I don't see why it should be one or the other. Agreed, we've got a lot of Rambus, Enron and SCO alike companies, but there is also this company, or the body shop, which donates 10% of its profits to charity.
Uncompressing Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo for GNU/Linux 3120.................
And somewhere an unconventional fellow with long hair and a beard feels joy about this game for a different reason than other people...
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm a little annoyed with people saying things like: "Well, since person A was the first to do X, we would not be doing X right now, if it wasn't for A.".
Without the Wright brothers, we still would have aeroplanes today. If Pythagoras died in infancy, someone else would have come up with A^2 + B^2 = C^2. If Bill Gates' mother did not have ties with IBM, someone else would have headed the company that provided IBM with an 'OS' for its PC.
I think the guys at Microsoft are under the impression that it is easier for a user to add metadata to a file than change its filename and put it in a logical place.
I think they are wrong.
Even if they put more annoying pop-ups like "Hi, I'm Photi, your annoying photo-organiser! What are the names of the people on this photo?" I think people will go straight for the 'Ok' button. Especially if you take the number of pictures that can be stored on a memory card these days. Even clicking 'Ok' 50 times can be pretty annoying.
Is this not the exact reason the reply-to field exists?
Sign your messages with PGP so that everyone knows it's really you, whatever address the mail comes from. AFAIK all mail clients automatically use the reply-to field when someone replies to your message.
Well, the plan on letting people who have just smuggled up to 3 Kg of white powder go without a warrant was nothing but a 'luchtballon' (en: hot-air balloon) 'let up' by the clueless minister Donner of the dutch ministry of justice.
He got flamed so bad, that this ridiculous plan will never see the light of day.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Simon Fuller, the manager of the former Spice Girls is behind UK Pop Idol. Something to do with him thinking it would have been very nice if he had used cameras to record all auditions for the Spice Girls.
After UK Pop Idol, the format was sold to stations around the globe.
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center 828,293 - Objectivity DB - Cluster - Objectivity - Sun - Sun
You can find that under 'database size, hybrid'. Note that this is an object database and as such will never be found under one of the 'number of rows' entries, simply because rows are relational and an object base simply stores objects.
But for Christ's sake, who in their right mind visits the SCO site for some light reading and news?
Maybe/.-ers who know that letters like this go in like candy with the editors and would like to see their story rejected/accepted ratio go from 1361/0 to 1361/1?
Was MS-DOS not simply a legal (bought) copy of QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System)? IANAPA (not a patent atorney) so I cannot get through all the legalese, RTF patents and actually understand them, but could it be possible that a lot of the stuff in these patents has prior art in the QDOS file system (FAT12 IIRC)?
Somewhere, there's a baker who's just realized that his bread is being eaten by burglars, murderers, con-artists, scientists working on wmd-s and lawyers.
You are right up to a point. The problem lies not in the fact that the pres. of the USA cannot attack one of its neighbours, it lies in the fact that it can start wars all around the world (vietnam, afghanistan, iraq) as long as it is far enough from the US mainland. Most of the US population simply does not give a f*ck, as long as their soldier-boys are unharmed. Journalist, who should be critical of the government, are not, and by abstaining from their task, they keep the people uninformed, and even make them think the US is doing only good stuff.
As long as the US government can get away with starting wars at will, I cannot trust it with such weapons.
According to your (Score:4, Insightful), no, you are not the only one, but you are incorrect anyway;-). What if we were talking about FM radio here?
Reread the original post with FM radio in mind, and then tell me the RIAA will have lawyers drafting notes to have all FM radio stations shutdown because of the comments of people that say they are recording songs from FM...
Maybe someone could inform Kollar-Kotelly or whats-her-name? To me this is a clear case of a monopolist buying a company and killing support for alternate products.
I agree that scientists are also human, that's why I said 'not have as extreme prejudice'. The nice thing is that your example makes it clear that science _itself_ is objective: fabricated evidence can be debunked. Religion can and will always fall back to: "Well, this is what we believe.", which then is the end of any discussion.
I don't know of a single religious zealot who wants to prevent Darwin's theory of evolution from being talked about
There have been teachers in US courts of law because they told their students about Darwin. That enough for you?
The problem the religious zealots have is that the Darwinian's are preventing creationist theories from being talked about.
Religious zealots do not like science, because there is no 'believing' involved. Also Darwinist, being scientists, do not have as extreme prejudice in discussions as religious zealots. Scientists change their pov when they are proven wrong, they do not run away with fingers in their ears like some others do. Has there ever been a creationist in a court of law for telling about the Adam & Eve story?
In an education environment, it's quite reasonable to expect that both theories be taught. (Yes, they are both theories. There is nothing scientifically factual about evolution whatsoever.)
Yes, and the earth existing for only 4000 years is also a theory? No. In no way. A theory is supported by evidence and/or objective reasoning and/or perceptions. Basically the only thing creationists have is: "Well, there are all these creatures, they _must_ have been created.". They never have a decent explanation for exinct creatures (did God make a mistake?), nor for the fact that species change over the course of many generations (God making a mistake again? His design was not perfect), nor for the fact that several million years ago the bio-diversity was much, much lower (God making a mistake again, not having created enough species).
In fact, it was the employer excercising their rights to fire an employee for making statements they didn't like(...) (emph. mine)
The term 'statement' does not exactly cover what he said. It is an scientifically well-known fact that monoculture leads to vulnerability. Genetic diversity exists for a specific reason: to ensure survival of the species.
So, he got fired for speaking the truth. No great miracle considering that religious zealots in the same country want to prevent Darwins theories from being talked about in schools.
I have to admit you have sort of a point, but not all the way. Corporate image, a loyal customer base and strong brand names are pretty important. If hp were to loose all goodwill of all geeks in this world, the shareholders would certainly mind.
I used this link some time ago to state that I am often asked by people what they should buy (I'm considered to be a nerd). Because of the previous sponsor action for SCO Forum and because of hp-s abysmal support for linux drivers for their scanners, I now advice people to buy Epson, and bought an Epson scanner myself as well.
If enough people send notes like this, we might make a difference. Just remember to keep it simple and refrain from cursing and swearing.
That's very bad, indeed. If it were true. There would never be possibilities to patent text or pictures.
Again, there are tools on the web that do a 1-on-1 translation from c code into a jpg; there are also tools that do a 1-on-1 translation from c code into English proze. Because of that 1-on-1 relation you effectively create patents on pictures and proze by allowing patents on software. There is no way around that. Why do you ignore this? Also why do you ignore the fact that the software biz has flourished without patents?
They could build [development budgets] by patent licensing.
Your point? Again, until now there have been huge amounts of software created, all without funding from patents. Conclusion: s/w patents are not at all needed to fund development. And looking at the US one can see that s/w patents are just holding back a whole industry.
I said that I will be a patent attorney
My mistake then, I thought that was the same.
But when someone copies your idea and writes his own code, you're lost as copyright won't help you. Period.
Again, how is this different from writing a book on a certain subject? Do you propose to put patents on cooking recipies as well? There is a reason that the Coca Cola company keeps the coke recipy known only to a handfull of people: a recipy is not (and should not) be patentable. And recipies are very similar to programs.
Also, there are tools out there that convert the source for a program written in c into the english language. Just plain text. There are also tools that convert into a picture. By allowing software patents you are allowing to patent text, pictures, whatever. This is very, very bad.
Well, my fellow country man, you are trolling, but I'll bite since you got modded up by some ignorant moderator.
A lot of software development costs large amounts of money and not every company is in the position to make far too much money on a crappy OS to support development of other software.
So basically what you are saying is that a lot of software development can only be funded by Microsoft? Bzzt, wrong! Please explain how bind, apache, (gnu/)linux, etc. have been created. Also please explain the existance of winzip, kazaa, oracle, ad-aware,...
They have to earn that money with the sales of their ideas.
Wrong again. Closed source companies make money by selling their software, open source companies make money by selling support. Only crappy 'ip-companies' in the US make money by doing nothing else but sitting on their backs and making money of patents that often are bought from other companies (SCO comes to mind).
And all of you out there protesting against software patents should be very happy that software protection is not included in copyright protection, because that would make protection probably five time longer (at least).
And you call yourself a lawyer? All software in NL is covered by copyright. Period.
No, I don't feel guilty about my job. You will probably compare with a gun manufacturer.
No, but I am tempted to call you a bad politician.
In other words: it's probably the only way for small enterprises to protect themselves against the large companies. Imagine when graphical web browsing would have been patented by the NCSA or Netscape would have patented a lot of improvements.
With such reasoning I am tempted to think that you have voted for Pim Fortuyn as well. Your example is totally meaningless: without s/w patents it would not have been possible to patent something like 'web-browsing'.
And one of the very legal (also ethical IMO) is to protect your idea from being copied (!= stolen) by a large company in the North West of the US.
I've got this idea to put onto paper (i.e.to write a book) about kids and wizardry, I can. But hey, according to you, that is not ethical, because someone had such idea before me!
Since you claim you are a laywer, you must have seen the inside of a Dutch university for at least 4 years, so you must be able to do some logical thinking. Try to follow me:
Software is nothing more than an algorithm, or a collection of algorithms. An algorithm is nothing more than a recipe for a calculation. Computers can only make calculations, as you might know. It is not possible to patent calculations.
Also, in a very short amount of time (compare to for instance, the time it took for humanity to come from stone to bronze) the software era exploded onto humanity. It needed no patents whatsoever to do so and I can see no indication that any change is needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why it should be one or the other. Agreed, we've got a lot of Rambus, Enron and SCO alike companies, but there is also this company, or the body shop, which donates 10% of its profits to charity.
Uncompressing Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo for GNU/Linux 3120.................
And somewhere an unconventional fellow with long hair and a beard feels joy about this game for a different reason than other people...
I'm a little annoyed with people saying things like: "Well, since person A was the first to do X, we would not be doing X right now, if it wasn't for A.".
Without the Wright brothers, we still would have aeroplanes today. If Pythagoras died in infancy, someone else would have come up with A^2 + B^2 = C^2. If Bill Gates' mother did not have ties with IBM, someone else would have headed the company that provided IBM with an 'OS' for its PC.
I think the guys at Microsoft are under the impression that it is easier for a user to add metadata to a file than change its filename and put it in a logical place.
I think they are wrong.
Even if they put more annoying pop-ups like "Hi, I'm Photi, your annoying photo-organiser! What are the names of the people on this photo?" I think people will go straight for the 'Ok' button. Especially if you take the number of pictures that can be stored on a memory card these days. Even clicking 'Ok' 50 times can be pretty annoying.
It's always better than "Darl Does Dallas".
Is this not the exact reason the reply-to field exists?
Sign your messages with PGP so that everyone knows it's really you, whatever address the mail comes from. AFAIK all mail clients automatically use the reply-to field when someone replies to your message.
"Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With!"
Ehhm...
Sorry, wrong book, wrong movie.
Well, the plan on letting people who have just smuggled up to 3 Kg of white powder go without a warrant was nothing but a 'luchtballon' (en: hot-air balloon) 'let up' by the clueless minister Donner of the dutch ministry of justice.
He got flamed so bad, that this ridiculous plan will never see the light of day.
That should of course be:
Karma: SELEKT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Sorry, but you are wrong. Simon Fuller, the manager of the former Spice Girls is behind UK Pop Idol. Something to do with him thinking it would have been very nice if he had used cameras to record all auditions for the Spice Girls.
After UK Pop Idol, the format was sold to stations around the globe.
Let's see:
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center 828,293 - Objectivity DB - Cluster - Objectivity - Sun - Sun
You can find that under 'database size, hybrid'. Note that this is an object database and as such will never be found under one of the 'number of rows' entries, simply because rows are relational and an object base simply stores objects.
I believe that CERN has got a huge odbms also.
But for Christ's sake, who in their right mind visits the SCO site for some light reading and news?
Maybe /.-ers who know that letters like this go in like candy with the editors and would like to see their story rejected/accepted ratio go from 1361/0 to 1361/1?
Was MS-DOS not simply a legal (bought) copy of QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System)? IANAPA (not a patent atorney) so I cannot get through all the legalese, RTF patents and actually understand them, but could it be possible that a lot of the stuff in these patents has prior art in the QDOS file system (FAT12 IIRC)?
Not trolling here, I am simply curious.
Somewhere, there's a baker who's just realized that his bread is being eaten by burglars, murderers, con-artists, scientists working on wmd-s and lawyers.
You are right up to a point. The problem lies not in the fact that the pres. of the USA cannot attack one of its neighbours, it lies in the fact that it can start wars all around the world (vietnam, afghanistan, iraq) as long as it is far enough from the US mainland. Most of the US population simply does not give a f*ck, as long as their soldier-boys are unharmed. Journalist, who should be critical of the government, are not, and by abstaining from their task, they keep the people uninformed, and even make them think the US is doing only good stuff.
As long as the US government can get away with starting wars at will, I cannot trust it with such weapons.
According to your (Score:4, Insightful), no, you are not the only one, but you are incorrect anyway ;-). What if we were talking about FM radio here?
Reread the original post with FM radio in mind, and then tell me the RIAA will have lawyers drafting notes to have all FM radio stations shutdown because of the comments of people that say they are recording songs from FM...
Maybe someone could inform Kollar-Kotelly or whats-her-name? To me this is a clear case of a monopolist buying a company and killing support for alternate products.
I agree that scientists are also human, that's why I said 'not have as extreme prejudice'. The nice thing is that your example makes it clear that science _itself_ is objective: fabricated evidence can be debunked. Religion can and will always fall back to: "Well, this is what we believe.", which then is the end of any discussion.
I don't know of a single religious zealot who wants to prevent Darwin's theory of evolution from being talked about
There have been teachers in US courts of law because they told their students about Darwin. That enough for you?
The problem the religious zealots have is that the Darwinian's are preventing creationist theories from being talked about.
Religious zealots do not like science, because there is no 'believing' involved. Also Darwinist, being scientists, do not have as extreme prejudice in discussions as religious zealots. Scientists change their pov when they are proven wrong, they do not run away with fingers in their ears like some others do. Has there ever been a creationist in a court of law for telling about the Adam & Eve story?
In an education environment, it's quite reasonable to expect that both theories be taught. (Yes, they are both theories. There is nothing scientifically factual about evolution whatsoever.)
Yes, and the earth existing for only 4000 years is also a theory? No. In no way. A theory is supported by evidence and/or objective reasoning and/or perceptions. Basically the only thing creationists have is: "Well, there are all these creatures, they _must_ have been created.". They never have a decent explanation for exinct creatures (did God make a mistake?), nor for the fact that species change over the course of many generations (God making a mistake again? His design was not perfect), nor for the fact that several million years ago the bio-diversity was much, much lower (God making a mistake again, not having created enough species).
In fact, it was the employer excercising their rights to fire an employee for making statements they didn't like(...) (emph. mine)
The term 'statement' does not exactly cover what he said. It is an scientifically well-known fact that monoculture leads to vulnerability. Genetic diversity exists for a specific reason: to ensure survival of the species.
So, he got fired for speaking the truth. No great miracle considering that religious zealots in the same country want to prevent Darwins theories from being talked about in schools.
I have to admit you have sort of a point, but not all the way. Corporate image, a loyal customer base and strong brand names are pretty important. If hp were to loose all goodwill of all geeks in this world, the shareholders would certainly mind.
I used this link some time ago to state that I am often asked by people what they should buy (I'm considered to be a nerd). Because of the previous sponsor action for SCO Forum and because of hp-s abysmal support for linux drivers for their scanners, I now advice people to buy Epson, and bought an Epson scanner myself as well.
If enough people send notes like this, we might make a difference. Just remember to keep it simple and refrain from cursing and swearing.
That's very bad, indeed. If it were true. There would never be possibilities to patent text or pictures.
Again, there are tools on the web that do a 1-on-1 translation from c code into a jpg; there are also tools that do a 1-on-1 translation from c code into English proze. Because of that 1-on-1 relation you effectively create patents on pictures and proze by allowing patents on software. There is no way around that. Why do you ignore this? Also why do you ignore the fact that the software biz has flourished without patents?
They could build [development budgets] by patent licensing.
Your point? Again, until now there have been huge amounts of software created, all without funding from patents. Conclusion: s/w patents are not at all needed to fund development. And looking at the US one can see that s/w patents are just holding back a whole industry.
I said that I will be a patent attorney
My mistake then, I thought that was the same.
But when someone copies your idea and writes his own code, you're lost as copyright won't help you. Period.
Again, how is this different from writing a book on a certain subject? Do you propose to put patents on cooking recipies as well? There is a reason that the Coca Cola company keeps the coke recipy known only to a handfull of people: a recipy is not (and should not) be patentable. And recipies are very similar to programs.
Also, there are tools out there that convert the source for a program written in c into the english language. Just plain text. There are also tools that convert into a picture. By allowing software patents you are allowing to patent text, pictures, whatever. This is very, very bad.
Well, my fellow country man, you are trolling, but I'll bite since you got modded up by some ignorant moderator.
A lot of software development costs large amounts of money and not every company is in the position to make far too much money on a crappy OS to support development of other software.
So basically what you are saying is that a lot of software development can only be funded by Microsoft? Bzzt, wrong! Please explain how bind, apache, (gnu/)linux, etc. have been created. Also please explain the existance of winzip, kazaa, oracle, ad-aware, ...
They have to earn that money with the sales of their ideas.
Wrong again. Closed source companies make money by selling their software, open source companies make money by selling support. Only crappy 'ip-companies' in the US make money by doing nothing else but sitting on their backs and making money of patents that often are bought from other companies (SCO comes to mind).
And all of you out there protesting against software patents should be very happy that software protection is not included in copyright protection, because that would make protection probably five time longer (at least).
And you call yourself a lawyer? All software in NL is covered by copyright. Period.
No, I don't feel guilty about my job. You will probably compare with a gun manufacturer.
No, but I am tempted to call you a bad politician.
In other words: it's probably the only way for small enterprises to protect themselves against the large companies. Imagine when graphical web browsing would have been patented by the NCSA or Netscape would have patented a lot of improvements.
With such reasoning I am tempted to think that you have voted for Pim Fortuyn as well. Your example is totally meaningless: without s/w patents it would not have been possible to patent something like 'web-browsing'.
And one of the very legal (also ethical IMO) is to protect your idea from being copied (!= stolen) by a large company in the North West of the US.
I've got this idea to put onto paper (i.e.to write a book) about kids and wizardry, I can. But hey, according to you, that is not ethical, because someone had such idea before me!
Since you claim you are a laywer, you must have seen the inside of a Dutch university for at least 4 years, so you must be able to do some logical thinking. Try to follow me:
Software is nothing more than an algorithm, or a collection of algorithms. An algorithm is nothing more than a recipe for a calculation. Computers can only make calculations, as you might know. It is not possible to patent calculations.
Also, in a very short amount of time (compare to for instance, the time it took for humanity to come from stone to bronze) the software era exploded onto humanity. It needed no patents whatsoever to do so and I can see no indication that any change is needed.