Aren't there any software developers that work at the patent office???
A while back I was (um) underemployed and being interested in the patent system started watching the USPTO job listings for employment in that kind of area. I saw listings for employment for systems people to work on the USPTO systems (and the like) but not one for anyone who would actually get to do anything like look at software patents.
I came to suspect that all such people are really being impersonated by wind up dolls, with just enough functionality to stamp "Approved" on the applications.
It sounds to me like what you are saying is that most of most patents is meaningless bullshit.
So why are those claims put in?
Probably in the hope that they'll be taken for real and meaningful and upheld in the courts.
If they're never upheld in the courts, why bother?
Are you saying that meaningless bullshit belongs in the patents? Then you're far from upholding your own thesis which seems to be that there is something meaningful (ie not meaningless) in the process. On the other hand, perhaps it is there to give patent attorneys something to do so they can get paid a lot. But I dont know that that justifies your crankiness with the automatically anti-microsoft, anti-patent slashdot geeks, it sounds to me like paying people to insert meaningless bullshit is a good reason to view the patent process with alarums and excursions (to the loo for emesis).
Here's my response to orbes, submitted (simultaneously or nearly so) to their comments and to/. - I doubt it will see the light of day there :
The author of this story is showing not only a misunderstanding of the GPL, where it comes from and what it means, but also what looks like a wilful disregard of the facts.
Some people write programs and parts of programs because they enjoy the process (and for other reasons). They may then release their code under the GPL or other licenses. This by no means removes their rights as copyright holders, instead, it is a way to enforce such rights - the authors are not asking for money in return for their work, but instead they are requiring that that work and its derivatives be kept free.
This is far from unreasonable. Too often in the software industry people have written essential parts of programs and then discovered that people are using them for their own profit, often enough where the original author is then denied any recompense for the work. Indeed, in some cases, authors have not only been denied reasonable returns, but have also been prohibited from even using their own work in other ways.
When people "steal music" its called "piracy" - however in the case where people or companies are "stealing" other kinds of intellectual property from the creators the "pirates" are somehow viewed as being woefully aggrieved when they are caught and required to pay up.
As a software author and holder of copyright on that software, surely I am allowed to sell it.
Equally surely I should be allowed to give it away, and to give it away protected in a way that prevents someone else from profiting on my work without appropriately recompensing me - an action that I would (I think rightfully) regard as theft.
But closed source software is not punished in the market. Closed sourse software is substantially favored. In the US it occurs in part because some closed source vendors have what amounts to monopolies that close out other alternatives (not just Microsoft). In part it occurs because the vendors who make money advertise heavily, subsidize use of their software in education and otherwise make their products almost impossible to ignore. In part its because vendors indulge in FUD campaigns. In part it occurs because users, once committed to a software solution, are too lazy (or stupid) to change.
To indluge in a multi-purpose analogy,
evenhandedness in such an environment is like being a fair referee in a boxing match between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Georgy Russell.
If your goal is to have the biggest win, evenhanded is good. If your goal is to have the best person win evenhanded is probably a very bad thing. If you r goal is even to have a good fight, evenhanded is not going to do it. If your goal is to have the best person for governor win, evenhanded is probably very, very wrong.
"The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.
In unix this can be taken one level further, of course. Start by adding a new bin directory added to the persons path with symbolic links to everything in the normal path. Shuffle. Then have the prompt run the shuffler every time a new prompt is issued.
(Of course, experienced hackers would just do this by writing a new shell.)
And that could not help but remind me of the fun (barrels of monkeys) to be had with stty. Use stty to set l ("ls") to intr, e ("exit") to eof, s ("stty") to stop.
You don't have to be malicious and actually delete files. On unix the following can be wonderfully effective :
mkdir...
mkdir.../...
mkdir.../.../...
mv *.*.../.../...
If you want to be that tiny bit more nasty you might change those to "...\ ".
On unix machines I just changed peoples prompts. (In the right profile file, of course.) Usually to be something long and annoying - but I did have worse for those who did it more than once.
But a prompt like :
"I left myself logged in and some idiot came around and changed my prompt to this long and stupid thing here. \nI cant imagine why anyone would do such a mean thing anyway. \nIt is very annoying indeed and I should probably remember not to leave myself logged in again so that it cant happen to me again, but I probably wont.\nWoe is me.\nWOE is me.\nWOE IS me.\nWOE IS ME.\n : "
Is pretty nice and should suffice to discourage. The worst part though was the people who could not figure how to to change the prompt back to something reasonable and who had to look at that for months on end.
We could perhaps build some other role playing games for fun. Lets see, theres :
PATENT IT! in which you get to patent your ideas. But the patent office charges lots of monopoly money, doesn't check the patents for prior art or infringement and hence will patent most anything for anyone with the money.
Once you have a patent you get to threaten everyone else with even vaguely similar ideas and get them to pay you so you can buy more ideas and patent them too...
SUE THE BASTARD! Half of the participants are lawyers. They all get tickets with numbers - higher numbers enable them to win cases. The rest of the participants are just ordinary folks. They get numbers indicating how much money they have and they get assigned other "folks" to sue. Money buys good lawyers as usual.
MONOPOLY! Not your old game of monopoly, but the good kind. One person is picked as having a monopoly on something everyone else wants. They get to charge what they want on it. Others can try to challenge the monopoly if they're brave.
And the list goes on. Consider Do Call, Don't Call (also known as SPAM! where people get points for being annoying and for annoying the most other people.) Representative Government where the representatives need money to be re-elected and some people have it - most dont.
Professors in the US don't (in most colleges and universities at least) get paid a whole lot. There are exceptions - mostly those who do the right kind of research and sell the results to industry or who gather honoraria for lots of speechifying.
You don't get paid well for teaching. Or for learning or doing. And industry looks on time spent teaching as wasted time even though I (personally) could easily code circles around many industry geeks.
I would sometimes do my best to get the callers full name, home address and phone number. For some odd reason it seems to make the telemarketer types very, very nervous. I had one woman who called me sounding like she was about to break into tears. I tried to feel sympathetic - but she was about the fourth telemarketer that day - sympathy was not readily achievable.
And any chance at sympathy was lost when I asked to be put on their don't call list and was told it would take at least three months. What do they do, circulate those lists by Galapagos tortoise?
Next time you get a call from one of these organizations, get a number for the company that called you, then get the name (first and last), email address and street address of the person on the other end of the line. Stay on the line until you get it, or until they hang up on you. If they hang up, call the organization and complain that they hung up.
Then call that person at home. After all, they wanted to call you, so you should assume they want to talk to you. Don't harrass them, just chat. Tell a few jokes, or if you can't think of any good jokes, put the phone in front of a tv running the comedy channel. Maybe publish their email on the usenet BBW group or something.
Actually, I've never called any of these folks at home - but they all seem to be very, very unhappy at the idea that I want all that information.
Firstly I'm a professor type, so $10K is a fair pile of cash to me. And secondly it would be a good way to push myself to learn all the details of of the FOP. Not that I want to spend a lot of time mucking about in it, just want to play with it once.
MS Office is required because users expect MS Office and will fight like hell the smallest changes in their comfy environment.
But the right kind of XML editor or even WYSIWYG
(though I think most WYSIWYG editors are really WYSIWYGBYTATGSAAAAFTB (what you see is what you get but you've thrown all the good stuff away and added awful formatting to boot)) with a meaningful XML back end (with markup like "to", "to-address", "date", "title", "section", and so on and with domain specific markup as needed) would really change how documents are used, stored and generally manipulated.
One document style could really be used across an organization (in large companies this sometimes happens - in small to midsize ones rarely). Documents could be indexed meaninfully or even stored with minimal indexing, but fancy XQuery based search capabilities. Layouts could be changed to accomodate different types of paper (and I'm not just thinking letter vs legal or A3 vs A4, but things like letterhead changes etc). Documents could be stored (even transmitted) as the minimal xml markup needed to regenerate that (meaning maybe a couple Kb rather than a dozen or three Mb).
Documents could leave out boilerplate since large chunks of boilerplate could be inserted with a single tag (<patent-claim-from-hell> could expand to three pages of standard write-once legal nonsense <sig> could expand to your signature...).
It ain't gunna happen. Users love their Word, they love being able to set up their own ugly-as-shit document layouts, being able to lose documents easily, being able to spend hours tweaking a font here or there instead of doing real work.
And even the vaguest mention that XML would be good is enough to generate a storm of protest. "Oh, but you can do that in MS Word already." But few people do and XML makes much more possible.
I sometimes think it would be interesting to make secretaries pay for MS Word themselves (not unreasonable - mechanics usually pay for their own tools) and for the disk space used by its documents.
XML to PDF can be done with the XSLT outputting FOP and then a FOP to PDF translator.
That probably sounds icky and scary, but should not be all that hard.
I don't know what the formats are, but there's a whole pile of flexibility in XSL and FOP so building a very accurate version could take some fiddling. But producing a close approximation is probably very straightforward.
So, lets see. If I (and all like minded slashdotters) were to issue lots and lots of curl's and wgets for, say "http://foo%08x.com/verisignsucks.html" % random()
with no appreciable waits in between, it could not possibly be a denial of service since we'd all be querying different web sites, right?
As opposed to the fifteen page position paper by Mega-Anony-Co in which the glories of software patents are heralded as being generally good for business (meaning good for Mega-Anony-Co's business).
Mega-Anony-Co is likely to charge everything they can for their substandard product, export jobs to Burkina Faso, pay their CEO ten times what he's worth and generally screw all and sundry for a profit.
I'll leave the reasonable conclusions to the interested reader.
I'd love to see what you have since I've been thinking about similar things in a completely digital realm (only email, web pages, files on my (several) machines and so on).
So, let this be a bit of encouragement for you to put the code somewhere where it can be looked at and experimented with.
The old saying goes "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
But when it comes to web designers these days, I suspect they've either got major stock in adobe (pdf), in microsoft (IE specific code) or in macromedia (flash).
So I'd be tempted to rewrite it as "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stock ownership."
Though, I do know enough web designers that I suspect few own stock and I know just how lazy and incapable many of them are. So, more sensibly it should be written as "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by a complete inability to learn anything more difficult than 'Dick and Jane do Power Point'."
And the fact that so many of our educational institutions are on all fours for the convenience of Microsoft and other corporations helps not a whit to alleviate the general witlessness.
Slashdot Mirror
A while back I was (um) underemployed and being interested in the patent system started watching the USPTO job listings for employment in that kind of area. I saw listings for employment for systems people to work on the USPTO systems (and the like) but not one for anyone who would actually get to do anything like look at software patents.
I came to suspect that all such people are really being impersonated by wind up dolls, with just enough functionality to stamp "Approved" on the applications.
So why are those claims put in?
Probably in the hope that they'll be taken for real and meaningful and upheld in the courts.
If they're never upheld in the courts, why bother? Are you saying that meaningless bullshit belongs in the patents? Then you're far from upholding your own thesis which seems to be that there is something meaningful (ie not meaningless) in the process. On the other hand, perhaps it is there to give patent attorneys something to do so they can get paid a lot. But I dont know that that justifies your crankiness with the automatically anti-microsoft, anti-patent slashdot geeks, it sounds to me like paying people to insert meaningless bullshit is a good reason to view the patent process with alarums and excursions (to the loo for emesis).
The author of this story is showing not only a misunderstanding of the GPL, where it comes from and what it means, but also what looks like a wilful disregard of the facts.
Some people write programs and parts of programs because they enjoy the process (and for other reasons). They may then release their code under the GPL or other licenses. This by no means removes their rights as copyright holders, instead, it is a way to enforce such rights - the authors are not asking for money in return for their work, but instead they are requiring that that work and its derivatives be kept free.
This is far from unreasonable. Too often in the software industry people have written essential parts of programs and then discovered that people are using them for their own profit, often enough where the original author is then denied any recompense for the work. Indeed, in some cases, authors have not only been denied reasonable returns, but have also been prohibited from even using their own work in other ways.
When people "steal music" its called "piracy" - however in the case where people or companies are "stealing" other kinds of intellectual property from the creators the "pirates" are somehow viewed as being woefully aggrieved when they are caught and required to pay up.
As a software author and holder of copyright on that software, surely I am allowed to sell it. Equally surely I should be allowed to give it away, and to give it away protected in a way that prevents someone else from profiting on my work without appropriately recompensing me - an action that I would (I think rightfully) regard as theft.
But closed source software is not punished in the market. Closed sourse software is substantially favored. In the US it occurs in part because some closed source vendors have what amounts to monopolies that close out other alternatives (not just Microsoft). In part it occurs because the vendors who make money advertise heavily, subsidize use of their software in education and otherwise make their products almost impossible to ignore. In part its because vendors indulge in FUD campaigns. In part it occurs because users, once committed to a software solution, are too lazy (or stupid) to change.
To indluge in a multi-purpose analogy, evenhandedness in such an environment is like being a fair referee in a boxing match between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Georgy Russell.
If your goal is to have the biggest win, evenhanded is good. If your goal is to have the best person win evenhanded is probably a very bad thing. If you r goal is even to have a good fight, evenhanded is not going to do it. If your goal is to have the best person for governor win, evenhanded is probably very, very wrong.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.
I do my best to look grave.
But I'd be more impressed if I also saw analysts saying things like :
Imaginary analyst quotes follow.....
Merril Lynch analyst to SCO : Change or risk becoming SEC fodder!
Financial Times analysts tell RIAA - Adapt to technology or risk being ignored completely.
WSJ analysts tell Linux Advocates : Crunch not lest ye be crunched!
(Of course, experienced hackers would just do this by writing a new shell.)
And that could not help but remind me of the fun (barrels of monkeys) to be had with stty. Use stty to set l ("ls") to intr, e ("exit") to eof, s ("stty") to stop.
mkdir
mkdir
mkdir
mv *
If you want to be that tiny bit more nasty you might change those to "...\ ".
Not that I'd ever do anything like that myself.
But a prompt like :
"I left myself logged in and some idiot came around and changed my prompt to this long and stupid thing here. \nI cant imagine why anyone would do such a mean thing anyway. \nIt is very annoying indeed and I should probably remember not to leave myself logged in again so that it cant happen to me again, but I probably wont.\nWoe is me.\nWOE is me.\nWOE IS me.\nWOE IS ME.\n : "
Is pretty nice and should suffice to discourage. The worst part though was the people who could not figure how to to change the prompt back to something reasonable and who had to look at that for months on end.
PATENT IT! in which you get to patent your ideas. But the patent office charges lots of monopoly money, doesn't check the patents for prior art or infringement and hence will patent most anything for anyone with the money.
Once you have a patent you get to threaten everyone else with even vaguely similar ideas and get them to pay you so you can buy more ideas and patent them too...
SUE THE BASTARD! Half of the participants are lawyers. They all get tickets with numbers - higher numbers enable them to win cases. The rest of the participants are just ordinary folks. They get numbers indicating how much money they have and they get assigned other "folks" to sue. Money buys good lawyers as usual.
MONOPOLY! Not your old game of monopoly, but the good kind. One person is picked as having a monopoly on something everyone else wants. They get to charge what they want on it. Others can try to challenge the monopoly if they're brave.
And the list goes on. Consider Do Call, Don't Call (also known as SPAM! where people get points for being annoying and for annoying the most other people.) Representative Government where the representatives need money to be re-elected and some people have it - most dont.
You don't get paid well for teaching. Or for learning or doing. And industry looks on time spent teaching as wasted time even though I (personally) could easily code circles around many industry geeks.
And any chance at sympathy was lost when I asked to be put on their don't call list and was told it would take at least three months. What do they do, circulate those lists by Galapagos tortoise?
Then call that person at home. After all, they wanted to call you, so you should assume they want to talk to you. Don't harrass them, just chat. Tell a few jokes, or if you can't think of any good jokes, put the phone in front of a tv running the comedy channel. Maybe publish their email on the usenet BBW group or something.
Actually, I've never called any of these folks at home - but they all seem to be very, very unhappy at the idea that I want all that information.
Firstly I'm a professor type, so $10K is a fair pile of cash to me. And secondly it would be a good way to push myself to learn all the details of of the FOP. Not that I want to spend a lot of time mucking about in it, just want to play with it once.
took 3 minutes and 20 seconds to timeout.
curl 2342323432423432.org
returned a resolver error in less than two tenths of a second.
curl 2342323432423432.gov
returned a resolver error in less than a tenth of a second.
Will anyone really wait three minutes for a web page?
MS Office is required because users expect MS Office and will fight like hell the smallest changes in their comfy environment.
But the right kind of XML editor or even WYSIWYG (though I think most WYSIWYG editors are really WYSIWYGBYTATGSAAAAFTB (what you see is what you get but you've thrown all the good stuff away and added awful formatting to boot)) with a meaningful XML back end (with markup like "to", "to-address", "date", "title", "section", and so on and with domain specific markup as needed) would really change how documents are used, stored and generally manipulated.
One document style could really be used across an organization (in large companies this sometimes happens - in small to midsize ones rarely). Documents could be indexed meaninfully or even stored with minimal indexing, but fancy XQuery based search capabilities. Layouts could be changed to accomodate different types of paper (and I'm not just thinking letter vs legal or A3 vs A4, but things like letterhead changes etc). Documents could be stored (even transmitted) as the minimal xml markup needed to regenerate that (meaning maybe a couple Kb rather than a dozen or three Mb).
Documents could leave out boilerplate since large chunks of boilerplate could be inserted with a single tag (<patent-claim-from-hell> could expand to three pages of standard write-once legal nonsense <sig> could expand to your signature...).
It ain't gunna happen. Users love their Word, they love being able to set up their own ugly-as-shit document layouts, being able to lose documents easily, being able to spend hours tweaking a font here or there instead of doing real work.
And even the vaguest mention that XML would be good is enough to generate a storm of protest. "Oh, but you can do that in MS Word already." But few people do and XML makes much more possible.
I sometimes think it would be interesting to make secretaries pay for MS Word themselves (not unreasonable - mechanics usually pay for their own tools) and for the disk space used by its documents.
Granted... XML is far beyond anything a CSV ever did
I'm confused. Is the different not that signifcant or is XML far beyond...?
That probably sounds icky and scary, but should not be all that hard.
I don't know what the formats are, but there's a whole pile of flexibility in XSL and FOP so building a very accurate version could take some fiddling. But producing a close approximation is probably very straightforward.
"http://foo%08x.com/verisignsucks.html" % random()
with no appreciable waits in between, it could not possibly be a denial of service since we'd all be querying different web sites, right?
Not, of course, that anyone would ever do that.
Mega-Anony-Co is likely to charge everything they can for their substandard product, export jobs to Burkina Faso, pay their CEO ten times what he's worth and generally screw all and sundry for a profit.
I'll leave the reasonable conclusions to the interested reader.
So, let this be a bit of encouragement for you to put the code somewhere where it can be looked at and experimented with.
Since the created of DDC1 was an advocate of spelling reform, they should properly honor his notions and use the name as he spelled it : Melvil Dui
But when it comes to web designers these days, I suspect they've either got major stock in adobe (pdf), in microsoft (IE specific code) or in macromedia (flash).
So I'd be tempted to rewrite it as "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stock ownership."
Though, I do know enough web designers that I suspect few own stock and I know just how lazy and incapable many of them are. So, more sensibly it should be written as "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by a complete inability to learn anything more difficult than 'Dick and Jane do Power Point'."
And the fact that so many of our educational institutions are on all fours for the convenience of Microsoft and other corporations helps not a whit to alleviate the general witlessness.