Ever heard of leisure time - why can't I work in a bar _and_ write software whan I get home?
You can. You just aren't going to be very successful at it.
Or temporary unemployment or disability or any number of reasons why you cannot blithely and naively equate time and money?
If you're unemployed, you need to spend your time finding a source of income, not on counting angels on the head of a pin. And if you're disabled, I'm sure you're going to have enough trouble finding a way to pay for your medical needs.
Your flawed logic implies that everything worthwhile ever accomplished by any human being should be measured in dollars alone and that all intellectual works should be patentable too.
Oh, please. "It's not about dollars, man! That's just your greed talking!" Whatever. The point is that time, tools, and intellect do not grow on trees. They are not free. There is an opportunity cost, and almost always a direct dollar cost, associated with each. Who's going to pay your mortgage while you take a year off to write the Next Big Thing in software?
I for one have no non-free, commercial software and the fact that most people do is hardly a proof that it is necessarily so.
I submit to you that you're not doing anything particularly interesting with computers then.
How is it that there are 1000 or more packages in the larger GNU/Linux distros?
How many of them are novelties like "fortune" or redundant like the endless stream of window managers or command shells or email clients? Quantity alone is not a virtue, my friend.
To say that the idea of an intellectual commons is morally bankrupt would set every great thinker that has ever lived spinning in their grave.
Got a monopoly on the insights of great thinkers, huh? I humbly suggest that you might want to read a little more before making such sweeping statements.
Let's start with a little thought-provoking dialogue. Question one: Would you agree with the statement that property rights are a fundamental aspect of our culture? Question two: Would you agree with the position that the seizure of property by the state as a matter of course is neither morally nor ethically justified?
Discuss, Colossus. Exercise that great big brain of yours and see if you can't squeeze a thought or two out of it.
I've written more words about the fallacy of the commons that I know what to do with. Read, oh, any one of fully A THIRD of the items in my journal.
Long story short: the convenient fiction of a "commons" is just a euphemism for state seizure of private property. In the year-and-a-half or so since I last wrote on the subject there have been some developments that lead me to concede that exceptions exist: the idea of "creative commons," whereby property owners voluntarily cede their property to the state, is far more morally sound than what the other poster was talking about.
The sanctity of private property is, to me, right up there with life and liberty. It's inviolable. The idea that the state would seize property after a period of time (as in copyrights) disgusts me.
Brief elaboration: if you apply for a patent, you have to disclose your innovation to the state. But you don't have to apply for a patent, so this isn't seizure as much as it is a trade: you give up ownership of your property later for legal protection by the state today. But copyrights are different. You don't have to apply for copyright protection; every written work gets it automatically. This is the good part. But that copyright protection expires (!!) after a time, at which point the author's property rights are revoked and his property is seized by the state. How would you feel if your house only belonged to you for 20 years, after which time you'd have to give it to the state? Property doesn't work like that in our culture. The idea of "the commons" is almost always invoked to refer to the idea that somehow property isn't really property, and that everything really belongs to the state, or "the commons." It's used to justify seizure of property by invoking a high-minded notion of greater good.
It's bullshit, and it's wrong.
Now, let me address one other thing: your ignorance of a point of view does not mean that point of view doesn't exist or isn't valid or, heaven forbid, is actually more valid than your own. Be a little more humble next time.
Truly talented people innovate because it comes easily to them and they enjoy it.
What do those people do for money? Work the bar at their neighborhood Starbucks?
You, like most of the other respondents in this thread, seem to be losing sight of the whole "economy" thing. The idea that you can't do anything without money, and you don't get money unless you can convince somebody to give it to you, and you don't convince anybody unless you can promise them value in return.
Personally, I don't want to rely on Jimbo inventing the next great advance in software (like, possibly, fading windows as described in this instance) whenever he gets around to it. I have no great faith in the hobbyist sector. They tend to work on whatever it is they want, rather than what I (i.e., the public at large) wants.
To convert color space accurately, you need color space profiles, gamut matching, etc.
Nonsense. These are helpful tools, yes, but they're not necessary. How do you think we did RGB->CMYK in the days before ICC? Using simple algorithms like UCR and GCR.
Gimp either lacks or until very recently lacked even that kind of basic--and perfectly usable--CMYK support. It just wasn't there. And you can't blame that on patents.
Ironically, this is one area where patents may be particularly well justified
Except for the fact that I don't think it's ironic in the slightest, I agree with you completely.:-)
The only person who benefits from patents are the patent holders, not the consumers.
Right! That's exactly the point! The purpose of a patent is to give a person or group the exclusive benefit of their labor for a time, thereby allowing them to recoup the investment that went into producing whatever it was they invented.
A lot of people here have said that they think it's easy to create original software inventions. I would ask them if they've ever done it.
What was it Douglas Adams said about invention?
"It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
In fact, patents were NOT created to incite inventors to invent, because, face it, inventor invented things well before patents.
The Constitution of the United States gives Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Other legislative documents have similar ideas embodied in them.
So yeah, patents were created to "incite" (what the living hell made you choose that word?) inventors to invent.
Patents were created as a tradeoff with inventors, because at the time (industrial revolution)...
Did you know that the steam engine, the invention that basically sparked the industrial revolution, was patented? It's true. James Watt improved on existing designs to create the first modern reciprocating steam engine in 1763, and was granted a patent for it. That patent didn't expire until 1800, by which time Watt and his business partner, Michael Boulton, had manufactured some 500 engines.
So yeah, patents predated the industrial revolution by quite a ways. The tradition is usually traced back to the English Statute of Monopolies of 1623.
Patents were created so inventors explained their invention.
True. That's the beauty of the system. The system of which so many posters here call vehemently for the abolition.
Now patents are legal giberrish totally encrypted for a normal engieneer.
Oh, please. The fact that you struggle with basic literacy is not an indictment of the system, my dear friend.
With software patents we're in a totally different realm, the one of pure thought.
This is obviously not true; please remember that the creation of software requires education, time, a place to work, and equipment. None of these things is free. That cheese sandwich you had for lunch today? Not free. "Realm of pure thought" my ass.
Most invention is not primarily driven by a desire to make money.
Whatever, man.
The failure to grasp this is a possible explanation of why software companies are the least likely companies to last five years.
You might be interested to know that virtually no company lasts for five years, statistically speaking. Depending on which market segment you look at, between 80% and 95% of all new businesses fail to last through their first year, and the rate of attrition remains high after that.
The existence of patents (owned by HP and Panatone) is why Photoshop is better than GIMP, for print work.
It's not just Pantone's color technology. There are other reasons, too. RGB-to-CMYK color space conversion, for example, is not a patented technique, but Gimp still lacks that basic requirement. (It may have gotten it just recently; if so, the point still stands that it only got it just recently.)
Most CGI studios use Cinepaint, which is a fork of GIMP.
Not really. Most CGI studios use in-house tools. ILM, for example, uses a paint package called Sabre that has been under active development for years. Disney has DAPS. And so on.
What this has to do with software patents, I don't know.
The major barrier to entry in the field of software development is inherently intellectual, not financial. I don't need to spend money on scarce resources like raw materials and factories to produce software; I need time, a computer, and a brain.
Time costs money, either directly or through opportunity costs. Who's going to pay your rent while you sit around all day and gaze at your navel? Your computer and related resources obviously cost money: at the lowest level, even electricity is not free. And your "brain," i.e. your education, certainly cost you money. Have you paid off your student loans yet? If so, who gave you the money to do so? If not, where do you plan to get it?
The barrier to entry in software, as in everything else, is financial. This will be true as long as time and effort have a dollar value associated with them.
Therefore the natural initial outlay for software development is much lower than for the production of tangible goods.
Perhaps, but it's definitely not zero.
This means that the development of software is not inherently restricted to those with money - rich people, and companies.
We can test this hypothesis. Look at the world around you. Where does most useful software come from? Companies. Yes, a good deal of software, some of it quite useful, comes from hobbyists, for lack of a better term. But most of it comes from commercial development.
So no, the development of software isn't inherently restricted to those with money, but it is practically restricted to those with money.
The good news is that there's nothing stopping you, for sake of argument assumed to be a person of little means, from getting the money you need. All you have to do is find a rich person and convince him that you've got a good idea. Because the world is chock full of stupid rich people, you don't even have to necessarily have a good idea in order to pull this little trick.
All your talk about "intellectual commons" is summarily ignored. The idea is morally bankrupt, as has been discussed at exhaustive length elsewhere.
So, the windows fade with time (if they are not used much), and the windows below are phased above the fading window...
More importantly, once the window fades "enough" (for some arbitrary and time-dependent value of "enough") it becomes transparent not only visually, but also to user input. You can click "through" it, in other words, once it's faded to a certain point.
I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly how such a feature should be used, but it's not hard to imagine how it could be used.
The existence of a patent can have a chilling effect on innovation
That is the most specious argument I've ever heard.
The possibility of acquiring a patent, and thereby a guaranteed source of revenue, is what spurs innovation.
I know that this is going to piss a lot of people off, but I'm gonna say it anyway because I believe it's true: the people doing the innovating, software-wise, are the people who are doing it for profit. Yes, there are exceptions; there are amazing and wonderful innovations that have arisen from people who were doing it just for fun. We even have a name for this kind of thing: "serendipity."
But for the most part, the profit motive is what drives innovation. Patents are essential to that process.
This whole "Send out the dogs! Begin the search for prior art! Kill the pigs! Fly, my pretties, fly!" thing is sickening. It's disgustingly hostile to people who work for a living to make new things, and it arises from nothing more than a misguided meme that ownership is immoral and must be stopped. It really bugs me, ya know?
You didn't make a point! You were snide, and sarcastic, and that's all. You said nothing of substance, okay? Let me repeat that, in case you're failing to understand: you did not contribute an idea or an opinion.
I ask again, "where is the love?". It seems Consumericans are incapable of it.
Bored now. Moving on to folks who have something to say.
Just that there ought damned well to be alternatives to spending $Trillions of dollars on something, and a nation which considers itself 'great' ought to have definitively and aggressively considered and pursued those options before defaulting to warfare and weaponry.
Two things.
One: are you asserting that our nation didn't?
Two: are you uncool with the concept of doing more than one thing at once? More specifically, are you not down with the idea of working for peace and preparing for war at the same time?
Actually, I do know the answer, and I'm sharing it with you
Take two Sunni children and two Shi'ite children, give them a mud-making machine away from all the adults, and show them how to work together to make houses for all the lepers in the neighborhood. There. Peace.
So what you're saying is that the only way to solve conflicts like these is the eradication of millennia-old cultural traditions?
Everybody knows that if you take a Jewish and an Arab toddler and put them in the same sandbox, they'll play together happily. Or a white and a black toddler, or a Muslim and a Hindu toddler, or a Catholic and a Protestant toddler. But the thing is, a Muslim toddler isn't really a Muslim, is he? He's just a kid. And kids are, basically, all alike.
The sons of Isaac hate the sons of Ishmael, and vice versa. That's their culture. How do we change it? Should we spend billions on a Sesame Street airlift and bring the "It's Fun to Play Together" song to an entire generation of Muslim and Jewish kids?
I don't know. I don't know the answers, and neither do you.
But to decry those who are working to defend our way of life from the people who would seek to hurt us... that's just low, man. That's just low.
Saddam made payments, out of the Iraqi national treasury, to the families of Palestinian murderers. Not small payments, either: $25,000 each, which to a Palestinian family is an absolute fortune.
Let me say it more plainly: Saddam paid terrorists for killing Israelis. By our definition, Saddam was a terrorist.
What is that definition, you ask? A terrorist is a person who attacks noncombatants with deadly force in an effort to impose social or political change through fear, or a person who attempts to do such a thing, or a person who provides material support or safe harbor to anyone who does or attempts to do such a thing.
There's still no evidence that Saddam is even linked to Al-Qaeda.
Honestly? Nobody cares. Saddam was a bad man. His continued existence as a head of state was a threat to the national security of the United States, of all Western democracies, and most especially to Israel. It's good that he's no longer in power.
Why did we invade Iraq? Because we had just cause to do so, and because it made the world a safer place. Marginally safer, yes, but safer nonetheless. You only need look to our diplomatic victories in Libya and (to a much lesser extent) Syria and Iran to see that.
Although personally I think we're gonna need to put boots on the ground in Damascus before this is all over. The Asad family isn't getting the message as quickly as I think they need to.
Re:Popularity of miniATX is validation for the Cub
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Have you actually used a Cube? The button was on top, larger and more conspicuous... Waving your hand past it would shut the machine down.
The button on a monitor is right there, glowing invitingly. And it's also very sensitive, just like a Cube's. Maybe it's slightly less sensitive, but not in practical terms.
How is an iMac or eMac without a screen a "niche box"?
We're going around in circles here. Apple floated the idea: it failed. Why would they float it again? What in the marketplace has changed?
Look, if you're hoping Apple will slice their profit margins to produce a cheaper Mac, forget it. They've become one of the most consistently profitable (perhaps the most consistently profitable; they're going on 30 straight quarters of positive revenues, aren't they?) using a high-margin business model. They're not going to just chuck that because some guy on Slashdot think it'd be wicked kewl.
the iMac "lamp" design is dated
That's a matter of opinion. The iMac itself is certainly not dated, however; you can get one with a 1.25 GHz G4 and a 20" screen. A 20" screen! Have you used one of those things? It's huge! It's 1680 by 1050!
I guess my basic point boils down to this: Apple is doing very well. They tried your idea and it tanked. Why would they even consider, even for a nanosecond, trying it again?
I mean, isn't one of the signs of insanity doing the same thing again and expecting different results?
Re:Popularity of miniATX is validation for the Cub
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G5 in an iMac
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Plus, they had a few well-publicized flaws that made them unappealing... A hair-trigger on/off switch and a lucite case prone to cracks.
I don't buy it. The whole G4 series and the currently shipping monitors have these. (Well, the G4s have the same mechanical power switches the G5's have, but the monitors have touch-sensitive switches, and when the monitor's plugged it, its switch controls the sleep/wake behavior of the computer, just like the mechanical switch on the computer itself does.)
Apple could do well to make a low-end "cube", a cheap and portable desktop without the screen.
Don't buy that, either. Remember, in order to be successful, Apple has to sell hundreds of thousands of units a month of whatever products they're making. The demand for the kind of niche box you describe just isn't there.
Re:Popularity of miniATX is validation for the Cub
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G5 in an iMac
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The popularity of miniATX boards and Shuttle's mini PC are a proof that Apple was on the right track with the Cube.
And yet the dismal sales figures say... not so much.
Some people want a Cube, obviously, but not enough of them to make it worth Apple's while.
I'm startled to hear that, considering that my music library includes more than 11,000 tracks and 44 GB. Closer to 90, because I keep a redundant copy on a separate hard drive.
Pirated music is not okay, of course, but the RIAA didn't have anything to do with that. It was illegal a long time before the RIAA came along.
Look, if you want to fill up a petabyte, just do this: never throw anything away. Ever. Every CD you've ever bought, every DVD, every piece of software you've ever purchased. Every phone number, every vacation photo, every email, every phone call. Every bad poem you ever wrote. Every love letter you ever received. Every home movie of your kids you ever shot. Keep it all on line, forever.
Would that fill up a petabyte? No, probably not. But for a family of four....
A hundred years ago, before we had home movies and vacation photos, it was the family bible. In it was recorded every milestone in every person's life: births, deaths, marriages, whatever. Family bibles were passed down for generations.
A couple decades from now, it's gonna be the family hard drive.
Don't ever throw anything away. Keep it, pass it down. Be the archivist of your own personal history.
(Adding the layers of intelligence that can keep an archive like that in a semblance of order is a challenge for the programmers out there. Go be clever.)
In fact I don't even know for sure why birth rates are low in industrial countries
It's a cultural thing. In the middle of the 20th century, a cultural movement arose contending that reproduction was tantamount to enslavement, and that in order for women to be free they had to choose not to have children.
On its face, the argument was that women had to have the choice in order to be free, but in practice to amounted to having to make the choice in order to be free.
That's where Humanae Vitae came from, which basically worked like telling your kids not to look in the upstairs closet. The moment the Church came out against birth control, it became absolutely mandatory in the eyes of a lot of women in the West.
It's not economic pressure; it's social pressure. We have had and entire generation of women now (we're currently raising our second) who grew up believing that the highest virtue of a woman is to avoid reproducing, either through birth control or through abortion. These two freedoms are a woman's legacy, passed down to her from her mother, and there's immense social pressure to accept that legacy.
Only on Slashdot can you take a bogus URL thrown out there as a joke, wrap HTML around it to make it clickable, and get moderated "informative" for it.
Read it. Boring. Diamond pays too much attention to biology and ecology and not enough to culture.
Why do some cultures succeed spectacularly while others fail? Diamond asserts, in essence, that it's basically luck. If you had a head-start in hunting and gathering, well, the game is pretty much won right there.
Which is a fucking crock of shit. It's Western liberal apologetics of the worst kind. "I'm sorry that my culture dominates a huge chunk of the world. It's not our fault, really. It was just luck. If the breaks had gone the other way, it would have been the Zulus building the four-masted men-of-war and conquering the known world instead of us."
Yeah, whatever. I don't say this with pride, but with simple objectivity: some cultures are demonstrably better than others. Not races, not ethnicities; it's not biology at work, it's culture. We can have a productive discussion about why this is so, but first we have to set aside our white liberal guilt and drop the foolish pretensions that it's all just random chance.
The public now knows about it, which will certainly encourage the military to clean up its act. That's what changed.
Hang on a sec.
1. Members of the United States military engage in conduct unbecoming and other offenses.
2. Said members are brought up according to the terms of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
3. Months later, the public becomes aware of the offenses.
4. Somehow, the military will "clean up its act" as a result of this.
If you're hoping that individual members of the military will be more aware of their actions and refrain from this kind of unlawful behavior in the future, I'm right there with you. But that's not "the military's act." Those are the acts of individual soldiers.
The military, in fact, comes out of this news cycle looking squeaky-clean, because they acted before the offenses became public. The military, as has often been said, takes care of its own.
You make it sound as if public opinion is irrelevant.
If the shoe fits...
But do you disagree that even a single prisoner being mistreated is too many?
I do, actually. If I made the rules, the kind of treatment these animals received would be entirely legal. Hell, let's make it mandatory.
It's nothing compared to what they themselves perpetrated.
But I don't make the rules. We make the rules by consensus in this country. So I expect that I'll get outvoted on that one.
We invaded Iraq under the pretense of removing WMD.
Oh, please. Were you born sometimes in the past year? Did you spend the past year... no, wait; two years... damn, it would have to have been more than FOURTEEN YEARS now. Anyway, did you spend the past fourteen years living in a cave on Mars with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears?
If you want to participate in this discussion, go read a fucking newspaper. Don't come in here with that "It's all about WMD!" bullshit. The people who are spewing that crap don't believe it; the people who are hearing it don't believe it. The only ones who believe it are the morons who are repeating it.
The United States is supposed to be the leader of the free world, the country the rest of the world looks to for morality. And right now we're not being a very good role model.
Wrong. The United States is the leader of the free world precisely because of things like this. Individuals under our care did wrong; we (collectively) investigated, and enacted justice according to our laws.
I, for one, am currently ashamed to be an American
I've seen the articles, in translation. (I don't read Arabic.) Your characterization is not accurate. I don't have them with me, and I'm not 100% sure I could quote from them without getting in trouble anyway, but the gist of it was not all that different from what you hear out of the Mullahs every Friday at sunset: Kill the infidels, bash their brains out with rocks, throw your children onto the points of their swords if you have to, martyr yourselves, you'll be rewarded in blah blah blah.
If you read these things, you'd wonder at the coalition's restraint. If it'd been up to me, I would have burned the fucking building to the ground and salted the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of leisure time - why can't I work in a bar _and_ write software whan I get home?
You can. You just aren't going to be very successful at it.
Or temporary unemployment or disability or any number of reasons why you cannot blithely and naively equate time and money?
If you're unemployed, you need to spend your time finding a source of income, not on counting angels on the head of a pin. And if you're disabled, I'm sure you're going to have enough trouble finding a way to pay for your medical needs.
Your flawed logic implies that everything worthwhile ever accomplished by any human being should be measured in dollars alone and that all intellectual works should be patentable too.
Oh, please. "It's not about dollars, man! That's just your greed talking!" Whatever. The point is that time, tools, and intellect do not grow on trees. They are not free. There is an opportunity cost, and almost always a direct dollar cost, associated with each. Who's going to pay your mortgage while you take a year off to write the Next Big Thing in software?
I for one have no non-free, commercial software and the fact that most people do is hardly a proof that it is necessarily so.
I submit to you that you're not doing anything particularly interesting with computers then.
How is it that there are 1000 or more packages in the larger GNU/Linux distros?
How many of them are novelties like "fortune" or redundant like the endless stream of window managers or command shells or email clients? Quantity alone is not a virtue, my friend.
To say that the idea of an intellectual commons is morally bankrupt would set every great thinker that has ever lived spinning in their grave.
Got a monopoly on the insights of great thinkers, huh? I humbly suggest that you might want to read a little more before making such sweeping statements.
Let's start with a little thought-provoking dialogue. Question one: Would you agree with the statement that property rights are a fundamental aspect of our culture? Question two: Would you agree with the position that the seizure of property by the state as a matter of course is neither morally nor ethically justified?
Discuss, Colossus. Exercise that great big brain of yours and see if you can't squeeze a thought or two out of it.
He backs it up by invoking an unknown "elsewhere"
I've written more words about the fallacy of the commons that I know what to do with. Read, oh, any one of fully A THIRD of the items in my journal.
Long story short: the convenient fiction of a "commons" is just a euphemism for state seizure of private property. In the year-and-a-half or so since I last wrote on the subject there have been some developments that lead me to concede that exceptions exist: the idea of "creative commons," whereby property owners voluntarily cede their property to the state, is far more morally sound than what the other poster was talking about.
The sanctity of private property is, to me, right up there with life and liberty. It's inviolable. The idea that the state would seize property after a period of time (as in copyrights) disgusts me.
Brief elaboration: if you apply for a patent, you have to disclose your innovation to the state. But you don't have to apply for a patent, so this isn't seizure as much as it is a trade: you give up ownership of your property later for legal protection by the state today. But copyrights are different. You don't have to apply for copyright protection; every written work gets it automatically. This is the good part. But that copyright protection expires (!!) after a time, at which point the author's property rights are revoked and his property is seized by the state. How would you feel if your house only belonged to you for 20 years, after which time you'd have to give it to the state? Property doesn't work like that in our culture. The idea of "the commons" is almost always invoked to refer to the idea that somehow property isn't really property, and that everything really belongs to the state, or "the commons." It's used to justify seizure of property by invoking a high-minded notion of greater good.
It's bullshit, and it's wrong.
Now, let me address one other thing: your ignorance of a point of view does not mean that point of view doesn't exist or isn't valid or, heaven forbid, is actually more valid than your own. Be a little more humble next time.
Truly talented people innovate because it comes easily to them and they enjoy it.
What do those people do for money? Work the bar at their neighborhood Starbucks?
You, like most of the other respondents in this thread, seem to be losing sight of the whole "economy" thing. The idea that you can't do anything without money, and you don't get money unless you can convince somebody to give it to you, and you don't convince anybody unless you can promise them value in return.
Personally, I don't want to rely on Jimbo inventing the next great advance in software (like, possibly, fading windows as described in this instance) whenever he gets around to it. I have no great faith in the hobbyist sector. They tend to work on whatever it is they want, rather than what I (i.e., the public at large) wants.
To convert color space accurately, you need color space profiles, gamut matching, etc.
:-)
Nonsense. These are helpful tools, yes, but they're not necessary. How do you think we did RGB->CMYK in the days before ICC? Using simple algorithms like UCR and GCR.
Gimp either lacks or until very recently lacked even that kind of basic--and perfectly usable--CMYK support. It just wasn't there. And you can't blame that on patents.
Ironically, this is one area where patents may be particularly well justified
Except for the fact that I don't think it's ironic in the slightest, I agree with you completely.
The only person who benefits from patents are the patent holders, not the consumers.
Right! That's exactly the point! The purpose of a patent is to give a person or group the exclusive benefit of their labor for a time, thereby allowing them to recoup the investment that went into producing whatever it was they invented.
A lot of people here have said that they think it's easy to create original software inventions. I would ask them if they've ever done it.
What was it Douglas Adams said about invention?
"It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."
In fact, patents were NOT created to incite inventors to invent, because, face it, inventor invented things well before patents.
The Constitution of the United States gives Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Other legislative documents have similar ideas embodied in them.
So yeah, patents were created to "incite" (what the living hell made you choose that word?) inventors to invent.
Patents were created as a tradeoff with inventors, because at the time (industrial revolution)...
Did you know that the steam engine, the invention that basically sparked the industrial revolution, was patented? It's true. James Watt improved on existing designs to create the first modern reciprocating steam engine in 1763, and was granted a patent for it. That patent didn't expire until 1800, by which time Watt and his business partner, Michael Boulton, had manufactured some 500 engines.
So yeah, patents predated the industrial revolution by quite a ways. The tradition is usually traced back to the English Statute of Monopolies of 1623.
Patents were created so inventors explained their invention.
True. That's the beauty of the system. The system of which so many posters here call vehemently for the abolition.
Now patents are legal giberrish totally encrypted for a normal engieneer.
Oh, please. The fact that you struggle with basic literacy is not an indictment of the system, my dear friend.
With software patents we're in a totally different realm, the one of pure thought.
This is obviously not true; please remember that the creation of software requires education, time, a place to work, and equipment. None of these things is free. That cheese sandwich you had for lunch today? Not free. "Realm of pure thought" my ass.
Most invention is not primarily driven by a desire to make money.
Whatever, man.
The failure to grasp this is a possible explanation of why software companies are the least likely companies to last five years.
You might be interested to know that virtually no company lasts for five years, statistically speaking. Depending on which market segment you look at, between 80% and 95% of all new businesses fail to last through their first year, and the rate of attrition remains high after that.
The existence of patents (owned by HP and Panatone) is why Photoshop is better than GIMP, for print work.
It's not just Pantone's color technology. There are other reasons, too. RGB-to-CMYK color space conversion, for example, is not a patented technique, but Gimp still lacks that basic requirement. (It may have gotten it just recently; if so, the point still stands that it only got it just recently.)
Most CGI studios use Cinepaint, which is a fork of GIMP.
Not really. Most CGI studios use in-house tools. ILM, for example, uses a paint package called Sabre that has been under active development for years. Disney has DAPS. And so on.
What this has to do with software patents, I don't know.
The major barrier to entry in the field of software development is inherently intellectual, not financial. I don't need to spend money on scarce resources like raw materials and factories to produce software; I need time, a computer, and a brain.
Time costs money, either directly or through opportunity costs. Who's going to pay your rent while you sit around all day and gaze at your navel? Your computer and related resources obviously cost money: at the lowest level, even electricity is not free. And your "brain," i.e. your education, certainly cost you money. Have you paid off your student loans yet? If so, who gave you the money to do so? If not, where do you plan to get it?
The barrier to entry in software, as in everything else, is financial. This will be true as long as time and effort have a dollar value associated with them.
Therefore the natural initial outlay for software development is much lower than for the production of tangible goods.
Perhaps, but it's definitely not zero.
This means that the development of software is not inherently restricted to those with money - rich people, and companies.
We can test this hypothesis. Look at the world around you. Where does most useful software come from? Companies. Yes, a good deal of software, some of it quite useful, comes from hobbyists, for lack of a better term. But most of it comes from commercial development.
So no, the development of software isn't inherently restricted to those with money, but it is practically restricted to those with money.
The good news is that there's nothing stopping you, for sake of argument assumed to be a person of little means, from getting the money you need. All you have to do is find a rich person and convince him that you've got a good idea. Because the world is chock full of stupid rich people, you don't even have to necessarily have a good idea in order to pull this little trick.
All your talk about "intellectual commons" is summarily ignored. The idea is morally bankrupt, as has been discussed at exhaustive length elsewhere.
So, the windows fade with time (if they are not used much), and the windows below are phased above the fading window...
More importantly, once the window fades "enough" (for some arbitrary and time-dependent value of "enough") it becomes transparent not only visually, but also to user input. You can click "through" it, in other words, once it's faded to a certain point.
I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly how such a feature should be used, but it's not hard to imagine how it could be used.
The existence of a patent can have a chilling effect on innovation
That is the most specious argument I've ever heard.
The possibility of acquiring a patent, and thereby a guaranteed source of revenue, is what spurs innovation.
I know that this is going to piss a lot of people off, but I'm gonna say it anyway because I believe it's true: the people doing the innovating, software-wise, are the people who are doing it for profit. Yes, there are exceptions; there are amazing and wonderful innovations that have arisen from people who were doing it just for fun. We even have a name for this kind of thing: "serendipity."
But for the most part, the profit motive is what drives innovation. Patents are essential to that process.
This whole "Send out the dogs! Begin the search for prior art! Kill the pigs! Fly, my pretties, fly!" thing is sickening. It's disgustingly hostile to people who work for a living to make new things, and it arises from nothing more than a misguided meme that ownership is immoral and must be stopped. It really bugs me, ya know?
Completely missing the point that...
You didn't make a point! You were snide, and sarcastic, and that's all. You said nothing of substance, okay? Let me repeat that, in case you're failing to understand: you did not contribute an idea or an opinion.
I ask again, "where is the love?". It seems Consumericans are incapable of it.
Bored now. Moving on to folks who have something to say.
Just that there ought damned well to be alternatives to spending $Trillions of dollars on something, and a nation which considers itself 'great' ought to have definitively and aggressively considered and pursued those options before defaulting to warfare and weaponry.
Two things.
One: are you asserting that our nation didn't?
Two: are you uncool with the concept of doing more than one thing at once? More specifically, are you not down with the idea of working for peace and preparing for war at the same time?
Actually, I do know the answer, and I'm sharing it with you
No, you don't. That's my point.
Terrorism cannot be defined.
Okay, that's obviously false. Let's see what else you've got.
There's no difference at the base level from what Al-Qaeda did to the WTC on 9/11 from what the US military is doing in Iraq now
Yeah, more of the same. Nihilism and moral equivalence. Nothing is anything, so everything's the same. Sure, man.
Tell you what: let's try this again after you graduate.
Resorting to a sarcastic, snide remark about "1984." You lose, man.
Take two Sunni children and two Shi'ite children, give them a mud-making machine away from all the adults, and show them how to work together to make houses for all the lepers in the neighborhood. There. Peace.
So what you're saying is that the only way to solve conflicts like these is the eradication of millennia-old cultural traditions?
Everybody knows that if you take a Jewish and an Arab toddler and put them in the same sandbox, they'll play together happily. Or a white and a black toddler, or a Muslim and a Hindu toddler, or a Catholic and a Protestant toddler. But the thing is, a Muslim toddler isn't really a Muslim, is he? He's just a kid. And kids are, basically, all alike.
The sons of Isaac hate the sons of Ishmael, and vice versa. That's their culture. How do we change it? Should we spend billions on a Sesame Street airlift and bring the "It's Fun to Play Together" song to an entire generation of Muslim and Jewish kids?
I don't know. I don't know the answers, and neither do you.
But to decry those who are working to defend our way of life from the people who would seek to hurt us... that's just low, man. That's just low.
Saddam wasn't a terrorist.
Saddam made payments, out of the Iraqi national treasury, to the families of Palestinian murderers. Not small payments, either: $25,000 each, which to a Palestinian family is an absolute fortune.
Let me say it more plainly: Saddam paid terrorists for killing Israelis. By our definition, Saddam was a terrorist.
What is that definition, you ask? A terrorist is a person who attacks noncombatants with deadly force in an effort to impose social or political change through fear, or a person who attempts to do such a thing, or a person who provides material support or safe harbor to anyone who does or attempts to do such a thing.
There's still no evidence that Saddam is even linked to Al-Qaeda.
Honestly? Nobody cares. Saddam was a bad man. His continued existence as a head of state was a threat to the national security of the United States, of all Western democracies, and most especially to Israel. It's good that he's no longer in power.
Why did we invade Iraq? Because we had just cause to do so, and because it made the world a safer place. Marginally safer, yes, but safer nonetheless. You only need look to our diplomatic victories in Libya and (to a much lesser extent) Syria and Iran to see that.
Although personally I think we're gonna need to put boots on the ground in Damascus before this is all over. The Asad family isn't getting the message as quickly as I think they need to.
Have you actually used a Cube? The button was on top, larger and more conspicuous... Waving your hand past it would shut the machine down.
The button on a monitor is right there, glowing invitingly. And it's also very sensitive, just like a Cube's. Maybe it's slightly less sensitive, but not in practical terms.
How is an iMac or eMac without a screen a "niche box"?
We're going around in circles here. Apple floated the idea: it failed. Why would they float it again? What in the marketplace has changed?
Look, if you're hoping Apple will slice their profit margins to produce a cheaper Mac, forget it. They've become one of the most consistently profitable (perhaps the most consistently profitable; they're going on 30 straight quarters of positive revenues, aren't they?) using a high-margin business model. They're not going to just chuck that because some guy on Slashdot think it'd be wicked kewl.
the iMac "lamp" design is dated
That's a matter of opinion. The iMac itself is certainly not dated, however; you can get one with a 1.25 GHz G4 and a 20" screen. A 20" screen! Have you used one of those things? It's huge! It's 1680 by 1050!
I guess my basic point boils down to this: Apple is doing very well. They tried your idea and it tanked. Why would they even consider, even for a nanosecond, trying it again?
I mean, isn't one of the signs of insanity doing the same thing again and expecting different results?
Plus, they had a few well-publicized flaws that made them unappealing... A hair-trigger on/off switch and a lucite case prone to cracks.
I don't buy it. The whole G4 series and the currently shipping monitors have these. (Well, the G4s have the same mechanical power switches the G5's have, but the monitors have touch-sensitive switches, and when the monitor's plugged it, its switch controls the sleep/wake behavior of the computer, just like the mechanical switch on the computer itself does.)
Apple could do well to make a low-end "cube", a cheap and portable desktop without the screen.
Don't buy that, either. Remember, in order to be successful, Apple has to sell hundreds of thousands of units a month of whatever products they're making. The demand for the kind of niche box you describe just isn't there.
The popularity of miniATX boards and Shuttle's mini PC are a proof that Apple was on the right track with the Cube.
And yet the dismal sales figures say... not so much.
Some people want a Cube, obviously, but not enough of them to make it worth Apple's while.
RIAA has all but outlawed music on the computer
I'm startled to hear that, considering that my music library includes more than 11,000 tracks and 44 GB. Closer to 90, because I keep a redundant copy on a separate hard drive.
Pirated music is not okay, of course, but the RIAA didn't have anything to do with that. It was illegal a long time before the RIAA came along.
Look, if you want to fill up a petabyte, just do this: never throw anything away. Ever. Every CD you've ever bought, every DVD, every piece of software you've ever purchased. Every phone number, every vacation photo, every email, every phone call. Every bad poem you ever wrote. Every love letter you ever received. Every home movie of your kids you ever shot. Keep it all on line, forever.
Would that fill up a petabyte? No, probably not. But for a family of four....
A hundred years ago, before we had home movies and vacation photos, it was the family bible. In it was recorded every milestone in every person's life: births, deaths, marriages, whatever. Family bibles were passed down for generations.
A couple decades from now, it's gonna be the family hard drive.
Don't ever throw anything away. Keep it, pass it down. Be the archivist of your own personal history.
(Adding the layers of intelligence that can keep an archive like that in a semblance of order is a challenge for the programmers out there. Go be clever.)
In fact I don't even know for sure why birth rates are low in industrial countries
It's a cultural thing. In the middle of the 20th century, a cultural movement arose contending that reproduction was tantamount to enslavement, and that in order for women to be free they had to choose not to have children.
On its face, the argument was that women had to have the choice in order to be free, but in practice to amounted to having to make the choice in order to be free.
That's where Humanae Vitae came from, which basically worked like telling your kids not to look in the upstairs closet. The moment the Church came out against birth control, it became absolutely mandatory in the eyes of a lot of women in the West.
It's not economic pressure; it's social pressure. We have had and entire generation of women now (we're currently raising our second) who grew up believing that the highest virtue of a woman is to avoid reproducing, either through birth control or through abortion. These two freedoms are a woman's legacy, passed down to her from her mother, and there's immense social pressure to accept that legacy.
Only on Slashdot can you take a bogus URL thrown out there as a joke, wrap HTML around it to make it clickable, and get moderated "informative" for it.
Read it. Boring. Diamond pays too much attention to biology and ecology and not enough to culture.
Why do some cultures succeed spectacularly while others fail? Diamond asserts, in essence, that it's basically luck. If you had a head-start in hunting and gathering, well, the game is pretty much won right there.
Which is a fucking crock of shit. It's Western liberal apologetics of the worst kind. "I'm sorry that my culture dominates a huge chunk of the world. It's not our fault, really. It was just luck. If the breaks had gone the other way, it would have been the Zulus building the four-masted men-of-war and conquering the known world instead of us."
Yeah, whatever. I don't say this with pride, but with simple objectivity: some cultures are demonstrably better than others. Not races, not ethnicities; it's not biology at work, it's culture. We can have a productive discussion about why this is so, but first we have to set aside our white liberal guilt and drop the foolish pretensions that it's all just random chance.
The public now knows about it, which will certainly encourage the military to clean up its act. That's what changed.
Hang on a sec.
1. Members of the United States military engage in conduct unbecoming and other offenses.
2. Said members are brought up according to the terms of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
3. Months later, the public becomes aware of the offenses.
4. Somehow, the military will "clean up its act" as a result of this.
If you're hoping that individual members of the military will be more aware of their actions and refrain from this kind of unlawful behavior in the future, I'm right there with you. But that's not "the military's act." Those are the acts of individual soldiers.
The military, in fact, comes out of this news cycle looking squeaky-clean, because they acted before the offenses became public. The military, as has often been said, takes care of its own.
You make it sound as if public opinion is irrelevant.
If the shoe fits...
But do you disagree that even a single prisoner being mistreated is too many?
I do, actually. If I made the rules, the kind of treatment these animals received would be entirely legal. Hell, let's make it mandatory.
It's nothing compared to what they themselves perpetrated.
But I don't make the rules. We make the rules by consensus in this country. So I expect that I'll get outvoted on that one.
We invaded Iraq under the pretense of removing WMD.
Oh, please. Were you born sometimes in the past year? Did you spend the past year... no, wait; two years... damn, it would have to have been more than FOURTEEN YEARS now. Anyway, did you spend the past fourteen years living in a cave on Mars with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears?
If you want to participate in this discussion, go read a fucking newspaper. Don't come in here with that "It's all about WMD!" bullshit. The people who are spewing that crap don't believe it; the people who are hearing it don't believe it. The only ones who believe it are the morons who are repeating it.
The United States is supposed to be the leader of the free world, the country the rest of the world looks to for morality. And right now we're not being a very good role model.
Wrong. The United States is the leader of the free world precisely because of things like this. Individuals under our care did wrong; we (collectively) investigated, and enacted justice according to our laws.
I, for one, am currently ashamed to be an American
What a fucking surprise.
I'm ashamed you're an American, too.
I've seen the articles, in translation. (I don't read Arabic.) Your characterization is not accurate. I don't have them with me, and I'm not 100% sure I could quote from them without getting in trouble anyway, but the gist of it was not all that different from what you hear out of the Mullahs every Friday at sunset: Kill the infidels, bash their brains out with rocks, throw your children onto the points of their swords if you have to, martyr yourselves, you'll be rewarded in blah blah blah.
If you read these things, you'd wonder at the coalition's restraint. If it'd been up to me, I would have burned the fucking building to the ground and salted the earth.