Unfortunately, that's usually the way things get when a platform gains momentum, especially when the space fills up with opinionated, self-righteous people who lack the tact to disagree with each other in a constructive fashion. It's really bad when the originators or early adopters are that way.
If the judge doesn't go along with their argument, they'll have to shut up about ripping being unauthorized.
If they get mp3's from ripping ruled to be unauthorized usage, that will just drive another nail in the coffin of CD sales. Consumers will turn to digital download services and completely eschew physical media. Artists will see the dwindling usefulness of the record companies and go independent.
Either way, the RIAA member companies will lose out. It would be far better for them to compete in the new arena than to use litigation to drive their way of thinking down everyone's throat. If they continue to ignore the cluebat beating them over the head, they'll wind up in the same boat with other organizations that have tried a similar approach (*cough*SCO*cough*).
I think it's a fair assessment that open source spends a lot of time reinventing the wheel for the sake of having OSS coverage, but that's not to say the realm of OSS is devoid of innovation.
To be honest, the only piece of innovation that's really given me a "Wow!" moment in Open Source is the Mylyn project from Eclipse.
IBM doesn't necessarily follow trends. It invests in areas where it thinks it can make money. They've been on the Second Life bandwagon for a while now, and they've built quite a presence and have tutorials on DeveloperWorks about developing content for SecondLife using Rational Application Developer.
If they followed their standard operating procedure since they got into power, they would have developed a bill Bush didn't like and then used it as a wedge issue in the upcoming election (like the children's insurance bill, for which Pelosi's rhetoric somehow managed to link Bush's veto to supporting cigarette makers over children).
Honestly, the MPG requirements here don't go far enough. With gas prices outpacing inflation and hostile leadership controlling significant chunks of the oil supply, we need more efficient vehicles to reduce the risks to our economy.
...essentially cover allowing users to selectively retrieve voice mail messages using an inbox-type display.
How is NeXTSTEP's mail app (with integrated voice support) not prior art?
AOL and Vonage may not have been able to turn up prior art, but Apple owns NeXTSTEP. It would seem reasonable for them to fight it, considering the damages claimed. If the suit weren't filed in patent troll central, it would seem to be a no-brainer.
Don't disparage the entirety of the religious right because of the actions of a few (or even many or most). Judging people by group labeling is exactly the same sort of cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all thinking that brings us idiocy like political correctness.
I'm fed up with the demonizing that goes on in both directions. There are more than enough idiots on both sides of the political spectrum.
If you think I'm an apologist, you're sorely mistaken. GWB should be run out of town on a rail. Incompetence isn't any less bad than malice in my book.
I think you should slap yourself repeatedly for jumping to such a wrongheaded idiotic conclusion. Unfortunately, I doubt self-flagellation would cause you to think any more before spouting tripe.
Sorry, but you must not be familiar with the meaning of the word "malice".
The intent, without just cause or reason, to commit a wrongful act that will result in harm to another.
It all hinges on the intent. GWB had what he believed to be just cause or reason -- the belief, despite the evidence, that WMD's existed in Iraq and Saddam Husein was hiding them well.
Note that I am not an apologist for GWB. He shouldn't have been elected (and, in all honesty, we should have had better choices from both parties).
Please....the Bush's don't have a monopoly on either malice or incompetence (and to be completely honest, our problems are more due to GWB taking incompetent action than taking malicious action). If the Iraq War had been prosecuted competently, all we'd have left in Iraq now is a police force training Iraqis on how to police their own country.
No, it wasn't malice that caused this to be a mess -- it was incompetence.
Indeed. The Dems and Reps are both moronic and evil -- it's just easier to catch the Reps at it because most members of the media (except for Fox and the radio talk show hosts) has a chip on its shoulder about them.
Creationists (of which I'm not one) and anti-creationists (of which I'm also not one) are dogmatic. The fact that the beliefs come from a different world-view doesn't change the fact that it's dogma. Faith that there is a supreme being is not much different from the faith that there isn't -- the faith in science to explain the fundamentally unexplainable (how and why *anything* exists).
Rewriting an existing system only makes sense if either the benefits outweigh the costs, or there is a high level of risk to staying on the base system (i.e., the hardware or software is no longer supported).
Other than that, most overhaul/modernization efforts should be focused on making the UI more accessible to end users and interoperable with other systems.
Rails was not at fault here. The fault was expecting Rails to be a silver bullet....that just by choosing Rails, everything will happen as if by magic. They ignore the fact that Rails can't do everything. If it tried, it would become bloated to the point that people start talking about it like they talk now about Java. Writing in Ruby, clean and elegant as it is, doesn't change that fact.
The argument isn't about whether or not the patents are valid or whether they advance or retard scientific progress. The argument is about whether or not patent encumbered standards should be allowed.
But, to answer your question, the extra cash from royalties/lawsuits would help CSIRO, but not the scientific community at large. It is the community at large that helps progression...to assume that progress would be helped by paying royalties to a single inventor, the question is: is that vendor *uniquely* positioned to advance the state of the art? In CSIRO's case, the answer is no.
What if, every time you had an idea, you had to go hire a lawyer to perform a patent search? How long does that take, how much does it cost, and what happens if the patent search turns up prior patents? That's a good way to put a damper on research, and is probably contributing to the decline of corporate-funded R&D labs in the U.S.
To be fair, it was Microsoft taking Netscape's idea of browser-as-application-platform and making AJAX out of it that enabled Google to write its apps. It wasn't the platform.
The prevailing knowledge two years ago was that global warming was going to increase the number and severity of hurricanes like Katrina. The scientific data was being used to try to explain the circumstances of the time.
More recent studies have concluded that global warming will actually reduce the number and severity of hurricanes. The warmer air temperatures will increase wind shear, running a counterbalance against the warming water and air temperatures:
While the people that said we were going to have more Katrina-like storms got a lot of press, this study hasn't gotten as much press. It certainly wasn't being talked about at "Live Earth".
The point is that there is a groupthink that has formed, where the analysis is being made to fit a particular view of what will be happening to the world. The question has become "how can this data show that climate change is dangerous" instead of "what does this data say about what will happen"?
How do you not know how much energy recycling a battery takes? Sure, it's better than dumping it in a landfill, but it takes a non-trivial amount of energy to heat the batteries.
If the process were like standard auto batteries (which don't require heating), then there wouldn't be a problem.
Certain computational problems aren't easily decomposed into parallelizeable chunks. Deriding faster clock speeds as a waste of time in light of additional cores is extremely naive. We need multi-cores for problems that can be broken down into chunks and faster clocks for tearing through those chunks.
IBM's POWER6 is an acknowledgment that parallelism only goes so far. It's around 4.5GHz per core. I'll be interested to see the benchmarks.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that's usually the way things get when a platform gains momentum, especially when the space fills up with opinionated, self-righteous people who lack the tact to disagree with each other in a constructive fashion. It's really bad when the originators or early adopters are that way.
If the judge doesn't go along with their argument, they'll have to shut up about ripping being unauthorized.
If they get mp3's from ripping ruled to be unauthorized usage, that will just drive another nail in the coffin of CD sales. Consumers will turn to digital download services and completely eschew physical media. Artists will see the dwindling usefulness of the record companies and go independent.
Either way, the RIAA member companies will lose out. It would be far better for them to compete in the new arena than to use litigation to drive their way of thinking down everyone's throat. If they continue to ignore the cluebat beating them over the head, they'll wind up in the same boat with other organizations that have tried a similar approach (*cough*SCO*cough*).
I think it's a fair assessment that open source spends a lot of time reinventing the wheel for the sake of having OSS coverage, but that's not to say the realm of OSS is devoid of innovation.
To be honest, the only piece of innovation that's really given me a "Wow!" moment in Open Source is the Mylyn project from Eclipse.
IBM doesn't necessarily follow trends. It invests in areas where it thinks it can make money. They've been on the Second Life bandwagon for a while now, and they've built quite a presence and have tutorials on DeveloperWorks about developing content for SecondLife using Rational Application Developer.
If they followed their standard operating procedure since they got into power, they would have developed a bill Bush didn't like and then used it as a wedge issue in the upcoming election (like the children's insurance bill, for which Pelosi's rhetoric somehow managed to link Bush's veto to supporting cigarette makers over children).
Honestly, the MPG requirements here don't go far enough. With gas prices outpacing inflation and hostile leadership controlling significant chunks of the oil supply, we need more efficient vehicles to reduce the risks to our economy.
...essentially cover allowing users to selectively retrieve voice mail messages using an inbox-type display.
How is NeXTSTEP's mail app (with integrated voice support) not prior art?
AOL and Vonage may not have been able to turn up prior art, but Apple owns NeXTSTEP. It would seem reasonable for them to fight it, considering the damages claimed. If the suit weren't filed in patent troll central, it would seem to be a no-brainer.
Don't disparage the entirety of the religious right because of the actions of a few (or even many or most). Judging people by group labeling is exactly the same sort of cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all thinking that brings us idiocy like political correctness.
I'm fed up with the demonizing that goes on in both directions. There are more than enough idiots on both sides of the political spectrum.
If you think I'm an apologist, you're sorely mistaken. GWB should be run out of town on a rail. Incompetence isn't any less bad than malice in my book.
I think you should slap yourself repeatedly for jumping to such a wrongheaded idiotic conclusion. Unfortunately, I doubt self-flagellation would cause you to think any more before spouting tripe.
The intent, without just cause or reason, to commit a wrongful act that will result in harm to another.
It all hinges on the intent. GWB had what he believed to be just cause or reason -- the belief, despite the evidence, that WMD's existed in Iraq and Saddam Husein was hiding them well.
Note that I am not an apologist for GWB. He shouldn't have been elected (and, in all honesty, we should have had better choices from both parties).
You're almost right. The dogma is that everything worth knowing can be ascertained through the scientific method.
Please....the Bush's don't have a monopoly on either malice or incompetence (and to be completely honest, our problems are more due to GWB taking incompetent action than taking malicious action). If the Iraq War had been prosecuted competently, all we'd have left in Iraq now is a police force training Iraqis on how to police their own country.
No, it wasn't malice that caused this to be a mess -- it was incompetence.
Indeed. The Dems and Reps are both moronic and evil -- it's just easier to catch the Reps at it because most members of the media (except for Fox and the radio talk show hosts) has a chip on its shoulder about them.
Creationists (of which I'm not one) and anti-creationists (of which I'm also not one) are dogmatic. The fact that the beliefs come from a different world-view doesn't change the fact that it's dogma. Faith that there is a supreme being is not much different from the faith that there isn't -- the faith in science to explain the fundamentally unexplainable (how and why *anything* exists).
Have you not visited Wal-Mart's digital downloads section on their website?
This thing is a flea circus. Anything that generates clicks is fodder for exploitation by the media.
It'd be nice if they stuck to things that were actually newsworthy.
Rewriting an existing system only makes sense if either the benefits outweigh the costs, or there is a high level of risk to staying on the base system (i.e., the hardware or software is no longer supported).
Other than that, most overhaul/modernization efforts should be focused on making the UI more accessible to end users and interoperable with other systems.
Rails was not at fault here. The fault was expecting Rails to be a silver bullet....that just by choosing Rails, everything will happen as if by magic. They ignore the fact that Rails can't do everything. If it tried, it would become bloated to the point that people start talking about it like they talk now about Java. Writing in Ruby, clean and elegant as it is, doesn't change that fact.
The argument isn't about whether or not the patents are valid or whether they advance or retard scientific progress. The argument is about whether or not patent encumbered standards should be allowed.
But, to answer your question, the extra cash from royalties/lawsuits would help CSIRO, but not the scientific community at large. It is the community at large that helps progression...to assume that progress would be helped by paying royalties to a single inventor, the question is: is that vendor *uniquely* positioned to advance the state of the art? In CSIRO's case, the answer is no.
What if, every time you had an idea, you had to go hire a lawyer to perform a patent search? How long does that take, how much does it cost, and what happens if the patent search turns up prior patents? That's a good way to put a damper on research, and is probably contributing to the decline of corporate-funded R&D labs in the U.S.
To be fair, it was Microsoft taking Netscape's idea of browser-as-application-platform and making AJAX out of it that enabled Google to write its apps. It wasn't the platform.
Sheesh, where's PriceLine when you need it?
The prevailing knowledge two years ago was that global warming was going to increase the number and severity of hurricanes like Katrina. The scientific data was being used to try to explain the circumstances of the time.
m
More recent studies have concluded that global warming will actually reduce the number and severity of hurricanes. The warmer air temperatures will increase wind shear, running a counterbalance against the warming water and air temperatures:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2007/s2840.ht
While the people that said we were going to have more Katrina-like storms got a lot of press, this study hasn't gotten as much press. It certainly wasn't being talked about at "Live Earth".
The point is that there is a groupthink that has formed, where the analysis is being made to fit a particular view of what will be happening to the world. The question has become "how can this data show that climate change is dangerous" instead of "what does this data say about what will happen"?
I think the author uses the term "procedural programming" when what he's describing is a DSL for games.
It's 20 years from the date of application. It would expire in October 2008.
How do you not know how much energy recycling a battery takes? Sure, it's better than dumping it in a landfill, but it takes a non-trivial amount of energy to heat the batteries.
If the process were like standard auto batteries (which don't require heating), then there wouldn't be a problem.
Certain computational problems aren't easily decomposed into parallelizeable chunks. Deriding faster clock speeds as a waste of time in light of additional cores is extremely naive. We need multi-cores for problems that can be broken down into chunks and faster clocks for tearing through those chunks.
IBM's POWER6 is an acknowledgment that parallelism only goes so far. It's around 4.5GHz per core. I'll be interested to see the benchmarks.