Okay. (I'm assuming you're talking about mobile phones here.) Let me get this straight. If you call somebody on your mobile phone... you pay. If somebody calls you on your mobile phone... you pay. If somebody using a mobile phone calls you on your mobile phone... both of you pay. Boy, are you getting screwed!
No, I prefer it that way. When somebody needs to call me, I don't want them to hesitate or be unable to do so because they would be charged for it. It can be quite inconvenient or costly to make a for-pay call from a hotel, payphone, or business phone. Callers shouldn't have to pay for the recipient's decision to use a cellphone. And with plans that offer caller ID, first incoming minute free, and over 1000 minutes a month for less than $40, incoming calls really aren't a financial burden.
"And while I can appreciate the desire to compile everything from source, it doesn't cut it when you are managing 40 production machines, most of which have no compiler installed (for security reasons and lack of need)."
The "easy install" features are for end-users, not sysadmins. Sysadmins will still have other ways of installing to multiple machines.
What is so special about software that the legal system allows it to be simultaneously protected in three major ways - trade secrets, patents, *and* copyright?
You can patent software without supplying the source code to the public or the patent office, so it gets patented yet remains a trade secret. On top of that, copyright gives it the life+70 years protection.
Other creations are only allowed to simultaneously use one out of the three protections, maybe two in a few cases. But it is ridiculous that software is given the three-pronged protection when it needs it less than most other fields.
"Hop-on has secured multiple disposable-cell-phone patents from the STX patent collection. These patents have an effective filing date back to December 1995, which we believe predates all other patents directed to disposable cell phone technology. These patents include very broad claims directed to a method of operating a disposable cell phone with pre-programmed minutes.The patents further strengthen our competitive advantage, barring entry into the market by other companies."
I just hope they haven't actually patented the very concept of a disposable cell phone. The part about "very broad claims" disturbs me.
"Whay planet are you living on? So, if I write a one hit song/write one bestsellet I can go on tour for a few months and that compensates me for the rest of my life?"
Whatever you made on tour will dwarf the song sales. A platinum single will net you less than $250K in your pocket, but if you tour during the time your one-hit is up on the charts you can make more than that in a month.
They need to focus first on getting a permanent ban on data transfer taxes, i.e. taxing based on units such as megabytes transferred. Then once that is done, tbey can haggle over the other details. A bit tax would be the most destructive thing for the Internet in the USA.
When private parties such as web hosting services charge for bandwidth used, competitive pressures and improved technology make them charge less per megabyte as the years pass on. But whatever tax rate a government sets on bandwith usage, even if it is reasonable at first, within a few years it could become ridiculously exhorbitant as broadband and bandwith-heavy uses of the Internet become more commonplace. You may be able to afford to download a 650MB ISO today, but forget about downloading Linux in 2010 when it occupies a 50GB super-duper DVD.
If copyright only protected performance rights and not reproduction of recorded material, artists would not be hurt very much if at all.
That's because artists make the vast majority of their money from performing, merchandise, and endorsements, not from album sales. That holds true regardless of whether they are a local band that plays for $100/night or a double-platinum superstar. $1/CD isn't very much, especially after it gets split between band members, managers, and other interested parties. Britney Spears couldn't make anywhere near her $40+ million in a year just from album sales, and the local band would probably be among the many bands who lose money when they cut an album with a major label.
With recorded music being freely distributable, artists would [b]encourage[/b] people to put the music on P2P and burn CDs for their friends. Albums would serve as promotion material to attract people to buy concert tickets, T-shirts, autographed albums, etc., and the increased exposure would make up for most or all of whatever they would have earned from selling CDs.
Of course, the middlemen who eat up the other $17 out of the $18 per CD are the ones who would really hurt if all music CDs became freely copyable.
Unfortunately, just one or two artists deciding to allow free copying of their own music wouldn't help the situation much, because the RIAA still has so much control over the promotion and distribution channels. The whole system would have to be freed up in this manner for the artists to reap the benefits of the increased exposure that unrestricted copying would bring.
"Without copyright I, as a painter, could post images on a message board and some 15 year old could rip it off and win some art contest with it (ok, so this has happened anyways.)"
That is plagiarism, and copyright isn't needed to protect against that. If that 15 year old copied a 200-year-old painting (i.e. copyright no longer applies), pretending it was original, he would be kicked out of the contest if the organizers were told the truth. Anybody is free to copy art, music or novels that are no longer copyrighted, but they still can't legitimately claim to be the creator.
Laws for sale! Laws for sale! No sales tax! 15% discount if you're headquartered in Texas, Southern California, or Redmond! Come on down and buy yourself a law while the going's good!
Other rules engine books or papers?
on
Jess in Action
·
· Score: 1
Know about any other books or downloadable papers that provide an introduction to the theory behind rules engines and/or the Rete algorithm? I haven't been able to find anything useful on the web. Any search turns up sites hyping their own product.
"Most ideas will seem obvious when you hear them, but that is not the test that is used to decide whether a patent is granted or not."
There is a difference between sounding obvious after I only hear the the goal the item accomplishes, vs. sounding obvious after seeing all the details of the solution. If a simple phrase that describes the concept of the alleged invention is sufficient for a practitioner in the art to build a working implementation in a short time without seeing any of the details, then yes, it is bloody obvious and not worth of the high standard that patents should be (but aren't) held up to.
In addition to the USPTO being given deterrents against granting bad patents, applicants should be given deterrents against filing frivilous patents in the first place, in order to reduce the workload on the patent office and give them time to properly evaluate the genuine candidates.
Patent holders should be fined if a patent is overturned, perhaps with a fine proportional to the license fees they have extracted. To be fair, they should also be given the opportunity to voluntarily withdraw a patent at any time before a challenge without being liable for any penalty.
"The applicant has way to much interest in failing to prove that it has been done for this system to work, and since they can not conclusively prove that it has never been done I really don't see how this would work at all.
What amount of evidence on the applicants part would convince you that their invention is in fact new, and that they are just ignoring that really good piece of prior art that they conveniently forgot to bring with them?"
I didn't say they have to conclusively prove anything. They just have to convince the examiner of the improbability that anyone else has done it, with the examiner starting from the presumption that it has already been done or is obvious. For example, they could point to the existing widespread multibillion dollar market for chemical pesticides as evidence which indicates that no one has invented a sonar device that efffectively deters all insects and rodents over large land areas.
Not only are patents presumed valid when they are challenged in court, they are presumed valid even before granting, to the extent that the burden is on the patent officer to establish why it should not be granted. That is utterly ridiculous. When someone applies for a patent, they are making a blatant and sweeping claim against the whole human race; essentially, they are saying that no one else in the history of the earth has built something like it.
Strong statements like that should be backed up with extremely solid evidence. While it is not possible for an applicant to conclusively prove a negative, the burden of proof should still lie on the applicant's shoulders, forcing them to impress the patent examiners and convince them that there is a strong likelihood that they are the first one on earth to put the alleged invention together.
The desired effect could be acheived by immediately publishing the abstract of the patent (or maybe a one-sentence summary of the abstract that does not reveal too much), without the details. Then the public is allowed to build something or describe a detailed design of something that they think would implement the patent, within a specified time frame such as 60 days. If any submission is substantially similar, the patent should be rejected as being obvious -- because if it wasn't obvious no one would be able to produce something so similar so quickly without seeing the details. This way, timestamps and prior art would not matter. This would have prevented "one click shopping" or "buy it now" from being patented, because the mere words "one click shopping" or "buy it now" are enough for any decent web programmer to create a working prototype within 8 hours.
Why EJB is chosen
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Managers are seduced by the hype, and their observation that "everybody else is doing it", so they order EJB to be used in the company.
Programmers are seduced by the buzzwords, and want to be able to put EJB on their resume, so they will either actively encourage their management to choose EJB, or will use it for every imaginable task if it has already been chosen.
In reality, over 95% of EJB applications could have been developed cheaper and faster and with less bugs if they used Java without EJB. You can get scalability, clustering, and failover with servlets, without the tedium of EJB. You can get persistence with JDO or JDBC facades, with better performance and simpler than entity beans. You can get asynchronous messaging by using JMS without EJB. You can get remoteness using RMI without EJB.
But the reality doesn't matter. Both programmers and managers have been seduced by the hype and buzzwords, so EJB will live on even if it makes things ten times more difficult and expensive.
Re:EJB For Scientific Computing
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 1
"Most of the examples in the EJB books thus far focus on e-commerce uses. Has anyone had any success using EJB for large scale scientific computing?"
No. Scientists are too smart to be fooled by the buzzwords and hype that cause managers and programmers to choose EJB.
Or very very very close to 100%. If I get into an accident on a 30 mph city street I certainly don't want the box to have a glitch that could cause it to quote the 65 mph I was legitimately doing 2 minutes ago on the highway, making it seem like I was going that fast in the couple seconds before the accident.
If you don't want it to ever become public domain, you can keep it a secret and only yourself and your descendants will ever see it.
Once you release it, it now becomes a burden on society to forever force people not to reproduce the words, sounds, images, or physical constructs that they would naturally want to do and be able to do.
Second, in this day and age, nothing truly useful is developed from scratch. If you are a good author, artist, or musician, you learned from others that went before you. As a kid, your interest in learning to read and write was likely helped with public domain fairy tales and fables. If you write music or play an instrument, you almost certainly were helped by practising or being exposed to music from previous centuries. Not to mention that the form and function of instruments themselves are public domain. If you write books, your skill almost certainly benefitted from the public domain works of authors like Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Shakespeare, or your teachers did. You took from the public domain to make your creations, so eventually you should give back to it.
As far as discoveries are concerned, if you never discovered something, it is almost certain that somebody else would eventually discover it. So it would be terribly restrictive to forever stop people from creating or using something that they would have been able to find themselves if you didn't do it.
So why does the US have to match the EU instead of the other way around? If somebody is going to change to match another, why does it have to be that the change is made to match the one with the longer copyright term? If a country has a 1000 year term, does that mean the US has to have 1000 years too? The burden is at America's door, no one else. There really is no compelling reason to go for anything longer than what is provided under the Berne convention. Unless of course, you consider campaign contributions from copyright-holding corporations to be compelling reasons.
"I totally agree with you, in fact I think that we should just take all the money from society and distribute it equally to every person, regardless of contribution."
Well, what they're doing right now is taking money from society and distributing it to copyright holders (even if we aren't buying a copyrighted product - like with the tax on blank tapes), and suing people and/or threatening jail time for having certain bit patterns of music data on their hard drive, or just for reading the data they paid for in a manner that was not approved by the copyright holders. Under true capitalism and a free market, people would be free to copy and communicate whatever data they want using any method they want.
If a company has a problem with another company using their trademark for advertising, they should confront the company who bought the ad, not the media who carried it. Requiring Google to proactively compare every word against trademarks is ridiculous, and is a bad precedent that could be extended to cripple other forms of media.
There should be a law against middlemen altering content without notifying the reader of such content. Anytime this is done to a page, the page should contain a big and bold sentence warning the user that the contents have been altered from the publisher's source, or other obvious notations like "[expletive deleted]".
It's the company's network and computer, so they should be free to BLOCK any content they want, but they shouldn't be able to use that power to mislead the reader into believing the publisher was saying something that they didn't. It's fine if they want to ban me from using their phone to make personal calls; but if they allow me to make personal calls they mustn't secretly use voice processing hardware to alter the words I hear or speak.
It is a violation of free speech because it *secretly* robs the content publishers of opportunities to deliver their intended message. If they block a web site or inform the user that the content has been altered, the user still knows they can go elsewhere and access the unmodified content. But when it is altered secretly, the user is misled into believing the content had certain information, without the knowledge that they need to go elsewhere to see the real infromation.
I can smell a lawsuit from the content publishers brewing.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. (I'm assuming you're talking about mobile phones here.) Let me get this straight.
If you call somebody on your mobile phone... you pay.
If somebody calls you on your mobile phone... you pay.
If somebody using a mobile phone calls you on your mobile phone... both of you pay.
Boy, are you getting screwed!
No, I prefer it that way. When somebody needs to call me, I don't want them to hesitate or be unable to do so because they would be charged for it. It can be quite inconvenient or costly to make a for-pay call from a hotel, payphone, or business phone. Callers shouldn't have to pay for the recipient's decision to use a cellphone. And with plans that offer caller ID, first incoming minute free, and over 1000 minutes a month for less than $40, incoming calls really aren't a financial burden.
"And while I can appreciate the desire to compile everything from source, it doesn't cut it when you are managing 40 production machines, most of which have no compiler installed (for security reasons and lack of need)."
The "easy install" features are for end-users, not sysadmins. Sysadmins will still have other ways of installing to multiple machines.
What is so special about software that the legal system allows it to be simultaneously protected in three major ways - trade secrets, patents, *and* copyright?
You can patent software without supplying the source code to the public or the patent office, so it gets patented yet remains a trade secret. On top of that, copyright gives it the life+70 years protection.
Other creations are only allowed to simultaneously use one out of the three protections, maybe two in a few cases. But it is ridiculous that software is given the three-pronged protection when it needs it less than most other fields.
http://www.hop-on.com/technology.html
"Hop-on has secured multiple disposable-cell-phone patents from the STX patent collection. These patents have an effective filing date back to December 1995, which we believe predates all other patents directed to disposable cell phone technology. These patents include very broad claims directed to a method of operating a disposable cell phone with pre-programmed minutes.The patents further strengthen our competitive advantage, barring entry into the market by other companies."
I just hope they haven't actually patented the very concept of a disposable cell phone. The part about "very broad claims" disturbs me.
"Whay planet are you living on? So, if I write a one hit song/write one bestsellet I can go on tour for a few months and that compensates me for the rest of my life?"
Whatever you made on tour will dwarf the song sales. A platinum single will net you less than $250K in your pocket, but if you tour during the time your one-hit is up on the charts you can make more than that in a month.
They need to focus first on getting a permanent ban on data transfer taxes, i.e. taxing based on units such as megabytes transferred. Then once that is done, tbey can haggle over the other details. A bit tax would be the most destructive thing for the Internet in the USA.
When private parties such as web hosting services charge for bandwidth used, competitive pressures and improved technology make them charge less per megabyte as the years pass on. But whatever tax rate a government sets on bandwith usage, even if it is reasonable at first, within a few years it could become ridiculously exhorbitant as broadband and bandwith-heavy uses of the Internet become more commonplace. You may be able to afford to download a 650MB ISO today, but forget about downloading Linux in 2010 when it occupies a 50GB super-duper DVD.
If copyright only protected performance rights and not reproduction of recorded material, artists would not be hurt very much if at all.
That's because artists make the vast majority of their money from performing, merchandise, and endorsements, not from album sales. That holds true regardless of whether they are a local band that plays for $100/night or a double-platinum superstar. $1/CD isn't very much, especially after it gets split between band members, managers, and other interested parties. Britney Spears couldn't make anywhere near her $40+ million in a year just from album sales, and the local band would probably be among the many bands who lose money when they cut an album with a major label.
With recorded music being freely distributable, artists would [b]encourage[/b] people to put the music on P2P and burn CDs for their friends. Albums would serve as promotion material to attract people to buy concert tickets, T-shirts, autographed albums, etc., and the increased exposure would make up for most or all of whatever they would have earned from selling CDs.
Of course, the middlemen who eat up the other $17 out of the $18 per CD are the ones who would really hurt if all music CDs became freely copyable.
Unfortunately, just one or two artists deciding to allow free copying of their own music wouldn't help the situation much, because the RIAA still has so much control over the promotion and distribution channels. The whole system would have to be freed up in this manner for the artists to reap the benefits of the increased exposure that unrestricted copying would bring.
"Without copyright I, as a painter, could post images on a message board and some 15 year old could rip it off and win some art contest with it (ok, so this has happened anyways.)"
That is plagiarism, and copyright isn't needed to protect against that. If that 15 year old copied a 200-year-old painting (i.e. copyright no longer applies), pretending it was original, he would be kicked out of the contest if the organizers were told the truth. Anybody is free to copy art, music or novels that are no longer copyrighted, but they still can't legitimately claim to be the creator.
With no encryption, I'm not sure that distributing hacks to disable the flag would qualify as a DMCA violation... that's the interesting question."
It wouldn't be a DMCA violation. It would be a violation of this new law.
Laws for sale! Laws for sale! No sales tax! 15% discount if you're headquartered in Texas, Southern California, or Redmond! Come on down and buy yourself a law while the going's good!
Know about any other books or downloadable papers that provide an introduction to the theory behind rules engines and/or the Rete algorithm? I haven't been able to find anything useful on the web. Any search turns up sites hyping their own product.
In Soviet Russia, YOU send email scams to Nigeria!
"Most ideas will seem obvious when you hear them, but that is not the test that is used to decide whether a patent is granted or not."
There is a difference between sounding obvious after I only hear the the goal the item accomplishes, vs. sounding obvious after seeing all the details of the solution. If a simple phrase that describes the concept of the alleged invention is sufficient for a practitioner in the art to build a working implementation in a short time without seeing any of the details, then yes, it is bloody obvious and not worth of the high standard that patents should be (but aren't) held up to.
In addition to the USPTO being given deterrents against granting bad patents, applicants should be given deterrents against filing frivilous patents in the first place, in order to reduce the workload on the patent office and give them time to properly evaluate the genuine candidates.
Patent holders should be fined if a patent is overturned, perhaps with a fine proportional to the license fees they have extracted. To be fair, they should also be given the opportunity to voluntarily withdraw a patent at any time before a challenge without being liable for any penalty.
"The applicant has way to much interest in failing to prove that it has been done for this system to work, and since they can not conclusively prove that it has never been done I really don't see how this would work at all.
What amount of evidence on the applicants part would convince you that their invention is in fact new, and that they are just ignoring that really good piece of prior art that they conveniently forgot to bring with them?"
I didn't say they have to conclusively prove anything. They just have to convince the examiner of the improbability that anyone else has done it, with the examiner starting from the presumption that it has already been done or is obvious. For example, they could point to the existing widespread multibillion dollar market for chemical pesticides as evidence which indicates that no one has invented a sonar device that efffectively deters all insects and rodents over large land areas.
Not only are patents presumed valid when they are challenged in court, they are presumed valid even before granting, to the extent that the burden is on the patent officer to establish why it should not be granted. That is utterly ridiculous. When someone applies for a patent, they are making a blatant and sweeping claim against the whole human race; essentially, they are saying that no one else in the history of the earth has built something like it.
Strong statements like that should be backed up with extremely solid evidence. While it is not possible for an applicant to conclusively prove a negative, the burden of proof should still lie on the applicant's shoulders, forcing them to impress the patent examiners and convince them that there is a strong likelihood that they are the first one on earth to put the alleged invention together.
The desired effect could be acheived by immediately publishing the abstract of the patent (or maybe a one-sentence summary of the abstract that does not reveal too much), without the details. Then the public is allowed to build something or describe a detailed design of something that they think would implement the patent, within a specified time frame such as 60 days. If any submission is substantially similar, the patent should be rejected as being obvious -- because if it wasn't obvious no one would be able to produce something so similar so quickly without seeing the details. This way, timestamps and prior art would not matter. This would have prevented "one click shopping" or "buy it now" from being patented, because the mere words "one click shopping" or "buy it now" are enough for any decent web programmer to create a working prototype within 8 hours.
Managers are seduced by the hype, and their observation that "everybody else is doing it", so they order EJB to be used in the company.
Programmers are seduced by the buzzwords, and want to be able to put EJB on their resume, so they will either actively encourage their management to choose EJB, or will use it for every imaginable task if it has already been chosen.
In reality, over 95% of EJB applications could have been developed cheaper and faster and with less bugs if they used Java without EJB. You can get scalability, clustering, and failover with servlets, without the tedium of EJB. You can get persistence with JDO or JDBC facades, with better performance and simpler than entity beans. You can get asynchronous messaging by using JMS without EJB. You can get remoteness using RMI without EJB.
But the reality doesn't matter. Both programmers and managers have been seduced by the hype and buzzwords, so EJB will live on even if it makes things ten times more difficult and expensive.
"Most of the examples in the EJB books thus far focus on e-commerce uses. Has anyone had any success using EJB for large scale scientific computing?"
No. Scientists are too smart to be fooled by the buzzwords and hype that cause managers and programmers to choose EJB.
Or very very very close to 100%. If I get into an accident on a 30 mph city street I certainly don't want the box to have a glitch that could cause it to quote the 65 mph I was legitimately doing 2 minutes ago on the highway, making it seem like I was going that fast in the couple seconds before the accident.
If you don't want it to ever become public domain, you can keep it a secret and only yourself and your descendants will ever see it.
Once you release it, it now becomes a burden on society to forever force people not to reproduce the words, sounds, images, or physical constructs that they would naturally want to do and be able to do.
Second, in this day and age, nothing truly useful is developed from scratch. If you are a good author, artist, or musician, you learned from others that went before you. As a kid, your interest in learning to read and write was likely helped with public domain fairy tales and fables. If you write music or play an instrument, you almost certainly were helped by practising or being exposed to music from previous centuries. Not to mention that the form and function of instruments themselves are public domain. If you write books, your skill almost certainly benefitted from the public domain works of authors like Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Shakespeare, or your teachers did. You took from the public domain to make your creations, so eventually you should give back to it.
As far as discoveries are concerned, if you never discovered something, it is almost certain that somebody else would eventually discover it. So it would be terribly restrictive to forever stop people from creating or using something that they would have been able to find themselves if you didn't do it.
So why does the US have to match the EU instead of the other way around? If somebody is going to change to match another, why does it have to be that the change is made to match the one with the longer copyright term? If a country has a 1000 year term, does that mean the US has to have 1000 years too? The burden is at America's door, no one else. There really is no compelling reason to go for anything longer than what is provided under the Berne convention. Unless of course, you consider campaign contributions from copyright-holding corporations to be compelling reasons.
"I totally agree with you, in fact I think that we should just take all the money from society and distribute it equally to every person, regardless of contribution."
Well, what they're doing right now is taking money from society and distributing it to copyright holders (even if we aren't buying a copyrighted product - like with the tax on blank tapes), and suing people and/or threatening jail time for having certain bit patterns of music data on their hard drive, or just for reading the data they paid for in a manner that was not approved by the copyright holders. Under true capitalism and a free market, people would be free to copy and communicate whatever data they want using any method they want.
If a company has a problem with another company using their trademark for advertising, they should confront the company who bought the ad, not the media who carried it. Requiring Google to proactively compare every word against trademarks is ridiculous, and is a bad precedent that could be extended to cripple other forms of media.
There should be a law against middlemen altering content without notifying the reader of such content. Anytime this is done to a page, the page should contain a big and bold sentence warning the user that the contents have been altered from the publisher's source, or other obvious notations like "[expletive deleted]".
It's the company's network and computer, so they should be free to BLOCK any content they want, but they shouldn't be able to use that power to mislead the reader into believing the publisher was saying something that they didn't. It's fine if they want to ban me from using their phone to make personal calls; but if they allow me to make personal calls they mustn't secretly use voice processing hardware to alter the words I hear or speak.
It is a violation of free speech because it *secretly* robs the content publishers of opportunities to deliver their intended message. If they block a web site or inform the user that the content has been altered, the user still knows they can go elsewhere and access the unmodified content. But when it is altered secretly, the user is misled into believing the content had certain information, without the knowledge that they need to go elsewhere to see the real infromation.
I can smell a lawsuit from the content publishers brewing.