Re:For those slashdotters unaware of the SCOTUS ca
on
Patents and Eminent Domain
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In the SCOTUS case private indivuduals are exploiting government force to acquire private property against the wishes of the former owners.
Looks to me like both the government and the manipulating individuals are wrong.
The US Military Tribunal that decided the case of IG Farben at the Nuremberg trials would probably have agreed. (In brief, the executives of Farben (a chemical company) were held criminally responsible for Farben's seizure of property. The seizure was often done via Nazi government force, or was done with the connivance of the Nazis. The executives were held guilty despite all the dressings of legality they had draped themselves with at the time).
Er...great, from patents to Nazi regimes so smoothly in this thread. An indicator of the times we live in?
Re:This version doesnt fix some new type of popups
on
Firefox 1.0.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Sure, the point is that the system is bad. However, it is pretty obvious that lawyers benefit from this, not the defendents or society at large.
The patent system ensures that it is perfectly legal to make money by such immoral means. Therefore it is the duty of companies like TT to do so because they are required to increase shareholder value.
This will continue as long as the patents system is in place. Throw away patents and we won't have this kind of lawyer feeding frenzy.
I wouldn't say they are really trading barbs if you look at the facts in the Fine Article.
Gates is providing a valid reason for patenting as much as possible since innovation is grinding to a halt because of patenting. So, he is saying the patent system is bad, but that MS needs to patent as a result.
Stallman is pointing out that innovation is grinding to halt because of patents. So he is saying the patent system is bad, and hence patents are bad.
So they both actually agree that patents are bad, and they are both acting according to their principles in this bad system.
This is a the tragedy of the commons situation, where the intellectual "property" commons is being fenced off by people now standing on the shoulders of giants of the past. The people fencing off the property are preventing others from wandering into what used to be an open knowledge commons, a commons which in the past used to be shared. Because the resources of this commons are inexhaustible, there is no fundamental reason to restrict it. There is no fundamental reason to have a system of patents that make human knowledge subject to a land run.
That is why intellectual "property" is intellectual theft when you actually start examining the premises.
Gate's intellectual landgrab is quite legal, and hence not regarded as theft. Indeed, he is doing absolutely and clearly the right and sensible thing in the current system.
The way to fix the problem would actually be to do away with the patent system.
What is more likely to happen is the patent quagmire analogy. In this analogy, you have dinosaurs and mammals of all sizes struggling in a muddy pit courtesy of the legal system. The larger the animal is and the more teeth and claws it has, the more likely it is to submerge its rivals. If it sees another animal in the quagmire has enough teeth and claws itself, there is a stand-off - no point in attacking another if you are likely to get counter-attacked. MS is like the T-rex in this. Sun is maybe an allosaurus, OSX a velociraptor, BSD a stegosaurus. Linux, um, was like a brontosaurus, being eyed up by the rest of the slavering predators for slaughter - but it has now been pretty much armor-plated by IBM's patenting marvel-comics-blast of gamma-radiation and it is now mutating into a cute sabre-toothed tiger ready for total world domination.
Or something like that.
Anyway, the point I really wanted to make before I got caught up in my maniacal metaphor was that patent portfolios create a Mexican standoff between the bigger outfits, but mean that the smaller outfits cannot innovate without getting swallowed by the bigger outfits in today's world. So the pace of innovation is going to grind to a halt unless the patents system is scrapped.
I can't see any way that a force to scrap the system is going to emerge, because the timescale over which innovation is being killed off is too large for people to notice, and the trend is not easy to quantify anyway. Even if it were demonstrated to be true, there is still the problem of how to fix it when the most powerful lobbying for patents is actually by the companies that have the patent portfolios.
See Hardin's the tragedy of the commons paper for further details about the class of problem this comes under, and how it gets solved. In short - the problem is that of the over-exploitation of common property at the cost of everyone else, and the solution is that of enforcement of rules against this kind of exploitation. Societies which do not do that die off.
whowho said: [snip MS licence quote] > They are "committed" but on the other hand "reserve the > right to change"? How is that committed?
Well, they are committed to the right to embrace and extend, aren't they?
How it would work?
Well, the inertia to stay with word remains now that the standards are open. Compatible word processing apps would have to track each change to remain compatible. At some point, if MS decides to change the open policy, all the other word processing apps would be left in reverse-engineering (and maybe DRM)-land. Forking off would be a bit harder than the clean break we have had growing these days if MS had simply continued being closed standard.
> with each security patch released, a new flock of botnet > worms will descend on the vast majority of unpatched > windows computers
You make a good point. Eg, most of the windows boxes in Delhi, India, run illegally copied software. Many (most?) of them are infected. Two-thirds of the net traffic behind a typical double NAT cablewallah ISP is worm/spam/virus traffic because of this and people not patching their systems. Amazing. It may encourage a move to FLOSS.
> parents will pick if they want the latest copy of > Mathematica or Maple installed in their childs brain
Sure. Just make sure you run an OS better than MS Windows Mind2020. Else, if you visit a fun-looking porn site ("with enhanced force-feedback teledildonics!") you'll pick up an STD (Surfing Transmitted Disease) and promptly join an army of brain-controlled zombies in mindlessly spamming US citizens for green cards to Canada/India.
What good is something that is so hard to measure that you can't even find out about it until you build better detectors?
What a strange question.
Rutherford couldn't figure out the structure of atoms until he figured out a better detector. He made one, and the result was the nuclear atom was discovered, and a new era in physics started up.
More generally, the answer to why you should try and find out about odd anomalies is because that's how you find out interesting stuff. That's how science develops.
The anomolous orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune.
The anomolous behaviour of mouldy bread led to the discovery of penicillin.
The anomolous behaviour of time led to the theories of relativity.
Part of the problem is that HFS+ cannot be fscked from linux for the ipod mini yet (the normal ipods can with fsck.hfsplus.
After 32 mounts, it needs an fsck or you get read only mode. Which means you can't change the stuff on the ipod. The only solution currently seems to be to get an XP machine to vfat the drive and it from linux like that henceforth, or to regularly go to an OSX machine to fsck the drive.
Another part of the problem is that the usb module stack or fireware module can get cnofused if you don't do the connecting thing in the right order. Reconnecting a confused status further messes up things. This holds true for the MS windows kernel as well.
I reckon any hardware problems are minor compared with that.
People have a fundamental need for sex (it is after all necessary for species survival). Suppress sex, and people try and replace it with religion. Or drugs. Or a hobby. All of which offer a substitute for loneliness.
You can't dump it on the people who would want it, because you are presumably in the USA, and shipping it to a 3rd world country would cost way more than $20.
I wonder if it is fast enough to act as a NAT? For speeds of up to 1Mbps - probably. No moving parts for the cpu means it should last forever too. Give it a new life as a customisable nat?
The reason the cost is so high for meds in the USA is that the companies developing them charge high prices.
Why?
Because they can (they have a monopoly right from patents)
Why has such a monopoly right been needed?
Because the FDA makes it so expensive to bring a new drug to market.
Why does the FDA make it so expensive?
Because they want to try and ensure that people will not get harmed from new meds. Hence their expensive requirement for phased clinical trials.
How can a company cut down on the cost of FDA approval?
By outsourcing the trial phases to places where life is cheaper.
So that is what they are doing.
My opinion: the FDA system needs to be overhauled at the very least. Ideally drug patents would be abolished entirely, and the free market be allowed to reign. But vested interests will prevent that happening.
Actually, Europeans and Americans can already be detected by locals with RFID scanning - the USD 20 note and the Euro notes they carry have RFID's in it. Great for muggers/kidnapers.
1. So, buy an RFID scanner
2. Hang around a touristy area until you hear the biggest "kaching!!!" jackpot sound from your scanner, and hit the jackpot. (by hit I mean get a group together to stalk the guy, and forcibly separate him from his money).
3. Profit!
There we have it. We now know what the missing step 2 was all along!
Dunno if it's possible to write cool hacks for it, but if it were, then I'd probably use it with a usb roll-up keyboard (not necessary, but handy for my situation, which would be at a desk) and use it with a console screen (on the screen of the phone) for entering records quickly (using a stylus would take longer - data entry via a keyboard is better that way).
Maybe the app would be ncurses based.
I guess I could even add a few sketches (and the occasional photo) into the record - it has about 58MB of user memory.
I would sync the data later with the pc.
It would be handier than a laptop or tablet that way - a convenient, customisable, robust jotter to put records in, in a machine readable form. Maybe *the* killer app/device combination, 'cos I imagine it is a need a lot of people have.
How about this as a more fitting quote?: "the people can always be brought
to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same way in any country."
That was Goering, one of Hitler's cronies. See http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
To make a PDA as useful as a laptop you need it to have the same screensize and keyboard size as a laptop.
To get to that, how about making the screen a small eye-glass type of display? Ie, pop out a borg-style eyewear part from the PDA. There are vga type HUD (head up displays) around already. Horribly expensive though.
The other issue is the keyboard. For a touch typist, the sony u1 and u3 keyboards are pretty close to the smallest useable qwerty keyboards around. You cannot get a type-friendly laptop smaller than that if you are going to keep to a rigid keyboard. But a cloth keyboard that wraps around the PDA is fine. Folding keyboards are good (like the IBM butterfly keyboard), but probably not shrinkable enough. Membrane keyboards and their ilk are actually quite OK (useable) for touchtypists.
Then we need loads of USB ports. So we can add on a keyboard and a mouse and additional storage and connect it to a desktop. Use the desktop as the front end to the PDA if you like - that's an easy way to do it. The usb port would mean you don't need to bother with a builtin camera - just get a better dedicated camera.
Making it a phone as well is possible, and won't add too much weight these days. Useful for skype users. But it is not necessary when separate, dedicated simple phones are lightweight and cheap (ie throwaway).
A video out for watching TV, a VGA connector to connect to a monitor would top off the package.
Concentrate on the user interface of the hardware, and the other hardware features like wifi/bluetooth and software will evolve for it IMO.
Actually, it's a PR thing which should not have made it on slashdot. Probably the misleading title got it on.
That said, Indian eye surgeons are pretty much the best in the world. Why? Because they get so many cases to handle. Practice makes perfect. Don't believe me? Do a google search on "ophthalmology" and you will see about half the results thrown up have an Indian link (Indian name or location). This is disproportionate.
Slashdot Mirror
In the SCOTUS case private indivuduals are exploiting government force to acquire private property against the wishes of the former owners.
Looks to me like both the government and the manipulating individuals are wrong.
The US Military Tribunal that decided the case of IG Farben at the Nuremberg trials would probably have agreed. (In brief, the executives of Farben (a chemical company) were held criminally responsible for Farben's seizure of property. The seizure was often done via Nazi government force, or was done with the connivance of the Nazis. The executives were held guilty despite all the dressings of legality they had draped themselves with at the time).
Er...great, from patents to Nazi regimes so smoothly in this thread. An indicator of the times we live in?
Version 1.0 blocks it just fine AFAIK.
Only checks for extension updates AFAIK.
Sure, the point is that the system is bad. However, it is pretty obvious that lawyers benefit from this, not the defendents or society at large.
The patent system ensures that it is perfectly legal to make money by such immoral means. Therefore it is the duty of companies like TT to do so because they are required to increase shareholder value.
This will continue as long as the patents system is in place.
Throw away patents and we won't have this kind of lawyer feeding frenzy.
Gates is providing a valid reason for patenting as much as possible since innovation is grinding to a halt because of patenting. So, he is saying the patent system is bad, but that MS needs to patent as a result.
Stallman is pointing out that innovation is grinding to halt because of patents. So he is saying the patent system is bad, and hence patents are bad.
So they both actually agree that patents are bad, and they are both acting according to their principles in this bad system.
This is a the tragedy of the commons situation, where the intellectual "property" commons is being fenced off by people now standing on the shoulders of giants of the past. The people fencing off the property are preventing others from wandering into what used to be an open knowledge commons, a commons which in the past used to be shared. Because the resources of this commons are inexhaustible, there is no fundamental reason to restrict it. There is no fundamental reason to have a system of patents that make human knowledge subject to a land run.
That is why intellectual "property" is intellectual theft when you actually start examining the premises.
Gate's intellectual landgrab is quite legal, and hence not regarded as theft. Indeed, he is doing absolutely and clearly the right and sensible thing in the current system.
The way to fix the problem would actually be to do away with the patent system.
What's the difference between Microsoft Corporation Security Chief Mike Nash and Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf?
... is that you?
One spouts hilarious, barefaced lies with great conviction, contradicting the obvious facts and the other....um, hang on...
Al-Sahaf
Why do you think I mutated linux into a mammal (sabre-toothed tiger) ;-)
What is more likely to happen is the patent quagmire analogy. In this analogy, you have dinosaurs and mammals of all sizes struggling in a muddy pit courtesy of the legal system. The larger the animal is and the more teeth and claws it has, the more likely it is to submerge its rivals. If it sees another animal in the quagmire has enough teeth and claws itself, there is a stand-off - no point in attacking another if you are likely to get counter-attacked. MS is like the T-rex in this. Sun is maybe an allosaurus, OSX a velociraptor, BSD a stegosaurus. Linux, um, was like a brontosaurus, being eyed up by the rest of the slavering predators for slaughter - but it has now been pretty much armor-plated by IBM's patenting marvel-comics-blast of gamma-radiation and it is now mutating into a cute sabre-toothed tiger ready for total world domination.
Or something like that.
Anyway, the point I really wanted to make before I got caught up in my maniacal metaphor was that patent portfolios create a Mexican standoff between the bigger outfits, but mean that the smaller outfits cannot innovate without getting swallowed by the bigger outfits in today's world. So the pace of innovation is going to grind to a halt unless the patents system is scrapped.
I can't see any way that a force to scrap the system is going to emerge, because the timescale over which innovation is being killed off is too large for people to notice, and the trend is not easy to quantify anyway. Even if it were demonstrated to be true, there is still the problem of how to fix it when the most powerful lobbying for patents is actually by the companies that have the patent portfolios.
See Hardin's the tragedy of the commons paper for further details about the class of problem this comes under, and how it gets solved. In short - the problem is that of the over-exploitation of common property at the cost of everyone else, and the solution is that of enforcement of rules against this kind of exploitation. Societies which do not do that die off.
whowho said:
[snip MS licence quote]
> They are "committed" but on the other hand "reserve the
> right to change"? How is that committed?
Well, they are committed to the right to embrace and extend, aren't they?
How it would work?
Well, the inertia to stay with word remains now that the standards are open. Compatible word processing apps would have to track each change to remain compatible. At some point, if MS decides to change the open policy, all the other word processing apps would be left in reverse-engineering (and maybe DRM)-land. Forking off would be a bit harder than the clean break we have had growing these days if MS had simply continued being closed standard.
Let's see how it goes.
> with each security patch released, a new flock of botnet
> worms will descend on the vast majority of unpatched
> windows computers
You make a good point. Eg, most of the windows boxes in Delhi, India, run illegally copied software. Many (most?) of them are infected. Two-thirds of the net traffic behind a typical double NAT cablewallah ISP is worm/spam/virus traffic because of this and people not patching their systems. Amazing. It may encourage a move to FLOSS.
> parents will pick if they want the latest copy of
> Mathematica or Maple installed in their childs brain
Sure. Just make sure you run an OS better than MS Windows Mind2020. Else, if you visit a fun-looking porn site ("with enhanced force-feedback teledildonics!") you'll pick up an STD (Surfing Transmitted Disease) and promptly join an army of brain-controlled zombies in mindlessly spamming US citizens for green cards to Canada/India.
What good is something that is so hard to measure that you can't even find out about it until you build better detectors?
What a strange question.
Rutherford couldn't figure out the structure of atoms until he figured out a better detector. He made one, and the result was the nuclear atom was discovered, and a new era in physics started up.
More generally, the answer to why you should try and find out about odd anomalies is because that's how you find out interesting stuff. That's how science develops.
The anomolous orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune.
The anomolous behaviour of mouldy bread led to the discovery of penicillin.
The anomolous behaviour of time led to the theories of relativity.
Part of the problem is that HFS+ cannot be fscked from linux for the ipod mini yet (the normal ipods can with fsck.hfsplus. After 32 mounts, it needs an fsck or you get read only mode. Which means you can't change the stuff on the ipod. The only solution currently seems to be to get an XP machine to vfat the drive and it from linux like that henceforth, or to regularly go to an OSX machine to fsck the drive. Another part of the problem is that the usb module stack or fireware module can get cnofused if you don't do the connecting thing in the right order. Reconnecting a confused status further messes up things. This holds true for the MS windows kernel as well. I reckon any hardware problems are minor compared with that.
So I reckon drugs are a kind of sex really.
If SCO had any sense they'd put a cap in their lawyers.
basiclinux should work nicely on the box though
I wonder if it is fast enough to act as a NAT? For speeds of up to 1Mbps - probably. No moving parts for the cpu means it should last forever too. Give it a new life as a customisable nat?
The reason the cost is so high for meds in the USA is that the companies developing them charge high prices.
Why?
Because they can (they have a monopoly right from patents)
Why has such a monopoly right been needed?
Because the FDA makes it so expensive to bring a new drug to market.
Why does the FDA make it so expensive?
Because they want to try and ensure that people will not get harmed from new meds. Hence their expensive requirement for phased clinical trials.
How can a company cut down on the cost of FDA approval?
By outsourcing the trial phases to places where life is cheaper.
So that is what they are doing.
My opinion: the FDA system needs to be overhauled at the very least. Ideally drug patents would be abolished entirely, and the free market be allowed to reign. But vested interests will prevent that happening.
1. So, buy an RFID scanner
2. Hang around a touristy area until you hear the biggest "kaching!!!" jackpot sound from your scanner, and hit the jackpot. (by hit I mean get a group together to stalk the guy, and forcibly separate him from his money).
3. Profit!
There we have it. We now know what the missing step 2 was all along!
Maybe the app would be ncurses based.
I guess I could even add a few sketches (and the occasional photo) into the record - it has about 58MB of user memory.
I would sync the data later with the pc.
It would be handier than a laptop or tablet that way - a convenient, customisable, robust jotter to put records in, in a machine readable form. Maybe *the* killer app/device combination, 'cos I imagine it is a need a lot of people have.
ceramic==usually more scratchproof
eg: the rado ceramic watchface cannot be scratched with mild steel.
How about this as a more fitting quote?:
"the people can always be brought
to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same way in any country."
That was Goering, one of Hitler's cronies. See http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm
Dunno what you mean by "legal". Oftel, which is
the telecom regulatory authority,
defined it as 256kbps+ downstream a while ago.
To make a PDA as useful as a laptop you need it to have the same screensize and keyboard size as a laptop.
To get to that, how about making the screen a small eye-glass type of display? Ie, pop out a borg-style eyewear part from the PDA. There are vga type HUD (head up displays) around already. Horribly expensive though.
The other issue is the keyboard. For a touch typist, the sony u1 and u3 keyboards are pretty close to the smallest useable qwerty keyboards around. You cannot get a type-friendly laptop smaller than that if you are going to keep to a rigid keyboard. But a cloth keyboard that wraps around the PDA is fine. Folding keyboards are good (like the IBM butterfly keyboard), but probably not shrinkable enough. Membrane keyboards and their ilk are actually quite OK (useable) for touchtypists.
Then we need loads of USB ports. So we can add on a keyboard and a mouse and additional storage and connect it to a desktop. Use the desktop as the front end to the PDA if you like - that's an easy way to do it. The usb port would mean you don't need to bother with a builtin camera - just get a better dedicated camera.
Making it a phone as well is possible, and won't add too much weight these days. Useful for skype users. But it is not necessary when separate, dedicated simple phones are lightweight and cheap (ie throwaway).
A video out for watching TV, a VGA connector to connect to a monitor would top off the package.
Concentrate on the user interface of the hardware, and the other hardware features like wifi/bluetooth and software will evolve for it
IMO.
Forget flying cars and monorails. Considering the prevalence of obesity, it is about time that the beliwheel from Judge Dredd was made available.
Actually, it's a PR thing which should not have made it on slashdot. Probably the misleading title got it on.
That said, Indian eye surgeons are pretty much the best in the world. Why? Because they get so many cases to handle. Practice makes perfect. Don't believe me? Do a google search on "ophthalmology" and you will see about half the results thrown up have an Indian link (Indian name or location). This is disproportionate.