If the code was written before software patents were officially acceptable, then Linux coders could argue that extending patent protection now to companies like Microsoft would be in violation of the Constitution's anti-ex post facto clause.
Post 9-11 there were many ways for the government to cut down on the possibility of terrorist attacks that had nothing to do with restricting the rights of the American people or the majority of legal resident aliens. The government could easily have shut down the borders with the military and ordered the deportation of all Saudi citizens from the country.
But no, the government would rather go after women who are 8 months pregnant, senior citizens and everybody else who is as far away from the profiled group that executed the WTC attack as possible. Because we cannot risk being seen as "racist" in our defense. Well here's some news for those that think that our security shouldn't come before the "rights" of resident aliens.
No other world power in the history of mankind has allowed people from ethnic groups who are openly bitterly hateful and have shown a marked tendency to kill that world power's people, to enter the world power's territory except under special circumstances. Even the Romans kept the Germans at arms' length whenever they could.
It isn't racist to look at someone from a group that has blown up over 3,000 civilians and say "out of my country" if they aren't fellow citizens. One thing the media hasn't been good about reporting is that 9-11 was supposed to have about 20 plans, not 3.
Wring your hands all you want, but would you rather be dead right than alive, wrong?
Congress first of all doesn't particularly care about drafting laws that actually benefit copyright holders in general, rather they care about protecting the interests of the big donors and their pet causes. The DMCA's anti-circumvention statute actually hurts smaller businesses by cutting out "consumer reports" style reviews of DRM systems. Losing 25% of one's potential sales to piracy hurts a small copyright holder significantly more than a large one. In fact, it could make the difference between having a day job and being able to get better at one's creative endeavor.
Hatch has been steadily earning the name "RINO" in conservative circles for his "Republican In Name Only" politics. The RP may not be too conservative, but he's a flaming statist if there ever were one in the Senate. It's also alarming to see many self-proclaimed capitalists support this measure, as IPCentral, a capitalist IP blog and Motley Fool seem to think that INDUCE is common sense. Of course, IPCentral didn't have trackback enabled so I had to email a rebuttal to some of their arugments.
At this point I just don't understand the record labels. Why don't they push hard to get people buying on iTunes so that they can turn digital distribution into an even bigger cashcow? They seem to be convinced of the "justice" of their cause, so much so that they'd rather be dead right than wrong alive.
I don't even need to boycotte them anymore because Century Media and Projekt make most of my favorite music now. Lacuna Coil, a fast rising goth metal band that stole the show at Ozzfest 2004, is signed to CM, which is not affiliated with the RIAA according to the RIAA Radar. This is the future, people. Labels like Century Media know the writing is on the wall, and that being a member of the RIAA is as socially acceptable in the 21st century as declaring you're down with people who gas Jews and lynch black people for fun.
I contemplated joining, but thought "what the hell, they may not even be approaching this right, why risk wasting CPU cycles on them?" Then I found out about Folding@Home, and am impressed with its goal. It actually will make a difference in the quality of human life by helping us fight more diseases.
SETI@Home might get us in touch with an alien race, but is that even desirable at this point? All of those people racing to contact ET forget that most of the abduction stories involving the "greys" are incredibly negative and traumatic. Do we really want to full open ourselves up to them others who may be just like them in their attitude toward human life?
Maybe this would account for why I have 8 banner clicks and no revenues for them. I didn't generate any of those and I was actually quite surprised to see 8 in one day. Maybe their software is a little TOO aggressive?
Microsoft has expanded into many markets that they didn't need to. There is nothing wrong with that, and it is even pragmatic, but it is not conducive toward encouraging others to prosper with you. The truth is that Microsoft has merely allowed others to live. It's easier to let Adobe exist than to build a competitor to Photoshop, but Microsoft has the resources to do it.
Look at how with Longhorn they're systematically attacking Macromedia by going after Flash and Shockwave. They're already trying to demolish Dreamweaver and if they take out Flash, Shockwave and Dreamweaver then Macromedia will be at best a shadow of its former self.
The problem with Microsoft's attitude of "only the paranoid survive" is that it causes companies to see competitors where they don't really exist. Netscape didn't compete with Microsoft and a business agreement with Netscape probably would have worked better. Same thing with Java. Microsoft should have worked hard to be "the best Java platform provider, period." If Microsoft did that then no one would want to run Java on any OS other than Windows because anything else would be second rate.
The only thing Microsoft needs now is an answer to IBM Global Services. Unfortunately they're too busy attacking the trees to realize that the forest is moving in to kill them. Linux is just a few trees in the greater non-Microsoft forest that IBM GS is the vanguard of. The stronger they get, the weaker Microsoft's position gets, and IBM is playing hardball with Microsoft here.
I have been playing around with this module a bit and have found it to be damn good at what it does. It really makes it easy for people to take advantage of XML for simpler operations which takes away an advantage of ASP.NET.
For many operations, SAX and DOM are simply too convoluted or complex. As long as you have an idea of what the document structure will be like in advance, you can quickly handle documents.
Here is an example from my site of what it looks like
<?php
$xml = simplexml_load_file("test.xml");//where test.xml contains the XML from up above
print $xml->statement[0];
print "<br/>";
print $xml->statement[1];
?>
It may not always be $0.99. There has been some discussion about raising the tracks to as high as $3.00 each!! Outrageous, isn't it, to think that a new album download could cost as much as 2x the in store price.
That was one of the reasons I cited when I posted a rebuttal on my site to an argument that was made at IPCentral's blog. I have noticed a curious tendency among the copyright expansionists: they don't want to get into pissing matches with other capitalists over their abuse of capitalism.
Bottom line is prepared for the music industry to once again forget market realities and raise the cost if they think they can get away with it. Non-functional copyrights like music and movies don't compete with each other in a free market fashion like software. Too much of what passes for "art" in this country is little more than bad entertainment.
Most of the hard science majors I know didn't get there because of their K-12 education. It couldn't come really even close to covering what they needed to know to do anything with it. I can look at schools' "computer science" classes and see basically identical results.
Most of the real coders in my computer science classes are the ones who didn't waste their time with "computer science" classes in K-12. I tried taking one for fun and found it to be quite possibly the most asinine class there, even more so than PE.
K-12 is designed to build up the lowest common denominator to a point slightly above dark ages superstitions about the world. Overall it is an abysmal system and I see no reason anymore to fix it or fund it more.
Think of education like hemp rope. Some will use it for good and useful purposes, some will hang themselves with it, but the majority will do nothing with it except maybe try to smoke it and get high off of it.
If the DoD switches in near totality to OpenOffice, hundreds of corporations will switch too for the sake of compatability with their primary source of bread and butter. Microsoft is terrified at the idea of losing not just approximately 1-1.5 million defense desktops (not counting the other, smaller, departments) but the corporations that sell to them. A mass move to Linux, or better yet in 2 years, HaikuOS would be a disaster for Microsoft.
In quasi-Socialist America, corporations benefit greatly from a close relationship with the government. The more the government spends, the more money they make. Therefore OSS could actually do a lot of good in upsetting that relationship.
Microsoft made $521M in sales from the US Army a procurement cycle ago. Imagine if by switching to Linux for most of that, the US Army could cut down the market by $450M. If the government's contract values go down significantly because of Linux then the major companies will have less interest in selling to the government.
In the long run this will reduce the reasons for why we are taxed so heavily by our Congressional overlords who at present cannot account already for approximately at least 1/22 ($100B) of the federal budget. To put that in perspective, that is approximately 1/80 of the wealth generated by Americans that is wasted by government bureacracy. That is not even counting the waste at the state level and the good old boy/girl networks commonly known as your average municipal "public service."
In the military you are held accountable for what your subordinates do. Unless they make a conscious, conspiratorial effort to keep you out of the loop, you are presumed to know what they are doing. In other words, 999 out of 1000 cases, a noncom or officer is presumed to know exactly what they are doing. Therefore they are held responsible if they are violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Unlike the civilian world, in the military world, the buck stops with whoever is in charge where the violation was occurring, and damage can spill over into higher ranking personnel.
The only way to stop stuff like this is to apply that standard to the civilian business world on criminal activity. Don't punish the stockholders by fining the company because Mr. Big Rich White CEO claims he didn't know what was going on. Bullshit, he was hired specifically to know what at a minimum his underlings were doing. Can you imagine the fallout of an army major saying "gee Mr. JAG Officer, I had no idea that lieutenant smith was killing civilians while we were occupying this village." The JAG would laugh his ass off as military police escorted at least the lt. and probably the major too off to a brig.
Personal responsibility is out of style in America today. We want power, but so many don't want the responsibilities that come with it. Look at the female general who is trying to cry like a little girl that she "didn't know that the abuse was going on in Abu Ghraib." Bullshit. With a command that small in such tight quarters you'd have to know. Let the DirecTV executives get hit directly instead of the company and that will scare off anyone that would follow in their footsteps.
I will finally be able to run Linux in VMWare with a VMWare instance running Windows98 running Bochs running BeOS emulating OSX with PearPC. Thank you AMD, you have guaranteed me alpha male status in the CS department for a semester.
OpenOffice needs to put that and other commonly used features in areas that are close to where the user will be working. Most people don't even bother to use Help because they often cannot even think of what to type into the help search.
And that is to get the government and private industry so hooked on open source software that software patents would wreck the economy. The fastest way for the public to begin to realize that this is a terrible legal system is to make it hit home.
But then open source developers often just don't get it either. OpenOffice for example doesn't even have a word count feature nor the ability to print multiple slides on the same page. These are two features that are absolutely critical in an academic environment for students. With academia firmly against proprietary software giants, we can use universities as a weapon against them.
We really need for a group like Knoppix to make a LiveCD with the ability to do a very clean, intelligent install to the hard drive. LiveCDs are the way to go for installations. The user can play around with them all they want and then ideally, just run an installer to copy it to the hard drive and configure the bootloader.
Right now we have about 1.5-2 years before the next version of Windows comes out. Now is the time for the major projects to conduct user surveys to find out what is missing, add the features and get the product out the door. The fastest way to take down Microsoft, the biggest threat on patents, is to make them stop growing their profits. Since the company makes a lot of its payments from stock, if we can stop them from growing, maybe even cause them to actually have slight negative growth, it would unbalance their payment system which would cause them to have to burn through more cash.
And as an aside, ironically to those who are thinking G-ddamn he is a socialist.... I'm voting libertarian in 2004.
Tell them that the system needs to be fixed, not thrown out. Mine is Goodlatte (R-VA, 6th) and my suggestion to him is to use funds from the axed TSA to hire qualified laid off IT workers to act as screeners since they, unlike typical patent screeners, worked in the industry.
The push should be to limit software patents to 2-3 years so that we don't sound like anti-business commies. Follow it up with hiring good patent examiners and you're suggesting a good solution that moderate congressmen can safely support.
The Chinese for millennia have had a deep-seated contempt for foreign cultures. Their entire national cultural mythos is based on the concept of them being the "Middle Kingdom." It simply doesn't work for them to actually have to get along with those that their ancestors regarded as "barbarians."
So does that mean if you come up with some novel idea, intel or some other big company should be able to profit from it, while you don't because they have the capital to persue the idea and you don't? Would it really benefit society if people could only earn money through either manual labor, or being part of the already established business community?
Does it benefit society to allow people to restrict who can build on their ideas? This patent is most likely based on an idea that was the base of one Intel used. In other words, Intel built on someone else's idea. The prick who patented it in the first place, in turn built it on someone else's ideas.
Patents allow people to sit on ideas until someone else decides to actually put them to use. What you're not taking into account is that a bigger company might also have a better idea of how to use the patent. They might already have something they're working on that would better utilize the idea(s) than the little guy. I see no reason why either should "own" the ideas, since society is better off by allowing unfettered creativity.
Patents are one of the few ways new, little companies and inventors can get into the market. Without them the only entities that would ever make money are the established players. Patent abuse and a broken patent system, by themselves, don't make patents in general a bad thing.
The patent arsenals that the major companies have cannot be overcome by a few from a small competitor. Reality is very different from the fiction of a perfect free market where everything works well. In the real world, any upstart stupid enough to challenge the big players would get crushed by patent suits themselves. Do you honestly think that IBM couldn't find 50 patents that the small competitor was violating?
In reality, patents only protect those who get to market first and then it protects them into a lock over their competitors. It is a little known fact that the Constitution gives Congress the power to determine that only certain industries need them, ie the industries that require incredibly large sums of research dollars to be spent like the pharmaceuticals.
With the Eolas victory, this and other previous lawsuits, you'd think that the big guys would push for the ending of patents in their industry. It's not like they have much to lose. Patent machines couldn't come after them and they'd not lose their position in the marketplace.
I have always had a problem with patents (not industry specific protections like for pharmaceuticals) because I don't believe ideas and methods should be property. As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive. Copyrights can encourage creativity, patents just encourage people to make a product then rape and pillage their industry.
I use the UK Mirror service all the time because it gets me the best download rates. It's often a lifesaver when it comes to getting the fastest rates for things like Yellow Dog Linux. I'd definitely contribute.
**For the masses who are as ignorant of American culture as many Americans are of much of the rest of the world, Yank/Yankee/Yanqui and American are not interchangeable. If you are ever below the Mason-Dixon line in America, do not call anyone a Yankee unless they have a New England accent. (This message brought to you by too many foreigners who have called me a Yank, being that I'm from Dixie)
Gnosticism got me back out of my malaise into being a christian. I had for a long time dismissed people like Jack Van Impe and Tim LaHaye as wishful thinkers (God will solve our problems) and outright lunatics whose desire for the endtimes was scary as hell. Then I started actually watching what is happening and comparing it to the more mature prophecy.
1) With the Law of the Sea Treaty and UN Convention on Organized Crime and International Criminal Court we are moving towards a true one world government. If the momentum continues, the UN could be a planetary government in 20-30 years with its own tax system, police, legislature and scariest of all: military.
2) Corporations, unions and governments have been conspiring for decades to terminate individual freedom and centralize all meaningful government power in the hands of an unaccountable elite. The US Congress is barely representative of our own population, just imagine how corruptable that sort of legislature would be. The Congress and EU would look like they're dominated by statesmen of the finest calibre by comparison.
3) We have a version of the mark of the beast being propogated in a way that is palitable to the general population.
While I don't think that we're going to see the rapture or anything quite that fantastical, I do think we are going to see some very dark days for mankind coming very soon.
Slashdot Mirror
If the code was written before software patents were officially acceptable, then Linux coders could argue that extending patent protection now to companies like Microsoft would be in violation of the Constitution's anti-ex post facto clause.
Post 9-11 there were many ways for the government to cut down on the possibility of terrorist attacks that had nothing to do with restricting the rights of the American people or the majority of legal resident aliens. The government could easily have shut down the borders with the military and ordered the deportation of all Saudi citizens from the country.
But no, the government would rather go after women who are 8 months pregnant, senior citizens and everybody else who is as far away from the profiled group that executed the WTC attack as possible. Because we cannot risk being seen as "racist" in our defense. Well here's some news for those that think that our security shouldn't come before the "rights" of resident aliens.
No other world power in the history of mankind has allowed people from ethnic groups who are openly bitterly hateful and have shown a marked tendency to kill that world power's people, to enter the world power's territory except under special circumstances. Even the Romans kept the Germans at arms' length whenever they could.
It isn't racist to look at someone from a group that has blown up over 3,000 civilians and say "out of my country" if they aren't fellow citizens. One thing the media hasn't been good about reporting is that 9-11 was supposed to have about 20 plans, not 3.
Wring your hands all you want, but would you rather be dead right than alive, wrong?
Congress first of all doesn't particularly care about drafting laws that actually benefit copyright holders in general, rather they care about protecting the interests of the big donors and their pet causes. The DMCA's anti-circumvention statute actually hurts smaller businesses by cutting out "consumer reports" style reviews of DRM systems. Losing 25% of one's potential sales to piracy hurts a small copyright holder significantly more than a large one. In fact, it could make the difference between having a day job and being able to get better at one's creative endeavor.
Hatch has been steadily earning the name "RINO" in conservative circles for his "Republican In Name Only" politics. The RP may not be too conservative, but he's a flaming statist if there ever were one in the Senate. It's also alarming to see many self-proclaimed capitalists support this measure, as IPCentral, a capitalist IP blog and Motley Fool seem to think that INDUCE is common sense. Of course, IPCentral didn't have trackback enabled so I had to email a rebuttal to some of their arugments.
At this point I just don't understand the record labels. Why don't they push hard to get people buying on iTunes so that they can turn digital distribution into an even bigger cashcow? They seem to be convinced of the "justice" of their cause, so much so that they'd rather be dead right than wrong alive.
I don't even need to boycotte them anymore because Century Media and Projekt make most of my favorite music now. Lacuna Coil, a fast rising goth metal band that stole the show at Ozzfest 2004, is signed to CM, which is not affiliated with the RIAA according to the RIAA Radar. This is the future, people. Labels like Century Media know the writing is on the wall, and that being a member of the RIAA is as socially acceptable in the 21st century as declaring you're down with people who gas Jews and lynch black people for fun.
I contemplated joining, but thought "what the hell, they may not even be approaching this right, why risk wasting CPU cycles on them?" Then I found out about Folding@Home, and am impressed with its goal. It actually will make a difference in the quality of human life by helping us fight more diseases.
SETI@Home might get us in touch with an alien race, but is that even desirable at this point? All of those people racing to contact ET forget that most of the abduction stories involving the "greys" are incredibly negative and traumatic. Do we really want to full open ourselves up to them others who may be just like them in their attitude toward human life?
Maybe this would account for why I have 8 banner clicks and no revenues for them. I didn't generate any of those and I was actually quite surprised to see 8 in one day. Maybe their software is a little TOO aggressive?
Microsoft has expanded into many markets that they didn't need to. There is nothing wrong with that, and it is even pragmatic, but it is not conducive toward encouraging others to prosper with you. The truth is that Microsoft has merely allowed others to live. It's easier to let Adobe exist than to build a competitor to Photoshop, but Microsoft has the resources to do it.
Look at how with Longhorn they're systematically attacking Macromedia by going after Flash and Shockwave. They're already trying to demolish Dreamweaver and if they take out Flash, Shockwave and Dreamweaver then Macromedia will be at best a shadow of its former self.
The problem with Microsoft's attitude of "only the paranoid survive" is that it causes companies to see competitors where they don't really exist. Netscape didn't compete with Microsoft and a business agreement with Netscape probably would have worked better. Same thing with Java. Microsoft should have worked hard to be "the best Java platform provider, period." If Microsoft did that then no one would want to run Java on any OS other than Windows because anything else would be second rate.
The only thing Microsoft needs now is an answer to IBM Global Services. Unfortunately they're too busy attacking the trees to realize that the forest is moving in to kill them. Linux is just a few trees in the greater non-Microsoft forest that IBM GS is the vanguard of. The stronger they get, the weaker Microsoft's position gets, and IBM is playing hardball with Microsoft here.
I have been playing around with this module a bit and have found it to be damn good at what it does. It really makes it easy for people to take advantage of XML for simpler operations which takes away an advantage of ASP.NET.
For many operations, SAX and DOM are simply too convoluted or complex. As long as you have an idea of what the document structure will be like in advance, you can quickly handle documents.
Here is an example from my site of what it looks like
<?php$xml = simplexml_load_file("test.xml");
print $xml->statement[0];
print "<br/>";
print $xml->statement[1];
?>
Odeon is quite odious
It may not always be $0.99. There has been some discussion about raising the tracks to as high as $3.00 each!! Outrageous, isn't it, to think that a new album download could cost as much as 2x the in store price.
That was one of the reasons I cited when I posted a rebuttal on my site to an argument that was made at IPCentral's blog. I have noticed a curious tendency among the copyright expansionists: they don't want to get into pissing matches with other capitalists over their abuse of capitalism.
Bottom line is prepared for the music industry to once again forget market realities and raise the cost if they think they can get away with it. Non-functional copyrights like music and movies don't compete with each other in a free market fashion like software. Too much of what passes for "art" in this country is little more than bad entertainment.
Most of the hard science majors I know didn't get there because of their K-12 education. It couldn't come really even close to covering what they needed to know to do anything with it. I can look at schools' "computer science" classes and see basically identical results. Most of the real coders in my computer science classes are the ones who didn't waste their time with "computer science" classes in K-12. I tried taking one for fun and found it to be quite possibly the most asinine class there, even more so than PE. K-12 is designed to build up the lowest common denominator to a point slightly above dark ages superstitions about the world. Overall it is an abysmal system and I see no reason anymore to fix it or fund it more. Think of education like hemp rope. Some will use it for good and useful purposes, some will hang themselves with it, but the majority will do nothing with it except maybe try to smoke it and get high off of it.
If the DoD switches in near totality to OpenOffice, hundreds of corporations will switch too for the sake of compatability with their primary source of bread and butter. Microsoft is terrified at the idea of losing not just approximately 1-1.5 million defense desktops (not counting the other, smaller, departments) but the corporations that sell to them. A mass move to Linux, or better yet in 2 years, HaikuOS would be a disaster for Microsoft.
In quasi-Socialist America, corporations benefit greatly from a close relationship with the government. The more the government spends, the more money they make. Therefore OSS could actually do a lot of good in upsetting that relationship.
Microsoft made $521M in sales from the US Army a procurement cycle ago. Imagine if by switching to Linux for most of that, the US Army could cut down the market by $450M. If the government's contract values go down significantly because of Linux then the major companies will have less interest in selling to the government.
In the long run this will reduce the reasons for why we are taxed so heavily by our Congressional overlords who at present cannot account already for approximately at least 1/22 ($100B) of the federal budget. To put that in perspective, that is approximately 1/80 of the wealth generated by Americans that is wasted by government bureacracy. That is not even counting the waste at the state level and the good old boy/girl networks commonly known as your average municipal "public service."
In the military you are held accountable for what your subordinates do. Unless they make a conscious, conspiratorial effort to keep you out of the loop, you are presumed to know what they are doing. In other words, 999 out of 1000 cases, a noncom or officer is presumed to know exactly what they are doing. Therefore they are held responsible if they are violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Unlike the civilian world, in the military world, the buck stops with whoever is in charge where the violation was occurring, and damage can spill over into higher ranking personnel.
The only way to stop stuff like this is to apply that standard to the civilian business world on criminal activity. Don't punish the stockholders by fining the company because Mr. Big Rich White CEO claims he didn't know what was going on. Bullshit, he was hired specifically to know what at a minimum his underlings were doing. Can you imagine the fallout of an army major saying "gee Mr. JAG Officer, I had no idea that lieutenant smith was killing civilians while we were occupying this village." The JAG would laugh his ass off as military police escorted at least the lt. and probably the major too off to a brig.
Personal responsibility is out of style in America today. We want power, but so many don't want the responsibilities that come with it. Look at the female general who is trying to cry like a little girl that she "didn't know that the abuse was going on in Abu Ghraib." Bullshit. With a command that small in such tight quarters you'd have to know. Let the DirecTV executives get hit directly instead of the company and that will scare off anyone that would follow in their footsteps.
I will finally be able to run Linux in VMWare with a VMWare instance running Windows98 running Bochs running BeOS emulating OSX with PearPC. Thank you AMD, you have guaranteed me alpha male status in the CS department for a semester.
That if you add a h to David's last name that his name aptly matches his behavior?
OpenOffice needs to put that and other commonly used features in areas that are close to where the user will be working. Most people don't even bother to use Help because they often cannot even think of what to type into the help search.
And that is to get the government and private industry so hooked on open source software that software patents would wreck the economy. The fastest way for the public to begin to realize that this is a terrible legal system is to make it hit home.
But then open source developers often just don't get it either. OpenOffice for example doesn't even have a word count feature nor the ability to print multiple slides on the same page. These are two features that are absolutely critical in an academic environment for students. With academia firmly against proprietary software giants, we can use universities as a weapon against them.
We really need for a group like Knoppix to make a LiveCD with the ability to do a very clean, intelligent install to the hard drive. LiveCDs are the way to go for installations. The user can play around with them all they want and then ideally, just run an installer to copy it to the hard drive and configure the bootloader.
Right now we have about 1.5-2 years before the next version of Windows comes out. Now is the time for the major projects to conduct user surveys to find out what is missing, add the features and get the product out the door. The fastest way to take down Microsoft, the biggest threat on patents, is to make them stop growing their profits. Since the company makes a lot of its payments from stock, if we can stop them from growing, maybe even cause them to actually have slight negative growth, it would unbalance their payment system which would cause them to have to burn through more cash.
And as an aside, ironically to those who are thinking G-ddamn he is a socialist.... I'm voting libertarian in 2004.
Tell them that the system needs to be fixed, not thrown out. Mine is Goodlatte (R-VA, 6th) and my suggestion to him is to use funds from the axed TSA to hire qualified laid off IT workers to act as screeners since they, unlike typical patent screeners, worked in the industry.
The push should be to limit software patents to 2-3 years so that we don't sound like anti-business commies. Follow it up with hiring good patent examiners and you're suggesting a good solution that moderate congressmen can safely support.
Isn't that when your applet jumps out of its sandbox and gets all cozy and promiscuous with local apps?
The Chinese for millennia have had a deep-seated contempt for foreign cultures. Their entire national cultural mythos is based on the concept of them being the "Middle Kingdom." It simply doesn't work for them to actually have to get along with those that their ancestors regarded as "barbarians."
The real question is, whose technology will Dell copy if Apple and HP fall apart?
Does it benefit society to allow people to restrict who can build on their ideas? This patent is most likely based on an idea that was the base of one Intel used. In other words, Intel built on someone else's idea. The prick who patented it in the first place, in turn built it on someone else's ideas.
Patents allow people to sit on ideas until someone else decides to actually put them to use. What you're not taking into account is that a bigger company might also have a better idea of how to use the patent. They might already have something they're working on that would better utilize the idea(s) than the little guy. I see no reason why either should "own" the ideas, since society is better off by allowing unfettered creativity.
The patent arsenals that the major companies have cannot be overcome by a few from a small competitor. Reality is very different from the fiction of a perfect free market where everything works well. In the real world, any upstart stupid enough to challenge the big players would get crushed by patent suits themselves. Do you honestly think that IBM couldn't find 50 patents that the small competitor was violating?
In reality, patents only protect those who get to market first and then it protects them into a lock over their competitors. It is a little known fact that the Constitution gives Congress the power to determine that only certain industries need them, ie the industries that require incredibly large sums of research dollars to be spent like the pharmaceuticals.
With the Eolas victory, this and other previous lawsuits, you'd think that the big guys would push for the ending of patents in their industry. It's not like they have much to lose. Patent machines couldn't come after them and they'd not lose their position in the marketplace.
I have always had a problem with patents (not industry specific protections like for pharmaceuticals) because I don't believe ideas and methods should be property. As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive. Copyrights can encourage creativity, patents just encourage people to make a product then rape and pillage their industry.
I use the UK Mirror service all the time because it gets me the best download rates. It's often a lifesaver when it comes to getting the fastest rates for things like Yellow Dog Linux. I'd definitely contribute.
**For the masses who are as ignorant of American culture as many Americans are of much of the rest of the world, Yank/Yankee/Yanqui and American are not interchangeable. If you are ever below the Mason-Dixon line in America, do not call anyone a Yankee unless they have a New England accent. (This message brought to you by too many foreigners who have called me a Yank, being that I'm from Dixie)
Gnosticism got me back out of my malaise into being a christian. I had for a long time dismissed people like Jack Van Impe and Tim LaHaye as wishful thinkers (God will solve our problems) and outright lunatics whose desire for the endtimes was scary as hell. Then I started actually watching what is happening and comparing it to the more mature prophecy.
1) With the Law of the Sea Treaty and UN Convention on Organized Crime and International Criminal Court we are moving towards a true one world government. If the momentum continues, the UN could be a planetary government in 20-30 years with its own tax system, police, legislature and scariest of all: military.
2) Corporations, unions and governments have been conspiring for decades to terminate individual freedom and centralize all meaningful government power in the hands of an unaccountable elite. The US Congress is barely representative of our own population, just imagine how corruptable that sort of legislature would be. The Congress and EU would look like they're dominated by statesmen of the finest calibre by comparison.
3) We have a version of the mark of the beast being propogated in a way that is palitable to the general population.
While I don't think that we're going to see the rapture or anything quite that fantastical, I do think we are going to see some very dark days for mankind coming very soon.