It was the courts (actually a specific Federal Circuit court) which decided, on their own, after years of ruling that software was not patentable, that all of a sudden it was. So asking the Supreme Court to rule otherwise isn't as unreasonable as you make it out to be.
Slashdotters can find prior art for any stupid patent mentioned on slashdot, because at least some slashdotters -- unlike, unfortunately, patent examiners -- are well-versed in the subject matter the patent covers.
Attorneys representing alleged infringers often DO introduce prior art, of course. They may even coincidentally be the same prior art mentioned on slashdot (attorneys, of course, have to document it better). But because of the way the court system works, it may be cheaper to settle now than win later. And even with the law and facts on your side, you can't guarantee a win, so if the stakes are high enough you may be best off settling anyway. That's a problem with the system, not with slashdotter's knowledge of it.
The patent in question here is for a certain set of hierarchical menus on a portable music player. Where's the novelty? Hierarchical menus following that same pattern on non-portable music players (that is, software for general purpose computers) have been done prior to the creative patent. Portable music players have been done. Is it really patentable novelty to use an interface already used on general purpose computers on portable music players? Or is that simply a forseeable result of technology making it practical to do so?
I hate to do it, but I have to agree with Stallman on the one actual point of disagreement mentioned in TFA. That is, if a hardware manufacturer releases source for a software product which drives their hardware but the hardware won't actually run modified versions, that's not really "open source" (and certainly not "free software"). That's "look but don't touch".
The plasma makers say it doesn't happen any more, but they still warn against watching too much 4:3 unstretched content, and those channel bugs still end up burned in to the display. As LCD goes up in size and quality and down in price, it will push plasma out of the running. Sure, the LCD backlight will fade, but it won't burn in and it doesn't matter what you display (thus no reason to watch distorted content).
DLP, LCD projection and CRT (projection or direct) aren't really competing for the same niche because they aren't thin panels. CRT also has the 4:3 burn-in issue.
The problem is an absolutely stupid and misguided part of US trademark law called the Federal Anti-Dilution Act. This allows owners of famous marks to go after users of similar marks in any field, even fields where there would be no confusion. There's no doubt that "iPod" is a famous mark. It's the trademark winner-take-all act.
Though to be fair, Apple might have a case against a maker of MP3 player sleeves even without anti-dilution.
Of course they pay up. Suppose you're a 100% innocent person who has never used a file sharing program (even for Linux ISOs). You don't have a wireless network and you're the only one who uses your connection. Now you get a threatening letter from the RIAA stating that you've been caught pirating the latest pop hits, so pay $3000 or you'll be sued. Try to talk to a lawyer and they all note that defending you is going to cost $5000+. Simple financial equation -- pay $3000 and be done with it, or pay $5000+ and maybe lose anyway to the tune of $50,000+ in statutory damages.
It amounts to a form of barratry, but the courts won't recognize it as such because the cases aren't (usually) completely meritless, as they would be if the RIAA simply picked names out of a phone book.
You need to get the same power out of the batteries whether they are providing AC or DC. Why would it matter whether you had 168 cells in series or if they were series-parallel for the same number of volt-amps?
If the car can't (according to the insurance company) be stolen, then by accepting premiums for insurance which covers loss due to theft (without any intention of ever paying said claims), they are comitting fraud. Sounds like some insurance company executives need to go to jail.
Typically they let out the traditional criminals who are no real threat to the government or the powers that be, to make space for the political prisoners -- that is, those who went and violated the arbitrary order of some judge or MP or something.
Uhh, in what state has being arrested prevented you from sitting as a juror? You may be rejected during voir dire (as you can be for any number of reasons, or no reason), but you're not ineligible.
Having an FBI file doesn't mean anything nowadays. Probably anyone who has posted on slashdot has one...
I'm sure you're right being arrested for a felony can cause problems for getting a clearance. But getting a security clearance from the government is hardly on the same level as just plain using a PC or the Internet.
You're right about the drug money thing, it's disgusting and despicable and often seems aimed at ensuring the defendant doesn't have the resources to defend himself. But that's the only one similar to the orders proposed in the article.
It's never only the blood of those currently in power. As Jefferson wrote, it takes the blood of both patriots and tyrants. But there will be no revolution. Most people are happy with things just the way it is, and those that don't have no real power or voice.
Apparently the spammers figure I'm blind or something (maybe from all the porn they think they sold me in the past?), because I'm getting more ringtone spam than anything else lately.
The artist entered an agreement, and the artist may have entered it in good faith, but the record company did not; it's well known they'll screw over the artist every chance they get. More than that, the ground rules under which the artist and the record company entered the deal were set beforehand by the legislation passed at the behest of the record company's trade groups; like I said, the thuggery of those groups is inextricably linked with the situation.
Your use of the term "appropriated" is the language of the record companies. It's a subtle form of equivocation; the term "appropriate" can mean "to make use of without authority or right", but more normally it means "to take exclusive possession of". The record companies would like to blur that distinction, but it's a hard one to blur. For digital copying of music to be "appropriation", you must accept the legitimacy of copyright as it exists today. And copyright as it exists today is largely a product of record company lobbying (and before that, centuries before that, lobbying of equally thuggish groups). And there we are right back at the thuggery of the record companies.
You'd like people to examine the issue starting from the assumption that all the laws and rules and contracts which exist are fair and proper. That's just allowing the RIAA to have the benefit of the deck it has spent so much time and money stacking; it's not surprising that many people aren't willing to do so.
Actually, according to intenational copyright conventions, while copyright is convention-wide, _exhaustion_ (which is what provides resale rights, for instance) only applies to the country it occurs in (though exhaustion in any EU country applies to all of them).
So it is a violation of copyright to buy something in one country and import it to another without permission of the copyright holder. This doesn't hold in the US (such a case has been to the Supreme Court), but that just means the copyright interests in the US will need to purchase a few more laws.
The real question is this, and try to answer it without muddying the waters with talk of copyrights and the thuggery of trade groups: when, how, and under what circumstances are the people who CREATE and/or OWN content allowed to set pricing on their own materials? Remember that record labels, however good or evil you think them, have legitimate ownership of the content within the bounds of society's frameworks on such matters. Other countries and jurisdictions may view the issue differently, but ultimately, there can't be entities that decide it's up to them to undercut others' rights.
The thuggish trade groups would like you to think that way. But you _can't_ answer that without talk of copyrights and the thuggery of trade groups; they are inextricably linked. Yes, the record labels have legal ownership of the content. But how did they get it? Answer: they bought it. Not from the performers; they bought it from the U.S. and other governments through lobbying dollars; before that, the phonorecord copyright simply did not exist. So of course, there ARE entities that decide it's up to them to undercut others' rights. Those entities are the record labels and the thuggish trade groups they support. They don't like it when anyone else undercuts the rights they bought, of course, but at that point you're not talking about any fundamental questions; you just have an amoral and asymmetric power struggle.
As to your last question, the answer is yes... but they don't have a right to obtain what they ask for.
In fact, "deconstruction" also refers to "The process of taking apart a structure with the primary goal of preserving the value of all useful building materials, so that they may be reused or recycled." (California Integrated Waste Management Board)
Seems like a lot of people want to avoid the one fact that sticks out like a sore thumb. Just as nature adapts to the environmental effects of humans, humans need to adapt to the environmental effects of nature. Instead of trying to stop the ice caps from melting, maybe it's time to move the houses on the shorelines back a mile or two and put in better flood control.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
[QUOTE]If there are hundreds of *qualified* people out there, I'd like to see them. We're trying to hire, and so far not much luck. I certainly don't see hundreds of resumes.[/QUOTE]
Then you're probably doing a reasonably good job of separating the wheat from the chaff -- and throwing away the wheat. Lots of ways you can do this. You could be demanding a set of skills which nobody has, so only poseurs apply. You could be demanding a set of skills which nobody at the professional level you're asking for for has. Your job ads might hint that you aren't a good employer to work for. If you have someone pre-screening the resume, they could be doing it badly, again letting only poseurs through. Etc.
If poor treatment by instructors caused women to avoid a field completely, there'd be no women in ballet either.
Re:Useless to all but theoraticians
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
That gives you the dupes; I was trying to eliminate them. This is perfectly easy to do in portable SQL --
SELECT DISTINCT fields FROM tables WHERE hairy join clauses and conditions
The problem wasn't that it didn't work; the problem is that the optimizer did something stupid and made it take forever. Because the result set was far smaller than the tables, the fastest way to do the DISTINCT query was to do the ALL query and then filter the results. But for some reason Oracle did something completely different, involving lots of full table scans. I had to write a hack to trick it into doing the right thing.
Re:Useless to all but theoraticians
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. In theory, you can write good SQL and each system will do the right thing. In practice, that ain't the case. For instance, I had a query which joined a bunch of tables together to come up with a small result set containing duplicate rows. Ran fine, but I wanted to get rid of the dupes. Add "DISTINCT". Whoops, all of a sudden the query takes forever. "Explain Plan" tells me it's now for some reason ignoring indexing and doing full table scans and that sort of thing. The "solution" was an ugly hack like
SELECT DISTINCT foo, bar, baz from (SELECT foo, bar, baz from...))
explicitly telling it to create the result set and THEN eliminate duplicates
Contrariwise, the original query performed fine with an ORDER BY clause -- and if I added a "DISTINCT" to that one, it continued to perform fine.
Tell me that sort of thing is applicable across databases. Actually, please don't. I don't do queries any more and I'm glad of it.
The problem with the EFF ("Losing the battle for our digital rights since 1990") is they lose nearly every copyright/DMCA battle they get into. They lost Blizzard v. Bnetd (which should have been a frigging slam dunk), they surrendered the 2600 case after losing at the appellate level, they couldn't get the Felten case off the ground, they lost MGM v Grokster (putting a nice big crack in Betamax), etc. What'd they win? The garage door opener case. Consolation prize. Fact is, when it comes to the DMCA, the MPAA and RIAA have the EFF beat. Of course, aside from articles like this one in relatively obscure technical journals, the RIAA and MPAA controls the press. You can cross off the soap box, ballot box, and jury box. You'll never win a revolution (or even get a significant number of people mildly interested) over this, so that rules out the last one. The DMCA is therefore here to stay, and inexorably the laws WILL get worse.
"Enough people" won't do anything. Most people, when the issues are explained to them, will either say "huh?" or say "that seems fair" regarding most of the MPAA/RIAA demands. Even if they disagree, it's just not a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent -1, Wrong. There is no personal use exception for patents in the US Code.
It was the courts (actually a specific Federal Circuit court) which decided, on their own, after years of ruling that software was not patentable, that all of a sudden it was. So asking the Supreme Court to rule otherwise isn't as unreasonable as you make it out to be.
Slashdotters can find prior art for any stupid patent mentioned on slashdot, because at least some slashdotters -- unlike, unfortunately, patent examiners -- are well-versed in the subject matter the patent covers.
Attorneys representing alleged infringers often DO introduce prior art, of course. They may even coincidentally be the same prior art mentioned on slashdot (attorneys, of course, have to document it better). But because of the way the court system works, it may be cheaper to settle now than win later. And even with the law and facts on your side, you can't guarantee a win, so if the stakes are high enough you may be best off settling anyway. That's a problem with the system, not with slashdotter's knowledge of it.
The patent in question here is for a certain set of hierarchical menus on a portable music player. Where's the novelty? Hierarchical menus following that same pattern on non-portable music players (that is, software for general purpose computers) have been done prior to the creative patent. Portable music players have been done. Is it really patentable novelty to use an interface already used on general purpose computers on portable music players? Or is that simply a forseeable result of technology making it practical to do so?
I hate to do it, but I have to agree with Stallman on the one actual point of disagreement mentioned in TFA. That is, if a hardware manufacturer releases source for a software product which drives their hardware but the hardware won't actually run modified versions, that's not really "open source" (and certainly not "free software"). That's "look but don't touch".
The plasma makers say it doesn't happen any more, but they still warn against watching too much 4:3 unstretched content, and those channel bugs still end up burned in to the display. As LCD goes up in size and quality and down in price, it will push plasma out of the running. Sure, the LCD backlight will fade, but it won't burn in and it doesn't matter what you display (thus no reason to watch distorted content).
DLP, LCD projection and CRT (projection or direct) aren't really competing for the same niche because they aren't thin panels. CRT also has the 4:3 burn-in issue.
The problem is an absolutely stupid and misguided part of US trademark law called the Federal Anti-Dilution Act. This allows owners of famous marks to go after users of similar marks in any field, even fields where there would be no confusion. There's no doubt that "iPod" is a famous mark. It's the trademark winner-take-all act.
Though to be fair, Apple might have a case against a maker of MP3 player sleeves even without anti-dilution.
Of course they pay up. Suppose you're a 100% innocent person who has never used a file sharing program (even for Linux ISOs). You don't have a wireless network and you're the only one who uses your connection. Now you get a threatening letter from the RIAA stating that you've been caught pirating the latest pop hits, so pay $3000 or you'll be sued. Try to talk to a lawyer and they all note that defending you is going to cost $5000+. Simple financial equation -- pay $3000 and be done with it, or pay $5000+ and maybe lose anyway to the tune of $50,000+ in statutory damages.
It amounts to a form of barratry, but the courts won't recognize it as such because the cases aren't (usually) completely meritless, as they would be if the RIAA simply picked names out of a phone book.
You need to get the same power out of the batteries whether they are providing AC or DC. Why would it matter whether you had 168 cells in series or if they were series-parallel for the same number of volt-amps?
If the car can't (according to the insurance company) be stolen, then by accepting premiums for insurance which covers loss due to theft (without any intention of ever paying said claims), they are comitting fraud. Sounds like some insurance company executives need to go to jail.
Typically they let out the traditional criminals who are no real threat to the government or the powers that be, to make space for the political prisoners -- that is, those who went and violated the arbitrary order of some judge or MP or something.
Uhh, in what state has being arrested prevented you from sitting as a juror? You may be rejected during voir dire (as you can be for any number of reasons, or no reason), but you're not ineligible.
Having an FBI file doesn't mean anything nowadays. Probably anyone who has posted on slashdot has one...
I'm sure you're right being arrested for a felony can cause problems for getting a clearance. But getting a security clearance from the government is hardly on the same level as just plain using a PC or the Internet.
You're right about the drug money thing, it's disgusting and despicable and often seems aimed at ensuring the defendant doesn't have the resources to defend himself. But that's the only one similar to the orders proposed in the article.
It's never only the blood of those currently in power. As Jefferson wrote, it takes the blood of both patriots and tyrants. But there will be no revolution. Most people are happy with things just the way it is, and those that don't have no real power or voice.
Even we Emacs partisans make fun of its size.
I remember when Eight Megs And Counting Still was an indictment of its gluttony rather than a celebration of its parsimony...
Apparently the spammers figure I'm blind or something (maybe from all the porn they think they sold me in the past?), because I'm getting more ringtone spam than anything else lately.
The artist entered an agreement, and the artist may have entered it in good faith, but the record company did not; it's well known they'll screw over the artist every chance they get. More than that, the ground rules under which the artist and the record company entered the deal were set beforehand by the legislation passed at the behest of the record company's trade groups; like I said, the thuggery of those groups is inextricably linked with the situation.
Your use of the term "appropriated" is the language of the record companies. It's a subtle form of equivocation; the term "appropriate" can mean "to make use of without authority or right", but more normally it means "to take exclusive possession of". The record companies would like to blur that distinction, but it's a hard one to blur. For digital copying of music to be "appropriation", you must accept the legitimacy of copyright as it exists today. And copyright as it exists today is largely a product of record company lobbying (and before that, centuries before that, lobbying of equally thuggish groups). And there we are right back at the thuggery of the record companies.
You'd like people to examine the issue starting from the assumption that all the laws and rules and contracts which exist are fair and proper. That's just allowing the RIAA to have the benefit of the deck it has spent so much time and money stacking; it's not surprising that many people aren't willing to do so.
Actually, according to intenational copyright conventions, while copyright is convention-wide, _exhaustion_ (which is what provides resale rights, for instance) only applies to the country it occurs in (though exhaustion in any EU country applies to all of them).
So it is a violation of copyright to buy something in one country and import it to another without permission of the copyright holder. This doesn't hold in the US (such a case has been to the Supreme Court), but that just means the copyright interests in the US will need to purchase a few more laws.
The thuggish trade groups would like you to think that way. But you _can't_ answer that without talk of copyrights and the thuggery of trade groups; they are inextricably linked. Yes, the record labels have legal ownership of the content. But how did they get it? Answer: they bought it. Not from the performers; they bought it from the U.S. and other governments through lobbying dollars; before that, the phonorecord copyright simply did not exist. So of course, there ARE entities that decide it's up to them to undercut others' rights. Those entities are the record labels and the thuggish trade groups they support. They don't like it when anyone else undercuts the rights they bought, of course, but at that point you're not talking about any fundamental questions; you just have an amoral and asymmetric power struggle.
As to your last question, the answer is yes... but they don't have a right to obtain what they ask for.
In fact, "deconstruction" also refers to "The process of taking apart a structure with the primary goal of preserving the value of all useful building materials, so that they may be reused or recycled." (California Integrated Waste Management Board)
This use is jargon, but so is the literary one.
[QUOTE]If there are hundreds of *qualified* people out there, I'd like to see them. We're trying to hire, and so far not much luck. I certainly don't see hundreds of resumes.[/QUOTE]
Then you're probably doing a reasonably good job of separating the wheat from the chaff -- and throwing away the wheat. Lots of ways you can do this. You could be demanding a set of skills which nobody has, so only poseurs apply. You could be demanding a set of skills which nobody at the professional level you're asking for for has. Your job ads might hint that you aren't a good employer to work for. If you have someone pre-screening the resume, they could be doing it badly, again letting only poseurs through. Etc.
If poor treatment by instructors caused women to avoid a field completely, there'd be no women in ballet either.
That gives you the dupes; I was trying to eliminate them. This is perfectly easy to do in portable SQL --
SELECT DISTINCT fields FROM tables WHERE hairy join clauses and conditions
The problem wasn't that it didn't work; the problem is that the optimizer did something stupid and made it take forever. Because the result set was far smaller than the tables, the fastest way to do the DISTINCT query was to do the ALL query and then filter the results. But for some reason Oracle did something completely different, involving lots of full table scans. I had to write a hack to trick it into doing the right thing.
Exactly. In theory, you can write good SQL and each system will do the right thing. In practice, that ain't the case. For instance, I had a query which joined a bunch of tables together to come up with a small result set containing duplicate rows. Ran fine, but I wanted to get rid of the dupes. Add "DISTINCT". Whoops, all of a sudden the query takes forever. "Explain Plan" tells me it's now for some reason ignoring indexing and doing full table scans and that sort of thing. The "solution" was an ugly hack like
...))
SELECT DISTINCT foo, bar, baz from (SELECT foo, bar, baz from
explicitly telling it to create the result set and THEN eliminate duplicates
Contrariwise, the original query performed fine with an ORDER BY clause -- and if I added a "DISTINCT" to that one, it continued to perform fine.
Tell me that sort of thing is applicable across databases. Actually, please don't. I don't do queries any more and I'm glad of it.
The problem with the EFF ("Losing the battle for our digital rights since 1990") is they lose nearly every copyright/DMCA battle they get into. They lost Blizzard v. Bnetd (which should have been a frigging slam dunk), they surrendered the 2600 case after losing at the appellate level, they couldn't get the Felten case off the ground, they lost MGM v Grokster (putting a nice big crack in Betamax), etc. What'd they win? The garage door opener case. Consolation prize. Fact is, when it comes to the DMCA, the MPAA and RIAA have the EFF beat. Of course, aside from articles like this one in relatively obscure technical journals, the RIAA and MPAA controls the press. You can cross off the soap box, ballot box, and jury box. You'll never win a revolution (or even get a significant number of people mildly interested) over this, so that rules out the last one. The DMCA is therefore here to stay, and inexorably the laws WILL get worse.
"Enough people" won't do anything. Most people, when the issues are explained to them, will either say "huh?" or say "that seems fair" regarding most of the MPAA/RIAA demands. Even if they disagree, it's just not a big deal.