No, that's not quite right. The problem is that their theories and data are ignored because funding is slashed, and they must resort to gaining funding from intrests which are not neutral. This brings their research into question, and they are easily dismissed.
This cycle perpetuates itself, and we only end up hearing half of the story.
We were saying about labeling people as corporate stooges?
Here's the way it works:
1. You say "hey, this thing is more complex than we thought, let's try to understand it" 2. Your are labeled an "enemy of the planet" by those who review grant money 3. You get no further funding 4. You go to the sources that WILL fund your research 5. Because you are now backed by evil corporations your are branded a stooge 6. Your peers ignore your data and input
Isn't it great how we're not surpressing anyone's research?
PS: "enemy of the planet" is a direct quote from those reviewing funding for a friend of mine who was in solar astrophysics at the time. His lab had dared to propose a model by which the sun could power observed warming.
PHP exists in an entirely different space, and suffers almost no direct competition from JBOSS. Red Hat already has a decent lock on the enterprise customers who want to do simple Web stuff ala PHP. JBOSS is much more a set of APIs than a tool for generating Web pages.
Disclaimer: I'm an outsider JBOSS-wise, but this is as I understand it from some personal investiagation and comments from friends who work with it.
The problem with "solving" global warming is that we don't yet know what the mechanisms involved are. We understand that the Earth is (geologically speaking) in a plateau of high temperatures that stands between major ice-ages. We understand that, unless something has changed on a scale we cannot yet account for, another ice age will begin "real soon now" (again, geologically speaking). We also understand that warming trends on Earth (and now we also have some data about Mars) continue to ebb and flow at they have for a very long time in terms of human history (the last blink of an eye, geologically). That's about where the hard facts end. We have some data (disputed as most data about large systems tends to be, but still pretty decent data) to suggest that VERY recent warming trends (decades) have been unreasonably strong. That's not to say that we should not have expected warming during that time, but that we saw MORE warming than we could account for.
That's what we know. We can arm-wave about the climate, but we have never put our finger on how the major systems work. We have some excellent theories (some of which conflict) about the impact of CO2, water vapor, ice coverage, water levels, cloud cover, non-CO2 trace gasses, biological components, the magnetosphere, solar winds, overall solar output, etc. The work done to understand these systems in the last 40 years has been AMAZING, and when we stop to think about the fact that all of the progress made has been made while a political debate raged on, we should be in AWE! It's just that we're only getting started, and compared to splitting the atom, this is actually hard.
So, getting back to your space dust idea. What would be the impact? Rise warming? Not terribly likely (given the reduction in incoming solar energy. Ice Age? Much more likely. Temperature moderation as you hoped? Well... probably not, but who knows.
Still want to roll the dice?
I think the single most reasonable concern that I've heard is that, assuming there is a man-made component, we could be raising temperatures to a level that somehow triggers ice ages (most likely having to do with the release of water from melting ice or the coincident reduction in ice coverage). But, even that is just an interesting theory at this point.
I don't get why D-Link doesn't just solve the problem. All they need to do is put up an ntp.dlink.com with a simple mock DNS server that checks the requesting IP, and returns the closest known, public (or authorized for that network) NTP server as a CNAME. In most of the cases, that's going to be the IP's ISP-provided NTP server, which D-Link could easily compile a list of from ISP Web-sites. It's like 2 weeks of one person's work to write the server, gather data, and solve 80% of the problem (and avoid doing this to companies that CAN afford to sue in the future). This would also allow organizations to request special listings in D-Link's table.
Even in the case where the request comes from a recursive lookup, it should (in almost all cases) come from a DNS server which indicates the rough location (in terms of Internet topography) of the client.
Of course, they could also obey DHCP responses (either to the device or to a directly connected IP) as a fallback, solving even more of the problem.
Someone else replied, but let me actually EXPLAIN.
pool.ntp.org is a collection of volunteer NTP servers, served up via DNS. You should not expect to get meaningful results from pointing a Web browser at such a host name, but because it is random, you could end up hitting Amazon.com (assuming they volunteered) or some guy that just set up an Apache server.
http://www.pool.ntp.org/ is what you meant, as a simple google search for "pool ntp" would have told you.
There needs to be equal protection. Just because you're a giant corporation and I'm one person, you should get no special treatment, be it positive or negative. You don't get to stomp on my rights, and I don't get to stomp on yours (yes, we gave corporations rights in the US in the late 1800s, and in the rest of the world in the mid-20th century... get over it, it's not going to change).
Trademarks on backwards "R"s need to be stopped, but overall trademark works fine.
Copyright works pretty well, but really needs to be limited. My theory on this one would be to make copyright 20 years with an automatic (but explicit, so that it could be looked up) extension for any work which continued to be published for up to 100 years. This means Steamboat Willie gets 100 years of protection, but folk music published in the 1980s and then never re-published would be coming into the public domain now.
Patents are a bear. I agree that the core idea makes sense. A physical widget like a new kind of wiper blade needs to be protectable, but I don't like:
the way patent ownership is handled
the difficulty in knowning if something is covered
the shift of burden from the applicant to the courts in terms of defending a patent
the variable duration of patents because of international agreements
coverage of business models, math and algorithms, etc.
Much of this could be fixed by making patents associate only with an individual, with no transferability and placing a public peer-review process into the end of the approval timeline.
I wasn't saying that SCO did have a leg to stand on, I was just pointing out that the suggestion that IBM could improve their situation by applying clean-room tactics doesn't actually address SCO's legal concerns at all.
Isn't it more complex than that? In my experience almost no one NEEDS Oracle, but in addition to having bought into the idea that they do need it, most cannot move away from it, because they've allowed their applications to become locked into proprietary features, even where open versions of those features exist.
It should be noted that IBM does have excellent code separation procedures, which are strongly enforced. The problem is that SCO claims that code that IBM felt it had every right to use DIRECTLY, IBM did not actually have every right to use. The history (or part of it) goes back to the purchase of Sequent. They made a mid-range parallel supercomputer, and solved many of the problems which are the cornerstone of modern multi-processor operating systems. That technology was merged into Unix by Sequent. IBM bought them, took the code and used it in AIX and Linux. SCO's only coherent claim is that IBM didn't have the right to open source the code that they bought when they bought Sequent because it was developed FOR Unix, and therefore was a derivative work of Unix. This is a very, very tenuous argument, so SCO also claims that "oh, and there's lots of other stuff too." Until they define "other stuff", however, IBM is left to guess what it is that SCO is asking for them to produce. Lawyers hate guessing, as you might imagine. It's right up there with light jokes on the Bar's list of things not to do in a legal context.
That's some VERY shady math! The far more likely case in any blind sampling is that reviewers had some error rate. If, for example, there were 3 errors on average in BT and 4 in WP, and we assume that the reviewers had as much as a 50% error rate in identifying errors, then that means that BT had a final rate of 1.5/article while Wikipedia had 2... again, a 33% error rate.
Your assumption that errors in the evaluation would have changed the ratio pre-supposes that errors would exist ONLY in the Brittanica evaluations. Since these evaluations were done blind, that does not seem to be a reasonable default assumption.
The problem is that the options aren't, "get raped by companies or pass laws like S/O or this." There are other options as well. For example, you could work with the companies that will be affected, have them explain their business processes and how oversight will impact them, and then pass very specific, very detailed regulations that constrain businesses in ways that help consumers without constraining them by default in ways that do not help.
One great example with S/O is data retention. It makes sense to say, "you must retain records." However, this leads to a drastic change in business practices, much of which hurts the consumer far more than it helps. It also hurts that the law is relatively vague, and so businesses must cover their asses by applying the law in its broadest possible interpretation (until courts narrow the scope of the law, if they do). In the end, you pay for billions of dollars worth of data retention which could never possibly benefit you while the data retention that WOULD benefit you was already being performed by most companies for other reasons (such as defence against suits).
In short, always start by codifying best existing practice into law where needed, and then step back to see what, if anything, else is needed.
The key point in all of this is that the study was done blind. Reviewers did not know (though they COULD have checked) which source their article was from. Wikipedia showed more errors, but only 33% more per article than Brittanica at the rate of 4 per. Wikipedia is an astounding resource, and I think it moves Brittanica into a secondary role. What I would find very interesting would be a Brittanica effort to copy-edit, fact-check, and release a dead-tree Wikipedia (based on featured articles and whatever others are needed for context). I know I'd buy it!
At this point, I would have thought that we would have grown up and realized that the Internet is full of noise and occasionally dangerous signal. That Sun put out something that fell over instantly demonstrates that they are still incapable of anticipating the requirements of a large-scale system exposed to the general public. To sum up: Sun ain't no Google and the script kiddies aren't the ones to be upset with. After all, to complain about script kiddies is a bit like arriving at work in Seatle soaking wet, complaining about how the rain ruined your clothes.
There was a time when sendmail exploits were all the rage, but at the time, sendmail was one of a very, very small number of programs that had reached its level of maturity, breadth of features AND was network accessible, and was the only one in widespread use under Unix-like systems. Because of some high-profile bugs, many companies including Sun and later Red Hat did heavy security audits of the code, revealing and fixing more problems.
These are all good things, and it seems to me to be a bit two-faced to say that the power of open source is that there are many eyes on the source, and then to punish the software with the most eyes on it. Sendmail has been the heart of mail on the Internet for decades, and deservedly will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
These bugs demonstrate the old saying: where there is code, there are bugs. I'll stick with software that has already had the vast majority of its security problems shaken out.
Ah, but that is a technical point which has long since been circumvented by the reality. For all practical purposes scientific principles have been patentable since at least the 80s (XOR anyone?)
It means that if a real estate agent lists a house for sale, he can be sued because an existing patent for selling houses includes item No. 7, "List the house."
"Obviously Mr. Crichton has not been informed of the "all elements" rule."
This presumes that hypothetical item number 7 is not, itself, a claim.
Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned.
"The genes themselves are not owned. A "product of nature" - a naturally occurring substance discovered in the wild - may not be patented per se.
"However, a method for extracting, isolating, and purifying a gene may be patentable."
Ok, so he's correct. then. Why is this on your list if he's correct? Or were you just not counting the technicality (because I assure you that the courts and drug companies are!
"But keep in mind that patents only last for 20 years - so these patented methods will be publicly available for free in less than 20 years."
20 years... give or take possible renewal and the massive impact that 20 years can have on innovation. Oh, and the fact that duplicate patents are routinely issued.
"And others are still free to find other methods of extraction."
And yet, since vague claims are granted, other methods are likely to infringe.
"Certainly Mr. Crichton can afford an introductory class in patent law."
I'm not sure that's the case, but I am sure that innovation is in one of two modes everywhere that I look now: a slow, cautious crawl, in an attempt to avoid getting sued; or a rapid, but questionable pace of innovating on top of IP that isn't owned by the innovator (e.g. open source software).
No one said that Google is saving the Chinese from their lot, but the fact of the matter remains that their logic is sound: they can either give no information to the Chinese or give limited, but otherwise accurate information to the Chinese. There is no "give what we want to the Chinese" option. Given that, I don't see how Google's choice was one that violates their creedo.
Oh, and about "do no evil". Let's keep in mind why they put that in their S1: Every public company MUST do everything in their power to execute their business plan to the best interests of their stock holders. They can be held responsible for stockholder lossess if it can be proven to a court that they did not do so. Google introduced a rather clever loophole: they stated in their S1 (the legally binding form of the business plan (among other items), submitted to the SEC) that they would "do no evil". This is an audacious move, but Google's value at IPO time allowed them to take several liberties that other companies would not have been able to afford, and they took them in ways that clearly benefited the consumer (both this and the dutch auction format which other companies including Slashdot's parent had done in the past).
How did it benefit the consumer? If Google reaches a point where they are losing market share, and the only hope to regain it is to violate the trust of users (in a legal way), they could do it (and might; no one claims to know what anyone else will do for sure), but they do not HAVE to! That's a fundamental difference between Google and (almost?) all other public companies. Because of that little phrase, they don't HAVE to do anything which could be construed as "evil" in order to prevent shareholder suits because the shareholders were warned up-front of the risks.
If you took this to be some sort of warm-and-fuzzy marketting speak, you would be correct... IF it had been in a press release or on a Web site. The fact that it was in a filing to the SEC changes everything, and actually hurts Google (there is some (probably unmeasurable) impact to their valuation because of that phrase), but there's nothing that the shareholders can do about it... for now.
In the end, though, people spend too much time focusing on that phrase. It's meaningless. Google's actions speak far louder than their S1. They have been the first search engine to inform the public of government actions that threaten privacy. They have contributed massively to open source software. They have pushed back (though not eliminated) the steady tide of the advent of banner ads (something that I never thought I'd see!) They have kept Google Groups alive for years, even though it MUST be a money sink. They've been a force for standards compliance.
Overall, Google may or may not "do evil", but I see strong evidence that they AREN'T EVIL.
I trust any company less than the identical company with 100 fewer employees, so my answer to that question would have to be "yes". However, I'd also have to point out that when compared to ANY OTHER FOR-PROFIT COMPANY OF ITS SIZE, I trust Google far, far more. This relative trust is highly significant to Google's business, and until they do something to violate that trust (no, censoring Chinese content doesn't violate that trust because it provides more information to the Chinese than they would have had if Google had refused), I will continue to use their products over Microsoft's, Yahoo's and their other competitors'.
Yes, but the point is that if you are a college student working on a "cocaine detector" you can get permission to legally purchase cocaine from the DEA;)
Seriously, I have to wonder where they get it. They could get it from a drug company, as they have substantial amounts of it, most of which is used to create the various "-ain" drugs, but they might also have simply gone to the source, depending on how much they needed. For those not aware, "the source" in the U.S. is generally Coca Cola. According to the Wall Street Journal, Coca Cola's flagship product used to (circa the 19th century) be made with cocaine, but they began removing the cocain due to rising health and addiction concerns. They did not, however, stop using coca leaves. They simply denature them (they used to use kerosene, but now use an unknown solvent), extracting the active cocaine and selling it to the drug companies who happily pay for the drug which they don't have to extract, and which can be used to make dizzying arrays of important drugs.
I did read the WSJ journal article myself, but can't recall the date. There are many references to it out there, though.
Your reaction disgusts me! You should be ashamed! Here we are predicting the imminent demise of USENET, and you're.... what's that?.... Oh, a FLU PANDEMIC? Oh.... Nevermind.
Seriously, did you catch the last bit in the blurb:
The H5N1 influenza virus, which originated in Asia, could hit the U.S. this fall, potentially causing an epidemic, the nation's chief avian flu coordinator warned.
What's he supposed to say? "It's all poppycock, and I'm over-paid"? We're not that naive are we?
Please note that when you update, your version number may not change. Depending on what OS you use and who you get your updates from, you might get an old version with back-ported fixes. If your version number is not the one mentioned here, you need to check with your OS vendor. Most will have a Web site listing security updates and what vulnerabilities they address.
"Google has become too prolific. [...] I refuse to use any product that Google made, bought, or comes into contact with. [...] Google is not to be trusted."
Wow. You do realize that you're obsessed and not making any sense, right?
"comes into contact with"?! What the heck does that mean? Do you seriously think that there is some sort of "Google contagion" that's going to infect your software?
My Congressional Representitive has been trying to get more information on this case to the public for a few years... it hasn't helped much, and the official line from the U.S. Government is still one of denial, even though the events are a matter of public record in three countries, and Arar now lives with recurring nightmares.
If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing more to fear than anyone else who has done nothing wrong... and that should worry you.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's not quite right. The problem is that their theories and data are ignored because funding is slashed, and they must resort to gaining funding from intrests which are not neutral. This brings their research into question, and they are easily dismissed.
This cycle perpetuates itself, and we only end up hearing half of the story.
We were saying about labeling people as corporate stooges?
Here's the way it works:
1. You say "hey, this thing is more complex than we thought, let's try to understand it"
2. Your are labeled an "enemy of the planet" by those who review grant money
3. You get no further funding
4. You go to the sources that WILL fund your research
5. Because you are now backed by evil corporations your are branded a stooge
6. Your peers ignore your data and input
Isn't it great how we're not surpressing anyone's research?
PS: "enemy of the planet" is a direct quote from those reviewing funding for a friend of mine who was in solar astrophysics at the time. His lab had dared to propose a model by which the sun could power observed warming.
"PHP has an even bigger market share"
PHP exists in an entirely different space, and suffers almost no direct competition from JBOSS. Red Hat already has a decent lock on the enterprise customers who want to do simple Web stuff ala PHP. JBOSS is much more a set of APIs than a tool for generating Web pages.
Disclaimer: I'm an outsider JBOSS-wise, but this is as I understand it from some personal investiagation and comments from friends who work with it.
The problem with "solving" global warming is that we don't yet know what the mechanisms involved are. We understand that the Earth is (geologically speaking) in a plateau of high temperatures that stands between major ice-ages. We understand that, unless something has changed on a scale we cannot yet account for, another ice age will begin "real soon now" (again, geologically speaking). We also understand that warming trends on Earth (and now we also have some data about Mars) continue to ebb and flow at they have for a very long time in terms of human history (the last blink of an eye, geologically). That's about where the hard facts end. We have some data (disputed as most data about large systems tends to be, but still pretty decent data) to suggest that VERY recent warming trends (decades) have been unreasonably strong. That's not to say that we should not have expected warming during that time, but that we saw MORE warming than we could account for.
That's what we know. We can arm-wave about the climate, but we have never put our finger on how the major systems work. We have some excellent theories (some of which conflict) about the impact of CO2, water vapor, ice coverage, water levels, cloud cover, non-CO2 trace gasses, biological components, the magnetosphere, solar winds, overall solar output, etc. The work done to understand these systems in the last 40 years has been AMAZING, and when we stop to think about the fact that all of the progress made has been made while a political debate raged on, we should be in AWE! It's just that we're only getting started, and compared to splitting the atom, this is actually hard.
So, getting back to your space dust idea. What would be the impact? Rise warming? Not terribly likely (given the reduction in incoming solar energy. Ice Age? Much more likely. Temperature moderation as you hoped? Well... probably not, but who knows.
Still want to roll the dice?
I think the single most reasonable concern that I've heard is that, assuming there is a man-made component, we could be raising temperatures to a level that somehow triggers ice ages (most likely having to do with the release of water from melting ice or the coincident reduction in ice coverage). But, even that is just an interesting theory at this point.
I don't get why D-Link doesn't just solve the problem. All they need to do is put up an ntp.dlink.com with a simple mock DNS server that checks the requesting IP, and returns the closest known, public (or authorized for that network) NTP server as a CNAME. In most of the cases, that's going to be the IP's ISP-provided NTP server, which D-Link could easily compile a list of from ISP Web-sites. It's like 2 weeks of one person's work to write the server, gather data, and solve 80% of the problem (and avoid doing this to companies that CAN afford to sue in the future). This would also allow organizations to request special listings in D-Link's table.
Even in the case where the request comes from a recursive lookup, it should (in almost all cases) come from a DNS server which indicates the rough location (in terms of Internet topography) of the client.
Of course, they could also obey DHCP responses (either to the device or to a directly connected IP) as a fallback, solving even more of the problem.
Someone else replied, but let me actually EXPLAIN.
pool.ntp.org is a collection of volunteer NTP servers, served up via DNS. You should not expect to get meaningful results from pointing a Web browser at such a host name, but because it is random, you could end up hitting Amazon.com (assuming they volunteered) or some guy that just set up an Apache server.
http://www.pool.ntp.org/ is what you meant, as a simple google search for "pool ntp" would have told you.
There needs to be equal protection. Just because you're a giant corporation and I'm one person, you should get no special treatment, be it positive or negative. You don't get to stomp on my rights, and I don't get to stomp on yours (yes, we gave corporations rights in the US in the late 1800s, and in the rest of the world in the mid-20th century... get over it, it's not going to change).
Trademarks on backwards "R"s need to be stopped, but overall trademark works fine.
Copyright works pretty well, but really needs to be limited. My theory on this one would be to make copyright 20 years with an automatic (but explicit, so that it could be looked up) extension for any work which continued to be published for up to 100 years. This means Steamboat Willie gets 100 years of protection, but folk music published in the 1980s and then never re-published would be coming into the public domain now.
Patents are a bear. I agree that the core idea makes sense. A physical widget like a new kind of wiper blade needs to be protectable, but I don't like:
- the way patent ownership is handled
- the difficulty in knowning if something is covered
- the shift of burden from the applicant to the courts in terms of defending a patent
- the variable duration of patents because of international agreements
- coverage of business models, math and algorithms, etc.
Much of this could be fixed by making patents associate only with an individual, with no transferability and placing a public peer-review process into the end of the approval timeline.I wasn't saying that SCO did have a leg to stand on, I was just pointing out that the suggestion that IBM could improve their situation by applying clean-room tactics doesn't actually address SCO's legal concerns at all.
Isn't it more complex than that? In my experience almost no one NEEDS Oracle, but in addition to having bought into the idea that they do need it, most cannot move away from it, because they've allowed their applications to become locked into proprietary features, even where open versions of those features exist.
It should be noted that IBM does have excellent code separation procedures, which are strongly enforced. The problem is that SCO claims that code that IBM felt it had every right to use DIRECTLY, IBM did not actually have every right to use. The history (or part of it) goes back to the purchase of Sequent. They made a mid-range parallel supercomputer, and solved many of the problems which are the cornerstone of modern multi-processor operating systems. That technology was merged into Unix by Sequent. IBM bought them, took the code and used it in AIX and Linux. SCO's only coherent claim is that IBM didn't have the right to open source the code that they bought when they bought Sequent because it was developed FOR Unix, and therefore was a derivative work of Unix. This is a very, very tenuous argument, so SCO also claims that "oh, and there's lots of other stuff too." Until they define "other stuff", however, IBM is left to guess what it is that SCO is asking for them to produce. Lawyers hate guessing, as you might imagine. It's right up there with light jokes on the Bar's list of things not to do in a legal context.
That's some VERY shady math! The far more likely case in any blind sampling is that reviewers had some error rate. If, for example, there were 3 errors on average in BT and 4 in WP, and we assume that the reviewers had as much as a 50% error rate in identifying errors, then that means that BT had a final rate of 1.5/article while Wikipedia had 2... again, a 33% error rate.
Your assumption that errors in the evaluation would have changed the ratio pre-supposes that errors would exist ONLY in the Brittanica evaluations. Since these evaluations were done blind, that does not seem to be a reasonable default assumption.
The problem is that the options aren't, "get raped by companies or pass laws like S/O or this." There are other options as well. For example, you could work with the companies that will be affected, have them explain their business processes and how oversight will impact them, and then pass very specific, very detailed regulations that constrain businesses in ways that help consumers without constraining them by default in ways that do not help.
One great example with S/O is data retention. It makes sense to say, "you must retain records." However, this leads to a drastic change in business practices, much of which hurts the consumer far more than it helps. It also hurts that the law is relatively vague, and so businesses must cover their asses by applying the law in its broadest possible interpretation (until courts narrow the scope of the law, if they do). In the end, you pay for billions of dollars worth of data retention which could never possibly benefit you while the data retention that WOULD benefit you was already being performed by most companies for other reasons (such as defence against suits).
In short, always start by codifying best existing practice into law where needed, and then step back to see what, if anything, else is needed.
The key point in all of this is that the study was done blind. Reviewers did not know (though they COULD have checked) which source their article was from. Wikipedia showed more errors, but only 33% more per article than Brittanica at the rate of 4 per. Wikipedia is an astounding resource, and I think it moves Brittanica into a secondary role. What I would find very interesting would be a Brittanica effort to copy-edit, fact-check, and release a dead-tree Wikipedia (based on featured articles and whatever others are needed for context). I know I'd buy it!
At this point, I would have thought that we would have grown up and realized that the Internet is full of noise and occasionally dangerous signal. That Sun put out something that fell over instantly demonstrates that they are still incapable of anticipating the requirements of a large-scale system exposed to the general public. To sum up: Sun ain't no Google and the script kiddies aren't the ones to be upset with. After all, to complain about script kiddies is a bit like arriving at work in Seatle soaking wet, complaining about how the rain ruined your clothes.
There was a time when sendmail exploits were all the rage, but at the time, sendmail was one of a very, very small number of programs that had reached its level of maturity, breadth of features AND was network accessible, and was the only one in widespread use under Unix-like systems. Because of some high-profile bugs, many companies including Sun and later Red Hat did heavy security audits of the code, revealing and fixing more problems.
These are all good things, and it seems to me to be a bit two-faced to say that the power of open source is that there are many eyes on the source, and then to punish the software with the most eyes on it. Sendmail has been the heart of mail on the Internet for decades, and deservedly will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
These bugs demonstrate the old saying: where there is code, there are bugs. I'll stick with software that has already had the vast majority of its security problems shaken out.
Yes, in order to disable the extra security provided by SE/Linux you just need to install Windows... it's not recommended, however.
</sarcasm>
I beg to differ.
"1) Scientific principles are not patentable."
Ah, but that is a technical point which has long since been circumvented by the reality. For all practical purposes scientific principles have been patentable since at least the 80s (XOR anyone?)
"Obviously Mr. Crichton has not been informed of the "all elements" rule."
This presumes that hypothetical item number 7 is not, itself, a claim.
"The genes themselves are not owned. A "product of nature" - a naturally occurring substance discovered in the wild - may not be patented per se.
"However, a method for extracting, isolating, and purifying a gene may be patentable."
Ok, so he's correct. then. Why is this on your list if he's correct? Or were you just not counting the technicality (because I assure you that the courts and drug companies are!
"But keep in mind that patents only last for 20 years - so these patented methods will be publicly available for free in less than 20 years."
20 years... give or take possible renewal and the massive impact that 20 years can have on innovation. Oh, and the fact that duplicate patents are routinely issued.
"And others are still free to find other methods of extraction."
And yet, since vague claims are granted, other methods are likely to infringe.
"Certainly Mr. Crichton can afford an introductory class in patent law."
I'm not sure that's the case, but I am sure that innovation is in one of two modes everywhere that I look now: a slow, cautious crawl, in an attempt to avoid getting sued; or a rapid, but questionable pace of innovating on top of IP that isn't owned by the innovator (e.g. open source software).
No one said that Google is saving the Chinese from their lot, but the fact of the matter remains that their logic is sound: they can either give no information to the Chinese or give limited, but otherwise accurate information to the Chinese. There is no "give what we want to the Chinese" option. Given that, I don't see how Google's choice was one that violates their creedo.
Oh, and about "do no evil". Let's keep in mind why they put that in their S1: Every public company MUST do everything in their power to execute their business plan to the best interests of their stock holders. They can be held responsible for stockholder lossess if it can be proven to a court that they did not do so. Google introduced a rather clever loophole: they stated in their S1 (the legally binding form of the business plan (among other items), submitted to the SEC) that they would "do no evil". This is an audacious move, but Google's value at IPO time allowed them to take several liberties that other companies would not have been able to afford, and they took them in ways that clearly benefited the consumer (both this and the dutch auction format which other companies including Slashdot's parent had done in the past).
How did it benefit the consumer? If Google reaches a point where they are losing market share, and the only hope to regain it is to violate the trust of users (in a legal way), they could do it (and might; no one claims to know what anyone else will do for sure), but they do not HAVE to! That's a fundamental difference between Google and (almost?) all other public companies. Because of that little phrase, they don't HAVE to do anything which could be construed as "evil" in order to prevent shareholder suits because the shareholders were warned up-front of the risks.
If you took this to be some sort of warm-and-fuzzy marketting speak, you would be correct... IF it had been in a press release or on a Web site. The fact that it was in a filing to the SEC changes everything, and actually hurts Google (there is some (probably unmeasurable) impact to their valuation because of that phrase), but there's nothing that the shareholders can do about it... for now.
In the end, though, people spend too much time focusing on that phrase. It's meaningless. Google's actions speak far louder than their S1. They have been the first search engine to inform the public of government actions that threaten privacy. They have contributed massively to open source software. They have pushed back (though not eliminated) the steady tide of the advent of banner ads (something that I never thought I'd see!) They have kept Google Groups alive for years, even though it MUST be a money sink. They've been a force for standards compliance.
Overall, Google may or may not "do evil", but I see strong evidence that they AREN'T EVIL.
That's true, and if MIT needed only trace amounts (likely), then that works. But it gets expensive fast, and they'd likely want to go to the source.
I trust any company less than the identical company with 100 fewer employees, so my answer to that question would have to be "yes". However, I'd also have to point out that when compared to ANY OTHER FOR-PROFIT COMPANY OF ITS SIZE, I trust Google far, far more. This relative trust is highly significant to Google's business, and until they do something to violate that trust (no, censoring Chinese content doesn't violate that trust because it provides more information to the Chinese than they would have had if Google had refused), I will continue to use their products over Microsoft's, Yahoo's and their other competitors'.
Yes, but the point is that if you are a college student working on a "cocaine detector" you can get permission to legally purchase cocaine from the DEA ;)
Seriously, I have to wonder where they get it. They could get it from a drug company, as they have substantial amounts of it, most of which is used to create the various "-ain" drugs, but they might also have simply gone to the source, depending on how much they needed. For those not aware, "the source" in the U.S. is generally Coca Cola. According to the Wall Street Journal, Coca Cola's flagship product used to (circa the 19th century) be made with cocaine, but they began removing the cocain due to rising health and addiction concerns. They did not, however, stop using coca leaves. They simply denature them (they used to use kerosene, but now use an unknown solvent), extracting the active cocaine and selling it to the drug companies who happily pay for the drug which they don't have to extract, and which can be used to make dizzying arrays of important drugs.
I did read the WSJ journal article myself, but can't recall the date. There are many references to it out there, though.
Seriously, did you catch the last bit in the blurb:What's he supposed to say? "It's all poppycock, and I'm over-paid"? We're not that naive are we?
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"Google has become too prolific. [...] I refuse to use any product that Google made, bought, or comes into contact with. [...] Google is not to be trusted."
Wow. You do realize that you're obsessed and not making any sense, right?
"comes into contact with"?! What the heck does that mean? Do you seriously think that there is some sort of "Google contagion" that's going to infect your software?
Deep breath. It's going to be OK.
"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
Uh-huh... so, it would be no problem to be a Syrian-born Canadian citizen flying into the U.S. if you had done nothing wrong, correct?
Maher Arar...
My Congressional Representitive has been trying to get more information on this case to the public for a few years... it hasn't helped much, and the official line from the U.S. Government is still one of denial, even though the events are a matter of public record in three countries, and Arar now lives with recurring nightmares.
If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing more to fear than anyone else who has done nothing wrong... and that should worry you.