TFA itself states that "a significant number of protocols date from the early 1980's," so, "here is no reason to suspect that Microsoft has any patent rights to these early protocols (such as the TCP/IP v4 core protocols). Further, in the unlikely event that applicable patents may be discovered, they would have likely expired at this point."
This is clearly, yet again, a story that is more about MSFT bashing than about anything real.
However a follow up to TFA states:
Keep in mind that even though the core protocols haven't changed that
much, actual TCP/IP deployments have drastically changed since the
early 80s. Efficient packet forwarding algorithms (which are
necessary in Gigabit networks and beyond) are certainly subject to
patents today.
Just to say that I appreciate your polite replies to my post and others - it must be frustrating trying to explain solutions to people who only care about the problem. Thanks for the insight into the real world of software patents.
For myself it just highlights why software patents are a bad idea - whatever good they may do in some limited areas, just doesn't justify this situation. Being British I just hope the EU realise this.
I think the point was that any system that cannot see the obviousness in the above steps is either broken or being run by monkeys*. I don't need to know the wording and interpretaion of the legislation to deduce that - the granting of the patent proves this from first principles.
* NB I don't have any personal knowledge of which it is, but anything that produces results like that has got to be due to either bad systems or bad people.
one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge
Do a Google search for success acclaim dichotomy and you will see it is not a new concept. Still it was a good line, and I'm sure we'll see it in someone's sig soon.
One interesting argument put forward by Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture, is that copyright law is inherently badly suited to digital material - the very nature of the material makes copying it a natural action. And when copyright law is being enforced by machines, this becomes a problem.
Consider that there are a number of legitimate reasons you might want to copy/paste material from Google Print, most of them covered by the defence of Fair Use. DRM prevents you from carrying out a perfectly legal action.
Copyright law is triggered by the act of copying, and this is how all DRM systems enforce it. However mechanically enforcing copyright law at the point of copying turns intellectual property (that has some temporary rights granted to the holder), into actual property (which is owned outright by a citizen, with the full protection of the law).
I'm British, but I'd like to point out that this distinction is explicitly set out in the US Constitution. I'm not saying DRM is illegal in any way, but I do think copyright law is broken, and DRM as it's currently conceived is a sign of this. IMO (this argument is lifted (and hopefully not too badly mangled) almost entirely from Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig).
OK Google trying to deactivate copy/paste/print, is not a major irritant - the number of justifiable actions it inhibits will be relatively small, but This Whole DRM Thing(TM;) threatens (and in the ferverent hope of many powerful people, will conquer) the general purpose computer.
Re:Tariffs make things BETTER, not worse
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
I think your plain wrong on this issue (disclaimer: I'm from the UK).
If the US can't compete in the global marketplace ('scuse buzzwords), then there really is no hope for you're country. You're king of the hill in so many ways at the moment, and yet you are willing to sacrifice the dream of global free trade simply for short-term protection of a few industries.
Not only does this handicap the US consumers of these industries (often themselves healthy industries and employers), but how do you think it makes other countries react when you won't open your markets to them? More healthy US industries are damaged since they can't service foreign markets which otherwise they could dominate on merit.
I'm not saying tariffs are always evil - the early US for example made very good use of them to protect and grow it's domestic manuacturing industries in the face of British (then the Workshop of the World) competition. But they are a way for a relatively underdeveloped country to grow its economic infrastructure, not for the dominant economic superpower to avoid moving with the times.
I would also advance a moral argument against developed countries protecting their markets from the developing world, particularly in agriculture, but even without these I simply don't think it makes sense from the US's own interests. Britain for decades protected (nationalised even) then-core industries such as steel production and coal mining. Result: these industries stood still relative to their potential foreign competitiors. When protection was removed they collapsed under their own weight (plus also costing the rest of us tax-payers huge sums and damaging the rest of the economy which should have been able to buy cheaper foreign goods).
I live in Britain, and I don't have any problems with CCTV as it stands now - if I'm worried about being mugged, CCTV is definately my friend.
However I will admit to being worried where it's going to be in a few decades - decent facial recognition software, easy cross-referencing, and the British governmental habit of giving access to systems like that to every local governmental employee - does make me wonder what we are creating here.
A habit of democracy might sum it up quite well. If your interested in the BBC, you could do worse than read John Simpson's (senior BBC foreign corespondant) autobiographies. Say what you like about him - and many people do - they give a good overview of what might be described as the BBC's public service ethos.
That link looks a little out of date (Firebird era). While I wouldn't argue that Opera was first with a lot of features, I'd be interested to know of any that you can't get on Firefox by installing the relevant extension. And lets face it, Opera does not come close to all the functionality out there in Firefox extensions.
If your saying that Opera is a more feature rich browser that default Firefox, then no arguments there - and I think it's probably something Firefox will have to address in some way to appeal to a broad market - but if you want a browser that does exactly what you want it to do, and you don't mind spending a little time getting it set up, then chose Firefox.
Yeah he'd only bullied his way into Checkoslovakia, replaced a democratic government with a dictatorship and arranged the assasination of less than a hundred of his political enemies over a period of a few days.
As far as the Jews had gone he had merely made them where badges, and had only burnt a scant handful of synagogues and denied Jews citizenship and the protection of the courts. Maybe a couple of other things, but hardly anything else at all really.
Obviously a model leader for 1938, I'm sure Time magazine are very proud.
And on any other day the numrange feature would be worth a story on its own: search for 100...200 and it finds all numbers in that range; very cool, especially if you live in a country with purely numerical Zip codes.. Damn Post Office.
One thing I like about Google is, while they put their searchers first, they also maintain very good relations with advertisers and site owners in general.
See this thread at WebMasterWorld - the Google rep is called GoogleGuy.
Why do you label the actions mentioned in the story as cheating? No rules have been circumvented. All that is being done is making use of the information which is available to everyone in a clever way.... However, the casinos don't want people to do anything other than blindly guess because it means the odds can be tipped in their favour instead of in favour of the house.
Right, because they would go out of business any other way. There isn't any deception in casino roulette; everyone knows the odds favour the house.
All your interpretation would do is stop casinos being able to offer roulette to their punters - or more likely just control the enviroment in some way to stop people gaming the system. Why bother. A casino is a place where, on average, you lose.
I'm all for supporting the little guy against all those nasty corporations/governments/black helicopters etc. but this is silly.
Have you actually studied the fall of the western Empire in any detail?
It's been a few years since I have, but my reading of it was that after the third century crisis, the Empire underwent certain fundamental changes. To vastly over simplify, these could be sumed up as 1) a large increse in the tax burden levied by the empire, 2) a change in the position of local elites; from the principle benificery of Roman rule, to suffering an ever increasing burden, and 3) allowing (admitedly under preassure from increased "barbarian" frontier threats) non-Romanised auxilleries to form cohesive units/societies within the Roman sphere of influence.
These (in the opinion of my teachers:)) combined into the transfer of power from the centre to the regions - as local elites found local "barbarians" better able to provide security/maintain their position than the incresingly weak centre. [disclaimer: I did say I oversimplified]
To look on the fall(/surviving as long as it did) of the western Empire as being primarily due to military reasons is to ignore the last 50 years of historical work on the period.
If Apple loses that means that EVERY hard drive that could potentially hold and play illegal music files - which by my calculations is all of them - is fair game for such a tax.
My reading of the article is that, in France, hard drives are already taxed; hence their case against Apple. Seems mad I admit..
Slashdot Mirror
TFA itself states that "a significant number of protocols date from the early 1980's," so, "here is no reason to suspect that Microsoft has any patent rights to these early protocols (such as the TCP/IP v4 core protocols). Further, in the unlikely event that applicable patents may be discovered, they would have likely expired at this point."
This is clearly, yet again, a story that is more about MSFT bashing than about anything real.
However a follow up to TFA states:
Keep in mind that even though the core protocols haven't changed that much, actual TCP/IP deployments have drastically changed since the early 80s. Efficient packet forwarding algorithms (which are necessary in Gigabit networks and beyond) are certainly subject to patents today.
Just to say that I appreciate your polite replies to my post and others - it must be frustrating trying to explain solutions to people who only care about the problem. Thanks for the insight into the real world of software patents.
For myself it just highlights why software patents are a bad idea - whatever good they may do in some limited areas, just doesn't justify this situation. Being British I just hope the EU realise this.
I think the point was that any system that cannot see the obviousness in the above steps is either broken or being run by monkeys*. I don't need to know the wording and interpretaion of the legislation to deduce that - the granting of the patent proves this from first principles.
* NB I don't have any personal knowledge of which it is, but anything that produces results like that has got to be due to either bad systems or bad people.
one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge
Machiavelli
Do a Google search for success acclaim dichotomy and you will see it is not a new concept. Still it was a good line, and I'm sure we'll see it in someone's sig soon.
One interesting argument put forward by Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture, is that copyright law is inherently badly suited to digital material - the very nature of the material makes copying it a natural action. And when copyright law is being enforced by machines, this becomes a problem.
;) threatens (and in the ferverent hope of many powerful people, will conquer) the general purpose computer.
Consider that there are a number of legitimate reasons you might want to copy/paste material from Google Print, most of them covered by the defence of Fair Use. DRM prevents you from carrying out a perfectly legal action.
Copyright law is triggered by the act of copying, and this is how all DRM systems enforce it. However mechanically enforcing copyright law at the point of copying turns intellectual property (that has some temporary rights granted to the holder), into actual property (which is owned outright by a citizen, with the full protection of the law).
I'm British, but I'd like to point out that this distinction is explicitly set out in the US Constitution. I'm not saying DRM is illegal in any way, but I do think copyright law is broken, and DRM as it's currently conceived is a sign of this. IMO (this argument is lifted (and hopefully not too badly mangled) almost entirely from Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig).
OK Google trying to deactivate copy/paste/print, is not a major irritant - the number of justifiable actions it inhibits will be relatively small, but This Whole DRM Thing(TM
I think your plain wrong on this issue (disclaimer: I'm from the UK).
If the US can't compete in the global marketplace ('scuse buzzwords), then there really is no hope for you're country. You're king of the hill in so many ways at the moment, and yet you are willing to sacrifice the dream of global free trade simply for short-term protection of a few industries.
Not only does this handicap the US consumers of these industries (often themselves healthy industries and employers), but how do you think it makes other countries react when you won't open your markets to them? More healthy US industries are damaged since they can't service foreign markets which otherwise they could dominate on merit.
I'm not saying tariffs are always evil - the early US for example made very good use of them to protect and grow it's domestic manuacturing industries in the face of British (then the Workshop of the World) competition. But they are a way for a relatively underdeveloped country to grow its economic infrastructure, not for the dominant economic superpower to avoid moving with the times.
I would also advance a moral argument against developed countries protecting their markets from the developing world, particularly in agriculture, but even without these I simply don't think it makes sense from the US's own interests. Britain for decades protected (nationalised even) then-core industries such as steel production and coal mining. Result: these industries stood still relative to their potential foreign competitiors. When protection was removed they collapsed under their own weight (plus also costing the rest of us tax-payers huge sums and damaging the rest of the economy which should have been able to buy cheaper foreign goods).
I live in Britain, and I don't have any problems with CCTV as it stands now - if I'm worried about being mugged, CCTV is definately my friend.
However I will admit to being worried where it's going to be in a few decades - decent facial recognition software, easy cross-referencing, and the British governmental habit of giving access to systems like that to every local governmental employee - does make me wonder what we are creating here.
A habit of democracy might sum it up quite well. If your interested in the BBC, you could do worse than read John Simpson's (senior BBC foreign corespondant) autobiographies. Say what you like about him - and many people do - they give a good overview of what might be described as the BBC's public service ethos.
I'd certainly agree mouse gestures are a great invention - personally I use the All-in-One Gestures Firefox extension, but there are others
:)
As someone else mentioned, the Tabbrowser Preferences extension will do what you want in terms of tab behaviour.
That link looks a little out of date (Firebird era). While I wouldn't argue that Opera was first with a lot of features, I'd be interested to know of any that you can't get on Firefox by installing the relevant extension. And lets face it, Opera does not come close to all the functionality out there in Firefox extensions.
If your saying that Opera is a more feature rich browser that default Firefox, then no arguments there - and I think it's probably something Firefox will have to address in some way to appeal to a broad market - but if you want a browser that does exactly what you want it to do, and you don't mind spending a little time getting it set up, then chose Firefox.
I agree, but I think the important question is how common it is.
Are there a hundred life bearing planets in our galaxy or a hundred billion? We just don't know at present.
I can't remember if this is a standard option or an extension, but you can get Firefox to prompt you before closing a window with multiple tabs
Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure its an option in the Tabbrowser Preferences extension.
Yeah he'd only bullied his way into Checkoslovakia, replaced a democratic government with a dictatorship and arranged the assasination of less than a hundred of his political enemies over a period of a few days.
As far as the Jews had gone he had merely made them where badges, and had only burnt a scant handful of synagogues and denied Jews citizenship and the protection of the courts. Maybe a couple of other things, but hardly anything else at all really.
Obviously a model leader for 1938, I'm sure Time magazine are very proud.
It's even better than that, since we don't have children we're borowing the planet from complete strangers. - Dogbert (or possibly Catbert)
And on any other day the numrange feature would be worth a story on its own: search for 100...200 and it finds all numbers in that range; very cool, especially if you live in a country with purely numerical Zip codes.. Damn Post Office.
One thing I like about Google is, while they put their searchers first, they also maintain very good relations with advertisers and site owners in general.
See this thread at WebMasterWorld - the Google rep is called GoogleGuy.
Right, because they would go out of business any other way. There isn't any deception in casino roulette; everyone knows the odds favour the house.
All your interpretation would do is stop casinos being able to offer roulette to their punters - or more likely just control the enviroment in some way to stop people gaming the system. Why bother. A casino is a place where, on average, you lose.
I'm all for supporting the little guy against all those nasty corporations/governments/black helicopters etc. but this is silly.
Have you actually studied the fall of the western Empire in any detail?
:)) combined into the transfer of power from the centre to the regions - as local elites found local "barbarians" better able to provide security/maintain their position than the incresingly weak centre. [disclaimer: I did say I oversimplified]
It's been a few years since I have, but my reading of it was that after the third century crisis, the Empire underwent certain fundamental changes. To vastly over simplify, these could be sumed up as 1) a large increse in the tax burden levied by the empire, 2) a change in the position of local elites; from the principle benificery of Roman rule, to suffering an ever increasing burden, and 3) allowing (admitedly under preassure from increased "barbarian" frontier threats) non-Romanised auxilleries to form cohesive units/societies within the Roman sphere of influence.
These (in the opinion of my teachers
To look on the fall(/surviving as long as it did) of the western Empire as being primarily due to military reasons is to ignore the last 50 years of historical work on the period.
I've heard of preparing for the last war, but this is ridiculous.
You might want to check out the new Safari Extender - it has the ability to save/restore tab groups.