Theory was that the prices of computers would fall.
I don't recall anyone credible espousing such a theory. It's a rather ignorant idea... (Unless you're looking at it from a large enough scale where prices genuinely have fallen, which is the case over a 4+ year measurement)
It's true that marketing pressure causes people to replace computers unnessecarily. But the idea that "if not for greedy marketers, we'd all be buying new PIII 400mhz computers for $40" is completely unfounded.
It doesn't really cost all that much less, today, to built a 300mhz CPU than a 3000mhz one. Major R&D improvements were needed so that 3000mhz would even be possible... but now that the money's been spent, there'd be little financial incentive to continue building the slow ones. If some insane vendor wanted to build new 100mhz Pentium computers (from new parts, not leftovers) it would cost nearly as much as a new bargain-basement 1.4Ghz system. There's no meaningful savings from using the weaker stuff.
Look at the automobile market. A 1993 car is $1000, a 1997 is $5000, and a 2003 is $15000. The old stuff is cheaper... but there is no way a manufacturer could build a new car to 1993 standards for any less than a 2003 model.
Oh, an orthodox theist who doesn't enjoy a book about "The Unbeliever"! What a surprise!
3. think that comparing him to C. S. Lewis, in writing skill or theological depth, verges on literary malpractice, if not blasphemy.
I'd agree with this, but in the opposite way. The Narnia series was enjoyable right up til the end, when the laughable deus ex machina devalued everything that came before.
How anyone can interpret Narnia or the contemporaneous LOTR to be pro-Christian is beyond me... although, neither is so antithetical to that faith's principles as is "A Tale of Two Cities".
But The Sword of Shannara is a much better realization of the same story than Lord of the Rings, and one of the best epic fantasy books ever written.
That's arguable, but taking it as a given, it's still unimpressive.
The Fokker DR1 is a superior aircraft to the Wright Flyer (of Kitty Hawk fame), but is a lesser achievement, because it built on what came before. Brooks had 50 years worth of public reaction to LOTR to gauge what would make another book popular.
Or, instead of thinking, I'll just tell you: roguish charm.
It is none of the federal government's damn business how I get my money or what I do with it.
It's their business to enforce your honesty. They can't do that without your claim being described in sufficient detail to be falsifiable.
We should, IMHO, replace the income tax with a national sales tax
"Replace income tax with sales tax" actually means "Put a larger tax burden on the poor than the rich".
We have an income tax because its the only way to have a global, progressive tax- where the rate increases the richer you are. The effective rate for sales taxes decreases the more money you have.
altering the sales tax rate so that its higher on luxuries and lower on staples
Sheyeah right. Attempting to categorize items like that would involve more complexity than the IRS currently requires, and still wouldn't work. An excessive quantity of staples IS a luxury!
I have not been able to identify an actual penalty that can be applied for failing to file the form 1040.
The penalty is called an "audit". It's painful and expensive, and when you're done, the IRS has essentially done the 1040 for you (in more detail than you could've accomplished on your own).
many non-voters are low income to poor. Thus they might be more inclined to vote for democrats.
Frequently the opposite is true. The wealthy have many ways to influence the behavior of elected officials- contributions, etc. The poor have only their vote.
Also, look at how much it costs one person to vote- voting normally takes up your time; say 20-90 minutes worth, depending on locality. The time is the same for poor and rich, but the money equivalent is more for the rich (since they earn more per hour).
And finally, look at how much a different elected official will change the life of a prospective voter. Rich people won't be inconvenienced either way depending on who is School Superintendent or County Sheriff. But the poor could be substantially effected by local politicians choices. So they may be more likely to go to polls because local politics are more meaningful to them.
Here's a saying: "The poor vote; the rich buy ads to tell them how"
And do you really think pressing two buttons on the camera (which could be simplified to one) is really going to have a big impact in whether or not someone replaced and obsolete low quality camera for a modern high quality one?
No, I don't. Nor did I write anything to suggest that. (Feel free to read what I actually said, at your leisure...)
I lended him my, formatted as ext2, and the camera had no problem as it formatted it to FAT itself.
As I tried to say earlier, most users won't be happy if swapping a card between two different brands of cameras causes pictures already on the card to be deleted by a reformat.
Anyway, here's an article that explains what submarine patents are, since you apparently don't know.
That article is incorrect. The definition of submarine patent it presents is excessively specific.
"Submarine patent" doesn't only mean the patent has been kept in USPTO filing-limbo. It can also apply in any circumstance where a patent-holder encourages others to use the patented technique while intentionally not revealing that is patented.
I'd be willing to buy a digital camera that's just a little less convenient in order to take this and rub it in Billy's face.
Admirable. And non-representative of the typical consumer's response.
PS. Slashdot had better not allow editing of posts. That's inimical to a threaded message system. You can't have a coherent discussion if the comment you were replying to can be totally redone, leaving a response floating after it that now seems irrelevant.
If editing is allowed, it should always leave an option to see the earlier version(s)... and if someone responds to the pre-editing version of the post, then that version should be the default one displayed (With a small link going to the new version).
The first thing Slashdot should do to modernize its comment system is to create an official way to quote the preceding message, instead of relying users to manually paste it and insert italic tags.
Clean-room procedures can avoid patents if the result in something that creates the same or compatible output without doing the things specified in the patent.
Clean room is still meaningless in that case. If you can figure out a way to do something equivalent without infringing the patent, it makes no difference if you've already read the patent or not.
If you then sell that product and get sued for patent infringement, the court will only be interested in whether or not your version infringes the patent- they don't care if you knew about the patent before you built it. Clean-room procedures will only make your re-invention work slower and more expensive. ("Oops, sorry. That idea violates the patent too! I won't tell you how, though. Just get back in that closet and try again!")
However, this is easily avoided. If you use MS Windows to create an image,
If you paid for that Windows, then you're hardly avoiding a dependency on Microsoft.
Who's preventing FOSS PDF readers? They stopped Skylarov (sic?) from distributing a program that cracked the encryption on Adobe eBooks.
So a FOSS reader cannot open an encrypted PDF file (even if you know the password)... So a FOSS reader cannot open all PDF files... So the FOSS program can't honestly be called a PDF reader then, can it?
(If you don't belive me, then go buy Acrobat and download xpdf and kghostview. Have Acrobat export a text file to encrypted PDF, and see if either of the Free programs can read it. They can't even try)
You expect everyone to throw away all those nifty 256Meg cards they just bought six months ago
Its not a matter of throwing them away. A simple computer program can reformat a card from VFAT into ext2 or whatever you like. Linux users do this all the time (because VFAT cannot support the "ln -s" program some Linux applications need).
But although the hardware investment wouldn't be lost, the public would not be willing to go through the time investment to reformat everything. (Unless Microsoft was charging an excessive price for FAT, which they won't do. They're smart enough to keep the cost of paying less than the cost of workarounds)
Consider second: the most powerful political position in the world was decided by a margin that is substantially smaller than the number of/. lurkers currently nodding and saying "Yeah, Voting SUXX0RS".
Yeah, so the Democrats lost that election by less than 1000 people, right? And yet if 50,000 more Democrats had voted in Massachusetts and California, they wouldn't have changed a thing.
This reinforces why from an individual perspective, voting is mostly useless. Those people who didn't bother voting in the 49 other states were right- they wouldn't have counted anyway.
the cameras are designed to use FAT because they're made to interface with Windows machines.
Once, but not any more. Originally cameras used FAT for Windows compatibility (Even though it wasn't really needed back then... at that time, consumers needed new drivers to recognize flashcards, so they could've installed a new filesystem at the same time). But today, cameras need to be compatible not only with Windows desktops, but also other digital cameras, media on store shelves, Kodak photo-kiosks.
MS isn't going after Sony for the cameras they made yesterday, they're gunning for license fees for cameras they are *going* to build.
That's painfully obvious, and changes nothing.
The cameras don't talk to each other, so it won't matter if the camera I buy next year doesn't speak FAT.
Oh really? You've never moved a memcard from one camera to another? You don't enjoy the convenience of tearing an SD Card out of its package and immediately jamming it into your camera, without reformating it first? (Which would erase any data already on the card)
It is precisely because all current digital cameras use FAT that future cameras will need to- otherwise, those future cameras will be at a competitive disadvantage because sticking a memory-card into them doesn't "just work".
From a domineering-industrialist standpoint, Microsoft has played this very well: they allowed FAT support to seem free long enough for all digital cameras to use it, even though initially filesystem didn't matter. Now that the manufacturers are addicted, they can start to bring up the price. A textbook submarine patent.
The solution Microsoft came up with is much better than what you were proposing. They didn't leave extra filenames in places that older programs could see them and get confused (like they do with Shortcut files). They're hidden in previously unused portions of the disk records, invisible to everything but the OS.
Yes, the response is obvious: Linux distributors will treat FAT code just like they do DeCSS today. That's not a satisfactory solution... look at how badly reviewers take the DeCSS situation today.
This may really hurt the adoption of Linux. No longer will you be able to just slip a Linux CD (Knoppix for instance) into a WindowsME box and start reading off of the existing hard drives. No, you've first got to get networking going so it can download the FAT driver from a "pirate" server in Bermuda.
(Nevermind that the easiest way for Linux to automatically establish a network connection would be to read the FAT disk and see what settings Windows(r) is using...)
Mandrake and Suse will do fuck-all, since they're in Europe. Gentoo users will say 'what's a binary package?
And newbies will say "Linux sucks, it can't even read a hard drive! I give up"
It's not an issue that a clean-room implementation would fix. The patent in question isn't on the code,
No clean-room procedure can ever help avoid any patent. Clean-room applies to copyright disputes ONLY, and has no effect on patents or trademarks.
If you can legally prove that you clean-room implemented something 25 years before the patent was applied for, it doesn't help you at all: infringing on that patent is still illegal.
The purpose of the DMCA is for situations like Adobe's ebook, where if someone cracks the encryption they'd get free ebooks. In that situation the DMCA is a Good Thing. Coporations can't use the DMCA to cover up illegal activity or to stifle competition
Prohibiting the creation of Free Software PDF readers is undeniably stifling competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope - you just can't buy 333MHz packages anymore.
Blatantly nonfactual.
Theory was that the prices of computers would fall.
I don't recall anyone credible espousing such a theory. It's a rather ignorant idea... (Unless you're looking at it from a large enough scale where prices genuinely have fallen, which is the case over a 4+ year measurement)
It's true that marketing pressure causes people to replace computers unnessecarily. But the idea that "if not for greedy marketers, we'd all be buying new PIII 400mhz computers for $40" is completely unfounded.
It doesn't really cost all that much less, today, to built a 300mhz CPU than a 3000mhz one. Major R&D improvements were needed so that 3000mhz would even be possible... but now that the money's been spent, there'd be little financial incentive to continue building the slow ones. If some insane vendor wanted to build new 100mhz Pentium computers (from new parts, not leftovers) it would cost nearly as much as a new bargain-basement 1.4Ghz system. There's no meaningful savings from using the weaker stuff.
Look at the automobile market. A 1993 car is $1000, a 1997 is $5000, and a 2003 is $15000. The old stuff is cheaper... but there is no way a manufacturer could build a new car to 1993 standards for any less than a 2003 model.
1. am a practicing Orthodox Christian, and
Oh, an orthodox theist who doesn't enjoy a book about "The Unbeliever"! What a surprise!
3. think that comparing him to C. S. Lewis, in writing skill or theological depth, verges on literary malpractice, if not blasphemy.
I'd agree with this, but in the opposite way. The Narnia series was enjoyable right up til the end, when the laughable deus ex machina devalued everything that came before.
How anyone can interpret Narnia or the contemporaneous LOTR to be pro-Christian is beyond me... although, neither is so antithetical to that faith's principles as is "A Tale of Two Cities".
But The Sword of Shannara is a much better realization of the same story than Lord of the Rings, and one of the best epic fantasy books ever written.
That's arguable, but taking it as a given, it's still unimpressive.
The Fokker DR1 is a superior aircraft to the Wright Flyer (of Kitty Hawk fame), but is a lesser achievement, because it built on what came before. Brooks had 50 years worth of public reaction to LOTR to gauge what would make another book popular.
Or, instead of thinking, I'll just tell you: roguish charm.
Just one entry in a long, long list.
The Moon offers the possibility of a self-sustaining colony, which is much less likely with a station.
Antarctica offers the possibility of a self-sustaining colony, which is much less likely on the Moon.
That's just as insightful as "All men are mortal".
The statement "A $POLITICAL_SYSTEM cannot exist as a permanent form of government" is a tautology, because of elementary thermodynamics.
It is none of the federal government's damn business how I get my money or what I do with it.
It's their business to enforce your honesty. They can't do that without your claim being described in sufficient detail to be falsifiable.
We should, IMHO, replace the income tax with a national sales tax
"Replace income tax with sales tax" actually means "Put a larger tax burden on the poor than the rich".
We have an income tax because its the only way to have a global, progressive tax- where the rate increases the richer you are. The effective rate for sales taxes decreases the more money you have.
altering the sales tax rate so that its higher on luxuries and lower on staples
Sheyeah right. Attempting to categorize items like that would involve more complexity than the IRS currently requires, and still wouldn't work. An excessive quantity of staples IS a luxury!
I have not been able to identify an actual penalty that can be applied for failing to file the form 1040.
The penalty is called an "audit". It's painful and expensive, and when you're done, the IRS has essentially done the 1040 for you (in more detail than you could've accomplished on your own).
. Good and bad are ill-defined, and in many cases the choice is between bad and worse.
Erhm, so file that under his choices 1c and 3b.
On top of that, the entire story is a complete rip off of the LOTR trilogy,
Hey, wait a minute! Ripping off LOTR is a patented business model of Terry Brooks ! Someone's got a lawsuit coming...
many non-voters are low income to poor. Thus they might be more inclined to vote for democrats.
Frequently the opposite is true. The wealthy have many ways to influence the behavior of elected officials- contributions, etc. The poor have only their vote.
Also, look at how much it costs one person to vote- voting normally takes up your time; say 20-90 minutes worth, depending on locality. The time is the same for poor and rich, but the money equivalent is more for the rich (since they earn more per hour).
And finally, look at how much a different elected official will change the life of a prospective voter. Rich people won't be inconvenienced either way depending on who is School Superintendent or County Sheriff. But the poor could be substantially effected by local politicians choices. So they may be more likely to go to polls because local politics are more meaningful to them.
Here's a saying: "The poor vote; the rich buy ads to tell them how"
And do you really think pressing two buttons on the camera (which could be simplified to one) is really going to have a big impact in whether or not someone replaced and obsolete low quality camera for a modern high quality one?
No, I don't. Nor did I write anything to suggest that. (Feel free to read what I actually said, at your leisure...)
I lended him my, formatted as ext2, and the camera had no problem as it formatted it to FAT itself.
As I tried to say earlier, most users won't be happy if swapping a card between two different brands of cameras causes pictures already on the card to be deleted by a reformat.
Anyway, here's an article that explains what submarine patents are, since you apparently don't know.
That article is incorrect. The definition of submarine patent it presents is excessively specific.
"Submarine patent" doesn't only mean the patent has been kept in USPTO filing-limbo. It can also apply in any circumstance where a patent-holder encourages others to use the patented technique while intentionally not revealing that is patented.
I'd be willing to buy a digital camera that's just a little less convenient in order to take this and rub it in Billy's face.
Admirable. And non-representative of the typical consumer's response.
PS. Slashdot had better not allow editing of posts. That's inimical to a threaded message system. You can't have a coherent discussion if the comment you were replying to can be totally redone, leaving a response floating after it that now seems irrelevant.
If editing is allowed, it should always leave an option to see the earlier version(s)... and if someone responds to the pre-editing version of the post, then that version should be the default one displayed (With a small link going to the new version).
The first thing Slashdot should do to modernize its comment system is to create an official way to quote the preceding message, instead of relying users to manually paste it and insert italic tags.
Clean-room procedures can avoid patents if the result in something that creates the same or compatible output without doing the things specified in the patent.
Clean room is still meaningless in that case. If you can figure out a way to do something equivalent without infringing the patent, it makes no difference if you've already read the patent or not.
If you then sell that product and get sued for patent infringement, the court will only be interested in whether or not your version infringes the patent- they don't care if you knew about the patent before you built it. Clean-room procedures will only make your re-invention work slower and more expensive. ("Oops, sorry. That idea violates the patent too! I won't tell you how, though. Just get back in that closet and try again!")
However, this is easily avoided. If you use MS Windows to create an image,
If you paid for that Windows, then you're hardly avoiding a dependency on Microsoft.
Who's preventing FOSS PDF readers? They stopped Skylarov (sic?) from distributing a program that cracked the encryption on Adobe eBooks.
So a FOSS reader cannot open an encrypted PDF file (even if you know the password)...
So a FOSS reader cannot open all PDF files...
So the FOSS program can't honestly be called a PDF reader then, can it?
(If you don't belive me, then go buy Acrobat and download xpdf and kghostview. Have Acrobat export a text file to encrypted PDF, and see if either of the Free programs can read it. They can't even try)
You expect everyone to throw away all those nifty 256Meg cards they just bought six months ago
Its not a matter of throwing them away. A simple computer program can reformat a card from VFAT into ext2 or whatever you like. Linux users do this all the time (because VFAT cannot support the "ln -s" program some Linux applications need).
But although the hardware investment wouldn't be lost, the public would not be willing to go through the time investment to reformat everything. (Unless Microsoft was charging an excessive price for FAT, which they won't do. They're smart enough to keep the cost of paying less than the cost of workarounds)
Consider second: the most powerful political position in the world was decided by a margin that is substantially smaller than the number of /. lurkers currently nodding and saying "Yeah, Voting SUXX0RS".
Yeah, so the Democrats lost that election by less than 1000 people, right? And yet if 50,000 more Democrats had voted in Massachusetts and California, they wouldn't have changed a thing.
This reinforces why from an individual perspective, voting is mostly useless. Those people who didn't bother voting in the 49 other states were right- they wouldn't have counted anyway.
the cameras are designed to use FAT because they're made to interface with Windows machines.
Once, but not any more. Originally cameras used FAT for Windows compatibility (Even though it wasn't really needed back then... at that time, consumers needed new drivers to recognize flashcards, so they could've installed a new filesystem at the same time). But today, cameras need to be compatible not only with Windows desktops, but also other digital cameras, media on store shelves, Kodak photo-kiosks.
MS isn't going after Sony for the cameras they made yesterday, they're gunning for license fees for cameras they are *going* to build.
That's painfully obvious, and changes nothing.
The cameras don't talk to each other, so it won't matter if the camera I buy next year doesn't speak FAT.
Oh really? You've never moved a memcard from one camera to another? You don't enjoy the convenience of tearing an SD Card out of its package and immediately jamming it into your camera, without reformating it first? (Which would erase any data already on the card)
It is precisely because all current digital cameras use FAT that future cameras will need to- otherwise, those future cameras will be at a competitive disadvantage because sticking a memory-card into them doesn't "just work".
From a domineering-industrialist standpoint, Microsoft has played this very well: they allowed FAT support to seem free long enough for all digital cameras to use it, even though initially filesystem didn't matter. Now that the manufacturers are addicted, they can start to bring up the price. A textbook submarine patent.
because you've revealed it to the world as far as the law is concerned.
The whole point of NDAs is that you have not revealed it to the public from a legal standpoint.
Is there any other reason for NDAs to even exist?
The solution Microsoft came up with is much better than what you were proposing. They didn't leave extra filenames in places that older programs could see them and get confused (like they do with Shortcut files). They're hidden in previously unused portions of the disk records, invisible to everything but the OS.
That's easy.
Yes, the response is obvious: Linux distributors will treat FAT code just like they do DeCSS today. That's not a satisfactory solution... look at how badly reviewers take the DeCSS situation today.
This may really hurt the adoption of Linux. No longer will you be able to just slip a Linux CD (Knoppix for instance) into a WindowsME box and start reading off of the existing hard drives. No, you've first got to get networking going so it can download the FAT driver from a "pirate" server in Bermuda.
(Nevermind that the easiest way for Linux to automatically establish a network connection would be to read the FAT disk and see what settings Windows(r) is using...)
Mandrake and Suse will do fuck-all, since they're in Europe. Gentoo users will say 'what's a binary package?
And newbies will say "Linux sucks, it can't even read a hard drive! I give up"
"Take it with a grain of salt" dates back 2000 years, to what was then a popular superstition: salt is an antidote for poison.
Taking salt with food was a sign of distrusting the one who provided it.
It's not an issue that a clean-room implementation would fix. The patent in question isn't on the code,
No clean-room procedure can ever help avoid any patent. Clean-room applies to copyright disputes ONLY, and has no effect on patents or trademarks.
If you can legally prove that you clean-room implemented something 25 years before the patent was applied for, it doesn't help you at all: infringing on that patent is still illegal.
The purpose of the DMCA is for situations like Adobe's ebook, where if someone cracks the encryption they'd get free ebooks. In that situation the DMCA is a Good Thing. Coporations can't use the DMCA to cover up illegal activity or to stifle competition
Prohibiting the creation of Free Software PDF readers is undeniably stifling competition.
How do you know that the device isn't reading a non-FAT filesystem, and exporting to you a virtual FAT view of it?
1. Because that would be unstable, inefficient, and crazy.
2. Because creating a "virtual FAT view" would violate the patents just like using actual FAT.