Yeah really. Check out this comment from the article:
"From a cultural point of view, we find it strange that European artists are protected more in the U.S. than they are back home," she said.
Let me summarize: "But Mom, he's doing it, so why can't I do it too!!!"
They continue with this line of reasoning:
"We feel there is real discrimination here," Cunningham said. "Record companies in the U.S., their assets are valued much more highly because they have a much longer term of (copyright) protection....
This is like a 13-year old screaming "this is so unfair".
Nobody is revisiting the underlying arguments for extending copyright protection past its usual lifetime. They see this as a business argument to be settled about competition and profitability.
The EFF need to get in there and make sure that at least some relevant questions are being asked. Like what the purpose of copyright in the first place is, and how a proposed extension either supports or undermines that purpose.
And here's your mom's comeback for the "but he's doing it too" teenager whine:
Hey Europe, if all of your friends were jumping off of a bridge, would you do it too?
Those poor bastards. I don't know how they deal with that amount of spam. I don't know how many times I've been foo@bar.com. I'd also like to publicly apologize to the owner of a particular domain. I have used obviously@faked.com many times as well.
What an arms race spam has become! I have several layers of defense, as well as multiple mail boxes. (The public me, the private me, the work me, and of course the slashdot me) Going multiple personality I have found is the most effective defense against the rabble.:)
I think though that most people buy cameras for the functionality of the camera, rather than the image file format. Besides, a lot of the cameras that have strange formats come with ready-made software to convert that format into something reasonable, (even if such software doesn't run on minority OS's)
They aren't hurting their presence in the professional space - those folks still are going to buy the camera for its camera features. That provides an opportunity to sneak in other stuff that the camera company thinks will distinguish it from other companies, including different file formats with extensions to do particular things.
is meaning that the camera manufacturers are seeing their poduct become commoditised, and apparently feeling unable to compete on hardware quality alone
If what you say there is true, you've identified the reason for the strange formats and differences between cameras; they are trying to differentiate themselves.
The fine applies if they can't come to an agreement about the way to fix the issue. The way I read the article, it's not that they are currently dodging the fine, it's that the fine doesn't apply unless a set of conditions are met, and they're trying to avoid meeting that set of conditions, by putting together a different agreement with the EU that supposedly everybody can live with.
From the article:
The U.S. software giant could be hit with a fine of up to $5 million a day if the European Commission concludes that its proposals would not allow non-Microsoft work group servers to achieve full interoperability with Windows PC and servers.
Why not? I use it all the time for small to medium size files
Ever tried using it for large files? It's not so much that you annoy your administrator if you do this, it's more that the actual software out there is just lousy at supporting these types of actions. It does work fine for small and medium files, but unless it works well for all files, it can't really be called a good file transfer mechanism.
It's the most convenient way for me to send someone one or more files
That's part of my point - there's no reason you should use something other than email to do this. It is the most convenient way to do it. It's just that the current software sucks to support that. You can't so much as tag a description of an attached file when you do attach something. You have to describe in the body of the email what r4242_b233.pdf actually is.
With the right email client, the plots get displayed with the message
With the right email client. I use Mutt, maybe you use Outlook, maybe the third person uses Eudora. Are we all going to see it?
I'm sure there is some system administrator at the receiving end who is unhappy about his email system getting clogged up with attached files. I don't care, and he better get used to it. The email system was installed to meet the needs of the users, not the system administrator.
Again I agree. The point I was trying to make is that the protocols, standards, software, and hardware aren't behind email to make it possible for him to support some types of usage efficiently. The course of action I'd suggest is not to fire the sysadmin or give up your hopes of doing things conveniently, but rather to revamp the idea of email a bit so you could continue doing the same reasonable things, only have them well supported and reliable.
I hope that the natural evolution provides for changes to the email system. I'd agree with your points, but email is far from perfect for about a million reasons. Examples:
E-mail is not a file transfer mechanism. Don't even try it with really huge files, and it probably shouldn't be used as a file repository (Everything you've gotten over the past 5 years, including 10 iterations of the same document, etc)
It's lacking in metadata in many places. Headers are great, user-added headers are better, but there's some semantic metadata that's missing and would be helpful.
People violate standards in creative ways about the main text of the message (is it text, is it an HTML attachment, is it HTML as the text, etc) and encoding of attachments.
Interchange between systems like lotus, outlook, straight internet email, various groupware packages. These lose email addresses and only use name aliases with forwarded messages, and so on. You have a huge problem with gateways between systems
Non-standard integration with other packages, such as sending meeting announcements as a very particular type of email message (Outlook). This is another example of missing metadata - rather than being a particular piece of text, it should be flagged as what it is - a meeting announcement
It seems that with IPV4, people designed a network to operate in a particular context (academic research 20-30 years ago). Later, it was acknowledged that the first cut standard doesn't do everything that's needed for a global distributed network, and now we're moving to IPV6. Why shouldn't the same happen with the email related standards and systems?
Very unlikely. It probably has much more to do with Red Hat's move into the server market - they don't seem too concerned with desktop linux because that's really not how they make their money. The things they do in the server market you might be able to attribute to reactions to whatever else is happening with other vendors, but they just don't focus on Fedora anymore, that's why they're letting it go.
Giving more control to an external foundation is a good thing. I hope the developers run with it.
..Or maybe someone could make the Mac Mini even smaller, something that could sit on the "top" of your "palm". What kind of computer would they call that?
Here's the basic idea. You have several product lines: desktops, laptops, palm tops. Each line has a top of the market, and a bottom that provide the most and least features within that line, respectively. I think what we're seeing here is an instance of a phenomenon where the bottom of one product line can come into the neighborhood of the top of another product line.
You're right. No one writes articles about detecting sentences (for example) by looking for the first capital letter and then the period that follows.
That is a problem that has a solution though - the examiners need to know the area. If you filed a patent for what you just described, and a perl programmer was examining your patent, the guy would laugh himself to death. No so if you're dealing with a pointy-headed lawyer with no background in technology other than a several-day seminar he took in technology licensing.
I think the one thing that's hard to swallow is that this is defensive patent. IE they get "sued" by someone and need to fire back
Actually, the point of the defensive patent is the opposite - the reason you'd get sued in the first place is because someone else had the patent. If you had the patent, (hypothetically) no one would sue you in the first place, so there'd be nothing to defend. On the other hand, if you don't patent, someone else might, and then use that patent as a cudgel. If you don't think that defensive patent is a valuable strategy, just ask yourself: "Wouldn't it have been wise for Barnes & Noble to patent one-click in retrospect?" They may have won or settled their case, but $50,000 for a patent application sure beats $500,000 in defense fees.
This is an abuse of the patent system, which should be protecting real innovators from being ripped off.
That remains to be seen, based on how MS enforces the patent. Given their patent portfolio, if they really did litigate everything that they might have standing to litigate, MS and IBM would practically be the only producers of software worldwide. I think it's more plausible that they've done this intentionally as a defensive move, and don't have interest in litigating because (A) MS wants people to develop software for its platform, even if it's with MS's own techniques (B) the patent probably wouldn't stand up to a serious challenge (C) They got the patent in the first place to avoid being sued, not to do the suing themselves.
The consequence to going overboard in the other direction is probably not very desirable.
There are those who would say people would stop innovating. Personally, I don't buy that. I think the more realistic consequence is that they would go places where they felt their interests were better protected. Practically, that might mean applying for intellectual property protection elsewhere in the world, or incorporating their business elsewhere.
One of the things that I'm not sure has been decided is burden of guilt/proof in patent evaluation. In the court system, the US bias is clear: we would rather see 2 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man falsely imprisoned. That's what "innocent until proven guilty" and "burden of proof on accuser" practically means. What's the patent analog? Option A: we would rather register 5 false patents than deny a legitimate patent registration. Option B: We would rather deny 5 legitimate patents than allow one false patent. Option B sounds scary to me. What important drug, breakthrough software, life-saving medical device, biotech invention, or other such thing may be germinated elsewhere as a result of choosing option B?
It's not deniable that inventors go to specific places they see in their interests from the perspective of intellectual property. (Examples would be the Chinese and Europeans who come to the US to develop ideas because of perceived better protection)
My solution is much easier than yours; end business process and software patents
I don't think that this is a good choice, because it presupposes that there aren't any really new ideas in this area that should be protected. In other words, it biases the discussion towards Option B.
Interesting question: What would constitute due diligence in searching prior art? Answer carefully; go overboard, and you'll cripple the USPTO and their ability to grant legitimate patents. Answer too loosely, and you'll end up with people patenting ridiculous things.
This is a very real and practical issue that the USPTO is facing. I'm not sure that there is a good answer.
One of the problems IMHO is that the review and litigation process is too slow, too expensive, and too difficult. People can threaten suit and get others to back down even if the person being attacked knows they have a winning case. (A "winning case" though sometimes takes 3 years and $1 million, which may not be reimbursed, even if you could front the money to do it)
One potential solution would be to streamline the courts - make it quicker and simpler to bring a patent issue to court. It would disincentivize people from bringing false patent claims against other people (since they could lose in short order if they didn't have a case) and things could get properly reviewed. I don't pretend to know how this actually would be done. It's easy to suggest, but practically speaking it would be really, really hard. (Streamlining the courts)
A couple of other things to keep in mind about the USPTO - this doesn't in any way excuse their behavior, but makes it at least somewhat understandable. First, this was filed in 2000, so the examination about its merit probably happened a long time ago. Whatever standards the USPTO has now for examination of these patents, they didn't have standards even that high at the time this thing was being seriously considered.
There are also quite a few claims with some specificity in them, which might have led the USPTO to think this was a new idea. One problem with these "obvious" ideas is that if it's really obvious, no one ever publishes anything on it, which lends credence to the claim it's a new idea. After all, if it wasn't a new idea, wouldn't someone have written about it?
Keep in mind also that a patent is frequently used as a defensive mechanism. There's a difference between having a patent with the claims that they have attached, and having something that will lead to a successful suit in open court against an infringing party. Sometimes though just the threat of an expensive lawsuit is enough to get people to back down.
My guess though would be that this is so widespread, MS probably patented it to prevent someone else from doing the same and then beating them over the head with the patent.
That means that all you suckers who use.sigs now owe me a dollar every time you post. You'll all be recieving bills very soon now.
That could seriously damage my.sig business! I've been in the business of selling high-quality signature files for quite some time now. I figure I may as well get my plug in:
This.sig is free shareware. Register now for only $49.95 to get its full 10MB version!
People have a lot of theories for why bad patents are granted. In reality, it's a bunch of different problems combined. I've dealt with a few trademarks and I've been involved in some patent review talks. Here's my IANAL take on some of what's involved:
The examining attorneys don't get it. They don't have sufficient people with sufficiently deep knowledge in any particular field, so what's obvious to the practitioner isn't necessarily obvious to the examining attorney.
They don't know how to search for prior art. If you don't know that "a digital identifier associated with an individual user of digital (web-based resources) intended to act as an identifying mechanism" is commonly called a cookie, you might grant a patent related to that because you didn't know how to search for similar stuff.
In some cases, examining attorneys are paid by the office action, or how many letters they send back and forth contesting a mark or patent. In some cases, this provides opportunities for applicants to add much more supporting information to the application, and get a feeling for the thinking of the USPTO and what they need to say in order to get around the USPTO's mental biases
Lawyers have the time and money to browbeat and appeal USPTO decisions. USPTO doesn't have the time and the money to fight every one to the bitter end. The reality is that the only way to make some attorneys go away is to grant it.
There's a company out there called M-CAM that does IP valuation - in other words they can tell you if what you have is a bogus patent worth nothing that shouldn't have been granted, or if you've got something that is fundamentally innovative. I saw a presentation a while back from the guy who runs the company, and they really get it. (The presentation started off by likening bogus patents to counterfeit money, particularly since companies use these patents to inflate perceptions of their valuation when sold)
You have a misunderstanding. Every freenet user is a node administrator. The freenet node is what actually does all the work. Every user runs a node
Nope, no understanding. What I was trying to point out is that yes, that is the way it currently works, but not the way that it might ideally work. Freenet users and node administrators are currently one and the same, I agree.
Nodes however are built for access through FCP (freenet client protocol, or at least that's what it was a while ago) and there were explicit settings for whether or not this was allowed outside of your machine. Several people ran open FCP machines where anyone could connect. It's really just a client/server setup, where the node is the server.
20,000,000 users at some time in the future, 20,000,000 nodes? Ouch, that's really going to suck for network performance I would suppose, even with the best graph connection algorithms. Far more likely is that some trustable people will run nodes that many people will use, and they'll have lots of disk space. Granted, there are issues of trust (do you trust the person running your node) but I expect that if the network really grows, this will happen.
No, it sounds more to me like a fancy excuse for lack of scalability. Every other network that has enjoyed wide success has grown pretty quickly. Good networks of course always have teething problems and growing pains, but they very rarely completely shut down.
There may be a theoretical discussion about the way these types of networks work that amounts to the statement "no, seriously, we need to grown slowly" - that discussion might even be right. It still doesn't change the dynamics of the way things actually work on the internet. Things that get attention grow quickly. If you can't handle that, you have a serious problem. Not an unsolveable problem, not an impossible problem, but something that really needs to be looked at.
Fast networks with nothing in them aren't very useful.
The web exploded when everybody and their brother started publishing web pages, not when people had browsers or connections to the internet.
It's about content. For freenet though, that means a very different type of content that you wouldn't want on the web. The social problems that they'll face if the network does grow into something substantial are surely going to be something to behold.
The actual things that are done by any software are pretty complicated - that doesn't prevent us from abstracting them away from the user.
Now freenet is slightly different in that it uses encryption. From that perspective, things can change slightly in that PGP had problems with users needing to know about public/private keypair security, understanding what signing was, why it was important, concepts behind the web of trust, etc.
I don't see freenet having those issues though. Node administrators for sure, but not freenet users. Freenet users don't really have keys or even any necessary knowledge of the technical layer of encryption. They need to know how to connect to a node.
What's so fundamentally different about freenet that it's inevitably going to be more complicated? For disambiguation, specifically I'm talking about the user perspective, not the node administrator perspective (which sadly have been one in the same so far). Node administrators will deal with stuff that users don't see.
I'm not trying to beat up on freenet here, I just think that if the software is very complicated, it's probably due to a potential lack in usability design as opposed to something inherent about the software. If you buy the metaphor of freenet as some gigantic encrypted data store in the sky, using it from a user's perspective shouldn't be much more complicated than using a hard disk. Send files, get files. Sure, there's lots of sticky details, but the node should worry about that for us, shouldn't it?
Re:Newsbyte is a well known troll
on
Revamping Freenet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How about using this opportunity of discussion on Slashdot to bring up some of your own thoughts on Freenet? I for one used it regularly quite some time ago, but I got lost in all of the network upgrades and software transitions that left me with nothing but RNF and DNF messages even after having run a node for several days.
I'm really, genuinely interested in this project, and I'm all ears to hear about any forward movement or positive momentum the project has. Let us know about it.
Whether or not Newsbyte is a tool isn't really an interesting issue - let's talk about the ideas that are going to make the network actually usable!
We are just completely spoiled in terms of expected turn-around time in R&D. The timetables you are suggesting are inconvenient and bad, but not impossible to deal with. We're just used to faster in other areas of technology.
There are plenty of concerns to be taken care of with nuclear propulsion. I think it probably can be done safely and effectively in the long run, but having a Columbia or Challenger type incident with lots of radioactive material onboard is bound to make some people a bit queasy...
The politicians get stuck on the horns of a dilemma, possibly due to uninformed voters.
Scenario: Congress creates a bill called the "fluffy bunny petting act of 2005, providing (amongst other things) for free cold fusion generated power and eternal global peace"
Sen Dick Shaftus, (R-TX) decides that this is his opportunity, and attaches a rider - "Infant Mulching Federal Subsidies for the Rich".
Principled politician, Molly Naivitus (D-MA) votes against the bill, desparate to prevent the mulching of infants in her state.
Republicans campaign against Naivitus in Massachussets, outraged that she would vote against petting fluffy bunnies and eternal global peace!
Voters, spun by soundbites and browbeaten by O'Reilly, vote Naivitus out of office.
Future Senators take note, and convince themselves that the main purpose of the bill is probably enough, and some of those infants might have deserved it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me summarize: "But Mom, he's doing it, so why can't I do it too!!!"
They continue with this line of reasoning:
This is like a 13-year old screaming "this is so unfair".
Nobody is revisiting the underlying arguments for extending copyright protection past its usual lifetime. They see this as a business argument to be settled about competition and profitability.
The EFF need to get in there and make sure that at least some relevant questions are being asked. Like what the purpose of copyright in the first place is, and how a proposed extension either supports or undermines that purpose.
And here's your mom's comeback for the "but he's doing it too" teenager whine:
Hey Europe, if all of your friends were jumping off of a bridge, would you do it too?
Those poor bastards. I don't know how they deal with that amount of spam. I don't know how many times I've been foo@bar.com. I'd also like to publicly apologize to the owner of a particular domain. I have used obviously@faked.com many times as well.
:)
What an arms race spam has become! I have several layers of defense, as well as multiple mail boxes. (The public me, the private me, the work me, and of course the slashdot me) Going multiple personality I have found is the most effective defense against the rabble.
I don't know...there's also:
* The United Nations
* The Washington, DC housing market
* North Korea & China
* Alpha Centauri (for the moment...)
I think though that most people buy cameras for the functionality of the camera, rather than the image file format. Besides, a lot of the cameras that have strange formats come with ready-made software to convert that format into something reasonable, (even if such software doesn't run on minority OS's)
They aren't hurting their presence in the professional space - those folks still are going to buy the camera for its camera features. That provides an opportunity to sneak in other stuff that the camera company thinks will distinguish it from other companies, including different file formats with extensions to do particular things.
is meaning that the camera manufacturers are seeing their poduct become commoditised, and apparently feeling unable to compete on hardware quality alone
If what you say there is true, you've identified the reason for the strange formats and differences between cameras; they are trying to differentiate themselves.
The fine applies if they can't come to an agreement about the way to fix the issue. The way I read the article, it's not that they are currently dodging the fine, it's that the fine doesn't apply unless a set of conditions are met, and they're trying to avoid meeting that set of conditions, by putting together a different agreement with the EU that supposedly everybody can live with.
From the article:
The U.S. software giant could be hit with a fine of up to $5 million a day if the European Commission concludes that its proposals would not allow non-Microsoft work group servers to achieve full interoperability with Windows PC and servers.
Why not? I use it all the time for small to medium size files
Ever tried using it for large files? It's not so much that you annoy your administrator if you do this, it's more that the actual software out there is just lousy at supporting these types of actions. It does work fine for small and medium files, but unless it works well for all files, it can't really be called a good file transfer mechanism.
It's the most convenient way for me to send someone one or more files
That's part of my point - there's no reason you should use something other than email to do this. It is the most convenient way to do it. It's just that the current software sucks to support that. You can't so much as tag a description of an attached file when you do attach something. You have to describe in the body of the email what r4242_b233.pdf actually is.
With the right email client, the plots get displayed with the message
With the right email client. I use Mutt, maybe you use Outlook, maybe the third person uses Eudora. Are we all going to see it?
I'm sure there is some system administrator at the receiving end who is unhappy about his email system getting clogged up with attached files. I don't care, and he better get used to it. The email system was installed to meet the needs of the users, not the system administrator.
Again I agree. The point I was trying to make is that the protocols, standards, software, and hardware aren't behind email to make it possible for him to support some types of usage efficiently. The course of action I'd suggest is not to fire the sysadmin or give up your hopes of doing things conveniently, but rather to revamp the idea of email a bit so you could continue doing the same reasonable things, only have them well supported and reliable.
I hope that the natural evolution provides for changes to the email system. I'd agree with your points, but email is far from perfect for about a million reasons. Examples:
It seems that with IPV4, people designed a network to operate in a particular context (academic research 20-30 years ago). Later, it was acknowledged that the first cut standard doesn't do everything that's needed for a global distributed network, and now we're moving to IPV6. Why shouldn't the same happen with the email related standards and systems?
There are three kinds of bacterial simulation software in this world:
* Those that have off-by-one errors in the code,
* and those that don't.
Very unlikely. It probably has much more to do with Red Hat's move into the server market - they don't seem too concerned with desktop linux because that's really not how they make their money. The things they do in the server market you might be able to attribute to reactions to whatever else is happening with other vendors, but they just don't focus on Fedora anymore, that's why they're letting it go.
Giving more control to an external foundation is a good thing. I hope the developers run with it.
..Or maybe someone could make the Mac Mini even smaller, something that could sit on the "top" of your "palm". What kind of computer would they call that?
Here's the basic idea. You have several product lines: desktops, laptops, palm tops. Each line has a top of the market, and a bottom that provide the most and least features within that line, respectively. I think what we're seeing here is an instance of a phenomenon where the bottom of one product line can come into the neighborhood of the top of another product line.
That is a problem that has a solution though - the examiners need to know the area. If you filed a patent for what you just described, and a perl programmer was examining your patent, the guy would laugh himself to death. No so if you're dealing with a pointy-headed lawyer with no background in technology other than a several-day seminar he took in technology licensing.
Actually, the point of the defensive patent is the opposite - the reason you'd get sued in the first place is because someone else had the patent. If you had the patent, (hypothetically) no one would sue you in the first place, so there'd be nothing to defend. On the other hand, if you don't patent, someone else might, and then use that patent as a cudgel. If you don't think that defensive patent is a valuable strategy, just ask yourself: "Wouldn't it have been wise for Barnes & Noble to patent one-click in retrospect?" They may have won or settled their case, but $50,000 for a patent application sure beats $500,000 in defense fees.
That remains to be seen, based on how MS enforces the patent. Given their patent portfolio, if they really did litigate everything that they might have standing to litigate, MS and IBM would practically be the only producers of software worldwide. I think it's more plausible that they've done this intentionally as a defensive move, and don't have interest in litigating because (A) MS wants people to develop software for its platform, even if it's with MS's own techniques (B) the patent probably wouldn't stand up to a serious challenge (C) They got the patent in the first place to avoid being sued, not to do the suing themselves.
There are those who would say people would stop innovating. Personally, I don't buy that. I think the more realistic consequence is that they would go places where they felt their interests were better protected. Practically, that might mean applying for intellectual property protection elsewhere in the world, or incorporating their business elsewhere.
One of the things that I'm not sure has been decided is burden of guilt/proof in patent evaluation. In the court system, the US bias is clear: we would rather see 2 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man falsely imprisoned. That's what "innocent until proven guilty" and "burden of proof on accuser" practically means. What's the patent analog? Option A: we would rather register 5 false patents than deny a legitimate patent registration. Option B: We would rather deny 5 legitimate patents than allow one false patent. Option B sounds scary to me. What important drug, breakthrough software, life-saving medical device, biotech invention, or other such thing may be germinated elsewhere as a result of choosing option B?
It's not deniable that inventors go to specific places they see in their interests from the perspective of intellectual property. (Examples would be the Chinese and Europeans who come to the US to develop ideas because of perceived better protection)
I don't think that this is a good choice, because it presupposes that there aren't any really new ideas in this area that should be protected. In other words, it biases the discussion towards Option B.
Interesting question: What would constitute due diligence in searching prior art? Answer carefully; go overboard, and you'll cripple the USPTO and their ability to grant legitimate patents. Answer too loosely, and you'll end up with people patenting ridiculous things.
This is a very real and practical issue that the USPTO is facing. I'm not sure that there is a good answer.
One of the problems IMHO is that the review and litigation process is too slow, too expensive, and too difficult. People can threaten suit and get others to back down even if the person being attacked knows they have a winning case. (A "winning case" though sometimes takes 3 years and $1 million, which may not be reimbursed, even if you could front the money to do it)
One potential solution would be to streamline the courts - make it quicker and simpler to bring a patent issue to court. It would disincentivize people from bringing false patent claims against other people (since they could lose in short order if they didn't have a case) and things could get properly reviewed. I don't pretend to know how this actually would be done. It's easy to suggest, but practically speaking it would be really, really hard. (Streamlining the courts)
A couple of other things to keep in mind about the USPTO - this doesn't in any way excuse their behavior, but makes it at least somewhat understandable. First, this was filed in 2000, so the examination about its merit probably happened a long time ago. Whatever standards the USPTO has now for examination of these patents, they didn't have standards even that high at the time this thing was being seriously considered.
There are also quite a few claims with some specificity in them, which might have led the USPTO to think this was a new idea. One problem with these "obvious" ideas is that if it's really obvious, no one ever publishes anything on it, which lends credence to the claim it's a new idea. After all, if it wasn't a new idea, wouldn't someone have written about it?
Keep in mind also that a patent is frequently used as a defensive mechanism. There's a difference between having a patent with the claims that they have attached, and having something that will lead to a successful suit in open court against an infringing party. Sometimes though just the threat of an expensive lawsuit is enough to get people to back down.
My guess though would be that this is so widespread, MS probably patented it to prevent someone else from doing the same and then beating them over the head with the patent.
That could seriously damage my .sig business! I've been in the business of selling high-quality signature files for quite some time now. I figure I may as well get my plug in:
This .sig is free shareware. Register now for only $49.95 to get its full 10MB version!
People have a lot of theories for why bad patents are granted. In reality, it's a bunch of different problems combined. I've dealt with a few trademarks and I've been involved in some patent review talks. Here's my IANAL take on some of what's involved:
There's a company out there called M-CAM that does IP valuation - in other words they can tell you if what you have is a bogus patent worth nothing that shouldn't have been granted, or if you've got something that is fundamentally innovative. I saw a presentation a while back from the guy who runs the company, and they really get it. (The presentation started off by likening bogus patents to counterfeit money, particularly since companies use these patents to inflate perceptions of their valuation when sold)
Nope, no understanding. What I was trying to point out is that yes, that is the way it currently works, but not the way that it might ideally work. Freenet users and node administrators are currently one and the same, I agree.
Nodes however are built for access through FCP (freenet client protocol, or at least that's what it was a while ago) and there were explicit settings for whether or not this was allowed outside of your machine. Several people ran open FCP machines where anyone could connect. It's really just a client/server setup, where the node is the server.
20,000,000 users at some time in the future, 20,000,000 nodes? Ouch, that's really going to suck for network performance I would suppose, even with the best graph connection algorithms. Far more likely is that some trustable people will run nodes that many people will use, and they'll have lots of disk space. Granted, there are issues of trust (do you trust the person running your node) but I expect that if the network really grows, this will happen.
Wait...lemme get this straight.
Now, admittedly, I'm ignorant of who PHK is, or what exactly this person has done to annoy you.
But you're going to switch operating systems because of a single person? A troll, even?
I didn't realize that trolls had gotten that powerful. Perhaps there is some magical property to hot grits that I had not realized.
Don't leave us hanging. What's the name of the project, and where can we check it out?
No, it sounds more to me like a fancy excuse for lack of scalability. Every other network that has enjoyed wide success has grown pretty quickly. Good networks of course always have teething problems and growing pains, but they very rarely completely shut down.
There may be a theoretical discussion about the way these types of networks work that amounts to the statement "no, seriously, we need to grown slowly" - that discussion might even be right. It still doesn't change the dynamics of the way things actually work on the internet. Things that get attention grow quickly. If you can't handle that, you have a serious problem. Not an unsolveable problem, not an impossible problem, but something that really needs to be looked at.
Fast networks with nothing in them aren't very useful.
The web exploded when everybody and their brother started publishing web pages, not when people had browsers or connections to the internet.
It's about content. For freenet though, that means a very different type of content that you wouldn't want on the web. The social problems that they'll face if the network does grow into something substantial are surely going to be something to behold.
The actual things that are done by any software are pretty complicated - that doesn't prevent us from abstracting them away from the user.
Now freenet is slightly different in that it uses encryption. From that perspective, things can change slightly in that PGP had problems with users needing to know about public/private keypair security, understanding what signing was, why it was important, concepts behind the web of trust, etc.
I don't see freenet having those issues though. Node administrators for sure, but not freenet users. Freenet users don't really have keys or even any necessary knowledge of the technical layer of encryption. They need to know how to connect to a node.
What's so fundamentally different about freenet that it's inevitably going to be more complicated? For disambiguation, specifically I'm talking about the user perspective, not the node administrator perspective (which sadly have been one in the same so far). Node administrators will deal with stuff that users don't see.
I'm not trying to beat up on freenet here, I just think that if the software is very complicated, it's probably due to a potential lack in usability design as opposed to something inherent about the software. If you buy the metaphor of freenet as some gigantic encrypted data store in the sky, using it from a user's perspective shouldn't be much more complicated than using a hard disk. Send files, get files. Sure, there's lots of sticky details, but the node should worry about that for us, shouldn't it?
How about using this opportunity of discussion on Slashdot to bring up some of your own thoughts on Freenet? I for one used it regularly quite some time ago, but I got lost in all of the network upgrades and software transitions that left me with nothing but RNF and DNF messages even after having run a node for several days.
I'm really, genuinely interested in this project, and I'm all ears to hear about any forward movement or positive momentum the project has. Let us know about it.
Whether or not Newsbyte is a tool isn't really an interesting issue - let's talk about the ideas that are going to make the network actually usable!
We are just completely spoiled in terms of expected turn-around time in R&D. The timetables you are suggesting are inconvenient and bad, but not impossible to deal with. We're just used to faster in other areas of technology.
There are plenty of concerns to be taken care of with nuclear propulsion. I think it probably can be done safely and effectively in the long run, but having a Columbia or Challenger type incident with lots of radioactive material onboard is bound to make some people a bit queasy...
The politicians get stuck on the horns of a dilemma, possibly due to uninformed voters.
Scenario: Congress creates a bill called the "fluffy bunny petting act of 2005, providing (amongst other things) for free cold fusion generated power and eternal global peace"
Sen Dick Shaftus, (R-TX) decides that this is his opportunity, and attaches a rider - "Infant Mulching Federal Subsidies for the Rich".
Principled politician, Molly Naivitus (D-MA) votes against the bill, desparate to prevent the mulching of infants in her state.
Republicans campaign against Naivitus in Massachussets, outraged that she would vote against petting fluffy bunnies and eternal global peace!
Voters, spun by soundbites and browbeaten by O'Reilly, vote Naivitus out of office.
Future Senators take note, and convince themselves that the main purpose of the bill is probably enough, and some of those infants might have deserved it anyway.