If anything, this is the world crying out "what were you _thinking_ having a 60,000 unit network all running the same system???" and perhaps the world will wake up and realize that it _might_ be a good idea to mix systems a bit so that whatever happens to one system, you still have some significant percentage of the network still running. Doesn't anyone do risk analysis anymore?
What really amuses me is when you have this super-clever mega-skinnable way-stylish-looking ultracool app with a million themes and skins... except, of course, a vanilla Windows UI skin:-) Some applications just beg to be uninstalled...
This is only true so long as developing a patent is difficult to do so that you already have to be "in the industry" to do it. If any old upstart can come along with a show-stopping patent to use against you, you feel the pain. This can easily happen with software and business method patents. These are basically idea patents and anyone can have a good idea without necessarily having a large organisation and R&D department behind them. Having come up with one such idea, you establish a small one-patent company that doesn't do anything except sue people for violating that one patent. If executed carefully, there is precious little this one-patent company can be counter-sued for and so the entire patent portfolio of the bigger companies is useless. Once we get enough leeches like this, the patent system may start falling apart.
When I receive a sizzling skillet that the waiter has told me not to touch, I _expect_ that skillet to be dangerous to touch. If I clamped my hands around it, got burns, and sued, I would expect to lose the suit.
When I receive a cup of coffee, I do not expect the contents to be outright dangerous. If the contents ends up causing third degree burns, destroying massive amounts of nerves, and turning my life into a waking nightmare for years to come, then I fully expect to be able to take them to the cleaners in court.
Coffee is _supposed_ to be moderately hot. Coffee is _supposed_ to cause no more than moderate pain if you spill it on yourself. It is _not_ supposed to destroy your life if you spill it on yourself. Since MacDonalds advertised "coffee" and not "coffee from hell" then what I expect to receive is _normal_ coffee. When they serve me something that is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than normal coffee, they are to blame and they should pay for it.
You did a good job at completely missing the point. How many products are not suitable for consumption out of the box? Go in a high-enough class restaurant. Plates are always EXTREMELY hot so your meal keeps warm. You cannot touch them without burning yourself. Do you sue the restaurant because they knew you cannot touch the plate right away, even though the waiter told you it was too hot to touch?
If the plate gives you third degree burns, you most certainly do.
When I buy a cup of coffee, I expect a cup of hot coffee. I do not expect a cup of lava.
Laws aren't computer programs and judges aren't computers. If a law is well written so that it is clear to the judge what the intent of the law is, he will recognize a computer retailer when he sees one and he'll say "defendent coughs up - next case".
It is the _job_ of a judge to make judgement calls. If a product looks like a new product, a plaintiff looks like a consumer and a defendent looks like a retailer then this is what the judge will treat them all as - regardless of what names they choose to put on themselves.
It won't take much more than perhaps half a dozen cases like this for the industry to catch on and stop pretending they're something they're not. Well, if your country has a functional legal system anyway.
Taking the claimed 96% accuracy rate as a given, suppose that 1/10K people are terrorists. If I randomly polygraph 10K peple, I'll on average turn up 1 terrorist and 400 false positives. I can only be 1/4 of one percent sure in my result.
But that doesn't really matter much in the context of screening job candidates for the govt. If you screen 10k applicants and throw out 401 of them for being "possible terrorists" you're still left with 9599 people to pick from. Hardly much of a loss even if 400 of the ones you dropped were false positives. In this case, the polygraph _did_ give you a 96% chance of not having hired the one terrorist. I'd buy that.
Not that I think for a second that polygraphs have a 96% success rate, but I'm willing to pretend for the sake of argument:-)
Actually, they are _guaranteed_ to have a range of _at least_ several centimeters. The effective range is necessarily quite a bit larger than this and potentially very large (several meters).
Yes. They have protocols specifically to allow for this. It might be more of a problem if there are RFID _readers_ all over the place. They might interfere with eachother's attempt at scanning for RFID chips. I have no idea whether the protocols allow for this.
If you write a buggy, undocumented piece of crap you are obviously never going to make yourself redundant because you will be needed 24/7 to maintain the code. This sort of behaviour is what many refer to as "job security". I abhor the very concept of purposefully crippling your product just so that you can stay employed and consider it tantamount to corruption. Therefore, if I manage to write clear, correct code that is well documented, I may stand a chance of making myself redundant because the software works excellently 99% of the time and for the last 1% anyone with an inkling of programming skills can easily fix whatever turns out to be wrong. Obviously, for any programmer on an end-user-oriented program, making oneself truly redundant requires some future massive leap in software development methodology. This massive leap has been promised us for at least a decade now (if not two) with the holy grail that is 4th generation languages. The benefits promised have yet to materialise but I certainly hope that they eventually do because in addition to making me redundant (the very idea of which, as I said previously, doesn't make cringe in terror) it would also provide an immense benefit to society, which could then reallocate vast amounts of what it is today sunk into software development and use it for something even more interesting.
Yet proprietary software should be called 'handcuffware'. If you really care as much as you want us to believe, the very least you should do is actually _read_ that web site and try to figure out exactly _what_ it is he suggests calling handcuffware. It's not "proprietary software" as you seem to have deluded yourself into thinking.
Only a communist would demand that publishers and artists work for nothing... Actually, a communist wouldn't. A communist would expect them to work at their capacity while receiving sufficient resources from the state to sustain themselves and their families. The main beneefits of a capitalistic approach is first that you get a better way of weeding out the bad (i.e., unpopular) ones and further encouraging the good (popular) ones whereas a communist system would tend to degenerate into corruption and base their decisions on the private motivations of a few and secondly that in the capitalistic system, you end up driving a large number of people into the business who otherwise wouldn't bother but who are tempted by the wealth and who turn out to be quite good in spite of their lack of initial interest in the business.
In my opinion, if I manage to do such a good job automating my activities that I make myself redundant, I will have achieved an astonishing success and I will leave my job with a grin on my face. I'm a clever guy, I will find something else interesting to do to put bread on the table. I can see, however, how this might be a scary prospect for the leeches out there:-)
I don't necessarily agree with the last. If what the usurpers achieve in doing is to bring to the world at large useful knowledge that would otherwise have remained hidden to us, then they have potentially done us a great favour and deserve some credit for it. What use is it to me that the Oompaloompas of central Brasil have a cure for cancer if that cure never ever leaves the rain forest? Much more useful, then, to be able to do a "cure for cancer" search in the USPTO database and find what I need... Of course, if the usurpers go on to require licensing fees from the Oompaloompas for doing what they've been doing for centuries, _then_ they most certainly are evil.
Well, it simply has to not be clear:-) Company A can happily sell their patent to law firm B with an agreement that B won't sue A over that patent. Noone can then blame A when B starts suing left right and center. Assuming there is no clear connection between A and B beyond this transaction, of course.
It shall be very interesting to see how many custom-built single-patent companies start popping up in order to cash in on a patent while shielding the mother organisation from retaliation suits. If this really starts taking off, then even large patent-holders might start rethinking their position. A patent portfolio will no longer be the suit of armour it used to be.
Actually, by analogous logic, using a lockpick should be considered _better_ than not since this means you are making some effort not to damage your victim's door or lock:-)
Breaking in wouldn't be ok if it actually "broke" something. Sneaking in without doing any damage, however, would be fine in my book. Of course, if they caught you, you would be in a spot of trouble trying to convince anyone you actually bought tickets, but that's the risk you accept when deciding to sneak in.
The court tends to care a lot about intent, and if the software developer's intent can reasonably be said to have been to cause damage to the computers of copyright violators, then this would be governed by any number of anti intrusion and sabotage laws. It wouldn't help the developer _at all_ that this is also a clear case of vigilantism. The courts like to maintain a monopoly on punishment:-)
Presumably they name them and are capable of recognizing each individual one. They just can't tell you how many there are of them. To take a very unflattering example, an ant queen will be able to keep track of all its little worker ants but I doubt it knows exactly how many there are of them.
Now, I am quite sure that it is possible to define "mathematics" so widely so as to have it cover absolutely everything. I don't think this is very useful however, and I personally consider tasks along the line of "make this pile as big as that pile over there" to be far far towards the practical end of the scale rather than for it to be mathematics.
Right now, cracked boxes are used for sending spam. If you slow down the rate that it's possible to send spam by 1000, then you get a thousandfold decrease in spam.
Only if generating spam is currently a CPU-bound process. I suspect it is more of a bandwidth-bound process and that it will remain so until significantly more people obtain broadband access.
I'm not entirely sure that we're talking about intelligence here, but even if we are, you should keep in mind that IQ isn't a measure of intelligence, it's a measure of IQ. Exactly what intelligence is and how to measure it remains unclear and it may or may not have a strong correlation with IQ.
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If anything, this is the world crying out "what were you _thinking_ having a 60,000 unit network all running the same system???" and perhaps the world will wake up and realize that it _might_ be a good idea to mix systems a bit so that whatever happens to one system, you still have some significant percentage of the network still running.
Doesn't anyone do risk analysis anymore?
What really amuses me is when you have this super-clever mega-skinnable way-stylish-looking ultracool app with a million themes and skins ... except, of course, a vanilla Windows UI skin :-) ...
Some applications just beg to be uninstalled
This is only true so long as developing a patent is difficult to do so that you already have to be "in the industry" to do it. If any old upstart can come along with a show-stopping patent to use against you, you feel the pain.
This can easily happen with software and business method patents. These are basically idea patents and anyone can have a good idea without necessarily having a large organisation and R&D department behind them.
Having come up with one such idea, you establish a small one-patent company that doesn't do anything except sue people for violating that one patent. If executed carefully, there is precious little this one-patent company can be counter-sued for and so the entire patent portfolio of the bigger companies is useless.
Once we get enough leeches like this, the patent system may start falling apart.
When I receive a sizzling skillet that the waiter has told me not to touch, I _expect_ that skillet to be dangerous to touch. If I clamped my hands around it, got burns, and sued, I would expect to lose the suit.
When I receive a cup of coffee, I do not expect the contents to be outright dangerous. If the contents ends up causing third degree burns, destroying massive amounts of nerves, and turning my life into a waking nightmare for years to come, then I fully expect to be able to take them to the cleaners in court.
Coffee is _supposed_ to be moderately hot. Coffee is _supposed_ to cause no more than moderate pain if you spill it on yourself. It is _not_ supposed to destroy your life if you spill it on yourself. Since MacDonalds advertised "coffee" and not "coffee from hell" then what I expect to receive is _normal_ coffee. When they serve me something that is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than normal coffee, they are to blame and they should pay for it.
You did a good job at completely missing the point. How many products are not suitable for consumption out of the box? Go in a high-enough class restaurant. Plates are always EXTREMELY hot so your meal keeps warm. You cannot touch them without burning yourself. Do you sue the restaurant because they knew you cannot touch the plate right away, even though the waiter told you it was too hot to touch?
If the plate gives you third degree burns, you most certainly do.
When I buy a cup of coffee, I expect a cup of hot coffee. I do not expect a cup of lava.
Laws aren't computer programs and judges aren't computers. If a law is well written so that it is clear to the judge what the intent of the law is, he will recognize a computer retailer when he sees one and he'll say "defendent coughs up - next case".
It is the _job_ of a judge to make judgement calls. If a product looks like a new product, a plaintiff looks like a consumer and a defendent looks like a retailer then this is what the judge will treat them all as - regardless of what names they choose to put on themselves.
It won't take much more than perhaps half a dozen cases like this for the industry to catch on and stop pretending they're something they're not. Well, if your country has a functional legal system anyway.
Taking the claimed 96% accuracy rate as a given, suppose that 1/10K people are terrorists. If I randomly polygraph 10K peple, I'll on average turn up 1 terrorist and 400 false positives. I can only be 1/4 of one percent sure in my result.
:-)
But that doesn't really matter much in the context of screening job candidates for the govt. If you screen 10k applicants and throw out 401 of them for being "possible terrorists" you're still left with 9599 people to pick from. Hardly much of a loss even if 400 of the ones you dropped were false positives. In this case, the polygraph _did_ give you a 96% chance of not having hired the one terrorist. I'd buy that.
Not that I think for a second that polygraphs have a 96% success rate, but I'm willing to pretend for the sake of argument
Actually, they are _guaranteed_ to have a range of _at least_ several centimeters. The effective range is necessarily quite a bit larger than this and potentially very large (several meters).
Yes. They have protocols specifically to allow for this.
It might be more of a problem if there are RFID _readers_ all over the place. They might interfere with eachother's attempt at scanning for RFID chips. I have no idea whether the protocols allow for this.
I predict a growing market for metal-lined wallets :-)
If you write a buggy, undocumented piece of crap you are obviously never going to make yourself redundant because you will be needed 24/7 to maintain the code. This sort of behaviour is what many refer to as "job security". I abhor the very concept of purposefully crippling your product just so that you can stay employed and consider it tantamount to corruption. Therefore, if I manage to write clear, correct code that is well documented, I may stand a chance of making myself redundant because the software works excellently 99% of the time and for the last 1% anyone with an inkling of programming skills can easily fix whatever turns out to be wrong.
Obviously, for any programmer on an end-user-oriented program, making oneself truly redundant requires some future massive leap in software development methodology. This massive leap has been promised us for at least a decade now (if not two) with the holy grail that is 4th generation languages. The benefits promised have yet to materialise but I certainly hope that they eventually do because in addition to making me redundant (the very idea of which, as I said previously, doesn't make cringe in terror) it would also provide an immense benefit to society, which could then reallocate vast amounts of what it is today sunk into software development and use it for something even more interesting.
Yet proprietary software should be called 'handcuffware'.
If you really care as much as you want us to believe, the very least you should do is actually _read_ that web site and try to figure out exactly _what_ it is he suggests calling handcuffware. It's not "proprietary software" as you seem to have deluded yourself into thinking.
Only a communist would demand that publishers and artists work for nothing...
Actually, a communist wouldn't. A communist would expect them to work at their capacity while receiving sufficient resources from the state to sustain themselves and their families.
The main beneefits of a capitalistic approach is first that you get a better way of weeding out the bad (i.e., unpopular) ones and further encouraging the good (popular) ones whereas a communist system would tend to degenerate into corruption and base their decisions on the private motivations of a few and secondly that in the capitalistic system, you end up driving a large number of people into the business who otherwise wouldn't bother but who are tempted by the wealth and who turn out to be quite good in spite of their lack of initial interest in the business.
In my opinion, if I manage to do such a good job automating my activities that I make myself redundant, I will have achieved an astonishing success and I will leave my job with a grin on my face. :-)
I'm a clever guy, I will find something else interesting to do to put bread on the table.
I can see, however, how this might be a scary prospect for the leeches out there
I don't necessarily agree with the last. If what the usurpers achieve in doing is to bring to the world at large useful knowledge that would otherwise have remained hidden to us, then they have potentially done us a great favour and deserve some credit for it. ...
What use is it to me that the Oompaloompas of central Brasil have a cure for cancer if that cure never ever leaves the rain forest? Much more useful, then, to be able to do a "cure for cancer" search in the USPTO database and find what I need
Of course, if the usurpers go on to require licensing fees from the Oompaloompas for doing what they've been doing for centuries, _then_ they most certainly are evil.
Well, it simply has to not be clear :-)
Company A can happily sell their patent to
law firm B with an agreement that B won't sue
A over that patent. Noone can then blame A when
B starts suing left right and center.
Assuming there is no clear connection between
A and B beyond this transaction, of course.
It shall be very interesting to see how many
custom-built single-patent companies start popping
up in order to cash in on a patent while shielding
the mother organisation from retaliation suits.
If this really starts taking off, then even large
patent-holders might start rethinking their
position. A patent portfolio will no longer be
the suit of armour it used to be.
Actually, by analogous logic, using a lockpick :-)
should be considered _better_ than not since
this means you are making some effort not to
damage your victim's door or lock
Breaking in wouldn't be ok if it actually "broke"
something. Sneaking in without doing any damage,
however, would be fine in my book. Of course, if
they caught you, you would be in a spot of trouble
trying to convince anyone you actually bought
tickets, but that's the risk you accept when
deciding to sneak in.
The court tends to care a lot about intent, and :-)
if the software developer's intent can reasonably
be said to have been to cause damage to the
computers of copyright violators, then this would
be governed by any number of anti intrusion and
sabotage laws.
It wouldn't help the developer _at all_ that this
is also a clear case of vigilantism. The courts
like to maintain a monopoly on punishment
Presumably they name them and are capable
of recognizing each individual one. They just
can't tell you how many there are of them.
To take a very unflattering example, an ant queen
will be able to keep track of all its little
worker ants but I doubt it knows exactly how many
there are of them.
Now, I am quite sure that it is possible to define
"mathematics" so widely so as to have it cover
absolutely everything. I don't think this is very
useful however, and I personally consider tasks
along the line of "make this pile as big as that
pile over there" to be far far towards the
practical end of the scale rather than for it to
be mathematics.
They weren't tested for mathematical skills, they
were tested for practical skills involving
quantities of items or events larger than 3.
Right now, cracked boxes are used for sending spam. If you slow down the rate that it's possible to send spam by 1000, then you get a thousandfold decrease in spam.
Only if generating spam is currently a CPU-bound process. I suspect it is more of a bandwidth-bound process and that it will remain so until significantly more people obtain broadband access.
I'm not entirely sure that we're talking
about intelligence here, but even if we are,
you should keep in mind that IQ isn't a measure
of intelligence, it's a measure of IQ. Exactly
what intelligence is and how to measure it remains
unclear and it may or may not have a strong
correlation with IQ.