If a barrier is undetectable and people can pass through it at will, can it really be said to exist?
If inalienable (and, by implication, universal) rights can't be consistently defined (compare the moral codes of any 2 doctrines of your choice) and a lot of people don't respect them anyway, can they really be said to be universal?
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound or does it just vibrate the air?
Thanks for a great discussion. I shall proceed with a list of my mistakes - thanks for drawing my attention to them.
I said: "I will show courtesy to you in the expectation that it'll be reciprocated, yes." Just to confirm, I wasn't being rude, I was just translating what you said to avoid starting my argument against rights with an implicit appeal to them.
My working definition of inalienable is still incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred
My bad - I'd got my definitions confused.
If you cut out my tongue, you still don't have my willful obedience. I still have a free nature. You have failed to take that away.
Yeah, that was a bit of a sophistry. I think the point that I was trying to make is that free will is a very fuzzily-defined concept. The very concept that will can exist independent of body presupposes a divide between them, which isn't always the case (at best it's a simplification). A trivial example: if I hit your knee, triggering the kick reflex, have I removed your free nature? It was your nervous system that triggered the action after all, and that nervous system forms the lowest level of your mind.
I'd also like to point out that sufficient torture is able to warp the mind of even the strongest individual - read 1984 for a description of the effects. Given the fact that, with sufficient effort, it is possible to subjugate the will of another, can we really say that our free natures can't be taken away? That would seem to be at best a rather fine distinction.
Moving on to the key points:
I earlier stated that I was well aware of regimes where such rights are not respected. The rights themselves continue to exist.
How do we know that the rights still exist if they fail to manifest themselves in any way? How do we know that they're not just a happy illusion that enables us to get along with each other? Continuing in the same thread...
If inalienable rights are a lie, then they would not be a good thing -- at least in the sense that they would encourage an ignorant and delusional population.
They would also be good in the sense that they would foster a stable society. Without some perception that other people Have Rights, and just as importantly that other people have the same perception, we'd be a nation of sociopaths and civilisation would die in a sea of paranoia. Personally I prefer a white lie to constant fear. None of this, however, implies that rights are anything more than convenient lies.
On a lighter note, regards the ignorant and delusional population: have you taken a good look at the world lately?:P
If I can ascribe to one illusion, what else can I accept as truth that is false? Where does it stop?
My thoughts are as follows (quite lengthy - skip it if it gets boring):
We may accept the input of our senses as being an accurate reflection of the forces acting on our bodies unless we have specific reason to think otherwise (hallucinogenic drugs for example). It may not be true (we could be in the Matrix), but if we don't make this assumption then there's no point continuing anyway, so we might as well give the world as we perceive it the benefit of the doubt.
We can, on average, give information relayed to us by the scientific community the benefit of the doubt. This is because it is independently verifiable, even by ourselves if we wish to go to that much trouble. It's noticeable on slashdot that people are instantly taken more seriously if they provide links to references for their argument. Even if no-one follows the argument, the fact that it's possible to check whether the reference is valid or whether it's just another goatse link renders the reference trustable.
We can't rely on things we're told that aren't independently verifiable. As an example of the distinction: Religious Studies classes are trustable since we can actually go check what
Cherry-picking the key points (I'll try not to take them out of context):
I respect your right to opine as you do, and I hope you will find it in you to respect mine to disagree.
I will show courtesy to you in the expectation that it'll be reciprocated, yes.
Nothing is inalienable according to [your] way of thinking.
That would be broadly accurate and fits in with, for example, the fact that one of the largest nations on earth, China, doesn't give a damn about human rights. As far as I can tell, the concept of inalienable rights is a very Western, specifically American, viewpoint.
We are all powerless slaves that have to go begging for privileges from the master.
As Mao said, power emanates from the barrel of a gun. In America the citizenry have a lot of guns. As a Brit, and thus a subject of a monarchy with a long and bloody past, I'm aware that pretty much the only thing that stops the government oppressing me is the fact that it would be more trouble than it's worth. I've seen Americans trying to adapt to this attitude; it's not pretty.
Authoritarianism depends on this kind of thinking.
I never said inalienable rights weren't a damn useful illusion to maintain. The fact that it's a good idea to act like they exist doesn't mean that they do.
You can outlaw something like speaking freely, but you cannot take away man's natural ability to do so.
You can cut out his tongue or kill him. This has generally proved to be an extremely effective approach in the absence of sign language and/or necromancy. I'd also note that any argument that applies to the ability to speak freely also applies to the ability to hit your neighbour over the head with a mallet, which I doubt you would class as an inalienable right.
Even within the most repressive of regimes there has typically existed a very active underground where the true nature of man is able to continue despite terrible opposition.
Yeah, Britain has one of those. It's called the IRA and, as far as I can tell, the part of man's true nature that it expresses is his enjoyment of blowing up other men. And women and, for the hat trick, children and puppies. Again, if these rights you speak of are so inalienable, how come they're not easily differentiable, except by pointing, from the mallet example I mentioned earlier?
Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done.
I'd suggest that, if what the master intended was for you to be an example pour encourager les autres, he has in fact succeeded.
On a side note: it's trivial to show that there are no inalienable rights - show me a right and I'll give you an example of when and where it's been alienated. What I think you mean is "rights that shouldn't be alienated". This is an entirely relative concept, depending on who's talking. In the absence of a Creator god, there is no intrinsic moral direction to the universe, so there's no easy way to decide whose "should" is correct. Hence there are no universal inalienable rights.
No matter what steps are taken, my free will cannot be taken from me. Freedom is inherent in my very nature. It is inalienable. It is a right.
If this were the case I'd have killed my pesky little sister long ago:P After all, my free will cannot be taken from me, right?
I tend to favour the evolutionary process as creator. The problem with this is that then right and wrong can only be defined in terms of what is good or bad for a society (culture of violence bad, doing your job good, that sort of thing). Rights are just those privileges that we've managed to wrest en masse from whatever authorities have set themselves up, and inalienable rights are just those that we're really keen not to let go of.
Unless you're a strong believer in Plato's forms, these concepts don't have any existence in and of themselves any more than the hypothetical pages of work that I should be producing now do.
This would seem to be the same story covered here. It's been repackaged a lot in its passage round the news outlets, so I'm not surprised Zonk didn't spot it.
I was carefully using "country" in the broadest possible sense. In America, your rights are determined less by the government and more by a hodgepodge of history, mob rule and corporate interests. The principle that rights are an artefact of the legal system still applies. I felt it was important to make that point as the parent poster had apparently not grasped this concept.
Re:Can Microsoft even legally sell Windows in Cuba
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Cuba Switching to Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Unfortunately, that's bollocks. If Cuban law states that "you need not ask permission or pay anything before using software written by someone else" then it is no longer up to Microsoft. Not in Cuba anyway.
Remember, rights are not universal; they're granted at the discretion of the country in question, however much we might wish it otherwise.
The problem with patents is that any areas they're applied to will tend to gravitate towards a natural lifecycle identical to the patent lifetime (17 years, iirc).
In industries such as, say, grand piano making, where the natural product lifecycle is very long, patents give an effectively zero window of opportunity - they just don't last long enough to be worth getting. It could be argued that in this case patents don't put enough stress on the industry.
In industries such as bioresearch, where creating new products is very costly, the tendency is to just produce knock-offs. As a result the natural product lifespan is probably in the region of 30 years or so (after that the drugs will cease to be effective or will have been surpassed by academically-researched alternatives). In these industries patents give a medium-length (relatively speaking) window of opportunity for getting ahead of one's competitors, thus encouraging innovation. The stress that this puts on the industry speeds the average product lifecycle up to approach the lifetime of the patent.
In the software industry, the average product lifecycle lasts for somewhere between 1 and 7 years - call it 3 years. The lifetime of a software patent is almost 6 times that. In such a fast-moving industry, this is an effectively infinite window of opportunity, resulting in companies theoretically being able to get a big heap of patents then sit back and relax (or fail to get patents then die). The stress that patents put on the software industry is thus misdirected towards lengthening rather than shortening the product lifecycle, and just results in lots of protesters rather than any actual progress.
I would accept software patents if they were of duration = 2 or 3 years, but then they'd be so short that, given the speed of the patent system and legal system, they wouldn't be worth filing for. Anything longer than that and they can only be harmful, with progress proceeding despite patents rather than because of them.
Seems likely to me that there would be a discrepancy between what should be public and what is public. If private information comes out into public, does that make it ethically right that it has done so?
1) Patents are written in legalese, not in english. Unless you are a patent lawyer, I don't think you can really judge them. That's why you see stories like Microsoft patenting the double-click or Apple patenting alpha compositing.
The patent system definitely shouldn't be that way, and I have trouble believing it is intended to be that way. If this were the case then it would be impossible for any small inventor to check that they weren't infringing a given patent without hiring an expensive lawyer.
2) This is not a patent for autocomplete. It is much more specific.
From what I can tell through a 5-minute read of the patent document, it's a patent for a combination of "hunt for email addresses everywhere we can think of" and "autocomplete". Basically it covers a broadening of existing techniques, with a couple of fairly nice ideas for GUIs (which aren't patentable, of course). This isn't that much more innovative. I could have misread it, but if there's any truly innovative stuff in their it's quite well hidden.
3) We did innovate in this space in MacOE.
That may be the case. However, the patent in question probably doesn't count as innovation.
4) Patents are a good defensive strategy for any company. We get sued all the time. Witness the current Eolas lawsuit.
(Surely the best way to deal with that situation would be to lobby for patent reform rather than encouraging software patents in Europe?) As a rule I'll accept this as a reason for patenting dodgy stuff if and only if the filer gives written assurance that they will never use their patents against anyone who isn't suing them.
5) I think there are a lot of things that are lame about the patent system.
No kidding and I'm sorry that slashdot ruined your good mood at getting your first patent - first anything is always fun.
I don't know why so many people here, quite a lot of which seem to be anti-patent in general, became pro-patent in this case
I think there's just this big mental thought bubble hanging over slashdot with the words "Oh, so now you're worried about damn stupid patents?" written in it.
I have no doubt that the majority of slashdotters, if given school admin jobs, would have more sympathy for the hackers than the current crop of sysadmins. How would you implement the value system that the parent described us as holding to? How would you organise things if you were in charge so that a) students could learn advanced computer use within the system, b) accountability could be imposed on students and c) normal use would not be impaired?
The best way I can think of is a three-tier approach. Tier one is a set of stand-alone computers that anyone can use regardless of whether they're an evil brat or not. No connection to any other computers and no internet connection, so damage done from playing silly buggers would be minimised. These computers would be monitored to the maximum extent physically and legally possible.
Tier two would be most of the computers in the school - standard desktops, connected to the internet via a firewall etc etc. Anyone playing silly buggers on these would get kicked off and only allowed to use the stand-alone machines (with the result that they'd have to transfer any files via floppy disks and so on). These computers would be monitored to make sure no-one was playing major silly buggers and no viruses were present etc, but would be mostly left alone.
Tier three would be a stand-alone network, with a variety of computers running a variety of different operating systems. Anyone with an interest in computers could come and try stuff out here, and anything would go, with the caveat that, if you break it, you have to fix it. Little or no monitoring required, since any damage done would be localised to this separate network, and silly buggers could thus be permitted to reign unchecked.
The advantages of this system would be that a) you'd have a place for all the teenage hackers to work off their hormones, b) you'd have a disciplinary system (play silly buggers on tier 2 and you get dropped to tier 1) and c) you'd have a cadre of well-trained young security experts who you could supervise in auditing the tier 2 network.
Does anyone have suggestions for improvements or see any problems with this (apart from cost)?
In some circumstances you do have to report these things. For example, in my old secondary school, a friend and I discovered that the admin server - with everyone's sensitive details on it - was running a version of IIS with the unicode directory traversal bug. We told the computer staff and they did fuck-all about it - apparently the admin server wasn't their turf and they weren't willing to be helpful to their fellow man.
In the end, the situation was resolved by my friend and I wandering round to the admin office and having a chat with them which led to us being let in to disable IIS on the server. However, if that hadn't been an option, we'd have been faced with a choice: 1) we could have sat back and waited until someone more malicious than ourselves noticed the vulnerability and played silly buggers or 2) we could have broken into the server, acquired some evidence of the hack and gone to visit the headmaster.
I like to think I'm a fairly moral person, and I think the latter is more "good samaritan"ish, as well as being healthier for my personal data, so that's what I would probably have chosen. The alternative would have been to sit and wait for the day that I pissed off the wrong person and my attendance record suddenly showed that I hadn't been in all year. However, if we *had* taken option 2, we could well have ended up in the same position the grandparent did. Talk about your rock and hard place...
Scientists use words like chess masters use pawns; saying something's "just a theory" tends to have roughly the same effect on their mental state as kicking the board over.
Thanks for the link - I honestly hadn't come across that snippet before. That does add a lot of credence to SCO's claims.
Currently the evidence in the case of Sys-con seems to be a little less convincing - I've seen 5 IPs running "wget -r/" cited as the supposed DoS attack (enough to swamp a small host, but certainly not enough to be construed as definitely malicious).
As far as I can tell, this system is no more resistant than any other to the simple expedient of piping the dvd output to a file not the monitor/speakers.
Additionally, every extra layer of difficulty they add to the usage of DVDs just encourages more piracy. I can't play DVD x on my computer? Fine, I'll just go on the 'net, someone there will have it, and I won't even have to feel guilty.
I honestly can't see how the MPAA can continue to exist in its current form for much longer.
It was a joke. I fully understand that every technology has beneficial effects, including RFID. I understand that the majority of privacy issues are overstated, although things like chipped passports still worry me. I am well aware how useful RFID can be in a number of situations, such as the one you described.
I understand that DRM, while being problematic for privacy advocates and those of us who like complete control over our own computers, is, when properly applied, one plausible way of encouraging more people to acquire non-infringing copies of media. I don't like it cos I fit into both the above categories but, as long as they don't figure out how to stop me re-encoding media in a decent format, I can live with their attempts.
I'm not keen on the RIAA or MPAA cos, viewed as monolithic organisations, they're bothbastards. However, I understand that it's naive to label any one organisation or individual as completely good or evil - for example, a friend of mine works for Microsoft, and another is getting his education courtesy of IBM.
None of this stops me seeing the article title, having a sudden image of many millions of geeks having spontaneous heart-attacks, ruining my keyboard with the proverbial Morning Dew and deciding to share that little frisson of amusement with the rest of Slashdot, in the hope of cheering people up. My investments in the keyboard-manufacturing industry have nothing to do with it at all.
Neither, I assume, does the guy's mother. It's interesting that the MPAA and co. only stopped screaming about how morally wrong the concept of home recording was when it became clear that it was a major cash cow.
Since discovering that particular bit of history (I'm too young to remember it personally) I tend to just play things by "no harm, no foul" rules. In this case, that would mean downloading Dr Who, since I was never going to watch it with adverts in place anyway (I'm at uni without a telly, so it's being recorded at home and parents rarely make a point of taping the adverts).
"No harm no foul" is legally unenforceable but imo is very nearly as moral and a damn sight less confusing to live by.
I know what you mean. I'm not sure that it's necessarily a bad thing - I subscribe to the "rising water" model of open source which suggests that closed source gets there first but open source gets there better.
I doubt there will be any truly unexpected projects produced for linux until after it's become the favoured operating system - open source tends to favour done deals over innovation, so it's helpful to have someone from the closed source world blaze the trail for us. I do think that day will come though - as the PC market matures, getting there better will become increasingly more important than getting there first. Then the battle will move to userspace apps and so on up the chain. Anyone who claims to be able to see much past that is probably having you on.
Basically, this is a nice experiment that deals with some stuff we don't properly understand yet. Currently we've been considering various ideas for filling those holes in our knowledge, string theory being an example. We don't know if they're correct and we're not likely to know in the near future, we're just window dressing.
If this test doesn't work as predicted then we go "eww, that colour won't go with my hair" and walk away from the shop. This translates to "oh shit, we really don't have a clue what's going on do we?" If the data coming out matches theoretical predictions reasonably well, we'll need to go inside and try a few things on before coming to an informed conclusion. This probably translates to massive demands for more academic funding, and a large number of lucrative book deals. Either way, it'll be interesting, precisely because we don't quite know which it's going to be.
This is Open Source remember? It's legally quite hard to play silly buggers of that sort because of the "thou shalt not further limit thy users' freedoms" clause.
On a side note, I *want* one of these things dammit!
How about the group that DDOSed SCO? Or are we still in denial about that happening?
Again, I'll believe it when I see the logs. Until then, I'll treat it the same way as I do SCO's magical disappearing code in linux.
Sorry to inform you, but nobody gives a flying fuck about Mareeen O'Gara or SysCon except Pamala Jones and her thralls.
I think you misinterpreted me (my fault). When I said "There are plenty of people out there with both the means and the inclination to launch a DoS attack against syscon" I was referring to your common or garden script kiddie, as opposed to anyone with an emotional involvement with the case. Sorry, I should have worded that more clearly. I'd agree with you that pretty much the only people who care what Maureen O'Gara is saying are those she does a hatchet job on.
And a lot of those fuckos feel seriously wronged and may not have one's normal moral boundries in place.
My personal experience of the groklaw crowd is that, on average, they're noticeably more moral than, for example, the slashdot crowd. There's a far higher signal to noise ratio and considerably less obscenity and trolling. Certainly there's less chance of a groklawer doing anything nastier to MOG than sending her an annoyed letter. This is just my opinion, so your mileage may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
If a barrier is undetectable and people can pass through it at will, can it really be said to exist?
If inalienable (and, by implication, universal) rights can't be consistently defined (compare the moral codes of any 2 doctrines of your choice) and a lot of people don't respect them anyway, can they really be said to be universal?
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound or does it just vibrate the air?
Thanks for a great discussion. I shall proceed with a list of my mistakes - thanks for drawing my attention to them.
:P
I said: "I will show courtesy to you in the expectation that it'll be reciprocated, yes." Just to confirm, I wasn't being rude, I was just translating what you said to avoid starting my argument against rights with an implicit appeal to them.
My working definition of inalienable is still incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred
My bad - I'd got my definitions confused.
If you cut out my tongue, you still don't have my willful obedience. I still have a free nature. You have failed to take that away.
Yeah, that was a bit of a sophistry. I think the point that I was trying to make is that free will is a very fuzzily-defined concept. The very concept that will can exist independent of body presupposes a divide between them, which isn't always the case (at best it's a simplification). A trivial example: if I hit your knee, triggering the kick reflex, have I removed your free nature? It was your nervous system that triggered the action after all, and that nervous system forms the lowest level of your mind.
I'd also like to point out that sufficient torture is able to warp the mind of even the strongest individual - read 1984 for a description of the effects. Given the fact that, with sufficient effort, it is possible to subjugate the will of another, can we really say that our free natures can't be taken away? That would seem to be at best a rather fine distinction.
Moving on to the key points:
I earlier stated that I was well aware of regimes where such rights are not respected. The rights themselves continue to exist.
How do we know that the rights still exist if they fail to manifest themselves in any way? How do we know that they're not just a happy illusion that enables us to get along with each other? Continuing in the same thread...
If inalienable rights are a lie, then they would not be a good thing -- at least in the sense that they would encourage an ignorant and delusional population.
They would also be good in the sense that they would foster a stable society. Without some perception that other people Have Rights, and just as importantly that other people have the same perception, we'd be a nation of sociopaths and civilisation would die in a sea of paranoia. Personally I prefer a white lie to constant fear. None of this, however, implies that rights are anything more than convenient lies.
On a lighter note, regards the ignorant and delusional population: have you taken a good look at the world lately?
If I can ascribe to one illusion, what else can I accept as truth that is false? Where does it stop?
My thoughts are as follows (quite lengthy - skip it if it gets boring):
We may accept the input of our senses as being an accurate reflection of the forces acting on our bodies unless we have specific reason to think otherwise (hallucinogenic drugs for example). It may not be true (we could be in the Matrix), but if we don't make this assumption then there's no point continuing anyway, so we might as well give the world as we perceive it the benefit of the doubt.
We can, on average, give information relayed to us by the scientific community the benefit of the doubt. This is because it is independently verifiable, even by ourselves if we wish to go to that much trouble. It's noticeable on slashdot that people are instantly taken more seriously if they provide links to references for their argument. Even if no-one follows the argument, the fact that it's possible to check whether the reference is valid or whether it's just another goatse link renders the reference trustable.
We can't rely on things we're told that aren't independently verifiable. As an example of the distinction: Religious Studies classes are trustable since we can actually go check what
Cherry-picking the key points (I'll try not to take them out of context):
:P After all, my free will cannot be taken from me, right?
I respect your right to opine as you do, and I hope you will find it in you to respect mine to disagree.
I will show courtesy to you in the expectation that it'll be reciprocated, yes.
Nothing is inalienable according to [your] way of thinking.
That would be broadly accurate and fits in with, for example, the fact that one of the largest nations on earth, China, doesn't give a damn about human rights. As far as I can tell, the concept of inalienable rights is a very Western, specifically American, viewpoint.
We are all powerless slaves that have to go begging for privileges from the master.
As Mao said, power emanates from the barrel of a gun. In America the citizenry have a lot of guns. As a Brit, and thus a subject of a monarchy with a long and bloody past, I'm aware that pretty much the only thing that stops the government oppressing me is the fact that it would be more trouble than it's worth. I've seen Americans trying to adapt to this attitude; it's not pretty.
Authoritarianism depends on this kind of thinking.
I never said inalienable rights weren't a damn useful illusion to maintain. The fact that it's a good idea to act like they exist doesn't mean that they do.
You can outlaw something like speaking freely, but you cannot take away man's natural ability to do so.
You can cut out his tongue or kill him. This has generally proved to be an extremely effective approach in the absence of sign language and/or necromancy. I'd also note that any argument that applies to the ability to speak freely also applies to the ability to hit your neighbour over the head with a mallet, which I doubt you would class as an inalienable right.
Even within the most repressive of regimes there has typically existed a very active underground where the true nature of man is able to continue despite terrible opposition.
Yeah, Britain has one of those. It's called the IRA and, as far as I can tell, the part of man's true nature that it expresses is his enjoyment of blowing up other men. And women and, for the hat trick, children and puppies. Again, if these rights you speak of are so inalienable, how come they're not easily differentiable, except by pointing, from the mallet example I mentioned earlier?
Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done.
I'd suggest that, if what the master intended was for you to be an example pour encourager les autres, he has in fact succeeded.
On a side note: it's trivial to show that there are no inalienable rights - show me a right and I'll give you an example of when and where it's been alienated. What I think you mean is "rights that shouldn't be alienated". This is an entirely relative concept, depending on who's talking. In the absence of a Creator god, there is no intrinsic moral direction to the universe, so there's no easy way to decide whose "should" is correct. Hence there are no universal inalienable rights.
No matter what steps are taken, my free will cannot be taken from me. Freedom is inherent in my very nature. It is inalienable. It is a right.
If this were the case I'd have killed my pesky little sister long ago
I tend to favour the evolutionary process as creator. The problem with this is that then right and wrong can only be defined in terms of what is good or bad for a society (culture of violence bad, doing your job good, that sort of thing). Rights are just those privileges that we've managed to wrest en masse from whatever authorities have set themselves up, and inalienable rights are just those that we're really keen not to let go of.
Unless you're a strong believer in Plato's forms, these concepts don't have any existence in and of themselves any more than the hypothetical pages of work that I should be producing now do.
This would seem to be the same story covered here. It's been repackaged a lot in its passage round the news outlets, so I'm not surprised Zonk didn't spot it.
I was carefully using "country" in the broadest possible sense. In America, your rights are determined less by the government and more by a hodgepodge of history, mob rule and corporate interests. The principle that rights are an artefact of the legal system still applies. I felt it was important to make that point as the parent poster had apparently not grasped this concept.
Unfortunately, that's bollocks. If Cuban law states that "you need not ask permission or pay anything before using software written by someone else" then it is no longer up to Microsoft. Not in Cuba anyway.
Remember, rights are not universal; they're granted at the discretion of the country in question, however much we might wish it otherwise.
The problem with patents is that any areas they're applied to will tend to gravitate towards a natural lifecycle identical to the patent lifetime (17 years, iirc).
In industries such as, say, grand piano making, where the natural product lifecycle is very long, patents give an effectively zero window of opportunity - they just don't last long enough to be worth getting. It could be argued that in this case patents don't put enough stress on the industry.
In industries such as bioresearch, where creating new products is very costly, the tendency is to just produce knock-offs. As a result the natural product lifespan is probably in the region of 30 years or so (after that the drugs will cease to be effective or will have been surpassed by academically-researched alternatives). In these industries patents give a medium-length (relatively speaking) window of opportunity for getting ahead of one's competitors, thus encouraging innovation. The stress that this puts on the industry speeds the average product lifecycle up to approach the lifetime of the patent.
In the software industry, the average product lifecycle lasts for somewhere between 1 and 7 years - call it 3 years. The lifetime of a software patent is almost 6 times that. In such a fast-moving industry, this is an effectively infinite window of opportunity, resulting in companies theoretically being able to get a big heap of patents then sit back and relax (or fail to get patents then die). The stress that patents put on the software industry is thus misdirected towards lengthening rather than shortening the product lifecycle, and just results in lots of protesters rather than any actual progress.
I would accept software patents if they were of duration = 2 or 3 years, but then they'd be so short that, given the speed of the patent system and legal system, they wouldn't be worth filing for. Anything longer than that and they can only be harmful, with progress proceeding despite patents rather than because of them.
Shouts to Clausewitz for the "stress" metaphor.
Seems likely to me that there would be a discrepancy between what should be public and what is public. If private information comes out into public, does that make it ethically right that it has done so?
1) Patents are written in legalese, not in english. Unless you are a patent lawyer, I don't think you can really judge them. That's why you see stories like Microsoft patenting the double-click or Apple patenting alpha compositing.
The patent system definitely shouldn't be that way, and I have trouble believing it is intended to be that way. If this were the case then it would be impossible for any small inventor to check that they weren't infringing a given patent without hiring an expensive lawyer.
2) This is not a patent for autocomplete. It is much more specific.
From what I can tell through a 5-minute read of the patent document, it's a patent for a combination of "hunt for email addresses everywhere we can think of" and "autocomplete". Basically it covers a broadening of existing techniques, with a couple of fairly nice ideas for GUIs (which aren't patentable, of course). This isn't that much more innovative. I could have misread it, but if there's any truly innovative stuff in their it's quite well hidden.
3) We did innovate in this space in MacOE.
That may be the case. However, the patent in question probably doesn't count as innovation.
4) Patents are a good defensive strategy for any company. We get sued all the time. Witness the current Eolas lawsuit.
(Surely the best way to deal with that situation would be to lobby for patent reform rather than encouraging software patents in Europe?) As a rule I'll accept this as a reason for patenting dodgy stuff if and only if the filer gives written assurance that they will never use their patents against anyone who isn't suing them.
5) I think there are a lot of things that are lame about the patent system.
No kidding and I'm sorry that slashdot ruined your good mood at getting your first patent - first anything is always fun.
I don't know why so many people here, quite a lot of which seem to be anti-patent in general, became pro-patent in this case
I think there's just this big mental thought bubble hanging over slashdot with the words "Oh, so now you're worried about damn stupid patents?" written in it.
I have no doubt that the majority of slashdotters, if given school admin jobs, would have more sympathy for the hackers than the current crop of sysadmins. How would you implement the value system that the parent described us as holding to? How would you organise things if you were in charge so that a) students could learn advanced computer use within the system, b) accountability could be imposed on students and c) normal use would not be impaired?
The best way I can think of is a three-tier approach. Tier one is a set of stand-alone computers that anyone can use regardless of whether they're an evil brat or not. No connection to any other computers and no internet connection, so damage done from playing silly buggers would be minimised. These computers would be monitored to the maximum extent physically and legally possible.
Tier two would be most of the computers in the school - standard desktops, connected to the internet via a firewall etc etc. Anyone playing silly buggers on these would get kicked off and only allowed to use the stand-alone machines (with the result that they'd have to transfer any files via floppy disks and so on). These computers would be monitored to make sure no-one was playing major silly buggers and no viruses were present etc, but would be mostly left alone.
Tier three would be a stand-alone network, with a variety of computers running a variety of different operating systems. Anyone with an interest in computers could come and try stuff out here, and anything would go, with the caveat that, if you break it, you have to fix it. Little or no monitoring required, since any damage done would be localised to this separate network, and silly buggers could thus be permitted to reign unchecked.
The advantages of this system would be that a) you'd have a place for all the teenage hackers to work off their hormones, b) you'd have a disciplinary system (play silly buggers on tier 2 and you get dropped to tier 1) and c) you'd have a cadre of well-trained young security experts who you could supervise in auditing the tier 2 network.
Does anyone have suggestions for improvements or see any problems with this (apart from cost)?
In some circumstances you do have to report these things. For example, in my old secondary school, a friend and I discovered that the admin server - with everyone's sensitive details on it - was running a version of IIS with the unicode directory traversal bug. We told the computer staff and they did fuck-all about it - apparently the admin server wasn't their turf and they weren't willing to be helpful to their fellow man.
In the end, the situation was resolved by my friend and I wandering round to the admin office and having a chat with them which led to us being let in to disable IIS on the server. However, if that hadn't been an option, we'd have been faced with a choice: 1) we could have sat back and waited until someone more malicious than ourselves noticed the vulnerability and played silly buggers or 2) we could have broken into the server, acquired some evidence of the hack and gone to visit the headmaster.
I like to think I'm a fairly moral person, and I think the latter is more "good samaritan"ish, as well as being healthier for my personal data, so that's what I would probably have chosen. The alternative would have been to sit and wait for the day that I pissed off the wrong person and my attendance record suddenly showed that I hadn't been in all year. However, if we *had* taken option 2, we could well have ended up in the same position the grandparent did. Talk about your rock and hard place...
And most of the alternatives are conjectures.
Scientists use words like chess masters use pawns; saying something's "just a theory" tends to have roughly the same effect on their mental state as kicking the board over.
Thanks for the link - I honestly hadn't come across that snippet before. That does add a lot of credence to SCO's claims.
/" cited as the supposed DoS attack (enough to swamp a small host, but certainly not enough to be construed as definitely malicious).
Currently the evidence in the case of Sys-con seems to be a little less convincing - I've seen 5 IPs running "wget -r
Sorry for taking so long to reply.
As far as I can tell, this system is no more resistant than any other to the simple expedient of piping the dvd output to a file not the monitor/speakers.
Additionally, every extra layer of difficulty they add to the usage of DVDs just encourages more piracy. I can't play DVD x on my computer? Fine, I'll just go on the 'net, someone there will have it, and I won't even have to feel guilty.
I honestly can't see how the MPAA can continue to exist in its current form for much longer.
It was a joke. I fully understand that every technology has beneficial effects, including RFID. I understand that the majority of privacy issues are overstated, although things like chipped passports still worry me. I am well aware how useful RFID can be in a number of situations, such as the one you described.
I understand that DRM, while being problematic for privacy advocates and those of us who like complete control over our own computers, is, when properly applied, one plausible way of encouraging more people to acquire non-infringing copies of media. I don't like it cos I fit into both the above categories but, as long as they don't figure out how to stop me re-encoding media in a decent format, I can live with their attempts.
I'm not keen on the RIAA or MPAA cos, viewed as monolithic organisations, they're both bastards. However, I understand that it's naive to label any one organisation or individual as completely good or evil - for example, a friend of mine works for Microsoft, and another is getting his education courtesy of IBM.
None of this stops me seeing the article title, having a sudden image of many millions of geeks having spontaneous heart-attacks, ruining my keyboard with the proverbial Morning Dew and deciding to share that little frisson of amusement with the rest of Slashdot, in the hope of cheering people up. My investments in the keyboard-manufacturing industry have nothing to do with it at all.
RFID and DRM? Are they trying to send every geek on the planet apopleptic or something?
Neither, I assume, does the guy's mother. It's interesting that the MPAA and co. only stopped screaming about how morally wrong the concept of home recording was when it became clear that it was a major cash cow.
Since discovering that particular bit of history (I'm too young to remember it personally) I tend to just play things by "no harm, no foul" rules. In this case, that would mean downloading Dr Who, since I was never going to watch it with adverts in place anyway (I'm at uni without a telly, so it's being recorded at home and parents rarely make a point of taping the adverts).
"No harm no foul" is legally unenforceable but imo is very nearly as moral and a damn sight less confusing to live by.
I know what you mean. I'm not sure that it's necessarily a bad thing - I subscribe to the "rising water" model of open source which suggests that closed source gets there first but open source gets there better.
I doubt there will be any truly unexpected projects produced for linux until after it's become the favoured operating system - open source tends to favour done deals over innovation, so it's helpful to have someone from the closed source world blaze the trail for us. I do think that day will come though - as the PC market matures, getting there better will become increasingly more important than getting there first. Then the battle will move to userspace apps and so on up the chain. Anyone who claims to be able to see much past that is probably having you on.
Basically, this is a nice experiment that deals with some stuff we don't properly understand yet. Currently we've been considering various ideas for filling those holes in our knowledge, string theory being an example. We don't know if they're correct and we're not likely to know in the near future, we're just window dressing.
If this test doesn't work as predicted then we go "eww, that colour won't go with my hair" and walk away from the shop. This translates to "oh shit, we really don't have a clue what's going on do we?" If the data coming out matches theoretical predictions reasonably well, we'll need to go inside and try a few things on before coming to an informed conclusion. This probably translates to massive demands for more academic funding, and a large number of lucrative book deals. Either way, it'll be interesting, precisely because we don't quite know which it's going to be.
This is Open Source remember? It's legally quite hard to play silly buggers of that sort because of the "thou shalt not further limit thy users' freedoms" clause.
On a side note, I *want* one of these things dammit!
Personally I define stealing as implying a restriction of the original posessor's ability to use the thing stolen.
Using this definition, if MS copies an idea and then drives the original company out of business, they could very well be said to be stealing an idea.
We can just block the whole of sys-con's output from our computers without catching the apparently very nice people at LinuxWorld in the crossfire.
How about the group that DDOSed SCO? Or are we still in denial about that happening?
Again, I'll believe it when I see the logs. Until then, I'll treat it the same way as I do SCO's magical disappearing code in linux.
Sorry to inform you, but nobody gives a flying fuck about Mareeen O'Gara or SysCon except Pamala Jones and her thralls.
I think you misinterpreted me (my fault). When I said "There are plenty of people out there with both the means and the inclination to launch a DoS attack against syscon" I was referring to your common or garden script kiddie, as opposed to anyone with an emotional involvement with the case. Sorry, I should have worded that more clearly. I'd agree with you that pretty much the only people who care what Maureen O'Gara is saying are those she does a hatchet job on.
And a lot of those fuckos feel seriously wronged and may not have one's normal moral boundries in place.
My personal experience of the groklaw crowd is that, on average, they're noticeably more moral than, for example, the slashdot crowd. There's a far higher signal to noise ratio and considerably less obscenity and trolling. Certainly there's less chance of a groklawer doing anything nastier to MOG than sending her an annoyed letter. This is just my opinion, so your mileage may vary.