Dvorak was. I don't think you can disassociate municipal WiFi from the broader municipal broadband issue.
There's no possibility of a natural monopoly on wifi.
Sure there is. It's called "interference". IIRC from the last WiFi config I did, you have a choice of a whopping three channels: 1,6,11 (in the US). Just type "wifi interference" into a Google search box and you find manyarticlesdiscussingtheissue. At best you could have two muni-wide WiFi installations, using two channels and leaving the third for citizens to use for their own home networks if they're not using the muni WiFi service.
And, with respect to your "moral responsibility" phrase, municipalities have no "moral responsibility" to provide electricity, telephone, television, water, sewer, garbage/recycling, snow removal, park maintenance, etc. to its citizens either, and one could debate whether the phrase "moral responsibility" would cover such things as police, ambulance, or fire services. In these cases, many municipalities offer some of these services (or centralized rights-of-way for services, such as with telephone and television franchises) due to natural monopolies.
Citizens in many municipalities have much more competition for the goods and services you cite (food, clothing, shelter) than they do broadband Internet access. Moreover, in many municipalities, the rules that govern competition in broadband are natural (e.g., only so much fiber in available rights-of-way) or are set by larger political entities (e.g., state telecommunications regulatory commissions).
So, when you say:
yet the market manages to provide those necessities to me without the help of municipal government
please understand that "the market" works best for a municipality's citizens when it is not a natural or artificial monopoly.
In markets where there is inadequate competition, it's well within reason for a municipality to do something to provide better options for its citizens. That could be municipal broadband. That could be attaching riders to franchise agreement renewals with cable or phone providers to open up the market more (for municipalities that get to negotiate their own franchise agreements). That could be endorsing the actions of a non-profit that brings in a competitive broadband solution. Or who knows what else.
Conversely, if there's adequate competition, a municipality shouldn't need to bother, beyond perhaps offering WiFi in public buildings, parks, etc.
Wish I had points to mod you up. Instead, I'll just extend your edition of the analogy, as it'd be like...
...if major car manufacturers had lobbied Congress to create the Driving Millennium Conformance Act (DMCA), which made it illegal for people to modify their limiters to actually drive within the speed limit but higher than the limiter-imposed 15 MPH.
...if major car manufacturers were lobbying Congress actively to require 15 MPH limiters on all cars regardless of manufacturer (let alone actual speed limits).
...if Motor Car Association of America (MCAA) were suing people who didn't own cars for driving over the speed limit.
3. Since there are humans on Earth, but no plants or people on Mars, there is a strong suspicion that increased Solar activity is the culprit.
Care to provide a citation for the sources of this "strong suspicion"?
As a counterpoint:
A person in Lower Manhattan was robbed at gunpoint, and therefore has no money.
There is no money on Mars, since there are no lifeforms who have evolved past the barter stage of cultural development.
Therefore, in terms of lack of money, there is a strong suspicion that increased Solar[sic] activity is the culprit.
Now, I just made this up, and so there's no truth to it that I'm aware of. However, since both your and my analyses lack citations, my assertions have just as much credence as yours do.
Some types of media support metadata, and Creative Commons has the means for putting license metadata in such media. See the Creative Commons Tools and Developer Wiki pages for details.
That doesn't cover situations where the media lacks metadata, either because the format doesn't support metadata or the metadata is missing. It also doesn't protect you against claims that you injected the CC metadata against the wishes of a non-CC-using copyright owner. I don't see where the CC metadata includes any sort of digital signature to tie the license to the media and copyright holder in a form that prevents repudiation.
Does anyone have any experience with domain registrars that would have handled this situation better than did GoDaddy? I'd love a registrar that's demonstrated that it strikes a better balance between "anything goes" and "you so much as look at us cross-eyed and we'll shut you down".
Yes, so long as it is all game traffic, not just whoever's game traffic a man-in-the-middle ISP decides to grant low latency.
How about smooth VoIP conversations?
Yes, so long as it is for all VOIP systems, not just the one offered by an ISP.
Would you like your ISP to block the spambot from filling your email with nonsense?
Not particularly, since I don't use my ISP's mail servers.
Please keep them out of the decision making process and let ISPs run their business.
I'm fine with that...
If you have no choice, go talk to your local city council about laying municipal fiber and you'll have plenty of choices when that is done.
...except that ISPs are suing to block muni broadband. As far as I'm concerned, if there's a way to build an Internet that bypasses ISP stupidity as needed, ISPs can be stupid. But, if ISPs are going to block build-outs like muni broadband, then the ISPs have to follow a code of conduct (e.g., "common carrier") that offers a level playing field to all. They can't have their cake ("we'll charge arbitrary content providers arbitrary amounts or turn off the tubes") and eat it too ("and no, you can't stop us by building a municipal network").
(I tried posting this as a reply to the blog posting, but I'm not getting the confirmation email, so I'll post it here)
From a purely technical standpoint, I agree with your assertion that, for well-baked files like RSS DTDs, clients should not be relying on a file hosted by an arbitrary service.
That being said, please understand that the emotional message you're sending is: "Don't rely on Netscape".
Why?
Back when RSS was first starting out, Netscape's documentation said to use Netscape URLs for the RSS DTDs. Witness this page, published by Netscape, from late 2000:
Now, a shade over six years later, Netscape is saying "Oh, yeah, what we told you to do? Never mind. We're not supporting it any more."
If Netscape/AOL was shutting its doors, that'd be one thing. If the service in question was obviously onerous, that too would be understandable. Or, if Netscape told people "For the love of all that is holy, don't use our URLs for your DTD needs!" from the get-go (based on that document, you didn't), any such reliance would be our own fault.
But, because AOL does not want to serve up two static files, each of which is smaller than the "Netscape Reports" graphic on the netscape.com home page, Netscape is abandoning a service they told people to use.
So what are we to think about Netscape's current services and their long-term usability?
The full paragraph containing summary's quoted section is:
The bill would require cable, Internet and satellite providers to use reasonably available technology to protect the music, IF they want to enjoy the benefit of a government license. If, however, a company wants to use new technologies beyond the scope of a government license then they must go to the record companies directly to negotiate a licensing agreement through the market.
So, on the face of it, this particular "feature" of the Act shouldn't affect the use of music that is licensed freely (e.g., many Creative Commons licenses). In that case, the step of "negotiate a licensing agreement through the market" is done up front in the form of the music license.
What would probably cause problems for free music is the terms that restrict what players can do (e.g., "What a listener cannot do is set a recording device to find all the Frank Sinatra songs being played on the radio-service and only record those songs."). Hopefully, we can figure out a way to create players that support restricted features but only use them against music with appropriate licensing metadata, versus those features simply not being implemented.
personally I'd rather declare any code I produce to belong to the Public Domain or just keep it entirely closed and private
IANAL, but I worked with a number of attorneys on OSS licensing between 2000 and 2003. Of course, that was a few years ago, so my recollections may be fuzzy.
A typical public domain declaration (e.g., "dedicate to the public domain any and all copyright interest...") does not disclaim warranties, meaning you may be "on the hook" if your code is used and problems arise. Implicit warranties don't stem from copyright law, but rather commercial law (e.g., the Uniform Commercial Code in the US), so public-domain provisions won't automatically disclaim any implicit warranties (e.g., fitness for use, merchantability).
I seem to recall there was also some debate over whether in the US it was even possible for ordinary folk to create public domain works, given the language in the Copyright Act of 1976 that automatically applies copyrights to every work.
If you are going to try the public domain route, please try to find some language for making that grant that's been reviewed by an attorney, versus just rolling your own.
What's the official way to let you know about this sort of thing? I'm not trolling -- the better you can inform folk like us about how to interact with you, the more likely it is you'll get a response when you need it. For example, a quick scan of the Help and FAQ pages linked to off of the Netscape home page shows no mention of how to contact folk like you.
The 'technological community' in general has shown little to no interest in establishing a culture that encourages the safeguarding of IP contentholders legal rights
I doubt the 'technological community' [sic] is quite as homogeneous as you give it credit for. That being said, I think you're giving said community the short shrift.
I suspect a wide range of people, 'technological' or not, would agree that:
We want art (e.g., books, music) and science (e.g., pharmaceuticals, software) to be created
We want a fair system for financing said art and science, one that provides sufficient incentive to have the art and science created, and therefore not throw all its power to one side (RIAA/MPAA/patent trolls) or the other (Pirate Bay)
What the 'technological community' — and I would argue it's really more the 'tech-savvy consumer community' — is reacting to is the fact that the deck appears stacked in favor of the RIAA/MPAA/patent trolls side:
They have concentrated wealth; consumers arguably have more money but are ill-organized
Given that wealth and the campaign finance systems in many nations, they have the ear of the government (via lobbyists and donations); consumers arguably are the citizens but many aren't used to a culture of both paying taxes and paying extra to politicians to actually get paid attention to
They also have control over the means of production, either due to practicality (consumers can't readily just band together and create a pharmaceuticals lab) or due to structure (payola and other dubious-to-illegal tactics creating an entertainment industry with a handful of artist 'haves' and a whole lot of artist 'have nots')
The 'technological community' therefore tends towards promoting anarchy (e.g., turning a blind eye towards 'pirated' music) as an easy means of providing a check and balance to the entrenched powers, even if such anarchy tends to run counter to the ideals of the 'technological community'.
Your goal — finding a reasonable middle ground — is noble but too soon, particularly since your suggestions smack of asking the 'technological community' to unilaterally disarm.
If you really want to get to a reasonable middle ground, here's the windmill I'd tilt at:
Get the government to pay more explicit attention to the will of its citizens
Use the government as a forum for finding a reasonable middle ground that meets the goals outlined towards the top of my post
Admittedly, this is probably 10-50 years in the making, and so from a practical standpoint it might not have much of an impact over the specific issue of IP rights in the digital era. Personally, I'm more concerned with fixing the over-arching system (raising citizens' voice in government) than fixing individual problems (IP rights in the digital era). But, that's just me.
Changing phone numbers in an address book isn't unique to VOIP. A virus could scan Outlook and other common address book systems and change phone numbers, whether VOIP or not. Since most people don't have their bank phone numbers memorized, they'll assume that the address book entry is correct. Even if they use a non-VOIP phone, the phishing attack can work.
Now, a VOIP system might have an integrated address-book/speed-dial system that could also be attacked. But otherwise, I don't see where this is unique to VOIP.
According to TechDirt, the concessions might be just smoke and mirrors, at least in part. They've carved out exceptions to their agreement to keep network neutrality ("This commitment also does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service") and possibly some limitations on how useful the "affordable stand-alone digital subscriber line service" is.
Does anyone make a handheld RFID detector? Not something to read the tags, but just to note their presence, kinda like the rudimentary keychain WiFi detectors? I'd love to have something that I can use at home to find these little buggers as they start invading everything, so I can choose which to keep, which to somehow enclose (e.g., passport), and which to hammer into oblivion.
For my purposes, a simple meter showing strength of reflected RFID signal would probably suffice, so one can slowly pan over an area to watch for needle jumps. An audible signal (think Geiger counter or metal detector) could work too, though a headset jack would be nice in that case.
For many people, I suspect they will get an OpenID as a side-effect of joining some specific service of interest. For example, IIRC, LiveJournal IDs can be used as OpenIDs. So, people who joined LiveJournal to blog get, as a benefit, an OpenID they can use elsewhere (e.g., commenting on other blogs). So, in the case of your mother, she might well wind up with an OpenID from an existing service that converts to OpenID as a provider -- for example, it would be fairly easy for Yahoo or Google to offer OpenIDs for their existing account services.
There's been discussion of OpenID providers offering aliases, so you could have a number of distinct "IDs" you mix-and-match with, but they're all validated by an OpenID provider. I don't think the spec says one way or another regarding this; it would be a feature of whichever OpenID provider you used for your identity.
The patent applications which details what the patents are covering are public domain, and therefore perfectly available to open source programmers.
Yes and no.
Patents that were filed by Microsoft itself should be able to be found on the USPTO Web site by searching for their name. You might even find some patents by searching for the names of well-known Microsoft employees (e.g., Bill Gates), if they were filed under their names and not Microsoft. However, patents that were assigned to Microsoft -- by employees under Microsoft's direction, by purchasing patents, or by acquisitions of firms holding patents -- will be much more difficult to unearth. Microsoft's done quite a few deals and has had tens of thousands of employees in its history. A dedicated research team might be able to put together a close-to-definitive database of Microsoft patents, but might never get them all.
Then, there is the issue of "open source programmers" reading those patents, as that introduces treble damages if they were to then lose a lawsuit where they accused of violating those patents (treble damages is US law; not sure about other nations).
Ideally, either OIN or SDLC or some similar organization would put together a team to both build the database and analyze the code of major open source projects (Linux, Apache, etc.) to identify possible areas of patent problems. However, this won't exactly be cheap, even if they get some volunteer assistance.
We've just got to flush 20+ years of expertize down the drain, unlearn everything we know, and re-learn it all on linux, using *TOTALLY* different apps, different languages, APIs, widgets, frameworks, concepts and everything else.
If you have 20+ years of expertise on Windows, I'm rather impressed, since it was only Windows 1.0 back in 2006, and there wasn't much happening on that version.
Let's assume for the moment that you have ~15 years of Windows experience, dating back to Windows 3.0/3.1. During that time, you've used:
Two major iterations of the Windows API (Win16 and Win32)
A few different windowing toolkits (raw API, probably at least one third-party, MFC, ATL, and.NET)
Probably more than one programming language (at least C/C++, and maybe a little VB, C#, Delphi, or some such thrown in there)
Definitely more than one programming tool, since Visual Studio didn't exist back in the day
More than one scripting language (DOS batch language, then VBScript)
Heavens knows how many database access APIs (vendor-specific, raw ODBC, DAO, ADO,.NET)
Etc.
Somehow, life went on. Yet, changes required to use Linux are now somehow difficult? If you really have 15+ years of programming experience, and Linux is somehow a challenge to you, I'm truly sorry.
Even the infamous one-click shopping patent involves the exchange of money for goods - thus software is only a one part of it.
And the rest of it is a business process, not a technical process. Business processes weren't supposed to be patentable, either. Business process patents and software patents tend to go hand-in-hand, IMHO.
but I would like to point out that it does not matter where you get your iPod. It will always be the same price. Apple does not allow resellers to sell at any price other than the MSRP. They enforce their policy be cutting off or fining resellers that fail to comply.
So, when one goes onto price search engines and search for the iPod Nano and come up with a range of prices from $130 to $212, that's just a whole bunch of typos on a whole bunch of ecommerce sites?
Speaking of Apple's sales policy, did anyone else notice that the 2GB model is only available in "plain" silver, and the only black iPod is the 8GB model.
So, the 2GB black iPod Nano I just bought doesn't exist? Damn! But it looks so shiny!
Slashdot Mirror
Dvorak was. I don't think you can disassociate municipal WiFi from the broader municipal broadband issue.
Sure there is. It's called "interference". IIRC from the last WiFi config I did, you have a choice of a whopping three channels: 1,6,11 (in the US). Just type "wifi interference" into a Google search box and you find many articles discussing the issue. At best you could have two muni-wide WiFi installations, using two channels and leaving the third for citizens to use for their own home networks if they're not using the muni WiFi service.
And, with respect to your "moral responsibility" phrase, municipalities have no "moral responsibility" to provide electricity, telephone, television, water, sewer, garbage/recycling, snow removal, park maintenance, etc. to its citizens either, and one could debate whether the phrase "moral responsibility" would cover such things as police, ambulance, or fire services. In these cases, many municipalities offer some of these services (or centralized rights-of-way for services, such as with telephone and television franchises) due to natural monopolies.
Citizens in many municipalities have much more competition for the goods and services you cite (food, clothing, shelter) than they do broadband Internet access. Moreover, in many municipalities, the rules that govern competition in broadband are natural (e.g., only so much fiber in available rights-of-way) or are set by larger political entities (e.g., state telecommunications regulatory commissions).
So, when you say:
please understand that "the market" works best for a municipality's citizens when it is not a natural or artificial monopoly.
In markets where there is inadequate competition, it's well within reason for a municipality to do something to provide better options for its citizens. That could be municipal broadband. That could be attaching riders to franchise agreement renewals with cable or phone providers to open up the market more (for municipalities that get to negotiate their own franchise agreements). That could be endorsing the actions of a non-profit that brings in a competitive broadband solution. Or who knows what else.
Conversely, if there's adequate competition, a municipality shouldn't need to bother, beyond perhaps offering WiFi in public buildings, parks, etc.
Wish I had points to mod you up. Instead, I'll just extend your edition of the analogy, as it'd be like...
Jonathan Swift called; he wants his plot back.
Care to provide a citation for the sources of this "strong suspicion"?
As a counterpoint:
Now, I just made this up, and so there's no truth to it that I'm aware of. However, since both your and my analyses lack citations, my assertions have just as much credence as yours do.
Some types of media support metadata, and Creative Commons has the means for putting license metadata in such media. See the Creative Commons Tools and Developer Wiki pages for details.
That doesn't cover situations where the media lacks metadata, either because the format doesn't support metadata or the metadata is missing. It also doesn't protect you against claims that you injected the CC metadata against the wishes of a non-CC-using copyright owner. I don't see where the CC metadata includes any sort of digital signature to tie the license to the media and copyright holder in a form that prevents repudiation.
Does anyone have any experience with domain registrars that would have handled this situation better than did GoDaddy? I'd love a registrar that's demonstrated that it strikes a better balance between "anything goes" and "you so much as look at us cross-eyed and we'll shut you down".
Yes, so long as it is all game traffic, not just whoever's game traffic a man-in-the-middle ISP decides to grant low latency.
Yes, so long as it is for all VOIP systems, not just the one offered by an ISP.
Not particularly, since I don't use my ISP's mail servers.
I'm fine with that...
...except that ISPs are suing to block muni broadband. As far as I'm concerned, if there's a way to build an Internet that bypasses ISP stupidity as needed, ISPs can be stupid. But, if ISPs are going to block build-outs like muni broadband, then the ISPs have to follow a code of conduct (e.g., "common carrier") that offers a level playing field to all. They can't have their cake ("we'll charge arbitrary content providers arbitrary amounts or turn off the tubes") and eat it too ("and no, you can't stop us by building a municipal network").
(I tried posting this as a reply to the blog posting, but I'm not getting the confirmation email, so I'll post it here)
From a purely technical standpoint, I agree with your assertion that, for well-baked files like RSS DTDs, clients should not be relying on a file hosted by an arbitrary service.
That being said, please understand that the emotional message you're sending is: "Don't rely on Netscape".
Why?
Back when RSS was first starting out, Netscape's documentation said to use Netscape URLs for the RSS DTDs. Witness this page, published by Netscape, from late 2000:
Now, a shade over six years later, Netscape is saying "Oh, yeah, what we told you to do? Never mind. We're not supporting it any more."
If Netscape/AOL was shutting its doors, that'd be one thing. If the service in question was obviously onerous, that too would be understandable. Or, if Netscape told people "For the love of all that is holy, don't use our URLs for your DTD needs!" from the get-go (based on that document, you didn't), any such reliance would be our own fault.
But, because AOL does not want to serve up two static files, each of which is smaller than the "Netscape Reports" graphic on the netscape.com home page, Netscape is abandoning a service they told people to use.
So what are we to think about Netscape's current services and their long-term usability?
The full paragraph containing summary's quoted section is:
So, on the face of it, this particular "feature" of the Act shouldn't affect the use of music that is licensed freely (e.g., many Creative Commons licenses). In that case, the step of "negotiate a licensing agreement through the market" is done up front in the form of the music license.
What would probably cause problems for free music is the terms that restrict what players can do (e.g., "What a listener cannot do is set a recording device to find all the Frank Sinatra songs being played on the radio-service and only record those songs."). Hopefully, we can figure out a way to create players that support restricted features but only use them against music with appropriate licensing metadata, versus those features simply not being implemented.
IANAL, but I worked with a number of attorneys on OSS licensing between 2000 and 2003. Of course, that was a few years ago, so my recollections may be fuzzy.
A typical public domain declaration (e.g., "dedicate to the public domain any and all copyright interest...") does not disclaim warranties, meaning you may be "on the hook" if your code is used and problems arise. Implicit warranties don't stem from copyright law, but rather commercial law (e.g., the Uniform Commercial Code in the US), so public-domain provisions won't automatically disclaim any implicit warranties (e.g., fitness for use, merchantability).
I seem to recall there was also some debate over whether in the US it was even possible for ordinary folk to create public domain works, given the language in the Copyright Act of 1976 that automatically applies copyrights to every work.
If you are going to try the public domain route, please try to find some language for making that grant that's been reviewed by an attorney, versus just rolling your own.
What's the official way to let you know about this sort of thing? I'm not trolling -- the better you can inform folk like us about how to interact with you, the more likely it is you'll get a response when you need it. For example, a quick scan of the Help and FAQ pages linked to off of the Netscape home page shows no mention of how to contact folk like you.
I doubt the 'technological community' [sic] is quite as homogeneous as you give it credit for. That being said, I think you're giving said community the short shrift.
I suspect a wide range of people, 'technological' or not, would agree that:
What the 'technological community' — and I would argue it's really more the 'tech-savvy consumer community' — is reacting to is the fact that the deck appears stacked in favor of the RIAA/MPAA/patent trolls side:
The 'technological community' therefore tends towards promoting anarchy (e.g., turning a blind eye towards 'pirated' music) as an easy means of providing a check and balance to the entrenched powers, even if such anarchy tends to run counter to the ideals of the 'technological community'.
Your goal — finding a reasonable middle ground — is noble but too soon, particularly since your suggestions smack of asking the 'technological community' to unilaterally disarm.
If you really want to get to a reasonable middle ground, here's the windmill I'd tilt at:
Admittedly, this is probably 10-50 years in the making, and so from a practical standpoint it might not have much of an impact over the specific issue of IP rights in the digital era. Personally, I'm more concerned with fixing the over-arching system (raising citizens' voice in government) than fixing individual problems (IP rights in the digital era). But, that's just me.
Changing phone numbers in an address book isn't unique to VOIP. A virus could scan Outlook and other common address book systems and change phone numbers, whether VOIP or not. Since most people don't have their bank phone numbers memorized, they'll assume that the address book entry is correct. Even if they use a non-VOIP phone, the phishing attack can work.
Now, a VOIP system might have an integrated address-book/speed-dial system that could also be attacked. But otherwise, I don't see where this is unique to VOIP.
Why do Web design tools, desktop publishing tools, and the like have to be part of an office suite? Just because Microsoft put them there?
According to TechDirt, the concessions might be just smoke and mirrors, at least in part. They've carved out exceptions to their agreement to keep network neutrality ("This commitment also does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service") and possibly some limitations on how useful the "affordable stand-alone digital subscriber line service" is.
Does anyone make a handheld RFID detector? Not something to read the tags, but just to note their presence, kinda like the rudimentary keychain WiFi detectors? I'd love to have something that I can use at home to find these little buggers as they start invading everything, so I can choose which to keep, which to somehow enclose (e.g., passport), and which to hammer into oblivion.
For my purposes, a simple meter showing strength of reflected RFID signal would probably suffice, so one can slowly pan over an area to watch for needle jumps. An audible signal (think Geiger counter or metal detector) could work too, though a headset jack would be nice in that case.
Would this be the Vista that's been available in beta form for months? That was reviewed five and six months ago?
Why would FSF launch this program without having reviewed the beta?
For many people, I suspect they will get an OpenID as a side-effect of joining some specific service of interest. For example, IIRC, LiveJournal IDs can be used as OpenIDs. So, people who joined LiveJournal to blog get, as a benefit, an OpenID they can use elsewhere (e.g., commenting on other blogs). So, in the case of your mother, she might well wind up with an OpenID from an existing service that converts to OpenID as a provider -- for example, it would be fairly easy for Yahoo or Google to offer OpenIDs for their existing account services.
There's been discussion of OpenID providers offering aliases, so you could have a number of distinct "IDs" you mix-and-match with, but they're all validated by an OpenID provider. I don't think the spec says one way or another regarding this; it would be a feature of whichever OpenID provider you used for your identity.
Yes and no.
Patents that were filed by Microsoft itself should be able to be found on the USPTO Web site by searching for their name. You might even find some patents by searching for the names of well-known Microsoft employees (e.g., Bill Gates), if they were filed under their names and not Microsoft. However, patents that were assigned to Microsoft -- by employees under Microsoft's direction, by purchasing patents, or by acquisitions of firms holding patents -- will be much more difficult to unearth. Microsoft's done quite a few deals and has had tens of thousands of employees in its history. A dedicated research team might be able to put together a close-to-definitive database of Microsoft patents, but might never get them all.
Then, there is the issue of "open source programmers" reading those patents, as that introduces treble damages if they were to then lose a lawsuit where they accused of violating those patents (treble damages is US law; not sure about other nations).
Ideally, either OIN or SDLC or some similar organization would put together a team to both build the database and analyze the code of major open source projects (Linux, Apache, etc.) to identify possible areas of patent problems. However, this won't exactly be cheap, even if they get some volunteer assistance.
If you have 20+ years of expertise on Windows, I'm rather impressed, since it was only Windows 1.0 back in 2006, and there wasn't much happening on that version.
Let's assume for the moment that you have ~15 years of Windows experience, dating back to Windows 3.0/3.1. During that time, you've used:
Somehow, life went on. Yet, changes required to use Linux are now somehow difficult? If you really have 15+ years of programming experience, and Linux is somehow a challenge to you, I'm truly sorry.
And the rest of it is a business process, not a technical process. Business processes weren't supposed to be patentable, either. Business process patents and software patents tend to go hand-in-hand, IMHO.
The author of the piece, Daniel Lyons, has a history of not exactly being friendly to Free Software and open source.
So, when one goes onto price search engines and search for the iPod Nano and come up with a range of prices from $130 to $212, that's just a whole bunch of typos on a whole bunch of ecommerce sites?
So, the 2GB black iPod Nano I just bought doesn't exist? Damn! But it looks so shiny!