Bzzzt, wrong. "Free trade" is a myth. True, free trade would be warlordism, might makes right.
Instead, we have a huge number of laws that attempt to discourage negative competitive behaviour (fraud, protection rackets, smuggling without taxes, lying about the competition, property ownership laws etc.) and allow positive competitive behaviour (improving the product, decreasing the price, finding synergies etc.).
That framework of laws is what matters in this "free" trade agreement and at the the moment the IP laws do almost nothing to stop negative competitive behaviour. In fact they create entirely new ways to compete negatively by pulling the competition down.
if there are little imperfections
Hardly minor. This is going to affect generations of people to come. In the not too distant future when people spend their entire lives in virtual realities (now they just spend eight hours a day in front of the box) intellectual property laws are going to define people's lives. Bad IP law will mean corporations write citizen's lives. Science fiction dystopias have been written about this.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Unfortunately, no. A small number of people in the EU may make out really well. The vast majority will pay much more for software than would be possible in a fair, truly competitive market.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
More like commercial zealotry. Yes, most vendors would like to pretend the license doesn't matter and bury all the nasty stuff in the fine print.
We here in the real world know that the license is one of the most important characteristics of a program. It can have a major effect on the quality or otherwise of the user experience, including the quality of the program itself.
When the vendor hides the source, disclaims all liability in the license and provides no realistic mechanism for fixes then for any significant piece of software odds are you're going to have unfixable problems.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Believe me, I create IP every day. I know exactly what copyright is for. Yes, copyright would only protect an implementation of this "idea". That's the whole point.
This "idea" does not deserve any other protection. It's trivial and variations have and will be created many times by programmers and software architects everywhere as they create software on a day-to-day basis. As a result on a day-to-day basis these intellectual property creators will be fucked over by these parasites. There is no hard research/development work to protect. There is no innovation to protect. It's just parasites stealing from the creators.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Bullshit. I've just scanned the patents. (numbers 5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592). They're trash and completely uninnovative. Whether you like it or not the use of the radio spectrum to transmit email with addressing is obvious and should never have been monopolised in this way.
Also, like many patent office boosters you appear to be confusing the creation of intellectual property with the granting of a patent. Without getting into the semantics (I don't care whether it's called IP or something else) the former is a good thing. The later is usually parasites in action, particularly for software patents.
Software patents should be protecting true innovation and hard research/development work. Unfortunately, that is so rarely the case in software that software patents are doing far more harm than good and should never have been allowed.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
This is insane! What you've described may deserve copyright protection but in no way does it deserve patent protection. It is totally uninnovative to track, list and process tags in text. A great example of the patent office fucking up the whole world - here, everybody but M$.
I really hate the way that the patent office, lawyers and some business types are trying to parasitise the intellectual property I, and other intellectual property creators, are making. Such people should be in jail and it's a sad reflection on our justice system that they aren't.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Uh, no--how do trojan attachments and viruses that moron users open have anything at all to do with Microsoft?
They have everything to do with M$. They claim to design software for the normal user. These are normal users. M$'s software is not fit for the merchantable purpose. It is broken.
It is trivial to design email programs that handle attachments safely. Disable them by default or at least don't allow executable code in attachments (99% of email messages do not need attachments). Or sandbox attachments until they've been verified. Or limit attachments (executable or otherwise) to the company domain. Have a zone security architecture like Internet Explorer. Don't have have utterly trivial bugs like allowing changed file extensions to cause problems. M$ claims to employ smart people but they have been very stupid on this one. Just finger pointing and saying "it's not my fault". Like little children.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
actually debatable and interesting: the merits of the patent in question, its defensibiblty and its consequences.
What is debatable and interesting is the merit of software patents in general, not this particular patent. Not on us to "prove" this patent is valueless. This patent is almost certainly garbage and not worth talking about. The onus is on the patent holder to prove they are entitled to monopolise some piece of technology.
I really hate the way that the patent office, lawyers and some big business types are trying to parasitise the intellectual property I, and other intellectual property creators, are making. Such people are scum.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
By default, yes. They are interference by the government in the citizen's business. The onus is on the patent holder to show why they have a god-given right to monopolise some piece of technology. The vast majority software patents I've seen are nothing more than a means for lawyers and the patent office to make money on. Parasites trying to make money my, and other intellectual property creators', hard work. They are scum.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Key word. The problem is that, given that everyone can blow everyone else up, in a world of 6,000,000,000 people all it takes is 0.00000001% deviants and we're doomed. No social system can be so perfect that every one of that many people will be well adjusted.
Look at the present day; the number of terrorists in the world are statistically insignificant but there's still enough to cause all sorts of grief.
That's not to say we shouldn't do everything we can to create a better world. It's just that it can never be perfect.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
The software market, as IP law is currently written, is unstable. It will tend to favour one player because, understandably, everybody wants a standard. M$ was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. It could equally have been Apple, Digital Research or IBM.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
I'd hardly call making the software industry a commodity, service industry destruction. More like evolution and maturation.
At the moment broken IP law means that we have the completely farcical situation of a dominant mindshare company like M$ writing a program and getting paid billions for it and smaller company like Sun writing an identically functional program and getting paid 1/100 or less. The so-called free market is broken when that happens and it needs to be fixed.
The free market is a myth. A truly free market would be warlordism, might makes right. Instead, we have laws that discourage negative competitive behaviour (truth in advertising, product liability etc.) and allow positive competitive behaviour (improving the product, decreasing prices etc.). We now need new IP law that encourages fair, equivalent payment for equivalent software writing effort and true competition in product, not manipulation of the law with patents and the like.
Answering your question: Personally, I've got no problem with charging for software in principle but I have a big problem with broken IP law that allows wildly different renumeration for writing software. I don't mind a 10 times difference in charges to encourage innovation and competition but more than that is not on. Life is unfair enough as it is without creating laws that make it even more unfair.
---
User friendly Windows/XP User unfriendly Windows/XP license.
the client had about 6 GB of compressed data and wanted to send it to all of their stores nightly.
I'm curious, was that 6GB of completely new data every night? I would've thought that there aren't many businesses that generate that quantity of new data daily. If not why don't you send the differences and save money and operator/transmission time? rsync is your friend.
---
User friendly Windows/XP. User unfriendly Windows/XP license.
The resolution of the human eye is about 2500x2500 (6-7,000,000) cone cells (color) and 35000x35000 (120,000,000) rod cells (grey). Not evenly spread and the rods are not individually sensitive with multiple rods triggering the one nerve. See this more detail.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
That's just semantics. If enough people are "breaking the law" it's pretty damn visible, as is happening now with downloading, despite the fact that individuals are quite sensibly trying to stay invisible.
Since the media/IP cartels are using their enormous financial resources, partly accumulated through broken law, to game the legal system even more now, it's not unreasonable for citizens to use the relatively minor resources they do have (individual anonymity) to make their point. I do agree with your implied point that people should lobby more pro-actively.
filthy pirates
No, just sensible people who think they are being overcharged by a cartel.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API
I think you mean standard, not API. Always re-inventing yet another API is one of the reasons why programming in M$/Windows is such a pain. And one of the reasons why the applications are often so buggy. No attempt at abstraction and consistency, just a mess of inconsistent function calls.
tell Windows how to uninstall itself
That's another problem in M$/Windows. Every one installs/uninstalls differently, for no good reason. And usually stuff up working files and shared resources like DLL's and the registry while they are at it.
7 second app startup time
Nonsense. All versions of M$/Windows are as slow or slower to start applications as GNU/Linux etc. on the same hardware. On both platforms some applications move the startup time to boot/login time and claim they've made it faster; they haven't (pre-loading).
sane API in the vein of Cocoa and.NET
.NET is hardly a sane API. Yet another new API that simply duplicates existing libraries and functionality for marketing reasons. It may be clean on it's own but it's not clean embedded in the real world. Don't know about Cocoa.
install the binary driver
No thank you, that's the whole point of open source. There is no reason why an installation couldn't do a quick compile if the environment was sufficiently standard.
Having said the above I agree with alot of what you say; the big failing of Linux at the moment is basic standards, not GUI functionality. Despite what some poor programmers like to claim standards, if written properly, are not inconsistent with innovation and choice.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed, but it doesn't follow that things should be monopoly expensive either.
While I don't do it myself I have no problem with a little civil disobedience while IP law is such an ass.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
It's possible to stop free speech not only with too little message but also with too much noise.
No person can interpret every message out there. Large corporations can and do try to crowd out alternative points of view by the sheer volume of their message. Look at Coca-Cola/McDonalds. How many Coke/McD ad's have you seen? The purpose of their ad's is not to inform you of something you already know but to crowd out the competition's viewpoint. Mindshare is everything.
Having said that I have no problem with open source web sites taking M$ money for limited banner ad's because as long as they are not lying it presents a valid, alternative point of view.
Not surprisingly microsoft.com doesn't allow quid pro quo for exactly that reason. Because M$ presents an unbalanced viewpoint I have no problem with sites like slashdot trying to balance that out.
I have a big problem with the astro-turfers though - they should do jail time for fraud.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Nonsense. M$/Windows until at least M$Windows/98 had a completely broken security architecture that allowed a virus culture to develop. Unix has been around a lot longer with no such culture developing.
M$Windows/NT onwards had some security but they keep allowing it to be disabled for patches/updates. And they allowed executable attachments in emails by default for way too long. I can remember seeing it for the first time many years ago and thinking, you stupid, bloody idiots. I and many other people predicted the virus culture developing that day.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
I agree with you in general, but not for software.
The software industry is rife with ambiguous terminology; many names for the same things, poorly defined names, different meanings for the same label, different meanings in different era's, deliberate obsfucation by marketing people etc. etc.
It's not surprising. Software is soft - it can be anything people want it to be and without a physical reality to keep people grounded it has become a mess.
Look at what the pattern people are trying to do; incredibly basic software programming terminology but still when you talk about something like, for example, MVC (model/view/controller), it's often not even clear if a particular piece of software might be described in that way.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Actually, a big shakeup in pharmaceutical patents might be a good idea.
It's clear to me that the current system is not working well. It has many gross inefficiencies. Very few truly new treatments are being created. The ability of simple chemicals to fix things in a complex mechanism like the human body is vastly overrated, causing much pain and waste (do you fix most problems in your car with a pill in the gas tank?). Modern pharmaceutical companies sometimes bear more than a passing resemblance to the money making quacks of previous centuries, including scientific pseudo-babble to justify their existance.
Look at AIDS. For some strange reason the big pharmaceutical companies have come up with dozens of treatments for AIDS. You know, where the patient is a revenue stream for the company for the rest of their lives, but no one-shot cures for AIDS have been created.
Another example is short sightedness. It's been known for years that myopia is caused almost entirely by too much reading and near vision during childhood development (The Inuit went from close to 0% myopia to the 30% of the wider population in one generation, the generation that reading was introduced) but do you see the vision industry pushing prevention? Not on your life!
I don't attribute this to maliciousness. Mostly it is (no pun intended) tunnel vision; companies/industries so highly optimised to make money that they lose sight of more important social issues. Changing the law to encourage more entrepreneurship and niches for more inefficient, socially oriented companies may be just what is needed.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
More money to the PTO is not going to help. That's just a gravy trough for lawyers. It is completely unrealistic to expect a government department to properly assess all human knowledge for prior art, no matter how well funded it is. See some patent fixes.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
And making the patent too general means that the language is ambiguous and meangingless, leading to conflicting understanding and more money for lawyers. For software usually, despite what the patent office likes to say, there is no happy medium, leading to all the problems patents currently cause.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Free Trade is Good Period
Bzzzt, wrong. "Free trade" is a myth. True, free trade would be warlordism, might makes right.
Instead, we have a huge number of laws that attempt to discourage negative competitive behaviour (fraud, protection rackets, smuggling without taxes, lying about the competition, property ownership laws etc.) and allow positive competitive behaviour (improving the product, decreasing the price, finding synergies etc.).
That framework of laws is what matters in this "free" trade agreement and at the the moment the IP laws do almost nothing to stop negative competitive behaviour. In fact they create entirely new ways to compete negatively by pulling the competition down.
if there are little imperfections
Hardly minor. This is going to affect generations of people to come. In the not too distant future when people spend their entire lives in virtual realities (now they just spend eight hours a day in front of the box) intellectual property laws are going to define people's lives. Bad IP law will mean corporations write citizen's lives. Science fiction dystopias have been written about this.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
that the EU could make out pretty well
Unfortunately, no. A small number of people in the EU may make out really well. The vast majority will pay much more for software than would be possible in a fair, truly competitive market.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
More like commercial zealotry. Yes, most vendors would like to pretend the license doesn't matter and bury all the nasty stuff in the fine print.
We here in the real world know that the license is one of the most important characteristics of a program. It can have a major effect on the quality or otherwise of the user experience, including the quality of the program itself.
When the vendor hides the source, disclaims all liability in the license and provides no realistic mechanism for fixes then for any significant piece of software odds are you're going to have unfixable problems.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Believe me, I create IP every day. I know exactly what copyright is for. Yes, copyright would only protect an implementation of this "idea". That's the whole point.
This "idea" does not deserve any other protection. It's trivial and variations have and will be created many times by programmers and software architects everywhere as they create software on a day-to-day basis. As a result on a day-to-day basis these intellectual property creators will be fucked over by these parasites. There is no hard research/development work to protect. There is no innovation to protect. It's just parasites stealing from the creators.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Bullshit. I've just scanned the patents. (numbers 5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592). They're trash and completely uninnovative. Whether you like it or not the use of the radio spectrum to transmit email with addressing is obvious and should never have been monopolised in this way.
Also, like many patent office boosters you appear to be confusing the creation of intellectual property with the granting of a patent. Without getting into the semantics (I don't care whether it's called IP or something else) the former is a good thing. The later is usually parasites in action, particularly for software patents.
Software patents should be protecting true innovation and hard research/development work. Unfortunately, that is so rarely the case in software that software patents are doing far more harm than good and should never have been allowed.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
This is insane! What you've described may deserve copyright protection but in no way does it deserve patent protection. It is totally uninnovative to track, list and process tags in text. A great example of the patent office fucking up the whole world - here, everybody but M$.
I really hate the way that the patent office, lawyers and some business types are trying to parasitise the intellectual property I, and other intellectual property creators, are making. Such people should be in jail and it's a sad reflection on our justice system that they aren't.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Uh, no--how do trojan attachments and viruses that moron users open have anything at all to do with Microsoft?
They have everything to do with M$. They claim to design software for the normal user. These are normal users. M$'s software is not fit for the merchantable purpose. It is broken.
It is trivial to design email programs that handle attachments safely. Disable them by default or at least don't allow executable code in attachments (99% of email messages do not need attachments). Or sandbox attachments until they've been verified. Or limit attachments (executable or otherwise) to the company domain. Have a zone security architecture like Internet Explorer. Don't have have utterly trivial bugs like allowing changed file extensions to cause problems. M$ claims to employ smart people but they have been very stupid on this one. Just finger pointing and saying "it's not my fault". Like little children.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
actually debatable and interesting: the merits of the patent in question, its defensibiblty and its consequences.
What is debatable and interesting is the merit of software patents in general, not this particular patent. Not on us to "prove" this patent is valueless. This patent is almost certainly garbage and not worth talking about. The onus is on the patent holder to prove they are entitled to monopolise some piece of technology.
I really hate the way that the patent office, lawyers and some big business types are trying to parasitise the intellectual property I, and other intellectual property creators, are making. Such people are scum.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
all patents are baaaaad!
By default, yes. They are interference by the government in the citizen's business. The onus is on the patent holder to show why they have a god-given right to monopolise some piece of technology. The vast majority software patents I've seen are nothing more than a means for lawyers and the patent office to make money on. Parasites trying to make money my, and other intellectual property creators', hard work. They are scum.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
See patent articles
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
generally
Key word. The problem is that, given that everyone can blow everyone else up, in a world of 6,000,000,000 people all it takes is 0.00000001% deviants and we're doomed. No social system can be so perfect that every one of that many people will be well adjusted.
Look at the present day; the number of terrorists in the world are statistically insignificant but there's still enough to cause all sorts of grief.
That's not to say we shouldn't do everything we can to create a better world. It's just that it can never be perfect.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Seems to me they certainly got something right.
Mainly their marketing.
The software market, as IP law is currently written, is unstable. It will tend to favour one player because, understandably, everybody wants a standard. M$ was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. It could equally have been Apple, Digital Research or IBM.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Only six zillion more /. dupe's to go to catch up to the Microsoft advertising dupe's. We're on track!
---
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
I'd hardly call making the software industry a commodity, service industry destruction. More like evolution and maturation.
At the moment broken IP law means that we have the completely farcical situation of a dominant mindshare company like M$ writing a program and getting paid billions for it and smaller company like Sun writing an identically functional program and getting paid 1/100 or less. The so-called free market is broken when that happens and it needs to be fixed.
The free market is a myth. A truly free market would be warlordism, might makes right. Instead, we have laws that discourage negative competitive behaviour (truth in advertising, product liability etc.) and allow positive competitive behaviour (improving the product, decreasing prices etc.). We now need new IP law that encourages fair, equivalent payment for equivalent software writing effort and true competition in product, not manipulation of the law with patents and the like.
Answering your question: Personally, I've got no problem with charging for software in principle but I have a big problem with broken IP law that allows wildly different renumeration for writing software. I don't mind a 10 times difference in charges to encourage innovation and competition but more than that is not on. Life is unfair enough as it is without creating laws that make it even more unfair.
---
User friendly Windows/XP
User unfriendly Windows/XP license.
the client had about 6 GB of compressed data and wanted to send it to all of their stores nightly.
I'm curious, was that 6GB of completely new data every night? I would've thought that there aren't many businesses that generate that quantity of new data daily. If not why don't you send the differences and save money and operator/transmission time? rsync is your friend.
---
User friendly Windows/XP.
User unfriendly Windows/XP license.
The resolution of the human eye is about 2500x2500 (6-7,000,000) cone cells (color) and 35000x35000 (120,000,000) rod cells (grey). Not evenly spread and the rods are not individually sensitive with multiple rods triggering the one nerve. See this more detail.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
breaking the law in public
That's just semantics. If enough people are "breaking the law" it's pretty damn visible, as is happening now with downloading, despite the fact that individuals are quite sensibly trying to stay invisible.
Since the media/IP cartels are using their enormous financial resources, partly accumulated through broken law, to game the legal system even more now, it's not unreasonable for citizens to use the relatively minor resources they do have (individual anonymity) to make their point. I do agree with your implied point that people should lobby more pro-actively.
filthy pirates
No, just sensible people who think they are being overcharged by a cartel.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API
I think you mean standard, not API. Always re-inventing yet another API is one of the reasons why programming in M$/Windows is such a pain. And one of the reasons why the applications are often so buggy. No attempt at abstraction and consistency, just a mess of inconsistent function calls.
tell Windows how to uninstall itself
That's another problem in M$/Windows. Every one installs/uninstalls differently, for no good reason. And usually stuff up working files and shared resources like DLL's and the registry while they are at it.
7 second app startup time
Nonsense. All versions of M$/Windows are as slow or slower to start applications as GNU/Linux etc. on the same hardware. On both platforms some applications move the startup time to boot/login time and claim they've made it faster; they haven't (pre-loading).
sane API in the vein of Cocoa and .NET
.NET is hardly a sane API. Yet another new API that simply duplicates existing libraries and functionality for marketing reasons. It may be clean on it's own but it's not clean embedded in the real world. Don't know about Cocoa.
install the binary driver
No thank you, that's the whole point of open source. There is no reason why an installation couldn't do a quick compile if the environment was sufficiently standard.
Having said the above I agree with alot of what you say; the big failing of Linux at the moment is basic standards, not GUI functionality. Despite what some poor programmers like to claim standards, if written properly, are not inconsistent with innovation and choice.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed, but it doesn't follow that things should be monopoly expensive either.
While I don't do it myself I have no problem with a little civil disobedience while IP law is such an ass.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed. There is an additional factor though.
It's possible to stop free speech not only with too little message but also with too much noise.
No person can interpret every message out there. Large corporations can and do try to crowd out alternative points of view by the sheer volume of their message. Look at Coca-Cola/McDonalds. How many Coke/McD ad's have you seen? The purpose of their ad's is not to inform you of something you already know but to crowd out the competition's viewpoint. Mindshare is everything.
Having said that I have no problem with open source web sites taking M$ money for limited banner ad's because as long as they are not lying it presents a valid, alternative point of view.
Not surprisingly microsoft.com doesn't allow quid pro quo for exactly that reason. Because M$ presents an unbalanced viewpoint I have no problem with sites like slashdot trying to balance that out.
I have a big problem with the astro-turfers though - they should do jail time for fraud.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Nonsense. M$/Windows until at least M$Windows/98 had a completely broken security architecture that allowed a virus culture to develop. Unix has been around a lot longer with no such culture developing.
M$Windows/NT onwards had some security but they keep allowing it to be disabled for patches/updates. And they allowed executable attachments in emails by default for way too long. I can remember seeing it for the first time many years ago and thinking, you stupid, bloody idiots. I and many other people predicted the virus culture developing that day.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
general != ambiguous
I agree with you in general, but not for software.
The software industry is rife with ambiguous terminology; many names for the same things, poorly defined names, different meanings for the same label, different meanings in different era's, deliberate obsfucation by marketing people etc. etc.
It's not surprising. Software is soft - it can be anything people want it to be and without a physical reality to keep people grounded it has become a mess.
Look at what the pattern people are trying to do; incredibly basic software programming terminology but still when you talk about something like, for example, MVC (model/view/controller), it's often not even clear if a particular piece of software might be described in that way.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Actually, a big shakeup in pharmaceutical patents might be a good idea.
It's clear to me that the current system is not working well. It has many gross inefficiencies. Very few truly new treatments are being created. The ability of simple chemicals to fix things in a complex mechanism like the human body is vastly overrated, causing much pain and waste (do you fix most problems in your car with a pill in the gas tank?). Modern pharmaceutical companies sometimes bear more than a passing resemblance to the money making quacks of previous centuries, including scientific pseudo-babble to justify their existance.
Look at AIDS. For some strange reason the big pharmaceutical companies have come up with dozens of treatments for AIDS. You know, where the patient is a revenue stream for the company for the rest of their lives, but no one-shot cures for AIDS have been created.
Another example is short sightedness. It's been known for years that myopia is caused almost entirely by too much reading and near vision during childhood development (The Inuit went from close to 0% myopia to the 30% of the wider population in one generation, the generation that reading was introduced) but do you see the vision industry pushing prevention? Not on your life!
I don't attribute this to maliciousness. Mostly it is (no pun intended) tunnel vision; companies/industries so highly optimised to make money that they lose sight of more important social issues. Changing the law to encourage more entrepreneurship and niches for more inefficient, socially oriented companies may be just what is needed.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
More money to the PTO is not going to help. That's just a gravy trough for lawyers. It is completely unrealistic to expect a government department to properly assess all human knowledge for prior art, no matter how well funded it is. See some patent fixes.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
And making the patent too general means that the language is ambiguous and meangingless, leading to conflicting understanding and more money for lawyers. For software usually, despite what the patent office likes to say, there is no happy medium, leading to all the problems patents currently cause.
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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.