"This assumes that the 'good guys' will discover the holes before the 'bad guys' do."
That's what beta releases and pilot runs are for. Open the code to scrutiny before it is used for anything that matters, so that whatever the bad guys find won't cause harm, and whatever the good guys find can be fixed before the production release.
There is still an assumption though -- that the good guys will find all that the bad guys found (who finds it first doesn't matter, as long as it is found before the live release). But that assumption is safer than expecting bad guys to not find the holes just because the code wasn't open. The bad guys' advantage is increased with closed source, because good guys don't want to waste time trying all sorts of random attacks.
"Open Source says what I develop belongs to the greater community. I have no problems with open source, but it is communism."
There is still a big difference between open source and communism. With communism you have no choice; anything you build belongs to the community whether you like it or not, unless you get their explicit permission to keep it for yourself. With open source, it is the other way around, and you aren't forced by law to release anything you create under an open source license.
It would be even more economically inefficient if reverse engineering were illegal. The reduced competition would increase monopoly powers, and monopolists are very economically inefficient.
"As the article pointed out, the plaintiff is very sympathetic in this case (just like in the McDonald's spilled hot coffee case)."
Exactly, which is a big problem in the justice system. If it was a 230-lb muscular construction worker who spilled coffee on himself, he wouldn't have won a damn thing. But they felt sorry for the little old lady, so she won the case and a large monetary award.
I thought copyright only protected the embodiments and expressions of ideas, and not the ideas themselves. Didn't the Supreme Court specifically state that in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case?
So id should sue all first-person shooters even though they wrote their own separate 3D engine? And Marvel should be able to legitimately sue anybody who writes a story about a man who becomes purple and muscular when he is happy? Ridiculous. Copyright was not meant to protect all likenesses and concepts of a work.
"On April 11, 2002, ABC's popular TV drama The Practice drew a TiVo rating of 8.9, meaning 8.9% of TiVo owners watched the show live or recorded it and watched it later. But those viewers watched just 30% of the ads shown. Meanwhile, quiz show The Weakest Link, drew a rating of 0.9, but viewers watched 78% of the commercials. TV news magazine 60 Minutes got only a 2.2 rating, but its viewers sat through 73% of the ads."
Even though the percentage of ads skipped increases with the popularity of the show, the popular shows still get more ads played through overall.
With the 8.9 show above, 30% of that show's viewers played the ads, which means those ads were played through by 30% of 8.9% = 2.67% of viewers. With the 0.9 show, 78% of its viewers played the ads, and 78% of 0.9% = 0.702% overall. So the ads that air with the most popular shows still get the most eyeballs, despite the inverse relationship mentioned in the article.
"The trouble with this approach to business is that it causes businesses to converge on the same thing - Hey, the restaurant next door is now selling tacos as well as burgers! We need to sell tacos too, only, erm, bigger ones!"
So true. Management fads rule today's business world. 5 years ago some companies started spending millions in attempts to make money on the Internet, so everybody else followed. Then the bubble burst and the profits didn't materialize for most of them, so they laid off like crazy.
The upsurge in offshore outsourcing is another symptom of the copycat mentality. 5 years ago, hiring American developers was more expensive, Indian programmers cost half as much, and the US dollar was stronger. If they were genuinely concerned about cost savings, why didn't they outsource more back then instead of paying $80K for a kid who knows HTML and can spell "Java"? Everybody else back then was hiring like crazy, so they did it too (even though it didn't help profits), and now that everybody else is outsourcing they have to follow too even though the prospects for real savings are iffy.
The point is not to make spamming impossible, it is to make it expensive enough that it becomes unprofitable for the majority of them.
Retrying would mean their systems have to remember what they sent originally, and use additional bandwidth to send it again. The process of retrying would also make the spammer become identified and blacklisted more readily. Those factors together would dramatically increase the average cost per successfully delivered message, to the point that most will find spamming unprofitable.
For a company to agree to a ridiculous deadline because the client delayed the startup date, shows that the company is desperate for projects and the management is easily bullied by clients. Sometimes you have to make certain compromises, but you don't last long in this business if your clients can bully you like that.
If a client insisted to IBM or EDS that they must have the project finished by the same fixed date after the client delayed it, they (the client) would get the contract shoved up their ass.
Tell them to put the request to work 12/7 for however many months in writing.
Then don't work all those extra hours - work 12/5 or 10/6 and let them fire you if they want. Then if they fire you for not doing 12/7, sue their ass for wrongful termination and for the unpaid overtime you did so far. As an exempt employee, they are not supposed to be counting your hours and penalizing you for going below a ridiculously high amount.
The senior management of SCO should be criminally prosecuted for extortion and fraud. Too bad the US legal system has no effective penalties to discourage fraudulent lawsuits and baseless litiguous coercion... because if it did, that would mean less work for lawyers, and we can't allow that to happen now, can we?
"The union ideal has its merits but one major flaw. Unions do not account for skill. They presume all members once achieving the working levels are equally skilled."
Nonsense. A union is what its members make it. The NBA has a players' union, but the top players make over 50 times the lowest-paid players.
They don't let us see the EULA until after we purchase the product, so we don't have to let them to see the EVLA until after purchase either.
Just write up your own EVLA and mail it to them, remembering to include the following:
If you do not accept the terms of this agreement, you have 14 days to reimburse the purchase price plus sales taxes and the software product will be returned to you. Failure to return the money within 14 days indicates acceptance of the agreement, which supercedes all End User Licensing Agreements past, present or future.
Then if the manufacturer ever gets around to replying to you, tell them you are not responsible for returning the product; the store where you bought it will send them one. Or if the store contacts you, direct them to the manufacturer.
My problem with this is that it rotates so fast, that I can't figure out what the effect of a rotation is supposed to be. The speed also makes learning by observing it solving itself useless... just some flashes and 0.25 seconds later it's done. Any way to slow it down?
"I am an intellectual property owner. Would anyone care to explain why I can spend six years working my butt off on a technological creation, and I get rights to it for 20 years, paying fees every few years, but Andrew Lloyd Weber can hold the rights to "Cats" until the end of time?"
There is a significant difference between the type of intellectual property in creative works such as books and music, when compared to technological works protected by patents. With books and artistic works, there is an infinitisemal chance that someone else would have ever created the same or substantially similar work. But with patented inventions, if one particular inventor didn't create it, some years later somebody else would. Certainly the light bulb would have been invented by now if Edison didn't do it. However, if Michael Jackson didn't do Thriller and Shakespeare didn't do Hamlet, nobody else would have done them. Others would have written similar themes or general subject matter, but not the same actual content.
By giving patents a protection period as long as copyrights, they would be unfairly preventing too many others from creating what they could have done without any knowledge gained from the original inventor. But copyrights don't prevent others from creating what they would have created independently.
Still, I don't think it does any good to make copyrights last longer than 20 years.
"It's illegal to sell them, and for a good reason. They don't provide any Canadian content and they don't provide Canadian commercials."
So what? There are thousands of other products brought into Canada that don't have any Canadian content, so why should DirecTV be singled out? Plus, I would expect that if DirecTV could legally sell their services in Canada, they'd gladly enable Canadian companies to pay for commercials and include local Canadian channels (like they carry local channels for many US cities).
I am not the type to watch a movie in the first couple of weeks, so when I do get around to seeing one, the place is usually over 60% empty, sometimes even 90%. Dynamic pricing would allow them to fill seats when movies are no longer "hot", while still charging a fairly high price for first-week blockbusters.
It really makes no sense that all movies at a given cinema are for the same price, whether it is an opening day blockbuster or a mediocre film in its last week. It is nothing but price-fixing by the motion picture cartels that causes ticket prices to defy the laws of supply and demand.
This one guy's mistake is that he could increase his profits by selling popcorn and other food and beverages, given that the lower ticket prices would increase the number of people and the amount they are willing to spend on refreshments. Concession stands are profit centers, not costs to be minimized.
Re:stun guns are not that effective
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 1
"You have a gun, I have a gun, everyone around you has a gun. Are you going to pull a gun on me?"
Gangstas carry guns, and they know that everybody in the rival gangs also carry guns, but they still frequently pull their guns on each other and shoot.
So now somebody can patent a spam-blocking technique, then bombard you with spam which you can't legally stop because they have patented spam blocking. Then a virus creator will patent virus detection and removal, so you can't legally eliminate their viruses. And they can do the same thing with ad blocking, firewalls, and the list goes on.
The evils brought on society by software patents far outweigh the good brought by the 1% of useful software patents.
HTML is just a document format, not a programming language.
Too many have called themselves "web programmers" when all they know is how to create HTML documents. The dotcom hype tolerated that, but in today's world HTML does not a programmer make.
Those sidebars that don't change when you navigate from page to page are basically just server-side includes. I believe that was around even before Netscape 2 and frames.
The main purpose of patents is to promote the creation of inventions, not to guarantee profit for the inventors. Any reward to the inventor is just a means to an end.
If the patent from your own country was sufficient to urge you to create the invention, you need no further incentive -- it has already been created.
The only question is whether there are uncreated inventions lurking out there that would be created if and only if global patents exist. I doubt there are a sufficient number of those to justify the harm to society that erroneously awarded global patents would bring (a bogus global patent would have far worse effects than a bogus patent restricted to one country).
Slashdot Mirror
"This assumes that the 'good guys' will discover the holes before the 'bad guys' do."
That's what beta releases and pilot runs are for. Open the code to scrutiny before it is used for anything that matters, so that whatever the bad guys find won't cause harm, and whatever the good guys find can be fixed before the production release.
There is still an assumption though -- that the good guys will find all that the bad guys found (who finds it first doesn't matter, as long as it is found before the live release). But that assumption is safer than expecting bad guys to not find the holes just because the code wasn't open. The bad guys' advantage is increased with closed source, because good guys don't want to waste time trying all sorts of random attacks.
"Open Source says what I develop belongs to the greater community. I have no problems with open source, but it is communism."
There is still a big difference between open source and communism. With communism you have no choice; anything you build belongs to the community whether you like it or not, unless you get their explicit permission to keep it for yourself. With open source, it is the other way around, and you aren't forced by law to release anything you create under an open source license.
It would be even more economically inefficient if reverse engineering were illegal. The reduced competition would increase monopoly powers, and monopolists are very economically inefficient.
"As the article pointed out, the plaintiff is very sympathetic in this case (just like in the McDonald's spilled hot coffee case)."
Exactly, which is a big problem in the justice system. If it was a 230-lb muscular construction worker who spilled coffee on himself, he wouldn't have won a damn thing. But they felt sorry for the little old lady, so she won the case and a large monetary award.
I thought copyright only protected the embodiments and expressions of ideas, and not the ideas themselves. Didn't the Supreme Court specifically state that in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case?
So id should sue all first-person shooters even though they wrote their own separate 3D engine? And Marvel should be able to legitimately sue anybody who writes a story about a man who becomes purple and muscular when he is happy? Ridiculous. Copyright was not meant to protect all likenesses and concepts of a work.
"On April 11, 2002, ABC's popular TV drama The Practice drew a TiVo rating of 8.9, meaning 8.9% of TiVo owners watched the show live or recorded it and watched it later. But those viewers watched just 30% of the ads shown. Meanwhile, quiz show The Weakest Link, drew a rating of 0.9, but viewers watched 78% of the commercials. TV news magazine 60 Minutes got only a 2.2 rating, but its viewers sat through 73% of the ads."
Even though the percentage of ads skipped increases with the popularity of the show, the popular shows still get more ads played through overall.
With the 8.9 show above, 30% of that show's viewers played the ads, which means those ads were played through by 30% of 8.9% = 2.67% of viewers. With the 0.9 show, 78% of its viewers played the ads, and 78% of 0.9% = 0.702% overall. So the ads that air with the most popular shows still get the most eyeballs, despite the inverse relationship mentioned in the article.
"The trouble with this approach to business is that it causes businesses to converge on the same thing - Hey, the restaurant next door is now selling tacos as well as burgers! We need to sell tacos too, only, erm, bigger ones!"
So true. Management fads rule today's business world. 5 years ago some companies started spending millions in attempts to make money on the Internet, so everybody else followed. Then the bubble burst and the profits didn't materialize for most of them, so they laid off like crazy.
The upsurge in offshore outsourcing is another symptom of the copycat mentality. 5 years ago, hiring American developers was more expensive, Indian programmers cost half as much, and the US dollar was stronger. If they were genuinely concerned about cost savings, why didn't they outsource more back then instead of paying $80K for a kid who knows HTML and can spell "Java"? Everybody else back then was hiring like crazy, so they did it too (even though it didn't help profits), and now that everybody else is outsourcing they have to follow too even though the prospects for real savings are iffy.
They should have used one of the top 500 to host the list of the top 500!
The point is not to make spamming impossible, it is to make it expensive enough that it becomes unprofitable for the majority of them.
Retrying would mean their systems have to remember what they sent originally, and use additional bandwidth to send it again. The process of retrying would also make the spammer become identified and blacklisted more readily. Those factors together would dramatically increase the average cost per successfully delivered message, to the point that most will find spamming unprofitable.
For a company to agree to a ridiculous deadline because the client delayed the startup date, shows that the company is desperate for projects and the management is easily bullied by clients. Sometimes you have to make certain compromises, but you don't last long in this business if your clients can bully you like that.
If a client insisted to IBM or EDS that they must have the project finished by the same fixed date after the client delayed it, they (the client) would get the contract shoved up their ass.
Tell them to put the request to work 12/7 for however many months in writing.
Then don't work all those extra hours - work 12/5 or 10/6 and let them fire you if they want. Then if they fire you for not doing 12/7, sue their ass for wrongful termination and for the unpaid overtime you did so far. As an exempt employee, they are not supposed to be counting your hours and penalizing you for going below a ridiculously high amount.
The senior management of SCO should be criminally prosecuted for extortion and fraud. Too bad the US legal system has no effective penalties to discourage fraudulent lawsuits and baseless litiguous coercion ... because if it did, that would mean less work for lawyers, and we can't allow that to happen now, can we?
"The union ideal has its merits but one major flaw. Unions do not account for skill. They presume all members once achieving the working levels are equally skilled."
Nonsense. A union is what its members make it. The NBA has a players' union, but the top players make over 50 times the lowest-paid players.
They don't let us see the EULA until after we purchase the product, so we don't have to let them to see the EVLA until after purchase either.
Just write up your own EVLA and mail it to them, remembering to include the following:
If you do not accept the terms of this agreement, you have 14 days to reimburse the purchase price plus sales taxes and the software product will be returned to you. Failure to return the money within 14 days indicates acceptance of the agreement, which supercedes all End User Licensing Agreements past, present or future.
Then if the manufacturer ever gets around to replying to you, tell them you are not responsible for returning the product; the store where you bought it will send them one. Or if the store contacts you, direct them to the manufacturer.
My problem with this is that it rotates so fast, that I can't figure out what the effect of a rotation is supposed to be. The speed also makes learning by observing it solving itself useless ... just some flashes and 0.25 seconds later it's done. Any way to slow it down?
"I am an intellectual property owner. Would anyone care to explain why I can spend six years working my butt off on a technological creation, and I get rights to it for 20 years, paying fees every few years, but Andrew Lloyd Weber can hold the rights to "Cats" until the end of time?"
There is a significant difference between the type of intellectual property in creative works such as books and music, when compared to technological works protected by patents. With books and artistic works, there is an infinitisemal chance that someone else would have ever created the same or substantially similar work. But with patented inventions, if one particular inventor didn't create it, some years later somebody else would. Certainly the light bulb would have been invented by now if Edison didn't do it. However, if Michael Jackson didn't do Thriller and Shakespeare didn't do Hamlet, nobody else would have done them. Others would have written similar themes or general subject matter, but not the same actual content.
By giving patents a protection period as long as copyrights, they would be unfairly preventing too many others from creating what they could have done without any knowledge gained from the original inventor. But copyrights don't prevent others from creating what they would have created independently.
Still, I don't think it does any good to make copyrights last longer than 20 years.
"It's illegal to sell them, and for a good reason. They don't provide any Canadian content and they don't provide Canadian commercials."
So what? There are thousands of other products brought into Canada that don't have any Canadian content, so why should DirecTV be singled out? Plus, I would expect that if DirecTV could legally sell their services in Canada, they'd gladly enable Canadian companies to pay for commercials and include local Canadian channels (like they carry local channels for many US cities).
I am not the type to watch a movie in the first couple of weeks, so when I do get around to seeing one, the place is usually over 60% empty, sometimes even 90%. Dynamic pricing would allow them to fill seats when movies are no longer "hot", while still charging a fairly high price for first-week blockbusters.
It really makes no sense that all movies at a given cinema are for the same price, whether it is an opening day blockbuster or a mediocre film in its last week. It is nothing but price-fixing by the motion picture cartels that causes ticket prices to defy the laws of supply and demand.
This one guy's mistake is that he could increase his profits by selling popcorn and other food and beverages, given that the lower ticket prices would increase the number of people and the amount they are willing to spend on refreshments. Concession stands are profit centers, not costs to be minimized.
"You have a gun, I have a gun, everyone around you has a gun. Are you going to pull a gun on me?"
Gangstas carry guns, and they know that everybody in the rival gangs also carry guns, but they still frequently pull their guns on each other and shoot.
"Because I am not really a much at calculus, which is necessary if you want to be really good at Computer Science."
Calculus is generally important only if you're programming something like sophisticated graphics or simulations.
Discrete mathematics is needed much more than Calculus.
So now somebody can patent a spam-blocking technique, then bombard you with spam which you can't legally stop because they have patented spam blocking. Then a virus creator will patent virus detection and removal, so you can't legally eliminate their viruses. And they can do the same thing with ad blocking, firewalls, and the list goes on.
The evils brought on society by software patents far outweigh the good brought by the 1% of useful software patents.
HTML is just a document format, not a programming language.
Too many have called themselves "web programmers" when all they know is how to create HTML documents. The dotcom hype tolerated that, but in today's world HTML does not a programmer make.
You don't need to specifically put "input type crash", as something like this also crashes IE:
<html>
<form>
<input type abc123>
</form>
</html>
Those sidebars that don't change when you navigate from page to page are basically just server-side includes. I believe that was around even before Netscape 2 and frames.
The main purpose of patents is to promote the creation of inventions, not to guarantee profit for the inventors. Any reward to the inventor is just a means to an end.
If the patent from your own country was sufficient to urge you to create the invention, you need no further incentive -- it has already been created.
The only question is whether there are uncreated inventions lurking out there that would be created if and only if global patents exist. I doubt there are a sufficient number of those to justify the harm to society that erroneously awarded global patents would bring (a bogus global patent would have far worse effects than a bogus patent restricted to one country).