There is no doubt that the Bible relates a number of very scary concepts (The story of Lot, restricting warfare to damages no greater than inflicted upon your tribe (that eye for an eye thing), or even its revision by Jesus, i.e. Love for one's enemies and do good to those that hate you).
But the real question is why many people equate the Constitution to a Holy book. The Constitution does discuss slavery as if it were a reasonable institution, and that can be hard for children to deal with.
Does this require a warning label? I don't think so, but giving it one doesn't bother me given some of its historical contents.
I absolutely agree. You can't whitewash all lawyers as blood suckers just because most of them are. After all, like the joke goes, 99 percent of the lawyers give 1 percent of the lawyers a bad name. But let's look at this a bit more realistically.
The worst of the worst of the lawyers are the ones WE elect to make the laws and run the legal system that is their life blood. Does anyone really believe that lawyers are primarily concerned with the common good as opposed to what is good for their profession/friends/contributors? Your NEED for lawyers would be dramatically reduced if lawyers were not running things. So why do we keep electing these bozos?
Lastly, plaintiffs might be the ones that sue, but it is the lawyers by far and large that take home the booty. If they are the primary beneficiaries of a system they as a profession construct, maintain, run, and profit by, then why blame the plaintiffs? The plaintiffs often suffer nearly as much at the hands of the system as the defendants.
If you look at the color spectrum and its frequencies, you will notice the following:
red -- 610 to 760 nm gap - 590 to 620 nm green -- 500 to 570 nm blue -- 450 to 500 nm
Now I couldn't find any actual explanation on the net for why Yellow would make a better picture. But if you look at the frequencies above, you will notice that adding yellow DOES do something. It reduces the gap between Red and Green by half; Yellow is in that gap, and comprises the frequencies from 570 to 590.
By this theory, maybe adding Orange (590 to 610 nm) would make an even more realistic picture?
Right. A Small business with one or two or ten patents (at anywhere from 50 grand to 100 grand apiece) is protected in what way from a single patent in the hand of a patent troll? The patent troll has no product to infringe on the patents held by this hypothetical small business.
IBM and Microsoft and HP and Adobe and Amazon and Oracle all have thousands of patents. Each. Does your hypothetical small business have enough fire power to take any of these guys on, should they care to "stomp" you?
In the 1980's we used to complain about the "patent thickets" built up in Japan around any interesting patent filed by a U.S. Company. Little modifications and changes to a patent. Even if you had a patent, you couldn't produce a product in Japan without infringing on one of the patents that cropped up around your own IP.
Under the current system the U.S. is WAY worse than Japan ever was. Not even Microsoft has enough patents to allow Word to ship with an XML Editor!!!!
What hope does your Small Business *really* have.... That's easy. They could get BOUGHT by someone big.
Small == defenseless. Same as in nature, the best defense of the small is to hide, or make peace with something bigger and badder than you.
In WWII there was that saying, "loose lips sink ships". It is generally applied today to mean that our nation cannot compete militarily or economically with the rest of the world if we are open about what our military does, where they are deployed, and what weapons they have.
I imagine the same goes for various companies, and their products.
I don't buy it. First of all, the Intertubes pretty much allow unrestricted transfers of information around the world. Spies don't have to meet reading newspapers in parks, or smuggle microfilm in false teeth. We are not going to fool the people we have to fool militarily.
On the other hand, secrets allow governments/companies to harm others without any recourse to the victims.
We should error on the side of being open. We have never done so to date. We should try it, then fix any problems that might occur.
My bet is that no significant problem would occur.
We were told that ACTA had to remain secret for "National Security Reasons". We were told it had to remain secret or other countries would walk away from the table.
But the truth is that most of Europe will walk away if there is no disclosure. And none of the countries that have supported secrecy have threatened to leave the talks. And the US hasn't even claimed to take a position (though we all know that is a lie).
And to top it all off, despite all the leaks so far, we do not have a single terrorist organization that has been able to leverage the revealed all-so-dangerous-information commit any terrorist act.
At least, as long as you don't consider Michael Geist a terrorist.
I don't care what Apple does because I don't develop for them. I can ignore IPhones and IPads and ITunes and other Apple products. But slowly and surely Apple is gaining ground by rapidly out running development in some (I have to admit) cool applications.
We have to free up the infrastructure. Nothing about the IPhone required Apple to invent it other than the fact that it took Apple/Jobs to stand up to the wireless operators and deliver a platform outside *their* control. It took Apple/Jobs to stand up to the RIAA and deliver legitimate digital music over the Internet.
So what is Apple good at? They are good at forcing their way through various Corporate and Social barriers because they have the ego to do so. But many customers do not recognize that Apple does this while at the same time erecting barriers for others to prevent them from following their path. Apple erects barriers to prevent others from leveraging their products.
So why do I say "ego" to do this? Because they don't respect any other corporate entity's efforts to protect their turf (a good thing, I think), but haven't any problem doing a far better and more comprehensive job of protecting their own (good in the short term for customers, bad in the long term).
Hurray to Apple for breaking barriers. Boo to Apple for building replacements that might be far more difficult to break down.
All is great as long as Apple is innovating. But all innovative companies become stagnate over time. And I fear at some point Apple will no longer be the rising star of technology, but just another corporate boat anchor.
Copyright law is set up to assume that *someone* created the painting/movie/music/book/poem/sculpture... If an AI creates the music completely, can it be copyrighted? Can we claim that the person that pushed the button or clicked the mouse created something if all the decisions are programmed via AI?
Once a person has created something, then they can assign the copyright to a corporation. BUT if there isn't a human author, how can this assignment be done legally?
I can imagine that various acts and trusts might want to claim if their profiles (or the profiles of artists whose copyrights a trust holds) are used to create the background for an AI then the music that such an AI generates is clearly a derivative work, and belongs to them. But how would this be any different than a human doing the same thing, and clearly in the latter case the copyright belongs to the artist regardless of how steeped in the style of someone else.
Besides, if one takes this program and feeds into it music from a hundred artists, then the result is no different than any musician. Yet an AI author has no standing in the law as an author, does it?
Thinking about this, it is nothing new. I wonder what the court has said about previous music produced by non human sources? I think in most cases, the recording is still done by a person who gets the credit/copyright. But a computer doesn't even need a person to do the recording, being able to do all the tasks required all by itself.
We have the technology to detect explosive fluids, just like the have the technology to detect explosive solids. The bomb you referenced involved constructing a bomb from liquid nitroglycerin.
He DID NOT formulate the nitroglycerin on the plane from otherwise inert liquids, which is what the ban on liquids is supposed to prevent.
It is an off the shelf proto-board and a nine volt battery! This is all off the self, nothing unusual, training materials for 101 classes in electronics and circuits! At a glance, anyone that has actually been trained should be able to recognize these components for what they are!
Besides, even if you figure you have a strange circuit on her shirt, where did these security folks think she had the explosives? In her Bra?
And if we are afraid that Bra's might be used to carry explosives, shouldn't we ban anyone with boobs from all airports?
I am not a fan of people yapping on their cell phones, even though I do myself.
But the need isn't to CALL OUT, as you might recall, but people GETTING info. The people on the other three planes didn't know anything, but rapid distribution of information makes a difference in safety.
Besides, I don't find people yapping on cell phones as nearly as annoying as paying billions in tax dollars to support security theater that doesn't make me safer. I'd just like policy to be based on reality rather than something that is more like reality T.V.
Suppose you have a football team with only 11 resources. And suppose they have a "zero tolerance" of any apparent threat made by the other team. So EVERY time it looks like the ball is handed to a running back, they blast in for a tackle on that guy.
This football team is going to lose, and they are going to lose because they cannot distinguish *apparent* threats from *real* threats. The *real* threats are constructed to not look like threats in the early stages of execution. Or they rely on a shifting of resources by the other team to deal with a fake threat while the real threat goes unopposed.
Terrorism and flight safety are very much the same sort of situation. If you are not dealing with real threats, and wasting your resources on trivia, you are not doing your job.
... the people running our security repeatedly prove to be absolutely clueless?
Let's look at a list, shall we?
They want to ban batteries when there isn't any scientific proof of an interesting risk.
They ban knitting needles when nobody has ever hijacked a plane with knitting needles.
Liquids are banned outside 3 oz amounts held in a quart bag despite their own scientists failing to demonstrate how such fluids can be used as an explosive, and the only terrorist to date that has used fluids only succeeded in burning himself.
They banned pilots from carrying tweezers after 9/11. Why, because pilots might honestly hijack themselves should they find tweezers in their pocket?
Pocket knives continue to be banned, and are thrown away costing consumers millions in lost property without any evidence that having pocket knives adds to any risk to anyone.
Canes *are* allowed on planes. Clearly a better choice of a weapon than a pen knife.
Cell phones clearly thwarted a attack on the capital on 9/11, but the use of cell phones on planes continues to be banned.... despite no evidence that cell phones pose any risk to navigation equipment (despite years of claims otherwise without scientific proof).
A MIT student is nearly shot while picking up a friend at the air port because her T-Shirt had a proto board mounted between her boobs. It had blinking lights and wires.... Seriously, I can understand how a regular person might not understand the situation, but don't they actually train security people? And if they are not trained, are we safer?
I could go on. That's just off the top of my head.
Seriously, when are we going to make rules based on actual risk? When are we going to admit you can't eliminate all risk? When are we going to deal with risks we can address, and accept risks we can't do anything reasonable about?
If you are sharing, you make the file available. If someone downloads that file, they may or may not have the legal right to do so. For example, the owner of the copyrighted work could download it. There is no law that says you cannot provide the copyright owner with a copy of their work. The question becomes, who breaks the law if someone downloads a file from your machine, you? Or the person downloading the file?
If you can be held liable when someone gets information from you, is that the limit? To what degree are you required to protect files? Suppose I have software installed on my computer like iTunes, and I do not wipe my drive before I give it to a repair shop. If they can boot my computer, they can take my files, possibly infringing. Am I liable?
I understand why content owners would like to say someone who shares files is liable, but it doesn't exactly make sense, does it?
How is this remark insightful? It's fine to say that "statutory damages" are in the picture IF they have been proven and quantified. However, there isn't any evidence to suggest that if this particular person had never shared a MP3 file that this would have had any impact at all on the number of people that gained access to these files via file sharing.
While the defendant admitted to downloading and sharing files, the defendant never claimed to be "entitled to free copies of his mp3 downloads". I am not even sure what that means.
Willful and reckless disregard of the law does NOT make a very good case for the imposition of punitive or statutory damages. Almost everyone runs afoul of hosts of laws "willfully and recklessly" by this definition. Everything from traffic laws, to the proper disposal of batteries, to singing Christmas Carols from a xerox, to singing "Happy Birthday" to relatives in restaurants.
We don't have proof the individual damaged anyone, so it is unclear what is "reckless" about their behavior.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the DOJ does not file a brief in every case, and does not always agree with the outcome of all cases tried in court. When the DOJ files a brief, this has nothing to do with their activities in the enforcement of the law, but rather their opinion about the judgement of the court after the fact.
In this case, this was a civil suit, right? What enforcement of the "law as passed" was every required of the DOJ in this case?
I don't pay for access to news (unless looking at ads counts as paying). Few single news sources cover a high enough percentage of the kinds of stories I am interested for me to allocate actual money to said sources. I'd like access to Nature, and New Scientist, and a number of technical sources, but rely on "second hand" access as other free sources report on *their* stories. Given that I rarely complete covering these summaries in a day before I have to actually deal with life in the real world, I don't think it is worth my money to get access to things I don't have time to ready anyway.
The Fate of any news service behind a pay wall or limited free pay wall is obscurity. No news story in the NY Times can remain exclusive to the NY Times unless nobody cared about that story in the first place.
But I like the idea that they are going to "wait and see" how others will fare over the year. I don't have to wait, I can tell them their growth and revenue will be flat at best. Them kind of returns are not going to excite the NY Times, and I'd bet in the end this will never really happen.
This argument is not too different from the argument creationists make against evolution. How, they ask, can an eye develop by chance?
The flaw in *your* logic is that it assumes that no company will take a risk if they cannot be insured a return. But *competition* insures that not improving, not developing, and not changing is the *biggest* risk! If company A doesn't come out with a better drug, company B will! Then where will company A be?
So what happens without patents? Companies begin to rely on rapid progress, and to some extent on keeping trade secrets instead. There is some risk then that we will not get the free and open distribution of ideas in a world completely without patents. This is why *some* term for patents might be justified. It should be long enough to interest companies in its protection (for the distribution of ideas) but not so long as to tie progress up in knots.
With our increasing ability to reverse engineer products, I am not so sure the "trade secret" issue is much of a barrier to progress. And rapid progress in today's world pretty much requires documented processes.... They are too complicated to keep in one or two person's heads. And where drugs are concerned, a certain amount of documentation must be required to get FDA approval.
All in all, pointing to the Pharma industry for justification of patents is quite the hoax. The Pharma Industry can be quite easily implicated in the suppression of life saving drugs needed in developing countries, and whole hog inflation of health care costs in the USA, all done by leveraging patents. We would be far better off with more rapid development and production of medicines gained by removing patent barriers than what we currently have to live with.
Other than we are *told* that we need patents, why do you think gutting the patent system is a horrible idea? What are the "worse results" that we could expect? Here are a few I thought of:
* Fewer lawsuits -- Hard to sue someone for patent infringement if we gut the system
* Lower liability -- Well, if you eliminate a major liability (risk of being sued), what do you get?
* More competition -- Certainly the first horse out of the gate has an advantage, but others can run too!
* More products -- If we can copy tech, won't more companies produce said tech?
* More innovation -- Innovation builds on the existing tech. Patents lock up existing tech.
* More upstarts -- Existing markets get crowded by existing companies and their patents.
* More failures -- Companies that cannot produce product cannot survive off license fees.
* More failures -- Companies that cannot continue to innovate will not survive off old products
* More failures -- Companies that cannot provide what customer's want will lose to competition
I need to make a point more clearly than I did in my, er...., rant (I admit it)... above.
The coward asserted: "What the patent system is meant to do is allow companies/individuals to recoup research and development cost."
To which I pointed to the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
The point I wish to make clear is that the U.S. Government has no constitutional motivation in seeking to insure that any company "recoups" anything.
Let's make that clear. EVEN if striking patents led to the damage of numerous companies, this is no justification for patents.
If an inventor or company fails to make money off their inventions, they will join a pantheon of historical figures and companies suffered that the same fate in the past.
No, what is important is the efficiency and the productivity of our companies, and the advancement of knowledge and progress. Most of us believe that it is only competition that drives progress. This is supposed to be why communism failed (no competition) and capitalism (competition) succeeded.
So why do we need to limit competition again? Because we need patents to compete with other such government defined and constricted systems like communism? Nobody would be willing to build a company unless the government set up a little space for it to thrive without anyone else competing with it?
Thumbnail representations of pictures allowed you to look at a picture before you invested the time to wait for the full resolution picture to load. This is very much like a preview. The observation strikes at the "obviousness" of the patent in question. Right now, if I were to do a 3-D capture of a complicated object, I don't have a program to allow me to view it on my 3-D T.V. before I render it on my home 3-D printer. Mostly because none of these products are available yet to give meaning to that feature. It is still obvious, because it is useful in other settings. With or without Kodak.
"Yes, it might be obvious now..." What a distortion of reality. I was born in 1960 and shot loads of film with my Cannon. And I drooled as I read about the possibility of digital photography..... BECAUSE digital photography promised to be able to IMMEDIATELY see what you SHOT. Now immediately first meant downloading to a computer to view. And we dreamed of a display right on the camera to avoid that. I don't know how old you are, but I lived through that period, and as an engineer involved in digital representations of pictures and texts, I promise you this was obvious.
"What the patent system is meant to do is allow companies/individuals to recoup research and development cost." Nope. You are absolutely wrong. Patents and copyrights are meant to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The research shows that our current polices on patents (and copyrights) do not in fact promote "Science and useful Arts". Or perhaps you can demonstrate your point with this particular "invention"? If you got rid of patents, what camera manufacturer would not provide picture preview? Do you really think that nobody would have invented this feature to create a product that would sell better?
We seriously need to compete with PRODUCTS, not by rushing out to create artificial TAXES (enforced via patent license fees) on companies wishing to produce products.
If some invention seriously took millions of dollars to create (picture preview is just a little software program, once you have the display and the picture), then I THINK we would be out of the obvious zone. This patent isn't there.
As other posters have already pointed out, we don't have much detail at this time. But let us assume for a moment that the Kodak patent in question is over the ability to preview a picture taken....
We have had thumbnail representations of pictures for much longer than 20 years.
And given a digital camera, the first thing you might want, after you take a picture, is to see what the picture looks like.
If this isn't obvious, what is?
And exactly how does it advance the technology to have every company pay a "tax" to Kodak who makes a camera with preview ?
Toss obvious patents! Cut the lifetime of the rest to 5 years!
If we really wanted free markets, competition, and growth of technology, the goal would be to cut the number of patents filed in the U.S. by 75 percent! Big companies use patents to tax others, and to crowd out competition. Do we really think Kodak had to come around and invent preview for digital cameras? Hogwash.
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There is no doubt that the Bible relates a number of very scary concepts (The story of Lot, restricting warfare to damages no greater than inflicted upon your tribe (that eye for an eye thing), or even its revision by Jesus, i.e. Love for one's enemies and do good to those that hate you).
But the real question is why many people equate the Constitution to a Holy book. The Constitution does discuss slavery as if it were a reasonable institution, and that can be hard for children to deal with.
Does this require a warning label? I don't think so, but giving it one doesn't bother me given some of its historical contents.
I absolutely agree. You can't whitewash all lawyers as blood suckers just because most of them are. After all, like the joke goes, 99 percent of the lawyers give 1 percent of the lawyers a bad name. But let's look at this a bit more realistically.
The worst of the worst of the lawyers are the ones WE elect to make the laws and run the legal system that is their life blood. Does anyone really believe that lawyers are primarily concerned with the common good as opposed to what is good for their profession/friends/contributors? Your NEED for lawyers would be dramatically reduced if lawyers were not running things. So why do we keep electing these bozos?
Lastly, plaintiffs might be the ones that sue, but it is the lawyers by far and large that take home the booty. If they are the primary beneficiaries of a system they as a profession construct, maintain, run, and profit by, then why blame the plaintiffs? The plaintiffs often suffer nearly as much at the hands of the system as the defendants.
OPPS! The chart should have been:
red -- 610 to 760 nm
gap - 570 to 610 nm
green -- 500 to 570 nm
blue -- 450 to 500 nm
If you look at the color spectrum and its frequencies, you will notice the following:
red -- 610 to 760 nm
gap - 590 to 620 nm
green -- 500 to 570 nm
blue -- 450 to 500 nm
Now I couldn't find any actual explanation on the net for why Yellow would make a better picture. But if you look at the frequencies above, you will notice that adding yellow DOES do something. It reduces the gap between Red and Green by half; Yellow is in that gap, and comprises the frequencies from 570 to 590.
By this theory, maybe adding Orange (590 to 610 nm) would make an even more realistic picture?
Right. A Small business with one or two or ten patents (at anywhere from 50 grand to 100 grand apiece) is protected in what way from a single patent in the hand of a patent troll? The patent troll has no product to infringe on the patents held by this hypothetical small business.
IBM and Microsoft and HP and Adobe and Amazon and Oracle all have thousands of patents. Each. Does your hypothetical small business have enough fire power to take any of these guys on, should they care to "stomp" you?
In the 1980's we used to complain about the "patent thickets" built up in Japan around any interesting patent filed by a U.S. Company. Little modifications and changes to a patent. Even if you had a patent, you couldn't produce a product in Japan without infringing on one of the patents that cropped up around your own IP.
Under the current system the U.S. is WAY worse than Japan ever was. Not even Microsoft has enough patents to allow Word to ship with an XML Editor!!!!
What hope does your Small Business *really* have.... That's easy. They could get BOUGHT by someone big.
Small == defenseless. Same as in nature, the best defense of the small is to hide, or make peace with something bigger and badder than you.
In WWII there was that saying, "loose lips sink ships". It is generally applied today to mean that our nation cannot compete militarily or economically with the rest of the world if we are open about what our military does, where they are deployed, and what weapons they have.
I imagine the same goes for various companies, and their products.
I don't buy it. First of all, the Intertubes pretty much allow unrestricted transfers of information around the world. Spies don't have to meet reading newspapers in parks, or smuggle microfilm in false teeth. We are not going to fool the people we have to fool militarily.
On the other hand, secrets allow governments/companies to harm others without any recourse to the victims.
We should error on the side of being open. We have never done so to date. We should try it, then fix any problems that might occur.
My bet is that no significant problem would occur.
We were told that ACTA had to remain secret for "National Security Reasons". We were told it had to remain secret or other countries would walk away from the table.
But the truth is that most of Europe will walk away if there is no disclosure. And none of the countries that have supported secrecy have threatened to leave the talks. And the US hasn't even claimed to take a position (though we all know that is a lie).
And to top it all off, despite all the leaks so far, we do not have a single terrorist organization that has been able to leverage the revealed all-so-dangerous-information commit any terrorist act.
At least, as long as you don't consider Michael Geist a terrorist.
I don't care what Apple does because I don't develop for them. I can ignore IPhones and IPads and ITunes and other Apple products. But slowly and surely Apple is gaining ground by rapidly out running development in some (I have to admit) cool applications.
We have to free up the infrastructure. Nothing about the IPhone required Apple to invent it other than the fact that it took Apple/Jobs to stand up to the wireless operators and deliver a platform outside *their* control. It took Apple/Jobs to stand up to the RIAA and deliver legitimate digital music over the Internet.
So what is Apple good at? They are good at forcing their way through various Corporate and Social barriers because they have the ego to do so. But many customers do not recognize that Apple does this while at the same time erecting barriers for others to prevent them from following their path. Apple erects barriers to prevent others from leveraging their products.
So why do I say "ego" to do this? Because they don't respect any other corporate entity's efforts to protect their turf (a good thing, I think), but haven't any problem doing a far better and more comprehensive job of protecting their own (good in the short term for customers, bad in the long term).
Hurray to Apple for breaking barriers. Boo to Apple for building replacements that might be far more difficult to break down.
All is great as long as Apple is innovating. But all innovative companies become stagnate over time. And I fear at some point Apple will no longer be the rising star of technology, but just another corporate boat anchor.
Copyright law is set up to assume that *someone* created the painting/movie/music/book/poem/sculpture... If an AI creates the music completely, can it be copyrighted? Can we claim that the person that pushed the button or clicked the mouse created something if all the decisions are programmed via AI?
Once a person has created something, then they can assign the copyright to a corporation. BUT if there isn't a human author, how can this assignment be done legally?
I can imagine that various acts and trusts might want to claim if their profiles (or the profiles of artists whose copyrights a trust holds) are used to create the background for an AI then the music that such an AI generates is clearly a derivative work, and belongs to them. But how would this be any different than a human doing the same thing, and clearly in the latter case the copyright belongs to the artist regardless of how steeped in the style of someone else.
Besides, if one takes this program and feeds into it music from a hundred artists, then the result is no different than any musician. Yet an AI author has no standing in the law as an author, does it?
Thinking about this, it is nothing new. I wonder what the court has said about previous music produced by non human sources? I think in most cases, the recording is still done by a person who gets the credit/copyright. But a computer doesn't even need a person to do the recording, being able to do all the tasks required all by itself.
We have the technology to detect explosive fluids, just like the have the technology to detect explosive solids. The bomb you referenced involved constructing a bomb from liquid nitroglycerin.
He DID NOT formulate the nitroglycerin on the plane from otherwise inert liquids, which is what the ban on liquids is supposed to prevent.
So try again.
It is an off the shelf proto-board and a nine volt battery! This is all off the self, nothing unusual, training materials for 101 classes in electronics and circuits! At a glance, anyone that has actually been trained should be able to recognize these components for what they are!
Besides, even if you figure you have a strange circuit on her shirt, where did these security folks think she had the explosives? In her Bra?
And if we are afraid that Bra's might be used to carry explosives, shouldn't we ban anyone with boobs from all airports?
I am not a fan of people yapping on their cell phones, even though I do myself.
But the need isn't to CALL OUT, as you might recall, but people GETTING info. The people on the other three planes didn't know anything, but rapid distribution of information makes a difference in safety.
Besides, I don't find people yapping on cell phones as nearly as annoying as paying billions in tax dollars to support security theater that doesn't make me safer. I'd just like policy to be based on reality rather than something that is more like reality T.V.
Let's put this a different way.
Suppose you have a football team with only 11 resources. And suppose they have a "zero tolerance" of any apparent threat made by the other team. So EVERY time it looks like the ball is handed to a running back, they blast in for a tackle on that guy.
This football team is going to lose, and they are going to lose because they cannot distinguish *apparent* threats from *real* threats. The *real* threats are constructed to not look like threats in the early stages of execution. Or they rely on a shifting of resources by the other team to deal with a fake threat while the real threat goes unopposed.
Terrorism and flight safety are very much the same sort of situation. If you are not dealing with real threats, and wasting your resources on trivia, you are not doing your job.
... the people running our security repeatedly prove to be absolutely clueless?
Let's look at a list, shall we?
They want to ban batteries when there isn't any scientific proof of an interesting risk.
They ban knitting needles when nobody has ever hijacked a plane with knitting needles.
Liquids are banned outside 3 oz amounts held in a quart bag despite their own scientists failing to demonstrate how such fluids can be used as an explosive, and the only terrorist to date that has used fluids only succeeded in burning himself.
They banned pilots from carrying tweezers after 9/11. Why, because pilots might honestly hijack themselves should they find tweezers in their pocket?
Pocket knives continue to be banned, and are thrown away costing consumers millions in lost property without any evidence that having pocket knives adds to any risk to anyone.
Canes *are* allowed on planes. Clearly a better choice of a weapon than a pen knife.
Cell phones clearly thwarted a attack on the capital on 9/11, but the use of cell phones on planes continues to be banned.... despite no evidence that cell phones pose any risk to navigation equipment (despite years of claims otherwise without scientific proof).
A MIT student is nearly shot while picking up a friend at the air port because her T-Shirt had a proto board mounted between her boobs. It had blinking lights and wires.... Seriously, I can understand how a regular person might not understand the situation, but don't they actually train security people? And if they are not trained, are we safer?
I could go on. That's just off the top of my head.
Seriously, when are we going to make rules based on actual risk? When are we going to admit you can't eliminate all risk? When are we going to deal with risks we can address, and accept risks we can't do anything reasonable about?
If you are sharing, you make the file available. If someone downloads that file, they may or may not have the legal right to do so. For example, the owner of the copyrighted work could download it. There is no law that says you cannot provide the copyright owner with a copy of their work. The question becomes, who breaks the law if someone downloads a file from your machine, you? Or the person downloading the file?
If you can be held liable when someone gets information from you, is that the limit? To what degree are you required to protect files? Suppose I have software installed on my computer like iTunes, and I do not wipe my drive before I give it to a repair shop. If they can boot my computer, they can take my files, possibly infringing. Am I liable?
I understand why content owners would like to say someone who shares files is liable, but it doesn't exactly make sense, does it?
I am with you in a heart beat! Mod this suggestion up!
How is this remark insightful? It's fine to say that "statutory damages" are in the picture IF they have been proven and quantified. However, there isn't any evidence to suggest that if this particular person had never shared a MP3 file that this would have had any impact at all on the number of people that gained access to these files via file sharing.
While the defendant admitted to downloading and sharing files, the defendant never claimed to be "entitled to free copies of his mp3 downloads". I am not even sure what that means.
Willful and reckless disregard of the law does NOT make a very good case for the imposition of punitive or statutory damages. Almost everyone runs afoul of hosts of laws "willfully and recklessly" by this definition. Everything from traffic laws, to the proper disposal of batteries, to singing Christmas Carols from a xerox, to singing "Happy Birthday" to relatives in restaurants.
We don't have proof the individual damaged anyone, so it is unclear what is "reckless" about their behavior.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the DOJ does not file a brief in every case, and does not always agree with the outcome of all cases tried in court. When the DOJ files a brief, this has nothing to do with their activities in the enforcement of the law, but rather their opinion about the judgement of the court after the fact.
In this case, this was a civil suit, right? What enforcement of the "law as passed" was every required of the DOJ in this case?
I don't pay for access to news (unless looking at ads counts as paying). Few single news sources cover a high enough percentage of the kinds of stories I am interested for me to allocate actual money to said sources. I'd like access to Nature, and New Scientist, and a number of technical sources, but rely on "second hand" access as other free sources report on *their* stories. Given that I rarely complete covering these summaries in a day before I have to actually deal with life in the real world, I don't think it is worth my money to get access to things I don't have time to ready anyway.
The Fate of any news service behind a pay wall or limited free pay wall is obscurity. No news story in the NY Times can remain exclusive to the NY Times unless nobody cared about that story in the first place.
But I like the idea that they are going to "wait and see" how others will fare over the year. I don't have to wait, I can tell them their growth and revenue will be flat at best. Them kind of returns are not going to excite the NY Times, and I'd bet in the end this will never really happen.
This argument is not too different from the argument creationists make against evolution. How, they ask, can an eye develop by chance?
The flaw in *your* logic is that it assumes that no company will take a risk if they cannot be insured a return. But *competition* insures that not improving, not developing, and not changing is the *biggest* risk! If company A doesn't come out with a better drug, company B will! Then where will company A be?
So what happens without patents? Companies begin to rely on rapid progress, and to some extent on keeping trade secrets instead. There is some risk then that we will not get the free and open distribution of ideas in a world completely without patents. This is why *some* term for patents might be justified. It should be long enough to interest companies in its protection (for the distribution of ideas) but not so long as to tie progress up in knots.
With our increasing ability to reverse engineer products, I am not so sure the "trade secret" issue is much of a barrier to progress. And rapid progress in today's world pretty much requires documented processes.... They are too complicated to keep in one or two person's heads. And where drugs are concerned, a certain amount of documentation must be required to get FDA approval.
All in all, pointing to the Pharma industry for justification of patents is quite the hoax. The Pharma Industry can be quite easily implicated in the suppression of life saving drugs needed in developing countries, and whole hog inflation of health care costs in the USA, all done by leveraging patents. We would be far better off with more rapid development and production of medicines gained by removing patent barriers than what we currently have to live with.
Opps! Missed the obvious one:
* Lower cost -- lower liability, more competition, no license fees
Other than we are *told* that we need patents, why do you think gutting the patent system is a horrible idea? What are the "worse results" that we could expect? Here are a few I thought of:
* Fewer lawsuits -- Hard to sue someone for patent infringement if we gut the system
* Lower liability -- Well, if you eliminate a major liability (risk of being sued), what do you get?
* More competition -- Certainly the first horse out of the gate has an advantage, but others can run too!
* More products -- If we can copy tech, won't more companies produce said tech?
* More innovation -- Innovation builds on the existing tech. Patents lock up existing tech.
* More upstarts -- Existing markets get crowded by existing companies and their patents.
* More failures -- Companies that cannot produce product cannot survive off license fees.
* More failures -- Companies that cannot continue to innovate will not survive off old products
* More failures -- Companies that cannot provide what customer's want will lose to competition
I am being honest here. What am I missing?
I need to make a point more clearly than I did in my, er...., rant (I admit it) ... above.
The coward asserted: "What the patent system is meant to do is allow companies/individuals to recoup research and development cost."
To which I pointed to the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
The point I wish to make clear is that the U.S. Government has no constitutional motivation in seeking to insure that any company "recoups" anything.
Let's make that clear. EVEN if striking patents led to the damage of numerous companies, this is no justification for patents.
If an inventor or company fails to make money off their inventions, they will join a pantheon of historical figures and companies suffered that the same fate in the past.
No, what is important is the efficiency and the productivity of our companies, and the advancement of knowledge and progress. Most of us believe that it is only competition that drives progress. This is supposed to be why communism failed (no competition) and capitalism (competition) succeeded.
So why do we need to limit competition again? Because we need patents to compete with other such government defined and constricted systems like communism? Nobody would be willing to build a company unless the government set up a little space for it to thrive without anyone else competing with it?
I am just trying to understand the logic here....
Thumbnail representations of pictures allowed you to look at a picture before you invested the time to wait for the full resolution picture to load. This is very much like a preview. The observation strikes at the "obviousness" of the patent in question. Right now, if I were to do a 3-D capture of a complicated object, I don't have a program to allow me to view it on my 3-D T.V. before I render it on my home 3-D printer. Mostly because none of these products are available yet to give meaning to that feature. It is still obvious, because it is useful in other settings. With or without Kodak.
"Yes, it might be obvious now ..." What a distortion of reality. I was born in 1960 and shot loads of film with my Cannon. And I drooled as I read about the possibility of digital photography ..... BECAUSE digital photography promised to be able to IMMEDIATELY see what you SHOT. Now immediately first meant downloading to a computer to view. And we dreamed of a display right on the camera to avoid that. I don't know how old you are, but I lived through that period, and as an engineer involved in digital representations of pictures and texts, I promise you this was obvious.
"What the patent system is meant to do is allow companies/individuals to recoup research and development cost." Nope. You are absolutely wrong. Patents and copyrights are meant to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The research shows that our current polices on patents (and copyrights) do not in fact promote "Science and useful Arts". Or perhaps you can demonstrate your point with this particular "invention"? If you got rid of patents, what camera manufacturer would not provide picture preview? Do you really think that nobody would have invented this feature to create a product that would sell better?
We seriously need to compete with PRODUCTS, not by rushing out to create artificial TAXES (enforced via patent license fees) on companies wishing to produce products.
If some invention seriously took millions of dollars to create (picture preview is just a little software program, once you have the display and the picture), then I THINK we would be out of the obvious zone. This patent isn't there.
As other posters have already pointed out, we don't have much detail at this time. But let us assume for a moment that the Kodak patent in question is over the ability to preview a picture taken....
We have had thumbnail representations of pictures for much longer than 20 years.
And given a digital camera, the first thing you might want, after you take a picture, is to see what the picture looks like.
If this isn't obvious, what is?
And exactly how does it advance the technology to have every company pay a "tax" to Kodak who makes a camera with preview ?
Toss obvious patents! Cut the lifetime of the rest to 5 years!
If we really wanted free markets, competition, and growth of technology, the goal would be to cut the number of patents filed in the U.S. by 75 percent! Big companies use patents to tax others, and to crowd out competition. Do we really think Kodak had to come around and invent preview for digital cameras? Hogwash.