Frankly, I don't care for ICANN's crappy, archaic rules that probably don't matter anymore. It's good to have standards, as long as you stick to them, but they don't do it very well. They've already broken a few of them by allowing numerals as the first character in a domain name (the @ host, e.g. "2600.com" is technically invalid, DNS-wise), as well as single character domain names.
Try again. Leading numerals in domain name components have been valid since October 1989, per RFC 1123:
2.1 Host Names and Numbers
The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952 [DNS:4]. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax.
I can find nowhere that requires that domain names are required to have at least two characters - can you cite an RFC for that one?
..commercial funding for software research would be reduced, as the potential of making back the investment would be greatly diminished.
"Patently" untrue (ahem...)
Businesses will still need technologies to sell and to enhance their own efficiency. Do you imagine that in the absence of patents they'd all just close up shop?
Did I say that? No. I said that funding would be diminished, and much of what would be developed would be protected as "trade secrets". Businesses only exist to do one thing - make a profit. If something is high risk, like most research, there needs to be a high potential for return. Otherwise, they'll accept the lower returns of the low risk avenue of producing known quantities. Take away the protection of patents, and the risk stays high while the return lessens, probably to unacceptably low levels. In that environment, most businesses will wait for someone with a higher tolerance for risk to gamble that they can develop something new and make enough of a profit off of it before everyone else duplicates it.
No, all that would happen is that instead of licensing other firms' technologies they'd either get them for free if they were out in the open (and I'm sure those able to do so would *not* be moaning about the loss of the patent system)...or else they'd happily re-invent what others have but are keeping secret.
Second, what research there was would largely result in work which would remain trade secrets, which impede progress as much as overbroad overlong patents do.
I don't see any evidence for such a conclusion.
I've heard estimates that anywhere from 80% to 95% of software is developed internally by companies which do not publish software. How much of that is "out in the open"? Pitifully little. Why? Not because they have any desire to make a direct profit off of the software, but because there is no reason to release it, and perceived reason not to - perhaps their software gives them an advantage over their competitors, so keep it a "trade secret".
Under the current patent system, you are not allowed to reinvent and if the owner of the patent doesn't want to licence to you then you are stuffed. If we abandon the patents system then anyone is free to invent or re-invent whatever they want. Isn't that a more natural system for a free market economy?
Perhaps, but the free market economy has nothing to do with the purpose of the patent system.
The current patent system only preserves monopolies, it doesn't facilitate progress at all.
I think that that statement is overbroad, but I agree with the essence - the current patent system preserves monopolies, and does little to facilitate progress.
The only possible downside is the cost of reinvention. But in that case, who is the loser anyway? The company doing the reinventing only pays for its own R&D instead of stumping up royalties to the firm that could afford the most expensive lawyers. So the overall costs to such companies probably don't change much. But *even if* more money is being spent overall, then this money still isn't going into a black hole. It's being spent in the form of salaries to the scientists and engineers doing that R&D. IOW, the money is still circulating, but it's circulating through salaries to the extra R&D workers rather than through dividend payments to Acme Corp's stockholders. Do you have a problem with that?
No, if that would be what would happen. It isn't. Let's go back to the issue of internal software. Who is the loser in the current situation? Arguably, every business is, because in most cases they've paid programmers to reimplement something that someone else has implemented, possibly better. Unfortunately, there's a prisoner's dilemma here, because unless every company opens their internal software, those who don't have the benefits of their own labor plus everything those who have opened it have.
But lets suppose that every business did open their code. Would that lead to increased employment for programmers? Hardly. Instead of having a team of programmers to develop something to do X, and another to develop one to do Y, and..., they would have a team to modify application A to do exactly X, then to modify application B to do exactly Y, and..., or perhaps it would be a set of smaller teams to do all of them in parallel. Would these non-software companies suddenly develop more varied software to keep their old programmers employed? Nope, they'd be in the unemployment lines, just like...
In other words abandoning the patent system would result in no net effect upon the economy, but in the training and employment of more scientists and engineers, less idle rich parasite investors lounging around... and much less employment of Intellectual Property lawyers;o)
No, there would be fewer scientists and engineers being employed, as most businesses would only be employing the bare minimum necessary to reproduce the advances made by the rare adventurous business. The idle rich would find something else to invest in, but you're right about one thing - there would probably be fewer IP lawyers - unless they all got work fighting "trade secret" suits.
You seem to have the idea that businesses exist to do research. If so, you're wrong. Businesses exist to make a profit. If research makes a profit, they'll do research. If copying what others have researched makes more of a profit, they'll copy what others have researched. Right now, the patent system makes patents too valuable for too long, thereby impeding progress, but by scrapping patents entirely, you would be impeding (or failing to encourage) progress by removing the corporate incentive to fund research. Sure, there will be some research done, which the company will do its best to keep secret - that doesn't facilitate progress. There will be some people who will do research for their own pleasure, or in educational settings, but it won't be anything close to what we have today, and it definitely won't be your nirvana of increased research. We need to find some middle ground, where patents are valid long enough to encourage businesses to fund research, but not so long as to choke off research which builds on other patents.
The intellectual property industry these days typically uses the argument that intellectual property law helps innovation, because without the rewards that they can get through being granted a monopoly, the creators of intellectual property would have no incentive to create.
Like most absolutes, that's not entirely true, but there is a degree of truth in it. Some creators might have less of an incentive, but the [Open Source|Free Software] community demonstrates that financial reward isn't the only source of incentive.
I am usually sceptical of this claim, because I think that if there is an incentive to use an invention, then there is an incentive for potential users to pay for its creation. At least there certainly is when the costs of creation are relatively low. Perhaps in cases where the up front costs of the invention are high and the potential users are widely dispersed (eg pharmaceuticals) then this argument might hold. (Actually I'm still not convinced. Many people would have applied it in this form to such things as operating systems just a few years ago). However, in most instances I don't think the argument holds very well at all.
Creative individuals will create, but, like developers being paid to develop open source, creative people can create more if they don't have to meet their basic needs by doing less creative things. Business owners will do what is necessary to make more money, and if that is to pay creative people to create, that's what they will do. What patents are intended to do is to tilt the profit balance further toward creating new things, rather than reproducing old things, which makes businesses more likely to hire more creative people. Has this balance gotten wildly out of whack? Sure. As communications have improved, the cycles of one person learning of another's invention and building upon it have gotten shorter and shorter, but patent law hasn't adjusted to that.
Along those lines, I can believe that the costs of pharmecutical research are greater than most others, but that's not because of any exception that research has from the speedup in general, but because of the artificial (and, IMNSHO, necessary) inflation in costs caused by government regulation. Call me cynical, but I suspect that the only way to get pharmacutical companies to perform adequate safety testing otherwise would be for them to be hit with multi-billion dollar lawsuits (and evn that isn't always sufficient).
By granting monopolies on ideas and inventions and what I can do with them, patent laws are placing restrictions on my freedom.
Like most laws.
Very strong arguments are needed to justify this.
In.us, those arguments were made over 200 years ago, when a group of men who had risked their lives and wealth (I suspect that the former is often easier to risk than the latter) for freedom decided that these restricitons were worth the benefit. I doubt that many of those here, including those of us who have served in the military, have risked as much for freedom. Given that, very strong arguments will be needed to convince me that patents no longer have any use.
The point is that there is a difference between inventions which can be used without disclosure, and those which are useless without disclosure. The latter group are disclosed, and thus "promote progress in the useful arts", the instant anyone starts using them; the reverse-auction and one-click shopping are examples.
Can you give me an example of a patent which can be used in a product without disclosure as you mean it?
I'm looking at a Kensington MemoryLock, which has a patent associated with it for a "stud or lock bolting device". Both "what you can do" and "how you do it" are both disclosed by the device.
Contrast this with the one-click shopping patent, where "what you can do" is definitely disclosed, but "how you do it" is only partially disclosed, as you can certainly see any cookies deposited, but you can only make intelligent guesses as to exactly how they are used.
With these two examples, we already know that you consider the one-click shopping patent disclosed, and shgouldn't be (easily) patentable. Would you find the locking device similarly (or more) disclosed, and likewise unpatentable? If not, why not? I have to say that, having seen the MemoryLock, that the concept seems obvious (run a case screw through a block, and seat a removable lock into opening), but was it really an obvious way of securing a screw when it was introduced? Was it really obvious that a cookie could be used to charge someone's credit card with one click, and noone else was crazy enough to gamble credit card charges on the security of their customers' cookie files? (I'm assuming that one-click shopping doesn't require you to log in each time, as I don't use Amazon. I have visions of someone's one-click cookie getting snarfed, and caseloads of $OBJECTIONABLE_TO_THEM books showing up on their doorstep.)
Some patents are granted for inventions that cannot be used without being disclosed (look-and-feel patents, anyone?).... Since the progress in the useful arts is brought about by disclosure, schemes such as the above which cannot be used without being disclosed should be held to a very high level of scrutiny before any patent is granted.
I'm afraid I don't get you here. Every patent has to be disclosed (aside from some patents with "National Security" implications), when the patent is granted.
Most of the benefits of many inventions is not in the sales, but in the use. (See open-source software.) Techniques such as wavelet compression are far more useful if they are not patented, because the requirement to negotiate use rights is a barrier to their use, and their value is increased by ubiquity; the promise of "progress in the useful arts" is taken back by the barriers to entry.
And it always has been. The purpose of the patent system is not to "promote use of the useful arts", but, as you pointed out, to "promote progress of the useful arts". While the current system, especially the length of the patents and the inability of the PTO to recognize obviousness and intependently research prior art, impedes progress, so would eliminating software patents, as two things would happen. First, commercial funding for software research would be reduced, as the potential of making back the investment would be greatly diminished. Second, what research there was would largely result in work which would remain trade secrets, which impede progress as much as overbroad, overlong patents do.
I think the best solution is to greatly reduce the patent period for software patents to 3 years after award or 5 years after application, and to increase funding for the PTO to adequately research patents. Perhaps the funding could come from a sliding scale for patent application fees based on the applicant's annual revenues, with an additional fee for patents transferred within 1 year of issue (the additional fee being the difference between what the fee would be for the company gaining the patent, minus the amount paid to the original recipient of the patent.
For example, digital media has shattered the usefulness of copyright law by making controlling copying impossible.
Is this really true, or is it an example of needing to have a legal solution to a technological problem? Copyright law wasn't needed when copying a work was prohibitively expensive, so "content producers" could make a living by selling copies of their work, or by performing it. As the cost of copying a work decreased, the need for legal means of controlling the copying increased, hence the development of copyright law.
As the cost of copying a work is rapidly approaching zero, the need for fair and rational copyright laws are more imperative. The person(s) who creates, or pays for the creation of, a work has the right to charge what they feel to be a fair price for the distribution of their work, although it's certainly be nice when people make it available for free. At the same time, it needs to be forcefully impressed on these people that copies of a work made for the purposes of personal use at a more convenient time, in a more convenient format, or on a more convenient system are legitimate, and that a certain amount of technically illegitimate copying and distribution among friends needs to be accepted as one of the costs of doing business.
The actions of RIAA against MP3 are certainly distasteful, and the deceptive recasting of the threat DeCSS poses to the licensing fees that the DVD CCA charges to player manufacturers as a copyright control issue is wholly repugnant, but we shouldn't toss copyright law out based upon excesses of this nature.
It seems that here in the U.S., with the number of laws that have been struck down by courts on Constitutional grounds,
What number of laws is that? Even with the high-profile, politically motivated, we-have-to-save-the-children-and-the-hell-with-the -Constitution laws, there aren't that many laws struck down as unconstitutional.
Technology changes fast enough that we can't etch a law into stone before the technology makes the law obsolete (not to mention the technology!).
Perhaps this is a problem with the specific laws, and not the concept of law? After all, the Constitution hasn't been made obsolete by technology. Too often, however, laws are written as if current technology is the end of development. The trick, I think, is for the laws to be written broadly enough to apply to future technology, without being restrictive enough to choke off the development of that technology.
All this "poll" demonstrates is that Deja ratings, just like any other poll where the pollees select themselves, is essentially meaningless, especially when the tally can be trivially stuffed.
In a different arena, Comics Buyers Guide used to permit anyone to vote for their annual awards using copies of their ballot. This lasted until the year of the Duckslide, when Carl Barks fans openly stuffed the ballot box and won all but one of the categories (Barks didn't have any painted comics published that year). As a result, they now require you to use the original ballot from the CBG. The ballot can still be stuffed, by buying large quantities of the CBG, just like reliable polls can be rigged by careful wording and ordering of questions. Open voting is a nice idea, but it's trivial to abuse, and we really don't need to get worked up over it.
A decent name? No offence meant, but would YOU be attracted to a place that states that it -is- the pits?
I take it as a general rule that when someone says "no offence meant", offense is meant, and offense is taken. Does the name "William Pitt" mean anything to you? Frankly, I'm glad that you aren't interested in living in Pittsburgh, as I wouldn't be interested in having you live there.
I used to keep a copy of an article from 1993 or 1994 about how to keep Windows programmers happy, because the things it listed seemed to me to apply more generally to any computer geek. Unfortunately, I don't know where my copy is (or even if I still have it), and I can't find it in Google (no big surprise there, given the date), but I recall three of the points, two of which are probably still accurate:
1) You need an alpha geek. While it's fair to say that leading geeks is like herding cats, geeks also swarm around alpha geeks like bees around a queen.
2) Provide the geeks cool toys. Just like, if you keep bees in an area with plenty of nectar you can steal their honey, if you keep geeks in a steady supply of cool toys you can reap the fruits of their labor. By 'cool toys', I don't mean frisbees and puzzles and yo-yos and such (although walk through the exhibit area of any geek convention and you can tell we're attracted to those), I mean things like that new dual Athalon 800 system, or a Visor Deluxe, or ADSL.
3) The item that I'm not sure applies as much is that, in return for reaping the fuits of the geeks labor, you don't have to pay them a king's ransom, you just have to pay them enough that when they hear their father say "When are you going to get a real job?", they can reply "But Dad, I'm making more than you are." (this all occurs in the geek's head). I'm not sure that it's quite that easy any more, but you can prolly substitute some stock options for hard currency.
As for myself, if all of my relatives were to be moved outside of a 300 mile radius, and I could find a comprable job, I'd be in Pittsburgh. I love my family dearly, but I like them far enough away that they have to call before they show up at my door.;)
As the Executive Director of Linux International, and a member of the Board of Directors of USENIX, what sort of overlap do you see between the two communities, and what sort of overlap would you like to see?
is it really sensible to spend time and resources porting Linux to lets say S/390
Recall that all but one of the listed contributors of the S/390 code in 2.2.14 gave ibm.com email addresses. My guess is that they are affiliated with the S/390 group in some fashion, which would suggest that someone there thinks that it does make business sense to have Linux/390. Also, it's unlikely that those people would have been orking on Linux in any other (official) fashion, so it's not really time and resources which could have been used elsewhere.
Beyond that, I think that a major part of the strength of open source is that, for the most part, developers are volunteers, and they work on problems that they find interesting. It's possible that they find the problem interesting because they expect to learn something from it, and a practical application of their results is secondary. I've often thought that Linux on a Palm isn't very useful, but then I consider that their are Palm devices with 8MB RAM that accept Flash cards, and I wonder...
But BSD had networking then. Linux didn't. So you had a choice of IDE disks or networking. I guess most people had IDE disks and no network to connect to.
I'm not sure when "then" was, but Linux had TCP/IP by early 1993. Trying to remember why we chose to go with Linux over 386BSD, it's a bit hazy. It wouldn't have been the IDE issue, as the systems we were looking to use with an affordable alternative to SCO initially all had SCSI drives. It wasn't failure to know about 386BSD, as Dave Burgess was right down the hall, gently evangelizing. The only thing that I can think of was the uncertainty of the USL vs BSDI lawsuit. I suppose that by the time that was settled, we had already invested enough into Linux, and showed enough progress with it, that there wasn't any reason at that point to switch horses to one of the BSD branches.
it's obvoisly not FUD or any anti-linux campaining.
But Microsoft claims:
The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible.
This is a false statement designed to make you doubt that you can use Linux and Windows on the same system, sow uncertainty about those who claim to do it, and fear that if you try Linux that it will be difficult to return to Windows. How is that not FUD?
now that your done playing games heres how to put a real OS back on your system
Well, that is sort of what I do at home - I play some of those 3D-accelerated games in Win98, then boot back into a real OS. Now, once VMware can pass through 3D acceleration, or Wine can do it...
The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible.
A curious definition of "incompatible". Last I checked, my notebook had Linux and Windows partitions coexisting quite nicely, and Linux could access them all. Is it _our_ fault that _Microsoft's_ product is deficient in this area?
The Linux operating system is generally installed on partition type 83 (Linux native) or 82 (Linux swap).
Hey, how many people have installed Linux on the swap partition?
The Linux boot manager (LILO) can be configured to start from:... The root folder (superblock) of the Linux partition.
I think the lilo README says it far better:
The LILO boot sector is designed to be usable as a partition boot sector.
(I.e. there is room for the partition table.) Therefore, the LILO boot sector can be stored at the following locations:
- boot sector of a Linux floppy disk. (/dev/fd0,...) - MBR of the first hard disk. (/dev/hda,/dev/sda,...) - boot sector of a primary Linux file system partition on the first hard disk. (/dev/hda1,...) - partition boot sector of an extended partition on the first hard disk. (/dev/hda1,...)*
"Superblock" in Linux terminology means that the Linux partition should be the active partition.
Well, since every (formatted) ext2 partition has a super block, that would be a bit difficult, wouldn't it?
Remove native, swap, and boot partitions used by Linux:
Hey, you told us about the native and swap partition types, but what is this "boot partition" type?
Insert either a bootable floppy disk or a bootable CD-ROM for the Linux operating system on your computer, and then press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart your computer.
Good...
Remove LILO. To remove the LILO, type fdisk/mbr at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.
Well, no. Since you booted from a Linux disk, assuming that you did that from the shell, you'd get:
# fdisk/mbr
Unable to open/mbr
Also, Linux recognizes more than forty different partition types,
Closer to eighty, but I guess when comparing it to Windows, which is brain damaged and only recognizes things like
FAT 12 (Type 01)
FAT 16 > 32 M Primary (Type 06)
FAT 16 Extended (Type 05)
FAT 32 w/o LBA Primary (Type 0b)
FAT 32 w/LBA Primary (Type 0c)
FAT 16 w/LBA (Type 0e)
FAT 16 w/LBA Extended (Type 0f)
I guess they didn't want to make Windows look too bad in comparison (although they forgot to mention the NTFS partition types which Linux knows about). Well, I guess that I'll just tell them that their "information" didn't answer my question.;)
You probably mean a GNU command line utility. Linux is the kernel, some of us prefer to call the whole system GNU/Linux.
I use the 90%+ of the same GNU utilities on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, etc. Should I be calling them GNU/Solaris, GNU/HP-UX, GNU/AIX, GNU/FreeBSD, etc? I think not. I use GNU utilities on a Linux system, just as I do on any other Unix (derived) system.
Re:Collecting E-mail adresses? For spam?
on
Win an AIBO
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· Score: 1
You have my assurances as both an engineer at Everyone.net, and a good friend of the individual whose brainchild this contest is...
No offense, but your assurances don't carry any weight. We've seen with the Sun/Imprise/Blackdown fiasco, and the repeated missteps of Corel Linux licenses, how much personal assurances are worth.
Then again, you've effectively turned your web server into an email open relay, so I suppose that you'll be taken advantage of soon enough.
IANAL, but this is the New York State Court of Appeals, not a federal court, which means that it's certainly not binding outside of New York, and prolly not binding on federal courts within New York. Beyond that, the article quotes Michael J. Silverberg, an attorney for Prodigy, as saying "The Court is saying, under New York law and without going to federal law and without having to determine the scope of the Communications Decency Act, that this kind of case doesn't stand up.". Since it doesn't interpret any law which is applicable outside of New York, it isn't even of much use to point to and say "This is how New York interprets this law.". It's a good decision, certainly, but I don't think that it's The Decision which grants ISPs Common Carrier status.
But this was out on the IETF raven list a couple of weeks ago. ZDTV did go into some more detail, but William Allen Simpson first posted about it on November 18th, and followed up on November 19th.
One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.
As you indicated, that is the classical man-month tenet, more formally known as Brooks Law. As ESR pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, this doesn't hold true when people are working on a problem that they find interesting with a communications medium at least as good as the Internet. In the world of closed source, Brooks Law holds true, because when you throw money at a project, and hire more developers, you aren't getting developers who are interested in solving the problems of your project. You're getting developers who are interested in making a living. However,
isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it?
For the most part, yes, but how much are they able to work on it? Most developers have to work on problems they are not interested in in order to make a living, and work on their interests in their own time. By adding funding to Mozilla, Red Hat presumably intends for Mozilla to do what Red Hat has done with Linux - find people who already find the problem interesting and are working on it, and pay them to work on problems they find interesting. Yes, they may work on things other than what you're hoping to get, but if done properly, they will still find the problems you want solved interesting and will continue working on them as well.
They can use the same methods of protest and civil disobedience that every other citizen is entitled to. They could show up on the doorstep of the justice department with pitchforks, plowshares, and torches, if they "really" don't like the status quo.
Except they are not "every other citizen", they are Federal employees, and they can be fired for doing what you suggest. Certainly, they could do that, and be replaced by someone who doesn't give a damn. Or they could stay in the system, trying to make sensible changes within the legal boundries established by Congress and the courts.
But I guess they don't dislike it *that* much now do they?
I suspect that they like putting food on the table for their families, just like you do.
Or, say, Scheduled Tasks in the Tivoli Management Environment? In TME, the Endpoint receives a start message from the TMR Server. This start message contains the command to be run, and optionally arguments to the command and the command binaries. When completed, the Endpoint sends a message to the Server including the output from the Task.
Tivoli has been doing this since at least 1995. Since IBM owns Tivoli, this could get very interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't care for ICANN's crappy, archaic rules that probably don't matter anymore. It's good to have standards, as long as you stick to them, but they don't do it very well. They've already broken a few of them by allowing numerals as the first character in a domain name (the @ host, e.g. "2600.com" is technically invalid, DNS-wise), as well as single character domain names.
Try again. Leading numerals in domain name components have been valid since October 1989, per RFC 1123:
2.1 Host Names and Numbers
The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952 [DNS:4]. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax.
I can find nowhere that requires that domain names are required to have at least two characters - can you cite an RFC for that one?
"Patently" untrue (ahem...)
Businesses will still need technologies to sell and to enhance their own efficiency. Do you imagine that in the absence of patents they'd all just close up shop?
Did I say that? No. I said that funding would be diminished, and much of what would be developed would be protected as "trade secrets". Businesses only exist to do one thing - make a profit. If something is high risk, like most research, there needs to be a high potential for return. Otherwise, they'll accept the lower returns of the low risk avenue of producing known quantities. Take away the protection of patents, and the risk stays high while the return lessens, probably to unacceptably low levels. In that environment, most businesses will wait for someone with a higher tolerance for risk to gamble that they can develop something new and make enough of a profit off of it before everyone else duplicates it.
No, all that would happen is that instead of licensing other firms' technologies they'd either get them for free if they were out in the open (and I'm sure those able to do so would *not* be moaning about the loss of the patent system)...or else they'd happily re-invent what others have but are keeping secret.
I don't see any evidence for such a conclusion.
I've heard estimates that anywhere from 80% to 95% of software is developed internally by companies which do not publish software. How much of that is "out in the open"? Pitifully little. Why? Not because they have any desire to make a direct profit off of the software, but because there is no reason to release it, and perceived reason not to - perhaps their software gives them an advantage over their competitors, so keep it a "trade secret".
Under the current patent system, you are not allowed to reinvent and if the owner of the patent doesn't want to licence to you then you are stuffed. If we abandon the patents system then anyone is free to invent or re-invent whatever they want. Isn't that a more natural system for a free market economy?
Perhaps, but the free market economy has nothing to do with the purpose of the patent system.
The current patent system only preserves monopolies, it doesn't facilitate progress at all.
I think that that statement is overbroad, but I agree with the essence - the current patent system preserves monopolies, and does little to facilitate progress.
The only possible downside is the cost of reinvention. But in that case, who is the loser anyway? The company doing the reinventing only pays for its own R&D instead of stumping up royalties to the firm that could afford the most expensive lawyers. So the overall costs to such companies probably don't change much. But *even if* more money is being spent overall, then this money still isn't going into a black hole. It's being spent in the form of salaries to the scientists and engineers doing that R&D. IOW, the money is still circulating, but it's circulating through salaries to the extra R&D workers rather than through dividend payments to Acme Corp's stockholders. Do you have a problem with that?
No, if that would be what would happen. It isn't. Let's go back to the issue of internal software. Who is the loser in the current situation? Arguably, every business is, because in most cases they've paid programmers to reimplement something that someone else has implemented, possibly better. Unfortunately, there's a prisoner's dilemma here, because unless every company opens their internal software, those who don't have the benefits of their own labor plus everything those who have opened it have.
But lets suppose that every business did open their code. Would that lead to increased employment for programmers? Hardly. Instead of having a team of programmers to develop something to do X, and another to develop one to do Y, and..., they would have a team to modify application A to do exactly X, then to modify application B to do exactly Y, and..., or perhaps it would be a set of smaller teams to do all of them in parallel. Would these non-software companies suddenly develop more varied software to keep their old programmers employed? Nope, they'd be in the unemployment lines, just like...
In other words abandoning the patent system would result in no net effect upon the economy, but in the training and employment of more scientists and engineers, less idle rich parasite investors lounging around... and much less employment of Intellectual Property lawyers
No, there would be fewer scientists and engineers being employed, as most businesses would only be employing the bare minimum necessary to reproduce the advances made by the rare adventurous business. The idle rich would find something else to invest in, but you're right about one thing - there would probably be fewer IP lawyers - unless they all got work fighting "trade secret" suits.
You seem to have the idea that businesses exist to do research. If so, you're wrong. Businesses exist to make a profit. If research makes a profit, they'll do research. If copying what others have researched makes more of a profit, they'll copy what others have researched. Right now, the patent system makes patents too valuable for too long, thereby impeding progress, but by scrapping patents entirely, you would be impeding (or failing to encourage) progress by removing the corporate incentive to fund research. Sure, there will be some research done, which the company will do its best to keep secret - that doesn't facilitate progress. There will be some people who will do research for their own pleasure, or in educational settings, but it won't be anything close to what we have today, and it definitely won't be your nirvana of increased research. We need to find some middle ground, where patents are valid long enough to encourage businesses to fund research, but not so long as to choke off research which builds on other patents.
The intellectual property industry these days typically uses the argument that intellectual property law helps innovation, because without the rewards that they can get through being granted a monopoly, the creators of intellectual property would have no incentive to create.
.us, those arguments were made over 200 years ago, when a group of men who had risked their lives and wealth (I suspect that the former is often easier to risk than the latter) for freedom decided that these restricitons were worth the benefit. I doubt that many of those here, including those of us who have served in the military, have risked as much for freedom. Given that, very strong arguments will be needed to convince me that patents no longer have any use.
Like most absolutes, that's not entirely true, but there is a degree of truth in it. Some creators might have less of an incentive, but the [Open Source|Free Software] community demonstrates that financial reward isn't the only source of incentive.
I am usually sceptical of this claim, because I think that if there is an incentive to use an invention, then there is an incentive for potential users to pay for its creation. At least there certainly is when the costs of creation are relatively low. Perhaps in cases where the up front costs of the invention are high and the potential users are widely dispersed (eg pharmaceuticals) then this argument might hold. (Actually I'm still not convinced. Many people would have applied it in this form to such things as operating systems just a few years ago). However, in most instances I don't think the argument holds very well at all.
Creative individuals will create, but, like developers being paid to develop open source, creative people can create more if they don't have to meet their basic needs by doing less creative things. Business owners will do what is necessary to make more money, and if that is to pay creative people to create, that's what they will do. What patents are intended to do is to tilt the profit balance further toward creating new things, rather than reproducing old things, which makes businesses more likely to hire more creative people. Has this balance gotten wildly out of whack? Sure. As communications have improved, the cycles of one person learning of another's invention and building upon it have gotten shorter and shorter, but patent law hasn't adjusted to that.
Along those lines, I can believe that the costs of pharmecutical research are greater than most others, but that's not because of any exception that research has from the speedup in general, but because of the artificial (and, IMNSHO, necessary) inflation in costs caused by government regulation. Call me cynical, but I suspect that the only way to get pharmacutical companies to perform adequate safety testing otherwise would be for them to be hit with multi-billion dollar lawsuits (and evn that isn't always sufficient).
By granting monopolies on ideas and inventions and what I can do with them, patent laws are placing restrictions on my freedom.
Like most laws.
Very strong arguments are needed to justify this.
In
The point is that there is a difference between inventions which can be used without disclosure, and those which are useless without disclosure. The latter group are disclosed, and thus "promote progress in the useful arts", the instant anyone starts using them; the reverse-auction and one-click shopping are examples.
Can you give me an example of a patent which can be used in a product without disclosure as you mean it?
I'm looking at a Kensington MemoryLock, which has a patent associated with it for a "stud or lock bolting device". Both "what you can do" and "how you do it" are both disclosed by the device.
Contrast this with the one-click shopping patent, where "what you can do" is definitely disclosed, but "how you do it" is only partially disclosed, as you can certainly see any cookies deposited, but you can only make intelligent guesses as to exactly how they are used.
With these two examples, we already know that you consider the one-click shopping patent disclosed, and shgouldn't be (easily) patentable. Would you find the locking device similarly (or more) disclosed, and likewise unpatentable? If not, why not? I have to say that, having seen the MemoryLock, that the concept seems obvious (run a case screw through a block, and seat a removable lock into opening), but was it really an obvious way of securing a screw when it was introduced? Was it really obvious that a cookie could be used to charge someone's credit card with one click, and noone else was crazy enough to gamble credit card charges on the security of their customers' cookie files? (I'm assuming that one-click shopping doesn't require you to log in each time, as I don't use Amazon. I have visions of someone's one-click cookie getting snarfed, and caseloads of $OBJECTIONABLE_TO_THEM books showing up on their doorstep.)
Some patents are granted for inventions that cannot be used without being disclosed (look-and-feel patents, anyone?). ... Since the progress in the useful arts is brought about by disclosure, schemes such as the above which cannot be used without being disclosed should be held to a very high level of scrutiny before any patent is granted.
I'm afraid I don't get you here. Every patent has to be disclosed (aside from some patents with "National Security" implications), when the patent is granted.
Most of the benefits of many inventions is not in the sales, but in the use. (See open-source software.) Techniques such as wavelet compression are far more useful if they are not patented, because the requirement to negotiate use rights is a barrier to their use, and their value is increased by ubiquity; the promise of "progress in the useful arts" is taken back by the barriers to entry.
And it always has been. The purpose of the patent system is not to "promote use of the useful arts", but, as you pointed out, to "promote progress of the useful arts". While the current system, especially the length of the patents and the inability of the PTO to recognize obviousness and intependently research prior art, impedes progress, so would eliminating software patents, as two things would happen. First, commercial funding for software research would be reduced, as the potential of making back the investment would be greatly diminished. Second, what research there was would largely result in work which would remain trade secrets, which impede progress as much as overbroad, overlong patents do.
I think the best solution is to greatly reduce the patent period for software patents to 3 years after award or 5 years after application, and to increase funding for the PTO to adequately research patents. Perhaps the funding could come from a sliding scale for patent application fees based on the applicant's annual revenues, with an additional fee for patents transferred within 1 year of issue (the additional fee being the difference between what the fee would be for the company gaining the patent, minus the amount paid to the original recipient of the patent.
For example, digital media has shattered the usefulness of copyright law by making controlling copying impossible.
Is this really true, or is it an example of needing to have a legal solution to a technological problem? Copyright law wasn't needed when copying a work was prohibitively expensive, so "content producers" could make a living by selling copies of their work, or by performing it. As the cost of copying a work decreased, the need for legal means of controlling the copying increased, hence the development of copyright law.
As the cost of copying a work is rapidly approaching zero, the need for fair and rational copyright laws are more imperative. The person(s) who creates, or pays for the creation of, a work has the right to charge what they feel to be a fair price for the distribution of their work, although it's certainly be nice when people make it available for free. At the same time, it needs to be forcefully impressed on these people that copies of a work made for the purposes of personal use at a more convenient time, in a more convenient format, or on a more convenient system are legitimate, and that a certain amount of technically illegitimate copying and distribution among friends needs to be accepted as one of the costs of doing business.
The actions of RIAA against MP3 are certainly distasteful, and the deceptive recasting of the threat DeCSS poses to the licensing fees that the DVD CCA charges to player manufacturers as a copyright control issue is wholly repugnant, but we shouldn't toss copyright law out based upon excesses of this nature.
It seems that here in the U.S., with the number of laws that have been struck down by courts on Constitutional grounds,
e -Constitution laws, there aren't that many laws struck down as unconstitutional.
What number of laws is that? Even with the high-profile, politically motivated, we-have-to-save-the-children-and-the-hell-with-th
Technology changes fast enough that we can't etch a law into stone before the technology makes the law obsolete (not to mention the technology!).
Perhaps this is a problem with the specific laws, and not the concept of law? After all, the Constitution hasn't been made obsolete by technology. Too often, however, laws are written as if current technology is the end of development. The trick, I think, is for the laws to be written broadly enough to apply to future technology, without being restrictive enough to choke off the development of that technology.
All this "poll" demonstrates is that Deja ratings, just like any other poll where the pollees select themselves, is essentially meaningless, especially when the tally can be trivially stuffed.
In a different arena, Comics Buyers Guide used to permit anyone to vote for their annual awards using copies of their ballot. This lasted until the year of the Duckslide, when Carl Barks fans openly stuffed the ballot box and won all but one of the categories (Barks didn't have any painted comics published that year). As a result, they now require you to use the original ballot from the CBG. The ballot can still be stuffed, by buying large quantities of the CBG, just like reliable polls can be rigged by careful wording and ordering of questions. Open voting is a nice idea, but it's trivial to abuse, and we really don't need to get worked up over it.
A decent name? No offence meant, but would YOU be attracted to a place that states that it -is- the pits?
I take it as a general rule that when someone says "no offence meant", offense is meant, and offense is taken. Does the name "William Pitt" mean anything to you? Frankly, I'm glad that you aren't interested in living in Pittsburgh, as I wouldn't be interested in having you live there.
I used to keep a copy of an article from 1993 or 1994 about how to keep Windows programmers happy, because the things it listed seemed to me to apply more generally to any computer geek. Unfortunately, I don't know where my copy is (or even if I still have it), and I can't find it in Google (no big surprise there, given the date), but I recall three of the points, two of which are probably still accurate:
;)
1) You need an alpha geek. While it's fair to say that leading geeks is like herding cats, geeks also swarm around alpha geeks like bees around a queen.
2) Provide the geeks cool toys. Just like, if you keep bees in an area with plenty of nectar you can steal their honey, if you keep geeks in a steady supply of cool toys you can reap the fruits of their labor. By 'cool toys', I don't mean frisbees and puzzles and yo-yos and such (although walk through the exhibit area of any geek convention and you can tell we're attracted to those), I mean things like that new dual Athalon 800 system, or a Visor Deluxe, or ADSL.
3) The item that I'm not sure applies as much is that, in return for reaping the fuits of the geeks labor, you don't have to pay them a king's ransom, you just have to pay them enough that when they hear their father say "When are you going to get a real job?", they can reply "But Dad, I'm making more than you are." (this all occurs in the geek's head). I'm not sure that it's quite that easy any more, but you can prolly substitute some stock options for hard currency.
As for myself, if all of my relatives were to be moved outside of a 300 mile radius, and I could find a comprable job, I'd be in Pittsburgh. I love my family dearly, but I like them far enough away that they have to call before they show up at my door.
As the Executive Director of Linux International, and a member of the Board of Directors of USENIX, what sort of overlap do you see between the two communities, and what sort of overlap would you like to see?
is it really sensible to spend time and resources porting Linux to lets say S/390
Recall that all but one of the listed contributors of the S/390 code in 2.2.14 gave ibm.com email addresses. My guess is that they are affiliated with the S/390 group in some fashion, which would suggest that someone there thinks that it does make business sense to have Linux/390. Also, it's unlikely that those people would have been orking on Linux in any other (official) fashion, so it's not really time and resources which could have been used elsewhere.
Beyond that, I think that a major part of the strength of open source is that, for the most part, developers are volunteers, and they work on problems that they find interesting. It's possible that they find the problem interesting because they expect to learn something from it, and a practical application of their results is secondary. I've often thought that Linux on a Palm isn't very useful, but then I consider that their are Palm devices with 8MB RAM that accept Flash cards, and I wonder...
But BSD had networking then. Linux didn't. So you had a choice of IDE disks or networking. I guess most people had IDE disks and no network to connect to.
I'm not sure when "then" was, but Linux had TCP/IP by early 1993. Trying to remember why we chose to go with Linux over 386BSD, it's a bit hazy. It wouldn't have been the IDE issue, as the systems we were looking to use with an affordable alternative to SCO initially all had SCSI drives. It wasn't failure to know about 386BSD, as Dave Burgess was right down the hall, gently evangelizing. The only thing that I can think of was the uncertainty of the USL vs BSDI lawsuit. I suppose that by the time that was settled, we had already invested enough into Linux, and showed enough progress with it, that there wasn't any reason at that point to switch horses to one of the BSD branches.
it's obvoisly not FUD or any anti-linux campaining.
But Microsoft claims:
The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible.
This is a false statement designed to make you doubt that you can use Linux and Windows on the same system, sow uncertainty about those who claim to do it, and fear that if you try Linux that it will be difficult to return to Windows. How is that not FUD?
now that your done playing games heres how to put a real OS back on your system
Well, that is sort of what I do at home - I play some of those 3D-accelerated games in Win98, then boot back into a real OS. Now, once VMware can pass through 3D acceleration, or Wine can do it...
The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible.
A curious definition of "incompatible". Last I checked, my notebook had Linux and Windows partitions coexisting quite nicely, and Linux could access them all. Is it _our_ fault that _Microsoft's_ product is deficient in this area?
The Linux operating system is generally installed on partition type 83 (Linux native) or 82 (Linux swap).
Hey, how many people have installed Linux on the swap partition?
The Linux boot manager (LILO) can be configured to start from:
I think the lilo README says it far better:
"Superblock" in Linux terminology means that the Linux partition should be the active partition.
Well, since every (formatted) ext2 partition has a super block, that would be a bit difficult, wouldn't it?
Remove native, swap, and boot partitions used by Linux:
Hey, you told us about the native and swap partition types, but what is this "boot partition" type?
Insert either a bootable floppy disk or a bootable CD-ROM for the Linux operating system on your computer, and then press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart your computer.
Good...
Remove LILO. To remove the LILO, type fdisk
Well, no. Since you booted from a Linux disk, assuming that you did that from the shell, you'd get:
Also, Linux recognizes more than forty different partition types,
Closer to eighty, but I guess when comparing it to Windows, which is brain damaged and only recognizes things like
FAT 12 (Type 01)
FAT 16 > 32 M Primary (Type 06)
FAT 16 Extended (Type 05)
FAT 32 w/o LBA Primary (Type 0b)
FAT 32 w/LBA Primary (Type 0c)
FAT 16 w/LBA (Type 0e)
FAT 16 w/LBA Extended (Type 0f)
I guess they didn't want to make Windows look too bad in comparison (although they forgot to mention the NTFS partition types which Linux knows about). Well, I guess that I'll just tell them that their "information" didn't answer my question.
You probably mean a GNU command line utility. Linux is the kernel, some of us prefer to call the whole system GNU/Linux.
I use the 90%+ of the same GNU utilities on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, etc. Should I be calling them GNU/Solaris, GNU/HP-UX, GNU/AIX, GNU/FreeBSD, etc? I think not. I use GNU utilities on a Linux system, just as I do on any other Unix (derived) system.
You have my assurances as both an engineer at Everyone.net, and a good friend of the individual whose brainchild this contest is...
No offense, but your assurances don't carry any weight. We've seen with the Sun/Imprise/Blackdown fiasco, and the repeated missteps of Corel Linux licenses, how much personal assurances are worth.
Then again, you've effectively turned your web server into an email open relay, so I suppose that you'll be taken advantage of soon enough.
IANAL, but this is the New York State Court of Appeals, not a federal court, which means that it's certainly not binding outside of New York, and prolly not binding on federal courts within New York.
Beyond that, the article quotes Michael J. Silverberg, an attorney for Prodigy, as saying "The Court is saying, under New York law and without going to federal law and without having to determine the scope of the Communications Decency Act, that this kind of case doesn't stand up.". Since it doesn't interpret any law which is applicable outside of New York, it isn't even of much use to point to and say "This is how New York interprets this law.".
It's a good decision, certainly, but I don't think that it's The Decision which grants ISPs Common Carrier status.
But this was out on the IETF raven list a couple of weeks ago. ZDTV did go into some more detail, but William Allen Simpson first posted about it on November 18th, and followed up on November 19th.
One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.
As you indicated, that is the classical man-month tenet, more formally known as Brooks Law. As ESR pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, this doesn't hold true when people are working on a problem that they find interesting with a communications medium at least as good as the Internet. In the world of closed source, Brooks Law holds true, because when you throw money at a project, and hire more developers, you aren't getting developers who are interested in solving the problems of your project. You're getting developers who are interested in making a living. However,
isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it?
For the most part, yes, but how much are they able to work on it? Most developers have to work on problems they are not interested in in order to make a living, and work on their interests in their own time. By adding funding to Mozilla, Red Hat presumably intends for Mozilla to do what Red Hat has done with Linux - find people who already find the problem interesting and are working on it, and pay them to work on problems they find interesting. Yes, they may work on things other than what you're hoping to get, but if done properly, they will still find the problems you want solved interesting and will continue working on them as well.
They can use the same methods of protest and civil disobedience that every other citizen is entitled to. They could show up on the doorstep of the justice department with pitchforks, plowshares, and torches, if they "really" don't like the status quo.
Except they are not "every other citizen", they are Federal employees, and they can be fired for doing what you suggest. Certainly, they could do that, and be replaced by someone who doesn't give a damn. Or they could stay in the system, trying to make sensible changes within the legal boundries established by Congress and the courts.
But I guess they don't dislike it *that* much now do they?
I suspect that they like putting food on the table for their families, just like you do.
Or, say, Scheduled Tasks in the Tivoli Management Environment? In TME, the Endpoint receives a start message from the TMR Server. This start message contains the command to be run, and optionally arguments to the command and the command binaries. When completed, the Endpoint sends a message to the Server including the output from the Task.
Tivoli has been doing this since at least 1995. Since IBM owns Tivoli, this could get very interesting.
One solution is the Sun Interface Converter, part X465A.