Alot of change in the world has occured for the better because people have said f**k you to what is unfair and broken the law.
The music industry, after keeping to antiquated and grossly outdated technology, and finding their music sales slumping, have pointed the finger to the Grokster and ran to mummy for help.
No you piss ant RIAA idiots, you haven't loss your music sales because people are using Grokster. You are lossing sales because people have a nice shiny new DVD player and they are spending money on those new and shiny DVDs. If Grokster is so dangerous why the f**k else would DVD sales be skyrocketing when these movies are being shared on the same network as your music.
Read the f**king research paper that says that new technology drives sales in content. (Couldn't be bothered pasting a link). Or read about the fate of companies like Atari, Commodore and many others who refused to improve their technologies not until the nth hour when it was too late
I partly agree with you. Performance should be implemented from the start through good programming practice and clean development standards - Programmers should be aware of the programming practices resulting in efficient applications and programming practices that result in slow applications.
However, I disagree that this should be a primary concern because if this was the case then all development would be made in assembly. Programmers need to understand how to program continguencies into their code, so if something is not working as well as they would have liked they can replace that bottleneck in their application without disrupting the rest of the application. You can also use performance analysers to find exactly where your application is faltering and this is usually turns out to be areas you least expect. Unit tests are also invaluable because they allow you tune your application with a guarantee (almost) that nothing will break.
Consider a real estate holding company, or an another kind of investment firm. They don't create products, but they are still real businesses, because they make money off the things of value that they own.
If you are using real estate and comparing it to patents, then you must consider that only a very minor part of land and sea is privately owned in a capatalist country like USA. In a city like New York there is vast parts of the city that are public areas; the parks, subways and streets. Public property and land is essential for any society to function.
It must be the same with intellectual property. From an economic standpoint, for any value to be derived from intellectual property, then there must be a maximum gain in value through the intellectual property system, and if ideas build upon ideas then we should not protect ideas. We should be protecting the implementation of ideas and in the case of software the implementation of an idea is the code and not a vague system design.
Software patents is extending private ownership concept too far and would be equavalent to having a city without streets. We need the public space in order for the city to function and work effectively.
For that matter calling GPL and open source software red is equavelent to calling New York red because Central Park is publicly owned.
And you have been watching too many movies. There can be no comparison of violent crime compared to non-violent crime. Being punched in head is not a triviality as the movies would let you believe, it can cause a serious injury. I personally know of someone who DIED after being hit at the back of the head and let me tell you it affects much more people than a person being defrauded of a few thousand dollars. Just ask anyone how much it costs to stay in an emergency ward for a single DAY. Consider the cost of looking after a person who is disabled by a violent attack for a lifetime, that is loss of two incomes for life, what about the cost of that and it happens alot more than you expect. I know that slashdotters would give away a million dollars in a heartbeat in order to keep their intellect, so don't give me your infantile crap comparing physical violence to non-physical violence, society has evolved beyond this.
I believe this is a case that will be good for the anti-patent lobby. Patents are not meant to protect an idea but protect the know-how in getting the idea to become reality. Any software developer knows that the real substance into getting a vague software concept into reality is the code and really if patents are to be useful then they ought to contain a number of code examples that implement an idea.
Now according to this case if copyright is meant to protect a implementation of an idea and patents protect an implementation of an idea then they do the same thing. Therefore we do not need to protect software through copyrights because patents will suffice.
Now the judges involved in the case will need to really wrestle with the ideas behind copyright and patents and they will probably find themselves questioning the need for software patents when copyright offers adequate and appropriate protection for software.
The ideal outcome from this case would be the judge rulling that it is copyrights and not software patents that is most appropriate for protecting software and it should be software patents that ought to be invalidated and not copyrights. One can dream...
Actually you can "superheat" water using a microwave but the water and this superheated state is unstable. Add something to the water like coffee or sugar and the water will go wild and froth all over the place. Infact many accidents happen where people heat water in a microwave then get scoulded when they add something to the water like coffee. This site provides details
I believe it will be only a matter of time before the economic credibility of patents comes crumbling down like a castle of cards. This is the argument that will ultamately win the fight against patents.
Value of flimsy ideas comming out of the patent system $0.
Economic loss due to having substantial reduced competition, next to zero innovation and overheads in software development $mega bucks.
It just is not worth it!
Now if you consider the term "intellectual property" and the parallel to physical property, having software patents is equivalent to saying that air should be owned by a corporation (thus making you pay for air) or that I have to pay someone a license to look at the moon, or that some corporation owns a part of airspace so that you have to pay 1,000,000 corporations to travel from Australia to USA. We have private property rights essential for a functional society that believes in liberty but we have also have limits to property ownership also essential for a functional and society that believes in liberty.
If you consider the Kyoto protocol, this protocol intends to moneterise carbon emission levels not for the heck of it, but because limiting and moneterising carbon emissions has much greater economic gain than the loss and overheads involved with placing an artificial barrier to the carbon emission levels. Thus this same principle must apply to patents.
There has been a huge level of innovation in OSS software. The GPL which is tied into copyright is mainly responsible for this. It has nothing to do with patents. The way the patent system is now, with a weekend worth of brainstorming I can generate a million dollars of patents. Where is the value? Now you really need patents when you have to invest in a billion dollar labratory to invent new innovations in any field. But to give someone a monopoly for so many software generations for zero value, we are just selling out our future!
Consider the hinderence to innovation. Spend 10 million dollars per innovation or spend 0 dollars per innovation, which will you choose? If I was given the option I would choose the cheaper option. But any patent authority that is meant to encourage innovation must make every company that applies for a monopoly really EARN their monopoly, which is not happening, nor will it ever happen with software patents.
Did anyone find the half bus-half Porsche. It is on a street on the right of the photo. Must be the most fustrating game of "Where's Wally" I've ever seen.
The patent system has denegrated into patenting ideas. Ideas have always been explicitely excluded from the patent system and this is why the patent system has survived till today.
Now monopoly is the best way to describe the patent system today (I don't know who originally came up with this analogy). People start the game in a desperate land grab. As the game progresses you own enough patents to demand an income from your rivals randomly landing on your patents.
Patents can be categorised into different areas like property colours in monopoly, so if you get a whole set then let your rivals beware! If you cannot get a whole set then you have to negotiate with your rivals to make sure that both of you can benefit by a patent swap whilst everyone else can suffer.
The game continues and the number of your rivals gradually reduces and you become more and more of a monopoly whilst your rivals become bankrupt, at which time you acquire their patents and become even more of a monopoly.
When looking at intellectual property and software, there were two ways that the industry could have gone. Through patents and through copyright. Copyright was choosen because it is much cheaper (free), less beuracratic and has a longer protection period.
Copyright has served the industry well and the relative freedom and lack of beuracracy involed in copyright and has allowed a good balance of protecting an investment an organisation makes in implementing an idea at the same time as promoting competition between organisations who implement the same idea.
To some people, the amount of innovation that is occuring with regards to software is too great and too confusing so these people are comforted by the fact that the software patent system is putting intellectual property into the safe hands of the corporations. This is probably how conservative judges naturally act when overwhelmed by the rapidly changing world and the technology related cases that are put towards them. Therefore the patent system has become a mechanism to control innovation instead of encouraging innovation because of case law that conservative judges have enacted due to their fear of a rapidily changing world.
What is the 12 months period for and why don't companies wait till the 12 month period is over before patenting the solution and possibly earn millions of dollars from the patent?
The typical amount of infringment that occurs when someone uses a p2p network would probably be about the same of infringment that would occur in a unauthorised public performance at a wedding reception, birthday party, etc. I don't see music from 70+ years ago being played, so that music must be all copyrighted works.
So are we to expect the RIAA to sue a number of people who hold large parties or weddings? I'm sure that would do wonders for their music sales.
How about calling any person who holds a party of some sort a thief>?!
How about the RIAA making agreements with a university so that they can incorporate licensing costs of public broadcasts of music at university parties in to student fees?!
Microsoft is another example of a company that will never overcome its negative hacker-attracting brand name... then again maybe it can after a couple decades like IBM.;-)
For the record, patents protect inventions (such as the Flowbee, and not ideas such as gravity (Newton), metaphysics (Descartes). I imagine that since Pascal was producing adding machines, he likely would've liked protection for his invention. The Wright brothers did not get a patent for flying, or the Bernoulli Effect, they got a patent for a machine that performed these functions. As for Mozart & Beethoven, this is not patent law- it's copyright. And yes, those two were quite wealthy back in their time.
Software patents really muddies the water when it comes to what is an idea (eg Bernoulli effect) and what is an implementation that uses an idea (eg flying machine). Without software patents, Copyright is sufficient protection to protect the implementation of an idea (eg. Search advertising system implemented by Google) without protecting the idea (eg. pay-per-click advertising).
Patents are meant to provide for incentive and protection of inventions, real implementations of ideas (that work) because putting an idea into practice involves lots of persperation and not just inspiration as Thomas Edison would put it. And if ever a legal test as to the patentability of anything technological is to be used, then Thomas Edison should be the inspiration for this test when he said that inventions are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In terms of incentive, the incentive should be for those who rise above the status quo to build something that is of real benefit to society.
Patents ought to encorage corporations and individuals to rise above the status quo and innovate. However, software patents are hampering competition in an extremely innovative industry because companies are falling into the practice of using malformed software patents as a monopoly license of common sense ideas against their competitors.
Reading about the abuses of patents really makes my blood boil, but at the same time it is comforting to know that economists are starting to react against software patents.
I think that most economists believe that monopolies are bad and competition is good. I think that the more the economic viewpoint like those mentioned in the papers above start to have stronger acceptance amongst economists, then these viewpoints will start to hit the main stream press such as the Sydney Morning Herald (as a main stream newspaper in Australia). Hopefully, by this point, these viewpoints would start to influence government policy.
Geeks got on to the problem of software patents early. But the "geeky" point of view is often overlooked by governments. Economists are much more respected in government and probably can articulate an argument against software patents that probably will not be be overlooked. I'm looking from the perspective in Australia, I don't know how politics works in other parts of the world. But I hope that common sense will prevail.
And let me give you another thought to chew on: the real _waste_ is in the re-implementation. Do we need 100,000 different re-implementations of a simple e-commerce web site? Not really. One would be enough. Hundreds of billions yearly are _wasted_ on reimplementing the same things, again and again, the only difference being a new crop of bugs.
It's not a benefit to society, it's a _drain_ of useful resources. Those hundreds of billions would be better invested in either creating something new for a change, or just building a few new factories. Wasting them on reimplementing the same tired crap is _not_ a benefit.
Seams like you are advocating that we move towards a centralised communist system. I for one, believe in a capitalist system. What you call "waste of resources", I call competition.
Competition breeds innovation. Innovation breeds technological superiority. Ever wonder why "cyberterriorism" has not eventuated in America? Its because of the technological superiority of America especially in IT, which has occurred because of key court decisions that have encouraged a free market in terms of the Information Technology industry.
So if you want to support a centralised communistic system then go right ahead. But I believe in a capitalist anti-monopolistic free market system that is based on sound economic theory. Balance in intellectual property laws has lead to the western world technological superiority, this balance in intellectual property laws has undermined by the way that software patents are being used.
This will also have great benefit for foreign language programmers. Imagine Indian programmers writing code in Hindi or Chinese programmers writing code in Chinese. The coding engine needs to have something that automatically translates the comments though.
I was a bit sceptical of the Python method of blocking. Then I tried Python and really lost my tempo because I was so used to having closed braces. But after getting used to the Python way, I found it was so QUICK!
Indentation should be done with TABS and avoid spaces altogether. This will allow a user to define indents the way they like it. If they want 2 spaces then set the tab width to 2 spaces. If 4 spaces then set the tab width to 4 spaces width. 8 spaces then set the tab width to 8 spaces. I can't understand why this does not happen.
I heard one director say that audiences like to see the same movie again when they watch sequels. I didn't believe it. But now reading the comments related to the Matrix; People are saying they hated the movie because it was not like the first movie. I for one am glad that the movie is very different from the first movie. I would say that a good scifi sequel should develop the mythology of a world. A good example is the movie Aliens, which developed the mythology of the world from Alien.
Another good example is the second Matrix movie which really developed the mythology of the Matrix world and thats what kept me glued to my seat whilst I was watching the movie. The third matrix movie didn't do it for me, it really just was there to bring people into the box office, but did not really contribute to the story other than providing an ending. I would hate to have seen what borefest would have been made if the sequels of the Matrix were like the first. Diversity is the spice of life.
I think what most geeks complain about in the second movie is that the movie did not go as they imagined it. The first movie was abiguous, which meant that people could imagine the mythology of the world. The second movie is more explicit which is completely different to what people imagine and thus these people get offended when the second movie does not go the way they imagined it.
I say stop being CMGs (Closed Minded Geeks) and experience something differnt to you narrow bounds and go along for the ride. The Matrix trilogy WILL be a classic movie series remembered for decades.
IP addresses are not like phone numbers and this is a very incompetant analogy to make. Phone numbers are numbers because the phone dialing system only allows numbers to be dialled because of historical reasons. Phone numbers in modern telephone exchanges are more equivalent to DNS entries. You dial a number, this number gets converted into a physical address and this physical address is orgarnised in a way that is convenient for routing from source to destination.
To have IP number compatibility you need either an incredibly complex routing system or you need a way to convert an address that is "owned" to an address that is convenient for routing. IP over IP will probably do it. Are we in for a TCP/IP/IP future?
A couple years ago I heard a talk from an executive from one of Australia's bank (can't remember which one). She talked about how the bank spent a few million dollars on the office design for a five floor building (I think) and how successful the design was on affecting how the workers worked.
There was a couple things she did that were of note. Apart from having the obvious aspects of having a well lit and plessant work place. The building was designed to facilitate communication between the different departments of the organisation that wouldn't usually communicate. This was done by having a coffee shop in a cetral aspect of the building (in the middle of the middle floor). There was a large stair case that was centrally located which meant that people could easily move between floors. People from different departments would meet in the coffee shop (accidentally or on purpose) who would otherwise not see each other but would depend on each other. In the informal setting of the coffee shop they would talk to each other about their work which built organisational coherence and changed the adversereal nature of the departments within the organisation.
The building also had an abundance of informal meeting rooms (some without chairs or a table) and some formal meeting rooms, which meant that people could meet easily and communicate more readily.
In terms of having an office design, I think it is most important to facilitate communication. The organisation will need to work as a whole which is much greater than the sum of its parts. Ideas need to evolve by diverse groups of people talking to each other. Informal meeting rooms automatically lower bariers and tention between people which helps in having successful meetings. The office needs to resist peoples ability to build walls around themselves and fortify themselves beuracratically.
It is relatively early days in terms of Wavelet and Fractal technology. Looking at JPEG DCT vs JPEG2000 Wavelets vs Fractals... What makes an image look bad in terms of image quality is the ability of our brain to pick out unnatural patterns from an image. The simplest way to represent an image with less information is to reduce the number of pixels that form the image. Problem is that if we try to do this too much our brain picks up little squares that form the image. What happened with JPEG was that instead of using unnatural looking squares, images were broken down into natural looking sine waves, which when used in an image looked quite convincing. So when you have lots of data to use for image storage, say compression levels of 1:10, there is not much difference between Wavelets, Fractals, DCT and the original image. But when you start to go to compression levels of 1:50 and beyond JPEG image quality falls off because you loose the high frequency components of the image that give the image fidelity. But wavelet patterns are much more complicated and therefore harder for our brain to predict so images based on this complicated patterns look much better. Fractals could possibly have infinite complexity and possibly represent just about any image with very little data. But its like decryption where finding the right key is like finding a needle in a thousand-million haystacks. Fractal compression has the most potential but currently fractal compression works with very simplified mathematical models. I predict that we are starting to hit a technological barrier in terms of DCT and video, so we are starting to move to exploiting wavelets. After we start to exploit the limits of wavelets then fractals will be the answer. Actually I read a paper that showed a mathematical link between wavelets and fractals. The paper was a bit beyond me, but from what I understood wavelets have an interative nature that fractals also have, and the paper somehow demonstrated this mathematically.
Slashdot Mirror
Balmer is great at making presentations.
Alot of change in the world has occured for the better because people have said f**k you to what is unfair and broken the law.
The music industry, after keeping to antiquated and grossly outdated technology, and finding their music sales slumping, have pointed the finger to the Grokster and ran to mummy for help.
No you piss ant RIAA idiots, you haven't loss your music sales because people are using Grokster. You are lossing sales because people have a nice shiny new DVD player and they are spending money on those new and shiny DVDs. If Grokster is so dangerous why the f**k else would DVD sales be skyrocketing when these movies are being shared on the same network as your music.
Read the f**king research paper that says that new technology drives sales in content. (Couldn't be bothered pasting a link). Or read about the fate of companies like Atari, Commodore and many others who refused to improve their technologies not until the nth hour when it was too late
WAHHH, MUMMY THEY ARE NOT PLAYING FAIR! MOMMY!
I partly agree with you. Performance should be implemented from the start through good programming practice and clean development standards - Programmers should be aware of the programming practices resulting in efficient applications and programming practices that result in slow applications.
However, I disagree that this should be a primary concern because if this was the case then all development would be made in assembly. Programmers need to understand how to program continguencies into their code, so if something is not working as well as they would have liked they can replace that bottleneck in their application without disrupting the rest of the application. You can also use performance analysers to find exactly where your application is faltering and this is usually turns out to be areas you least expect. Unit tests are also invaluable because they allow you tune your application with a guarantee (almost) that nothing will break.
Consider a real estate holding company, or an another kind of investment firm. They don't create products, but they are still real businesses, because they make money off the things of value that they own.
If you are using real estate and comparing it to patents, then you must consider that only a very minor part of land and sea is privately owned in a capatalist country like USA. In a city like New York there is vast parts of the city that are public areas; the parks, subways and streets. Public property and land is essential for any society to function.
It must be the same with intellectual property. From an economic standpoint, for any value to be derived from intellectual property, then there must be a maximum gain in value through the intellectual property system, and if ideas build upon ideas then we should not protect ideas. We should be protecting the implementation of ideas and in the case of software the implementation of an idea is the code and not a vague system design.
Software patents is extending private ownership concept too far and would be equavalent to having a city without streets. We need the public space in order for the city to function and work effectively.
For that matter calling GPL and open source software red is equavelent to calling New York red because Central Park is publicly owned.
And you have been watching too many movies. There can be no comparison of violent crime compared to non-violent crime. Being punched in head is not a triviality as the movies would let you believe, it can cause a serious injury. I personally know of someone who DIED after being hit at the back of the head and let me tell you it affects much more people than a person being defrauded of a few thousand dollars. Just ask anyone how much it costs to stay in an emergency ward for a single DAY. Consider the cost of looking after a person who is disabled by a violent attack for a lifetime, that is loss of two incomes for life, what about the cost of that and it happens alot more than you expect. I know that slashdotters would give away a million dollars in a heartbeat in order to keep their intellect, so don't give me your infantile crap comparing physical violence to non-physical violence, society has evolved beyond this.
I believe this is a case that will be good for the anti-patent lobby. Patents are not meant to protect an idea but protect the know-how in getting the idea to become reality. Any software developer knows that the real substance into getting a vague software concept into reality is the code and really if patents are to be useful then they ought to contain a number of code examples that implement an idea.
Now according to this case if copyright is meant to protect a implementation of an idea and patents protect an implementation of an idea then they do the same thing. Therefore we do not need to protect software through copyrights because patents will suffice.
Now the judges involved in the case will need to really wrestle with the ideas behind copyright and patents and they will probably find themselves questioning the need for software patents when copyright offers adequate and appropriate protection for software.
The ideal outcome from this case would be the judge rulling that it is copyrights and not software patents that is most appropriate for protecting software and it should be software patents that ought to be invalidated and not copyrights. One can dream...
Actually you can "superheat" water using a microwave but the water and this superheated state is unstable. Add something to the water like coffee or sugar and the water will go wild and froth all over the place. Infact many accidents happen where people heat water in a microwave then get scoulded when they add something to the water like coffee. This site provides details
Recently there has been news that says that Euro online sales will be greater that US sales, if I remember correctly, over christmas.
I believe it will be only a matter of time before the economic credibility of patents comes crumbling down like a castle of cards. This is the argument that will ultamately win the fight against patents.
Value of flimsy ideas comming out of the patent system $0.
Economic loss due to having substantial reduced competition, next to zero innovation and overheads in software development $mega bucks.
It just is not worth it!
Now if you consider the term "intellectual property" and the parallel to physical property, having software patents is equivalent to saying that air should be owned by a corporation (thus making you pay for air) or that I have to pay someone a license to look at the moon, or that some corporation owns a part of airspace so that you have to pay 1,000,000 corporations to travel from Australia to USA. We have private property rights essential for a functional society that believes in liberty but we have also have limits to property ownership also essential for a functional and society that believes in liberty.
If you consider the Kyoto protocol, this protocol intends to moneterise carbon emission levels not for the heck of it, but because limiting and moneterising carbon emissions has much greater economic gain than the loss and overheads involved with placing an artificial barrier to the carbon emission levels. Thus this same principle must apply to patents.
There has been a huge level of innovation in OSS software. The GPL which is tied into copyright is mainly responsible for this. It has nothing to do with patents. The way the patent system is now, with a weekend worth of brainstorming I can generate a million dollars of patents. Where is the value? Now you really need patents when you have to invest in a billion dollar labratory to invent new innovations in any field. But to give someone a monopoly for so many software generations for zero value, we are just selling out our future!
Consider the hinderence to innovation. Spend 10 million dollars per innovation or spend 0 dollars per innovation, which will you choose? If I was given the option I would choose the cheaper option. But any patent authority that is meant to encourage innovation must make every company that applies for a monopoly really EARN their monopoly, which is not happening, nor will it ever happen with software patents.
Did anyone find the half bus-half Porsche. It is on a street on the right of the photo. Must be the most fustrating game of "Where's Wally" I've ever seen.
Here, here... If only I had the mod points.
The patent system has denegrated into patenting ideas. Ideas have always been explicitely excluded from the patent system and this is why the patent system has survived till today.
Now monopoly is the best way to describe the patent system today (I don't know who originally came up with this analogy). People start the game in a desperate land grab. As the game progresses you own enough patents to demand an income from your rivals randomly landing on your patents.
Patents can be categorised into different areas like property colours in monopoly, so if you get a whole set then let your rivals beware! If you cannot get a whole set then you have to negotiate with your rivals to make sure that both of you can benefit by a patent swap whilst everyone else can suffer.
The game continues and the number of your rivals gradually reduces and you become more and more of a monopoly whilst your rivals become bankrupt, at which time you acquire their patents and become even more of a monopoly.
When looking at intellectual property and software, there were two ways that the industry could have gone. Through patents and through copyright. Copyright was choosen because it is much cheaper (free), less beuracratic and has a longer protection period.
Copyright has served the industry well and the relative freedom and lack of beuracracy involed in copyright and has allowed a good balance of protecting an investment an organisation makes in implementing an idea at the same time as promoting competition between organisations who implement the same idea.
To some people, the amount of innovation that is occuring with regards to software is too great and too confusing so these people are comforted by the fact that the software patent system is putting intellectual property into the safe hands of the corporations. This is probably how conservative judges naturally act when overwhelmed by the rapidly changing world and the technology related cases that are put towards them. Therefore the patent system has become a mechanism to control innovation instead of encouraging innovation because of case law that conservative judges have enacted due to their fear of a rapidily changing world.
What is the 12 months period for and why don't companies wait till the 12 month period is over before patenting the solution and possibly earn millions of dollars from the patent?
The typical amount of infringment that occurs when someone uses a p2p network would probably be about the same of infringment that would occur in a unauthorised public performance at a wedding reception, birthday party, etc. I don't see music from 70+ years ago being played, so that music must be all copyrighted works.
So are we to expect the RIAA to sue a number of people who hold large parties or weddings? I'm sure that would do wonders for their music sales.
How about calling any person who holds a party of some sort a thief>?!
How about the RIAA making agreements with a university so that they can incorporate licensing costs of public broadcasts of music at university parties in to student fees?!Microsoft is another example of a company that will never overcome its negative hacker-attracting brand name... then again maybe it can after a couple decades like IBM. ;-)
For the record, patents protect inventions (such as the Flowbee, and not ideas such as gravity (Newton), metaphysics (Descartes). I imagine that since Pascal was producing adding machines, he likely would've liked protection for his invention. The Wright brothers did not get a patent for flying, or the Bernoulli Effect, they got a patent for a machine that performed these functions. As for Mozart & Beethoven, this is not patent law- it's copyright. And yes, those two were quite wealthy back in their time.
Software patents really muddies the water when it comes to what is an idea (eg Bernoulli effect) and what is an implementation that uses an idea (eg flying machine). Without software patents, Copyright is sufficient protection to protect the implementation of an idea (eg. Search advertising system implemented by Google) without protecting the idea (eg. pay-per-click advertising).
Patents are meant to provide for incentive and protection of inventions, real implementations of ideas (that work) because putting an idea into practice involves lots of persperation and not just inspiration as Thomas Edison would put it. And if ever a legal test as to the patentability of anything technological is to be used, then Thomas Edison should be the inspiration for this test when he said that inventions are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In terms of incentive, the incentive should be for those who rise above the status quo to build something that is of real benefit to society.
Patents ought to encorage corporations and individuals to rise above the status quo and innovate. However, software patents are hampering competition in an extremely innovative industry because companies are falling into the practice of using malformed software patents as a monopoly license of common sense ideas against their competitors.
Reading about the abuses of patents really makes my blood boil, but at the same time it is comforting to know that economists are starting to react against software patents.
The economic papers (and probably many others) " Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation" and " An Empirical Look at Software Patents" articulate in economic terms why software patents don't work.
I think that most economists believe that monopolies are bad and competition is good. I think that the more the economic viewpoint like those mentioned in the papers above start to have stronger acceptance amongst economists, then these viewpoints will start to hit the main stream press such as the Sydney Morning Herald (as a main stream newspaper in Australia). Hopefully, by this point, these viewpoints would start to influence government policy.
Geeks got on to the problem of software patents early. But the "geeky" point of view is often overlooked by governments. Economists are much more respected in government and probably can articulate an argument against software patents that probably will not be be overlooked. I'm looking from the perspective in Australia, I don't know how politics works in other parts of the world. But I hope that common sense will prevail.
And let me give you another thought to chew on: the real _waste_ is in the re-implementation. Do we need 100,000 different re-implementations of a simple e-commerce web site? Not really. One would be enough. Hundreds of billions yearly are _wasted_ on reimplementing the same things, again and again, the only difference being a new crop of bugs.
It's not a benefit to society, it's a _drain_ of useful resources. Those hundreds of billions would be better invested in either creating something new for a change, or just building a few new factories. Wasting them on reimplementing the same tired crap is _not_ a benefit.
Seams like you are advocating that we move towards a centralised communist system. I for one, believe in a capitalist system. What you call "waste of resources", I call competition. Competition breeds innovation. Innovation breeds technological superiority. Ever wonder why "cyberterriorism" has not eventuated in America? Its because of the technological superiority of America especially in IT, which has occurred because of key court decisions that have encouraged a free market in terms of the Information Technology industry.
So if you want to support a centralised communistic system then go right ahead. But I believe in a capitalist anti-monopolistic free market system that is based on sound economic theory. Balance in intellectual property laws has lead to the western world technological superiority, this balance in intellectual property laws has undermined by the way that software patents are being used.
This will also have great benefit for foreign language programmers. Imagine Indian programmers writing code in Hindi or Chinese programmers writing code in Chinese. The coding engine needs to have something that automatically translates the comments though.
I was a bit sceptical of the Python method of blocking. Then I tried Python and really lost my tempo because I was so used to having closed braces. But after getting used to the Python way, I found it was so QUICK!
Indentation should be done with TABS and avoid spaces altogether. This will allow a user to define indents the way they like it. If they want 2 spaces then set the tab width to 2 spaces. If 4 spaces then set the tab width to 4 spaces width. 8 spaces then set the tab width to 8 spaces. I can't understand why this does not happen.
I heard one director say that audiences like to see the same movie again when they watch sequels. I didn't believe it. But now reading the comments related to the Matrix; People are saying they hated the movie because it was not like the first movie. I for one am glad that the movie is very different from the first movie. I would say that a good scifi sequel should develop the mythology of a world. A good example is the movie Aliens, which developed the mythology of the world from Alien.
Another good example is the second Matrix movie which really developed the mythology of the Matrix world and thats what kept me glued to my seat whilst I was watching the movie. The third matrix movie didn't do it for me, it really just was there to bring people into the box office, but did not really contribute to the story other than providing an ending. I would hate to have seen what borefest would have been made if the sequels of the Matrix were like the first. Diversity is the spice of life.
I think what most geeks complain about in the second movie is that the movie did not go as they imagined it. The first movie was abiguous, which meant that people could imagine the mythology of the world. The second movie is more explicit which is completely different to what people imagine and thus these people get offended when the second movie does not go the way they imagined it.
I say stop being CMGs (Closed Minded Geeks) and experience something differnt to you narrow bounds and go along for the ride. The Matrix trilogy WILL be a classic movie series remembered for decades.
IP addresses are not like phone numbers and this is a very incompetant analogy to make. Phone numbers are numbers because the phone dialing system only allows numbers to be dialled because of historical reasons. Phone numbers in modern telephone exchanges are more equivalent to DNS entries. You dial a number, this number gets converted into a physical address and this physical address is orgarnised in a way that is convenient for routing from source to destination.
To have IP number compatibility you need either an incredibly complex routing system or you need a way to convert an address that is "owned" to an address that is convenient for routing. IP over IP will probably do it. Are we in for a TCP/IP/IP future?
A couple years ago I heard a talk from an executive from one of Australia's bank (can't remember which one). She talked about how the bank spent a few million dollars on the office design for a five floor building (I think) and how successful the design was on affecting how the workers worked.
There was a couple things she did that were of note. Apart from having the obvious aspects of having a well lit and plessant work place. The building was designed to facilitate communication between the different departments of the organisation that wouldn't usually communicate. This was done by having a coffee shop in a cetral aspect of the building (in the middle of the middle floor). There was a large stair case that was centrally located which meant that people could easily move between floors. People from different departments would meet in the coffee shop (accidentally or on purpose) who would otherwise not see each other but would depend on each other. In the informal setting of the coffee shop they would talk to each other about their work which built organisational coherence and changed the adversereal nature of the departments within the organisation. The building also had an abundance of informal meeting rooms (some without chairs or a table) and some formal meeting rooms, which meant that people could meet easily and communicate more readily.
In terms of having an office design, I think it is most important to facilitate communication. The organisation will need to work as a whole which is much greater than the sum of its parts. Ideas need to evolve by diverse groups of people talking to each other. Informal meeting rooms automatically lower bariers and tention between people which helps in having successful meetings. The office needs to resist peoples ability to build walls around themselves and fortify themselves beuracratically.
Good Luck!It is relatively early days in terms of Wavelet and Fractal technology. Looking at JPEG DCT vs JPEG2000 Wavelets vs Fractals... What makes an image look bad in terms of image quality is the ability of our brain to pick out unnatural patterns from an image. The simplest way to represent an image with less information is to reduce the number of pixels that form the image. Problem is that if we try to do this too much our brain picks up little squares that form the image. What happened with JPEG was that instead of using unnatural looking squares, images were broken down into natural looking sine waves, which when used in an image looked quite convincing. So when you have lots of data to use for image storage, say compression levels of 1:10, there is not much difference between Wavelets, Fractals, DCT and the original image. But when you start to go to compression levels of 1:50 and beyond JPEG image quality falls off because you loose the high frequency components of the image that give the image fidelity. But wavelet patterns are much more complicated and therefore harder for our brain to predict so images based on this complicated patterns look much better. Fractals could possibly have infinite complexity and possibly represent just about any image with very little data. But its like decryption where finding the right key is like finding a needle in a thousand-million haystacks. Fractal compression has the most potential but currently fractal compression works with very simplified mathematical models. I predict that we are starting to hit a technological barrier in terms of DCT and video, so we are starting to move to exploiting wavelets. After we start to exploit the limits of wavelets then fractals will be the answer. Actually I read a paper that showed a mathematical link between wavelets and fractals. The paper was a bit beyond me, but from what I understood wavelets have an interative nature that fractals also have, and the paper somehow demonstrated this mathematically.