It's just outside of Milton Keynes, about 30 miles north of London. Their website has information about getting there, and also a collection of interesting photographs of Turing, Colossus, Ultra, and general war photos.
Patents are meant to protect processes, not the end result.
If you patent the snagglepuss method of making steel from iron ore, then there is nothing stopping someone else from inventing the droopy method instead. The inputs are the same, the outputs are the same, the method differs. If you use the snagglepuss method to produce copper from copper ore, then you have NOT infringed the patent. Similarly if you take the snagglepuss method and use this a a basis to make a variation to make steel, then you have NOT infringed. You especially see this in medical patents. When one new drug comes out with one particular way of acting, within a few years you'll find many 'clones' of the drug, with minor variation but all working using the same methodology.
In many fields, this is considered a good thing. I take salbutamol for asthma. It is a good drug for me, with few side effects. My sister takes terbutaline, a similar drug, but with slightly different side effects, as she had problems taking salbutamol. If drugs were treated in the way that you suggest, then no-one would be allowed to produce drugs which act the same as existing ones.
Software patents are bad, they slow down technology improvements, and in many cases fail the 'obviousness' or "prior knowledge" tests.
"Why do we feel that we need to conceal what we are doing from the government? Why does the Government feel it needs to conceal from us? I think more participation is the best way to expose what is going on to sunlight, and as Learned Hand once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." Now I agree Credit Card and passwd info needs to be encrypted, every e-mail does not! The future of encryption as I see it is: A limit on the number of CHARACTERS that is permitted to be encrypted...say 20. That should cover both passwd and CC. Plus it will prevent easy communication between all thoes terrorists. Would you trust the government to make the decision which is confidential and which isn't?
Also, your 20 characters only covers a very small subset of the information I encrypt.
Today I encrypted someone's name and address. He'd much rather it didn't get into someones else's hands, so I fired up pgp and now only I can read it. That's about 80 characters.
I've also got a story I'm writing. I don't want anyone to read it until it's finished. It's approximatly 50,000 characters.
The SSL server at work has transfered approximatly 1.5Gb of encrypted traffic in the last 3 weeks. Perhaps much of this didn't need to be encrypted, but it's just a dumb server - it has no way of recognizing a password from a graphic.
Now, I've got no particular reason to conceal any of these from the government, but I do have reason to make it hard to decrypt, as there are plenty of people who can decrypt 40 or 56 bit encryption in an unacceptably short amount of time, and with the ever declining cost of CPU cycles, I know of no way of ensuring that only a govermental CPU can crack a system while a private CPU cannot.
Re:No I'm not. It's right there on your head!
on
New Transmeta Patent
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Does this take money? You bet it does. Piles of it. But think about it: if the patent situation is truly as out of hand as many appear to think, it should be possible to raise lots of money to get the most obvious patents voided. If a patent is truly obvious and is truly burdensome for a large number of people or companies, wouldn't they be willing to be named as parties in a suit? If I were being wronged that badly, I know I certainly would.
Unfortunatly, companies don't have much inclination to fight unjust patents. If MegaCorp A has a patent on the off switch, and MegaCorp B has a patent on the volume control, they cross license their patents, and carry on as before. It's the little guy who's hurt in software patents, who doesn't have a patent in the bleeding obvious or the money to fight it.
To me, the patent system was designed to make it possible to reproduce engineering designs. For this it seems to work well. You can make your widgit for n years with protection, then everyone can do it.
For software, it doesn't seem to work well. There are many reasons for this:
1) Software is mainly ideas, not implementation. Thinking up the idea of a dancing paperclip is the hard part. Once you've thought of that idea, it's relativily easy to produce a new dancing paperclip.
2) Software is self documenting. If you have FooBar 99, you can, with sufficent skill, work out how it makes paperclips dance. Thus the documentation of the patent isn't very useful for propegating the knowledge. This is especially true with the very non-standard language that is used in patents.
3) Software parents are too fine grained. Patents for real processes tend to be large, and useful on their own. A process for making threaded copper pipes. Software patents tend to be small things. Cursors, caches & compression schemes. These aren't useful on their own, but only as part of a large program.
If we wish to promote human knowledge, we should make reverse engineering explictily legal, regardless of what shrinkwrap licenses say, and eliminate software patents. Copyright is perfectly adequete for protecting intellectual property.
It used to be that you had to have a seperate FP unit. In older systems, this was a seperate box next to your main processor. Later, it was a co-processor. Nowadays, you'll find the FP unit embededed in the CPU.
"Whoops! That FPU died. Better go buy a new CPU for that server..."
Increasing integration is nothing new, RAM, FPU, cache controllers and DMA controllers all used to be seperate, and are now included on the CPU.
cast your minds back to when SEA was pushing the ARC compression format, and PK was pushing ZIP.
And do you know WHY.ARC died? Because SEA tried to push their weight around using their "IP rights" to stop PK from producing an easier to use program.
Ever build a "hello world" program in g++? Using, say, just the C calls, and #including *only* stdio.h? On, say, Solaris, the binary will be over 500k.
I don't have g++ available on solaris, but using Sun's CC: WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 C++ 5.0, the traditional helloworld.c comes to 8796 bytes.
Using g++ on Linux, gives a binary of 19410 bytes.
These are without running strip on the binary to remove debugging information. If I do that, then the size decreases to 5612 under solaris & 5668 under Linux.
I'd imagine that there would be a similar sort of thing with TV programs.
Fans of various TV programs would watch them on a regular basis, but programs which people watch just because they're on after Sienfeld or Friends wouldn't get that audience boost.
This wouldn't greatly affect the total number of shows. I'm sure that the 6 or 7 sites I visit reguarly isn't the same as the 6 or 7 the next person does, but it would mean that people would watch less shows they're not interested in, just because they're on.
I tend to think that in time, the concept of channels will disappear.
Right now, if you want to watch a program, you either have to be in front of the box, or set up your VCR in advance. If not recording, and two programs are on at the same time then you have to decide which one you want to miss and which one you want to watch. Ditto for three if recording.
If you don't know about a program in advance, you loose.
Cable channels like HBO repeat the same program/movie multiple times in the month, this helps the problem a bit, but even so, you're still at the channel's mercy for when you can see it.
However, with boxes like this, and increased channel capacity, we're going to move to an interface more like the web than like traditional TV. Instead of being driven by the channel's schedule, we will start making our own decisions about what to watch when.
>What law provides them that power? [To enter premises] Contract Law.
The person signing the contract (The artist or more likely the record company) isn't the person controlling the access to premises. If I sign a contract with you then that doesn't give you any rights to enter CmdrTaco's bedroom.
The only power they have to enter arbitary premises is due to waving threating lawyer letters about.
Imagine if you made, say, a really spiffy Got Milk parody featuring Yoda, and someone else displayed it on their site, within a frame, so that although the image was coming from your site, it looked like it was their's. You'd be pissed, right? But it's not the original content site that's complaining. ASCAP don't make music. They don't broadcast music. They don't sell music. They just hastle those who do.
"It bucks the trends of current browsers by mining random visuals and snippets of sentences from the Web and having it float endlessly across a black backdrop, accompanied by clips of sound, if the user desires. Users can specify a topic, then retrieve text, images, and/or audio from the Internet on the subject. They navigate by typing keywords into the browser, not by pointing and clicking."
I think that the major reason that the internet enabled systems have problems that the legacy systems don't is the point that bluGill (hank@black-hole.com) made above about not overselling your capacity.
If you have a mainframe with 3270 terminals, you know exactly how many users you will handle. Adding more users involves a definate decision, and you can decide what upgrades you need in order to handle those extra users.
With an internet application, there isn't such a direct link between the number of users you can support. HTTP is a very variable protocol, perhaps one page requires 3 HTTP accesses, all of which can be served in under 1/100 second, another page requires 50 accesses, which can take up to 3 seconds. Together with the growth of any Internet application, this makes capacity planning very difficult.
I'm sure that capacity planning will become better in the future, but for now, some growing pains are inevitable.
Actually, many large libraries do carry a full complement of periodicals, including pornographic ones, though they are kept as restricted access - IE adults only.
The problem with banning stuff because someone objects to their tax dollars funding it, is that very quickly you end up with nothing at all. Should an adult be prevented from reading The Statanic Verses because of the objections of the Islamic community?
First of all, can you name one instance where any type of police investigation was hampered because of encrypted email messages?
Criminals, and spies, have known for a long time that better than encryption for some purposes are codes. If you send "The blue geese fly tonight", then it doesn't matter if you can read the text, you don't know what's going to happen unless you have the code book.
As this sort of protection is impossible to legistate against or prevent, then any laws against crypto are not going to prevent criminals from communicating secretly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just outside of Milton Keynes, about 30 miles north of London. Their website has information about getting there, and also a collection of interesting photographs of Turing, Colossus, Ultra, and general war photos.
If you patent the snagglepuss method of making steel from iron ore, then there is nothing stopping someone else from inventing the droopy method instead. The inputs are the same, the outputs are the same, the method differs. If you use the snagglepuss method to produce copper from copper ore, then you have NOT infringed the patent. Similarly if you take the snagglepuss method and use this a a basis to make a variation to make steel, then you have NOT infringed. You especially see this in medical patents. When one new drug comes out with one particular way of acting, within a few years you'll find many 'clones' of the drug, with minor variation but all working using the same methodology.
In many fields, this is considered a good thing. I take salbutamol for asthma. It is a good drug for me, with few side effects. My sister takes terbutaline, a similar drug, but with slightly different side effects, as she had problems taking salbutamol. If drugs were treated in the way that you suggest, then no-one would be allowed to produce drugs which act the same as existing ones.
Software patents are bad, they slow down technology improvements, and in many cases fail the 'obviousness' or "prior knowledge" tests.
An obvious reason is so that you can have an TV Guide type page with a link to your VCR to record the program.
Also, your 20 characters only covers a very small subset of the information I encrypt.
Today I encrypted someone's name and address. He'd much rather it didn't get into someones else's hands, so I fired up pgp and now only I can read it. That's about 80 characters.
I've also got a story I'm writing. I don't want anyone to read it until it's finished. It's approximatly 50,000 characters.
The SSL server at work has transfered approximatly 1.5Gb of encrypted traffic in the last 3 weeks. Perhaps much of this didn't need to be encrypted, but it's just a dumb server - it has no way of recognizing a password from a graphic.
Now, I've got no particular reason to conceal any of these from the government, but I do have reason to make it hard to decrypt, as there are plenty of people who can decrypt 40 or 56 bit encryption in an unacceptably short amount of time, and with the ever declining cost of CPU cycles, I know of no way of ensuring that only a govermental CPU can crack a system while a private CPU cannot.
Unfortunatly, companies don't have much inclination to fight unjust patents. If MegaCorp A has a patent on the off switch, and MegaCorp B has a patent on the volume control, they cross license their patents, and carry on as before. It's the little guy who's hurt in software patents, who doesn't have a patent in the bleeding obvious or the money to fight it.
To me, the patent system was designed to make it possible to reproduce engineering designs. For this it seems to work well. You can make your widgit for n years with protection, then everyone can do it.
For software, it doesn't seem to work well. There are many reasons for this:
1) Software is mainly ideas, not implementation. Thinking up the idea of a dancing paperclip is the hard part. Once you've thought of that idea, it's relativily easy to produce a new dancing paperclip.
2) Software is self documenting. If you have FooBar 99, you can, with sufficent skill, work out how it makes paperclips dance. Thus the documentation of the patent isn't very useful for propegating the knowledge. This is especially true with the very non-standard language that is used in patents.
3) Software parents are too fine grained. Patents for real processes tend to be large, and useful on their own. A process for making threaded copper pipes. Software patents tend to be small things. Cursors, caches & compression schemes. These aren't useful on their own, but only as part of a large program.
If we wish to promote human knowledge, we should make reverse engineering explictily legal, regardless of what shrinkwrap licenses say, and eliminate software patents. Copyright is perfectly adequete for protecting intellectual property.
If you want to keep your kids safe, statistically speaking, then you should always send them to the theatre with a stranger :-)
"Whoops! That FPU died. Better go buy a new CPU for that server..."
Increasing integration is nothing new, RAM, FPU, cache controllers and DMA controllers all used to be seperate, and are now included on the CPU.
Actually, some vaccines do spread. For example, the live vacine for polio.
And do you know WHY .ARC died? Because SEA tried to push their weight around using their "IP rights" to stop PK from producing an easier to use program.
I don't have g++ available on solaris, but using Sun's CC: WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 C++ 5.0, the traditional helloworld.c comes to 8796 bytes.
Using g++ on Linux, gives a binary of 19410 bytes.
These are without running strip on the binary to remove debugging information. If I do that, then the size decreases to 5612 under solaris & 5668 under Linux.
Fans of various TV programs would watch them on a regular basis, but programs which people watch just because they're on after Sienfeld or Friends wouldn't get that audience boost.
This wouldn't greatly affect the total number of shows. I'm sure that the 6 or 7 sites I visit reguarly isn't the same as the 6 or 7 the next person does, but it would mean that people would watch less shows they're not interested in, just because they're on.
Right now, if you want to watch a program, you either have to be in front of the box, or set up your VCR in advance. If not recording, and two programs are on at the same time then you have to decide which one you want to miss and which one you want to watch. Ditto for three if recording.
If you don't know about a program in advance, you loose.
Cable channels like HBO repeat the same program/movie multiple times in the month, this helps the problem a bit, but even so, you're still at the channel's mercy for when you can see it.
However, with boxes like this, and increased channel capacity, we're going to move to an interface more like the web than like traditional TV. Instead of being driven by the channel's schedule, we will start making our own decisions about what to watch when.
Contract Law.
The person signing the contract (The artist or more likely the record company) isn't the person controlling the access to premises. If I sign a contract with you then that doesn't give you any rights to enter CmdrTaco's bedroom.
The only power they have to enter arbitary premises is due to waving threating lawyer letters about.
If that's what it is like, them I'm right. It IS disgusting.
Imagine if you made, say, a really spiffy Got Milk parody featuring Yoda, and someone else displayed it on their site, within a frame, so that although the image was coming from your site, it looked like it was their's. You'd be pissed, right? But it's not the original content site that's complaining. ASCAP don't make music. They don't broadcast music. They don't sell music. They just hastle those who do.
Sounds absolutly disgusting.
Almost every minivan on the road looks very similar to any other car.
Almost every jet in the air looks very similar to any other jet.
Almost every toaster in the kitchens looks very similar to any other toaster.
let's face it, copying the look of a successful product is the way the world works.
Seems like a nobrainer to me.
The obvious question would be who would the government get an injunction against?
Isn't this they've behaved in EVERY domain name dispute?
Ditto to that.
about Carl
Carl J Lydick photos
If you have a mainframe with 3270 terminals, you know exactly how many users you will handle. Adding more users involves a definate decision, and you can decide what upgrades you need in order to handle those extra users.
With an internet application, there isn't such a direct link between the number of users you can support. HTTP is a very variable protocol, perhaps one page requires 3 HTTP accesses, all of which can be served in under 1/100 second, another page requires 50 accesses, which can take up to 3 seconds. Together with the growth of any Internet application, this makes capacity planning very difficult.
I'm sure that capacity planning will become better in the future, but for now, some growing pains are inevitable.
The problem with banning stuff because someone objects to their tax dollars funding it, is that very quickly you end up with nothing at all. Should an adult be prevented from reading The Statanic Verses because of the objections of the Islamic community?
Criminals, and spies, have known for a long time that better than encryption for some purposes are codes. If you send "The blue geese fly tonight", then it doesn't matter if you can read the text, you don't know what's going to happen unless you have the code book.
As this sort of protection is impossible to legistate against or prevent, then any laws against crypto are not going to prevent criminals from communicating secretly.
When you pirate some software, then the original owner still has his copy of the software.
The economics of physical items is very different to the economics of virtual items.