"So, it might actually be reasonable to give infinite ownership to the creator."
Laws are rarely only to the benefit of specific individuals. If they are, it's often a sign of corruption. The purpose of law in a democracy should be to maximize the good for society as a whole, which sometimes coincides with creating a benefit for certain individuals, but which should never benefit individuals just 'because'.
The natural 'right' of a creator is the right to keep his creations to himself, should he wish to. The natural 'right' of everyone else is to imitate, embellish and retell those creations, the tradition on which creativity throughout the ages has built upon. Indeed, what the very concept of human learning builds upon.
Copyright not only grants a new right to the creator, it also takes away natural rights from everyone else. It does this for the very specific reason of benefitting society as a whole by encouraging creators to share and to create more, while still letting the rest of society engage in their rights after a while.
"And all this makes the "X years plus life of author" make sense, I suppose. It's a balance. I think it would probably be best, from an economic standpoint, to have X = 25 years."
How does that benefit society? Will the average writer write more if he will get money after his death? Or will he create less when he needs write nothing else? What benefit outweighs limiting the freedom of everyone else for that time?
What economic and social benefits would we have seen if Disney were not allowed to make films based on old stories? What would we gain if nobody was allowed to use and adapt Mark Twains books?
Copyright not only promotes creativity, it also prevents the evolution and adaption of works, and in the case of abandoned works, it can remove them from humanity as a whole.
So, your argument is that as they could set up a uranium mining operation themselves and spend several years mining and refining the uranium it's a good idea to give it to them?
The mining and extraction would be just a little bit more time and manpower intensive than the rest of the process would necessarily be, and thus slightly more noticable by interested parties.
If that's the level of the reasoning within the US administration then, indeed, they've already won.
Or some other way to generate neutrons. You dont necessarily have to have a fission reactor to generate them. Once you get the Pu buildup it will drive the reaction itself.
"They are very hard to implement."
They are indeed very hard and expensive to implement safely. How much easier is it if you are willing to take a chance? The fundies would not necessarily be overly concerned with a core meltdown.
And, the point is, no matter how hard and expensive it is, it's _possible_, so how bright is it to give the fundies access to an ingredient they can use for nuclear ambitions, in a fashion that will make it almost utterly untracable?
However, as far as I can tell, there isnt anything preventing DU material from being bred into isotopes with far more dangerous fission potential. Which some fundamentalists may eventually figure out.
Which makes it a terminally bad idea to spread it around.
"And if a patent is later granted for something you wrote, what you wrote is prior art, and the patent is invalidated."
What you wrote _may_ be prior art. If you can prove you wrote it before. In an acceptable manner (published in a journal, notarized, etc).
And the patent _might_ be invalidated. After you pay for a piece of extremely expensive litigation. Which you might not be able to afford, in which case the patent isnt invalidated at all, and you have to settle or risk getting sued for distributing something you wrote yourself.
The point is, none of it is a guarantee that you wont get subjected to litigation. The only way you can be sure not to get sued for patent infringement is not to produce any software.
The problem is partly that 'the art' is by now thousands or tens of thousands of fields. The days when one person could have 'ordinary skill' within a field like biology, chemistry or computers are long gone. They might have 'ordinary skill' in a field like rodents digestive systems or paralellizing fluid dynamic calculations, and be one of a few thousand in the world to whom a specific problem has an obvious solution.
The patent offices will never be able to hire people from each small subfield, and thus arent able to judge the obviousness of inventions anymore.
Just because you need spend a year or two reading before getting 'skilled in the art' does not mean an invention is not trivial and obvious.
The size of human knowledge has simply outgrown the ability of patent examiners to judge obviousness, and it's expanding far too fast for that to change in the future.
Indeed. And when the USPTO actually grants the patents to the part-time amateurs who file them years after they became standard practice in the industry, there's a serious problem.
Open source and free software protects you from copyright infringment if you follow the licenses.
They wont protect you from patent infringement. Not even a patent search will really protect you as a patent could be granted for something you wrote later. If you cant afford to go to court to get it overturned the triviality or prior art is useless.
Well, I was thinking of plain old ATA as that remains cheapest for the moment. SATA is getting 4 disk controllers too these days, but they're still a bit on the expensive side ($50-$100) for this purpose.
AIT-3 is indeed twice the capacity, but the drives are in the 5K range as far as I can tell.
And none of the tape solutions we've discussed actually include a real lib (only a reader, unless you found a really cheap lib), while the IDE solutions I've suggested are all on-line (altho they would have disadvantages for offsite storage).
So, for 1 TB storage (2.6TB compressed): $250 for computer, extra controller $50, 5 200GB disks $600 = $900. AIT-2 drive $2000 + $50*20 tapes = $3K AIT-3 drive $5000 + $50*10 tapes = $5.5K
Of course, at that size ide disks start having all sorts of other drawbacks, like power consumption, maintenance, etc. And AIT-3 will soon be cheaper for the installation.
The point isnt really that tape is always a bad solution. It's just it's getting to a point where ordinary disk storage is cheaper for even pretty large sites, and unless the tape companies do something really significant to their price/capacity they are going to get run over by consumer hardware driven capacity expansion as even their bread and butter customers storage needs are outpaced by consumer hardware. As the next strong phase of consumer storage growth is just starting up (driven by PVR type hardware and software) it will only get worse.
130 GB for an AIT-2 tape is compressed capacity. It's 50GB uncompressed. You get an around 200GB ATA disk for $100. As the data compresses just as well on the disk that's half the $ per unit. You can build storage units with 8 disks each for around $250 (case, cheapo motherboard+cpu+memory+ata controller).
At many capacities that will be _far_ cheaper than tape storage.
It's been a long long time since tape was cheaper for backups for most data sizes. And it's not getting better. By now you need to get up to many TB before tape is even close to viable..
"It would only prevent the open source crowd from copying other software and would not limit them from innovating."
Bullshit spewed by people who have not the faintest clue about how software works. Almost all software is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It builds on previous software and ideas as the computing power and infrastructure available makes new things feasible.
To innovate in software you must have free access to the entire heridity of code and ideas, and one single patent anywhere within the idea path kills your right and ability to make a specific innovation.
In such circumstances, to be able to freely innovate you need a massive defensive patent portfolio and massive finances to be able to kill anyone trying to go after you as everyone is constantly violating everyone elses patents and only the threat of mutual destruction keeps the lawsuits from happening.
"If, in the case of this Microsoft patent, it really was ridiculous, then it would instantly be shot down in court as soon as it was contested."
In their delusional world, I'm sure. In the real world, where the rest of us live, the Microsoft patent might get shot down after a few years of court proceedings and evidence discovery. Microsoft can afford those years. Someone with a massive defensive portfolio could threaten countersuit. Someone with massive finances could affort the years and the risk of losing due to MS's slick lawyers. Your average programmer would be bankrupt and starving by the time it even got to court.
It would be interesting also if you could as your attorney colleagues why software should be the single field anywhere protected by _both_ patents and copyright, and, by extension, why books, paintings, music, tv, news, speeches, laws, chessgames and pretty much any other human intellectual activity should not be covered by patents?
Would they enjoy being barred from raising a legal argument in court because another lawfirm has a patent on that?
And the stuff mentioned in the article actually _is_ vmware + coda + optional USB disk. Someone else mentioned the available PDF of the intel research paper.
So it's not an entirely 'new' previously unheard of technology, just the natural extension of getting vm tech, caching remote filesystems and easily removable and transportable disks ubiqutous.
How well do you think our respective national governments would have stood up to the US and Japanese pressure by themselves?
Most of the corruption this far in the EU is, as far as I can tell, related to _our own national governments_, not the EU itself. It's the people appointed by our governments (in the commission) or our own ministers (in the council) that are heading the corruption train. The directly-elected parliament are the ones who've been behaving at least slightly in the voters interest.
As long as the national governments are the ones screwing us I dont quite see the point in leaving the EU, more the reverse.
"You have to move your mouse just to see what's open"
Well, I see that on the pager, or on the actual display. The taskbar itself doesnt help much, as it contains too many tasks for any specific one to be immediately visible.
"You can't see any alerts blinking in the system tray (new email, network activity, CPU usage, bandwidth usage, etc)."
That's why I have a separate panel on the side of the screen with only things like that.
"And that, in turn, is a step toward the holy grail of marketing: being able to figure out how people will make choices that haven't been offered yet."
Except, of course, the slight problem that even if you can measure the result on a single neuron in a single primate, the brain is so horrendously complex that it will be an entirely different neuron firing at a different rate in an individual with a slightly different life experience.
Unless the idea is to have monitors surgically implanted into the entire customer base, it makes no more sense than having test groups. Which is probably cheaper.
"The only point I'm trying to make here is that TCG is not DRM, and there are many legitimate uses for a TPM, TCG compliant or not, that have nothing to do with keeping things _from_ the user."
Oh, I dont disagree. My point is that while a TPM enables some legitimate security, similar security (for most users) can be obtained in other (cheaper) ways. The only thing that cannot be obtained _without_ a TPM is reliably removing control beyond most users, eg, DRM.
Now, as that remains the main feature outside the overlapping featureset, and serious money is spent on this, it's hard to see the legitimate uses as anything but an excuse (and positive side effect) to get the tech into most users computers, and not the primary goal. The tech is not 'evil' itself, but the intended use most likely is, and the widespread introduction of standardized TPM's is the easiest and fastest way (if not only way) to enable the necessary marketshare to make such a scheme feasible.
"In fact, I have a TCG TPM on my laptop's systemboard that uses PKI to protect 1024bit AES keys used"
For most it will make much more sense to have passphrase protected private keys. One could even keep it on a USB disk if it's critical to really protect the private key. You dont need a TPM to achieve that.
"Think you can get your fingerprint snapshots in to my TPM? You can't."
Why would I need to? Your own fingerprints are freely available all over your laptop. I'd just use those if I needed to fake your biometrics. Or are you using gloves while using it?
You've been listening a bit too much to the sales pitch, I think.
There is, for the user, no security you can obtain with a TPM that you cannot easily obtain in a multitude of other ways.
The entire idea with a TPM is to protect things _from_ the user, not _for_ the user. That's inherent in the entire architecture. And no matter how much the marketing speak may claim otherwise, the fact is the hardware architecture is engineered for that purpose.
As long as you're protecting things _for_ the user you dont need a TPM to do that job.
I suspect his point is that while DU is of minor danger if you get exposed to it in solid form, can you imagine the long term effect as DU dust gets dispersed into topsoil, plowed up during farming, sucked up into vegetation, dispersed again, etc, until the ecosystem finally dumps the battlefield rest products into water or deep enough into the ground that it wont get around again.
Would you eat grain from a field where you know DU dust has been spread?
Would you regard it as terrorism if some fundies decided to spread several tons of DU dust over US farmland?
If you wouldnt find that perfectly acceptable then you cannot reasonably accept the spreading of this shit over other countries land.
So, I suppose you'll be volunteering your backyard as nuclear waste storage facility for the next several million years then?
Ok, it may be a bit bad for the property value, but it's not that dangerous. At least compared to the risk of getting shot on a battlefield. And hey, if you use it to insulate your house it could be efficient in repelling asteroid strikes.
Great material, really. Definitely what you want to live in every day.
Indeed, that's what they say. However, as ip telephony can be expected to use a miniscule fraction of the bandwidth on a broadband connection, and IP telephony service isnt that expensive to set up, they'd have to figure out a way to lock you in, easiest by controlling and raising the price on your broadband as it would be much harder to control and overcharge for IP telephony service.
"the examiner may stumble on it (Google) and not allow the patent."
Considering the patents granted by the USPTO I'm not sure they've even heard about that 'web browser' thing.
Seriously, from what I've seen, to have a real chance of getting it actually reasonably considered to be prior art you need to get published in a 'real' place. Industry rag, something that can be reliably timestamped and will be considered 'published' by the court.
Preferably you should have it submitted to the patent office, as they actually appear to search their own databases... some of the time, as of course they've granted multiple patents for the same thing in some instances.
A web page or CVS checkin doesnt cut it. The likelyhood that a patent examiner will find it is very low, the likelyhood that a court would accept it isnt very high either, unless you had a seriously high profile website in the field...
Because software patents cover concepts themselves. If it were allowed in literature, youd have patents for 'novel where a person gets murdered', 'novel based partially in historic facts', etc. With the current rate of software patenting it already is pretty much impossible to write any program doing anything without violating several patents.
Software is already covered by copyright, which protects a certain implementation of something, so the intention of software patents implicitly is to extend beyond the implementation to the very concept of doing or accomplishing something.
Software, unlike pretty much any other field, becomes twice-covered by both patents and copyright.
"If you can't afford a patent lawyer then just put it out there. If someone else patents it then yours is prior art to theirs."
Yours is prior art to theirs _if_ you can _prove_ it is in court. Which rather requires that patent lawyer you couldnt afford in the first place.
If you cant afford to patent something there's no way you'll be able to defend yourself when someone else steals your idea, patents it and claims they were first, then proceeds to sue you for patent infringement on something you invented in the first place.
That sure is going to have such beneficial effects on that 'innovation' thing...
Slashdot Mirror
"So, it might actually be reasonable to give infinite ownership to the creator."
Laws are rarely only to the benefit of specific individuals. If they are, it's often a sign of corruption. The purpose of law in a democracy should be to maximize the good for society as a whole, which sometimes coincides with creating a benefit for certain individuals, but which should never benefit individuals just 'because'.
The natural 'right' of a creator is the right to keep his creations to himself, should he wish to. The natural 'right' of everyone else is to imitate, embellish and retell those creations, the tradition on which creativity throughout the ages has built upon. Indeed, what the very concept of human learning builds upon.
Copyright not only grants a new right to the creator, it also takes away natural rights from everyone else. It does this for the very specific reason of benefitting society as a whole by encouraging creators to share and to create more, while still letting the rest of society engage in their rights after a while.
"And all this makes the "X years plus life of author" make sense, I suppose. It's a balance. I think it would probably be best, from an economic standpoint, to have X = 25 years."
How does that benefit society? Will the average writer write more if he will get money after his death? Or will he create less when he needs write nothing else? What benefit outweighs limiting the freedom of everyone else for that time?
What economic and social benefits would we have seen if Disney were not allowed to make films based on old stories? What would we gain if nobody was allowed to use and adapt Mark Twains books?
Copyright not only promotes creativity, it also prevents the evolution and adaption of works, and in the case of abandoned works, it can remove them from humanity as a whole.
So, your argument is that as they could set up a uranium mining operation themselves and spend several years mining and refining the uranium it's a good idea to give it to them?
The mining and extraction would be just a little bit more time and manpower intensive than the rest of the process would necessarily be, and thus slightly more noticable by interested parties.
If that's the level of the reasoning within the US administration then, indeed, they've already won.
"like you get from an operating fission reactor."
Or some other way to generate neutrons. You dont necessarily have to have a fission reactor to generate them. Once you get the Pu buildup it will drive the reaction itself.
"They are very hard to implement."
They are indeed very hard and expensive to implement safely. How much easier is it if you are willing to take a chance? The fundies would not necessarily be overly concerned with a core meltdown.
And, the point is, no matter how hard and expensive it is, it's _possible_, so how bright is it to give the fundies access to an ingredient they can use for nuclear ambitions, in a fashion that will make it almost utterly untracable?
However, as far as I can tell, there isnt anything preventing DU material from being bred into isotopes with far more dangerous fission potential. Which some fundamentalists may eventually figure out.
Which makes it a terminally bad idea to spread it around.
"And if a patent is later granted for something you wrote, what you wrote is prior art, and the patent is invalidated."
What you wrote _may_ be prior art. If you can prove you wrote it before. In an acceptable manner (published in a journal, notarized, etc).
And the patent _might_ be invalidated. After you pay for a piece of extremely expensive litigation.
Which you might not be able to afford, in which case the patent isnt invalidated at all, and you have to settle or risk getting sued for distributing something you wrote yourself.
The point is, none of it is a guarantee that you wont get subjected to litigation. The only way you can be sure not to get sued for patent infringement is not to produce any software.
The problem is partly that 'the art' is by now thousands or tens of thousands of fields. The days when one person could have 'ordinary skill' within a field like biology, chemistry or computers are long gone. They might have 'ordinary skill' in a field like rodents digestive systems or paralellizing fluid dynamic calculations, and be one of a few thousand in the world to whom a specific problem has an obvious solution.
The patent offices will never be able to hire people from each small subfield, and thus arent able to judge the obviousness of inventions anymore.
Just because you need spend a year or two reading before getting 'skilled in the art' does not mean an invention is not trivial and obvious.
The size of human knowledge has simply outgrown the ability of patent examiners to judge obviousness, and it's expanding far too fast for that to change in the future.
Indeed. And when the USPTO actually grants the patents to the part-time amateurs who file them years after they became standard practice in the industry, there's a serious problem.
Open source and free software protects you from copyright infringment if you follow the licenses.
They wont protect you from patent infringement. Not even a patent search will really protect you as a patent could be granted for something you wrote later. If you cant afford to go to court to get it overturned the triviality or prior art is useless.
Well, I was thinking of plain old ATA as that remains cheapest for the moment. SATA is getting 4 disk controllers too these days, but they're still a bit on the expensive side ($50-$100) for this purpose.
AIT-3 is indeed twice the capacity, but the drives are in the 5K range as far as I can tell.
And none of the tape solutions we've discussed actually include a real lib (only a reader, unless you found a really cheap lib), while the IDE solutions I've suggested are all on-line (altho they would have disadvantages for offsite storage).
So, for 1 TB storage (2.6TB compressed):
$250 for computer, extra controller $50, 5 200GB disks $600 = $900.
AIT-2 drive $2000 + $50*20 tapes = $3K
AIT-3 drive $5000 + $50*10 tapes = $5.5K
2 TB storage:
$600 2 comps+controllers, $1000 10 disks = $1600
AIT-2 combo: $4K
AIT-3 combo: $6K
20 TB storage:
13 comps, 100 disks = $14K
AIT-2: $22K
AIT-3: $15K
Of course, at that size ide disks start having all sorts of other drawbacks, like power consumption, maintenance, etc. And AIT-3 will soon be cheaper for the installation.
The point isnt really that tape is always a bad solution. It's just it's getting to a point where ordinary disk storage is cheaper for even pretty large sites, and unless the tape companies do something really significant to their price/capacity they are going to get run over by consumer hardware driven capacity expansion as even their bread and butter customers storage needs are outpaced by consumer hardware. As the next strong phase of consumer storage growth is just starting up (driven by PVR type hardware and software) it will only get worse.
Your calculations are way off.
130 GB for an AIT-2 tape is compressed capacity. It's 50GB uncompressed. You get an around 200GB ATA disk for $100. As the data compresses just as well on the disk that's half the $ per unit. You can build storage units with 8 disks each for around $250 (case, cheapo motherboard+cpu+memory+ata controller).
At many capacities that will be _far_ cheaper than tape storage.
It's been a long long time since tape was cheaper for backups for most data sizes. And it's not getting better. By now you need to get up to many TB before tape is even close to viable..
"It would only prevent the open source crowd from copying other software and would not limit them from innovating."
Bullshit spewed by people who have not the faintest clue about how software works. Almost all software is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It builds on previous software and ideas as the computing power and infrastructure available makes new things feasible.
To innovate in software you must have free access to the entire heridity of code and ideas, and one single patent anywhere within the idea path kills your right and ability to make a specific innovation.
In such circumstances, to be able to freely innovate you need a massive defensive patent portfolio and massive finances to be able to kill anyone trying to go after you as everyone is constantly violating everyone elses patents and only the threat of mutual destruction keeps the lawsuits from happening.
"If, in the case of this Microsoft patent, it really was ridiculous, then it would instantly be shot down in court as soon as it was contested."
In their delusional world, I'm sure. In the real world, where the rest of us live, the Microsoft patent might get shot down after a few years of court proceedings and evidence discovery. Microsoft can afford those years. Someone with a massive defensive portfolio could threaten countersuit. Someone with massive finances could affort the years and the risk of losing due to MS's slick lawyers. Your average programmer would be bankrupt and starving by the time it even got to court.
It would be interesting also if you could as your attorney colleagues why software should be the single field anywhere protected by _both_ patents and copyright, and, by extension, why books, paintings, music, tv, news, speeches, laws, chessgames and pretty much any other human intellectual activity should not be covered by patents?
Would they enjoy being barred from raising a legal argument in court because another lawfirm has a patent on that?
And the stuff mentioned in the article actually _is_ vmware + coda + optional USB disk. Someone else mentioned the available PDF of the intel research paper.
So it's not an entirely 'new' previously unheard of technology, just the natural extension of getting vm tech, caching remote filesystems and easily removable and transportable disks ubiqutous.
How well do you think our respective national governments would have stood up to the US and Japanese pressure by themselves?
Most of the corruption this far in the EU is, as far as I can tell, related to _our own national governments_, not the EU itself. It's the people appointed by our governments (in the commission) or our own ministers (in the council) that are heading the corruption train. The directly-elected parliament are the ones who've been behaving at least slightly in the voters interest.
As long as the national governments are the ones screwing us I dont quite see the point in leaving the EU, more the reverse.
"You have to move your mouse just to see what's open"
Well, I see that on the pager, or on the actual display. The taskbar itself doesnt help much, as it contains too many tasks for any specific one to be immediately visible.
"You can't see any alerts blinking in the system tray (new email, network activity, CPU usage, bandwidth usage, etc)."
That's why I have a separate panel on the side of the screen with only things like that.
"And that, in turn, is a step toward the holy grail of marketing: being able to figure out how people will make choices that haven't been offered yet."
Except, of course, the slight problem that even if you can measure the result on a single neuron in a single primate, the brain is so horrendously complex that it will be an entirely different neuron firing at a different rate in an individual with a slightly different life experience.
Unless the idea is to have monitors surgically implanted into the entire customer base, it makes no more sense than having test groups. Which is probably cheaper.
A tenth of the cost of traffic every year?
"The only point I'm trying to make here is that TCG is not DRM, and there are many legitimate uses for a TPM, TCG compliant or not, that have nothing to do with keeping things _from_ the user."
:).
Oh, I dont disagree. My point is that while a TPM enables some legitimate security, similar security (for most users) can be obtained in other (cheaper) ways. The only thing that cannot be obtained _without_ a TPM is reliably removing control beyond most users, eg, DRM.
Now, as that remains the main feature outside the overlapping featureset, and serious money is spent on this, it's hard to see the legitimate uses as anything but an excuse (and positive side effect) to get the tech into most users computers, and not the primary goal. The tech is not 'evil' itself, but the intended use most likely is, and the widespread introduction of standardized TPM's is the easiest and fastest way (if not only way) to enable the necessary marketshare to make such a scheme feasible.
Have a good time with the games
"teach classes on the use of TCG compliant TPMs"
"who are investing millions in TCG hardware"
Good buisness, eh?
"In fact, I have a TCG TPM on my laptop's systemboard that uses PKI to protect 1024bit AES keys used"
For most it will make much more sense to have passphrase protected private keys. One could even keep it on a USB disk if it's critical to really protect the private key. You dont need a TPM to achieve that.
"Think you can get your fingerprint snapshots in to my TPM? You can't."
Why would I need to? Your own fingerprints are freely available all over your laptop. I'd just use those if I needed to fake your biometrics. Or are you using gloves while using it?
You've been listening a bit too much to the sales pitch, I think.
There is, for the user, no security you can obtain with a TPM that you cannot easily obtain in a multitude of other ways.
The entire idea with a TPM is to protect things _from_ the user, not _for_ the user. That's inherent in the entire architecture. And no matter how much the marketing speak may claim otherwise, the fact is the hardware architecture is engineered for that purpose.
As long as you're protecting things _for_ the user you dont need a TPM to do that job.
I suspect his point is that while DU is of minor danger if you get exposed to it in solid form, can you imagine the long term effect as DU dust gets dispersed into topsoil, plowed up during farming, sucked up into vegetation, dispersed again, etc, until the ecosystem finally dumps the battlefield rest products into water or deep enough into the ground that it wont get around again.
Would you eat grain from a field where you know DU dust has been spread?
Would you regard it as terrorism if some fundies decided to spread several tons of DU dust over US farmland?
If you wouldnt find that perfectly acceptable then you cannot reasonably accept the spreading of this shit over other countries land.
So, I suppose you'll be volunteering your backyard as nuclear waste storage facility for the next several million years then?
Ok, it may be a bit bad for the property value, but it's not that dangerous. At least compared to the risk of getting shot on a battlefield. And hey, if you use it to insulate your house it could be efficient in repelling asteroid strikes.
Great material, really. Definitely what you want to live in every day.
Indeed, that's what they say. However, as ip telephony can be expected to use a miniscule fraction of the bandwidth on a broadband connection, and IP telephony service isnt that expensive to set up, they'd have to figure out a way to lock you in, easiest by controlling and raising the price on your broadband as it would be much harder to control and overcharge for IP telephony service.
"the examiner may stumble on it (Google) and not allow the patent."
Considering the patents granted by the USPTO I'm not sure they've even heard about that 'web browser' thing.
Seriously, from what I've seen, to have a real chance of getting it actually reasonably considered to be prior art you need to get published in a 'real' place. Industry rag, something that can be reliably timestamped and will be considered 'published' by the court.
Preferably you should have it submitted to the patent office, as they actually appear to search their own databases... some of the time, as of course they've granted multiple patents for the same thing in some instances.
A web page or CVS checkin doesnt cut it. The likelyhood that a patent examiner will find it is very low, the likelyhood that a court would accept it isnt very high either, unless you had a seriously high profile website in the field...
Because software patents cover concepts themselves. If it were allowed in literature, youd have patents for 'novel where a person gets murdered', 'novel based partially in historic facts', etc. With the current rate of software patenting it already is pretty much impossible to write any program doing anything without violating several patents.
Software is already covered by copyright, which protects a certain implementation of something, so the intention of software patents implicitly is to extend beyond the implementation to the very concept of doing or accomplishing something.
Software, unlike pretty much any other field, becomes twice-covered by both patents and copyright.
"If you can't afford a patent lawyer then just put it out there. If someone else patents it then yours is prior art to theirs."
Yours is prior art to theirs _if_ you can _prove_ it is in court. Which rather requires that patent lawyer you couldnt afford in the first place.
If you cant afford to patent something there's no way you'll be able to defend yourself when someone else steals your idea, patents it and claims they were first, then proceeds to sue you for patent infringement on something you invented in the first place.
That sure is going to have such beneficial effects on that 'innovation' thing...