The main excuse that corporations give for accumulating large stocks of frivolous patents (software or otherwise) is "We'd never sue someone over these patents unless they sued us first." On the scale of individual companies, this argument is morally defensible, if true. For company X to accumulate patents for the sole purpose of countersuits actually probably reduces the number of frivolous lawsuits against them.
But clearly, on a general scale, the assumption is that any competitor with enough money to sue company X over patent infringement has already infringed company X's patents. In other words, the idea is to make it impossible to do business without breaking the law. This is clearly stupid even for the big corps, and unfair to the small ones/ open source projects/ and individuals.
It does bring up a good idea though. Have some sort of GPL for patents. "You can use this patent freely as long as you never sue anyone for patent infringement." If corps really are accumulating patents just for countersuits, they shouldn't hesitate to put them all under such a license, assuming it was well-written enough to work.
all right, we're way off topic here, but you don't have an email address posted, so I can't take it off line.
You collect the dry ice, and put it (as gaseous CO2) into depleted oil wells. Not a mine shaft. Hopefully, it stays down there.
Yes, LN2 has crappy energy density. The negative emissions, though, is a bonus that no other fuel technology has. Non-flammability is another bonus. And (like methanol or H2 fuel cells) it beats the hell out of the currently hyped battery powered vehicles which take forever to refuel and need replacement of pollution-causing batteries every few years.
Anyway, I just like the fantasy of LN2 (or actually, liquified air - it's cheaper if you don't separate the oxygen) cars. Imagine LA's freeways naturally air-conditioned with headily fresh-smelling CO2-depleted air... and, as I said, as a side benefit the computer in your car could pack in the gigahertz.
Writing more lines of code doesn't make you a better programmer. It does make you a different programmer. This article doesn't scratch the surface in terms of what the actual differences are between US and non-US programmers. I was wondering if anyone with direct experience could talk about what those differences are, and how they lead to different numbers in LoC?
"Conservative groups [according to the CRC] tend to be those groups with a direct commitment to a conservative agenda. Liberal groups tend to be all those that seek to use government in any way to pursue a goal or group interest. Thus, the CRC includes among liberals all major environmental groups (including the Nature Conservancy), all major representatives of minority groups (not only African American and Hispanic, but Jewish and Asian American), the League of Women Voters, and, most intrestingly, several business groups as well (Council on Foreign Relations, Committee on Economic Development, the Foreign Policy Association, Trilateral Commission, National Alliance of Business). p111
"To put it bluntly, I believe they decide what their answer is and then try to torque their responses to meet their very extreme bias. I mean, they take, in our particular situation, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent of our total dollar grants annually and then on that basis proceed to determine by their litmus test and their measurement tool whether you're right, moderate, left of center, etc. It's some of the lousiest junk I've seen anyone put out" (corporate giving officer on the CRC) p. 118
The CRC takes a manichean view... American politics [to them] is a battle between pro-business and anti-business forces... there is little middle ground" p 121
The Capital Research Center is a right-wing think tank whose main activity has been to produce yearly "report cards" on charities and to "alert" corporate executives that their corporate giving programs give money to charitable groups with anti-capitalist agendas. Most corporate giving officers report that even the executives who supervise them treat the CRC as a joke. The CRC slams even the most white-bread charities as being anti-capitalist for doing things like lobbying for government funding for social programs or for laws that would restrict the rights of landowners. They have become a joke even in the far-from-left-wing halls of corporate charity, and we should treat them as no less than a joke on Slashdot. Give this article the monty-python foot icon it deserves!
The source of the above info is "Looking Good and Doing Good : Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Power" by Jerome L. Himmelstein. Since I'm repeating this from memory, any inaccuracies are my own doing.
I heard a rumor a full year ago that Handykey was working on a new version of the twiddler optimized for PDA's such as PalmPilot. Currently, I believe that there are power supply issues, and the "mouse" functionality is not especially useful. The current model is also somewhat bigger than it needs to be - taking a centimeter off of length would be significant for PDA users. Has anyone heard more about such rumors?
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The main excuse that corporations give for accumulating large stocks of frivolous patents (software or otherwise) is "We'd never sue someone over these patents unless they sued us first." On the scale of individual companies, this argument is morally defensible, if true. For company X to accumulate patents for the sole purpose of countersuits actually probably reduces the number of frivolous lawsuits against them.
But clearly, on a general scale, the assumption is that any competitor with enough money to sue company X over patent infringement has already infringed company X's patents. In other words, the idea is to make it impossible to do business without breaking the law. This is clearly stupid even for the big corps, and unfair to the small ones/ open source projects/ and individuals.
It does bring up a good idea though. Have some sort of GPL for patents. "You can use this patent freely as long as you never sue anyone for patent infringement." If corps really are accumulating patents just for countersuits, they shouldn't hesitate to put them all under such a license, assuming it was well-written enough to work.
all right, we're way off topic here, but you don't have an email address posted, so I can't take it off line.
You collect the dry ice, and put it (as gaseous CO2) into depleted oil wells. Not a mine shaft. Hopefully, it stays down there.
Yes, LN2 has crappy energy density. The negative emissions, though, is a bonus that no other fuel technology has. Non-flammability is another bonus. And (like methanol or H2 fuel cells) it beats the hell out of the currently hyped battery powered vehicles which take forever to refuel and need replacement of pollution-causing batteries every few years.
Anyway, I just like the fantasy of LN2 (or actually, liquified air - it's cheaper if you don't separate the oxygen) cars. Imagine LA's freeways naturally air-conditioned with headily fresh-smelling CO2-depleted air... and, as I said, as a side benefit the computer in your car could pack in the gigahertz.
... that when our cars all run on liquid nitrogen, that it will be cheaper to put a fast computer in your car than in your house?
Writing more lines of code doesn't make you a better programmer. It does make you a different programmer. This article doesn't scratch the surface in terms of what the actual differences are between US and non-US programmers. I was wondering if anyone with direct experience could talk about what those differences are, and how they lead to different numbers in LoC?
"Conservative groups [according to the CRC] tend to be those groups with a direct commitment to a conservative agenda. Liberal groups tend to be all those that seek to use government in any way to pursue a goal or group interest. Thus, the CRC includes among liberals all major environmental groups (including the Nature Conservancy), all major representatives of minority groups (not only African American and Hispanic, but Jewish and Asian American), the League of Women Voters, and, most intrestingly, several business groups as well (Council on Foreign Relations, Committee on Economic Development, the Foreign Policy Association, Trilateral Commission, National Alliance of Business). p111
"To put it bluntly, I believe they decide what their answer is and then try to torque their responses to meet their very extreme bias. I mean, they take, in our particular situation, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent of our total dollar grants annually and then on that basis proceed to determine by their litmus test and their measurement tool whether you're right, moderate, left of center, etc. It's some of the lousiest junk I've seen anyone put out" (corporate giving officer on the CRC) p. 118
The CRC takes a manichean view... American politics [to them] is a battle between pro-business and anti-business forces... there is little middle ground"
p 121
The Capital Research Center is a right-wing think tank whose main activity has been to produce yearly "report cards" on charities and to "alert" corporate executives that their corporate giving programs give money to charitable groups with anti-capitalist agendas. Most corporate giving officers report that even the executives who supervise them treat the CRC as a joke. The CRC slams even the most white-bread charities as being anti-capitalist for doing things like lobbying for government funding for social programs or for laws that would restrict the rights of landowners. They have become a joke even in the far-from-left-wing halls of corporate charity, and we should treat them as no less than a joke on Slashdot. Give this article the monty-python foot icon it deserves!
The source of the above info is
"Looking Good and Doing Good : Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Power" by Jerome L. Himmelstein. Since I'm repeating this from memory, any inaccuracies are my own doing.
I heard a rumor a full year ago that Handykey was working on a new version of the twiddler optimized for PDA's such as PalmPilot. Currently, I believe that there are power supply issues, and the "mouse" functionality is not especially useful. The current model is also somewhat bigger than it needs to be - taking a centimeter off of length would be significant for PDA users. Has anyone heard more about such rumors?