The higher court merely sent the case back to the lower court for reconsideration. It did NOT issue a ruling on whether the patent was valid, only that the lower court should reconsider its original ruling.
The words were also twisted in the submission to give it more controversy - for example, the company never claimed that they had any intention of exacting royalties for "every internet download". This was a statement made by the defendants to win favor with the court!!
Any patent defense has two strategies - first, you can get the patent declared invalid, and second, you claim that you aren't infringing. This case applies only to the first. There's plenty of battle left ahead on the second point.
I doubt they'll ever extort royalties from this. It's very clear after reading the patent that it is, indeed, extremely limited, regardless of the court's interpretations.
Right on. I wish I had a few moderator points to throw your way.
Back to the original point, NASA has become little more than a very expensive entertainment troupe. We get neat photos, exciting rockets blasting off, and that lovely sense of awe in thinking about all that we don't know.
Fine, but it's awfully expensive entertainment. Why do you think they put John Glenn back into orbit? Do you really believe the bullshit about 'researching age effects in space travel'?? Puhleaze. Attention, and entertainment, nothing more.
I'm personally tired of paying for it. NASA should be more like PBS - those who value it, should put up their money. Those who don't, shouldn't be forced to.
Right now, they are - I've got a gun pointed at me if I don't fork it over for these guys.
If it were free choice, I may choose to donate freely, or buy their entertainment willingly. But the way it is now is bullshit.
If I spend a year writing a book, that book cost me a year. If you copy the book without just compensation, you're stealing some portion of my time, and my work, directly.
Face up, folks. Copyrights, properly applied, are necessary.
The notion that any of this copying is "cost-free" is utter nonsense. The cost was borne by the creator, who has every right to control and charge for access to the material.
So you can 'wheel that one' right back into its barn.
All you're doing is turning off the fans, and covering the vents, neither of these is a very good idea.
Your computer was designed with fans for a reason. You're taking a stupid risk by defeating them.
It was ok, but not all that.
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 5
I found the movie enjoyable, but not nearly as thought provoking or as well executed as it could have been.
Despite the strong presence of Kubrick's influence (the movie would have been horrible otherwise), there were countless episodes of Spielberg-isms akin to those things that made me dislike Jurassic Park so much. Gratuitious tear-jerkers, cutsey-laughs, and all of the other crap that's thrown in to make the movie more marketable to the typical McDonald's customer and general-purpose merchandisers.
I was also disappointed with the trivialization of Kubrick's role in forming this - it's quite clear from the movie that his role was much more than "talking [about it] with Spielberg".
And I totally disagree with michael and JK's conclusion at the end that this is any indication of "Spielberg's ability to grow artistically.." and I am horrified that they think "this movie begins where 2001 left off, and then goes a galaxy or two farther."
No way. The movie was decent, and I'm glad I saw it, but to even compare this to achievements like 2001, or even Speilberg's real achievements like Jaws, Close Encounters or E.T. is nonsense.
It's a good flick, but it's no epic. Get over it, boys.
I applaud these manufacturers for standing up to Rambus, and destroying their fraudulent patent-manipulation schemes.
Fortune recently wrote an article about the schemes of Jerome Lemelson, who, with his cohorts, extorted billions from various industries by similar patent manipulations. Some have said "he didn't patent inventions, he invented patents."
Cognex is going after them now, ready to fight the good fight, just like these other folks did. Hopefully they'll be as successful.
If they have not provided you with a proper degree of service, you should absolutely withold payment. In a conflict liie this, it is FAR more difficult to get money back than it is to get a bill cancelled.
Of course, the ISP is easily within their rights to report the failure of a bill payment to a collection agency, but the burden of proof, and its enforcement, is on the shoulders of the vendor.
Asking for a refund is not at all the way to handle this. Clearly you haven't dealt with many vendors like this before.
This isn't an intentional troll or flamebait, I'm just trying to point out the truth of the situation here. The layoffs are happening because the company cannot support them, and the investments are running out. Looking the other way out of a sense of 'good will' and 'community' is for the suckers.
Note that Xbox is a public company; their financial reports will undoubedly have a line-item indicating how much money they made from the sale of this trademark.
From the looks of things, they really needed the dough... they've only got $22k in the bank. Their stockholders didn't really apprciate this, however, seeing as their stock is down 13% today..
It does all of this, and blocks banner ads (if you want). It works great.
Obviously it would be nice to include in a browser, but it is available, might as well use it.
Earth travels around the sun - frame of reference
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
It all depends on your frame of reference. From the sun's frame of reference, the earth goes around the sun. From a reference of person on the earth's surface, the sun goes around the earth.
Had Galileo used this line of reasoning, he would have saved himself a whole lot of trouble you know.
Living off the internet for a year? Big freaking deal; there's almost nothing you can't buy online these days. Even comparing such a mundane 'stunt' to this japanese challenge is totally insulting.
"Look at me, guys, I can like for a whole year just from Stop & Shop and Sears! Wheeeee!"
The judgement that Rambus had committed fraud will almost certainly be used by another judge in a patent dispute. I'm no lawyer, but I'm fairly sure that if a patent was obtained thorugh fradulent means, that may be grounds for invalidating it.
Patents aren't evil at all - they're absolutely necessary, when properly applied, to protect the individual inventor. Without them, it would be completely impossible for most small manufacturers/business to remain in business. Sure, the system has problems, but patents are inherently good, just, and valuable.
OK, so the photos from the period were black and white, but what about the paintings, both from that period, as well as earlier?
Since perhaps the color paintings were largely replaced by B&W photos some time ago, does that mean that there's only a specific timeframe that was 'in black and white', instead of 'everything older'?
I just don't understand what is so profound about this.
Colorkinetics has been hyping their 'innovative' use of colored LED's for a long time, and have very little to actually show for it. It's my guess that they're after more VC funding.
I would say that their patent claims are very misleading, and the patents themselves probably aren't worth the paper they're written on. Here are the two patents they cited:
6,016,038 Multicolored LED lighting method and apparatus
The systems and methods described herein relate to LED systems capable of generating light, such as for illumination or display purposes. The light-emitting LEDs may be controlled by a processor to alter the brightness and/or color of the generated light, e.g., by using pulse-width modulated signals. Thus, the resulting illumination may be controlled by a computer program to provide complex, predesigned patterns of light in virtually any environment.
6,150,774 Multicolored LED lighting method and apparatus
The systems and methods described herein relate to LED systems capable of generating light, such as for illumination or display purposes. The light-emitting LEDs may be controlled by a processor to alter the brightness and/or color of the generated light, e.g., by using pulse-width modulated signals. Thus, the resulting illumination may be controlled by a computer program to provide complex, predesigned patterns of light in virtually any environment.
There's no way this is a novel invention. Using a processor to modulate and change LED colors? Done for decades. I'm willing to bet that they've never attempted to enforce these patents, and most likely they won't.
As for the video game application, there's maybe a small niche here, but this is hardly earth-shattering news.
These challenges should be done with another, more advanced game, such as 'Go'. Go is not amenable to brute-force solutions, as chess is, and therefore a program able to play a decent game would be a far greater achievement. To date, there are no computer programs that can beat a reasonably skilled Go player. (Of course, they can still beat me...)
Chess is just a more elaborate form of checkers, and is very close to being solved by purely brute-force methods. Computer chess programs shouldn't impress anyone.
As a small business owner myself, I have to agree completely with what you're saying. I would also suggest that most of the people making the same tired, liberal-emotional pleas have no conception of what it means to run, and be responsible for, a business.
In order for a business to run efficiently and successfully, they must hire the people who can do their jobs the best. Period. Nothing else matters at all. A racist or discriminating company will lose in the long run, as they're using irrational criteria to select employees - putting other factors ahead of performance. If a superior candidate is rejected by a competitor simply because of a handicap or race, I'll scoop them up in a minute.
However, I must never be forced to decide on hiring anyone on any basis beyond performance.
Hiring any employee is a substantial risk, and if it things don't work out well, the costs are borne by the company, and ultimately its employees and customers. An employer must use all available information to minimize the risks involved. Always. Anything less is irrational, grossly unjust, and detrimental to all parties involved.
Anytime I hear justification of policies that include arguments for bettering "society as a whole", I cringe-the arguments are almost always unjust to/real people/.
The situation described by the parent post was not a privacy issue. The information requested by the employer was directly relevant to the performance of the employee, and because the employer is (unfortunately) responsible for the long-term health care of that employee, the employer has *every right* to reduce their risk.
Coercing someone to get their medical records without their consent is wrong, but that's not the issue the parent poster brought up. It's whether the employer can ask for this data as a condition of employment. Absolutely they should.
So there's a choice here; either:
1. Allow the employer to properly assess the risks they are taking by hiring the employee, as they're liable for their long-term health.
2. Remove the liability of the employer for long-term health care of the worker.
You can't have it both ways, and ask an employer to assume liability for risks they are not permitted to assess. Doing so is totally unjust, and extremely dangerous, yes, to "society as a whole" as well as all individuals involved.
The key is hashed right directly from the passphrase. With the passphrase, you can mount the drive. Without it, you can't. No need for keydisks and whatnot. Scramdisk even has provisions for hiding its own existance.
For any decent passphrase, breaking it will be impossibly difficult. Sure, with an 'unlimited' amount of time, but no one has 10^20 years to do it.
This method is totally viable, and successful. Read up at alt.security.scramdisk .
There are (at least) three extremely good packages available for performing seamless, convenient, on-the-fly encryption of your hard drives. I can't believe they are stupid enough to not only neglect to use one, but also to propose an unreliable physical 'bomb' to destroy the drive! C'mon!
Scramdisk, E4M, and PGPDisk all create 'virtual' mounted disks on your system, which act just as any normal disk. When you boot up, you run the software, 'mount' the virtual disk (it's a large file on your hard drive), and voila. You have a fully high-strength encrypted volume to use just like you would any other disk. Very, very easy. You can even install your apps there if you want.
The data itself is encrypted on the fly, and stored on fully encrypted form on the disk. Therefore, if the volume was unmounted (say, by rebooting), the data is totally unaccessible. If you just rely on your computer to kick into password-protected 'sleep' mode, or use a password-protected screen saver, you're pretty well covered - the only way you can really get by these things is by rebooting - which unmounts the encrypted disk. Abracadabra.
Everyone in business who travels with a laptop should be using software like this. Scramdisk is, in fact, free (Win98/ME, $20 for NT/2k), and open source! I believe E4M is free, as well (not sure about the source).
Why this stuff isn't more universally used by laptop-travelers, especially government-secret or business-secret toters, is absolutely baffling. Hell, it's even easier to use than public-key encryption.
How about fair use? We're legally allowed to utilize copyrighted material freely in a variety of ways, including excerpts, educational use, etc. None of that is stealing, and all of it is protected by law.
The DMCA, and now the EU regulation, is effectively eliminating provisions for fair use, which should be protected. I suspect that this will eventually end up in the Supreme Court, and I predict that they'll strike it down for that very reason.
Note, that I don't agree that they should outlaw encryption - there's no law saying it has to be easy to get your excerpts. But outlawing any attempt to exercise your fair use rights is deplorable.
There are lessons to be learned from this case, but they are not the ones being promoted by many of the other comments, or the tone of the article ("businesses suck, they always try to screw the little guy", etc..)
The lesson here is simple: don't steal. Adam Hinks stole the property that these businesses rightfully paid for, and has been found guilty of such in a court of law.
Him making these apparently honest businesspeople out to be 'con artists' in his little rant is totally unfair. Adam Hinks is the con-artist.
And he was caught. Good.
In the future, I'm sure he will be much more careful about the contracts he should sign (as we all should be), as well as what he does when the deal 'sours'.
[This is an honest opinion, and well-justified by the facts of the case. It's not flamebait.]
These two may be looking for attention, but you can't tell me that's atypical of scientists! It would be extremely prestigious to clone a human - but you cannot dismiss their credibility simply due to their desire to do so! It would also be prestigious to cure cancer - does that make someone who proposes doing so a quack?
A human clone has the same rights as any other person. There are no ambiguities at all about this - clones aren't manufactured independently of humans, they're born, just like all babies.
You're definitely letting your irrational, emotional aversion to cloning obscure your ability to reason logically.
As for 'whether we should or not', that's another issue, but I tell you this - if a parent had to choose between allowing their child to die, or using cloning technology to save them, they'll absolutely save their child. Those who choose not to will be about as rare as the present-day monsters who let their children die because they don't believe in immunizations.
Slashdot Mirror
The article, as written, is wrong (as usual).
The higher court merely sent the case back to the lower court for reconsideration. It did NOT issue a ruling on whether the patent was valid, only that the lower court should reconsider its original ruling.
The words were also twisted in the submission to give it more controversy - for example, the company never claimed that they had any intention of exacting royalties for "every internet download". This was a statement made by the defendants to win favor with the court!!
Any patent defense has two strategies - first, you can get the patent declared invalid, and second, you claim that you aren't infringing. This case applies only to the first. There's plenty of battle left ahead on the second point.
I doubt they'll ever extort royalties from this. It's very clear after reading the patent that it is, indeed, extremely limited, regardless of the court's interpretations.
Right on. I wish I had a few moderator points to throw your way.
Back to the original point, NASA has become little more than a very expensive entertainment troupe. We get neat photos, exciting rockets blasting off, and that lovely sense of awe in thinking about all that we don't know.
Fine, but it's awfully expensive entertainment. Why do you think they put John Glenn back into orbit? Do you really believe the bullshit about 'researching age effects in space travel'?? Puhleaze. Attention, and entertainment, nothing more.
I'm personally tired of paying for it. NASA should be more like PBS - those who value it, should put up their money. Those who don't, shouldn't be forced to.
Right now, they are - I've got a gun pointed at me if I don't fork it over for these guys.
If it were free choice, I may choose to donate freely, or buy their entertainment willingly. But the way it is now is bullshit.
Poetic, but wrong.
If I spend a year writing a book, that book cost me a year. If you copy the book without just compensation, you're stealing some portion of my time, and my work, directly.
Face up, folks. Copyrights, properly applied, are necessary.
The notion that any of this copying is "cost-free" is utter nonsense. The cost was borne by the creator, who has every right to control and charge for access to the material.
So you can 'wheel that one' right back into its barn.
All you're doing is turning off the fans, and covering the vents, neither of these is a very good idea.
Your computer was designed with fans for a reason. You're taking a stupid risk by defeating them.
I found the movie enjoyable, but not nearly as thought provoking or as well executed as it could have been.
.." and I am horrified that they think "this movie begins where 2001 left off, and then goes a galaxy or two farther."
Despite the strong presence of Kubrick's influence (the movie would have been horrible otherwise), there were countless episodes of Spielberg-isms akin to those things that made me dislike Jurassic Park so much. Gratuitious tear-jerkers, cutsey-laughs, and all of the other crap that's thrown in to make the movie more marketable to the typical McDonald's customer and general-purpose merchandisers.
I was also disappointed with the trivialization of Kubrick's role in forming this - it's quite clear from the movie that his role was much more than "talking [about it] with Spielberg".
And I totally disagree with michael and JK's conclusion at the end that this is any indication of "Spielberg's ability to grow artistically
No way. The movie was decent, and I'm glad I saw it, but to even compare this to achievements like 2001, or even Speilberg's real achievements like Jaws, Close Encounters or E.T. is nonsense.
It's a good flick, but it's no epic. Get over it, boys.
I applaud these manufacturers for standing up to Rambus, and destroying their fraudulent patent-manipulation schemes.
Fortune recently wrote an article about the schemes of Jerome Lemelson, who, with his cohorts, extorted billions from various industries by similar patent manipulations. Some have said "he didn't patent inventions, he invented patents."
Cognex is going after them now, ready to fight the good fight, just like these other folks did. Hopefully they'll be as successful.
Here's to the good guys!
If they have not provided you with a proper degree of service, you should absolutely withold payment. In a conflict liie this, it is FAR more difficult to get money back than it is to get a bill cancelled.
Of course, the ISP is easily within their rights to report the failure of a bill payment to a collection agency, but the burden of proof, and its enforcement, is on the shoulders of the vendor.
Asking for a refund is not at all the way to handle this. Clearly you haven't dealt with many vendors like this before.
The VA Linux IPO was a simple pump-and-dump stock scheme, which is partly the reason they're now being sued, probably with good reason.
Notice how fast Robert Russo ran off with around $6 million as the stock petered out? How many others inside the company did the same thing?
Read it all here.
This isn't an intentional troll or flamebait, I'm just trying to point out the truth of the situation here. The layoffs are happening because the company cannot support them, and the investments are running out. Looking the other way out of a sense of 'good will' and 'community' is for the suckers.
Note that Xbox is a public company; their financial reports will undoubedly have a line-item indicating how much money they made from the sale of this trademark.
From the looks of things, they really needed the dough... they've only got $22k in the bank. Their stockholders didn't really apprciate this, however, seeing as their stock is down 13% today..
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/x/xbox.ob.html
www.adsubtract.com .
It does all of this, and blocks banner ads (if you want). It works great.
Obviously it would be nice to include in a browser, but it is available, might as well use it.
It all depends on your frame of reference. From the sun's frame of reference, the earth goes around the sun. From a reference of person on the earth's surface, the sun goes around the earth.
Had Galileo used this line of reasoning, he would have saved himself a whole lot of trouble you know.
Living off the internet for a year? Big freaking deal; there's almost nothing you can't buy online these days. Even comparing such a mundane 'stunt' to this japanese challenge is totally insulting.
"Look at me, guys, I can like for a whole year just from Stop & Shop and Sears! Wheeeee!"
Are you crazy? That was a great joke. Bravo.
+1 Funny.
The judgement that Rambus had committed fraud will almost certainly be used by another judge in a patent dispute. I'm no lawyer, but I'm fairly sure that if a patent was obtained thorugh fradulent means, that may be grounds for invalidating it.
Patents aren't evil at all - they're absolutely necessary, when properly applied, to protect the individual inventor. Without them, it would be completely impossible for most small manufacturers/business to remain in business. Sure, the system has problems, but patents are inherently good, just, and valuable.
OK, so the photos from the period were black and white, but what about the paintings, both from that period, as well as earlier?
Since perhaps the color paintings were largely replaced by B&W photos some time ago, does that mean that there's only a specific timeframe that was 'in black and white', instead of 'everything older'?
I just don't understand what is so profound about this.
Colorkinetics has been hyping their 'innovative' use of colored LED's for a long time, and have very little to actually show for it. It's my guess that they're after more VC funding.
I would say that their patent claims are very misleading, and the patents themselves probably aren't worth the paper they're written on. Here are the two patents they cited:
6,016,038 Multicolored LED lighting method and apparatus
The systems and methods described herein relate to LED systems capable of generating light, such as for illumination or display purposes. The light-emitting LEDs may be controlled by a processor to alter the brightness and/or color of the generated light, e.g., by using pulse-width modulated signals. Thus, the resulting illumination may be controlled by a computer program to provide complex, predesigned patterns of light in virtually any environment.
6,150,774 Multicolored LED lighting method and apparatus
The systems and methods described herein relate to LED systems capable of generating light, such as for illumination or display purposes. The light-emitting LEDs may be controlled by a processor to alter the brightness and/or color of the generated light, e.g., by using pulse-width modulated signals. Thus, the resulting illumination may be controlled by a computer program to provide complex, predesigned patterns of light in virtually any environment.
There's no way this is a novel invention. Using a processor to modulate and change LED colors? Done for decades. I'm willing to bet that they've never attempted to enforce these patents, and most likely they won't.
As for the video game application, there's maybe a small niche here, but this is hardly earth-shattering news.
These challenges should be done with another, more advanced game, such as 'Go'. Go is not amenable to brute-force solutions, as chess is, and therefore a program able to play a decent game would be a far greater achievement. To date, there are no computer programs that can beat a reasonably skilled Go player. (Of course, they can still beat me...)
Chess is just a more elaborate form of checkers, and is very close to being solved by purely brute-force methods. Computer chess programs shouldn't impress anyone.
I thought these were abandoned by Compaq.
As a small business owner myself, I have to agree completely with what you're saying. I would also suggest that most of the people making the same tired, liberal-emotional pleas have no conception of what it means to run, and be responsible for, a business.
In order for a business to run efficiently and successfully, they must hire the people who can do their jobs the best. Period. Nothing else matters at all. A racist or discriminating company will lose in the long run, as they're using irrational criteria to select employees - putting other factors ahead of performance. If a superior candidate is rejected by a competitor simply because of a handicap or race, I'll scoop them up in a minute.
However, I must never be forced to decide on hiring anyone on any basis beyond performance.
Hiring any employee is a substantial risk, and if it things don't work out well, the costs are borne by the company, and ultimately its employees and customers. An employer must use all available information to minimize the risks involved. Always. Anything less is irrational, grossly unjust, and detrimental to all parties involved.
Anytime I hear justification of policies that include arguments for bettering "society as a whole", I cringe-the arguments are almost always unjust to /real people/.
The situation described by the parent post was not a privacy issue. The information requested by the employer was directly relevant to the performance of the employee, and because the employer is (unfortunately) responsible for the long-term health care of that employee, the employer has *every right* to reduce their risk.
Coercing someone to get their medical records without their consent is wrong, but that's not the issue the parent poster brought up. It's whether the employer can ask for this data as a condition of employment. Absolutely they should.
So there's a choice here; either:
1. Allow the employer to properly assess the risks they are taking by hiring the employee, as they're liable for their long-term health.
2. Remove the liability of the employer for long-term health care of the worker.
You can't have it both ways, and ask an employer to assume liability for risks they are not permitted to assess. Doing so is totally unjust, and extremely dangerous, yes, to "society as a whole" as well as all individuals involved.
The key is hashed right directly from the passphrase. With the passphrase, you can mount the drive. Without it, you can't. No need for keydisks and whatnot. Scramdisk even has provisions for hiding its own existance.
For any decent passphrase, breaking it will be impossibly difficult. Sure, with an 'unlimited' amount of time, but no one has 10^20 years to do it.
This method is totally viable, and successful. Read up at alt.security.scramdisk .
There are (at least) three extremely good packages available for performing seamless, convenient, on-the-fly encryption of your hard drives. I can't believe they are stupid enough to not only neglect to use one, but also to propose an unreliable physical 'bomb' to destroy the drive! C'mon!
Scramdisk, E4M, and PGPDisk all create 'virtual' mounted disks on your system, which act just as any normal disk. When you boot up, you run the software, 'mount' the virtual disk (it's a large file on your hard drive), and voila. You have a fully high-strength encrypted volume to use just like you would any other disk. Very, very easy. You can even install your apps there if you want.
The data itself is encrypted on the fly, and stored on fully encrypted form on the disk. Therefore, if the volume was unmounted (say, by rebooting), the data is totally unaccessible. If you just rely on your computer to kick into password-protected 'sleep' mode, or use a password-protected screen saver, you're pretty well covered - the only way you can really get by these things is by rebooting - which unmounts the encrypted disk. Abracadabra.
Everyone in business who travels with a laptop should be using software like this. Scramdisk is, in fact, free (Win98/ME, $20 for NT/2k), and open source! I believe E4M is free, as well (not sure about the source).
Take a look:
Scramdisk
E4M
PGP
Why this stuff isn't more universally used by laptop-travelers, especially government-secret or business-secret toters, is absolutely baffling. Hell, it's even easier to use than public-key encryption.
HebGb
This has got to be a troll, but I'll bite.
How about fair use? We're legally allowed to utilize copyrighted material freely in a variety of ways, including excerpts, educational use, etc. None of that is stealing, and all of it is protected by law.
The DMCA, and now the EU regulation, is effectively eliminating provisions for fair use, which should be protected. I suspect that this will eventually end up in the Supreme Court, and I predict that they'll strike it down for that very reason.
Note, that I don't agree that they should outlaw encryption - there's no law saying it has to be easy to get your excerpts. But outlawing any attempt to exercise your fair use rights is deplorable.
I couldn't have said it better.
There are lessons to be learned from this case, but they are not the ones being promoted by many of the other comments, or the tone of the article ("businesses suck, they always try to screw the little guy", etc..)
The lesson here is simple: don't steal. Adam Hinks stole the property that these businesses rightfully paid for, and has been found guilty of such in a court of law.
Him making these apparently honest businesspeople out to be 'con artists' in his little rant is totally unfair. Adam Hinks is the con-artist.
And he was caught. Good.
In the future, I'm sure he will be much more careful about the contracts he should sign (as we all should be), as well as what he does when the deal 'sours'.
[This is an honest opinion, and well-justified by the facts of the case. It's not flamebait.]
These two may be looking for attention, but you can't tell me that's atypical of scientists! It would be extremely prestigious to clone a human - but you cannot dismiss their credibility simply due to their desire to do so! It would also be prestigious to cure cancer - does that make someone who proposes doing so a quack?
A human clone has the same rights as any other person. There are no ambiguities at all about this - clones aren't manufactured independently of humans, they're born, just like all babies.
You're definitely letting your irrational, emotional aversion to cloning obscure your ability to reason logically.
As for 'whether we should or not', that's another issue, but I tell you this - if a parent had to choose between allowing their child to die, or using cloning technology to save them, they'll absolutely save their child. Those who choose not to will be about as rare as the present-day monsters who let their children die because they don't believe in immunizations.