Time will tell on which company has done more damage. Microsoft is probably ahead right now, but if everyone goes the way of the app store like it's looking now, it will quite handily swing the other way. Turning PCs into walled gardens could become the single most damaging development in computing within my lifetime.
The burden of evidence is on the person making a claim, not on the reader of said claim.
Telling people to search for the evidence of your claims on their own is a strong indication that your claim is weakly-supported (even if it is not, like this instance). Otherwise, why would you not provide them up-front?
No, it's a rational observation that a fine must be meaningful to a corporation for it to have any hope of affecting change.
If the fine is too small (as fines generally are), it is dismissed as a simple cost of business. The immediate problem is remedied (so as not to piss off the authoritative body that caught them), but similar problems are guaranteed to arise again in the future. After all, if it wasn't profitable to break the law in the first place, the company wouldn't have done it. If the fine is going to be a small fraction of that profit each time, the smart business decision is to continue the practice of doing something which breaks the law, preparing for the inevitable "whoops - we'll fix that, your honor" for when someone catches on, and milking the ill-gotten profits until then.
Unfortunately, many sales people I have worked with only insulate my team and I from #1. They agree to and pass off the responsibility for implementing #2 and #3, and can often times exacerbate both.
The difference is that anyone who works in the legal profession is trained to understand why sexual harassment is wrong for both moral and legal reasons.
There is another subtle difference: female lawyers are not paid to dress in bikinis in an attempt to get a better ruling from the judge.
What makes the foreign talent so much more attractive?
Because when hired under a visa program, they can be strong-armed into lower wages under threat of letting the visa lapse.
Because there's a continued assault on STEM education here in the states, an utter lack of parent involvement and encouragement, and a rather pitiful showing by students' test scores.
Take your pick, but the right answer is "all of the above".
When you see the US espouse itself as a pinnacle of freedom and justice occupy another country for 11 years, taking resources and torturing prisoners, it should be unsurprising that a lot of people cry foul. The US military is hardly the worst in the world, but it is the most visible, and it is hardly a bunch of white knights riding in on horses and serving up happiness, rainbows, and puppies.
Nonsense! We need intellectual property protections for the content of proposed bills to encourage these wondrous innovators to create more bills in the future! Why do you hate America?
If the US Government had a magical device that materialized food whenever someone pressed a button, I would have absolutely no problem as a taxpayer in allowing any foreign government to regularly visit and ask for food. I would simply put the foreign governments in a priority queue where US citizens were considered the highest priority.
The only way this is going to be overturned is to place a stamp of copyright protection on API interfaces directly and hand this whole case to Oracle, giving them everything they ever wanted and more. I just don't see any higher court will do something like that.
I don't see it happening, either, especially as it runs contrary to the interoperability clauses contained within the DMCA. If we are granted special privileges to reverse engineer copy protected works for the purposes of interoperability, surely it is a difficult sell that using an API could be construed as infringing. There is nothing I saw at a glance that explicitly says so, but it is pretty clear that cross-compatibility of programs is considered important, and any ruling to lock down APIs is a complete 180 from that.
His point is valid, though. The proper example to cite is government regulators. There's a revolving door between industry and the regulatory bodies who govern the industry, and as such, you get a lot of backroom deals and agents looking the other way.
If the primary criteria for familiarity with a topic is former employment, expect most judges to become industry-captured much the same way.
I'm not saying I *want* the judges to be ignorant of the topics they preside over, but having well-informed judges is a sticky problem.
The problem is that corporations are people. So for the issue of free speech for example, should not the board of directors and executives be allowed the right as human beings to express their views even if they do this collectively? I don't like the ability of corporations with such deep pockets to do this but I don't see any legal rationale to prevent it.
I'm right there with you up until I recall the ruling that money == speech and realize that if I were to give millions of dollars to a public official, I would be jailed for attempted bribery.
Apparently they fail to understand basic economics. If the supply is low and the demand is high, the cost is going to go up, no matter how much you would like it to stay low. If you do not want to pay the salary for a full time IT person, there are plenty of consultants that would love to work for 3x+ the pay per hour over a smaller time period.
I do find it odd, though, that in an age where the average CEO salary is around 3 full orders of magnitude greater than your average worker that it is so difficult to pay a fair wage for an IT guy.
It's not just managers, though they can certainly be the most vile form of distraction. With anyone else, you can at least tell them to leave.
"Inside voice" was a natural thing when the common wisdom was "better to be silent and thought of as a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
In the Facebook-and-Twitter-era, though, quiet voices died out because why wouldn't everyone around you* want to hear every inane thought running through your head? After all, a few thousand people you've never met or had a conversation with follow your every tweet and wall post with the utmost of attention (or at least, you like to think so).
I think you misunderstand how chemistry works. You can take naturally occurring compounds, mix them in interesting ways (sometimes with energy input), and transform them into non-natural compounds of varying uses.
Sulfur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen can all be found in various forms within nature. Yet, Earth failed to have acid rain until we started heavily using combustion processes for energy.
SharpDevelop is arguably a better IDE than Visual Studio Express, though I certainly prefer the paid versions of Visual Studio I use at work. For homegrown development, though, SharpDevelop isn't bad.
In any normal case, that would be true. But as Samsung is the major (still only?) supplier of screens for the iPad3, the relationship is more complicated. Tim Cook isn't taking his current position because he really hates lawsuits. He's taking it because he figures that even if Apple wins the legal battles against Samsung outright, it could still end up a Pyrrhic victory.
In my mind this and the proliferation of, at best, highly questionable patents is the real problem. I don't see a huge problem with the duration of patents. In part because some really innovative technologies, medications for example, cost billions of dollars to develop and the time to recoup that investment is going to be longer than five years.
Similarly, though, even 20-year patents are devastating in industries that move at a faster pace (e.g., software). 20 years is an eternity in an industry where that same time span could see yourself through multiple major shifts in direction. Just imagine what would have happened if many of the early ITEF RFCs were patent-encumbered.
The duration of copyrights on the other hand are absolutely obscene. Even there five years is really short. I think the danger with such a short term would be that it would empower large corporations to some degree. After all other companies have the resources to go out there and compete head to head even if there is no copyright. The small content creator, without a major corporation behind him, is basically forced to try and compete in a wide open market. My guess is the small creator would just get crushed if anything he made caught the eye of a major company.
I have read where others say that the only copyright duration that makes any sense is the life of the author. I do not know that this always makes sense, but it does seem like a good upper-bound. I would, however, go further and say that copyrights should be non-transferable, and that the most an employment contract should be able to do is require an exclusive license for sale over a limited period. While the company is aiding in the creative process by pumping resources into the author, the idea still comes from the individual.
I think the real problem is that patents and copyrights have been corrupted. Both are good ideas and encourage people to invent and create things.
The problem is that we have no real way to validate this. How do we know both really foster creation? It can be easily proven that invention and creative endeavors existed before copyright and patents, so the burden is in proving that IP laws increase this behavior. But, how do you even test for this? With all the entrenched interests, you sure as hell are not going to get Congress to repeal IP law just to test the hypothesis.
You can even show cases where the opposite is true - where IP law blocks new inventions and/or creative works. But, how does this relate to the supposed incentives? Does it cancel out the benefits? Does it do worse? My gut feeling is that IP law is on the whole more destructive than helpful, but it is no easier (or possible) to prove this position than to prove that IP laws help.
The problem is they've both been corrupted to the benefit of a few entrenched interests. Copyrights in particular bear little resemblance to what they were supposed to be. I mean the whole point of them was to encourage people to create things so that the public domain would be enriched. Now they've become a tool for the virtual destruction of the public domain. Which is clearly not what was intended.
When you introduce big money into anything, expect corruption and perversion of whatever original intent there was.
Slashdot Mirror
Time will tell on which company has done more damage. Microsoft is probably ahead right now, but if everyone goes the way of the app store like it's looking now, it will quite handily swing the other way. Turning PCs into walled gardens could become the single most damaging development in computing within my lifetime.
Search for it. I am not your personal Google.
The burden of evidence is on the person making a claim, not on the reader of said claim.
Telling people to search for the evidence of your claims on their own is a strong indication that your claim is weakly-supported (even if it is not, like this instance). Otherwise, why would you not provide them up-front?
No, it's a rational observation that a fine must be meaningful to a corporation for it to have any hope of affecting change.
If the fine is too small (as fines generally are), it is dismissed as a simple cost of business. The immediate problem is remedied (so as not to piss off the authoritative body that caught them), but similar problems are guaranteed to arise again in the future. After all, if it wasn't profitable to break the law in the first place, the company wouldn't have done it. If the fine is going to be a small fraction of that profit each time, the smart business decision is to continue the practice of doing something which breaks the law, preparing for the inevitable "whoops - we'll fix that, your honor" for when someone catches on, and milking the ill-gotten profits until then.
Unfortunately, many sales people I have worked with only insulate my team and I from #1. They agree to and pass off the responsibility for implementing #2 and #3, and can often times exacerbate both.
The difference is that anyone who works in the legal profession is trained to understand why sexual harassment is wrong for both moral and legal reasons.
There is another subtle difference: female lawyers are not paid to dress in bikinis in an attempt to get a better ruling from the judge.
What makes the foreign talent so much more attractive?
Because when hired under a visa program, they can be strong-armed into lower wages under threat of letting the visa lapse.
Because there's a continued assault on STEM education here in the states, an utter lack of parent involvement and encouragement, and a rather pitiful showing by students' test scores.
Take your pick, but the right answer is "all of the above".
When you see the US espouse itself as a pinnacle of freedom and justice occupy another country for 11 years, taking resources and torturing prisoners, it should be unsurprising that a lot of people cry foul. The US military is hardly the worst in the world, but it is the most visible, and it is hardly a bunch of white knights riding in on horses and serving up happiness, rainbows, and puppies.
Ya, but given how things are these days,the above three are just representatives of the church, the people, and the government, respectively.
Everything about the world is based around CYA and money.
FTFY
I haven't looked too much at it to determine if it has that kind of fine-grained revision history, but what you are asking for is essentially here.
Nonsense! We need intellectual property protections for the content of proposed bills to encourage these wondrous innovators to create more bills in the future! Why do you hate America?
If the US Government had a magical device that materialized food whenever someone pressed a button, I would have absolutely no problem as a taxpayer in allowing any foreign government to regularly visit and ask for food. I would simply put the foreign governments in a priority queue where US citizens were considered the highest priority.
The only way this is going to be overturned is to place a stamp of copyright protection on API interfaces directly and hand this whole case to Oracle, giving them everything they ever wanted and more. I just don't see any higher court will do something like that.
I don't see it happening, either, especially as it runs contrary to the interoperability clauses contained within the DMCA. If we are granted special privileges to reverse engineer copy protected works for the purposes of interoperability, surely it is a difficult sell that using an API could be construed as infringing. There is nothing I saw at a glance that explicitly says so, but it is pretty clear that cross-compatibility of programs is considered important, and any ruling to lock down APIs is a complete 180 from that.
His point is valid, though. The proper example to cite is government regulators. There's a revolving door between industry and the regulatory bodies who govern the industry, and as such, you get a lot of backroom deals and agents looking the other way.
If the primary criteria for familiarity with a topic is former employment, expect most judges to become industry-captured much the same way.
I'm not saying I *want* the judges to be ignorant of the topics they preside over, but having well-informed judges is a sticky problem.
The problem is that corporations are people. So for the issue of free speech for example, should not the board of directors and executives be allowed the right as human beings to express their views even if they do this collectively? I don't like the ability of corporations with such deep pockets to do this but I don't see any legal rationale to prevent it.
I'm right there with you up until I recall the ruling that money == speech and realize that if I were to give millions of dollars to a public official, I would be jailed for attempted bribery.
Apparently they fail to understand basic economics. If the supply is low and the demand is high, the cost is going to go up, no matter how much you would like it to stay low. If you do not want to pay the salary for a full time IT person, there are plenty of consultants that would love to work for 3x+ the pay per hour over a smaller time period.
I do find it odd, though, that in an age where the average CEO salary is around 3 full orders of magnitude greater than your average worker that it is so difficult to pay a fair wage for an IT guy.
It's not just managers, though they can certainly be the most vile form of distraction. With anyone else, you can at least tell them to leave.
"Inside voice" was a natural thing when the common wisdom was "better to be silent and thought of as a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
In the Facebook-and-Twitter-era, though, quiet voices died out because why wouldn't everyone around you* want to hear every inane thought running through your head? After all, a few thousand people you've never met or had a conversation with follow your every tweet and wall post with the utmost of attention (or at least, you like to think so).
Schools need to teach intelligent falling. I call BS on this heathen "theory" of gravitation.
I think you misunderstand how chemistry works. You can take naturally occurring compounds, mix them in interesting ways (sometimes with energy input), and transform them into non-natural compounds of varying uses.
Sulfur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen can all be found in various forms within nature. Yet, Earth failed to have acid rain until we started heavily using combustion processes for energy.
SharpDevelop is arguably a better IDE than Visual Studio Express, though I certainly prefer the paid versions of Visual Studio I use at work. For homegrown development, though, SharpDevelop isn't bad.
Wrestling is surprisingly Sci-Fi. The science is in the steroids, and the fiction is in the wrestling.
In any normal case, that would be true. But as Samsung is the major (still only?) supplier of screens for the iPad3, the relationship is more complicated. Tim Cook isn't taking his current position because he really hates lawsuits. He's taking it because he figures that even if Apple wins the legal battles against Samsung outright, it could still end up a Pyrrhic victory.
Walled gardens are quickly becoming the technical equivalent of Company towns.
If he didn't have the mental disorder, he wouldn't be a VP.
In my mind this and the proliferation of, at best, highly questionable patents is the real problem. I don't see a huge problem with the duration of patents. In part because some really innovative technologies, medications for example, cost billions of dollars to develop and the time to recoup that investment is going to be longer than five years.
Similarly, though, even 20-year patents are devastating in industries that move at a faster pace (e.g., software). 20 years is an eternity in an industry where that same time span could see yourself through multiple major shifts in direction. Just imagine what would have happened if many of the early ITEF RFCs were patent-encumbered.
The duration of copyrights on the other hand are absolutely obscene. Even there five years is really short. I think the danger with such a short term would be that it would empower large corporations to some degree. After all other companies have the resources to go out there and compete head to head even if there is no copyright. The small content creator, without a major corporation behind him, is basically forced to try and compete in a wide open market. My guess is the small creator would just get crushed if anything he made caught the eye of a major company.
I have read where others say that the only copyright duration that makes any sense is the life of the author. I do not know that this always makes sense, but it does seem like a good upper-bound. I would, however, go further and say that copyrights should be non-transferable, and that the most an employment contract should be able to do is require an exclusive license for sale over a limited period. While the company is aiding in the creative process by pumping resources into the author, the idea still comes from the individual.
I think the real problem is that patents and copyrights have been corrupted. Both are good ideas and encourage people to invent and create things.
The problem is that we have no real way to validate this. How do we know both really foster creation? It can be easily proven that invention and creative endeavors existed before copyright and patents, so the burden is in proving that IP laws increase this behavior. But, how do you even test for this? With all the entrenched interests, you sure as hell are not going to get Congress to repeal IP law just to test the hypothesis.
You can even show cases where the opposite is true - where IP law blocks new inventions and/or creative works. But, how does this relate to the supposed incentives? Does it cancel out the benefits? Does it do worse? My gut feeling is that IP law is on the whole more destructive than helpful, but it is no easier (or possible) to prove this position than to prove that IP laws help.
The problem is they've both been corrupted to the benefit of a few entrenched interests. Copyrights in particular bear little resemblance to what they were supposed to be. I mean the whole point of them was to encourage people to create things so that the public domain would be enriched. Now they've become a tool for the virtual destruction of the public domain. Which is clearly not what was intended.
When you introduce big money into anything, expect corruption and perversion of whatever original intent there was.