I'm all for limiting how and what can be patented in software as, at least in the U.S., to many suits and abuses have come from people trying to collect money on just a few lines of code anyone can easily come up with when they think (read one-click purchasing).
But if someone does come up with something truly unique that is expressed in software, how can this be legally protected so someone else doesn't steal your work after one or one-half year?
Perhaps there should be no software patents at all, just some sort of legal copyright protection for 5 years or so. But how is that uniqueness defined anyway? At what point does a subsection of code become unique enough to be protected?
As me ol' chums would say, this truly is a sticky wicket!
Let's see, it rains in over almost as much as Seattle, the climate is colder, and you have a seemingly more open policy towards skin on the tube...
Yeah, I can see "piracy" higher as well as just copying a program and lending it to your friends (otherwise known as legal fair use that corporations are trying to stop here in the US).
And, no, this isn't flamebait since this is exactly what fascism does do - among other things.
But yeah, I'm not surprised what this intellectually dull, narrow-minded, oligarchical administration pulls anymore.
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us the Grand Canyon was a result of one freak flood! DOH!
What does surprise me is that so few people seem to care that we no longer live in a representative republic. But this type of thing happens everywhere in the U.S. now, not just on the federal level. Here in Virginia while George Allen was governor, a person similar in his dictatorial and screwy religious beliefs to president shrub, the state version of the EPA was being told what its findings would be. In one case, scientists were told what their study's conclusions would say since the actual conclusions were contradictory to what the governor wanted to see.
Beware people. Fascists are here and are running our state and federal governments and I don't doubt many local governments too!
How do they actually figure those $s? I mean, I don't doubt that spam is a problem and it does costs us, but do they really know how long it takes each of us to delete, ignore, *woops!-open* or similarly waste our time on it? I've never actually seen a study that does figure these things properly. With the virus industry for instance, I am very suspicious that the "computer viruses cost us $X" lines are way over estimated on purpose just to get more business for the anti-virus firms. But for that to be the case with spam, there has to be companies that can profit from such studies. Who would that be? Besian (sp?) filter firms? Mozilla? Were they even supporters of the study to begin with?
Just seems like a waste of time at this point. Everyone already knows this stuff is hurting us anyway.
My personal solution (and this is not a paid promotion) was to use Firefox. Instead of spending nearly an hour every day deleting spam, I now spend about 5 minutes. That's my solution. And seeing as the government won't do anything about this anytime soon, I think it's one that most people will end up using.
Is it me or does anyone else think that the purpose of most reviews are to make a big stink about how good or bad a film is just so people notice the reviewer, not the film?
I mean, when was the last time you read much that could be considered a real critique of a movie rather than simply over-glorious praise or base trashing of a movie?
What I said though is that the powers that be VIEW it as a copyright issue.
Of course it is not, as you say. And anyone who can purchase the right equipment, can view any DVD anywhere they want. But it isn't easy, and stops people from getting some titles they like that others don't want you to have in region X from region Y. And viewing it in any case is something the industry frowns upon.
I see a possible conflict of interest, here. I think he needs to maintain a rigorous separation between any interests that google may profess and what is good for firefox to maintain it as essentially, an open source project.
Google is for profit, firefox isn't, even though both offer use of their product for free.
I think the legal term might be a "chinese wall" to separate work on one from work on another.
As stupid as it is, the MPAA will pull out all stops to prevent region encoding from disappearing. They view it as a copyright issue. To their minds, getting rid of region encoding is the same as removing all copy protection or the RIAA allowing free copying of CDs and distribution of mp3s.
Next on the hit list will be the last of the old ZDNet/TechTV shows.
Screensavers - a shadow of what it once was will disappear entirely. The only thing keeping X-Play on the air is the female member of the cast, if I read G4's tastes right. That leaves what? Nothing, I think (sorry if I missed a show).
This is a golden opportunity to start a *NEW* ZDNet TV network. First step is to get The Chris Pirillo Show on the network and work forward from there.
I think it's not that increasing intellectual property rights is good/bad but rather who owns them. I mean, should the individual or team who creates a new technology get the protection or the company that they work for get the protection?
Of course, what deserves protection? Certainly not that I can make your shopping easier by including a "one-click" buy now type of button - that's simple code and shouldn't be protected. But it is now, isn't it?
Ah, the whole thing's a mess and gates is being reactionary doesn't help anyone.
I read the books like everyone else. Through my cultural glasses, I changed the appearance of a few of the characters to make me feel more comfortable. Hey, I wanted to imagine naughty things with some of the females and I was in my early teens anyway, so of course I did this.
But Ms. LeGuin is right. I watched the miniseries and, though it was enjoyable, much was missing or changed from the book. After all, a wise director would have been working with her as much as humanly possible. That obviously wasn't the case here.
Now, for you people who say she isn't right in complaining about the color of the actors' skin, you are plain wrong. Why? It obviously was a concious choice of hers to set up her books with multiple "races." It made getting into the story a challenge at time for the young me but I did it anyway. She has every right to complain as she did.
Hopefully, someone will make a better adaptation of the story in future years. One that is true to the original story.
First, this is frighteningly similar to something out of 1984. It IS a violation of our rights to force us to have our picture taken to complete a transaction. (Everyone is free to disagree here.) All I should need to buy something is cash in hand.
Second, David Brin's books, Kiln People and Earth demonstrate a future where such surveilance is commonplace. They are suppose to be the future and I thought they were well off in the future (though Dr. Brin probably did not) but it appears I was wrong.
Just for the record, Clinton was a centerist who was bamboozled by activist conservative republicans. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have the DMCA anyway. Clinton was just trying to work with what he had and reach consensus. Because the conservatives never want to truly compromise, we went too far to the right on many, many issues.
One of these issues was civil rights that is abridged by the DMCA. Software patents is a continuation of this trend. I do not see this changing anytime soon because we now have a Conservative and even Neo-Conservative majority (not simply Republican). More changes will be made that will continue to abridge our civil rights, make money for large corporations, take money away from the middle class, remove services from the lower incomes and the public in general and ruin the environment just to make money.
I have strayed and will probably get modded down because of it but my on subject point is this: Software Patents play right into the hands of robber-barons who can more easily abuse people by buying up companies and suing other companies because they now "own the patent" thus stifling innovation. Sound familiar Linux users?
I think the publicity SGI got from this end of the business helped the rest of their business. They'd probably disagree, at least at the point they got out of the business.
But via the publicity from this ariticle,/., and others talking, maybe SGI will re-think this. Heck any loss they get from low sales will be offset by the overall corporate business increase, I bet. It's worth the shot.
Amen brother. What's this called? An Oligarchy? Rule by the powerful few that thing they are better than others? In this case it's people who run big corporations who think they have the right to make money by hook or by crook.
It will be interesting to see how this goes in the U.S. too. Rest assured that if there's any big monied interests that give heavily to the Republican Party or at least have to the Bush family that we will see a diminishment of rights for the common folk, i.e. legislation or directives on the side of patents.
I wish this were just flamebait but it's now cold, hard reality in the U.S. (This will probably be rated "overrated!";-)
Hmmm, so I'm moderated down as Overrated? And that's the second one too. Probably some right-wing looser probably had nothing better to do than downgrade an statement he disagreed with.
Such is the way with a public anything these days.
The "Bow, nigger" piece is not any new type of journalism really. It's just a new area to report on. This piece is more a human interest story when you break it down. Mixed with loose sci-fi I guess.
So is it journalism? I guess, if you into reading about playing games. This story, particularly, is more about how involving and how much of an alternate life (for those without one?) OMRPGs can be. Not a comforting look at the field IMO. But I don't see it as bringing anything new to the field of journalism. I mean, this writer is just reporting on what he did that day. Which makes it more a log or diary than anything else.
Yeah, it's journalism but it's nothing new at all.
Okay, won't use it. Too reminicent of Nazi Germany anyway, re: "Fatherland" (ooh, and there are many other scary parallels too, nowadays). But I digress. To stay on subject, read on.
The idea I was trying to get across was that U.S. government, pre-Bush II, was upset about PGP's system anyway and wanted a "backdoor" way, or the equivalent, to decrypt the messages sent from one party to the next. Of course, now, they'll want that, likely without a warrant - just on their say-so.
I don't like that, of course, not that I use PGP. But the idea burns in my liberal minded brain and makes me angry. I figure, it ain't their business what I'm sending unless they can prove, to a high standard, that something criminal is occurring.
Are there backdoors? And if there are not, what will Homeland Security or the like try to do about it?
Can they do anything about it, realistically?
Have I completely misunderstood this (a common event, unfortunately) or will this be one of the few ways of having as close to true privacy as we can realistically get?
But is it available in Rural America?
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 1
Nope, don't think so. Let me explain why.
I'd love VOIP and this service IF it was available here in SW VA. I admit, though, that I'd want someone else to try it first. Personally, I'm still waiting on HDTV to be easily and commonly available and for the TVs to become cheap.
You know, if I'm typical of the average ruralish consumer, this will never make it here. There'll be no incentive for these companies to come here!
I hope I'm wrong though. I do have DSL, so maybe I'm wrong.
Hey, I have one kid and another on the way. I use desktops. Maybe I should switch, especially since I just set up wireless in my home.
To top it off, I ride bike a lot (2000+ miles a year). It has been long known that if you aren't careful with you position and the type of seat you use, you can damage the same thing on a guy. So, I should change my position, get a really old racing seat and put bring a laptop along on all my rides to keep the old "third leg" too warm for its own good.
Who knew!
With this type of goofy draconian suing going on and the supposed implementation of anti-copying hardware going into production on DVD drives for PCs, how much longer can we expect to have equipment available to consumers that will allow us to roll our own without either
having tons of EE/CE knowledge
being able to afford doing so comparetively cheaply
or having some doofus suit-happy corporation suing our A** off?
I know it's a dead issue since we hear so much about it but why do we business with these people?
Big corporations have one moral - make money - and now the U.S. is just a big corporation. At least that's the way it's gone. And we are back in the bad guilded age of "the business of America is business."
Too bad. Support repressive regimes? Who cares! It makes us money.
YUK!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for limiting how and what can be patented in software as, at least in the U.S., to many suits and abuses have come from people trying to collect money on just a few lines of code anyone can easily come up with when they think (read one-click purchasing).
But if someone does come up with something truly unique that is expressed in software, how can this be legally protected so someone else doesn't steal your work after one or one-half year?
Perhaps there should be no software patents at all, just some sort of legal copyright protection for 5 years or so. But how is that uniqueness defined anyway? At what point does a subsection of code become unique enough to be protected?
As me ol' chums would say, this truly is a sticky wicket!
Let's see, it rains in over almost as much as Seattle, the climate is colder, and you have a seemingly more open policy towards skin on the tube...
Yeah, I can see "piracy" higher as well as just copying a program and lending it to your friends (otherwise known as legal fair use that corporations are trying to stop here in the US).
And, no, this isn't flamebait since this is exactly what fascism does do - among other things.
But yeah, I'm not surprised what this intellectually dull, narrow-minded, oligarchical administration pulls anymore.
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us the Grand Canyon was a result of one freak flood! DOH!
What does surprise me is that so few people seem to care that we no longer live in a representative republic. But this type of thing happens everywhere in the U.S. now, not just on the federal level. Here in Virginia while George Allen was governor, a person similar in his dictatorial and screwy religious beliefs to president shrub, the state version of the EPA was being told what its findings would be. In one case, scientists were told what their study's conclusions would say since the actual conclusions were contradictory to what the governor wanted to see.
Beware people. Fascists are here and are running our state and federal governments and I don't doubt many local governments too!
How do they actually figure those $s? I mean, I don't doubt that spam is a problem and it does costs us, but do they really know how long it takes each of us to delete, ignore, *woops!-open* or similarly waste our time on it? I've never actually seen a study that does figure these things properly. With the virus industry for instance, I am very suspicious that the "computer viruses cost us $X" lines are way over estimated on purpose just to get more business for the anti-virus firms. But for that to be the case with spam, there has to be companies that can profit from such studies. Who would that be? Besian (sp?) filter firms? Mozilla? Were they even supporters of the study to begin with?
Just seems like a waste of time at this point. Everyone already knows this stuff is hurting us anyway.
My personal solution (and this is not a paid promotion) was to use Firefox. Instead of spending nearly an hour every day deleting spam, I now spend about 5 minutes. That's my solution. And seeing as the government won't do anything about this anytime soon, I think it's one that most people will end up using.
Is it me or does anyone else think that the purpose of most reviews are to make a big stink about how good or bad a film is just so people notice the reviewer, not the film?
I mean, when was the last time you read much that could be considered a real critique of a movie rather than simply over-glorious praise or base trashing of a movie?
Or maybe I don't read enough reviews... 8^>
What I said though is that the powers that be VIEW it as a copyright issue.
Of course it is not, as you say. And anyone who can purchase the right equipment, can view any DVD anywhere they want. But it isn't easy, and stops people from getting some titles they like that others don't want you to have in region X from region Y. And viewing it in any case is something the industry frowns upon.
I see a possible conflict of interest, here. I think he needs to maintain a rigorous separation between any interests that google may profess and what is good for firefox to maintain it as essentially, an open source project.
Google is for profit, firefox isn't, even though both offer use of their product for free.
I think the legal term might be a "chinese wall" to separate work on one from work on another.
As stupid as it is, the MPAA will pull out all stops to prevent region encoding from disappearing. They view it as a copyright issue. To their minds, getting rid of region encoding is the same as removing all copy protection or the RIAA allowing free copying of CDs and distribution of mp3s.
Next on the hit list will be the last of the old ZDNet/TechTV shows.
Screensavers - a shadow of what it once was will disappear entirely. The only thing keeping X-Play on the air is the female member of the cast, if I read G4's tastes right. That leaves what? Nothing, I think (sorry if I missed a show).
This is a golden opportunity to start a *NEW* ZDNet TV network. First step is to get The Chris Pirillo Show on the network and work forward from there.
I think it's not that increasing intellectual property rights is good/bad but rather who owns them. I mean, should the individual or team who creates a new technology get the protection or the company that they work for get the protection? Of course, what deserves protection? Certainly not that I can make your shopping easier by including a "one-click" buy now type of button - that's simple code and shouldn't be protected. But it is now, isn't it? Ah, the whole thing's a mess and gates is being reactionary doesn't help anyone.
Read what I write more carefully. They don't stop you from making a transaction when you cover over the lens, do they? No.
I read the books like everyone else. Through my cultural glasses, I changed the appearance of a few of the characters to make me feel more comfortable. Hey, I wanted to imagine naughty things with some of the females and I was in my early teens anyway, so of course I did this.
But Ms. LeGuin is right. I watched the miniseries and, though it was enjoyable, much was missing or changed from the book. After all, a wise director would have been working with her as much as humanly possible. That obviously wasn't the case here.
Now, for you people who say she isn't right in complaining about the color of the actors' skin, you are plain wrong. Why? It obviously was a concious choice of hers to set up her books with multiple "races." It made getting into the story a challenge at time for the young me but I did it anyway. She has every right to complain as she did.
Hopefully, someone will make a better adaptation of the story in future years. One that is true to the original story.
First, this is frighteningly similar to something out of 1984. It IS a violation of our rights to force us to have our picture taken to complete a transaction. (Everyone is free to disagree here.) All I should need to buy something is cash in hand.
Second, David Brin's books, Kiln People and Earth demonstrate a future where such surveilance is commonplace. They are suppose to be the future and I thought they were well off in the future (though Dr. Brin probably did not) but it appears I was wrong.
Just for the record, Clinton was a centerist who was bamboozled by activist conservative republicans. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have the DMCA anyway. Clinton was just trying to work with what he had and reach consensus. Because the conservatives never want to truly compromise, we went too far to the right on many, many issues.
One of these issues was civil rights that is abridged by the DMCA. Software patents is a continuation of this trend. I do not see this changing anytime soon because we now have a Conservative and even Neo-Conservative majority (not simply Republican). More changes will be made that will continue to abridge our civil rights, make money for large corporations, take money away from the middle class, remove services from the lower incomes and the public in general and ruin the environment just to make money.
I have strayed and will probably get modded down because of it but my on subject point is this: Software Patents play right into the hands of robber-barons who can more easily abuse people by buying up companies and suing other companies because they now "own the patent" thus stifling innovation. Sound familiar Linux users?
I think the publicity SGI got from this end of the business helped the rest of their business. They'd probably disagree, at least at the point they got out of the business.
But via the publicity from this ariticle, /., and others talking, maybe SGI will re-think this. Heck any loss they get from low sales will be offset by the overall corporate business increase, I bet. It's worth the shot.
Amen brother. What's this called? An Oligarchy? Rule by the powerful few that thing they are better than others? In this case it's people who run big corporations who think they have the right to make money by hook or by crook.
It will be interesting to see how this goes in the U.S. too. Rest assured that if there's any big monied interests that give heavily to the Republican Party or at least have to the Bush family that we will see a diminishment of rights for the common folk, i.e. legislation or directives on the side of patents.
I wish this were just flamebait but it's now cold, hard reality in the U.S. (This will probably be rated "overrated!" ;-)
Hmmm, so I'm moderated down as Overrated? And that's the second one too. Probably some right-wing looser probably had nothing better to do than downgrade an statement he disagreed with. Such is the way with a public anything these days.
The "Bow, nigger" piece is not any new type of journalism really. It's just a new area to report on. This piece is more a human interest story when you break it down. Mixed with loose sci-fi I guess. So is it journalism? I guess, if you into reading about playing games. This story, particularly, is more about how involving and how much of an alternate life (for those without one?) OMRPGs can be. Not a comforting look at the field IMO. But I don't see it as bringing anything new to the field of journalism. I mean, this writer is just reporting on what he did that day. Which makes it more a log or diary than anything else. Yeah, it's journalism but it's nothing new at all.
Okay, won't use it. Too reminicent of Nazi Germany anyway, re: "Fatherland" (ooh, and there are many other scary parallels too, nowadays). But I digress. To stay on subject, read on.
The idea I was trying to get across was that U.S. government, pre-Bush II, was upset about PGP's system anyway and wanted a "backdoor" way, or the equivalent, to decrypt the messages sent from one party to the next. Of course, now, they'll want that, likely without a warrant - just on their say-so.
I don't like that, of course, not that I use PGP. But the idea burns in my liberal minded brain and makes me angry. I figure, it ain't their business what I'm sending unless they can prove, to a high standard, that something criminal is occurring.
Are there backdoors? And if there are not, what will Homeland Security or the like try to do about it?
Can they do anything about it, realistically?
Have I completely misunderstood this (a common event, unfortunately) or will this be one of the few ways of having as close to true privacy as we can realistically get?
Nope, don't think so. Let me explain why.
I'd love VOIP and this service IF it was available here in SW VA. I admit, though, that I'd want someone else to try it first. Personally, I'm still waiting on HDTV to be easily and commonly available and for the TVs to become cheap.
You know, if I'm typical of the average ruralish consumer, this will never make it here. There'll be no incentive for these companies to come here!
I hope I'm wrong though. I do have DSL, so maybe I'm wrong.
Hey, I have one kid and another on the way. I use desktops. Maybe I should switch, especially since I just set up wireless in my home. To top it off, I ride bike a lot (2000+ miles a year). It has been long known that if you aren't careful with you position and the type of seat you use, you can damage the same thing on a guy. So, I should change my position, get a really old racing seat and put bring a laptop along on all my rides to keep the old "third leg" too warm for its own good. Who knew!
With this type of goofy draconian suing going on and the supposed implementation of anti-copying hardware going into production on DVD drives for PCs, how much longer can we expect to have equipment available to consumers that will allow us to roll our own without either
That's exactly what I find so frustrating. There really is a cognitive break in many people's understanding of this.
I know it's a dead issue since we hear so much about it but why do we business with these people? Big corporations have one moral - make money - and now the U.S. is just a big corporation. At least that's the way it's gone. And we are back in the bad guilded age of "the business of America is business." Too bad. Support repressive regimes? Who cares! It makes us money. YUK!