Hopefully the reality of the system will match with what they are saying. I'm not sure how they expect to have enough satellites to get a signal into dense cities, but more having satellites in view is certainly welcomed by me.
The thing that I'm surprised nobody has mentioned is that GPS is aging and losing satellites from the constellation. Those sats haven't been replaced, and so the reliability of the system is going down. I hope there will be a maintanance plan for Galileo.
You can get this kind of high accuracy from GPS, if you do a little bit of engineering. The more satellites that you can hear, the more accurately you can fix your position. If you incorporate a ground station into your network, you get more substantial improvements in accuracy.
The main problem that I see with GPS is the same with Galileo, or any other satellite system: it doesn't work when the sky is obscured. You really want line of sight to a satellite to communicate with it. That's why GPS has issues in vehicles, cities, and dense forests. To compensate for the forest and vehicle issue, you need to either boost transmit power, or use more sensitive receivers. To deal with the city issue, you need to have more satellite in your constellation. This will work better, until you're in a dense area where the only visible sky is directly above you. The EU isn't going to be able to transmit through buildings...
If Galileo was really about public use, there wouldn't be a private subscriber channel. The system would just put out accurate data to begin with. Why would the EU citizens accept paying billions for this network, just to have to pay for a subscription to actually use its full capabilities?
They didn't, and it doesn't. IE for Mac was a completely different team, and it does not render the same as IE for Windows. It does not support ActiveX, either. It is a different browser in all but name. Unlike some other unfortunate ports to Mac, MS did not implement a hacked up Windows API compatibility layer for IE.
Go look at the project history, developer statements, or thousands of different web design sites that talk about this. The two browsers render quite differently, in that IE for Mac tended to be much more standards compliant, and did not implement the IE for Windows specific behaviors.
Take my post a little more literally; I meant it exactly as stated. I know there are a few WinCE phones that exist, but they are so uncommon that I have never actually seen one in the real world.
The site you linked has three vendors, and I've definitely never known of anyone that has a product made by them. The MS site lists a total of 9 phones in the Americas, and at least two of those aren't available in the US.
I just wouldn't call that a "wide range" of phones.
The other poster is right. While they would end up with standards compliance, the problem is that Opera doesn't have all the IE rendering bugs. All the "designed for IE" sites wouldn't work right.
They would have to hack in all the things that make IE a bad browser before they could release it as an upgrade path from IE.
Actually, I've never seen a cellular phone that runs WinCE. Most cell phones actually run Symbian. Blackberry's run a proprietary OS. Some of the other PDA phones run PalmOS.
Since most cell phones also come with a JRE, there is very little reason to make a phone wince with WinCE.
That number is already incredibly small. Those taxable sales are not profit, they are revenue. Having revenue of $5 million is not that difficult for a moderately successful online merchant. For example, if you receive $50 in sales for each of 295 people a day, 340 days a year, that's $5,000,000. How many online retailers do you think can manage to do that?
In that situation, then I agree with you. You would have helped to orchestrate a crime, so you are accessory to that crime; you were a knowing participant. The act of sale is still not the crime, but, rather, the act of helping to commit a crime.
That act of sale does not infringe on the rights of others. A criminal act by the recipient of your goods or services may do so, however. If you were to sell plans for a gun to someone, and then someone used the plans to make a gun, and then committed a crime using it, who is at fault? The modern approach is to blame both. The problem is that only the last person in that chain actually *caused* harm.
Laws and procedures, such as this, restrict the freedoms of everyone, for the supposed reason of stopping a person from committing a crime. The issue is that the person committing the crime will ignore your law, so the law has failed. The result is simply that you have removed a freedom from everyone that would not have been a criminal anyway.
Here is the problem: restrictions through law only stop those willing to follow the law. Someone that is dedicated to causing harm will not follow the law any further than required to not be detected. It isn't that they are willing to follow the law, they are just willing to stay unnoticed long enough to do what they want, and that happens to look like following law.
Also, as you point out, the country of Iran did not attack the US. Rogue people that may have been citizens of Iran attacked. How do you justify sanctions against the country, when that country did not purpetrate the crime?
Wow, that's absolutely retarded. Are you serious that they do those sorts of things? It would seem to me that they took someone that either couldn't afford new tires, or didn't realize they had bald ones, and screwed them rather than issuing a warning and having them get it fixed. It would probably the former, which would mean they couldn't get it fixed, or were biding as much time as possible. They do this in the States all the time, too. Retarded processes, like that, are the major reason why there are so many unlicensed drivers here. I suspect that Britain is having this problem too, and that it's just about to get a lot worse.
However, if you believe there is a fire in said crowded theater, then you have not acted with malicious intent. Likewise, if the information is true, and there is a fire, it doesn't matter if you were trying to spread panic purposefully.
If the people making those claims about Juniper believe they have creedence, they can even say them to be malicious, because they believe the claims to be true. It would not be considered libel in that case.
As many other people have posted, it is very difficult to prove libel, because the intent of the statement, as well as the validity, come into question. Juniper will have to show that the statements are false, that the posers knew they were false, and that the were posted for the purpose of being malicious toward Juniper.
I also think it's important to note that you still are free to *say* the untrue statement, knowing it is untrue, and to be malicious. Of course, you will have to deal with the legality of what happens as a result of that statement.
According to Mirriam-Webster:
Main Entry: seem
1 : to appear to the observation or understanding
2 : to give the impression of being
So, if something "seems to be" something to me, that would mean that according to what I see/know, it would appear to be that way, or at least gives implication of being so. It *is* stronger than opinion, but can still be based on opinion formed from observation.
For example, I could say that "The sky seems to be dyed blue.", and would not be making an untrue statement. The observation could lead as such:
Air is clear and water is clear.
If I dye water, it changes color.
If I dye air, it should change color.
Since air is clear, and the sky is air, it would seem to be dyed.
It's a conclusion based upon observation, that is not presented as fact. I choose this example because you can reason it out sensibly, but we all know that it is wrong. In the case of the statement about Juniper, someone was simply saying that from the available information, it was reasonable to think that there was some form of foul play, and that they believed this was the case.
That's a great response, except that I'm 100% correct. A copyright is protection for a work, a patent is protection for an invention. You document the invention by filing your design as part of the patent application, thus protecting that specific design.
Then again, perhaps for the last 250 years of patent and copyright filings, laws, and cases, we've all been wrong. However, that's preposterous; you're just ignorant.
copyright
The legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.
patent
1. 1. A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
I remember something more recent than that, actually. The inital bit involved a retest of the Michelson experiment, and then the readings taken from the US Shuttle over a period of time. Perhaps it was just wild speculation related to what you linked to.::shrug:: It's my birthday, and I'm in no condition to have a coherent argument.:) I'd feel better if c was constant, regardless! I remember this coming up a few years ago.
The constant that I can think is the speed of light. Apparently, c has decreased over the last 100 years, as measured in the various experiments that have been performed. I haven't heard about it in a while, so it might have been disproven.
No, it would not bar software licenses; that would be copyright, not patent. The GPL uses copyright on a specific implementation of software. All software licenses that I know about would still be valid, as they all use copyright.
The telephone design would still be patentable. Just because you connect a different wire to it, this does not change the design of the device at all. I could connect a steel wire to a telephone right now, and it would function. Also, color would not effect the design of the device, as both would function exactly the same. That means the second device would violate a patent, should one have been filed on the first.
What's actually happening is that you either never had, or did not pay attention to, the history of the US Constitution and patent/copyright system. Everything about the creation of patent and copyright happens to agree with me.
Inventors would just have to do it the way that they always had done it in the US. You *gasp* patent your idea. Then you shop your idea around. Or you do it under contract, with terms so that the other party can't steal the idea; we call those "Non-Disclosure Agreements".
What inventors would have to do, in the NTP case, would be to patent their idea, and then sell the patent to NTP. Otherwise, the inventor would have to risk NTP stealing the idea and having their way with it. The same as those inventors that you mention with their start-ups. If you haven't patented the idea, then you aren't protected.
The RIM case is that NTP is abusing a broken system, because that system allowed something to be patented that was not actually eligible for patent. NTP should have been copyrighting their implementation. This is *exactly* why concept/method should not be patentable. There is no way to implement a system that does a similar function, but does not violate the NTP patent. The NTP provides *nothing* in terms of an implementation, thus being actually ineligible for a patent under the traditional patent system.
Basically, the Economist article is absolute trite bullshit. The patent system was *never* supposed to protect something like this. In the pre-Bono Copyright Act era, the USPTO would never have even allowed something like this to be patented. (Not that the Mickey Mouse Act was the cause, as it wasn't even the same part of the law, just the start of the era.)
This is either a case for copyright, or for an implementation and patent upon it. If they copyrighted it, then I could make a new thing and not be caught up with that. If they patent it, I can design a system that accomplishes the same goal, but through a different mechanism. *That* is how it is supposed to work. Really, go read up on the history of the system, rather than throwing some industry rag article out there as gospel.
People with your lack of knowledge on the topic are the large part of the problem. They don't realize how broken the system is, or how it go broken. Then they elect idiots that screw the system up for the benefit of business, in some vague manner. Their constituents don't understand what these officials just screwed up, so they don't realize it happened. As a result, the officials stay in office, screwing things up even more.
I'm with you completely on that. I didn't purposefully imply that I thought a generic idea should be able to be copyrighted, just a specific expression, as you said. I don't even like that lyrics can be copyrighted, but only the specific rendition of the song as a whole. That way another artist could cover/remix the song, and it would be fine.
Hex editors don't load the whole file, and this is likely true for WinRAR, too. They are filling a small view buffer, and have to read from the file when you move to a different position in the stream.
Most text editors will load the full file into memeory, and then load it into an editing window. So you need at least as much memory as file size. You need even more if you're loading something like XML.
Reject that idea as you wish, but IP is not a real thing. Property is a physical asset that can be seen, bought, and traded. That the US is allowing patents on concept is ridiculous; ideas were never supposed to be patentable, only the implementation. Copyright is for ideas, such as music, literature, or art.
Paying inventors is fine and dandy. For one thing, it would mean that someone actually invented something. However, NTP invented nothing; they have no product, no prototype, nothing of value.
NTP did exactly what RAMBUS did. Both are dirty, unethical, and reprehensible business practices. They took their patents, and waited for someone to come up with the same idea as their patent covered, and then they sued that someone. They add nothing to society, they advance nothing, and their practices fail against the reasons patents were created.
Patents are for your design for doing something. A copyright is for an idea. NTP could patent *their* way of doing wireless email, but nobody should hold a patent on wireless email.
NTP is completely at fault for their intentional abuse of the patent system with the goal of profiting from it. They have no product, no design, and absolutely no use.
The US was also the only western country that discarded slavery using violence. Hell, the whole emancipation was a political move by Pres. Lincoln during the Civil War, in an attempt to garner support from the South to support the war.
This is not the best example to use. Europe doesn't have slavery, either, and for longer a period than the US.
If you want civil rights as an argument, then you just have to look at the loss of freedom we endured to achieve "equality". Now we have legally required discrimination.
I love my country, and I work actively to fix what I see as wrong. We've made a lot of bad choices, and there is lot to fix today. The worst is that most people don't see the problems, think the problems are progress, or are too lazy/content to do something about the problems. The US is certainly not alone in this; it seems to be a modern world epidemic.
Re:I guess it depends on where you came from
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
Not quite what I was getting at. I don't have a problem with the Java concept. There are things that I think make Java a bad choice for desktop apps, but it it's all implementation detail, and could be fixed.
However, you do have to "compile" Java, and every time you run it, for that matter. It's just a completely transparent process. You load the bytecode, and the bytecode is translated through the VM into native instructions. It's only semantically different from what you're saying, since you obviously know how it works. I'm just likening the act of compiling to having to translate the bytecode at runtime.
My point was that today, someone could package up a C/C++ platform that you could drop onto a system and have it work. The idea of POSIX was an attempt at this, and it generally works. Unfortunately, we don't really have a GUI equivalent. Nobody has really done this properly, unfortunately, which is one reason why many commercial UNIX applications come packaged into their own private environment.
I personally hate running Java applets, since the JRE plugin has a tendancy to screw up and crash the browser. If you've ever using HP Web JetAdmin, you might know what I mean. I happen to think that Java is only currently usable on server side. There are issues with Java as end user applications. It's a nice idea, but, as I mentioned in the beginning, there are a few things that need to be taken care of first.
Anyway, no I don't think something like that should replace Java. The intent of Java is different from the intent of C/C++.
Re:I guess it depends on where you came from
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
Yeah, Java eliminated the need to compile, all right. Which is why you have to interpret Java to execute it on the host system, correct?
Java is object code for an imaginary processor with a translator to run it. You could liken it to just an automated compiler. You could do the same for any language. Package up your program into a "runtime environment", run all the code through the "interpreter", except swap runtime with headers/libraries and interpreter with compiler.
There's your 1 and 2 right there. You'd have one compiler, that's ported to various architectures, and one set of libraries and headers, which are also brought to each architecture. So you *would* have a compiler following your standards, and you *would* have libraries that worked the same everywhere.
You have to do all of this to bring the JRE to another platform, too.
You could very well be right. I certainly believe the same; too many parents are not taking responsibility for raising their children. There are a lot of reasons for that, some more understandable than others. Schools are certainly not going to get any better until the parents start parenting, though.
I'm not saying that it's unreasonable. My point is solely that since they did it by setting the specific standard, and saying that vendors would have to support it, that they're open to a lot more attack. Their entire procedure was called into question. It gaves a company like MS a lot more chinks in the armor to work their propaganda into.
Of course State should be able to define their own standards. However, the politicians ultimately can tell ITD what they're going to be doing and using. MS has been doing a bit too well at "helping" them to see the "problems" with OpenDocument. Had ITD gone with a requirement spec instead of naming a standard, this would be more difficult.
I agree that this is similar to what departments went through while trying to move onto IP. I agree that they got the same kind of arguments against their procedures. However, just because departments were able to overcome the propoganda last time, and got their way, it doesn't mean they will have it any easier this time.
This reeks of the same kind of propoganda that MS threw out there when the SCO lawsuits started to fly. For a while there, a lot of damage happened to the ability to adopt open source platforms and tools. It made management skeptical of the liability of doing so. Thankfully, tech departments prevailed and have largely been able to implement with the best tools, regardless of source.
I really do hope OpenDocument gets selected for State documents. It would make me quite happy to see the MS format lock-in go away. I'm already moving my municipality to OpenDocument, and it was that much easier with the State saying they were doing the same. If the State initiative gets thrown in the trash, then I have to worry about political pressure forcing me back into a MS Office world.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully the reality of the system will match with what they are saying. I'm not sure how they expect to have enough satellites to get a signal into dense cities, but more having satellites in view is certainly welcomed by me.
The thing that I'm surprised nobody has mentioned is that GPS is aging and losing satellites from the constellation. Those sats haven't been replaced, and so the reliability of the system is going down. I hope there will be a maintanance plan for Galileo.
You can get this kind of high accuracy from GPS, if you do a little bit of engineering. The more satellites that you can hear, the more accurately you can fix your position. If you incorporate a ground station into your network, you get more substantial improvements in accuracy.
The main problem that I see with GPS is the same with Galileo, or any other satellite system: it doesn't work when the sky is obscured. You really want line of sight to a satellite to communicate with it. That's why GPS has issues in vehicles, cities, and dense forests. To compensate for the forest and vehicle issue, you need to either boost transmit power, or use more sensitive receivers. To deal with the city issue, you need to have more satellite in your constellation. This will work better, until you're in a dense area where the only visible sky is directly above you. The EU isn't going to be able to transmit through buildings...
If Galileo was really about public use, there wouldn't be a private subscriber channel. The system would just put out accurate data to begin with. Why would the EU citizens accept paying billions for this network, just to have to pay for a subscription to actually use its full capabilities?
They didn't, and it doesn't. IE for Mac was a completely different team, and it does not render the same as IE for Windows. It does not support ActiveX, either. It is a different browser in all but name. Unlike some other unfortunate ports to Mac, MS did not implement a hacked up Windows API compatibility layer for IE.
Go look at the project history, developer statements, or thousands of different web design sites that talk about this. The two browsers render quite differently, in that IE for Mac tended to be much more standards compliant, and did not implement the IE for Windows specific behaviors.
Take my post a little more literally; I meant it exactly as stated. I know there are a few WinCE phones that exist, but they are so uncommon that I have never actually seen one in the real world.
The site you linked has three vendors, and I've definitely never known of anyone that has a product made by them. The MS site lists a total of 9 phones in the Americas, and at least two of those aren't available in the US.
I just wouldn't call that a "wide range" of phones.
The other poster is right. While they would end up with standards compliance, the problem is that Opera doesn't have all the IE rendering bugs. All the "designed for IE" sites wouldn't work right.
They would have to hack in all the things that make IE a bad browser before they could release it as an upgrade path from IE.
Actually, I've never seen a cellular phone that runs WinCE. Most cell phones actually run Symbian. Blackberry's run a proprietary OS. Some of the other PDA phones run PalmOS.
Since most cell phones also come with a JRE, there is very little reason to make a phone wince with WinCE.
That number is already incredibly small. Those taxable sales are not profit, they are revenue. Having revenue of $5 million is not that difficult for a moderately successful online merchant. For example, if you receive $50 in sales for each of 295 people a day, 340 days a year, that's $5,000,000. How many online retailers do you think can manage to do that?
In that situation, then I agree with you. You would have helped to orchestrate a crime, so you are accessory to that crime; you were a knowing participant. The act of sale is still not the crime, but, rather, the act of helping to commit a crime.
That act of sale does not infringe on the rights of others. A criminal act by the recipient of your goods or services may do so, however. If you were to sell plans for a gun to someone, and then someone used the plans to make a gun, and then committed a crime using it, who is at fault? The modern approach is to blame both. The problem is that only the last person in that chain actually *caused* harm.
Laws and procedures, such as this, restrict the freedoms of everyone, for the supposed reason of stopping a person from committing a crime. The issue is that the person committing the crime will ignore your law, so the law has failed. The result is simply that you have removed a freedom from everyone that would not have been a criminal anyway.
Here is the problem: restrictions through law only stop those willing to follow the law. Someone that is dedicated to causing harm will not follow the law any further than required to not be detected. It isn't that they are willing to follow the law, they are just willing to stay unnoticed long enough to do what they want, and that happens to look like following law.
Also, as you point out, the country of Iran did not attack the US. Rogue people that may have been citizens of Iran attacked. How do you justify sanctions against the country, when that country did not purpetrate the crime?
Wow, that's absolutely retarded. Are you serious that they do those sorts of things? It would seem to me that they took someone that either couldn't afford new tires, or didn't realize they had bald ones, and screwed them rather than issuing a warning and having them get it fixed. It would probably the former, which would mean they couldn't get it fixed, or were biding as much time as possible. They do this in the States all the time, too. Retarded processes, like that, are the major reason why there are so many unlicensed drivers here. I suspect that Britain is having this problem too, and that it's just about to get a lot worse.
You're right.
However, if you believe there is a fire in said crowded theater, then you have not acted with malicious intent. Likewise, if the information is true, and there is a fire, it doesn't matter if you were trying to spread panic purposefully.
If the people making those claims about Juniper believe they have creedence, they can even say them to be malicious, because they believe the claims to be true. It would not be considered libel in that case.
As many other people have posted, it is very difficult to prove libel, because the intent of the statement, as well as the validity, come into question. Juniper will have to show that the statements are false, that the posers knew they were false, and that the were posted for the purpose of being malicious toward Juniper.
I also think it's important to note that you still are free to *say* the untrue statement, knowing it is untrue, and to be malicious. Of course, you will have to deal with the legality of what happens as a result of that statement.
According to Mirriam-Webster:
Main Entry: seem
1 : to appear to the observation or understanding
2 : to give the impression of being
So, if something "seems to be" something to me, that would mean that according to what I see/know, it would appear to be that way, or at least gives implication of being so. It *is* stronger than opinion, but can still be based on opinion formed from observation.
For example, I could say that "The sky seems to be dyed blue.", and would not be making an untrue statement. The observation could lead as such:
Air is clear and water is clear.
If I dye water, it changes color.
If I dye air, it should change color.
Since air is clear, and the sky is air, it would seem to be dyed.
It's a conclusion based upon observation, that is not presented as fact. I choose this example because you can reason it out sensibly, but we all know that it is wrong. In the case of the statement about Juniper, someone was simply saying that from the available information, it was reasonable to think that there was some form of foul play, and that they believed this was the case.
That's a great response, except that I'm 100% correct. A copyright is protection for a work, a patent is protection for an invention. You document the invention by filing your design as part of the patent application, thus protecting that specific design.
Then again, perhaps for the last 250 years of patent and copyright filings, laws, and cases, we've all been wrong. However, that's preposterous; you're just ignorant.
copyright
The legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.
patent
1. 1. A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
I remember something more recent than that, actually. The inital bit involved a retest of the Michelson experiment, and then the readings taken from the US Shuttle over a period of time. Perhaps it was just wild speculation related to what you linked to. ::shrug:: It's my birthday, and I'm in no condition to have a coherent argument. :) I'd feel better if c was constant, regardless! I remember this coming up a few years ago.
The constant that I can think is the speed of light. Apparently, c has decreased over the last 100 years, as measured in the various experiments that have been performed. I haven't heard about it in a while, so it might have been disproven.
No, it would not bar software licenses; that would be copyright, not patent. The GPL uses copyright on a specific implementation of software. All software licenses that I know about would still be valid, as they all use copyright.
The telephone design would still be patentable. Just because you connect a different wire to it, this does not change the design of the device at all. I could connect a steel wire to a telephone right now, and it would function. Also, color would not effect the design of the device, as both would function exactly the same. That means the second device would violate a patent, should one have been filed on the first.
What's actually happening is that you either never had, or did not pay attention to, the history of the US Constitution and patent/copyright system. Everything about the creation of patent and copyright happens to agree with me.
Inventors would just have to do it the way that they always had done it in the US. You *gasp* patent your idea. Then you shop your idea around. Or you do it under contract, with terms so that the other party can't steal the idea; we call those "Non-Disclosure Agreements".
What inventors would have to do, in the NTP case, would be to patent their idea, and then sell the patent to NTP. Otherwise, the inventor would have to risk NTP stealing the idea and having their way with it. The same as those inventors that you mention with their start-ups. If you haven't patented the idea, then you aren't protected.
The RIM case is that NTP is abusing a broken system, because that system allowed something to be patented that was not actually eligible for patent. NTP should have been copyrighting their implementation. This is *exactly* why concept/method should not be patentable. There is no way to implement a system that does a similar function, but does not violate the NTP patent. The NTP provides *nothing* in terms of an implementation, thus being actually ineligible for a patent under the traditional patent system.
Basically, the Economist article is absolute trite bullshit. The patent system was *never* supposed to protect something like this. In the pre-Bono Copyright Act era, the USPTO would never have even allowed something like this to be patented. (Not that the Mickey Mouse Act was the cause, as it wasn't even the same part of the law, just the start of the era.)
This is either a case for copyright, or for an implementation and patent upon it. If they copyrighted it, then I could make a new thing and not be caught up with that. If they patent it, I can design a system that accomplishes the same goal, but through a different mechanism. *That* is how it is supposed to work. Really, go read up on the history of the system, rather than throwing some industry rag article out there as gospel.
People with your lack of knowledge on the topic are the large part of the problem. They don't realize how broken the system is, or how it go broken. Then they elect idiots that screw the system up for the benefit of business, in some vague manner. Their constituents don't understand what these officials just screwed up, so they don't realize it happened. As a result, the officials stay in office, screwing things up even more.
I'm with you completely on that. I didn't purposefully imply that I thought a generic idea should be able to be copyrighted, just a specific expression, as you said. I don't even like that lyrics can be copyrighted, but only the specific rendition of the song as a whole. That way another artist could cover/remix the song, and it would be fine.
Hex editors don't load the whole file, and this is likely true for WinRAR, too. They are filling a small view buffer, and have to read from the file when you move to a different position in the stream.
Most text editors will load the full file into memeory, and then load it into an editing window. So you need at least as much memory as file size. You need even more if you're loading something like XML.
Reject that idea as you wish, but IP is not a real thing. Property is a physical asset that can be seen, bought, and traded. That the US is allowing patents on concept is ridiculous; ideas were never supposed to be patentable, only the implementation. Copyright is for ideas, such as music, literature, or art.
Paying inventors is fine and dandy. For one thing, it would mean that someone actually invented something. However, NTP invented nothing; they have no product, no prototype, nothing of value.
NTP did exactly what RAMBUS did. Both are dirty, unethical, and reprehensible business practices. They took their patents, and waited for someone to come up with the same idea as their patent covered, and then they sued that someone. They add nothing to society, they advance nothing, and their practices fail against the reasons patents were created.
Patents are for your design for doing something. A copyright is for an idea. NTP could patent *their* way of doing wireless email, but nobody should hold a patent on wireless email.
NTP is completely at fault for their intentional abuse of the patent system with the goal of profiting from it. They have no product, no design, and absolutely no use.
The US was also the only western country that discarded slavery using violence. Hell, the whole emancipation was a political move by Pres. Lincoln during the Civil War, in an attempt to garner support from the South to support the war.
This is not the best example to use. Europe doesn't have slavery, either, and for longer a period than the US.
If you want civil rights as an argument, then you just have to look at the loss of freedom we endured to achieve "equality". Now we have legally required discrimination.
I love my country, and I work actively to fix what I see as wrong. We've made a lot of bad choices, and there is lot to fix today. The worst is that most people don't see the problems, think the problems are progress, or are too lazy/content to do something about the problems. The US is certainly not alone in this; it seems to be a modern world epidemic.
Not quite what I was getting at. I don't have a problem with the Java concept. There are things that I think make Java a bad choice for desktop apps, but it it's all implementation detail, and could be fixed.
However, you do have to "compile" Java, and every time you run it, for that matter. It's just a completely transparent process. You load the bytecode, and the bytecode is translated through the VM into native instructions. It's only semantically different from what you're saying, since you obviously know how it works. I'm just likening the act of compiling to having to translate the bytecode at runtime.
My point was that today, someone could package up a C/C++ platform that you could drop onto a system and have it work. The idea of POSIX was an attempt at this, and it generally works. Unfortunately, we don't really have a GUI equivalent. Nobody has really done this properly, unfortunately, which is one reason why many commercial UNIX applications come packaged into their own private environment.
I personally hate running Java applets, since the JRE plugin has a tendancy to screw up and crash the browser. If you've ever using HP Web JetAdmin, you might know what I mean. I happen to think that Java is only currently usable on server side. There are issues with Java as end user applications. It's a nice idea, but, as I mentioned in the beginning, there are a few things that need to be taken care of first.
Anyway, no I don't think something like that should replace Java. The intent of Java is different from the intent of C/C++.
Yeah, Java eliminated the need to compile, all right. Which is why you have to interpret Java to execute it on the host system, correct?
Java is object code for an imaginary processor with a translator to run it. You could liken it to just an automated compiler. You could do the same for any language. Package up your program into a "runtime environment", run all the code through the "interpreter", except swap runtime with headers/libraries and interpreter with compiler.
There's your 1 and 2 right there. You'd have one compiler, that's ported to various architectures, and one set of libraries and headers, which are also brought to each architecture. So you *would* have a compiler following your standards, and you *would* have libraries that worked the same everywhere.
You have to do all of this to bring the JRE to another platform, too.
You could very well be right. I certainly believe the same; too many parents are not taking responsibility for raising their children. There are a lot of reasons for that, some more understandable than others. Schools are certainly not going to get any better until the parents start parenting, though.
I'm not saying that it's unreasonable. My point is solely that since they did it by setting the specific standard, and saying that vendors would have to support it, that they're open to a lot more attack. Their entire procedure was called into question. It gaves a company like MS a lot more chinks in the armor to work their propaganda into.
Of course State should be able to define their own standards. However, the politicians ultimately can tell ITD what they're going to be doing and using. MS has been doing a bit too well at "helping" them to see the "problems" with OpenDocument. Had ITD gone with a requirement spec instead of naming a standard, this would be more difficult.
I agree that this is similar to what departments went through while trying to move onto IP. I agree that they got the same kind of arguments against their procedures. However, just because departments were able to overcome the propoganda last time, and got their way, it doesn't mean they will have it any easier this time.
This reeks of the same kind of propoganda that MS threw out there when the SCO lawsuits started to fly. For a while there, a lot of damage happened to the ability to adopt open source platforms and tools. It made management skeptical of the liability of doing so. Thankfully, tech departments prevailed and have largely been able to implement with the best tools, regardless of source.
I really do hope OpenDocument gets selected for State documents. It would make me quite happy to see the MS format lock-in go away. I'm already moving my municipality to OpenDocument, and it was that much easier with the State saying they were doing the same. If the State initiative gets thrown in the trash, then I have to worry about political pressure forcing me back into a MS Office world.