One of the nifty things that computers make easier is called "editing". Perhaps you've heard of the process? It involves going back over things which have been written out and making improvements. People typically "edit" to improve clarity, accuracy, style, tone and content. It also provides a manner to convert notes jotted down quickly to readable prose intended for 3rd-party consumption.
Failure to do this last bit indicates contempt for your audience -- and a general lack of class on your own part. Think of/. as a big technical meeting with folks running the gamut from n00bs to accomplished engineers. You wouldn't spit on the engineers in a real-life forum if you wanted them to respect you; likewise, you shouldn't use shorthand in your posts in a technical forum online if you want to be considered anything more than another scum-of-the-earth clueless idiot inherited from AOL.
I realize that being told that you should go out of your way to change your habits isn't much fun -- but if you don't want to be looked down on by those who might otherwise have cause (even if you think it's bad cause) to consider themselves your betters, you should seriously consider it.
Every day a drug spends in development averages out to $1 million dollars in lost revenue before the drug goes off patent.
Why is the lost revenue that large? Because they're able to charge so much for the drugs they develop. Why are they able to charge so much? Because their development and regulatory costs are so high as to reduce effective competition.
The drug companies invest tens of billions and are working day night to figure out new ways to shorten the drug development cycle.
For themselves; not necessarily for anyone and everyone who may be interested in entering the field.
(Warning: The above BS is not guaranteed to be 100% pure).
In all the X apps I use the text selection functionality is inconsistent and unpredictable, along with the scroll bars and other things that the rest of computerdom had working smoothly 20 years ago.
We're obviously using different apps. Almost all the X apps I use are based on GTK, and the exceptions use Qt; both of those define reasonable behaviours for text selection, scroll bars and such. So, I'm curious -- what *are* these X apps of which you speak? Are they based on Motif, raw Xlib, Xaw or something?
In my company, the engineers have a lot of control over what gets prioritized. They spend the vast majority of their time working on projects that are very very cool and will never ever make a dime. Meanwhile projects like optimization and bugfixing that are unglamorous but actually affect our customers go untended.
In my company, the lead engineer actually has a sense of perspective and cares more about what will earn us returns on our stock than about what's cool -- and he's very effective at persueding those under him to do the same.
I'd argue that there's nothing wrong (and a great deal right) with giving engineering a say in management -- so long as you hire engineers with perspective.
Massachusetts adopts a regulation designed to exclude current versions of Microsoft Office
More accurately: Massachusets adopts a regulation designed to ensure that the state's documents will be accessible in perpetuity and permit competition amongst multiple vendors for their office-suite-related business.
Microsoft had two options to avoid being excluded by this policy: Either permit their own XML-based document format to be freely enough licensed to meet the state's requirements, or support a document format that is freely enough licensed to meet the state's requirements.
Let me say that again: Microsoft needed to do no development work whatsoever to meet the state's requirements; they simply needed to make the MSXML license sublicensable (or do development work and support ODF). They have declined to do either.
leaving blind users without a working alternative
First, the Massachusets policy permits disabled users to use whatever software they need, even if this would otherwise be in conflict with their policy.
Second, there will be freely available 3rd-party filters to allow Office to read and write ODF documents before 2005 is out, so the policy doesn't really prohibit use of MS Office -- so long as it's used in conjunction with onesuch filter.
Third, there are multiple companies on crash courses to finish accessibility work on competing ODF-aware tools long before the policy goes into effect.
They're being short changed by idiotic attempts to go away from [Microsoft]
Bullshit. Nobody in Massachusets wants to get away from Microsoft. Peter Quinn isn't against using Microsoft software. Much to the contrary, he's in faver of using ODF. Only thing is that Microsoft refuses to support ODF. If they do, and the Massachusets CIO's office still tells them to piss off, it makes Peter Quinn a hypocrite -- and he and his office are having enough trouble keeping power as it is.
So all Microsoft needs to do right now is support a sufficiently open document format (and ODF has already been selected as onesuch), and then they still have the business of the executive branch of the state of Massachusets. It's not all that hard, given the number of 3rd-party formats they'll already interoperate with. Heck, they could even open up the licensing on MSXML, and that would work too -- except that Microsoft refuses to do either of those things.
It's not about the users. If it was, the Linux and other OS os/app people would actually try to honestly grok why the end users consistantly choose Microsoft Windows over Linux and BSD and so forth. It's about sticking it to Microsoft, it's about FUD about Microsoft, and paranoia about Microsoft. I don't expect too many on/. to grasp any of this, but it's true. OPEN is not some magic word and those who wield it are frequently like the political correctness wonks on campus who whine about free speech but only as long as it is theirs: "the users" only matter as long as it is their hated enemy Microsoft that is getting the buys.
Perhaps that's the case with most of the OSS types you find on campus. It's a rather different matter with the folks who are doing OSS work commercially. You know, for pay? With managers?
I'm one of those people -- though it's not my full-time job anymore, I still do paid OSS work (primarily bugfixes, adding features we need, doing custom integration and the like) for my full-time employer very frequently (and no, we're not an "open source company", though my last employer -- still in business -- is).
You look at the usability work being done today, and it's mostly being funded by someone. Novell, IBM, Red Hat, Sun (they use GNOME for their desktop)... someone. But the point is that it does get funded, and once someone does it, everyone benefits.
(A) An expensive office suite migration was decided upon without waiting to see if there would be more practical third-party ODF support for MS Office
That's obvious. Practical 3rd-party ODF support for Office appears by all indication to be less than a quarter away -- and no office suite migration was decided on, only an office document format migration.
(B) The MS Office XML formats were dismissed largely for OSS-centric reasoning and not necessarily MA's policy objectives.
Allowing a maximal number of entrants (including those who sell codebases including code they received under licenses with sublicensability requirements) to complete for the state's business is clearly in line with MA's policy objectives.
Adding ODF support to MS Office was listed in the article as one of the preferable solutions to this issue; indeed, that Microsoft is not doing that and instead wielding the disabled community as a weapon against OpenDocument is one of the points that's clearly made.
Second, OpenOffice's accessibility functionality is not second-tier to MS Office's. Rather, all the useful accessibility functionality is coded not into MS Office but into the 3rd-party solutions which interoperate with it. Sure, the end effect is the same -- but it's considerably harder to blame the suite.
Ahh, the joys of off-topic conversations. Could you at least squelch your +1 while we're this far away from the article?
No doubt she does need OpenOffice, but she doesn't need the very latest version -- any any distribution worth its salt has at minimum older versions long since packaged, and some have packages for the newer ones. Further, in modern RPM-based distributions, an RPM which has been downloaded (say, off the OpenOffice site) can be installed via a double-click operation.
As for LimeWire -- your younger siblings shouldn't be engaging in illegal file sharing anyhow. If they are going to do so, though, LimeWire's graphical installer has straightforward directions on the LimeWire site as to how to kick it off.
That said -- does your mother really need to install software? No, seriously. I built a system for my father-in-law a while back, and the requirements were as follows:
- Read email - Browse the web - Play a few simple games - Don't break (his last machine, a Windows box, was overwhelmed with malware; he doesn't have safe-browsing habits, and isn't likely to be easily trained into them either).
Installing software was absolutely not on the list. I built it as a lightweight Linux system, reserving root access for remote maintenance but giving him user-level access only. He's had the machine for a while (on the scale of 6-8 months), and I haven't gotten a single support request or complaint about it yet.
Development by an individual team who, it is affirmatively demonstrated, has in no way been exposed to the contents of the patent, either by reading the patent itself or via observing a product which implements the method covered by said patent. It is expected that design notes, workbooks, logs, etc. will be used to demonstrate the existance of an independent development process not guided by already knowing the end result.
Basically, the same (expensive, process- and documentation-intensive) rigamarole that's traditionally been used by folks who need to legally reverse engineer trade secrets -- such as how Compaq got the PC BIOS. It was expensive -- but since IBM wasn't offering licenses to 3rd parties, it was the only route available.
Besides, like I noted in my post, if your system is so complex or time-consuming that any reverse-engineering would take as much or nearly as much time and effort to implement as coming up with the idea from scratch, then maybe in your case you don't need the patent protection anyway!
Sure, I may not need a patent -- but let's say I get one anyhow, and then set the price of licensing said patent at 10x the cost of developing the technology from scratch. Even though this is blatently unfair, I can do so under the current system -- whereas allowing clean-room development (with legal, documentation and process requirements making it nontrivially expensive) would mean that I *couldn't* make excessive demoands, but would still allow sufficient benefit to repay my expenses. In short, it keeps the initial inventor honest, while still allowing one to make back one's costs (in cases where nontrivial R&D costs exist -- which, for software patents, is frequently not the case).
See the summary here, which references the following papers on the topic:
Maurer, S., and S. Scotchmer. 2002. "The Independent Invention Defense in Intellectual Property." Economica 69:535-547.
Ottoz, E., and F. Cugno. 2004. "The Independent Invention Defence in a Cournot-Duopoly Model." Economics Bulletin 12:1-7.
What incentive is there for any company to invest in R&D if a freeloader can then come in and undercut your prices because they didn't have to pay for the R&D?
Just because the freeloader isn't prohibited from using the same methods you use doesn't mean they need to do no R&D whatsoever. Particularly in the case of software: My company has patents on our UI. That's not to say that the man-years of skilled (artists') labor involved in implementing that UI (which is very, *very* heavily graphical) can be duplicated without a lot of time and effort -- during which we're busy getting ahead with other improvements, such that even when the copycat comes out with a product it's substantially inferior to what we then have. It's not that the patent-protected portions of our UI are necessarily hard to reverse-engineer -- it's just hard to implement all the copyright-protected work that goes into it.
Yes, this is good for consumers, because it tends to drive prices down to their free market level quickly. However, who then is going to pay for the R&D if they are unable to recoup their costs via above market pricing?
Did you notice where I suggested that the patent system, rather than being scrapped, be modified to have an affirmative defense of independent development? So long as the practical barrior to meeting that defense is high enough that clean-room reimplementation is expensive, there's still enough incentive for 3rd parties who wish to get into the market to license preexisting patents rather doing a clean-room reimplementation -- so long as the patent holder is reasonable (and the patent is on a technology difficult enough to develop that a clean-room implementation isn't completely trivial -- which should make the kind of useless idiot patents we're seeing lately go away, and bring market forces into the determination of what level of monopoly rents a patent-holder should be able to extract).
However, if you think about it the other way, without the licensed technology in the first place, the research would never have been done! Better late than never.
Nonsense. Much if not most research gets done for the same reason much software gets created: Someone needs its results for their own use, or to benefit a product which has functions above and beyond those which an individual patent might cover. Even if their competitors copy the fruits of their research, one still had first-mover advantage in applying it first.
I say this as an individual holding a substantial stake in a small software company. I personally stand to benefit substantially from software patents if we can sell or license them -- but this does little to help our vulnerability from either (1) a larger company with a substantial patent portfolio wishing to force a cross-licensing agreement to allow them to use our technology for free, or (2) a holding company with one or two widely applicable patents we infringe on, and no product development of their own by which they might infringe on our patents (which are mostly specific to the field we're in, anyhow). Personally, I would be happy to clear the playing field altogether and compete on the merits of our product (and the difficulty of reproducing the years of research that went into our product even when one is able to observe that product's behaviour) without these risks in play.
Even so, I'm not saying that the patent system needs to eliminated. Rather, I argue only that it needs to be scaled back dramatically, particularly in areas like software where invention is comparatively cheap and low-risk. Adding an affirmative defense of independant invention makes sense in almost all cases except those where the initial invention incurrs very high risk (such as the pharma industry).
I shopped around for a fridge back after buying my house, and ended up paying about $1300 for a fairly nice one, in white. Two week later I got to Costco, and find the exact same fridge... in brushed steel... for $1100.
Not *all* their prices are outstanding, but enough are to more than pay for the membership. The other thing is their customer service: When I bought a washer and dryer from costco.com and the installers cracked the tile in my garage putting it in, my local warehouse's staff went to bat for me with the vendor, spending *multiple hours* on the phone 'till the vendor paid for repairs.
Well, obviously they know that the advertising is done -- the ads and clicks are pulled from their servers.
What they didn't know is whether the users consented to the installation of the software displaying the ads -- the binaries they provided had a EULA which folks were just expected not to read; this fellow modified the copy he was distributing to no longer request or retrieve the user's consent.
Arguably, so long as the binaries they provide Do The Right Thing, they're legitimate wrt pushing the blame on the guy who made and distributed the modified version on users w/o their consent.
This is just for applications which need a local cache.
Yes, but Oracle *sucks* for that. SQLite is considerably more appropriate for that kind of usage -- it's much less of a PITA to administer (and Oracle *is* indeed a PITA).
I'm quite certain this is aimed where they say it is: Open-source databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Many of the instances of either are small installations intended to act as backend to a webapp or five for a small company's intranet -- nothing needing hardware outside of the range of what they're limiting this edition to.
That said -- there are cases where an Oracle database can be hosed badly enough that the recovery docs specify to always call Oracle support before going through the next steps provided. Support's not going to be free even if the software is, right? And Oracle gets pretty darned arcane.
Heck, this'll give more folks a chance to see just how bad Oracle is about not complying with operating systems' local conventions (FHS? What's that?) and requiring vastly more specialized knowledge to admin than their OSS competitors... perhaps it'll even *lose* them marketshare.
...all the folks who adhere to intelligent design as dogma (and try to make everyone else do so to) drown out the people who support intelligent design because they think it's right and can make a good argument in its favor.
No, really -- they exist.
One fellow I'm privileged to know is a doctor who graduated from medical school at the top of his class. He's a completely brilliant guy, as are his kids -- one time when I was over for dinner he asked me to explain to his primary-school-age (but home-schooled) daughters how the Internet worked; in less than 20 minutes they had gone from zero knowledge on the subject to asking me about whether routers could listen in on ongoing connections. He's a strong proponent of intelligent design, with the provisio that he may well be wrong if all possible universes exist.
Within that framework, he makes a helluva argument -- drawing heavily on statistics and biology (the latter being something he knows a thing or two about, given his background and profession) -- but also acknowledges the places where that argument ends.
Now, I'm not saying whether I think he's right or not -- but I think it's completely asinine that the people who make stupid, ill-informed arguments are the ones who get the airtime.
There've been rather substantial changes since Andy Valencia was owner/maintainer.
WRT the message passing, I'm pretty sure they don't actually *copy* the messages around anymore, but just map around who has read access to the pages containing them. [If this is what they were already doing -- oops; I'm just a userspace coder who occasionally sits in and listens to one of the core FMI/OS guys rant about what's going on that month, and I may not have been following closely enough while the recent performance-enhancing changes were being described].
Can't comment on the DoS angle, though -- I'll have to ask about that next time I'm over that way.
You don't have to submit your page to Google, that much is true, but it's still opt-in. Google cannot index the content of your databases unless you let them do it.
You mean, "unless you modify your robots.txt to exclude them"? That's equivalent to saying that you've opted in unless you opt out -- obviously not so.
Certainly, someone Google is indexing needs to link to you -- but that need involve no voluntary act on your part, so by no means does it qualify as opting in.
Well, no -- but you can't make copies. Let's say you're making multiple copies of a piece of software to install on your customers' machines; that you violate some (nonsensical?) provision of the license (not necessarily a EULA, may be a site license or such) granting you to make such multiple copies. Can criminal charges apply?
See Title 17, Circular 92, Chapter 5, Section 506:
(a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
Well, yes; as I mentioned in my other response (where I would like any replies to this post to go, if you don't mind), the typical EULA doesn't grant permission to take any actions which might otherwise constitute criminal copyright infringement. The matter stands, however, that one could; and that failing to comply with such a license while taking such actions could legitimately result in criminal charges.
Thus, the sweeping generalization that anyone who claims that failing to comply with a license can result in criminal charges is a "doofus" is incorrect.
My point was simply that there exist actions which constitute criminal copyright infringement which can be permitted via license from the copyright holder; and thus that failure to possess or comply with such a license while taking such actions can legitimately result in criminal charges.
I wasn't arguing that your typical software EULA will grant permission to take such actions as might otherwise constitute such infringement.
...But Copyright Infringement Can Be
on
End User License Gems
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If there's no license granting you permission to take actions governed by copyright, you can then be liable for copyright infringement.
An increasing number of forms of copyright infringement are criminal.
If you read it, the idea was a bug (ie. an actual device placed on the person or in the belongings of the person being monitored) which would record their gait -- in much the same way as the proposed phone would do it now.
Granted, there are practical considerations, as it would really need to be more on the person than in the belongings of the individual being monitored -- and unless they're cheap to produce and have wireless output, the individual trying to retrieve this information would generally want to get it back afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the nifty things that computers make easier is called "editing". Perhaps you've heard of the process? It involves going back over things which have been written out and making improvements. People typically "edit" to improve clarity, accuracy, style, tone and content. It also provides a manner to convert notes jotted down quickly to readable prose intended for 3rd-party consumption.
/. as a big technical meeting with folks running the gamut from n00bs to accomplished engineers. You wouldn't spit on the engineers in a real-life forum if you wanted them to respect you; likewise, you shouldn't use shorthand in your posts in a technical forum online if you want to be considered anything more than another scum-of-the-earth clueless idiot inherited from AOL.
Failure to do this last bit indicates contempt for your audience -- and a general lack of class on your own part. Think of
I realize that being told that you should go out of your way to change your habits isn't much fun -- but if you don't want to be looked down on by those who might otherwise have cause (even if you think it's bad cause) to consider themselves your betters, you should seriously consider it.
(Warning: The above BS is not guaranteed to be 100% pure).
In my company, the engineers have a lot of control over what gets prioritized. They spend the vast majority of their time working on projects that are very very cool and will never ever make a dime. Meanwhile projects like optimization and bugfixing that are unglamorous but actually affect our customers go untended.
In my company, the lead engineer actually has a sense of perspective and cares more about what will earn us returns on our stock than about what's cool -- and he's very effective at persueding those under him to do the same.
I'd argue that there's nothing wrong (and a great deal right) with giving engineering a say in management -- so long as you hire engineers with perspective.
Microsoft had two options to avoid being excluded by this policy: Either permit their own XML-based document format to be freely enough licensed to meet the state's requirements, or support a document format that is freely enough licensed to meet the state's requirements.
Let me say that again: Microsoft needed to do no development work whatsoever to meet the state's requirements; they simply needed to make the MSXML license sublicensable (or do development work and support ODF). They have declined to do either.First, the Massachusets policy permits disabled users to use whatever software they need, even if this would otherwise be in conflict with their policy.
Second, there will be freely available 3rd-party filters to allow Office to read and write ODF documents before 2005 is out, so the policy doesn't really prohibit use of MS Office -- so long as it's used in conjunction with onesuch filter.
Third, there are multiple companies on crash courses to finish accessibility work on competing ODF-aware tools long before the policy goes into effect.
So all Microsoft needs to do right now is support a sufficiently open document format (and ODF has already been selected as onesuch), and then they still have the business of the executive branch of the state of Massachusets. It's not all that hard, given the number of 3rd-party formats they'll already interoperate with. Heck, they could even open up the licensing on MSXML, and that would work too -- except that Microsoft refuses to do either of those things.Perhaps that's the case with most of the OSS types you find on campus. It's a rather different matter with the folks who are doing OSS work commercially. You know, for pay? With managers?
I'm one of those people -- though it's not my full-time job anymore, I still do paid OSS work (primarily bugfixes, adding features we need, doing custom integration and the like) for my full-time employer very frequently (and no, we're not an "open source company", though my last employer -- still in business -- is).
You look at the usability work being done today, and it's mostly being funded by someone. Novell, IBM, Red Hat, Sun (they use GNOME for their desktop)... someone. But the point is that it does get funded, and once someone does it, everyone benefits.
Adding ODF support to MS Office was listed in the article as one of the preferable solutions to this issue; indeed, that Microsoft is not doing that and instead wielding the disabled community as a weapon against OpenDocument is one of the points that's clearly made.
Second, OpenOffice's accessibility functionality is not second-tier to MS Office's. Rather, all the useful accessibility functionality is coded not into MS Office but into the 3rd-party solutions which interoperate with it. Sure, the end effect is the same -- but it's considerably harder to blame the suite.
Ahh, the joys of off-topic conversations. Could you at least squelch your +1 while we're this far away from the article?
No doubt she does need OpenOffice, but she doesn't need the very latest version -- any any distribution worth its salt has at minimum older versions long since packaged, and some have packages for the newer ones. Further, in modern RPM-based distributions, an RPM which has been downloaded (say, off the OpenOffice site) can be installed via a double-click operation.
As for LimeWire -- your younger siblings shouldn't be engaging in illegal file sharing anyhow. If they are going to do so, though, LimeWire's graphical installer has straightforward directions on the LimeWire site as to how to kick it off.
That said -- does your mother really need to install software? No, seriously. I built a system for my father-in-law a while back, and the requirements were as follows:
- Read email
- Browse the web
- Play a few simple games
- Don't break (his last machine, a Windows box, was overwhelmed with malware; he doesn't have safe-browsing habits, and isn't likely to be easily trained into them either).
Installing software was absolutely not on the list. I built it as a lightweight Linux system, reserving root access for remote maintenance but giving him user-level access only. He's had the machine for a while (on the scale of 6-8 months), and I haven't gotten a single support request or complaint about it yet.
Basically, the same (expensive, process- and documentation-intensive) rigamarole that's traditionally been used by folks who need to legally reverse engineer trade secrets -- such as how Compaq got the PC BIOS. It was expensive -- but since IBM wasn't offering licenses to 3rd parties, it was the only route available.Sure, I may not need a patent -- but let's say I get one anyhow, and then set the price of licensing said patent at 10x the cost of developing the technology from scratch. Even though this is blatently unfair, I can do so under the current system -- whereas allowing clean-room development (with legal, documentation and process requirements making it nontrivially expensive) would mean that I *couldn't* make excessive demoands, but would still allow sufficient benefit to repay my expenses. In short, it keeps the initial inventor honest, while still allowing one to make back one's costs (in cases where nontrivial R&D costs exist -- which, for software patents, is frequently not the case).
See the summary here, which references the following papers on the topic:
Maurer, S., and S. Scotchmer. 2002. "The Independent Invention Defense in
Intellectual Property." Economica 69:535-547.
Ottoz, E., and F. Cugno. 2004. "The Independent Invention Defence in a
Cournot-Duopoly Model." Economics Bulletin 12:1-7.
What incentive is there for any company to invest in R&D if a freeloader can then come in and undercut your prices because they didn't have to pay for the R&D?
Just because the freeloader isn't prohibited from using the same methods you use doesn't mean they need to do no R&D whatsoever. Particularly in the case of software: My company has patents on our UI. That's not to say that the man-years of skilled (artists') labor involved in implementing that UI (which is very, *very* heavily graphical) can be duplicated without a lot of time and effort -- during which we're busy getting ahead with other improvements, such that even when the copycat comes out with a product it's substantially inferior to what we then have. It's not that the patent-protected portions of our UI are necessarily hard to reverse-engineer -- it's just hard to implement all the copyright-protected work that goes into it.
Yes, this is good for consumers, because it tends to drive prices down to their free market level quickly. However, who then is going to pay for the R&D if they are unable to recoup their costs via above market pricing?
Did you notice where I suggested that the patent system, rather than being scrapped, be modified to have an affirmative defense of independent development? So long as the practical barrior to meeting that defense is high enough that clean-room reimplementation is expensive, there's still enough incentive for 3rd parties who wish to get into the market to license preexisting patents rather doing a clean-room reimplementation -- so long as the patent holder is reasonable (and the patent is on a technology difficult enough to develop that a clean-room implementation isn't completely trivial -- which should make the kind of useless idiot patents we're seeing lately go away, and bring market forces into the determination of what level of monopoly rents a patent-holder should be able to extract).
However, if you think about it the other way, without the licensed technology in the first place, the research would never have been done! Better late than never.
Nonsense. Much if not most research gets done for the same reason much software gets created: Someone needs its results for their own use, or to benefit a product which has functions above and beyond those which an individual patent might cover. Even if their competitors copy the fruits of their research, one still had first-mover advantage in applying it first.
I say this as an individual holding a substantial stake in a small software company. I personally stand to benefit substantially from software patents if we can sell or license them -- but this does little to help our vulnerability from either (1) a larger company with a substantial patent portfolio wishing to force a cross-licensing agreement to allow them to use our technology for free, or (2) a holding company with one or two widely applicable patents we infringe on, and no product development of their own by which they might infringe on our patents (which are mostly specific to the field we're in, anyhow). Personally, I would be happy to clear the playing field altogether and compete on the merits of our product (and the difficulty of reproducing the years of research that went into our product even when one is able to observe that product's behaviour) without these risks in play.
Even so, I'm not saying that the patent system needs to eliminated. Rather, I argue only that it needs to be scaled back dramatically, particularly in areas like software where invention is comparatively cheap and low-risk. Adding an affirmative defense of independant invention makes sense in almost all cases except those where the initial invention incurrs very high risk (such as the pharma industry).
I have to disagree.
I shopped around for a fridge back after buying my house, and ended up paying about $1300 for a fairly nice one, in white. Two week later I got to Costco, and find the exact same fridge... in brushed steel... for $1100.
Not *all* their prices are outstanding, but enough are to more than pay for the membership. The other thing is their customer service: When I bought a washer and dryer from costco.com and the installers cracked the tile in my garage putting it in, my local warehouse's staff went to bat for me with the vendor, spending *multiple hours* on the phone 'till the vendor paid for repairs.
I'm very, very happy with my Costco membership.
Well, obviously they know that the advertising is done -- the ads and clicks are pulled from their servers.
What they didn't know is whether the users consented to the installation of the software displaying the ads -- the binaries they provided had a EULA which folks were just expected not to read; this fellow modified the copy he was distributing to no longer request or retrieve the user's consent.
Arguably, so long as the binaries they provide Do The Right Thing, they're legitimate wrt pushing the blame on the guy who made and distributed the modified version on users w/o their consent.
This is just for applications which need a local cache.
Yes, but Oracle *sucks* for that. SQLite is considerably more appropriate for that kind of usage -- it's much less of a PITA to administer (and Oracle *is* indeed a PITA).
I'm quite certain this is aimed where they say it is: Open-source databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Many of the instances of either are small installations intended to act as backend to a webapp or five for a small company's intranet -- nothing needing hardware outside of the range of what they're limiting this edition to.
That said -- there are cases where an Oracle database can be hosed badly enough that the recovery docs specify to always call Oracle support before going through the next steps provided. Support's not going to be free even if the software is, right? And Oracle gets pretty darned arcane.
Heck, this'll give more folks a chance to see just how bad Oracle is about not complying with operating systems' local conventions (FHS? What's that?) and requiring vastly more specialized knowledge to admin than their OSS competitors... perhaps it'll even *lose* them marketshare.
...all the folks who adhere to intelligent design as dogma (and try to make everyone else do so to) drown out the people who support intelligent design because they think it's right and can make a good argument in its favor.
No, really -- they exist.
One fellow I'm privileged to know is a doctor who graduated from medical school at the top of his class. He's a completely brilliant guy, as are his kids -- one time when I was over for dinner he asked me to explain to his primary-school-age (but home-schooled) daughters how the Internet worked; in less than 20 minutes they had gone from zero knowledge on the subject to asking me about whether routers could listen in on ongoing connections. He's a strong proponent of intelligent design, with the provisio that he may well be wrong if all possible universes exist.
Within that framework, he makes a helluva argument -- drawing heavily on statistics and biology (the latter being something he knows a thing or two about, given his background and profession) -- but also acknowledges the places where that argument ends.
Now, I'm not saying whether I think he's right or not -- but I think it's completely asinine that the people who make stupid, ill-informed arguments are the ones who get the airtime.
There've been rather substantial changes since Andy Valencia was owner/maintainer.
WRT the message passing, I'm pretty sure they don't actually *copy* the messages around anymore, but just map around who has read access to the pages containing them. [If this is what they were already doing -- oops; I'm just a userspace coder who occasionally sits in and listens to one of the core FMI/OS guys rant about what's going on that month, and I may not have been following closely enough while the recent performance-enhancing changes were being described].
Can't comment on the DoS angle, though -- I'll have to ask about that next time I'm over that way.
FMI/OS (based on VSTa) is tiny, performant and arguably quite well-designed.
Certainly, someone Google is indexing needs to link to you -- but that need involve no voluntary act on your part, so by no means does it qualify as opting in.
See Title 17, Circular 92, Chapter 5, Section 506:Looks pretty clear to me that they do.
Well, yes; as I mentioned in my other response (where I would like any replies to this post to go, if you don't mind), the typical EULA doesn't grant permission to take any actions which might otherwise constitute criminal copyright infringement. The matter stands, however, that one could; and that failing to comply with such a license while taking such actions could legitimately result in criminal charges.
Thus, the sweeping generalization that anyone who claims that failing to comply with a license can result in criminal charges is a "doofus" is incorrect.
To be sure; I wasn't debating that.
My point was simply that there exist actions which constitute criminal copyright infringement which can be permitted via license from the copyright holder; and thus that failure to possess or comply with such a license while taking such actions can legitimately result in criminal charges.
I wasn't arguing that your typical software EULA will grant permission to take such actions as might otherwise constitute such infringement.
If there's no license granting you permission to take actions governed by copyright, you can then be liable for copyright infringement.
An increasing number of forms of copyright infringement are criminal.
Yes, but as pointed out in another post, the actual innovation happened before the fellow was hired.
If you read it, the idea was a bug (ie. an actual device placed on the person or in the belongings of the person being monitored) which would record their gait -- in much the same way as the proposed phone would do it now.
Granted, there are practical considerations, as it would really need to be more on the person than in the belongings of the individual being monitored -- and unless they're cheap to produce and have wireless output, the individual trying to retrieve this information would generally want to get it back afterwards.