Yeah, couldn't agree more. Makes ya wonder if Eli Whitney had to put up with his contemporaries saying "brushing cotton?! Pah, that's so obvious. I have my slaves do that all the time.. this is such an obvious patent."
Actually, around 1998, a DNS server that returned a different IP address for a lookup based on who the request is for was not only novel, it was considered WRONG. Geographical load balancing was your typical dot-com boom idea.
plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache. Evidence that you didn't even read the patent.. and you have the audacity to call the PTO incompetent. Not saying they're not, just saying that you shouldn't be throwing stones here.
The sex and violence of a patent is in the claims. go read em and now look at the date the patent was filed: May 19, 1999.. which means it was being written for 6 to 8 months before that. You're saying that rewriting urls in a web page to fetch objects from geographically different servers was obvious in late 1998?
Not defending the patent system in the US or anything, but claiming that something is "obvious" now when the patent was filed in '99 is pretty freakin', well, obvious!
Hey, it's you who is failing the imagination test.
"Mobile computing" is currently about doing the stuff you do on a desktop computer while you are not sitting at a desk. This even includes "making calls", even if you more often than not use your land line instead of something like Skype when you are at your desk.
In the future (the magical super future) the computers that are sewn into your clothes will not be helping you check your email.. they are will be helping you do all those things that just don't make any sense if you're not on the move:
* Helping you avoid traffic jams
* Telling you when the next bus/train/rocket is leaving on your regular route so you know to walk faster
* Posting your position to Facebook - or whatever takes its place
* Keeping track of where your friends are - cause kids in the future will care more about being able to find their friends than who can see where they are.
* Enabling you to search the local environment for businesses, single women, whatever.
* Interacting with all the new network enabled devices that haven't been invented yet.. and don't be surprised if you can't even get a coke from a vending machine if you don't have sufficient network presence.
We live in the only period of history where it is possible to get a patent on something you discovered without claiming you invented it. If I found a piece of farming equipment that did some novel thing and I went and applied for a patent on it, I would be asked to declare that I invented it and it is not the work of someone else - to satisfy the no-prior-art test. If, however, I am pulling apart a bacterium or some other living creature, the patent office will happily grand me a patent on its genes - they won't even ask me if I invented these genes because it is assumed that I am just patenting a discovery.
That certainly was the case... back when Linus starting working for Transmeta. Things have progressed a bit since then, you might wanna buy a new laptop sometime.
Digital information technology contributes to the world by making it easier to copy and modify information. Computers promise to make this easier for all of us.
Not everyone wants it to be easier. The system of copyright gives software programs "owners", most of whom aim to withhold software's potential benefit from the rest of the public. They would like to be the only ones who can copy and modify the software that we use.
The copyright system grew up with printing--a technology for mass production copying. Copyright fit in well with this technology because it restricted only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that.
Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright. Consider these four practices of the Software Publishers Association (SPA):
* Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.
* Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.
* Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.
* Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.
All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as "samizdat". There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness.
Owners make several kinds of arguments for giving them the power to control how we use information:
* Name calling.
Owners use smear words such as "piracy" and "theft", as well as expert terminology such as "intellectual property" and "damage", to suggest a certain line of thinking to the public--a simplistic analogy between programs and physical objects.
Our ideas and intuitions about property for material objects are about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else. They don't directly apply to making a copy of something. But the owners ask us to apply them anyway.
* Exaggeration.
Owners say that they suffer "harm" or "economic loss" when users copy programs themselves. But the copying has no direct effect on the owner, and it harms no one. The owner can lose only if the person who made the copy would otherwise have paid for one from the owner.
A little thought shows that most such people would not have bought copies. Yet the owners compute their "losses" as if each and every one would have bought a copy. That is exaggeration--to put it kindly.
* The law.
Owners often describe the current state of the law, and the harsh penalties they can threaten us with
Is there a legal way the RIAA could be achieving their goals or is the mere concept of aggressively enforcing their rights under copyright law against regular folk something the legal system is currently stacked against?
I guess what I'm asking is, are they just lazy or just stupid?
It's not just him ya know. Pretty-much every fusion researcher on the planet who isn't working on a Tokamak has had their funding dry up. This isn't because Tokamaks are so close to being ready, quite the opposite.
There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers--with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what the software user wants it to do. Free software also gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life. These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone.
But there are special reasons that apply to schools. They are the subject of this article.
First, free software can save the schools money. Even in the richest countries, schools are short of money. Free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software, so the school system can make copies for all the computers they have. In poor countries, this can help close the digital divide.
This obvious reason, while important, is rather shallow. And proprietary software developers can eliminate this disadvantage by donating copies to the schools. (Watch out!--a school that accepts this offer may have to pay for future upgrades.) So let's look at the deeper reasons.
School should teach students ways of life that will benefit society as a whole. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will use free software after they graduate. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated (and gouged) by megacorporations. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes: to get children addicted (1). They will not give discounts to these students once they grow up and graduate.
Free software permits students to learn how software works. When students reach their teens, some of them want to learn everything there is to know about their computer system and its software. That is the age when people who will be good programmers should learn it. To learn to write software well, students need to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. They will be intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.
Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, "The knowledge you want is a secret--learning is forbidden!" Free software encourages everyone to learn. The free software community rejects the "priesthood of technology", which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know. Schools that use free software will enable gifted programming students to advance.
The next reason for using free software in schools is on an even deeper level. We expect schools to teach students basic facts, and useful skills, but that is not their whole job. The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors--to cooperate with others who need their help. In the area of computers, this means teaching them to share software. Elementary schools, above all, should tell their pupils, "If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other children." Of course, the school must practice what it preaches: all the software installed by the school should be available for students to copy, take home, and redistribute further.
Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson. It also teaches students the role model of public service rather than that of tycoons. All levels of school should use free software.
Umm.. did you miss the part where the Emperor said the second Death Star *wasn't* under construction and that it was all an elaborate trap? I can understand, seeing as he talks like this all the time, but it was kind of a big plot point. The second Death Star was identical to the first.. it was built at the same time as the first.. the Emperor just wanted the Rebels to think it was built in response to the first being destroyed.
Actually the weakness was on both, that's why they went after the second one.. and it was a trap. In fact, the weakness was on all the big craft of the era. Star Destroyers were just as vulnerable to "Trench Run Syndrome" as the Death Stars. Snub starfighters were so successful at taking out large ships using TRS that the Imperial tactic of leaving small ships to planetary defenses had to be changed, thus creating the Lancer-class ships. Kuat Drive Yards designed and developed the first Lancer-class frigate with twenty quad-laser cannon batteries designed specifically for starfighter hunting. Ironically, the Imperial Starfleet found the Lancer-class too expensive for full fleet deployment. A few frigates made it into various fleets, but most admirals preferred to use, and subsequently lose, their TIE starfighters as anti-starfighter options. As a result, most Lancer-class frigates, like smaller ships before them, were assigned to rear guard operations and planetary defense after all.
The misconception over what a planet is, or a planetoid, or even an asteroid, is more than just a definitional thing - it's a whole way of thinking. Consider that it is now 2008 and NASA (and the Russians) are still mainly concerned with the von Braun plan: station, shuttle, moon, mars. It has been almost 40 years now since the first man walked on the Moon, and almost 40 years since Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill asked the provocative question, "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" He went on to show, conclusively some say, that the answer is a resounding "no". The discovery of the Near Earth Asteroids and other objects strengthened his case to such an extent that blasting our way out of a gravity well only to dive back into another cannot be considered anything other than folly.
There is no scientific doubt that living long term in space requires some form of artificial gravity.. and, also, it is not under debate that a spinning station of sufficient size can provide this fundamental physiological need. And yet, in-situ resource utilization is almost exclusively considered a question of which resources on the Moon can be used to get to Mars and which resources on Mars can be used to make our stay a little longer before we come back home. The NEAs are literally mountains of the most pure basic metals and useful carbon compounds that you will find in this part of the solar system. You won't find neither iron ore, nor coal on Earth that can compare.. yet they are largely ignored because the question of "how do we get the NEAs to the Moon, or Mars, or even Earth?" has no suitable answer. I hope you can see why this is the wrong question.
Anyway, give it another 50 years.. big changes in how we think take that long.
Heh, I've worked at a few places "run by geeks". They don't last long. There's this thing called "sales" that they seem to miss. Of course, I'm talking about IT geek here. I know some very successful business nerds. I know a girl who is a big time tax nerd.. natural born bureaucrat, wildly successful.. wears a lot of suits.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, couldn't agree more. Makes ya wonder if Eli Whitney had to put up with his contemporaries saying "brushing cotton?! Pah, that's so obvious. I have my slaves do that all the time.. this is such an obvious patent."
Besides which, the patent is about computers and I'm using a computer, so it is obvious!
Seriously, the arguments geeks make against patents are just brain farts.
And none of those things you just described is what the patent is about. Go and read the patent already.
in retrospect.
The sex and violence of a patent is in the claims. go read em and now look at the date the patent was filed: May 19, 1999.. which means it was being written for 6 to 8 months before that. You're saying that rewriting urls in a web page to fetch objects from geographically different servers was obvious in late 1998?
Not defending the patent system in the US or anything, but claiming that something is "obvious" now when the patent was filed in '99 is pretty freakin', well, obvious!
The death of the library is a harbinger of the death of free education.
Hey, it's you who is failing the imagination test.
"Mobile computing" is currently about doing the stuff you do on a desktop computer while you are not sitting at a desk. This even includes "making calls", even if you more often than not use your land line instead of something like Skype when you are at your desk.
In the future (the magical super future) the computers that are sewn into your clothes will not be helping you check your email.. they are will be helping you do all those things that just don't make any sense if you're not on the move:
* Helping you avoid traffic jams
* Telling you when the next bus/train/rocket is leaving on your regular route so you know to walk faster
* Posting your position to Facebook - or whatever takes its place
* Keeping track of where your friends are - cause kids in the future will care more about being able to find their friends than who can see where they are.
* Enabling you to search the local environment for businesses, single women, whatever.
* Interacting with all the new network enabled devices that haven't been invented yet.. and don't be surprised if you can't even get a coke from a vending machine if you don't have sufficient network presence.
and so on and so on.
We live in the only period of history where it is possible to get a patent on something you discovered without claiming you invented it. If I found a piece of farming equipment that did some novel thing and I went and applied for a patent on it, I would be asked to declare that I invented it and it is not the work of someone else - to satisfy the no-prior-art test. If, however, I am pulling apart a bacterium or some other living creature, the patent office will happily grand me a patent on its genes - they won't even ask me if I invented these genes because it is assumed that I am just patenting a discovery.
If the schedule for the next Falcon 1 launch is pushed back any further Musk might as well go back to writing software.
geminidomino was responding to my sig, you'd know that if you bothered to log in.
That certainly was the case... back when Linus starting working for Transmeta. Things have progressed a bit since then, you might wanna buy a new laptop sometime.
The point is what schools should be teaching about copyright.
The attitude of "don't share" is wrong.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
Digital information technology contributes to the world by making it easier to copy and modify information. Computers promise to make this easier for all of us.
Not everyone wants it to be easier. The system of copyright gives software programs "owners", most of whom aim to withhold software's potential benefit from the rest of the public. They would like to be the only ones who can copy and modify the software that we use.
The copyright system grew up with printing--a technology for mass production copying. Copyright fit in well with this technology because it restricted only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that.
Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright. Consider these four practices of the Software Publishers Association (SPA):
* Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.
* Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.
* Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.
* Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.
All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as "samizdat". There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness.
Owners make several kinds of arguments for giving them the power to control how we use information:
* Name calling.
Owners use smear words such as "piracy" and "theft", as well as expert terminology such as "intellectual property" and "damage", to suggest a certain line of thinking to the public--a simplistic analogy between programs and physical objects.
Our ideas and intuitions about property for material objects are about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else. They don't directly apply to making a copy of something. But the owners ask us to apply them anyway.
* Exaggeration.
Owners say that they suffer "harm" or "economic loss" when users copy programs themselves. But the copying has no direct effect on the owner, and it harms no one. The owner can lose only if the person who made the copy would otherwise have paid for one from the owner.
A little thought shows that most such people would not have bought copies. Yet the owners compute their "losses" as if each and every one would have bought a copy. That is exaggeration--to put it kindly.
* The law.
Owners often describe the current state of the law, and the harsh penalties they can threaten us with
Is there a legal way the RIAA could be achieving their goals or is the mere concept of aggressively enforcing their rights under copyright law against regular folk something the legal system is currently stacked against?
I guess what I'm asking is, are they just lazy or just stupid?
It's not just him ya know. Pretty-much every fusion researcher on the planet who isn't working on a Tokamak has had their funding dry up. This isn't because Tokamaks are so close to being ready, quite the opposite.
Tokamaks will never be cheap, nor efficient.
Inertial gravitational containment is the holy grail.
Inertial electrostatic containment is the next best thing.
and what have YOU done about it huh?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html
There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers--with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what the software user wants it to do. Free software also gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life. These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone.
But there are special reasons that apply to schools. They are the subject of this article.
First, free software can save the schools money. Even in the richest countries, schools are short of money. Free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software, so the school system can make copies for all the computers they have. In poor countries, this can help close the digital divide.
This obvious reason, while important, is rather shallow. And proprietary software developers can eliminate this disadvantage by donating copies to the schools. (Watch out!--a school that accepts this offer may have to pay for future upgrades.) So let's look at the deeper reasons.
School should teach students ways of life that will benefit society as a whole. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will use free software after they graduate. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated (and gouged) by megacorporations. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes: to get children addicted (1). They will not give discounts to these students once they grow up and graduate.
Free software permits students to learn how software works. When students reach their teens, some of them want to learn everything there is to know about their computer system and its software. That is the age when people who will be good programmers should learn it. To learn to write software well, students need to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. They will be intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.
Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, "The knowledge you want is a secret--learning is forbidden!" Free software encourages everyone to learn. The free software community rejects the "priesthood of technology", which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know. Schools that use free software will enable gifted programming students to advance.
The next reason for using free software in schools is on an even deeper level. We expect schools to teach students basic facts, and useful skills, but that is not their whole job. The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors--to cooperate with others who need their help. In the area of computers, this means teaching them to share software. Elementary schools, above all, should tell their pupils, "If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other children." Of course, the school must practice what it preaches: all the software installed by the school should be available for students to copy, take home, and redistribute further.
Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson. It also teaches students the role model of public service rather than that of tycoons. All levels of school should use free software.
And that's why other countries don't have punitive damages. Somehow civil matters got all mixed up in the USA. I guess greed does that.
Umm.. did you miss the part where the Emperor said the second Death Star *wasn't* under construction and that it was all an elaborate trap? I can understand, seeing as he talks like this all the time, but it was kind of a big plot point. The second Death Star was identical to the first.. it was built at the same time as the first.. the Emperor just wanted the Rebels to think it was built in response to the first being destroyed.
Gotta read something when the code is compiling.
Actually the weakness was on both, that's why they went after the second one.. and it was a trap. In fact, the weakness was on all the big craft of the era. Star Destroyers were just as vulnerable to "Trench Run Syndrome" as the Death Stars. Snub starfighters were so successful at taking out large ships using TRS that the Imperial tactic of leaving small ships to planetary defenses had to be changed, thus creating the Lancer-class ships. Kuat Drive Yards designed and developed the first Lancer-class frigate with twenty quad-laser cannon batteries designed specifically for starfighter hunting. Ironically, the Imperial Starfleet found the Lancer-class too expensive for full fleet deployment. A few frigates made it into various fleets, but most admirals preferred to use, and subsequently lose, their TIE starfighters as anti-starfighter options. As a result, most Lancer-class frigates, like smaller ships before them, were assigned to rear guard operations and planetary defense after all.
The misconception over what a planet is, or a planetoid, or even an asteroid, is more than just a definitional thing - it's a whole way of thinking. Consider that it is now 2008 and NASA (and the Russians) are still mainly concerned with the von Braun plan: station, shuttle, moon, mars. It has been almost 40 years now since the first man walked on the Moon, and almost 40 years since Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill asked the provocative question, "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" He went on to show, conclusively some say, that the answer is a resounding "no". The discovery of the Near Earth Asteroids and other objects strengthened his case to such an extent that blasting our way out of a gravity well only to dive back into another cannot be considered anything other than folly.
There is no scientific doubt that living long term in space requires some form of artificial gravity.. and, also, it is not under debate that a spinning station of sufficient size can provide this fundamental physiological need. And yet, in-situ resource utilization is almost exclusively considered a question of which resources on the Moon can be used to get to Mars and which resources on Mars can be used to make our stay a little longer before we come back home. The NEAs are literally mountains of the most pure basic metals and useful carbon compounds that you will find in this part of the solar system. You won't find neither iron ore, nor coal on Earth that can compare.. yet they are largely ignored because the question of "how do we get the NEAs to the Moon, or Mars, or even Earth?" has no suitable answer. I hope you can see why this is the wrong question.
Anyway, give it another 50 years.. big changes in how we think take that long.
tolweb seems to have lots of high level categories but no actual species.
Heh, I've worked at a few places "run by geeks". They don't last long. There's this thing called "sales" that they seem to miss. Of course, I'm talking about IT geek here. I know some very successful business nerds. I know a girl who is a big time tax nerd.. natural born bureaucrat, wildly successful.. wears a lot of suits.