Sorry, but your argument doesn't make much sense to me.
Patents are a guarantee of exclusivity for a short term, in exchange for offering your idea to the rest of society. If you don't want to make that offer, you're under no obligation to file for a patent, and you're quite at liberty to keep your secret.
Of course, if you don't file for a patent and disclose your invention, someone else can come along and invent the same thing themselves, and then you have no means to profit from it. But if you weren't profiting from it anyway, and they invented it independently, what right have you to stop them from taking advantage of their invention? At that point, they have as much right to develop the idea as you do.
All you're saying is that allowing patents that aren't used to be held purely to control the behaviour of others is a good idea. I just can't see any justification for that; in fact, it's exactly what the large companies do to bully the small ones, and exactly what this new organisation is going to do to make money by lawyering.
The sad thing is, this has always been the biggest danger with patents, but the people who could make a difference were too busy worrying about the big-guy-licensing-out-little-guy problem (or making their own money, depending) to notice.
Patents should work like trademarks: if you aren't actually using the invention and don't have any plans to do so within a reasonable timeframe, you automatically lose the patent rights and anyone can use the knowledge your patent documentation provides. (It would be better if you had to demonstrate a use or intended use before a patent application was approved, but that's obviously unrealistic right now.)
At the risk of sounding like I'm just sucking up, I actually find Slashdot to be one of the best resources for a programmer with general interest in most things IT, which I am.
There is a simple reason for this. We all know that there is loads of material out there, but something genuinely new and original is hard to find. However, when such a thing does come along, it's a sure bet that five million people (or one well-informed academic, depending) will submit an article to Slashdot, and the editors are smart enough to spot that submission and put it up on the front page. This sort of "digest" is invaluable as a starting point for further research.
The other thing is to distinguish reading background articles on potentially useful technologies so you have a rough idea of their strengths and weaknesses from reading detailed specs on things you might never need to know about. When you come across a project where they might be useful and you have a real context for further investigation, that's when download the detailed specs, buy the books, etc. Again, Slashdot is often quite useful for this, because amongst the detritus that swamps most discussions, there are a few pearls from genuinely informed people, and reading the right four or five backgrounders over a couple of years is worth more than reading thirty glorified press releases by companies offering the same technology in a different wrapper this week.
As far as I'm concerned, if your still running windows connected to the internet, buying Lexmark gear, and reading this with IE, then you deserve everything you get.
Sorry, but I really don't think that's a very constructive attitude.
There is simply too much small print in an average person's life for them to read and absorb all of it. That would probably still be true even it it were written in plain $LANGUAGE, and not deliberately obfuscated by lawyers. Hence it is unrealistic to expect anyone to understand and, if necessary, challenge everything that they might not agree with if asked in isolation.
To protect society from the unscrupulous behaviour of those who would capitalise on this systematic weakness, we have a legal system. We elect people to form a government that can spend its full time in administration on our behalf, so we don't have to. Their remit is to look after our interests for us in cases like this.
The problem with a lot of technology is that it takes a fairly long time for the elected government's knowledge and views catch up with informed professionals (who, of course, can dedicate their whole working life to the technology industry, an advantage the lawmakers don't have). Consequently there is a fairly large window of opportunity for profitable spamming, spyware, adware, etc. that aren't really in the general public's interests before it becomes illegal.
The only realistic solution to this problem is to educate the lawmakers and draw their attention to new problems faster so they can act against them. Expecting to educate everyone in society about every potential threat to their finances, privacy, security, work-life balance, etc. just isn't a realistic possibility, which is why comments like the parent post aren't very helpful.
Well aside from the conflict with the present Slashdot stance on copyright, it will not work because their work falls under the "work for hire" part of the law.
Talk to a lawyer, but I rather doubt the "work for hire" part counts if a court finds that they weren't given the consideration agreed for that hire. Challenging their copyright is actually a rather clever suggestion, IMHO. Of course, we're talking about the US legal system, so sanity may not be relevant here, and if you could prove that the contract was broken, the copyright issue is probably the least of EA's worries anyway...
Yes, so we thought, too. Unfortunately, that process apparently couldn't work out what was wrong (even though the lock-up screen when trying to boot the PC from the hard drive had no doubt about the file that was the culprit...) and didn't seem to offer any options to fix it (short of what we did).
After a little scratching of heads, we opted for the slow but reliable solution of reformatting and reinstalling, before wasting any more time trying to be clever.
Back to business: you generally have a limited budget. While we have a couple interns, we still need skilled people NOW. We can't afford (from both a budget and time perspective) to train everyone in basic programming.
Well, as the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance. If you you can't afford to train people, you sure as hell can't afford to employ good people who already have those skills, which might explain this:
System Administration is worse than programming. I just cant find anyone with decent "basic" skills, much less someone mid-level.
I suspect the problem isn't games, Linux fans doing their own thing, or newbies playing with your system. It's far more likely to be that you simply aren't offering the market rate for someone good enough to do the job you want done. If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys.:-)
Ah, but They should have trained up all the staff first, so We can hire them. You know, Them, the ones who do all the low-paid monkey-work so we don't have to.
The sad truth is that short-sighted corporate policy has frequently been:
Grab new grads.
Run them to breaking point for a couple of years, with
long hours
minimal back-up/support
little or no training.
Dump them when they get too expensive.
Goto 1.
With that sort of mindset, life is always going to come and kick you in the arse sooner or later. After all, you get what you pay for. If you pay for cheap labour, don't bother with proper training and looking after your people, and take the profits with a smile, then bend over and take the long-term results like a man as well.
Curiously, the company I work for (which pays reasonably, offers a decent overall package, and has fairly competent management) has no trouble retaining very skilled and experienced engineers for a decade or more.
FWIW, it just took me 5 minutes of talking to one of their staff [FX: call centre, Indian accents] just to cancel my old dial-up account. They wanted all sorts of background information about why I was cancelling, but I think they got bored after something like "unreliable service, cuts me off randomly, you changed the Ts & Cs unacceptably since I signed up, capped hours on-line in an 'unmetered' service, your web site doesn't work properly with non-IE browsers, your web server is configured incorrectly so my web site doesn't work properly with non-IE browsers either in spite of my making a simpler request to your admins to send correct MIME type info months ago..."
BTW, if you are in a similar position, never tell them you're moving to ADSL. They'll hassle you for everything you could possibly tell them about which ISP you're moving to, yada yada.
And the bastards still had the nerve to charge me for this month's direct debit even after I'd cancelled... One stroppy letter coming up.
Is there anything to prevent MS from say dropping the price for Longhorn to all major OEMs *except Dell*? It's their product, surely they can sell it to whoever they want at whatever price they see fit? (Serious question - I'm not overly familiar with US anti-trust/monopoly practice law)
Executive summary of MS history: Microsoft lost in court, and were convicted of monopoly abuse. They got away with mostly a slap on the wrist in the US, after Bush came in the first time and the DOJ basically backed down. Europe gave them a small but significant fine, but pretty much threw Ballmer out on the street when he went to ask for an 11th hour reprieve.
Executive summary of relevant anti-trust law, as it applies in most places relevant to this conversation: You may not treat a customer prejudicially in a market where you hold an effective monopoly (e.g., operating systems) because they don't follow your lead in another market (e.g., web browsers).
Given that Europe has warned MS once and could easily throw the book at them if they misbehave again, and in the US Microsoft's best friend at the government (Ashcroft) has just stepped down, now might not be the best time for them to try something of dubious legality...
Even supposing Dell have nothing to lose, what do they have to gain?
Lower customer support costs (good) and better customer satisfaction (priceless).
I use a similar scheme, but I use voice rendering software to read out the hex digits, and record it on tape. You should really try it; it's much more space efficient than a binder.
But the point of the sentence is not to "pay back" all the time stolen from society. Please see my comment on what the prison system is for, made when this subject first came up the other day.
Homosexuality is treated as the norm, when in reality, it should be classified as a mental disorder.
In which case, anyone who's in a monogamous marriage had better head on over to the asylum right behind "al dem queers 'n dykes", because monogamy certainly isn't a natural tendency for humans either. (Don't confuse this with forming families/communities and a desire to protect our young, both of which are.)
And finally, they would have to get rid of John Ashcroft, the incompetent git who lost an election to a dead guy, shut down the FBI people who informed him of the suspicious group of Arabs training in a flight school in Florida, and who has detained 6000 people without finding a single terrorist. As long as he's in place, nothing else will matter.
Fortunately, it seems as though both Ashcroft and Tom Ridge are likely to stand down for "personal reasons" around the time that Bush reshuffles his advisers. (This rumour has hit several mainstream news channels as I write, some attributing it to a White House source, but I've not seen anything concrete as a source yet.)
This is because, in Britain, there are many cameras specifically designed to catch speeding motorists and motorists running red lights. Since vehicle drivers kill far more people than terrorists this seems a reasonable priority.
Except, of course, for the fact that the government is reducing speed limits dramatically in areas with speed cameras in them, with local governments often violating central government guidelines on both appropriate speed limits and camera placement. Oh, and traffic light timings have been deliberately changed in many places to increase congestion and try to force car drivers to give up and use our pathetic public transport system instead.
On the other hand... arbitrarily guaging sentences such as this just for the fear and shock value it will inflict on other would-be spammers is a negligent policy decision.
It is?
In discussions like this, you have to start by establishing what the value/benefit of the prison system is. Is it to punish the criminals? Of course. But why?
Punishment in its own right won't undo many of the crimes that carry jail sentences. It's simply a sad fact that once a murder, rape, or other abuse has been committed, it's done, and nothing can change that. All you can do is try to prevent it happening again, by:
removing from society someone who is expected to repeat the offence, and/or
providing a deterrent for others who might commit the offence.
In the first case, you're talking about locking someone up for as long as it takes to mend their ways, potentially indefinitely. In the second, you're talking about providing a sufficient disincentive to prevent others feeling it's worth it to commit the crime.
In either respect, of course 9 years is far too long. These people aren't a danger to society; they're a pain in the arse. To encourage others not to be pains in the arse, a custodial sentence may be warranted, but throwing someone inside for 3-6 months should provide a sufficient kick up the backside for a first offence (on top of fining them 100% of the takings they made through the spamming, of course).
Something like 9 years is enough to destroy a life and make someone coming out turn to far darker things just to survive, which is not a productive use of the prison system from any point of view. Save long jail terms for the crimes so heinous that what we really want to do is lock someone up and throw away the key, where that scale of disincentive is required to inhibit further crimes by others, and keeping the perp off the streets for that long is necessary for public safety.
I do think Blair will get hammered for it, and I think Labour will lose a significant amount of its parliamentary majority at the next election as a result. Unfortunately, the only two other parties with a prayer of winning a significant number of seats in England are the Conservatives (whose leader may just be scarier than our Tone, and some of whose shadow ministers certainly make Jack Straw and David "Big Brother" Blunkett look good) and the Lib Dems (who talk a good fight, and have some decent policies when it comes to things like the Iraq war, but historically have never been a serious contender for winning the election).
It's going to be Labour by default, followed shortly by a quiet resignation by Tony and Gordon Brown taking over, followed shortly after that by a marked shift in foreign policy, I'd imagine...
I'm from the UK, where there will probably be a general election in the first half of next year, with little credible opposition to Blair. I feel your pain.:-(
I mean you can easily delete NTLDR.dll and XP won't replace it.
In fact, Windows System Update did that for me a few months back. The machine became unusable, and required another PC to recover the files from the hard drive, followed by a reformat and a complete OS reinstall (and all the apps of course) to get it back up and running.
It's interesting that everyone is watching the presidential election, but very few comments here concern the congress/senate seats that are up for grabs. It's surprising, for Slashdot, that no-one's noticed people like Fritz Hollings stepping down, for example. Given the strong views of a few specific congresscritters/senators on various geek-related matters, does anyone have a breakdown of how the usual suspects are doing?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but your argument doesn't make much sense to me.
Patents are a guarantee of exclusivity for a short term, in exchange for offering your idea to the rest of society. If you don't want to make that offer, you're under no obligation to file for a patent, and you're quite at liberty to keep your secret.
Of course, if you don't file for a patent and disclose your invention, someone else can come along and invent the same thing themselves, and then you have no means to profit from it. But if you weren't profiting from it anyway, and they invented it independently, what right have you to stop them from taking advantage of their invention? At that point, they have as much right to develop the idea as you do.
All you're saying is that allowing patents that aren't used to be held purely to control the behaviour of others is a good idea. I just can't see any justification for that; in fact, it's exactly what the large companies do to bully the small ones, and exactly what this new organisation is going to do to make money by lawyering.
The sad thing is, this has always been the biggest danger with patents, but the people who could make a difference were too busy worrying about the big-guy-licensing-out-little-guy problem (or making their own money, depending) to notice.
Patents should work like trademarks: if you aren't actually using the invention and don't have any plans to do so within a reasonable timeframe, you automatically lose the patent rights and anyone can use the knowledge your patent documentation provides. (It would be better if you had to demonstrate a use or intended use before a patent application was approved, but that's obviously unrealistic right now.)
Actions speak louder than words. Always have, always will.
At the risk of sounding like I'm just sucking up, I actually find Slashdot to be one of the best resources for a programmer with general interest in most things IT, which I am.
There is a simple reason for this. We all know that there is loads of material out there, but something genuinely new and original is hard to find. However, when such a thing does come along, it's a sure bet that five million people (or one well-informed academic, depending) will submit an article to Slashdot, and the editors are smart enough to spot that submission and put it up on the front page. This sort of "digest" is invaluable as a starting point for further research.
The other thing is to distinguish reading background articles on potentially useful technologies so you have a rough idea of their strengths and weaknesses from reading detailed specs on things you might never need to know about. When you come across a project where they might be useful and you have a real context for further investigation, that's when download the detailed specs, buy the books, etc. Again, Slashdot is often quite useful for this, because amongst the detritus that swamps most discussions, there are a few pearls from genuinely informed people, and reading the right four or five backgrounders over a couple of years is worth more than reading thirty glorified press releases by companies offering the same technology in a different wrapper this week.
Sorry, but I really don't think that's a very constructive attitude.
There is simply too much small print in an average person's life for them to read and absorb all of it. That would probably still be true even it it were written in plain $LANGUAGE, and not deliberately obfuscated by lawyers. Hence it is unrealistic to expect anyone to understand and, if necessary, challenge everything that they might not agree with if asked in isolation.
To protect society from the unscrupulous behaviour of those who would capitalise on this systematic weakness, we have a legal system. We elect people to form a government that can spend its full time in administration on our behalf, so we don't have to. Their remit is to look after our interests for us in cases like this.
The problem with a lot of technology is that it takes a fairly long time for the elected government's knowledge and views catch up with informed professionals (who, of course, can dedicate their whole working life to the technology industry, an advantage the lawmakers don't have). Consequently there is a fairly large window of opportunity for profitable spamming, spyware, adware, etc. that aren't really in the general public's interests before it becomes illegal.
The only realistic solution to this problem is to educate the lawmakers and draw their attention to new problems faster so they can act against them. Expecting to educate everyone in society about every potential threat to their finances, privacy, security, work-life balance, etc. just isn't a realistic possibility, which is why comments like the parent post aren't very helpful.
Talk to a lawyer, but I rather doubt the "work for hire" part counts if a court finds that they weren't given the consideration agreed for that hire. Challenging their copyright is actually a rather clever suggestion, IMHO. Of course, we're talking about the US legal system, so sanity may not be relevant here, and if you could prove that the contract was broken, the copyright issue is probably the least of EA's worries anyway...
Yes, so we thought, too. Unfortunately, that process apparently couldn't work out what was wrong (even though the lock-up screen when trying to boot the PC from the hard drive had no doubt about the file that was the culprit...) and didn't seem to offer any options to fix it (short of what we did).
After a little scratching of heads, we opted for the slow but reliable solution of reformatting and reinstalling, before wasting any more time trying to be clever.
Check.
Check.
Who?
That one's going to be a problem. :-)
Well, as the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance. If you you can't afford to train people, you sure as hell can't afford to employ good people who already have those skills, which might explain this:
I suspect the problem isn't games, Linux fans doing their own thing, or newbies playing with your system. It's far more likely to be that you simply aren't offering the market rate for someone good enough to do the job you want done. If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys. :-)
See also my reply to the grandparent post.
Ah, but They should have trained up all the staff first, so We can hire them. You know, Them, the ones who do all the low-paid monkey-work so we don't have to.
The sad truth is that short-sighted corporate policy has frequently been:
- Grab new grads.
- Run them to breaking point for a couple of years, with
- long hours
- minimal back-up/support
- little or no training.
- Dump them when they get too expensive.
- Goto 1.
With that sort of mindset, life is always going to come and kick you in the arse sooner or later. After all, you get what you pay for. If you pay for cheap labour, don't bother with proper training and looking after your people, and take the profits with a smile, then bend over and take the long-term results like a man as well.Curiously, the company I work for (which pays reasonably, offers a decent overall package, and has fairly competent management) has no trouble retaining very skilled and experienced engineers for a decade or more.
FWIW, it just took me 5 minutes of talking to one of their staff [FX: call centre, Indian accents] just to cancel my old dial-up account. They wanted all sorts of background information about why I was cancelling, but I think they got bored after something like "unreliable service, cuts me off randomly, you changed the Ts & Cs unacceptably since I signed up, capped hours on-line in an 'unmetered' service, your web site doesn't work properly with non-IE browsers, your web server is configured incorrectly so my web site doesn't work properly with non-IE browsers either in spite of my making a simpler request to your admins to send correct MIME type info months ago..."
BTW, if you are in a similar position, never tell them you're moving to ADSL. They'll hassle you for everything you could possibly tell them about which ISP you're moving to, yada yada.
And the bastards still had the nerve to charge me for this month's direct debit even after I'd cancelled... One stroppy letter coming up.
Executive summary of MS history: Microsoft lost in court, and were convicted of monopoly abuse. They got away with mostly a slap on the wrist in the US, after Bush came in the first time and the DOJ basically backed down. Europe gave them a small but significant fine, but pretty much threw Ballmer out on the street when he went to ask for an 11th hour reprieve.
Executive summary of relevant anti-trust law, as it applies in most places relevant to this conversation: You may not treat a customer prejudicially in a market where you hold an effective monopoly (e.g., operating systems) because they don't follow your lead in another market (e.g., web browsers).
Given that Europe has warned MS once and could easily throw the book at them if they misbehave again, and in the US Microsoft's best friend at the government (Ashcroft) has just stepped down, now might not be the best time for them to try something of dubious legality...
Lower customer support costs (good) and better customer satisfaction (priceless).
I use a similar scheme, but I use voice rendering software to read out the hex digits, and record it on tape. You should really try it; it's much more space efficient than a binder.
But the point of the sentence is not to "pay back" all the time stolen from society. Please see my comment on what the prison system is for, made when this subject first came up the other day.
If a FPS can manage to include the line "I don't have time to play with myself!" for a legitimate reason, they can't all be bad. :o)
In which case, anyone who's in a monogamous marriage had better head on over to the asylum right behind "al dem queers 'n dykes", because monogamy certainly isn't a natural tendency for humans either. (Don't confuse this with forming families/communities and a desire to protect our young, both of which are.)
Fortunately, it seems as though both Ashcroft and Tom Ridge are likely to stand down for "personal reasons" around the time that Bush reshuffles his advisers. (This rumour has hit several mainstream news channels as I write, some attributing it to a White House source, but I've not seen anything concrete as a source yet.)
Except, of course, for the fact that the government is reducing speed limits dramatically in areas with speed cameras in them, with local governments often violating central government guidelines on both appropriate speed limits and camera placement. Oh, and traffic light timings have been deliberately changed in many places to increase congestion and try to force car drivers to give up and use our pathetic public transport system instead.
It is?
In discussions like this, you have to start by establishing what the value/benefit of the prison system is. Is it to punish the criminals? Of course. But why?
Punishment in its own right won't undo many of the crimes that carry jail sentences. It's simply a sad fact that once a murder, rape, or other abuse has been committed, it's done, and nothing can change that. All you can do is try to prevent it happening again, by:
In the first case, you're talking about locking someone up for as long as it takes to mend their ways, potentially indefinitely. In the second, you're talking about providing a sufficient disincentive to prevent others feeling it's worth it to commit the crime.
In either respect, of course 9 years is far too long. These people aren't a danger to society; they're a pain in the arse. To encourage others not to be pains in the arse, a custodial sentence may be warranted, but throwing someone inside for 3-6 months should provide a sufficient kick up the backside for a first offence (on top of fining them 100% of the takings they made through the spamming, of course).
Something like 9 years is enough to destroy a life and make someone coming out turn to far darker things just to survive, which is not a productive use of the prison system from any point of view. Save long jail terms for the crimes so heinous that what we really want to do is lock someone up and throw away the key, where that scale of disincentive is required to inhibit further crimes by others, and keeping the perp off the streets for that long is necessary for public safety.
I do think Blair will get hammered for it, and I think Labour will lose a significant amount of its parliamentary majority at the next election as a result. Unfortunately, the only two other parties with a prayer of winning a significant number of seats in England are the Conservatives (whose leader may just be scarier than our Tone, and some of whose shadow ministers certainly make Jack Straw and David "Big Brother" Blunkett look good) and the Lib Dems (who talk a good fight, and have some decent policies when it comes to things like the Iraq war, but historically have never been a serious contender for winning the election).
It's going to be Labour by default, followed shortly by a quiet resignation by Tony and Gordon Brown taking over, followed shortly after that by a marked shift in foreign policy, I'd imagine...
No, just naive.
I'm from the UK, where there will probably be a general election in the first half of next year, with little credible opposition to Blair. I feel your pain. :-(
Why, did you think Bush had lots of fans in the Arab nations just now? Or maybe in China? Iran? N. Korea?
Even the nations whose governments gave some support to his "alliance" often did so against popular opinion, as is the case here in the UK.
In fact, Windows System Update did that for me a few months back. The machine became unusable, and required another PC to recover the files from the hard drive, followed by a reformat and a complete OS reinstall (and all the apps of course) to get it back up and running.
It's interesting that everyone is watching the presidential election, but very few comments here concern the congress/senate seats that are up for grabs. It's surprising, for Slashdot, that no-one's noticed people like Fritz Hollings stepping down, for example. Given the strong views of a few specific congresscritters/senators on various geek-related matters, does anyone have a breakdown of how the usual suspects are doing?