Colin Crawford no longer has a position directly overseeing the PC World/Macworld group. It's not a matter of a "golden parachute"; he has been moved into an executive role at IDG, the parent company of those publications -- which is where he came from in the first place.
To explain, IDG is a very large publishing company with properties and subsidiaries all around the world. It also remains privately held, something which is often touted as an advantage, given how turbulent publishing can sometimes be. The philosophy of Pat McGovern, the founder of IDG, is to take a very decentralized approach. Each publication is its own business unit, under the larger umbrella of IDG. So when I worked at InfoWorld, for example, we had our own CEO and our own vice presidents (a ridiculous number of them, in fact) -- all of whom were ultimately responsible to the Big Execs at IDG, but whom were given a certain amount of autonomy to run the business as they saw fit. IDG requires that all business units report on their financials, obviously, and they all have to explain how they plan to meet various proscribed fiscal goals for each year/quarter. If the plan doesn't add up, IDG will recommend adjustments. But, pretty much, the IDG model recognizes that the market for each content topic is going to be different and its various business units need to have flexible enough models that they can succeed in their chosen niches. The only disadvantage of this model is that IDG business units sometimes can't collaborate with each other as well as they might wish to -- they don't really share resources, so they're often reluctant to invest in something that will benefit other books as much as their own.
So, that said, Colin Crawford is no longer CEO of a business unit at IDG, but he remains an executive in the IDG umbrella organization. I understand his new title is executive vice president of online. Prior to becoming CEO of PC World/Macworld, I believe his title was senior vice president of online. So it sounds like he's kind of been given his old job back, with a little perfunctory upgrade in title.
I say good riddance. The guy sounds like a real creep. But, to be charitable, firing him probably wouldn't be the right thing to do. In a position at IDG, he no longer has any direct influence over any IDG business units. He's not sitting next to anybody's editorial. And there's evidence to suggest that he really does understand the publishing business. For example, Crawford was the architect behind the cross-company merger of Macworld and MacUser ten years ago -- and though you might have preferred one or another before the merger, it probably saved both of them at a time when the Mac market wasn't quite as hot as it is now.
Is a Honda Element an SUV? I was never much interested in this class of vehicle until a couple friends of mine, independently of each other, bought Elements. My first reaction was that it was probably the most gruesome-looking vehicle I had ever seen. After actually driving around in them on a few errands, however, I became impressed. The space in the back is really pretty efficient. It's only after you pop the seats out of the back and have to tie down a vintage moped that you realize that the little hooks to connect your tie-lines to seem to be in just the right places. And though the inside of the compartment doesn't look all industrial, sure enough you can hose out all the gasoline that leaked out of the bike and be on your way. And it really is pretty roomy back there. You could sleep in it, no problem. You could stack a lot of boxes in it. But up front, it feels like you're in a car. You're not too high up, you're not too huge, and it doesn't feel like you're in an industrial vehicle, even though you can get a 4WD option. I believe the factory-standard CD player will even play MP3 discs.
I don't know. The truth is, I don't even drive. But I thought these cars were pretty neat, once I got over what a fright they are to look at.
Awww, you just had bad luck. I once bought a new computer desk at Ikea and to get it into my studio apartment I needed to dismantle the old desk. After I had taken it apart, I realized that I no longer had the instructions on how to put it back together. No matter! I put all the screws and hardware into a plastic baggie, stacked all the melamine up against the wall, and posted an ad in the freebies section on Craigslist: "Like puzzles?" Within 24 hours it was gone.
Moral grounds are not a valid reason to pass a law
They're not? So all those laws against rape and murder are based upon some sort of socio-economic theory? Statistical analysis or something?
Re:I have CallVantage I don't understand problem?
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AT&T Dumps VOIP Customers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The posting makes it sound like AT&T has begun a process of systematically canceling its CallVantage customers' service. This is not the case; I, too, have CallVantage and it was sounding crystal clear as of five minutes ago.
What is happening is that certain CallVantage customers have always had trouble obtaining E911 service. In the past, I think what has happened is that those customers got letters saying, "We are working diligently to provide you with E911 service, but you must understand that YOU DO NOT HAVE IT RIGHT NOW AND IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO UNDERSTAND THAT. It should be here soon." Now it sounds like AT&T have had a change of heart. There is some unspecified number of customers who have not been able to obtain E911 through CallVantage to date, and AT&T now seems to be giving up on trying to get that service to them. Because of government regulations, AT&T are not allowed to provide VoIP without E911, so they really have little choice but to cancel the service for those customers.
If you live in an area/circumstance where you can't get E911 for whatever reason (which is out of your control) AT&T will no longer allow you to sign up for VoIP, nor will they allow you to continue your existing service.
Good point. And they don't have a plugin yet either. Had a lot of trouble during the 2.0 betas, too, since each new beta seemed to break the API all over again.
They would fold in two months because consumers wouldn't buy a more expensive magazine. Meaning consumers are choosing to pay less up front, but more in the long run through bad purchases. Which means, as I said, consumers are responsible as well.
We're only half arguing the same thing. You're saying "look at Consumer Reports, it can be done." I'm saying that to do it that way would mean completely changing PC World's business model to something totally unlike any business that has driven revenue at IDG before. I don't think you realize just how expensive the magazine would have to be each month to make up for the lost revenue if they decided to drop ads altogether. $30? I don't have the figures here. But as of right now the money is made from ads, not the cover price.
My point is that the money COULD be coming from the consumer, but is not.
Sure, with a different business model. Consumer Reports is not sold on the newsstands, unlike PC World. If I had to guess, I'd suspect that the Consumer Reports labs are available for various forms of private testing, as an additional revenue stream. But an outfit like PC World simply isn't set up to just announce, "the reader pays, no more ads!" Even if their content was the best in the world, they'd fold in two months.
RTFA. In this case, there was no direct pressure from advertisers. Colin Crawford, the President and CEO of PC World, claimed to get calls from Steve Jobs a lot while at MacWorld, but there's no evidence that he got one here. He just unilaterally killed the story in question. Harry McCracken didn't quit because advertisers wanted him not to run his story, he quit because his own superiors started dictating what content he could and couldn't run, for the sake of their sales plan.
ANY site, channel, newspaper, magazine, or other that has advertising has a massive, massive conflict of interest when discussing its advertisers or their products.
This is why traditionally publishing operations like PC World have essentially been split into two halves of the business: publishing and editorial.
Publishing is the umbrella under which falls operations like sales and marketing. They deal with the advertisers and generally have no contact with editorial.
Editorial produces the content and generally expects to have no contact with sales. An editor in chief, like Harry McCracken, knows his staff might do things from time to time that will ruffle the feathers of his superiors. He probably expects to be brought into the boss's office from time to time and harangued about the way a story cheesed off one of the advertisers. What he absolutely does NOT expect, however, is for the CEO to reach across the table, grab a story that's in progress, and drop it in the paper shredder. It's the biggest no-no in the book, the One Great No-No which, if you sit still for it, will probably ruin your career as an editor.
It's easy to be cynical and talk about how corrupt all media is, but let's hear it for Harry -- he did the right thing, at significant personal sacrifice. Bully for him.
As much as it is bad that corporations control (or at least influence) the media through advertising, it wouldn't go on if consumers wouldn't allow it to happen.
Unfortunately, no. The money is not coming from the consumer. PC World is going to price its magazine at a rate that will help to subsidize the cost of putting it on the newsstands (which, if you understand how that business works, is extremely wasteful) while not alienating readers. The real money then comes from advertising.
Because magazines have these two revenue sources, the formulae used to come up with cover prices and ad rates can be fairly complicated. Ads are typically sold based on the number of readers the ad will reach and the value of the reader to the advertiser. So if you raise the cover price by $2, that might decrease the effective circulation, which will end up lowering the ad rate. It's not an easy business to survive in, to be sure.
The idea of patenting math or algorithms is to indirectly suggest that somehow, the identities or theorems could somehow be different, which flies in the face of logic--in fact, is contradictory to the idea of logic itself.
Hmmmm, I think I see your point, but... if you wanted to make Coca-Cola could the formula be any different? Would any other combination of ingredients in any other quantities produce the same flavor? So Coca-Cola was "there" before the people in Atlanta ever came on the scene. Seems like that road lies madness. Conservation of mass suggests that nobody has ever really produced anything since the Big Bang.
That's what software is: Encoding mathematical operations in a computer-readable format. The human-readable source code is also nothing but an encoding of math, and even borrows much syntax from traditional math literature, modulo the limitations of standard computer character sets.
OK, and the sequence of operations used to put threads on a small piece of metal to turn it into a screw, encoded into human-readable format -- i.e. a patent -- differs from this how?
Traditional patents protect novel sequences of physical processes. Other than an overzealous application of the ivory-tower mentality of academia, why should novel sequences of mathematical processes be any different?
Running a warehouse isn't a representation of the motion of molecules, it is the motion of real molecules. If you merely describe how a warehouse should be run using mathematical formulae then you have something analagous to software, and yes, it is then just a human-understandable representation of the motion of molecules.
"Just" that, huh? I guess you make my point, then, because it's the latter that is patentable. And of course, this ignores how completely fatuous it is for you to even accept this premise. Only scientists deal in molecules. Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects. Boxes, shelves, forklifts. This is also the language of patents. They don't talk about the molecules that make up the boxes. Likewise, the language of software patents deals with the real-world outcomes of the software, not the the countless mathematical processes that are ticking away in the computer. I'm sure this must all be quite offensive to computer scientists, but this is the world we live in. This is not to say that I don't believe people are trying to patent trivial algorithms all the time -- I know they are -- but the lack of a clear standard for obviousness in software patents seems to me to be a different issue than that of whether software patents should exist at all.
Note that running software involves a device for executing encoded mathematical representations, aka a computer, which is a piece of hardware and patentable.
Really? So you designed and invented a computer, and you've patented that. And I write some software that makes your computer actually do something, so you must own that, too, then -- right? Because it falls under your patent: The computer is the only invention here. But no, you're claiming that no software should be patentable at all, I guess. But that seems pretty odd, considering that when you put the last drop of solder onto your computer, plug it into an AC outlet, and switch it on, it does... absolutely nothing.
My Windows Media Center box comes with a remote control that can be used to turn the computer off and on. It communicates with a USB receiver that has the ability to bring the computer out of sleep (including S3). Apparently it's that USB receiver that handles scheduled wake-up/sleep, as well. So when I'm done using the computer as a PC, I hit the sleep button and walk away. It will wake itself up to record my shows and then go back to sleep.
I'm still waiting for Ubuntu to sleep reliably on my laptop. It seems reaaallll close now, and I've had complete success once or twice, but inexplicably it will fail the very next time I try.
The average 5-year old is smart enough to figure this out.
So really, the problem is not necessarily software patents, but the fact that there doesn't seem to be an effective standard for obviousness for software patents. Which I guess is what the Supreme Court hopes to rectify?
algorithms and software (just a bunch of algorithms ) are just representations of a mental process.
As soon as you allow them to be patented you make thought itself against the law.
If I've got an RS-232 cable plugged into a computer and its nothing more than few lengths of copper wire, then I run a piece of software on the computer and now there's electrical current on pins 2, 8, and 11 of the cable, I'd say that's caused a change in the physical world. It's not just a "mental process," any more than a [patentable] method of putting threads on a screw is a mental process.
We don't live in the Matrix. Out there in the real world, people use computers for actual work. They store data and perform operations upon that data that yield new datasets that did not exist previously. I don't really see how a process that takes an information resource and adds value with computer software is substantially different than any process that takes a raw material like iron or petroleum and adds value to that (and on up the value chain).
Software is typed up stuff, written in a language or languages, and as such, is more akin to written books or articles or say like musical scores, and should only be allowed copyright, not patents.
The test for what can be protected under copyright is not "typed up stuff." Recipes, for example, cannot be copyrighted. Recipe books can be copyrighted -- which might include copious explanatory text, photos, and all sorts of other things -- but a list of ingredients and steps of how to put an individual meal together cannot. Neither can an instruction manual explaining how to build a model kit.
Recipes can, however, be patented. Mull that one over for a while.
Oh yeah... and you will observe that patents are themselves nothing more than "typed up stuff."
I'm curious... are those really T1s per se? To the point other posters have made, true point-to-point T1 lines are a somewhat outdated -- and hence expensive -- technology. Is the product that Speakeasy is selling you truly a T1 using that class of technology, or is it something like Frame Relay with enforced, guaranteed bandwidth? I know I was sold something that was called a T1 in the mid-1990s that was actually Frame Relay. To a certain extent, to me as a customer it made no difference. But if someone is really shopping for something that has to be a real, honest-to-gosh T1 line, maybe the price hasn't gone down.
I think all this talk about the "pact with the Devil" Toshiba struck by bringing in Chinese manufacturers is wayyy overstated. Grab a couple things from around your house -- anything -- and look for the label that says where it was made. My money says China.
Fair enough. But I would answer it this way: Anybody who spends a lot of time fretting over whether to learn Java or C# is missing the point. If you understand programming, it's not hard to learn both. And while you're at it, you should also pick up C and C++, in addition to Python and/or Perl. And whatever else you feel like. Experiment with things like functional languages while you're at it. These are all just tools. Some university-level computer science programs don't teach any programming languages. The language you use to implement your ideas is a secondary concern.
Similarly, the field of database design is choked with so-called DBAs who learned their trade using one tool to the exclusion of all others. Most of them can be forgiven for this, because that's how many database classes and books approach the problem. You're not taught databases... you're taught SQL. And since a lot of SQL is nonstandard, that means you learn PL/SQL or T-SQL. I'd argue that this is the wrong way to do it. There's a lot of science behind relational databases dating back decades, and DBAs too often ignore a lot of the best practices because they don't really understand relational theory and how databases work.
So back to your point: Sure, anybody who really understood database theory might have such a strong adverse reaction to MySQL that they'd never use it for anything. Then again, if they really know what they're doing that well, then they'll probably understand the application they're trying to build well enough to know if it's likely to grow beyond the capabilities of MySQL. If it's not likely to do so, then they might make the conscious decision to use the more popular tool because of its wide availability, strong community and ready support. To me, an Oracle DBA who doesn't also learn how to use MySQL is just being narrow-minded. (He should also understand the drawbacks and advantages of DB2 and MS-SQL, too, whether or not he ever intends to contract out to work on them.)
Or, to put it another way: When the only tool you have is a hammer, every job starts to look like a nail. And treating them that way might work, superficially, but there are all kinds of nails out there. It's not always about bringing the heaviest hammer you can find.
Movies do not have this regulation. All media or none.
Here's a simple test. Would you have this regulation apply to books? Are there some books -- and I'm talking about the kind with just words in them, now, no pictures -- that are not only inappropriate for anyone under the age of 17, but that should be illegal to sell to those under 17?
Here's me, the pimple-faced kid with the cracking voice from The Simpsons, and I'm behind the counter at a bookstore. Lisa walks up with a copy of Tropic of Cancer and I ring her up. WOOP! WOOP! Alarms sound, red lights flash, and out come Chief Wiggum and the boys to throw me in cuffs.
Sounds funny, but this sort of thing regularly happens to comic book stores. Comic books aren't seen as "books," so there's not the same stigma attached to banning them. So in certain communities, you have people hanging around comic book stores waiting for some kid to buy a copy of Legend of the Overfiend. When the purchase is made, in come the undercover agents and they take the kid behind the counter to jail. He's charged with a crime and ends up having to pay fines.
And the funny thing is, there's no law on the books specifically prohibiting the sale of adult comics to minors. In fact, there isn't even a real ratings system. (Don't talk to me about the Comics Code -- it hasn't had any teeth since the early 80s.) These arrests are based on so-called community standards, which legal precedent says is the benchmark for determining "obscenity."
This is how censorship starts. "What? Who me? I didn't censor anything! I don't even have the power to censor these products. I'm not the government. I'm just a lowly citizen." No, but what you did was hang the risk of arrest over anyone who sells the products, so it becomes to prohibitive for retailers even to stock them. That cuts into sales, especially in such a low-profit segment as comic books. And sooner or later, the company that produced the material to begin with can't support the operation anymore, and the offending material disappears.
Back to books. You think they didn't try it with Tropic of Cancer? Oh hell yeah, they did. We've been fortunate that, over the years, the efforts of various individuals and groups -- not least of whom, Holocaust survivors -- have put an even bigger stigma on book-banning than the stigma around selling books full of naughty things.
The real shame of it is that it's so much easier to want to ban videogames and movies than books because, I suspect, most people figure kids today aren't going to read books anyway. It sickens me to think that people don't realize how totally fucking unacceptable that excuse is, on so many levels.
YES, there is material that is not appropriate for minors. Where you draw that line, however, is fairly arbitrary. Parents should be raising their kids, right on through the teenage years. My own folks took a fairly laissez-faire approach to my adolescence, and through my peer group I got exposed to lot of eyebrow-raising ideas and situations, but that doesn't mean I was raised by wolves. On the other hand, if the government would have stepped in and said, "This is for you, this is not for you"... I can guarantee you that I would have struck back in some way. And, ironically, I would have done it while being a much more ignorant person, having had blinders put on by the government.
Bottom line, the idea that we're going to have a wooden cut-out of Chief Wiggum with his hand up and a sign that says "You must be at least THIS tall to watch this movie," while it may be comforting for a lot of scared parents, is not only silly, it's dangerous.
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Colin Crawford no longer has a position directly overseeing the PC World/Macworld group. It's not a matter of a "golden parachute"; he has been moved into an executive role at IDG, the parent company of those publications -- which is where he came from in the first place.
To explain, IDG is a very large publishing company with properties and subsidiaries all around the world. It also remains privately held, something which is often touted as an advantage, given how turbulent publishing can sometimes be. The philosophy of Pat McGovern, the founder of IDG, is to take a very decentralized approach. Each publication is its own business unit, under the larger umbrella of IDG. So when I worked at InfoWorld, for example, we had our own CEO and our own vice presidents (a ridiculous number of them, in fact) -- all of whom were ultimately responsible to the Big Execs at IDG, but whom were given a certain amount of autonomy to run the business as they saw fit. IDG requires that all business units report on their financials, obviously, and they all have to explain how they plan to meet various proscribed fiscal goals for each year/quarter. If the plan doesn't add up, IDG will recommend adjustments. But, pretty much, the IDG model recognizes that the market for each content topic is going to be different and its various business units need to have flexible enough models that they can succeed in their chosen niches. The only disadvantage of this model is that IDG business units sometimes can't collaborate with each other as well as they might wish to -- they don't really share resources, so they're often reluctant to invest in something that will benefit other books as much as their own.
So, that said, Colin Crawford is no longer CEO of a business unit at IDG, but he remains an executive in the IDG umbrella organization. I understand his new title is executive vice president of online. Prior to becoming CEO of PC World/Macworld, I believe his title was senior vice president of online. So it sounds like he's kind of been given his old job back, with a little perfunctory upgrade in title.
I say good riddance. The guy sounds like a real creep. But, to be charitable, firing him probably wouldn't be the right thing to do. In a position at IDG, he no longer has any direct influence over any IDG business units. He's not sitting next to anybody's editorial. And there's evidence to suggest that he really does understand the publishing business. For example, Crawford was the architect behind the cross-company merger of Macworld and MacUser ten years ago -- and though you might have preferred one or another before the merger, it probably saved both of them at a time when the Mac market wasn't quite as hot as it is now.
Is a Honda Element an SUV? I was never much interested in this class of vehicle until a couple friends of mine, independently of each other, bought Elements. My first reaction was that it was probably the most gruesome-looking vehicle I had ever seen. After actually driving around in them on a few errands, however, I became impressed. The space in the back is really pretty efficient. It's only after you pop the seats out of the back and have to tie down a vintage moped that you realize that the little hooks to connect your tie-lines to seem to be in just the right places. And though the inside of the compartment doesn't look all industrial, sure enough you can hose out all the gasoline that leaked out of the bike and be on your way. And it really is pretty roomy back there. You could sleep in it, no problem. You could stack a lot of boxes in it. But up front, it feels like you're in a car. You're not too high up, you're not too huge, and it doesn't feel like you're in an industrial vehicle, even though you can get a 4WD option. I believe the factory-standard CD player will even play MP3 discs.
I don't know. The truth is, I don't even drive. But I thought these cars were pretty neat, once I got over what a fright they are to look at.
...that won't happen until "God Emperor Jar-Jar."
Awww, you just had bad luck. I once bought a new computer desk at Ikea and to get it into my studio apartment I needed to dismantle the old desk. After I had taken it apart, I realized that I no longer had the instructions on how to put it back together. No matter! I put all the screws and hardware into a plastic baggie, stacked all the melamine up against the wall, and posted an ad in the freebies section on Craigslist: "Like puzzles?" Within 24 hours it was gone.
They're not? So all those laws against rape and murder are based upon some sort of socio-economic theory? Statistical analysis or something?
The posting makes it sound like AT&T has begun a process of systematically canceling its CallVantage customers' service. This is not the case; I, too, have CallVantage and it was sounding crystal clear as of five minutes ago.
What is happening is that certain CallVantage customers have always had trouble obtaining E911 service. In the past, I think what has happened is that those customers got letters saying, "We are working diligently to provide you with E911 service, but you must understand that YOU DO NOT HAVE IT RIGHT NOW AND IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO UNDERSTAND THAT. It should be here soon." Now it sounds like AT&T have had a change of heart. There is some unspecified number of customers who have not been able to obtain E911 through CallVantage to date, and AT&T now seems to be giving up on trying to get that service to them. Because of government regulations, AT&T are not allowed to provide VoIP without E911, so they really have little choice but to cancel the service for those customers.
If you live in an area/circumstance where you can't get E911 for whatever reason (which is out of your control) AT&T will no longer allow you to sign up for VoIP, nor will they allow you to continue your existing service.
Good point. And they don't have a plugin yet either. Had a lot of trouble during the 2.0 betas, too, since each new beta seemed to break the API all over again.
We're only half arguing the same thing. You're saying "look at Consumer Reports, it can be done." I'm saying that to do it that way would mean completely changing PC World's business model to something totally unlike any business that has driven revenue at IDG before. I don't think you realize just how expensive the magazine would have to be each month to make up for the lost revenue if they decided to drop ads altogether. $30? I don't have the figures here. But as of right now the money is made from ads, not the cover price.
Sure, with a different business model. Consumer Reports is not sold on the newsstands, unlike PC World. If I had to guess, I'd suspect that the Consumer Reports labs are available for various forms of private testing, as an additional revenue stream. But an outfit like PC World simply isn't set up to just announce, "the reader pays, no more ads!" Even if their content was the best in the world, they'd fold in two months.
RTFA. In this case, there was no direct pressure from advertisers. Colin Crawford, the President and CEO of PC World, claimed to get calls from Steve Jobs a lot while at MacWorld, but there's no evidence that he got one here. He just unilaterally killed the story in question. Harry McCracken didn't quit because advertisers wanted him not to run his story, he quit because his own superiors started dictating what content he could and couldn't run, for the sake of their sales plan.
This is why traditionally publishing operations like PC World have essentially been split into two halves of the business: publishing and editorial.
Publishing is the umbrella under which falls operations like sales and marketing. They deal with the advertisers and generally have no contact with editorial.
Editorial produces the content and generally expects to have no contact with sales. An editor in chief, like Harry McCracken, knows his staff might do things from time to time that will ruffle the feathers of his superiors. He probably expects to be brought into the boss's office from time to time and harangued about the way a story cheesed off one of the advertisers. What he absolutely does NOT expect, however, is for the CEO to reach across the table, grab a story that's in progress, and drop it in the paper shredder. It's the biggest no-no in the book, the One Great No-No which, if you sit still for it, will probably ruin your career as an editor.
It's easy to be cynical and talk about how corrupt all media is, but let's hear it for Harry -- he did the right thing, at significant personal sacrifice. Bully for him.
Unfortunately, no. The money is not coming from the consumer. PC World is going to price its magazine at a rate that will help to subsidize the cost of putting it on the newsstands (which, if you understand how that business works, is extremely wasteful) while not alienating readers. The real money then comes from advertising.
Because magazines have these two revenue sources, the formulae used to come up with cover prices and ad rates can be fairly complicated. Ads are typically sold based on the number of readers the ad will reach and the value of the reader to the advertiser. So if you raise the cover price by $2, that might decrease the effective circulation, which will end up lowering the ad rate. It's not an easy business to survive in, to be sure.
Harry was the editor in chief, actually. Top guy. An executive editor, if they had one, would report to him.
Hmmmm, I think I see your point, but... if you wanted to make Coca-Cola could the formula be any different? Would any other combination of ingredients in any other quantities produce the same flavor? So Coca-Cola was "there" before the people in Atlanta ever came on the scene. Seems like that road lies madness. Conservation of mass suggests that nobody has ever really produced anything since the Big Bang.
OK, and the sequence of operations used to put threads on a small piece of metal to turn it into a screw, encoded into human-readable format -- i.e. a patent -- differs from this how?
Traditional patents protect novel sequences of physical processes. Other than an overzealous application of the ivory-tower mentality of academia, why should novel sequences of mathematical processes be any different?
"Just" that, huh? I guess you make my point, then, because it's the latter that is patentable. And of course, this ignores how completely fatuous it is for you to even accept this premise. Only scientists deal in molecules. Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects. Boxes, shelves, forklifts. This is also the language of patents. They don't talk about the molecules that make up the boxes. Likewise, the language of software patents deals with the real-world outcomes of the software, not the the countless mathematical processes that are ticking away in the computer. I'm sure this must all be quite offensive to computer scientists, but this is the world we live in. This is not to say that I don't believe people are trying to patent trivial algorithms all the time -- I know they are -- but the lack of a clear standard for obviousness in software patents seems to me to be a different issue than that of whether software patents should exist at all.
Really? So you designed and invented a computer, and you've patented that. And I write some software that makes your computer actually do something, so you must own that, too, then -- right? Because it falls under your patent: The computer is the only invention here. But no, you're claiming that no software should be patentable at all, I guess. But that seems pretty odd, considering that when you put the last drop of solder onto your computer, plug it into an AC outlet, and switch it on, it doesMy Windows Media Center box comes with a remote control that can be used to turn the computer off and on. It communicates with a USB receiver that has the ability to bring the computer out of sleep (including S3). Apparently it's that USB receiver that handles scheduled wake-up/sleep, as well. So when I'm done using the computer as a PC, I hit the sleep button and walk away. It will wake itself up to record my shows and then go back to sleep.
I'm still waiting for Ubuntu to sleep reliably on my laptop. It seems reaaallll close now, and I've had complete success once or twice, but inexplicably it will fail the very next time I try.
So really, the problem is not necessarily software patents, but the fact that there doesn't seem to be an effective standard for obviousness for software patents. Which I guess is what the Supreme Court hopes to rectify?
If I've got an RS-232 cable plugged into a computer and its nothing more than few lengths of copper wire, then I run a piece of software on the computer and now there's electrical current on pins 2, 8, and 11 of the cable, I'd say that's caused a change in the physical world. It's not just a "mental process," any more than a [patentable] method of putting threads on a screw is a mental process.
We don't live in the Matrix. Out there in the real world, people use computers for actual work. They store data and perform operations upon that data that yield new datasets that did not exist previously. I don't really see how a process that takes an information resource and adds value with computer software is substantially different than any process that takes a raw material like iron or petroleum and adds value to that (and on up the value chain).
Can you show us a plausible proof for that assertion?
By your logic, running a warehouse is nothing more than a human-understandable representation of the motion of molecules.
The test for what can be protected under copyright is not "typed up stuff." Recipes, for example, cannot be copyrighted. Recipe books can be copyrighted -- which might include copious explanatory text, photos, and all sorts of other things -- but a list of ingredients and steps of how to put an individual meal together cannot. Neither can an instruction manual explaining how to build a model kit.
Recipes can, however, be patented. Mull that one over for a while.
Oh yeah ... and you will observe that patents are themselves nothing more than "typed up stuff."
I'm curious ... are those really T1s per se? To the point other posters have made, true point-to-point T1 lines are a somewhat outdated -- and hence expensive -- technology. Is the product that Speakeasy is selling you truly a T1 using that class of technology, or is it something like Frame Relay with enforced, guaranteed bandwidth? I know I was sold something that was called a T1 in the mid-1990s that was actually Frame Relay. To a certain extent, to me as a customer it made no difference. But if someone is really shopping for something that has to be a real, honest-to-gosh T1 line, maybe the price hasn't gone down.
I think all this talk about the "pact with the Devil" Toshiba struck by bringing in Chinese manufacturers is wayyy overstated. Grab a couple things from around your house -- anything -- and look for the label that says where it was made. My money says China.
Fair enough. But I would answer it this way: Anybody who spends a lot of time fretting over whether to learn Java or C# is missing the point. If you understand programming, it's not hard to learn both. And while you're at it, you should also pick up C and C++, in addition to Python and/or Perl. And whatever else you feel like. Experiment with things like functional languages while you're at it. These are all just tools. Some university-level computer science programs don't teach any programming languages. The language you use to implement your ideas is a secondary concern.
... you're taught SQL. And since a lot of SQL is nonstandard, that means you learn PL/SQL or T-SQL. I'd argue that this is the wrong way to do it. There's a lot of science behind relational databases dating back decades, and DBAs too often ignore a lot of the best practices because they don't really understand relational theory and how databases work.
Similarly, the field of database design is choked with so-called DBAs who learned their trade using one tool to the exclusion of all others. Most of them can be forgiven for this, because that's how many database classes and books approach the problem. You're not taught databases
So back to your point: Sure, anybody who really understood database theory might have such a strong adverse reaction to MySQL that they'd never use it for anything. Then again, if they really know what they're doing that well, then they'll probably understand the application they're trying to build well enough to know if it's likely to grow beyond the capabilities of MySQL. If it's not likely to do so, then they might make the conscious decision to use the more popular tool because of its wide availability, strong community and ready support. To me, an Oracle DBA who doesn't also learn how to use MySQL is just being narrow-minded. (He should also understand the drawbacks and advantages of DB2 and MS-SQL, too, whether or not he ever intends to contract out to work on them.)
Or, to put it another way: When the only tool you have is a hammer, every job starts to look like a nail. And treating them that way might work, superficially, but there are all kinds of nails out there. It's not always about bringing the heaviest hammer you can find.
Here's a simple test. Would you have this regulation apply to books? Are there some books -- and I'm talking about the kind with just words in them, now, no pictures -- that are not only inappropriate for anyone under the age of 17, but that should be illegal to sell to those under 17?
Here's me, the pimple-faced kid with the cracking voice from The Simpsons, and I'm behind the counter at a bookstore. Lisa walks up with a copy of Tropic of Cancer and I ring her up. WOOP! WOOP! Alarms sound, red lights flash, and out come Chief Wiggum and the boys to throw me in cuffs.
Sounds funny, but this sort of thing regularly happens to comic book stores. Comic books aren't seen as "books," so there's not the same stigma attached to banning them. So in certain communities, you have people hanging around comic book stores waiting for some kid to buy a copy of Legend of the Overfiend. When the purchase is made, in come the undercover agents and they take the kid behind the counter to jail. He's charged with a crime and ends up having to pay fines.
And the funny thing is, there's no law on the books specifically prohibiting the sale of adult comics to minors. In fact, there isn't even a real ratings system. (Don't talk to me about the Comics Code -- it hasn't had any teeth since the early 80s.) These arrests are based on so-called community standards, which legal precedent says is the benchmark for determining "obscenity."
This is how censorship starts. "What? Who me? I didn't censor anything! I don't even have the power to censor these products. I'm not the government. I'm just a lowly citizen." No, but what you did was hang the risk of arrest over anyone who sells the products, so it becomes to prohibitive for retailers even to stock them. That cuts into sales, especially in such a low-profit segment as comic books. And sooner or later, the company that produced the material to begin with can't support the operation anymore, and the offending material disappears.
Back to books. You think they didn't try it with Tropic of Cancer? Oh hell yeah, they did. We've been fortunate that, over the years, the efforts of various individuals and groups -- not least of whom, Holocaust survivors -- have put an even bigger stigma on book-banning than the stigma around selling books full of naughty things.
The real shame of it is that it's so much easier to want to ban videogames and movies than books because, I suspect, most people figure kids today aren't going to read books anyway. It sickens me to think that people don't realize how totally fucking unacceptable that excuse is, on so many levels.
YES, there is material that is not appropriate for minors. Where you draw that line, however, is fairly arbitrary. Parents should be raising their kids, right on through the teenage years. My own folks took a fairly laissez-faire approach to my adolescence, and through my peer group I got exposed to lot of eyebrow-raising ideas and situations, but that doesn't mean I was raised by wolves. On the other hand, if the government would have stepped in and said, "This is for you, this is not for you" ... I can guarantee you that I would have struck back in some way. And, ironically, I would have done it while being a much more ignorant person, having had blinders put on by the government.
Bottom line, the idea that we're going to have a wooden cut-out of Chief Wiggum with his hand up and a sign that says "You must be at least THIS tall to watch this movie," while it may be comforting for a lot of scared parents, is not only silly, it's dangerous.