If, as it initially appears (I'm no expert in this area), this patent represented a useful step forward in CDROM technology at the time, and the technology was picked up and used by Roxio and others without license, then why shouldn't Optima get due credit and compensation?
Because they sat on this patent for six years while other people invested significant time and money independently inventing and developing this technology. They quietly waited and said nothing while other people built up valuable businesses selling this technology to countless millions of customers. Then they pop up and sucker punch them in an effort to grab the loot without actually having to do the work of producing anything.
the author borrowed and modified some open source code for a terminal app into a Finder alternative. A bunch of GPL zealots then started a flame war with many actually demanding that he release the entire source code to the world under the GPL! What was worse was that the author had already helped the community by releasing many of the classes he had developed!
That's almost as bad as the story about this other guy. He borrowed some of the Windows system DLLs for use in his own alternative OS product. A bunch of BSA zealots then started a witch hunt with many actually demanding that he give all the money he'd made and more to Microsoft! What was worse was that he had already helped Microsoft by buying a copy of their Windows OS!
In the dark days before laser printers, we usually used a pencil. Draw your picture, xerox it onto a transparancy, and you're all set. (In the darker days befor cheap xerox machines, my school teachers used to do the same thing with special transparancies that worked in those purple mimeograph machines.)
As for text, that was often jotted on a blank transparancy or a chalkboard in the form of notes during the presentation itself.
It may be hard to believe, but that system worked just fine. The only reason you need powerpoint today is that everyone else uses it, and you wouldn't look cool enough if you used hand-drawn diagrams.
Wolf and Doom were Raycasting, not Raytracing. Conceptually a little similar, I guess, but in Wolf and Doom, the rays stopped after the first hit - they didn't reflect, refract or transmit through the material and hit more things, and in the wolf raycast, the raycaset was essentially 2D, used to pick entire columns out from a texture.
It was also essentially 2D (often called "2-1/2D") in Doom. They used some major trickery to make it look like you had real 3D. However, the tricks greatly constrained the map topology that could be used. For example, there are no "bridges" anywhere in doom; there is always exactly one ceiling and one floor at any point in the map. IIRC, there were no slopes either, only steps.
The fact that you could play the entire game and never notice these limitations goes to show just how skilled the map artists were.
I have a feeling that in a few years W2K will be going for a mint on eBay.
However, in a few years Microsoft is going to drop support for Win2K, and they will stop posting security patches. After that point, only a fool would run that OS on an Internet-connected machine.
So he wants more taxes, less military, and more government than they do. In other words, he's to the left of them.
At least that's a logically consistent set of goals; as opposed to the current administration which wants us to believe that we can have less taxes, more military and more government.
And as I poined out in a reply to that same post, it's because copying was much more difficult.
Copyright laws in general worked better well back when copying was much more difficult. It's easy to enforce this kind of "thoughtcrime" law when there are only a handful of pirate book publishers with big heavy sticky printing presses.
It's a lot harder today when every 12-year old has a high-volume distribution channel in their bedroom. Changes in technology threaten to make copyright laws unenforceable without imposing a police state.
Is promoting useful arts and sciences worth this price paid in freedom? Would progress really grind to a halt if, for example, non-commercial duplication of all copyrighted works were legalized?
Some people claim that the answer to those questions is obviously yes. I'm not so sure. Counterexamples like RedHat and the Grateful Dead prove that at least some content providers can feed their families without a total ban on copying.
If technology has changed and the price to society for enforcing a total ban on copying has increased, I would argue that maybe the number of content creators we can support should shrink correspondingly. Fewer content producers could be supported without a total ban on copying, but given that we are currently awash in a sea of content crap, I say that the media and software industries could stand a little weeding out. They certainly don't deserve to be allowed to turn this country into a fascist IP enforcement camp.
I am one of the guys who maintain the government, not the government itself. It has to ask me first to take that sort of decision.
You were asked the last time there was an election. You'll be asked again in the next election.
If enough people agree with you, this will become a campaign issue and the voters might kick out those scoundrels who dare enact guidelines that make government agencies consider open-source software.
If it bothers you enough, you can run for office yourself and make that a central plank in your platform.
In the meantime until the next election, the representatives currently in charge of government operations may decide to do it this way. It's no different than working at a job at a corporation where the managers create standards for what IT equipment the company buys.
You and the parent posts just keep repeating the axiom: "I created it, therefore I control it."
This is the basis of your argument; just like a philosopher starts with "I think, therefore I am". The whole point of my post was to question the validity of that assumption in the first place. You still don't understand what I'm trying to say.
Undoubtedly, the next response in this thread will start with "How can you question my axiom? I worked on it! I should control it!"
Depleted Uranium isn't very radioactive; Enriched Uranium is. That's why it's usefull in reactors and bombs. It splits easiy.
Enriched uranium is more radioactive than depleted uranium. However, with a half life of 700 million years, even 100% enriched pure U-235 is much less radioactive than most other nuclear materials. (Like plutonium at 24,000 years or nasty waste products at a few decades or centuries).
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think that splitting easily has anything to do with the inherent radioactivity of a sample until you get near the critical mass. It would seem that no physical principle would prevent even a totally stable isotope from being fissionable (although I don't think that any are); that property is a function of what happens when the nucleus captures an extra neutron, which doesn't have a direct relation to half life.
If you show it to someone, how does it follow that it would be intrinsically morally wrong if they made a copy of it? It's funny, after the centuries of philosophical debate over right and wrong through history, that this particular concept of having rights over distributing copies didn't pop up until the 17th century. It just must not have been as obvious to the great thinkers of history as it seems to be to you.
It is wrong only because it's wrong to break the law. The law in question was put in place for economic, not moral, reasons. It is not wrong to copy it just because you created it.
You seem to have a false sense of entitlement. If you want to keep total control of it, don't show it to anyone.
I am not asking about elements of law, I am asking for a reason why my work should be any more stealable (?) than someone else's.
But elements of law are the only thing you've got. IP protection is not a "natural" right that transcends the law. If it were, it wouldn't have an expiration date.
I would argue that waaaaay too many people are eager to give away other people's rights.
And I'm questioning whether it was wise to expand your rights to the extent they've been expanded over the last few years. They didn't come from nowhere, your expanded rights came at the expense of the rights of others.
Nuclear fission in a launch vehicle is pretty bold, considering the history behind non-proliferation. I sure hope this one doesn't blow up on the launch pad.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union launched several dozen fission reactors on naval radar satellites, most of which are still whizzing over our heads. (These orbits are expected to decay within the next couple of centuries.)
Actually, a new fission reactor loaded with fresh fuel would be no big deal if it blew up. Uranium isn't all that radioactive before you start splitting it. With just a little bit of depletion, it's regarded as safe enough to spew liberally over battlefields (for some definition of safe). If you don't switch the reactor on until you're safely in orbit, you won't have much to worry about.
The radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) that many of our current probes use are far more dangerous. They carry a considerable amount of a highly radioactive isotope of plutonium that has a half life of a few decades. The decay (not fission) of this isotope generates the heat to generate electricity with a thermocouple.
A fission reactor starts out with almost no radiation, and it builds up as the fuel burns. An RTG starts out with maximum radiation, and it slowly decays over time. Clearly, the first choice would be better to strap into a rocket.
What if there is a failure of some sort around Europa and the probe ends up crashing on the planet?
That nuclear material could have an unmeasureable detrimental effect on any life there is there, so NASA needs to be damn certain that this baby will not contaminate the surface even if the worst case scenario was to occur.
You do realize that if you were to stand unprotected on the surface of Europa today, you'd be killed within minutes by Jupiter's intense radiation belts. This reactor would just be a tiny drop in an ocean of ferocious radiation.
Seriously though: If I work for a month on a piece of code, why shouldn't I have exclusive rights to it if I want?
Why should you?
The clause in the U.S. constitution that gives congress the power to revoke my right to distribute copies of your work gives this justification: to promote useful arts and sciences. Your exclusive rights to it are a means to an end, not the end in itself.
You have to weigh the benefits vs. costs of the exclusive rights granted to authors to determine if you should have those rights. Most would argue that you should have some exclusive rights. Many would argue that over the past century, you've been given far too many exclusive rights.
Gnome and KDE weren't exactly a fork. They are two completely separate projects that share little if any code. Just because one was created in response to the other doesn't make it a fork, just as Pepsi is not a fork of Coke. How is this different from commercial software that has competing products in the same marketplace? (Or is the preferred natural condition of software a monopoly?)
At any rate, I don't see how forking of open source software could be nearly as great a risk as proprietary software being abandoned by its producers. When companies go out of business, drop products, or just drop support, that causes real costs to their customers if they wouldn't otherwise switch solutions. A forked project doesn't cause any immediate costs, and its long term costs are no worse than what happens when your software vendor gets a new competitor in the marketplace.
Uhm, 99% of all "garage" businesses fail miserably.
Probably close to 99% of raw R&D projects started within big businesses ultimately fail (or are simply canceled) as well. (I'm talking about blue-sky projects, not incremental follow-ons.) You just don't hear about them because they aren't made public unless they progress to the production stage. I've experienced this myself, being involved with more canceled projects than I care to remember.
The main difference is that most big businesses have enough resources from their few big successes to absorb the costs of their failed projects.
You've got to look at the big picture when allocating resources to safety. How many people die each year because of flimsy airliner seats? I can't recall any crashes of large aircraft in the U.S. from the past several years where anyone had any hope of survival (I might be wrong).
Increasing the strength of airplane seats would involve either more weight or more expensive materials. Both of these would be costly, and would result in an increase in air fares. More expensive flights would cause more poeple to choose driving than flying, which is statistically far more dangerous. Before you spend money making airplane seats stronger, perhaps saving a few dozen lives per decade, it would be a good idea to do the math on how many more automobile fatalities that might indirectly cause.
Actually, I mainly meant migration from old-school proprietary UNIX (tm). The fictional old guy in that ad probably would sneer at Linux almost as much as he would at Windows.
I agree that the crest of the wave that says "Windows is the next big thing on servers" is probably close to passing, and free OSes will probably be the next big wave. However, the ad looks to be targeted at those who didn't catch the Windows wave in the first place.
I thought the subliminal message being projected by that ad was funny (assuming it's the same one I've seen). They deliberately picked a guy that looks old and obstinate. The implication they are trying to make is that Unix and its sysadmins are obsolete washed up fuddy-duddies, and they need to migrate to Windows now before they get laid off.
I think that more than trying to sell this particular software product, Microsoft is trying to sow seeds of job insecurity doubts into the brains of the target audience in order to soften up resistance to Windows migration.
Corporate Japan's fascination with robotic workers has nothing to do with a 'looming labor shortage', and everything to do with eliminating the blue-collar worker to increase the white-collar's income.
At least they're keeping their blue-collar jobs inside their own country, creating quite a few good jobs for engineers and technicians to design and fix these electronic blue-collar workers.
Here in the USA, we're shipping the blue-collar jobs to 3rd world countries instead. All that leaves here is employment for a few low-level PHBs whose jobs are to make long-distance calls at weird hours. Boring.
In Canada, as in the UK, the lines are drawn based on population, not politics. Each candidate has 100,000 or thereabouts, people in their riding.
How much more fair do you want?
The number of people per district isn't the issue, it's the composition of each district. For example, even when all districts have exact equal populations, you can rig the process. You adjust the boundaries of the districts so that most of the districts have a mild majority of voters aligned with your party, and the rest have almost 100% opposition voters. If done right, you could end up with most of the seats even if fewer people actually vote for your party.
Example with 4 districts and 20 voters: (xxxoo xxxoo xxxoo ooooo).
The party with 45% of the vote gets 75% of the seats.
One symptom of this process is an increasing fractal dimension of the districts (the ratio of district boundary to its area). You get this when a district is drawn with an amoeba-like shape to try to select for neighborhoods with certain pockets of voters.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board audits everything about them, both physical and soft, for unintentional and intentional security holes.
Slot machine integrity is not verified solely by government oversight. Individual members of the community also make an invaluable contribution. People like William Bennett, who selflessly use their own funds to check, recheck and check yet again the accuracy of these machines' odds. Here is someone who has a real passion for testing these machines, who has the guts to trust his own resources to the integrity of the system, who is willing to invest the time it takes to make huge random samples, and who has the clout to make sure that any irregularities would be duly addressed.
Without people like this who provide major resources to help the gaming industry and the Nevada economy in general, we would all be worse off. The next time you walk down the Las Vegas strip enjoying the stunning display of neon lights, take a moment to think about the dedicated people that provide the funds to pay for them, and be thankful.
I might be wrong, but I don't believe that they ever even tested a large booter like the Saturn 5. but...
They tested their moon rocket, the N-1, several times in the 60s and early 70s. Each one blew up, mostly due a combination of bad luck, design bureau infighting, and a design that used 30 engines on the first stage alone. (What are the odds of no problems with that?)
They had better luck in the 80s with the "Energia" core booster for their space shuttle clone, the Buran. It was designed so that it could be launched without the heavy shuttle and with extra booster units to achieve very impressive payloads. It successfully launched their shuttle for one unmanned orbital flight, but IIRC the project was canceled after that.
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Because they sat on this patent for six years while other people invested significant time and money independently inventing and developing this technology. They quietly waited and said nothing while other people built up valuable businesses selling this technology to countless millions of customers. Then they pop up and sucker punch them in an effort to grab the loot without actually having to do the work of producing anything.
That's almost as bad as the story about this other guy. He borrowed some of the Windows system DLLs for use in his own alternative OS product. A bunch of BSA zealots then started a witch hunt with many actually demanding that he give all the money he'd made and more to Microsoft! What was worse was that he had already helped Microsoft by buying a copy of their Windows OS!
In the dark days before laser printers, we usually used a pencil. Draw your picture, xerox it onto a transparancy, and you're all set. (In the darker days befor cheap xerox machines, my school teachers used to do the same thing with special transparancies that worked in those purple mimeograph machines.)
As for text, that was often jotted on a blank transparancy or a chalkboard in the form of notes during the presentation itself.
It may be hard to believe, but that system worked just fine. The only reason you need powerpoint today is that everyone else uses it, and you wouldn't look cool enough if you used hand-drawn diagrams.
It was also essentially 2D (often called "2-1/2D") in Doom. They used some major trickery to make it look like you had real 3D. However, the tricks greatly constrained the map topology that could be used. For example, there are no "bridges" anywhere in doom; there is always exactly one ceiling and one floor at any point in the map. IIRC, there were no slopes either, only steps.
The fact that you could play the entire game and never notice these limitations goes to show just how skilled the map artists were.
However, in a few years Microsoft is going to drop support for Win2K, and they will stop posting security patches. After that point, only a fool would run that OS on an Internet-connected machine.
At least that's a logically consistent set of goals; as opposed to the current administration which wants us to believe that we can have less taxes, more military and more government.
Copyright laws in general worked better well back when copying was much more difficult. It's easy to enforce this kind of "thoughtcrime" law when there are only a handful of pirate book publishers with big heavy sticky printing presses.
It's a lot harder today when every 12-year old has a high-volume distribution channel in their bedroom. Changes in technology threaten to make copyright laws unenforceable without imposing a police state.
Is promoting useful arts and sciences worth this price paid in freedom? Would progress really grind to a halt if, for example, non-commercial duplication of all copyrighted works were legalized?
Some people claim that the answer to those questions is obviously yes. I'm not so sure. Counterexamples like RedHat and the Grateful Dead prove that at least some content providers can feed their families without a total ban on copying.
If technology has changed and the price to society for enforcing a total ban on copying has increased, I would argue that maybe the number of content creators we can support should shrink correspondingly. Fewer content producers could be supported without a total ban on copying, but given that we are currently awash in a sea of content crap, I say that the media and software industries could stand a little weeding out. They certainly don't deserve to be allowed to turn this country into a fascist IP enforcement camp.
You were asked the last time there was an election. You'll be asked again in the next election.
If enough people agree with you, this will become a campaign issue and the voters might kick out those scoundrels who dare enact guidelines that make government agencies consider open-source software.
If it bothers you enough, you can run for office yourself and make that a central plank in your platform.
In the meantime until the next election, the representatives currently in charge of government operations may decide to do it this way. It's no different than working at a job at a corporation where the managers create standards for what IT equipment the company buys.
Anyway, I was right. Your response was: "My axiom is obvious!"
This is the basis of your argument; just like a philosopher starts with "I think, therefore I am". The whole point of my post was to question the validity of that assumption in the first place. You still don't understand what I'm trying to say.
Undoubtedly, the next response in this thread will start with "How can you question my axiom? I worked on it! I should control it!"
Enriched uranium is more radioactive than depleted uranium. However, with a half life of 700 million years, even 100% enriched pure U-235 is much less radioactive than most other nuclear materials. (Like plutonium at 24,000 years or nasty waste products at a few decades or centuries).
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think that splitting easily has anything to do with the inherent radioactivity of a sample until you get near the critical mass. It would seem that no physical principle would prevent even a totally stable isotope from being fissionable (although I don't think that any are); that property is a function of what happens when the nucleus captures an extra neutron, which doesn't have a direct relation to half life.
So?
If you show it to someone, how does it follow that it would be intrinsically morally wrong if they made a copy of it? It's funny, after the centuries of philosophical debate over right and wrong through history, that this particular concept of having rights over distributing copies didn't pop up until the 17th century. It just must not have been as obvious to the great thinkers of history as it seems to be to you.
It is wrong only because it's wrong to break the law. The law in question was put in place for economic, not moral, reasons. It is not wrong to copy it just because you created it. You seem to have a false sense of entitlement. If you want to keep total control of it, don't show it to anyone.
I am not asking about elements of law, I am asking for a reason why my work should be any more stealable (?) than someone else's.
But elements of law are the only thing you've got. IP protection is not a "natural" right that transcends the law. If it were, it wouldn't have an expiration date.
I would argue that waaaaay too many people are eager to give away other people's rights.
And I'm questioning whether it was wise to expand your rights to the extent they've been expanded over the last few years. They didn't come from nowhere, your expanded rights came at the expense of the rights of others.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union launched several dozen fission reactors on naval radar satellites, most of which are still whizzing over our heads. (These orbits are expected to decay within the next couple of centuries.)
Actually, a new fission reactor loaded with fresh fuel would be no big deal if it blew up. Uranium isn't all that radioactive before you start splitting it. With just a little bit of depletion, it's regarded as safe enough to spew liberally over battlefields (for some definition of safe). If you don't switch the reactor on until you're safely in orbit, you won't have much to worry about.
The radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) that many of our current probes use are far more dangerous. They carry a considerable amount of a highly radioactive isotope of plutonium that has a half life of a few decades. The decay (not fission) of this isotope generates the heat to generate electricity with a thermocouple.
A fission reactor starts out with almost no radiation, and it builds up as the fuel burns. An RTG starts out with maximum radiation, and it slowly decays over time. Clearly, the first choice would be better to strap into a rocket.
That nuclear material could have an unmeasureable detrimental effect on any life there is there, so NASA needs to be damn certain that this baby will not contaminate the surface even if the worst case scenario was to occur.
You do realize that if you were to stand unprotected on the surface of Europa today, you'd be killed within minutes by Jupiter's intense radiation belts. This reactor would just be a tiny drop in an ocean of ferocious radiation.
Why should you?
The clause in the U.S. constitution that gives congress the power to revoke my right to distribute copies of your work gives this justification: to promote useful arts and sciences. Your exclusive rights to it are a means to an end, not the end in itself.
You have to weigh the benefits vs. costs of the exclusive rights granted to authors to determine if you should have those rights. Most would argue that you should have some exclusive rights. Many would argue that over the past century, you've been given far too many exclusive rights.
At any rate, I don't see how forking of open source software could be nearly as great a risk as proprietary software being abandoned by its producers. When companies go out of business, drop products, or just drop support, that causes real costs to their customers if they wouldn't otherwise switch solutions. A forked project doesn't cause any immediate costs, and its long term costs are no worse than what happens when your software vendor gets a new competitor in the marketplace.
Probably close to 99% of raw R&D projects started within big businesses ultimately fail (or are simply canceled) as well. (I'm talking about blue-sky projects, not incremental follow-ons.) You just don't hear about them because they aren't made public unless they progress to the production stage. I've experienced this myself, being involved with more canceled projects than I care to remember.
The main difference is that most big businesses have enough resources from their few big successes to absorb the costs of their failed projects.
Increasing the strength of airplane seats would involve either more weight or more expensive materials. Both of these would be costly, and would result in an increase in air fares. More expensive flights would cause more poeple to choose driving than flying, which is statistically far more dangerous. Before you spend money making airplane seats stronger, perhaps saving a few dozen lives per decade, it would be a good idea to do the math on how many more automobile fatalities that might indirectly cause.
I agree that the crest of the wave that says "Windows is the next big thing on servers" is probably close to passing, and free OSes will probably be the next big wave. However, the ad looks to be targeted at those who didn't catch the Windows wave in the first place.
I think that more than trying to sell this particular software product, Microsoft is trying to sow seeds of job insecurity doubts into the brains of the target audience in order to soften up resistance to Windows migration.
At least they're keeping their blue-collar jobs inside their own country, creating quite a few good jobs for engineers and technicians to design and fix these electronic blue-collar workers.
Here in the USA, we're shipping the blue-collar jobs to 3rd world countries instead. All that leaves here is employment for a few low-level PHBs whose jobs are to make long-distance calls at weird hours. Boring.
My God, it's full of spam!!
How much more fair do you want?
The number of people per district isn't the issue, it's the composition of each district. For example, even when all districts have exact equal populations, you can rig the process. You adjust the boundaries of the districts so that most of the districts have a mild majority of voters aligned with your party, and the rest have almost 100% opposition voters. If done right, you could end up with most of the seats even if fewer people actually vote for your party.
Example with 4 districts and 20 voters: (xxxoo xxxoo xxxoo ooooo). The party with 45% of the vote gets 75% of the seats.
One symptom of this process is an increasing fractal dimension of the districts (the ratio of district boundary to its area). You get this when a district is drawn with an amoeba-like shape to try to select for neighborhoods with certain pockets of voters.
Slot machine integrity is not verified solely by government oversight. Individual members of the community also make an invaluable contribution. People like William Bennett, who selflessly use their own funds to check, recheck and check yet again the accuracy of these machines' odds. Here is someone who has a real passion for testing these machines, who has the guts to trust his own resources to the integrity of the system, who is willing to invest the time it takes to make huge random samples, and who has the clout to make sure that any irregularities would be duly addressed.
Without people like this who provide major resources to help the gaming industry and the Nevada economy in general, we would all be worse off. The next time you walk down the Las Vegas strip enjoying the stunning display of neon lights, take a moment to think about the dedicated people that provide the funds to pay for them, and be thankful.
They tested their moon rocket, the N-1, several times in the 60s and early 70s. Each one blew up, mostly due a combination of bad luck, design bureau infighting, and a design that used 30 engines on the first stage alone. (What are the odds of no problems with that?)
They had better luck in the 80s with the "Energia" core booster for their space shuttle clone, the Buran. It was designed so that it could be launched without the heavy shuttle and with extra booster units to achieve very impressive payloads. It successfully launched their shuttle for one unmanned orbital flight, but IIRC the project was canceled after that.