If procedural errors can cause the entire system security to be breached, then I would say that the system is poorly designed. A properly designed secure communications system would not operate at all if correct security procedures were not followed.
I certainly wouldn't want to be a soldier with your radios then. One guy screws up and the entire system goes down..... IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKIN WAR! I don't think so.
It sure would be great for ambushes though. Kill one guy, take his radio and nobody will be able to call for backup. What could possibly go wrong?
It's not that I don't believe this thin can push air, but the claim that this pushes the same or more air that a fan using an equal amount of energy just doesn't seem right.
Were are the pictures or even a simple description of their test setup?
It's not just the 325 CMF [sic] rating, there are other other genreally sloppy things about this story, like a listed project cost of $9-15. Bullshit. ONE of those "fanless" heatsinks they used would cost more than that. And then there's also the issue that they use FANLESS heatsinks. As in NOT NEEDING A FAN.
This means their system would probably work with a magic 8 ball crammed int here for "cooling".
To quote Murrow's character is "Good Night and Good Luck":
I simply cannot accept that there are on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument.
Of course you use GWB as an example for a controversial article, but what about something like the holocaust? Are you going to remain "neutral" on the subject? Of course not. It would actually make you look very bad to be a place here neo-nazis were allowed to spout their counterfactual BS.
Here's my suggestion. Drop the neutrality rule. Come up with a new one. One which states something along the lines of: "Acticles shall contain only relevant, verifyable information." This way articles are not forced to be neutral, when that facts of the situation are clearly not neutral themselves.
If you have this rule AND a neutrality rule, the only way of complying in many cases is to deliberately weaken the facts presented for one side of the argument.
When your professor publishes original work in their field (i.e. something similar to an assignment for which they get "professional" credit), you bet your ASS they would get in trouble for "borrowing" without citing sources. Their lectures and your assignments therefore belong in very different categories, as far as the standards applied.
This flimsy justification could be applied to the non-original, non-published work that stuidents do as well.
Yes, there are lazy teachers, and that DOES exacerbate the problem, but not in the way that you claim.
How do you know? Sure there are other problem assosciated with lazy teachers as well, but that does not mean setting a poor example isn't one of them.
Luckily I can't think of a single significant case where outside materials were used without attribution in my 4 years of college. I even had a professor who wrote a 600 page text book for the course and sold it for the cost of duplication. I attribute it to the high academic standards that my professors were held to. Sure things like that take time to do, but it's just asking them to do their freaking job.
Students look up to and try to emulate their teachers. Teachers should know that behave accordingly. Your post reads like a rationalization from a "lazy" professor.
Lectures and course materials are professional work and should be treated as such.
The GPL governs how you use the code. It dictates how you must behave if you change it.
Wrong. Change anything you like. The GPL only kicks in when you start DISTRIBUTING.
DRM advocates could say the exact same thing--DRM doesn't govern use, it governs distribution.
As another poster said, They could but they'd be lying.
Either you don't have any clue what DRM is or you are deliberately lying.
It seems pretty clear that you don't have a good understanding of the GPL or DRM. I suggest you do some reading on the subject rather than just making things up.
If a company is sending spam why isn't the ISP for that company shutting them down? Isn't it against the AUP of most providers or at least the big carriers?
Because the spammers are paying them money.
See, it works like this:
Unless the company is losing more business than the spammers are giving them or hosting spammers is causing them real and significant liability problems, they can simple ignore this fact and keep taking their money.
Why do you think the only two cases you cite are so old?
Becuase they were high profile, easy to find cases.
You challenged someone to find a SINGLE case. I found two, quite easily.
You set up a challenge acting quite cocky and sure that it had NEVER happened.
Now that you been proven wrong, you still don't care to to further research on the matter or to adjust your viewpoint. You are intellectually dishonest.
You issued the challenge, I met it. Quit being a weasel about it. Corporations can be and have been the target of shareholder lawsuits for making the "moral" choice.
This is why the "corporations-have-no-choice"
Corporations HAVE a choice. There is ALWAYS have a choice. The system is set up in such a manner that they are biased towards making unethical choices. This is a problem that should be fixed.
Please stop perpetuating the myth that corporations are inherently amoral because their shareholders demand nothing less.
Corporations ARE inherently amoral.
The supreme court has found that the executives of a corporation have a fiduciary responsibility to the sharesholders to give them return on their investment.
I challenge you to provide an example where shareholders have sued a corporation because the corporation made a [positive] ethical choice.
It is not necessary to actually file a lawsuit. There are other ways to achieve this. Such as firing the old CEO and hiring a new CEO with more resemblance to a weasel than a person.
But I do like it when people set themselves up to have their entire argument shattered by a single counter-example. Especially since it shows that you really don't have much background knowedge on this subject.
Here are a few examples:
A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. v. Barlow 98 A.2d 581. (NJ 1953) This is a particularly famous supreme court case.
It would be trivial for Google to justify not providing filtered results in China as a show of good will that engenders brand loyalty among the rest of its users.
Then why don't they do it?
If the system works as you imply, then they would be taking the action you suggest. In reailty, there is potential for profit in their amoral actions and no real consequences to them for making them. It's a race to the bottom. Yahoo's doing it so they've "got" to do it to protect their market position.
Obviously there are benefits to moral corporate actions, the problem is that there is often MORE benefit to the amoral, unethical actions.
I was just basing my post on what the EFF (DVD Jon's defence) said. Sure, they might be random people on the net, but at least they're a bunch of random lawyers on the net.
You provided no link, no quote, no reference or attribution, so there was really only you.
By the way, DeCSS was protected under free speech in the US.
This is incorrect. The DeCSS source code may be protected, but the actual executable code and use of that code definately falls under the DMCA.
You are painting things with much too broad a brush.
...you mean by checking something against what somebody else had to say on the net about the legality of something?
I knew somebody would be a smartass about this.
If you want to check more places, that's perfectly fine.
It does not mean that I should not point out when someone makes a statement based on obviously flawed assumptions.
Checking is a good thing. Acting as though nothing said on the internet can be trusted is not.
What do you mean it doesn't matter if the RF section is different?? This thing is measuring differences in the RF signal.
Right, but it's a bandlimited signal that's digitally generated. If your spurious responses are lower than the noise floor of their receiver, then you can generate (basically) an arbitrary signal within that bandwidth.
Adding DSP filtering will only be able to accomplish a close approximation.
Actually, it will be a really close approximation. How do you think they are MEASURING this fingerprint?
Also, the DSP filter would likely have to pump to another transimitter unless you have a DSP filter that also happens to be a transmitter.
Or you just find a wifi card that uses a DSP and has hackable firmware.
To spoof a RF signature would be extremely expensive
You say this but you don't really have any support. At a minumum, spoofing it shouldn't be any more expensive than measuring it. Potentially, it's much cheaper.
would probably also require you to have the exact WiFi card you want to spoof on hand and if you have that card, then why would you want to spoof it?
You wouldn't need anything more than what the "fingerprinter" has. If you sit there with an antenna and capture for a while, that should be all you need.
Cuz you likely can't. To do so would require a microscope on alot of WiFi cards and even then it you likely won't come close enough.
You are WAY out in left field man.
Doing so requires adding a digital filter to the digital output of the DSP that is the matched filter of the difference between your card and their card.
It doesn't matter what in the RF section is different because you will be compensating for that digitally.
The are going to be cases where the filter can't adjust enough, but for practical purposes, this should work quite well.
We *created* this guy. We gave him the tools money and training to commit terrorist acts. Perhaps that wasn't such a good idea. And perhaps we shouldn't have given Saddam Hussein the key to the city of Detroit?
What on earth makes you think that unfounded retribution will make them hate you any less?
It's easier for you to believe that everyone with a grudge against the US is crazy, but there are many people for whom the US is either directly or indirectly for the death of a family member. Either through the civilian casualties we aren't even bothering to count in Iraq, or more indirect means.
It is also common knowledge that weiner dogs were bred for hunting badgers, but now people keep them as (uncontroversial) house pets. What was your point?
My point is that you are being deliberately dishonest.
Some breeds ARE more prone to violence that others.
It is a known fact, and humans have deliberately bred them to be so.
Pointing out examples of SMALL violent dogs does not absolve you of this deception, nor does it make BIG violent dogs any less dangerous than they are.
You might also be interested to hear that bulls are significantly less large than badgers. Did you ever think that it's not just the propensity towards violence, but that combined with the size and strength to maim and adult or kill a child? How many kids have been killed by weiner dogs in the last ten years?
Pit Bulls are popularly trained to fight because they're large, strong dogs, not because they're inherently vicious.
This is ignorant bullshit. Dog breeds for the vast majority of human existence have been bred both for their physical characteristics AND THEIR DEMEANOR.
doesn't mean it can't handle such temperatures, only that one or more components (chips, capacitors, resistors, etc...) in the system are not CERTIFIED to operate at the wide range of temperatures
As someone who DESIGNS things that ACTUALLY ARE required to work at -40 deg C, I can say that it is MORE than a specsmanship thing.
To put it simply, a system is more than the sum of its components. Every part in your system could even be certified to operate at -40 C, but unless the whole system is designed that way, there's still a good chance that it won't work right.
A simple example here would be electrolytic capacitors. Sure they're almost all "rated" for low temperature operation but they also loose a sizeable percentage of their capacitance at low temperatures. This means that the system must be intentionally designed to account for this.
And if you ran a cable company, your techs would be right on time. Even if they spent the last 30 minutes re-running a cable for a customer they didn't anticipate doing it for. Somehow, they would still arrive on time.
Yes, and you know how you do that?
HAVE ENOUGH FREAKIN TECHS!
It's really not that hard of a problem. Yes, the time to perform a service call can be considered a random variable, but you can also hire enough people to have a 90% confidence that you will have enough techs to make it to their scheduled appointments. You can also optimize your scheduling and routing.
Really, this is all stuff non-monopolies have have figured out for quite some time. The problem is that the cable company knows they've got you by the balls. If it takes them a month to get to you, it takes a month. There isn't shit you can do about it.
really it's not possible to do direct action easily these days.
Cry me a river. It's not *easy* to do things legally so let's just threaten people's lives instead?
In any animal rights movement you'll get people who will be sufficiently enraged at the caging, maming, abusing, skinning, and psychological trauma induced on animals----enough to take matters into their own hands.
And if by "taking matters into their own hands" you mean threatening to harm other people, then you are talking about terrorists plain and simple. These people are scum. Period. If these people can't recognize and respect the right of HUMANS to exist then, then they lack the single most basic moral there is. They deserve to be locked up with rapists, murderers and all the other miscellaneous scum.
Animal models just don't work
Bullshit. Citing a single example is not sufficient to prove that all aminal research is useless. Of course citing a single example of useful animal research IS sufficient to disprove your claim, and expose you as irrational. I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader:)
How is preventing people from torturing animals a political goal? It's a basic moral goal. If you're walking down the street and see someone beating a cat or dog would you not stop them?
Fuck you buddy. Quit being an apologist for these assholes.
Were not talking about direct action to stop the torture of an animal we're talking about firebombing someone's house.
Not firebombing houses, THAT's basic morals. These people are scumbags plain and simple. They have their excuses, just like every terrorist, but at the end of the day they are scum.
If you believe you are justfied in threatening the lives of those around you because you personally hold certain "morals" you have none at all. Your first obligation is to your fellow man. If you can't get that right, you are a piece of shit plain and simple.
Generally speaking, any law that requires a highly specialized person, trained **in the law** (not the regulated profession), to interpet it, is a bad law.
I definately see where you're coming from. However, part of the reason for all that archaic langure is that it has developed very well defined meanings and intepretations over hundreds of years.
I appreciate that sometimes one must be very specifc and thurough in their communications or they may well be misunderstood. It's not an ideal situation, but would you rather a judge have even more latitude interpreting this laws because the terminology used had no clear legal meaning?
Most of your other points I agrees with. It would be nice if the public got to vote OUT a supreme court justice every four years.
first, this argument could be taken to its natural conclusion by suggesting that *nothing* should be patented, since *everything* is simply a combination of laws of nature.
This is just not true.
There are many ways to build a transmission for a car.
There is only one correct answer to the question, "What is 2+2?"
You are deliberately confusing the issue.
As a "patent engineer" (*whatever* that is) you should hopefully understand the difference between an algorithm and an implementation of that algorithm.
2). BUT, and this is an important point, copyright only covers the specific implementation or manifestation of the invention. So, if I were to copyright an insanely powerful peer-to-peer model, you would only have to use a different programming language, change the system architecture a little bit, throw a different GUI on it, and away you go.
And what the HELL is wrong with that? Someone had to duplicate or reverse engineer ALL the work you did!
You say it as if they were getting a free ride, but that's not true.
And I hate to break it to you buddy, but cleanroom reimplementation is THE REASON you have a cheap PC on your desk right now rather than an expensive, IBM- branded one. If IBM had software patents on the BIOS we would have been screwed.
It's good to see companies which patent and sue about trivial ideas get sued themselves. Remember the trash can patent?
Is it?
It's not like that money comes from nowhere or means nothing.
Consider how many people 100 million dollars could employ.
Consider that nonsense like this is a direct disincentive to both innovation and copetition.
What you're saying is like saying that it's nice that heroin dealer got shot by herion dealer B. Is this really a good thing?
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If procedural errors can cause the entire system security to be breached, then I would say that the system is poorly designed. A properly designed secure communications system would not operate at all if correct security procedures were not followed.
I certainly wouldn't want to be a soldier with your radios then. One guy screws up and the entire system goes down..... IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKIN WAR! I don't think so.
It sure would be great for ambushes though. Kill one guy, take his radio and nobody will be able to call for backup. What could possibly go wrong?
I don't buy it.
It's not that I don't believe this thin can push air, but the claim that this pushes the same or more air that a fan using an equal amount of energy just doesn't seem right.
Were are the pictures or even a simple description of their test setup?
It's not just the 325 CMF [sic] rating, there are other other genreally sloppy things about this story, like a listed project cost of $9-15. Bullshit. ONE of those "fanless" heatsinks they used would cost more than that.
And then there's also the issue that they use FANLESS heatsinks. As in NOT NEEDING A FAN.
This means their system would probably work with a magic 8 ball crammed int here for "cooling".
A policy of "neutrality" is fundamentally flawed.
To quote Murrow's character is "Good Night and Good Luck":
Of course you use GWB as an example for a controversial article, but what about something like the holocaust? Are you going to remain "neutral" on the subject? Of course not. It would actually make you look very bad to be a place here neo-nazis were allowed to spout their counterfactual BS.
Here's my suggestion. Drop the neutrality rule. Come up with a new one. One which states something along the lines of: "Acticles shall contain only relevant, verifyable information." This way articles are not forced to be neutral, when that facts of the situation are clearly not neutral themselves.
If you have this rule AND a neutrality rule, the only way of complying in many cases is to deliberately weaken the facts presented for one side of the argument.
When your professor publishes original work in their field (i.e. something similar to an assignment for which they get "professional" credit), you bet your ASS they would get in trouble for "borrowing" without citing sources. Their lectures and your assignments therefore belong in very different categories, as far as the standards applied.
This flimsy justification could be applied to the non-original, non-published work that stuidents do as well.
Yes, there are lazy teachers, and that DOES exacerbate the problem, but not in the way that you claim.
How do you know? Sure there are other problem assosciated with lazy teachers as well, but that does not mean setting a poor example isn't one of them.
Luckily I can't think of a single significant case where outside materials were used without attribution in my 4 years of college. I even had a professor who wrote a 600 page text book for the course and sold it for the cost of duplication. I attribute it to the high academic standards that my professors were held to. Sure things like that take time to do, but it's just asking them to do their freaking job.
Students look up to and try to emulate their teachers. Teachers should know that behave accordingly. Your post reads like a rationalization from a "lazy" professor.
Lectures and course materials are professional work and should be treated as such.
The GPL governs how you use the code. It dictates how you must behave if you change it.
Wrong. Change anything you like. The GPL only kicks in when you start DISTRIBUTING.
DRM advocates could say the exact same thing--DRM doesn't govern use, it governs distribution.
As another poster said, They could but they'd be lying.
Either you don't have any clue what DRM is or you are deliberately lying.
It seems pretty clear that you don't have a good understanding of the GPL or DRM. I suggest you do some reading on the subject rather than just making things up.
If a company is sending spam why isn't the ISP for that company shutting them down? Isn't it against the AUP of most providers or at least the big carriers?
Because the spammers are paying them money.
See, it works like this:
Unless the company is losing more business than the spammers are giving them or hosting spammers is causing them real and significant liability problems, they can simple ignore this fact and keep taking their money.
So let me get this straight: If someone produces some sort of product and puts a bunch of limitations on how I can or cannot use
Repeat after me:
THE GPL DOES NOT GOVERN USE, IT GOVERNS DISTRIBUTION.
Why do you think the only two cases you cite are so old?
Becuase they were high profile, easy to find cases.
You challenged someone to find a SINGLE case. I found two, quite easily.
You set up a challenge acting quite cocky and sure that it had NEVER happened.
Now that you been proven wrong, you still don't care to to further research on the matter or to adjust your viewpoint. You are intellectually dishonest.
You issued the challenge, I met it. Quit being a weasel about it. Corporations can be and have been the target of shareholder lawsuits for making the "moral" choice.
This is why the "corporations-have-no-choice"
Corporations HAVE a choice. There is ALWAYS have a choice. The system is set up in such a manner that they are biased towards making unethical choices. This is a problem that should be fixed.
Corporations ARE inherently amoral.
The supreme court has found that the executives of a corporation have a fiduciary responsibility to the sharesholders to give them return on their investment.
I challenge you to provide an example where shareholders have sued a corporation because the corporation made a [positive] ethical choice.
It is not necessary to actually file a lawsuit. There are other ways to achieve this. Such as firing the old CEO and hiring a new CEO with more resemblance to a weasel than a person.
But I do like it when people set themselves up to have their entire argument shattered by a single counter-example. Especially since it shows that you really don't have much background knowedge on this subject.
Here are a few examples:
It would be trivial for Google to justify not providing filtered results in China as a show of good will that engenders brand loyalty among the rest of its users.
Then why don't they do it?
If the system works as you imply, then they would be taking the action you suggest. In reailty, there is potential for profit in their amoral actions and no real consequences to them for making them. It's a race to the bottom. Yahoo's doing it so they've "got" to do it to protect their market position.
Obviously there are benefits to moral corporate actions, the problem is that there is often MORE benefit to the amoral, unethical actions.
I was just basing my post on what the EFF (DVD Jon's defence) said. Sure, they might be random people on the net, but at least they're a bunch of random lawyers on the net.
You provided no link, no quote, no reference or attribution, so there was really only you.
By the way, DeCSS was protected under free speech in the US.
This is incorrect. The DeCSS source code may be protected, but the actual executable code and use of that code definately falls under the DMCA.
You are painting things with much too broad a brush.
...you mean by checking something against what somebody else had to say on the net about the legality of something?
I knew somebody would be a smartass about this.
If you want to check more places, that's perfectly fine.
It does not mean that I should not point out when someone makes a statement based on obviously flawed assumptions.
Checking is a good thing. Acting as though nothing said on the internet can be trusted is not.
The MPAA lost the case against DVD Jon. I think it's legal to watch DVDs now.
Yeah.... IN NORWAY!
(Do not trust what anybody on the net says about the legality of something without checking yourself.)
What do you mean it doesn't matter if the RF section is different?? This thing is measuring differences in the RF signal.
Right, but it's a bandlimited signal that's digitally generated. If your spurious responses are lower than the noise floor of their receiver, then you can generate (basically) an arbitrary signal within that bandwidth.
Adding DSP filtering will only be able to accomplish a close approximation.
Actually, it will be a really close approximation. How do you think they are MEASURING this fingerprint?
Also, the DSP filter would likely have to pump to another transimitter unless you have a DSP filter that also happens to be a transmitter.
Or you just find a wifi card that uses a DSP and has hackable firmware.
To spoof a RF signature would be extremely expensive
You say this but you don't really have any support. At a minumum, spoofing it shouldn't be any more expensive than measuring it. Potentially, it's much cheaper.
would probably also require you to have the exact WiFi card you want to spoof on hand and if you have that card, then why would you want to spoof it?
You wouldn't need anything more than what the "fingerprinter" has. If you sit there with an antenna and capture for a while, that should be all you need.
Actually, you DO have to pay to use the wheel!
Cuz you likely can't. To do so would require a microscope on alot of WiFi cards and even then it you likely won't come close enough.
You are WAY out in left field man.
Doing so requires adding a digital filter to the digital output of the DSP that is the matched filter of the difference between your card and their card.
It doesn't matter what in the RF section is different because you will be compensating for that digitally.
The are going to be cases where the filter can't adjust enough, but for practical purposes, this should work quite well.
How will that make them less likely to want to attack you?
Well, a good start would have been: Not training and financing Osama Bin Laden, then abandoning him after the cold war.
We *created* this guy. We gave him the tools money and training to commit terrorist acts. Perhaps that wasn't such a good idea.
And perhaps we shouldn't have given Saddam Hussein the key to the city of Detroit?
What on earth makes you think that unfounded retribution will make them hate you any less?
It's easier for you to believe that everyone with a grudge against the US is crazy, but there are many people for whom the US is either directly or indirectly for the death of a family member. Either through the civilian casualties we aren't even bothering to count in Iraq, or more indirect means.
It is also common knowledge that weiner dogs were bred for hunting badgers, but now people keep them as (uncontroversial) house pets. What was your point?
My point is that you are being deliberately dishonest.
Some breeds ARE more prone to violence that others.
It is a known fact, and humans have deliberately bred them to be so.
Pointing out examples of SMALL violent dogs does not absolve you of this deception, nor does it make BIG violent dogs any less dangerous than they are.
You might also be interested to hear that bulls are significantly less large than badgers. Did you ever think that it's not just the propensity towards violence, but that combined with the size and strength to maim and adult or kill a child? How many kids have been killed by weiner dogs in the last ten years?
Pit Bulls are popularly trained to fight because they're large, strong dogs, not because they're inherently vicious.
This is ignorant bullshit.
Dog breeds for the vast majority of human existence have been bred both for their physical characteristics AND THEIR DEMEANOR.
This is documented historical fact.
It is common knowledge however, that the Pit Bull breed was developed for blood sports: Bull baiting, bear baiting, and later, dogfighting.
doesn't mean it can't handle such temperatures, only that one or more components (chips, capacitors, resistors, etc...) in the system are not CERTIFIED to operate at the wide range of temperatures
As someone who DESIGNS things that ACTUALLY ARE required to work at -40 deg C, I can say that it is MORE than a specsmanship thing.
To put it simply, a system is more than the sum of its components. Every part in your system could even be certified to operate at -40 C, but unless the whole system is designed that way, there's still a good chance that it won't work right.
A simple example here would be electrolytic capacitors. Sure they're almost all "rated" for low temperature operation but they also loose a sizeable percentage of their capacitance at low temperatures. This means that the system must be intentionally designed to account for this.
And if you ran a cable company, your techs would be right on time. Even if they spent the last 30 minutes re-running a cable for a customer they didn't anticipate doing it for. Somehow, they would still arrive on time.
Yes, and you know how you do that?
HAVE ENOUGH FREAKIN TECHS!
It's really not that hard of a problem. Yes, the time to perform a service call can be considered a random variable, but you can also hire enough people to have a 90% confidence that you will have enough techs to make it to their scheduled appointments. You can also optimize your scheduling and routing.
Really, this is all stuff non-monopolies have have figured out for quite some time. The problem is that the cable company knows they've got you by the balls. If it takes them a month to get to you, it takes a month. There isn't shit you can do about it.
really it's not possible to do direct action easily these days.
:)
Cry me a river. It's not *easy* to do things legally so let's just threaten people's lives instead?
In any animal rights movement you'll get people who will be sufficiently enraged at the caging, maming, abusing, skinning, and psychological trauma induced on animals----enough to take matters into their own hands.
And if by "taking matters into their own hands" you mean threatening to harm other people, then you are talking about terrorists plain and simple. These people are scum. Period. If these people can't recognize and respect the right of HUMANS to exist then, then they lack the single most basic moral there is. They deserve to be locked up with rapists, murderers and all the other miscellaneous scum.
Animal models just don't work
Bullshit. Citing a single example is not sufficient to prove that all aminal research is useless. Of course citing a single example of useful animal research IS sufficient to disprove your claim, and expose you as irrational. I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader
How is preventing people from torturing animals a political goal? It's a basic moral goal. If you're walking down the street and see someone beating a cat or dog would you not stop them?
Fuck you buddy. Quit being an apologist for these assholes.
Were not talking about direct action to stop the torture of an animal we're talking about firebombing someone's house.
Not firebombing houses, THAT's basic morals. These people are scumbags plain and simple. They have their excuses, just like every terrorist, but at the end of the day they are scum.
If you believe you are justfied in threatening the lives of those around you because you personally hold certain "morals" you have none at all. Your first obligation is to your fellow man. If you can't get that right, you are a piece of shit plain and simple.
Generally speaking, any law that requires a highly specialized person, trained **in the law** (not the regulated profession), to interpet it, is a bad law.
I definately see where you're coming from. However, part of the reason for all that archaic langure is that it has developed very well defined meanings and intepretations over hundreds of years.
I appreciate that sometimes one must be very specifc and thurough in their communications or they may well be misunderstood. It's not an ideal situation, but would you rather a judge have even more latitude interpreting this laws because the terminology used had no clear legal meaning?
Most of your other points I agrees with. It would be nice if the public got to vote OUT a supreme court justice every four years.
first, this argument could be taken to its natural conclusion by suggesting that *nothing* should be patented, since *everything* is simply a combination of laws of nature.
This is just not true.
There are many ways to build a transmission for a car.
There is only one correct answer to the question, "What is 2+2?"
You are deliberately confusing the issue.
As a "patent engineer" (*whatever* that is) you should hopefully understand the difference between an algorithm and an implementation of that algorithm.
2). BUT, and this is an important point, copyright only covers the specific implementation or manifestation of the invention. So, if I were to copyright an insanely powerful peer-to-peer model, you would only have to use a different programming language, change the system architecture a little bit, throw a different GUI on it, and away you go.
And what the HELL is wrong with that? Someone had to duplicate or reverse engineer ALL the work you did!
You say it as if they were getting a free ride, but that's not true.
And I hate to break it to you buddy, but cleanroom reimplementation is THE REASON you have a cheap PC on your desk right now rather than an expensive, IBM- branded one. If IBM had software patents on the BIOS we would have been screwed.
It's good to see companies which patent and sue about trivial ideas get sued themselves. Remember the trash can patent?
Is it?
It's not like that money comes from nowhere or means nothing.
Consider how many people 100 million dollars could employ.
Consider that nonsense like this is a direct disincentive to both innovation and copetition.
What you're saying is like saying that it's nice that heroin dealer got shot by herion dealer B. Is this really a good thing?