As with most laws, the devil is in the detail. (...) What I mean is that a PC, a server and a PDA is a computer. A device meant to accept programs written by other people.
This definition is a bad idea. There are lots of legitimate uses for reprogramming e.g. a wireless router, a digital video recorder, media player, games console or satellite receiver, preferably with some flavor of Linux (especially once the original manufacturers have gone bust, e.g. because of flaws in the "best" and "only" software they would come up with and allow to run). Such competition in code innovation improves usability, makes economic sense, environmental sense, and should not be encumbered by a monopoly on programming such computers just because they don't look like the ordinary PC.
It's not that there were no concise truths to teach...
"An economic review of the patent system", Machlup's study for the U.S. Congress in 1958, dug up this little gem from the UK (footnote 111 at p. 22):
"(...) vague or angry declarations that invention is property, and the lavish use of the expressions 'pirate' and 'pilfer', and 'stealing of the fruit of other men's minds and labour' [do not] prove more than that certain persons gain an advantage rightly or wrongly, which they wish to keep."
Rev. J.E.T. Rogers
On the Rationale and Working of the Patent Laws
Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. XXBI (1863), p. 128
q.e.d.
Then how could the use of the words "Thought Thieves" and "stealing the ideas in your head" be anything else but an appalling attempt of indoctrination with blurred concepts of "IP"?
N.B. "mere" thoughts and ideas, neither expressed (copyright) nor reduced to practice (patents)...
I do not agree that copyright or patents are immoral per se, it is rather a problem of what e.g. the DMCA and the EU Directives on copyright and patents (try to) make of them...
"have been working with customers to regain control of their machines."
Not knowing the particular details of what went on at that provider, but hardly anyone can claim to "have been working with customers" without even (probing and) shutting down their Internet connections in the first place as soon as they knew that
these customers' PCs were infected
they were (at least about to be) hijacked
the users were unaware or incapable of fixing the problem, i.e. it was demonstrably out of control for the systems' owners.
With 3+ GHz CPUs, 512-1024 MB RAM, 300+ gigs of HDD and on a 3+ Mbit/s broadband connection, every ISP knows that off-the-shelf PCs can still appear to work under an amazing (crap)load today, and they have more potential to wreak havoc than entire major companies or universites a decade ago... I have seen (completely unsuspecting) home users' machines infected with no less than 200 different (!) "manifestations" of malware on them at once, several times this year already - from the kind of guys who don't even grasp the concept of a rescue disk, to whom a computer can only be "broken", and who just go and buy a new machine, every year or so, when their previous one comes down to a crawl. Even worse, the "old" machine (full wormload included) is usually passed on (and networked again) to primary-school kids or elderly relatives who are even more clueless.
None of them had ever received that call from their providers (which could even be automated to some extent):
"This is Incredible Internet Services Inc. - We regret to notify you that your Internet connection had to be temporarily shut down for violation of our Acceptable Use Policy: (specified...) You may have overlooked an infection of your PC or an access to your home network accidently left open. To get you back online as soon as possible, a complimentary 30-day trial copy of Soandso Security Software is already in the mail to you. Once you have finished disinfecting and securing your systems, or if you need any additional help, please call customer support at..."
there is one large problem with going to Opensource - staff and not so much students are very fixed in their M$ ways. If its not Microsoft they don't want to know type of attitude. (...) Look at all those people with something as simlpe Firefox instead of IE - but its got a funny icon, it looks slightly different, its not called "internet explorer" etc.
No really, this is like saying we must never expose our children to diversity, the experience that there is a range of products for almost any given job (and even the possibility to develop some themselves), differences of opinion, freedom of choice etc.
A subservient "consumer" attitude to the corporate overlords and prevailing opinions of the time is not what schools (on our taxes) are supposed to teach.
It's a bizarre thought anyway that kids should learn the internal details of how things work in all other subjects but the one (then only preposterously) titled Computer Science, if the latter needs to be limited to clicking about in the GUI of precompiled closed-source binaries because of a poor choice of software: Just like the natural sciences, computer skills need to be taught on systems the students can (and are encouraged to) tinker with and take apart (not all of them, not all of the time, but to some reasonable extent) and gain insights from - not as a pro-monopoly proprietary word processing and IP indoctrination class.
'The GPF has been replaced by two significantly improved errors:
"Specific Protection Fault" - used to corrupt an individual 16-bit process.
"Global Protection Fault" - this powerful memory management facility will allow a corrupt process not only to corrupt all other running processes, but corrupt processes on all other machines within a five-mile radius.
Even now we are developing "pre-emptive" memory management, which will be able to corrupt processes which are not yet running.
Threaded Multi-Tasking: The cooperative multi-tasking found in Winodws 3.1 has now been replaced with the far more powerful "uncooperative multi-tasking". This enhancement will allow several processes to crash simultaneously. Our new crash protection facility greatly enhances the multi-tasking environment. Should one process fail, the CPF will prevent this process from being disturbed by other cleanly running processes.'
BTW as a tribute of course this should not be called R/MSOD but... Guru Meditation!
If that one's still trademarked, call it Extremely Evil Exception Error.
Recent advances in semiconductors--LEDs are chips that glow when current runs through them--make that possible. Mueller and Lys anticipated those advances when they first tinkered with LEDs ten years ago [i.e. 1992 approx.] as students at Carnegie Mellon University.
Wow!
In 1997 he and Lys formed Color Kinetics to explore ways to control LEDs with microprocessors and software.
There are ways for microprocessors to control voltages or currents? Incredible!
[H]e and Lys figured out how to yoke together red, green and blue LEDs to make a light that can shine in more than 16 million colors, including white.
This, of course, must have been a non-trivial, truly patent-worthy achievement - the more you think of age-old stage lighting, or the closer you move to a CRT (if there's still one in front of you), the more you'll certainly be inclined believe it...
Color Kinetics uses software to pulse electricity to red, green and blue LEDs at different rates, mixing colors digitally the way a painter mixes colors to create different hues.
...as no one skilled in the art (in the 1990s!) could have come up with the idea to change the brightness of an LED through chopping instead of e.g. using a DAC.
Especially since infrared remote controls (at least since the 1970s) would never have used similar techniques to increase range by driving their LEDs with a pulse current significantly higher than the maximum sustained current (an idea which isn't reminiscent of the stroboscope -as opposed to the floodlight- either, of course)...
And I am taking bets on how fast before Nikon's Land Sharks start uttering the four letter
D-M-C-A...
Or probably so they won't, especially not the -C- in it, which supposedly still stood for "Copyright" the last time I checked (though there are legal scholars who contend it actually means "Censorship").
If this encryption is supposed to be a Technical Protection Measure to trigger the Anti-Circumvention Prohibitions of the DMCA... then what could Nikon claim copyright in: the respective measurement describing parameters of the digital photograph taken by their customer?
If you think this is copyrightable (let alone to Nikon rather than to the photographer), then please let us know under which provision...
I don't see how a patent can be granted for this. Emergency services have been doing this for years, just on paper and with log books. Sure, it's good to have needed information in one convenient place, with a simple interface, but I fail to see any innovation or invention. How can one patent something that is simply logic? Can logic really be patented? I know it has been, but that doesn't mean it's not asinine.
A recent decision from the other side of the Pond says it all:
4.6
The Board is aware that its comparatively broad interpretation of the term "invention" in Article 52(1) EPC will include activities which are so familiar that their technical character tends to be overlooked, such as the act of writing using pen and paper.
Board of Appeal, T 0258/03, 21 April 2004
Be sure to read on to subsection 2 of the above provision - but the U.S. don't even have any safeguard like this (anymore), and those who do seem increasingly inclined to wiggle their way around it...
Cases like this should answer the question whether using just "may" instead of "shall exclude" in Art. 27.2 TRIPs was a mistake.:-(
How precisely does a 20-year monopoly on ways of accessing emergency information benefit society at large? If it doesn't, it never ought to have been granted.
some argued viciously that, for example, we should postpone human space travel until it is completely safe
Erm, like we did for planes, automobiles, trains, riding horses/elephants/camels/whatever, canoes and rafts - and even fire for that matter... which is why we still live in caves? (Or wait a minute, hunting and gathering isn't completely safe either, so the Cro-Magnons should have been starving in the first place... "But this could be dangerous, Grog - so let's rather become extinct, end of evolution, period.")
Earth's geologic history is pretty clear: It says, quite frankly, that single-planet species don't last. Right now we're a single-planet species. We need to fix that.
Okay, the Extinction Level Event may never happen in our lifetimes (except on the silver screen)... but why don't we just prepare as if an asteroid was to hit us in the near future anyway? History has shown how the innovation spurred by space programs pays off in unexpected ways over decades (the U.S. kept its technological edge for the rest of the century), and this time, ironically, this might even encourage improvements in the more controversial (e.g. nuclear and defense) technologies with a focus strongly on "saving the planet". The investment it triggers should also help economies around the globe - threshold countries want to go to space for a reason even today, as they have realised the beneficial side effects of such programs. Even if all we ever get out of it is only the "usual, boring stuff" like affordable spaceflight, a boost to astronomy and advances in all fields of technology, clean power on earth and a holiday resort on the moon etc., in preparing for an impactor that never comes... it still sounds like "A Good Thing (TM)".
for which the Constitution's copyright clause was conceived?
IIRC it was mainly one to make people create, not litigate...
If the founding fathers had imagined industries suing hundreds of students into oblivion (with copyrights extended into eternity), they would have scrapped the clause altogether, straight from the drafting board, back in the 18th century...
Of course, "poor old IBM" has a history of its own in "hoarding" software patents, as well as enforcing them in ways that infuriate even top industry attorneys and the most fervent pro-patent advocates - cf. already Heckel, Debunking the Software Patent Myths, Communications of the ACM, June 1992, Vol.35, No.6, p.130.
It's good to see how the taste of their own medicine in cases such as the SCO litigation finally seems to lead IBM back to their initial stance of speaking out against software patents - from one of the world's largest patent holders, the obligation to "use or lose IP" as in trademark law is quite a remarkable one.
Now that I know my speech is restricted to your definitions...
Actually it is restricted by the Constitution itself. The First Amendment never allowed to send your speech C.O.D. with a description misrepresenting contents and sender, to blast it over a huge cranked-up PA system in a residential neighborhood at 3 AM or by making automated direct marketing phone calls at that time of night, or to attach your message to bricks, cannonballs or cruise missiles and smash it through everyone else's windows or roofs. It's noise when it drowns out other communication and causes harm to the victims forced to impart the message the speaker insists on conveying (and moreover, to pay for the postage or for the defense against having to hear ever more of it).
Admittedly there is always a risk of legitimate protests being labelled a nuisance by some as well, but with reasonable laws there are courts who should be able to tell one from the other: A wealth of documentation shows that it is possible.
Because Microsoft has ended support for Visual Basic 6, REAL Software is offering Visual Basic users a new home-REALbasic. From now through
April 15, 2005, Visual Basic users can get REALbasic 5.5 for Windows Standard Edition, completely free of charge.
you forgot that data is regularly backed up if you have half a brain and knocking out a major system in your network could cripple it and cost a great deal of money
If you manage to backup every system in and out of your offices every few hours... congratulations, please let us know your storage solution...
And then if you can tell us how you put these backups back onto thousands of locked hard drives that you don't even have write access to anymore (otherwise all you'd need are spare hard drives for every machine), you'd only need the staff to service all of these computers before a few days of lost business have bankrupted your company.
Or wait a minute, sounds like a plan:
Ask management for a 1:1 ratio of workstations per technician (i.e. each user gets his or her own personal tech wizard&admin - hey, once implemented that might also instantly solve most geeks' dating or mating problems;-))
Wait for the "super worm" to bite your company badly
In management, the survivors of 2. (if any) sign hiring orders for your request at 1.
could overclock the computer in some way and cause perminant damage to the system (...) why is this not a more major worry as this could cause real damage
Not only because any attack like this would have to work with rather primitive code on a wide(spread) variety of hardware (like an ATA hard drive - very few systems don't have one), but also because the goal of an extortionist is to have hostages (cf. the above quotes on the 1989 attack). The "horror scenario" is something like this: A malware written to interfere at an early stage, e.g. as a replacement Master Boot Record, to lock the drive with a random password and display a message (which includes a scrambled representation of the password used) telling the user that the system won't work on reboot, and where to send money for "his or her" particular unlock code and/or a "personal" unlock disk.
For those who are "lucky" enough to follow these "orders", there is a chance of getting the data back (i.e. "buying back" one's own system against "payola") until the blackmailer gets busted or bored... For anyone else just hitting reset, there will be no reboot, and specialist recovery to remove a 32-bit lock as the only chance (except for the vague hope that the malware or decrypter will very soon be "open-sourced" by the authorities on catching that crook).
It seems crucial to protect one's system ASAP against what could become a boon for blackmailers.
The problem is that if BIOS doesn't disable the function, a "well"-(i.e. viciously)-positioned malware (early in the boot process) could lock the hard drive on first reboot even before any protective software can kick in.
No need for conspiracy theories;-), the math alone is simple enough: Take a typical corporate or federal office building with a few thousand desktops, compute the space & power saved directly by each CRT replaced with an LCD, and indirectly by the load on power lines, UPS back-up systems & air conditioning (we're not talking one CRT, but several dozen floors full of them), sum it all up and add the savings they'll get from their insurers if they tell them there's not much left to implode - all of this is sufficient reason to spend a little more on getting rid of the big tubes.
Slashdot Mirror
The Running Man
Wedlock/Deadlock
Fortress
"An economic review of the patent system", Machlup's study for the U.S. Congress in 1958, dug up this little gem from the UK (footnote 111 at p. 22):
q.e.d.Then how could the use of the words "Thought Thieves" and "stealing the ideas in your head" be anything else but an appalling attempt of indoctrination with blurred concepts of "IP"?
N.B. "mere" thoughts and ideas, neither expressed (copyright) nor reduced to practice (patents)...
I do not agree that copyright or patents are immoral per se, it is rather a problem of what e.g. the DMCA and the EU Directives on copyright and patents (try to) make of them...
- these customers' PCs were infected
- they were (at least about to be) hijacked
- the users were unaware or incapable of fixing the problem, i.e. it was demonstrably out of control for the systems' owners.
With 3+ GHz CPUs, 512-1024 MB RAM, 300+ gigs of HDD and on a 3+ Mbit/s broadband connection, every ISP knows that off-the-shelf PCs can still appear to work under an amazing (crap)load today, and they have more potential to wreak havoc than entire major companies or universites a decade agoNone of them had ever received that call from their providers (which could even be automated to some extent):
A subservient "consumer" attitude to the corporate overlords and prevailing opinions of the time is not what schools (on our taxes) are supposed to teach.
It's a bizarre thought anyway that kids should learn the internal details of how things work in all other subjects but the one (then only preposterously) titled Computer Science, if the latter needs to be limited to clicking about in the GUI of precompiled closed-source binaries because of a poor choice of software: Just like the natural sciences, computer skills need to be taught on systems the students can (and are encouraged to) tinker with and take apart (not all of them, not all of the time, but to some reasonable extent) and gain insights from - not as a pro-monopoly proprietary word processing and IP indoctrination class.
If that one's still trademarked, call it Extremely Evil Exception Error.
Especially since infrared remote controls (at least since the 1970s) would never have used similar techniques to increase range by driving their LEDs with a pulse current significantly higher than the maximum sustained current (an idea which isn't reminiscent of the stroboscope -as opposed to the floodlight- either, of course)...
If this encryption is supposed to be a Technical Protection Measure to trigger the Anti-Circumvention Prohibitions of the DMCA... then what could Nikon claim copyright in: the respective measurement describing parameters of the digital photograph taken by their customer?
If you think this is copyrightable (let alone to Nikon rather than to the photographer), then please let us know under which provision...
Be sure to read on to subsection 2 of the above provision - but the U.S. don't even have any safeguard like this (anymore), and those who do seem increasingly inclined to wiggle their way around it...
How precisely does a 20-year monopoly on ways of accessing emergency information benefit society at large? If it doesn't, it never ought to have been granted.
for which the Constitution's copyright clause was conceived?
IIRC it was mainly one to make people create, not litigate...
If the founding fathers had imagined industries suing hundreds of students into oblivion (with copyrights extended into eternity), they would have scrapped the clause altogether, straight from the drafting board, back in the 18th century...
It's good to see how the taste of their own medicine in cases such as the SCO litigation finally seems to lead IBM back to their initial stance of speaking out against software patents - from one of the world's largest patent holders, the obligation to "use or lose IP" as in trademark law is quite a remarkable one.
Admittedly there is always a risk of legitimate protests being labelled a nuisance by some as well, but with reasonable laws there are courts who should be able to tell one from the other: A wealth of documentation shows that it is possible.
Let's just hope the daily documentary on "A spammer's life in jail" will be televised/webcast soon, for anyone else in his "business" to see.
But seriously, even after more than a decade of being spammed, some people still don't seem to realise one important fact about the First Amendment:
Then again, shouldn't we all be truly worried for Porthos?
And then if you can tell us how you put these backups back onto thousands of locked hard drives that you don't even have write access to anymore (otherwise all you'd need are spare hard drives for every machine), you'd only need the staff to service all of these computers before a few days of lost business have bankrupted your company.
Or wait a minute, sounds like a plan:
The problem is that if BIOS doesn't disable the function, a "well"-(i.e. viciously)-positioned malware (early in the boot process) could lock the hard drive on first reboot even before any protective software can kick in.
No need for conspiracy theories ;-), the math alone is simple enough: Take a typical corporate or federal office building with a few thousand desktops, compute the space & power saved directly by each CRT replaced with an LCD, and indirectly by the load on power lines, UPS back-up systems & air conditioning (we're not talking one CRT, but several dozen floors full of them), sum it all up and add the savings they'll get from their insurers if they tell them there's not much left to implode - all of this is sufficient reason to spend a little more on getting rid of the big tubes.