The topic of "the end of scarcity" has been covered in several science fiction books. Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" is most obviously pertinent to this article, but "Distraction" by Sterling also covers that ground. And of course, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is readable online for free.
The answers given in each of those works are, respsectively, "Space", "Knowledge", and "Popularity".
(Well actually, Diamond Age presented many more forms of new scarcity. There was conspicuous inefficiency, energy, intellectual property, and real-estate...)
until it is reduced to a working invention. This is a requirement of getting a patent.
Nope, it once was a requirement, but no longer. You can patent things without a working model or even a schematic. A "Description of Preferred Embodiment" is needed, but can be quite vague, if a sharp lawyer writes it up.
So, you are saying that myself, an very small-time inventor, should have no right to protect myself against someone with more money that comes up with the same idea long after myself?
If by "protect yourself" you mean "extract money from a more successful competitor", then no, you should have no right.
Patents should only serve to promote progress "of science or useful arts". Allowing you to exact a tax on all DVD players does not promote progress. You haven't demonstrated any way that your invention accelerated the arrival of an entertaining consumer product. Having read 6142913, it looks quite worthy of inclusion in the ever-growing list of spurious patents for obvious ideas.
The fact that patent law does not allow indepentent rediscovery as an absolute defense is one of its greatest failings.
There are no fees for filing third party observations.
No fee, but a large cost. All the time need to read and respond to the wave of obfuscated legalese/technobabble.
The people should not have to volunteer as uncompensated patent examiners just to safeguard their own creative rights in the future.
Art.115 injects further pro-corporate bias into the patent system. Only major businesses will be able to afford a legal staff to monitor applications to scan for things they can shoot down.
I'm not sure why it has occured but capitalism has come to be taken as synonymous with "free market".
That linguistic transition occured because the word "capitalism" does not convey useful meaning unless it also implies a fluid marketplace. There are two possible definitions of "capitalism".
By looking only at the word roots, capitalism would be defined as "the social system where capital (money) is in control". That's a content-free, circular definition, since money itself is defined as an abstracted measurement of controling power. That interpretation is correct, but too broad to be useful, as many obselete economic systems fit under it. Feudalism can be considered as a case of capitalism where one family happens to own all the real estate in a nation. Communism is like one big labor union owning all factories.
You made a distinction between private and government ownership of capital. But there's no real difference. If a single corporation acquires 99.5% of the nation's money, it has become the government- regardless of whether the ruler wears a crown or a necktie.
The shortcomings of that definition is why modern dictionaries include "in a free market" as part of the entry for capitalism. And it's why anti-monopoly trustbuster laws are viewed as defending the capitalist way, even though they punish the most successful of capitalists.
Is not the patent system meant to benefit people like me, who thought up something before it was possible to do
NO IT IS NOT!!!!
Otherwise Arthur C Clarke could've charged a NASA a trillion dollars for the priviledge of launching his invention, the communication satellite.
People like you should not benefit from the patent system. You thought up something that was impossible at the time... meaning it was "useless"... flying in the face of the "progress of science and useful arts" clause of the US Constituion.
Was your idea a real breakthrough? I don't know, but I doubt it. Were you some amazing genius, who discovered something nobody else would have? Unlikely. Chances are that as technology progressed to the point where it was possible to accomplish these things, many many other smart people would have had the same ideas you did.
In fact, it's fairly likely that several people though of your "invention" before you did, too. They just didn't have the legal "foresight" to seek government monopoly on an idea with no practical application.
against a company that came up with this idea about three years after I had developed it to
There, you acknowledge the patent system should not be defending you. By stating that they "came up with this idea", you admit they independently rediscovered your great invention- suggesting it wasn't all that special to begin with.
See, the very premise you're starting from is far from a given. You can't compile a piece of code and expect it to simply run on any Linux machine. It may run on many but nowhere near the 100% you can reach with Windows.
That, and most other counter-arguments you give, are security through obscurity. Claiming that systems are resistant to exploitation because they're nonstandardized is a weak, shortsighted defense. (And carries a pessimistic assumption that Linux will not become a dominant computing platform and acquire 'monoculture' characteristics)
(1) once you get code executed on a system you can do bad stuff (but don't think getting that code executed is such a trivial task); (2) a good security model is useless in the hands of ignorant users.
It's not a good security model. Allowing a system to contain privilege-escalation exploits is a design flaw, even if those exploits rely on watching a normal user until he says the magic word to update his priviledges. A good multiuser OS will allow only a small number of tightly-controlled and un-spoofable paths to reaching root access. One should never be allowed to "su" from an insecure environment (one that potentially has been tainted by untrusted code).
It should be possible to train users that there is just one way to change to a higher priviledge mode, so they can be certain any other prompt requesting the root password is an attack. The approved way to escalate priviledges should be protected by the OS so that no user-application is able to emulate or intercept it. Unix does not meet this criteria. The "su" command certainly isn't safe, nor are remote-root logins. Only Ctrl-Alt-F1 comes close, but even that has weaknesses.
This is what is alluded to by section 3.2.2.1.1 of the DoD Trusted Computer Criteria, which is the requirement that lead to Microsoft's use of Ctrl-Alt-Delete for a login box. (A feature they haven't always implemented correctly or even completely, but at least someone was trying. They seem to be backing away from this approach in XP, but have other, funny ideas to face this problem.)
What's to prevent a well-written virus from doing what it takes to hijack your private key, and digitally sign copies of itself to all your friends?
The fact that his system doesn't get infected by viruses.
The whole point of the story was that even though, as a *nix user, he was immune to the infection, other people thought he had it because his email address was spoofed.
And, please, QuickDraw was before Direct X, if i remember correctly. That would be another item that Redmond has taken from the smaller company.
DirectX is not a copy of QuickDraw. It hardly even makes sense to compare them. The functions they perform aren't even roughly equivalent.
One could contrast QuickDraw vs Microsoft GDI. Or look at Quickdraw 3D vs DirectX vs OpenGL; although in that case, DirectX still provides a broader sprectrum of features (including audio and human input) than the competitors.
If the source code for a standard is "Free" (by FSF definition), then the standard specification itself is also free.
MP3 (and MPEG in general, and GIF, and etc) is "bad" because the specification for the format is IP-encumbered. To even write your own decompression software is requires you to license a patent, copyright, or both.
However, any data format for which a correct, GPL player exists is automatically free. Any average programmer can extract the specification, using the GPL code as a reference implementation, and then write a new program under totally his own copyright.
As for GPL being "the only way to keep the code free" that is simply nonsense. As long as one copy is out there BSD licensed code will be free, and nobody can make every copy vanish off the face of the Earth.
Not nonsense (although the "freak accident destroys all but one copy" scenario is a little out-there).
If the person holding the sole surviving copy of a BSD program wants to "vanish" it, he can- even if he still uses & releases that code in software he publishes! On the other hand, if it were GPL, then he couldn't reuse the code in his own products without also re-introducing it to the world at large.
That 19 million figure for NY you have, BTW, is for New York State, not NYC (again, according to the US Census...).
Nope. It's the New York "Metropolitan Area". What you'd call "one city" if you judged borders by building density. Since NYC is on the border to New Jersey, the Metro area includes people out of NY state. Thus the Met-area by itself is as populous as NYS.
If you want to check your facts and figures, you're welcome to play again, though.
I already checked, as the authoritative tone of my post was supposed to indicate. I didn't want to insult by implying you were unable to operate google yourself. But now I have no choice, and will provide links, and even paste in the relevant factoids.
The World's 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas 1 Tokyo-Yokohama Japan 33,190,000 2 New York United States 20,270,000 4 Mexico City Mexico 19,620,000 8 Los Angeles United States 16,200,000 27 Chicago United States 8,960,000 29 Washington-Baltimore United States 7,430,000 34 San Francisco United States 6,940,000 37 Philadelphia United States 6,010,000 39 Detroit-Windsor United States-Canada 5,810,000 42 Boston United States 5,690,000 49 Dallas-Fort Worth United States 5,010,000 50 Madrid Spain 4,950,000
And what position does Sydney have on that list? None. No Australian city even places. (Adding Paramatta's 150,000 into the Sydney total still won't bump it ahead of Madrid)
Just for the record: Sydney is the 31st largest city in the world, with a population just above 4 million, according to this site.
I don't believe that chart. It compares apples and orange trees.
According to this Sydney page, the population of Sydney is 72,500. That's the city itself. The Sydney Metropolitan Area is the one with 4 million people.
Compare that to the NYC area, which has more than 19 million people (same as all of Australia). The Met areas of LA, Seattle, Chicago, DC, and other US cities dwarf Sydney as well. Why, even tiny Boston and desolate Dallas have 3+ million in their areas.
A nation that wants to seem more important on the world stage can play games with city limits, pumping up the size number for a "city" by lumping in the neighboring areas. From a practical standpoint, though, US metropoli are larger than anything you'll find Down Under.
Second, just because I decide to offer an "all you can copy for $0" deal this year, doesn't mean I can't turn around and start charging for copies next year, or demanding royalties from downstream copiers.
I said "unlimited reproduction rights". Once I sell you those for any price, there is no way to revoke them.
The phrase I used was "unrestricted redistribution". I can hardly imagine a software company doing that, unless they had Open Source tendencies (which would be better served with a standard Open Source license)
The example of images is not "unrestricted" redistribution- a non-commercial restriction was applied.
The example of ArmourSoft appears ficticious. While ArmourSoft allows evaluation copies, you are required to contact them over the telephone first, so I sincerely doubt they'd permit redistribution.
Adobe, as well, places restrictions on redistribution. You can't put it on an anonymous FTP server for example.
Is that really productive, though? There are 3 potentially blamable parties: Microsoft, the peron who decided to buy Microsoft, and the worm author.
Liability should be assessed to prevent similar disasters from happening in the future. Fear of legal judgement is supposed to be a threat causing rational, selfish entities to do the right thing.
Who is most likely to be swayed by the prospect of a multibillion-dollar judgement? I'd say that this kind of threat has the least influence over the worm writer. He's a random, unstable individual, who either thinks his involvement won't be discovered, or doesn't care much about his future.
Microsoft and the power companies, on the other hand, will be firmly implicated for any role they had bringing this about. To deploy critical services relying on software whose security record is charitably "spotty" is negligence of the highest degree.
To prevent such mistakes in the future, those people need to fear consequences. We must hold victims of hacking partially responsible for their self-created vulnerability. Defense begins at home.
Legal liablilty might be able to prevent developers from writing exploitable code, or industry from deploying it- but it'll never stop a lone Chinese hacker from releasing a worm.
All these damn licenses acheive nothing. People released code into the public domain LONG before they were penned.
That's exactly why they were penned. Because RMS released Emacs as PD, and then was unhappy that modifications to the program he'd given away were being sold without him being able to see the code as freely as he'd given it.
You don't need case law or anything. This is just self-evident. The concept of "Public Domain" doesn't have to be explicitly defined, since it is an automatic result of normal copyright law.
The owner of copyright has sole discretion as to allowing a work to be copied and distributed, and can ask any price he wants. He can allow 1 copy for $10,000, or 50,000 copies for $19.95 each, or even infinite copies for $0. In the latter case, Public Domain has been created.
Now, the angle some people are going at is that since Berne allows an author to recieve copyright protection without making any affirmative claim (he doesn't have to print "Copyright 2004" on the first page), that it is somehow impossible for him to forgo recieving that copyright. This is untrue, but even if it were so, it wouldn't matter: once owning copyright, the author can always offer "unlimited reproduction rights for $0" and make it effectively PD again.
Did you see the "?" characters throughout my post? There were 2 of them. They're question marks, and they indicate that the preceding sentence was a question- something you'd have to answer to have any credibility. To hammer it in a little more, here's another question: "If Kinkos rents you a laptop to edit your report, but warns you against putting any software on it, do you accept? Or do you claim that since all data is software, they've forbidden you from making any use at all?"
You obviously just haven't properly considered the meaning of the words before.
Funny, I was going to say the same thing, until I realized you've spent entirely too much time considering it. This is actually a well-documented phenomena: "Your radical ideas about philosophy have already occured to others". It normally occurs in college students forced into aimless musing as they sit up all night watching a roommate cram for finals.
Any list of instructions that can be carried out by a computer is software.
And is "red, red, green, red, blue, green, blue, red, green" a set of instructions? No, it emphatically is not. "drawpixel(red);drawpixel(red);drawpixel(green)... " are instructions. If a person wanted to be useless, he could claim they're equivalent, but they're not. Not every fact is an instruction.
That would be the same as calling any rock or lump of wood a "machine". A silly person can claim "the rock is a machine to describe the shape of a rock", but the world will see him for a fool.
Machines (or "hardware") are a subset of all matter. Software is a subset of all data. (Hardware|Software) is (matter|data) that has been built into a functional machine. There is much matter that clearly is not hardware, and much data which isn't software.
The word software was clearly invented to sepperate the concept of software from hardware.
Yes, that's correct. So why do you refuse to honor the intentional meaning of the word?
In the distant past there were computers which read data from cards and processed it as electrical impulses. When a new computational function was desired, the hardware had to be laboriously rewired. The great insight was that data could act like hardware, and we'd call that software. From the dream of the UTM was born the general-purpose, stored-program computer.
Your position would deny the greatness of that invention, by claiming that since computers had already processed data, "software" had existed all along.
That's the definition common to university classes titled "Robotics". But as often happens, the experts of a certain field have chosen to claim a common word as their own, re-defining it to mean whatever they happen to study.
The work robot was invented by Karel Capek as a modification of robotnik, Czech for serf/slave. It implied machines that approached human-like characteristics over time, including the desire to be free from servitude.
"Mechanical arms with 3 degrees of freedom" is a useful subject for research, and practitioners have adopted the less-unwieldy name "roboticists", but that doesn't make it correct.
Other examples of experts invalidly redefining a word to a more specific form comes from the military. The vehicle called a "Tank" really means any mobile ground platform capable of surviving sustained machinegun fire. That definition was created around 1920 (the same time "robot" was). But today, military commanders only call something a tank if it's not only well armored, but also well-armed enough to damage a similar vehicle.
An example prehaps more familiar to you is "hacker". It really means someone who "operates a complex system in a manner inconsistent with the designer's intent". Today, people calling themselves "hackers" attempt to redefine the word to mean "highly skilled computer programmers".
suction cups with an oxygyn tank (I'll leave that as an exercise for you to figure out).
This one hurts my head. How big an oxygen tank are you talking here? Enough to pressurize the "space" outside the vehicle so that the robot's suction-cups are low pressure by comparison?
Slashdot Mirror
I have to ask what you think is wrong with it. It's got a nice little tree, tab completion, multiple M$ style shift key first to last list
I was going to ask what dialogue you were talking about, because the GTK FileOpen box I know of is nothing like what you describe.
However now I see that the latest GTK has a halfway decent box, nothing like the piece of trash installed with Redhat 9 for example.
The topic of "the end of scarcity" has been covered in several science fiction books. Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" is most obviously pertinent to this article, but "Distraction" by Sterling also covers that ground. And of course, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is readable online for free.
The answers given in each of those works are, respsectively, "Space", "Knowledge", and "Popularity".
(Well actually, Diamond Age presented many more forms of new scarcity. There was conspicuous inefficiency, energy, intellectual property, and real-estate...)
until it is reduced to a working invention. This is a requirement of getting a patent.
Nope, it once was a requirement, but no longer. You can patent things without a working model or even a schematic. A "Description of Preferred Embodiment" is needed, but can be quite vague, if a sharp lawyer writes it up.
So, you are saying that myself, an very small-time inventor, should have no right to protect myself against someone with more money that comes up with the same idea long after myself?
If by "protect yourself" you mean "extract money from a more successful competitor", then no, you should have no right.
Patents should only serve to promote progress "of science or useful arts". Allowing you to exact a tax on all DVD players does not promote progress. You haven't demonstrated any way that your invention accelerated the arrival of an entertaining consumer product. Having read 6142913, it looks quite worthy of inclusion in the ever-growing list of spurious patents for obvious ideas.
The fact that patent law does not allow indepentent rediscovery as an absolute defense is one of its greatest failings.
There are no fees for filing third party observations.
No fee, but a large cost. All the time need to read and respond to the wave of obfuscated legalese/technobabble.
The people should not have to volunteer as uncompensated patent examiners just to safeguard their own creative rights in the future.
Art.115 injects further pro-corporate bias into the patent system. Only major businesses will be able to afford a legal staff to monitor applications to scan for things they can shoot down.
I'm not sure why it has occured but capitalism has come to be taken as synonymous with "free market".
That linguistic transition occured because the word "capitalism" does not convey useful meaning unless it also implies a fluid marketplace. There are two possible definitions of "capitalism".
By looking only at the word roots, capitalism would be defined as "the social system where capital (money) is in control". That's a content-free, circular definition, since money itself is defined as an abstracted measurement of controling power. That interpretation is correct, but too broad to be useful, as many obselete economic systems fit under it. Feudalism can be considered as a case of capitalism where one family happens to own all the real estate in a nation. Communism is like one big labor union owning all factories.
You made a distinction between private and government ownership of capital. But there's no real difference. If a single corporation acquires 99.5% of the nation's money, it has become the government- regardless of whether the ruler wears a crown or a necktie.
The shortcomings of that definition is why modern dictionaries include "in a free market" as part of the entry for capitalism. And it's why anti-monopoly trustbuster laws are viewed as defending the capitalist way, even though they punish the most successful of capitalists.
Is not the patent system meant to benefit people like me, who thought up something before it was possible to do
NO IT IS NOT!!!!
Otherwise Arthur C Clarke could've charged a NASA a trillion dollars for the priviledge of launching his invention, the communication satellite.
People like you should not benefit from the patent system. You thought up something that was impossible at the time... meaning it was "useless"... flying in the face of the "progress of science and useful arts" clause of the US Constituion.
Was your idea a real breakthrough? I don't know, but I doubt it. Were you some amazing genius, who discovered something nobody else would have? Unlikely. Chances are that as technology progressed to the point where it was possible to accomplish these things, many many other smart people would have had the same ideas you did.
In fact, it's fairly likely that several people though of your "invention" before you did, too. They just didn't have the legal "foresight" to seek government monopoly on an idea with no practical application.
against a company that came up with this idea about three years after I had developed it to
There, you acknowledge the patent system should not be defending you. By stating that they "came up with this idea", you admit they independently rediscovered your great invention- suggesting it wasn't all that special to begin with.
See, the very premise you're starting from is far from a given. You can't compile a piece of code and expect it to simply run on any Linux machine. It may run on many but nowhere near the 100% you can reach with Windows.
That, and most other counter-arguments you give, are security through obscurity. Claiming that systems are resistant to exploitation because they're nonstandardized is a weak, shortsighted defense. (And carries a pessimistic assumption that Linux will not become a dominant computing platform and acquire 'monoculture' characteristics)
(1) once you get code executed on a system you can do bad stuff (but don't think getting that code executed is such a trivial task); (2) a good security model is useless in the hands of ignorant users.
It's not a good security model. Allowing a system to contain privilege-escalation exploits is a design flaw, even if those exploits rely on watching a normal user until he says the magic word to update his priviledges. A good multiuser OS will allow only a small number of tightly-controlled and un-spoofable paths to reaching root access. One should never be allowed to "su" from an insecure environment (one that potentially has been tainted by untrusted code).
It should be possible to train users that there is just one way to change to a higher priviledge mode, so they can be certain any other prompt requesting the root password is an attack. The approved way to escalate priviledges should be protected by the OS so that no user-application is able to emulate or intercept it. Unix does not meet this criteria. The "su" command certainly isn't safe, nor are remote-root logins. Only Ctrl-Alt-F1 comes close, but even that has weaknesses.
This is what is alluded to by section 3.2.2.1.1 of the DoD Trusted Computer Criteria, which is the requirement that lead to Microsoft's use of Ctrl-Alt-Delete for a login box. (A feature they haven't always implemented correctly or even completely, but at least someone was trying. They seem to be backing away from this approach in XP, but have other, funny ideas to face this problem.)
What's to prevent a well-written virus from doing what it takes to hijack your private key, and digitally sign copies of itself to all your friends?
The fact that his system doesn't get infected by viruses.
The whole point of the story was that even though, as a *nix user, he was immune to the infection, other people thought he had it because his email address was spoofed.
And, please, QuickDraw was before Direct X, if i remember correctly. That would be another item that Redmond has taken from the smaller company.
DirectX is not a copy of QuickDraw. It hardly even makes sense to compare them. The functions they perform aren't even roughly equivalent.
One could contrast QuickDraw vs Microsoft GDI. Or look at Quickdraw 3D vs DirectX vs OpenGL; although in that case, DirectX still provides a broader sprectrum of features (including audio and human input) than the competitors.
Capitalization really matters, sometimes.
In the 80s, DARPA had "an internet". Only after Gore led Congress to fund widespread adoption was "the Internet" created.
(Yes, there was a time long ago when people actually imagined that multiple non-connected "internets" could exist!)
If the source code for a standard is "Free" (by FSF definition), then the standard specification itself is also free.
MP3 (and MPEG in general, and GIF, and etc) is "bad" because the specification for the format is IP-encumbered. To even write your own decompression software is requires you to license a patent, copyright, or both.
However, any data format for which a correct, GPL player exists is automatically free. Any average programmer can extract the specification, using the GPL code as a reference implementation, and then write a new program under totally his own copyright.
As for GPL being "the only way to keep the code free" that is simply nonsense. As long as one copy is out there BSD licensed code will be free, and nobody can make every copy vanish off the face of the Earth.
Not nonsense (although the "freak accident destroys all but one copy" scenario is a little out-there).
If the person holding the sole surviving copy of a BSD program wants to "vanish" it, he can- even if he still uses & releases that code in software he publishes! On the other hand, if it were GPL, then he couldn't reuse the code in his own products without also re-introducing it to the world at large.
Nope. It's the New York "Metropolitan Area". What you'd call "one city" if you judged borders by building density. Since NYC is on the border to New Jersey, the Metro area includes people out of NY state. Thus the Met-area by itself is as populous as NYS.
If you want to check your facts and figures, you're welcome to play again, though.
I already checked, as the authoritative tone of my post was supposed to indicate. I didn't want to insult by implying you were unable to operate google yourself. But now I have no choice, and will provide links, and even paste in the relevant factoids.
The World's 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas
1 Tokyo-Yokohama Japan 33,190,000
2 New York United States 20,270,000
4 Mexico City Mexico 19,620,000
8 Los Angeles United States 16,200,000
27 Chicago United States 8,960,000
29 Washington-Baltimore United States 7,430,000
34 San Francisco United States 6,940,000
37 Philadelphia United States 6,010,000
39 Detroit-Windsor United States-Canada 5,810,000
42 Boston United States 5,690,000
49 Dallas-Fort Worth United States 5,010,000
50 Madrid Spain 4,950,000
And what position does Sydney have on that list? None. No Australian city even places. (Adding Paramatta's 150,000 into the Sydney total still won't bump it ahead of Madrid)
For verification, here's a separate list of metro areas in the US only.
Just for the record: Sydney is the 31st largest city in the world, with a population just above 4 million, according to this site.
I don't believe that chart. It compares apples and orange trees.
According to this Sydney page, the population of Sydney is 72,500. That's the city itself. The Sydney Metropolitan Area is the one with 4 million people.
Compare that to the NYC area, which has more than 19 million people (same as all of Australia). The Met areas of LA, Seattle, Chicago, DC, and other US cities dwarf Sydney as well. Why, even tiny Boston and desolate Dallas have 3+ million in their areas.
A nation that wants to seem more important on the world stage can play games with city limits, pumping up the size number for a "city" by lumping in the neighboring areas. From a practical standpoint, though, US metropoli are larger than anything you'll find Down Under.
Second, just because I decide to offer an "all you can copy for $0" deal this year, doesn't mean I can't turn around and start charging for copies next year, or demanding royalties from downstream copiers.
I said "unlimited reproduction rights". Once I sell you those for any price, there is no way to revoke them.
The phrase I used was "unrestricted redistribution". I can hardly imagine a software company doing that, unless they had Open Source tendencies (which would be better served with a standard Open Source license)
The example of images is not "unrestricted" redistribution- a non-commercial restriction was applied.
The example of ArmourSoft appears ficticious. While ArmourSoft allows evaluation copies, you are required to contact them over the telephone first, so I sincerely doubt they'd permit redistribution.
Adobe, as well, places restrictions on redistribution. You can't put it on an anonymous FTP server for example.
Is that really productive, though? There are 3 potentially blamable parties: Microsoft, the peron who decided to buy Microsoft, and the worm author.
Liability should be assessed to prevent similar disasters from happening in the future. Fear of legal judgement is supposed to be a threat causing rational, selfish entities to do the right thing.
Who is most likely to be swayed by the prospect of a multibillion-dollar judgement? I'd say that this kind of threat has the least influence over the worm writer. He's a random, unstable individual, who either thinks his involvement won't be discovered, or doesn't care much about his future.
Microsoft and the power companies, on the other hand, will be firmly implicated for any role they had bringing this about. To deploy critical services relying on software whose security record is charitably "spotty" is negligence of the highest degree.
To prevent such mistakes in the future, those people need to fear consequences. We must hold victims of hacking partially responsible for their self-created vulnerability. Defense begins at home.
Legal liablilty might be able to prevent developers from writing exploitable code, or industry from deploying it- but it'll never stop a lone Chinese hacker from releasing a worm.
They also thought that since they owned a patent on airplanes, they could stop armies from using them.
please stop comparing bill clinton
Who said anything about Clinton? Disputing the definition of "is" was a feature of Bill Gate's testimony in the antitrust suit.
Clinton argued about what "sexual relations" means, but the award for redefining "is" goes to a different Bill.
A work is considered public domain ONLY if it is released without restrictions.
Which is exactly what I meant in my $0 example. Did I mention any other restrictions? No, because there weren't any!
Many companys allow unrestricted distribution of software or literary works while explicitly restating copyright.
Please name 3 software companies which do this.
All these damn licenses acheive nothing. People released code into the public domain LONG before they were penned.
That's exactly why they were penned. Because RMS released Emacs as PD, and then was unhappy that modifications to the program he'd given away were being sold without him being able to see the code as freely as he'd given it.
You don't need case law or anything. This is just self-evident. The concept of "Public Domain" doesn't have to be explicitly defined, since it is an automatic result of normal copyright law.
The owner of copyright has sole discretion as to allowing a work to be copied and distributed, and can ask any price he wants. He can allow 1 copy for $10,000, or 50,000 copies for $19.95 each, or even infinite copies for $0. In the latter case, Public Domain has been created.
Now, the angle some people are going at is that since Berne allows an author to recieve copyright protection without making any affirmative claim (he doesn't have to print "Copyright 2004" on the first page), that it is somehow impossible for him to forgo recieving that copyright. This is untrue, but even if it were so, it wouldn't matter: once owning copyright, the author can always offer "unlimited reproduction rights for $0" and make it effectively PD again.
Did you see the "?" characters throughout my post? There were 2 of them. They're question marks, and they indicate that the preceding sentence was a question- something you'd have to answer to have any credibility. To hammer it in a little more, here's another question: "If Kinkos rents you a laptop to edit your report, but warns you against putting any software on it, do you accept? Or do you claim that since all data is software, they've forbidden you from making any use at all?"
. " are instructions. If a person wanted to be useless, he could claim they're equivalent, but they're not. Not every fact is an instruction.
You obviously just haven't properly considered the meaning of the words before.
Funny, I was going to say the same thing, until I realized you've spent entirely too much time considering it. This is actually a well-documented phenomena: "Your radical ideas about philosophy have already occured to others". It normally occurs in college students forced into aimless musing as they sit up all night watching a roommate cram for finals.
Any list of instructions that can be carried out by a computer is software.
And is "red, red, green, red, blue, green, blue, red, green" a set of instructions? No, it emphatically is not. "drawpixel(red);drawpixel(red);drawpixel(green)..
That would be the same as calling any rock or lump of wood a "machine". A silly person can claim "the rock is a machine to describe the shape of a rock", but the world will see him for a fool.
Machines (or "hardware") are a subset of all matter. Software is a subset of all data. (Hardware|Software) is (matter|data) that has been built into a functional machine. There is much matter that clearly is not hardware, and much data which isn't software.
The word software was clearly invented to sepperate the concept of software from hardware.
Yes, that's correct. So why do you refuse to honor the intentional meaning of the word?
In the distant past there were computers which read data from cards and processed it as electrical impulses. When a new computational function was desired, the hardware had to be laboriously rewired. The great insight was that data could act like hardware, and we'd call that software. From the dream of the UTM was born the general-purpose, stored-program computer.
Your position would deny the greatness of that invention, by claiming that since computers had already processed data, "software" had existed all along.
That's the definition common to university classes titled "Robotics". But as often happens, the experts of a certain field have chosen to claim a common word as their own, re-defining it to mean whatever they happen to study.
The work robot was invented by Karel Capek as a modification of robotnik, Czech for serf/slave. It implied machines that approached human-like characteristics over time, including the desire to be free from servitude.
"Mechanical arms with 3 degrees of freedom" is a useful subject for research, and practitioners have adopted the less-unwieldy name "roboticists", but that doesn't make it correct.
Other examples of experts invalidly redefining a word to a more specific form comes from the military. The vehicle called a "Tank" really means any mobile ground platform capable of surviving sustained machinegun fire. That definition was created around 1920 (the same time "robot" was). But today, military commanders only call something a tank if it's not only well armored, but also well-armed enough to damage a similar vehicle.
An example prehaps more familiar to you is "hacker". It really means someone who "operates a complex system in a manner inconsistent with the designer's intent". Today, people calling themselves "hackers" attempt to redefine the word to mean "highly skilled computer programmers".
suction cups with an oxygyn tank (I'll leave that as an exercise for you to figure out).
This one hurts my head. How big an oxygen tank are you talking here? Enough to pressurize the "space" outside the vehicle so that the robot's suction-cups are low pressure by comparison?
Stairs to the moon.
But I lost all faith in hollywood when I saw keanu reaves restart some chick's heart in the matrix reloaded,
How did you feel in "The Matrix" when the chick restarted his heart?