I don't think that there is anything wrong in an inventor selling rights to his or her invention to somebody else. That's not the part I am complaining about.
I have some problem with the idea of sitting on patents, never intending to develop them, but only preventing others from developing them. It seems like a dog-in-the-manger attitude to me. However, I can see that there might be circumstances where this could be a useful feature FOR A LIMITED TIME. And I think that 17 years, or whatever a patent is good for, might have fit the definition of a "limited time" a century ago, but it is eternal, for all practical purposes, in today's technological world.
The thing I have real difficulty with is "submarine" patents. It's irrelevant whether the owner of the patent is the inventor or somebody else he sold the invention to. What I find despicable is the practice of deliberately waiting until somebody else INDEPENDENTLY invents the same thing, FURTHER waiting until they have invested a lot of money in developing this idea, and only then revealing that you have a prior claim on the technology.
And sure, it's just as despicable when IBM or SCO does it as when NTP does it.
It's not really like buying houses and holding them until they appreciate in value at all. For one thing, when you buy property, you buy it FROM somebody. When you think of an idea, sometimes you do get it by hearing it from somebody, but other times you get it by thinking it up all by yourself. Absolutely, if somebody tells you an idea, then you go on to develop it yourself, you do owe something to the person who told it to you (depending on the circumstances, it may be royalties, or it may be a duty to acknowledge them, or it may be just gratitude, but that's irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make).
Imagine, however, if land ownership were something more like what goes on in the world of ideas. Some land is owned by people or corporations, and other land is just open wilderness. You get ownership of the wilderness by putting in stakes to mark your claim. So some people stake out land, but the stakes are sort of hidden, so that they are very hard to find. They then wait until somebody else stakes that same claim. Then they wait until that other person clears the land and builds a farm, and only then do they come out and show that their stakes were put in first and so the farm belongs to them.
Should people be allowed to stake claims? Sure! Should they be able to sell their staked claims? Sure! Should people be allowed to just hold the land until it appreciates in value? Sure! Should the earlier stakes invalidate the later stakes to the same land? Sure! But should people who stake claims, then don't warn other pioneers who stake the same claim, and wait until they have invested a lot in making the land into a useful farm before revealing that they have first rights to it deserve to profit from that business method? Not in my opinion.
Many patents do *not* "DISCLOSE something valuable". They STAKE A CLAIM to something valuable, but this business method DEPENDS on somebody else figuring it out themselves WITHOUT using any information disclosed by the patent. If nobody did that (and assuming they had no intention of using or licencing the patent themselves), the patent would be worthless.
But why should they be able to make any money out of it at all? The business model does NOT involve inventing something for anyone to use. It is completely about ambushing somebody else. Why should somebody have a right to make money by ambushing people?
Yes, if they were IP *CREATORS*, then absolutely they should be able to make money from their creations, but they're not. The whole business model DEPENDS on somebody else independently inventing the IP that these people have staked out for themselves.
The problem is that NTP is *not* "teaching the public how to do things that might otherwise remain secret." They buy the patents, WAIT until somebody *else* completely independently invents the same thing, then pop up and sue them.
I still think that patents ought to be like land grants in pioneer days: Once you got some land, you had to clear it and build something on it within a year or two, otherwise the grant lapsed. (Okay, I'm an engineer, not a history student, and I might be misremembering, or my imagination might be making this all up). But I think patents that the patent holder or licencee is not developing at all should lapse after a year or two.
And what are you going to do when you have to change that password in 4 weeks? Or, if you can come up with an equally good one, what about the time after that? What about the tenth time you have to do it, in less than a year?
And yes, in another thread, people have pointed out that on SOME systems you can just change your password 20 times in a row and get back to the complicated phrase you were using, but on other systems, the server will force you to change your password every 4 weeks, will not let you reuse any of your previous 20 passwords, and will not let you make password changes more often than once per day.
I have about 4, EXCEPT FOR WORK. At work, they require changing passwords every month or so. So now, having used up all my imaginative ones, I use fairly easy-to-remember (and so easy-to-guess) passwords at work. Somehow, they don't seem to realize that by forcing me into the situation where I *can't* have a password that is both obscure and easy for me to remember, they are making the system LESS secure, rather than nore secure.
Fans have been extremely hostile towards the Wesley Crusher character (and some of it seems to have been directed towards Wil). Yet my kids thought Wesley was WONDERFUL. I think I've figured out why:
Many fans were teenagers or even adults, and they were looking up to, and imagining themselves as, the captain or the other officers on the bridge. "This is what I want to be when I grow up" and that kind of thing. To them, Wesley was this annoying younger kid, and they resented his presence in their fantasy world.
My kids were much younger at the time. For them, WESLEY was the character to look up to. Wesley was what they wanted to be when they got older. Wesley was the character they admired. They couldn't even imagine themselves as adults, as Star Fleet officers. Their fantasy was to be Wesley, to be a teenager on a spaceship, to be the one who was able to save the ship when even the grown-ups didn't know what to do.
I think that the article does answer this question, when it says "Language experience causes neural changes. One hypothesis, native language neural commitment (NLNC), proposes that language learning produces dedicated neural networks that code the patterns of native-language speech. As these networks develop, they make it easier for new speech elements and patterns to be learned if they are consistent with the existing patterns, but place constraints on the learning of foreign-language patterns. NLNC might explain the closing of the 'sensitive period' for language learning; once a certain amount of learning has occurred, neural commitment interferes with the learning of new languages so they cannot be learned as easily."
I think the "sensitive period" referred to is the period from birth to about age 11. If you learn a second language before about 11, you can learn to speak it like a native. If you learn one AFTER age 11 or so, you will always have an accent when you speak that language.
Syntax and word meanings, which are sort of higher layer protocols, seem to be processed under more conscious control (i.e. more brain software, less neural-net firmware) than phonology, so it's certainly possible for people to learn languages later in life and speak them completely grammatically and fluently, even though they have an accent.
So, in answer to your question, the problem is not the way the subjects are presented in high school (although that may be a problem, too). The problem is simply our biology. Our language facility is programmable up to the critical age, and becomes much less so afterwards. Presumably, learning languages that are similar to ones you alraedy know is easier, because you can reuse some of the circuits you have already built in your brain.
Wow! I like that explanation. I don't think I've ever heard of the "Popperian criterion of good law" before, but this is a concept we should all beome aware of.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I've always understood that a "troll" was a post made with the SOLE purpose of getting a reaction from people. In other words, if somebody is actually expressing their own opinion (whether or not it is labelled as such), it is not a troll. If someone actually believes what they are writing, it might be flamebait, but it's not a troll.
There's a simple solution. The government could issue licenses for encryption to those who have given them the keys (or whatever alternate conditions they decide to impose).
It's simple enough to build a still, so anybody can do it. Lots of huge businesses depend on distillation to produce their product. Government couldn't possibly outlaw stills and prevent me from making my own booze, right? Well, no: at least where I am, and from what I remember my high school chemistry teacher telling us oh-so-many years ago, there are lots of licenced stills, but building one of my own without a licence will land me before a judge.
In that case, it won't be long at all before the use of encryption becomes illegal. Simply using encryption will be a enough to put you behind bars, regardless of what you are encrypting.
As I read through the comments on this article, there are a few that seem to indicate that the poster was completely clueless. And then, when I look more closely, I see that all of them were posted by the same person.
Yes, I know that I shouldn't post replies like this, but this is getting annoying. Quite a few people have posted explanations about what this technology could be useful for. Make an effort to understand it, instead of continuing to post "I don't understand" comments.
You said: "Noone's going to install dedicated IBM crypto hardware in their mailservers. No company is going to invest big bucks in a mailserver just so it can run 100% CPU utilization all the time for no good reason. That costs actual real world money, and continues to cost in power usage."
That's absolutely right, and that's the whole POINT of POW tokens. If you are going to send one or two emails, it won't bother you all that much that your computer has to perform a few seconds of computation before your email gets accepted. If you are a spammer and you want to send a MILLION emails, then your computer would have to perform a few million seconds of computation, which would either slow you down tremendously OR force you to pay real money to buy lots of fast computers and power them.
The problem with the CURRENT model of email is that the sender does not have to pay anything to send spam, so they can send millions of them, and it's still worthwhile if they get one reply in ten thousand attempts. But if they had to pay something to send each spam, they would send less.
Junk snail mail senders have to pay for postage, and so, even though they may be annoying, they are not the same kind of problem as spammers are. They tend to send out flyers only for things that they expect to get SOME response for.
You also said "So spammers spam each other (or themselves from a different host) and have an endless supply of RPOW tokens." Again, you've missed the point. If they spam each other, then yes, the recipient now has the ability to send out the same amount of spam, but the sender has used up his tokens by transferring them to the sender. No new POW tokens are created by this process. If I give you $10 and you give me $10, we're NOT both $10 dollars richer -- what I gave you, I no longer have. And if we pass the $10 bill back and forth 100 times, we haven't somehow created $1000 for each of us to spend; we still have the same amount of money that we started with.
And your point about us not wanting secure hardware on our machines is irrelevant. Nothing in this idea implies that you should have secure hardware on your machine. It can all be done in software, open source software (or any other kind).
"I'm pretty sure that you can hop on competitors towers (roam feature) as long as you're using CDMA..."
For emergency 911 calls, yes. For any other calls, only if the two companies have a roaming agreement (i.e. company A provides the service and bills company B, which bills you). I'm under the impression that two companies in the same country rarely have roaming agreements with each other.
So, as long as the technology and the frequency bands match, yes, TECHNICALLY you can hop on the competitor's tower, but administratively the call will not be put through.
In a small company, it's reasonable to say "either trust me, or get rid of me". I used to work in a 5-developers-and-a-secretary company that was like that, and nobody abused the trust.
In a larger company (the one I'm in now has about 2000 employees), you have to assume that there WILL be employees who will be stupid, who will be malicious, etc., etc., so you probably NEED to have some central control.
And that is one of the reasons why I GREATLY prefer working for small companies.
Was there a parent to this post that got modded down into oblivion or something? Or was this poster really responding like this to the person who said that he appreciated learning about Egyptian culture from this interview?
Of course, by the time you are much slower than the surrounding traffic, it is impossible for the tailgater to change lanes to zip around you (since he didn't leave himself any acceleration room). I've done this sort of thing, slowing down gradually in front of a tailgater, right to the point of a complete stop. Funny, though, when I accelerated afterwards, he didn't follow me nearly as closely.
Slashdot Mirror
It's difficult to RTFA when it's slashdotted already.
I don't think that there is anything wrong in an inventor selling rights to his or her invention to somebody else. That's not the part I am complaining about.
I have some problem with the idea of sitting on patents, never intending to develop them, but only preventing others from developing them. It seems like a dog-in-the-manger attitude to me. However, I can see that there might be circumstances where this could be a useful feature FOR A LIMITED TIME. And I think that 17 years, or whatever a patent is good for, might have fit the definition of a "limited time" a century ago, but it is eternal, for all practical purposes, in today's technological world.
The thing I have real difficulty with is "submarine" patents. It's irrelevant whether the owner of the patent is the inventor or somebody else he sold the invention to. What I find despicable is the practice of deliberately waiting until somebody else INDEPENDENTLY invents the same thing, FURTHER waiting until they have invested a lot of money in developing this idea, and only then revealing that you have a prior claim on the technology.
And sure, it's just as despicable when IBM or SCO does it as when NTP does it.
It's not really like buying houses and holding them until they appreciate in value at all. For one thing, when you buy property, you buy it FROM somebody. When you think of an idea, sometimes you do get it by hearing it from somebody, but other times you get it by thinking it up all by yourself. Absolutely, if somebody tells you an idea, then you go on to develop it yourself, you do owe something to the person who told it to you (depending on the circumstances, it may be royalties, or it may be a duty to acknowledge them, or it may be just gratitude, but that's irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make).
Imagine, however, if land ownership were something more like what goes on in the world of ideas. Some land is owned by people or corporations, and other land is just open wilderness. You get ownership of the wilderness by putting in stakes to mark your claim. So some people stake out land, but the stakes are sort of hidden, so that they are very hard to find. They then wait until somebody else stakes that same claim. Then they wait until that other person clears the land and builds a farm, and only then do they come out and show that their stakes were put in first and so the farm belongs to them.
Should people be allowed to stake claims? Sure! Should they be able to sell their staked claims? Sure! Should people be allowed to just hold the land until it appreciates in value? Sure! Should the earlier stakes invalidate the later stakes to the same land? Sure! But should people who stake claims, then don't warn other pioneers who stake the same claim, and wait until they have invested a lot in making the land into a useful farm before revealing that they have first rights to it deserve to profit from that business method? Not in my opinion.
Many patents do *not* "DISCLOSE something valuable". They STAKE A CLAIM to something valuable, but this business method DEPENDS on somebody else figuring it out themselves WITHOUT using any information disclosed by the patent. If nobody did that (and assuming they had no intention of using or licencing the patent themselves), the patent would be worthless.
But why should they be able to make any money out of it at all? The business model does NOT involve inventing something for anyone to use. It is completely about ambushing somebody else. Why should somebody have a right to make money by ambushing people?
Yes, if they were IP *CREATORS*, then absolutely they should be able to make money from their creations, but they're not. The whole business model DEPENDS on somebody else independently inventing the IP that these people have staked out for themselves.
The problem is that NTP is *not* "teaching the public how to do things that might otherwise remain secret." They buy the patents, WAIT until somebody *else* completely independently invents the same thing, then pop up and sue them.
I still think that patents ought to be like land grants in pioneer days: Once you got some land, you had to clear it and build something on it within a year or two, otherwise the grant lapsed. (Okay, I'm an engineer, not a history student, and I might be misremembering, or my imagination might be making this all up). But I think patents that the patent holder or licencee is not developing at all should lapse after a year or two.
And what are you going to do when you have to change that password in 4 weeks? Or, if you can come up with an equally good one, what about the time after that? What about the tenth time you have to do it, in less than a year?
And yes, in another thread, people have pointed out that on SOME systems you can just change your password 20 times in a row and get back to the complicated phrase you were using, but on other systems, the server will force you to change your password every 4 weeks, will not let you reuse any of your previous 20 passwords, and will not let you make password changes more often than once per day.
Many systems will not let you change passwords more than once a day (or some other arbitrary period), so that will not work there.
This gets confusing, but eventually you learn all of these passwords.
UNLESS they make you change them all in 6 weeks. How would you handle it then?
I have about 4, EXCEPT FOR WORK. At work, they require changing passwords every month or so. So now, having used up all my imaginative ones, I use fairly easy-to-remember (and so easy-to-guess) passwords at work. Somehow, they don't seem to realize that by forcing me into the situation where I *can't* have a password that is both obscure and easy for me to remember, they are making the system LESS secure, rather than nore secure.
???
It's obvious to anyone who has taken a look at WWdN that Wil is married to someone named Anne, with two children and assorted pets.
Fans have been extremely hostile towards the Wesley Crusher character (and some of it seems to have been directed towards Wil). Yet my kids thought Wesley was WONDERFUL. I think I've figured out why:
Many fans were teenagers or even adults, and they were looking up to, and imagining themselves as, the captain or the other officers on the bridge. "This is what I want to be when I grow up" and that kind of thing. To them, Wesley was this annoying younger kid, and they resented his presence in their fantasy world.
My kids were much younger at the time. For them, WESLEY was the character to look up to. Wesley was what they wanted to be when they got older. Wesley was the character they admired. They couldn't even imagine themselves as adults, as Star Fleet officers. Their fantasy was to be Wesley, to be a teenager on a spaceship, to be the one who was able to save the ship when even the grown-ups didn't know what to do.
I think that the article does answer this question, when it says "Language experience causes neural changes. One hypothesis, native language neural commitment (NLNC), proposes that language learning produces dedicated neural networks that code the patterns of native-language speech. As these networks develop, they make it easier for new speech elements and patterns to be learned if they are consistent with the existing patterns, but place constraints on the learning of foreign-language patterns. NLNC might explain the closing of the 'sensitive period' for language learning; once a certain amount of learning has occurred, neural commitment interferes with the learning of new languages so they cannot be learned as easily."
I think the "sensitive period" referred to is the period from birth to about age 11. If you learn a second language before about 11, you can learn to speak it like a native. If you learn one AFTER age 11 or so, you will always have an accent when you speak that language.
Syntax and word meanings, which are sort of higher layer protocols, seem to be processed under more conscious control (i.e. more brain software, less neural-net firmware) than phonology, so it's certainly possible for people to learn languages later in life and speak them completely grammatically and fluently, even though they have an accent.
So, in answer to your question, the problem is not the way the subjects are presented in high school (although that may be a problem, too). The problem is simply our biology. Our language facility is programmable up to the critical age, and becomes much less so afterwards. Presumably, learning languages that are similar to ones you alraedy know is easier, because you can reuse some of the circuits you have already built in your brain.
From then article: "the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam"
Words fail me.
Wow! I like that explanation. I don't think I've ever heard of the "Popperian criterion of good law" before, but this is a concept we should all beome aware of.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I've always understood that a "troll" was a post made with the SOLE purpose of getting a reaction from people. In other words, if somebody is actually expressing their own opinion (whether or not it is labelled as such), it is not a troll. If someone actually believes what they are writing, it might be flamebait, but it's not a troll.
I'm told the truth is "Write once, debug everywhere"
There's a simple solution. The government could issue licenses for encryption to those who have given them the keys (or whatever alternate conditions they decide to impose).
It's simple enough to build a still, so anybody can do it. Lots of huge businesses depend on distillation to produce their product. Government couldn't possibly outlaw stills and prevent me from making my own booze, right? Well, no: at least where I am, and from what I remember my high school chemistry teacher telling us oh-so-many years ago, there are lots of licenced stills, but building one of my own without a licence will land me before a judge.
In that case, it won't be long at all before the use of encryption becomes illegal. Simply using encryption will be a enough to put you behind bars, regardless of what you are encrypting.
That's how a police state works.
If I don't pay for the wiretapping costs, don't wiretap me.
As I read through the comments on this article, there are a few that seem to indicate that the poster was completely clueless. And then, when I look more closely, I see that all of them were posted by the same person.
Yes, I know that I shouldn't post replies like this, but this is getting annoying. Quite a few people have posted explanations about what this technology could be useful for. Make an effort to understand it, instead of continuing to post "I don't understand" comments.
You said: "Noone's going to install dedicated IBM crypto hardware in their mailservers. No company is going to invest big bucks in a mailserver just so it can run 100% CPU utilization all the time for no good reason. That costs actual real world money, and continues to cost in power usage."
That's absolutely right, and that's the whole POINT of POW tokens. If you are going to send one or two emails, it won't bother you all that much that your computer has to perform a few seconds of computation before your email gets accepted. If you are a spammer and you want to send a MILLION emails, then your computer would have to perform a few million seconds of computation, which would either slow you down tremendously OR force you to pay real money to buy lots of fast computers and power them.
The problem with the CURRENT model of email is that the sender does not have to pay anything to send spam, so they can send millions of them, and it's still worthwhile if they get one reply in ten thousand attempts. But if they had to pay something to send each spam, they would send less.
Junk snail mail senders have to pay for postage, and so, even though they may be annoying, they are not the same kind of problem as spammers are. They tend to send out flyers only for things that they expect to get SOME response for.
You also said "So spammers spam each other (or themselves from a different host) and have an endless supply of RPOW tokens." Again, you've missed the point. If they spam each other, then yes, the recipient now has the ability to send out the same amount of spam, but the sender has used up his tokens by transferring them to the sender. No new POW tokens are created by this process. If I give you $10 and you give me $10, we're NOT both $10 dollars richer -- what I gave you, I no longer have. And if we pass the $10 bill back and forth 100 times, we haven't somehow created $1000 for each of us to spend; we still have the same amount of money that we started with.
And your point about us not wanting secure hardware on our machines is irrelevant. Nothing in this idea implies that you should have secure hardware on your machine. It can all be done in software, open source software (or any other kind).
"I'm pretty sure that you can hop on competitors towers (roam feature) as long as you're using CDMA ..."
For emergency 911 calls, yes. For any other calls, only if the two companies have a roaming agreement (i.e. company A provides the service and bills company B, which bills you). I'm under the impression that two companies in the same country rarely have roaming agreements with each other.
So, as long as the technology and the frequency bands match, yes, TECHNICALLY you can hop on the competitor's tower, but administratively the call will not be put through.
In a small company, it's reasonable to say "either trust me, or get rid of me". I used to work in a 5-developers-and-a-secretary company that was like that, and nobody abused the trust.
In a larger company (the one I'm in now has about 2000 employees), you have to assume that there WILL be employees who will be stupid, who will be malicious, etc., etc., so you probably NEED to have some central control.
And that is one of the reasons why I GREATLY prefer working for small companies.
Was there a parent to this post that got modded down into oblivion or something? Or was this poster really responding like this to the person who said that he appreciated learning about Egyptian culture from this interview?
Of course, by the time you are much slower than the surrounding traffic, it is impossible for the tailgater to change lanes to zip around you (since he didn't leave himself any acceleration room). I've done this sort of thing, slowing down gradually in front of a tailgater, right to the point of a complete stop. Funny, though, when I accelerated afterwards, he didn't follow me nearly as closely.
If it's open source, you could modify it so it couldn't get hacked, so it's your own fault to some extent.
If it's closed source, you don't HAVE that option. You are totally dependent on the provider of the software.