As food for thought in considering whether the patent system encourages or discourages innovation, try to estimate what the cost would be of accurately determining whether or not a small commercial application (e.g. ~50k lines of code) violates any patents.
Given that patents grant the patent holder the right to prevent anyone from not only selling infringing goods, but from making or using them as well, what small developer could hope to develop anything without paying patent license fees to someone, particularly when patents are as incremental as this one is!
It seems to me that the only reason the patent system continues in its current form is that patents aren't enforced most of the time. The exclusion rights that patents provide are only worth enforcing when the target is sufficiently wealthy that they have something you want to take, or sufficiently popular that they threaten your business. Nevertheless, I don't like the idea of granting this kind of power - it's a bit like setting low speed limits everywhere so police can stop anyone they need to.
Getting back to my original point, the patent system simply doesn't scale:
The proportion of human activity that counts as "inventive" under patent law is increasing. In the 1200's, nearly everyone was farming, whereas now a much larger percentage is researching, developing pharmaceuticals, programming, etc. Looked at another way, the value of "uninventive" work to "inventive" work is dropping steadily.
The cost of determining whether an invention is patent-infringing rises the more patents are granted.
Through international treaties, the geographic area covered by the US patent system is expanding to more and more of the globe.
If your idea is novel, and patentable, you can't use it without obtaining the rights to any patents it might be considered derived from.
Looking forward 30 years, this creates a pretty dismal outlook for inventors without significant backing.
Incidentally, didn't Ultima Online have a method for translating in-game player chats to other languages? Would this make the cut as prior art?
Also, this patent doesn't seem to specify 'natural languages' (which would exclude, say, XML dialects), so wouldn't this include any sort of translation, such XSL transformation?
Although there are economic incentives to combine them, you can look at the problem of selling and distribution (how I get the music) separately from marketing (how I find out about it in the first place).
Right now, we get this information through a few fairly coarse channels, such as commercial media (e.g. advertising, genre radio stations), and our immediate influences (bands my friends listen to).
The desire for "local music" is just a special case of more fine-grained preferences. I'd like to buy music by bands that count Pink Floyd among their influences - whether or I'm downloading an MP3 from a garage band's Geocities home page or buying a CD from Sony's latest most-advertised darling is a separate issue.
So.. I'm all for a lot more metadata being available about music.
As Feynman might have said, the managers can fool themselves, but nobody can fool the computer. If you're too tired to do the project properly, it's going to be pretty obvious sooner or later.
The problem is that it's usually later. Without good visibility into the project's progress, it's really tempting to do unhelpful things (getting the staff to work very long hours, adding more programmers near the end).
This is one of the reasons that I/really/ like iterative development. When you get stuck with an unrealistic schedule, it's pretty obvious when it takes you three weeks to pull off what was supposed to take two.
You may wind up doing hellish overtime earlier in the project, but at least it will be plain enough whether that works before too long. What your management does next tells you whether you should be working there.
Whatever you think of him, he puts forward an interesting test for his theory, namely that distant objects would be observed in slow motion. In the case of binary stars, as he points out, this would show them rotating about one another more slowly than we'd expect. My physics isn't enough to know whether this is also true of gravitationally red-shifted light.
I'm far more worried about what the trend implies from a public awareness point of view. We're adept at specialization, both because it can make us more productive (I can spend a lot of time learning to program because I don't have to make my own shoes), but also because it lets us benefit from situations we wouldn't be comfortable being exposed to directly.
I mean, it's great that I don't have to flip my own burgers, but consider pornography, Nike shoes, or meat, all of which I would enjoy significantly less were I exposed to their manufacture.
Once we have a robot army, our leaders will finally be free from the awkward domestic protests that plagued wars like Vietnam.
Does this imply that software leasing is more likely to favour good software than than software selling? Good software, which doesn't need replacing, doesn't threaten its revenue stream by not needing replacement.
Michael
Bear in mind that those reasons for not accepting a counter-offer are being publicized by a company that has a vested interest in people not accepting counter-offers.:-)
Michael Ignatieff has book, partly on this subject, which I recommend. It's called (somewhat unfortunately) Virtual War. Using the US-allied nations' air war in against Milosovic in Kosovo, it asks what are the consequences are of technologically advanced nations being able to wage war with impunity.
The enormous modern investment in war-at-a-distance technologies like combat drones and high-altitude precision bombing is largely due to the fact that a war without casualties is a lot easier for a government to wage, politically speaking, than one where its people are put directly in harm's way.
Contrast the difference between WWI, where tens of thousands of soldiers combatants died in individual battles, with the Gulf War, where the loss of one pilot incites media frenzy?
As we become increasingly able to do so, the author asks, what does it mean to be willing to kill for something you're not willing to die for?
I like Fowler's point that sometimes, comments indicate a problem. If feel you need to explain what you're doing, you might not be doing it clearly enough.
freeTheArray( array );
public void freeTheArray( int[] array )
{
for( i = 0; i = array.length; i++ )
free( array[i] );
free( array );
}
A recent experience with JBoss had me cursing open source software for this very reason. I'd accidentally declared a JBoss-persisted field 'private' instead of 'public' (as we later found), but JBoss' not-so-helpful response was to throw a NullPointerException. Ironically, I discovered by reading the source that it was actually bombing while trying to construct a more helpful error message!
It was helpful, however, to compare this with an earlier experience with WebSphere 3.0. Whenever you did any number of incorrect actions in the management GUI (such as giving two servlets the same URL), it brought up a nice little dialog with a similarly inpenetrable RemoteException stack trace. Useful!
The only pratical difference between the two was that JBoss' cryptic message could be deciphered by reading its source code.
3. Security. It seems silly to assume people would *want* to walk up to a random machine somewhere and have all their documents streamed to it over the Big Network. For one thing, who knows whether the terminal is secure, or if it's got secret programs installed in it to capture your keystrokes? Using a publicly accessible terminal to get to your private data is a bad idea.
If you'll forgive some idle speculation.. You've certainly expressed how I feel about my data, but perhaps a generation raised under the scrutiny of face-recognizing surveillance cameras may come to have different feelings about privacy.
In any case, it's not such a strange leap - I share personal financial data with white-label bank machines several times a month without worrying overmuch about the potential for the various intermediaries to make use of it.
Having personalized access to a pervasive computer network makes some neat things possible, and the potential for data collection gives companies huge incentives to support it.
Your implied point is how easy it is to abuse an infrastructure such as this. If the applications are useful enough, people will use them despite the fact that we know better, and before you know it, they'll be a vital part of society.
At that point, if current trends are anything to go by, the response I'd expect from society facing a wave of 'rogue terminal' activity would be harsher criminal penalties for the perpetrators, not a mass societal "oops, guess we should have thought of more secure infrastructure".
Next thing you know, it's illegal to distribute tools that could be used to create rogue terminals. Unfortunately, the Mitnicks of two decades from now won't even be able to use a vending machine, but nobody will care, because their favourite song is playing everywhere they go..
Your post reminds me of two things. Java RMI requires that every call to a potentially remote object be checked for possible RemoteExceptions. The rationale was that since network operations are decidedly riskier than local operations, remote object access shouldn't be transparent, since the application should really be architected to protect itself from all the hazards of disconnects, slow links, etc. Perhaps a similar argument could be made against making persistence transparent.
Secondly, the TOPLink object-relational layer from ObjectPeople (since sold to WebGain) had a couple of features that address your complaint about EOF. In situations where you need to access a large number of objects, but only need a small subset of their information, there's a way of designating which attributes you're interested in. TOPLink then returns your objects partially populated with data (it also doesn't put them in the cache, because they'd be useless for anything else).
If you want to write your own SQL, it's smart enough to use the result set's meta data and the O/R mapping to determine what kind of objects you can get back, and it will create similarly partially populated objects, which is really cool.
Slashdot Mirror
As food for thought in considering whether the patent system encourages or discourages innovation, try to estimate what the cost would be of accurately determining whether or not a small commercial application (e.g. ~50k lines of code) violates any patents.
Given that patents grant the patent holder the right to prevent anyone from not only selling infringing goods, but from making or using them as well, what small developer could hope to develop anything without paying patent license fees to someone, particularly when patents are as incremental as this one is!
It seems to me that the only reason the patent system continues in its current form is that patents aren't enforced most of the time. The exclusion rights that patents provide are only worth enforcing when the target is sufficiently wealthy that they have something you want to take, or sufficiently popular that they threaten your business. Nevertheless, I don't like the idea of granting this kind of power - it's a bit like setting low speed limits everywhere so police can stop anyone they need to.
Getting back to my original point, the patent system simply doesn't scale:
Looking forward 30 years, this creates a pretty dismal outlook for inventors without significant backing.
Incidentally, didn't Ultima Online have a method for translating in-game player chats to other languages? Would this make the cut as prior art?
Also, this patent doesn't seem to specify 'natural languages' (which would exclude, say, XML dialects), so wouldn't this include any sort of translation, such XSL transformation?
Although there are economic incentives to combine them, you can look at the problem of selling and distribution (how I get the music) separately from marketing (how I find out about it in the first place).
Right now, we get this information through a few fairly coarse channels, such as commercial media (e.g. advertising, genre radio stations), and our immediate influences (bands my friends listen to).
The desire for "local music" is just a special case of more fine-grained preferences. I'd like to buy music by bands that count Pink Floyd among their influences - whether or I'm downloading an MP3 from a garage band's Geocities home page or buying a CD from Sony's latest most-advertised darling is a separate issue.
So.. I'm all for a lot more metadata being available about music.
Michael
As Feynman might have said, the managers can fool themselves, but nobody can fool the computer. If you're too tired to do the project properly, it's going to be pretty obvious sooner or later.
/really/ like iterative development. When you get stuck with an unrealistic schedule, it's pretty obvious when it takes you three weeks to pull off what was supposed to take two.
The problem is that it's usually later. Without good visibility into the project's progress, it's really tempting to do unhelpful things (getting the staff to work very long hours, adding more programmers near the end).
This is one of the reasons that I
You may wind up doing hellish overtime earlier in the project, but at least it will be plain enough whether that works before too long. What your management does next tells you whether you should be working there.
Michael
My wife proposed to me, with an inexpensive silver ring. She'd prefer something I made myself to needlessly expensive trophies.
If you really loved her, wouldn't you have spent a little more?
Michael
Whatever you think of him, he puts forward an interesting test for his theory, namely that distant objects would be observed in slow motion. In the case of binary stars, as he points out, this would show them rotating about one another more slowly than we'd expect. My physics isn't enough to know whether this is also true of gravitationally red-shifted light.
I'm far more worried about what the trend implies from a public awareness point of view. We're adept at specialization, both because it can make us more productive (I can spend a lot of time learning to program because I don't have to make my own shoes), but also because it lets us benefit from situations we wouldn't be comfortable being exposed to directly.
I mean, it's great that I don't have to flip my own burgers, but consider pornography, Nike shoes, or meat, all of which I would enjoy significantly less were I exposed to their manufacture.
Once we have a robot army, our leaders will finally be free from the awkward domestic protests that plagued wars like Vietnam.
Does this imply that software leasing is more likely to favour good software than than software selling? Good software, which doesn't need replacing, doesn't threaten its revenue stream by not needing replacement. Michael
Bear in mind that those reasons for not accepting a counter-offer are being publicized by a company that has a vested interest in people not accepting counter-offers. :-)
I think this issue nicely points out the fact that a privacy policy is fundamentally meaningless unless it restricts the data collector's ability to:
e.g. "We won't sell your data without 30 days notice, at which point your only recourse is to stop giving us new data."
Fuseboy
When I can copy Word from my Windows machine to my Linux machine and it runs, then I'll be fully convinced of the viability of the cross-platform CLR.
Michael Ignatieff has book, partly on this subject, which I recommend. It's called (somewhat unfortunately) Virtual War. Using the US-allied nations' air war in against Milosovic in Kosovo, it asks what are the consequences are of technologically advanced nations being able to wage war with impunity.
The enormous modern investment in war-at-a-distance technologies like combat drones and high-altitude precision bombing is largely due to the fact that a war without casualties is a lot easier for a government to wage, politically speaking, than one where its people are put directly in harm's way.
Contrast the difference between WWI, where tens of thousands of soldiers combatants died in individual battles, with the Gulf War, where the loss of one pilot incites media frenzy?
As we become increasingly able to do so, the author asks, what does it mean to be willing to kill for something you're not willing to die for?
I like Fowler's point that sometimes, comments indicate a problem. If feel you need to explain what you're doing, you might not be doing it clearly enough.
freeTheArray( array );
public void freeTheArray( int[] array )
{
for( i = 0; i = array.length; i++ )
free( array[i] );
free( array );
}
A recent experience with JBoss had me cursing open source software for this very reason. I'd accidentally declared a JBoss-persisted field 'private' instead of 'public' (as we later found), but JBoss' not-so-helpful response was to throw a NullPointerException. Ironically, I discovered by reading the source that it was actually bombing while trying to construct a more helpful error message!
It was helpful, however, to compare this with an earlier experience with WebSphere 3.0. Whenever you did any number of incorrect actions in the management GUI (such as giving two servlets the same URL), it brought up a nice little dialog with a similarly inpenetrable RemoteException stack trace. Useful!
The only pratical difference between the two was that JBoss' cryptic message could be deciphered by reading its source code.
3. Security. It seems silly to assume people would *want* to walk up to a random machine somewhere and have all their documents streamed to it over the Big Network. For one thing, who knows whether the terminal is secure, or if it's got secret programs installed in it to capture your keystrokes? Using a publicly accessible terminal to get to your private data is a bad idea.
If you'll forgive some idle speculation.. You've certainly expressed how I feel about my data, but perhaps a generation raised under the scrutiny of face-recognizing surveillance cameras may come to have different feelings about privacy.
In any case, it's not such a strange leap - I share personal financial data with white-label bank machines several times a month without worrying overmuch about the potential for the various intermediaries to make use of it.
Having personalized access to a pervasive computer network makes some neat things possible, and the potential for data collection gives companies huge incentives to support it.
Your implied point is how easy it is to abuse an infrastructure such as this. If the applications are useful enough, people will use them despite the fact that we know better, and before you know it, they'll be a vital part of society.
At that point, if current trends are anything to go by, the response I'd expect from society facing a wave of 'rogue terminal' activity would be harsher criminal penalties for the perpetrators, not a mass societal "oops, guess we should have thought of more secure infrastructure".
Next thing you know, it's illegal to distribute tools that could be used to create rogue terminals. Unfortunately, the Mitnicks of two decades from now won't even be able to use a vending machine, but nobody will care, because their favourite song is playing everywhere they go..
Your post reminds me of two things. Java RMI requires that every call to a potentially remote object be checked for possible RemoteExceptions. The rationale was that since network operations are decidedly riskier than local operations, remote object access shouldn't be transparent, since the application should really be architected to protect itself from all the hazards of disconnects, slow links, etc. Perhaps a similar argument could be made against making persistence transparent.
Secondly, the TOPLink object-relational layer from ObjectPeople (since sold to WebGain) had a couple of features that address your complaint about EOF. In situations where you need to access a large number of objects, but only need a small subset of their information, there's a way of designating which attributes you're interested in. TOPLink then returns your objects partially populated with data (it also doesn't put them in the cache, because they'd be useless for anything else).
If you want to write your own SQL, it's smart enough to use the result set's meta data and the O/R mapping to determine what kind of objects you can get back, and it will create similarly partially populated objects, which is really cool.