That would be where well defined questions come in, and of course human judgment. No one is suggesting that such a machine should take over the entirely of the judicial process. Context is still important after all.
You have a group of individuals who have a proven capability to penetrate and/or disrupt computer systems including government ones, ill defined objectives and agendas and numerous political and national allegiances. Whether they are a threat in the sense that they plan to do something is up for debate. The fact that they could and most likely would is not up for debate. Even if lulzsec and Anonymous were allied in some sense with the US government they'd still be a national security threat.
A lot of the reason that prior art litigation is difficult is that the fact that something is prior art is not entirely obvious. If I take an idea and copy it exactly except I tweak one feature, is that feature in and of itself enough to make the new device novel, even if the rest of it is identical to a pre-existing product? Maybe, maybe not. Is doing something on the internet with different technical challenges and requirements the same as doing it in a brick and mortar store? Maybe, maybe not. Is an exact implementation of an idea which is contained in published university research subject to prior art, definitely.
Attempting to patent a properly published idea would be legal suicide.
It only applies to the results of the research it funds. Not to anything else. So if your materials engineering department comes up with the new plastic, you can still build yourself a scrooge McDuck money tower.
Published works count as prior art. If the university publishes its results Intel can't patent it unless they can prove they were working on it first which is removed by first to file.
If the university doesn't publish their findings then what you say holds true and Intel can patent the invention even if they didn't actually do the inventing, however any university which doesn't publish its findings is unlikely to get any kind of funding from anyone because publishing findings is entirely what universities are about.
I've seen this argument a hundred times lately. If you invent something and choose not to publish or patent it, first to file can screw you. If you invent something more slowly than someone else, even though you started first, first to file can screw you. If you invent something and show that invention to someone with a better team of lawyers than you have without applying for a provisional patent first, first to file can screw you. It's not a perfect system by any means.
That said, a perfect system would require perfect knowledge which we simply don't have. Proving who came up with an idea first is difficult, time consuming and expensive. First to invent also screws the little guy as it is far far easier for a gigantic corporation to generate the appropriate paper trail than it is for a small inventor, and where no such paper trail exists on either side, the big corporation has better lawyers. First to file is an imperfect system, but it is a more perfect system than any form of "first to invent" we can actually deliver.
It would certainly be open for abuse, but so is a pipe wrench. You could use a 100% accurate lie detector to invade someone's privacy for sure, but if you stuck to questions like "Are you planning on killing anyone today?" or "Did you kill that person?" you'd probably be fine. Especially since you wouldn't actually need to have a person in the room if you had a 100% accurate lie detector. You need a person now because interrogation requires instinct, but with a machine that could actually detect truth or lies and the right questions you could put someone in a room, have the machine ask them a preselected list of questions and then let them out if they're fine.
You couldn't take people out of the equation entirely of course as you'd need them for answering "Why did you kill that person?".
You'd definitely have to be careful about fishing expeditions, and with a much higher solve rate people would be a lot more careful about what they allowed to become law in the first place, but there's nothing inherently unethical about asking someone if they committed or are planning on committing a specific crime and being able to rely on the answer.
It's not about the money, and it never was. It's about Davlik.
Oracle doesn't want Davlik to exist and Google can't get rid of it without ending Android.
My feeling is that Oracle would take a settlement of a buck if Google replaced Davlik with Java, hell they'd probably even license it to them for free.
The problem is that replacing Davlik would kill Android, not because Java is bad or Davlik is much better, but because every single Android application would have to be at the very least recompiled, retested, and redistributed. Every single Android phone would have to have its firmware updated and all its apps removed. Phones which didn't get updates wouldn't be able to get new applications, applications which didn't get updated wouldn't be available for new phones. By the time it was all sorted out they'd have lost a fortune.
That's because it's not using IE, it's using the windows HTML libraries which are incidentally IE like, they're always there so they are what developers program against.
No it means that a corporation can't come and say "oh that thing you published, we invented that the day before you published it we just haven't filed yet". Whoever gets it out there first(either by publishing it into the public domain) or getting a patent gets to keep it forever. If you sat on an invention for trolling purposes you're no SoL.
Essentially what this means is that if two entities approach the patent office with the same patent which they've been developing in secret and haven't published any details about or released, instead of the patent office spending a crap load of time and money trying to work out which company "invented" the thing first for whatever value of "invented" you choose to have by wading through both entities reams of fraudulent information and vague hints, they just say "entity A got here first" and give the patent to them.
It does nothing to prior art, it does nothing to any of the other tests, it just means that if two people claim to have invented the same thing and neither of them have published or released the product it's first come first served.
It's also the method used everywhere else in the world including Europe which Slashdot generally seems to feel has a better patent system.
They were fairly fast before, but no one got to see how they worked. Research wasn't shared because it wasn't protected. Part of what patents do is encourage people to invent by giving them financial motivation. Most of what patents do is force inventors to document how their idea works. The old guild days were far worse for innovation than today, and if we could reform the patent system(and this is a good first step believe it or not) it will be even better.
The basic issue with deflation isn't so much that we can't understand it, people could work it out even if they grumbled for a while. The issue with deflation is that it punishes debt far more harshly than inflation punishes savings and debt, at least in moderation, is far more important to economic growth than savings. Imagine the housing bubble bursting happening to your car loan, your student loans, your credit card loan, your business loan, essentially all your debt and you'll begin to imagine what any significant deflation would be like. If you have any kind of serious inflation the only remotely sane thing you can do is hold onto your money because spending it is a net loss, borrowing it results in negative equity, and lending to people who can't pay(due to negative equity) is not the best idea.
Inflation on the other hand is really only bad for people who have no income stream which is to say essentially the self supporting elderly. Trying to bet on when you're going to die is a bet most people end up losing one way or the other anyway and there are better ways to deal with the problems of retirement than trying to deflate the currency.
Lots of people have implied Google is breaking the law, and an awful lot of people, yourself included, seem to be absolutely convinced that Google are the good guys and shocked when they aren't. Have you read what Eric Schmidt has to say about Google+ as an identity service and anonymity on the internet? They've gone over to the dark side mate.
Except that honeycomb isn't licensed under the GPL. The kernel is, as are certain third party user space applications, for all of which Google has released the source code. The rest of Honeycomb is open source, but is not licensed under the GPL. It's not illegal to distribute it without permission, but if you ask they can tell you to stuff off.
Lots of people have this illusion that OSX and Android are different than they are. You can have an open source kernel for a proprietary operating system, you have to release the source for any changes you distribute to the kernel, and there are arguments that kernel drivers are covered as well, but the OS itself doesn't have to be because calling system calls doesn't require a GPL license.
Except that it doesn't just have to be done once, it has to be done once, and then it has to be maintained, and supported, and migrated to and tested with the new OS version. If it's a modification to an existing open source program then it has to be maintained and potentially rewritten from scratch every time there's any changes to the parts of the original program that they modified.
People who think that software is a one time sunk cost haven't ever written any.
Or you could see it as arguing that mandating that only open source software be purchased doesn't mean that closed source software isn't being used. It's all fine and dandy to order a PC with Linux on it, but if you order a PC with Linux on it when what you really want is Microsoft Office, do you reckon the government employees are doing without or using pirated copies. Prohibiting the purchase of any kind of software doesn't stop that software being used, just purchased.
The iPad2 is a vastly superior device. Not because of any features it has or because I like it, I don't, but because the iPad2 has made Apple bucket loads of money whereas the Galaxy Tab hasn't made Samsung squat.
People like to buy iPads, they don't like to buy anything else, do with that what you will.
Haven't done much in a couple of years, but I found that in terms of post processing there just wasn't anything even remotely on par with Photoshop, Darktable appears to be new and it might fit into that space between having nothing and having Photoshop better than the GIMP did.
Now that they know, yes, it will probably be found. That doesn't mean that 1) tarballs weren't infected and 2) that changes weren't made to the code and approved because someone was impersonating a trusted developer. It will be resolved, but it could also easily have created a problem which may take months to fully work itself out.
The hash isn't automagic, it's produced and provided by the distributor of the code or binary. A hash won't protect you if the source of the hash has been hacked. Sure I can download a kernel tar from a mirror and then check kernel.org for the hash, but where do you go to validate that kernel.org is real. A clever hacker in 17 days, could very easily replace the kernel tar balls and their associated hashes and the only way anyone would know would be if someone happened to have a reference of what that key had been or an exact copy of the files used to generate it in the first place which was known good. Release versions would be very easy to hack.
You're also not even guaranteed that there's no malicious code in the repository. Do you reckon that everyone's commits are reviewed with the same diligence that some random patch is. If you were clever enough and used the stolen passwords to impersonate the right person you could quite easily get something into the trunk. I mean if you've known and worked with a guy for years are you really going to check for a really well hidden back door?
When you're a teacher buying said laptop from a student at a school for juvenile delinquents you should assume that everything they own is stolen and not buy it.
The fundamental problem with Eclipse is that it runs on the JRE, which fundamentally makes its memory management bloody awful, that's not because Java is bad at memory, it's because the JRE is bad at memory. You need to specify the maximum amount of memory it is allowed to use, and the minimum amount of memory it has to start with. Get those numbers wrong and your performance in the application is fairly shocking for large projects because you page in and out all the time or the performance of your machine is fairly shocking because you've allocated too much memory. The JRE, at least on Windows, isn't super great at moving between those two numbers either.
Visual Studio runs as native code and so is both more responsive and takes absolutely no configuration to get up and running. Eclipse can be made to operate in a relatively efficient manner(depending on the JRE versions you have available to you), but it isn't like that out of the box, whereas VS is.
Add in the fact that Visual Studio has improved an awful lot over the last few iterations whereas eclipse hasn't(though to be fair it was a lot better to start with),.NET is currently beating the pants of Java, and you start seeing VS coming out on top for a lot of people. I personally love eclipse, it's the best Java IDE I've ever used, and I can make it do almost anything I want either with 3rd party plugins or if I'm desperate my own code. On the other hand, Visual Studio 2010 is a seriously nice IDE, and.NET has improved a lot while Java has been rotting in the JCP for the last 5 years. Java 8 which isn't due out till next year won't even catch up on what.NET has right now, and if you're running on Windows it performs better and is easier to configure.
I love Java, but Oracle has a long way to go to get it back up to snuff.
It's not a kindle because LCD is not eInk. I've used both, they're not comparable, for reading a book, eInk is vastly superior. That's not to say that the iPad doesn't work, but it's not as good at that particular task.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be where well defined questions come in, and of course human judgment. No one is suggesting that such a machine should take over the entirely of the judicial process. Context is still important after all.
They would be denied on the grounds of prior art, on the grounds that the information was PUBLISHED FIRST
You have a group of individuals who have a proven capability to penetrate and/or disrupt computer systems including government ones, ill defined objectives and agendas and numerous political and national allegiances. Whether they are a threat in the sense that they plan to do something is up for debate. The fact that they could and most likely would is not up for debate. Even if lulzsec and Anonymous were allied in some sense with the US government they'd still be a national security threat.
Prior art isn't exactly the way you think it is.
A lot of the reason that prior art litigation is difficult is that the fact that something is prior art is not entirely obvious. If I take an idea and copy it exactly except I tweak one feature, is that feature in and of itself enough to make the new device novel, even if the rest of it is identical to a pre-existing product? Maybe, maybe not. Is doing something on the internet with different technical challenges and requirements the same as doing it in a brick and mortar store? Maybe, maybe not. Is an exact implementation of an idea which is contained in published university research subject to prior art, definitely.
Attempting to patent a properly published idea would be legal suicide.
It only applies to the results of the research it funds. Not to anything else. So if your materials engineering department comes up with the new plastic, you can still build yourself a scrooge McDuck money tower.
Published works count as prior art. If the university publishes its results Intel can't patent it unless they can prove they were working on it first which is removed by first to file.
If the university doesn't publish their findings then what you say holds true and Intel can patent the invention even if they didn't actually do the inventing, however any university which doesn't publish its findings is unlikely to get any kind of funding from anyone because publishing findings is entirely what universities are about.
I've seen this argument a hundred times lately. If you invent something and choose not to publish or patent it, first to file can screw you. If you invent something more slowly than someone else, even though you started first, first to file can screw you. If you invent something and show that invention to someone with a better team of lawyers than you have without applying for a provisional patent first, first to file can screw you. It's not a perfect system by any means.
That said, a perfect system would require perfect knowledge which we simply don't have. Proving who came up with an idea first is difficult, time consuming and expensive. First to invent also screws the little guy as it is far far easier for a gigantic corporation to generate the appropriate paper trail than it is for a small inventor, and where no such paper trail exists on either side, the big corporation has better lawyers. First to file is an imperfect system, but it is a more perfect system than any form of "first to invent" we can actually deliver.
Please remove your head from your rectum.
I suppose it depends on what questions you ask.
It would certainly be open for abuse, but so is a pipe wrench. You could use a 100% accurate lie detector to invade someone's privacy for sure, but if you stuck to questions like "Are you planning on killing anyone today?" or "Did you kill that person?" you'd probably be fine. Especially since you wouldn't actually need to have a person in the room if you had a 100% accurate lie detector. You need a person now because interrogation requires instinct, but with a machine that could actually detect truth or lies and the right questions you could put someone in a room, have the machine ask them a preselected list of questions and then let them out if they're fine.
You couldn't take people out of the equation entirely of course as you'd need them for answering "Why did you kill that person?".
You'd definitely have to be careful about fishing expeditions, and with a much higher solve rate people would be a lot more careful about what they allowed to become law in the first place, but there's nothing inherently unethical about asking someone if they committed or are planning on committing a specific crime and being able to rely on the answer.
It's not about the money, and it never was. It's about Davlik.
Oracle doesn't want Davlik to exist and Google can't get rid of it without ending Android.
My feeling is that Oracle would take a settlement of a buck if Google replaced Davlik with Java, hell they'd probably even license it to them for free.
The problem is that replacing Davlik would kill Android, not because Java is bad or Davlik is much better, but because every single Android application would have to be at the very least recompiled, retested, and redistributed. Every single Android phone would have to have its firmware updated and all its apps removed. Phones which didn't get updates wouldn't be able to get new applications, applications which didn't get updated wouldn't be available for new phones. By the time it was all sorted out they'd have lost a fortune.
That's because it's not using IE, it's using the windows HTML libraries which are incidentally IE like, they're always there so they are what developers program against.
No it means that a corporation can't come and say "oh that thing you published, we invented that the day before you published it we just haven't filed yet". Whoever gets it out there first(either by publishing it into the public domain) or getting a patent gets to keep it forever. If you sat on an invention for trolling purposes you're no SoL.
You have to publish it to be prior art.
Essentially what this means is that if two entities approach the patent office with the same patent which they've been developing in secret and haven't published any details about or released, instead of the patent office spending a crap load of time and money trying to work out which company "invented" the thing first for whatever value of "invented" you choose to have by wading through both entities reams of fraudulent information and vague hints, they just say "entity A got here first" and give the patent to them.
It does nothing to prior art, it does nothing to any of the other tests, it just means that if two people claim to have invented the same thing and neither of them have published or released the product it's first come first served.
It's also the method used everywhere else in the world including Europe which Slashdot generally seems to feel has a better patent system.
They were fairly fast before, but no one got to see how they worked. Research wasn't shared because it wasn't protected. Part of what patents do is encourage people to invent by giving them financial motivation. Most of what patents do is force inventors to document how their idea works. The old guild days were far worse for innovation than today, and if we could reform the patent system(and this is a good first step believe it or not) it will be even better.
The basic issue with deflation isn't so much that we can't understand it, people could work it out even if they grumbled for a while. The issue with deflation is that it punishes debt far more harshly than inflation punishes savings and debt, at least in moderation, is far more important to economic growth than savings. Imagine the housing bubble bursting happening to your car loan, your student loans, your credit card loan, your business loan, essentially all your debt and you'll begin to imagine what any significant deflation would be like. If you have any kind of serious inflation the only remotely sane thing you can do is hold onto your money because spending it is a net loss, borrowing it results in negative equity, and lending to people who can't pay(due to negative equity) is not the best idea.
Inflation on the other hand is really only bad for people who have no income stream which is to say essentially the self supporting elderly. Trying to bet on when you're going to die is a bet most people end up losing one way or the other anyway and there are better ways to deal with the problems of retirement than trying to deflate the currency.
Lots of people have implied Google is breaking the law, and an awful lot of people, yourself included, seem to be absolutely convinced that Google are the good guys and shocked when they aren't. Have you read what Eric Schmidt has to say about Google+ as an identity service and anonymity on the internet? They've gone over to the dark side mate.
Except that honeycomb isn't licensed under the GPL. The kernel is, as are certain third party user space applications, for all of which Google has released the source code. The rest of Honeycomb is open source, but is not licensed under the GPL. It's not illegal to distribute it without permission, but if you ask they can tell you to stuff off.
Lots of people have this illusion that OSX and Android are different than they are. You can have an open source kernel for a proprietary operating system, you have to release the source for any changes you distribute to the kernel, and there are arguments that kernel drivers are covered as well, but the OS itself doesn't have to be because calling system calls doesn't require a GPL license.
Except that it doesn't just have to be done once, it has to be done once, and then it has to be maintained, and supported, and migrated to and tested with the new OS version. If it's a modification to an existing open source program then it has to be maintained and potentially rewritten from scratch every time there's any changes to the parts of the original program that they modified.
People who think that software is a one time sunk cost haven't ever written any.
Or you could see it as arguing that mandating that only open source software be purchased doesn't mean that closed source software isn't being used. It's all fine and dandy to order a PC with Linux on it, but if you order a PC with Linux on it when what you really want is Microsoft Office, do you reckon the government employees are doing without or using pirated copies. Prohibiting the purchase of any kind of software doesn't stop that software being used, just purchased.
The iPad2 is a vastly superior device. Not because of any features it has or because I like it, I don't, but because the iPad2 has made Apple bucket loads of money whereas the Galaxy Tab hasn't made Samsung squat.
People like to buy iPads, they don't like to buy anything else, do with that what you will.
Haven't done much in a couple of years, but I found that in terms of post processing there just wasn't anything even remotely on par with Photoshop, Darktable appears to be new and it might fit into that space between having nothing and having Photoshop better than the GIMP did.
Wow, digital photography on Linux, that's a painful process.
Now that they know, yes, it will probably be found. That doesn't mean that 1) tarballs weren't infected and 2) that changes weren't made to the code and approved because someone was impersonating a trusted developer. It will be resolved, but it could also easily have created a problem which may take months to fully work itself out.
The hash isn't automagic, it's produced and provided by the distributor of the code or binary. A hash won't protect you if the source of the hash has been hacked. Sure I can download a kernel tar from a mirror and then check kernel.org for the hash, but where do you go to validate that kernel.org is real. A clever hacker in 17 days, could very easily replace the kernel tar balls and their associated hashes and the only way anyone would know would be if someone happened to have a reference of what that key had been or an exact copy of the files used to generate it in the first place which was known good. Release versions would be very easy to hack.
You're also not even guaranteed that there's no malicious code in the repository. Do you reckon that everyone's commits are reviewed with the same diligence that some random patch is. If you were clever enough and used the stolen passwords to impersonate the right person you could quite easily get something into the trunk. I mean if you've known and worked with a guy for years are you really going to check for a really well hidden back door?
When you're a teacher buying said laptop from a student at a school for juvenile delinquents you should assume that everything they own is stolen and not buy it.
The fundamental problem with Eclipse is that it runs on the JRE, which fundamentally makes its memory management bloody awful, that's not because Java is bad at memory, it's because the JRE is bad at memory. You need to specify the maximum amount of memory it is allowed to use, and the minimum amount of memory it has to start with. Get those numbers wrong and your performance in the application is fairly shocking for large projects because you page in and out all the time or the performance of your machine is fairly shocking because you've allocated too much memory. The JRE, at least on Windows, isn't super great at moving between those two numbers either.
Visual Studio runs as native code and so is both more responsive and takes absolutely no configuration to get up and running. Eclipse can be made to operate in a relatively efficient manner(depending on the JRE versions you have available to you), but it isn't like that out of the box, whereas VS is.
Add in the fact that Visual Studio has improved an awful lot over the last few iterations whereas eclipse hasn't(though to be fair it was a lot better to start with), .NET is currently beating the pants of Java, and you start seeing VS coming out on top for a lot of people. I personally love eclipse, it's the best Java IDE I've ever used, and I can make it do almost anything I want either with 3rd party plugins or if I'm desperate my own code. On the other hand, Visual Studio 2010 is a seriously nice IDE, and .NET has improved a lot while Java has been rotting in the JCP for the last 5 years. Java 8 which isn't due out till next year won't even catch up on what .NET has right now, and if you're running on Windows it performs better and is easier to configure.
I love Java, but Oracle has a long way to go to get it back up to snuff.
It's not a kindle because LCD is not eInk. I've used both, they're not comparable, for reading a book, eInk is vastly superior. That's not to say that the iPad doesn't work, but it's not as good at that particular task.