With statutory damages of $150,000 per CD, it looks like the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue. No wonder the music industry is hurting.
Why? If we can have redundant TLDs like ".com" and ".biz", why can't we let this redundant domain which is in popular demand just go on? Are there any other countries that could be abbreviates with S and U clamoring for this slot right now? If not, what's the big deal?
I think that all those numbers at the ends are too confusing. They should replace them with unique combinations of easy-to-remember terms such as "Pair", "Twin" and "Quartet". Then we would have more friendly names without arbitrary digits, such as:
Furthermore, if you ban the low level languages, what are you going to write the high level language's byte-code interpreters in? Why, turtles of course. Turtles all the way down.
OK, maybe you're right. I can't read and understand the patent claims. Echostar's patent lawyers can't read and understand the patent claims even after years of study. You can't understand them; in fact, nobody can understand them. (But maybe a jury of 12 random laymen off the street gets to decide what they mean.)
All that goes to show is just how arbitrary and stupid these obvious and vaguely worded software patents are.
What exactly makes you think that the Echostar update claim clears them?
The claims in the patent cover only specific arrangements of data streams. By routing data in a way that's not quite as obvious as the way the patent is worded, it would be relatively straightforward to create a non-infringing implementation.
I've seen\used the other DVRs that are apparently also using the same "obvious" ideas and they SUCK while using a TIVO is actually pretty good.
How does that relate to the "Time Warp" patent (#6,233,389)? This patent is actually rather narrow and describes low-level implementation details that are totally invisible to the user. The claims are, IMO, obvious to an average developer, but they are worded in such a way that it's not hard to come up with a slightly less obvious implementation that doesn't infringe. The fact that EchoStar put out a software update that works around the patent supports this.
You're talking about the quality of the GUI and menus, which have nothing to do with this litigation.
Why the hell would you want to pronounce that highly awkward, useless and redundant fifth syllable? We've spent centuries over here cleaning up the English language by expunging extraneous letters and normalizing spelling to match pronunciation. Much has been accomplished, but more needs to be done. Get with the program.
For the software industry, you have it exactly backwards.
The probability of building a non-trivial application that doesn't infringe on some existing patent is essentially zero. Large companies build patent portfolios and cross-license them with each other to build up an oligarchy of a few big players with a huge barrier around their market positions. They are all free to operate under this mutual patent umbrella.
These big guys can squash any small player that comes along with a new product that threatens their established market position. If a small player that actually produces products were to assert a patent against one of the oligarchy members, it will most get countersued for patents in the big guy's portfolio. The party with the most lawyers and financial resources will be the one most likely to prevail. (The only small guys who do not run this risk are the ones that don't actually produce anything to be countersued over, i.e., the patent trolls.)
In the software industry, patents are nothing more than an unpredictable minefield that can pop up anywhere to threaten any small company's survival, and patent trolls can pop up do do significant financial damage even to large companies. Software patents negative economic effects outweigh any benefits they provide.
They didn't break your TV, they stopped an aging service that they were under no obligation to continue
In a democratic republic, if enough people think that the government has an obligation regarding the analog TV broadcast under their control, then by definition it has one. As it turns out, they do have an obligation, and they're taking action on it with these coupons.
Should the government buy you a new TV if yours breaks?
If the *government* broke my TV by selling the bandwidth for its broadcast protocol to private parties for billions of dollars, you're damned right the government should use some of the proceeds to cover my costs of rectifying the situation.
Whether or not the entire idea of giving people a converter box, as opposed to "letting the market sort it out" itself is another story
That's a good idea. We could put the onus on the wireless companies who want this analog TV bandwidth. They would have to negotiate with each and every television owner in this nation to create an individualized plan to upgrade or adapt their old TVs. As soon as every last analog TV in the country has been fixed its owner's satisfaction, the telcos could start using their bandwidth.
I totally agree that there should be a public broadcasting system in place, however, I don't think that because some people can't afford a convertor box, that fellow tax payers should be penalized over a luxery preference in tv viewing.
And I think that if Google and a bunch of telcos pay the government $billions to make bandwith landgrabs that break my perfectly good TV, the least they can do is use some of the proceeds to compensate me for my expenses.
If nuclear power is so dangerous, why do the same two (bad) examples keep getting talked about over and over?
The reason is the effects of an accident: ruining the real estate values of the area of a small US state for almost a century. It doesn't matter that the radiation effects wouldn't actually be all that dangerous or that not all that many people would be killed. The way people perceive the accident would cause a huge disruption to a large area, and it would have negative affects hugely disproportionate to the actual damages.
Chernobyl was a big factor in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a country which had survived Stalinism and utter devastation in WWII. Rightly or wrongly, a major nuclear power accident is extremely traumatic. People just don't get that worked up over diffuse threats such as how many people die from coal soot.
Your complaints won't change the psychology of the population at large, nor will it make the risks of an accident or attack exactly zero. And that was the reason I made my post: the GP post was essentially claiming that the risks are zero. They aren't, and the characteristics of a nuclear incident make its effects much more damaging to society than chemical plant accidents or mundane threats that routinely kill thousands of people per year.
The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse
The Chernobyl plant exploded, and the biggest fear during the TMI incident was of an explosion. Explosions can include chemical and/or pressure driven events, not just fission chain reactions.
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....
That's patently false, especially if you consider the risks of sabotage or terrorist attacks, which are probably higher than the risk of technical failure. Shit happens.
Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
In actuality, the regional chieftan's wife just wanted a new stone table for the kitchen nook. She drew up a picture for a local mason contractor, but she accidentally jotted down the height as 20' instead of 20". The contractor decided to go ahead with the project as drawn, figuring that questioning the plans would achieve little other than reducing his potential compensation for construction costs (which the chieftan would have to cover in any event to save face). The rest is history.
Of course, that assumes that all power plants are coal powered plants that do not attempt reclaim mercury. I guess nuclear and gas fired plants don't exist.
No, you guess because you didn't RTFA, which states on page 10 that "The electricity mix used in the operation phase is assumed to be the average of all U.S generation."
And there's no such thing as waste heat in the winter. Sure, you're only using 12W. Which means that you'll need another 48W worth of heat to catch up to the incandescent.
But only a tiny percentage of the population live near a hydroelectric plant in the winter enjoying government subsidized power costs. For most everybody else near a normal power plant, 120W of additional energy is lost in power plant smokestacks, cooling towers and transmission wires to generate the power for a 60W bulb. For most people, your 48W shortfall would be much better made up with a modern 90% efficient residential furnace than with electricity. It becomes a total of 65W of fuel energy input vs. 180W.
When it's not cold out, the advantage for CFLs is even more pronounced.
Slashdot Mirror
With statutory damages of $150,000 per CD, it looks like the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue. No wonder the music industry is hurting.
Unlike DRMed music, it's not a federal offense for someone service your minivan when it breaks.
Why? If we can have redundant TLDs like ".com" and ".biz", why can't we let this redundant domain which is in popular demand just go on? Are there any other countries that could be abbreviates with S and U clamoring for this slot right now? If not, what's the big deal?
Core 2 Duo Twin Pair Double
Core 2 Extreme Quartet Pair Duplex
Core 2 Quad Twin Quartet II Deuce
Core 2 Trio Double Couplet Twin Duet
It's not really an euphemism. The definition of "ballistic" literally means to fall like a rock.
Yes, but first you have to figure out how to approximate Linux as a Taylor series.
All that goes to show is just how arbitrary and stupid these obvious and vaguely worded software patents are.
The claims in the patent cover only specific arrangements of data streams. By routing data in a way that's not quite as obvious as the way the patent is worded, it would be relatively straightforward to create a non-infringing implementation.
How does that relate to the "Time Warp" patent (#6,233,389)? This patent is actually rather narrow and describes low-level implementation details that are totally invisible to the user. The claims are, IMO, obvious to an average developer, but they are worded in such a way that it's not hard to come up with a slightly less obvious implementation that doesn't infringe. The fact that EchoStar put out a software update that works around the patent supports this.
You're talking about the quality of the GUI and menus, which have nothing to do with this litigation.
Why the hell would you want to pronounce that highly awkward, useless and redundant fifth syllable? We've spent centuries over here cleaning up the English language by expunging extraneous letters and normalizing spelling to match pronunciation. Much has been accomplished, but more needs to be done. Get with the program.
Nope, more like NASCAR. Just a bunch of bits turning left for 500 ns.
As you may recall, the entire idea that software can even be patented in the US was originally legislated from the bench.
For the software industry, you have it exactly backwards.
The probability of building a non-trivial application that doesn't infringe on some existing patent is essentially zero. Large companies build patent portfolios and cross-license them with each other to build up an oligarchy of a few big players with a huge barrier around their market positions. They are all free to operate under this mutual patent umbrella.
These big guys can squash any small player that comes along with a new product that threatens their established market position. If a small player that actually produces products were to assert a patent against one of the oligarchy members, it will most get countersued for patents in the big guy's portfolio. The party with the most lawyers and financial resources will be the one most likely to prevail. (The only small guys who do not run this risk are the ones that don't actually produce anything to be countersued over, i.e., the patent trolls.)
In the software industry, patents are nothing more than an unpredictable minefield that can pop up anywhere to threaten any small company's survival, and patent trolls can pop up do do significant financial damage even to large companies. Software patents negative economic effects outweigh any benefits they provide.
In a democratic republic, if enough people think that the government has an obligation regarding the analog TV broadcast under their control, then by definition it has one. As it turns out, they do have an obligation, and they're taking action on it with these coupons.
If the *government* broke my TV by selling the bandwidth for its broadcast protocol to private parties for billions of dollars, you're damned right the government should use some of the proceeds to cover my costs of rectifying the situation.
That's a good idea. We could put the onus on the wireless companies who want this analog TV bandwidth. They would have to negotiate with each and every television owner in this nation to create an individualized plan to upgrade or adapt their old TVs. As soon as every last analog TV in the country has been fixed its owner's satisfaction, the telcos could start using their bandwidth.
And I think that if Google and a bunch of telcos pay the government $billions to make bandwith landgrabs that break my perfectly good TV, the least they can do is use some of the proceeds to compensate me for my expenses.
The reason is the effects of an accident: ruining the real estate values of the area of a small US state for almost a century. It doesn't matter that the radiation effects wouldn't actually be all that dangerous or that not all that many people would be killed. The way people perceive the accident would cause a huge disruption to a large area, and it would have negative affects hugely disproportionate to the actual damages.
Chernobyl was a big factor in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a country which had survived Stalinism and utter devastation in WWII. Rightly or wrongly, a major nuclear power accident is extremely traumatic. People just don't get that worked up over diffuse threats such as how many people die from coal soot. Your complaints won't change the psychology of the population at large, nor will it make the risks of an accident or attack exactly zero. And that was the reason I made my post: the GP post was essentially claiming that the risks are zero. They aren't, and the characteristics of a nuclear incident make its effects much more damaging to society than chemical plant accidents or mundane threats that routinely kill thousands of people per year.
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....The Chernobyl plant exploded, and the biggest fear during the TMI incident was of an explosion. Explosions can include chemical and/or pressure driven events, not just fission chain reactions.
That's patently false, especially if you consider the risks of sabotage or terrorist attacks, which are probably higher than the risk of technical failure. Shit happens.
Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
In actuality, the regional chieftan's wife just wanted a new stone table for the kitchen nook. She drew up a picture for a local mason contractor, but she accidentally jotted down the height as 20' instead of 20". The contractor decided to go ahead with the project as drawn, figuring that questioning the plans would achieve little other than reducing his potential compensation for construction costs (which the chieftan would have to cover in any event to save face). The rest is history.
Well, if the law uses a normal word, maybe you people in the patent industry ought to interpret the law the way it is written.
Maybe so, but it's rather doubtful that a nuclear war could somehow be stopped after just a "few" cities.
No, you guess because you didn't RTFA, which states on page 10 that "The electricity mix used in the operation phase is assumed to be the average of all U.S generation."
But only a tiny percentage of the population live near a hydroelectric plant in the winter enjoying government subsidized power costs. For most everybody else near a normal power plant, 120W of additional energy is lost in power plant smokestacks, cooling towers and transmission wires to generate the power for a 60W bulb. For most people, your 48W shortfall would be much better made up with a modern 90% efficient residential furnace than with electricity. It becomes a total of 65W of fuel energy input vs. 180W.
When it's not cold out, the advantage for CFLs is even more pronounced.