I've spent about 9 years researching what I aim to patent. IMHO it's new, unique, and original.
But, the length of time to copy it (after reading the patent, playing with my prototypes) is trivial for someone like MS or IBM.
Is having a patent much good against the "big boys". They can certainly afford to pay more than you can for lawyers. If you were attempt to take them to court as a LIP then they could drag the case out for years.
My guess is that the reason they don't use the method you've described is that there is too much energy loss in the conversion and too much weight. You would need powerful electric motors and generators to pull it off. If you used efficient components, they would be too heavy. If you used light components, they wouldn't be efficient.
An internal combustion engine driving a generator which then powers electric motors is a very common arrangement for rail transport. It just happens to be unusual for road vehicles.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Inflated billing isn't "robbery". It's fraud. If someone sent an excessive bill to a bank, it'd be fraud as well and, if they plead guilty and paid double the amount in fines and restitution, they'd get away without jail time also. NEC didn't send people to break into schools to steal money.
Actually stealing things from a building is "theft". Since "robbery" requires that force be threatened against a human being.
NEC is getting what any individual person would for the same crime.
Typically when an individual is found guilty of a criminal offence the relevent statute(s) will contain sentencing guidelines of the form "a fine of not more than X and/or imprisonment for not more than Y". But there is no possibility of NEC winding up in a jail cell.
That's not the point. The fact is, a serious crime has been committed, and those responsible have got off with a slap on the wrist. If I committed that sort of fraud, even of several orders of magnitude smaller than this, I'd be locked away.
It's quite possible that if you committed the same level of fraud you'd be ok. The chances of going to jail are possibly inversely related to the amount of money involved.
$10 million of fraud doesn't just happen on it's own. Somebody is responsible - maybe the guy in charge of the project, maybe one of his subordinates, or maybe it was a direct order from the CEO. The job of law enforcement should be to find that somebody and punish him, not just to fine the company he works for.
Is regular law enforcement much interested? Or is this something only people in 7foot chicken suits are likely to chase after...
Its like people who drive how they like - speeding, running lights, parking offences etc because they can easily affort the fine, to them the fine isnt so much a punishment/deterrent but the price of a license to do whatever they want.
Then the better option is removal of their licence to drive on the public roads. If they drive on a suspended licence then put them in jail. The have the daft situation currently that it can be easier for someone to lose their licence for something unconnected with driving.
Accounting is done to take into consideration fines and lawsuits, they wernt kidding in Fight-Club when they said the motor company would only issue a recall of defective cars if the estimated cost of lawsuits was bigger than the cost of the recall!
IIRC there was an actual case of this happening in the 1960's where the judge found out about this kind of thing and imposed a fine which ment it would have been cheaper for the fault to have been fixed...
Executives are able to steal, lie and embezzle pretty much with impunity.
IIRC these kind of crooks make off with more money a year than all the muggers, burglars, shoplifters, "till dippers", etc put together.
They might just get a slap on the wrist if you get caught.
Assuming they do get caught, since most law enforcement dosn't appear that interested.
I am still outraged over the CitiBank-Enron collusion that joe bloggs had to foot the bill for.
Have those responsible have any punisment what so ever?
Some of the high profile 'white collar' criminals need to spend a few years in a confined with large (in more ways than one) powerful gentlemen of ambivalent sexuality who are being fed tripple doses of viagra in their meals. It might not bring the money back but the revenge factor will be priceless.
That could become the latest in the "reality TV" craze:)
What's sad about this is that Linspire could EASILY do this the way OS X does it. When you install something in OS X, a box pops up asking for the admininstrator password. It's easy and maintains security for the system level stuff.
As well as maintaining a distinction between "administrator" and "user" tasks. Which means that it is far more difficult to get the "click on a web link and have some malware quietly installed" senario.
Think of all those vulnerabilities that are defaults in Windows. Think also about the fact that most Linux distros do not encourage the user to run as "root". Not that Linux has no potential vulnerabilities, but they are much fewer than Windows..
The other difference is that Linux code, both kernel and application, is more likely to be modular and structured. Both because this is the "unix way" but also because it's far easier for a diverse group of developers to work with such code.
What you have said isn't really true. One of the major strengths of Linux is the lack of a monoculture. Most distributions come with 3 or 4 web browsers, e-mail programs, and media players etc. It would take a very good hacker to find a generic security hole in every program.
Also Redhat, Debian, SuSE, etc all have different binaries of the same program. With things like buffer overflow attacks it's the binary which matters.
The court system in Europe is very weak compaired to other parts of the government and has always been so. They do pretty much what the party in power wants them to do with few exceptions.
Actually European courts are quite good at telling the party in power where to stick it. The difficulty is that the party in power is likely to subsequently ammend the law...
Here in the United States that is different the courts have far more power and once in place a Judge has less pressure on them then his/her counterparts in europe.
The real difference is that in the US 2 political parties dominate at all levels. In most European countries there are not only more political parties but is perfectly possible to have independent judges and magistrates.
Where did the publishing industry come from? It came from folk culture. It took over folk culture and imposed a legal framework on it. The notion of "property" that was "intellectual" was invented out of whole cloth to protect the interests of the powerful and the owners of equipment. On your reasoning "... [w]hen you publish information, you really should play by the rules of the publishing industry" the entire publishing industry has failed to "play by the rules" of the culture it stole from for over 200 years (since 1793 say).
Actually the publishing industry is very much a creation of copyright laws. Which were originally intended for state control over what was (and was not) published. The idea of them having anything to do with protecting authors, which was incorporated into the US Constitution, is a later development.
Thus, using your own argument we know that they have no claim whatsoever to the "naturalness" of their property.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" is a fiction. The real issue is along the lines of "Does it make sense now to pretend that X is like a piece of physical property?" (Rather than "Did it make sense some time in the past, be it a couple of centuries or a couple of weeks ago.)
Folk culture (Brothers Grimm etc) was stolen by the likes of Disney and Berlusconi. It disappeared, but now folk culture is coming back.
Did it ever really go away? Things such as "fan fiction" are more noticable a website than with a limited circulation "Fanzine".
We don't need these companies to "publish" for us. Berlusconi's corps do not provide useful "publishing" services anyway (any more than any other company), all they do is exert editorial control on information.
Not to have that control is probably a terrifying idea for people like Berlusconi.
P2P is a form of publishing. When you publish information, you really should play by the rules of the publishing industry
Plenty of business models (including some which existed for far longer than third party publishing) have gone extinct. Typically because someone, using some new technology, did not "play by the rules".
But that's true for proprietary sowtware as well (even worse, a popular, but unprofitrable proprietary project is quite likely not to be continued).
It's quite possible that whilst that piece of software is profitable the company itself is not.
Now, if a commercial procect ceases to be supported, you can either just use it and hope that it will continue to work (with your new hardware, with new demands to it, etc.),
Assuming you can. Maybe your licence dosn't allow you to do this...
or switch to another product (if there's another whitch can replace it). With OSS, you have the same options and in addition the options to try to find another company willing to support the very same product you're already using, or to hire some programmer yourself to adapt the product to your changing needs.
Without it mattering why the software became unsupported in the first place.
Hopefully one has insurance to cover the potential damage. So, it's possible that one's insurance company may charge a higher premium for going with a "free" plumber.
Or they might charge extra if you used a plumber with a reputation for poor workmanship.
On the other hand, plumbing might not be the best analogy to software. Most pieces of software have some kind of EULA stating that the software is not suitable for any particular purpose and that the vendor is not liable for any damage resulting from use of the software.
Actually plumbing is a good analogy. If you compare software with plumbing components. Rather than comparing software with a piece of plumbing work...
So, who would one go after if the plumbing job sprung a leak and ruined twenty grand worth of housing?
You either go after the plumber who installed it or make an insurance claim. Note that you couldn't claim from the pipe manufacturer unless you could demonstrate that they were defective in a way that a competent plumber would not be able to spot.
This is imho the primary reason OSS fails in the business world and the primary reason geeks don't understand it's failure: The US, through the tax code, gives businesses money to spend on 'capital investments' that they can depreciate for years and years.
Just because things work this way in the US does not mean that this is the case everywhere...
Can some accountant in the crowd explain to me how a commercial software license is 'capital'
Probably because the likes of Microsoft like to pretend they are selling a product. EULA's not withstanding.
and money spent on installing and improving open source software is somehow not a 'capital' expense?
What catagory does building, cabling, plumbing, etc come under here? Is putting up a new building or refurbishing an old one "capital investment/expenditure"?
Although, this is a completely domain specific topic, I'll go out on a limb and say in most cases open source software is at least up to par with closed source alternatives. People often tout missing features in open source software while ignoring the converse.
e.g. lack of multiple virtual desktops in MS Windows... Claiming that proprietary software is always best is simply bigotry.
something isn't done in exactly the same way doesn't mean that a feature is missing. Open source isn't about emulating closed source, its about providing a viable niche filler with minimal investment.
If you really need a "feature" you can always add it yourself, pay someone to add it for you or even just ask. With a proprietary piece of software then you are likely to be out of luck if your requirements don't fit with their "vision".
The GIMP bashing was a case of, "I learned photoshop and now I don't want to learn another new interface" crybaby syndrome. Most people that learn photoshop make a living off using photoshop and showing others how to use photoshop. They feel threatened when they see this new interface (because they are no longer experts with it), and naturally try to discredit it.
Of course a piece of proprietary would never change it's user interface between versions...
So is plumbing. Anyone who charges for plumbing work is pure evil, and plain greedy. All plumbing should be done for free.
Plumbing is a tertiary industry. The major cost is in any plumbing job is "labour". i.e. the cost of skilled people's time. Microsoft treats software as a secondary industry, as though they are manufacturing a product. Whilst manufacturing and transporting pipes has a real cost software can be duplicated (and even transported about the planet) at close to zero cost. OSS allows software infrastructure to be treated just like plumbing. Including being able to "get three quotes for the job" etc...
So explain the bottled water market to me. The government provides drinkable water for free; yet somehow, companies manage to charge $5/litre for their own "superior" water.
Sometimes what they are bottling is drinking water from a water company...
Conversely, the superior product is too expensive to be worth the cost for many. I just don't see the problem here...
If you're offering something "better", and nobody buys, then the free market has proved it wasn't "better" enough.
Or that most people don't agree that what you think is "better" actually is. One person's "features" are another's "bells and whistles" and vice versa.
Now, Open Source Software is usually free. It don't get no cheaper. And that's a bad thing. Because if Open Source puts a company out of business in a particular market, there's only Open Source left in its wake. Meaning no competetion.
Only if you insist on seeing software as being about manufacturing "off the shelf" widgets. When this kind of software is actually in the minority.
I'm sick of hearing that the price of software is a tax. Hey: if a product takes a million dollars to write (which is pretty cheap), another million to support for a year, and has a market of roughly ten thousand, how much do you have to charge for it? If your answer is "nothing, because 10% of them will buy support licenses from you for $1000 a year," you're wrong.
The value your customers place on the product has no relationship to your costs.
OSS is demonstrating that developers are becoming less needed. Software is reaching the point where it's acceptable to continue using the old stuff with minor modifications. In the future there will be fewer programmers servicing a larger number of computers, in the same way that there are today fewer farmers feeding more people.
Or developers become more akin to electricians, plumbers, builders, etc. OSS works well with tertiary business models. Software has the interesting property that it costs nothing to duplicate.
I'm not sure I accept your comparison with the "Liberal Democrats." In this case, both "liberal" and "democrat" have very narrowly defined definitions to compare the party platform against. This case is much like the brazenly named "Democratic Republic of the Congo", which doesn't appear to have had a peaceful government change in the last thirty years.
"Democratic" dosn't imply that things will be peaceful or governments will be stable. The issue, as with the former "German Democratic Republic", would be to ask if the government in question is either a republic or democratic.
Many of the practices of the Inquisition were obviously motivated more by greed than by any true feeling of religious devotion.
Whilst very few religions preach hatred. This appears to be almost the norm when politics and religion become intertwined.
For example, it was a common practice for the suspects of the Inquisition to pay the (often extravagant) living costs of the inquisitionists.
This is hardly the only, or even the most recent, example of victimised people being expected to "pay for the privilege".
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I've spent about 9 years researching what I aim to patent. IMHO it's new, unique, and original.
But, the length of time to copy it (after reading the patent, playing with my prototypes) is trivial for someone like MS or IBM.
Is having a patent much good against the "big boys". They can certainly afford to pay more than you can for lawyers. If you were attempt to take them to court as a LIP then they could drag the case out for years.
My guess is that the reason they don't use the method you've described is that there is too much energy loss in the conversion and too much weight. You would need powerful electric motors and generators to pull it off. If you used efficient components, they would be too heavy. If you used light components, they wouldn't be efficient.
An internal combustion engine driving a generator which then powers electric motors is a very common arrangement for rail transport. It just happens to be unusual for road vehicles.
FWIW, Ashcroft has denied ever using the Patriot Act to review library records.
As if he would admit if he had...
You're comparing apples and oranges. Inflated billing isn't "robbery". It's fraud. If someone sent an excessive bill to a bank, it'd be fraud as well and, if they plead guilty and paid double the amount in fines and restitution, they'd get away without jail time also. NEC didn't send people to break into schools to steal money.
Actually stealing things from a building is "theft". Since "robbery" requires that force be threatened against a human being.
NEC is getting what any individual person would for the same crime.
Typically when an individual is found guilty of a criminal offence the relevent statute(s) will contain sentencing guidelines of the form "a fine of not more than X and/or imprisonment for not more than Y". But there is no possibility of NEC winding up in a jail cell.
That's not the point. The fact is, a serious crime has been committed, and those responsible have got off with a slap on the wrist. If I committed that sort of fraud, even of several orders of magnitude smaller than this, I'd be locked away.
It's quite possible that if you committed the same level of fraud you'd be ok. The chances of going to jail are possibly inversely related to the amount of money involved.
$10 million of fraud doesn't just happen on it's own. Somebody is responsible - maybe the guy in charge of the project, maybe one of his subordinates, or maybe it was a direct order from the CEO. The job of law enforcement should be to find that somebody and punish him, not just to fine the company he works for.
Is regular law enforcement much interested? Or is this something only people in 7foot chicken suits are likely to chase after...
Its like people who drive how they like - speeding, running lights, parking offences etc because they can easily affort the fine, to them the fine isnt so much a punishment/deterrent but the price of a license to do whatever they want.
Then the better option is removal of their licence to drive on the public roads. If they drive on a suspended licence then put them in jail. The have the daft situation currently that it can be easier for someone to lose their licence for something unconnected with driving.
Accounting is done to take into consideration fines and lawsuits, they wernt kidding in Fight-Club when they said the motor company would only issue a recall of defective cars if the estimated cost of lawsuits was bigger than the cost of the recall!
IIRC there was an actual case of this happening in the 1960's where the judge found out about this kind of thing and imposed a fine which ment it would have been cheaper for the fault to have been fixed...
Executives are able to steal, lie and embezzle pretty much with impunity.
:)
IIRC these kind of crooks make off with more money a year than all the muggers, burglars, shoplifters, "till dippers", etc put together.
They might just get a slap on the wrist if you get caught.
Assuming they do get caught, since most law enforcement dosn't appear that interested.
I am still outraged over the CitiBank-Enron collusion that joe bloggs had to foot the bill for.
Have those responsible have any punisment what so ever?
Some of the high profile 'white collar' criminals need to spend a few years in a confined with large (in more ways than one) powerful gentlemen of ambivalent sexuality who are being fed tripple doses of viagra in their meals. It might not bring the money back but the revenge factor will be priceless.
That could become the latest in the "reality TV" craze
What's sad about this is that Linspire could EASILY do this the way OS X does it. When you install something in OS X, a box pops up asking for the admininstrator password. It's easy and maintains security for the system level stuff.
As well as maintaining a distinction between "administrator" and "user" tasks. Which means that it is far more difficult to get the "click on a web link and have some malware quietly installed" senario.
Think of all those vulnerabilities that are defaults in Windows. Think also about the fact that most Linux distros do not encourage the user to run as "root". Not that Linux has no potential vulnerabilities, but they are much fewer than Windows..
The other difference is that Linux code, both kernel and application, is more likely to be modular and structured.
Both because this is the "unix way" but also because it's far easier for a diverse group of developers to work with such code.
What you have said isn't really true. One of the major strengths of Linux is the lack of a monoculture. Most distributions come with 3 or 4 web browsers, e-mail programs, and media players etc. It would take a very good hacker to find a generic security hole in every program.
Also Redhat, Debian, SuSE, etc all have different binaries of the same program. With things like buffer overflow attacks it's the binary which matters.
I can understand that such a thing is a different matter in non-English speaking countries, like The Netherlands.
The vast majority of the Dutch speak perfectly good English.
How could they ever not say that it is a generic term in English speaking countries, like the USA?
What proportion of the US population speak English?
The court system in Europe is very weak compaired to other parts of the government and has always been so. They do pretty much what the party in power wants them to do with few exceptions.
Actually European courts are quite good at telling the party in power where to stick it. The difficulty is that the party in power is likely to subsequently ammend the law...
Here in the United States that is different the courts have far more power and once in place a Judge has less pressure on them then his/her counterparts in europe.
The real difference is that in the US 2 political parties dominate at all levels. In most European countries there are not only more political parties but is perfectly possible to have independent judges and magistrates.
Where did the publishing industry come from? It came from folk culture. It took over folk culture and imposed a legal framework on it. The notion of "property" that was "intellectual" was invented out of whole cloth to protect the interests of the powerful and the owners of equipment. On your reasoning "... [w]hen you publish information, you really should play by the rules of the publishing industry" the entire publishing industry has failed to "play by the rules" of the culture it stole from for over 200 years (since 1793 say).
Actually the publishing industry is very much a creation of copyright laws. Which were originally intended for state control over what was (and was not) published. The idea of them having anything to do with protecting authors, which was incorporated into the US Constitution, is a later development.
Thus, using your own argument we know that they have no claim whatsoever to the "naturalness" of their property.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" is a fiction. The real issue is along the lines of "Does it make sense now to pretend that X is like a piece of physical property?" (Rather than "Did it make sense some time in the past, be it a couple of centuries or a couple of weeks ago.)
Folk culture (Brothers Grimm etc) was stolen by the likes of Disney and Berlusconi. It disappeared, but now folk culture is coming back.
Did it ever really go away? Things such as "fan fiction" are more noticable a website than with a limited circulation "Fanzine".
We don't need these companies to "publish" for us. Berlusconi's corps do not provide useful "publishing" services anyway (any more than any other company), all they do is exert editorial control on information.
Not to have that control is probably a terrifying idea for people like Berlusconi.
P2P is a form of publishing. When you publish information, you really should play by the rules of the publishing industry
Plenty of business models (including some which existed for far longer than third party publishing) have gone extinct. Typically because someone, using some new technology, did not "play by the rules".
You're dichotomy between "open source" and "commercial" software is false because open source software can be commercial too.
In addition it's quite possible for proprietary software to be "non commercial". e.g. freely downloadable.
But that's true for proprietary sowtware as well (even worse, a popular, but unprofitrable proprietary project is quite likely not to be continued).
It's quite possible that whilst that piece of software is profitable the company itself is not.
Now, if a commercial procect ceases to be supported, you can either just use it and hope that it will continue to work (with your new hardware, with new demands to it, etc.),
Assuming you can. Maybe your licence dosn't allow you to do this...
or switch to another product (if there's another whitch can replace it). With OSS, you have the same options and in addition the options to try to find another company willing to support the very same product you're already using, or to hire some programmer yourself to adapt the product to your changing needs.
Without it mattering why the software became unsupported in the first place.
Hopefully one has insurance to cover the potential damage. So, it's possible that one's insurance company may charge a higher premium for going with a "free" plumber.
Or they might charge extra if you used a plumber with a reputation for poor workmanship.
On the other hand, plumbing might not be the best analogy to software. Most pieces of software have some kind of EULA stating that the software is not suitable for any particular purpose and that the vendor is not liable for any damage resulting from use of the software.
Actually plumbing is a good analogy. If you compare software with plumbing components. Rather than comparing software with a piece of plumbing work...
So, who would one go after if the plumbing job sprung a leak and ruined twenty grand worth of housing?
You either go after the plumber who installed it or make an insurance claim.
Note that you couldn't claim from the pipe manufacturer unless you could demonstrate that they were defective in a way that a competent plumber would not be able to spot.
This is imho the primary reason OSS fails in the business world and the primary reason geeks don't understand it's failure: The US, through the tax code, gives businesses money to spend on 'capital investments' that they can depreciate for years and years.
Just because things work this way in the US does not mean that this is the case everywhere...
Can some accountant in the crowd explain to me how a commercial software license is 'capital'
Probably because the likes of Microsoft like to pretend they are selling a product. EULA's not withstanding.
and money spent on installing and improving open source software is somehow not a 'capital' expense?
What catagory does building, cabling, plumbing, etc come under here? Is putting up a new building or refurbishing an old one "capital investment/expenditure"?
Although, this is a completely domain specific topic, I'll go out on a limb and say in most cases open source software is at least up to par with closed source alternatives. People often tout missing features in open source software while ignoring the converse.
e.g. lack of multiple virtual desktops in MS Windows...
Claiming that proprietary software is always best is simply bigotry.
something isn't done in exactly the same way doesn't mean that a feature is missing. Open source isn't about emulating closed source, its about providing a viable niche filler with minimal investment.
If you really need a "feature" you can always add it yourself, pay someone to add it for you or even just ask. With a proprietary piece of software then you are likely to be out of luck if your requirements don't fit with their "vision".
The GIMP bashing was a case of, "I learned photoshop and now I don't want to learn another new interface" crybaby syndrome. Most people that learn photoshop make a living off using photoshop and showing others how to use photoshop. They feel threatened when they see this new interface (because they are no longer experts with it), and naturally try to discredit it.
Of course a piece of proprietary would never change it's user interface between versions...
So is plumbing. Anyone who charges for plumbing work is pure evil, and plain greedy. All plumbing should be done for free.
Plumbing is a tertiary industry. The major cost is in any plumbing job is "labour". i.e. the cost of skilled people's time.
Microsoft treats software as a secondary industry, as though they are manufacturing a product.
Whilst manufacturing and transporting pipes has a real cost software can be duplicated (and even transported about the planet) at close to zero cost.
OSS allows software infrastructure to be treated just like plumbing. Including being able to "get three quotes for the job" etc...
So explain the bottled water market to me. The government provides drinkable water for free; yet somehow, companies manage to charge $5/litre for their own "superior" water.
Sometimes what they are bottling is drinking water from a water company...
Conversely, the superior product is too expensive to be worth the cost for many. I just don't see the problem here...
If you're offering something "better", and nobody buys, then the free market has proved it wasn't "better" enough.
Or that most people don't agree that what you think is "better" actually is. One person's "features" are another's "bells and whistles" and vice versa.
Now, Open Source Software is usually free. It don't get no cheaper. And that's a bad thing. Because if Open Source puts a company out of business in a particular market, there's only Open Source left in its wake. Meaning no competetion.
Only if you insist on seeing software as being about manufacturing "off the shelf" widgets. When this kind of software is actually in the minority.
I'm sick of hearing that the price of software is a tax. Hey: if a product takes a million dollars to write (which is pretty cheap), another million to support for a year, and has a market of roughly ten thousand, how much do you have to charge for it? If your answer is "nothing, because 10% of them will buy support licenses from you for $1000 a year," you're wrong.
The value your customers place on the product has no relationship to your costs.
OSS is demonstrating that developers are becoming less needed. Software is reaching the point where it's acceptable to continue using the old stuff with minor modifications. In the future there will be fewer programmers servicing a larger number of computers, in the same way that there are today fewer farmers feeding more people.
Or developers become more akin to electricians, plumbers, builders, etc.
OSS works well with tertiary business models. Software has the interesting property that it costs nothing to duplicate.
I'm not sure I accept your comparison with the "Liberal Democrats." In this case, both "liberal" and "democrat" have very narrowly defined definitions to compare the party platform against. This case is much like the brazenly named "Democratic Republic of the Congo", which doesn't appear to have had a peaceful government change in the last thirty years.
"Democratic" dosn't imply that things will be peaceful or governments will be stable. The issue, as with the former "German Democratic Republic", would be to ask if the government in question is either a republic or democratic.
Many of the practices of the Inquisition were obviously motivated more by greed than by any true feeling of religious devotion.
Whilst very few religions preach hatred. This appears to be almost the norm when politics and religion become intertwined.
For example, it was a common practice for the suspects of the Inquisition to pay the (often extravagant) living costs of the inquisitionists.
This is hardly the only, or even the most recent, example of victimised people being expected to "pay for the privilege".