Did you notice the vast quantity of *GREEN* in that image? I did. I suspect that on average an image of the USA from that perspective would be considerable more *grey*.
We really should be paying some attention to this, folks.
I understand your point and it is well taken. Please temper your reading of what I'm about to say with the knowledge in mind that I agree that patents of late have been silly:
The notion of patents came about for a reason, which (if memory serves) goes something like this: It gives the "little guy" an incentive to create, and a chance to profit from its creation wherein for a period of time it is not under threat of having some large monopoly simply imitate and walk away with the market.
Ring a bell?
Now, in the case of browser technology, it happens that we're all much better off in the long run that browser technologies aren't patented. We'd be in a very different "world" today if such patents existed. In this sense you're absolutely right.
But I'm not sure it's right to begrudge the "little guy" some small protection under the law for a short period of time. Minus this protection, creativity outside the context of a corporate monolith seems decidedly less attractive to me.
Absolutely! Mirrors are the way to go, and each and every time the KDE folks make a new release that's the first place I go. I go to several of them, in fact!
Several, because whenever there's a new release of KDE, the mirrors are conspicuously entirely void of any whisper of the new version that's just been announced.
This is especially frustrating, as the mirrors never seem to actually *get* the complete new fileset 'til AFTER the "everybody's downloading from the master site 'cause it's not located on any mirrors" syndrome has passed....
It'd be great if, PRIOR to the big announcements, someone made sure that at least some of the mirror sites actually had the new stuff so as to spread the load, etc. 'Til then, it'll continue to be a frustrating "catch 22"
Slashdot Mirror
Did you notice the vast quantity of *GREEN* in that image? I did. I suspect that on average an image of the USA from that perspective would be considerable more *grey*.
We really should be paying some attention to this, folks.
I understand your point and it is well taken. Please temper your reading of what I'm about to say with the knowledge in mind that I agree that patents of late have been silly:
The notion of patents came about for a reason, which (if memory serves) goes something like this: It gives the "little guy" an incentive to create, and a chance to profit from its creation wherein for a period of time it is not under threat of having some large monopoly simply imitate and walk away with the market.
Ring a bell?
Now, in the case of browser technology, it happens that we're all much better off in the long run that browser technologies aren't patented. We'd be in a very different "world" today if such patents existed. In this sense you're absolutely right.
But I'm not sure it's right to begrudge the "little guy" some small protection under the law for a short period of time. Minus this protection, creativity outside the context of a corporate monolith seems decidedly less attractive to me.
I dunno. I agree that the vast majority software patenting that's been going on lately is silly; "One click ordering" is a pretty obvious thing.
But from what I've read, Google's search logic is pretty ingenious, and not very obvious at all.
Is this not an example of a case where a patent makes sense? At the moment I'd say that I am not troubled much at all by this one.
Absolutely! Mirrors are the way to go, and each and every time the KDE folks make a new release that's the first place I go. I go to several of them, in fact!
Several, because whenever there's a new release of KDE, the mirrors are conspicuously entirely void of any whisper of the new version that's just been announced.
This is especially frustrating, as the mirrors never seem to actually *get* the complete new fileset 'til AFTER the "everybody's downloading from the master site 'cause it's not located on any mirrors" syndrome has passed....
It'd be great if, PRIOR to the big announcements, someone made sure that at least some of the mirror sites actually had the new stuff so as to spread the load, etc. 'Til then, it'll continue to be a frustrating "catch 22"
*sigh*