Navteq and teleAtlas use the USGS data to create there databases. So which do you think they are going to license for less? That data that they had to pay in order to assemble databases (every other country) or the data that is given to them for free (US data).
Because the vast majority of our data is available to the public for free (can even be downloaded) and because of this and the fact that there is a slightly better market for the US service which is what drove companies like navteq which has the best database to make primarily US only data.
Navteq is not giving anything away for free, so if you are Google, what would you do for a beta/startup period? Use a country who's data may cost more and be lower quality and probably draw less web traffic, or stick with the U.S. data?
No, silly. They just convert the lats and lons to base N. This is about displaying the Base N data in an url. That is really what makes this patent unique and non-obvious.
Actually, mine is bottom of the line and about a year old, and it is more than I need for everything but games. But, like I said, it all depends on what your using it for.
I thought I was going to be the only one that partially agreed with Bill on this one. It is common sense. If one company controls everything and is incredibly large they can obviously bring interoperability to the masses sooner with a specific vision in mind of how the technology works. The advantage of the current OSS market is that you may not get the software as soon but once you get it you will probably have choices, and choices mean that the lower quality products will die off and you will be left with superior products that follow superior standards.
Note that I said OSS market and not OSS development because this is where Bill is clearly wrong and twisting things to market his product. If MS products were OSS that would clearly not affect how well they interoperate with each other.
The key to the whole arguments isn't about software, but rather standards, and open standards will in the end result in a more open market with lower prices.
The author makes a good point. Linux will never be able to compete with Windows alone on TCO on just the desktop. Part of the reason that the Windows computers are cheaper is that MS is willing to sell to HP or Dell for less with certain agreements. Another reason is just pure volume. It takes manpower to manage those configurations that come with linux, and on top of that the distro is going to charge some money. The point is that the value of linux has to come from more than just the OS. It has to come in things like decreased admin time, increased software availability at a reduced price, complete IT infrastructure TCO.
I do think that the same is not true for OpenOffice versus MS Office. I think OpenOffice.org wins this battle hands down. Few people actually use features that can't be found in open office. Most just write simple documents or work with simple spreadsheets and to be honest, I think OO.org is better in this respect because it is simpler. That is just my opinion however. I do not understand these large businesses that are investing heavily in MS Office. If a few employees still need Access, then just buy it for them. But for the rest, OO.org is ready to go.
Unless your doing something like game development, I think exactly the opposite is true. I do all my work on my laptop because it is convenient to carry it anywhere in my house and with me on trips. If anything, I wish my notebook were smaller and lighter.
EIT is only for only gets you recognized by the Nationaly Society of Professional Engineers. It is meaningless in the actual practice of engineering. The NSPE would love to make their professional training program a requirement to practice engineering, but most engineers would prefer to be members of organizations/societies that are more specific to their field.
You missed his point. Software already is protected by copyrights. Even without patent protections those apps you mentioned would have been created. Patents provided no incentives and at least for bittorrent it is doubtful that a patent was applied for. Software patents are generally only used to create a barrier to market so that smaller companies have a high risk in creating competetive products.
He clearly advocated modifying patent law, not throwing it out. When he made the comment " I fall squarely in the middle of the two camps, and get shot at from both sides" he was obviously referring to the one camp which believes in throwing out protections and the other camp which believes in ever increasing protections. Based on that statement, most of us would have guessed that he does in fact support the use of patents. He merely supports rolling back some of the excess protectionism. I think you have demonstrated who the "fucktard" is.
I can somewhat see your point because I have often been in the same situation and needed better documentation (although there are lots of windows apps that have the same problem, and the windows OS documentation has NEVER been useful to me) but my experience with non-geek users, which is what the article is about, is that they never use help even when it is available and of high quality. Every single time that anyone has called me for help and I ask if they have looked in the help file, the answer is almost always "no". The only exception is my wife who most of the time will try to find the answers on her own first.
Only someone who is not creative and wants to leech off the works of others would make this argument.
Actually, I am a fairly creative person, and yes, I want to leech off the works of others. Trying to create something great without relying on the works of others makes absolutely no sense at all. There is nothing wrong with leeching off of anothers work whether that means paying for use of it or if it has passed into public domain. And yes, protectionism can stifle innovation. Lack of protection can discourage the appeal of investing in innovation because it may lower the returns you get on that investment. Too much protectionism can also discourage investment because it can create a barrier to entry in the market. If competitors are holding defensive patents whether applicable or not, you now have to budget for things like legal expenses and you may also have to purchase rights to use certain technologies.
If complete protection is what is best for society than we should just extend all intellectual property to last forever. Luckily, even the talking heads in Washington realize that complete protectionism would be bad and limit the terms of protection. I merely advocate adjusting those terms of protection to ones that I feel would benefit society as a whole. Those who want to make protectionism vertially limitless are the extremists.
You do not have to hand them over to anyone when copyright expires, but others who have your photos are now allowed to make copies as well.
Clearly copyright need to expire at sometime, having them extend to infinity is simply unrealistic. The Grandparent post merely feels that the current copyright term is too long and frankly I agree.
Clearly from your post you are one of those that thinks that copyright really is a right. You are wrong in this. It is not a natural right and it is not the same as owning real property. It is like owning air, a thought, or energy. It is not even possible. It is possible for the government to force society to restrict the ability to distribute works, and that is what happens. The goal of this is to give incentives to inventors/creators/writers so that these creations will lead to the progress of all of society. If there is too much protectionism, it can stifle creation. If there is too little protectionism then a market is created in which nobody wants to invest in works of creation. The key is to find the terms of protection which lead to the most progress for each type of intellectual property. I agree with the grandparent in that the current copyright term is far too long. However, I agree with you that 10 years is probably too short for copyrights on photographs.
Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U
on
US Stem Cells Contaminated
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It is accurate. If your research depended on use or construction of stem cell research prior to Bush, your federal funding was cut unless you were already using one of the mentioned preexisting cell lines. There was federally funded research involving production of stem cells, some of which led to the already existing lines of stem cells. I have no idea where you got your information, but if I were you I would consider any information you get from political sources to be highly suspect, whether from Republicans or Democrats.
Look! It's another "begs the question" elitist. You know the ones who like to assign the phrase to a situation in which it does not appear to have any application and then criticize anyone who dares use the phrase in any situation in which it seems to make any logical sense.
Seriously, If something is so illogical that it is "begging" for someone to ask a question, then why is it wrong to use the phrase "begs the question"? Some insist that in this situation you should use "raises the question", but that does not make as much sense given the meaning of the word "raise". Is this some sort of conspiracy that is trying to get everyone to use verbs incorrectly so that we are all eventually speaking gibberish and thereby making the english language impossible to understand by non-native speakers?
1. Taint english language with phrases that make no sense.
Questionable is the right word for this. If you let your invention to slip out without protecting it and it becomes part of "popular culture", then you can lose your patent. It all depends on what kind of mood the judge is in.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen a number of European ONLY mapping sites and I have not seen any US Citizens complaining.
Databasing vector data for the entire world in a fast and usable fashion is not as easy as you may think. Nor is the data always easy to procure.
Navteq and teleAtlas use the USGS data to create there databases. So which do you think they are going to license for less? That data that they had to pay in order to assemble databases (every other country) or the data that is given to them for free (US data).
Navteq is not giving anything away for free, so if you are Google, what would you do for a beta/startup period? Use a country who's data may cost more and be lower quality and probably draw less web traffic, or stick with the U.S. data?
Or maybe Google only has the US because it is the easiest data to obtain and this is just in beta.
Yes, I was attempting sarcasm, but in retrospect, I did not make it very obvious.
No, silly. They just convert the lats and lons to base N. This is about displaying the Base N data in an url. That is really what makes this patent unique and non-obvious.
You are correct. WYSIWYG is exactly the opposite of what I meant to say
Actually, mine is bottom of the line and about a year old, and it is more than I need for everything but games. But, like I said, it all depends on what your using it for.
All this talk about word processors and nobody mentions LYX? WYSIWYG is the only way to go for technical writing.
Note that I said OSS market and not OSS development because this is where Bill is clearly wrong and twisting things to market his product. If MS products were OSS that would clearly not affect how well they interoperate with each other.
The key to the whole arguments isn't about software, but rather standards, and open standards will in the end result in a more open market with lower prices.
I do think that the same is not true for OpenOffice versus MS Office. I think OpenOffice.org wins this battle hands down. Few people actually use features that can't be found in open office. Most just write simple documents or work with simple spreadsheets and to be honest, I think OO.org is better in this respect because it is simpler. That is just my opinion however. I do not understand these large businesses that are investing heavily in MS Office. If a few employees still need Access, then just buy it for them. But for the rest, OO.org is ready to go.
Unless your doing something like game development, I think exactly the opposite is true. I do all my work on my laptop because it is convenient to carry it anywhere in my house and with me on trips. If anything, I wish my notebook were smaller and lighter.
EIT is only for only gets you recognized by the Nationaly Society of Professional Engineers. It is meaningless in the actual practice of engineering. The NSPE would love to make their professional training program a requirement to practice engineering, but most engineers would prefer to be members of organizations/societies that are more specific to their field.
Also, can a non-profit also be an LLC?
You missed his point. Software already is protected by copyrights. Even without patent protections those apps you mentioned would have been created. Patents provided no incentives and at least for bittorrent it is doubtful that a patent was applied for. Software patents are generally only used to create a barrier to market so that smaller companies have a high risk in creating competetive products.
He clearly advocated modifying patent law, not throwing it out. When he made the comment " I fall squarely in the middle of the two camps, and get shot at from both sides" he was obviously referring to the one camp which believes in throwing out protections and the other camp which believes in ever increasing protections. Based on that statement, most of us would have guessed that he does in fact support the use of patents. He merely supports rolling back some of the excess protectionism. I think you have demonstrated who the "fucktard" is.
I can somewhat see your point because I have often been in the same situation and needed better documentation (although there are lots of windows apps that have the same problem, and the windows OS documentation has NEVER been useful to me) but my experience with non-geek users, which is what the article is about, is that they never use help even when it is available and of high quality. Every single time that anyone has called me for help and I ask if they have looked in the help file, the answer is almost always "no". The only exception is my wife who most of the time will try to find the answers on her own first.
Is this overly subtle sarcasm? or are you serious?
Actually, I am a fairly creative person, and yes, I want to leech off the works of others. Trying to create something great without relying on the works of others makes absolutely no sense at all. There is nothing wrong with leeching off of anothers work whether that means paying for use of it or if it has passed into public domain. And yes, protectionism can stifle innovation. Lack of protection can discourage the appeal of investing in innovation because it may lower the returns you get on that investment. Too much protectionism can also discourage investment because it can create a barrier to entry in the market. If competitors are holding defensive patents whether applicable or not, you now have to budget for things like legal expenses and you may also have to purchase rights to use certain technologies.
If complete protection is what is best for society than we should just extend all intellectual property to last forever. Luckily, even the talking heads in Washington realize that complete protectionism would be bad and limit the terms of protection. I merely advocate adjusting those terms of protection to ones that I feel would benefit society as a whole. Those who want to make protectionism vertially limitless are the extremists.
Clearly copyright need to expire at sometime, having them extend to infinity is simply unrealistic. The Grandparent post merely feels that the current copyright term is too long and frankly I agree.
Clearly from your post you are one of those that thinks that copyright really is a right. You are wrong in this. It is not a natural right and it is not the same as owning real property. It is like owning air, a thought, or energy. It is not even possible. It is possible for the government to force society to restrict the ability to distribute works, and that is what happens. The goal of this is to give incentives to inventors/creators/writers so that these creations will lead to the progress of all of society. If there is too much protectionism, it can stifle creation. If there is too little protectionism then a market is created in which nobody wants to invest in works of creation. The key is to find the terms of protection which lead to the most progress for each type of intellectual property. I agree with the grandparent in that the current copyright term is far too long. However, I agree with you that 10 years is probably too short for copyrights on photographs.
It is accurate. If your research depended on use or construction of stem cell research prior to Bush, your federal funding was cut unless you were already using one of the mentioned preexisting cell lines. There was federally funded research involving production of stem cells, some of which led to the already existing lines of stem cells. I have no idea where you got your information, but if I were you I would consider any information you get from political sources to be highly suspect, whether from Republicans or Democrats.
Well, then you better tell that to judges who have ruled otherwise on some cases like these. Eminent Domain covers patents as well.
Seriously, If something is so illogical that it is "begging" for someone to ask a question, then why is it wrong to use the phrase "begs the question"? Some insist that in this situation you should use "raises the question", but that does not make as much sense given the meaning of the word "raise". Is this some sort of conspiracy that is trying to get everyone to use verbs incorrectly so that we are all eventually speaking gibberish and thereby making the english language impossible to understand by non-native speakers?
1. Taint english language with phrases that make no sense.
2. ??????????????
3. Profit!
Questionable is the right word for this. If you let your invention to slip out without protecting it and it becomes part of "popular culture", then you can lose your patent. It all depends on what kind of mood the judge is in.