You don't need to patent something defensively. If you do something but don't patent it, nobody else can patent it afterwords because of a little caveat called "Prior Art."
I suspect this is a myth. It is claimed that prior art is sufficient to defend against a patent but I believe I've seen references in this forum that show that prior art isn't always a defense.
And, in any case, even if prior art were a defense, you still have to defend yourself in court and that means spending lots of ca$h. But if you have a patent on something that the other guy is likely to be using himself, you can politely point that out to him before his patent lawsuit gets off the ground and then arrange a cross-licensing agreement of some kind.
The traditional players in the field, and it seems that Microsoft is one of them, use patents as a way of preventing themselves from being sued. It's primarily morons like Amazon that have decided to break with this tradition and thus put the entire field in jeopardy.
I disagree that a police state is a stable form of government.
...
Thus there is a large possibility to get away with a crime against the government. In order to prevent crime the government must make the penalties draconian. This then provides rallying points for the citezenry against the government. Unlike in other countries where these punishments are conducted exclusively against a less powerful group (the arabs in isreal) by a large racial/socia group in power these indignities would be perpratrated on the american people as a whole thus fermenting rebellion.
If you believe that a police state isn't a stable form of government, then ask yourself this: how did the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc governments remain in power for more than 60 years without being overthrown through popular revolution? Remember: the people most likely to rebel are those who remember what it was like before the police state came into being.
What killed the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries was economic competition from the outside. But that wouldn't exist in a world police state. Nor would references to other, better systems, except in the hands of a few: remember that a police state has to control information in order to control people. The way to make that happen is for the state to control the education systems and the means of information dissemination. Hence, controls on the communications infrastructure.
It should be obvious that you can't build a police state in a single generation, because the contrast would be too great. You have to build it a little at a time, slowly enough that people won't notice. A right removed here, a privilege revoked there, a restriction put somewhere else. Rebellion can only happen if the people believe that what they have isn't good, but whether or not they believe that is largely determined by what they can contrast their current condition against. That's why the "ruling class" has to remain untouchable and mysterious: the populace has to believe that there's no way for them to get from where they are to where the ruling class is, otherwise they'll yearn for it and become dissatisfied with their own conditions.
Also, one needn't formally try, convict, etc., a "criminal". One need only make something happen to them. A car accident, a heart attack, etc. A police state has no need for leniency, as long as the fact that the troublemaker died can't be traced back to the source. Obviously this works best when it's not obvious that the person in question was making trouble to begin with.
Lastly, a dumb populace is an easily managed populace. So a police state will be on a sharp lookout for those with above-average intelligence, so that they can deal with the issue, either by relocating them such that they have no more communiction with the rest of the population (this can be explained away by the government by saying that the person is going to a special school or something) or by arranging for an "accident" to happen to them.
Oh, well. I'm just rambling now. But it seems obvious to me that there are lots of ways that a police state can maintain itself indefinitely.
It seems to me that the U.S., the U.K., and other countries are in a race to see who becomes a police state first. At the current pace, it seems the U.K. will probably win.
Personally, I wish the U.K. would get on with it, so that there will be enough time for the rest of the world to see firsthand that a police state can easily emerge from a "democracy" (as loosely as that may apply), and so that the citizenry of the rest of the world can prevent the U.S. and other countries from also becoming police states.
It'll be a real bad deal if the U.S. gets there first...it has enough power that the rest of the world will probably descend into a police state, also. Unfortunately, a world police state may be the most stable government structure we know since there will be nobody on the outside to overthrow it, and it may even be that a descent into that is inevitable.
After 20 years of GUIs, you'd think we'd have them pretty much nailed down by now, and that we'd have learned much more than was known when the Macintosh UI was designed. But interestingly enough, the same basic principles and requirements still apply:
Consistency
Predictability
Simplicity
Obviousness
"Least Astonishment"
Fitts' Law
A GUI under Linux or any other Unix system will have a tougher time of meeting all these requirements than a GUI built on a newly-designed OS. The reason is that Unix already has certain ways of doing things and the requirement for consistency demands that those ways be complied with in a GUI. An example is the documentation access method: Unix uses manpages, and so a GUI should also use manpages. There's nothing that says that you can't build on that, but it's very wrong, IMO, to build an entirely new documentation structure because it violates the rule of consistency and predictability (those two tend to go hand-in-hand).
Thus far, pretty much every Unix-based GUI (and Windows, too) violates Fitts' Law, which basically says that larger targets are easier to hit and thus more desirable, so edges of the screen are prime real-estate since they are infinite in at least one dimension. Gnome has the additional problem that its default scrollbars are far too narrow and thus are difficult to hit, which makes them difficult and annoying to use. Why the width of the scrollbars isn't included in the.gtkrc theme settings (it can only be changed in a binary theme) is beyond me.
Both Gnome and KDE are making slow but steady progress towards being easy and pleasing to use. But I think it's very important that they avoid the mistakes made in Windows, even at the cost of compatibility with the Windows GUI: it's more important to get the UI right than it is to get it to be compatible. People can learn, especially if what they're learning conforms with the principles listed above.
It's obvious that the patent problem can be tracked all the way back to the source: the patent office. It's also obvious to me that the patent office won't change how it does things, because it has no incentive to and every incentive to keep things the way they are (they get paid for approving patents, after all).
So how do you kill the patent problem? By killing the patent office! But how do you do that?
Simple: figure out the things the patent office must use in order to do its job, and patent them. The patent office, being run by a bunch of morons, will gleefully grant you the patent.
You then threaten the patent office with a patent infringement lawsuit if they don't comply with your licensing terms. Your licensing terms, of course, will involve enough cash to make it impossible for the patent office to operate at all, thus putting them out of business. They'll have to pay, of course, because you'll have a monopoly on the processes the patent office uses.
And remember: even if you have to take it to court, it's very likely you'll win, since prior art appears to be irrelevant to the courts today.
Ah, but breaking the speed laws is statistical murder, not a crime with no victims. It's just that you're not _particularly_ likely to kill anyone. But someone doing _exactly_ what you are will.
Not because they were speeding, though. Because they were stupid enough that they didn't realize that speed and distance are related, and that an increase in speed requires an increase in distance from other objects in order to be able to react properly.
What matters is relative speed, not absolute speed. If I'm going 40 mph faster than everyone else, then I'm driving in a hazardous manner because others won't have enough time to react to me and I'll probably have a hard time reacting to them. But if I'm going 10 mph faster than everyone else, there's no problem. If you can't handle someone going 10 mph relative to you then you obviously can't handle riding a bicycle, much less driving a car.
As with anything else, it all depends on the environment. Most speeding occurs on highways, which is the safest environment you could ask for, as the only objects that you really have to worry about (i.e., the ones accelerating from a stop) are the cop cars.:-)
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Freedom is a multi-edged sword
on
Protesting DMCA
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Yeah, let's criticize the people who have risked their lives to uphold our freedom. I'm sure their testicular fortitude is no match for 20 Slashdotters who are upset because they can't watch the DVDs that mommy brought back from Japan.
Under other circumstances I might agree with you.
However, the veterans in question are, ironically, supporting a measure which is designed to add a restriction to the very thing they defended: freedom.
People, freedom in general is like free speech: it's not free unless there is the possibility of it conflicting with your own preferences. Speech is not free if it's restricted to, say, speech that you happen to agree with, or speech that you don't happen to find offensive, etc. Actions are the same: I'm not free unless I can perform actions that you disagree with, but which otherwise do not harm you or others. Flag burning is an example. You and others might not agree with it, but it doesn't harm you.
It is very important to distinguish between actions which infringe upon the rights of others and actions which do not. The latter should be allowed unconditionally. The former will require a compromise.
To be honest, I don't understand why there are so many attempts by so many people to restrict what others say or do simply because it's disagreeable (however disagreeable it might be). It's as if nobody has any backbone anymore when it comes to this kind of thing. What's with this society turning into one full of wimps?
It would be nice if people would quit acting like little babies that need to be protected from the big, bad world.
Anyone else have ideas on making software patents palatable?
Yeah: all potential patents are publicly peer-reviewed prior to issuance to ensure that they really are worthy of the status of a patent.
Some will argue here that doing so would mean that the idea couldn't be used as a trade secret should it fail to achieve patent status. And they would be correct. But a patent represents a monopoly on an idea and should thus be issued rarely. If someone wants to go for the gold and attempt to get a patent, they should risk something in the process. What more appropriate thing to risk than the idea itself?
Public peer-review prior to patent issuance would have two effects: it would cause people to attempt to patent only those things that they truly thought were worthy of a patent (i.e., likely to be patentable) and it would cause bogus patent attempts (there will always be people stupid enough to attempt to patent the obvious, even in such a system) to be shot down quickly.
I see this as the fastest and easiest way to reform the patent system.
Early Comments... If my patent application is rejected, then I can still develop it in secret. However, that secret would be out of the bag in this case.
Correct. But that risk should be the price you pay for going for a monopoly on your idea.
Folks, the very fact that a patent grants you a monopoly means that the act of going for it should be risky. Why should patents be different from most other financial endeavors, where high profits and high risk usually go hand-in-hand?
Patentable ideas should be the exception, not the rule. If you want to fix the patent system, the fastest way to do so would be to require up-front disclosure of the idea to the world prior to its evaluation. It would mean that the only ideas that would get patented would be the ones that the owner truly believes deserve a patent, and not every cheap little idea that someone in a company gets like what we have right now.
I don't really think that user-friendliness is as hard to achieve in an open-sourced project as many people think. But there is one thing the developers must do more than anything else for it to work.
Many of us have non-technical friends. They can be an excellent resource in helping to make a program more user-friendly. The trick? Listen to them! Ask for their feedback on what things they find difficult to do, what things they would like to be able to do. The fact that they are non-technical is an advantage here, because it means that the only real way for them to be able to effectively use the program is if it is easy to learn.
The real trick is, of course, making the program easy to use as well as easy to learn, and that means optimizing the program for its primary mission. It's important to avoid creating a "swiss army knife" since that will not only make the program more difficult to learn but will force the developer to concentrate his effort on something other than the main purpose of the program.
Programs that are simple but powerful are rare, but are among the best finds out there. I think that simplicity and power in a program aren't mutually exclusive when the program is done right. One cheap (and perhaps relatively easy) way to make a program powerful and simple at the same time is to create the user interface so that only the most common functions are readily available in "normal" mode, and arrange for the rest of the functions to be available perhaps via a command line (the program will be a lot more powerful if it has a built-in scripting language) or perhaps via an "advanced mode".
Just remember that large arrays of buttons and tons of menu items will make the program more difficult to learn, so it's important to concentrate on making available (at least in the default UI mode) only the most important functions of the program.
Section 59.1-508.16. This section deals with electronic means to exercise the software publisher's rights to possession of the software and prevention of use due to a breach of contract. It specifically disallows the use of electronic methods for this unless you, as the end user, has specifically and separately (separate from the license) agreed to the use of these methods. Which means that once again, they can't reach in and delete or disable the software unless you told them that they could. And even if you have agreed to this, they have to notify you before they do using a means that you both agreed on beforehand (whether it be email, phone, in writing, etc.). And if they misuse these electronic means, this section provides you with a recourse against them for damages.
Hmm...let's see...so the software, during the installation process, pops up a dialog box with the overall license -- "Do you agree (Y/N)?" -- and says goodbye if you don't say "Y". If you agree, it pops up a second dialog box that says, buried in the middle of a lot of other legal mumbo-jumbo, "Licensee shall allow the Licensor to access Licensee's computer or computers to disable the Software and all related components. Failure to allow such access is grounds for immediate termination of the License and Licensee will return all copies of the Software to the Licensor in addition to a 10% restocking fee"... "Do you agree (Y/N)?" -- and immediately exits if the response is "N".
So now the user has to click "OK" on two dialog boxes, not one. Please tell us how this is any different than just burying the bit about remote control in the license itself? Especially since they can bury it in a bunch of other legal mumbo-jumbo?
It wouldn't surprise me if the UCITA would apply to safety-critical software just as much as it would apply to normal software...
The House version of the UCITA is HB561, and it passed today (2/15) with a 95 to 2 vote.
SJ239 and HJ277 are Senate and House resolutions to STUDY the UCITA. The House version was stricken from the docket a few days before they passed the UCITA itself.
Thankfully, the Senate version of the measure to study the UCITA was agreed to by a voice vote today (2/15), though that might not make any difference in the long run...:-(
I'll probably refrain from purchasing something from Etoys until next year. If they don't try this same crap again during the next Christmas season, that'll be much more convincing evidence that Etoys is sincere and has learned something. But unfortunately, it's difficult to tell until then.
That's the coldest, cruelist thing I've heard in a long time. That it is correct, well reasoned, and even rational just somehow makes it worse...
I fully agree. I don't want to see the UK become a police state. But I don't see how it can be avoided without some kind of outside intervention. It seems to me that if the UK were left to its own devices a police state is exactly what it would become.
As it stands, even with outside countries around, I can easily see the UK eventually becoming a police state...if it's done slowly enough.
Unfortunately, it looks to me like the U.S. is headed in roughly the same direction, but the forces against that are stronger here than in the UK. That will buy us more time if nothing else. And if the UK becomes a police state first, that alone might be enough to prevent the U.S. from becoming one... hopefully.
Yes, but the UK DOESN'T want to volunteer. The Government volunteers us.
Which shows just how close to the edge the UK already is.
When the people no longer have any real say in what their government does, it's only a matter of time before they becomes citizens of a police state. And since the citizenry of the UK isn't even armed, there's even less they can do than if there were armed.
You can argue all you want that the death rate by guns in the UK is so much less than it is in the U.S., but before you do that, answer this: what was the death rate by firearms in the UK before the citizenry of the UK was disarmed?
I'm no gun nut. Far from it. I don't even own one myself. But I recognize that an armed citizenry at least has a fighting chance of having their way with the government when all else fails. An unarmed citizenry has no real chance at all.
But the biggest problem in the UK isn't related to that at all: it's that the citizenry has no set of "rights" that they hold sacred that the government doesn't dare take away outright lest the population revolt.
In the U.S., we at least have a Constitution that clearly states the rights that the government WILL NOT trample on. The document itself isn't actually what's important. What's important is the effect it has: it serves as a rallying point that the citizenry can believe in and can use as common ground against the government. It sets the expectations of the people, and therefore strongly influences the willingness of the government to infringe on those rights, since doing so outright is a sure way of getting the elected officials quickly kicked out of office if nothing else. It also influences the voting tendencies of the population: they're not likely to vote for someone who is an obvious police state advocate.
Hard to deal with, of course, if you're a geek and given to common sense. Common sense, however, has nothing to do with the law; what the law seeks is internal consistency. The eventual implications of any individual case rarely matter.
This is an excellent example of why lawyers rank so low with us techies.
You see, the purpose of law is to serve society, NOT ITSELF. What you state above may be true but is precisely why many of us find the way law is practiced so abhorrent. When the application of a law runs contrary to common sense that is a very strong indicator that the suitability of the law itself should be questioned for that situation, and perhaps for others as well.
The law should, in general, be a reflection of common sense (or, more precisely, the common sensibilities of the general population) because the law's whole reason for existing is to make the lives of the individuals living in the society better -- to make society as a whole better. Common sense is the mechanism in humans that tells us how the world works and how we can make our own lives better as a result of that understanding. And one of the things common sense tells us is that the eventual implications of an individual case should matter, and that a system where the implications of an individual case are unimportant is a fundamentally broken one.
This is, of course, all IMHO, but with that in mind:
As someone who has been interested and involved in technological things pretty much all my life, there is one thing that seems to be consistent among most of the really good practitioners in the technology field: the recognition of purpose and the application of first principles.
In the technology field, we often question the very purpose of something, because in doing so we are able to determine for ourselves whether or not that something is necessary. This process makes our designs more efficient and more applicable to the problem being solved. We despise feature-richness and bloat because they are the results of attempts to apply a tool to something it wasn't designed for.
We apply the same methods when looking at laws. We ask ourselves whether or not a law that others are attempting to apply to something should apply. We always fall back to the age-old question "what is the purpose of this law?" when evaluating the law's effectiveness.
It would appear that many (perhaps most?) lawyers don't do this. To them, the law itself is the final answer. To them, it seems that there is no difference between right/wrong and legal/illegal: they are the same thing. Many judges appear to operate the same way.
This is why precedence is so important to lawyers and judges: because precedence is the way lawyers and judges decide how a law "should" be applied to a situation. Lawyers and judges "need" this because they do not know how (or do not care) to fall back to first principles when applying law. They don't know how or do not care to ask what the purpose of a law is and use that to make the decision. If the purpose of a law were used to decide how to rule in a case, then precedence would be irrelevant and would therefore not have the status in law that it has.
These two approaches are almost diametrically opposed, but this much can be said of the lawyers' approach: it is arbitrary, and therefore wide open to manipulation. For when a tool is allowed to be applied without regard to its purpose, then that tool can and will be misapplied. As is shown time and time again.
That is what we techies find abhorrent about lawyers and the law. To us the argument that "we should do it this way because it's always been done this way" (i.e., precedence) is specious on its face because it ignores the reason, or purpose, of doing something a certain way.
To us, laws are tools to be used in meeting the needs of the society which creates them. Each law, as a tool, has a purpose, and we recognize that it should not be applied when it doesn't serve that purpose. This is something that is very obviously lost on many (perhaps most) lawyers and judges.
Before you burn me at the stake, please hear me out.
We need Big Brother. More precisely, we need a living example of Big Brother. We need to see a country like the UK devolve into an all-seeing, all-knowing police state.
We need an example that we can point to that shows that it CAN happen even in a "democratic" society, so that we will KNOW that it is we, the people, who must remain firmly in control of the government, and not vice-versa. So that we will see with our own eyes what happens when we sacrifice freedom for security.
But it has to happen to a country that is relatively small and thus relatively harmless to the rest of the world.
I think the UK would make an excellent candidate. It's big enough that it'll have an impact on a large enough number of people to make the example compelling, but not big enough to pose a real danger of taking the rest of the world down with it.
It would be much, much worse if the U.S. devolved into such a police state because the U.S. is powerful enough to take the rest of the world with it. If that happened humanity might never climb out of the resulting hole.
We need an example like where the UK is headed to keep the rest of the world free.
If the UK wants to volunteer for this, who are we to argue?:-)
We humans CAN make error free software. We have missles that fly through the air, make tight corners, fly through windows and blow up. As opposed to software that is on windows that just blow up. Yet, the 'market' won't 'buy' software that is bug-free. Personally, I believe the market won't buy it because it hasn't been convinced to buy it.
No, the market won't buy it because it's far too expensive. The only way to reliably produce error free software is by doing a correctness proof of the software. That is horribly expensive.
Yes, it's possible to write error free software without doing a correctness proof -- but it's only by sheer luck that the resulting software will, in fact, be error free. A correctness proof is the only way to know for sure.
I agreed with you right up until the part about the tollbooths. (haha) Here's why:
3M patented the Post-It Note and made a fortune. If they would have "open-sourced" it as you suggest, and allowed anybody and their brother to use the technology, do you really think the office supply industry would have benefitted "from further innovation and not entrenched battles" as you suggest? Do you think we would have had a sticky-note revolution?
Of course.
If the idea is sound and someone builds it and sells it, people will buy it. Whether or not the implementation is patented has no effect on whether or not the end consumer will accept the implementation.
But even for a technology where there's no obvious way to improve it, an "open source" approach works better in the long run. The reason is that if there does happen to be a means of improving it, it's more likely to be found and, more importantly, exploited. The reason it's more likely to be found is that there isn't a patent to prevent people from even trying. If something is patented, that seriously discourages further exploration along those lines because royalties will have to be paid to the patent holder, thus making it (perhaps very significantly) more expensive to sell, and therefore (perhaps very significantly) harder to profit from. So most people with any sense won't even bother to try improving on a patented process. The same things apply to the exploitation of an improvement.
Of course not. There are plenty of products out there that are indeed truly revolutionary, and that can't really be improved a whole heck of a lot. Banner ads are a perfect example.
But all a patent does is grant a "temporary" (but, for the purposes of the computing industry, permanent) monopoly on something. This means that the price of that something will be higher. Perhaps much higher, but ALMOST ALWAYS higher. This is very important: the more expensive something is, the less demand there will be for it, and the less demand there is for something, the harder it is to profit from it.
This is why a patent holder really is a tollbooth: the patent holder is charging money for the mere use of an idea. He's making it more expensive for others to develop and improve the idea.
If you want a slight change in the law that might help, perhaps the law should state that only the patent holder may use the patent...end of discussion. So the only way for the patent holder to make any money is to sell it to someone who will really do something with the patent. Then again, perhaps this is a bad idea: perhaps it will prevent most patented ideas from being developed.
[Ugh...I really hate the notion that an idea is patentable, but that is exactly how patents appear to be applied in the U.S.]
Yes, Slashdot would have existed. Things similar to Slashdot existed for a long, long time - they were called local BBS's. We had this discussion here a while back. There will always be free forums for informed individuals to discuss ideas.
Maybe Geocities might not have come to fruition - but is that such a bad thing?
I agree with this, but look at your reasoning: Slashdot would have existed because it doesn't need banner ads. It doesn't need to make money. All that matters is that it's freely available to the users, and as long as someone with the resources to provide the service is willing, the service will be there.
What I'm getting at is that the existence of Slashdot has nothing to do with patents at all. Perhaps this is what you mean as well.
Their intent is not to hurt people/development/whatever, it's just to make a quick buck.
I generaly don't buy into X or Y is 'evil'. There are very few people who are truly 'evil', in the sense thay they do stuff just to hurt others. To make the obligatory Microsoft reference : Bill Gates isn't evil, he's just trying to make more dollars for his shareholders, and for his own wife and kid. His intent is to make money, not surpress the helpless computer users. If he thought he could make more money by going open source, he would do it faster than you can say GPL, I'm sure.
If you really want evil, take a look at random acts of violence/vandalism, where there is absolutely no personal gain. That's what I define as 'evil'.
Hmm...
"It's just business. Nothing personal". Isn't that the very same excuse in use by the Mob?
It doesn't work there, and it doesn't work here either.
What you and others like you are saying is that it isn't wrong to ignore the effects of your actions on others. But it IS wrong. The whole point behind ethics is to define, teach, and encourage behavior that is better for society as a whole.
If I steal money from someone else, I'm in the wrong because I have in essence nullified their efforts without their consent (there are corner cases like when it's the only thing you can do to survive where it wouldn't be wrong unless the action would cause the other person's life to be in danger, but we're not talking about that here). I have probably made the world a worse place to live, even if only a little, and especially for the person I stole from. I have directly caused harm to come to someone so that I might profit from it.
By your logic, stealing money from someone else would be okay as long as my intent is merely to make a quick buck. That someone else gets hurt in the process is irrelevant, right?
What these scumbag lawyers are doing is in essence NO DIFFERENT from what the Mob does. The only difference is that the lawyers do it by manipulating the law in court and while holding elected office while the Mob does it by breaking the law. One other difference: the Mob is willing to kill people to get their money ("it's just business...nothing personal"). These scumbag lawyers are willing to kill companies to get their money, but seem to generally stop short of killing. But my bet is that the only reason that they will stop there is that murder is against the law. My bet is that if it weren't against the law, these lawyers would be perfectly willing to kill in order to make a buck. Just business. Nothing personal.
As for random acts of violence, the gain isn't material, it's psychological. But it is there. Hence, I view it as being roughly the same thing as killing someone for their money.
I think your idea is doomed to failure, not just because you'd probably never get anyone else to buy into it, but also because of these:
No trademarks: good luck getting that buy the court system.
No money: ok, you give away the domain names. There will be a gold rush to grab up every name in existance. And just because you don't charge doesn't mean that the new squatters won't charge behind your back.
First come, first serve: Ok, I'll bite. I'd like to reserve:
...
I think the answer to most of these issues is very simple: one domain name per primary/secondary nameserver combination. Of course, primary/secondary combination A/B is equivalent to B/A. A registration request where the primary/secondary nameserver combination is the same as that of some other domain gets rejected. So does a request to change the primary/secondary nameserver combination of an existing domain to one that is the same as another registered domain.
Now, some of you will undoubtedly say that this will be unacceptable to lots of companies. Well, tough. The mission isn't to solve all the world's problems: it's to provide a "safe haven" for people who legitimately want domain names without the hassle of squatters and the other nonsense that goes on with the current system. A top level domain mechanism for the mere mortals among us. But note that the implication of this mechanism is that the more publicly-visible nameservers a company has under its control, the more domains it can register. This is as it should be: larger companies are more likely to have acquired smaller companies and it's reasonable for them to want to keep the domain names associated with those acquisitions. It also means that becoming a squatter means acquiring a lot of IP address space, which is a reasonably expensive thing to do these days.
Personally, I think there should be no more than one TLD (.com,.org, etc.) managed by any given company. That means that NSI should only manage one of.com,.org, etc. There could, of course, be multiple companies managing a TLD, but there should never be multiple TLDs under a company.
This would simplify things a lot. If I don't like the way NSI manages.com, I can go to.cpy and be guaranteed that someone else will be managing it. They might be better or they might be worse, but they'll be different.
This obviously doesn't address the issue of trademarks. I think the answer is simple: if the company managing the TLD is in a country where this is an issue, they'll obviously have to heed the trademark laws. But if I were running the company, it would take a court order to get me to take away someone's domain.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect this is a myth. It is claimed that prior art is sufficient to defend against a patent but I believe I've seen references in this forum that show that prior art isn't always a defense.
And, in any case, even if prior art were a defense, you still have to defend yourself in court and that means spending lots of ca$h. But if you have a patent on something that the other guy is likely to be using himself, you can politely point that out to him before his patent lawsuit gets off the ground and then arrange a cross-licensing agreement of some kind.
The traditional players in the field, and it seems that Microsoft is one of them, use patents as a way of preventing themselves from being sued. It's primarily morons like Amazon that have decided to break with this tradition and thus put the entire field in jeopardy.
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If you believe that a police state isn't a stable form of government, then ask yourself this: how did the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc governments remain in power for more than 60 years without being overthrown through popular revolution? Remember: the people most likely to rebel are those who remember what it was like before the police state came into being.
What killed the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries was economic competition from the outside. But that wouldn't exist in a world police state. Nor would references to other, better systems, except in the hands of a few: remember that a police state has to control information in order to control people. The way to make that happen is for the state to control the education systems and the means of information dissemination. Hence, controls on the communications infrastructure.
It should be obvious that you can't build a police state in a single generation, because the contrast would be too great. You have to build it a little at a time, slowly enough that people won't notice. A right removed here, a privilege revoked there, a restriction put somewhere else. Rebellion can only happen if the people believe that what they have isn't good, but whether or not they believe that is largely determined by what they can contrast their current condition against. That's why the "ruling class" has to remain untouchable and mysterious: the populace has to believe that there's no way for them to get from where they are to where the ruling class is, otherwise they'll yearn for it and become dissatisfied with their own conditions.
Also, one needn't formally try, convict, etc., a "criminal". One need only make something happen to them. A car accident, a heart attack, etc. A police state has no need for leniency, as long as the fact that the troublemaker died can't be traced back to the source. Obviously this works best when it's not obvious that the person in question was making trouble to begin with.
Lastly, a dumb populace is an easily managed populace. So a police state will be on a sharp lookout for those with above-average intelligence, so that they can deal with the issue, either by relocating them such that they have no more communiction with the rest of the population (this can be explained away by the government by saying that the person is going to a special school or something) or by arranging for an "accident" to happen to them.
Oh, well. I'm just rambling now. But it seems obvious to me that there are lots of ways that a police state can maintain itself indefinitely.
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It seems to me that the U.S., the U.K., and other countries are in a race to see who becomes a police state first. At the current pace, it seems the U.K. will probably win.
Personally, I wish the U.K. would get on with it, so that there will be enough time for the rest of the world to see firsthand that a police state can easily emerge from a "democracy" (as loosely as that may apply), and so that the citizenry of the rest of the world can prevent the U.S. and other countries from also becoming police states.
It'll be a real bad deal if the U.S. gets there first...it has enough power that the rest of the world will probably descend into a police state, also. Unfortunately, a world police state may be the most stable government structure we know since there will be nobody on the outside to overthrow it, and it may even be that a descent into that is inevitable.
Sigh...
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A GUI under Linux or any other Unix system will have a tougher time of meeting all these requirements than a GUI built on a newly-designed OS. The reason is that Unix already has certain ways of doing things and the requirement for consistency demands that those ways be complied with in a GUI. An example is the documentation access method: Unix uses manpages, and so a GUI should also use manpages. There's nothing that says that you can't build on that, but it's very wrong, IMO, to build an entirely new documentation structure because it violates the rule of consistency and predictability (those two tend to go hand-in-hand).
Thus far, pretty much every Unix-based GUI (and Windows, too) violates Fitts' Law, which basically says that larger targets are easier to hit and thus more desirable, so edges of the screen are prime real-estate since they are infinite in at least one dimension. Gnome has the additional problem that its default scrollbars are far too narrow and thus are difficult to hit, which makes them difficult and annoying to use. Why the width of the scrollbars isn't included in the
Both Gnome and KDE are making slow but steady progress towards being easy and pleasing to use. But I think it's very important that they avoid the mistakes made in Windows, even at the cost of compatibility with the Windows GUI: it's more important to get the UI right than it is to get it to be compatible. People can learn, especially if what they're learning conforms with the principles listed above.
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It's obvious that the patent problem can be tracked all the way back to the source: the patent office. It's also obvious to me that the patent office won't change how it does things, because it has no incentive to and every incentive to keep things the way they are (they get paid for approving patents, after all).
So how do you kill the patent problem? By killing the patent office! But how do you do that?
Simple: figure out the things the patent office must use in order to do its job, and patent them. The patent office, being run by a bunch of morons, will gleefully grant you the patent.
You then threaten the patent office with a patent infringement lawsuit if they don't comply with your licensing terms. Your licensing terms, of course, will involve enough cash to make it impossible for the patent office to operate at all, thus putting them out of business. They'll have to pay, of course, because you'll have a monopoly on the processes the patent office uses.
And remember: even if you have to take it to court, it's very likely you'll win, since prior art appears to be irrelevant to the courts today.
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Not because they were speeding, though. Because they were stupid enough that they didn't realize that speed and distance are related, and that an increase in speed requires an increase in distance from other objects in order to be able to react properly.
What matters is relative speed, not absolute speed. If I'm going 40 mph faster than everyone else, then I'm driving in a hazardous manner because others won't have enough time to react to me and I'll probably have a hard time reacting to them. But if I'm going 10 mph faster than everyone else, there's no problem. If you can't handle someone going 10 mph relative to you then you obviously can't handle riding a bicycle, much less driving a car.
As with anything else, it all depends on the environment. Most speeding occurs on highways, which is the safest environment you could ask for, as the only objects that you really have to worry about (i.e., the ones accelerating from a stop) are the cop cars.
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Under other circumstances I might agree with you.
However, the veterans in question are, ironically, supporting a measure which is designed to add a restriction to the very thing they defended: freedom.
People, freedom in general is like free speech: it's not free unless there is the possibility of it conflicting with your own preferences. Speech is not free if it's restricted to, say, speech that you happen to agree with, or speech that you don't happen to find offensive, etc. Actions are the same: I'm not free unless I can perform actions that you disagree with, but which otherwise do not harm you or others. Flag burning is an example. You and others might not agree with it, but it doesn't harm you.
It is very important to distinguish between actions which infringe upon the rights of others and actions which do not. The latter should be allowed unconditionally. The former will require a compromise.
To be honest, I don't understand why there are so many attempts by so many people to restrict what others say or do simply because it's disagreeable (however disagreeable it might be). It's as if nobody has any backbone anymore when it comes to this kind of thing. What's with this society turning into one full of wimps?
It would be nice if people would quit acting like little babies that need to be protected from the big, bad world.
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Yeah: all potential patents are publicly peer-reviewed prior to issuance to ensure that they really are worthy of the status of a patent.
Some will argue here that doing so would mean that the idea couldn't be used as a trade secret should it fail to achieve patent status. And they would be correct. But a patent represents a monopoly on an idea and should thus be issued rarely. If someone wants to go for the gold and attempt to get a patent, they should risk something in the process. What more appropriate thing to risk than the idea itself?
Public peer-review prior to patent issuance would have two effects: it would cause people to attempt to patent only those things that they truly thought were worthy of a patent (i.e., likely to be patentable) and it would cause bogus patent attempts (there will always be people stupid enough to attempt to patent the obvious, even in such a system) to be shot down quickly.
I see this as the fastest and easiest way to reform the patent system.
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Correct. But that risk should be the price you pay for going for a monopoly on your idea.
Folks, the very fact that a patent grants you a monopoly means that the act of going for it should be risky. Why should patents be different from most other financial endeavors, where high profits and high risk usually go hand-in-hand?
Patentable ideas should be the exception, not the rule. If you want to fix the patent system, the fastest way to do so would be to require up-front disclosure of the idea to the world prior to its evaluation. It would mean that the only ideas that would get patented would be the ones that the owner truly believes deserve a patent, and not every cheap little idea that someone in a company gets like what we have right now.
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I don't really think that user-friendliness is as hard to achieve in an open-sourced project as many people think. But there is one thing the developers must do more than anything else for it to work.
Many of us have non-technical friends. They can be an excellent resource in helping to make a program more user-friendly. The trick? Listen to them! Ask for their feedback on what things they find difficult to do, what things they would like to be able to do. The fact that they are non-technical is an advantage here, because it means that the only real way for them to be able to effectively use the program is if it is easy to learn.
The real trick is, of course, making the program easy to use as well as easy to learn, and that means optimizing the program for its primary mission. It's important to avoid creating a "swiss army knife" since that will not only make the program more difficult to learn but will force the developer to concentrate his effort on something other than the main purpose of the program.
Programs that are simple but powerful are rare, but are among the best finds out there. I think that simplicity and power in a program aren't mutually exclusive when the program is done right. One cheap (and perhaps relatively easy) way to make a program powerful and simple at the same time is to create the user interface so that only the most common functions are readily available in "normal" mode, and arrange for the rest of the functions to be available perhaps via a command line (the program will be a lot more powerful if it has a built-in scripting language) or perhaps via an "advanced mode".
Just remember that large arrays of buttons and tons of menu items will make the program more difficult to learn, so it's important to concentrate on making available (at least in the default UI mode) only the most important functions of the program.
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Hmm...let's see...so the software, during the installation process, pops up a dialog box with the overall license -- "Do you agree (Y/N)?" -- and says goodbye if you don't say "Y". If you agree, it pops up a second dialog box that says, buried in the middle of a lot of other legal mumbo-jumbo, "Licensee shall allow the Licensor to access Licensee's computer or computers to disable the Software and all related components. Failure to allow such access is grounds for immediate termination of the License and Licensee will return all copies of the Software to the Licensor in addition to a 10% restocking fee"
So now the user has to click "OK" on two dialog boxes, not one. Please tell us how this is any different than just burying the bit about remote control in the license itself? Especially since they can bury it in a bunch of other legal mumbo-jumbo?
It wouldn't surprise me if the UCITA would apply to safety-critical software just as much as it would apply to normal software...
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The House version of the UCITA is HB561, and it passed today (2/15) with a 95 to 2 vote.
:-(
SJ239 and HJ277 are Senate and House resolutions to STUDY the UCITA. The House version was stricken from the docket a few days before they passed the UCITA itself.
Thankfully, the Senate version of the measure to study the UCITA was agreed to by a voice vote today (2/15), though that might not make any difference in the long run...
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Perhaps you should read it a bit more carefully.
What was stricken from the docket was a resolution to study the UCITA. Check this out if you don't believe me.
The UCITA itself is HB561, here, and was passed with a 95 to 2 vote. Not quite unanimous, but damned close. It was passed today, 2/15.
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It appears Infoworld may be right:
There appear to be two separate things: one is a resolution to study the UCITA, the other is the UCITA itself.
The resolution to study the UCITA, HJ277, was stricken from the docket by the Rules Committee.
The UCITA itself, HB561, appears to have passed the House 95:2 with almost no modification and has been communicated to the Senate.
So not only does the House appear to have passed the bill, it would appear that they aren't even interested in its implications!!
What a surprise...(not...)
Sigh...
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I'll probably refrain from purchasing something from Etoys until next year. If they don't try this same crap again during the next Christmas season, that'll be much more convincing evidence that Etoys is sincere and has learned something. But unfortunately, it's difficult to tell until then.
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I fully agree. I don't want to see the UK become a police state. But I don't see how it can be avoided without some kind of outside intervention. It seems to me that if the UK were left to its own devices a police state is exactly what it would become.
As it stands, even with outside countries around, I can easily see the UK eventually becoming a police state...if it's done slowly enough.
Unfortunately, it looks to me like the U.S. is headed in roughly the same direction, but the forces against that are stronger here than in the UK. That will buy us more time if nothing else. And if the UK becomes a police state first, that alone might be enough to prevent the U.S. from becoming one
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Which shows just how close to the edge the UK already is.
When the people no longer have any real say in what their government does, it's only a matter of time before they becomes citizens of a police state. And since the citizenry of the UK isn't even armed, there's even less they can do than if there were armed.
You can argue all you want that the death rate by guns in the UK is so much less than it is in the U.S., but before you do that, answer this: what was the death rate by firearms in the UK before the citizenry of the UK was disarmed?
I'm no gun nut. Far from it. I don't even own one myself. But I recognize that an armed citizenry at least has a fighting chance of having their way with the government when all else fails. An unarmed citizenry has no real chance at all.
But the biggest problem in the UK isn't related to that at all: it's that the citizenry has no set of "rights" that they hold sacred that the government doesn't dare take away outright lest the population revolt.
In the U.S., we at least have a Constitution that clearly states the rights that the government WILL NOT trample on. The document itself isn't actually what's important. What's important is the effect it has: it serves as a rallying point that the citizenry can believe in and can use as common ground against the government. It sets the expectations of the people, and therefore strongly influences the willingness of the government to infringe on those rights, since doing so outright is a sure way of getting the elected officials quickly kicked out of office if nothing else. It also influences the voting tendencies of the population: they're not likely to vote for someone who is an obvious police state advocate.
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This is an excellent example of why lawyers rank so low with us techies.
You see, the purpose of law is to serve society, NOT ITSELF. What you state above may be true but is precisely why many of us find the way law is practiced so abhorrent. When the application of a law runs contrary to common sense that is a very strong indicator that the suitability of the law itself should be questioned for that situation, and perhaps for others as well.
The law should, in general, be a reflection of common sense (or, more precisely, the common sensibilities of the general population) because the law's whole reason for existing is to make the lives of the individuals living in the society better -- to make society as a whole better. Common sense is the mechanism in humans that tells us how the world works and how we can make our own lives better as a result of that understanding. And one of the things common sense tells us is that the eventual implications of an individual case should matter, and that a system where the implications of an individual case are unimportant is a fundamentally broken one.
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This is, of course, all IMHO, but with that in mind:
As someone who has been interested and involved in technological things pretty much all my life, there is one thing that seems to be consistent among most of the really good practitioners in the technology field: the recognition of purpose and the application of first principles.
In the technology field, we often question the very purpose of something, because in doing so we are able to determine for ourselves whether or not that something is necessary. This process makes our designs more efficient and more applicable to the problem being solved. We despise feature-richness and bloat because they are the results of attempts to apply a tool to something it wasn't designed for.
We apply the same methods when looking at laws. We ask ourselves whether or not a law that others are attempting to apply to something should apply. We always fall back to the age-old question "what is the purpose of this law?" when evaluating the law's effectiveness.
It would appear that many (perhaps most?) lawyers don't do this. To them, the law itself is the final answer. To them, it seems that there is no difference between right/wrong and legal/illegal: they are the same thing. Many judges appear to operate the same way.
This is why precedence is so important to lawyers and judges: because precedence is the way lawyers and judges decide how a law "should" be applied to a situation. Lawyers and judges "need" this because they do not know how (or do not care) to fall back to first principles when applying law. They don't know how or do not care to ask what the purpose of a law is and use that to make the decision. If the purpose of a law were used to decide how to rule in a case, then precedence would be irrelevant and would therefore not have the status in law that it has.
These two approaches are almost diametrically opposed, but this much can be said of the lawyers' approach: it is arbitrary, and therefore wide open to manipulation. For when a tool is allowed to be applied without regard to its purpose, then that tool can and will be misapplied. As is shown time and time again.
That is what we techies find abhorrent about lawyers and the law. To us the argument that "we should do it this way because it's always been done this way" (i.e., precedence) is specious on its face because it ignores the reason, or purpose, of doing something a certain way.
To us, laws are tools to be used in meeting the needs of the society which creates them. Each law, as a tool, has a purpose, and we recognize that it should not be applied when it doesn't serve that purpose. This is something that is very obviously lost on many (perhaps most) lawyers and judges.
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Before you burn me at the stake, please hear me out.
:-)
We need Big Brother. More precisely, we need a living example of Big Brother. We need to see a country like the UK devolve into an all-seeing, all-knowing police state.
We need an example that we can point to that shows that it CAN happen even in a "democratic" society, so that we will KNOW that it is we, the people, who must remain firmly in control of the government, and not vice-versa. So that we will see with our own eyes what happens when we sacrifice freedom for security.
But it has to happen to a country that is relatively small and thus relatively harmless to the rest of the world.
I think the UK would make an excellent candidate. It's big enough that it'll have an impact on a large enough number of people to make the example compelling, but not big enough to pose a real danger of taking the rest of the world down with it.
It would be much, much worse if the U.S. devolved into such a police state because the U.S. is powerful enough to take the rest of the world with it. If that happened humanity might never climb out of the resulting hole.
We need an example like where the UK is headed to keep the rest of the world free.
If the UK wants to volunteer for this, who are we to argue?
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"Oh, no! The world hasn't ended! Oh, wait...silly us...the new millennium isn't until next year. Keep preaching it, brothers!"
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No, the market won't buy it because it's far too expensive. The only way to reliably produce error free software is by doing a correctness proof of the software. That is horribly expensive.
Yes, it's possible to write error free software without doing a correctness proof -- but it's only by sheer luck that the resulting software will, in fact, be error free. A correctness proof is the only way to know for sure.
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If the idea is sound and someone builds it and sells it, people will buy it. Whether or not the implementation is patented has no effect on whether or not the end consumer will accept the implementation.
But even for a technology where there's no obvious way to improve it, an "open source" approach works better in the long run. The reason is that if there does happen to be a means of improving it, it's more likely to be found and, more importantly, exploited. The reason it's more likely to be found is that there isn't a patent to prevent people from even trying. If something is patented, that seriously discourages further exploration along those lines because royalties will have to be paid to the patent holder, thus making it (perhaps very significantly) more expensive to sell, and therefore (perhaps very significantly) harder to profit from. So most people with any sense won't even bother to try improving on a patented process. The same things apply to the exploitation of an improvement.
But all a patent does is grant a "temporary" (but, for the purposes of the computing industry, permanent) monopoly on something. This means that the price of that something will be higher. Perhaps much higher, but ALMOST ALWAYS higher. This is very important: the more expensive something is, the less demand there will be for it, and the less demand there is for something, the harder it is to profit from it.
This is why a patent holder really is a tollbooth: the patent holder is charging money for the mere use of an idea. He's making it more expensive for others to develop and improve the idea.
If you want a slight change in the law that might help, perhaps the law should state that only the patent holder may use the patent...end of discussion. So the only way for the patent holder to make any money is to sell it to someone who will really do something with the patent. Then again, perhaps this is a bad idea: perhaps it will prevent most patented ideas from being developed.
[Ugh...I really hate the notion that an idea is patentable, but that is exactly how patents appear to be applied in the U.S.]
I agree with this, but look at your reasoning: Slashdot would have existed because it doesn't need banner ads. It doesn't need to make money. All that matters is that it's freely available to the users, and as long as someone with the resources to provide the service is willing, the service will be there.
What I'm getting at is that the existence of Slashdot has nothing to do with patents at all. Perhaps this is what you mean as well.
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Hmm...
"It's just business. Nothing personal". Isn't that the very same excuse in use by the Mob?
It doesn't work there, and it doesn't work here either.
What you and others like you are saying is that it isn't wrong to ignore the effects of your actions on others. But it IS wrong. The whole point behind ethics is to define, teach, and encourage behavior that is better for society as a whole.
If I steal money from someone else, I'm in the wrong because I have in essence nullified their efforts without their consent (there are corner cases like when it's the only thing you can do to survive where it wouldn't be wrong unless the action would cause the other person's life to be in danger, but we're not talking about that here). I have probably made the world a worse place to live, even if only a little, and especially for the person I stole from. I have directly caused harm to come to someone so that I might profit from it.
By your logic, stealing money from someone else would be okay as long as my intent is merely to make a quick buck. That someone else gets hurt in the process is irrelevant, right?
What these scumbag lawyers are doing is in essence NO DIFFERENT from what the Mob does. The only difference is that the lawyers do it by manipulating the law in court and while holding elected office while the Mob does it by breaking the law. One other difference: the Mob is willing to kill people to get their money ("it's just business...nothing personal"). These scumbag lawyers are willing to kill companies to get their money, but seem to generally stop short of killing. But my bet is that the only reason that they will stop there is that murder is against the law. My bet is that if it weren't against the law, these lawyers would be perfectly willing to kill in order to make a buck. Just business. Nothing personal.
As for random acts of violence, the gain isn't material, it's psychological. But it is there. Hence, I view it as being roughly the same thing as killing someone for their money.
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I think the answer to most of these issues is very simple: one domain name per primary/secondary nameserver combination. Of course, primary/secondary combination A/B is equivalent to B/A. A registration request where the primary/secondary nameserver combination is the same as that of some other domain gets rejected. So does a request to change the primary/secondary nameserver combination of an existing domain to one that is the same as another registered domain.
Now, some of you will undoubtedly say that this will be unacceptable to lots of companies. Well, tough. The mission isn't to solve all the world's problems: it's to provide a "safe haven" for people who legitimately want domain names without the hassle of squatters and the other nonsense that goes on with the current system. A top level domain mechanism for the mere mortals among us. But note that the implication of this mechanism is that the more publicly-visible nameservers a company has under its control, the more domains it can register. This is as it should be: larger companies are more likely to have acquired smaller companies and it's reasonable for them to want to keep the domain names associated with those acquisitions. It also means that becoming a squatter means acquiring a lot of IP address space, which is a reasonably expensive thing to do these days.
Personally, I think there should be no more than one TLD (.com,
This would simplify things a lot. If I don't like the way NSI manages
This obviously doesn't address the issue of trademarks. I think the answer is simple: if the company managing the TLD is in a country where this is an issue, they'll obviously have to heed the trademark laws. But if I were running the company, it would take a court order to get me to take away someone's domain.
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