At which point he's put in at least as much effort as you did (reverse engineering is hard).
Does that mean bank robbers deserve the money if they can penetrate the 20-inch vault door of a bank? Because penetrating that door is hard.
Is this a serious question, or are you just trolling?
The purpose of patents (and copyright) is to promote innovation. They are not natural rights like life, liberty, etc. If they do not promote innovation, they should not exist.
Innovation doesn't happen by itself, people have to spend time and money on it. And patents ensure they get paid for their efforts.
Except of course, that you routinely see things like the burst of innovation in steam engines that happened immediately after Watt's patents expired (quotes from here):
During the period of Wattâ(TM)s patents the U.K. added about
750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years
following Wattâ(TM)s patents, additional horsepower was added at a
rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of
steam engines changed little during the period of Wattâ(TM)s patent;
while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a
factor of five.
Many new improvements to the steam engine, such as those of
William Bull, Richard Trevithick, and Arthur Woolf, became
available by 1804: although developed earlier these innovations
were kept idle until the Boulton and Watt patent expired. None of
these innovators wished to incur the same fate as Jonathan
Hornblower.
The impact of the expiration of his patents on Wattâ(TM)s
empire may come as a surprise. As might be expected, when the
patents expired âoemany establishments for making steam-engines of
Mr. Watt's principle were then commenced.â However, Wattâ(TM)s
competitors âoeprincipally aimed at...cheapness rather than
excellence.â As a result, we find that far from being driven out of
business âoeBoulton and Watt for many years afterwards kept up
their price and had increased orders.â
In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor,
responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts
suggest an alternative interpretation. Watt is one of many clever
inventors working to improve steam power in the second half of
the eighteenth century. After getting one step ahead of the pack, he
remained ahead not by superior innovation, but by superior
exploitation of the legal system.
Since State Street, there has been immeasurable innovation in the field of software.
That is entirely meaningless. What you need to measure is (1) how much of that innovation would not have happened without patents, and (2) how much other innovation would have happened without patents.
Figure out how much software there is where once you know what it does or how it works, re-implementing it would take 100x less effort.
Figure out how much software was lost due to "chilling effects" where people are afraid to do anything, and how much was outright killed (like for example Blackboard has been trying to do to everyone else in that industry).
I'm guessing that (1) is very very small, and (2) is significantly bigger but still somewhat small when taken as a fraction of all software.
I would think a software creator would prefer a copyright over a patent because copyrights last much longer even though they are not as encompassing
Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X. Once he understands how it works (reverse engineering), he can then recreate that code in a higher language, say C. Copyright does not work here. Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. Therefore having patents is necessary.
At which point he's put in at least as much effort as you did (reverse engineering is hard). Which means that he can't unfairly undercut you, so the only thing patents would do is hinder progress by letting you sit on your ass for 20 years.
Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas.... However, for software there is no need for this mechanism. There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress. If one person doesn't think of it, another one will.
This is not in any way unique to software.
Fine for many types of inventions, including medical drugs, but not for software (or business methods).
My understanding is that the main argument in favor of medical patents is that the cost of FDA approval is so insanely high compared to the production cost once things are approved. Which is remarkably similar to software, where development is expensive but distribution costs a few cents per copy for bandwidth or a dollar or two for a CD in a cardboard box.
SSDs are chips that use address lines and 2^ sizes dude.
They can always have optimizations that use that difference and return to the user exactly 16,000,000 KiB.
The external interface is that each SSD is a completely separate array of blocks, exactly like an HDD. It's not like RAM where everything shares an address space and set of address lines to the rest of the system and you don't want funny-sized holes.
I'm not sure when business first started to see IT as generic, interchangeable and disposable, but someone needs to inform the C-level people out there that software is NOT a bunch of Lego bricks snapped together and that good and talented people need to be maintained not only for now, but for the unforeseeable tomorrow.
Software is not yet a bunch of Lego bricks you can snap together, but I think it's definitely moving in that direction. Some of it's there already, like *nix shellutils.
The SI prefixes have been around for nearly 5 decades, and have a specific meaning used by everybody. Every scientist uses them in one way or another, and for every last one of of them, they have the same meaning.
Why can't we, the C.S. people, accept that?
Giga is 10^9. It has been 10^9 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 10^9.
If you want to talk about 1024^3, then it's Gibi. Gibi is 2^30 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 2^30.
Get over it.
(and yes, I try to always use GiB whenever it's appropriate).
I suppose you might have had a point here if we were talking about switching to 2^10-based prefixes and breaking 5 decades of established convention. But that isn't actually the case, the 2^10-based prefixes have been around for about as long.
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining. So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?
The "right" solution is that things dependent on the number of address lines (cache size, RAM size) are in units measured in 2^10, and things not dependent on the number address lines (network bandwidth, HDD/SSD size) are in units measured in 10^3. Files are interesting in that the base unit is a 512 byte sector but they don't depend on address lines, so they should be measured like floppy disks where 1kB is 1024 bytes, 1MB is 1000kB,and 1GB is 1000MB etc -- but this is confusing, so they'll probably just consistently use steps of 1000.
RTFA - they do not need snow plows, they heat themselves.
Oh, lovely. So instead of just snow, you'll be driving on a layer of slush/ice on top of a little water. That's about as bad as it can get, except for maybe a flash flood.
Yes. Put up a page with lots of clear descriptions of what you are, where you're going, what you're currently doing, who's involved, etc. Try to minimize the amount of personal interaction needed to quickly get a vague understanding of the project. Have a clear place to go to see your collective reactions to recent events, and keep it updated in absurd (but clear and easily searchable/accessible) detail.
Or if that's too hard, just find a way to edit the "news" industry to be more about in-depth content and less about "First Post!" so that by the time you do attract media attention the reporters will have longer deadlines and be able to be more respectful of your time.
Honestly I'd like to see them create separate tests for Linux, Mac and Windows cause one test does NOT apply to all three.
Sure it does. "This is the address bar. This part is the hostname. 'http' means you're in danger, 'https' means there's a bit less danger, a green bar with the name of the company you're trying to do business with means there's even less." "Don't open unexpected email attachments, no matter how much free porn they promise." "If the lights on your modem are always on even when you're not using the computer, get the computer looked at by a professional."
Actually, once the bad guys have installed malware on your PC, it's pretty much game over. DNSSEC won't help you, and SSL won't help you: they are designed to thwart man-in-the-middle attacks, not man-in-the-endpoint attacks. If your PC is compromised, the DLL that performs DNSSEC or SSL verification can also be compromised.
Sure, but a cursory reading of the summary/headline seemed to imply that they were using their position as ISP to cause trouble, rather than just being generic malware vendors.
Our understanding of the tidal interactions between planets and stars, which is the basis of the expected orbital decay, requires rather more levels of inference and are based on considerably more tenuous data.
Such as the tides anyone can see if they go to the beach, or the absurdly precise measurements that have been made of the moon's orbit (it's speeding up and getting farther away: the earth rotates faster than the moon orbits, so the tides are speeding it up (and slowing the earth's rotation))?
DNSSEC only helps you if you run your own DNS resolver. 99% of the population uses their ISP's resolver. The exception are corporate networks, etc. DNSSEC does nothing to protect or help the end-user know that queries are good. The data from the resolver to client isn't signed or authenticated in any way, so even if you ask for the +adflag, etc., if someone has a way to mess with your DNS queries with MitM, they can add the "ad" (authenticated data) flag so your client would thing the data had been verified by DNSSEC.
No, you can demand that the ISP's resolver forward all the records you need in order to verify the signatures yourself. The first thing google comes back with is this, from 2007:
The current DNSSEC standards define a security-aware (stub) resolver that would be located at the users PC and which can indicate to a security-aware intermediate nameserver that it will perform its own DNSSEC validation by setting the Checking Disabled (CD) flag in the DNS query Header. This has the effect of inhibiting DNSSEC at the security-aware nameserver causing all necessary records to be supplied to the resolver to enable it to perform the security validation. The net result is we have achieved end-to-end security.
...and DNS hijacking.... The story's interesting, and a typical internet user would be exposed in such a situation. What security measures should be taken to prevent normal users from falling victim to such malicious bodies?
DNSSEC so they can't do anything to your DNS queries (not even by directing you to an evil resolver), and SSL or similar for everything else so your connections can't be edited or sniffed. Then there's not really much the can do, besides just dropping all your connections.
The funny thing about that is that the many eyewitness reports of sprites were routinely disregarded because we "knew that wasn't possible". Thus, for a long time they were regarded in a fashion not unlike the way people who experience paranormal phenomena are treated today, that is, relegated to the fringes because they were considered unworthy of serious formal investigation.
There is a difference, which is that people have actually seriously looked into various paranormal stuff (mostly looking for military applications, I think) before dismissing it, rather than dismissing it without investigation.
I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible." If there's one lesson that institutional science should have learned from its history it's that one.
The absence of that obstacle would itself be an obstacle, when all the researchers got DDOSed with investigating people's perpetual motion machines and reactionless thrusters.
I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints,
such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?).
The trouble with EU is that you can look at what it says about our local environment (the sun, weather on earth, etc), go make observations, and realize that reality doesn't match the theory.
The same thing can be found by regarding the solar wind as an electrical current instead of viewing it in mechanical terms. The solar wind is the flow of charged particles from the Sun. "The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.
Salt water flowing through a tube is also a flow of charged particles (lots of Na and Cl ions). What makes this not an electric current is that for every so many + charges moving past a given point, there are the same number of - charges moving past in the same direction.
At some point, the independent thinker realizes that "mainstream" does not represent the pinnacle of human knowledge about which we are most certain, though ideally this would be the case.
Instead, it represents a combination of a lot of the pinnacle of what we were certain of a few years ago, and a little of whatever's politically fashionable at the moment.
Rather, it unfortunately tends to represent what is most easily demonstrated to the shallowest and least questioning of minds who are all too easily influenced by the authority or the credentials of the person who is speaking.
That's not "mainstream" science, it's "popular" science. Things like books you find at amazon, rather than papers you find in journals.
Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature.
How do you propose to determine whether it's "scientific"? How do you propose to convince people that it's worth their time to review yet another "everything everyone knows is wrong" theory instead of working with what's already "known" to push the limits of what we're able to do?
Case in point: I work for an IT shop that supports many physicians offices. one of the primary methods of moving data between offices and hospitals is through EMR applications that USE FTP. Who is the ISP to tell me that my FTP traffic is less important than Disney's HTTP traffic?
Yikes, what the fuck hospitals and doctors do you work for?
Can we say major HIPAA violation? Clear text passwords, no data encryption for EMR?!?
Jesus. At the shop I work at, SCP, IPSec ONLY, for all of our HIPAA-covered data (EMR, claim and benefits).
Meh.
We use plain FTP for stuff that's legally protected like that, we just make sure that everything on the ftp server is pgp/gpg encrypted.
My wireless router had a bug where it would hang after seeing some large number of connections (memory leak?), which went away after a firmware update. Perhaps your cable modem has a similar issue?
Roughly $27.5 million over five-ish years is $5.5 million a year. Consider they're paying for servers, electricity, bandwidth, data processing, updates... That doesn't seem like a huge amount to me.
Is that $27M total, or $18M total of which $9M is this year?
Assuming the lower amount, that comes to, what, maybe 15-25 people full-time plus $4M of initial expenses (hardware and executive/sales bonuses, I guess)?
Slashdot Mirror
Does that mean bank robbers deserve the money if they can penetrate the 20-inch vault door of a bank? Because penetrating that door is hard.
Is this a serious question, or are you just trolling?
The purpose of patents (and copyright) is to promote innovation. They are not natural rights like life, liberty, etc. If they do not promote innovation, they should not exist.
Innovation doesn't happen by itself, people have to spend time and money on it. And patents ensure they get paid for their efforts.
Except of course, that you routinely see things like the burst of innovation in steam engines that happened immediately after Watt's patents expired (quotes from here):
Since State Street, there has been immeasurable innovation in the field of software.
That is entirely meaningless. What you need to measure is (1) how much of that innovation would not have happened without patents, and (2) how much other innovation would have happened without patents.
Figure out how much software there is where once you know what it does or how it works, re-implementing it would take 100x less effort.
Figure out how much software was lost due to "chilling effects" where people are afraid to do anything, and how much was outright killed (like for example Blackboard has been trying to do to everyone else in that industry).
I'm guessing that (1) is very very small, and (2) is significantly bigger but still somewhat small when taken as a fraction of all software.
Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X. Once he understands how it works (reverse engineering), he can then recreate that code in a higher language, say C. Copyright does not work here. Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. Therefore having patents is necessary.
At which point he's put in at least as much effort as you did (reverse engineering is hard). Which means that he can't unfairly undercut you, so the only thing patents would do is hinder progress by letting you sit on your ass for 20 years.
Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas. ... However, for software there is no need for this mechanism. There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress. If one person doesn't think of it, another one will.
This is not in any way unique to software.
Fine for many types of inventions, including medical drugs, but not for software (or business methods).
My understanding is that the main argument in favor of medical patents is that the cost of FDA approval is so insanely high compared to the production cost once things are approved. Which is remarkably similar to software, where development is expensive but distribution costs a few cents per copy for bandwidth or a dollar or two for a CD in a cardboard box.
SSDs are chips that use address lines and 2^ sizes dude.
They can always have optimizations that use that difference and return to the user exactly 16,000,000 KiB.
The external interface is that each SSD is a completely separate array of blocks, exactly like an HDD. It's not like RAM where everything shares an address space and set of address lines to the rest of the system and you don't want funny-sized holes.
I'm not sure when business first started to see IT as generic, interchangeable and disposable, but someone needs to inform the C-level people out there that software is NOT a bunch of Lego bricks snapped together and that good and talented people need to be maintained not only for now, but for the unforeseeable tomorrow.
Software is not yet a bunch of Lego bricks you can snap together, but I think it's definitely moving in that direction. Some of it's there already, like *nix shellutils.
The SI prefixes have been around for nearly 5 decades, and have a specific meaning used by everybody. Every scientist uses them in one way or another, and for every last one of of them, they have the same meaning.
Why can't we, the C.S. people, accept that?
Giga is 10^9. It has been 10^9 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 10^9.
If you want to talk about 1024^3, then it's Gibi. Gibi is 2^30 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 2^30.
Get over it.
(and yes, I try to always use GiB whenever it's appropriate).
I suppose you might have had a point here if we were talking about switching to 2^10-based prefixes and breaking 5 decades of established convention. But that isn't actually the case, the 2^10-based prefixes have been around for about as long.
So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining. So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?
The "right" solution is that things dependent on the number of address lines (cache size, RAM size) are in units measured in 2^10, and things not dependent on the number address lines (network bandwidth, HDD/SSD size) are in units measured in 10^3. Files are interesting in that the base unit is a 512 byte sector but they don't depend on address lines, so they should be measured like floppy disks where 1kB is 1024 bytes, 1MB is 1000kB ,and 1GB is 1000MB etc -- but this is confusing, so they'll probably just consistently use steps of 1000.
RTFA - they do not need snow plows, they heat themselves.
Oh, lovely. So instead of just snow, you'll be driving on a layer of slush/ice on top of a little water. That's about as bad as it can get, except for maybe a flash flood.
The lesson here is plan ahead.
Yes. Put up a page with lots of clear descriptions of what you are, where you're going, what you're currently doing, who's involved, etc. Try to minimize the amount of personal interaction needed to quickly get a vague understanding of the project. Have a clear place to go to see your collective reactions to recent events, and keep it updated in absurd (but clear and easily searchable/accessible) detail.
Or if that's too hard, just find a way to edit the "news" industry to be more about in-depth content and less about "First Post!" so that by the time you do attract media attention the reporters will have longer deadlines and be able to be more respectful of your time.
Honestly I'd like to see them create separate tests for Linux, Mac and Windows cause one test does NOT apply to all three.
Sure it does. "This is the address bar. This part is the hostname. 'http' means you're in danger, 'https' means there's a bit less danger, a green bar with the name of the company you're trying to do business with means there's even less." "Don't open unexpected email attachments, no matter how much free porn they promise." "If the lights on your modem are always on even when you're not using the computer, get the computer looked at by a professional."
So having been born in Florida makes me a Native American? Probably technically true I suppose, but not what most people would take that to mean.
Actually, once the bad guys have installed malware on your PC, it's pretty much game over. DNSSEC won't help you, and SSL won't help you: they are designed to thwart man-in-the-middle attacks, not man-in-the-endpoint attacks. If your PC is compromised, the DLL that performs DNSSEC or SSL verification can also be compromised.
Sure, but a cursory reading of the summary/headline seemed to imply that they were using their position as ISP to cause trouble, rather than just being generic malware vendors.
Our understanding of the tidal interactions between planets and stars, which is the basis of the expected orbital decay, requires rather more levels of inference and are based on considerably more tenuous data.
Such as the tides anyone can see if they go to the beach, or the absurdly precise measurements that have been made of the moon's orbit (it's speeding up and getting farther away: the earth rotates faster than the moon orbits, so the tides are speeding it up (and slowing the earth's rotation))?
DNSSEC only helps you if you run your own DNS resolver. 99% of the population uses their ISP's resolver. The exception are corporate networks, etc. DNSSEC does nothing to protect or help the end-user know that queries are good. The data from the resolver to client isn't signed or authenticated in any way, so even if you ask for the +adflag, etc., if someone has a way to mess with your DNS queries with MitM, they can add the "ad" (authenticated data) flag so your client would thing the data had been verified by DNSSEC.
No, you can demand that the ISP's resolver forward all the records you need in order to verify the signatures yourself. The first thing google comes back with is this, from 2007:
DNSSEC so they can't do anything to your DNS queries (not even by directing you to an evil resolver), and SSL or similar for everything else so your connections can't be edited or sniffed. Then there's not really much the can do, besides just dropping all your connections.
Don't forget you pay your $699 SCO licenseing fee, you cock-smoking teabaggers!
Or switch to BSD, because it doesn't have these ownership questions.
Odd name, is it associated with Apple somehow?
The funny thing about that is that the many eyewitness reports of sprites were routinely disregarded because we "knew that wasn't possible". Thus, for a long time they were regarded in a fashion not unlike the way people who experience paranormal phenomena are treated today, that is, relegated to the fringes because they were considered unworthy of serious formal investigation.
There is a difference, which is that people have actually seriously looked into various paranormal stuff (mostly looking for military applications, I think) before dismissing it, rather than dismissing it without investigation.
I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible." If there's one lesson that institutional science should have learned from its history it's that one.
The absence of that obstacle would itself be an obstacle, when all the researchers got DDOSed with investigating people's perpetual motion machines and reactionless thrusters.
I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints,
It's amazing how much we see what we look for, isn't it?
such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?).
The trouble with EU is that you can look at what it says about our local environment (the sun, weather on earth, etc), go make observations, and realize that reality doesn't match the theory.
The same thing can be found by regarding the solar wind as an electrical current instead of viewing it in mechanical terms. The solar wind is the flow of charged particles from the Sun. "The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.
Salt water flowing through a tube is also a flow of charged particles (lots of Na and Cl ions). What makes this not an electric current is that for every so many + charges moving past a given point, there are the same number of - charges moving past in the same direction.
At some point, the independent thinker realizes that "mainstream" does not represent the pinnacle of human knowledge about which we are most certain, though ideally this would be the case.
Instead, it represents a combination of a lot of the pinnacle of what we were certain of a few years ago, and a little of whatever's politically fashionable at the moment.
Rather, it unfortunately tends to represent what is most easily demonstrated to the shallowest and least questioning of minds who are all too easily influenced by the authority or the credentials of the person who is speaking.
That's not "mainstream" science, it's "popular" science. Things like books you find at amazon, rather than papers you find in journals.
Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature.
How do you propose to determine whether it's "scientific"? How do you propose to convince people that it's worth their time to review yet another "everything everyone knows is wrong" theory instead of working with what's already "known" to push the limits of what we're able to do?
Yikes, what the fuck hospitals and doctors do you work for?
Can we say major HIPAA violation? Clear text passwords, no data encryption for EMR?!?
Jesus. At the shop I work at, SCP, IPSec ONLY, for all of our HIPAA-covered data (EMR, claim and benefits).
Meh.
We use plain FTP for stuff that's legally protected like that, we just make sure that everything on the ftp server is pgp/gpg encrypted.
My wireless router had a bug where it would hang after seeing some large number of connections (memory leak?), which went away after a firmware update. Perhaps your cable modem has a similar issue?
Roughly $27.5 million over five-ish years is $5.5 million a year. Consider they're paying for servers, electricity, bandwidth, data processing, updates... That doesn't seem like a huge amount to me.
Is that $27M total, or $18M total of which $9M is this year?
Assuming the lower amount, that comes to, what, maybe 15-25 people full-time plus $4M of initial expenses (hardware and executive/sales bonuses, I guess)?
I thought the defining features of a startup were being small and not having any money.
...our soon-to-be BSD-using foreign satellite provider overlords.