your demanding to write an application in APL is not going to impress me,
What's "demanding" got to do with it?
You argue for the business case, just like everything else.
Presumably you're an expert at the subject at hand and your manager trusts your judgement on it. Your manager is hopefully more aware of company wide concerns. You both use your combined knowledge to achieve an optimal result. Everybody wins.
There's very few projects of any size where only one language is appropriate. I'd like to see somebody trying to write a compiler in HTML, a web page in SQL or a backup script in Ada.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are lying scum, misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion.
No, businesses historically and businesses in many parts of the world. What we've got now is an historical aberration.
Any company that develops anything usually has lots of patents.
They are necessary to protect against being sued by your competitors for infringing _their_ patents.
In other words an arms race where everybody loses except the patent mafia. Great ethical basis that.
Not to mention, if you don't patent something, someone else will patent it and sue you for infringement. Unless you want to spend hundreds of millions of bucks proving prior art, you will have to pay licensing fees.
Nonsense. As the patent mafia are fond of claiming all you have to do is to publish to get prior art. No need to patent.
This happens on a daily basis -- for example, Creative patented the iPod interface (that they stole from Apple in the first place) and now wants money from Apple. That's the simple reality of how it works.
Nope, the simple reality of a broken legal system that people are ignoring wholesale. The Prohibition all over again.
Grow up. Sure, lawyers are parasites. Until you need one to protect your interests.
Where did I say all lawyers are parasites? The problem is parasite lawyers protecting their own "interests" (parasitising the rest of the community for little in return). Every new law, copyrighted item and patent is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the general community. Unfortunately there's currently very few checks and balances to stop the growth of these, particularly patents. Judges are former lawyers, congress is mainly lawyers. Unfortunately, the founding fathers were unable to anticipate and deal with the parasitism in the legal profession. It's a gigantic real life game of nomic.
Your examples are why not every idea should be patentable, but they're irrelevant for 2 reasons: #1, the current system wouldn't let you do this;
No, you miss my point. I was making the point that what is [not] patentable is completely arbitrary and has no rational basis, just hand waving justifications. Arbitrary law is unjust law and has no ethical basis.
#2, I already agree that some things shouldn't get patents. The dispute is if we should have patents at all.
We're getting into semantics here. When patent law is changed sufficiently should it still be called a patent?
I contend that patents are a good thing, and that we just need to drastically reform the system.
I've said in other posts that I would support patents if there were credible evidence for them. As it is now all we've got is self-serving bullshit from the "IP industry". Since a large percentage of the tech community, the people this nonsense is supposed to be protecting, are saying that patents are suspect then it's time to revisit in a big way.
Given the massive impact that patents have on the economy the government should at a minimum fund objective, multi-million dollar research looking at the forms that legal protection for intellectual effort should take. As it is we have this tragic situation where some obscure bureaucrat in a minor government office can act as gatekeeper on multi-million dollar projects. The whole idea that a bureacrat can assess whether a scientist working in some obscure area is original or not is just plain sick.
The existing justifications for patents are, frankly, bullshit, and you do your cause no good by implicitly claiming they have merit.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
An alternative approach: Don't patch, use rsync
on
Linux Patch Management
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I like making all files on all machines on a LAN, excluding network addressing, electronic licensing and logs, bit-for-bit identical. Doing so massively reduces management overhead and improves management control.
I've managed networks of several hundred machines this way and it works well. I checksum all files and directories on all machines on a regular basis and if anything's different in time or space I find out why and make sure it doesn't happen again. I've found dozens of very obscure and troublesome software and hardware bugs this way, have very good uptime and I can concentrate on making sure the master machines are well configured rather than waste time trying to put out fires all over the network all the time. If individual machine classes need to have different configurations I partition those differences out and manage them separately
Distributing patch packages is error prone. By working at the file level it's easy to be confident everything is okay. You can also often distribute and back out "patches" (just a list of files to be rsync'ed) in the background very quickly at short notice with minimal impact on users.
The science agrees with you. e.g. Lottery winners, one year after, are no happier than they were before. What makes people happy long term are experiences, not pay increases, and with a bit of lateral thinking and creativity experiences don't have to cost much.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Sure, our business worked fine before we started changing the way things get done. But we've invented new ways to do things, and so now we do it better. For some of those things, we rely on patents to be able to keep doing things better than the competiton for a few years.
It's a "nice to have" from the perspective of your company, not a "be able to".
Profit incentive is what makes high risk ventures worthwhile.
No, profit incentive and the average expected return is the reason all businesses, of any risk profile, are created.
Patents are often how you make those profits.
No. Patents are an additional incentive. Like most business ideas first-mover advantage, local expertese and bragging rights are equally important. Patents distort the free market. Patents or other forms of incentive may be required to get a very small fraction of ideas over the profit threshold but the vast majority of ideas are not in that category, despite what the IP lawyers might like to claim. Distorting the market that much so that a very small fraction of ideas can see the light of day is anti-capitalist and anti-free-market.
The patent system needs to be fixed, but I disagree with your implication that the entire idea is invalid.
I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a town that's never had a hardware store. I invest a lot of time, money and effort in making my store a reality. It turns out there's a real demand for hardware in this town so somebody else decides they're going to open a hardware store too. Why shouldn't I be able to get a patent on my idea so I have no competition in that suburb/town/state/country? Or patent the idea that imports from Tibet are profitable even though it's never been done before? Or patent the idea of selling life insurance to women aged between 40 and 42 in towns with names of 20 letters in length?
Because it's anti-free market is why and the entire patent system is anti-free market in the same way. The problems it purports to solve are probably tiny compared to the damage it does.
I'd support patents if much of the systemic unfairness was fixed (e.g. independent invention is recognised), there was scientific, objective evidence for it's benefit in every technological area where it was applied and significant research was done to figure out the best way to create innovation incentives (patents as currently implemented are only one of an infinite number of possibilities). The current patent system isn't even remotely close to that.
The FDA has the concept of "generally recognized as safe," or GRAS, for drugs in wide use before government drug acceptance testing was introduced. The FDA now does extensive testing of GRAS to make sure they are, in fact, safe. It's time we did the same thing with laws, like patent law, that have a billion dollar impact on business. It's also time we researched good law rather than leaving it to the lawyers to come up with self-serving law. The bulk of both houses of congress are former lawyers, judges are former lawyers, and even with the best will in the world they all look after the interests of the people they identify with first (i.e. lawyers) at the expense of the general population. It's all a gigantic real life game of nomic and every day people like you make it worse by encouraging it.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
We are investing a lot of money in R&D, and inventing things, and I don't think it's bad for us to want to reap our profits from that work. We're making tons of money doing our own legitimate business, not trying to sue other companies. That's exactly what patents *should* do.
Stop pretending that patents are necessary for your company to make a profit. Most businesses have no patents and get along just fine. Ideas are copied and adapted continuously. That's business.
So what's your objection? Do you object to the very idea of software patents? Don't quit your job. That won't do anything to end software patents.
Yes it will. It will make more people aware that if they want to hold onto a good programmer they'd better start thinking seriously about whether patents on balanbce are a good idea. Holding onto good people is one of the most important things a company can do to be profitable and if those people are giving them the finger they're going to do something about it.
It'll just cause a minor rearrangement in who ends up patenting what.
No. It'll raise awareness of the harm that patenting is causing and cost the company some money to find a replacement. With luck they'll recover that money by firing the lawyer who suggested that patents were a good thing.
Instead, get involved in patent reform.
Get involved in patent reform. Full stop.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Don't conflate invention with patents. They are completely different.
Second, patents look great on your resume.
Only if want a job at a firm which idolises patent parasites.
Third, you can keep your job. No big anyway, because now your resume has patents on it.
And maybe he can keep his job anyway. Or maybe he can get a job at a company that appreciates true inventiveness rather than the parasitism that most patents promote.
Fourth, you get a lot of exposure to the intellectual property legal system.
And this is a good thing how? The more time that is wasted on a fucked up legal system and supporting parasites the less time you have working on worthwhile things. You have only one life, don't waste it.
It's time to get over the whole "software patents suck thing:" they already exist, they already affect you, and your failure to patent something doesn't mean someone else won't try to patent it.
If everybody was like you we'd still be living in caves. We need to fix the system, not pretend it's "normal".
In a war, you have to shoot people because they are shooting at you.
There are different ways of "shooting". Yours is a bad way that just perpetuates a broken system where the parasites win.
If you don't kill them, they will kill you.
While we're using idiotic analogies: If you starve the patent parasites of oxygen then maybe they'll get more worthwhile jobs where they contribute to the community instead of being parasites.
This software patent thing is a war.
No it isn't. It's parasitism by a patent mafia. A real world version of nomic where lawyers are manipulating the legal system for their own benefit. Why do you think this is going to stop at patents? If this keeps up soon every area of life will have a lawyer-parasite attached to it.
You enlisted when you took a computer job.
No, you just took a computer job.
So what if you've been in the rear echelon since basic training. Every Marine a rifleman, every coder an inventor.
And invention has very little to do with the patent system as it stands today. Patents can't even handle the real world reality of simultaneous independent invention, let alone anything more subtle like progressive refinement or concepts having multiple terminologies.
Hooah
This is not a game. It's a bunch of arseholes trying to parasitise the rest of society. Don't pretend it's business as usual.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
patents are a required business tool and your company would be stupid not to use them.
They are not a required business tool. The vast majority of businesses have no patents and get along just fine.
You can't just avoid getting patents, unless you want to be out of business.
Unless you want to avoid giving even more money to lawyer-parasites. Every new patent is annother opportunity for a lawyer to make more money at the expense of the wider community.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Taken literally, that would mean that kids shouldn't be punished for rape or murder either; after all, they're against the law.
Your need to improve your reading comprehension skills. He said "just because", meaning breaking the law is a necessary, but not sufficient, reason for ruining a kid's life.
Now, I don't think you meant it that way, but unless "You did the crime, now do the time." applies to everybody, nobody's going to pay any attention to the law.
Most people aren't paying any attention to this law anyway.
Just like the US Alcohol Prohibition it's broken. And like the Prohibition legislators will hopefully eventually realise that fact and create more sane, balanced law.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Maybe they tried and the patent holder was not reasonable, but I imagine had they thrown the guy a few more bucks (perhaps a nice round US$10 million) they could have just solved the problem and spared their customers a lot of stress and expense.
That would just encourage more members of the patent mafia to try their luck. There are tens of thousands of bogus software patents out there and tens of thousands of parasitic lawyers who want to make money off them.
Every new law, patent and copyrighted item is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community. Real life nomic.
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The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
All research has inputs and outputs, both physical and mental.
Research and new ideas don't happen in a vacuum. This is directly affecting research.
The cosy world view of the patent mafia has only a tenuous link with the reality of research and development.
Amongst many other things research depends on the free exchange of ideas; people checking on, working with and re-arranging other people's ideas. That's the "re" in research. Publishing an intentionally difficult to interpret patent doesn't even remotely cut it.
The whole idea that some minor government bureaucrat is capable of assessing whether something is truly original or non-obvious in some obscure scientific field where they haven't done any real world research themselves in their entire life would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
The Constitution mandates that patents be awarded to inventors. That means the first inventor, not some johnny-come-lately. Whether he's the second, or third, or one thousandth person to invent something, he's not the inventor. That was the person who was first.
Yep, by the sick logic of the patent mafia having an independent inventor is somehow not clear evidence that invention is obvious to a person skilled in the art. Double-think at it's very best.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
While I think the publishers of a scientific journal bare some responsibility when it turns out an article was entirely bogus I don't understand why people want to blame the publishers of an Autobiography.
Had the publishers known the book was faked, contrived or otherwise bogus they should have refused publishing it as an autobiography. I see no reason for them to go out of their way to prove, or disprove it though.
They should've made a reasonable effort to verify that the book they were representing as fact was fact. Reasonable effort means doing some fact checking, not taking the author's word for it.
People take some things far too seriously.
It's called fraud. Everybody should take it seriously. The publisher is misrepresenting something as fact that is fiction.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Microsoft loses money on each system sold currently
The conventional wisdom, but where is your evidence for that assertion?
Sure, they're probably not making much money but I'm pretty sure they won't be losing much either. Their big costs are the fixed, sunk costs of development and tooling. Maximising unit sales can only help amortise that cost.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
... as those people will buy hardware (which loses money)
What is your evidence for that assertion? Sure, they're probably not making much money on the hardware but I doubt they're losing any.
The major cost is the sunk, fixed cost of development and tooling up.
By maximising unit sales they amortise that cost over the number of units sold and also maximise the probability that people will buy associated products (i.e. the software) as well. Even somebody who's bought a console just to hack it is likely to buy a game or two.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Wikipedia already does this, but it puts all versions in the one article. The problems arise when some idiot wants to suppress the other version, when they want to to give equal weight to a minority viewpoint or when they they want to outright lie in their own version.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
That's the view of the average Windows user. If you make a patch under an open source license, you are claiming to help people, but ensuring that people can't use the patch because of the license you are releasing it under.
Average Windows User: "Oh, so you made a patch to fix this bug, but neither Microsoft nor I can use it because you have a political point to make with your license? Thanks, dickweed. Thanks for nothing."
The average M$Windows user is not as naive as you claim. While there's certainly a large contingent that thinks that Bill Gates walks on water and M$ can do no wrong the majority are pissed because their PC is yet again not working properly and they have no practical out.
While M$ tries to hide the cost of M$Windows in the cost of the PC the vendors these days makes damn sure they know. Users think quite reasonably that it's M$'s or their vendor's responsibility if their PC is not working properly and the idea that some third party can stop M$ from fixing a problem in their own software is just silly.
If the user does discover a third party managed to create a patch they'll be happy (or more correctly, less unhappy) but they're well aware it's not that third party's responsibility to do a damn thing. And just like they've been forced to pay for M$Windows the user won't think it at all unreasonable that M$ should be forced to pay, per-copy, for a third party patch to fix software that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
Just like a product recall or a product that does not work as advertised.
Here's a clue: submitting a patch to MS under an open-source license is not going to set off a chain reaction that winds up releasing all MS code under open source licensing.
Nobody said it would. Most it'll make it into the trade press as a funny story and into
the mainstream news as "wow, a third party fixed it faster than M$, has the M$ share price fallen?" story.
It's just a futile effort to make a political point that just winds up making the patcher look like a bad sport.
Not at all. It's not futile, it's marketing and over the long haul will make M$ and others aware that M$ can't continue to be manipulative on licensing, marketing and technical tricks (e.g. the various forms of M$Windows crippleware, legal shenanigans and interroperability breakages) without expecting other people to respond in kind. No free lunch for M$, on patches or anything else.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Try and think without your anti Microsoft biasness.
Try to think without your pro-M$ zealotry.
In any case M$ marketing is about as biased as they come. You think they should have a privileged position?
Try and imagine if this was google forced to give up their secrets.
Your comparison is meaningless. Google is not an entrenched monopoly. The switching cost from google to a number of alternatives is nothing more than a mouse click and interoperability is also not a major concern.
And in any case, if at some future point there were structural impediments in a free market entrenching google as a monopoly I would be more than happy for them or any other company to be legally forced to neutralize those impediments.
Where, other then pure artificial law, does it say group X has to give group Y their secrets?
Where, other than purely artificial law, does it say that group X is allowed to keep secrets from group Y?
In this case group X being an entrenched monopoly and group Y being the population at large. I think the interests of the population at large trump the interests of an entrenched monopoly.
If MS doesn't want to give up their secrets, and thusly have a "worse" product for it - that is their problem. Again, who says you have to buy it?
They have an entrenched desktop monopoly with major structural problems for any potential competition. Meaning no meaningful choice and no choice about buying M$ in a host of common, society wide situations. If you're going to deny that I've got some land in Florida I want to sell you.
Also, Windows has been interoperable for years without them having to release their source code. Otherwise, how else would we use non-MS products with Windows?
Complete nonsense. Sure it's interroperable, but only in ways that entrench the monopoly. If you're going to pretend you don't understand that you're probably an M$ marketing sock puppet.
And nobody seems to care about the legitimate concerns of the source code being released (illegally) to the masses. Which as more groups get a hold of the source code it is more likely to be released (voluntarily or involuntarily)
Again, nonsense. Releasing the source code costs nothing. It's all copyrighted, nobody can take their work. It doesn't affect piracy. It doesn't affect their existing business. If anybody reuses any of their code and it's materially affecting them they have plenty of legal avenues open to them. Even then the source they're releasing is very incomplete and I'm sure they'll do their level best to make it unusable. Virus writers might get a minor leg up but that will simply encourage M$ to lift their security game.
The whole idea of releasing the source, under copyright, being a "the sky is falling" big deal is just hand waving nonsense by lawyers and marketers. As just one example the entire web, billions of pages, is "source" visible but business continues just fine. Ditto car and house designs and a host of other products.
For a free and efficient market I for one would like to make it a legal requirement that all software sales are required to provide copyrighted source with the binary at nominal cost if requested by the customer. One of the prerequisites for an efficient free market is efficient producer+consumer communication and knowledge. Just like stock markets require companies to make anouncements about anything that will materially affect the company's share price. Closed source software allows a multitude of sins to be hidden and, as in this case, can cause major market failures.
The only cost to M$ is the potential for a free market and real, interroperable competition where switching costs are low. I, as a citizen in a hopefully free world think that's a damn good idea and would like to see it firmly entrenched in the law for software companies in general.
You mention you're a recent college grad. which leads me to believe you're young.
The description of your job fits a pattern I see regularly - young enthusastic worker just out of college not knowing how things work and being taken advantage of by a well meaning but highly ambitious small business boss for whom the business is everything. Usually with a short fuse. Eventually young enthustiastic worker burns out but because they don't have a lot of experience they're not sure what to do next. Does this fit? I've seen it time and time again. I was there myself once.
What to do? First of all realise that what you're doing is not the norm for the industry. You need to gradually ease your boss into the idea that you do have a life outside work and it's not reasonable for him/her to regularly keep you outside of 8-9am to 5-6pm except in exceptional circumstances. ("Sorry boss, can't stay, playing tennis with my buddies..."). Next, you need to work your boss into the idea that working hours flexibility works both ways, for both the company and for you. If the company expects you to work late once in a while it's completely reasonable that you should be able to take similar time off once in while. For personal reasons that you shouldn't have to explain in detail. You can then use that flexibility to control your personal life, including things like job interviews and dental appointments.
You need to decide for yourself what you want out of your job and get a better idea of what you're worth and what you're prepared to do to get it. Sounds to me like your temperament is more suited to a large corporation than a small business. Big business is more bureaucratic and less inspiring but it does tend to take working hours and stress more seriously and you do get much more of a social life if you can handle the cubical farm.
In summary, I'd gradually push the wire with the boss on the number and flexibility of hours you're working. If you're good at your job you're not going to get fired and you can gradually improve your conditions. Then use that flexibility (work late one night, work early the next) to job hunt. In the unlikely event you're fired make sure you have a buffer in the bank to tide you over. You can get a new job very quickly if you're willing to accept, temporarily, some compromises like lower pay, boring job and/or part time work.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
No, you aren't. In the case of a patent infringement problem, all the source gets you is an opportunity to be sued by the patent holder.
Source or otherwise doesn't affect the effect of a patent. In any case, nobody is going to bother suing an individual open (or closed) source user. Having the source available just gives you a lot more flexibility in how you deal with it.
Open source is everything that closed source is. Plus the source is available.
And it's worse than that - at least here in the USA, you'd be subject to treble damages for knowingly violating the patent.
Only after you'd been explicitly warned, which could happen whether you're using closed or open source software.
This combination of technologies was both novel and original,
You had to sneak that in didn't you? Those patents (5,625,670;
5,631,946;
5,819,172;
6,067,451
and
6,317,592)
are completely and utterly obvious to somebody versed in the art at the time, despite what the airheads at the patent office might like to claim. Those patents do not protect innovation or hard work in any shape or form, they just protect the USPTO's, and assorted other parasites', gravy train.
Just because RIM might be an obnoxious company doesn't somehow justify NTP being an obnoxious company also. RIM's actions such as stonewalling NTP are entirely appropriate if the patents are bullshit. Even the USPTO is now being forced to admit the majority of patents it issued are bullshit.
Both NTP and RIM should be suing the USPTO for all their legal and other costs, and RIM should be suing NTP for vexatious litagation. Of course in practice they can't do that, so there's no checks and balances on an out of control USPTO and assorted other patent parasites.
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The USA and Europe should harmonize their software patent laws with China and India.
In all seriousness, would you really blame them for making it ridiculously high priced?
Yes. It means that they're obeying the technicality but not the spirit of the ruling.
This cost will will lock out large sections of society who want to interroperate in various unforeseen ways.
The reality is increasing the monetary (or reverse engineering) cost of anything has, in the limit, exactly the same effect as a legal ban.
Though European law now says M$ can no longer block interroperability M$ is still trying to use the technical, monetary and legal tricks it's used for decades to block a free, open and competitive market. Rather than competing on product and price.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Slashdot Mirror
your demanding to write an application in APL is not going to impress me,
What's "demanding" got to do with it?
You argue for the business case, just like everything else.
Presumably you're an expert at the subject at hand and your manager trusts your judgement on it. Your manager is hopefully more aware of company wide concerns. You both use your combined knowledge to achieve an optimal result. Everybody wins.
There's very few projects of any size where only one language is appropriate. I'd like to see somebody trying to write a compiler in HTML, a web page in SQL or a backup script in Ada.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are lying scum, misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion.
Yeah, businesses like restaurants.
No, businesses historically and businesses in many parts of the world. What we've got now is an historical aberration.
Any company that develops anything usually has lots of patents.
They are necessary to protect against being sued by your competitors for infringing _their_ patents.
In other words an arms race where everybody loses except the patent mafia. Great ethical basis that.
Not to mention, if you don't patent something, someone else will patent it and sue you for infringement. Unless you want to spend hundreds of millions of bucks proving prior art, you will have to pay licensing fees.
Nonsense. As the patent mafia are fond of claiming all you have to do is to publish to get prior art. No need to patent.
This happens on a daily basis -- for example, Creative patented the iPod interface (that they stole from Apple in the first place) and now wants money from Apple. That's the simple reality of how it works.
Nope, the simple reality of a broken legal system that people are ignoring wholesale. The Prohibition all over again.
Grow up. Sure, lawyers are parasites. Until you need one to protect your interests.
Where did I say all lawyers are parasites? The problem is parasite lawyers protecting their own "interests" (parasitising the rest of the community for little in return). Every new law, copyrighted item and patent is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the general community. Unfortunately there's currently very few checks and balances to stop the growth of these, particularly patents. Judges are former lawyers, congress is mainly lawyers. Unfortunately, the founding fathers were unable to anticipate and deal with the parasitism in the legal profession. It's a gigantic real life game of nomic.
Your examples are why not every idea should be patentable, but they're irrelevant for 2 reasons: #1, the current system wouldn't let you do this;
No, you miss my point. I was making the point that what is [not] patentable is completely arbitrary and has no rational basis, just hand waving justifications. Arbitrary law is unjust law and has no ethical basis.
#2, I already agree that some things shouldn't get patents. The dispute is if we should have patents at all.
We're getting into semantics here. When patent law is changed sufficiently should it still be called a patent?
I contend that patents are a good thing, and that we just need to drastically reform the system.
I've said in other posts that I would support patents if there were credible evidence for them. As it is now all we've got is self-serving bullshit from the "IP industry". Since a large percentage of the tech community, the people this nonsense is supposed to be protecting, are saying that patents are suspect then it's time to revisit in a big way.
Given the massive impact that patents have on the economy the government should at a minimum fund objective, multi-million dollar research looking at the forms that legal protection for intellectual effort should take. As it is we have this tragic situation where some obscure bureaucrat in a minor government office can act as gatekeeper on multi-million dollar projects. The whole idea that a bureacrat can assess whether a scientist working in some obscure area is original or not is just plain sick.
The existing justifications for patents are, frankly, bullshit, and you do your cause no good by implicitly claiming they have merit.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
I like making all files on all machines on a LAN, excluding network addressing, electronic licensing and logs, bit-for-bit identical. Doing so massively reduces management overhead and improves management control.
I've managed networks of several hundred machines this way and it works well. I checksum all files and directories on all machines on a regular basis and if anything's different in time or space I find out why and make sure it doesn't happen again. I've found dozens of very obscure and troublesome software and hardware bugs this way, have very good uptime and I can concentrate on making sure the master machines are well configured rather than waste time trying to put out fires all over the network all the time. If individual machine classes need to have different configurations I partition those differences out and manage them separately
Distributing patch packages is error prone. By working at the file level it's easy to be confident everything is okay. You can also often distribute and back out "patches" (just a list of files to be rsync'ed) in the background very quickly at short notice with minimal impact on users.
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Keep your options open!
The science agrees with you. e.g. Lottery winners, one year after, are no happier than they were before. What makes people happy long term are experiences, not pay increases, and with a bit of lateral thinking and creativity experiences don't have to cost much.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Sure, our business worked fine before we started changing the way things get done. But we've invented new ways to do things, and so now we do it better. For some of those things, we rely on patents to be able to keep doing things better than the competiton for a few years.
It's a "nice to have" from the perspective of your company, not a "be able to".
Profit incentive is what makes high risk ventures worthwhile.
No, profit incentive and the average expected return is the reason all businesses, of any risk profile, are created.
Patents are often how you make those profits.
No. Patents are an additional incentive. Like most business ideas first-mover advantage, local expertese and bragging rights are equally important. Patents distort the free market. Patents or other forms of incentive may be required to get a very small fraction of ideas over the profit threshold but the vast majority of ideas are not in that category, despite what the IP lawyers might like to claim. Distorting the market that much so that a very small fraction of ideas can see the light of day is anti-capitalist and anti-free-market.
The patent system needs to be fixed, but I disagree with your implication that the entire idea is invalid.
I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a town that's never had a hardware store. I invest a lot of time, money and effort in making my store a reality. It turns out there's a real demand for hardware in this town so somebody else decides they're going to open a hardware store too. Why shouldn't I be able to get a patent on my idea so I have no competition in that suburb/town/state/country? Or patent the idea that imports from Tibet are profitable even though it's never been done before? Or patent the idea of selling life insurance to women aged between 40 and 42 in towns with names of 20 letters in length?
Because it's anti-free market is why and the entire patent system is anti-free market in the same way. The problems it purports to solve are probably tiny compared to the damage it does.
I'd support patents if much of the systemic unfairness was fixed (e.g. independent invention is recognised), there was scientific, objective evidence for it's benefit in every technological area where it was applied and significant research was done to figure out the best way to create innovation incentives (patents as currently implemented are only one of an infinite number of possibilities). The current patent system isn't even remotely close to that.
The FDA has the concept of "generally recognized as safe," or GRAS, for drugs in wide use before government drug acceptance testing was introduced. The FDA now does extensive testing of GRAS to make sure they are, in fact, safe. It's time we did the same thing with laws, like patent law, that have a billion dollar impact on business. It's also time we researched good law rather than leaving it to the lawyers to come up with self-serving law. The bulk of both houses of congress are former lawyers, judges are former lawyers, and even with the best will in the world they all look after the interests of the people they identify with first (i.e. lawyers) at the expense of the general population. It's all a gigantic real life game of nomic and every day people like you make it worse by encouraging it.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
We are investing a lot of money in R&D, and inventing things, and I don't think it's bad for us to want to reap our profits from that work. We're making tons of money doing our own legitimate business, not trying to sue other companies. That's exactly what patents *should* do.
Stop pretending that patents are necessary for your company to make a profit. Most businesses have no patents and get along just fine. Ideas are copied and adapted continuously. That's business.
So what's your objection? Do you object to the very idea of software patents? Don't quit your job. That won't do anything to end software patents.
Yes it will. It will make more people aware that if they want to hold onto a good programmer they'd better start thinking seriously about whether patents on balanbce are a good idea. Holding onto good people is one of the most important things a company can do to be profitable and if those people are giving them the finger they're going to do something about it.
It'll just cause a minor rearrangement in who ends up patenting what.
No. It'll raise awareness of the harm that patenting is causing and cost the company some money to find a replacement. With luck they'll recover that money by firing the lawyer who suggested that patents were a good thing.
Instead, get involved in patent reform.
Get involved in patent reform. Full stop.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
First, it's great fun. Inventing is cathartic.
Don't conflate invention with patents. They are completely different.
Second, patents look great on your resume.
Only if want a job at a firm which idolises patent parasites.
Third, you can keep your job. No big anyway, because now your resume has patents on it.
And maybe he can keep his job anyway. Or maybe he can get a job at a company that appreciates true inventiveness rather than the parasitism that most patents promote.
Fourth, you get a lot of exposure to the intellectual property legal system.
And this is a good thing how? The more time that is wasted on a fucked up legal system and supporting parasites the less time you have working on worthwhile things. You have only one life, don't waste it.
It's time to get over the whole "software patents suck thing:" they already exist, they already affect you, and your failure to patent something doesn't mean someone else won't try to patent it.
If everybody was like you we'd still be living in caves. We need to fix the system, not pretend it's "normal".
In a war, you have to shoot people because they are shooting at you.
There are different ways of "shooting". Yours is a bad way that just perpetuates a broken system where the parasites win.
If you don't kill them, they will kill you.
While we're using idiotic analogies: If you starve the patent parasites of oxygen then maybe they'll get more worthwhile jobs where they contribute to the community instead of being parasites.
This software patent thing is a war.
No it isn't. It's parasitism by a patent mafia. A real world version of nomic where lawyers are manipulating the legal system for their own benefit. Why do you think this is going to stop at patents? If this keeps up soon every area of life will have a lawyer-parasite attached to it.
You enlisted when you took a computer job.
No, you just took a computer job.
So what if you've been in the rear echelon since basic training. Every Marine a rifleman, every coder an inventor.
And invention has very little to do with the patent system as it stands today. Patents can't even handle the real world reality of simultaneous independent invention, let alone anything more subtle like progressive refinement or concepts having multiple terminologies.
Hooah
This is not a game. It's a bunch of arseholes trying to parasitise the rest of society. Don't pretend it's business as usual.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
patents are a required business tool and your company would be stupid not to use them.
They are not a required business tool. The vast majority of businesses have no patents and get along just fine.
You can't just avoid getting patents, unless you want to be out of business.
Unless you want to avoid giving even more money to lawyer-parasites. Every new patent is annother opportunity for a lawyer to make more money at the expense of the wider community.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Taken literally, that would mean that kids shouldn't be punished for rape or murder either; after all, they're against the law.
Your need to improve your reading comprehension skills. He said "just because", meaning breaking the law is a necessary, but not sufficient, reason for ruining a kid's life.
Now, I don't think you meant it that way, but unless "You did the crime, now do the time." applies to everybody, nobody's going to pay any attention to the law.
Most people aren't paying any attention to this law anyway.
Just like the US Alcohol Prohibition it's broken. And like the Prohibition legislators will hopefully eventually realise that fact and create more sane, balanced law.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Maybe they tried and the patent holder was not reasonable, but I imagine had they thrown the guy a few more bucks (perhaps a nice round US$10 million) they could have just solved the problem and spared their customers a lot of stress and expense.
That would just encourage more members of the patent mafia to try their luck. There are tens of thousands of bogus software patents out there and tens of thousands of parasitic lawyers who want to make money off them.
Every new law, patent and copyrighted item is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community. Real life nomic.
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The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
All research has inputs and outputs, both physical and mental.
Research and new ideas don't happen in a vacuum. This is directly affecting research.
The cosy world view of the patent mafia has only a tenuous link with the reality of research and development.
Amongst many other things research depends on the free exchange of ideas; people checking on, working with and re-arranging other people's ideas. That's the "re" in research. Publishing an intentionally difficult to interpret patent doesn't even remotely cut it.
The whole idea that some minor government bureaucrat is capable of assessing whether something is truly original or non-obvious in some obscure scientific field where they haven't done any real world research themselves in their entire life would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
The Constitution mandates that patents be awarded to inventors. That means the first inventor, not some johnny-come-lately. Whether he's the second, or third, or one thousandth person to invent something, he's not the inventor. That was the person who was first.
Yep, by the sick logic of the patent mafia having an independent inventor is somehow not clear evidence that invention is obvious to a person skilled in the art. Double-think at it's very best.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
While I think the publishers of a scientific journal bare some responsibility when it turns out an article was entirely bogus I don't understand why people want to blame the publishers of an Autobiography.
Had the publishers known the book was faked, contrived or otherwise bogus they should have refused publishing it as an autobiography. I see no reason for them to go out of their way to prove, or disprove it though.
They should've made a reasonable effort to verify that the book they were representing as fact was fact. Reasonable effort means doing some fact checking, not taking the author's word for it.
People take some things far too seriously.
It's called fraud. Everybody should take it seriously. The publisher is misrepresenting something as fact that is fiction.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
What would you prefer: A percentage of books with incorrect facts, or no books at all because the industry isn't profitable?
False dichotomy. The reality is you'd have less books but of higher quality.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Microsoft loses money on each system sold currently
The conventional wisdom, but where is your evidence for that assertion?
Sure, they're probably not making much money but I'm pretty sure they won't be losing much either. Their big costs are the fixed, sunk costs of development and tooling. Maximising unit sales can only help amortise that cost.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
What is your evidence for that assertion? Sure, they're probably not making much money on the hardware but I doubt they're losing any.
The major cost is the sunk, fixed cost of development and tooling up.
By maximising unit sales they amortise that cost over the number of units sold and also maximise the probability that people will buy associated products (i.e. the software) as well. Even somebody who's bought a console just to hack it is likely to buy a game or two.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Wikipedia already does this, but it puts all versions in the one article. The problems arise when some idiot wants to suppress the other version, when they want to to give equal weight to a minority viewpoint or when they they want to outright lie in their own version.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
That's the view of the average Windows user. If you make a patch under an open source license, you are claiming to help people, but ensuring that people can't use the patch because of the license you are releasing it under.
Average Windows User: "Oh, so you made a patch to fix this bug, but neither Microsoft nor I can use it because you have a political point to make with your license? Thanks, dickweed. Thanks for nothing."
The average M$Windows user is not as naive as you claim. While there's certainly a large contingent that thinks that Bill Gates walks on water and M$ can do no wrong the majority are pissed because their PC is yet again not working properly and they have no practical out.
While M$ tries to hide the cost of M$Windows in the cost of the PC the vendors these days makes damn sure they know. Users think quite reasonably that it's M$'s or their vendor's responsibility if their PC is not working properly and the idea that some third party can stop M$ from fixing a problem in their own software is just silly.
If the user does discover a third party managed to create a patch they'll be happy (or more correctly, less unhappy) but they're well aware it's not that third party's responsibility to do a damn thing. And just like they've been forced to pay for M$Windows the user won't think it at all unreasonable that M$ should be forced to pay, per-copy, for a third party patch to fix software that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
Just like a product recall or a product that does not work as advertised.
Here's a clue: submitting a patch to MS under an open-source license is not going to set off a chain reaction that winds up releasing all MS code under open source licensing.
Nobody said it would. Most it'll make it into the trade press as a funny story and into the mainstream news as "wow, a third party fixed it faster than M$, has the M$ share price fallen?" story.
It's just a futile effort to make a political point that just winds up making the patcher look like a bad sport.
Not at all. It's not futile, it's marketing and over the long haul will make M$ and others aware that M$ can't continue to be manipulative on licensing, marketing and technical tricks (e.g. the various forms of M$Windows crippleware, legal shenanigans and interroperability breakages) without expecting other people to respond in kind. No free lunch for M$, on patches or anything else.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Try and think without your anti Microsoft biasness.
Try to think without your pro-M$ zealotry.
In any case M$ marketing is about as biased as they come. You think they should have a privileged position?
Try and imagine if this was google forced to give up their secrets.
Your comparison is meaningless. Google is not an entrenched monopoly. The switching cost from google to a number of alternatives is nothing more than a mouse click and interoperability is also not a major concern.
And in any case, if at some future point there were structural impediments in a free market entrenching google as a monopoly I would be more than happy for them or any other company to be legally forced to neutralize those impediments.
Where, other then pure artificial law, does it say group X has to give group Y their secrets?
Where, other than purely artificial law, does it say that group X is allowed to keep secrets from group Y?
In this case group X being an entrenched monopoly and group Y being the population at large. I think the interests of the population at large trump the interests of an entrenched monopoly.
If MS doesn't want to give up their secrets, and thusly have a "worse" product for it - that is their problem. Again, who says you have to buy it?
They have an entrenched desktop monopoly with major structural problems for any potential competition. Meaning no meaningful choice and no choice about buying M$ in a host of common, society wide situations. If you're going to deny that I've got some land in Florida I want to sell you.
Also, Windows has been interoperable for years without them having to release their source code. Otherwise, how else would we use non-MS products with Windows?
Complete nonsense. Sure it's interroperable, but only in ways that entrench the monopoly. If you're going to pretend you don't understand that you're probably an M$ marketing sock puppet.
And nobody seems to care about the legitimate concerns of the source code being released (illegally) to the masses. Which as more groups get a hold of the source code it is more likely to be released (voluntarily or involuntarily)
Again, nonsense. Releasing the source code costs nothing. It's all copyrighted, nobody can take their work. It doesn't affect piracy. It doesn't affect their existing business. If anybody reuses any of their code and it's materially affecting them they have plenty of legal avenues open to them. Even then the source they're releasing is very incomplete and I'm sure they'll do their level best to make it unusable. Virus writers might get a minor leg up but that will simply encourage M$ to lift their security game.
The whole idea of releasing the source, under copyright, being a "the sky is falling" big deal is just hand waving nonsense by lawyers and marketers. As just one example the entire web, billions of pages, is "source" visible but business continues just fine. Ditto car and house designs and a host of other products.
For a free and efficient market I for one would like to make it a legal requirement that all software sales are required to provide copyrighted source with the binary at nominal cost if requested by the customer. One of the prerequisites for an efficient free market is efficient producer+consumer communication and knowledge. Just like stock markets require companies to make anouncements about anything that will materially affect the company's share price. Closed source software allows a multitude of sins to be hidden and, as in this case, can cause major market failures.
The only cost to M$ is the potential for a free market and real, interroperable competition where switching costs are low. I, as a citizen in a hopefully free world think that's a damn good idea and would like to see it firmly entrenched in the law for software companies in general.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property cre
You mention you're a recent college grad. which leads me to believe you're young.
The description of your job fits a pattern I see regularly - young enthusastic worker just out of college not knowing how things work and being taken advantage of by a well meaning but highly ambitious small business boss for whom the business is everything. Usually with a short fuse. Eventually young enthustiastic worker burns out but because they don't have a lot of experience they're not sure what to do next. Does this fit? I've seen it time and time again. I was there myself once.
What to do? First of all realise that what you're doing is not the norm for the industry. You need to gradually ease your boss into the idea that you do have a life outside work and it's not reasonable for him/her to regularly keep you outside of 8-9am to 5-6pm except in exceptional circumstances. ("Sorry boss, can't stay, playing tennis with my buddies..."). Next, you need to work your boss into the idea that working hours flexibility works both ways, for both the company and for you. If the company expects you to work late once in a while it's completely reasonable that you should be able to take similar time off once in while. For personal reasons that you shouldn't have to explain in detail. You can then use that flexibility to control your personal life, including things like job interviews and dental appointments.
You need to decide for yourself what you want out of your job and get a better idea of what you're worth and what you're prepared to do to get it. Sounds to me like your temperament is more suited to a large corporation than a small business. Big business is more bureaucratic and less inspiring but it does tend to take working hours and stress more seriously and you do get much more of a social life if you can handle the cubical farm.
In summary, I'd gradually push the wire with the boss on the number and flexibility of hours you're working. If you're good at your job you're not going to get fired and you can gradually improve your conditions. Then use that flexibility (work late one night, work early the next) to job hunt. In the unlikely event you're fired make sure you have a buffer in the bank to tide you over. You can get a new job very quickly if you're willing to accept, temporarily, some compromises like lower pay, boring job and/or part time work.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
No, you aren't. In the case of a patent infringement problem, all the source gets you is an opportunity to be sued by the patent holder.
Source or otherwise doesn't affect the effect of a patent. In any case, nobody is going to bother suing an individual open (or closed) source user. Having the source available just gives you a lot more flexibility in how you deal with it.
Open source is everything that closed source is. Plus the source is available.
And it's worse than that - at least here in the USA, you'd be subject to treble damages for knowingly violating the patent.
Only after you'd been explicitly warned, which could happen whether you're using closed or open source software.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
This combination of technologies was both novel and original,
You had to sneak that in didn't you? Those patents (5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592) are completely and utterly obvious to somebody versed in the art at the time, despite what the airheads at the patent office might like to claim. Those patents do not protect innovation or hard work in any shape or form, they just protect the USPTO's, and assorted other parasites', gravy train.
Just because RIM might be an obnoxious company doesn't somehow justify NTP being an obnoxious company also. RIM's actions such as stonewalling NTP are entirely appropriate if the patents are bullshit. Even the USPTO is now being forced to admit the majority of patents it issued are bullshit.
Both NTP and RIM should be suing the USPTO for all their legal and other costs, and RIM should be suing NTP for vexatious litagation. Of course in practice they can't do that, so there's no checks and balances on an out of control USPTO and assorted other patent parasites.
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The USA and Europe should harmonize their software patent laws with China and India.
who refuses to do the 'right thing' and share your fix with MS.
Why is it the 'right thing' to distribute a free patch to a profit taking company, particularly one that is a profit maximising monopoly?
Most users would find it funny if somebody threw M$' licensing ju-jitsu right back at them.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
In all seriousness, would you really blame them for making it ridiculously high priced?
Yes. It means that they're obeying the technicality but not the spirit of the ruling.
This cost will will lock out large sections of society who want to interroperate in various unforeseen ways.
The reality is increasing the monetary (or reverse engineering) cost of anything has, in the limit, exactly the same effect as a legal ban.
Though European law now says M$ can no longer block interroperability M$ is still trying to use the technical, monetary and legal tricks it's used for decades to block a free, open and competitive market. Rather than competing on product and price.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.