And the CIA clearly has control over the British and Swedish justice systems
Yes. CIA ordered the extradition of two terrorists from Sweden outside the legal framework. Wikileaks' Amazon, VISA and Mastercard accounts have been closed outside the legal framework for alleged terrorism. Wikileaks DNS records have been removed with a similar heavy-handed measure (a completely ridiculous move but also an incredibly aggressive one). I understand why Assange finds it credible that as soon he lands in Sweden he will be put back in a plane and directed toward U.S.A.
One thing, however, that might save his ass is the US senator who said that Assange deserved the death penalty. It is forbidden for a EU state to authorize extradition of a criminal or a suspect if there is reason to believe that he will be executed (we don't do that in EU, that's barbaric and contrary to human rights:-p ).
Different fields need different protections. Drugs research, for instance, need protection between the discovery for the drug and its production/commercialization. Software, on the other hand, do not need such protection. Patents usually cover trivial solutions to common problems. I think that software patents could be forbidden altogether, like they are already in Europe, and it wouldn't prevent innovations from appearing.
IANAL, but how is this a good thing? What's the obvious thing that I'm missing?
You are making the assumption that patents are registered either to cash out on licenses or to protect an invention. The sad truth is that a lot of companies file patents only as a defensive weapon. I wouldn't be surprised if Google joined such an alliance. They have stated their opposition to the patent game, their licenses on the WebM standard is very interesting in that respect ("If you sue us, you can't use any of the patents we freely offer to anyone")
Patent trolls will be unaffected (and really, either judges or legislators need to make these disappear) but big companies will be.
The idea is that if you are a member of the DPL, make a video player for windows, and Microsoft decides it violates a patent, the DPL will find a patent it owns that Microsoft violates and will counter-sue. So even if Microsoft is not a part of the DPL this could be an effective deterrent, if done well.
New rules, new models. Sure, many things have to change, because the current market is really focused on selling licenses, but it is quite possible and far less risky to fund the development this way.
Here's the thing, finding someone who'll bankroll you or your team of developers for a year or so to get a project going isn't very easy
It is not easy, but it is doable. I just left a company who found such a client : several million euros for developing a software during 2 years with a 10 persons team.
This isn't the 80's any more. Any self-respecting software user will prefer (if not outright demand) software that uses standard data formats and allows for migrating data, for maximum interoperability and an easy way to migrate away
You are right, we are not in the 80s anymore, we are in 2012, the biggest IT company right now is Apple, who is the paragon of closed format and impossible interoperability.
You think that a development of a software must be paid by the sales of licenses. Like you said, that's a hard thing to do in a world where every software is copyable at no cost, sources or not. You have to get paid for developing the software itself. Find a client that is in need of a software and talk with him about the cost of development, what he really needs and what you will charge.
It is not even true that you have no advantage once your code is published. The intimate knowledge of the code makes you the most likely developer if an improvement is required. It just stops you from simple extorting money in exchange of future development for a captive client.
I don't think open sourcing the projects gives the creators much benefits, while it disadvantages them horribly if they want to monetize their work.
Well, yes and the same can be said with monopolies : it disadvantages you horribly to not create a monopoly if you have the occasion.
I think however that you are not seeing this from the right angle : if you share the source code, you are willing to erase any advantage you have, you are not disadvantaged. That would be the free market solution in an ideal world....
Well, it is inconvenient to say so, because so many of us depend on close source to get paid, but it is actually unethical to give a client a software in binary form without the source code, I wholeheartedly agree.
Right now, I am developing two pieces of open source software, and am being paid (fulll time) for this. The first one is a custom implementation of a known algorithm, to be run on a webserver. The client considers it strategical for him so while he will have the source code, he plans not to publish it. If it was closed, I could lock-in the client, forcing him to ask me for any modification. That would bring me more money, though in an unethical way. In this case, once that is well understood, I was paid more to be open source than proprietary.
The second project is a prototype of a kinect based game for schools. A national lab pays for it and wants it to be open source and publicly available, because they found out that it is the best way to disseminate a piece of software amongst the people interested. In this case, it is me who is making a cut in the price, because I think it is good that schools take the habit of open source software.
So are we going toward what Cory Doctorow called "The War On General Purpose Computers" ? How long before someone proposes to make it illegal to use a rooted/jailbroken device on internet ?
Who am I kidding ? The mobile internet is already becoming that...
Personally I am freaking out about the fact that being root on most of these devices voids the warranty. The erosion of rights is really freaking me out.
When I was an employee I doubted that salespeople were doing a work worth more than what programmers did. They told me I was naive. I became freelance and had to do the sales work. It is really as simple as it look : Meet clients, organise meetings, eat food together, sign contracts and hassle them when they don't pay. Being the programmer of the product gives you an incredible edge in negotiation though : Normal salesmen talk about the advantages of a product without understanding anything about what they say. They sometime sell features trying to guess how hard it is to get them done. Being an engineer really gives you an edge. You know you struck gold when a small feature can be sold for 10 times what it will cost you.
Actually our reprocessing facilities are owned by Areva, our public company that manages France's nuclear power plants. Not that anything of this is incompatible with "capitalism"...
And that is, of course, after Iran successfully won the court case about US sabotaging its uranium enrichment. This may be a slight bit more a serious offense...
Don't forget to send the wastes to us in France, after you'll have finished decommissioning the last nuclear fuel reprocessing facility in USA. We'll be very happy to sell you back the resulting MOX fuel.
But what can we suggest as an alternative form of debate ? I agree that this gives a false impression of the demographics of the debate but when you have to present a subject you know whack about, how do you, as a journalist, understand which point is the most reasonable ?
Crackpots will spend a lot of resources trying to look legit. They have their fancy "labs", their fancy publication journals, their fancy diplomas. How are you supposed to see through that ? This is not as easy as it sounds.
I can see how one can imagine that making both side hear their arguments is a good way of letting everyone have an opinion. Justice courts work that way, that doesn't seem like such a good idea.
I'm not a specialist of judaism, but I think that "jewishness" is propagated through the mother, right ? That single characteristic means that it is faaaaar easier to track ethnicity : we usually check for mitochondrial DNA, that are exactly transmitted from mother to children, so checking for the feminine ascendancy is far easier than the ethnic group that accept purely male descendants to be part of the ethnic group.
There are a lot of claims about Ashkenazi jews and at least half of them is pure propaganda. When checking fact about them, be cautious about this. That said, they do have a specific genetic history, there could be interesting features in their genomes.
How close are they from creating a person from picked genes
Actually quite far, mammals cloning suffer some problems that cheap sequencing will don't help solving.
how does that affect evolution?
Evolution ? Of humans ? Since the beginning of medicine, since we save the weak and the sick, evolution is not a natural process anymore, but something we control ourselves as a civilization.
Cheap sequencing, on the other hand, is a very good news to raise the size of human data that we have. Medicine will improve thanks to that. There is still a lot to understand, and the more data we have, the better.
I also have this theory that they really want to push for SSDs and are not interested in improving the prices on regular HDDs. I observed that 1 TB laptops are hard to find if the same shop sells high-end SSD-equiped laptops too. It may be anecdotal, I have observed that in 3 shops. Has anyone made the same observation ?
Slashdot Mirror
And the CIA clearly has control over the British and Swedish justice systems
Yes. CIA ordered the extradition of two terrorists from Sweden outside the legal framework. Wikileaks' Amazon, VISA and Mastercard accounts have been closed outside the legal framework for alleged terrorism. Wikileaks DNS records have been removed with a similar heavy-handed measure (a completely ridiculous move but also an incredibly aggressive one). I understand why Assange finds it credible that as soon he lands in Sweden he will be put back in a plane and directed toward U.S.A.
:-p ).
One thing, however, that might save his ass is the US senator who said that Assange deserved the death penalty. It is forbidden for a EU state to authorize extradition of a criminal or a suspect if there is reason to believe that he will be executed (we don't do that in EU, that's barbaric and contrary to human rights
Different fields need different protections. Drugs research, for instance, need protection between the discovery for the drug and its production/commercialization. Software, on the other hand, do not need such protection. Patents usually cover trivial solutions to common problems. I think that software patents could be forbidden altogether, like they are already in Europe, and it wouldn't prevent innovations from appearing.
IANAL, but how is this a good thing? What's the obvious thing that I'm missing?
You are making the assumption that patents are registered either to cash out on licenses or to protect an invention. The sad truth is that a lot of companies file patents only as a defensive weapon. I wouldn't be surprised if Google joined such an alliance. They have stated their opposition to the patent game, their licenses on the WebM standard is very interesting in that respect ("If you sue us, you can't use any of the patents we freely offer to anyone")
Patent trolls will be unaffected (and really, either judges or legislators need to make these disappear) but big companies will be.
The idea is that if you are a member of the DPL, make a video player for windows, and Microsoft decides it violates a patent, the DPL will find a patent it owns that Microsoft violates and will counter-sue. So even if Microsoft is not a part of the DPL this could be an effective deterrent, if done well.
In the world of smartphones, softwares modifications can void the warranty. PC vendors dream to enforce a similar rule...
Here's the thing, finding someone who'll bankroll you or your team of developers for a year or so to get a project going isn't very easy
It is not easy, but it is doable. I just left a company who found such a client : several million euros for developing a software during 2 years with a 10 persons team.
This isn't the 80's any more. Any self-respecting software user will prefer (if not outright demand) software that uses standard data formats and allows for migrating data, for maximum interoperability and an easy way to migrate away
You are right, we are not in the 80s anymore, we are in 2012, the biggest IT company right now is Apple, who is the paragon of closed format and impossible interoperability.
And growing the ability to anticipate and favor the changes we prefer is what will make us fit to survive or not.
You think that a development of a software must be paid by the sales of licenses. Like you said, that's a hard thing to do in a world where every software is copyable at no cost, sources or not. You have to get paid for developing the software itself. Find a client that is in need of a software and talk with him about the cost of development, what he really needs and what you will charge.
It is not even true that you have no advantage once your code is published. The intimate knowledge of the code makes you the most likely developer if an improvement is required. It just stops you from simple extorting money in exchange of future development for a captive client.
I don't think open sourcing the projects gives the creators much benefits, while it disadvantages them horribly if they want to monetize their work.
Well, yes and the same can be said with monopolies : it disadvantages you horribly to not create a monopoly if you have the occasion.
I think however that you are not seeing this from the right angle : if you share the source code, you are willing to erase any advantage you have, you are not disadvantaged. That would be the free market solution in an ideal world....
Well, it is inconvenient to say so, because so many of us depend on close source to get paid, but it is actually unethical to give a client a software in binary form without the source code, I wholeheartedly agree.
Right now, I am developing two pieces of open source software, and am being paid (fulll time) for this. The first one is a custom implementation of a known algorithm, to be run on a webserver. The client considers it strategical for him so while he will have the source code, he plans not to publish it. If it was closed, I could lock-in the client, forcing him to ask me for any modification. That would bring me more money, though in an unethical way. In this case, once that is well understood, I was paid more to be open source than proprietary.
The second project is a prototype of a kinect based game for schools. A national lab pays for it and wants it to be open source and publicly available, because they found out that it is the best way to disseminate a piece of software amongst the people interested. In this case, it is me who is making a cut in the price, because I think it is good that schools take the habit of open source software.
So are we going toward what Cory Doctorow called "The War On General Purpose Computers" ? How long before someone proposes to make it illegal to use a rooted/jailbroken device on internet ?
Who am I kidding ? The mobile internet is already becoming that...
Personally I am freaking out about the fact that being root on most of these devices voids the warranty. The erosion of rights is really freaking me out.
When I was an employee I doubted that salespeople were doing a work worth more than what programmers did. They told me I was naive. I became freelance and had to do the sales work. It is really as simple as it look : Meet clients, organise meetings, eat food together, sign contracts and hassle them when they don't pay. Being the programmer of the product gives you an incredible edge in negotiation though : Normal salesmen talk about the advantages of a product without understanding anything about what they say. They sometime sell features trying to guess how hard it is to get them done. Being an engineer really gives you an edge. You know you struck gold when a small feature can be sold for 10 times what it will cost you.
Curiosity is a felony, please turn up to your closest police station.
I'll leave this here : Information Awareness Office
Actually our reprocessing facilities are owned by Areva, our public company that manages France's nuclear power plants. Not that anything of this is incompatible with "capitalism"...
And that is, of course, after Iran successfully won the court case about US sabotaging its uranium enrichment. This may be a slight bit more a serious offense...
Don't forget to send the wastes to us in France, after you'll have finished decommissioning the last nuclear fuel reprocessing facility in USA. We'll be very happy to sell you back the resulting MOX fuel.
Hahaha, for less than a 200$ fee ? No, all they provide is a piece of paper that YOU can then use as an element in a real court.
Heh, obviously you don't pay the startup the fees it charges, that's what is wrong.
The only thing this company provides to you is an element to show in a real court, it doesn't prevent you from having to go to a real court.
But what can we suggest as an alternative form of debate ? I agree that this gives a false impression of the demographics of the debate but when you have to present a subject you know whack about, how do you, as a journalist, understand which point is the most reasonable ?
Crackpots will spend a lot of resources trying to look legit. They have their fancy "labs", their fancy publication journals, their fancy diplomas. How are you supposed to see through that ? This is not as easy as it sounds.
I can see how one can imagine that making both side hear their arguments is a good way of letting everyone have an opinion. Justice courts work that way, that doesn't seem like such a good idea.
I'm not a specialist of judaism, but I think that "jewishness" is propagated through the mother, right ? That single characteristic means that it is faaaaar easier to track ethnicity : we usually check for mitochondrial DNA, that are exactly transmitted from mother to children, so checking for the feminine ascendancy is far easier than the ethnic group that accept purely male descendants to be part of the ethnic group.
There are a lot of claims about Ashkenazi jews and at least half of them is pure propaganda. When checking fact about them, be cautious about this. That said, they do have a specific genetic history, there could be interesting features in their genomes.
1) Nothing indicates that this increase is of genetic origin.
2) The Flynn effect seems to have stalled in several countries since the 90s.
How close are they from creating a person from picked genes
Actually quite far, mammals cloning suffer some problems that cheap sequencing will don't help solving.
how does that affect evolution?
Evolution ? Of humans ? Since the beginning of medicine, since we save the weak and the sick, evolution is not a natural process anymore, but something we control ourselves as a civilization.
Cheap sequencing, on the other hand, is a very good news to raise the size of human data that we have. Medicine will improve thanks to that. There is still a lot to understand, and the more data we have, the better.
Move into the store with a smartphone labels are usually just as useless as salesmen when it comes to understand what a specific chip or GPU is.
I also have this theory that they really want to push for SSDs and are not interested in improving the prices on regular HDDs. I observed that 1 TB laptops are hard to find if the same shop sells high-end SSD-equiped laptops too. It may be anecdotal, I have observed that in 3 shops. Has anyone made the same observation ?