Pharmaceutical companies rarely spend research money on cures, they spend it on treatments and so are unlikely to find cures. Just like crop companies that spend money on crops genetically modified to resist herbicides, not bugs.
The documentary The Corporation describes modern corporations as sociopaths, optimised to make money above all else. An exaggeration but in large companies where individual employees, including the managing director, can rationalise and distance themselves from a company's misdeeds there is some truth in that assertion.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
slocate's updatedb is one of the first things I turn off when I install a new version of linux.
The people who think it's reasonable that a machine should be slowed to a crawl by locking up the disk every single day at an arbitrary time for 10+ minutes for infrequent random searches are not being very sensible. Particularly with large disks. Particularly when only a tiny fraction of the disk changes every day. Particularly since most people usually only search a tiny fraction of the disk each day. Particularly since slocate doesn't allow the arbitrary expressions like -exec that find does. Particularly since slocate won't find things created since the last database update.
At the very least the distributions should provide a GUI or on-demand manual update option and leave the automatic update off by default.
The same reasoning applies to other dross the distributers put into cron including man page update and to a lesser extent core file cleanup. Cron usually makes sense only on an always-on machine and is fundamentally inefficient. Efficiently implemented on-demand is better. It's like the difference between polling and interrupts. Polling/cron is always a performance "race" condition.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you'd like to explain to me the basis for the quoted statement,
See for example the non-obvious section described here.
Note that I am not a lawyer and sometimes argue from ethical as well as legal considerations.
as well as the assertion that a givern patent examiner is incompetent and can't understand a change in vocabulary, I'd love to reply to that.
Sorry if I've caused offence, I may have expressed that badly.
What I meant to say, and this is a problem for all software engineering and research, not just software patents, is that software and marketing people are continuously "inventing" software structures which are just rehashes of old ideas with new terminology. Simple keyword-type examples include "metadata" (that's just data), "write-once, run-anywhere" (=portable), "thin client" (=dumb client), "client server" (=remote procedure call=distributed objects=remote services=network services=backend/frontend=...), "index" (=hash table), "database query" (=structured search=data extraction=data retrieval). The list goes on forever. Sometimes it is obvious only to a specialist that two "concepts" are the same or overlapping.
The problem with software is that it is almost purely a creation of the mind with insufficient physical reality to ground it. It is just too easy to create castles in the air.
In the context of bad patents an example is the todo list. It should be called "keyword search and list" and have been rejected immediately. Most programmers do this every day with general purpose search programs and text editors. The patent is merely a specific example of the general application.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Yep, it means that Bill Gates is paying the same percentage of his income as a million other concerned citizens. As far as it goes, a good thing and my congratulations to him.
I find it interesting that he really only got started donating to significant non-M$ benefiting causes when he met Melinda. She appears to have been a positive influence.
In any case M$ is still taxing the world $35,000,000,000 per year for about a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits (the device drivers) being largely written by third parties. That's wrong, the market isn't working and the law needs to be fixed.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. The "I'm only following orders" or "I'm only doing my job" arguments went out years ago.
Either the examiners are taking advantage of the system and are as culpable as everybody else in the patent office or they're not, and they've resigned and/or are publically and continuously trying to get the system fixed, both from within the patent office and in public forums including congress. If the attitudes you describe are as common as you suggest why don't you, assuming you're a patent examiner, and the others get organised? The examiners, as much as anyone, are in the best position to do something about it.
Our generation is laying down many of the groundrules for the largely virtual world our children will be living in. Like software, law is a construct of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. Lets get it right.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You are playing into the hands of patent parasites.
Lack of prior art is necessary but not sufficient evidence of inventiveness.
Many patents should not monopolise ideas because the idea is trival and obvious to somebody in the field, because the patent examiner is an incompetent who can't recognise a change in terminology and not substance, or because it is an idea who's time has come with many people/companies coming across it simultaneously and no one person/company entitled to monopolise the rewards.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nonsense. It is humanly impossible for the patent office to validly assess lack of prior art. Doesn't matter how much (realistic) money they get. To say otherwise is dishonest. See this thread.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't believe in making it harder (or less financially attractive) for drug companies to cure diseases.
Yes, most people want free money and is a big part of why the pharmaceutical industry is so horrendeously inefficient today.
Whether you like it or not a big part of good medicine is affordability. The current industry is not providing it. A good example is AIDS, dozens of "treatments" providing perpetual, high-value revenue streams for the vendors, but for some reason no cures.
A working market depends on an informed consumer. Drugs are complex and subtle enough that it is very difficult for a consumer, even a doctor, to be well informed and as a result pharmaceutical companies get away with a lot more than they should. Do a google search for iatrogenic illness to get an idea of how bad it is.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
8.29 billion to create a drug? If that isn't an example of a complete market failure I don't know what is. In a functioning, competitive market costs are supposed to reduce, not increase.
In any case, why on earth do you believe that number? The majority of it is probably marketing and bonuses for the executive team, though of course they will never admit that.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I think people with the cancer would rather have the cure.
My tax money. My research. My cure.
You're as bad as those academics who try to sell for personal gain the work my tax dollars paid for. If they wanted to retain the work they should have paid for it with their own money.
Or are you arguing that the government, my representative, should pay the company to distribute the drug?
Okay, but let's be upfront about it: Have the government contract out the distribution and collect any IP royalties on my behalf. Why should the distributor collect any royalties?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You will need it because the customers you are dealing with will be using it and the documents they are supplying you are Integrity Assured (tm) i.e. DRM'ed to the hilt by M$ and others so that you can only access the documents with the latest version of M$ software. After all, it's M$' document format and they can do what they like with it. You must be a DMCA criminal if you want to use any software other than M$' to access the documents.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The pessimist view.;-) I think you are being overly optimistic. This is all about maximising the vendor company's revenue stream. Unfortunately, with current IP law, IP owners have way too much control and will use that control to, at a minimum, not disadvantage themselves.
I've been on the customer or vendor end of hundreds of annual software support contracts. Almost without exception they were poor value for the customer. The customer would've got better value by paying by the incident. One extreme example was a contract that cost more than a million dollars annually (many seats) and the customer got 3 (!) support tickets/phone calls, none of which solved any significant problems. Not surprisingly they dropped the support contract after that.
In any case, it doesn't necessarily make much sense from an economic point of view to keep on paying indefinitely for an indefinite number of seats for the one-off effort of writing some software. The market will hopefully deal with it assuming IP law lets it happen. Free (as in libre) software should do well.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Stop equating the law with ethics. He may or may not have broken law. I don't know the particulars of this case but while I respect copyright law in general the automatic assumption that the the copyright of mass market members of the RIAA should be acknowledged is bogus. See my signature for the reason why.
And before the the RIAA parasites on this forum start targetting me please note that, no, I am not mass copier or distributer but neither I am particularly anti such people either.
IP law is an ass. Until law that represents the interests of all citizens, not just parasite corporations, is enacted, civil disobedience may be entirely appropriate. As the documentary says corporations are sociopaths, making money above all else, and need good law to keep them in check.
The fact that the GPL uses copyright law to implement its goals is irrelevant. Democracies use guns to kill people. In both cases the tools being used are appropriate to the context they are in.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The only real argument for putting this together is because it can be done.
And because Tivo isn't available for 95% of the world's population.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
How can a country lose $300 billion in productivity and still be the most productive country in the world?
One of the things that makes America productive is that it is a third world economy (millions of illegals) mixed in with a first world economy. With no border and transport costs in between business can choose first or third world workers as appropriate to maximise their productivity, particularly in California. There aren't that many other countries where this happens on such a large scale.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nonsense. Other OS' at the time, including RT-11, RSX-11 and others were running in similar memory with greater functionality.
Face it, PCDOS/MSDOS was nothing more than a rebadged hack gotten out of the door quickly for marketing reasons. It worked, but users suffered for a decade as a result and M$ still has a who-cares-about-the-users-as-long-as-we-can-sell-i t culture.
Little, if any thought, was given to the needs and interests of non-engineers.
Since MSDOS/PCDOS functionality was a strict subset of CPM/RT-11 etc. functionality, but incompatible for no good reason, this argument is meaningless. It was a quick hack, nothing more, and M$ managed to gradually leverage that hack into the vendor lockin they have today.
That has rather a lot to do with the fact that most people would still not be using Unix even if Microsoft had never existed.
Nice ad hominem.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It also happens to be orders of magnitude faster than VNC or X.
Nonsense. It may be faster than VNC depending on the hardware but it is a fraction of the speed of remote X. Citrix remote desktop is an abortion that makes the GUI practically unusable because of slowness, screen artifacts and lost mouse clicks.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Not as many as M$ wants to maximise a monopoly revenue stream.
What more do you need to know?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Maybe someday we'll ditch the free market for information
The existence of copyright means the free market has already been ditched. The only thing being argued about here is what form the unfree market should take.
An unfree market is not necessarily a bad thing but this bullshit about the current set of laws being a naturally "free" market has got to stop.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Early versions were flaky as hell and had obviously never been tested on an actual corrupt file system, nor coded with all possible file system failures in mind. Core dumps, exceptions, you name it.
Whoever wrote it didn't know what they were doing. Newer versions are probably better but once burned, twice shy. I don't trust people who code file system checking utilities as an afterthought.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It's like blaming firemen for setting peoples houses on purpose.
Except that firemen don't have a multi-million dollar incentive to light fires and can't light them without risking being seen.
What is the value of the anti-virus industry these days?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A good thought but I don't think it would make much difference. The computer is just a tool and it can be used by patent submitters to randomly obfuscate and rearrange patents (wearing patent examiners down with "innovative" terminology), as well as patent examiners looking for prior art.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Neither a.sxw or a PDF one would be very useful for someone new to PCs
Not true. Like a lot of people you assume your circumstances are the same as other people. I can think of a bunch of situations where it would be very useful:
For a new hire at a company set up in front of their computer by the company IT guy. The company doesn't want the hassle of giving hard copies to everybody.
For the country/third world family member getting their feet wet for the first time being set up by the family [semi-]geek and the nearest place to buy a book is a hundred K away.
By the school kid with no money but access to a school computer being shown by his friend and/teacher where to get started.
Fact is, online materials can often be useful for almost anybody if for no other reason than they are freely avilable and accessible anywhere the internet is accessible.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Try SuSE 9.1. Almost all point and click. Uses RPM under the hood but installing security/recommended updates online is easy:
Click System/YaST on the main menu. YaST is the equivalent of the MSWindows ControlPanel.
Enter the root password and click OK.
Click Software/Online Update.
Click Next to accept the default source site.
Click Accept to accept the default set of patches.
Click Finish to finalise patch installation. I've seen one patch that required a reboot.
9.1 was released recently so updates should be available for a while yet.
I've no connection to SuSE other than as a satisfied user.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A bank can post record profits, but fraud against that bank is still wrong.
And the American revolution was wrong because they rebelled against duly constituted authority.
Sometimes, the law is an ass and you've just gotta do what you've just gotta do.
I'm not condoning bank fraud (troll comparison by the way) but IP law is so ridiculously unfair now that I have no problem with people ignoring it wholesale.
M$ being paid $35,000,000,000 per year for software it largely wrote more than a decade ago and for which it didn't even write most of the complicated bits, the device drivers. RIAA is being paid $1,000,000's for songs that took a few hours to create. In both cases broken IP law is giving them monopoly/cartel advantages they're not earning.
I want to see an economic and legal system that encourages creativity and a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. IP law now isn't and lawyers/politicians are asleep at the wheel.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be true but follow the money.
Pharmaceutical companies rarely spend research money on cures, they spend it on treatments and so are unlikely to find cures. Just like crop companies that spend money on crops genetically modified to resist herbicides, not bugs.
The documentary The Corporation describes modern corporations as sociopaths, optimised to make money above all else. An exaggeration but in large companies where individual employees, including the managing director, can rationalise and distance themselves from a company's misdeeds there is some truth in that assertion.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
slocate's updatedb is one of the first things I turn off when I install a new version of linux.
The people who think it's reasonable that a machine should be slowed to a crawl by locking up the disk every single day at an arbitrary time for 10+ minutes for infrequent random searches are not being very sensible. Particularly with large disks. Particularly when only a tiny fraction of the disk changes every day. Particularly since most people usually only search a tiny fraction of the disk each day. Particularly since slocate doesn't allow the arbitrary expressions like -exec that find does. Particularly since slocate won't find things created since the last database update.
At the very least the distributions should provide a GUI or on-demand manual update option and leave the automatic update off by default.
The same reasoning applies to other dross the distributers put into cron including man page update and to a lesser extent core file cleanup. Cron usually makes sense only on an always-on machine and is fundamentally inefficient. Efficiently implemented on-demand is better. It's like the difference between polling and interrupts. Polling/cron is always a performance "race" condition.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
If you'd like to explain to me the basis for the quoted statement,
See for example the non-obvious section described here.
Note that I am not a lawyer and sometimes argue from ethical as well as legal considerations.
as well as the assertion that a givern patent examiner is incompetent and can't understand a change in vocabulary, I'd love to reply to that.
Sorry if I've caused offence, I may have expressed that badly.
What I meant to say, and this is a problem for all software engineering and research, not just software patents, is that software and marketing people are continuously "inventing" software structures which are just rehashes of old ideas with new terminology. Simple keyword-type examples include "metadata" (that's just data), "write-once, run-anywhere" (=portable), "thin client" (=dumb client), "client server" (=remote procedure call=distributed objects=remote services=network services=backend/frontend=...), "index" (=hash table), "database query" (=structured search=data extraction=data retrieval). The list goes on forever. Sometimes it is obvious only to a specialist that two "concepts" are the same or overlapping.
The problem with software is that it is almost purely a creation of the mind with insufficient physical reality to ground it. It is just too easy to create castles in the air.
In the context of bad patents an example is the todo list. It should be called "keyword search and list" and have been rejected immediately. Most programmers do this every day with general purpose search programs and text editors. The patent is merely a specific example of the general application.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Mean anything?
Yep, it means that Bill Gates is paying the same percentage of his income as a million other concerned citizens. As far as it goes, a good thing and my congratulations to him.
I find it interesting that he really only got started donating to significant non-M$ benefiting causes when he met Melinda. She appears to have been a positive influence.
In any case M$ is still taxing the world $35,000,000,000 per year for about a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits (the device drivers) being largely written by third parties. That's wrong, the market isn't working and the law needs to be fixed.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. The "I'm only following orders" or "I'm only doing my job" arguments went out years ago.
Either the examiners are taking advantage of the system and are as culpable as everybody else in the patent office or they're not, and they've resigned and/or are publically and continuously trying to get the system fixed, both from within the patent office and in public forums including congress. If the attitudes you describe are as common as you suggest why don't you, assuming you're a patent examiner, and the others get organised? The examiners, as much as anyone, are in the best position to do something about it.
Our generation is laying down many of the groundrules for the largely virtual world our children will be living in. Like software, law is a construct of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. Lets get it right.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You are playing into the hands of patent parasites.
Lack of prior art is necessary but not sufficient evidence of inventiveness.
Many patents should not monopolise ideas because the idea is trival and obvious to somebody in the field, because the patent examiner is an incompetent who can't recognise a change in terminology and not substance, or because it is an idea who's time has come with many people/companies coming across it simultaneously and no one person/company entitled to monopolise the rewards.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nonsense. It is humanly impossible for the patent office to validly assess lack of prior art. Doesn't matter how much (realistic) money they get. To say otherwise is dishonest. See this thread.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't believe in making it harder (or less financially attractive) for drug companies to cure diseases.
Yes, most people want free money and is a big part of why the pharmaceutical industry is so horrendeously inefficient today.
Whether you like it or not a big part of good medicine is affordability. The current industry is not providing it. A good example is AIDS, dozens of "treatments" providing perpetual, high-value revenue streams for the vendors, but for some reason no cures.
A working market depends on an informed consumer. Drugs are complex and subtle enough that it is very difficult for a consumer, even a doctor, to be well informed and as a result pharmaceutical companies get away with a lot more than they should. Do a google search for iatrogenic illness to get an idea of how bad it is.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
8.29 billion to create a drug? If that isn't an example of a complete market failure I don't know what is. In a functioning, competitive market costs are supposed to reduce, not increase.
In any case, why on earth do you believe that number? The majority of it is probably marketing and bonuses for the executive team, though of course they will never admit that.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I think people with the cancer would rather have the cure.
My tax money. My research. My cure.
You're as bad as those academics who try to sell for personal gain the work my tax dollars paid for. If they wanted to retain the work they should have paid for it with their own money.
Or are you arguing that the government, my representative, should pay the company to distribute the drug?
Okay, but let's be upfront about it: Have the government contract out the distribution and collect any IP royalties on my behalf. Why should the distributor collect any royalties?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You will need it because the customers you are dealing with will be using it and the documents they are supplying you are Integrity Assured (tm) i.e. DRM'ed to the hilt by M$ and others so that you can only access the documents with the latest version of M$ software. After all, it's M$' document format and they can do what they like with it. You must be a DMCA criminal if you want to use any software other than M$' to access the documents.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
d.) Spend less money. ...
The pessimist view. ;-) I think you are being overly optimistic. This is all about maximising the vendor company's revenue stream. Unfortunately, with current IP law, IP owners have way too much control and will use that control to, at a minimum, not disadvantage themselves.
I've been on the customer or vendor end of hundreds of annual software support contracts. Almost without exception they were poor value for the customer. The customer would've got better value by paying by the incident. One extreme example was a contract that cost more than a million dollars annually (many seats) and the customer got 3 (!) support tickets/phone calls, none of which solved any significant problems. Not surprisingly they dropped the support contract after that.
In any case, it doesn't necessarily make much sense from an economic point of view to keep on paying indefinitely for an indefinite number of seats for the one-off effort of writing some software. The market will hopefully deal with it assuming IP law lets it happen. Free (as in libre) software should do well.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Stop equating the law with ethics. He may or may not have broken law. I don't know the particulars of this case but while I respect copyright law in general the automatic assumption that the the copyright of mass market members of the RIAA should be acknowledged is bogus. See my signature for the reason why.
And before the the RIAA parasites on this forum start targetting me please note that, no, I am not mass copier or distributer but neither I am particularly anti such people either.
IP law is an ass. Until law that represents the interests of all citizens, not just parasite corporations, is enacted, civil disobedience may be entirely appropriate. As the documentary says corporations are sociopaths, making money above all else, and need good law to keep them in check.
The fact that the GPL uses copyright law to implement its goals is irrelevant. Democracies use guns to kill people. In both cases the tools being used are appropriate to the context they are in.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The only real argument for putting this together is because it can be done.
And because Tivo isn't available for 95% of the world's population.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
How can a country lose $300 billion in productivity and still be the most productive country in the world?
One of the things that makes America productive is that it is a third world economy (millions of illegals) mixed in with a first world economy. With no border and transport costs in between business can choose first or third world workers as appropriate to maximise their productivity, particularly in California. There aren't that many other countries where this happens on such a large scale.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A tiny shell was a necessity.
Nonsense. Other OS' at the time, including RT-11, RSX-11 and others were running in similar memory with greater functionality.
Face it, PCDOS/MSDOS was nothing more than a rebadged hack gotten out of the door quickly for marketing reasons. It worked, but users suffered for a decade as a result and M$ still has a who-cares-about-the-users-as-long-as-we-can-sell-i t culture.
Little, if any thought, was given to the needs and interests of non-engineers.
Since MSDOS/PCDOS functionality was a strict subset of CPM/RT-11 etc. functionality, but incompatible for no good reason, this argument is meaningless. It was a quick hack, nothing more, and M$ managed to gradually leverage that hack into the vendor lockin they have today.
That has rather a lot to do with the fact that most people would still not be using Unix even if Microsoft had never existed.
Nice ad hominem.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It also happens to be orders of magnitude faster than VNC or X.
Nonsense. It may be faster than VNC depending on the hardware but it is a fraction of the speed of remote X. Citrix remote desktop is an abortion that makes the GUI practically unusable because of slowness, screen artifacts and lost mouse clicks.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
how many more forks will we have?
As many as people want.
Not as many as M$ wants to maximise a monopoly revenue stream.
What more do you need to know?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Maybe someday we'll ditch the free market for information
The existence of copyright means the free market has already been ditched. The only thing being argued about here is what form the unfree market should take.
An unfree market is not necessarily a bad thing but this bullshit about the current set of laws being a naturally "free" market has got to stop.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Early versions were flaky as hell and had obviously never been tested on an actual corrupt file system, nor coded with all possible file system failures in mind. Core dumps, exceptions, you name it.
Whoever wrote it didn't know what they were doing. Newer versions are probably better but once burned, twice shy. I don't trust people who code file system checking utilities as an afterthought.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It's like blaming firemen for setting peoples houses on purpose.
Except that firemen don't have a multi-million dollar incentive to light fires and can't light them without risking being seen.
What is the value of the anti-virus industry these days?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A good thought but I don't think it would make much difference. The computer is just a tool and it can be used by patent submitters to randomly obfuscate and rearrange patents (wearing patent examiners down with "innovative" terminology), as well as patent examiners looking for prior art.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Neither a .sxw or a PDF one would be very useful for someone new to PCs
Not true. Like a lot of people you assume your circumstances are the same as other people. I can think of a bunch of situations where it would be very useful:
Fact is, online materials can often be useful for almost anybody if for no other reason than they are freely avilable and accessible anywhere the internet is accessible.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Try SuSE 9.1. Almost all point and click. Uses RPM under the hood but installing security/recommended updates online is easy:
9.1 was released recently so updates should be available for a while yet.
I've no connection to SuSE other than as a satisfied user.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A bank can post record profits, but fraud against that bank is still wrong.
And the American revolution was wrong because they rebelled against duly constituted authority.
Sometimes, the law is an ass and you've just gotta do what you've just gotta do.
I'm not condoning bank fraud (troll comparison by the way) but IP law is so ridiculously unfair now that I have no problem with people ignoring it wholesale.
M$ being paid $35,000,000,000 per year for software it largely wrote more than a decade ago and for which it didn't even write most of the complicated bits, the device drivers. RIAA is being paid $1,000,000's for songs that took a few hours to create. In both cases broken IP law is giving them monopoly/cartel advantages they're not earning.
I want to see an economic and legal system that encourages creativity and a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. IP law now isn't and lawyers/politicians are asleep at the wheel.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.