That's not trickey. You HOSTED the material in that example, so you are the responsible party if it is illegal to HOST the material. You "expressly" hosted it. That is an agregous offense. Sucks to be you dude...
Where is the question?
We are discussing whether those "link site operators" should be held liable. (They shouldn't BTW) If you are stupid enough to commit a actionable offense in public, you deserve what you get. All the "link farmers" did was draw attention to you. For the most part, the link farmers (arguably) did the infringed party a favor by making you locatable. (OK, that is going a bit far, but only a bit.)
The point being missed is that linker isn't responsible for the actions of the linkee. And there is no "sufficent" excuse to care about the linker in the "piracy" case that isn't completely and thuroughly trumped by the issues that actually matter in all the "not piracy" cases.
It is "more good for the human condition" to allow free linking. The total exposure of letting the thieves steal the music they weren't going to buy anyway is (absolutely and unequivicablly) NOTHING when weighed against the unimaginable harm that could be wrought if the meer act of pointing at something was re-cast into a legally conspiratorial act.
Consider the whole encryption issue. For years the US Government was trying to keep adequate cryptogoraphy out of the hands of honest citizens. Lots of US sites then just linked to web sites hosting PGP (etc) in *free* *countries* so that the citezens of the US could protect their own privacy. Those linkers would have been FELONS if linking was illegal, and a great injustice (in weighty governmental abuse) would have been allowed to flourish.
Or how about the Chineese government wanting to kill freenet by keeping it out of the hands of its citizenry. That is exactly analogous to the RIAA's position on linking. They (both) don't like what is happening and it would greatly advance their ajenda if they could stop it. If you recognize the lesser claim you legitimze the greater by definition.
How about "community standards"? Does your podunk town think something your site points to is pornographic or otherwise doesn't meet the comunities standards of "good, moral, and decent behavior"? If so, you are screwed. Sure, you didn't possess one whit of the aforementioned objectionable material, but your computer linked to it and that is "enough for them" and you do a quick five-spot for "trafficing" in "porn" because you have a link to a site that advocates the right of consenting adults on private property hanging out naked by the pool with like-minded consenting adults.
Yea, making all that illegal is *such* a small price to pay to protect the overriding cultural need we all feel for the RIAA to make an extra one-half percent on their margins next year.
So I have this friend fred and everybody is always making jokes about how honest he is. I make a link on my site "cheap crack and murder-for-hire at freds house" because that is the last thing I or anybody who knows me would beleive of fred. It is, in fact, funny.
But the joke is on me because frank is just really good at hiding his darker nature and he does sell crack and kill people. Whoops, my bad. Made a joke, spend life in prision as an accessory to murder.
Or even worse, franks "frank.com" gets taken over while I'm not looking by a less honest frank. And I am screwed again.
Sound far fetched? Its not. It is simply likely outcomes which are "no more extreme" than your extreme example.
Consider you hate $cientology, and you link to their site on your site, as an example of how screwed in the head you think they are. They change the contents of the page you link to so it contains some of their intellectual property and then get your site and your ISP taken down.
Unlikely? Nope, actually a near-certian outcome.
Since the linked-to content is out of the control of the linker, it is too easy "become guilty" as a result of your innocent act when a target page changes.
Allowing prosecutors and complaining parties to "posit theroies" about your intent is always a bad thing. Consider the "Intent to Sell" clauses of drug laws in the US. The state doesnt have to proove any actual intent, as after "intent to sell" was made a criminal condition, they (re) decided that having more that a certian raw weight of drugs prooves that intent. Sounds clear and obvious and "ok"? Turns out it isn't. Consider that the statute says how many milligrams of LSD is one dose. Then they measure the LSD-soaked paper (the paper weighs several hundred times "one dose") so you have five doses and you go to jail for intent to sell because the raw wight of the innert material takes you over the limit. No abuse there. No sirreee.
You simply cannot trust "the state" to do the right thing. If you could, then you wouldn't need the Bill of Rights (or non US equivalant where you live).
That is your baby in that bathwater. Who do you choose to decide what gets thrown out and how? If you are smart you don't give that power to random strangers.
Consider the chilling (abbusable) effect of making linking illegal or conspiritorial act.
You have a problem with a person or organization. You link to their site as an example of the problem you have with them. (Say you link to the Debold site because they are "election fraudsters".)
If your problem is that they can (a) persue you because you linked to their stuff or (b) change the page you innocently linked to to an infringing content site (you infringe their content, but they don't, so clearly you meant others to infringe their property.)
Plus there is a proof-by-induction problem. You link to a friends page because you like him. Unbenonst to you, he links to infringing material. An over-zealous RIAA decides that the "only possible reason" for you to have linked to such a malcontent was that you must share his every view.
How many link steps does it take to wash an outgoing link?
Suppose you have a bunch of links lying fallow on your friends page that you haven't bothered to clean out for a while. A new user takes over an old firends equally fallow account and posts kiddie porn. Your link reads (and always had read) something innocent like "A young lady who's company I enjoy" but "margrets-life.com" now takes you to naughty-margret the hottest little 12 year old in siagon...
Its a mire.
You sould be able to link to anything. Essentially when you link you are in a crowded stadium and you are pointing your finger across the crowded field (at a possible stranger). Such pointing should not make you responsible for the actions of the person you are pointing at.
Its just too much "who guesses what whom intended where? We'll let the prosicutor who is up for reelection decided... he should be impartial..."
(And yes, this goes for a link that says "crack and murder-for-hire at franks house" because when you wrote it, it might have been a joke. How do you *really know* what frank does in his off time anyway?)
Don't sacrafice your life on the alter of "seeming reasonable".
Each of the three regions, Eastern, Western, and that Texas place have exactly one (1) active controlling generation turbine online at any one time. It is a case of "Biggest Rules". The heaviest (really, as in weight) single armature (?) turbine, coil thingy in the entire region has an oscilator that sets the clock.
This is the beast that sets the pace. (There are several in each region, in diverse geographical locations, capible of being the guy in charge, but only one is in the system at a time.)
Every other, lighter turbine generator coil thingy is actually trying to go "ever so slightly" faster than the master. By doing this, but being unable to out-mass the leader, all the turbines stay in synch "naturally".
This is part and parcil of the comment about how a turbine has to be taken out of the loop if it starts to fall off the pace. The coils start acting as a motor instead of a generator. The stress and current demands go way up and either the bearings blow from atypical stress (wobbling) or the current in the coils begin climbing exponentially.
While the "one big machine" analogy seems hollistic, it is actually more a systemic fact. Though the DC connections might make it more like three big machines stapled to one another, the former imagry is close enough to literal fact thaty the times-three oversatement is worth the hyperbole.
The power inputs and outputs are tweaked to effect net delivery and distribution, but the "organisim" is effectively singular (in each region).
The symphony orchastra analogy is also quite approprate. The master turbines are the conductors. The system is arranged such that there is "always" a spare conductor standing by. But at any moment there is, in fact, only one.
Were one able to take over every one of the several (4 or so per region) possible masters, and then take the current master off line and prevent the other masters from comming on line, the mess would be intolerable. The "heaviest" non master would instantly be elected, but his regulator would still be set to try to overtake a real master. With the lack of that moderation the frequency of the entire net (region) would begin to rise. As the frequency rose the same mathimatical factor that goes into the "30mHz of sag loses 1Gw of power" curve would mean that for the same voltage, the power being carried would rise and things would start to melt.
Better yet, take possession of the master/moderators and just turn up the frequency by hand. Say to 70cycles instead of 60.
All of the stations would start to drop off even as the power lines and the generators themselves were being damaged by the excessive current flow. As the rate of dropout increased the damage done to each quitter would increase. That's why the blackout happened so fast. Last guy on the line takes the most damage.
Each region really is just one machine.
The correct analogy is not how all humans are one organism, but how each human body is one machine. Different member organs have different degrees of criticality. You can cut off whole sections and still have a live human, but the shape of the key systems is critical. Arms and legs are disposable but cut a one inch slit in the aorta and see how long you live.
No, if they were *REALLY* listening they would pony up and fix their mistake.
I bought TurboTax 02 and ran it in a vmware partiton to prevent the infection from spreading.
So far all the remedies Intuit has offered is a way to uninstall the mal-ware when you uninstall the product. They have done nothing to provide me with an unencumbered and fully working replacement for the crapware they originally released.
If they were serious about keeping my business they would send me a CD that contained the program in 100% workable, 100% mal-ware-freee format so that it was safe for me to use next year to consult on my old records.
That or release a patch that make the program "uncrippled" (etc) using the CD I already have.
OK, but where is my uninfected copy of turbotax 2002? (I bought it an ran it in a vmware session to prevent the spread of disease. I would like to have it "for real" wihtout the crap. "or else")
Cross-dressing and "homosexual agenda"? Be serious. There is no deterministic relationship between the two outside bad steriotypes.
Izzard is straight and tranvestite. I'm homosexual, dislike "drag shows" and pusshy-queen walking steriotypes, and would go naked before putting on a dress. Getting transvesties onto TV is about as far from my agenda as you can get. I don't want them not-there, but seeing a man in drag is like watching straight people kiss; it does nothing for me at all and generally looks a little creepy. 8-)
Lumping people into broad categories just because you haven't bothered to do any fact-finding, and then claiming they lumped themselves and are now subscribed to a particular "agenda", is tiresome and childish.
On a less-side note, I dislike anybody sexualizing characters that don't need it. It makes for bad literary construction as no mater how you slant sexuality you, by definition, slant it into a niche. Izzard could be a hoot as the doctor if he is capible of playing the character. I've seen him in suit and tie so I think he could pull off a nice excentric personality without injecting sex where it doesn't need to go.
[FURTHER ASIDE] I once had an over-straight homophobe ask: "What do you mean 'phobia'? Why would I be afraid of some faggot?"
My response: Clearly you are affraid that there are men out in the world who might think about you, and treat you, as badly as you think about and treat women.
I have never met a homophobe, or indeed any man who used the phrase "homosexual agenda" (etc), that didn't also misstreat, marginalize, or rampently objectify every woman foolish enough to approach him.
Ok, so I didn't do any actual research , but I have come to realization that all the izzle-speak is nothing but "pig-latin from the hood". It's got the same basic *kind* of substitution rules and about the same information kenitics [data compression is to elaboration, as consicice word choice is to izzlizing] given the number of nonsense-symbols that can be added to the informaion stream.
So white people stole jaz from black people, and now black people have stolen pig-latin from white people.
Who are the better theives? 8-)
I would have recommended they steal something else, like investment banking, but most black people I know are too honest for investment banking./sardonic-but-evil-grin
So we are at odds, with two different user experiences. I don't know what your machine count is, nor what your configuration count, so lets call this a sample size of two. Of the two of us, 50% have daily reason to think Windows is crap. The other 50% thinks its fine. But with that sample size being so small it hardly constitues proof either way.
Oddly enough, neither 50% of us think linux hangs all the time or costs us work or aggrevation. So there is a very tenuous trend in the size-of-two sample set. (Maybe you don't use linux, maybe you don't care to, but at the lest there is are no negative data points in evidence for linux stability in this "study" so far.)
So far linux is "Better" for uptime stability.
But we need a bigger sample set.
Oh wait, we have one. We have a whole forum full of people, many of whom think Windows is unreliable crap.
In the end, however, the three-messages-back assertion that we think Windows is crap *only* because we havn't tried 2k, has been addressed and disproved. Some of us *have* tried it and still had the ongoing craptacular experience.
God's speed and good luck to you on your rendering. May your ongoing fortune continue, and would that only the rest of us were so lucky to not win-hang often and severely... but wait... we do... crap...
Guess I'll just have to stick with what works where I can, and Win2k where otherwise.
I am running a Win2K/Linux dual boot on a brand-spankin-new P4C800 motherboard here at home. At work I spend equal parts of my time using Linux and Windows XP (on separate machines).
Linux works fine, with so-far-unlimited continuous uptime.
Win2K (at home) hangs after an hour or two of uptime if (and only if) I plug in *ANY* USB device. [If I don't plug in any USB devices I get up to several days straight before windows hangs]
Win XP (at work) only hangs every few days to two weeks.
In short, windows is still crap and you can't say I have my opinion because I haven't tried it lately.
And since I code on *and* using Windows, Linux, and RTXC I feel qualified to say that with no reservation what-so-ever.
See, the thing is, since Microsoft has a policy *against* rewriting production code, much of the crap from 1998 is still in there. They've covered the crap, and put restart harnesses around it, and segmented the crap on the left from the crap on the right by beefing up the memory model. But it still takes very little to push the code base off the pointy top-end of "working well" and into a thundering roll down the hill to the "what ate my data" cravasse?
Not an hour ago I had to do the hang-reboot-checkdisk-reboot dance on my windows partition.
So at home I mostly use Windows (2k) for games and printing and looking at pr0n, while doing everything else using linux. At work I use it (XP) because windows is the only platform that runs the tool-chain for compiling the OS for the client [RTXC embedded platform] we sell, and because I have to exchange.doc files with my co-workers. [The server part of our solution uses a Embedded Planet board running linux, and I program for that using linux.] I use windows a lot. I use Linux a lot.
Windows is crap. If all you do is browse the web, and you don't mind rebooting regularly (or you naturally turn off or sleep you box to save electricity anyway so it gets its regular reboot because of your natural behavior) you may not notice it much.
The bit mistake you (people) make when thinking about their "free" software projects is that they act and think that because they don't normally charge money, their work product has little or no value.
Consider:
1) the product is valuable to you because it satisfies, or at least addressess, a need for you.
2) the product is valuable to others for the same reason.
3) you are engaged in a valid (in the contractual sense) exchange of goods for services when you make open source software available.
Even though no money has changed hands, at a minimum, the software is valuable in the "other consideration" category. Even the most plaintive user is providing test-iterations and feedback on the code base. Some few will do more by returning ideas. Fewer still will do more by returning code. But all of this is labor time at the least, and as we know, time is actually money. You *are* engaged in a reasonably balanced contractual exchange, and the contract is embodied by the license you release under.
So you should not feel any form of "guilt" for charging someone for work you "would have done anyway." That work had and has real comercial value.
What you are selling, when you get paid for open source development, is "concentration." The business world recognizes different levels of concentration to be a real asset. When you are paid a retainer, you are promising to "answer the phone" and, presumably, keep yourself generally ready to answer the phone by spending some minimal effort to remain viable in your field. A lawyer, for instance, may take a retainer for a clent. The client is "buying into" the fact that the lawyer is lawyer-ing to stay laywer-ey so that if they need him he will be ready to at least decided whether he want's to represent the client.
The absence of the retainer, or indeed all retainers, doesn't mean that the lawyer will stop lawyer-ing. And for those days or years before and between the clients and retainers, a lawyer keeps lawyer-ing (if he's smart) so that he is ready to lawyer for cause.
So you program, and you pursue this particular project at whatever rate you feel approprate for your needs.
This client comes along and gives you money to buy a degree of attention and concentration above your needs and into the range of their needs.
Presumably they are buying:
1) the project getting done faster. 2) influence on the prioritization of tasks. (e.g. that you will work on "their features" first if a decision needs to be made between alternative elements) 3) insight into the product. [They get to talk to you and they get a disproportionate share of the expectation that you will listen. They get to ask you questions that, were they to come in via email, you might more certianly blow off. They get to ask you to *explain* instead of reading the code and documentaiton for themselves.]
All of this is worth buying if and when a customer decides that your project meets their need.
So ask yourself which of the three buyables (among possible others) you are really willing to sell and to what degree.
If you are only selling mostly #1 (faster, targeted completion) then charge by feature and target date.
If you are selling primarly #3 then you are in a time-and-materials sort of circumstance. They want not just your product, but a slice of you. You don't "finish" by milestone so you shouldn't be paid by milestone.
If you are stuck in the middle (mostly both, i.e. #2), split the invoice. Charge by the feature for the features and by the hour for all non-design/development time.
So a mixed approach:
Feature X will be N dollars and includes M hours of support and training.
For all X, the cost is the sum(N), for hours in excess of sum(M) the hourly cost is L per hour. They/You pay travel expenses (to whatever limits) and so on.
If they don't want to be this formal, don't you dare let yourself feel tha tyou have agreed to this fomality. Tha
First off, "they" wrote it. Each of the contributors listed their position and company with equal emphasis. No representations were made about the "official" positions of the respecitve and multiple companies listed.
Yes, we seem to be living in a world with increasing need to disclaim. In fact, we live in a legal claim/disclaim toxic environment.
If you were to global search-and-replace the company names with the names of universities; and likewise exchange the professional titles with academic ones; this paper would be perfectly kosher.
So now, apparently you can't publish a shcollarly work unless you *don't* have a "real job." How nice.
Remember: The great/golden age of the Arrab Empires collapsed because of one act. They closed their libraries. After that scolarship fell into disrepute. Then learning. Then knowledge. Then "not being an idiot" was against the social norm, and *poof* they lost the initiative.
Let's not repeat that debacle in our age, shall we?
Persons should enjoy the right to freely publish their thoughts and understandings of any issue with greater social ramafications.
Silence == Death... As a slogan it is applicable to far more than the AIDS crisis.
I, in my role as Amazing Kreskin standin, predict that "very shortly" there will be new DRM based chatroom system in place within MSN. Using the DRM to remove anonomus nature of chats to "protect the children" and thus get the DRM software into a "must use" niche.
They should have also protected "the operator" of the vehicle.
This does nothig to protect a person from the abuse of the information when they Rent a car (c.f. the story of the "speeding penalty" enacted by the one rental agency) or when a person has a "company car".
Finally, one wonders whether this separates the purchasers and leasees of cars into two separately and unequally protected classes.
After all, if you lease a car, your leasing company owns it. So the police could end-around and make a request of them to access the black-box.
Then again, section 215 lets the FBI do any dang thing they want in the search and seizure arena despite the Constitution.
Fifteen or more years ago I was a lab assistant at a community college and I watched as a room full of students failed to complete a word processing assignment. They had been given a "starting document" and printed copy; the assignment was to make the starting document match the printed copy. One of them finally turned to me in utter dispair and after I made her look around at all the trouble everyone was having (and after I told her how "bad" her teacher must have been) I gave her the four simple rules of electronic document preparation:
(In Order) 1) Content. Get all the words and ideas you desire to express into the system. 2) Correctness. Go after the grammar and spelling, make sure that each thought really makes sense. 3) Grouping. Check your punctuation (again) and your paragraph breaks. Make tables and inset boxes. 4) Presentation. Now that everything is said, you are free to highlight, bold, etc. Do your colors and fonts and drop in your pictures if you want.
As you grow with a tool you may find that you can do several of these steps at once. A *rare* person can do all four at the same time as long as he keeps them in the above order in mental priority, ready at any moment to abandon any higher numbered step in favor of paying needed attention to a lower.
If you apply these steps to your process, either for the whole document, or for chapters, or sections or whatever "largest comfortable" segment works for you, you will never have trouble with your tools distrupting your workflow.
The pointless stalls happen when a person jumps over a step. They pick a font size and such so that the text looks just so, then they find a spelling or punctuation error and what was one bold banner across the page is now a two-line peel-away that has bumped half of the following text into some oblivion of the next page.
Back to the anticdote, she got her work done and blew the curve for the class.
(BTW: I didn't get much beyond step one in composing this post. I am blowing off stress and wasting time under deadline pressure just now, and the slashdot interface does not lend itself well to spellcheck... 8-)
DNS isn't the web. There is no "user" just sitting there to be queried for virtually any of the transactions.
Are you going to pay an outsourcing company in india big bucks to sit and preview each of the spam attempts that pass through your ISPs email system to check if there is a SOUNDEX match to each mention of a DNS-resolved element?
Hyperbole? Mayhaps, but well deserved.
OK, so you go to this site, say "slashdot.org" but you type "slsahdot.org". The site has 70 graphics and insets on the page, all targeted by "relative" links. So, you will want to have the DNS support in your computer pop up the same "did you mean slashdot?" dialog box 71 times?
Remember that the DNS system isn't *IN* the browser. So the fact that you told the DNS system which IP address you wanted (by picking ithe right one out of the SOUNDEX list) it has no means of going back into the browser and telling it to stop asking for what you asked for.
You basically have violated the first principle of design. You asked "couldn't we just (something)" without even understanding the most basic divisions of labor/effort and therefore, the implications of your proposed action.
You presumed that since you only directly interract with the system in one way, that being your browser, that all interractions with all people (including yourself) using the system follow a similarly interractive model.
Or even simpler: which "search engine" should get to pick where I go to validate the security for this web page before I send my credit card information off?
Or even simpler: "Ikea" or "Ike & Leah", either way, I expect if I send them my credit card info, I'll get a nice floor lamp.
Or even simpler: when Bank of America sends your electronic funds transfr for your mortgage off to "your" mortgage company, do you want it to be "guessing" between ranked alternatives as to which bank gets your money?
The mind boggles.
"I think the phone book, when you open it, should decide which numbers to give you because all these people are the same."
Since they cannot get face recognition software to work, how is the image going to be claissified?
Microsoft is going to hire half of Guatamala to sit at low-grade terminals 140 hours a week, looking at grany internet porn and going "that's Brad Pitt!" (click).
Other companies "Embrace and Extend and then PUBLISH" when they work with open standards.
Microsoft's policy is to cut the sentence somewhat shorter than that, or at least change the last word out out with some secret internal Scino-speak word meaning "capture and extort the foolish prey user base".
Oh wait, I rememember their secretly redefined word, its "innovate".
So my roommate, who works with some high-end audio software that runs on a Mac discovered something interesting.
If you open an iTune with a particular piece of editing software on the Mac, and click save-as, no more DRM.
I would tell you the name of the product, but I don't remember it (not being an audio nor Mac geek myself). It costs in the $800 range but you *can* find it fairly easily in a semi-pbulic lab at, say, a school has a good audio engineering program.
And no, the arangement doesn't require that you buy the iTune for the computer running the software.
(I really wish I could say that I was withholding the name of the program because of the DMCA, but I am just a big dummy and I cant remember.)
Then again, said "big" corporation making and marketing the "cimcumvention tool" which is also "one of the big names in Digital Audio Production" would make for interesting conflict of interests.
Do you think Lars be happy to know he is using the same software to master his music as the random college hippies are using to steal it?
And no, my roommate is not using this discovery to violate anybodies copyrights, he just mentioned that he'd found the flaw by accident and that it was funny...
Where my "What The Hell" Meeter goes off is the fact that the fatal shooting was first.
Oh, we're really sorry your honor, but when the first car went careening across the road with a dead-guy behind the wheel we figured that it was a million to one shot, but we had to find out for sure, so we couln't stop there. That would have been immoral.
Be serious people.
Those letters of appology are crap. These kids are dammaged goods if they didn't go "oh shit" (in the bad way, as opposed to the happy giggling way) at the first killing.
Sure, one video game did all that disassociating damage all at once, that makes *perfect* sense.
And the judge? "I wanted to just let them go but..." What is wrong with people?
Everyone has become blind to personal responsibility. When it is even the judges it is time for a nice mass extinction.
When you open your account, it shoudl be firewalled.
When you go to your account management page, you shuld be able to open or close ports at will, or disable their firewall of your account all together.
So, you start with the default of protecting the stupid or uninterested and allow it to scale on demand.
And in a SOX-Firewall-Proxy style activity, you sould be able to have an applicaiton that temporarily opens ports.
(all without intrusive record keeping, because requireing the ISPs to keep records of all the tiny changes, presumably for some obscure government anti-music-terrorist scheme hatched by some evil anarchist hating "special interest"; because having to track these records would be the only technical or financial barrier to getting this done more or less by next weekend... 8-)
Actually, since the pattent would, by definition, be inclusive of the add-in or modified "X", company Z would not be able to just go make it.
If the thing X were largely more applicable to the world, the patent holder would be forced to weigh the value of holding the patent against the potential proffit of commoditizing X.
So lets say I "invent" a cool new way to do communications. For as long as I can maintian, and am satisfied by, a profit structure where all my cusmoters must come to me for all the parts, I can hold my patent, and I am happy.
As soon as I want to get out of the market of providing my thing completely, I must begin licensing my patent to others.
If I do that to a judicious degree I can keep my protection-to-profit ratio in line.
It becomes a "natural feature" of the system that, when I start licensing my thing to everybody, then nobody needs to license it any more.
It becomes a natural feature that if I try to use my thingy to corner and control a large cross-section of the planet, my patent lapses into public interest.
This construction naturally mimics the "fast" world of computer/software development. The patent is naturally only as long-lived as it is usefully "innovative" or "inventive".
The curves (profitability, protectionisim, market demand, manufacturing interest, tooling/retooling) should all hold for a year or three and then one will drop out. Three years is a long time in the computer system lifestyle.
-- The longer order interests that don't apply to a broad cross-section are more maintainable and the patents will "last longer". -- A crucial product will get licensed around and then fall into the commons. -- Pure idea-space is protected from IP poaching by lawyers. -- Companies will have to actually make plans and consider their market and manufacturing posture before deciding that a patent is or isn't worth the filing fee. -- Patenting things because you "need" some part you don't actually need automatically fails.
This self-policing and naturally self-regulating posture is far better, case by case, than saying "no patents" or screwing around with particular durations. Every invetion is not equal in its longevity nor scope, so unless the rule is case-limited by a real measure.
Consider a legal strong-arming attempt. It would fail "autmatically" and by definition if some guy just wrote it again on his laptop.
Bad Lawyer: "Your honor, this person violated our patent by implementing our software and giving it away."
Good Lawyer: "Your honor, the software given away doesn't violate the patent, or more correctly it invalidates the patent, because it runs on any laptop with a sound card."
Judge: "Mr. Bad Lawyer, you have no case, you should have known you had no case, and I'll be forwarding this incident to the Bar Association. Pay the defendants legal fees and get out."
The idea is generally self-correcting against abbuse, spurious legal action, and attempts to steal common idea space by taking "on the web" or "using a computer" onto common activities.
No more "one click shopping" (which is just "put it on my tab, Bob" in a larger context and using a computer)
No more "I own comptuer auctions"
No more patenting the idea of mounting a directory across a lan.
No more "lets patent everything we can think of, just in case."
If it is, or it *can* *be*, implemented on a computer bought "off the shelf" and optionally modified only by parts bought "off the shelf" [e.g. "I added an eithernet card"] then it can not be patented.
If it has been patented, and the state of "the comercial shelf" from which parts are normally bought [e.g. comp-USA etc] advances to the point where the above rule would make it un-patentable, the patent has reached its terminal lifespan and is no longer valid.
In short, if you don't need a soldering iron [etc] it isn't patentable.
(CPU Microcode is Copyrighted, not patented)
That's it.
[And yes, my name is on a patented thing just now (unless my employer lied about the inventor) so I do know the range and impact of what I am suggesting.]
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That's not trickey. You HOSTED the material in that example, so you are the responsible party if it is illegal to HOST the material. You "expressly" hosted it. That is an agregous offense. Sucks to be you dude...
Where is the question?
We are discussing whether those "link site operators" should be held liable. (They shouldn't BTW) If you are stupid enough to commit a actionable offense in public, you deserve what you get. All the "link farmers" did was draw attention to you. For the most part, the link farmers (arguably) did the infringed party a favor by making you locatable. (OK, that is going a bit far, but only a bit.)
The point being missed is that linker isn't responsible for the actions of the linkee. And there is no "sufficent" excuse to care about the linker in the "piracy" case that isn't completely and thuroughly trumped by the issues that actually matter in all the "not piracy" cases.
It is "more good for the human condition" to allow free linking. The total exposure of letting the thieves steal the music they weren't going to buy anyway is (absolutely and unequivicablly) NOTHING when weighed against the unimaginable harm that could be wrought if the meer act of pointing at something was re-cast into a legally conspiratorial act.
Consider the whole encryption issue. For years the US Government was trying to keep adequate cryptogoraphy out of the hands of honest citizens. Lots of US sites then just linked to web sites hosting PGP (etc) in *free* *countries* so that the citezens of the US could protect their own privacy. Those linkers would have been FELONS if linking was illegal, and a great injustice (in weighty governmental abuse) would have been allowed to flourish.
Or how about the Chineese government wanting to kill freenet by keeping it out of the hands of its citizenry. That is exactly analogous to the RIAA's position on linking. They (both) don't like what is happening and it would greatly advance their ajenda if they could stop it. If you recognize the lesser claim you legitimze the greater by definition.
How about "community standards"? Does your podunk town think something your site points to is pornographic or otherwise doesn't meet the comunities standards of "good, moral, and decent behavior"? If so, you are screwed. Sure, you didn't possess one whit of the aforementioned objectionable material, but your computer linked to it and that is "enough for them" and you do a quick five-spot for "trafficing" in "porn" because you have a link to a site that advocates the right of consenting adults on private property hanging out naked by the pool with like-minded consenting adults.
Yea, making all that illegal is *such* a small price to pay to protect the overriding cultural need we all feel for the RIAA to make an extra one-half percent on their margins next year.
Right...
So I have this friend fred and everybody is always making jokes about how honest he is. I make a link on my site "cheap crack and murder-for-hire at freds house" because that is the last thing I or anybody who knows me would beleive of fred. It is, in fact, funny.
But the joke is on me because frank is just really good at hiding his darker nature and he does sell crack and kill people. Whoops, my bad. Made a joke, spend life in prision as an accessory to murder.
Or even worse, franks "frank.com" gets taken over while I'm not looking by a less honest frank. And I am screwed again.
Sound far fetched? Its not. It is simply likely outcomes which are "no more extreme" than your extreme example.
Consider you hate $cientology, and you link to their site on your site, as an example of how screwed in the head you think they are. They change the contents of the page you link to so it contains some of their intellectual property and then get your site and your ISP taken down.
Unlikely? Nope, actually a near-certian outcome.
Since the linked-to content is out of the control of the linker, it is too easy "become guilty" as a result of your innocent act when a target page changes.
Allowing prosecutors and complaining parties to "posit theroies" about your intent is always a bad thing. Consider the "Intent to Sell" clauses of drug laws in the US. The state doesnt have to proove any actual intent, as after "intent to sell" was made a criminal condition, they (re) decided that having more that a certian raw weight of drugs prooves that intent. Sounds clear and obvious and "ok"? Turns out it isn't. Consider that the statute says how many milligrams of LSD is one dose. Then they measure the LSD-soaked paper (the paper weighs several hundred times "one dose") so you have five doses and you go to jail for intent to sell because the raw wight of the innert material takes you over the limit. No abuse there. No sirreee.
You simply cannot trust "the state" to do the right thing. If you could, then you wouldn't need the Bill of Rights (or non US equivalant where you live).
That is your baby in that bathwater. Who do you choose to decide what gets thrown out and how? If you are smart you don't give that power to random strangers.
Consider the chilling (abbusable) effect of making linking illegal or conspiritorial act.
You have a problem with a person or organization. You link to their site as an example of the problem you have with them. (Say you link to the Debold site because they are "election fraudsters".)
If your problem is that they can (a) persue you because you linked to their stuff or (b) change the page you innocently linked to to an infringing content site (you infringe their content, but they don't, so clearly you meant others to infringe their property.)
Plus there is a proof-by-induction problem. You link to a friends page because you like him. Unbenonst to you, he links to infringing material. An over-zealous RIAA decides that the "only possible reason" for you to have linked to such a malcontent was that you must share his every view.
How many link steps does it take to wash an outgoing link?
Suppose you have a bunch of links lying fallow on your friends page that you haven't bothered to clean out for a while. A new user takes over an old firends equally fallow account and posts kiddie porn. Your link reads (and always had read) something innocent like "A young lady who's company I enjoy" but "margrets-life.com" now takes you to naughty-margret the hottest little 12 year old in siagon...
Its a mire.
You sould be able to link to anything. Essentially when you link you are in a crowded stadium and you are pointing your finger across the crowded field (at a possible stranger). Such pointing should not make you responsible for the actions of the person you are pointing at.
Its just too much "who guesses what whom intended where? We'll let the prosicutor who is up for reelection decided... he should be impartial..."
(And yes, this goes for a link that says "crack and murder-for-hire at franks house" because when you wrote it, it might have been a joke. How do you *really know* what frank does in his off time anyway?)
Don't sacrafice your life on the alter of "seeming reasonable".
The Mr. Bill true subtext:
Once *I* decide something is going to be fixed I used to allow 40 hours before I fired someone. Now I only allow 24.
Oh, how long between bug report or exploit and that order?
By my preference, Microsoft doesn't patch anything until a MS copproate resource is compromised. That's just good policy...
Er, rtfa? If you follow his very first recomendation and use the STL for vector and string (correctly) then you won't overrun.
Each of the three regions, Eastern, Western, and that Texas place have exactly one (1) active controlling generation turbine online at any one time. It is a case of "Biggest Rules". The heaviest (really, as in weight) single armature (?) turbine, coil thingy in the entire region has an oscilator that sets the clock.
This is the beast that sets the pace. (There are several in each region, in diverse geographical locations, capible of being the guy in charge, but only one is in the system at a time.)
Every other, lighter turbine generator coil thingy is actually trying to go "ever so slightly" faster than the master. By doing this, but being unable to out-mass the leader, all the turbines stay in synch "naturally".
This is part and parcil of the comment about how a turbine has to be taken out of the loop if it starts to fall off the pace. The coils start acting as a motor instead of a generator. The stress and current demands go way up and either the bearings blow from atypical stress (wobbling) or the current in the coils begin climbing exponentially.
While the "one big machine" analogy seems hollistic, it is actually more a systemic fact. Though the DC connections might make it more like three big machines stapled to one another, the former imagry is close enough to literal fact thaty the times-three oversatement is worth the hyperbole.
The power inputs and outputs are tweaked to effect net delivery and distribution, but the "organisim" is effectively singular (in each region).
The symphony orchastra analogy is also quite approprate. The master turbines are the conductors. The system is arranged such that there is "always" a spare conductor standing by. But at any moment there is, in fact, only one.
Were one able to take over every one of the several (4 or so per region) possible masters, and then take the current master off line and prevent the other masters from comming on line, the mess would be intolerable. The "heaviest" non master would instantly be elected, but his regulator would still be set to try to overtake a real master. With the lack of that moderation the frequency of the entire net (region) would begin to rise. As the frequency rose the same mathimatical factor that goes into the "30mHz of sag loses 1Gw of power" curve would mean that for the same voltage, the power being carried would rise and things would start to melt.
Better yet, take possession of the master/moderators and just turn up the frequency by hand. Say to 70cycles instead of 60.
All of the stations would start to drop off even as the power lines and the generators themselves were being damaged by the excessive current flow. As the rate of dropout increased the damage done to each quitter would increase. That's why the blackout happened so fast. Last guy on the line takes the most damage.
Each region really is just one machine.
The correct analogy is not how all humans are one organism, but how each human body is one machine. Different member organs have different degrees of criticality. You can cut off whole sections and still have a live human, but the shape of the key systems is critical. Arms and legs are disposable but cut a one inch slit in the aorta and see how long you live.
No, if they were *REALLY* listening they would pony up and fix their mistake.
I bought TurboTax 02 and ran it in a vmware partiton to prevent the infection from spreading.
So far all the remedies Intuit has offered is a way to uninstall the mal-ware when you uninstall the product. They have done nothing to provide me with an unencumbered and fully working replacement for the crapware they originally released.
If they were serious about keeping my business they would send me a CD that contained the program in 100% workable, 100% mal-ware-freee format so that it was safe for me to use next year to consult on my old records.
That or release a patch that make the program "uncrippled" (etc) using the CD I already have.
When I see *THAT* effort, I will be satisfied.
OK, but where is my uninfected copy of turbotax 2002? (I bought it an ran it in a vmware session to prevent the spread of disease. I would like to have it "for real" wihtout the crap. "or else")
That would satisfy me.
...you arn't entitled to an opinion.
Cross-dressing and "homosexual agenda"? Be serious. There is no deterministic relationship between the two outside bad steriotypes.
Izzard is straight and tranvestite. I'm homosexual, dislike "drag shows" and pusshy-queen walking steriotypes, and would go naked before putting on a dress. Getting transvesties onto TV is about as far from my agenda as you can get. I don't want them not-there, but seeing a man in drag is like watching straight people kiss; it does nothing for me at all and generally looks a little creepy. 8-)
Lumping people into broad categories just because you haven't bothered to do any fact-finding, and then claiming they lumped themselves and are now subscribed to a particular "agenda", is tiresome and childish.
On a less-side note, I dislike anybody sexualizing characters that don't need it. It makes for bad literary construction as no mater how you slant sexuality you, by definition, slant it into a niche. Izzard could be a hoot as the doctor if he is capible of playing the character. I've seen him in suit and tie so I think he could pull off a nice excentric personality without injecting sex where it doesn't need to go.
[FURTHER ASIDE]
I once had an over-straight homophobe ask: "What do you mean 'phobia'? Why would I be afraid of some faggot?"
My response: Clearly you are affraid that there are men out in the world who might think about you, and treat you, as badly as you think about and treat women.
I have never met a homophobe, or indeed any man who used the phrase "homosexual agenda" (etc), that didn't also misstreat, marginalize, or rampently objectify every woman foolish enough to approach him.
Ok, so I didn't do any actual research , but I have come to realization that all the izzle-speak is nothing but "pig-latin from the hood". It's got the same basic *kind* of substitution rules and about the same information kenitics [data compression is to elaboration, as consicice word choice is to izzlizing] given the number of nonsense-symbols that can be added to the informaion stream.
/sardonic-but-evil-grin
So white people stole jaz from black people, and now black people have stolen pig-latin from white people.
Who are the better theives? 8-)
I would have recommended they steal something else, like investment banking, but most black people I know are too honest for investment banking.
So we are at odds, with two different user experiences. I don't know what your machine count is, nor what your configuration count, so lets call this a sample size of two. Of the two of us, 50% have daily reason to think Windows is crap. The other 50% thinks its fine. But with that sample size being so small it hardly constitues proof either way.
Oddly enough, neither 50% of us think linux hangs all the time or costs us work or aggrevation. So there is a very tenuous trend in the size-of-two sample set. (Maybe you don't use linux, maybe you don't care to, but at the lest there is are no negative data points in evidence for linux stability in this "study" so far.)
So far linux is "Better" for uptime stability.
But we need a bigger sample set.
Oh wait, we have one. We have a whole forum full of people, many of whom think Windows is unreliable crap.
In the end, however, the three-messages-back assertion that we think Windows is crap *only* because we havn't tried 2k, has been addressed and disproved. Some of us *have* tried it and still had the ongoing craptacular experience.
God's speed and good luck to you on your rendering. May your ongoing fortune continue, and would that only the rest of us were so lucky to not win-hang often and severely... but wait... we do... crap...
Guess I'll just have to stick with what works where I can, and Win2k where otherwise.
I am running a Win2K/Linux dual boot on a brand-spankin-new P4C800 motherboard here at home. At work I spend equal parts of my time using Linux and Windows XP (on separate machines).
.doc files with my co-workers. [The server part of our solution uses a Embedded Planet board running linux, and I program for that using linux.] I use windows a lot. I use Linux a lot.
Linux works fine, with so-far-unlimited continuous uptime.
Win2K (at home) hangs after an hour or two of uptime if (and only if) I plug in *ANY* USB device. [If I don't plug in any USB devices I get up to several days straight before windows hangs]
Win XP (at work) only hangs every few days to two weeks.
In short, windows is still crap and you can't say I have my opinion because I haven't tried it lately.
And since I code on *and* using Windows, Linux, and RTXC I feel qualified to say that with no reservation what-so-ever.
See, the thing is, since Microsoft has a policy *against* rewriting production code, much of the crap from 1998 is still in there. They've covered the crap, and put restart harnesses around it, and segmented the crap on the left from the crap on the right by beefing up the memory model. But it still takes very little to push the code base off the pointy top-end of "working well" and into a thundering roll down the hill to the "what ate my data" cravasse?
Not an hour ago I had to do the hang-reboot-checkdisk-reboot dance on my windows partition.
So at home I mostly use Windows (2k) for games and printing and looking at pr0n, while doing everything else using linux. At work I use it (XP) because windows is the only platform that runs the tool-chain for compiling the OS for the client [RTXC embedded platform] we sell, and because I have to exchange
Windows is crap. If all you do is browse the web, and you don't mind rebooting regularly (or you naturally turn off or sleep you box to save electricity anyway so it gets its regular reboot because of your natural behavior) you may not notice it much.
The bit mistake you (people) make when thinking about their "free" software projects is that they act and think that because they don't normally charge money, their work product has little or no value.
Consider:
1) the product is valuable to you because it satisfies, or at least addressess, a need for you.
2) the product is valuable to others for the same reason.
3) you are engaged in a valid (in the contractual sense) exchange of goods for services when you make open source software available.
Even though no money has changed hands, at a minimum, the software is valuable in the "other consideration" category. Even the most plaintive user is providing test-iterations and feedback on the code base. Some few will do more by returning ideas. Fewer still will do more by returning code. But all of this is labor time at the least, and as we know, time is actually money. You *are* engaged in a reasonably balanced contractual exchange, and the contract is embodied by the license you release under.
So you should not feel any form of "guilt" for charging someone for work you "would have done anyway." That work had and has real comercial value.
What you are selling, when you get paid for open source development, is "concentration." The business world recognizes different levels of concentration to be a real asset. When you are paid a retainer, you are promising to "answer the phone" and, presumably, keep yourself generally ready to answer the phone by spending some minimal effort to remain viable in your field. A lawyer, for instance, may take a retainer for a clent. The client is "buying into" the fact that the lawyer is lawyer-ing to stay laywer-ey so that if they need him he will be ready to at least decided whether he want's to represent the client.
The absence of the retainer, or indeed all retainers, doesn't mean that the lawyer will stop lawyer-ing. And for those days or years before and between the clients and retainers, a lawyer keeps lawyer-ing (if he's smart) so that he is ready to lawyer for cause.
So you program, and you pursue this particular project at whatever rate you feel approprate for your needs.
This client comes along and gives you money to buy a degree of attention and concentration above your needs and into the range of their needs.
Presumably they are buying:
1) the project getting done faster.
2) influence on the prioritization of tasks. (e.g. that you will work on "their features" first if a decision needs to be made between alternative elements)
3) insight into the product. [They get to talk to you and they get a disproportionate share of the expectation that you will listen. They get to ask you questions that, were they to come in via email, you might more certianly blow off. They get to ask you to *explain* instead of reading the code and documentaiton for themselves.]
All of this is worth buying if and when a customer decides that your project meets their need.
So ask yourself which of the three buyables (among possible others) you are really willing to sell and to what degree.
If you are only selling mostly #1 (faster, targeted completion) then charge by feature and target date.
If you are selling primarly #3 then you are in a time-and-materials sort of circumstance. They want not just your product, but a slice of you. You don't "finish" by milestone so you shouldn't be paid by milestone.
If you are stuck in the middle (mostly both, i.e. #2), split the invoice. Charge by the feature for the features and by the hour for all non-design/development time.
So a mixed approach:
Feature X will be N dollars and includes M hours of support and training.
For all X, the cost is the sum(N), for hours in excess of sum(M) the hourly cost is L per hour. They/You pay travel expenses (to whatever limits) and so on.
If they don't want to be this formal, don't you dare let yourself feel tha tyou have agreed to this fomality. Tha
First off, "they" wrote it. Each of the contributors listed their position and company with equal emphasis. No representations were made about the "official" positions of the respecitve and multiple companies listed.
Yes, we seem to be living in a world with increasing need to disclaim. In fact, we live in a legal claim/disclaim toxic environment.
If you were to global search-and-replace the company names with the names of universities; and likewise exchange the professional titles with academic ones; this paper would be perfectly kosher.
So now, apparently you can't publish a shcollarly work unless you *don't* have a "real job." How nice.
Remember: The great/golden age of the Arrab Empires collapsed because of one act. They closed their libraries. After that scolarship fell into disrepute. Then learning. Then knowledge. Then "not being an idiot" was against the social norm, and *poof* they lost the initiative.
Let's not repeat that debacle in our age, shall we?
Persons should enjoy the right to freely publish their thoughts and understandings of any issue with greater social ramafications.
Silence == Death... As a slogan it is applicable to far more than the AIDS crisis.
I, in my role as Amazing Kreskin standin, predict that "very shortly" there will be new DRM based chatroom system in place within MSN. Using the DRM to remove anonomus nature of chats to "protect the children" and thus get the DRM software into a "must use" niche.
You just watch...
Sneaky, sneaky.
This does nothig to protect a person from the abuse of the information when they Rent a car (c.f. the story of the "speeding penalty" enacted by the one rental agency) or when a person has a "company car".
Finally, one wonders whether this separates the purchasers and leasees of cars into two separately and unequally protected classes.
After all, if you lease a car, your leasing company owns it. So the police could end-around and make a request of them to access the black-box.
Then again, section 215 lets the FBI do any dang thing they want in the search and seizure arena despite the Constitution.
Fifteen or more years ago I was a lab assistant at a community college and I watched as a room full of students failed to complete a word processing assignment. They had been given a "starting document" and printed copy; the assignment was to make the starting document match the printed copy. One of them finally turned to me in utter dispair and after I made her look around at all the trouble everyone was having (and after I told her how "bad" her teacher must have been) I gave her the four simple rules of electronic document preparation:
(In Order)
1) Content. Get all the words and ideas you desire to express into the system.
2) Correctness. Go after the grammar and spelling, make sure that each thought really makes sense.
3) Grouping. Check your punctuation (again) and your paragraph breaks. Make tables and inset boxes.
4) Presentation. Now that everything is said, you are free to highlight, bold, etc. Do your colors and fonts and drop in your pictures if you want.
As you grow with a tool you may find that you can do several of these steps at once. A *rare* person can do all four at the same time as long as he keeps them in the above order in mental priority, ready at any moment to abandon any higher numbered step in favor of paying needed attention to a lower.
If you apply these steps to your process, either for the whole document, or for chapters, or sections or whatever "largest comfortable" segment works for you, you will never have trouble with your tools distrupting your workflow.
The pointless stalls happen when a person jumps over a step. They pick a font size and such so that the text looks just so, then they find a spelling or punctuation error and what was one bold banner across the page is now a two-line peel-away that has bumped half of the following text into some oblivion of the next page.
Back to the anticdote, she got her work done and blew the curve for the class.
(BTW: I didn't get much beyond step one in composing this post. I am blowing off stress and wasting time under deadline pressure just now, and the slashdot interface does not lend itself well to spellcheck... 8-)
DNS isn't the web. There is no "user" just sitting there to be queried for virtually any of the transactions.
Are you going to pay an outsourcing company in india big bucks to sit and preview each of the spam attempts that pass through your ISPs email system to check if there is a SOUNDEX match to each mention of a DNS-resolved element?
Hyperbole? Mayhaps, but well deserved.
OK, so you go to this site, say "slashdot.org" but you type "slsahdot.org". The site has 70 graphics and insets on the page, all targeted by "relative" links. So, you will want to have the DNS support in your computer pop up the same "did you mean slashdot?" dialog box 71 times?
Remember that the DNS system isn't *IN* the browser. So the fact that you told the DNS system which IP address you wanted (by picking ithe right one out of the SOUNDEX list) it has no means of going back into the browser and telling it to stop asking for what you asked for.
You basically have violated the first principle of design. You asked "couldn't we just (something)" without even understanding the most basic divisions of labor/effort and therefore, the implications of your proposed action.
You presumed that since you only directly interract with the system in one way, that being your browser, that all interractions with all people (including yourself) using the system follow a similarly interractive model.
Or even simpler: which "search engine" should get to pick where I go to validate the security for this web page before I send my credit card information off?
Or even simpler: "Ikea" or "Ike & Leah", either way, I expect if I send them my credit card info, I'll get a nice floor lamp.
Or even simpler: when Bank of America sends your electronic funds transfr for your mortgage off to "your" mortgage company, do you want it to be "guessing" between ranked alternatives as to which bank gets your money?
The mind boggles.
"I think the phone book, when you open it, should decide which numbers to give you because all these people are the same."
Since they cannot get face recognition software to work, how is the image going to be claissified?
Microsoft is going to hire half of Guatamala to sit at low-grade terminals 140 hours a week, looking at grany internet porn and going "that's Brad Pitt!" (click).
Other companies "Embrace and Extend and then PUBLISH" when they work with open standards.
Microsoft's policy is to cut the sentence somewhat shorter than that, or at least change the last word out out with some secret internal Scino-speak word meaning "capture and extort the foolish prey user base".
Oh wait, I rememember their secretly redefined word, its "innovate".
So my roommate, who works with some high-end audio software that runs on a Mac discovered something interesting.
If you open an iTune with a particular piece of editing software on the Mac, and click save-as, no more DRM.
I would tell you the name of the product, but I don't remember it (not being an audio nor Mac geek myself). It costs in the $800 range but you *can* find it fairly easily in a semi-pbulic lab at, say, a school has a good audio engineering program.
And no, the arangement doesn't require that you buy the iTune for the computer running the software.
(I really wish I could say that I was withholding the name of the program because of the DMCA, but I am just a big dummy and I cant remember.)
Then again, said "big" corporation making and marketing the "cimcumvention tool" which is also "one of the big names in Digital Audio Production" would make for interesting conflict of interests.
Do you think Lars be happy to know he is using the same software to master his music as the random college hippies are using to steal it?
And no, my roommate is not using this discovery to violate anybodies copyrights, he just mentioned that he'd found the flaw by accident and that it was funny...
Where my "What The Hell" Meeter goes off is the fact that the fatal shooting was first.
Oh, we're really sorry your honor, but when the first car went careening across the road with a dead-guy behind the wheel we figured that it was a million to one shot, but we had to find out for sure, so we couln't stop there. That would have been immoral.
Be serious people.
Those letters of appology are crap. These kids are dammaged goods if they didn't go "oh shit" (in the bad way, as opposed to the happy giggling way) at the first killing.
Sure, one video game did all that disassociating damage all at once, that makes *perfect* sense.
And the judge? "I wanted to just let them go but..." What is wrong with people?
Everyone has become blind to personal responsibility. When it is even the judges it is time for a nice mass extinction.
When you open your account, it shoudl be firewalled.
When you go to your account management page, you shuld be able to open or close ports at will, or disable their firewall of your account all together.
So, you start with the default of protecting the stupid or uninterested and allow it to scale on demand.
And in a SOX-Firewall-Proxy style activity, you sould be able to have an applicaiton that temporarily opens ports.
(all without intrusive record keeping, because requireing the ISPs to keep records of all the tiny changes, presumably for some obscure government anti-music-terrorist scheme hatched by some evil anarchist hating "special interest"; because having to track these records would be the only technical or financial barrier to getting this done more or less by next weekend... 8-)
Actually, since the pattent would, by definition, be inclusive of the add-in or modified "X", company Z would not be able to just go make it.
If the thing X were largely more applicable to the world, the patent holder would be forced to weigh the value of holding the patent against the potential proffit of commoditizing X.
So lets say I "invent" a cool new way to do communications. For as long as I can maintian, and am satisfied by, a profit structure where all my cusmoters must come to me for all the parts, I can hold my patent, and I am happy.
As soon as I want to get out of the market of providing my thing completely, I must begin licensing my patent to others.
If I do that to a judicious degree I can keep my protection-to-profit ratio in line.
It becomes a "natural feature" of the system that, when I start licensing my thing to everybody, then nobody needs to license it any more.
It becomes a natural feature that if I try to use my thingy to corner and control a large cross-section of the planet, my patent lapses into public interest.
This construction naturally mimics the "fast" world of computer/software development. The patent is naturally only as long-lived as it is usefully "innovative" or "inventive".
The curves (profitability, protectionisim, market demand, manufacturing interest, tooling/retooling) should all hold for a year or three and then one will drop out. Three years is a long time in the computer system lifestyle.
-- The longer order interests that don't apply to a broad cross-section are more maintainable and the patents will "last longer".
-- A crucial product will get licensed around and then fall into the commons.
-- Pure idea-space is protected from IP poaching by lawyers.
-- Companies will have to actually make plans and consider their market and manufacturing posture before deciding that a patent is or isn't worth the filing fee.
-- Patenting things because you "need" some part you don't actually need automatically fails.
This self-policing and naturally self-regulating posture is far better, case by case, than saying "no patents" or screwing around with particular durations. Every invetion is not equal in its longevity nor scope, so unless the rule is case-limited by a real measure.
Consider a legal strong-arming attempt. It would fail "autmatically" and by definition if some guy just wrote it again on his laptop.
Bad Lawyer: "Your honor, this person violated our patent by implementing our software and giving it away."
Good Lawyer: "Your honor, the software given away doesn't violate the patent, or more correctly it invalidates the patent, because it runs on any laptop with a sound card."
Judge: "Mr. Bad Lawyer, you have no case, you should have known you had no case, and I'll be forwarding this incident to the Bar Association. Pay the defendants legal fees and get out."
The idea is generally self-correcting against abbuse, spurious legal action, and attempts to steal common idea space by taking "on the web" or "using a computer" onto common activities.
No more "one click shopping" (which is just "put it on my tab, Bob" in a larger context and using a computer)
No more "I own comptuer auctions"
No more patenting the idea of mounting a directory across a lan.
No more "lets patent everything we can think of, just in case."
This is not that tough an issue...
If it is, or it *can* *be*, implemented on a computer bought "off the shelf" and optionally modified only by parts bought "off the shelf" [e.g. "I added an eithernet card"] then it can not be patented.
If it has been patented, and the state of "the comercial shelf" from which parts are normally bought [e.g. comp-USA etc] advances to the point where the above rule would make it un-patentable, the patent has reached its terminal lifespan and is no longer valid.
In short, if you don't need a soldering iron [etc] it isn't patentable.
(CPU Microcode is Copyrighted, not patented)
That's it.
[And yes, my name is on a patented thing just now (unless my employer lied about the inventor) so I do know the range and impact of what I am suggesting.]