The patents were clear: other people going on about patent fraud and so forth are way off base, as are you. My father was also extremely good at patenting not just the best known mode, but as many viable variations as he could prototype. That's entirely legitimate, and makes it that much harder for competition to work around your patent. But the design specifications (not the patent) were sufficiently complete for the engineers reviewing the design to approve it: it wasn't necessary (or, as it turned out, desirable) to make those specs so complete that they could just take them away from you and use them any way they saw fit.
conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue.
It's a problem for software companies that have been jerking their customers around for decades and gouging to a Biblical degree. There's a phase change in software development occurring, no different in principle from the switch from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, or physical distribution of music to purely electronic. Those with a heavy investment in the old way of doing business will get screwed, to be sure, unless they adapt... what George Guilder termed "creative destruction." Individual organizations and long-standing business models will fall by the wayside, but the benefits to society will be great.
Yeah fuck the GPL. It's a piece of shit that is viral and likes to screw over companies who are trying to make a profit. These same companies employee the largest percentage of the work force, and the viral GPL comes along and makes these hardworking companies in America and the rest of the world give up their competitive advantage. I think Stallman is nothing but a lousy hobo who can't seem to stop living in the 60s.
You're a remarkably uninformed example of a Slashdot troll. Try harder next time... having a coherent argument backed by a few actual facts would help.
The way I read this (and I'm a lawyer) through official action, a state can now, willy-nilly, appropriate intellectual property with immunity.
Yeah, that doesn't sound good at all, although it's one of those things that may cost them more in the long run.
Besides, the military has been doing that forever. My father worked on a number of major contracts for the Navy and Air Force back in the sixties, and anything they decided they liked and wanted to have built cheaper elsewhere they would just stamp "CLASSIFIED".
Once that was done, the original manufacturer/designer/inventor was basically screwed out of his rights (patents, copyrights, whatever) and couldn't even take it to court. After that happened to Dad a couple of times, he made damn sure that the patent apps and design specs left out crucial elements such that they'd eventually have to come back and buy it from his company. That, or invest a whole lot of time and money figuring out what he hadn't told them. They deserved it though: the Navy severely shafted his company on a number of contracts. Just outright stole years of work, and put them out on open bid ("classified", yeah, right.) Sleazy, and not what most people would expect from the service. A used car salesman, sure, but not from the world's most powerful military.
I disagree. A cult is generally a group of people who follow a charismatic leader who has only his own best interests at heart. The followers themselves are usually unable to recognize the fact they're being hoodwinked, or even do much thinking for themselves. That does not in any way describe the people that follow NYCL's writings, or Ray Beckerman himself for that matter.
Forced into being common carriers? They're fighting tooth and nail to keep their common carrier status.
You are incorrect. That battle was fought years ago and they won it: even the Telcos, which do fall under that regulation only count as common carriers for their voice services. Data services received an exemption and are consequently not subject to the universal coverage and quality-of-service standards to which phone companies must adhere.
And I wish we'd (USA) stop treating them like they're our best chums while they're violating human rights on international scales.
I do too, but the reality is they have us by the short and curly. We're so dependent upon China that we can't even clothe ourselves without imports. Do you realize that? Our textile industry is in a shambles, enormous manufacturing facilities are lying fallow, all the machine tools sold to China for pennies on the dollar. That applies to our entire industrial base, by the way: they've decimated it in true Japanese style (only on a much, much vaster scale.) Our own military, which we need now more than ever, is dependent upon China's manufacturing. We've seriously shot ourselves in the foot in order to make a very few of us very rich. I'm not dissing China here (although they do seem to be using their economy as a weapon against every industrialized nation on the planet) but our own fatal shortsightedness.
What tiny Japan started giant China is finishing... and when we're finished, I suspect we'll have more to worry about than a cyberattack launched against our news agencies. Odds are that what China is doing to Tibet, they'll eventually being doing to us. Unless you believe that China's leadership will suddenly begin to grasp Western ideals about the rule of law and respect for human life. Hell, our own government has forgotten that: why should we expect China's to do any better?
I can't. That's exactly what Verisign tried doing a few years ago, and got bitchslapped for because it breaks things. Not every piece of equipment that connects to the Internet and uses the Domain Name System is a Web browser, you know, and many of those systems expect a failed resolution attempt to return the proper error codes. These corporate bastards should be required to honor the basic Internet standards that exist, and which millions upon millions of networked machines depend upon for proper operation. Failure to do so should involve hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and lost tax breaks, because their arrogance costs everyone else at least that much when they pull stunts like this.
Bloodsucking leeches, all of them. These jerks are just asking for some heavy-handed regulation to be applied to them: if they don't want to be forced into being common carriers, they'd damn well better act responsibly. Contrary to what these idiots may think, the Internet is not a private profit-making engine built exclusively for their use. It's reached the point of being a public utility, as important to our well-being as clean water. Sure, maybe as individuals we can live without our personal Internet connection: the supply chain which provides us with vital goods and services cannot.
Well, as much as Comcast irritates the FUCK out of me at times, at least when I typed "www.fjfjdkslsjdkflds.com" into Firefox I got a server not found response. So no redirects there (yet.)
In general I feel that whenever 'weapons' (DoS attacks, censorship, physical force) are used to end a discussion, it means that party has run out of reasonable arguments (and in a way, admits moral defeat).
The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas. -- H.G. Wells, "Time after Time"
I'd say it bodes well. Not for the quality of the shows themselves, I agree, but for broadcasting as a whole.
Put it this way. Television has been losing ground to the many other activities that attract our eyeballs these days, things that didn't exist back in the heyday of broadcast TV. Internet access, Youtube, videogames, cell phones, texting... there's lots of attractive timewasters available nowadays. At one time, broadcast TV reigned supreme in that area, but no more.
Apparently, the only response that the networks have to those competitive threats is to make their products even less appealing to the viewing public. If that's truly the case, they're fundamentally incompetent and deserve to go the way of the dinosaur and the Dodo bird. Nobody will mourn them, and perhaps something better will come along to use the spectrum currently being wasted by these fools.
If it wasn't government sponsored, then it was promulgated by some individual or group with substantial resources (a hitherto-unknown botnet, perhaps.) They need to be found out and put away for a few years. On the other hand, if it was sponsored by the Chinese leadership it means they're attempting to extend their brand of censorship worldwide. In which case, they also need to be put away for a few years.
evaluating a sale of Skype if new ways cannot be found for the fast-growing service to support its core e-commerce business.
So, you have a hugely profitable and growing division, that you're going to sell off because... what?
Not that I ever understood the logic of EBay owning Skype anyway: I suppose they felt they could use it to augment their core business in some way, but that always seemed a remote prospect anyway. Rather like @Home spending some 900 million on Blue Mountain. That was a WTF moment for me, and of course it wasn't hard to figure out why @Home eventually folded, with that kind of decision-making going on at the top.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names.
It really is heartening to know that our lawmakers invest considerable time and effort understanding the complex technical issues put before them.
What an ignorant ass. Actually, Biden is no Ted Stevens... he's not so much ignorant as he is dissembling. Frankly I'm not sure which is worse.
When person A calls person B an idiot, it doesn't indicate that person B is an idiot. It does indicate that person A berates people.
That may be, but it seems to work for Dr. House. He says, "You're an IDIOT!", and the target will generally express any of a number of different emotions... and never bother House again.
Slashdot Mirror
The patents were clear: other people going on about patent fraud and so forth are way off base, as are you. My father was also extremely good at patenting not just the best known mode, but as many viable variations as he could prototype. That's entirely legitimate, and makes it that much harder for competition to work around your patent. But the design specifications (not the patent) were sufficiently complete for the engineers reviewing the design to approve it: it wasn't necessary (or, as it turned out, desirable) to make those specs so complete that they could just take them away from you and use them any way they saw fit.
conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue.
... what George Guilder termed "creative destruction." Individual organizations and long-standing business models will fall by the wayside, but the benefits to society will be great.
It's a problem for software companies that have been jerking their customers around for decades and gouging to a Biblical degree. There's a phase change in software development occurring, no different in principle from the switch from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, or physical distribution of music to purely electronic. Those with a heavy investment in the old way of doing business will get screwed, to be sure, unless they adapt
Yeah fuck the GPL. It's a piece of shit that is viral and likes to screw over companies who are trying to make a profit. These same companies employee the largest percentage of the work force, and the viral GPL comes along and makes these hardworking companies in America and the rest of the world give up their competitive advantage. I think Stallman is nothing but a lousy hobo who can't seem to stop living in the 60s.
... having a coherent argument backed by a few actual facts would help.
You're a remarkably uninformed example of a Slashdot troll. Try harder next time
The way I read this (and I'm a lawyer) through official action, a state can now, willy-nilly, appropriate intellectual property with immunity.
Yeah, that doesn't sound good at all, although it's one of those things that may cost them more in the long run.
Besides, the military has been doing that forever. My father worked on a number of major contracts for the Navy and Air Force back in the sixties, and anything they decided they liked and wanted to have built cheaper elsewhere they would just stamp "CLASSIFIED".
Once that was done, the original manufacturer/designer/inventor was basically screwed out of his rights (patents, copyrights, whatever) and couldn't even take it to court. After that happened to Dad a couple of times, he made damn sure that the patent apps and design specs left out crucial elements such that they'd eventually have to come back and buy it from his company. That, or invest a whole lot of time and money figuring out what he hadn't told them. They deserved it though: the Navy severely shafted his company on a number of contracts. Just outright stole years of work, and put them out on open bid ("classified", yeah, right.) Sleazy, and not what most people would expect from the service. A used car salesman, sure, but not from the world's most powerful military.
I disagree. A cult is generally a group of people who follow a charismatic leader who has only his own best interests at heart. The followers themselves are usually unable to recognize the fact they're being hoodwinked, or even do much thinking for themselves. That does not in any way describe the people that follow NYCL's writings, or Ray Beckerman himself for that matter.
Then again, that's probably the reason why I don't have the same cult following as you do.
Technically, when people follow someone who they recognize actually knows what he's talking about it's not a cult.
It only smells bad if you sniff the stiff you just snuffed.
Hey, if the Magnum was good enough for Dirty Harry it's good enough for me.
Forced into being common carriers? They're fighting tooth and nail to keep their common carrier status.
You are incorrect. That battle was fought years ago and they won it: even the Telcos, which do fall under that regulation only count as common carriers for their voice services. Data services received an exemption and are consequently not subject to the universal coverage and quality-of-service standards to which phone companies must adhere.
Now - what is AT&T actually saying?
That they charge too much for what they deliver, and want to charge more for even less in a few years.
What Are the Best Laptop Theft Recovery Measures?
.44 Magnum.
GPS and a
And I wish we'd (USA) stop treating them like they're our best chums while they're violating human rights on international scales.
... and when we're finished, I suspect we'll have more to worry about than a cyberattack launched against our news agencies. Odds are that what China is doing to Tibet, they'll eventually being doing to us. Unless you believe that China's leadership will suddenly begin to grasp Western ideals about the rule of law and respect for human life. Hell, our own government has forgotten that: why should we expect China's to do any better?
I do too, but the reality is they have us by the short and curly. We're so dependent upon China that we can't even clothe ourselves without imports. Do you realize that? Our textile industry is in a shambles, enormous manufacturing facilities are lying fallow, all the machine tools sold to China for pennies on the dollar. That applies to our entire industrial base, by the way: they've decimated it in true Japanese style (only on a much, much vaster scale.) Our own military, which we need now more than ever, is dependent upon China's manufacturing. We've seriously shot ourselves in the foot in order to make a very few of us very rich. I'm not dissing China here (although they do seem to be using their economy as a weapon against every industrialized nation on the planet) but our own fatal shortsightedness.
What tiny Japan started giant China is finishing
I can see doing this for nonexistant domains
I can't. That's exactly what Verisign tried doing a few years ago, and got bitchslapped for because it breaks things. Not every piece of equipment that connects to the Internet and uses the Domain Name System is a Web browser, you know, and many of those systems expect a failed resolution attempt to return the proper error codes. These corporate bastards should be required to honor the basic Internet standards that exist, and which millions upon millions of networked machines depend upon for proper operation. Failure to do so should involve hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and lost tax breaks, because their arrogance costs everyone else at least that much when they pull stunts like this.
Bloodsucking leeches, all of them. These jerks are just asking for some heavy-handed regulation to be applied to them: if they don't want to be forced into being common carriers, they'd damn well better act responsibly. Contrary to what these idiots may think, the Internet is not a private profit-making engine built exclusively for their use. It's reached the point of being a public utility, as important to our well-being as clean water. Sure, maybe as individuals we can live without our personal Internet connection: the supply chain which provides us with vital goods and services cannot.
Well, as much as Comcast irritates the FUCK out of me at times, at least when I typed "www.fjfjdkslsjdkflds.com" into Firefox I got a server not found response. So no redirects there (yet.)
In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.
That is without question the stupidest comment I've heard all week (anything belched forth from the White House excepted, of course.)
In general I feel that whenever 'weapons' (DoS attacks, censorship, physical force) are used to end a discussion, it means that party has run out of reasonable arguments (and in a way, admits moral defeat).
The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas. -- H.G. Wells, "Time after Time"
This divergence of purpose bodes ill.
... there's lots of attractive timewasters available nowadays. At one time, broadcast TV reigned supreme in that area, but no more.
I'd say it bodes well. Not for the quality of the shows themselves, I agree, but for broadcasting as a whole.
Put it this way. Television has been losing ground to the many other activities that attract our eyeballs these days, things that didn't exist back in the heyday of broadcast TV. Internet access, Youtube, videogames, cell phones, texting
Apparently, the only response that the networks have to those competitive threats is to make their products even less appealing to the viewing public. If that's truly the case, they're fundamentally incompetent and deserve to go the way of the dinosaur and the Dodo bird. Nobody will mourn them, and perhaps something better will come along to use the spectrum currently being wasted by these fools.
If it wasn't government sponsored, then it was promulgated by some individual or group with substantial resources (a hitherto-unknown botnet, perhaps.) They need to be found out and put away for a few years. On the other hand, if it was sponsored by the Chinese leadership it means they're attempting to extend their brand of censorship worldwide. In which case, they also need to be put away for a few years.
evaluating a sale of Skype if new ways cannot be found for the fast-growing service to support its core e-commerce business.
... what?
So, you have a hugely profitable and growing division, that you're going to sell off because
Not that I ever understood the logic of EBay owning Skype anyway: I suppose they felt they could use it to augment their core business in some way, but that always seemed a remote prospect anyway. Rather like @Home spending some 900 million on Blue Mountain. That was a WTF moment for me, and of course it wasn't hard to figure out why @Home eventually folded, with that kind of decision-making going on at the top.
No big problem if you build underground colonies instead of surface domes. Let a hundred feet of moon rock be your radiation shield.
Horticulture is impossible on the moon
It's difficult here on Earth too, for that matter. Remember, you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
Apparently, peas can grow like this.
Hey, give peas a chance! We should all work towards whirled peas in our lifetimes.
Huh. Well, all I have to say is that both of you should get out more often.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names.
... he's not so much ignorant as he is dissembling. Frankly I'm not sure which is worse.
It really is heartening to know that our lawmakers invest considerable time and effort understanding the complex technical issues put before them.
What an ignorant ass. Actually, Biden is no Ted Stevens
When person A calls person B an idiot, it doesn't indicate that person B is an idiot. It does indicate that person A berates people.
... and never bother House again.
That may be, but it seems to work for Dr. House. He says, "You're an IDIOT!", and the target will generally express any of a number of different emotions