However, if an article writer singles out Microsoft for criticism as if they were the only company doing this, and takes the opportunity to go on about how it all relates back to Gates' evil plans which hes had from day one, when all they're doing in this instance us something its competitors are just as guilty of, then its Microsoft bashing.
Except that Microsoft is rather unusual in having been found guilty of breaking laws several times.
I like your comment's anti-anti rant. Except the quote you pulled wasn't about G L O B A L I S A T I O N. It was about a free trade agreement whereby the United States uses ths agreement to insert it's own laws into another countries' laws.
Both "free trade" and "globalis/zation" often appear to involve what a certain well known author called "doublethink".
Instead of offering volume discounts, make each tier of filing (10, 100, 1000 p.a.) progressively more expensive. Say $75 USD each for the first ten applications, $750 USD each for 11-100, $7500 each for 1000+.
It might work better with a geometric progression.
Put some kind of restriction on patent transactions. Either restrict the number a company can buy in a given time period (unlikely to work) or disallow patent reselling for a period of (say) 5 years. There are probably other, better solutions.
An alternative would be to limit concurrent examination from any filer. Thus a flooding attempt simply winds up as a donation of money to the patent office.
Make the hiatus on filing retroactive - any patents applications filed after the date of the earliest rejected patent should be rejected without prejudice - come back in 6 months and refile, please.
With the filing date unchanged and a new filing fee...
It would be nice to have some non-monetary penalties apply for frivilous patents. Like, for instance, if a patent gets rejected for being obvious then the firm doing the patenting must wait six months before filing another patent.
Actually better would be to allow them to file several more patents. But not look at them for at least 6 months. This means that the patent office gets the fees plus 6 months interest. In the case of such an entity submitting lots of frivilous patents after the first 40 or so any more would be considered "pre-expired" even if they had been valid in the first place.
I compare this all patenting absurd more like creating modern warefare, for example, nukes. If I will have a big, nice, shiny nuke who can turn your capital into ashes in matter of seconds, you won't try to threat me with your nukes too. So we will be equal.
A situation called MAD:)
About those guys who won't have any kind of this nukes? Naah, they don't count.
Except for trying to make sure they can never get their hands on any nukes. Where the analogy breaks down is that cross licencing of patents requires a large minimal number of patents. Whereas even a few nukes will keep your country reasonably safe from invasion (even by countries which have lots of nukes).
Yes, you certainly can blame the politicians here. It is not their job to accomodate generous contributors. It is their job to represent the will of the people (ALL the people, not just the wealthy contributors) that they are supposed to be governing.
In many places (including the US) the deciding factor is ment to be simply one of geography. In the case of a real person where they live in the case of a corporate person where they have their registered office.
This "vicious circle" could be easily broken if there were politicians that actually cared about their constituents
All too often the "generous contributors" would not meet any meaningful definition of "constituents" anyway.
The amount of prior art is growing all the time. Problem is that patent examiners often only look at a few sources. Which is especially a problem if a filer is enguaging in deliberate fraud. Since they are likely to know what sources are likely to be checked and kinds of jargon most likely to be used in those sources.
Tangentially relevent: one news story recently which seems to have slipped past/. was the decision that in the EU non-published but `everyone knows that' information can count as prior art to kill a patent.
Information which is widely known is least likely to be documented since to do so would be redundant. This especially applied to "obvious" in any field. Thus it's a requirement that a patent examiner be familiar with the relevent field. Otherwise they simply can't tell if something is or isn't obvious.
Well that's interesting, but that effectively means that I as an inventor have to have the same knowledge skills and time as the patent investigators who do this for their job.
Assuming they actually do do their job. Part of the problem is that patent examiners don't appear to be examining things as well as they should. As well as an issue of "If I don't understand it then it must be novel".
I think a lot of the problems with patents would go away if applying for a patent for something that the applicant knew had been done before, or should have known was obvious to someone in that field, was treated as fraud.
From the Patent office position this would require both denying the patent and passing the application to law enforcement. Another way of handling things would be that all future patents from the same entity are date stamped and put to the "bottom of the pile".
That is a fine, or maybe even jail time for that applicant and senior management at that company.
How about jail time for the corporate entity itself? If we are to persist with the fiction of "corporate people" they why not treat them in the same way as real people.
Call me ignorant, but why would any company NOT want to stop competition?
The alternative is to compete.
If my company saw a(n) (legal) opportunity to stop or hinder the competition, we'd grab it with both hands and do whatever we could to exploit that opportunity.
It may not even matter if it was legal or not. Often the penalties for corporate criminals are so weak that the potential profits from breaking the law excede the potential fines. There's also the situation of corporate crooks "buying off" legislators and what (inadequate) law enforcement deals with this large area of crime.
Must've looked impressive... but I wouldn't exactly call it unexpected: Isn't the fact that it's a bloody great active volcano that has catastrophically erupted within living memory a bit of a heads-up? =)
The difference is that the last time it hadn't errupted for over a century. Thus had plenty of time to build up preassure. Far better for it to let off some steam every few decades than to do nothing then literally blow it's top...
The GPL contains provisions which allow any person who recieves a copy of a work licenced under the GPL to redistribute that work to any person or group of people as they see fit E.g. "the community". Therefore the author of a derived work licenced under the GPL has no mechanism by which to withold the source code to their derived work from "the community".
Actually there is a simple mechanism for the creator of such a derived work to withold it from the "community". That is that they don't distribute it to any other party.
If cherryos violates GPL, is someone going to actually try to do something about it? Where's the lawsuit?
It's up to the copyright holders of the infringed works to take action.
If not, the GPL might as well not exist.
A copyright holder failing to take action does not weaken either copyright in general or the copyrights they hold. The only thing it may do is limit the damages the copyright holder can claim if they later sue. On the basis that they allowed the infringement to continue once they became aware of it.
I believe years ago it was established that not protected personal information, even if was not personally identifiable, on a web site was actionable. If my recollection is correct, all the applicants have a good case for a class action law suit.
The 119 also would probably have grounds for a lawsuit on the basis of being sumarily rejected because their personal data was accessed by persons unknown.
If the original source is pre-broadcast then the quality could easily be much lower if it was encoded by someone who didn't know what they were doing.
All things being equal an encode taken from a broadcast receiver would be equally likely to be of low quality. However all things are not equal. Since the people who would have access to television programmes prior to broadcast are more likely to know what they are doing. Even if J Random Viewer has the same skill level as a broadcast engineer they have source material which has been mangled (in the case of some CATV systems mangled more than once) as a side effect of being broadcast.
Also, is this series in continuity with the previous series?
By the looks of things yes.
Or are they going for a tabula rosa to avoid the kinds of problems that plague series like Star Trek? (For example, Enterprise.)
The problem with ST Enterprise is that they made a big mess of pre-existing continuity. Which is rather harder to do where time travel is part of the deal anyway.
Anyway, the law strikes me as kind of stupid. Something I found noteworthy from the article is that True.com's searches apparantly don't catch criminals who are using fake names. This makes me wonder what data they search by.
Probably the cheapest they can get away with whilst charging their clients the most they can get away with...
Background searches just by name are possible, but they aren't reliable. For a simmilar slashdot thread, I decided to start putting my name into various sites, and now I know there's a sex offender in my state (Disclaimer: it's not me, so stfu) who happens to have my last name, a slightly different spelling of my first name, and my middle initial.
Modification of name/address details is one way in which people can track if their details are being sold.
The ugly fact is that it is not just this administration. At first glance it is. However, I would say that it is "Big ". Unfortunatly, this does not follow mere party lines (and one could say that the whole American way should go out the window due to political views).
Or that "party lines" are an illusion or even that different parties have the same lines.
People in political "power" are put there due to money and thier interests. Proponents with money back them up and therefore are what govens the collective "us".
If you are in the business of buying politicans then the fewer (effective) political parties the easier things are.
There should be three houses of Congress; The Senate, the House of Representatives and the Board of Editors. The third house would be comprised of disenfranchised magazine editors whose sole and entire purpose was to repeal legislation the other two houses dreamed up.
Would there be enough diesnfranchised editors to fill what would be the largest house in such a senario:)
Slashdot Mirror
However, if an article writer singles out Microsoft for criticism as if they were the only company doing this, and takes the opportunity to go on about how it all relates back to Gates' evil plans which hes had from day one, when all they're doing in this instance us something its competitors are just as guilty of, then its Microsoft bashing.
Except that Microsoft is rather unusual in having been found guilty of breaking laws several times.
I like your comment's anti-anti rant. Except the quote you pulled wasn't about G L O B A L I S A T I O N. It was about a free trade agreement whereby the United States uses ths agreement to insert it's own laws into another countries' laws.
Both "free trade" and "globalis/zation" often appear to involve what a certain well known author called "doublethink".
Instead of offering volume discounts, make each tier of filing (10, 100, 1000 p.a.) progressively more expensive. Say $75 USD each for the first ten applications, $750 USD each for 11-100, $7500 each for 1000+.
It might work better with a geometric progression.
Put some kind of restriction on patent transactions. Either restrict the number a company can buy in a given time period (unlikely to work) or disallow patent reselling for a period of (say) 5 years. There are probably other, better solutions.
An alternative would be to limit concurrent examination from any filer. Thus a flooding attempt simply winds up as a donation of money to the patent office.
Make the hiatus on filing retroactive - any patents applications filed after the date of the earliest rejected patent should be rejected without prejudice - come back in 6 months and refile, please.
With the filing date unchanged and a new filing fee...
It would be nice to have some non-monetary penalties apply for frivilous patents. Like, for instance, if a patent gets rejected for being obvious then the firm doing the patenting must wait six months before filing another patent.
Actually better would be to allow them to file several more patents. But not look at them for at least 6 months. This means that the patent office gets the fees plus 6 months interest. In the case of such an entity submitting lots of frivilous patents after the first 40 or so any more would be considered "pre-expired" even if they had been valid in the first place.
The fact of that matter is that the patent was granted! If MS didn't get that patent, someone else would have.
Actually the point is more that the patent should never have been granted to anyone.
The SYSTEM that allows these patents to be granted and abused is to blame, not the entity trying to avoid getting creamed by the system.
The same "logic" would give a large number of crimianls a "get out of jail" free card.
I compare this all patenting absurd more like creating modern warefare, for example, nukes. If I will have a big, nice, shiny nuke who can turn your capital into ashes in matter of seconds, you won't try to threat me with your nukes too. So we will be equal.
:)
A situation called MAD
About those guys who won't have any kind of this nukes? Naah, they don't count.
Except for trying to make sure they can never get their hands on any nukes.
Where the analogy breaks down is that cross licencing of patents requires a large minimal number of patents. Whereas even a few nukes will keep your country reasonably safe from invasion (even by countries which have lots of nukes).
Yes, you certainly can blame the politicians here. It is not their job to accomodate generous contributors. It is their job to represent the will of the people (ALL the people, not just the wealthy contributors) that they are supposed to be governing.
In many places (including the US) the deciding factor is ment to be simply one of geography. In the case of a real person where they live in the case of a corporate person where they have their registered office.
This "vicious circle" could be easily broken if there were politicians that actually cared about their constituents
All too often the "generous contributors" would not meet any meaningful definition of "constituents" anyway.
There is an unbelievable amount of prior art.
/. was the decision that in the EU non-published but `everyone knows that' information can count as prior art to kill a patent.
The amount of prior art is growing all the time.
Problem is that patent examiners often only look at a few sources. Which is especially a problem if a filer is enguaging in deliberate fraud. Since they are likely to know what sources are likely to be checked and kinds of jargon most likely to be used in those sources.
Tangentially relevent: one news story recently which seems to have slipped past
Information which is widely known is least likely to be documented since to do so would be redundant.
This especially applied to "obvious" in any field. Thus it's a requirement that a patent examiner be familiar with the relevent field. Otherwise they simply can't tell if something is or isn't obvious.
Well that's interesting, but that effectively means that I as an inventor have to have the same knowledge skills and time as the patent investigators who do this for their job.
Assuming they actually do do their job. Part of the problem is that patent examiners don't appear to be examining things as well as they should. As well as an issue of "If I don't understand it then it must be novel".
I think a lot of the problems with patents would go away if applying for a patent for something that the applicant knew had been done before, or should have known was obvious to someone in that field, was treated as fraud.
From the Patent office position this would require both denying the patent and passing the application to law enforcement.
Another way of handling things would be that all future patents from the same entity are date stamped and put to the "bottom of the pile".
That is a fine, or maybe even jail time for that applicant and senior management at that company.
How about jail time for the corporate entity itself? If we are to persist with the fiction of "corporate people" they why not treat them in the same way as real people.
Call me ignorant, but why would any company NOT want to stop competition?
The alternative is to compete.
If my company saw a(n) (legal) opportunity to stop or hinder the competition, we'd grab it with both hands and do whatever we could to exploit that opportunity.
It may not even matter if it was legal or not. Often the penalties for corporate criminals are so weak that the potential profits from breaking the law excede the potential fines.
There's also the situation of corporate crooks "buying off" legislators and what (inadequate) law enforcement deals with this large area of crime.
Must've looked impressive... but I wouldn't exactly call it unexpected: Isn't the fact that it's a bloody great active volcano that has catastrophically erupted within living memory a bit of a heads-up? =)
The difference is that the last time it hadn't errupted for over a century. Thus had plenty of time to build up preassure.
Far better for it to let off some steam every few decades than to do nothing then literally blow it's top...
The GPL contains provisions which allow any person who recieves a copy of a work licenced under the GPL to redistribute that work to any person or group of people as they see fit E.g. "the community".
Therefore the author of a derived work licenced under the GPL has no mechanism by which to withold the source code to their derived work from "the community".
Actually there is a simple mechanism for the creator of such a derived work to withold it from the "community". That is that they don't distribute it to any other party.
If cherryos violates GPL, is someone going to actually try to do something about it? Where's the lawsuit?
It's up to the copyright holders of the infringed works to take action.
If not, the GPL might as well not exist.
A copyright holder failing to take action does not weaken either copyright in general or the copyrights they hold. The only thing it may do is limit the damages the copyright holder can claim if they later sue. On the basis that they allowed the infringement to continue once they became aware of it.
I believe years ago it was established that not protected personal information, even if was not personally identifiable, on a web site was actionable. If my recollection is correct, all the applicants have a good case for a class action law suit.
The 119 also would probably have grounds for a lawsuit on the basis of being sumarily rejected because their personal data was accessed by persons unknown.
But note that 45 minutes BBC shows are "an American hour": "24" ran in a 45 minute slot on BBC TV.
An "American hour" is usually somewhere between 42 and 43 minutes. With a 45 minute BBC programme likely to be between 44 and 45 minutes.
If the original source is pre-broadcast then the quality could easily be much lower if it was encoded by someone who didn't know what they were doing.
All things being equal an encode taken from a broadcast receiver would be equally likely to be of low quality.
However all things are not equal. Since the people who would have access to television programmes prior to broadcast are more likely to know what they are doing.
Even if J Random Viewer has the same skill level as a broadcast engineer they have source material which has been mangled (in the case of some CATV systems mangled more than once) as a side effect of being broadcast.
And, again assuming you are correct and the television broadcast is a better quality broadcast,
If the original source is pre-broadcast then the quality could easily be higher than any off air source.
Also, is this series in continuity with the previous series?
By the looks of things yes.
Or are they going for a tabula rosa to avoid the kinds of problems that plague series like Star Trek? (For example, Enterprise.)
The problem with ST Enterprise is that they made a big mess of pre-existing continuity. Which is rather harder to do where time travel is part of the deal anyway.
Anyway, the law strikes me as kind of stupid. Something I found noteworthy from the article is that True.com's searches apparantly don't catch criminals who are using fake names. This makes me wonder what data they search by.
Probably the cheapest they can get away with whilst charging their clients the most they can get away with...
Background searches just by name are possible, but they aren't reliable. For a simmilar slashdot thread, I decided to start putting my name into various sites, and now I know there's a sex offender in my state (Disclaimer: it's not me, so stfu) who happens to have my last name, a slightly different spelling of my first name, and my middle initial.
Modification of name/address details is one way in which people can track if their details are being sold.
Foreign ministers deal problems with diplomacy. So one of the architects behind post sep 11 policy (Iraq etc) became diplomat.
Thing is that the US Government wanted to invade Iraq before then...
I generally don't post comment about USA politics but how this thing differs from making Miss Rice state secretary, aka foreign minister?
Was she in the business of annoying the rest of the world before she was appointed though...
The ugly fact is that it is not just this administration. At first glance it is. However, I would say that it is "Big ". Unfortunatly, this does not follow mere party lines (and one could say that the whole American way should go out the window due to political views).
Or that "party lines" are an illusion or even that different parties have the same lines.
People in political "power" are put there due to money and thier interests. Proponents with money back them up and therefore are what govens the collective "us".
If you are in the business of buying politicans then the fewer (effective) political parties the easier things are.
There should be three houses of Congress; The Senate, the House of Representatives and the Board of Editors. The third house would be comprised of disenfranchised magazine editors whose sole and entire purpose was to repeal legislation the other two houses dreamed up.
:)
Would there be enough diesnfranchised editors to fill what would be the largest house in such a senario