Using a mobile phone near a radio will give you an idea
Using my cordless phone near my microwave already gives me an idea.
[cell phone] usage is always prohibited on airliners
It's prohibited on airliners by the FCC, not the FAA, because cell phones in the air interfere with networks on the ground. You don't know what you're talking about.
You regard fast food, eaten with your fingers, as the norm.
And you didn't heed my sig. I never wrote that and you incorrectly assumed it. I merely gave fast-food examples that Joe Sixpack could relate to. Most people eat brie or caviar (on crackers) with their fingers as well.
There are some cultures where eating anything with your fingers is taboo
That doesn't make it either right, practical, or rational.
I remember being amazed seeing Chinese eat shell & eat a crab entirely using chopstick [sic], when it would be far easier to use fingers
Proves my point. Irrational taboos of other cultures don't interest me and can't be used a a justifaction for some action.
I guess they haven't discovered cutlery in your part of the world yet
Most people, probably yourself included, eat hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, french fries, appetizers in general, and lots of other finger-food with (guess what) your fingers.
On August 11 Google removed 12 Websites from their Website index because they recieved a complaint under the DMCA
That does not necessarily mean that (1) the DMCA was correctly applied or (2) the complaint had merit in any case. Perhaps Google just thought it simpler to remove the entries rather than fight a legal battle.
I would guess that living under the law of the DMCA will eventually be the downfall of Google.
Care to explain that? Google doesn't:
... manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that... is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the DMCA]
If an individual or company places information on the publicly accessible web, then clearly there is no "technological measure" to be circumvented to access it.
AFAIK, Google doesn't try to crack password-protected sites and make their content available.
If anything, violation of plain ol' copyright would be their downfall, not the DMCA. Methinks you don't know what the DMCA is.
Do we not want a better search engine to come along? Google is nice and all, but if someone can come up with something better... Well, I'd prefer that.
"Google" is the company that runs its search engine, not the search engine itself. In the next 5 years, I'm sure those smart folks over at Google (the company) will improve their search engine. Indeed, many (most?) of the people who work on search algorithms want to work for Google.
Do you really think you'll here the following in the CEO's office at Google? "The rest of the industry is advancing, but we're stuck with our Google search engine. We can't change it because then it wouldn't be Google any more and our company is named after our search engine."
Do you know how many bacteria, yeast, and fungus are on the floor? Your really eating foot-fungus when you eat something that just fell on the floor.
Do you know how many bacteria, yeast, and fungus, not to mention dried snot from people wiping their noses, are on handrails, doornobs, and kitchen counters? You're really just eating everything that hands have touched (unless you are religious about washing your hands before eating, and not touching anything else while eating).
What's so great about having a software patent vs. having a copyright on the software?
I'll first rephrase your question more generally since the software aspect is irrelevant and inflamatory:
What's so great about having a patent vs. having a copyright?
Having a patent means that you have the exclusive right to do as you please with idea for your invention. You can prevent anybody else from copying your invention even if they never heard of you and invented theirs independently.
Having a copyright means that you have the exclusive right to the embodiment of your idea, but not the idea itself. If somebody else makes their own version that does virtually everything yours does, but was developed independently, you can't stop them.
SpreadSheet calculation using topological sorting is patented, eventhough it was invented 40 year ago.
Then, at worst, that's an example of a bad patent, but, yet again, that doesn't imply that all patents whose preferred embodiment is in software are bad. You only hear about the bad ones. For every bad one, there are far more good ones.
Computer Programs are Writings. As such, they should be subject to copyright law (narrowly interpreted) or trade secret protection, but not patent law.
He's exactly right, and computer programs are subject to copyright law, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about "software patents." However, there is no such thing as a software patent.
It's the idea for which the software is an embodiment that is patented. If you try to copy the idea, even by writing your own software, you would be guilty of patent infringement.
More formally, the thing that is patented is the device a computer becomes when running a given piece of software. For example, if, back in the day, the guys who wrote VisiCalc had patented the idea for doing electronic spreadsheets, what they would have patented would have been the electronic spreadsheet machine that the computer would have become by running VisiCalc. The fact that the idea used a computer and software as part of its embodiment is irrelevant.
Putting software together in just the right way to transform a computer into a novel invention is patentable just like putting gears, wheels, iron plating, etc., together in just the right way to transform a bunch of metal into a steam engine is patentable.
The complaint against "software patents" and the USPTO has to do with the "novelty" and "non-obvious" tests for patent worthiness and calls into question the USPTO's ability to make good desicions regarding software-embodied inventions only and does not mean that software patents as a whole are bad.
Re:Hm, wildly successful brand name...LET'S CHANGE
on
Palm Reveals New Name
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· Score: 1
Although in this case it was a product (the Lucent WaveLAN 802.11b card). They changed that descriptive, even cool name to "Orinoco." Sigh...
SWISH-E is many times slower which is why I wrote SWISH++ in the first place. As for "easier to set up," I don't know what's so hard about changing a few things in a config file and typing "make". As for "easier to maintain," I don't see what's so hard about running a cron job.
I see this project as a competitor to shrink wrapped search engines. IE google appliance or maybe even Folio based products. Typically corporations have many documents that need to be indexed and searchable to their needs.
SWISH++ fills this niche nicely. It can index hundreds of thousands of documents very quickly, indexes not only HTML, but e-mail, news, man pages, LaTeX, RTF, and even the ID3 tags of MP3 files; can apply filters on-the-fly (convert PDF to text, then index that), can do incremental indexing, and can run as a multi-threaded search daemon.
Such conclusions are probably reached because of all the coverage of bad patents here on Slashdot. Yes, there are bad patents. But that doesn't mean all patents are bad:
Jerry Springer's TV show is bad. Therefore, all TV shows are bad.
Just because a novel idea happens to be expressed in software doesn't somehow automatically make it bad.
Suppose the whole idea for "transmitting a markup language over a computer network to a client program that will render said markup into a book-like page complete with images" (i.e., the "web") was patented. Clearly, such an idea is novel and non-obvious. (If it were obvious, somebody would have thought of it earlier.)
Such a patent would be a perfectly valid and "good" patent. The entire points of a patent are (a) to grant an inventor exclusive rights to an invention to allow him to make money out of it as payement for coming up with the idea in the first place, and (b) to advance society by giving inventors incentive to come up with new ideas that everybody can benefit from.
The fact that you may not like the whole patent system, or even particular patents, is irrelevant. Patents don't exist to please you. If they frustrate you because you can't use an idea that is patented, then you are free to come up with a new and better idea. If you do that, then society would benefit from the fact that you couldn't use the original idea.
[One click] should be obvious to anyone who knows the subject area.
It wasn't obvious at the time. Every web site was locked into the shopping-cart/check-out model. Yes, one-click seems "obvious" now. Most good ideas seem obvious after somebody thinks of them.
(Note to those who somehow read what I don't write: above, I never commented on whether an idea like one-click should be patentable. The only thing I said was that, at the time, said idea apparantly wasn't "obvious.")
Not being able to unmount a removable storage device... because some process had the bright idea of keeping an open file on it, or hanging around with it as its cwd.
FYI, this is just as true in Mac OS X (or any *nix).
They aren't a business, they're a government service. If they were a business they'd have been bankrupt decades ago.
However, they don't receive any money from the rest of the federal government (i.e., tax money from citizens). They are entirely self-sufficient and get their money exclusively from selling stamps and other services. Because they're a government service, they simply don't make a profit.
... most programmers don't have enough training to use a more complex language.
C is a fairly complex language, e.g.:
some_func( (void (*)(void*))x );
C is really just glorified assembly language.
I don't think this has ever been in distpute by anybody. However, it's still far easier to write in C than assembly.
I think that C and 'C++ used as C' is the reason alot of commercial software is so bug ridden. Hopefully Java,.NET/.GNU, scripting languages and competent use of modern C++ are starting to change that.
Java (and other "restrictive" languages) only prevent a small class of errors, e.g., memory leaks. They do nothing to prevent logic or algorithmic errors, and they all have their own gotchas. Try changing what hashcode() returns for an object at run-time after you've put in into a hashmap: have fun finding and debugging that!
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but what if a /. story submitter, knowing about the /. effect, willfully submits a story about some company? His intent might me DDOS.
If anything, violation of plain ol' copyright would be their downfall, not the DMCA. Methinks you don't know what the DMCA is.
Do you really think you'll here the following in the CEO's office at Google? "The rest of the industry is advancing, but we're stuck with our Google search engine. We can't change it because then it wouldn't be Google any more and our company is named after our search engine."
Having a copyright means that you have the exclusive right to the embodiment of your idea, but not the idea itself. If somebody else makes their own version that does virtually everything yours does, but was developed independently, you can't stop them.
It's the idea for which the software is an embodiment that is patented. If you try to copy the idea, even by writing your own software, you would be guilty of patent infringement.
More formally, the thing that is patented is the device a computer becomes when running a given piece of software. For example, if, back in the day, the guys who wrote VisiCalc had patented the idea for doing electronic spreadsheets, what they would have patented would have been the electronic spreadsheet machine that the computer would have become by running VisiCalc. The fact that the idea used a computer and software as part of its embodiment is irrelevant.
Putting software together in just the right way to transform a computer into a novel invention is patentable just like putting gears, wheels, iron plating, etc., together in just the right way to transform a bunch of metal into a steam engine is patentable.
The complaint against "software patents" and the USPTO has to do with the "novelty" and "non-obvious" tests for patent worthiness and calls into question the USPTO's ability to make good desicions regarding software-embodied inventions only and does not mean that software patents as a whole are bad.
Although in this case it was a product (the Lucent WaveLAN 802.11b card). They changed that descriptive, even cool name to "Orinoco." Sigh...
IMHO, a front-end is either useless or trivially written by those who really want them. If you want one so bad, write it yourself.
SWISH-E is many times slower which is why I wrote SWISH++ in the first place. As for "easier to set up," I don't know what's so hard about changing a few things in a config file and typing "make". As for "easier to maintain," I don't see what's so hard about running a cron job.
Suppose the whole idea for "transmitting a markup language over a computer network to a client program that will render said markup into a book-like page complete with images" (i.e., the "web") was patented. Clearly, such an idea is novel and non-obvious. (If it were obvious, somebody would have thought of it earlier.)
Such a patent would be a perfectly valid and "good" patent. The entire points of a patent are (a) to grant an inventor exclusive rights to an invention to allow him to make money out of it as payement for coming up with the idea in the first place, and (b) to advance society by giving inventors incentive to come up with new ideas that everybody can benefit from.
The fact that you may not like the whole patent system, or even particular patents, is irrelevant. Patents don't exist to please you. If they frustrate you because you can't use an idea that is patented, then you are free to come up with a new and better idea. If you do that, then society would benefit from the fact that you couldn't use the original idea.
(Note to those who somehow read what I don't write: above, I never commented on whether an idea like one-click should be patentable. The only thing I said was that, at the time, said idea apparantly wasn't "obvious.")