The article says that he faces 4 months in prison after being sued by Tegam.
The wording seems to imply that he was being sent to prison as a consequence of being sued, but even in France I imagine there's a clear distinction between civil and criminal law.
Or have they brought back debtor's prison?
I quite agree with your assessment. I'm waiting for them to move "Monday Report" to Thursday.
Their handling of Don Cherry is pathetic. It's perfectly all right to make provocative statements on the CBC, so long as it comes from the left.
And their centralization of production some years ago was a massive mistake. The last thing Canadians needed was a more Toronto-centric
viewpoint. Better if they had cut costs by removing one or two layers of management.
I agree, but I wouldn't have used the words loyalty or gratitude, but integrity.
When you're working for a company, you should work for the company. You're collecting their paycheck, so behave like a professional.
If you want to set up your own company, do it on your time with your own resources.
You own them at least that.
Do people have less integrity than in past generations? I'm not sure. I think malfeasance is better publicized than before (eg, this forum).
And in Canada, "family values" has never been used much. "Canadian values" is more common, but is often used by parties on the left to suggest that if you're not socialist you're being
unpatriotic.
Where did you get this idea that trade is mostly bad? That is the precise opposite of what economists say. The most prosperous nations today are the trading nations, and the correlation is no accident.
And since when have governments been able to optimize anything? Trade protectionism is mostly used to enrich the few at the expense of the many. For most governments this represents "optimal performance".
I agree with you about the Huan. It is an example of unfair trade practise, and I do not know what the best response should be. But that still does not change the point that privatization
is absolutely essential to their current growing prosperity. And I think a floating Huan would only have slowed, not stopped, the Chinese juggernaut.
But China is not about to renationalize its economy, whether you guarantee it or not. They are enjoying too much the wealth, and yes power, that private enterprize brings.
Actually, managed trade is the ideology. It presumes that governments know best. But there is scant evidence that governments do know best. It was only when China liberalized and privatized their means of production that they began to make serious improvements in their prosperity. Central planning simply does not work.
Many governments dislike free trade because it means they give up control. It makes it difficult to reward their cronies in industry who use protectionism as a way to line their pockets at the expense of society as a whole.
In truth, I have no idea what you're talking about. I never even mentioned labour standards.
I did not mean to suggest that business should be completely unimpeded by governments, if that's what you took it as. I have no objection to reasonable laws regarding such things. I meant that impediments to international trade should be removed.
If you want to take a completely paranoid view of the corporate world, well as they say, I can't reason you out of what you never reasoned yourself into in the first place. But one can't help but try.
How on earth is controlling the flow of goods and services supposed to make the local population's income go up? It's like screwing for virginity.
Recent economic studies have found that the benefits of increasing prosperity are not limited to the richest stratas of society.
but instead tend to be wide spread.
Indeed, they have found that lower-income
people often benefit more than the rich from
improved prosperity. Your claim that only the richest 1% benefit has no basis in fact.
There are few people that think Ayn Rand's philosophy, as a whole, is a workable, and I'm certainly not one. We should be using the results of modern economics, not philosphy, to be solving our problems. And economics say that free trade is an essential component of prosperity.
In truth, I am completely at a loss to understand how poverty can be eleviated without free trade. Do you think poor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century
by themselves? They need investment and open markets for their goods,
not closed borders.
I hadn't realized Stallman had bought into all the anti-corporate B.S. so prevalent these days, of which Naomi Klein is the grand prophet.
It's particularly interesting that he's radically libertarian about things like software, but disapproves of companies from different counties doing business unimpeded by governments.
The best thing developed countries can do for under-developed countries is trade with them. Protectionism only prolongs the poverty.
Actually, waves don't follow straight paths. This can be seen in bays where a wave enters a small gap, and then spreads out into the entire bay.
The result is that a disruption along a wave front can "heal" itself. This means that the undisrupted part of the wave front slowly fills in the disrupted part. The further past the dispruption you are, the less obvious it becomes that a dispruption even took place.
As a result, islands that are far from the coast may not give much protection.
Also note that bays and inlets can serve to focus and guide the wave energy.
For example, a tsunami once reached Port Alberni on Vancouver Island.
Here's a map http://www.travelamap.com/canada/centralisland.htm.
You can't patent binary. Patents protect the commercial use of an invention.
In other words, it's perfectly fine to write, compile, link, and run software that uses algorithms covered by other people's patents.
It's only the running of the program for commercial advantage which is protected.
According to a recent Scientific American article, global warming could (1) warm up the northern hemisphere, (2) thereby increasing the flow of fresh water into the North Atlantic, (3) thereby disrupting the gulf stream, (4) thereby making the Canada, Europe, and Russia far colder than they are now. This would also dry out Africa.
Of course, the gulf stream might restart once the
north had frozen over, starting the cycle over again.
Bottom line - it's very difficult predicting the results of global warming. Climate has all sorts of cataclysmic tipping points, most of which we surely do not understand.
Countries are beginning to issue money with holograms on it, presumably to foil conterfeiters.
New Canadian $20 bills are pretty nifty looking, perhaps to celebrate the fact that they're almost worth something these days.
They've also released limited edition $20 coins with holograms of Niagara falls and icebergs and such.
I'm sure other countries are beginning to do the same.
So when are they going to produce bills with hologrammatic movies on them? Or would a 3D clip of the Mounties's Musical Ride be way too annoying?
Technically you are right. You can charge as much as you want for distrbuting open source software, at least of the GPL type. But the software will very quickly become available for free, perhaps from the very people you distributed to. In order to keep charging for it, you will have to keep your fees small and find a way to insert additional value to your distribution.
In truth, I find the idea that most software will become open source as highly improbable anyway, not based on idealogical grounds but economic ones.
It costs money to generate software, and companies have most of the money to invest. There are few times when they will want to give away (to their competitors, amongst others) what they spent so much money developing.
I'm not saying that the open source concept won't be successful - I think it will - but I suspect it will always pale in comparison to "closed" software.
Don't get an education for your dad's sake, or for the sake of your career. Get an education for your own sake. If you're enjoying yourself and learning stuff, you're on the right track.
And don't just get a major. If you can handle it, go for the honours program, and study finite automata, formal languages, analysis of algorithms, discrete mathematics (in fact, all the mathematics you can handle), artificial intelligence, and so on.
Computer science degrees should be far more than just learning how to program. Go to a technical school if that's all you want. Universities present one of the few rare opportunities in life to forget about practicalities and really change ourselves.
I pity those who view universities strictly as a path to a job. They are the seeing blind, and I try not to hire them.
Must (sic) of the GOF book, in my opinion, is overrated.
"Design Patterns" is not overrated. It opened the door for many developers who wanted to be object oriented, but couldn't quite figure out
how to exploit its power. As well, it established a language by which developers could talk to each other and exchange ideas.
Of course, modularization needs to be understood properly as a concept by anyone who wishes to break the rules and use more modern organizational techniques.
Well, you've got me there. I honestly do not know of any software engineering concept more fundamental than modularization, nor do I know of
any successful methodology that does not use it. I may have to look at the methods you've mentioned.
But so far as analogies with the human mouth, well excuse my scepticism. I do not have a billion years to evolve my software.
I have been developing software for 25 years and was well versed in structured techniques before moving on to object orientation.
I find I can write more (internally) complicated programs because of OO. OO-based design patterns, such as Model-View-Control for interactive programs, are a God send. I can pull off computational tricks that, without OO techniques, would make an incomprehensible and unmaintainable mess of the code.
And by making things more powerful internally, I can write applications that are easier to use. The Economist articles are correct on that point.
The fact that you even have it out for modularization, which predated OO by decades, makes me glad I don't have to deal with your code.
I've never understood why we could not place spent fuel at the bottom of abandoned uranium mines in the Athabascan basin in northern Saskatchewan. The ground water within these mines is already contaminated from natural uranium, it's in a remote area relatively immune from terrorist attack, and the Canadian Shield is one of the most stable (and hardest!) geological features on the planet.
Perhaps/. readers could explain the problems with this plan.
Well that was the whole point of the original post.
Keep in mind small companies do not have the resources to commission a patent search every time they work up an innovative technique,
I read about 100 patents per week on everything from stamping sheet metal to modeling data to database systems to distributed computing.
If you read 100 patents per week, you're not a little better at reading them, your're a lot better. In particular, you're familiar with the specialized language that patent writers like to use. At any rate, you might scan or peruse 100 patents, but I suggest you don't have the time to read them all. It's a rare patent that can be fully read and understood in 20 minutes.
It would be extremely unwise to infringe on someone's patent unless you have direct counsel from a confident attorney.
Sometimes one has no choice. I've read patents that, depending on how you interpret it, seem to be patenting all of geophysical processing. I could get counsel on this, but here's what they would tell me: "If you can cite public works describing the technique you wish to use, and these works predate the patent (preferably by at least a year), then go ahead". Again, small companies do not have unlimited budgets.
The point is this. Individuals and small companies do not have the resources to employ batteries of patent lawyers to ensure they are not violating IP rights, and yet the system almost demands that they do so. In truth, the most sensible strategy is to (1) don't intentionally violate a patent, and (2) don't
publically disclose your methods if you can help it.
Regarding the first point, there are many patents which have a broad range of applications. My area is geophysical processing. To do a patent search, I have to worry about patents in sonar, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, remote sensing, spectral analysis, and a dozen (if not hundreds) of others, all of which might claim applications in geophysic processing.
Regarding the second point,
the fact that the law states the a patent has to be understandable to a person skilled in the art is of little help. The fact is a large percentage are not - I know this from experience. But unless one is willing to challenge the patent on these grounds (at enormous cost and effort) one is stuck with assuming that the patent is valid and might apply to one's own work.
Regarding the third point, you are correct. Patents are assumed valid until judged otherwise. In a matter of obvious prior art, however, one is faced with a dilemna. Should one go ahead and use the method, and be ready to cite the work upon which it's based if the patent holder challenges you? Or do you deprive yourself of a method for which the patent holder deserves no monopoly on?
This last point becomes particulary relevant in a time where vague and grossly broad patents are not uncommon.
A serious problem with patents is how difficult it is to determine whether something
is covered by a patent. Here are some of the obstacles:
You have to know how to do a patent search. This is fairly mechanical,
but many don't know how to do it.
You have to know what keywords to search on. There can be many different
names for the same things, particularly between different disciplines (eg,
singular-value decomposition, principal component, Karhunen-Loeve, reduced
rank, and eigen-whatever can all mean the same thing). Even experts in the
field might not be able to think of all possible terms.
You have to know how to read patents in general. This is no small thing.
You have to be able to understand the particular patent you are reading.
Good luck. Patents can be remarkably opaque. I've read patents in areas
that I'm expert in, and been left with only a vague idea of what they were
about.
After you understand the technical aspects of the patent, you have to analyze
exactly what is and is not covered by the patent. In many cases this can
take considerable legal expertise. It may even require the services of a
patent lawyer.
Even when you have determined that an invention is covered by a patent, is
the patent valid? For example, a three-year-old patent might describe a
method that's been well known for a decade - in other words, it's prior
art. A common occurrence is that only part of the patent might be invalid.
Do you take the risk of ignoring the patent?
Has the owner of the patent been paying the patent maintenance fees? Has
there been a judgement overturning or limiting the patent?
Saying someone sucks, or is a jerk, or has their head firmly embedded up their backside, is not defamation. You have to make some kind of substantial statement of fact (we all understand that the head comment is not meant to be taken literally). These insults are too general and meaningless to qualify.
Saying someone drinks too much, or enjoys the services of prostitutes, or has their hand in the company till, now that's good ol' fashion defamation.
I can't believe you were modded flamebait for pointing out the blindingly obvious! Whatever side of the dispute one takes, illumin8's posting stunk to high heaven.
You should have been modded "wasn't born yesterday".
Slashdot Mirror
The wording seems to imply that he was being sent to prison as a consequence of being sued, but even in France I imagine there's a clear distinction between civil and criminal law. Or have they brought back debtor's prison?
Their handling of Don Cherry is pathetic. It's perfectly all right to make provocative statements on the CBC, so long as it comes from the left.
And their centralization of production some years ago was a massive mistake. The last thing Canadians needed was a more Toronto-centric viewpoint. Better if they had cut costs by removing one or two layers of management.
When you're working for a company, you should work for the company. You're collecting their paycheck, so behave like a professional.
If you want to set up your own company, do it on your time with your own resources. You own them at least that.
Do people have less integrity than in past generations? I'm not sure. I think malfeasance is better publicized than before (eg, this forum).
And in Canada, "family values" has never been used much. "Canadian values" is more common, but is often used by parties on the left to suggest that if you're not socialist you're being unpatriotic.
And since when have governments been able to optimize anything? Trade protectionism is mostly used to enrich the few at the expense of the many. For most governments this represents "optimal performance".
But China is not about to renationalize its economy, whether you guarantee it or not. They are enjoying too much the wealth, and yes power, that private enterprize brings.
Many governments dislike free trade because it means they give up control. It makes it difficult to reward their cronies in industry who use protectionism as a way to line their pockets at the expense of society as a whole.
I did not mean to suggest that business should be completely unimpeded by governments, if that's what you took it as. I have no objection to reasonable laws regarding such things. I meant that impediments to international trade should be removed.
How on earth is controlling the flow of goods and services supposed to make the local population's income go up? It's like screwing for virginity.
Recent economic studies have found that the benefits of increasing prosperity are not limited to the richest stratas of society. but instead tend to be wide spread. Indeed, they have found that lower-income people often benefit more than the rich from improved prosperity. Your claim that only the richest 1% benefit has no basis in fact.
There are few people that think Ayn Rand's philosophy, as a whole, is a workable, and I'm certainly not one. We should be using the results of modern economics, not philosphy, to be solving our problems. And economics say that free trade is an essential component of prosperity.
In truth, I am completely at a loss to understand how poverty can be eleviated without free trade. Do you think poor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century by themselves? They need investment and open markets for their goods, not closed borders.
It's particularly interesting that he's radically libertarian about things like software, but disapproves of companies from different counties doing business unimpeded by governments.
The best thing developed countries can do for under-developed countries is trade with them. Protectionism only prolongs the poverty.
The result is that a disruption along a wave front can "heal" itself. This means that the undisrupted part of the wave front slowly fills in the disrupted part. The further past the dispruption you are, the less obvious it becomes that a dispruption even took place.
As a result, islands that are far from the coast may not give much protection.
Also note that bays and inlets can serve to focus and guide the wave energy. For example, a tsunami once reached Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. Here's a map http://www.travelamap.com/canada/centralisland.htm .
Read it and weep.
In other words, it's perfectly fine to write, compile, link, and run software that uses algorithms covered by other people's patents. It's only the running of the program for commercial advantage which is protected.
I wouldn't think an american university by the name of "Southern Trinity" wouldn teach evalution.
Of course, the gulf stream might restart once the north had frozen over, starting the cycle over again.
Bottom line - it's very difficult predicting the results of global warming. Climate has all sorts of cataclysmic tipping points, most of which we surely do not understand.
They've also released limited edition $20 coins with holograms of Niagara falls and icebergs and such.
I'm sure other countries are beginning to do the same.
So when are they going to produce bills with hologrammatic movies on them? Or would a 3D clip of the Mounties's Musical Ride be way too annoying?
In truth, I find the idea that most software will become open source as highly improbable anyway, not based on idealogical grounds but economic ones.
It costs money to generate software, and companies have most of the money to invest. There are few times when they will want to give away (to their competitors, amongst others) what they spent so much money developing.
I'm not saying that the open source concept won't be successful - I think it will - but I suspect it will always pale in comparison to "closed" software.
And don't just get a major. If you can handle it, go for the honours program, and study finite automata, formal languages, analysis of algorithms, discrete mathematics (in fact, all the mathematics you can handle), artificial intelligence, and so on.
Computer science degrees should be far more than just learning how to program. Go to a technical school if that's all you want. Universities present one of the few rare opportunities in life to forget about practicalities and really change ourselves.
I pity those who view universities strictly as a path to a job. They are the seeing blind, and I try not to hire them.
Wait till the Royal Canadian Air Force gets hold of this. It'll catapult them from the middle ages into the 15'th century.
"Design Patterns" is not overrated. It opened the door for many developers who wanted to be object oriented, but couldn't quite figure out how to exploit its power. As well, it established a language by which developers could talk to each other and exchange ideas.
Of course, modularization needs to be understood properly as a concept by anyone who wishes to break the rules and use more modern organizational techniques.
Well, you've got me there. I honestly do not know of any software engineering concept more fundamental than modularization, nor do I know of any successful methodology that does not use it. I may have to look at the methods you've mentioned.
But so far as analogies with the human mouth, well excuse my scepticism. I do not have a billion years to evolve my software.
I find I can write more (internally) complicated programs because of OO. OO-based design patterns, such as Model-View-Control for interactive programs, are a God send. I can pull off computational tricks that, without OO techniques, would make an incomprehensible and unmaintainable mess of the code.
And by making things more powerful internally, I can write applications that are easier to use. The Economist articles are correct on that point.
The fact that you even have it out for modularization, which predated OO by decades, makes me glad I don't have to deal with your code.
Or maybe I do. Now there's an ugly thought.
Perhaps /. readers could explain the problems with this plan.
Well that was the whole point of the original post. Keep in mind small companies do not have the resources to commission a patent search every time they work up an innovative technique,
I read about 100 patents per week on everything from stamping sheet metal to modeling data to database systems to distributed computing.
If you read 100 patents per week, you're not a little better at reading them, your're a lot better. In particular, you're familiar with the specialized language that patent writers like to use. At any rate, you might scan or peruse 100 patents, but I suggest you don't have the time to read them all. It's a rare patent that can be fully read and understood in 20 minutes.
It would be extremely unwise to infringe on someone's patent unless you have direct counsel from a confident attorney.
Sometimes one has no choice. I've read patents that, depending on how you interpret it, seem to be patenting all of geophysical processing. I could get counsel on this, but here's what they would tell me: "If you can cite public works describing the technique you wish to use, and these works predate the patent (preferably by at least a year), then go ahead". Again, small companies do not have unlimited budgets.
The point is this. Individuals and small companies do not have the resources to employ batteries of patent lawyers to ensure they are not violating IP rights, and yet the system almost demands that they do so. In truth, the most sensible strategy is to (1) don't intentionally violate a patent, and (2) don't publically disclose your methods if you can help it.
Regarding the second point, the fact that the law states the a patent has to be understandable to a person skilled in the art is of little help. The fact is a large percentage are not - I know this from experience. But unless one is willing to challenge the patent on these grounds (at enormous cost and effort) one is stuck with assuming that the patent is valid and might apply to one's own work.
Regarding the third point, you are correct. Patents are assumed valid until judged otherwise. In a matter of obvious prior art, however, one is faced with a dilemna. Should one go ahead and use the method, and be ready to cite the work upon which it's based if the patent holder challenges you? Or do you deprive yourself of a method for which the patent holder deserves no monopoly on?
This last point becomes particulary relevant in a time where vague and grossly broad patents are not uncommon.
- You have to know how to do a patent search. This is fairly mechanical,
but many don't know how to do it.
- You have to know what keywords to search on. There can be many different
names for the same things, particularly between different disciplines (eg,
singular-value decomposition, principal component, Karhunen-Loeve, reduced
rank, and eigen-whatever can all mean the same thing). Even experts in the
field might not be able to think of all possible terms.
- You have to know how to read patents in general. This is no small thing.
- You have to be able to understand the particular patent you are reading.
Good luck. Patents can be remarkably opaque. I've read patents in areas
that I'm expert in, and been left with only a vague idea of what they were
about.
- After you understand the technical aspects of the patent, you have to analyze
exactly what is and is not covered by the patent. In many cases this can
take considerable legal expertise. It may even require the services of a
patent lawyer.
- Even when you have determined that an invention is covered by a patent, is
the patent valid? For example, a three-year-old patent might describe a
method that's been well known for a decade - in other words, it's prior
art. A common occurrence is that only part of the patent might be invalid.
Do you take the risk of ignoring the patent?
- Has the owner of the patent been paying the patent maintenance fees? Has
there been a judgement overturning or limiting the patent?
I'm sure others can add to this list.Saying someone drinks too much, or enjoys the services of prostitutes, or has their hand in the company till, now that's good ol' fashion defamation.
So which one applies to the commander?
You should have been modded "wasn't born yesterday".