Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Um... we implicitly vote this way every day. Have you ever seen our media figures? Have you seen many newscasters, for instance, who don't meet all of the criteria you just named?
I think it's virtually inevitable, in modern American culture, that people will pursue the perfect baby. All of our lives, we're bombarded with these ideals which we're supposed to work towards for our entire lives. What parent wouldn't want to make their child's life easier by giving them as much of a head start as possible?
So, to prevent cosmetic genetic engineering of this type, I think we need to change a lot more than the public awareness of Hunkapiller's name. And I don't mean regulations on the industry, even; I mean the pervasive dedication to cosmetic perfection.
Incidentally, why's this published under YRO? Is it my inalienable right to read and pay for Steven King books, online or off? I wonder if every story about a new business model with a chance to "stick it to the man" is going to turn up here.
Hmm. I don't know about this. For one thing, he's NOT using the eBook format (which has some encryption, apparently...?), and the webpage even says "download it and pass it around to your friends." That's kind of like the napster theory; if you're a small, unknown band, it's only better the more people here you, whether they all pay or not.
Then again, steven king is not exactly a small unknown author. So why's he actually doing this? I don't think it's some big Athenian crusade either, but it can't have that much to do with money, if he's making it so deliberately easy to circumvent the payment system. So, we're faced with the possibility that he is indeed testing his audience for loyalty... it's all a big ego-stroke for King.
Which I can kind of understand, actually. There's a comment below (marked "flamebait," currently) that accuses King of really pandering to the publishers. I'm sure he's heard this accusation before; maybe he wants people to prove they really like him. "Hey guys, this one's just for you! I'm not being self aggrandizing and making a million bucks, see?"
Gee, I can't believe you forgot some of the really great ones out there, like Konqueror, Gnucash, KOffice (how come we've never seen a progress report on this one?), Gnucash, the soon-to-come A|W package, Gnucash, and Gnucash. Oh yeah, and Gnucash! It's a great financial package that lets you keep track of your money easily and efficiently under Linux! I know some of the Slashdot staff are very fond of it; how could you forget that?
would never make a port of lightwave to linux, linux people aren't the type to buy lightwave.
Exactly who are "Linux people?" I'm sick of the stereotype of everyone who uses linux as some kind of snobbish zealot who "aren't the type" to use a certain package. I use linux because it was free when I was poor, and it turned out to be way better than the other choices.
Maybe major-vendor packages like this will help everyone get over that stereotype, or at least change it...
Well, okay, sure, but if we switched to cleaner fuels, we'd need someone to produce and distribute them... it's not like the need for energy would disappear.
Granted, the map would be redrawn. OPEC might break up and the middle east would be seriously fscked. Then again, natural gas (and some other alternatives) are still petrol based, so we might not even "lose" the petrol industry by switching away from gas.
For the same reason Tobacco isn't controlled by the Food & Drug Administration...
Actually, the reason for this is more interesting. They just reconsidered this policy... mmm, last year, I think. The deal is, the charter (or whatever) of the FDA is to ensure that manufactured drugs contain "safe and useful" amounts of the active ingredients.
Problem is, nicotine is not safe at any level! Not to mention the arsenic, cyanide, etc, in cigarettes... basically, if the FDA controlled tobacco, their only option (under their own rules) would be to ban it for the safety of the population. And America is not ready for that. Ergo, no tobacco regulation:)
I'm more recently out of undergrad; maybe I can help clarify:)
The benchmarks I think you're talking about are the SPECint and SPECfp '95 benchmarks. These were designed to test, respectively, the integer processing and floating point processing abilities of various processors. It was primarily a hardware test.
As such, manufacturers added "tricks" to their processors or compilers to essentially skip segments of the benchmark, getting highly skewed results with processors that weren't much faster. This is definitely a weakness of those two benchmarks. However, the description of the SPECweb99 test (linked to from main story) seems to take a lot of things into consideration. I don't think you can write off all SPEC products because a couple were faulty.
You know, Jon, I don't know that I've differed a whole lot from your ideological stance throughout your months of "corporatism"-trashing, but your invectives seem less and less substantiated every week.
This essay in particular seems to fit squarely inside the genre, with liberal application of the terms "corporatism," "The corporate republic," and "unconcious citizens," but with nothing to really back up your claims. How is this essay even about corporatism? It's about one French guy's vivid, but ultimately useless, protest against a damn McDonald's franchise. Holding him aloft as a hero to modern america is quite a stretch, and only vaguely supported in your text. Back to the drawing board; try to draft enough paragraphs so that some can be cut next time.
Well, Jon, it looks like you yourself have fallen into the trap of glorifying this technology as the greatest medical miracle ever.
We have to recall that the human genome is precisely a blueprint for the construction of a human body, and only that. Although much psychological research has been leaning towards blaming all mental maladies on physical conditions, we should remember that our bodies simply produce other bodies, whether we make them "perfect" or not.
Human minds and cultures produce human beings. I don't think the most carefully produced "super baby" would be free from psychological problems if raised by an abusive parent. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World seems the closest literary example to what's possible now, and you'll remember, they had to use a steady regimen of drugs throughout life to get people as homogenous as they wanted.
Don't write everything off to genetics! There's still a lot of ways left for people to come out fsck'd up.
Hey, read the abstract. Okay, I admit, I didn't read any further than that:), but basically what it covers is a system for storing computer information in two sections, the first of which contains the actual data, and the second of which contains "information pertaining to the display of that data," such as keyboard shortcuts and, yes, hyperlinks.
Based on that, it seems like they'd ought to be suing Apple over the "forked" file system, which sounds a lot more like what they described. But anyway, since links in HTML are interleaved with the content, it really doesn't seem to fit under their description at all.
Right. Unfortunately, the government's case had nothing (really) to do with this. As the internet takes precedence, those services will be MS's prime property. Putting them together with the applications section, you're basically waiting for another monopoly to happen, IMHO.
Think about it. What OS is able to run on the largest number of hardware platforms these days? If linux isn't on top, it's #$%@^ close. This makes linux, in many ways, the ideal development platform - "Write once, compile anywhere," if you will. The more platforms linux runs on, the closer this comes to reality.
Of course, it's pretty much nowhere close to reality at the moment. Writing a program and betting that it'll compile on i386, alpha, and mkLinux is asking for disaster. But hopefully, the linux standard base (or what's it called now?), in combination with tons of hardware platforms, will bring this about.
From the article: "Perhaps [coining the term] cracker was not so much an attempt to educate the media, then, as a desire to rewrite the dictionary."
Yup, seems like a pretty safe bet.:)
But seriously. Of course we want to rewrite the dictionary -- how would the journalists like it if we kept calling them "lusers?" Thing is, they'd have an authority to fall back on: hey look, guys, we and our peers have another name for ourselves! We're not lusers!
We hackers just want the same, is all. Too much to ask?
Contemporary technology has, without a doubt, challenged historic ideas of how the economy works. Computing in particular is not only changing commerce, but revolutionizing access to markets by individual market investors, thus changing the markets themselves.
I think this is the crux (or one of the crux-es) of the matter: the market itself is being changed by the expanded access to it. Sounds like Schiller's book is something of a Jeremiad about how the market is being "ruined" by this emotional approach. In a way, I guess it is. I think untrained traders (read: e*trade clients) do use more emotion than reason in picking stocks. How else do startups gain 700% on opening day?
The thing is, this is nothing new. Companies always push their image not only to gain new customers, but also to woo investors and push up their initial valuation. The SEC "quiet period" is designed to combat this, but it still happens. So, what can we do about the stock market turning into a giant horsetrack? well...
[Schiller] pleads for the expansion of the number and variety of securities and markets for them, to allow people to protect themselves against major economic risks. He favors new "macro-markets"...
And the cool thing is, this is already happening. The German and British stock exchanges have already announced that they're merging. And also partnering with NASDAQ to form a 24-hour "world market". That last one sounds especially intriguing, although I don't know that it'll prevent the phenomenon that Schiller is talking about. There would be no "after the bell" anymore when you could announce profits, for one thing:)
So much for moderating this thread. To avoid accusations of redundancy, I'll first refer people to my previous post which seems more and more pressing with each development of this case.
Long story short, I think I can get an address where I could send something so that Jason Newstead might actually get it. I won't be distributing this address online, but I am willing to coordinate a "Send Metallica's stuff back" campaign (at least on a small scale:) to show them how we really feel.
My rationale for this is not that "I think the record companies are the real pirates, fsck them, take all their money," although I do feel that way sometimes. My point in this is that Metallica , by first suing napster and then taking actions against individuals, is just becoming a corporate mouthpeice.
Lars' accusation that trading music on Napster turns it into a "commodity" is a patent misinterpretation of music distribution these days. Contrary to the time when Metallica would give shows anywhere, talk directly to fans, and even give away truck loads of new equipment to startup bands, this demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding and lack of compassion towards their fanbase.
So, if you want to send your metallica albums, shirts, whatever, back and tell them what you think about this action, mail me (address spam-proofed above). Furthermore, I don't want this to be just a "slashdot thing," so tell your friends who you think would care.
In a complementary sense, this is already happening to other languages: English is working its way in at an alarming rate. Well, alarming for language purists, anyway. For example, I don't know japanese, but a friend who stayed there was telling me that most of the youth slang is English-based.
So, I think English will become a de facto standard, not because people will abandon their own native languages, but because those languages will evolve to mirror English to a great extent.
[first, a request: don't mark this offtopic, until you mark the parent post offtopic:]
Now. That poll has actually accounted for a significant psychological problem known as "yeasayers" and "naysayers." It was first noted during authoritarian personality study after WWII. There was a survey where all of the "yes" answers indicate "authoritarian tendencies."
So, people analyzing the research noted, "hey, some people just like to answer yes to stuff, and some people say no." Do they know why? No. But in the CNN poll, the first "yes" is a negative MS statement, and the second "yes" is a positive MS statement. So, they've at least accounted for that.
The order they used is probably not the best one, but they've accounted for some implicit polling problems. No conspiracy here.
Oh, jeez. If you split Excel from Word, you set MS back to 1990, when, if you wanted an office suite, you had to buy Wordperfect AND Lotus AND dBase2. Integration really is the current big thing (soon to be superceded by the services model, but oh well).
Now, I hate MS as much as the next guy, but it really wouldn't be fair to chunk them up THAT much. To endorse that, you'd have to endorse the splitup of Corel Office and all those, too.
The fact that MS-Office is tied to the OS really is the problem: they can set up a deal where you buy office (for $599, or whatever) and get a free OS to boot. Whereas corel sells their office suite for the same price, but then you have to buy Windows, too!
If the applications sector wasn't allowed to collude with the OS sector that way, that would solve a lot of problems. Not all, of course, but...
First off, I should say that I'm from Richland, MI, where Jason Newstead (bassplayer of Metallica) is from. We went to the same high school, albeit I was about 12 years later. When I was that age, I considered him something of a hometown hero, and even managed to get an autographed picture through a mutual friend (yeah, I'm friend-of-a-friend of Metallica - whoopee).
Now, I think I'll ask Jason's mom (who I know) for his address so I can return the picture, and also every tape of theirs that I own. I think it's really sick for a band who's perhaps the most famous in its genre to start whining about revenue lost to Napster. I mean, who can even find "kill em all" anymore? Why not trade it around?
But, even if they want to whine about that, it's their legal right. It disgusts me, but they're entitled, I guess. But to attack universities, which are non-profit organizations, even when they're ivy league, is just wrong. And moreover, this is an oblique attack on a freakin' tool, which is just as easily used for good as harm.
Yes, I know about the ratio of legal-to-illegal stuff traded on Napster. But it is a significant, if misguided, statement by thousands of people that they're sick of the markup the RIAA would have them pay. And instead of reaching out to their fans, Metallica -- who are all millionaires, BTW -- has decided to pitch a fit about a few thousand dollars in lost revenue.
So, maybe I can get one of their home addresses, and while I think it'd be irresponsible to spread that around the internet, I don't feel bad about sending a letter or two there. Anyone else want to send back your tapes/CDs to tell 'em how you feel? Give me a buzz!
What I'm doing about the Metallica lawsuit
on
Pay Lars
·
· Score: 1
First off, I should say that I'm from Richland, MI, where Jason Newstead (bassplayer of Metallica) is from. We went to the same high school, albeit I was about 12 years later. When I was that age, I considered him something of a hometown hero, and even managed to get an autographed picture through a mutual friend (yeah, I'm friend-of-a-friend of Metallica - whoopee).
Now, I think I'll ask Jason's mom (who I know) for his address so I can return the picture, and also every tape of theirs that I own. I think it's really sick for a band who's perhaps the most famous in its genre to start whining about revenue lost to Napster. I mean, who can even find "kill em all" anymore? Why not trade it around?
But, even if they want to whine about that, it's their legal right. It disgusts me, but they're entitled, I guess. But to attack universities, which are non-profit organizations, even when they're ivy league, is just wrong. And moreover, this is an oblique attack on a freakin' tool, which is just as easily used for good as harm.
Yes, I know about the ratio of legal-to-illegal stuff traded on Napster. But it is a significant, if misguided, statement by thousands of people that they're sick of the markup the RIAA would have them pay. And instead of reaching out to their fans, Metallica -- who are all millionaires, BTW -- has decided to pitch a fit about a few thousand dollars in lost revenue.
So, maybe I can get one of their home addresses, and while I think it'd be irresponsible to spread that around the internet, I don't feel bad about sending a letter or two there. Anyone else want to send back your tapes/CDs to tell 'em how you feel? Give me a buzz!
The fact is that patents do work for 99% of people, and that the issue requires far more thought than/.ers seem capable of. I don't know about 99% being valid. I saw an article recently (I can't remember where) that cites at least one law firm that wins 95% of its attempts to overturn patents. 95%! I'm not saying that 95% of patents are invalid, but most of the ones which are challenged end up being thrown out. Why? Because the process used by the PTO to search for prior art is woefully inadequate. That's the basis for most overturnings: the idea already existed before the patent was filed for. A suit is brought by a law firm with a client knowledgable in the area, so they can find prior art that the PTO itself just isn't finding. So, why aren't more patents challenged? Probably because the appropriate people don't have the resources. Obviously, when Amazon sued B&N, there was a substantial legal department on each side. But if you were a small internet startup implementing one-click type solutions for your clients, you'd be screwed. You'd just cave to Amazon. For this reason, I think it's vital that patents are better researched before being granted. This requires hiring more PTO workers, with the paradoxical result that less patents will be granted. More workers for less "result"... doesn't seem like this kind of measure will pass congress anytime soon. But I think it's the best option.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, sorry, looks like someone's done it...
Um... we implicitly vote this way every day. Have you ever seen our media figures? Have you seen many newscasters, for instance, who don't meet all of the criteria you just named?
I think it's virtually inevitable, in modern American culture, that people will pursue the perfect baby. All of our lives, we're bombarded with these ideals which we're supposed to work towards for our entire lives. What parent wouldn't want to make their child's life easier by giving them as much of a head start as possible?
So, to prevent cosmetic genetic engineering of this type, I think we need to change a lot more than the public awareness of Hunkapiller's name. And I don't mean regulations on the industry, even; I mean the pervasive dedication to cosmetic perfection.
Incidentally, why's this published under YRO? Is it my inalienable right to read and pay for Steven King books, online or off? I wonder if every story about a new business model with a chance to "stick it to the man" is going to turn up here.
Then again, steven king is not exactly a small unknown author. So why's he actually doing this? I don't think it's some big Athenian crusade either, but it can't have that much to do with money, if he's making it so deliberately easy to circumvent the payment system. So, we're faced with the possibility that he is indeed testing his audience for loyalty... it's all a big ego-stroke for King.
Which I can kind of understand, actually. There's a comment below (marked "flamebait," currently) that accuses King of really pandering to the publishers. I'm sure he's heard this accusation before; maybe he wants people to prove they really like him. "Hey guys, this one's just for you! I'm not being self aggrandizing and making a million bucks, see?"
Of course, if all goes well for him, he will ;)
;)
Exactly who are "Linux people?" I'm sick of the stereotype of everyone who uses linux as some kind of snobbish zealot who "aren't the type" to use a certain package. I use linux because it was free when I was poor, and it turned out to be way better than the other choices.
Maybe major-vendor packages like this will help everyone get over that stereotype, or at least change it...
Granted, the map would be redrawn. OPEC might break up and the middle east would be seriously fscked. Then again, natural gas (and some other alternatives) are still petrol based, so we might not even "lose" the petrol industry by switching away from gas.
Actually, the reason for this is more interesting. They just reconsidered this policy ... mmm, last year, I think. The deal is, the charter (or whatever) of the FDA is to ensure that manufactured drugs contain "safe and useful" amounts of the active ingredients.
Problem is, nicotine is not safe at any level! Not to mention the arsenic, cyanide, etc, in cigarettes... basically, if the FDA controlled tobacco, their only option (under their own rules) would be to ban it for the safety of the population. And America is not ready for that. Ergo, no tobacco regulation :)
The benchmarks I think you're talking about are the SPECint and SPECfp '95 benchmarks. These were designed to test, respectively, the integer processing and floating point processing abilities of various processors. It was primarily a hardware test.
As such, manufacturers added "tricks" to their processors or compilers to essentially skip segments of the benchmark, getting highly skewed results with processors that weren't much faster. This is definitely a weakness of those two benchmarks. However, the description of the SPECweb99 test (linked to from main story) seems to take a lot of things into consideration. I don't think you can write off all SPEC products because a couple were faulty.
This essay in particular seems to fit squarely inside the genre, with liberal application of the terms "corporatism," "The corporate republic," and "unconcious citizens," but with nothing to really back up your claims. How is this essay even about corporatism? It's about one French guy's vivid, but ultimately useless, protest against a damn McDonald's franchise. Holding him aloft as a hero to modern america is quite a stretch, and only vaguely supported in your text. Back to the drawing board; try to draft enough paragraphs so that some can be cut next time.
</RANT>
We have to recall that the human genome is precisely a blueprint for the construction of a human body, and only that. Although much psychological research has been leaning towards blaming all mental maladies on physical conditions, we should remember that our bodies simply produce other bodies, whether we make them "perfect" or not.
Human minds and cultures produce human beings. I don't think the most carefully produced "super baby" would be free from psychological problems if raised by an abusive parent. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World seems the closest literary example to what's possible now, and you'll remember, they had to use a steady regimen of drugs throughout life to get people as homogenous as they wanted.
Don't write everything off to genetics! There's still a lot of ways left for people to come out fsck'd up.
Based on that, it seems like they'd ought to be suing Apple over the "forked" file system, which sounds a lot more like what they described. But anyway, since links in HTML are interleaved with the content, it really doesn't seem to fit under their description at all.
Assuming that the breakup ever happens (yeah, right), any guesses which company Bill Gates will go with?
Right. Unfortunately, the government's case had nothing (really) to do with this. As the internet takes precedence, those services will be MS's prime property. Putting them together with the applications section, you're basically waiting for another monopoly to happen, IMHO.
Think about it. What OS is able to run on the largest number of hardware platforms these days? If linux isn't on top, it's #$%@^ close. This makes linux, in many ways, the ideal development platform - "Write once, compile anywhere," if you will. The more platforms linux runs on, the closer this comes to reality.
Of course, it's pretty much nowhere close to reality at the moment. Writing a program and betting that it'll compile on i386, alpha, and mkLinux is asking for disaster. But hopefully, the linux standard base (or what's it called now?), in combination with tons of hardware platforms, will bring this about.
1) Take down the kerberos posts
2) Tell MS to go fly a kite
3) Hemos RULZ
Yup, seems like a pretty safe bet. :)
But seriously. Of course we want to rewrite the dictionary -- how would the journalists like it if we kept calling them "lusers?" Thing is, they'd have an authority to fall back on: hey look, guys, we and our peers have another name for ourselves! We're not lusers!
We hackers just want the same, is all. Too much to ask?
I think this is the crux (or one of the crux-es) of the matter: the market itself is being changed by the expanded access to it. Sounds like Schiller's book is something of a Jeremiad about how the market is being "ruined" by this emotional approach. In a way, I guess it is. I think untrained traders (read: e*trade clients) do use more emotion than reason in picking stocks. How else do startups gain 700% on opening day?
The thing is, this is nothing new. Companies always push their image not only to gain new customers, but also to woo investors and push up their initial valuation. The SEC "quiet period" is designed to combat this, but it still happens. So, what can we do about the stock market turning into a giant horsetrack? well...
[Schiller] pleads for the expansion of the number and variety of securities and markets for them, to allow people to protect themselves against major economic risks. He favors new "macro-markets"...
And the cool thing is, this is already happening. The German and British stock exchanges have already announced that they're merging. And also partnering with NASDAQ to form a 24-hour "world market". That last one sounds especially intriguing, although I don't know that it'll prevent the phenomenon that Schiller is talking about. There would be no "after the bell" anymore when you could announce profits, for one thing :)
Long story short, I think I can get an address where I could send something so that Jason Newstead might actually get it. I won't be distributing this address online, but I am willing to coordinate a "Send Metallica's stuff back" campaign (at least on a small scale :) to show them how we really feel.
My rationale for this is not that "I think the record companies are the real pirates, fsck them, take all their money," although I do feel that way sometimes. My point in this is that Metallica , by first suing napster and then taking actions against individuals, is just becoming a corporate mouthpeice.
Lars' accusation that trading music on Napster turns it into a "commodity" is a patent misinterpretation of music distribution these days. Contrary to the time when Metallica would give shows anywhere, talk directly to fans, and even give away truck loads of new equipment to startup bands, this demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding and lack of compassion towards their fanbase.
So, if you want to send your metallica albums, shirts, whatever, back and tell them what you think about this action, mail me (address spam-proofed above). Furthermore, I don't want this to be just a "slashdot thing," so tell your friends who you think would care.
So, I think English will become a de facto standard, not because people will abandon their own native languages, but because those languages will evolve to mirror English to a great extent.
Now. That poll has actually accounted for a significant psychological problem known as "yeasayers" and "naysayers." It was first noted during authoritarian personality study after WWII. There was a survey where all of the "yes" answers indicate "authoritarian tendencies."
So, people analyzing the research noted, "hey, some people just like to answer yes to stuff, and some people say no." Do they know why? No. But in the CNN poll, the first "yes" is a negative MS statement, and the second "yes" is a positive MS statement. So, they've at least accounted for that.
The order they used is probably not the best one, but they've accounted for some implicit polling problems. No conspiracy here.
Now, I hate MS as much as the next guy, but it really wouldn't be fair to chunk them up THAT much. To endorse that, you'd have to endorse the splitup of Corel Office and all those, too.
The fact that MS-Office is tied to the OS really is the problem: they can set up a deal where you buy office (for $599, or whatever) and get a free OS to boot. Whereas corel sells their office suite for the same price, but then you have to buy Windows, too!
If the applications sector wasn't allowed to collude with the OS sector that way, that would solve a lot of problems. Not all, of course, but...
Now, I think I'll ask Jason's mom (who I know) for his address so I can return the picture, and also every tape of theirs that I own. I think it's really sick for a band who's perhaps the most famous in its genre to start whining about revenue lost to Napster. I mean, who can even find "kill em all" anymore? Why not trade it around?
But, even if they want to whine about that, it's their legal right. It disgusts me, but they're entitled, I guess. But to attack universities, which are non-profit organizations, even when they're ivy league, is just wrong. And moreover, this is an oblique attack on a freakin' tool, which is just as easily used for good as harm.
Yes, I know about the ratio of legal-to-illegal stuff traded on Napster. But it is a significant, if misguided, statement by thousands of people that they're sick of the markup the RIAA would have them pay. And instead of reaching out to their fans, Metallica -- who are all millionaires, BTW -- has decided to pitch a fit about a few thousand dollars in lost revenue.
So, maybe I can get one of their home addresses, and while I think it'd be irresponsible to spread that around the internet, I don't feel bad about sending a letter or two there. Anyone else want to send back your tapes/CDs to tell 'em how you feel? Give me a buzz!
Now, I think I'll ask Jason's mom (who I know) for his address so I can return the picture, and also every tape of theirs that I own. I think it's really sick for a band who's perhaps the most famous in its genre to start whining about revenue lost to Napster. I mean, who can even find "kill em all" anymore? Why not trade it around?
But, even if they want to whine about that, it's their legal right. It disgusts me, but they're entitled, I guess. But to attack universities, which are non-profit organizations, even when they're ivy league, is just wrong. And moreover, this is an oblique attack on a freakin' tool, which is just as easily used for good as harm.
Yes, I know about the ratio of legal-to-illegal stuff traded on Napster. But it is a significant, if misguided, statement by thousands of people that they're sick of the markup the RIAA would have them pay. And instead of reaching out to their fans, Metallica -- who are all millionaires, BTW -- has decided to pitch a fit about a few thousand dollars in lost revenue.
So, maybe I can get one of their home addresses, and while I think it'd be irresponsible to spread that around the internet, I don't feel bad about sending a letter or two there. Anyone else want to send back your tapes/CDs to tell 'em how you feel? Give me a buzz!
The fact is that patents do work for 99% of people, and that the issue requires far more thought than /.ers seem capable of. I don't know about 99% being valid. I saw an article recently (I can't remember where) that cites at least one law firm that wins 95% of its attempts to overturn patents. 95%! I'm not saying that 95% of patents are invalid, but most of the ones which are challenged end up being thrown out. Why? Because the process used by the PTO to search for prior art is woefully inadequate. That's the basis for most overturnings: the idea already existed before the patent was filed for. A suit is brought by a law firm with a client knowledgable in the area, so they can find prior art that the PTO itself just isn't finding. So, why aren't more patents challenged? Probably because the appropriate people don't have the resources. Obviously, when Amazon sued B&N, there was a substantial legal department on each side. But if you were a small internet startup implementing one-click type solutions for your clients, you'd be screwed. You'd just cave to Amazon. For this reason, I think it's vital that patents are better researched before being granted. This requires hiring more PTO workers, with the paradoxical result that less patents will be granted. More workers for less "result"... doesn't seem like this kind of measure will pass congress anytime soon. But I think it's the best option.