This means that unless an individual already works for a company, the only things he can learn about are the things that have been voluntarily released to the public. Companies rarely, if ever, release detailed information about their technologies, even if those technologies are obsolete, because new spins on those old techniques may give the company a competitive edge.
So where does this leave the individual? The only thing left for him to learn is old and outdated. And over time, the material available for him to learn will get older and older.
Which can only mean that the pace of innovation will slow to a crawl, because most innovation stands on top of prior innovation.
This may be the strongest overall argument in favor of reverse engineering and public disclosure of the results.
So now we don't have to worry about humans going extinct through thermonuclear war or whatever, because if we do, then we'll be able to revive ourselves.
Why don't Sci-Fi movies ever cover this? If you went back in time 75,000,000 years to see dinosaurs, you'd probably die within a day from some long extinct bacteria or virus you're totally vilnerable. What's more, you presence would likely spread a wave of death over the entire eco system from bacteria and viruses you brought from the future.
(Slaps forehead)
Of course! THAT's why the dinosaurs went extinct while the mammals didn't!
What's a distribution? A collection of software that, when installed on a computer, will allow the owner of that computer to perform a set of tasks with the computer.
More precisely, a set of tools.
But there is no single tool or set of tools that will do all the jobs that need doing unless the set in question includes every tool ever made. Such a tool set would be unwieldy.
My point? A single distribution can't possibly satisfy the needs of everyone without being so large and unwieldy as to be useless to everyone. Ergo, there will always be multiple distributions, and this is a good thing.
I think it's likely that not only does the CEO of Turbolinux believe that there will eventually be only one distribution of linux, but also that said distribution will be Turbolinux. What a surprise, huh?
Actually, C and Fortran code will probably be compatible, but code in other languages, most notably C++ due to incompatibilities in symbol encoding (``mangling''), the standard library and the application binary interface (ABI), is likely
to fail in some way.
WTF??? After all this time, they still haven't got C++ name mangling figured out? What the hell have these guys been doing all this time, playing solitaire?
I know maintaining a compiler is hard. But C++ name mangling is so fundamental to the function of the language that there's absolutely no excuse for this. Designing an extensible and robust name mangling scheme should have been the very first thing that was done prior to writing a single line of code for the C++ compiler. That they're changing the name mangling now makes them look like fools (of course, they could argue that they're fixing something that was broken from the very beginning, but that begs the question of why they haven't gotten to it until now)...
Walker added: "The burden of proof is not for the people who defend property rights, but those who want to take them away."
This is the fundamental flaw in today's thinking about intellectual property rights in general, and patents specifically. The view expounded above is very common: people believe that inventors and companies somehow have a right to patents.
Well, the very nature of intellectual property. combined with the nature of a patent, says otherwise. A patent is a privilege, a monopoly granted by the government to a single entity for a period of time. To argue that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate to the rest of the world what can and cannot be done with an idea is as ludicrous as arguing that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate what can and cannot be done with other forms of property that individuals own, like saying that an individual or company has the right to say what I can and cannot do with my computer, my car, or anything else I legitimately have in my possession.
No, Thomas Jefferson had it right: intellectual property is a contradiction of terms: ownership has no meaning when the thing in question is a mere idea, something that can be copied directly from person to person simply by the telling of it.
The logical conclusion of the assumption of intellectual property is thought control, and that way lies a police state.
At the same time, of course, it's appropriate to reward people for their intellectual work. And so, a compromise was reached and the system of intellectual property involving copyrights, trademarks, and patents was developed over centuries of civilization.
But make no mistake about it: intellectual property is itself an artificial construct, a set of rules that we as a society attempt to apply to ourselves in order to maximize the benefit to society, to ourselves.
And that goal, to maximize the benefit to society, should never be ignored, as it's being ignored right now. People have been brainwashed into thinking that this artificial construct we know as "intellectual property" is real and natural, as Walker illustrates so well.
It's not. The sooner we all realize that, the better off we as a society will be.
I disagree with you. No, corporations don't generally have ethics. But they should.
They should? [grin] That's a dangerous idea. Ethics are a personal value system. As such it has no necessary relationship to laws of the society, not to mention the general good. Ethics can be very different, and some varieties are extremely nasty and ugly.
and
I rather prefer ethicless corporations which just make money and obey the laws.
This is going to be something of a rant, so feel free to moderate it appropriately...
I might be inclined to agree with you but for one thing: a corporation has much more power than an individual has, while simultaneously having fewer responsibilities and less accountability. As an example, the most that happens to a company that causes the death of an individual is that the company gets sued and has to pay damages. None of the principals of the company go to jail, nor is the company dissolved as a result.
But when an individual causes the death of another individual, the responsible individual is usually thrown in prison, often for a very long time.
If companies are to operate without ethics and without regard to anyone but their shareholders, then they should be stripped of their power or held to the same (or harsher) legal standards that individuals are held to, meaning that (as an example of one way to implement the idea) harm done to an individual by a company causes the principals of the company to be held responsible as if they had personally done the deed themselves. The greater power of companies should be accompanied by greater risk and greater responsibility, not less of each.
Unless corporations are held to such standards, they should be stripped of all their power, particularly their power to influence politics.
But the current situation, where companies have greater power, fewer responsibilities, and less risk than individuals, is completely unacceptable, and is the cause of many of the ills of the world today.
If the number of visas granted increases, but the chances of getting a green card and, eventually, citizenship, decreases as a result of the increase in applications for these things, then it may be a net loss. As I understand things, most people who get H-1 visas try to get citizenship or, at least, a green card, so they can gain the freedom they really should have to begin with.
None of this is a problem as long as people's expectations are set properly ahead of time, before they apply for an H-1 visa. If they know that they're unlikely to get a green card or visa due to the time the INS takes to process things and are aware that they will be unable to change companies during their stay in the U.S., then I have no problem with this (otherwise sad) state of affairs: the results will be from a well-informed choice rather than from propaganda.
But unfortunately, I expect the INS situation to get worse as a result but for people to continue to expect to get green cards and citizenship. More people will be disappointed as a result, and that will be a shame.
The trend in the U.S. seems clear: the definition of "intellectual property" is broadening, and the restrictions placed on the general public as a result are increasing. This will probably continue, and this means that it will get more difficult to invent anything in the U.S. as the density of the IP minefield soars out of control.
But (counter to the beliefs of U.S. politicians), the U.S. isn't the only technologically adept country in the world, and while many other countries are following suit (most of Europe, for instance), not all of them are. I don't know, but perhaps Brazil might provide some competition in ideaspace. China could also, though it has other problems that currently yield the same basic stagnation that we will (more likely than not) see in the U.S. over time.
But the point is this: if the U.S. continues on this course, one of two things will happen: either the U.S. will get its ass kicked in the global marketplace as people in other countries invent things that can't be invented in the U.S. because nobody will bother to try, or technological improvement will grind to a halt worldwide.
Unless the latter happens, people in the rest of the world will be able to enjoy the benefits of non-U.S. developments while people in the U.S. will not, since U.S. patents govern commerce in the U.S. only, not elsewhere.
As an example that's relevant to this discussion, people in countries outside the U.S. will be able to purchase and use systems that make use of DDRSDRAM for cheap, because they won't be forced to pay the patent tax that people in the U.S. will have to pay: that tax will obviously be placed on goods in the U.S. in such a way as to make RDRAM more "economical" in the marketplace, and the end result is that people in the U.S. will be stuck using inferior equipment. Which will make businesses in the U.S. less competitive in the global marketplace. Certainly U.S. suppliers of computer equipment will be at a significant disadvantage in the non-U.S. marketplace relative to their foreign counterparts.
I want to see the companies in the U.S. get hurt where it counts, in the pocketbook, as a direct result of their own selfish greed and stupidity. But unfortunately, it's more likely that technological development worldwide will grind to a halt as the rest of the world follows the U.S. down the hole to hell.
Interestingly enough, it may be corporate stupidity, and not physics, which revokes Moore's Law....
Whoever wins *should* be a net win for us all. These are all meant to be free and exportable (importable in some cases as they aren't all US ciphers;). However, despite the fact that all entries are meant to be free of restrictions, note that Hitatchi (and perhaps others), have claimed patent right that cover a number of the entries...
If it's meant to be exportable then you can bet that the algorithm that gets selected will be one that the NSA knows how to crack with minimal effort. There's no way in hell they'd allow a standard that they couldn't crack to be approved by the U.S. Government.
As for the patent issue, the statement issued by NIST seems to imply that they won't initiate antitrust proceedings against anyone who has disclosed patent interests in the selected algorithm. I have a strong suspicion that the algorithm selected will have at least one big, disclosed patent against it. As with RSA, such a patent will hamper the standard from being adopted universally, which will be "good for National Security"...
NIST reminds all interested parties that the adoption of AES is being conducted as an open standards-setting activity....it may seek redress under the antitrust laws of the United States against any party in the future who might seek to exercise patent rights against any user of AES that have not been disclosed to NIST in response to this request for information.
Of course, there's no way for them to address patents that are granted after AES has already been selected, and given the stupidity of the patent office these days, you can bet that this will happen...
One more thing: if someone loses a lot of money by attempting to get a patent, I have little sympathy for them. The process of getting a monopoly on an idea should be risky. But it should be risky for all those who attempt it, not just the little guy.
There are a few rules that IMO should apply to patents:
The cost of filing for a patent should be some small percentage of the gross revenues of the applicant or the entity to whom the applicant has a contractual obligation to grant exclusive patent rights to. Thus, if you work for some company, the cost of filing a patent that the company will eventually gain exclusive use of is some percentage of that company's gross revenues.
A patentholder may charge no more than some small percentage of the money made from the items that make use of the patent, and the patentholder may only charge the originator of the item. Thus, if a patent is used in a piece of free software, the patentholder is out of luck, since no money is made from the software.
A patent may not be used to prevent the patented idea from being implemented. That is, the patentholder must license the patent.
The patent holder may not delay licensing attempts. That is, no submarine patents.
A patent should not be granted unless the idea in the patent can be concretely demonstrated by the patent applicant. If that means transporting the patent examiner to the patent applicant's site, so be it.
A patent lawyer should not be necessary for the submission of a patent to take place: the patent office should accept for examination patents that are written in such a way as to make plain the idea in question to someone skilled in the appropriate field. So it should be possible to write software patents (as an example...ugh) with source code examples and other things. This would significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the need for patent lawyers.
I agree with the last part of your statement above. However, it is grossly unfair to the applicant--especially after paying thousands of dollars in patent application fees and attorney fees--to reject it simply because the patent examiner doesn't have time to examine the patent.
If you're going to have a patent system at all, it needs to be done properly. Arbitrarily rejecting potentially good patents is just as bad as arbitrarily granting bad ones.
If the nature of a patent were different, I might be inclined to agree with you. But because a patent grants a monopoly, it is most definitely not true that arbitrarily rejecting potentially good patents is as bad as arbitrarily granting bad ones. Clearly, the latter is worse than the former.
Why? Because in the former case, the only people to lose out are those who are attempting to obtain the patent, whereas in the latter case the public at large loses out, as the cost of goods that depend on the (obvious) patent increases or, even worse, such goods are made unavailable.
I'd much rather see good patents rejected arbitrarily. The worst thing that happens in that case is that the idea isn't exploited by the originators. But unless the idea itself is so non-obvious that nobody else could come up with it, someone else will think of it and exploit it.
Remember: the patent system is a privilege, but you're treating it as a right. It should never be someone's right to obtain a monopoly on an idea.
But you still have the problem that they don't have adequate time and resources to examine the applications. Would arbitrarily accepting some applications and rejecting others be any better than the current system?
No. What would be better is automatic rejection of the patent if the examiner doesn't have time to examine it properly. So the default should be rejection, not acceptance. A patent grants a monopoly. It should be difficult to get.
Microsoft is a completely different matter. So is the MPAA, and the RIAA, and DIVX, etc. These entities have done hundreds of times more evil than NVidia has done, and they deserve to be punished.
Perhaps. But how much evil must a company do before you decide they should be frowned upon for it?
My answer is simple: a company generally holds a lot more power than an individual, so it must therefore be held to proportionally higher standards than an individual. That means that NVidia, 3Dfx, etc. had better keep their noses much cleaner than the average person does.
But guess what? They often do a lot worse than the average person.
As an individual, would you attempt to patent every idea you ever came up with and then sue everyone else who seems to be using those ideas? Never mind that as an individual you couldn't afford to do it. Would you do it if you could? Perhaps I'm naive, but I think most individuals would answer "no". But most companies answer "yes"!!
It doesn't matter if NVidia's first target is 3Dfx. What matters is that there's nothing to prevent them from doing the same to a small startup that has the potential to produce even better hardware than NVidia. That NVidia is willing to sue 3Dfx is proof that NVidia is willing to sue, period. The same can be said of 3Dfx and their multitexture lawsuit(s). Because of their behavior, neither company can be trusted with market dominance (something that in my mind carries as much responsibility as it does reward).
I've read a number of posts here criticizing the dim state of affairs at the Patent Office. What I haven't seen from this august body of patent law experts (snicker, snort) is anything resembling a workable alternative.
Workable alternative? Very simple: a patent grants monopoly power. Therefore it is something that should be granted very reluctantly. Hence, the contents of a patent application should be made public by the patent office so that anybody in the public may comment on it. Let the public do the peer review and the legwork required to validate or shoot down the patent application, and let the patentee defend his patent application in public. If the patentee in debate with the public fails to positively convince the patent office beyond any reasonable doubt that it deserves the patent then the patent office does not grant it.
Now, some will say that doing so puts the patentee at risk of "losing" his idea. They would be correct, and I think that's the way it should be: an extraordinary reward (monopoly on an idea) should require an extraordinary risk.
2) "They deliberately changed the command line interface to break every PGP-interoperable tool out there." No. *I* deliberately changed the command line interface (with much deliberation) for two reasons: Once Unix development started, we were on a very tight schedule, as the Windows and Mac versions had already been released (see below). The primary goal was to make it possible for Unix to decrypt the new key formats as quickly as possible. There was not time, under the schedule, to reimplement the 2.x command line item-for-item.
...and...
3) "They released the Windows version months before the UNIX version." True enough. We were a startup, in those days, and, if you look at Wired Magazine from the same time period, youll find we did significant layoffs at the company around that time. As 5.0 was rolling out, PGP, Inc. was realizing that it didn't really have enough funding to keep going as an independent entity. As a result, we didn't have any resources to devote to Unix.
When are people going to learn that tight schedules and solid, reliable, secure code are mutually exclusive? For most things what you did would have been excusable, but PGP's very mission makes it an exception to that. So as soon as you knew that you were on a tight schedule you should have concentrated releasing the source code of PGP 5.0 to the world so that others who did have the time to do things properly could have.
Instead, PGP 5.0 became yet another example of what happens when you try to code under a tight deadline. How many more such examples do we need before people START GETTING IT??? It's little surprise that most of the things we tend to use today are buggy pieces of crap: they were all designed and implemented with time to market as the primary goal.
Personally, I'm perfectly willing to wait a bit for something to be designed and implemented properly. But I seem to be very much an exception to the rule...
On what system do you think IT staffers are more likely to make undocumented changes, the one with lots of pretty little buttons or the one with flexible and powerful and occasionaly daunting text-based configuration? On what system is that IT staffer more likely to make documentation as he goes? I think Linux.
Better yet, any shop worth their salt will have their important config files under RCS. Anything that gets changed will therefore "automatically" be documented...
Of course, any drug company worth its salt will say that your computer's idle time is being used to simulate the effects of a very important drug currently in development.
How unfortunate that they'll forget to tell you that what you're simulating are the effects of this amazing new hair growth treatment they're working on (which is very important to them, of course, since it can bring in a boatload of cash for them)...
Argh! Whatever you think you know about the McDonald's "coffee" suit, it's wrong. It's been discussed before repeatedly on both Slashdot and elsewhere, so I'm not going to repeat it yet again here.
Yeah, it's been discussed here before, but there's one question that I've never seen asked: had the woman ever bought coffee at McDonald's in the recent past prior to that particular purchase? I suspect that she had, in which case she had firsthand prior experience with the temperature of McDonald's coffee and therefore had no grounds to sue, much less win, unless the temperature of the coffee that time was unusually high (which I don't believe was the case. Indeed, part of the reason she won is that it wasn't unusually high). It's not like McDonald's has a monopoly on coffee or anything...
Sure. Require a warranty. But limit liability to some function of the price paid for the software/license.
Interesting idea. Unfortunately most copies of Windows (and many of Office, etc.) come bundled with computers at no additional cost to the purchaser. Microsoft could (and probably would) argue that the consumer had paid $0 for the product and hence had no warranty. The PC manufacturer might be entitiled to $30 worth of warrenty (1 support call?), but the actualy buyer might be entitled to nothing.
If the software comes bundled with the computer, one might be able to successfully argue that the software is just part of the system the same way the CPU is part of the system, so when the software malfunctions, the system has malfunctioned and the manufacturer of the computer is then liable for (in the scheme being discussed here) up to three times the price of the computer in damages.
The only way the computer manufacturer should be able to get out of this is by itemizing the OS and other bundled software on the invoice and showing that they are free, and also offering the same computer system without an OS for the same price as with Windows. Not sure if they'd do that or not...
I really wish that they would include a step-by-step list of changes to the kernel that they make with patches / links to patches that they use so that an avereage user can "redo" a kernel on their own..
They do. Or at least they used to. It's called a source RPM, or SRPM, and it's included in your RedHat distribution (at least, most of them. Don't know if the CheapBytes ones have the SRPMS or not).
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Re:This has been going on for a long time...
on
The Leased Life?
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Specifically regarding maintenance, there is a certain amount of economics that should be going into these decisions.
For example, the oil change on my car. Yes, I could spend 20 minutes changing the oil myself, but it's really going to take me more time than that (I have to purchase the oil and filter, change into work clothes, change the oil, clean up, change clothes, take the oil to a recycling station), probably at least an hour.
Now, if we break out my salary into a monthly wage, I make over $20/hr post tax, doing what I know how to do well. Thus, that oil change cost me $30 to do myself, as opposed to $20 from the oil change shop.
Given the choice, I will have someone else change my oil.
A lot of people seem to make this mistake.
Your analysis is flawed. The reason it is flawed is that you are being paid a salary. That means that the amount of money you bring in is fixed and independent of the amount of time you spend on the job.
So you will save money if you to do the job of changing your oil yourself, since the time you'll spend doing it isn't time you could be paid for anyway.
Now, if you were a contractor being paid by the hour, your analysis would make a lot more sense.
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This is off-topic, but I don't mind if it's modera
on
The Leased Life?
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This is off-topic, but I don't mind if it's moderated that way...
Complaining about a person's actions? Fine. Or a whole group's actions. But invalidating a set of beliefs due to bad experiences with a few people who hold, or claim to hold, those beliefs? That's flat-out narrow-minded.
Agreed. But regarding Christianity (or, at least, many forms of it), the reason it's invalid is that it's a logical contradiction to believe in a God that has all of the following attributes:
All-knowing (knows everything).
All-powerful (is capable of everything).
Actually cares greatly about the welfare of human beings.
Created the universe we live in.
The reason is that if (2) and (3) are true then (4) cannot be true, for the universe we live in is capable of causing us pain. (1) means that this God knew exactly what it was doing when doing (4), and (2) means that this God was capable of building a universe that wouldn't harm us.
The fact that our universe is capable of harming us means that one of the assumptions in the list must be false. But most forms of Christianity that I'm familiar with assert that all four items are true, and hence those forms of Christianity are logically invalid.
None of this means that there aren't useful lessons to be learned from Christianity. But it does mean that the belief systems as systems are compromised. If they can't even get the basic logic right, what can they get right?
You believe that if there is no government, and no governing law, that the farmer is going to keep his tractor? What if the farmer down the road owns a bunch more land and has a gun? Can't he just take the first farmer's tractor? Heck, can't he enslave that farmer- and his family?
Violence == Force; Force == Coercion; Coercion.new->heiriarchy; Heirarchy != Anarchy.
When people use violence in order to increase their wealth, why that's called Capitalism, my friend.
Well, actually, it is called many things.
Somebody who wants to destroy government and replace it with a society based on equality and freedom is an anarchist. Somebody who just wants to destroy government, with no idea what to do afterwards is just a nut.
As appealing as the principles of anarchy may be, I cannot help but believe that they are far too idealistic. Here's why:
By definition, forcing someone to play by a certain set of rules, or to choose between a fixed set of options, is a form of coercion, a direct contradiction of anarchistic beliefs, yes?
So the problem in front of you, and which you cannot solve, is this: how can you always persuade someone through non-coercive means (e.g., convincing them through logical argument) that they should themselves not use coercive means? The answer to that question, of course, is that you can't. Not always. The only situation in which you can guarantee that coercive means will never be used for anything is when the idea of coercion never enters the mind(s) of any of the members of the society in question. For if it is possible for any of the members to get that idea, eventually one or more of them will attempt to carry it through to fruition. But it is human nature to at least think of using some form of coercion to achieve one's ends.
Hence, it will always be the case that some members of human society will attempt to use coercion to achieve their ends, and hence a true anarchistic society cannot exist, as nice as it might be. There must always be some form of coercion in a human society, if only to enforce a rule that says "thou shalt not coerce another to do thy bidding".
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose all reverse engineering were outlawed.
This means that unless an individual already works for a company, the only things he can learn about are the things that have been voluntarily released to the public. Companies rarely, if ever, release detailed information about their technologies, even if those technologies are obsolete, because new spins on those old techniques may give the company a competitive edge.
So where does this leave the individual? The only thing left for him to learn is old and outdated. And over time, the material available for him to learn will get older and older.
Which can only mean that the pace of innovation will slow to a crawl, because most innovation stands on top of prior innovation.
This may be the strongest overall argument in favor of reverse engineering and public disclosure of the results.
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So now we don't have to worry about humans going extinct through thermonuclear war or whatever, because if we do, then we'll be able to revive ourselves.
Oh, wait...
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(Slaps forehead)
Of course! THAT's why the dinosaurs went extinct while the mammals didn't!
:-) for the humor impaired...
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What's a distribution? A collection of software that, when installed on a computer, will allow the owner of that computer to perform a set of tasks with the computer.
More precisely, a set of tools.
But there is no single tool or set of tools that will do all the jobs that need doing unless the set in question includes every tool ever made. Such a tool set would be unwieldy.
My point? A single distribution can't possibly satisfy the needs of everyone without being so large and unwieldy as to be useless to everyone. Ergo, there will always be multiple distributions, and this is a good thing.
I think it's likely that not only does the CEO of Turbolinux believe that there will eventually be only one distribution of linux, but also that said distribution will be Turbolinux. What a surprise, huh?
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From the gcc working group's message:
WTF??? After all this time, they still haven't got C++ name mangling figured out? What the hell have these guys been doing all this time, playing solitaire?
I know maintaining a compiler is hard. But C++ name mangling is so fundamental to the function of the language that there's absolutely no excuse for this. Designing an extensible and robust name mangling scheme should have been the very first thing that was done prior to writing a single line of code for the C++ compiler. That they're changing the name mangling now makes them look like fools (of course, they could argue that they're fixing something that was broken from the very beginning, but that begs the question of why they haven't gotten to it until now)...
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This is the fundamental flaw in today's thinking about intellectual property rights in general, and patents specifically. The view expounded above is very common: people believe that inventors and companies somehow have a right to patents.
Well, the very nature of intellectual property. combined with the nature of a patent, says otherwise. A patent is a privilege, a monopoly granted by the government to a single entity for a period of time. To argue that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate to the rest of the world what can and cannot be done with an idea is as ludicrous as arguing that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate what can and cannot be done with other forms of property that individuals own, like saying that an individual or company has the right to say what I can and cannot do with my computer, my car, or anything else I legitimately have in my possession.
No, Thomas Jefferson had it right: intellectual property is a contradiction of terms: ownership has no meaning when the thing in question is a mere idea, something that can be copied directly from person to person simply by the telling of it.
The logical conclusion of the assumption of intellectual property is thought control, and that way lies a police state.
At the same time, of course, it's appropriate to reward people for their intellectual work. And so, a compromise was reached and the system of intellectual property involving copyrights, trademarks, and patents was developed over centuries of civilization.
But make no mistake about it: intellectual property is itself an artificial construct, a set of rules that we as a society attempt to apply to ourselves in order to maximize the benefit to society, to ourselves.
And that goal, to maximize the benefit to society, should never be ignored, as it's being ignored right now. People have been brainwashed into thinking that this artificial construct we know as "intellectual property" is real and natural, as Walker illustrates so well.
It's not. The sooner we all realize that, the better off we as a society will be.
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and
This is going to be something of a rant, so feel free to moderate it appropriately...
I might be inclined to agree with you but for one thing: a corporation has much more power than an individual has, while simultaneously having fewer responsibilities and less accountability. As an example, the most that happens to a company that causes the death of an individual is that the company gets sued and has to pay damages. None of the principals of the company go to jail, nor is the company dissolved as a result.
But when an individual causes the death of another individual, the responsible individual is usually thrown in prison, often for a very long time.
If companies are to operate without ethics and without regard to anyone but their shareholders, then they should be stripped of their power or held to the same (or harsher) legal standards that individuals are held to, meaning that (as an example of one way to implement the idea) harm done to an individual by a company causes the principals of the company to be held responsible as if they had personally done the deed themselves. The greater power of companies should be accompanied by greater risk and greater responsibility, not less of each.
Unless corporations are held to such standards, they should be stripped of all their power, particularly their power to influence politics.
But the current situation, where companies have greater power, fewer responsibilities, and less risk than individuals, is completely unacceptable, and is the cause of many of the ills of the world today.
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If the number of visas granted increases, but the chances of getting a green card and, eventually, citizenship, decreases as a result of the increase in applications for these things, then it may be a net loss. As I understand things, most people who get H-1 visas try to get citizenship or, at least, a green card, so they can gain the freedom they really should have to begin with.
None of this is a problem as long as people's expectations are set properly ahead of time, before they apply for an H-1 visa. If they know that they're unlikely to get a green card or visa due to the time the INS takes to process things and are aware that they will be unable to change companies during their stay in the U.S., then I have no problem with this (otherwise sad) state of affairs: the results will be from a well-informed choice rather than from propaganda.
But unfortunately, I expect the INS situation to get worse as a result but for people to continue to expect to get green cards and citizenship. More people will be disappointed as a result, and that will be a shame.
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The trend in the U.S. seems clear: the definition of "intellectual property" is broadening, and the restrictions placed on the general public as a result are increasing. This will probably continue, and this means that it will get more difficult to invent anything in the U.S. as the density of the IP minefield soars out of control.
But (counter to the beliefs of U.S. politicians), the U.S. isn't the only technologically adept country in the world, and while many other countries are following suit (most of Europe, for instance), not all of them are. I don't know, but perhaps Brazil might provide some competition in ideaspace. China could also, though it has other problems that currently yield the same basic stagnation that we will (more likely than not) see in the U.S. over time.
But the point is this: if the U.S. continues on this course, one of two things will happen: either the U.S. will get its ass kicked in the global marketplace as people in other countries invent things that can't be invented in the U.S. because nobody will bother to try, or technological improvement will grind to a halt worldwide.
Unless the latter happens, people in the rest of the world will be able to enjoy the benefits of non-U.S. developments while people in the U.S. will not, since U.S. patents govern commerce in the U.S. only, not elsewhere.
As an example that's relevant to this discussion, people in countries outside the U.S. will be able to purchase and use systems that make use of DDRSDRAM for cheap, because they won't be forced to pay the patent tax that people in the U.S. will have to pay: that tax will obviously be placed on goods in the U.S. in such a way as to make RDRAM more "economical" in the marketplace, and the end result is that people in the U.S. will be stuck using inferior equipment. Which will make businesses in the U.S. less competitive in the global marketplace. Certainly U.S. suppliers of computer equipment will be at a significant disadvantage in the non-U.S. marketplace relative to their foreign counterparts.
I want to see the companies in the U.S. get hurt where it counts, in the pocketbook, as a direct result of their own selfish greed and stupidity. But unfortunately, it's more likely that technological development worldwide will grind to a halt as the rest of the world follows the U.S. down the hole to hell.
Interestingly enough, it may be corporate stupidity, and not physics, which revokes Moore's Law....
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If it's meant to be exportable then you can bet that the algorithm that gets selected will be one that the NSA knows how to crack with minimal effort. There's no way in hell they'd allow a standard that they couldn't crack to be approved by the U.S. Government.
As for the patent issue, the statement issued by NIST seems to imply that they won't initiate antitrust proceedings against anyone who has disclosed patent interests in the selected algorithm. I have a strong suspicion that the algorithm selected will have at least one big, disclosed patent against it. As with RSA, such a patent will hamper the standard from being adopted universally, which will be "good for National Security"...
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Of course, there's no way for them to address patents that are granted after AES has already been selected, and given the stupidity of the patent office these days, you can bet that this will happen...
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There are a few rules that IMO should apply to patents:
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If the nature of a patent were different, I might be inclined to agree with you. But because a patent grants a monopoly, it is most definitely not true that arbitrarily rejecting potentially good patents is as bad as arbitrarily granting bad ones. Clearly, the latter is worse than the former.
Why? Because in the former case, the only people to lose out are those who are attempting to obtain the patent, whereas in the latter case the public at large loses out, as the cost of goods that depend on the (obvious) patent increases or, even worse, such goods are made unavailable.
I'd much rather see good patents rejected arbitrarily. The worst thing that happens in that case is that the idea isn't exploited by the originators. But unless the idea itself is so non-obvious that nobody else could come up with it, someone else will think of it and exploit it.
Remember: the patent system is a privilege, but you're treating it as a right. It should never be someone's right to obtain a monopoly on an idea.
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No. What would be better is automatic rejection of the patent if the examiner doesn't have time to examine it properly. So the default should be rejection, not acceptance. A patent grants a monopoly. It should be difficult to get.
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Perhaps. But how much evil must a company do before you decide they should be frowned upon for it?
My answer is simple: a company generally holds a lot more power than an individual, so it must therefore be held to proportionally higher standards than an individual. That means that NVidia, 3Dfx, etc. had better keep their noses much cleaner than the average person does.
But guess what? They often do a lot worse than the average person.
As an individual, would you attempt to patent every idea you ever came up with and then sue everyone else who seems to be using those ideas? Never mind that as an individual you couldn't afford to do it. Would you do it if you could? Perhaps I'm naive, but I think most individuals would answer "no". But most companies answer "yes"!!
It doesn't matter if NVidia's first target is 3Dfx. What matters is that there's nothing to prevent them from doing the same to a small startup that has the potential to produce even better hardware than NVidia. That NVidia is willing to sue 3Dfx is proof that NVidia is willing to sue, period. The same can be said of 3Dfx and their multitexture lawsuit(s). Because of their behavior, neither company can be trusted with market dominance (something that in my mind carries as much responsibility as it does reward).
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Workable alternative? Very simple: a patent grants monopoly power. Therefore it is something that should be granted very reluctantly. Hence, the contents of a patent application should be made public by the patent office so that anybody in the public may comment on it. Let the public do the peer review and the legwork required to validate or shoot down the patent application, and let the patentee defend his patent application in public. If the patentee in debate with the public fails to positively convince the patent office beyond any reasonable doubt that it deserves the patent then the patent office does not grant it.
Now, some will say that doing so puts the patentee at risk of "losing" his idea. They would be correct, and I think that's the way it should be: an extraordinary reward (monopoly on an idea) should require an extraordinary risk.
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...and...
When are people going to learn that tight schedules and solid, reliable, secure code are mutually exclusive? For most things what you did would have been excusable, but PGP's very mission makes it an exception to that. So as soon as you knew that you were on a tight schedule you should have concentrated releasing the source code of PGP 5.0 to the world so that others who did have the time to do things properly could have.
Instead, PGP 5.0 became yet another example of what happens when you try to code under a tight deadline. How many more such examples do we need before people START GETTING IT??? It's little surprise that most of the things we tend to use today are buggy pieces of crap: they were all designed and implemented with time to market as the primary goal.
Personally, I'm perfectly willing to wait a bit for something to be designed and implemented properly. But I seem to be very much an exception to the rule...
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Better yet, any shop worth their salt will have their important config files under RCS. Anything that gets changed will therefore "automatically" be documented...
Hehehe...try that with NT's registry...
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Of course, any drug company worth its salt will say that your computer's idle time is being used to simulate the effects of a very important drug currently in development.
How unfortunate that they'll forget to tell you that what you're simulating are the effects of this amazing new hair growth treatment they're working on (which is very important to them, of course, since it can bring in a boatload of cash for them)...
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Yeah, it's been discussed here before, but there's one question that I've never seen asked: had the woman ever bought coffee at McDonald's in the recent past prior to that particular purchase? I suspect that she had, in which case she had firsthand prior experience with the temperature of McDonald's coffee and therefore had no grounds to sue, much less win, unless the temperature of the coffee that time was unusually high (which I don't believe was the case. Indeed, part of the reason she won is that it wasn't unusually high). It's not like McDonald's has a monopoly on coffee or anything...
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If the software comes bundled with the computer, one might be able to successfully argue that the software is just part of the system the same way the CPU is part of the system, so when the software malfunctions, the system has malfunctioned and the manufacturer of the computer is then liable for (in the scheme being discussed here) up to three times the price of the computer in damages.
The only way the computer manufacturer should be able to get out of this is by itemizing the OS and other bundled software on the invoice and showing that they are free, and also offering the same computer system without an OS for the same price as with Windows. Not sure if they'd do that or not...
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They do. Or at least they used to. It's called a source RPM, or SRPM, and it's included in your RedHat distribution (at least, most of them. Don't know if the CheapBytes ones have the SRPMS or not).
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A lot of people seem to make this mistake.
Your analysis is flawed. The reason it is flawed is that you are being paid a salary. That means that the amount of money you bring in is fixed and independent of the amount of time you spend on the job.
So you will save money if you to do the job of changing your oil yourself, since the time you'll spend doing it isn't time you could be paid for anyway.
Now, if you were a contractor being paid by the hour, your analysis would make a lot more sense.
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Agreed. But regarding Christianity (or, at least, many forms of it), the reason it's invalid is that it's a logical contradiction to believe in a God that has all of the following attributes:
The reason is that if (2) and (3) are true then (4) cannot be true, for the universe we live in is capable of causing us pain. (1) means that this God knew exactly what it was doing when doing (4), and (2) means that this God was capable of building a universe that wouldn't harm us.
The fact that our universe is capable of harming us means that one of the assumptions in the list must be false. But most forms of Christianity that I'm familiar with assert that all four items are true, and hence those forms of Christianity are logically invalid.
None of this means that there aren't useful lessons to be learned from Christianity. But it does mean that the belief systems as systems are compromised. If they can't even get the basic logic right, what can they get right?
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Well, actually, it is called many things.
As appealing as the principles of anarchy may be, I cannot help but believe that they are far too idealistic. Here's why:
By definition, forcing someone to play by a certain set of rules, or to choose between a fixed set of options, is a form of coercion, a direct contradiction of anarchistic beliefs, yes?
So the problem in front of you, and which you cannot solve, is this: how can you always persuade someone through non-coercive means (e.g., convincing them through logical argument) that they should themselves not use coercive means? The answer to that question, of course, is that you can't. Not always. The only situation in which you can guarantee that coercive means will never be used for anything is when the idea of coercion never enters the mind(s) of any of the members of the society in question. For if it is possible for any of the members to get that idea, eventually one or more of them will attempt to carry it through to fruition. But it is human nature to at least think of using some form of coercion to achieve one's ends.
Hence, it will always be the case that some members of human society will attempt to use coercion to achieve their ends, and hence a true anarchistic society cannot exist, as nice as it might be. There must always be some form of coercion in a human society, if only to enforce a rule that says "thou shalt not coerce another to do thy bidding".
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