Lawyers do not decide when to file suit. Companies do. Lawyers do not lose $29M when they lose a case. Companies do. Lawyers do not make or change laws. The government does, especially when paid large sums of money from corporate lobbyists. It will be those corporations that decide when enough's enough. Not the lawyers.
The bottom line is that this is in no way a good thing for anybody
I disagree. It serves as a message that "he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword". If companies like eBay keep getting slapped like this, if the IP wars become too absurd, then maybe the message will get across that our IP system must change. And maybe real change will happen. As long as big and powerful companies can do all the slapping without getting slapped themselves just as hard, nothing will change.
Seems like this fool was trying to go after EBay by filing patents that were VERY similar to what EBay had already been doing.
Actually, this is not the case. If eBay could have shown that the ideas in the patent were significantly similar to their own IP work at the time the patent was first under development, they could have invalidated the patent and won the case. The fact that they failed to do so shows that Woolston's patent development was begun prior to anything eBay had developed along those lines, and was in fact original work.
I'm not defending him - I like using the "Buy It Now" feature of eBay and want it to stay. But them's the rules.
No, it's not bad news. Ebay is known for trouncing on people who claim IP infringement, yet slapping others for using "their" IP. They are an example of all that is evil with regard to corporate America and intellectual property laws. They may not be as bad as Microsoft or others in this regard, but that's probably because they're not quite as broad or powerful yet.
They deserve this, and maybe it will teach them to play nice in the future.
Though I'm sure their "new approach" will still contain a fair measure of FUD, actually hearing factual arguments from MS will be a nice change of pace. I respect arguments based on fact, even if I disagree with them.
Yes, this is the next logical step. If China can produce or acquire the components for a full PC on the cheap, they'll be a major force in the computer industry. I agree that people will want to have non-DRM systems (me for one!), but what if your favorite application will only run on a DRM-crippled PC? I, for example, am enough of a game addict that if the games I wanted to play required DRM to run, I'd probably have both a DRM and non-DRM PC.:)
Newegg has Pentium 3.2 for $699 and AMD 2100+ for $65.
It's just an example. Don't take my numbers too literally. If you really want to, then howz about 1/100th the price instead of 1/10th? Don't miss the forest for the trees.
The only problem is that these "dragon chips" are about equivilent to your average pentium 2, they can't hold a candle to anything coming out of the united states.
For now, that is. China has massive potential, and some day in the not too distant future the US CPU industry could be eating their dust. This event is not to be shrugged off lightly. It should be viewed as a call to arms by US chip developers. If they instead fall asleep at the wheel, things could end up quite ugly for them.
I am talking about raw performance here, BTW. The Chinese could some day produce chips that are faster than chips designed by the US. But that's not necessarily what's required for the Chinese to win. If they produce a chip with a very compelling price/performance ratio, that could also have a dramatic effect. Imagine a CPU with, as a theoretical example, half the speed of a top of the line Intel CPU, but for one tenth the price. The war might well be lost simply on this basis.
There's no computer language in the sense that would correspond to a natural (human) language.
True enough. I didn't say I thought this particular model could be applied. But the general approach seems like a step in the right direction. I think a computer being able to truly interpret and act upon a human language is a long way off. If and when it happens, it won't be due to people typing in a billion possibilities, but rather through some "learning" system.
Do you really want you computer using a statistical approach to trying to understand what you're telling it to rm?
Sure, why not? If I tell you what files I want to remove, it's not deterministic that you'll understand and delete the correct files. But I'd probably trust you to do it anyway.
I do not believe that computers learning behaviors based on statistics will yield results any less problematic than computers now yield. I just think the problems will be different in nature.
I believe that using a statistical approach like this is a step in the right direction. Manually building sets of rules, dictionaries, etc., is a waste of
time and hard to do. And manuall-built systems become stale as languages evolve, unless a lot of continuing work is done.
For me the holy grail is when I can converse with a computer meaningfully. I believe a similar approach will be required for the computer to "understand" language, and to be able to formulate a coherent and appropriate response.
I almost *always* opt to do it right the first time, regardless of the consequences. If you don't, nobody is going to give you the time to redo it correctly. And they're going to ream you for not doing it right the first time even though they didn't want to give you the time and resources to do it in the first place. PHBs are, by definition, incapable of understanding the simple mathematics of the situation: pay a little now, or pay a lot more later. I do my best to quote "quick and dirty" development times that are sufficient for me to actually do it right, and I usually get away with it. Those instances where I can't get the time, I either purposefully underquote the time estimate, knowing full well the project's going to slip, or work overtime to do it right in "Q&D time". I don't mind being underhanded about it. I'd rather do the job right or not at all than do it crappy, and often underhanded tactics are the only way to deal with PHBs.
You missed the point. Nobody would hang a thumbnail on the wall instead of a real print. And nobody would stock their music collection with 30 second clips instead of full length songs. In both cases, the sample isn't a good substitute for the real thing, and the presumpion is then that the customer must buy the real thing instead to enjoy the product.
What's at issue is what is important for a person's perception of pictures versus audio. With a picture, size is important. If it's small, it's very hard to blow up and use commercially with any level of success. Audio is different. It might seem that a low bitrate is the equivalent, but that's not exactly so. People can tolerate music at low bitrates, and are able to hear lyrics and melody despite a massive reduction in the quality of an audio recording. If people can listen to music on a tinny AM radio and be satisfied (it was good enough for most people for decades), then severely-low bitrate digital audio won't be sufficient reduction in quality to be considered fair use. That's why digital audio samples are chopped at 30 seconds.
Oh, and BTW, said clips are also low quality just to be sure.:)
Hopefully the RIAA wont object to me distributing thumbnails of music as MP3's
Actually, music "thumbnails" are legal. How do you think retail sites such as Amazon offer 30-second song clips? The wisdom in the business is that 30 second clips (this is the magic number for some reason) are perfectly legal to allow people to access without payment. However, it may be that it has to be done in the context of music sales. Simply putting a (preferably deep) link to a retail site on a web page bearing song clips is probably good enough.
It can't be hydrogen gas trapped beneath the polar caps. Molecules don't get much smaller or lighter than H2, and it surely would have wormed its way through any polar layer and into the atmosphere by now. And I can't imagine that it would be cold enough for the hydrogen to be in liquid form, so that pretty much leaves water as the most likely candidate.
Note that IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), so no flames please for anything I might have overlooked.
And if your house is on fire, the first thing you should do is leave; call for help from somewhere else.
Our local fire dept. representative tells me that you are supposed to dial 911 first thing, then leave. Just dial the number and drop the phone. The 911 dispatcher is supposed to give priority to calls where the person on the other end does not respond after calling. And they don't have to ask for your location, it's already on their screen. This will get you the fastest response possible, and does not delay your exit more than a few seconds. Of course, if you can't find the phone, you might want to go to plan B and just leave.
I was somewhat involved with Napster back in its heyday. I once visited their office, and was introduced to a new employee who came straight out of Orrin Hatch's office. He used to be an assistant of some sort to Hatch, and was clearly hired by Napster because he could serve as a lobbyist of sorts with some very direct Washington contacts. The funny thing is, as soon as they hired this guy, Hatch came out in strong support of Napster and defended them for a time.
I was amazed, but not surprised. That's not the sort of position one would have expected from the likes of Orrin Hatch, but clearly is ex-assistant was having significant influence on him in Napster's favor. How ironic, yet also unsurprising, that in the wake of Napster's demise, Hatch has pretty much gone 180 degrees from his previous stance.
Sounds to me like you are comparing RESIDENTIAL cable to BUSINESS DSL. In which case your comparison holds true. Perhaps you should look into the costs of residential DSL before posting utter nonsense.
Hmm, seems like you've got your asshole filter turned off. Try resetting it before posting further trollish defecation. As I noted in my post, if I want fixed IP addresses (which is only offered with business class service), the cost is $400 for 1.5 megabit. If you don't want fixed IP addresses (i.e. residential service), it's $90/month. That's as cheap as it gets around here.
Second If you belived the salesman that iDSL was infact DSL you are doubly confused. iDSL is really nothing more than rebranded ISDN. So comparing ISDN to cable as if it were DSL is also utter nonsense.
Sounds like you're assuming that because I didn't actually define iDSL in my post that I don't know what it is. Did you not notice my statement that I can now get *real* DSL, as opposed to the hokey iDSL I've had to put up with for years? That should have been your hint. But, if it will make you feel better: iDSL is simply a repackaging of ISDN, binding together the two 64kbit B channels (bearer channels) and the one 16kbit D channel (delta channel) for a grand total of 144kbit throughput. IDSL is generally used by people like me who can't get real DSL, and is marketed similarly to DSL because, from the user's standpoint, it looks pretty much the same, albeit very slow.
[...spew omitted...] Oh and while I am on it. Cable isn't giving you a fixed IP for $42/month either [...further spew omitted...]
Please read my posting again before emitting any further spew.
Did I ever say that I was getting fixed IP addresses with my cable service? Why the hell do you think I maintain two internet connections if I could get a fixed IP address with cable? I keep the slow iDSL because I run SMTP/DNS/other services off of it. Can't do that without fixed IP addresses. But it's too damn slow for good web surfing, streaming media, games, etc., which is why I have the cable. I would dearly love to have only one internet connection that was fast, cheap, and offered fixed IP addresses. No such luck, for now.
I think my posting well enough described the hassle one has to go through in my area to have fixed IP addresses and a nice fast connection at the same time without going totally bankrupt, and that cable isn't as horrible as some posters have indicated. I apologize (sarcasm) if my posting wasn't sufficently pedantic for you. I promise to be more precise in the future if you promise to keep your asshole post filter enabled when replying to people who are only trying to engage in reasonable discussion.
I have both cable and DSL. The cable costs $42/month and yields real throughput of up to 250k *bytes* per second. The DSL costs $120/month and comes with 5 IP addresses, at a whopping 144k *bits* per second. I live about 2000 feet too far away from the CO for real DSL, and could originally only get iDSL. I'm told I can finally get real DSL now, and it would only cost me $400/month for 1.5 megabit (about 190k bytes per second). If I want to give up having fixed IP addresses, I'd only have to pay $90/month for 1.5 megabit. What a deal! Twice as expensive as cable with no fixed IP addresses or 10 times as expensive with fixed IP.
Because of this, almost everyone in my area has cable, and the throughput seems not to suffer. Of course, some day it might start to suck, and since there's no SLA, we'd have to live with it. But even then it will probably always beat my DSL line, hands down.
When deciding whether to use enterprise vs. consumer Red Hat, I have to ask myself
if I mind rolling over to a new version of Red Hat *every year*. The answer is usually yes. Since they apparently will not be supporting a particular consumer product for more than a year at a pop, using the consumer version may require frequent and burdensome updating of the OS. The only options are:
Use a consumer Red Had product and reinstall all of your systems every year.
Don't care about updates and simply live with bugs and security holes.
Monitor the security/bug lists and build custom patches yourself (or find a third party to do it for you).
Use a Red Hat enterprise product.
Don't use Red Hat at all.
The most palatable option for our business has so far been option 5, mainly due to the cost and hassle of self-maintenance or using an enterprise product. Not to mention that Linux in general is not mature enough in certain areas that are important to our business. Our only viable option to date has been other Unix/Unix-like products.
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Lawyers do not decide when to file suit. Companies do. Lawyers do not lose $29M when they lose a case. Companies do. Lawyers do not make or change laws. The government does, especially when paid large sums of money from corporate lobbyists. It will be those corporations that decide when enough's enough. Not the lawyers.
The bottom line is that this is in no way a good thing for anybody
I disagree. It serves as a message that "he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword". If companies like eBay keep getting slapped like this, if the IP wars become too absurd, then maybe the message will get across that our IP system must change. And maybe real change will happen. As long as big and powerful companies can do all the slapping without getting slapped themselves just as hard, nothing will change.
Seems like this fool was trying to go after EBay by filing patents that were VERY similar to what EBay had already been doing.
Actually, this is not the case. If eBay could have shown that the ideas in the patent were significantly similar to their own IP work at the time the patent was first under development, they could have invalidated the patent and won the case. The fact that they failed to do so shows that Woolston's patent development was begun prior to anything eBay had developed along those lines, and was in fact original work.
I'm not defending him - I like using the "Buy It Now" feature of eBay and want it to stay. But them's the rules.
This is very bad news
No, it's not bad news. Ebay is known for trouncing on people who claim IP infringement, yet slapping others for using "their" IP. They are an example of all that is evil with regard to corporate America and intellectual property laws. They may not be as bad as Microsoft or others in this regard, but that's probably because they're not quite as broad or powerful yet.
They deserve this, and maybe it will teach them to play nice in the future.
Though I'm sure their "new approach" will still contain a fair measure of FUD, actually hearing factual arguments from MS will be a nice change of pace. I respect arguments based on fact, even if I disagree with them.
...if not outright economic terrorism. SCO should be dealt with accordingly.
Yes, this is the next logical step. If China can produce or acquire the components for a full PC on the cheap, they'll be a major force in the computer industry. I agree that people will want to have non-DRM systems (me for one!), but what if your favorite application will only run on a DRM-crippled PC? I, for example, am enough of a game addict that if the games I wanted to play required DRM to run, I'd probably have both a DRM and non-DRM PC. :)
Newegg has Pentium 3.2 for $699 and AMD 2100+ for $65.
It's just an example. Don't take my numbers too literally. If you really want to, then howz about 1/100th the price instead of 1/10th? Don't miss the forest for the trees.
The only problem is that these "dragon chips" are about equivilent to your average pentium 2, they can't hold a candle to anything coming out of the united states.
For now, that is. China has massive potential, and some day in the not too distant future the US CPU industry could be eating their dust. This event is not to be shrugged off lightly. It should be viewed as a call to arms by US chip developers. If they instead fall asleep at the wheel, things could end up quite ugly for them.
I am talking about raw performance here, BTW. The Chinese could some day produce chips that are faster than chips designed by the US. But that's not necessarily what's required for the Chinese to win. If they produce a chip with a very compelling price/performance ratio, that could also have a dramatic effect. Imagine a CPU with, as a theoretical example, half the speed of a top of the line Intel CPU, but for one tenth the price. The war might well be lost simply on this basis.
There's no computer language in the sense that would correspond to a natural (human) language.
True enough. I didn't say I thought this particular model could be applied. But the general approach seems like a step in the right direction. I think a computer being able to truly interpret and act upon a human language is a long way off. If and when it happens, it won't be due to people typing in a billion possibilities, but rather through some "learning" system.
Do you really want you computer using a statistical approach to trying to understand what you're telling it to rm?
Sure, why not? If I tell you what files I want to remove, it's not deterministic that you'll understand and delete the correct files. But I'd probably trust you to do it anyway.
I do not believe that computers learning behaviors based on statistics will yield results any less problematic than computers now yield. I just think the problems will be different in nature.
I believe that using a statistical approach like this is a step in the right direction. Manually building sets of rules, dictionaries, etc., is a waste of time and hard to do. And manuall-built systems become stale as languages evolve, unless a lot of continuing work is done.
For me the holy grail is when I can converse with a computer meaningfully. I believe a similar approach will be required for the computer to "understand" language, and to be able to formulate a coherent and appropriate response.
I almost *always* opt to do it right the first time, regardless of the consequences. If you don't, nobody is going to give you the time to redo it correctly. And they're going to ream you for not doing it right the first time even though they didn't want to give you the time and resources to do it in the first place. PHBs are, by definition, incapable of understanding the simple mathematics of the situation: pay a little now, or pay a lot more later. I do my best to quote "quick and dirty" development times that are sufficient for me to actually do it right, and I usually get away with it. Those instances where I can't get the time, I either purposefully underquote the time estimate, knowing full well the project's going to slip, or work overtime to do it right in "Q&D time". I don't mind being underhanded about it. I'd rather do the job right or not at all than do it crappy, and often underhanded tactics are the only way to deal with PHBs.
You missed the point. Nobody would hang a thumbnail on the wall instead of a real print. And nobody would stock their music collection with 30 second clips instead of full length songs. In both cases, the sample isn't a good substitute for the real thing, and the presumpion is then that the customer must buy the real thing instead to enjoy the product.
What's at issue is what is important for a person's perception of pictures versus audio. With a picture, size is important. If it's small, it's very hard to blow up and use commercially with any level of success. Audio is different. It might seem that a low bitrate is the equivalent, but that's not exactly so. People can tolerate music at low bitrates, and are able to hear lyrics and melody despite a massive reduction in the quality of an audio recording. If people can listen to music on a tinny AM radio and be satisfied (it was good enough for most people for decades), then severely-low bitrate digital audio won't be sufficient reduction in quality to be considered fair use. That's why digital audio samples are chopped at 30 seconds.
:)
Oh, and BTW, said clips are also low quality just to be sure.
Hopefully the RIAA wont object to me distributing thumbnails of music as MP3's
Actually, music "thumbnails" are legal. How do you think retail sites such as Amazon offer 30-second song clips? The wisdom in the business is that 30 second clips (this is the magic number for some reason) are perfectly legal to allow people to access without payment. However, it may be that it has to be done in the context of music sales. Simply putting a (preferably deep) link to a retail site on a web page bearing song clips is probably good enough.
It seems a bit recursive to make ASCII characters out of ASCII characters.
It can't be hydrogen gas trapped beneath the polar caps. Molecules don't get much smaller or lighter than H2, and it surely would have wormed its way through any polar layer and into the atmosphere by now. And I can't imagine that it would be cold enough for the hydrogen to be in liquid form, so that pretty much leaves water as the most likely candidate.
Note that IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist), so no flames please for anything I might have overlooked.
No prob, I've had more than my share of days too.
And if your house is on fire, the first thing you should do is leave; call for help from somewhere else.
Our local fire dept. representative tells me that you are supposed to dial 911 first thing, then leave. Just dial the number and drop the phone. The 911 dispatcher is supposed to give priority to calls where the person on the other end does not respond after calling. And they don't have to ask for your location, it's already on their screen. This will get you the fastest response possible, and does not delay your exit more than a few seconds. Of course, if you can't find the phone, you might want to go to plan B and just leave.
I was somewhat involved with Napster back in its heyday. I once visited their office, and was introduced to a new employee who came straight out of Orrin Hatch's office. He used to be an assistant of some sort to Hatch, and was clearly hired by Napster because he could serve as a lobbyist of sorts with some very direct Washington contacts. The funny thing is, as soon as they hired this guy, Hatch came out in strong support of Napster and defended them for a time.
I was amazed, but not surprised. That's not the sort of position one would have expected from the likes of Orrin Hatch, but clearly is ex-assistant was having significant influence on him in Napster's favor. How ironic, yet also unsurprising, that in the wake of Napster's demise, Hatch has pretty much gone 180 degrees from his previous stance.
Sounds to me like you are comparing RESIDENTIAL cable to BUSINESS DSL. In which case your comparison holds true. Perhaps you should look into the costs of residential DSL before posting utter nonsense.
Hmm, seems like you've got your asshole filter turned off. Try resetting it before posting further trollish defecation. As I noted in my post, if I want fixed IP addresses (which is only offered with business class service), the cost is $400 for 1.5 megabit. If you don't want fixed IP addresses (i.e. residential service), it's $90/month. That's as cheap as it gets around here.
Second If you belived the salesman that iDSL was infact DSL you are doubly confused. iDSL is really nothing more than rebranded ISDN. So comparing ISDN to cable as if it were DSL is also utter nonsense.
Sounds like you're assuming that because I didn't actually define iDSL in my post that I don't know what it is. Did you not notice my statement that I can now get *real* DSL, as opposed to the hokey iDSL I've had to put up with for years? That should have been your hint. But, if it will make you feel better: iDSL is simply a repackaging of ISDN, binding together the two 64kbit B channels (bearer channels) and the one 16kbit D channel (delta channel) for a grand total of 144kbit throughput. IDSL is generally used by people like me who can't get real DSL, and is marketed similarly to DSL because, from the user's standpoint, it looks pretty much the same, albeit very slow.
[...spew omitted...] Oh and while I am on it. Cable isn't giving you a fixed IP for $42/month either [...further spew omitted...]
Please read my posting again before emitting any further spew. Did I ever say that I was getting fixed IP addresses with my cable service? Why the hell do you think I maintain two internet connections if I could get a fixed IP address with cable? I keep the slow iDSL because I run SMTP/DNS/other services off of it. Can't do that without fixed IP addresses. But it's too damn slow for good web surfing, streaming media, games, etc., which is why I have the cable. I would dearly love to have only one internet connection that was fast, cheap, and offered fixed IP addresses. No such luck, for now.
I think my posting well enough described the hassle one has to go through in my area to have fixed IP addresses and a nice fast connection at the same time without going totally bankrupt, and that cable isn't as horrible as some posters have indicated. I apologize (sarcasm) if my posting wasn't sufficently pedantic for you. I promise to be more precise in the future if you promise to keep your asshole post filter enabled when replying to people who are only trying to engage in reasonable discussion.
I have both cable and DSL. The cable costs $42/month and yields real throughput of up to 250k *bytes* per second. The DSL costs $120/month and comes with 5 IP addresses, at a whopping 144k *bits* per second. I live about 2000 feet too far away from the CO for real DSL, and could originally only get iDSL. I'm told I can finally get real DSL now, and it would only cost me $400/month for 1.5 megabit (about 190k bytes per second). If I want to give up having fixed IP addresses, I'd only have to pay $90/month for 1.5 megabit. What a deal! Twice as expensive as cable with no fixed IP addresses or 10 times as expensive with fixed IP.
Because of this, almost everyone in my area has cable, and the throughput seems not to suffer. Of course, some day it might start to suck, and since there's no SLA, we'd have to live with it. But even then it will probably always beat my DSL line, hands down.
I'd definitely hurl if they tried to slingshot me into orbit. :)
- Use a consumer Red Had product and reinstall all of your systems every year.
- Don't care about updates and simply live with bugs and security holes.
- Monitor the security/bug lists and build custom patches yourself (or find a third party to do it for you).
- Use a Red Hat enterprise product.
- Don't use Red Hat at all.
The most palatable option for our business has so far been option 5, mainly due to the cost and hassle of self-maintenance or using an enterprise product. Not to mention that Linux in general is not mature enough in certain areas that are important to our business. Our only viable option to date has been other Unix/Unix-like products.