Ohh you're counting the fact that Canada has vast amounts of unoccupied land. Most of the poplutation in Canada is centered in 3 major areas.
That effect is more pronounced in Canada, but it's exactly why the USA has a low population density too. You could start using a more complex metric, but you need something quite a bit more complex than simple "population density for a country" to get useful information out of it.
I think that if you compared something like "population density in major population centers", you'd find that Canada and the United States come out basically the same - but you'd still be left with the fact that we're behind them on internet connectivity.
You're giving the US telecom industry far too much benefit of the doubt.
Even in the areas where we have *higher* population density than, say, South Korea - like Manhattan - we still can't get internet connections for a reasonable price that meet the South Korean definition of broadband. This "wishing we had Verizon 15/2 FIOS" thing is really sad. We should have had speeds like that years ago, and we should be wishing for 200 meg symmetric connections today.
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. We also take pride in being technologically advanced. The fact that we can't even get as good internet connectivity as South Korea and Belgium is sort of sad.
By the South Korean definition of broadband (20 meg symmetric), we don't even get broadband in the densest part of the USA. This report makes the USA sound backwards and technologically behind - that's true, but it's far worse than this report implies.
We don't even have as good broadband connectivity in Manhattan as South Korea has in their whole country. We're not just behind, our internet connectivity makes us the laughingstock of the developed world. Seriously, not only are these countries ahead of us in broadband penetration, they're doing it with their hands tied behind their backs - we define "broadband" as "128k download", they define it as anything from "2 meg download" to South Korea's "20 meg symmetric".
Population density is extremely overused as an excuse for the horrible internet connectivity in the USA.
Let's start with this fact: We're behind Canada, they have 1/10th of our population density.
Yes, we have large areas with very low population density - like Nebraska and Northern Alaska. That doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of our population is in reasonably high density urban / suburban areas - and that those areas don't have decent internet connectivity either.
South Korea has about 500 people per square kilometer. Rhode Island has 390 people per square kilometer. In South Korea, there's 90% broadband penetration where "broadband" is all faster than 20 Mbps symmetric. In Rhode Island, you're lucky if you can get 3 meg / 768k asymmetric DSL for more than Koreans pay for 100/100 meg lines.
The population density argument is really good if we need to get the last household in Kansas, but areas like eastern Massachusetts and southern New York state shouldn't have any trouble having as good broadband connectivity as Finland.
Soon just saying the name AT&T will cause people to become upset.
That's actually good, because people associate the AT&T name with telecom monopoly. Maybe someone will take advantage of the dissatisfaction with SBC/AT&T to push anti-monopoly policies. I'd sure like to catch up with, say, South Korea on broadband penetration - but it's currently illegal for anyone to compete with the DSL & cable providers.
And here I thought the visual IDE to be just as valid a tool as anything else, that being the one that solves the need of the programmer.
"Every tool is just as good as every other tool" is just as wrong as "my tool is always better than your tool". I suggest learning phrases like "I can do this faster with the tool I know than I can learn a new tool" and "Visual Studio is a better tool than vi when you're maintaining a form-heavy VB.NET program".
In the general case, I'd argue that Emacs in a *nix environment is the most powerful available toolkit for programming. That being said, the general case isn't what matters when you're doing something specific, and power isn't the only factor that influences people's choice of tools.
Do remember one thing though: It's hard to comment on how powerful a tool set is until you've actually used it seriously - I'd tend to think of this as applying primarily to Windows users who haven't learned *nix, but it applies just as much to me commenting about Visual Studio.
If it's a tax on road usage, it should tax road usage. If it's charged on fuel, then it's a fuel tax and it should only apply to material sold as fuel. No reasonable tax should ever require enforcers to physically check individual citizens for compliance - You'll note that income tax doesn't (withholdings), state sales taxes don't (included in the price), excise tax doesn't (you pay it to renew your registration), even property taxes really don't (you get a bill). If you can't enforce the tax without searching some individual's stuff, it's time to get a different tax.
Trying to tax a product based on how it's used is absurd.
The correct thing to do here is this: Define the tax to be on gasoline / diesel sales at a gas station. If a significant portion of the population (even a couple percent) decides to get diesel automobiles and buy heating oil to fuel them, then either apply the tax to sales of heating oil too or remove the tax on diesel fuel and create a yearly tax on owning a diesel vehicle. There's no reason to worry about vegetable oil at all - there isn't a large enough supply to matter.
My point is this: Distributors should be responsible for taxes on products they sell. If a few people get similar products through different channels, that's ok - they may be fringe, or the market may be changing. Once the market has changed, the taxes should be changed to catch up. But fining people for making a non-standard market choice is absurd - in fact, it should be criminal.
Try the "alternate" install CD. It's really hard to get a GUI installer to boot on every possible PC configuration, so Ubuntu provides the old text-based Debian installer for this sort of situation.
You mean those countries the size of a US state with triple or more the population density? That's a great comparison.
That excuse gets thrown around a lot, but it's basically bullshit.
Sure, Japan really does have a higher population density than the US. Sure, maybe wiring every last farmhouse in Nebraska could be obnoxious. But Japan isn't the only country with decent high speed service, and we don't need to get Northern Alaska wired tomorrow.
If we just consider, say, the easiest to reach 75% of the United States population the population density isn't significantly lower than South Korea or Finland. Another way to look at it is this: If it's an issue of size and population density, why haven't we finished wiring Rhode Island and Maryland yet?
As infrastructure matures, the marginal cost of adding new users decreases, so customers who aren't economically viable now might be next year, or the year after.
...and the speed of the resulting connection sounds worse and worse compared to other countries with more effective telecommunication policies. If 30/5 Verizon FIOS was available to 75% of the people in in the United States for $30/month tomorrow, we'd still be far behind a number of other countries. In other "high tech" countries, the norm for high speed broadband is 100 meg symmetric. The fact that we're arguing about infrastructure that might let us get a tenth that speed years from now is absurd.
"Stupid burecaucracy" very often is ther for a reason, most likely a legal one.
Legal concerns that don't come from lawyers are frequently just lame excuses to not change something. Taking legal advice from a non-lawyer is a bad idea anyway. In this case, random people are just guessing about potential legal issues on a web forum. That's definitely not valid legal advice.
As for the rest of your post, consider this: Maybe I'm not a "cowboy sysadmin". Maybe I'm instead a "competent manager". There's a reason why stock prices go up when companies do radical organizational restructuring and fire a bunch of admin staff.
The point I was trying to make in my post is that software patents don't provide an overall benifit in the real world. That'd still be true with shorter durations.
As for your other three points:
Proving that an idea was independently developed is not sufficiently possible to rely on legally. Legislating this would basically go like this: Pay a lawyer $1 million. Flip a coin. If you lose the coin flip, pay the patent aggressor $10 million - regardless of the facts of the case.
Patents being less vague would help a bit. Hell, if the patent office wanted to follow the spirit of the law, they'd require fully functional and easily readable source code for all software patents. The supposed purpose of the patent system is to cause the inventor to disclose his invention after all. Thing is, that's not how the patent system is used today. Today it's just an excuse to get a competitor or victim into court so you can sue them and disrupt their business. In order to change that, the patent system would have to be completely revamped. And it doesn't change the fact that software algorithms, as mathematical discoveries, shouldn't be patentable to begin with.
Again, reasonably obvious is already a requirement - and there's no way to actually enforce that requirement on software for a reasonable amount of money. The current guideline is "not obvious to someone of average skill in the art", and that ends up being that some patent examiner with a EE degree who did some programming in college doesn't think it's obvious. In order for this guideline to be useful in the harder cases, they'd have to hire someone working in the specific subfield that the patent applied to. There are too many software subfields, it'd be way too expensive.
Having actually been involved in a software patent application recently, I can assure you that the system is innately broken. When you're actually talking to patent lawyers or the patent office, the question isn't "is this obvious?", it's "does this look so completely obvious that it won't get by an overworked patent examiner? if so, how do we reword it?".
So... don't give them access to those systems. Just because there's a computer somewhere with grades on it doesn't mean that students can't do admin work on most of the computers in a school. There should be no "privacy concerns" over computer lab computers or classroom computers for example.
Sure, giving a student *any* responsibility means that they actually have to be a bit responsible - but that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Patents, in practice, are government granted monopolies that the owner can sell. It should be immediately obvious from that the effect they have: A large company buys a bunch of them, and then goes ahead and acts like an abusive monopolist. A little guy may incidentally get some corporate pocket change for the license transfer, but his gain will be more than offset by the economic damage caused by the monopoly itself.
That scenario sounds great, doesn't it. We'll protect the little guy who invented something amazing from "unfair competition" by the big guy. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way in any significant number of cases.
Here's some more realistic scenarios:
Some major company produces a new product. In the process, they come up with 753 different reasonably obvious ideas necessary to implement that product. They file for 753 patents, but the patent office only grants 218 of them. Small company separately produces an unrelated product that happens to use an idea they came up with that happens to look vaguely like one of the major company's patents. Small company ends up agreeing to pay $5,000,000 in protection money to avoid the lawsuit that they can't afford at all.
Someone comes up with a good idea that to any professional in the field is so obvious that you wouldn't bother to write a paper about it. Say "storing session state information in an HTTP cookie". They think it's an amazing invention, so they file a patent. There's no explicit prior art in the literature, so the patent is granted. They then go around suing / collecting protection money from everyone using the technique.
Here's my favorite: Small company invents something reasonably novel, gets a patent. Big company copies them. Small company sues. Big company counter-sues based on their massive collection of patents ("We have 23,751 patents - you're probably infringing something"). Small company ends up paying big company $20,000,000 to sign a cross licensing agreement. Big company continues to sell copied product, and has made $20 million.
At least that's how it works with software. Patents aren't about inventions, they're about "intellectual property portfolios" and "license fee revenue" and, more quietly, about excluding new entrants into existing markets.
no one gets hurt and they get the benefit of their short term monopoly on the idea to make it worth their while to come up with new things.
A monopoly for one year is only about 1/20th as bad as a monopoly for 20 years, but it's still bad. Companies don't need monopolies in order to do R&D, and if they tell you different it's just because they want government handouts.
I've worked with (used as a personal desktop or production server for more than a month) Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, SuSE, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris. From a user perspective, they are all basically the same. From an admin or programmer perspective there are differences, but they're not really relevant - it's stuff like the first SATA disk being/dev/sd0 instead of/dev/wd0 or the default shell being ksh instead of bash or the package manager being different. Any competent admin for one could deal with any of the others fine.
VMS is a completely different system - sure it'll be different - but the Free Software Unix-like systems are reasonably interchangeable.
The students who are intelligent and worthwhile rise above the crap.
Some students rise above the crap. Others get discouraged and spend all their time stoned. Others over-exert and end up being burned out on anything vaguely resembling academics for life. Most of them end up with emotional scars that make them phobic about mathematics. Personally, I ended up dropping out and going to community college - best decision ever.
Public school in the United States is poorly designed to accomplish any goal other than "keep kids off the street and pay a bunch of bureaucrats salaries". It's almost trivial to design a better system, but between teachers unions and all the funding-related bureaucrats it's almost impossible to get such a thing implemented.
we were told specifically that students were not allowed to have administrative access to anything at all for liability reasons.
It's a mistake to let stupid bureaucracy get in the way of effective operation. You can get free entry level sysadmin services out of some of these kids for free, and even some less competent kids can be recruited as free first level tech support - turning that down is dumb. Sure, you can't do without techs or anything, but most support organizations have low level techs to solve simple problems and high level techs to escalate problems to.
In a school, either you're trying to educate kids efficiently or you're wasting time and money. Some kids want to be computer techs enough that they're significantly self-taught once they're juniors and seniors in high school. Allowing them to get experience by helping the school network helps everyone.
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That effect is more pronounced in Canada, but it's exactly why the USA has a low population density too. You could start using a more complex metric, but you need something quite a bit more complex than simple "population density for a country" to get useful information out of it.
I think that if you compared something like "population density in major population centers", you'd find that Canada and the United States come out basically the same - but you'd still be left with the fact that we're behind them on internet connectivity.
You're giving the US telecom industry far too much benefit of the doubt.
Even in the areas where we have *higher* population density than, say, South Korea - like Manhattan - we still can't get internet connections for a reasonable price that meet the South Korean definition of broadband. This "wishing we had Verizon 15/2 FIOS" thing is really sad. We should have had speeds like that years ago, and we should be wishing for 200 meg symmetric connections today.
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. We also take pride in being technologically advanced. The fact that we can't even get as good internet connectivity as South Korea and Belgium is sort of sad.
By the South Korean definition of broadband (20 meg symmetric), we don't even get broadband in the densest part of the USA. This report makes the USA sound backwards and technologically behind - that's true, but it's far worse than this report implies.
We don't even have as good broadband connectivity in Manhattan as South Korea has in their whole country. We're not just behind, our internet connectivity makes us the laughingstock of the developed world. Seriously, not only are these countries ahead of us in broadband penetration, they're doing it with their hands tied behind their backs - we define "broadband" as "128k download", they define it as anything from "2 meg download" to South Korea's "20 meg symmetric".
Population density is extremely overused as an excuse for the horrible internet connectivity in the USA.
Let's start with this fact: We're behind Canada, they have 1/10th of our population density.
Yes, we have large areas with very low population density - like Nebraska and Northern Alaska. That doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of our population is in reasonably high density urban / suburban areas - and that those areas don't have decent internet connectivity either.
South Korea has about 500 people per square kilometer. Rhode Island has 390 people per square kilometer. In South Korea, there's 90% broadband penetration where "broadband" is all faster than 20 Mbps symmetric. In Rhode Island, you're lucky if you can get 3 meg / 768k asymmetric DSL for more than Koreans pay for 100/100 meg lines.
The population density argument is really good if we need to get the last household in Kansas, but areas like eastern Massachusetts and southern New York state shouldn't have any trouble having as good broadband connectivity as Finland.
That design scales great. It'll take seconds to write a 32 bit memory address, and forever to write a 128 bit address.
That's actually good, because people associate the AT&T name with telecom monopoly. Maybe someone will take advantage of the dissatisfaction with SBC/AT&T to push anti-monopoly policies. I'd sure like to catch up with, say, South Korea on broadband penetration - but it's currently illegal for anyone to compete with the DSL & cable providers.
"Every tool is just as good as every other tool" is just as wrong as "my tool is always better than your tool". I suggest learning phrases like "I can do this faster with the tool I know than I can learn a new tool" and "Visual Studio is a better tool than vi when you're maintaining a form-heavy VB.NET program".
In the general case, I'd argue that Emacs in a *nix environment is the most powerful available toolkit for programming. That being said, the general case isn't what matters when you're doing something specific, and power isn't the only factor that influences people's choice of tools.
Do remember one thing though: It's hard to comment on how powerful a tool set is until you've actually used it seriously - I'd tend to think of this as applying primarily to Windows users who haven't learned *nix, but it applies just as much to me commenting about Visual Studio.
If it's a tax on road usage, it should tax road usage. If it's charged on fuel, then it's a fuel tax and it should only apply to material sold as fuel. No reasonable tax should ever require enforcers to physically check individual citizens for compliance - You'll note that income tax doesn't (withholdings), state sales taxes don't (included in the price), excise tax doesn't (you pay it to renew your registration), even property taxes really don't (you get a bill). If you can't enforce the tax without searching some individual's stuff, it's time to get a different tax.
Trying to tax a product based on how it's used is absurd.
The correct thing to do here is this: Define the tax to be on gasoline / diesel sales at a gas station. If a significant portion of the population (even a couple percent) decides to get diesel automobiles and buy heating oil to fuel them, then either apply the tax to sales of heating oil too or remove the tax on diesel fuel and create a yearly tax on owning a diesel vehicle. There's no reason to worry about vegetable oil at all - there isn't a large enough supply to matter.
My point is this: Distributors should be responsible for taxes on products they sell. If a few people get similar products through different channels, that's ok - they may be fringe, or the market may be changing. Once the market has changed, the taxes should be changed to catch up. But fining people for making a non-standard market choice is absurd - in fact, it should be criminal.
Try the "alternate" install CD. It's really hard to get a GUI installer to boot on every possible PC configuration, so Ubuntu provides the old text-based Debian installer for this sort of situation.
That excuse gets thrown around a lot, but it's basically bullshit.
Sure, Japan really does have a higher population density than the US. Sure, maybe wiring every last farmhouse in Nebraska could be obnoxious. But Japan isn't the only country with decent high speed service, and we don't need to get Northern Alaska wired tomorrow.
If we just consider, say, the easiest to reach 75% of the United States population the population density isn't significantly lower than South Korea or Finland. Another way to look at it is this: If it's an issue of size and population density, why haven't we finished wiring Rhode Island and Maryland yet?
...and the speed of the resulting connection sounds worse and worse compared to other countries with more effective telecommunication policies. If 30/5 Verizon FIOS was available to 75% of the people in in the United States for $30/month tomorrow, we'd still be far behind a number of other countries. In other "high tech" countries, the norm for high speed broadband is 100 meg symmetric. The fact that we're arguing about infrastructure that might let us get a tenth that speed years from now is absurd.
Legal concerns that don't come from lawyers are frequently just lame excuses to not change something. Taking legal advice from a non-lawyer is a bad idea anyway. In this case, random people are just guessing about potential legal issues on a web forum. That's definitely not valid legal advice.
As for the rest of your post, consider this: Maybe I'm not a "cowboy sysadmin". Maybe I'm instead a "competent manager". There's a reason why stock prices go up when companies do radical organizational restructuring and fire a bunch of admin staff.
The point I was trying to make in my post is that software patents don't provide an overall benifit in the real world. That'd still be true with shorter durations.
As for your other three points:
Having actually been involved in a software patent application recently, I can assure you that the system is innately broken. When you're actually talking to patent lawyers or the patent office, the question isn't "is this obvious?", it's "does this look so completely obvious that it won't get by an overworked patent examiner? if so, how do we reword it?".
So... don't give them access to those systems. Just because there's a computer somewhere with grades on it doesn't mean that students can't do admin work on most of the computers in a school. There should be no "privacy concerns" over computer lab computers or classroom computers for example.
Sure, giving a student *any* responsibility means that they actually have to be a bit responsible - but that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Patents, in practice, are government granted monopolies that the owner can sell. It should be immediately obvious from that the effect they have: A large company buys a bunch of them, and then goes ahead and acts like an abusive monopolist. A little guy may incidentally get some corporate pocket change for the license transfer, but his gain will be more than offset by the economic damage caused by the monopoly itself.
That scenario sounds great, doesn't it. We'll protect the little guy who invented something amazing from "unfair competition" by the big guy. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way in any significant number of cases.
Here's some more realistic scenarios:
At least that's how it works with software. Patents aren't about inventions, they're about "intellectual property portfolios" and "license fee revenue" and, more quietly, about excluding new entrants into existing markets.
A monopoly for one year is only about 1/20th as bad as a monopoly for 20 years, but it's still bad. Companies don't need monopolies in order to do R&D, and if they tell you different it's just because they want government handouts.
Software ideas don't need to be "protected". They won't get hurt if someone else uses them.
There is at least one decent solution to the problem of collaborative image tagging:3 980976635143
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-824646
I've worked with (used as a personal desktop or production server for more than a month) Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, SuSE, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris. From a user perspective, they are all basically the same. From an admin or programmer perspective there are differences, but they're not really relevant - it's stuff like the first SATA disk being /dev/sd0 instead of /dev/wd0 or the default shell being ksh instead of bash or the package manager being different. Any competent admin for one could deal with any of the others fine.
VMS is a completely different system - sure it'll be different - but the Free Software Unix-like systems are reasonably interchangeable.
Some students rise above the crap. Others get discouraged and spend all their time stoned. Others over-exert and end up being burned out on anything vaguely resembling academics for life. Most of them end up with emotional scars that make them phobic about mathematics. Personally, I ended up dropping out and going to community college - best decision ever.
Public school in the United States is poorly designed to accomplish any goal other than "keep kids off the street and pay a bunch of bureaucrats salaries". It's almost trivial to design a better system, but between teachers unions and all the funding-related bureaucrats it's almost impossible to get such a thing implemented.
It's a mistake to let stupid bureaucracy get in the way of effective operation. You can get free entry level sysadmin services out of some of these kids for free, and even some less competent kids can be recruited as free first level tech support - turning that down is dumb. Sure, you can't do without techs or anything, but most support organizations have low level techs to solve simple problems and high level techs to escalate problems to.
In a school, either you're trying to educate kids efficiently or you're wasting time and money. Some kids want to be computer techs enough that they're significantly self-taught once they're juniors and seniors in high school. Allowing them to get experience by helping the school network helps everyone.