To counter the US dominance shown through the font size 14. China, EU, India and Russia have first time agreed jointly to counter the US dominance by agreeing to use font size 16. The US is reported to be contemplating to do a pre-emptive strike by increasing it font-size. However, details of the new size are classified.
I disagree. APJ Kalam, the president did not decide whether to create the Indian Nuclear program or even support it. Most of his career he worked in launch vehicles for civilian satellite launching. Yes, he did work on missiles, but then they are not WMDs.
And what is this WMD distate about? Western powers can have WMDs but not India? You cannot even say that India is an irresponsible rogue state and hence cannot have Nuclear weapons. India is 1/6th of humanity on earth, and a responsible democracy for last 50 years. When surrounded by China and Pakistan, there are few options for such countries. If you live in western country go ahead and tell your government to dump all its WMDs.
Also, he is a qualified Aeronautical engineer. He is the key architect of India's rocket launching capabilities. Also, an erudite poet and musician. Keeps his hair long and wears informal blue shirts most of the time. Spends time talking to school kids on all his visits. Cool guy, in short.
President is the official, though ceremonial, head of the executive branch of the Government in India. It is more like the Queen in U.K., who is a formal head, but the real executive is the prime minister and his cabinet.
I have a gold medal in Indian constitutional law.
Cheap can be excellent. Do you know about an OS called Linux? It is free/cheap and it is excellent. Same goes for Indian software, it is cheap and gives you a good value for "what you pay".
I am laughing out loudly watching the Slashdot crowd panic that most of them will have to move to India in order to survive in future!!! Since most of their lives they have learned that India is a poor living hell, they cannot palate this idea. Also, it burns their mitochondria that a poor country could excel at what they do and do it a cheaper price.:-)
By the way, I too did active programming for a long time to realize what programming is all about. Not to mention my B.Sc. in CS (Rank 2 in University), C programmer of the Year yada yada yada.
One major problem in your deep analysis is that you consider "patentable" as a special kind of status. Hence, a mechanical invention is patentable, but not software.
Patent is a mere legal right, it does not have a hallowed special status as some natural mechanism. Like we can say for a substance that it is either soluble in water or not soluble. Hence, inventions cannot be separated by some natural criteria as patentable and not patentable. Patent is a legal right and is extended to many inventions depending upon society's need to bargain with the inventor giving him exclusivity in return for disclosure. I think that due to the complied nature of software where the original code is almost secret and unreversible, software makes a great candidate for a patentable invention. If software will pervade all sorts of machines and processes in the soceity then society and law does have an interest in getting disclosure of the concepts underlying such socially important software. Hence, there is need for software to be patented.
I agree that a lot programmers will find it inconvenient that parts of their domain are protected by patents. However, it will also open-up a vast area of information that was previously unknown. A classic example is Adobe's Acrobat. The PDF file format is tightly protected by Adobe. Nobody would ever have found out mechanisms for underlying the PDF files and reader assuming that reverse engineering was hard or impossible. Of course, when some software becomes too popular there are kids out their who will reverse enginner it, however that is not the point. Adobe's patents on Acrobat technology has revealed so much information about the PDF mecahnism (see patents listed when Acrobat reader's splash screen comes up).
As to your point why Calculus is not patented. The society has made a conscious choice that mathematical techniques will not be patented. Also, it has decided that medical methods of treatment or surgery are not patentable. Software is not as important as surgical technique or calculus to be not patentable. Yes, a large section of society like programmers and geeks would argue against patentability of software - however - a majority of society that is more concerned about safety and efficacy of software would like the underlying information be out in public. That is the reasons that judiciary declared software to be patentable. Europe's opposition to software is opposition to the US dominance, and not based on any principal.
As to software being math. A large body of physical world is software. "A New Kind of Science" extends this to wider range of natural processes. For example, chemical reactions are pure software when designed in brain and on paper. They are only real reactions when chemicals are mixed. Should this chemical software be patentable or not? There is no natural answer to this. Chemistry is patentable since society thinks there is a value to it. Now you can forever argue the differences between chemistry is not software is not math is not chemistry, but that is not the point.
The fundamental problem with understanding software innovations is that it is perceived similar to writing and not designing. A piece of code written to say do speech synthesis may appear to be a "song" that a computer can play as per your analogy. However, there is a real innovation there - creating speech through a machine. I think one ought to get protection for such an innovation. The nature of software as writing may change over the years. Unfortuantely, due to its written nature, software is considered similar to literature and not an engineering design. Imagine a 3-D printer with robotic capabilities that can accept an engineering blue-print as an input to create a mechanical structure. Now, will this engineering design be a "song" that the 3-D printer can play? What about the innovation underlying this "song" in the design? Once software moves from writing to assembling components, people will realize its greater resemblance to engineering than literature. Software patents, or for that matter any patents, capture the innovation behind designs, code, models, plans etc and not the design per se.
Re:Patents Are Not a Problem...
on
Perens on Patents
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...Thanks for correcting that 17 year thing:-) The new cheap method for challenging a patent is already a law. It is called inter-parter re-examination. In the sense that you can ask the USPTO to re-examine the patent, where you can submit prior art to them, and the patent filer can be the opposite party. This proceeding is in the patent office and it is more or less between the patent applicant and the USPTO, where the challenger supplies the prior art. Unlike litigation where discovery and trial consumes most money, this is a cheap and effective way to challenge a patent. Of course there are safegaurds to protect against frivolous challenges.
My point was that that patents are allowed in almost all technical areas so why not for software? There is a long-term benefit in compliation of software patent literature just as it is for other technical fields. Broadness of initial patents is just a passing phase and open-source fanatics are damaging the overall purpose of software patents which is to develop a repository of knowledge which would otherwise be locked up in the vaults of giant corporations.
Patents Are Not a Problem...
on
Perens on Patents
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Patents are not that big a problem. I mean there are patents in Electronics world since the time electricity was invented. Has this stiffled innovation in the electronics arena? Has this stopped a hobbyist from building the latest circuit? Eventually, what is popular also gets cheap. Same will happen in software. First thing to remember is that software patents are hard to defend in the court. Look at the SBC Prodigy-BT case about a wild patent covering all forms of hyperlinking. The Judge threw out the case in few days.
On the other hand patents provide useful information in public domain very early. Almost all patents applications are now published in 18 months. So if IBM invented a new algorithm to convert Linux application into Windows application and if they applied for a patent then the technique would be out to public after just 18 months. Imagine an army of developer trying to better this invention or designing something in parallel to it. Who cares if IBM gets rights over the original idea for 17 years? Patents are another kind of open-source/public domain concept. I have never understood why the open-source community opposes patents.
Stereotypes exist in the whole product world. Ladies and Gents watches for example. Now, will the 12" powerbook be a ladies one and 15" a male one? Does size matter to make a tech product female or male like it does in watches? The whole notion is bullshit, but equality is a political idea. I mean there is a difference between female and male pants.
Recent story NY Times said that Banglore based US companies outifits have filed about 1,000 patents for the research done there. Major companies doing research there are GE, Texas Instruments (since last 20 years), Intel, Microsoft, HP, and others. So there is some cool work being done there for sure...
Your problem is addiction to a thing. Coffee is just a symptom. Try this: Some tribal women in India have problems with weaning a kid from breast-feeding. So they smear their nips with a red color powder to make it look dangerous and scare the kid away. In the same way you can put some crazy things in coffee (black pepper, mustard sauce, leftover chicken broth, etc) to make coffee disgushting to you. Be creative! Make sure the coffee-concotion is disgusting. I mean do not get hooked to a coffee-mixed-piss! Slowly you will be weaned away, and be master of yourself again.
American economy and its processes have to compete with those of the advanced world. Particularly with Japan and Germany. American economy has symbiotic relationships with what it has "outsourced" before. For example, Taiwan and Japan became electronic majors when America "outsourced" its electronic business to them. That has left Germany and other advanced companies still biting dust. By outsourcing hardware America could foucs on software like Internet where the real innovation and money lies. Similarly, that will happen with services being outsourced to India.
I think this is what innovation is like. There were forums and bulletin boards around since time immemorial. Yet, neither open-source guys nor the closed-source guys figured out that forums would be a better interface for email. I think this invention deserves a patent ! Unless someone can send me a link that prior-art exists!
I am sorry to hear what happened to you. However, it is time the American workers determined what work culture they want to work in. In third world, the foreign specialists come and sign hymns about the great American "hire and fire" system that gives flexibility to the employer to drop you like a used paper-towel. Look at UAW, they have awesome power, but then they are also labelled as evil by the republicans. In Japan, they have a life-time employment kind of system. Yet, they are masters of mass-production and a developed country too. Hence, giving a worker security of job is not a too dangerous things as the right in America would like to believe.
Well, next time they tell you about the great American capitalist system on TV are you ready to spit on them? If not then enjoy being fired.
TO HELL WITH AYN RAND...
See, you did freak out! I was not pointing out to slashdot as a single entity, but there is a defnite undercurrent to the observations posted here. I will not call it a "bias", but you get the idea. Afterall you are smartass enough to explain me how the UIDs can be interpreted.
Aren't patents supposed to be the ultimate evil on slashdot? Slashdot hardly differentiates between good and bad patents, so why is this one any good? Like software patents it can be argued that common cold viruses were known long ago, cancer is an old problem, and modifying a virus is also no-big deal, so what is new? Apparently, this is an "invention" just like a software invention, and hence a possible subject to patent. So next time you hear the word patent do not freak-out.
Somedays I wonder if the bad hackers have given MS-windows undue attention, and hence it has a larger share of security attacks. It seems that OSX or and any *nix hasn't received the kind attention of bad hackers and hence are apparently more "secure"!!!
You are right the pioneers get the top credit. That is the right of USSR/CCCP and USA in the field of space exploration. However, neither ISA or USSR have given India space technology on a platter. Agreed, Ford Aerospace built the first Indian communication satellites, and Russia is giving India is first cryogenic engines for its Geo-synchronous launch vehicle. However, Indian space program is not exactly "standing on the shoulders" of giants. India has to paintstakingly do its own research and spend tons of money over 50 years to do Nuclear and Space research. I guess if it were so easy to stand on shoulders of giants, even Vatican would have launched satellites to relay the word of Lord. However, giants will not let others stand on their shoulders. Therein lies the lesson that each space pioneer has to "Do It Yourself" the whole story. And do it all over again, inspite of theories being validated, is an engineering marvel of no small measure. Again, what USA and USSR/CCCP did was 100% amazing work, yet that does not diminish India's achievement in space. Please see www.isro.com for more information.
The simple logic is that every person (country) which takes the exam (technological achievement) get grades that it deserves. American space program was an amazing achievement, where the NASA put man on moon using elementary computing at its disposal. That was America's A+ grade. India also went the 50 year development route from sounding rockets to Geo-stationary launch vehicles. That is India's A+ grade in its test. I am just saying let's give India due credit for doing its exam ok too. One country's progress is not a negative aspersion on another country's progress. However, many in America think that anybody progressing after them is just not worth giving credit for since "oh, we did that 50 years ago!".
If globalization hits America, then it is EVIL. Then it is termed as a great job loot by Indians. Then it is the revenge of the El-Cheapo Indians. When the same globalization allows American goods and services to flood developing countries, then it is FREE-TRADE.
Welcome to DOUBLE-SPEAK...
Slashdot Mirror
To counter the US dominance shown through the font size 14. China, EU, India and Russia have first time agreed jointly to counter the US dominance by agreeing to use font size 16. The US is reported to be contemplating to do a pre-emptive strike by increasing it font-size. However, details of the new size are classified.
I disagree. APJ Kalam, the president did not decide whether to create the Indian Nuclear program or even support it. Most of his career he worked in launch vehicles for civilian satellite launching. Yes, he did work on missiles, but then they are not WMDs. And what is this WMD distate about? Western powers can have WMDs but not India? You cannot even say that India is an irresponsible rogue state and hence cannot have Nuclear weapons. India is 1/6th of humanity on earth, and a responsible democracy for last 50 years. When surrounded by China and Pakistan, there are few options for such countries. If you live in western country go ahead and tell your government to dump all its WMDs.
Also, he is a qualified Aeronautical engineer. He is the key architect of India's rocket launching capabilities. Also, an erudite poet and musician. Keeps his hair long and wears informal blue shirts most of the time. Spends time talking to school kids on all his visits. Cool guy, in short.
President is the official, though ceremonial, head of the executive branch of the Government in India. It is more like the Queen in U.K., who is a formal head, but the real executive is the prime minister and his cabinet. I have a gold medal in Indian constitutional law.
Cheap can be excellent. Do you know about an OS called Linux? It is free/cheap and it is excellent. Same goes for Indian software, it is cheap and gives you a good value for "what you pay".
I am laughing out loudly watching the Slashdot crowd panic that most of them will have to move to India in order to survive in future!!! Since most of their lives they have learned that India is a poor living hell, they cannot palate this idea. Also, it burns their mitochondria that a poor country could excel at what they do and do it a cheaper price. :-)
By the way, I too did active programming for a long time to realize what programming is all about. Not to mention my B.Sc. in CS (Rank 2 in University), C programmer of the Year yada yada yada. One major problem in your deep analysis is that you consider "patentable" as a special kind of status. Hence, a mechanical invention is patentable, but not software. Patent is a mere legal right, it does not have a hallowed special status as some natural mechanism. Like we can say for a substance that it is either soluble in water or not soluble. Hence, inventions cannot be separated by some natural criteria as patentable and not patentable. Patent is a legal right and is extended to many inventions depending upon society's need to bargain with the inventor giving him exclusivity in return for disclosure. I think that due to the complied nature of software where the original code is almost secret and unreversible, software makes a great candidate for a patentable invention. If software will pervade all sorts of machines and processes in the soceity then society and law does have an interest in getting disclosure of the concepts underlying such socially important software. Hence, there is need for software to be patented. I agree that a lot programmers will find it inconvenient that parts of their domain are protected by patents. However, it will also open-up a vast area of information that was previously unknown. A classic example is Adobe's Acrobat. The PDF file format is tightly protected by Adobe. Nobody would ever have found out mechanisms for underlying the PDF files and reader assuming that reverse engineering was hard or impossible. Of course, when some software becomes too popular there are kids out their who will reverse enginner it, however that is not the point. Adobe's patents on Acrobat technology has revealed so much information about the PDF mecahnism (see patents listed when Acrobat reader's splash screen comes up). As to your point why Calculus is not patented. The society has made a conscious choice that mathematical techniques will not be patented. Also, it has decided that medical methods of treatment or surgery are not patentable. Software is not as important as surgical technique or calculus to be not patentable. Yes, a large section of society like programmers and geeks would argue against patentability of software - however - a majority of society that is more concerned about safety and efficacy of software would like the underlying information be out in public. That is the reasons that judiciary declared software to be patentable. Europe's opposition to software is opposition to the US dominance, and not based on any principal. As to software being math. A large body of physical world is software. "A New Kind of Science" extends this to wider range of natural processes. For example, chemical reactions are pure software when designed in brain and on paper. They are only real reactions when chemicals are mixed. Should this chemical software be patentable or not? There is no natural answer to this. Chemistry is patentable since society thinks there is a value to it. Now you can forever argue the differences between chemistry is not software is not math is not chemistry, but that is not the point.
The fundamental problem with understanding software innovations is that it is perceived similar to writing and not designing. A piece of code written to say do speech synthesis may appear to be a "song" that a computer can play as per your analogy. However, there is a real innovation there - creating speech through a machine. I think one ought to get protection for such an innovation. The nature of software as writing may change over the years. Unfortuantely, due to its written nature, software is considered similar to literature and not an engineering design. Imagine a 3-D printer with robotic capabilities that can accept an engineering blue-print as an input to create a mechanical structure. Now, will this engineering design be a "song" that the 3-D printer can play? What about the innovation underlying this "song" in the design? Once software moves from writing to assembling components, people will realize its greater resemblance to engineering than literature. Software patents, or for that matter any patents, capture the innovation behind designs, code, models, plans etc and not the design per se.
...Thanks for correcting that 17 year thing :-) The new cheap method for challenging a patent is already a law. It is called inter-parter re-examination. In the sense that you can ask the USPTO to re-examine the patent, where you can submit prior art to them, and the patent filer can be the opposite party. This proceeding is in the patent office and it is more or less between the patent applicant and the USPTO, where the challenger supplies the prior art. Unlike litigation where discovery and trial consumes most money, this is a cheap and effective way to challenge a patent. Of course there are safegaurds to protect against frivolous challenges.
My point was that that patents are allowed in almost all technical areas so why not for software? There is a long-term benefit in compliation of software patent literature just as it is for other technical fields. Broadness of initial patents is just a passing phase and open-source fanatics are damaging the overall purpose of software patents which is to develop a repository of knowledge which would otherwise be locked up in the vaults of giant corporations.
Patents are not that big a problem. I mean there are patents in Electronics world since the time electricity was invented. Has this stiffled innovation in the electronics arena? Has this stopped a hobbyist from building the latest circuit? Eventually, what is popular also gets cheap. Same will happen in software. First thing to remember is that software patents are hard to defend in the court. Look at the SBC Prodigy-BT case about a wild patent covering all forms of hyperlinking. The Judge threw out the case in few days. On the other hand patents provide useful information in public domain very early. Almost all patents applications are now published in 18 months. So if IBM invented a new algorithm to convert Linux application into Windows application and if they applied for a patent then the technique would be out to public after just 18 months. Imagine an army of developer trying to better this invention or designing something in parallel to it. Who cares if IBM gets rights over the original idea for 17 years? Patents are another kind of open-source/public domain concept. I have never understood why the open-source community opposes patents.
Stereotypes exist in the whole product world. Ladies and Gents watches for example. Now, will the 12" powerbook be a ladies one and 15" a male one? Does size matter to make a tech product female or male like it does in watches? The whole notion is bullshit, but equality is a political idea. I mean there is a difference between female and male pants.
Recent story NY Times said that Banglore based US companies outifits have filed about 1,000 patents for the research done there. Major companies doing research there are GE, Texas Instruments (since last 20 years), Intel, Microsoft, HP, and others. So there is some cool work being done there for sure...
Where is Jerry's Networking site? I bet Tom-n-Jerry's networking sites wehn combined will provide solution to all my networking worries.
Your problem is addiction to a thing. Coffee is just a symptom. Try this: Some tribal women in India have problems with weaning a kid from breast-feeding. So they smear their nips with a red color powder to make it look dangerous and scare the kid away. In the same way you can put some crazy things in coffee (black pepper, mustard sauce, leftover chicken broth, etc) to make coffee disgushting to you. Be creative! Make sure the coffee-concotion is disgusting. I mean do not get hooked to a coffee-mixed-piss! Slowly you will be weaned away, and be master of yourself again.
Where the heck did you get an ideas that Brahmos is a cow's name? It is made from Bramhaputra and Moscowa - both are names of rivers!
American economy and its processes have to compete with those of the advanced world. Particularly with Japan and Germany. American economy has symbiotic relationships with what it has "outsourced" before. For example, Taiwan and Japan became electronic majors when America "outsourced" its electronic business to them. That has left Germany and other advanced companies still biting dust. By outsourcing hardware America could foucs on software like Internet where the real innovation and money lies. Similarly, that will happen with services being outsourced to India.
I think this is what innovation is like. There were forums and bulletin boards around since time immemorial. Yet, neither open-source guys nor the closed-source guys figured out that forums would be a better interface for email. I think this invention deserves a patent ! Unless someone can send me a link that prior-art exists!
I am sorry to hear what happened to you. However, it is time the American workers determined what work culture they want to work in. In third world, the foreign specialists come and sign hymns about the great American "hire and fire" system that gives flexibility to the employer to drop you like a used paper-towel. Look at UAW, they have awesome power, but then they are also labelled as evil by the republicans. In Japan, they have a life-time employment kind of system. Yet, they are masters of mass-production and a developed country too. Hence, giving a worker security of job is not a too dangerous things as the right in America would like to believe. Well, next time they tell you about the great American capitalist system on TV are you ready to spit on them? If not then enjoy being fired. TO HELL WITH AYN RAND...
See, you did freak out! I was not pointing out to slashdot as a single entity, but there is a defnite undercurrent to the observations posted here. I will not call it a "bias", but you get the idea. Afterall you are smartass enough to explain me how the UIDs can be interpreted.
Aren't patents supposed to be the ultimate evil on slashdot? Slashdot hardly differentiates between good and bad patents, so why is this one any good? Like software patents it can be argued that common cold viruses were known long ago, cancer is an old problem, and modifying a virus is also no-big deal, so what is new? Apparently, this is an "invention" just like a software invention, and hence a possible subject to patent. So next time you hear the word patent do not freak-out.
Somedays I wonder if the bad hackers have given MS-windows undue attention, and hence it has a larger share of security attacks. It seems that OSX or and any *nix hasn't received the kind attention of bad hackers and hence are apparently more "secure"!!!
Oops...it should www.isro.org
You are right the pioneers get the top credit. That is the right of USSR/CCCP and USA in the field of space exploration. However, neither ISA or USSR have given India space technology on a platter. Agreed, Ford Aerospace built the first Indian communication satellites, and Russia is giving India is first cryogenic engines for its Geo-synchronous launch vehicle. However, Indian space program is not exactly "standing on the shoulders" of giants. India has to paintstakingly do its own research and spend tons of money over 50 years to do Nuclear and Space research. I guess if it were so easy to stand on shoulders of giants, even Vatican would have launched satellites to relay the word of Lord. However, giants will not let others stand on their shoulders. Therein lies the lesson that each space pioneer has to "Do It Yourself" the whole story. And do it all over again, inspite of theories being validated, is an engineering marvel of no small measure. Again, what USA and USSR/CCCP did was 100% amazing work, yet that does not diminish India's achievement in space. Please see www.isro.com for more information.
The simple logic is that every person (country) which takes the exam (technological achievement) get grades that it deserves. American space program was an amazing achievement, where the NASA put man on moon using elementary computing at its disposal. That was America's A+ grade. India also went the 50 year development route from sounding rockets to Geo-stationary launch vehicles. That is India's A+ grade in its test. I am just saying let's give India due credit for doing its exam ok too. One country's progress is not a negative aspersion on another country's progress. However, many in America think that anybody progressing after them is just not worth giving credit for since "oh, we did that 50 years ago!".
If globalization hits America, then it is EVIL. Then it is termed as a great job loot by Indians. Then it is the revenge of the El-Cheapo Indians. When the same globalization allows American goods and services to flood developing countries, then it is FREE-TRADE. Welcome to DOUBLE-SPEAK...