So how about assuming that valid patent applications are rare, and paying the patent examiners for the ones they turn down? Like the way driving test examiners depending on the number of candidates they fail.
Patents are there to protect the rights of people who invent something and share their invention with the rest of the world to allow them the option to make money off of it.
Real property can be confiscated by order of the courts, and you can also be banned by court order from owning certain types of property (especially livestock or vehicles but sometimes computers, cameras or similar) for specified periods of time; so why not do the same with "Intellectual Property"?
EMACS was created before software was even ruled to be patentable. However, it can be cited as Prior Art which would render any subsequent attempt to take out a patent invalid.
A patent cannot be awarded for a process which is obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art. A trained chimpanzee with a text editor and a web browser should know that an /> tag could be nested inside an <a>..... </a> container. This patent is invalid by virtue of obviety and whoever is trying to use it in court should be branded a vexatious litigant.
Not necessarily so. Bought a server recently with an Intel 64-bit processor and the DVD+RW drive (from which I had already booted up with a Debian CD) wouldn't detect. Fortunately, I had a USB stick handy and the motherboard supported booting from such a device, so was able to create a netinstall image on that. (You'd be surprised how many motherboards won't boot from USB, or maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years). Even when I built myself a brand spanking new kernel, the DVD+RW drive remained obstinately undetectable.
Since that box is now the NIS/NFS and APT server for the whole site, I'm a bit reluctant to try anything else on with it. Obviously it'll have to be upgraded when Lenny goes stable, but that's unlikely to be for awhile:) Seems like Etch is going to hang on longer than Woody.....
I propose scrapping income tax for employed people and replacing it with a wages tax. This would follow a simple cubic regression, with the constant, proportional, squared and cubed coefficients changed on an annual basis; and be based on the amount actually received by the employee -- i.e., the wage after tax. Thus, a person seeing an advert for a job at £18000 would know that they would be taking home £18000.
THE MALWARE DOES NOT GET DETECTED BY ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE BECAUSE THE WRITERS TEST IT USING THE SAME TOOLS WE USE!
That's only half the story.
The most profitable malware writers have "preferred partners" in the anti-malware industry, to whom they pay bakshish to ensure that their malware doesn't get detected by their "preferred partners"' products.
Well, I personally support the idea of a maximum wage. Nobody needs more than £100 000 a year to live on.
I also think that job advertisements should be required by law to show the wages after tax. It's not like I get £x into my bank account and then £y taken out, in two separate transactions; my employer pays me £(x-y) and the taxman £y.
Ah, but there are entire free Operating Systems which are inherently immune to viruses, due to having a quaint old-fashioned little concept called "privilege separation" designed-in. They also have applications that weren't written by self-taught tinkerers using knocked-off copies of the development software and relying on guesswork.
No. Statutory Rights are sacrosanct. You cannot waive them. If you sign a contract that says you are not going to do something the Law of the Land says you can do, you can go ahead and do it anyway and not be found in breach of contract.
For example: using an object that employs someone else's patent is infringement, but if they give you a license to use the patent, then they have waived the right to sue you (even though 35 USC gives them the right to sue you for it were it not for the license).
Bullshit.
They have not "waived their right to sue" or anything like that. Patent law states that certain acts require advance written permission, and a patent licence is exactly that permission. Their right to sue never existed in the first place.
Not allowing someone to exercise their First Sale rights would amount to denying someone their rights under the Law of the Land. It could even potentially be construed as vandalism (since they are rendering someone else's property unusable).
About the only thing that's going to get nVidia et al to release the necessary specs that would enable someone to make full use of the hardware that they bought and paid for, is the full force of the law: release specs or face a sales ban.
As an Evil Penguin Shagging Communist (TM), I can honestly say I've never had problems with this software.
For viewing PDFs, I have KPDF.
For surfing the web, I have konqueror; for playing music I have mpg321 and for organising my collection I have mysql.
For updating my system, I have # apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. And then only because I insist to run Sid.
I don't have realplayer. I tried the open-source Helix player once. Didn't like it. Went back to vlc.
Java didn't do anything like that to me.
For talking on Yahoo messenger, I have Pidgin.
I don't need Norton anything. My OS of choice has a well-thought-out privilege separation system implemented correctly, guaranteeing some measure of security; and a full suite of userland tools, including scripting languages capable of dealing with binary files if it becomes necessary to create something nobody else already thought of.
Not got a Vaio.
I use various mail clients including KMail, Evolution and Alpine. They aren't in the least bit annoying.
The lack of a 64-bit Flash player was never such a great hardship for me. I've got youtube-dl to download YouTube videos, iplayer-dl to download BBC iPlayer videos and vlc for watching them. The Free flash clients such as GNASH can be expected to improve now Adobe have dropped their illegal and/or unenforcible restrictions on the use of the Flash format specification.
Sometimes Windows users remind me of someone who chooses to sit under a leaking pipe and moan about getting wet, as opposed to just moving somewhere else. Get a clue: You don't have to put up with this shit!
I'd much rather see Linux become a great OS, and that means heeding needs like having standards so that the installation of software and drivers is possible on any distro, old or new, which includes those standards.
There is a standard for Linux drivers. The standard is that drivers be provided in Source Code form, and compiled into the kernel or as loadable modules. This way, if ever the kernel suddenly requires a severe change, device drivers can be updated at the same time so that users of hardware will not be left stranded.
Withholding a great feature of an OS is just weak and causes everyone else pain, and that pain should not be forced on someone because of a fear of them installing something restrictive. Let them have that choice, because along with that freedom to choose comes many benefits.
A choice of masters is not the same thing as freedom. You already can (mostly) choose whether to compile from Source Code or install pre-compiled binaries; that's freedom.
Yes, the fact that nVidious can legally release a binary blob driver means that their graphics cards will work under Linux, and distributors can obtain permission to redistribute the nVidious blob alongside the Linux kernel (though to comply with the requirements of the GPL, the user must perform some deliberate act which will initiate the linking). BUT a legal requirement for hardware vendors to provide either driver Source Code or sufficient information to enable a competent programmer to create a driver, would also lead to a situation where everything Just Works with Linux. And with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Darwin, DragonFly, Haiku, GNU/Hurd and any OS now known or ever to be created.
Binary-only drivers are a Bad Thing in the long term. They take away a user's freedom to decide which software they want to run on their own machines, and give hardware vendors the power to decide what software other people must run. Just because something has to be made available in Source Code form, doesn't (usually) mean that it can't also be distributed pre-compiled, for the benefit of users who prefer convenience over security. More binary-only drivers would only end up constraining you to particular kernel versions. In the worst case, you might have a wireless card whose driver worked with one range of kernel versions and a DVB card whose binary driver worked with another kernel version outside that range. Is having to choose between "wireless support" or "DVB support" as separate options on your LILO menu really a good thing?
Whereas if they released driver Source Code, then those same graphics cards, wireless cards and webcams would work just as well under any Operating System.
What your going to make it illegal for a company to make closed source drivers?
Almost. I'm proposing for it to be illegal to conceal information from the rightful owners of hardware that they would need to know in order to make use of it. In order for someone who is implementing an entirely new OS from scratch -- yes, it's a rare circumstance, but not utterly inconceivable -- to make use of a piece of hardware that they own, they will need to know enough to implement a driver from scratch. Whether that is the complete Source Code for a driver for some reference platform or just a bare specification document is up to them; as long as any competent programmer reading that information would then be able to implement from scratch a driver capable of using all the functions of the hardware. There would also be a practical desirability of releasing a pre-compiled (or at least trivially easy to compile) Windows driver: its Source Code probably would satisfy the requirement.
no they could just stop supporting linux
Then the Linux community will create their own drivers, based on the specifications that the hardware company would be legally obliged to release.
Erm no, if forced to choose between reveal their closed specs * possibly infringing on 3rd party copyright or loosing 1% of their users, most companies will just stop supporting linux, so its like cliping your nails to keep your hand safe.
Except it's not 1% of users they will be risking losing: it's 100%. Remember, it will be illegal for them to sell their product at all without fully disclosing hardware specifications -- subject to the same sort of penalty as would be inflicted on a company which sold dangerous or interference-causing electrical appliances. As for the third party copyright material, a contract to do something which is against the law (such as conceal information which the law of the land says you must disclose) isn't enforcible. So their contracts with third parties not to reveal information would be annulled.
They all worked with Xp though, and some didnt work with linux at all, so what exactly is your point.
My point is that Microsoft et al currently have the power to declare hardware obsolete on a whim. By releasing a new, incompatible OS, they can turn an expensive precision instrument that somebody bought and paid for into garbage. Such behaviour in almost any other set of circumstances would amount to criminal damage.
No actually forbidding binary drivers means i lose control over my computer as i no longer have the choice to install them and i no longer have the choice to use hardware that is not supported by open source drivers.
But there won't be such a thing as "hardware that is not supported by open source drivers", because it will be compulsory for manufacturers to release driver Source Code for all their products.
If they decide to "take their ball and go home" (by just stopping selling their products; but that really is a case of cortar el pene para agravar los cojones and unlikely to happen in practice), you will still be able to use the existing drivers..... you just won't necessarily be able to update your kernel. Of course, that's what happens anyway when a manufacturer decides to stop supporting a product because it's "too old". There are landfill sites full of computer hardware which worked fine until Vista came out, but then no Vista-compatible driver was released.
Not really its exactly what happens under windows, i hear their hardware support it good.
Well, that's what Microsoft will tell you. But then, Microsoft actively persuade hardware manufacturers not to mention that their products work fine with other OSs.
Try finding Vista drivers for a 10-year-old scanner that works perfectly under Linux (despite only ever having been shipped with a driver for '98 and a crappy one at that) and then tell me with a straight face that Windows has the best hardware support.
The danger is that if the kernel ABI was stable, then the hardware manufacturers would think they were able to get away with releasing drivers only as binary blobs, without Source Code. This of course is highly undesirable. It also raises the nightmare possibility that repairing a deeply-embedded, totally-overlooked yet potentially fatal bug could cause major breakage. (XP SP2, and Vista UAC, I'm looking at you.)
If you want a stable ABI and binary-only drivers, then fork one of the BSDs. Hell, you can even cage the Source Code up and release the whole kernel binary-only. Recompiling something occasionally is a price I'm quite willing to pay for software freedom.
If all the distros standardised on the same kernel, there's a very great danger that hardware manufacturers might turn to releasing binary-only drivers. Then we will all lose out, because we will no longer have absolute control over our own computers.
Maybe the Linux kernel 3.0 will have some cool feature that makes binary-only drivers technically impossible, or maybe we'll see a decompiler soon. Or maybe even, just maybe the existing law which already forbids binary-only drivers will be enforced. But I don't think it's fair to gamble the future on such an eventuality. Right now, skewed kernel releases are about the best defence we've got against manufacturers not releasing driver Source Code.
Yeah. Or they could have just, you know, made the "free" version exactly the same, software-wise, as the "paid" version; with the difference being that the free version doesn't include the printed manuals and the telephone support hotline.
It's been my experience that each operating system has its place in a specific environment. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses when applied to a scenario. Instead of one choosing an operating system based on a visceral reaction, one should find the one that is the best solution to the particular problem.
When your goals absolutely depend on empowering people to take control over their use of the software rather than enslaving them to one person's idea of what the software should do, then anything that doesn't come with the Four Freedoms is a non-starter.
The original idea as I understood it was, build an educational aid primarily to replace paper textbooks electronically but also capable of doing a bit more than that, then let a bunch of kids muck about with the more general-purpose side of it. Most won't get much beyond running a document viewer and text editor, some will experiment with sound and graphics, but a minority will get heavily into programming it and they may then go on to do other things. (Note that the mic input to the sound card on this beast is DC-coupled, so it can even be used as an A-D converter. My old BBC model B had an A-D port, which was the business for connecting up various kinds of sensors.)
The fact that the majority of kids get to learn something useful using electronic "textbooks" and "exercise books" is a great side benefit, for sure. The fact that some will go on to start a tech industry in those countries is the beginning of the shift from developing world to developed world. The fact that all this is achieved without the involvement of predatory Western corporations -- and that means Microsoft -- is crucially important, because it means that those countries' IT industries, and their customers, aren't just going to end up working their backsides off to make rich Westerners richer.
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So how about assuming that valid patent applications are rare, and paying the patent examiners for the ones they turn down? Like the way driving test examiners depending on the number of candidates they fail.
True.
Real property can be confiscated by order of the courts, and you can also be banned by court order from owning certain types of property (especially livestock or vehicles but sometimes computers, cameras or similar) for specified periods of time; so why not do the same with "Intellectual Property"?
EMACS was created before software was even ruled to be patentable. However, it can be cited as Prior Art which would render any subsequent attempt to take out a patent invalid.
A patent cannot be awarded for a process which is obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art. A trained chimpanzee with a text editor and a web browser should know that an/> tag could be nested inside an <a> ..... </a> container. This patent is invalid by virtue of obviety and whoever is trying to use it in court should be branded a vexatious litigant.
Actually, just branding them would satisfy me!
No, it's not Itanic but Intel's copy of AMD's superior 64 bit architecture.
Not necessarily so. Bought a server recently with an Intel 64-bit processor and the DVD+RW drive (from which I had already booted up with a Debian CD) wouldn't detect. Fortunately, I had a USB stick handy and the motherboard supported booting from such a device, so was able to create a netinstall image on that. (You'd be surprised how many motherboards won't boot from USB, or maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years). Even when I built myself a brand spanking new kernel, the DVD+RW drive remained obstinately undetectable.
:) Seems like Etch is going to hang on longer than Woody .....
Since that box is now the NIS/NFS and APT server for the whole site, I'm a bit reluctant to try anything else on with it. Obviously it'll have to be upgraded when Lenny goes stable, but that's unlikely to be for awhile
Then the tax system needs changing.
I propose scrapping income tax for employed people and replacing it with a wages tax. This would follow a simple cubic regression, with the constant, proportional, squared and cubed coefficients changed on an annual basis; and be based on the amount actually received by the employee -- i.e., the wage after tax. Thus, a person seeing an advert for a job at £18000 would know that they would be taking home £18000.
The most profitable malware writers have "preferred partners" in the anti-malware industry, to whom they pay bakshish to ensure that their malware doesn't get detected by their "preferred partners"' products.
Well, I personally support the idea of a maximum wage. Nobody needs more than £100 000 a year to live on.
I also think that job advertisements should be required by law to show the wages after tax. It's not like I get £x into my bank account and then £y taken out, in two separate transactions; my employer pays me £(x-y) and the taxman £y.
Ah, but there are entire free Operating Systems which are inherently immune to viruses, due to having a quaint old-fashioned little concept called "privilege separation" designed-in. They also have applications that weren't written by self-taught tinkerers using knocked-off copies of the development software and relying on guesswork.
They have not "waived their right to sue" or anything like that. Patent law states that certain acts require advance written permission, and a patent licence is exactly that permission. Their right to sue never existed in the first place.
AFAIK it is illegal for catering establishments to charge money for water in every civilised country.
They could, but it would be illegal.
Not allowing someone to exercise their First Sale rights would amount to denying someone their rights under the Law of the Land. It could even potentially be construed as vandalism (since they are rendering someone else's property unusable).
About the only thing that's going to get nVidia et al to release the necessary specs that would enable someone to make full use of the hardware that they bought and paid for, is the full force of the law: release specs or face a sales ban.
As an Evil Penguin Shagging Communist (TM), I can honestly say I've never had problems with this software.
For viewing PDFs, I have KPDF.
For surfing the web, I have konqueror; for playing music I have mpg321 and for organising my collection I have mysql.
For updating my system, I have # apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. And then only because I insist to run Sid.
I don't have realplayer. I tried the open-source Helix player once. Didn't like it. Went back to vlc.
Java didn't do anything like that to me.
For talking on Yahoo messenger, I have Pidgin.
I don't need Norton anything. My OS of choice has a well-thought-out privilege separation system implemented correctly, guaranteeing some measure of security; and a full suite of userland tools, including scripting languages capable of dealing with binary files if it becomes necessary to create something nobody else already thought of.
Not got a Vaio.
I use various mail clients including KMail, Evolution and Alpine. They aren't in the least bit annoying.
The lack of a 64-bit Flash player was never such a great hardship for me. I've got youtube-dl to download YouTube videos, iplayer-dl to download BBC iPlayer videos and vlc for watching them. The Free flash clients such as GNASH can be expected to improve now Adobe have dropped their illegal and/or unenforcible restrictions on the use of the Flash format specification.
Sometimes Windows users remind me of someone who chooses to sit under a leaking pipe and moan about getting wet, as opposed to just moving somewhere else. Get a clue: You don't have to put up with this shit!
Yes, the fact that nVidious can legally release a binary blob driver means that their graphics cards will work under Linux, and distributors can obtain permission to redistribute the nVidious blob alongside the Linux kernel (though to comply with the requirements of the GPL, the user must perform some deliberate act which will initiate the linking). BUT a legal requirement for hardware vendors to provide either driver Source Code or sufficient information to enable a competent programmer to create a driver, would also lead to a situation where everything Just Works with Linux. And with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Darwin, DragonFly, Haiku, GNU/Hurd and any OS now known or ever to be created.
Binary-only drivers are a Bad Thing in the long term. They take away a user's freedom to decide which software they want to run on their own machines, and give hardware vendors the power to decide what software other people must run. Just because something has to be made available in Source Code form, doesn't (usually) mean that it can't also be distributed pre-compiled, for the benefit of users who prefer convenience over security. More binary-only drivers would only end up constraining you to particular kernel versions. In the worst case, you might have a wireless card whose driver worked with one range of kernel versions and a DVB card whose binary driver worked with another kernel version outside that range. Is having to choose between "wireless support" or "DVB support" as separate options on your LILO menu really a good thing?
Whereas if they released driver Source Code, then those same graphics cards, wireless cards and webcams would work just as well under any Operating System.
If they decide to "take their ball and go home" (by just stopping selling their products; but that really is a case of cortar el pene para agravar los cojones and unlikely to happen in practice), you will still be able to use the existing drivers
Try finding Vista drivers for a 10-year-old scanner that works perfectly under Linux (despite only ever having been shipped with a driver for '98 and a crappy one at that) and then tell me with a straight face that Windows has the best hardware support.
The danger is that if the kernel ABI was stable, then the hardware manufacturers would think they were able to get away with releasing drivers only as binary blobs, without Source Code. This of course is highly undesirable. It also raises the nightmare possibility that repairing a deeply-embedded, totally-overlooked yet potentially fatal bug could cause major breakage. (XP SP2, and Vista UAC, I'm looking at you.)
If you want a stable ABI and binary-only drivers, then fork one of the BSDs. Hell, you can even cage the Source Code up and release the whole kernel binary-only. Recompiling something occasionally is a price I'm quite willing to pay for software freedom.
If all the distros standardised on the same kernel, there's a very great danger that hardware manufacturers might turn to releasing binary-only drivers. Then we will all lose out, because we will no longer have absolute control over our own computers.
Maybe the Linux kernel 3.0 will have some cool feature that makes binary-only drivers technically impossible, or maybe we'll see a decompiler soon. Or maybe even, just maybe the existing law which already forbids binary-only drivers will be enforced. But I don't think it's fair to gamble the future on such an eventuality. Right now, skewed kernel releases are about the best defence we've got against manufacturers not releasing driver Source Code.
Yeah. Or they could have just, you know, made the "free" version exactly the same, software-wise, as the "paid" version; with the difference being that the free version doesn't include the printed manuals and the telephone support hotline.
The original idea as I understood it was, build an educational aid primarily to replace paper textbooks electronically but also capable of doing a bit more than that, then let a bunch of kids muck about with the more general-purpose side of it. Most won't get much beyond running a document viewer and text editor, some will experiment with sound and graphics, but a minority will get heavily into programming it and they may then go on to do other things. (Note that the mic input to the sound card on this beast is DC-coupled, so it can even be used as an A-D converter. My old BBC model B had an A-D port, which was the business for connecting up various kinds of sensors.)
The fact that the majority of kids get to learn something useful using electronic "textbooks" and "exercise books" is a great side benefit, for sure. The fact that some will go on to start a tech industry in those countries is the beginning of the shift from developing world to developed world. The fact that all this is achieved without the involvement of predatory Western corporations -- and that means Microsoft -- is crucially important, because it means that those countries' IT industries, and their customers, aren't just going to end up working their backsides off to make rich Westerners richer.