There is no such law. It would be nice if there were, but there isn't.
You may be thinking of the fact that there is no law that makes reverse engineering illegal, and the fact that the mechanics of copyright make "clean room" duplications of functionality legal - that stuff is true but has nothing to do with patents.
If you patent something, you have a legal monopoly on anything that a court would rule the patent to cover, reguarless of who built the implementation.
Remember that, in C, you generally include header files in order to use a library (reguardless of dynamic vs. static linking). The header file itself is copyright, so unless you pull some more complex trick you're generally succeptible to the GPL.
All research doesn't have to take place in academic institutions, but people who claim revolutionary results should be expected to have a decent background in the field.
What would you expect to happen if I showed up in sci.physics.catapults and said:
I've developed a revolutionary new catapult based on my super-accurate estimation of acceleration due to gravity at 11 m/s^2! With my new iterated approximation algorithmic technique, I can calculate trajectories so accurately I can hit a fly on a wall from a mile and a half!
That post is going to get flamed. Even the nice person is going to say "With your estimation for gravity off by 10% you're not going to get anywhere near that accuracy. Oh, and you should look at the literature for calculating trajectories - it's a solved problem."
There's no reason why beautiful HDTV content can't be created from movie film. It's just an investment with no obvious payoff in the very short term, so few movie companies are doing it. They will in the future, as more people get the gear to watch HDTV content.
People have been wanting that to happen for 20 years now. It'd be great - you could store a super complex game in almost no space. The concept-demos for it have been amazing (fractally generating the entire surface of a planet down to the pebbles on the beaches in under a meg, an entire high-res FPS in under 200k).
The problem is that the people needed to build these games basically don't exist. The programmer and the artist need to be the same person - and there's no one like that for game companies to hire. And they don't just need one of these people, they need whole teams.
Until someone manages to develop one of these procedurally generated games in like three months with five people and it looks better than a modern game with $10,000,000 hand-tweaked 3d-models and textures, I think the game industry is going to just keep ignoring the whole concept and stick with the proven game development techniques they already have.
everywhere but the small field dead center in your vision
Due to the way human vision works, the resolution in the center of the field of vision *is* the resolution of human vision. The only way you could take advantage of the lower edge resolution would be if you could predict, with certanty, exactly where the viewer would be looking all the time.
Vendor lock-in is real because the situation it describes is real compared to the alternitive. Consider the Windows server platform versus the Sun server platform - you are more "locked in" with the Windows platform as supported by Microsoft because it would require a major porting effort to move your applicatoin anywhere else. With the Solaris platform as supported by Sun, if you decide to ditch Sun, you can easily move to an IBM, HP, Novel, or Canotical solution with almost zero porting effort.
The issue for which vendor lock-in is a relevent consideration is the ability to ditch your vendor. From that perspective, vendor lock-in is a real property that some vendor solutions have and others do not.
I am annoyed by people who do things for recognition's sake.
You must really hate scientists and other academics. They want recognition for all their work. In fact, you must hate all authors who don't publish anonymously: Steven King? J.K. Rowling? Horrible, horrible people in your eyes.
Especially since for a long time I thought people wrote free software just for the philanthropic aspect of it.
Nope. Free software authors are generally trying to build something, not give away free stuff.
Here's a question for you: If software authors publish anonymously, where do I send patches that fix their bugs?
Re:Confusion About Abbie Hoffman
on
Steal This Film
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· Score: 1
Just because there exist people who disagree with you on a topic doesn't mean that you can't have a passion for that topic. Further, it doesn't mean that expressing what you believe to be the facts of that topic is an "intent to decieve".
There are people who still believe that the earth is flat. If I make a documentary expressing the view that the earth is a sphere am I attempting to decieve my audience? If my documentary doesn't mention the possibility that the earth could be flat, is that an attempt to decieve? I think not.
That's a great quote, but it's really unrelated to the topic at hand.
Some arbitrary FOSS application probably isn't as great a contribution to human knowledge as Lebnitz's Integral Calculus or Darwin's Origion of Species, but the authors are no less due full credit for their work.
Perhaps you could say some person is a "better man" for an anonymous donation to a charity compared to his neihbour who demands a bumper sticker for his gift, but that's completely unlike free software or an academic paper.
There is no reason to begrudge people their due credit for their contributions to the common weath of knowlege.
People who develop Free/Open Source Software are trying to build something useful. Not being able to contact the developer of software that you're using because they are anonymous is definately not useful - it's ridiculous.
There's just something about this "I want recognition" thing that rubs me the wrong way.
After much consideration, I've come up with the correct response to this comment. My response is not a troll; rather, it is a well thought out and appropriate response. Here it is: Dear Steve, Go die in a fire.
The problem is that many of these software patents are so trivial and obvious that they are regularly re-invented whenever someone encounters the same problem. It's like a patent on "using a flashlight to illuminate a dark closet" - it's not something that the designers of flashlights nessisarly explicitly considered, it's not nessiarily mentioned in the documentation for the flashlight, but when you're looking for something in a dark closet and you have a flashlight it doesn't take any great creative leap to "invent" that technique.
Having a patent system isn't a requirement. If the patent system doesn't result in a net gain in innovation, it would be better to abolish it than to keep it.
You'll be waiting a long time on that one. As with any significant purchase, you should spend a couple hours researching current CPUs and video cards before buying. Any of the hardware review sites (like hardocp.com / anandtech.com / tomshardware.com) will have extensive reviews and application benchmarks of all the available choices.
If your time is worth too much to spend a couple hours researching the topic, you'd be better off picking up a new Alienware box every year or two than worrying about individual component choices.
They model numbers. The requirement is that they be different between different cards, so customers can see that different products are different. Beyond that, marketting can do whatever they want with them - it doesn't really matter.
Suprisingly, the marketting departments at ATI and Nvidia have settled on a highly structured and informative system for model numbers (for something generated by marketting departments).
Here's how it works: Take the "X1950 XTX". That splits into 4 segments: "X1" is the generation, "9" is the class, "50" is the revision, and "XTX" is the specific model. Nvidia uses exactly the same system. For the 7950 GX2, we have generation 7, class 9, specific model GX2.
Generation usually changes yearly. Class splits into (generally): 0-3 is low-end, 5-7 is mid-range, and 8-9 is high end. The revision number allows more recent products to have higher numbers than older products. Generally for ATI "Pro" Now - that still doesn't let you determine which card is "better" based on the model number, but model numbers never do that. Which is better, An "AMD Opteron 165" or an "AMD Athlon64 FX-50"?
Students who have to 'see' the graph on a screen, rotating in three dimensions, are always going to struggle with the subject.
It's better that they struggle and understand then never understand at all.
I'm pretty good with math (3 semesters of college calculus so far - still having fun), but some of the stuff is just easier to see visually. In fact, a lot of time in my classes has been spent with the professor drawing really bad diagrams on a blackboard.
The thing that's key about computer graphs is that you can vary the parameters and see the results immediately. "What happens if I make 'A' negitive?" Once you've experimented yourself and visually seen the result, you have a much better chance of remembering it later.
You appear to have smaller hands than I do. Using my palm to press control popped up an error message "You are too fat, mash the keyboard to be sent a typing wand".
Then again, a campaign to get rid of the accents above letters in european languages and replace them with the letters or letter combinations that sound exactly like them wouldn't go amiss either.
Accents are actually the best solution we have available for the problem they solve.
In english, we use 6 symbols for vowels. American english has at least 15 distinct vowel sounds. We have multiple ways of spelling each of those vowel sounds, and no agreement on which vowel sounds are represented by which spellings.
Languages that have a separate symbol (vowel character with accent mark) for each vowel sound are definately a step up on us.
Game support for dual core systems is already here. Future games will easily support quad core processors, and once you're at that point scaling to more cores is pretty straightforward.
When a poor single mother is thrown thousands of dollars further into debt because she was forced to settle a lawsuit over sharing music, that's absurd and tragic.
When a reasonably large company has a legal hassle, that's normal. They've got a legal department for that sort of thing. With GPL violations, they had a lawyer read the licence and then a manager chose to take the risk. Who am I supposed to feel bad for here?
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such law. It would be nice if there were, but there isn't.
You may be thinking of the fact that there is no law that makes reverse engineering illegal, and the fact that the mechanics of copyright make "clean room" duplications of functionality legal - that stuff is true but has nothing to do with patents.
If you patent something, you have a legal monopoly on anything that a court would rule the patent to cover, reguarless of who built the implementation.
Remember that, in C, you generally include header files in order to use a library (reguardless of dynamic vs. static linking). The header file itself is copyright, so unless you pull some more complex trick you're generally succeptible to the GPL.
That's how it works. "Ubuntu 6.06 LTS" had the development codename "Dapper Drake". "Ubuntu 6.10" has the development codename "Edgy Eft".
All research doesn't have to take place in academic institutions, but people who claim revolutionary results should be expected to have a decent background in the field.
What would you expect to happen if I showed up in sci.physics.catapults and said:
That post is going to get flamed. Even the nice person is going to say "With your estimation for gravity off by 10% you're not going to get anywhere near that accuracy. Oh, and you should look at the literature for calculating trajectories - it's a solved problem."
There's no reason why beautiful HDTV content can't be created from movie film. It's just an investment with no obvious payoff in the very short term, so few movie companies are doing it. They will in the future, as more people get the gear to watch HDTV content.
People have been wanting that to happen for 20 years now. It'd be great - you could store a super complex game in almost no space. The concept-demos for it have been amazing (fractally generating the entire surface of a planet down to the pebbles on the beaches in under a meg, an entire high-res FPS in under 200k).
The problem is that the people needed to build these games basically don't exist. The programmer and the artist need to be the same person - and there's no one like that for game companies to hire. And they don't just need one of these people, they need whole teams.
Until someone manages to develop one of these procedurally generated games in like three months with five people and it looks better than a modern game with $10,000,000 hand-tweaked 3d-models and textures, I think the game industry is going to just keep ignoring the whole concept and stick with the proven game development techniques they already have.
Due to the way human vision works, the resolution in the center of the field of vision *is* the resolution of human vision. The only way you could take advantage of the lower edge resolution would be if you could predict, with certanty, exactly where the viewer would be looking all the time.
Vendor lock-in is real because the situation it describes is real compared to the alternitive. Consider the Windows server platform versus the Sun server platform - you are more "locked in" with the Windows platform as supported by Microsoft because it would require a major porting effort to move your applicatoin anywhere else. With the Solaris platform as supported by Sun, if you decide to ditch Sun, you can easily move to an IBM, HP, Novel, or Canotical solution with almost zero porting effort.
The issue for which vendor lock-in is a relevent consideration is the ability to ditch your vendor. From that perspective, vendor lock-in is a real property that some vendor solutions have and others do not.
You must really hate scientists and other academics. They want recognition for all their work. In fact, you must hate all authors who don't publish anonymously: Steven King? J.K. Rowling? Horrible, horrible people in your eyes.
Nope. Free software authors are generally trying to build something, not give away free stuff.
Here's a question for you: If software authors publish anonymously, where do I send patches that fix their bugs?
Just because there exist people who disagree with you on a topic doesn't mean that you can't have a passion for that topic. Further, it doesn't mean that expressing what you believe to be the facts of that topic is an "intent to decieve".
There are people who still believe that the earth is flat. If I make a documentary expressing the view that the earth is a sphere am I attempting to decieve my audience? If my documentary doesn't mention the possibility that the earth could be flat, is that an attempt to decieve? I think not.
That's a great quote, but it's really unrelated to the topic at hand.
Some arbitrary FOSS application probably isn't as great a contribution to human knowledge as Lebnitz's Integral Calculus or Darwin's Origion of Species, but the authors are no less due full credit for their work.
Perhaps you could say some person is a "better man" for an anonymous donation to a charity compared to his neihbour who demands a bumper sticker for his gift, but that's completely unlike free software or an academic paper.
There is no reason to begrudge people their due credit for their contributions to the common weath of knowlege.
After much consideration, I've come up with the correct response to this comment. My response is not a troll; rather, it is a well thought out and appropriate response. Here it is: Dear Steve, Go die in a fire.
The problem is that many of these software patents are so trivial and obvious that they are regularly re-invented whenever someone encounters the same problem. It's like a patent on "using a flashlight to illuminate a dark closet" - it's not something that the designers of flashlights nessisarly explicitly considered, it's not nessiarily mentioned in the documentation for the flashlight, but when you're looking for something in a dark closet and you have a flashlight it doesn't take any great creative leap to "invent" that technique.
Having a patent system isn't a requirement. If the patent system doesn't result in a net gain in innovation, it would be better to abolish it than to keep it.
If your time is worth too much to spend a couple hours researching the topic, you'd be better off picking up a new Alienware box every year or two than worrying about individual component choices.
WTF? You got written up for *doing work* on company time? And your response was to instead do that work at home? Sucker.
They model numbers. The requirement is that they be different between different cards, so customers can see that different products are different. Beyond that, marketting can do whatever they want with them - it doesn't really matter.
Suprisingly, the marketting departments at ATI and Nvidia have settled on a highly structured and informative system for model numbers (for something generated by marketting departments).
Here's how it works: Take the "X1950 XTX". That splits into 4 segments: "X1" is the generation, "9" is the class, "50" is the revision, and "XTX" is the specific model. Nvidia uses exactly the same system. For the 7950 GX2, we have generation 7, class 9, specific model GX2.
Generation usually changes yearly. Class splits into (generally): 0-3 is low-end, 5-7 is mid-range, and 8-9 is high end. The revision number allows more recent products to have higher numbers than older products. Generally for ATI "Pro" Now - that still doesn't let you determine which card is "better" based on the model number, but model numbers never do that. Which is better, An "AMD Opteron 165" or an "AMD Athlon64 FX-50"?
Absolutely. Ignorance is a priviledge that they should pay dearly for if they desire it.
It's better that they struggle and understand then never understand at all.
I'm pretty good with math (3 semesters of college calculus so far - still having fun), but some of the stuff is just easier to see visually. In fact, a lot of time in my classes has been spent with the professor drawing really bad diagrams on a blackboard.
The thing that's key about computer graphs is that you can vary the parameters and see the results immediately. "What happens if I make 'A' negitive?" Once you've experimented yourself and visually seen the result, you have a much better chance of remembering it later.
Brittish english is a bit better, at least y'all manage to only have 3 or 4 different regional accents with completely different pronunciation.
You appear to have smaller hands than I do. Using my palm to press control popped up an error message "You are too fat, mash the keyboard to be sent a typing wand".
Accents are actually the best solution we have available for the problem they solve.
In english, we use 6 symbols for vowels. American english has at least 15 distinct vowel sounds. We have multiple ways of spelling each of those vowel sounds, and no agreement on which vowel sounds are represented by which spellings.
Languages that have a separate symbol (vowel character with accent mark) for each vowel sound are definately a step up on us.
(ref: http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources /newstart.html )
Game support for dual core systems is already here. Future games will easily support quad core processors, and once you're at that point scaling to more cores is pretty straightforward.
Moore's law hasn't stopped yet, and you can read it directly as "The number of cores you can fit on a die of a given size doubles every 18 months".
Corporations aren't people.
When a poor single mother is thrown thousands of dollars further into debt because she was forced to settle a lawsuit over sharing music, that's absurd and tragic.
When a reasonably large company has a legal hassle, that's normal. They've got a legal department for that sort of thing. With GPL violations, they had a lawyer read the licence and then a manager chose to take the risk. Who am I supposed to feel bad for here?