninterrupted while being subjected to consistent jarring.
If none of these things bother you though, minidisc probably is the right way to go.
Obasan
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
> the legal system behind it. It has always been
> true that it is easy to get a patent, the hard
> part is making it stand up in the courts. So
> when you parade the evil patents, you really
> should be looking at the damages.
And I would say this is fundamentally flawed, it instantly closes out small businesses and individuals who don't have the money for an extended court battle. Filed a bad patent? Only another well financed company can challenge it. I don't see how you can endorse a system which has to use the legal system as quality control. If the patents were properly evaluated when they were filed it would save a lot of money on lawyers and courts, and help make things a little easier for small businesses and entrepreuners. Furthermore, the chances of finding a judge who understands technology well enough that they wouldn't be bamboozled by a clever defence of a bad patent are not good.
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?