It could damage national security and they've licensed it to China and Russia, but not the US? MS must be living in a really strong reality distortion field....
Geez don't go off half cocked, read what I wrote. Did I say "Israel is evil"? look at the reason I gave for people refusing to work on it "we found out it was going into a tank".
You have to realize that some people actually think killing is bad whether it's Israeli or Palistinian or anyone else. Your reaction just comes over as being totally ultra-paranoid
And for the record being "blinded by my anti-semitism" didn't stop me marrying my jewish wife (nor, as a result, having jewish kids) .
Technically it's a 'cell' if it converts chemical reactions to electricity, it's a 'battery' if it's a bunch of cells connected together (usually in series)....
What they are describing could easily be a cell... but 'battery' is used in place of 'cell' in everyday language so I think it's OK.
OTOH the article gets really sad when it tries to get technical - it tries to put cells in series to bump the voltage for electroplating (you need a minimum voltage, but after that parallel is much more usefull because the plating rate is proportional to the current). The later on it talks about putting cells in parallel when it should mean series.... (for shocks)
You do have control, you can write a GPL-like license that explicitly denies the military from using your software....
But therein lies a real 'double edged sword', the great thing about the GPL/LGPL is that it doesn't have lots of different potentially incompatible licenses - so people can mix and match their software - libertarian code works with lefty code works with evil warmongering republican code.
These sorts of of issues ARE real-life ethics problems people deal with every day, 20 years ago I used to port Unix to new hardware for a living.... one day a new job came into work from Israel (we would get them from all over the world, even from behind the then iron curtain), one by one engineers refused to work on the project (we found out it was going into a tank), eventually management found someone who would do it.
"Windows Update is committed to protecting your privacy. To provide you with the appropriate list of updates, Windows Update must collect a certain amount of configuration information from your computer. None of this configuration information can be used to identify you."
or maybe "we sent the address of your machine, not you, along with the list to the BSA expect a knock on the door"
The point of the new economic theory is that by creating something new - something that would today be called copyrightable or patentable - the inventor already has a form of monopoly rights. He has the unique widget he has invented.
Better yet - this laisse-faire system doesn't reward people who invent (ie patent) the obvious - because the obvious is easy to duplicate - no-one's going to pay you a million dollars for the idea for single-click purchases.... you have to invent things that are substantive, and not obvious, even on close inspection - invent the radio receiver from whole cloth and people will pay you to show them how it works, invent a new type of clothes hanger and they'll just copy it.
Mind you having the patent office refuse to take silly simple patents and only patent things that are substantive and non-obvious changes from existing art-in-the-field would go a long way to the same effect leaving most things that are patented today free for innovation.
My plan for patent reform would set the clock back 50 years and require that all patent applications include a wooden scale working model (remember all those cartoon from the 50s of people siting in the patent office waiting room):-)
But the most insidious of them all is the recent pronouncement that copyright, and intellectual property laws in general, create "monopolies", and so in fact are in opposition to the principles of free market economics. This is a gross perversion of the term monopoly, as it usually applies to monolithic, stifling state-supported enterprises.
nah - 'state monopolies' are a different animal (and a different discussion - I think you're trying to get off-topic by arguing the meaning of the words) - in fact there's a strong body of law in the US for dealing with private monopolies, it's been around for about 100 years so the idea of regulating private monopolies is certainly not a new one.
The US govt has has had various types of success in this area (railroads, oil companies, AT&T [the bells are slowly merging back together], IBM, and even Microsoft's recent conviction).
Copyrights do form a type of monopoly restricting competition... why can't I go down to the record store and choose between competing versions of the latest Rolling Stones album? it's because only one company has the right to publish them... if there were 3 chances are CDs would cost more like $5 each than $15+
spend years (well little tiny bits over years) getting into character as poor rednecks before they win that big lottery..... then they dump it into the stock market.... to close the story they show up while later and annouce how they lost it all nigerian money scams
strangely I think I had that discussion with my 12yr old just last month.... except it went along the lines of "you're about to become a teenager.... we're going to tell you not to do stuff you really want to do... really I think the best way for you to learn stuff is to make your own mistakes.... our job is to make sure you don't do anything permanently bad - like ending up in jail or dead".
Presumeably they are searching for strings of bits that are the same as some copyrighted work once it has been mp3 encoded some particular way.... what happens if my object happens to contain the same string of bits at some random location in it?
It's pretty obvious you can't copyright a length 1 bit string, so how many bits do you need before you own it and I don't? 10? 100? 10,000? I know you can't trademark a number, can you coprright one?
My name's pretty popular on the net, back around1990 a web search (such as there were) showed just one "Paul Campbell", now, sadly, there are 1000s of me....
For my kids it's different - my wife and I gave them a double-banger surname "Levitt-Campbell" - mostly this was a cop-out - we didn't want to do the usual patriarchal thing... but obviously they can't keep on doubling the size of their names for every generation either. However in retrospect We've given them something quite special... unique names on the internet - they are the only "Levitt-Campbell"s out there which in the future may well be a great thing
Re:Another example of WHY the US Patent office suc
on
NCR Patents the Internet
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I like the following clause from it which kind of implies some kid's parent wrote the patent for him - in a similar manner to kids getting politicians to pass them a law making this "state day of the eggplant" or whatever:
Lastly, it should be noted that because pulling alternately on one chain and then the other resembles in some measure the movements one would use to swing from vines in a dense jungle forest, the swinging method of the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as "Tarzan" swinging. The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required.
It does however have one redeeming quality - it's one of the most readable patents I've ever seen
A method and apparatus for providing access to object data stored in a database management system to a receiver client. The method comprises the steps of receiving a database query from a submitting client on a first communication path, transforming the database query into database management system commands, transmitting the database management system commands to a database management system, receiving a response from the database management system comprising a media object locator, compiling an answer set comprising the database management system response, and transmitting the media object locator to the receiver client on the first communication path.
Looking up a URL in a remote database and then using it - that describes just about everything usefull on the net (including Slashdot).
This is definitely both in the "obvious to the prectitioner in the art" (as shown by all the people who've gone off and done it) - and also prior art (because of all the DB driven web sites out there prior to 1998)
that's for the states where 'engineer' is a professional title, CA for example is not one of them - anyone can be an engineer there. (hell I am). It's also why we have the job title "Member of the Technical Staff" a title out of the east coast (Bell Labs I seem to remember, back when it was somewhere) that means roughly the same thing - smart person who understands applied technology and gets the job done
A database server is a backend server, and should be completely hidden from the Internet by not one but two layers of firewalls.
Well at one level I agree with you - it's stupid.... but it's a server... why shouldn't people provide access to their server over the net.... that's kind of the point of a networked server. The real problem is with POS code that has no real access security or that's full of exploits like this one.... and then sold as production ready code.
If I bought a car and people kept kept breaking in because the door locks didn't work, or because you could open the windows just by pushing them down I could get it replaced under the state lemon law... sadly we have tacky shhrink-wrap click-thru licenses that absolve M$ et al from liability for their crappy code
but the funny thing was that it made lots of sense.... I did a V6 port (a long time ago and to the Vax no less) and worried about that line over and over again..... I'd keep coming back to it and puzzle and worry over it.... one day I got there and it made absolute sense.... I'd won!.....
Basicly what was going on was that fork() internally was a routine [newproc()] that returned 1 or 0 depending on whether you were the parent or the child.... and one of two things happened... either you had enough memory, allocated it, copied the parent, and fudged up a return stack in the child to get back to return 0 (or 1 I forget which). But if you didn't have enough ram you'd swap out the parent and dummy up the swapped out image as the child, and set this bit in the process state saying you needed to return from newproc() somewhere in the swapper - which is why this comment was there - suddenly in the middle of a routine that returns no value it would test a flag, fudge the stack and return '1'.
I'm a long time PacBell DSL customer.... every time I call them with a problem I've gotten "you're running Linux we can't help you" from the 1st level tech support people - one person even hung up on me claiming it was my fault the line was broken BECAUSE I was running Linux (even though I explained exactly how they had broken the routing tables)...
So now they want me to download this wonderfull new software onto my Windows/Mac box.... to invade my privacy.... HA! ha! (as Nelson would say).... tough
the rocket is important.... you have to get the chute and lines away from a tumbling aircraft as fast as possible if you want a hope in hell of getting it deployed without tangling
because AT&T and Comcast don't directly compete - they service disjoint geographical areas (very very few parts of the US have competing cable systems)
E* and DTV on the other hand do compete directly both with each other and with local cable systems - their merger would have dropped the number of suppliers from 3 to 2 in most areas, and 2 to 1 in a lot of rural ones. Commcast/AT&T doesn't change this
Having said this I think a bigger Commcast is both good/bad - it creates someone to go up against AOL/TW - on the other hand it's just another media giant - us real people are pretty much forgotten in all this - except.... when companies like this merge/get sold - we do too, litterally - there's usually a $/subscriber amount set as part of the deal.
So - in the long run it's better to have two hungry satellite companies keeping the local cable giant honest
Adds support for additional third-party disc burners, including: LaCie d2 48x24x48x, Sony CRX-820E, Toshiba SD-R2212 and SD-R1202, Pioneer DVR-105, and Yamaha CDW-F1 44x24x44x models.
Geee when are they going to get around to ours.... it seems that the USB based burners have all been orphaned pre 10.0 which is a real pain for my kids that have older iMacs without firewire ports
yes but the copyright laws and the way in which they are applied create an environment that isn't true capitalism..... if it were I'd be able to go to the record store and find multiple versions of the same CD from different publishers competing for price - in practice artists have to sign with only one distributor creating a monopoly situation (at least so far as their music goes).
Of course the cost of setting up a distribution, publishing, etc has ment that the music industry has evolved this way - with our now 5 or 6 behometh publishers - it doesn't have to continue to be this way - there's no reason why a band these days can't be sold through multiple competing web sites - because the cost of distribution can be so low (no stores, no trucks, no pressing plants)
I suspect it's smarter than that.... I bet the access point spends time figuring out where each client is in the 3-space and tracks it - then directs the antenna at it when transmitting or receiving.... they probably use the idle times lookming for new clients
Slashdot Mirror
It could damage national security and they've licensed it to China and Russia, but not the US? MS must be living in a really strong reality distortion field ....
You have to realize that some people actually think killing is bad whether it's Israeli or Palistinian or anyone else. Your reaction just comes over as being totally ultra-paranoid
And for the record being "blinded by my anti-semitism" didn't stop me marrying my jewish wife (nor, as a result, having jewish kids) .
What they are describing could easily be a cell ... but 'battery' is used in place of 'cell' in everyday language so I think it's OK.
OTOH the article gets really sad when it tries to get technical - it tries to put cells in series to bump the voltage for electroplating (you need a minimum voltage, but after that parallel is much more usefull because the plating rate is proportional to the current). The later on it talks about putting cells in parallel when it should mean series .... (for shocks)
But therein lies a real 'double edged sword', the great thing about the GPL/LGPL is that it doesn't have lots of different potentially incompatible licenses - so people can mix and match their software - libertarian code works with lefty code works with evil warmongering republican code.
These sorts of of issues ARE real-life ethics problems people deal with every day, 20 years ago I used to port Unix to new hardware for a living .... one day a new job came into work from Israel (we would get them from all over the world, even from behind the then iron curtain), one by one engineers refused to work on the project (we found out it was going into a tank), eventually management found someone who would do it.
or maybe "we sent the address of your machine, not you, along with the list to the BSA expect a knock on the door"
Better yet - this laisse-faire system doesn't reward people who invent (ie patent) the obvious - because the obvious is easy to duplicate - no-one's going to pay you a million dollars for the idea for single-click purchases .... you have to invent things that are substantive, and not obvious, even on close inspection - invent the radio receiver from whole cloth and people will pay you to show them how it works, invent a new type of clothes hanger and they'll just copy it.
Mind you having the patent office refuse to take silly simple patents and only patent things that are substantive and non-obvious changes from existing art-in-the-field would go a long way to the same effect leaving most things that are patented today free for innovation.
My plan for patent reform would set the clock back 50 years and require that all patent applications include a wooden scale working model (remember all those cartoon from the 50s of people siting in the patent office waiting room) :-)
nah - 'state monopolies' are a different animal (and a different discussion - I think you're trying to get off-topic by arguing the meaning of the words) - in fact there's a strong body of law in the US for dealing with private monopolies, it's been around for about 100 years so the idea of regulating private monopolies is certainly not a new one.
The US govt has has had various types of success in this area (railroads, oil companies, AT&T [the bells are slowly merging back together], IBM, and even Microsoft's recent conviction).
Copyrights do form a type of monopoly restricting competition ... why can't I go down to the record store and choose between competing versions of the latest Rolling Stones album? it's because only one company has the right to publish them ... if there were 3 chances are CDs would cost more like $5 each than $15+
spend years (well little tiny bits over years) getting into character as poor rednecks before they win that big lottery ..... then they dump it into the stock market .... to close the story they show up while later and annouce how they lost it all nigerian money scams
It's pretty obvious you can't copyright a length 1 bit string, so how many bits do you need before you own it and I don't? 10? 100? 10,000? I know you can't trademark a number, can you coprright one?
For my kids it's different - my wife and I gave them a double-banger surname "Levitt-Campbell" - mostly this was a cop-out - we didn't want to do the usual patriarchal thing ... but obviously they can't keep on doubling the size of their names for every generation either. However in retrospect We've given them something quite special ... unique names on the internet - they are the only "Levitt-Campbell"s out there which in the future may well be a great thing
it shouldn't be a problem
just in time for Valentines day ....
Lastly, it should be noted that because pulling alternately on one chain and then the other resembles in some measure the movements one would use to swing from vines in a dense jungle forest, the swinging method of the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as "Tarzan" swinging. The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required.
It does however have one redeeming quality - it's one of the most readable patents I've ever seen
Looking up a URL in a remote database and then using it - that describes just about everything usefull on the net (including Slashdot).
This is definitely both in the "obvious to the prectitioner in the art" (as shown by all the people who've gone off and done it) - and also prior art (because of all the DB driven web sites out there prior to 1998)
that's for the states where 'engineer' is a professional title, CA for example is not one of them - anyone can be an engineer there. (hell I am). It's also why we have the job title "Member of the Technical Staff" a title out of the east coast (Bell Labs I seem to remember, back when it was somewhere) that means roughly the same thing - smart person who understands applied technology and gets the job done
Well at one level I agree with you - it's stupid .... but it's a server ... why shouldn't people provide access to their server over the net .... that's kind of the point of a networked server. The real problem is with POS code that has no real access security or that's full of exploits like this one .... and then sold as production ready code.
If I bought a car and people kept kept breaking in because the door locks didn't work, or because you could open the windows just by pushing them down I could get it replaced under the state lemon law ... sadly we have tacky shhrink-wrap click-thru licenses that absolve M$ et al from liability for their crappy code
Basicly what was going on was that fork() internally was a routine [newproc()] that returned 1 or 0 depending on whether you were the parent or the child .... and one of two things happened ... either you had enough memory, allocated it, copied the parent, and fudged up a return stack in the child to get back to return 0 (or 1 I forget which). But if you didn't have enough ram you'd swap out the parent and dummy up the swapped out image as the child, and set this bit in the process state saying you needed to return from newproc() somewhere in the swapper - which is why this comment was there - suddenly in the middle of a routine that returns no value it would test a flag, fudge the stack and return '1'.
So now they want me to download this wonderfull new software onto my Windows/Mac box .... to invade my privacy .... HA! ha! (as Nelson would say) .... tough
so is there an openp-source tn3270 clone?
the rocket is important .... you have to get the chute and lines away from a tumbling aircraft as fast as possible if you want a hope in hell of getting it deployed without tangling
E* and DTV on the other hand do compete directly both with each other and with local cable systems - their merger would have dropped the number of suppliers from 3 to 2 in most areas, and 2 to 1 in a lot of rural ones. Commcast/AT&T doesn't change this
Having said this I think a bigger Commcast is both good/bad - it creates someone to go up against AOL/TW - on the other hand it's just another media giant - us real people are pretty much forgotten in all this - except .... when companies like this merge/get sold - we do too, litterally - there's usually a $/subscriber amount set as part of the deal.
So - in the long run it's better to have two hungry satellite companies keeping the local cable giant honest
Geee when are they going to get around to ours .... it seems that the USB based burners have all been orphaned pre 10.0 which is a real pain for my kids that have older iMacs without firewire ports
Of course the cost of setting up a distribution, publishing, etc has ment that the music industry has evolved this way - with our now 5 or 6 behometh publishers - it doesn't have to continue to be this way - there's no reason why a band these days can't be sold through multiple competing web sites - because the cost of distribution can be so low (no stores, no trucks, no pressing plants)
I suspect it's smarter than that .... I bet the access point spends time figuring out where each client is in the 3-space and tracks it - then directs the antenna at it when transmitting or receiving .... they probably use the idle times lookming for new clients