Reverse engineering is a separate issue. The principle of operation of patents is way too broad to cover just reverse engineering.
Suppose two people have essentially the same idea. This happens a lot. It might be that they have independently come up with it (we all stand on the shoulders of giants), or perhaps one of them has copied it from the other. Patents don't make a distinction, the first to register gets a monopoly on what's in other peoples' heads for 20 years. That's like putting people in jail just in case they *might* be guilty.
A better system would be if the owner of the patent had to prove in court, beyond reasonable doubt, that the idea could not have been discovered independently. If in doubt, it's better to not stifle independent innovation.
We shouldn't accept "solutions" that allow software patents at all. Patents are wrong. They literally prohibit *you* from exploiting your *own* ideas, ideas that you came up with independently, just because someone else, who might be on the other side of the world, had the same idea a few years earlier and patented it.
One of my favourite stories along those lines (I don't recall the
title) weaves the human specialness with the failure to find any
Aliens at all in space. To cut a long story short, after centuries of
searching for life on every planet and not finding any, the last human
explorer meets unexpectedly an alien ship. It turns out that the
universe is teeming with life elsewhere, but in the distant
past, there was a galaxy wide war against Earth's evil dominion, and all
the planets in the local spiral arm of the galaxy were blown up,
leaving a prison/wasteland with the Earth at its center...
It seems to me there are broadly two reasons for battles in
space. You're either sending weapons to attack some location, or
you're sending weapons to defend a location.
In terms of war, the main location of interest is Earth, so battles
would be in earth orbit, not deep space. The other locations of
interest are asteroid fields, for mining. Planets are uninhabitable,
and the gravity wells surrounding them are too expensive for resource
extraction.
Because asteroid fields are large and asteroids are plentiful,
battles there would be unlikely - the attacker would need too many weapons to cover the field, and the defender could hide too easily.
Cheap transport to Earth would depend on gravity slingshots and Lagrange points, which move about and change as matter circles the sun. Those would probably not be good locations for battles - even if they were, what would be the point? The resources sent from the asteroids would still have to travel to Earth whoever was winning.
So it would most likely all be battles in Earth orbit. Since sending material up into space is expensive and even then it's going to be low volume, whoever can deploy weapons first should have a strong advantage. Then it's a game of king of the hill.
If a nation controls Earth orbit first, then it can threaten other nations that might want to go into space. Any other nation that tries to build launch capability would be targeted easily and bombed. So having a space battle to wrest control of Earth orbit will be a low success proposition.
I suspect the most likely "space" battles would be terrestrial. If the enemy can invade the king's land/take control of the king's assets, electronically or economically or politically, then they'll get the space weapons for free and become the new king. At that point they can send their own weapons up safely to upgrade or modify the system.
Assuming, as you seem to think, that the "new meaning" has replaced the "old meaning", then what we have here is merely evidence that meaning can change if people use words as they wish. And that implies that if you decide to use the words in their "old meaning", then it becomes possible for the new "old meaning" to replace the old "new meaning".
Humpty Dumpty said it best: "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to
be master - that's all."
Orbit the Earth, then walk on the moon, then take cars on the moon with you,
then play golf on the moon, then -for some reason- abstain from going
anywhere higher than low Earth orbit indefinetely?
Psst! It's the aliens, man! They said "All these low Earth orbits are yours except the Moon. Attempt no landing there."
The work that gets done now in China for Apple (or the other tech giants) used to be done in America, under American labor laws. Then the jobs moved to China, but they are equivalent jobs for American markets, so they should still be done under American labor laws.
Of course China has different laws, but American money from American consumers who pay for nominally American products should always get products made under American labor laws, regardless.
That leaves only two moral choices: either Chinese factories must raise their standards to American standards ASAP, or else Apple needs to be penalized (in America) for not following American labor laws while producing nominally American products.
However, just 10 years earlier in 1924 the Germans, who live next door
to Switzerland, experienced hyperinflation. This got so bad that they
had to change currencies and literally remove 12 zeros from the old one. Maybe
the counterfeiter got his 2's and 3's mixed up?
Suppose one of the students followed his friend around to see how he stole a laptop, and then later copied the method? Would he get credit, or be marked down for plagiarism?
And that's also ignoring the fundamental inefficiency of having a great many drugs on each chip, which will never be used. If there's 100 drugs on a chip, and only 10 drugs get dispensed by one chip, then that's wasting 90% of globally available drug reserves.
Totally agree with you about LaTeX. TeX (on which LaTeX is based) was done
back in the days of punch cards -- it was the only game in town for
typesetting mathematics papers on a computer.
Point of fact. No, it wasn't. You should read Knuth's "Mathematical Typography" (I think you might enjoy it).
As to your second point, LaTeX markup is a great way to communicate formulas in graphics poor enviroments (email, chat, etc), which is why it's lasted so long. That too was intentional, if you read Knuth's paper above.
How is this fair? You're basically arguing that because the publishers don't compensate authors enough, the taxpayer should do it (via libraries) instead?
If we're going to put authors on welfare, then let's do it properly. Have the government pay them a living wage, and let's cut out the publishers altogether. And let's stop with all that prohibited copying nonsense.
Patents are a good thing, they are the reason big companies spent millions
of dollars on R&D pushing the bounds of science.
Isn't that the exact *opposite* of what patents were supposed to accomplish? Patents were intended to help the small guy
make inventions that the big guys couldn't take away from them. Large corporations with money don't need a legal monopoly that distorts market forces around them.
I have nothing against open source, but if an open source product changes its API for some reason, we still have changes imposed from the top down. The only option
we have is to then maintain our own version of the opensource project or provide some sort of adapter component. What a headache!
Think of open source as insurance against sudden changes. You can maintain your own version for as long as you need to move to the new API, thereby being less disrupted. Without this option of open source, you get disrupted immediately when the API changes and you have to react or remain in a broken state, pushing all your other work aside while this happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this what Croquet was designed for? Does anyone have experience with it?
Suppose two people have essentially the same idea. This happens a lot. It might be that they have independently come up with it (we all stand on the shoulders of giants), or perhaps one of them has copied it from the other. Patents don't make a distinction, the first to register gets a monopoly on what's in other peoples' heads for 20 years. That's like putting people in jail just in case they *might* be guilty.
A better system would be if the owner of the patent had to prove in court, beyond reasonable doubt, that the idea could not have been discovered independently. If in doubt, it's better to not stifle independent innovation.
We shouldn't accept "solutions" that allow software patents at all. Patents are wrong. They literally prohibit *you* from exploiting your *own* ideas, ideas that you came up with independently, just because someone else, who might be on the other side of the world, had the same idea a few years earlier and patented it.
One of my favourite stories along those lines (I don't recall the title) weaves the human specialness with the failure to find any Aliens at all in space. To cut a long story short, after centuries of searching for life on every planet and not finding any, the last human explorer meets unexpectedly an alien ship. It turns out that the universe is teeming with life elsewhere, but in the distant past, there was a galaxy wide war against Earth's evil dominion, and all the planets in the local spiral arm of the galaxy were blown up, leaving a prison/wasteland with the Earth at its center...
In terms of war, the main location of interest is Earth, so battles would be in earth orbit, not deep space. The other locations of interest are asteroid fields, for mining. Planets are uninhabitable, and the gravity wells surrounding them are too expensive for resource extraction.
Because asteroid fields are large and asteroids are plentiful, battles there would be unlikely - the attacker would need too many weapons to cover the field, and the defender could hide too easily.
Cheap transport to Earth would depend on gravity slingshots and Lagrange points, which move about and change as matter circles the sun. Those would probably not be good locations for battles - even if they were, what would be the point? The resources sent from the asteroids would still have to travel to Earth whoever was winning.
So it would most likely all be battles in Earth orbit. Since sending material up into space is expensive and even then it's going to be low volume, whoever can deploy weapons first should have a strong advantage. Then it's a game of king of the hill.
If a nation controls Earth orbit first, then it can threaten other nations that might want to go into space. Any other nation that tries to build launch capability would be targeted easily and bombed. So having a space battle to wrest control of Earth orbit will be a low success proposition.
I suspect the most likely "space" battles would be terrestrial. If the enemy can invade the king's land/take control of the king's assets, electronically or economically or politically, then they'll get the space weapons for free and become the new king. At that point they can send their own weapons up safely to upgrade or modify the system.
Oh, right. I thought he meant Patent No. 666,834 "A Novel Method for Sinusoidal Telephony While Bungee Jumping".
Humpty Dumpty said it best: "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Psst! It's the aliens, man! They said "All these low Earth orbits are yours except the Moon. Attempt no landing there."
Gotta run, I hear someone coming!
Yes, but Floyd Dupensauger is not.
BraaaainX... BraaaainX... BraaaainX... 3... 2... 1... BraaaainX (*)
(*) Xombie language translation of your pledge, as a courtesy to our Xombie overlord guests.
Meh, you're just pissed off because your fingers got all sticky...
The work that gets done now in China for Apple (or the other tech giants) used to be done in America, under American labor laws. Then the jobs moved to China, but they are equivalent jobs for American markets, so they should still be done under American labor laws.
Of course China has different laws, but American money from American consumers who pay for nominally American products should always get products made under American labor laws, regardless.
That leaves only two moral choices: either Chinese factories must raise their standards to American standards ASAP, or else Apple needs to be penalized (in America) for not following American labor laws while producing nominally American products.
However, just 10 years earlier in 1924 the Germans, who live next door to Switzerland, experienced hyperinflation. This got so bad that they had to change currencies and literally remove 12 zeros from the old one. Maybe the counterfeiter got his 2's and 3's mixed up?
You big meanie! For every extra pixel over 2106000, a young Chinese worker cries himself to sleep every night.
My advice: switch to coding in Javascript. You'll feel a lot more like a user and less like a programmer ;-)
Suppose one of the students followed his friend around to see how he stole a laptop, and then later copied the method? Would he get credit, or be marked down for plagiarism?
What's your car's name, it's not Christine, is it?
And that's also ignoring the fundamental inefficiency of having a great many drugs on each chip, which will never be used. If there's 100 drugs on a chip, and only 10 drugs get dispensed by one chip, then that's wasting 90% of globally available drug reserves.
Wuh? I thought the command line is the cool futuristic "Matrix" like UI that everyone wants to have? What happened?
Point of fact. No, it wasn't. You should read Knuth's "Mathematical Typography" (I think you might enjoy it).
As to your second point, LaTeX markup is a great way to communicate formulas in graphics poor enviroments (email, chat, etc), which is why it's lasted so long. That too was intentional, if you read Knuth's paper above.
How is this fair? You're basically arguing that because the publishers don't compensate authors enough, the taxpayer should do it (via libraries) instead? If we're going to put authors on welfare, then let's do it properly. Have the government pay them a living wage, and let's cut out the publishers altogether. And let's stop with all that prohibited copying nonsense.
Isn't that the exact *opposite* of what patents were supposed to accomplish? Patents were intended to help the small guy make inventions that the big guys couldn't take away from them. Large corporations with money don't need a legal monopoly that distorts market forces around them.
Hey, Whitney, knock twice if you agree with betelgeuse68! ....
"Here's $100, go sit in Microsoft's building and recompile their code with a couple of changes, just for me"
Think of open source as insurance against sudden changes. You can maintain your own version for as long as you need to move to the new API, thereby being less disrupted. Without this option of open source, you get disrupted immediately when the API changes and you have to react or remain in a broken state, pushing all your other work aside while this happens.