How are they supposed to know that it is "existing"?
If I am writing a program and grab a library to link against to gain some functionality that I don't want to implement myself, then I should research the patent licensing issues surrounding it.
I know how the rules are implemented, I'm just saying what I think makes sense. Seriously, how can you call an idea original if multiple people come up with the same thing on their own, with no knowledge of each other?
Why not limit the life of the patent to letting the inventor recoup development costs? Once that has happened, no more patent, level playing field for free market competition. And seriously, making the patent holder solely responsible for finding people using their patents? That's not a good idea. It will mean the small independent inventors will lose out on royalties because they don't have the resources to both watch for potential infringements and manage their business. Anybody who decides to use an existing technology should do their due diligence to research patent history for that technology.
Independent invention is neither a license nor a defence.
If multiple independent parties are inventing the same thing over and over without prior knowledge of the existing work, then it's just not a novel invention, and doesn't deserve a patent.
The other point is that people who try to tell you that CD prices haven't gone down are, quite simply, lying to you.
They haven't gone down anywhere near as much as the cost to produce them has. I would venture a guess that the profit margins are as good or better than they were 20 years ago.
There was talk that Google would allow open server-to-server XMPP chat, and they have. You can add users from non-Google jabber servers to you contact list (provided they have the right DNS records and their server allows s2s). Integration with AIM should be coming soon. But I haven't heard anything about Yahoo or MSN.
Okay, I really want to hear your opinion on these illegal wiretaps.
From what I understand, they are only monitoring phone calls that come in from overseas and are from KNOWN parties of interest. The governement CAN NOT tap calls made from the US to other countries (not totally clear on this) or calls that remain within the US without a court order.
They're doing it without oversight. If the person being tapped is of known interest, they must have evidence already. So bring it to a judge and get a warrant.
wjhy wold they ? they are busy selling the frequency analysis of your IMs to advertoisers and rsearchers
They run the server, they can snoop even if their client allowed SSL/TLS connections. In fact, I believe using SSL/TLS is required for any 3rd party client to connect, so the server already supports it. The data is decrypted when it reaches the server, and reencrypted before leaving the server if the recipient is using SSL/TLS. The purpose of SSL/TLS is not to keep google from having read access, it's to prevent someone between you and google from snooping. As long as they control the server, I don't see any reason to attempt to encrypt things so they can't read it. If they wanted to they could log all your packets and run a distributed brute force on their 10k+ node cluster. The only way I would feel secure is to use signed and encrypted OTR messaging on a server I control.
Perhaps this also means they will port apps like gtalk and picasa to linux, albeit just to goobuntu. Although I'd probably still use kopete or gaim, since gtalk doesn't do any session encryption with the native client (plese join me in submitting feature requests and bug reports for every release of gtalk so that they'll consider adding it)
You can't honestly say you've really used Linux until you've sucessfully compiled your own kernel.
I've compiled many kernels, I even compiled my own kernel for a beowful cluster I built at IAT. But building custom kernels packagable by the distribution you're running seems to have become more complicated in the last 2 years. I've been quite happy with the default power management available in Ubuntu (suspend and hibernate work just dandy on my laptop!) so I haven't taken the time to figure out how the distro maintainers want you to do it these days.
Does that mean there will finally be suspend/hibernate built in the default fedora kernels? I switched to Ubuntu around FC2 because they wouldn't add any patches like swsusp2 or DSDT-in-initrd, and I just couldn't get a funcitoning custom compiled kernel.
In the RSA case, there is no development cost, it's just a sheer brilliance of the algorithm creators.
If there's truly no development cost, then what do you need to recoup? If you don't want to make the information public (which you have to do for a patent), then don't. Keep the information secret, and implement it in only the most obfuscated way you can imagine. But then you don't get a monopoly. You only get the monopoly in exchange for making the information public, so that other people can build on your idea after you've recouped your costs.
Unlike code writing monkeys, real software engineers need software patents to protect some original algorithm ideas from "clean room" re-implementation by free-riding bastards.
You aren't patenting code, you're patenting the algorithm. You then have a brief monopoly to recoup your development costs, then the algorithm becomes public domain, and anyone can implement it with whatever code they want, but the code itself is protected by copyright (which should also only last long enough to recoup development costs, and then be given to public domain). If you don't want the monopoly to recoup your costs, you don't get a patent or the copyright and instead rely on keeping it secret.
You would be able to show you made an effort to produce and distribute your invention, but were unable to due to lack of funds.
At which point you'd be stuck under the current system again, where you can claim you went to company A, they denied you, and sue company B. Of course, it just so happens that company A is a "friend" of yours, and a portion exists only to deny licensing of your patents.
Huh? You went to company A to manufacture the product, they turn you down, they steal the invention, you sue company A. Where did company B come from in this? When you get to court, it's pretty obvious you were trying to comply with the patent requirements and that company A stole your idea.
Besides, you wouldn't try to license the patent to a manufacturer, you would go to a venture capital firm and give them a portion of your profits in return for the money to manufacture and distribute the invention.
Why not? Lets say I develope a new toy, colored bubbles, where the bubbles blown are blue. Why not go to an existing coporotation, say Hasbro, who already has all the equipment necessary to mass market and mass produce the product? Why would I want to have to create the entire manufacturing line from scratch when I can go to another company and have them do it?
I was just saying that you have options to get it built. Most people get funding, and find a manufacturer, then get sales contracts with retailers. And I don't see what's novel about your example, given the limited description, I wouldn't say it deserves a patent.
So, what if I develope something or work it out. However, I can't mass produce it myself. So I goto a company to try to license my idea. They refuse, but start to manufacture it on their own. If I try to sue them, they can point to the court that I am not making anything with it and get the patent invalidated. Thus, while I came up with something, I still lose out on it.
You would be able to show you made an effort to produce and distribute your invention, but were unable to due to lack of funds. Besides, you wouldn't try to license the patent to a manufacturer, you would go to a venture capital firm and give them a portion of your profits in return for the money to manufacture and distribute the invention.
Think of Linux? Did investors need to pony up 500 million in R&D for soneone to roll their own OS. NO.
Bad example, Linux is a clean implementation of Unix, which is covered by copyrights. Software has no place in the patent world, software is written, therefor it is covered by copyright.
The fact that people need that kind of dough for that kind of research is another symptom of the patent system going out of controll.
And what if you want to do physics research in need of a particle accelerator? Are you going rent some time from the one at the corner store with money saved from your paper route? And if you have the money to build one, are you really going to do so when the 15 year old down the street can fund his own effort to take the end result and undercut you by getting a paper route? It makes sense to give people a monopoly on truly unique inventions they intend to build and sell to let them recoup their costs, and then open it up to free market competition. Once it's in the public domain, everyone can collaborate for free. Until then, the people with huge piles of cash can do really interesting things knowing they'll get a return on the investment.
Re:Patnets brought to their logical conclusion
on
Supreme Court spurns RIM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The reward for the effort of inventing your machine is not having snow on your driveway, and having the satisfaction that you made something usefull,
Not if the whole point of inventing the machine was to sell it for profit.
and maybe even a "first mover" advantage if you run a company
If you go bankrupt because your neighbor watches you from his window and then sells an identical device for 1/2 the cost, that first mover advantage doesn't mean anything, and would very likely be an advantage of less than one day.
Not a global monopoly who locks everyone else out
That's not the purpose of a patent. The purpose is to convince the guy in his garage that he will be able to recoup the R&D costs, so that he will share it with the public. Patents were supposed to be reasonably short lived, so that an inventor would actually have to keep inventing to make a living from it.
It's not "protection", because in a patent free world you are more free to copy and improve on other inventions too. In a patent world, big companies have more resources to lock you out, then you have to lock them out, it'd be foolish to believe otherwise.
You're far too naieve about the honesty and ethics of corporate executives. The problem isn't the institution of patents, it's the implementation. The two problems are the length of patents, and the lax attitude that patent examiners have for granting patents. A patent should be difficult to get, only for something truly new and unique and very specific. Not for adding "on the internet" to a business method that's been in use for decades. You should also be required to actually build and distribute the invention. Also, if patents were only valid up until the point where the inventor had recouped their documented R&D costs, that would alleviate most of the problems.
Take pharmaceuticals as an example industry. The medicines developped are necessary and beneficial to the public interest. They take billions of dollars to develop. Who's going to pay for that if they can't recoup the costs? It would have to be a government subsidized program. I don't believe socialized medical research produces the same quality as what we get with private industry. So you offer a limited monopoly to recoup the costs, and once that has happened the information becomes public domain and everybody gets the benefit not only the medecines, but the reduced cost resulting from a competetive free market.
Make no mistake, I'm not saying what we currently have in place for patents is a good system. But it could be with some significant changes.
Does Google's client support TLS yet? Every version I've tested (with ethereal, on computers both with and without firewalls/antivirus) doesn't do any encryption (either that or ethereal can magically decrypt gtalk but not gaim). I've posted on the groups and sent bug reports, and it just doesn't seem to get fixed. It surprises me because it seems every third party client will only connect if TLS or SSL is enabled.
I believe Office for Mac OS is probably their single highest margin product. You get Office much cheaper bundled with a Windows PC or corporate/educational bulk licensing. I would be surprised if Office for Mac OS made up less than 75% of the retail boxed copies of Office sold (I'm counting the copies you can buy from Apple when you buy a Mac, because it isn't any cheaper that way like it is when you buy it OEM with a Windows PC).
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If I am writing a program and grab a library to link against to gain some functionality that I don't want to implement myself, then I should research the patent licensing issues surrounding it.
I know how the rules are implemented, I'm just saying what I think makes sense. Seriously, how can you call an idea original if multiple people come up with the same thing on their own, with no knowledge of each other?
Why not limit the life of the patent to letting the inventor recoup development costs? Once that has happened, no more patent, level playing field for free market competition. And seriously, making the patent holder solely responsible for finding people using their patents? That's not a good idea. It will mean the small independent inventors will lose out on royalties because they don't have the resources to both watch for potential infringements and manage their business. Anybody who decides to use an existing technology should do their due diligence to research patent history for that technology.
If multiple independent parties are inventing the same thing over and over without prior knowledge of the existing work, then it's just not a novel invention, and doesn't deserve a patent.
They haven't gone down anywhere near as much as the cost to produce them has. I would venture a guess that the profit margins are as good or better than they were 20 years ago.
The day there is an available cure for AIDS, there will be fucking in the streets.
There was talk that Google would allow open server-to-server XMPP chat, and they have. You can add users from non-Google jabber servers to you contact list (provided they have the right DNS records and their server allows s2s). Integration with AIM should be coming soon. But I haven't heard anything about Yahoo or MSN.
From what I understand, they are only monitoring phone calls that come in from overseas and are from KNOWN parties of interest. The governement CAN NOT tap calls made from the US to other countries (not totally clear on this) or calls that remain within the US without a court order.
They're doing it without oversight. If the person being tapped is of known interest, they must have evidence already. So bring it to a judge and get a warrant.
They run the server, they can snoop even if their client allowed SSL/TLS connections. In fact, I believe using SSL/TLS is required for any 3rd party client to connect, so the server already supports it. The data is decrypted when it reaches the server, and reencrypted before leaving the server if the recipient is using SSL/TLS. The purpose of SSL/TLS is not to keep google from having read access, it's to prevent someone between you and google from snooping. As long as they control the server, I don't see any reason to attempt to encrypt things so they can't read it. If they wanted to they could log all your packets and run a distributed brute force on their 10k+ node cluster. The only way I would feel secure is to use signed and encrypted OTR messaging on a server I control.
Perhaps this also means they will port apps like gtalk and picasa to linux, albeit just to goobuntu. Although I'd probably still use kopete or gaim, since gtalk doesn't do any session encryption with the native client (plese join me in submitting feature requests and bug reports for every release of gtalk so that they'll consider adding it)
I've compiled many kernels, I even compiled my own kernel for a beowful cluster I built at IAT. But building custom kernels packagable by the distribution you're running seems to have become more complicated in the last 2 years. I've been quite happy with the default power management available in Ubuntu (suspend and hibernate work just dandy on my laptop!) so I haven't taken the time to figure out how the distro maintainers want you to do it these days.
Does that mean there will finally be suspend/hibernate built in the default fedora kernels? I switched to Ubuntu around FC2 because they wouldn't add any patches like swsusp2 or DSDT-in-initrd, and I just couldn't get a funcitoning custom compiled kernel.
Frink: Take an ordinary double-helix ...
Wiggum: Woah! Slow down there egghead.
If there's truly no development cost, then what do you need to recoup? If you don't want to make the information public (which you have to do for a patent), then don't. Keep the information secret, and implement it in only the most obfuscated way you can imagine. But then you don't get a monopoly. You only get the monopoly in exchange for making the information public, so that other people can build on your idea after you've recouped your costs.
You aren't patenting code, you're patenting the algorithm. You then have a brief monopoly to recoup your development costs, then the algorithm becomes public domain, and anyone can implement it with whatever code they want, but the code itself is protected by copyright (which should also only last long enough to recoup development costs, and then be given to public domain). If you don't want the monopoly to recoup your costs, you don't get a patent or the copyright and instead rely on keeping it secret.
Huh? You went to company A to manufacture the product, they turn you down, they steal the invention, you sue company A. Where did company B come from in this? When you get to court, it's pretty obvious you were trying to comply with the patent requirements and that company A stole your idea.
I was just saying that you have options to get it built. Most people get funding, and find a manufacturer, then get sales contracts with retailers. And I don't see what's novel about your example, given the limited description, I wouldn't say it deserves a patent.
You would be able to show you made an effort to produce and distribute your invention, but were unable to due to lack of funds. Besides, you wouldn't try to license the patent to a manufacturer, you would go to a venture capital firm and give them a portion of your profits in return for the money to manufacture and distribute the invention.
Bad example, Linux is a clean implementation of Unix, which is covered by copyrights. Software has no place in the patent world, software is written, therefor it is covered by copyright.
The fact that people need that kind of dough for that kind of research is another symptom of the patent system going out of controll.
And what if you want to do physics research in need of a particle accelerator? Are you going rent some time from the one at the corner store with money saved from your paper route? And if you have the money to build one, are you really going to do so when the 15 year old down the street can fund his own effort to take the end result and undercut you by getting a paper route? It makes sense to give people a monopoly on truly unique inventions they intend to build and sell to let them recoup their costs, and then open it up to free market competition. Once it's in the public domain, everyone can collaborate for free. Until then, the people with huge piles of cash can do really interesting things knowing they'll get a return on the investment.
Not if the whole point of inventing the machine was to sell it for profit.
and maybe even a "first mover" advantage if you run a company
If you go bankrupt because your neighbor watches you from his window and then sells an identical device for 1/2 the cost, that first mover advantage doesn't mean anything, and would very likely be an advantage of less than one day.
Not a global monopoly who locks everyone else out
That's not the purpose of a patent. The purpose is to convince the guy in his garage that he will be able to recoup the R&D costs, so that he will share it with the public. Patents were supposed to be reasonably short lived, so that an inventor would actually have to keep inventing to make a living from it.
It's not "protection", because in a patent free world you are more free to copy and improve on other inventions too. In a patent world, big companies have more resources to lock you out, then you have to lock them out, it'd be foolish to believe otherwise.
You're far too naieve about the honesty and ethics of corporate executives. The problem isn't the institution of patents, it's the implementation. The two problems are the length of patents, and the lax attitude that patent examiners have for granting patents. A patent should be difficult to get, only for something truly new and unique and very specific. Not for adding "on the internet" to a business method that's been in use for decades. You should also be required to actually build and distribute the invention. Also, if patents were only valid up until the point where the inventor had recouped their documented R&D costs, that would alleviate most of the problems.
Take pharmaceuticals as an example industry. The medicines developped are necessary and beneficial to the public interest. They take billions of dollars to develop. Who's going to pay for that if they can't recoup the costs? It would have to be a government subsidized program. I don't believe socialized medical research produces the same quality as what we get with private industry. So you offer a limited monopoly to recoup the costs, and once that has happened the information becomes public domain and everybody gets the benefit not only the medecines, but the reduced cost resulting from a competetive free market.
Make no mistake, I'm not saying what we currently have in place for patents is a good system. But it could be with some significant changes.
Does Google's client support TLS yet? Every version I've tested (with ethereal, on computers both with and without firewalls/antivirus) doesn't do any encryption (either that or ethereal can magically decrypt gtalk but not gaim). I've posted on the groups and sent bug reports, and it just doesn't seem to get fixed. It surprises me because it seems every third party client will only connect if TLS or SSL is enabled.
Steve Jobs wasn't with Apple during the clones, that was Gil Amelio.
Your test scores are below the "Peter" line.
I believe Office for Mac OS is probably their single highest margin product. You get Office much cheaper bundled with a Windows PC or corporate/educational bulk licensing. I would be surprised if Office for Mac OS made up less than 75% of the retail boxed copies of Office sold (I'm counting the copies you can buy from Apple when you buy a Mac, because it isn't any cheaper that way like it is when you buy it OEM with a Windows PC).
Use a high refresh rate.
Don't the resolution so high you need the screen up close to your face to read it without squinting.
Keep the ambient light low so you can have the screen's brightness down low.
I use grey as the default background color rather than white.
The last two go together pretty well and I've found them to have a more noticeable impact on eyestrain induced headaches than the first two.
"we know who's software we're using."
.... yours?
um