Seriously, that's pretty much what's happening anyway. The only way to find out if a patent is valid is through a court-case. I never understood why the patent office works the way it does. Why not just have people register whatever they want. If they find an infringer, they are going to have to prove that they really are infringing, and the infringer is going to have to prove that they are not in front of a judge and jury. Why try to (very ineffectively) do some of this in advance?
You could even add fines for entities registering patents which have unmentioned prior art (they obviously didn't do their research).
It would perhaps also keep investors from only investing in companies that _appear_ to have some interesting patents, but no real technology/knowledge/expertise to back it up. It would be nice to see more investment into companies that actually know how to make something and actually advance technology.
In which possible way would using an XML dialect have made anything about CSS better?
With HTML transitioning to valid XML, we could have ended up with one parser. For the W3C consortium it would have been a "eating your own dog-food" situation. It would have been an example of why we should use XML (and schemas, which would validate the XCSS...)
Five gets you ten that the movie comes up with some wild-ass conspiracy theory involving oil company influence at GM, though. After all, when an activist-favored technology fails utterly in the marketplace, it has to be the fault of Big Evil Corporations.
I don't know much about the EV1, but if you think you just debunked any conspiracy theories involving oil companies, you must be dreaming.
You claim yourself that:
California was going to impose a zero-emissions vehicle standard, that required a fixed percentage of the vehicles sold in California from every manufacturer be zero emissions
followed by:
California repeals the law just as it's going to go into effect
Which may very well be the reason why GM canned it (as you claim). But, there's no evidence in your argument that this move by California did NOT involve oil companies though.
California's original law was a good way to entice car mfgs to create electric cars. They aren't going to do it by themselves, because, obviously, initially it is not an interesting business proposition. In an industry like that you can't compete with an incumbant technology that has been optimized the hell out off, through decades. I don't know why California repealed it, but I think that's the big question here.
Veering well off-topic - activist-style: I am concerned about the outdated principles on which the US economy has become very dependent. These things just aren't sustainable: - dependency on foreign oil combined with oil companies having an amazing amount of control - intellectual property laws formed by corporations (RIAA/MPAA) - incredibly cheap labor in other countries
Or to put it in different words: The US: highly dependent on (cheap) foreign resources, while at the same time crippling the development of main product it has to offer (IP).
If this continues, sooner or later the US will price itself out of the market. And your buddies at the "Big Evil Corporations" won't do a god-damn thing for you.
Finally:
when an activist-favored technology fails utterly in the marketplace
Just to be clear, technologies do NOT fail in the marketplace because they are activist-favored.
I agree completely that the jerk should pay, but unless I'm just not creative enough I can't think of a way to enforce it.
Yeah, that is a problem. Maybe at least if you put it that way though, it will deter some from lying. But then again, once someone starts lying, they usually don't come clean anyways.
I guess it's just going to continue to be a frustrating exercise;)
I also have a policy now, which I inform sellers of upfront. If the item is different from how it was represented in the post or follow-up emails, both of which I will have with me, I walk out the door- this is after several sellers presented something that was nothing like what they described (like a PC missing half its ram, being sold by a software programmer who played dumb. Riight).
Yes, I have been thinking about an even more extreme version of that. Basically I think the seller should reimburse you for your expenses if they grosly misrepresented an item.
For example, I've been looking for cars and (unfortunately) it seems to continuously go like this: me: so has this car ever been repainted? salesguy: no, it's in great shape, original paint. me: okay, well, I'm going to drive 80 miles to see this car, and I have to tell you that I used to work for a body shop, so I'll be able to tell in 10 seconds if it was repainted. I know you can tell it that quickly too, so I'm just asking you to be straight with me. salesguy: it's never been repainted.
And then when you arrive, the car has not only been repainted (poorly), but the body has been "upgraded" to a newer model, the engine doesn't match the original car model, and the engine compartment is another color.
Last time that happened I actually started yelling at the guy. I mean, for fuck's sake. Posting freaking cell-phone pictures, claiming they don't do the car justice, insisting it's in "excellent" condition, and then presenting a car that was pretty much dug up from the Gulf of Mexico of the shore of New Orleans.
But what recourse do we have, as the person spending a few hours and cash on fuel to come see the pathetic piece of crap?
I think the asshole needs to reimburse us for the cost. I haven't tried it yet, but next time I'm going to propose this to the person because it's driving me nuts. You misrepresent your item, you pay for my expenses to come out to look at it.
All of those dollars the BSA is claiming as economic losses are actually being spent elsewhere
Yeah, what we should do is use the same tactics as these corporations (not to mention the GOP) do.
Let me see, I could spend $1100 on Microsoft Project & Office so I can create a schedule for the sprinkler system for our 6x3 feet lawn, create a nice flyer for the block party AND keep track of who has RSVPd.
Or I could use my friends copy and donate the money to an Anti Kiddie Porn organization.
Yep, a lot of the bounced emails seem to have nothing but HTML embedded images. Also a lot seem to be promoting stock.
Normally I'd say "follow the money", but I'm having a hard time figuring out who would actually profit from the original spam...
I'm sure we are not alone. I'm not sure what makes the spamers decide to use a certain domain/email address as the spoofed originator.
Now I don't want to sound pesimistic, but I don't think this is a problem that's going to be solved in the near future. But please let me know if you know any place where to start.:)
The only thing that's happened is that, because of the inherent insecurity of Windows machines and the increasing number of them with broadband connections, the bad guys now have access to orders of magnitude more bandwidth and horsepower than any single server can have.
Tell me about it.
rant So I have a catch-all email on my domain name (say 'example.com'). A couple of weeks ago, I started to receive bounced email which had a return address like 'wert@example.com' and 'nrtp@example.com'. Great, this is the second time this is happening, only now it seems to be persistent for several weeks.
So you think, well some asshole is obviously responsible for this, lets try to find out. But everything traces back to different originators. So this spammer controlling a whole bunch of zombies is impersonating fake email addresses at my domain, and sending it from systems all over the world. (and you got to wonder, even if he only impersonated 1 real address (say myname@example.com) it would be the same problem)
Now I'm starting to receive spam at random emails @ my domain as well. It's driving me nuts. Of course I can close my catch all account, and only let through legit addresses. But wtf?
I understand the 'need' for anonymity, but impersonation is something else. Why is this accepted? Why can't we have protocols that don't allow that?
Also why the fsck are email servers bouncing email back to an address that obviously can be easily spoofed?
I know there's tons of excuses, but you just wait until you get bombarded with crap and there's no way telling who's responsible for it. You seriously start to wonder about the validity of the email protocols we are using today. ~rant
If your not playing 3dgames or using some kind of crazy rendering software, onboard video is more than enough. For god sakes its 2d windows on top of windows and some video. you need 128 mb of ram for that???
Heh, obviously you haven't been read up on the new windowing system in Vista (can't blame you). It's all 3D now, the whole windowing system. Hence the need for lots of video RAM. I think that's actually one of the few "enhancements" that Vista has over XP that still remains...
Why is litigation always the first thing companies do?
How do you know? Were you involved in this, or are you just making general statements based on what you see as an outsider?
Because I suspect the majority of stuff going on before companies sue is not reported on as heavily, but you can rest assured that practically no lawyer will suggest an out-of-the-blue lawsuit. First thing a judge is going to ask is "did you try to work this out before suing?", and the answer better be "yes".
You are probably the wrong person to tell, but I just wanted to point to a potential bug:
If you go to the Kitchensink example, click on the "See Demo", then click on "Popups", then click "Show Dialog", then you can drag the DialogBox outside of your browser window (make your browser window smaller if needed). Now if you let go of the DialogBox, while it's not visible, you in essense lock up the web page.
Like I said, there's probably a better person to report this too, but I just happened upon it, and as I'm personally not interested in developing with this product, I don't have the time to dig and find the bug reporting page.
There are no real advantages to such a scheme and plenty of disadvantages
Exactly. For some reason most people here seem to forget the most important thing:
RFID has nothing to do with encryption/security. It's a serial number. What fucking good is that going to do you? So your car will start when your serial number is near? It should be pretty clear that faking a serial number is trivial. With RFIDs you don't even need physical contact to achieve that.
In other words: I am intrigued about building applications and solutions that will open my doors, unlock my car, log me on to my computer and control home automation
will not be solved by RFID. I don't even understand where someone would get that idea. You'd be crazy to rely on that. If you think that doing security through positive identification of a certain physical human being present is a good idea (which is debatable to begin with), then you're probably better off doing fingerprint or iris-scanning.
Now if RFID tags had RSA or something built in, it would be a different story. But they don't.
FFmpeg develop the libav libraries (libavcodec and libavformat) that demux, mux, decode and encode pretty much every video and audio format in existence
I don't want to be a stick-in-tha-mud here, but are you sure? Last time I looked, there were no OSS codecs for many of the latest formats. For example, if we can just keep the MS bashing out of this for a second, I'm thinking of WMV9 (HD).
It would be really cool if most AV compression formats in existence could be encoded/decoded by Open Source software, but the last time I looked into it, a lot of formats were actually handled by Windows DLLs, which raises some significant copyright issues let alone the fact that there is no source.
There is a common perception that EULAs have not been tested in court. This is incorrect. They have been.
Yes, and that's very sad. Because there are many other very valid arguments to support the idea of them being invalid. (other then the ones mentioned by parent & sibblings)
For starters, EULAs are such complicated documents that a normal person can not be expected to fully understand them. These legally binding contracts are created by teams of lawyers, under any other situation you wouldn't think twice to have your own lawyer review it. But in this case that would often come at a cost several times that of the product. It'd be interesting to see if there are any other so widely used products to which the same applies. Me thinks not.
An average user uses, say, between 20-100 pieces of software/websites per year, resulting in a huge financial burden to have every single EULA reviewed by a lawyer. If we are just talking 1 hour for a $300/hr lawyer, we are talking $6K-$30K a year, which is obviously not in the ballpark for an average user.
Still, either if you get a lawyer to review EULAs or you read it yourself, it adds a significant burden on your time as well. In case of using a lawyer it means that you simply can not continue on a path and have to wait for a x day turn around. If you read it yourself you can expect to spend more time reading than actually using the product. (how often doesn't it turn out a piece of software/website is crap?)
Well, I think you catch my drift, I think EULAs are totally out of control and absolutely unreasonable considering the average product they are attached to. Even for the best of products, if you take a product in a different field at the same price/importance level, no one is going to expect agreeing a 20 page contract. I understand that software is different than most tangible things, but a $20 piece of software is pretty similar to a just released CD.
The problem is, we are just putting up with it, because it easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, that's pretty much what's happening anyway. The only way to find out if a patent is valid is through a court-case. I never understood why the patent office works the way it does. Why not just have people register whatever they want. If they find an infringer, they are going to have to prove that they really are infringing, and the infringer is going to have to prove that they are not in front of a judge and jury. Why try to (very ineffectively) do some of this in advance?
You could even add fines for entities registering patents which have unmentioned prior art (they obviously didn't do their research).
It would perhaps also keep investors from only investing in companies that _appear_ to have some interesting patents, but no real technology/knowledge/expertise to back it up. It would be nice to see more investment into companies that actually know how to make something and actually advance technology.
Wouldn't it be fun to give the ants little shoes to make their legs longer? That would screw 'em up pretty good.
As pointed out by others, that's what the article is about...
One other reason to RTFA are classic quotes you might otherwise miss out on:
When the researchers shortened the ants' legs the insects had trouble finding home.
who would have thought.
Cool!
This would be awesome to combine with an address-asignment protocol I conjured up a while back: CERP:- Chicken-Egg Resolution Protocol.
Basically a DHCP-like service, without requiring a dedicated server. I've always wanted to release it as an RFC on April 1st.
In which possible way would using an XML dialect have made anything about CSS better?
With HTML transitioning to valid XML, we could have ended up with one parser. For the W3C consortium it would have been a "eating your own dog-food" situation. It would have been an example of why we should use XML (and schemas, which would validate the XCSS...)
Simple question (hopefully simple answer ;-)): why did you not use XML?
Five gets you ten that the movie comes up with some wild-ass conspiracy theory involving oil company influence at GM, though. After all, when an activist-favored technology fails utterly in the marketplace, it has to be the fault of Big Evil Corporations.
I don't know much about the EV1, but if you think you just debunked any conspiracy theories involving oil companies, you must be dreaming.
You claim yourself that:
California was going to impose a zero-emissions vehicle standard, that required a fixed percentage of the vehicles sold in California from every manufacturer be zero emissions
followed by:
California repeals the law just as it's going to go into effect
Which may very well be the reason why GM canned it (as you claim). But, there's no evidence in your argument that this move by California did NOT involve oil companies though.
California's original law was a good way to entice car mfgs to create electric cars. They aren't going to do it by themselves, because, obviously, initially it is not an interesting business proposition. In an industry like that you can't compete with an incumbant technology that has been optimized the hell out off, through decades. I don't know why California repealed it, but I think that's the big question here.
Veering well off-topic - activist-style: I am concerned about the outdated principles on which the US economy has become very dependent. These things just aren't sustainable:
- dependency on foreign oil combined with oil companies having an amazing amount of control
- intellectual property laws formed by corporations (RIAA/MPAA)
- incredibly cheap labor in other countries
Or to put it in different words: The US: highly dependent on (cheap) foreign resources, while at the same time crippling the development of main product it has to offer (IP).
If this continues, sooner or later the US will price itself out of the market. And your buddies at the "Big Evil Corporations" won't do a god-damn thing for you.
Finally:
when an activist-favored technology fails utterly in the marketplace
Just to be clear, technologies do NOT fail in the marketplace because they are activist-favored.
I agree completely that the jerk should pay, but unless I'm just not creative enough I can't think of a way to enforce it.
;)
Yeah, that is a problem. Maybe at least if you put it that way though, it will deter some from lying. But then again, once someone starts lying, they usually don't come clean anyways.
I guess it's just going to continue to be a frustrating exercise
I also have a policy now, which I inform sellers of upfront. If the item is different from how it was represented in the post or follow-up emails, both of which I will have with me, I walk out the door- this is after several sellers presented something that was nothing like what they described (like a PC missing half its ram, being sold by a software programmer who played dumb. Riight).
Yes, I have been thinking about an even more extreme version of that. Basically I think the seller should reimburse you for your expenses if they grosly misrepresented an item.
For example, I've been looking for cars and (unfortunately) it seems to continuously go like this:
me: so has this car ever been repainted?
salesguy: no, it's in great shape, original paint.
me: okay, well, I'm going to drive 80 miles to see this car, and I have to tell you that I used to work for a body shop, so I'll be able to tell in 10 seconds if it was repainted. I know you can tell it that quickly too, so I'm just asking you to be straight with me.
salesguy: it's never been repainted.
And then when you arrive, the car has not only been repainted (poorly), but the body has been "upgraded" to a newer model, the engine doesn't match the original car model, and the engine compartment is another color.
Last time that happened I actually started yelling at the guy. I mean, for fuck's sake. Posting freaking cell-phone pictures, claiming they don't do the car justice, insisting it's in "excellent" condition, and then presenting a car that was pretty much dug up from the Gulf of Mexico of the shore of New Orleans.
But what recourse do we have, as the person spending a few hours and cash on fuel to come see the pathetic piece of crap?
I think the asshole needs to reimburse us for the cost. I haven't tried it yet, but next time I'm going to propose this to the person because it's driving me nuts. You misrepresent your item, you pay for my expenses to come out to look at it.
All of those dollars the BSA is claiming as economic losses are actually being spent elsewhere
Yeah, what we should do is use the same tactics as these corporations (not to mention the GOP) do.
Let me see, I could spend $1100 on Microsoft Project & Office so I can create a schedule for the sprinkler system for our 6x3 feet lawn, create a nice flyer for the block party AND keep track of who has RSVPd.
Or I could use my friends copy and donate the money to an Anti Kiddie Porn organization.
The choice is very simple, right? Bill? George?
Maybe you have not been reading /. for long ... I have seldom seen a post that advocates piracy
;-)
LOL. Seldom, no less. Have you even read slashdot between now and when you originally registered?
Kind of disappointing, I was expecting a shoe-based charger. _That_ would be something I would buy. Charging your phone/iPod etc, while you walk.
I looked into it a few years back, and it seemed to me that there was enough energy there to do something with.
Yep, a lot of the bounced emails seem to have nothing but HTML embedded images. Also a lot seem to be promoting stock.
:)
Normally I'd say "follow the money", but I'm having a hard time figuring out who would actually profit from the original spam...
I'm sure we are not alone. I'm not sure what makes the spamers decide to use a certain domain/email address as the spoofed originator.
Now I don't want to sound pesimistic, but I don't think this is a problem that's going to be solved in the near future. But please let me know if you know any place where to start.
The only thing that's happened is that, because of the inherent insecurity of Windows machines and the increasing number of them with broadband connections, the bad guys now have access to orders of magnitude more bandwidth and horsepower than any single server can have.
Tell me about it.
rant
So I have a catch-all email on my domain name (say 'example.com'). A couple of weeks ago, I started to receive bounced email which had a return address like 'wert@example.com' and 'nrtp@example.com'. Great, this is the second time this is happening, only now it seems to be persistent for several weeks.
So you think, well some asshole is obviously responsible for this, lets try to find out. But everything traces back to different originators. So this spammer controlling a whole bunch of zombies is impersonating fake email addresses at my domain, and sending it from systems all over the world. (and you got to wonder, even if he only impersonated 1 real address (say myname@example.com) it would be the same problem)
Now I'm starting to receive spam at random emails @ my domain as well. It's driving me nuts. Of course I can close my catch all account, and only let through legit addresses. But wtf?
I understand the 'need' for anonymity, but impersonation is something else. Why is this accepted? Why can't we have protocols that don't allow that?
Also why the fsck are email servers bouncing email back to an address that obviously can be easily spoofed?
I know there's tons of excuses, but you just wait until you get bombarded with crap and there's no way telling who's responsible for it. You seriously start to wonder about the validity of the email protocols we are using today.
~rant
If your not playing 3dgames or using some kind of crazy rendering software, onboard video is more than enough. For god sakes its 2d windows on top of windows and some video. you need 128 mb of ram for that???
Heh, obviously you haven't been read up on the new windowing system in Vista (can't blame you). It's all 3D now, the whole windowing system. Hence the need for lots of video RAM. I think that's actually one of the few "enhancements" that Vista has over XP that still remains...
Why is litigation always the first thing companies do?
How do you know? Were you involved in this, or are you just making general statements based on what you see as an outsider?
Because I suspect the majority of stuff going on before companies sue is not reported on as heavily, but you can rest assured that practically no lawyer will suggest an out-of-the-blue lawsuit. First thing a judge is going to ask is "did you try to work this out before suing?", and the answer better be "yes".
You are probably the wrong person to tell, but I just wanted to point to a potential bug:
If you go to the Kitchensink example, click on the "See Demo", then click on "Popups", then click "Show Dialog", then you can drag the DialogBox outside of your browser window (make your browser window smaller if needed). Now if you let go of the DialogBox, while it's not visible, you in essense lock up the web page.
Like I said, there's probably a better person to report this too, but I just happened upon it, and as I'm personally not interested in developing with this product, I don't have the time to dig and find the bug reporting page.
Good luck with the product though, it looks good!
I saw the recording
;) Just kiddin'
Yeah right. That's impossible, I have it from authoritive sources that the take is still in rendering.
lol
The one for wife is funny too:
Wife for less
Looking for Wife?
Find exactly what you want today
www.eBay.com
I already have one, but one for less sounds very enticing.
There are no real advantages to such a scheme and plenty of disadvantages
Exactly. For some reason most people here seem to forget the most important thing:
RFID has nothing to do with encryption/security. It's a serial number. What fucking good is that going to do you? So your car will start when your serial number is near? It should be pretty clear that faking a serial number is trivial. With RFIDs you don't even need physical contact to achieve that.
In other words:
I am intrigued about building applications and solutions that will open my doors, unlock my car, log me on to my computer and control home automation
will not be solved by RFID. I don't even understand where someone would get that idea. You'd be crazy to rely on that. If you think that doing security through positive identification of a certain physical human being present is a good idea (which is debatable to begin with), then you're probably better off doing fingerprint or iris-scanning.
Now if RFID tags had RSA or something built in, it would be a different story. But they don't.
Eh, this whole story makes no sense at all.
You just got to love stuff like this:
So what is Play-Doh made of, you may ask? It goes without saying that the top secret formula is a closely guarded secret
Well, if it was patented, then by definition it's not at all a secret. It's about as public as it can get.
Furthermore, it sounds highly unlikely that a substance that ends up in infants mouths on a regular basis has any ingredients that are secret.
Yeah, okay, I'm nitpickin', still, sounds like a press release to me.
FFmpeg develop the libav libraries (libavcodec and libavformat) that demux, mux, decode and encode pretty much every video and audio format in existence
I don't want to be a stick-in-tha-mud here, but are you sure? Last time I looked, there were no OSS codecs for many of the latest formats. For example, if we can just keep the MS bashing out of this for a second, I'm thinking of WMV9 (HD).
It would be really cool if most AV compression formats in existence could be encoded/decoded by Open Source software, but the last time I looked into it, a lot of formats were actually handled by Windows DLLs, which raises some significant copyright issues let alone the fact that there is no source.
Give me a petabyte disk, please!
Here ya go!
Safety is a great goal, but I want to tell the car what to do - I don't want the car telling me what I can do
Me;- the pedestrian, feels very differently about that however.
There is a common perception that EULAs have not been tested in court. This is incorrect. They have been.
Yes, and that's very sad. Because there are many other very valid arguments to support the idea of them being invalid. (other then the ones mentioned by parent & sibblings)
For starters, EULAs are such complicated documents that a normal person can not be expected to fully understand them. These legally binding contracts are created by teams of lawyers, under any other situation you wouldn't think twice to have your own lawyer review it. But in this case that would often come at a cost several times that of the product. It'd be interesting to see if there are any other so widely used products to which the same applies. Me thinks not.
An average user uses, say, between 20-100 pieces of software/websites per year, resulting in a huge financial burden to have every single EULA reviewed by a lawyer. If we are just talking 1 hour for a $300/hr lawyer, we are talking $6K-$30K a year, which is obviously not in the ballpark for an average user.
Still, either if you get a lawyer to review EULAs or you read it yourself, it adds a significant burden on your time as well. In case of using a lawyer it means that you simply can not continue on a path and have to wait for a x day turn around. If you read it yourself you can expect to spend more time reading than actually using the product. (how often doesn't it turn out a piece of software/website is crap?)
Well, I think you catch my drift, I think EULAs are totally out of control and absolutely unreasonable considering the average product they are attached to. Even for the best of products, if you take a product in a different field at the same price/importance level, no one is going to expect agreeing a 20 page contract. I understand that software is different than most tangible things, but a $20 piece of software is pretty similar to a just released CD.
The problem is, we are just putting up with it, because it easy.
It'll probably deteriorate into a flame war at some point, but hopefully I can get a few contributions to each category before then.
Whereas here on slashdot, a troll like that normally ends with a fruitful discussion and many meaningful contributions.
Okay, I have one for you: SolidWorks.