" We need Libertarian pricipals so that we can check this, cutting fat inefficient agencies."
Or get them to do their job properly? Just because an agency is doing its job badly means you need to get rid of the agency, but it does mean you need to at least reform it. Replacing the USPTO with one or more private institutions might lead to less democratic control of the process and even more incentive to licence junk patents to ensure revenue. Government is neither uniquely efficient or inefficient, the same for private business. They are just different in character but subject to many of the same flaws.
Ideally I'd like to see the government intrude less and be smaller, but the alternative is sometimes a series of competing institutions with less individual credibility. Also a system of smaller institutions might be individually more efficient, but the overall system could be less efficient. (An analogy would be people moving a pile of rocks. Each person might be the most efficient an individual could be at moving a rock, but a cooperative system or monopoly might be more efficient as a whole. On the other hand with bad management of a rock moving gang it could also be dreadfully inefficient).
There's no ideal solution. It is a case of where you pitch the compromise.
"511MB, 288MB, and 276MB (the first one is eclipse"
Sort of explains why eclipse 3 runs like a dog on the 384MB machine on my desk at work. I like it because it is cross-platfrom across Solaris, Linux, Windows (and others). But it is such a memory hog.
And so someone just downloads an app from somewhere not in the EU... It won't stop counterfeiters, and counterfeiting is already illegal. It is an attempt at a non-feasible technical fix to a law enforcement problem.
It's relatively easy to solve this one on the face of it. You create a version of GIMP (or whatever) which links to some form of plug in which does the banknote recognition job. The plug in should be verifiable. GIMP would be not work without the plug in being sufficiently up to date. In theory this also allows the bulk of GIMP to be distributed under the GPL even if the plug in was closed source, since the plug in would not be distributed with GIMP (or whatever program).
However, GIMP being open source, there is no reason why you couldn't just hack out the code that requires the presence of the plug in. So this would require separate law enforcement to ensure that people are not hacking their source code to remove the constraints.
Even if there were constraints, you could just use an old version as GIMP, even if it was illegal. And if you are counterfeiting banknotes than legality of software is not probably high on your list of concerns.
Ultimately this is a fairly pointless exercise as it doesn't matter how things are being counterfeited - the true evidence of the crime are the notes, not the software.
Banknotes in Europe seem to be going out of fashion anyway. I keep small change for the bus and the sandwich shop, but most of my other forms of payment are on debit and credit cards. In fact this may leave the counterfeiting target as coins, not notes, as people will increasingly only be using small change not large notes.
However I do wonder if this is a real story, or one of those not-entirely-true-Europhobic-alarmist-stories put about just before the elections like the ficticious straight banana rule.
And a friend, a couple of years later, had one that would also count as a computing device - it had a calculator (with tiny buttons) integrated,
and an address book.
"Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers."
I'd like to know how to do this on Linux, across multiple browers and machines, let alone Windows.
"Hundreds of brilliant individual patentholders make millions of dollars every year from patents that they have transferred to large companies who make useful goods and services for the wide world out of them."
If you are a lone inventor with little captial patents are hard to get. The actual patent itself is not necessarily expensive, but searches, legal fees, and so on, make it out of reach of most of the "little guys". I don't think this is necessarily a problem with patents per se, more that the explosion of knowledge has made these steps more protracted and expensive. Perhaps what is needed is an intelligent automated search engine to look through past patents and prior art to reduce these costs. (No doubt such an agent would be patented).
In constrast copyright confers long term rights at little or no cost.
For the 'little guy' about the only way to pursue creating a patent if you don't have sufficient capital is via VC, but you have to ensure that you have protected the information regarding your ownership and the provenance of the invention to be on the safe side.
I'm tempted to set up a UKNIP party. The French seem to have a better education, health, and rail system, not to mention food and wine. Do you think they'd take the UK on as a Department?
"it's that the food that is produced is not distributed equally."
Even more than that it is often a product of failed infrastructure or conflict.
I remember arguing with a friend who contended that GM crops could help the starving in Africa. I pointed out that when the rebel army comes and drives you off your land, burns your GM crop and you end up in a refugee camp that bountiful GM crop isn't of much use.
As an example Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food. Look at it now.
In many areas where there is starvation the people are already largely vegetarians.
Action on political and economic improvements is the key, with the other major issues being land exhaustion, erosion, water rights/distribution, and education.
P.S.
The other thing to note is that the average fuel efficiency of cars in the UK is greater (less SUVs, mostly), and the average distances travelled are less. The typical TCO of a car in the US and the UK isn't a lot different, but a large part of that is due to the UK being smaller. It's not possible to shrink the USA, although more compact and mixed development, telecommuting (DSL, VPN and Access Grid in every home?), park-and-ride, etc might change the structure of US cities to need less car-miles for commuting. Given the stories of commuter hell I hear from the USA it might reduce road range too:-) I'm surprised we don't get more underground and rail-related rage in the UK, though, to be honest. I certainly wouldn't offer up the UK's rail system as a model for a viable alternative to US car journeys!
In the UK today the cost of petrol is about 0.90 per litre. The is about 16% overvalued at the moment compared to the $, so that means the equivalent price is actually about 0.75, or $1.30 per litre. There are 3.8 litres in a US gallon, so that makes petrol more or less $5 a US gallon in the UK. In the UK about 75% of the cost of petrol is in either petrol tax or sales taxes, so the cost per US gallon of the underlying petrol is, today, about $1.25. This is less than the current cost of US fuel including tax. US fuel used to be not much different to $1.25, but back then the cost per litre was lower here too.
This is what I presumed. Link statically and you are distributing the binary expression of the (L)GPL code. Link dynamically and you are simply using the interfaces to it. Maybe I didn't explain myself very well in the first place.
In theory, though, you could replace the (L)GPL library with one under a different licence, assuming the same call interfaces, etc. Thus the (L)GPL cannot apply to dynamically linked code as you can't predict what might be on a customer's computer. The LGPL seems to admit this possibility in that (although the language is far from clear) a work that simply makes calls to an LGPL library is not covered by the terms of it.
If simply dynamically linking with a library would force something linking to it to become LGPL then if someone wrote an LGPL version of something and dumped it onto a computer and then ran some proprietary code that links dynamically with that LGPL library rather than the expected proprietary equivalent then suddenly you would force the program to be LGPL. This would be viral in the extreme, and I can't believe this would be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Or get them to do their job properly? Just because an agency is doing its job badly means you need to get rid of the agency, but it does mean you need to at least reform it. Replacing the USPTO with one or more private institutions might lead to less democratic control of the process and even more incentive to licence junk patents to ensure revenue. Government is neither uniquely efficient or inefficient, the same for private business. They are just different in character but subject to many of the same flaws.
Ideally I'd like to see the government intrude less and be smaller, but the alternative is sometimes a series of competing institutions with less individual credibility. Also a system of smaller institutions might be individually more efficient, but the overall system could be less efficient. (An analogy would be people moving a pile of rocks. Each person might be the most efficient an individual could be at moving a rock, but a cooperative system or monopoly might be more efficient as a whole. On the other hand with bad management of a rock moving gang it could also be dreadfully inefficient).
There's no ideal solution. It is a case of where you pitch the compromise.
"511MB, 288MB, and 276MB (the first one is eclipse" Sort of explains why eclipse 3 runs like a dog on the 384MB machine on my desk at work. I like it because it is cross-platfrom across Solaris, Linux, Windows (and others). But it is such a memory hog.
You mean Meucci, the guy who was a couple of years ahead of Bell to the patent office, I presume?
And so someone just downloads an app from somewhere not in the EU... It won't stop counterfeiters, and counterfeiting is already illegal. It is an attempt at a non-feasible technical fix to a law enforcement problem.
It's relatively easy to solve this one on the face of it. You create a version of GIMP (or whatever) which links to some form of plug in which does the banknote recognition job. The plug in should be verifiable. GIMP would be not work without the plug in being sufficiently up to date. In theory this also allows the bulk of GIMP to be distributed under the GPL even if the plug in was closed source, since the plug in would not be distributed with GIMP (or whatever program).
However, GIMP being open source, there is no reason why you couldn't just hack out the code that requires the presence of the plug in. So this would require separate law enforcement to ensure that people are not hacking their source code to remove the constraints.
Even if there were constraints, you could just use an old version as GIMP, even if it was illegal. And if you are counterfeiting banknotes than legality of software is not probably high on your list of concerns.
Ultimately this is a fairly pointless exercise as it doesn't matter how things are being counterfeited - the true evidence of the crime are the notes, not the software.
Banknotes in Europe seem to be going out of fashion anyway. I keep small change for the bus and the sandwich shop, but most of my other forms of payment are on debit and credit cards. In fact this may leave the counterfeiting target as coins, not notes, as people will increasingly only be using small change not large notes.
However I do wonder if this is a real story, or one of those not-entirely-true-Europhobic-alarmist-stories put about just before the elections like the ficticious straight banana rule.
Thanks - I will give this a try.
I can check on specific versions. The behaviour seems no more stable on Linux or Windows, though.
IE crashes too. Less often than Firebird, but it crashes sometimes.
Opera seems as stable as IE, if more stable on Windows than Linux.
IE does seem to crash the least, but crashes seem to cause more serious lockups, very often, so low risk, higher consequence.
Ah - no NFS between work and home, sadly. This I didn't make clear, I suppose.
And a friend, a couple of years later, had one that would also count as a computing device - it had a calculator (with tiny buttons) integrated, and an address book.
yes - I remember that - about 1981 or so.
Can I please have an "unlimited resource" device?
I find that firefox crashes rather a lot, though.
Whilst I could import all bookmarks into firefox and use that, I'd like something that didn't crash while I was using it.
"Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers." I'd like to know how to do this on Linux, across multiple browers and machines, let alone Windows.
I remember double clicking on the Atari ST back in 1985.
AFAIK US patents are valid for 17 years.
To be valid the patent must have been applied for prior to GEM being released.
Thus if valid, the patent must already be expired.
Right you are - the 1989 one was first past the post. The Greens got about 2.5 million votes (twice what the lib dems got) and no seats.
My mistake - seems like 1999 was the first one with PR.
My memory is fallible.
It's been PR since the late 1980s AFAIK.
"Hundreds of brilliant individual patentholders make millions of dollars every year from patents that they have transferred to large companies who make useful goods and services for the wide world out of them."
If you are a lone inventor with little captial patents are hard to get. The actual patent itself is not necessarily expensive, but searches, legal fees, and so on, make it out of reach of most of the "little guys". I don't think this is necessarily a problem with patents per se, more that the explosion of knowledge has made these steps more protracted and expensive. Perhaps what is needed is an intelligent automated search engine to look through past patents and prior art to reduce these costs. (No doubt such an agent would be patented).
In constrast copyright confers long term rights at little or no cost.
For the 'little guy' about the only way to pursue creating a patent if you don't have sufficient capital is via VC, but you have to ensure that you have protected the information regarding your ownership and the provenance of the invention to be on the safe side.
I'm tempted to set up a UKNIP party. The French seem to have a better education, health, and rail system, not to mention food and wine. Do you think they'd take the UK on as a Department?
AFAIK it is on a party list system.
"it's that the food that is produced is not distributed equally." Even more than that it is often a product of failed infrastructure or conflict. I remember arguing with a friend who contended that GM crops could help the starving in Africa. I pointed out that when the rebel army comes and drives you off your land, burns your GM crop and you end up in a refugee camp that bountiful GM crop isn't of much use. As an example Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food. Look at it now. In many areas where there is starvation the people are already largely vegetarians. Action on political and economic improvements is the key, with the other major issues being land exhaustion, erosion, water rights/distribution, and education.
P.S. The other thing to note is that the average fuel efficiency of cars in the UK is greater (less SUVs, mostly), and the average distances travelled are less. The typical TCO of a car in the US and the UK isn't a lot different, but a large part of that is due to the UK being smaller. It's not possible to shrink the USA, although more compact and mixed development, telecommuting (DSL, VPN and Access Grid in every home?), park-and-ride, etc might change the structure of US cities to need less car-miles for commuting. Given the stories of commuter hell I hear from the USA it might reduce road range too :-) I'm surprised we don't get more underground and rail-related rage in the UK, though, to be honest. I certainly wouldn't offer up the UK's rail system as a model for a viable alternative to US car journeys!
In the UK today the cost of petrol is about 0.90 per litre. The is about 16% overvalued at the moment compared to the $, so that means the equivalent price is actually about 0.75, or $1.30 per litre. There are 3.8 litres in a US gallon, so that makes petrol more or less $5 a US gallon in the UK. In the UK about 75% of the cost of petrol is in either petrol tax or sales taxes, so the cost per US gallon of the underlying petrol is, today, about $1.25. This is less than the current cost of US fuel including tax. US fuel used to be not much different to $1.25, but back then the cost per litre was lower here too.
From the linked article:
"Operating lifetime exceed 1000 hours"
I would hope so!
8 hours a day at work, 5 days a week - I would sincerely hope that I wouldn't need to replace my monitor twice a year!
This is what I presumed. Link statically and you are distributing the binary expression of the (L)GPL code. Link dynamically and you are simply using the interfaces to it. Maybe I didn't explain myself very well in the first place.
In theory, though, you could replace the (L)GPL library with one under a different licence, assuming the same call interfaces, etc. Thus the (L)GPL cannot apply to dynamically linked code as you can't predict what might be on a customer's computer. The LGPL seems to admit this possibility in that (although the language is far from clear) a work that simply makes calls to an LGPL library is not covered by the terms of it.
If simply dynamically linking with a library would force something linking to it to become LGPL then if someone wrote an LGPL version of something and dumped it onto a computer and then ran some proprietary code that links dynamically with that LGPL library rather than the expected proprietary equivalent then suddenly you would force the program to be LGPL. This would be viral in the extreme, and I can't believe this would be the case.