It turns out that the reason this is still secret is that the Russinas haven't built a space suit using thouse nice pielter effect devices and still used a compressor like system just like your car's air conditioner. Never mind that pielter devices are being put into coolers in China but since the silly Ruskies aren't smart enough to use these devices, its clearly in the National Interest to hide this fact from them.
Maybe the Russians are perfectly capable of building pielter effect devices, but their engineers consider their design superior. (e.g. less likely to break down, easier to fix if it does, etc.) Remember that the Russians are the world leaders in long duration space flight and space station operation.
Can you cite examples of the gov't using secret evidence?
Most of the time governments want to do this they'd probably want to keep the trial secret too:) Actually if you want a good example of government use of secret evidence (and being highly selective about what does and possibly more important what does not get released to the press) check out the ongoing "war on terrorism" being played out in the news right now.
Dima's [dima.gov.au] web site had details on some of the reasons that these detainees are being held. Many of them refuse to provide any ID and fit descriptions of people wanted in different parts of the world.
This dosn't really make the task of identifying genuine asylum seekers any easier. Since someone leaving their country because they fear for their safety is unlikelt to do so as a tourist. With bogus criminal charges being a very obvious method an opressive state can employ...
They probably left some obvious bugs so the Chinese feel like they are securing the plane. You know, leave some to be found, so the *real* bugs aren't messed with.
The first thing which will happen to anyplane supplied to any government is that it will have a heavy maintanance visit. The people doing the work know both planes and bugs...
The U.S. can spend decades destroying other nations,
To give full credit the US has been doing this for at least a century.
then one of those nations (actually just 19 people) goes and blows up a couple American buildings and it's "unprovoked" and "pure evil" and blah, blah, blah.
Especially where the official story in places dosn't make much sense...
Try Macrovision. Screws up most VCR's available today.
Macrovision works by mangling the signal in such a way that it shouldn't confuse a TV, but will confuse a VCR. It's perfectly possibly to either unmangle the signal or to modify a VCR to handle the manged version.
The only way that they can prevent copying is if they were to replace every TV in the world with TVs that can decode an encrypted signal *after* it enters the TV. Since this would be very cost prohibitive to undertake even within the next 25 years, you can expect that, until this day, there will be a device that can copy the video signal on standard 75ohm coax that is used in the tens of millions of TVs in use today.
Actually the decryption would have to be on the component which does the displaying. Just about possible with an LCD, but not really practical with a CRT. Even then you are faced with the problem of making a display device which will only work with a human eye...
It probably makes searching for existing material more difficult. If you do a search for "multiple data sets in unitary format" you'd get far fewer results than if you did a search for "3d pie charts"
Which is the point of using such language in the first place. Not being able to find something in a search means that patent examiners are more likely to consider something to be an "innovation", when really they might do better issuing a patent on the jargon used in the patent application:)
M$ and Big Software would love this law. It would effectively kill the free/open-source software movement. Who besides MS, Sun, Oracle, et al. can afford to take a chance on getting hit for $10k for each bug?
Also there is the question of if they could claim that it would have cost them more than the fine to have removed the bug in the first place. The worst possible senario is even less competition, poor quality and big companies who simply consider fines as operating expenses.
The software producer's liability should be limited to the amount of their financial return on the software, except in cases where gross negligence is apparent
This would also favour large corporates. Since they tend to have more options for hiding income.
What will this mean for open source? OSS companies/programmers will be just as liable as closed source ones.
That is the central question. It would basically depend how the system works. You could have something like. If you can see and modify the source code then there is no liability If you can see, but not modify the source code then minimal liability If there is no source code access than maximal liability
Patents exist solely to protect the capital involved in bringing a product to market
Actually in the case of the USPO patents exist simply to encourage more inventions. If the original patent holder comes up with a marketable product simply isn't an issue...
It's good to know that people in this world are still thinking, but I don't believe that an idea you come up with in two minutes deserves the same patent that ten years of research came up with.
You see, patents are made to ensure that people will put enough money into development of ideas by giving them a monopoly on the result for a certain number of years.
Actually the idea of patents is to encourage innovation. Something which someone came up with in 2 minutes is probably more innovative than something which took 10 years.
The other problem is that the PTO has gotten to the point where people are actually rewarded for issuing as many patents as possible. This is a system that really has to be reviewed.
Maybe something more like rewarded for processing as many patents as possible. Which would include rejecting ones which were questionable or incomprehensible.
Of course you'd need a Legal gibberish to English translation tool [altavista.com] as well.
Or maybe simply a rule that applications must be in plain English (with a glossary for any needed technical terms or instructions for using a third party glossary/dictionary.)
From the article: "Three-Dimensional Presentation of Multiple Data Sets in Unitary Format with Pie Charts"
Gah, and you thought Marketing was the only group that made up complex phrases to describe something so obvious.
It appears to be commonplace for patent applicants to use overcomplicated language and jargon in an attempt to convince patent examiners that something is original. The best way to stop this would be to have a rule that if an application can't be understood then at least that application is void, possibly any future application for something similar is also voided. Another important thing is that the "obvious", to people skilled in the relevent area, may well not show up simply because people don't put obvious things in journal papera. Because doing so would be redundant.
you can currently set up solar panels to generate more electricity than you need, and you will get paid for
the extra electricity that gets pumped into the system.
Multiple sources of power generation (natural gas, drinking water, etc) make sense. But that isn't the case of multiple delivery
Anyone, and I mean Anyone can start their own long distance company,
You need several magnitudes less kit to run a long distance (even spanning the globe) telephone network compared with even wiring up a decent sized city. You need even less if you resell someone elses telephone servicethere are even a few competitors in local
phone service.
Wonder how many of these there are once you eliminate cable companies which also provide telephones and overlapping edges.
There is absolutly no reason there can't be compitition in broadband markets, sharing the same lines. But the regulations to force the big providers to
open up their lines don't exist yet.
This would be most likely competition through resellers. However in order to make this work you cannot have one company which is both providing and maintaining the service and also selling the service. Otherwise the company which actaully operates the lines will always be able to sideline the other providers.
Re:The economics of monopolies
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Absolutely. A monopoly simply means that a company has essentially an entire market segment to itself. That doesn't mean, however, that other companies can't try to compete in the same space. It's harder, to be sure, but in the end, consumers will vote with their dollars
It may well be impossible for a startup utility to compete against an already existing utility. Not only do they have to make a huge investment before they have anything to sell they also have to convince land owners (and government) to let them install pipes, cables, etc. When they are likely to get the response "there already is electricity, gas, drinking water, telephone,etc there".
What needs to be done is to force these phone companies to divest themselves of the last mile ownership, and instead treat that as a utility, thus which may be handled by a city, or by a small company or the like. Because it's a utility, the only care they have is to hook one end to your house, and provide several outlets at the other end (phone, cable, broadband, etc); you then simply sign up for the services at that other end, paying the phone or cable or broadband company for that service.
This is one of the ideas which sounds good, but is complex to get to work. The utility company would also need to operate all the telecoms hardware too. Otherwise you'd end up with all sorts of issues of duplicating kit and contractual issues over who has access to which kit.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 2
And having a totalitarian form of government does not necessarily mean a bad government, either. Benevolent dictators are as possible an outcome as benevolent monopolists. But real world outcomes in either case are mostly different, and to the detriment either of the governed or of the marketplace.
Even when you get a benevolent dictator one thing dictatorships are very poor at is producing good sucessor candidates. So if a benevolent dictator dies or steps down the result can be chaos (even civil war.) Similarly if you have a monopoly be it Microsoft or a public utility replacing it with a non monopoly which actually works is not at all easy.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 2
In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices. Rather they can result from good business practices. They can just as easily result from a variety of other things including very bad (i.e. criminal) business practices.
The bell DSL providers are doing better because they provide the service at a lower cost to them, with higher quality service.
Is this because their busines is more efficent or because they have the advantage of inheriting a system created by a state sponsored monopoly?
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out that the reason this is still secret is that the Russinas haven't built a space suit using thouse nice pielter effect devices and still used a compressor like system just like your car's air conditioner. Never mind that pielter devices are being put into coolers in China but since the silly Ruskies aren't smart enough to use these devices, its clearly in the National Interest to hide this fact from them.
Maybe the Russians are perfectly capable of building pielter effect devices, but their engineers consider their design superior. (e.g. less likely to break down, easier to fix if it does, etc.) Remember that the Russians are the world leaders in long duration space flight and space station operation.
Can you cite examples of the gov't using secret evidence?
:) Actually if you want a good example of government use of secret evidence (and being highly selective about what does and possibly more important what does not get released to the press) check out the ongoing "war on terrorism" being played out in the news right now.
Most of the time governments want to do this they'd probably want to keep the trial secret too
...is that those who make them secret often won't even divulge what it is they've made secret.
Most likely because such information would lead to too many questions about the sanity.
This is a major problem in a democratic society. In the US we are still dealing with decades of Cold-War-era documents that are difficult to get at.
Though this is an ongoing problem, didn't GW Bush just seal a set of documents by executive order.
The Freedom of Information Act provides some help, but if you don't know a secret exists, how can you file a request to have it released to you?
Hnece the list of banned books being on the banned books list
Also, the gov. is increasingly putting people on trial with secret evidence, that even the defendant and/or their attorney cannot see.
Making sure to make it very clear that these "arn't nice people" before bringing them before the "star chamber".
Dima's [dima.gov.au] web site had details on some of the reasons that these detainees are being held. Many of them refuse to provide any ID and fit descriptions of people wanted in different parts of the world.
This dosn't really make the task of identifying genuine asylum seekers any easier. Since someone leaving their country because they fear for their safety is unlikelt to do so as a tourist. With bogus criminal charges being a very obvious method an opressive state can employ...
Boeing would have no reason to bug the Chinese president's plane unless they were ordered to do so by the U.S. government.
Boeing probably have standing orders to bug any plane bought by a government (similarly with Airbus).
They probably left some obvious bugs so the Chinese feel like they are securing the plane. You know, leave some to be found, so the *real* bugs aren't messed with.
The first thing which will happen to anyplane supplied to any government is that it will have a heavy maintanance visit. The people doing the work know both planes and bugs...
The U.S. can spend decades destroying other nations,
To give full credit the US has been doing this for at least a century.
then one of those nations (actually just 19 people) goes and blows up a couple American buildings and it's "unprovoked" and "pure evil" and blah, blah, blah.
Especially where the official story in places dosn't make much sense...
Try Macrovision. Screws up most VCR's available today.
Macrovision works by mangling the signal in such a way that it shouldn't confuse a TV, but will confuse a VCR. It's perfectly possibly to either unmangle the signal or to modify a VCR to handle the manged version.
The only way that they can prevent copying is if they were to replace every TV in the world with TVs that can decode an encrypted signal *after* it enters the TV. Since this would be very cost prohibitive to undertake even within the next 25 years, you can expect that, until this day, there will be a device that can copy the video signal on standard 75ohm coax that is used in the tens of millions of TVs in use today.
Actually the decryption would have to be on the component which does the displaying. Just about possible with an LCD, but not really practical with a CRT. Even then you are faced with the problem of making a display device which will only work with a human eye...
I also think that invention should be distinguished from the natural evolution of technology. The former could be patentable, the later should not be.
THis is the sort of thing the criteria of an invention not being obvious (to someone knowlagable in the relevent area).
It probably makes searching for existing material more difficult. If you do a search for "multiple data sets in unitary format" you'd get far fewer results than if you did a search for "3d pie charts"
:)
Which is the point of using such language in the first place. Not being able to find something in a search means that patent examiners are more likely to consider something to be an "innovation", when really they might do better issuing a patent on the jargon used in the patent application
Most everyone else (especially Microsoft) leaves on all sorts of things they think you might find convenient.
Including things which are virtually never used (except as backdoors for crackers.)
You need a very good sysadmin to competently harden most systems.
Especially when it isn't well documented which services are even there.
M$ and Big Software would love this law. It would effectively kill the free/open-source software movement. Who besides MS, Sun, Oracle, et al. can afford to take a chance on getting hit for $10k for each bug?
Also there is the question of if they could claim that it would have cost them more than the fine to have removed the bug in the first place.
The worst possible senario is even less competition, poor quality and big companies who simply consider fines as operating expenses.
The software producer's liability should be limited to the amount of their financial return on the software, except in cases where gross negligence is apparent
This would also favour large corporates. Since they tend to have more options for hiding income.
What will this mean for open source? OSS companies/programmers will be just as liable as closed source ones.
That is the central question. It would basically depend how the system works. You could have something like.
If you can see and modify the source code then there is no liability
If you can see, but not modify the source code then minimal liability
If there is no source code access than maximal liability
Patents exist solely to protect the capital involved in bringing a product to market
Actually in the case of the USPO patents exist simply to encourage more inventions. If the original patent holder comes up with a marketable product simply isn't an issue...
It's good to know that people in this world are still thinking, but I don't believe that an idea you come up with in two minutes deserves the same patent that ten years of research came up with.
You see, patents are made to ensure that people will put enough money into development of ideas by giving them a monopoly on the result for a certain number of years.
Actually the idea of patents is to encourage innovation. Something which someone came up with in 2 minutes is probably more innovative than something which took 10 years.
The other problem is that the PTO has gotten to the point where people are actually rewarded for issuing as many patents as possible. This is a system that really has to be reviewed.
Maybe something more like rewarded for processing as many patents as possible. Which would include rejecting ones which were questionable or incomprehensible.
Of course you'd need a Legal gibberish to English translation tool [altavista.com] as well.
Or maybe simply a rule that applications must be in plain English (with a glossary for any needed technical terms or instructions for using a third party glossary/dictionary.)
From the article: "Three-Dimensional Presentation of Multiple Data Sets in Unitary Format with Pie Charts"
Gah, and you thought Marketing was the only group that made up complex phrases to describe something so obvious.
It appears to be commonplace for patent applicants to use overcomplicated language and jargon in an attempt to convince patent examiners that something is original.
The best way to stop this would be to have a rule that if an application can't be understood then at least that application is void, possibly any future application for something similar is also voided.
Another important thing is that the "obvious", to people skilled in the relevent area, may well not show up simply because people don't put obvious things in journal papera. Because doing so would be redundant.
you can currently set up solar panels to generate more electricity than you need, and you will get paid for the extra electricity that gets pumped into the system.
Multiple sources of power generation (natural gas, drinking water, etc) make sense. But that isn't the case of multiple delivery
Anyone, and I mean Anyone can start their own long distance company,
You need several magnitudes less kit to run a long distance (even spanning the globe) telephone network compared with even wiring up a decent sized city. You need even less if you resell someone elses telephone servicethere are even a few competitors in local phone service.
Wonder how many of these there are once you eliminate cable companies which also provide telephones and overlapping edges.
There is absolutly no reason there can't be compitition in broadband markets, sharing the same lines. But the regulations to force the big providers to open up their lines don't exist yet.
This would be most likely competition through resellers. However in order to make this work you cannot have one company which is both providing and maintaining the service and also selling the service. Otherwise the company which actaully operates the lines will always be able to sideline the other providers.
Absolutely. A monopoly simply means that a company has essentially an entire market segment to itself. That doesn't mean, however, that other companies can't try to compete in the same space. It's harder, to be sure, but in the end, consumers will vote with their dollars
It may well be impossible for a startup utility to compete against an already existing utility. Not only do they have to make a huge investment before they have anything to sell they also have to convince land owners (and government) to let them install pipes, cables, etc. When they are likely to get the response "there already is electricity, gas, drinking water, telephone,etc there".
What needs to be done is to force these phone companies to divest themselves of the last mile ownership, and instead treat that as a utility, thus which may be handled by a city, or by a small company or the like. Because it's a utility, the only care they have is to hook one end to your house, and provide several outlets at the other end (phone, cable, broadband, etc); you then simply sign up for the services at that other end, paying the phone or cable or broadband company for that service.
This is one of the ideas which sounds good, but is complex to get to work.
The utility company would also need to operate all the telecoms hardware too. Otherwise you'd end up with all sorts of issues of duplicating kit and contractual issues over who has access to which kit.
And having a totalitarian form of government does not necessarily mean a bad government, either. Benevolent dictators are as possible an outcome as benevolent monopolists. But real world outcomes in either case are mostly different, and to the detriment either of the governed or of the marketplace.
Even when you get a benevolent dictator one thing dictatorships are very poor at is producing good sucessor candidates. So if a benevolent dictator dies or steps down the result can be chaos (even civil war.)
Similarly if you have a monopoly be it Microsoft or a public utility replacing it with a non monopoly which actually works is not at all easy.
In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices.
Rather they can result from good business practices. They can just as easily result from a variety of other things including very bad (i.e. criminal) business practices.
The bell DSL providers are doing better because they provide the service at a lower cost to them, with higher quality service.
Is this because their busines is more efficent or because they have the advantage of inheriting a system created by a state sponsored monopoly?