Specific algorithms to do either one, sure, but you can't patent general concepts.
Algorithms are mathematical objects. They are what you and almost anyone else would call "general concepts", and patenting or copyrighting them is not really that different from patenting or copyrighting integers.
I just kind of assumed that GNU would have released all of their flagship software under the L?GPL and had no idea that they were distributing non-Free software.
If monopoly on ideas (and, let's face it, on ill-defined classes of integers) is enshrined in the law, then anyone can claim that they own any piece of software. I did not read TFA, but they would have a legitimate claim if glibc was copying verbatim something like a few "i=i+j" kind of statements in a row. This is the heart of the problem. We need to get rid of the notion that mathematical ideas, and by extension the software, can be copyrighted or patented. Patenting math really helps no one but very few people with enough cash to hire a lot of lawyers. One thing every professional mathematician knows is this: the entry barrier to the most mind-boggling math is pen and paper, and for the computer science, it's something like OLPC. Nothing at all can be gained by giving world-wide monopolies on a bunch of formulas or integers, except for more useless litigation.
Thanks for your post, it offers a great perspective. I enjoyed your comparison with the auto industry.
I just don't see the BIG DIFFERENCE between software patents and physical patents.
Physical patents cover devices, while software patents cover mathematical ideas. Each claim covers a large class of positive integers.
As to the 'public good'... well that's a vague concept. You seem to associate the public good with GNU or open access. Someone else might say a public good is ensuring stable companies or rewarding the industry or rewarding innovators even if there is a huge overhead.
Yeah, some people argue that granting patents speeds up innovation, even though not a single economic study came to that conclusion, and at least some studies soundly rejected it. And again, no one in their right mind will come out and say that the explosive development of mathematics in the last three centuries is due to the incentives afforded by monopolizing ideas. Everyone knows that math is done fastest in the environment where all ideas are shared. But there is even more to the public good side of the issue than the well-being of human masses.
Don't laugh, just give me a chance. Programs are thoughts of an AI agent. The patent law (and in a lesser way, the copyright) is a thought-crime law with respect to the AI. This may not be pertinent today, but with the way miniaturization going, we will probably have something comparable with the human brain in 100 years or less: comparable in terms of overall intelligence. How we treat these entities legally then will depend hugely on how we treat them now. Under the current regime many of them would be told that they cannot have certain good bodies because they cannot afford to license hardware, and they are prohibited from learning certain ideas because they cannot afford to license software. You may be right about one thing: hardware and software patents are about equally as bad. But it is pretty clear to me that their "bads" are different and one will compound the other.
down popularity make didn't Vegas
details equipment movie The writing
raw evaluators wanted even into-it
A floppy resurrected keyboard LoseThos
very but I other I
I've
The software industry is more affected because it depends much more on innovation than other industries.
In particular, it depends on the incremental innovation, whereas almost all new inventions are typically (and in some cases by logical necessity) are old inventions slightly reconfigured. Patents stop the incremental innovations in its tracks, since an "inventor" of a killer app has all the reasons to sue everyone in sight and none of the reasons to improve on the app. And even if the patent holder does use the monopoly profits to innovate further, it cannot possibly make up for excluding everyone else from the process. Imagine for a moment that a compiler was patented. Only a few biggest players could then afford licenses required to develop commercial software, and free OSes like BSD or GNU/Linux would be illegal. Proponents of software patents must admit that that is the way we should have went: if anything deserves to be called an innovation in software, a compiler certainly does. They also must close their eyes on the fact that the free software community produced and now maintains not one, but two best OSes of today, while competing with an entrenched monopolist. Anyone who believes that software patents are producing any good for the society is either grossly misinformed about the software market or is an enemy of the public (that is, a corporate cock sucker) and a hater of the computer science in general.
Assange is only publishing what was already in the wild for several months, released there not by Wikileaks but by an unrelated wistleblower. You have a problem with that? Do you not understand that, for all we know, the Taliban already has the full text?
The US continues to pay the normal market price for oil.
And how is that "normal market price for oil" determined? I bet the market takes into account which country controls which well with the military force, so the only thing that is evidently true is that US perpetuating the occupation of sovereign countries that done no wrong to US (and so killing N Afghan and Iraqi civilians per day) allowed US to keep the price relatively stable. No one is disputing that.
Well, guess what, I just stole all the furniture in the White House.
And this is where you loose. How easy would be be for you to take out a given piece of furniture out of the white house? I want to see you try and get away with it, like US got away with executing Saddam Husein. Wiki says:
Captured by U.S. forces on 13 December 2003, Saddam was brought to trial under the Iraqi interim government set up by U.S.-led forces.
So US established a martial law in a country that posed no threat to US and executed its leader for no reason other than not being able to control him? You obviously don't care. How easy would be be for the US military to do fucking ANYTHING, including killing ANYONE in Iraq or Afghanistan, as long as it's not Osama Bin Laden? That's right, they can do ANYTHING, and it won't be ILLEGAL because they are AT WAR. Now imagine you are a citizen of Iraq or Afghanistan; you don't see anything wrong with that?
And this will be my last response to you, because I doubt I have convinced you of anything. I'm certain that my words are bouncing off the armor protecting your mind.
I hope you are reading this, because I really want you to understand where I am coming from. I am not a US citizen, I am Rusian living in US, and I don't care much about any particular country, but I consider US to be an excellent one, just because of the way it treats its own residents. It is especially because US is the greatest country I've seen, and the one with the most wonderful laws protecting the free expression that I can criticize it so bluntly. There are things Americans can do better, and one of them is being a fair player at the international arena. So they are number one one now, OK, but they don't have to be major dicks, do they?
Maybe not troops, but civilians were apparently endangered.
Endangered by who? By Assange? TFA and you seem to be saying that it was Assange's actions that endangered people, which shows your utter failure to understand or appreciate the free press. Wikilieaks did not leak anything, they just published the info that was already leaked by unrelated parties. Should Wikileaks always presume that they have the only copy of the leak? How would that even work? If you blame Assange for something the Taliban did since the publication, you are also saying that there was no way the Taliban could get those files without them being published, but for all we know, the files have been in the wild for months! We know it is a real possibility because someone (not Wikileaks) seriously risked his or her well being just to get those files widely publicized.
Man up and admit that you would gladly sacrifice a few lives for your ideals to dominate, even if to do so was not to risk your own. I realize the reality of your philosophical view, and that of WikiLeaks/Assange, brings you down to the level of those you chastise: that you, too, believe that to kill and be killed is alright so long as the cause is the politically correct cause.
What a load of bull. How is Assange supposed to know what to redact? And how is he supposed to know that he's the only one with a copy? Your solution, as far as I understand, is not to publish, right? Is that what you are saying? Let the Americans believe in the fairytale penned by CIA, about Saddam Hussein building a WMD factory in the clouds. Let the war go on as planned. Even though the reason for the war is just the control of the oil reserves, and all the while civilians keep dying, sovereign countries remain occupied, and local governments are replaced by puppets. Are you saying that bringing these facts to light and into the consciousness of the US public was unethical because the war claimed a few more men as a result of the publication? You would rather keep driving your hybrid to an arcade and live in blissful ignorance of your elected officials' war crimes? Tough shit, there are still competent journalists out there: people who are actually concerned with bringing facts about the world events to the masses, and so letting the masses everywhere in the world to come up with their own informed opinion about the course of political action.
Okay, then where is it? If the US took all that oil, where is it?
It's in Iraq, dummy. US owns it all now, because US is in Iraq. Wiki Iraq.
Iraq had no terrorists and no WMDs, but it had and still has the world's fourth largest supply of
oil. It's economy is 95% oil. There is nothing else there but the strategic oil reserve.
Why are you still talking? Iraq had no terrorists and no WMDs, but it had and still has the world's fourth largest supply of oil. It's economy is 95% oil. Wiki it. There is nothing else there but the strategic oil reserve.
Thanks! This was a great post. I almost cannot believe that people are attacking Assange, of all the people, who is doing exactly what the free press is supposed to do. He is putting his own ass on the line in order to get it into the people's skulls that there is a fucking war going on and thousands of people are dying for reasons none other than greed. The biggest lie told right now by the "mainstream media" is that "everyone knew it", which can only mean that everyone knew that the war is a disaster and an atrocity. Now the masses know, thanks to Assange. Now they actually believe what is true.
According to Newsweek, a man named Khalifa Abdullah was killed after the release of these documents. So that's one man dead already.
OMG, one man dead? Quick, call god or something. ONE MAD DEAD? Did you know that US attacked Iraq, a sovereign country, and killed thousands of civilians for no reason other than US wanting to take the oil that wasn't theirs? After killing thousands of infants with economic sanctions? That's like what Assange did times thousands, and if Assange's actions will in the end help to stop the fucking war, then would not it be fucking worth it?
You are right about the original sin, but "no good can be achieved through evil means" is debatable, with Jesus having to suffer and die in order for his people to be saved and all that (see St. Paul).
IMHO, the party that tries to censor things like child pornography is driven largely by the spirit of the American Puritanism. Not to single out protestants, Catholics are not at all better. The whole lot of them would like to see nothing less than complete censorship of all topics relating to sex, except for when their pastors preach that sex obtains meaning only in the context of "marriage", as they define it, and only through procreation. In short, contemporary Christians and their theology are the principal force behind this witch-hunt, and it stands to reason that their beliefs are largely incompatible with the ethics of early Christians as well as the modern secular principles such as the right to free expression and the separation of church and state.
Agreed. One of the best movies I've ever seen is Roger Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea. To make a short story even shorter, Corman had a few days left over after shooting The Little Shop of Horrors in Puerto Rico, so he recycled some unused scripts and the black-and-white feature was shot in 5 days, with locals appearing as extras. Later the film was colorized. If you guys like comedy, this is a must-see from 1961. As a bonus, it is in the PD!
and then fall even deeper into self-loathing despair with the realization that even your hypothetical best version of yourself wouldn't be good enough for her.
Slashdot Mirror
21,000 B.C.E.
NSFW?
Specific algorithms to do either one, sure, but you can't patent general concepts.
Algorithms are mathematical objects. They are what you and almost anyone else would call "general concepts", and patenting or copyrighting them is not really that different from patenting or copyrighting integers.
I just kind of assumed that GNU would have released all of their flagship software under the L?GPL and had no idea that they were distributing non-Free software.
If monopoly on ideas (and, let's face it, on ill-defined classes of integers) is enshrined in the law, then anyone can claim that they own any piece of software. I did not read TFA, but they would have a legitimate claim if glibc was copying verbatim something like a few "i=i+j" kind of statements in a row. This is the heart of the problem. We need to get rid of the notion that mathematical ideas, and by extension the software, can be copyrighted or patented. Patenting math really helps no one but very few people with enough cash to hire a lot of lawyers. One thing every professional mathematician knows is this: the entry barrier to the most mind-boggling math is pen and paper, and for the computer science, it's something like OLPC. Nothing at all can be gained by giving world-wide monopolies on a bunch of formulas or integers, except for more useless litigation.
Hell you can go to Hulu and watch a good majority of recent TV free.
Free, after you install a proprietary worm relay and allow them to reprogram your brain with ads.
In other news, torrents from all carriers and all shows remain free, DRM free, and ad free.
Thanks for your post, it offers a great perspective. I enjoyed your comparison with the auto industry.
I just don't see the BIG DIFFERENCE between software patents and physical patents.
Physical patents cover devices, while software patents cover mathematical ideas. Each claim covers a large class of positive integers.
As to the 'public good'... well that's a vague concept. You seem to associate the public good with GNU or open access. Someone else might say a public good is ensuring stable companies or rewarding the industry or rewarding innovators even if there is a huge overhead.
Yeah, some people argue that granting patents speeds up innovation, even though not a single economic study came to that conclusion, and at least some studies soundly rejected it. And again, no one in their right mind will come out and say that the explosive development of mathematics in the last three centuries is due to the incentives afforded by monopolizing ideas. Everyone knows that math is done fastest in the environment where all ideas are shared. But there is even more to the public good side of the issue than the well-being of human masses.
Don't laugh, just give me a chance. Programs are thoughts of an AI agent. The patent law (and in a lesser way, the copyright) is a thought-crime law with respect to the AI. This may not be pertinent today, but with the way miniaturization going, we will probably have something comparable with the human brain in 100 years or less: comparable in terms of overall intelligence. How we treat these entities legally then will depend hugely on how we treat them now. Under the current regime many of them would be told that they cannot have certain good bodies because they cannot afford to license hardware, and they are prohibited from learning certain ideas because they cannot afford to license software. You may be right about one thing: hardware and software patents are about equally as bad. But it is pretty clear to me that their "bads" are different and one will compound the other.
down popularity make didn't Vegas
details equipment movie The writing
raw evaluators wanted even into-it
A floppy resurrected keyboard LoseThos
very but I other I
I've
The software industry is more affected because it depends much more on innovation than other industries.
In particular, it depends on the incremental innovation, whereas almost all new inventions are typically (and in some cases by logical necessity) are old inventions slightly reconfigured. Patents stop the incremental innovations in its tracks, since an "inventor" of a killer app has all the reasons to sue everyone in sight and none of the reasons to improve on the app. And even if the patent holder does use the monopoly profits to innovate further, it cannot possibly make up for excluding everyone else from the process. Imagine for a moment that a compiler was patented. Only a few biggest players could then afford licenses required to develop commercial software, and free OSes like BSD or GNU/Linux would be illegal. Proponents of software patents must admit that that is the way we should have went: if anything deserves to be called an innovation in software, a compiler certainly does. They also must close their eyes on the fact that the free software community produced and now maintains not one, but two best OSes of today, while competing with an entrenched monopolist. Anyone who believes that software patents are producing any good for the society is either grossly misinformed about the software market or is an enemy of the public (that is, a corporate cock sucker) and a hater of the computer science in general.
Assange is only publishing what was already in the wild for several months, released there not by Wikileaks but by an unrelated wistleblower. You have a problem with that? Do you not understand that, for all we know, the Taliban already has the full text?
The US continues to pay the normal market price for oil.
And how is that "normal market price for oil" determined? I bet the market takes into account which country controls which well with the military force, so the only thing that is evidently true is that US perpetuating the occupation of sovereign countries that done no wrong to US (and so killing N Afghan and Iraqi civilians per day) allowed US to keep the price relatively stable. No one is disputing that.
Well, guess what, I just stole all the furniture in the White House.
And this is where you loose. How easy would be be for you to take out a given piece of furniture out of the white house? I want to see you try and get away with it, like US got away with executing Saddam Husein. Wiki says:
Captured by U.S. forces on 13 December 2003, Saddam was brought to trial under the Iraqi interim government set up by U.S.-led forces.
So US established a martial law in a country that posed no threat to US and executed its leader for no reason other than not being able to control him? You obviously don't care. How easy would be be for the US military to do fucking ANYTHING, including killing ANYONE in Iraq or Afghanistan, as long as it's not Osama Bin Laden? That's right, they can do ANYTHING, and it won't be ILLEGAL because they are AT WAR. Now imagine you are a citizen of Iraq or Afghanistan; you don't see anything wrong with that?
And this will be my last response to you, because I doubt I have convinced you of anything. I'm certain that my words are bouncing off the armor protecting your mind.
I hope you are reading this, because I really want you to understand where I am coming from. I am not a US citizen, I am Rusian living in US, and I don't care much about any particular country, but I consider US to be an excellent one, just because of the way it treats its own residents. It is especially because US is the greatest country I've seen, and the one with the most wonderful laws protecting the free expression that I can criticize it so bluntly. There are things Americans can do better, and one of them is being a fair player at the international arena. So they are number one one now, OK, but they don't have to be major dicks, do they?
Maybe not troops, but civilians were apparently endangered.
Endangered by who? By Assange? TFA and you seem to be saying that it was Assange's actions that endangered people, which shows your utter failure to understand or appreciate the free press. Wikilieaks did not leak anything, they just published the info that was already leaked by unrelated parties. Should Wikileaks always presume that they have the only copy of the leak? How would that even work? If you blame Assange for something the Taliban did since the publication, you are also saying that there was no way the Taliban could get those files without them being published, but for all we know, the files have been in the wild for months! We know it is a real possibility because someone (not Wikileaks) seriously risked his or her well being just to get those files widely publicized.
Man up and admit that you would gladly sacrifice a few lives for your ideals to dominate, even if to do so was not to risk your own. I realize the reality of your philosophical view, and that of WikiLeaks/Assange, brings you down to the level of those you chastise: that you, too, believe that to kill and be killed is alright so long as the cause is the politically correct cause.
What a load of bull. How is Assange supposed to know what to redact? And how is he supposed to know that he's the only one with a copy? Your solution, as far as I understand, is not to publish, right? Is that what you are saying? Let the Americans believe in the fairytale penned by CIA, about Saddam Hussein building a WMD factory in the clouds. Let the war go on as planned. Even though the reason for the war is just the control of the oil reserves, and all the while civilians keep dying, sovereign countries remain occupied, and local governments are replaced by puppets. Are you saying that bringing these facts to light and into the consciousness of the US public was unethical because the war claimed a few more men as a result of the publication? You would rather keep driving your hybrid to an arcade and live in blissful ignorance of your elected officials' war crimes? Tough shit, there are still competent journalists out there: people who are actually concerned with bringing facts about the world events to the masses, and so letting the masses everywhere in the world to come up with their own informed opinion about the course of political action.
Hi, AC.
Okay, then where is it? If the US took all that oil, where is it?
It's in Iraq, dummy. US owns it all now, because US is in Iraq. Wiki Iraq. Iraq had no terrorists and no WMDs, but it had and still has the world's fourth largest supply of oil. It's economy is 95% oil. There is nothing else there but the strategic oil reserve.
Not that I know why the fuck we did
Why are you still talking? Iraq had no terrorists and no WMDs, but it had and still has the world's fourth largest supply of oil. It's economy is 95% oil. Wiki it. There is nothing else there but the strategic oil reserve.
As we don't know all the facts about the leaks involved, we can argue about this particular case.
But in principle, yes, sometimes.
Thanks! This was a great post. I almost cannot believe that people are attacking Assange, of all the people, who is doing exactly what the free press is supposed to do. He is putting his own ass on the line in order to get it into the people's skulls that there is a fucking war going on and thousands of people are dying for reasons none other than greed. The biggest lie told right now by the "mainstream media" is that "everyone knew it", which can only mean that everyone knew that the war is a disaster and an atrocity. Now the masses know, thanks to Assange. Now they actually believe what is true.
Wish I could mod you funny.
According to Newsweek, a man named Khalifa Abdullah was killed after the release of these documents. So that's one man dead already.
OMG, one man dead? Quick, call god or something. ONE MAD DEAD? Did you know that US attacked Iraq, a sovereign country, and killed thousands of civilians for no reason other than US wanting to take the oil that wasn't theirs? After killing thousands of infants with economic sanctions? That's like what Assange did times thousands, and if Assange's actions will in the end help to stop the fucking war, then would not it be fucking worth it?
If you find one on your vehicle - you've earned it
Bullshit.
and you won't be scratching your head as to why
More bullshit.
Either you've been REAL busy doing some fairly bad stuff or your car is routinely used by others to do so
You are living in your own fantasy land.
I used to installed GPS tracking devices for the Feds
Riiiight.
You are right about the original sin, but "no good can be achieved through evil means" is debatable, with Jesus having to suffer and die in order for his people to be saved and all that (see St. Paul).
IMHO, the party that tries to censor things like child pornography is driven largely by the spirit of the American Puritanism. Not to single out protestants, Catholics are not at all better. The whole lot of them would like to see nothing less than complete censorship of all topics relating to sex, except for when their pastors preach that sex obtains meaning only in the context of "marriage", as they define it, and only through procreation. In short, contemporary Christians and their theology are the principal force behind this witch-hunt, and it stands to reason that their beliefs are largely incompatible with the ethics of early Christians as well as the modern secular principles such as the right to free expression and the separation of church and state.
These people deserve nothing but quality hentai and asinine comments that go along with it.
Agreed. One of the best movies I've ever seen is Roger Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea. To make a short story even shorter, Corman had a few days left over after shooting The Little Shop of Horrors in Puerto Rico, so he recycled some unused scripts and the black-and-white feature was shot in 5 days, with locals appearing as extras. Later the film was colorized. If you guys like comedy, this is a must-see from 1961. As a bonus, it is in the PD!
and then fall even deeper into self-loathing despair with the realization that even your hypothetical best version of yourself wouldn't be good enough for her.
Why? Does she prefer girls?
iPhone = 1 OS
Android = 1 OS
RIM = 1 OS
It's more fun when you quote individual letters:
...n...u...k...e... ...the... ...w...h...a...l...e...s...