Ignorance is not an excuse for acting unethically. Even being paid is not an excuse for acting unethically. They're evil, plain and simple (not that this is specific to Microsoft's marketing department).
On the other hand, distributed ownership has it's benefits: more possible plaintiffs if someone violates the license, less ability to change the license (ie. RMS could pull an X Consortium), and no single entity to be enjoined against, sued, bribed, etc.
One interesting difference between the Linux model and the corporation model is who gets to "vote." With Linux, the voters are all the people who actually work on the kernel - they choose to coordinate with Linus, but if they didn't want him they could just start listening to someone else. In a corporation, the CEO would be voted out by members of the board, non-technical Wall Street types who often have very little to do with what the company actually produces. Linus's responsibility is to get programmers to listen to him; a CEO's responsibility is to profit the shareholders.
Have you ever noticed that whenever a company does something evil, they blame the shareholders? Why can't non-evil people be at the helm? As you can see, I'm somewhat annoyed at the system.
I personally use and like Dvorak, but it has three problems. First, you can't learn only Dvorak, so you have to switch, and this still takes my brain a few seconds, egpcbi,dcjd C yfl. icxx.pcodv (Mat.o a jrrn jre.w ydrgid) Second, with QWERTY you typically have runs of several letters on one hand, and you kinda queue those up, position your fingers, and type them in one handfall. With Dvorak, because the vowels are on the left hand, you alternate hands - some consider this an advantage, but as someone who learned QWERTY first, it's hard for my nerves to coordinate the hands to avoid transposition errors at high speed. And third, every word, every single one, needs both hands, unlike QWERTY where if you only have to type one word, there's a good chance you won't take your hands off the mouse.
Messenger popups are the canary that warns you of the larger problem - you don't have a firewall. So when you get a firewall, you still want the service running, because then you'll know when the firewall isn't working.
I really don't know, but isn't that also true of AIM, unless you directly connect? I know it's easy to have AIM conversations when both parties are behind NAT firewalls that don't allow inbound connections, but I'd have to forward a port to transfer files.
None whatsoever. They expression of it, however, is protected by US copyright law, which the US Constitution gives Congress the power to create. So they don't own the information (you could write a paragraph in your own words with the same information) but you can't just copy'n'paste theirs (except when that falls under fair use, which this probably does, so it's a moot point). Whether this is state of affairs is desirable is another matter entirely, though I'm cool with it.
Unix guarentees that new pages are zero-filled, and this can happen in the background. (You can't make that assumption in programming because the stack could have grown bigger than it is now, and function obviously don't zero the stack they used.)
Re:I think is was said somewhere else...
on
P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 2, Insightful
When in reality we should be looking at P2P authors.
Absolutely not. P2P authors, like any other programmers, are making tools. The person who should be held responsible is whichever idiot shared the files in the first place - even if accidental, why on earth was he running a P2P server on a government machine with classified data?
Thanks. I didn't know iTunes had a similar feature, and I wonder how it works. When I started, there were many "compressors", but they didn't have lookahead - maybe iTunes is like this? VLevel's first public release was in April 2003, and I probably had the idea some time before that - no idea how that compares to iTunes. And I certainly didn't copy it - basically I wrote it to stop my dad's complaining about the dynamic range of classical music, and I wasn't aware of anything else like it at the time. Anyway, yeah, I'd prefer not to be sued over it, so I'll probably return the favor by not suing iTunes.
The answer to "If it's so obvious, why didn't someone else patent it" is pretty straightforward - maybe they didn't have the resources to, or maybe they put their effort into implementing it instead, or maybe they were in a different country, etc. Prior art helps here, but again, even the possibility of a lawsuit has chilling effects. And I think more often than not, at least with software patents, the patent holder wasn't the first to think of it.
That raises another question - why does the first one to think of something get the exclusive right, and the second one get nothing, even if he thought of it independantly of the first? To me, that's the height of unfairness - I could have an idea, write software, and years later get sued because someone I've never heard of who didn't implement it thought of it a week before I did. Or what if I thought of it first, but he patented it before my implementation was published? And what if both inventors are moving at.9C relative to the USPTO - whose sequence of events do we trust? The law ought to recognize that we both did the same thing, and it's not fair to arbitrarily screw one of us. Copyright doesn't have this problem because it's almost impossible for two authors to write the exact same thing, and even if they come close, the law only punishes an author if he copied the other's work - if he can show he came up with it independantly, he's clear.
As for the economics, I don't think it's fair to imply that no software patents is somehow communist. Is not owning air communist? No, it's just that it doesn't make sense to declare some things, like air, and I think like broad ideas about software, to be property.
You don't want someone else to take your idea and undercut you? Of course - nobody wants to be undercut, but that doesn't make it wrong. It's a very competitive world out there, and that's a good thing. But you say they "made off with your idea as their own." No they didn't, it's just that they implemented it better (where "goodness" includes cost).
You can tell that I subscribe to the notion that copyrights and patents are incentives for sharing innovation, and thus should be balanced, as opposed to the notion that they follow from some theory of natural property rights and thus should be as strong as possible. And I'll admit that some patents are great - for example, the microchip patents you mention. Microchip designs would never be published if not for patents, and it's impossible to reverse engineer them. There, the patent system served it's purpose - the designer gets a limited monopoly, and we get the blueprints. But that's a different industry. In the software industry, the only good patents are very narrow ones.
Instead of trusting the USPTO to keep out the general patents (which they've botched so far), we could simply broaden copyright somewhat. For example, if you invent some great new audio compression method, just publish the copyrighted code. If I then write some audio compression software, you could sue me saying that I merely reverse engineered it. But if I came up with it on my own, or if mine was sufficiently different that I couldn't have just copied it, I'd be fine. I think that broadening the scope of derivative works in that way would be much better than the current situation with software patents.
In most cases, the large patent holders are busy bribing lawmakers to perpetuate the current system, so they do deserve a significant portion of the blame.
If Eli Whittney had the resources Microsoft has, and the basement infringers were undercutting their main product, you can bet the industrial revolution would have sucked. And if he patented interchangeable parts, it never would have happened.
Otherwise, anyone could copy your idea for a widget, and produce it at a cost less than yours - after all, they didn't have the R&D costs of developing a prototype of the idea.
What's wrong with that? In the software industry, the implementation is what costs money.
Fig. 1: A button where, when you click it, you buy something.
+------+ | Buy! | +------+
void button::onClick() {/* TODO: make it buy stuff */ }
See - it's took me 30 seconds to prototype that. The actual investment would have been filling in that comment. And if someone else can do that part cheaper, then let them - everyone gets cheaper widgets, and the company's real investment, the implementation, remains protected by copyright law. This also gives them an incentive to improve their implementation, whereas if they patented it, not only would they not need to improve it, they could keep others from improving it.
Sig says it all. The Supreme Court has said that copyright law is compatible with the first ammendment only because of fair use. I'm cool with that (except that life plus seventy isn't limited in my book). But code is speech, not a machine. Patent law never stops you from communicating with someone, so it shouldn't be able to stop you from distributing your code - those actions are one and the same.
It is true that many projects could be continued elsewhere - look at Myth, formerly PlayFair, which moved overseas in response to legal theats. But driving useful software underground and overseas is still a bad thing - and good luck convincing your boss to let the company run software hosted in Elbonia for legal reasons.
The real problem is software patents protect the wrong thing. Ideas are worthless, but in software, the real investment is in implementation. And copyright is perfect for protecting software implementations. Besides that, having the exclusive right to an idea, and not just an implementation of it, works against the goals of having computers work together smoothly and having them be user friendly. If you can patent ideas, then the lock-in problem becomes insurmountable. If you can patent user interfaces, then there will be so many other interfaces to circumvent the patent that nobody will be able to figure out how to use the damn thing.
And as a seperate problem, no, you can't "just" claim prior art. You have to be dragged into court, comply with C&D letters for several months, and give huge amounts of money to lawyers. Individuals simply can't afford this - for any project smaller than Linux itself, the maintainers would likely give up for financial reasons. Our legal system is too bloated and ineffective to rely on it as a safety valve for the chilling effects of patents.
The Vorbis format really is a godsend for gamers, because in the game programming world, the roadblocks which otherwise hinder it are gone. For one, the no license fee argument becomes applicable - Vorbis doesn't help portable player makers much, because they have to support MP3 and WMA anyway. But since the consumer doesn't care what format game audio is in, programmers can go for a cheap (BSD licensed), easy (good APIs), and very good (high quality) solution without worrying about making the game less useful. Many games already use Ogg Vorbis, like UT2003/4 - here's a complete list. (Well, it would be there, if the Wiki was up.)
The whole point of patents is that you don't have to reverse engineer them, they're published. Of course in practice, assembly language is often easier to read than legalese, but still...
Out of curiosity, just how dumb does the equipment need to be? Can you directly copy a commercial DVD onto a dual-layer consumer blank with only hacked firmware, or do you need special media or a commercial press?
That may be true, but consider that your definition of 'friendly' is very subjective. We don't really know under what conditions life here started, but they would probably be rather extreme by our standards. And that's just our specific form of life - we label conditions as extreme because the processes we see in local life aren't portable - but it may not be the case for other lifeforms. I personally think the chances for life on Mars are slim, but we really have no idea what conditions are needed for life to form.
During the space race, there was a boom in education - partly because we needed to outsmart the Soviets, but also because there was more demand for education and more interest in science, both of which can be attributed to NASA. People dreamed of being space explorers, educated themselves, and got employed by NASA. And there was related medical research and spin-off technologies like efficient fuel cells to help with the environment.
My point is that the money spent on space exploration isn't just buying pretty pictures, it's also creating a demand for educated Americans, among other helpful effects. Spending money on schools can't create this demand, it only helps supply it. The other way to do the same thing is through the military industrial complex, but isn't exploration more noble than war?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm too young to remember whether this was true, but were the caddies standardized? If not, I'm not surprised they failed.
Ignorance is not an excuse for acting unethically. Even being paid is not an excuse for acting unethically. They're evil, plain and simple (not that this is specific to Microsoft's marketing department).
On the other hand, distributed ownership has it's benefits: more possible plaintiffs if someone violates the license, less ability to change the license (ie. RMS could pull an X Consortium), and no single entity to be enjoined against, sued, bribed, etc.
Have you ever noticed that whenever a company does something evil, they blame the shareholders? Why can't non-evil people be at the helm? As you can see, I'm somewhat annoyed at the system.
I personally use and like Dvorak, but it has three problems. First, you can't learn only Dvorak, so you have to switch, and this still takes my brain a few seconds, egpcbi ,dcjd C yfl. icxx.pcodv (Mat.o a jrrn jre.w ydrgid) Second, with QWERTY you typically have runs of several letters on one hand, and you kinda queue those up, position your fingers, and type them in one handfall. With Dvorak, because the vowels are on the left hand, you alternate hands - some consider this an advantage, but as someone who learned QWERTY first, it's hard for my nerves to coordinate the hands to avoid transposition errors at high speed. And third, every word, every single one, needs both hands, unlike QWERTY where if you only have to type one word, there's a good chance you won't take your hands off the mouse.
Messenger popups are the canary that warns you of the larger problem - you don't have a firewall. So when you get a firewall, you still want the service running, because then you'll know when the firewall isn't working.
I really don't know, but isn't that also true of AIM, unless you directly connect? I know it's easy to have AIM conversations when both parties are behind NAT firewalls that don't allow inbound connections, but I'd have to forward a port to transfer files.
None whatsoever. They expression of it, however, is protected by US copyright law, which the US Constitution gives Congress the power to create. So they don't own the information (you could write a paragraph in your own words with the same information) but you can't just copy'n'paste theirs (except when that falls under fair use, which this probably does, so it's a moot point). Whether this is state of affairs is desirable is another matter entirely, though I'm cool with it.
Unix guarentees that new pages are zero-filled, and this can happen in the background. (You can't make that assumption in programming because the stack could have grown bigger than it is now, and function obviously don't zero the stack they used.)
Absolutely not. P2P authors, like any other programmers, are making tools. The person who should be held responsible is whichever idiot shared the files in the first place - even if accidental, why on earth was he running a P2P server on a government machine with classified data?
Thanks. I didn't know iTunes had a similar feature, and I wonder how it works. When I started, there were many "compressors", but they didn't have lookahead - maybe iTunes is like this? VLevel's first public release was in April 2003, and I probably had the idea some time before that - no idea how that compares to iTunes. And I certainly didn't copy it - basically I wrote it to stop my dad's complaining about the dynamic range of classical music, and I wasn't aware of anything else like it at the time. Anyway, yeah, I'd prefer not to be sued over it, so I'll probably return the favor by not suing iTunes.
That raises another question - why does the first one to think of something get the exclusive right, and the second one get nothing, even if he thought of it independantly of the first? To me, that's the height of unfairness - I could have an idea, write software, and years later get sued because someone I've never heard of who didn't implement it thought of it a week before I did. Or what if I thought of it first, but he patented it before my implementation was published? And what if both inventors are moving at .9C relative to the USPTO - whose sequence of events do we trust? The law ought to recognize that we both did the same thing, and it's not fair to arbitrarily screw one of us. Copyright doesn't have this problem because it's almost impossible for two authors to write the exact same thing, and even if they come close, the law only punishes an author if he copied the other's work - if he can show he came up with it independantly, he's clear.
As for the economics, I don't think it's fair to imply that no software patents is somehow communist. Is not owning air communist? No, it's just that it doesn't make sense to declare some things, like air, and I think like broad ideas about software, to be property.
You don't want someone else to take your idea and undercut you? Of course - nobody wants to be undercut, but that doesn't make it wrong. It's a very competitive world out there, and that's a good thing. But you say they "made off with your idea as their own." No they didn't, it's just that they implemented it better (where "goodness" includes cost).
You can tell that I subscribe to the notion that copyrights and patents are incentives for sharing innovation, and thus should be balanced, as opposed to the notion that they follow from some theory of natural property rights and thus should be as strong as possible. And I'll admit that some patents are great - for example, the microchip patents you mention. Microchip designs would never be published if not for patents, and it's impossible to reverse engineer them. There, the patent system served it's purpose - the designer gets a limited monopoly, and we get the blueprints. But that's a different industry. In the software industry, the only good patents are very narrow ones.
Instead of trusting the USPTO to keep out the general patents (which they've botched so far), we could simply broaden copyright somewhat. For example, if you invent some great new audio compression method, just publish the copyrighted code. If I then write some audio compression software, you could sue me saying that I merely reverse engineered it. But if I came up with it on my own, or if mine was sufficiently different that I couldn't have just copied it, I'd be fine. I think that broadening the scope of derivative works in that way would be much better than the current situation with software patents.
In most cases, the large patent holders are busy bribing lawmakers to perpetuate the current system, so they do deserve a significant portion of the blame.
If Eli Whittney had the resources Microsoft has, and the basement infringers were undercutting their main product, you can bet the industrial revolution would have sucked. And if he patented interchangeable parts, it never would have happened.
What's wrong with that? In the software industry, the implementation is what costs money.
See - it's took me 30 seconds to prototype that. The actual investment would have been filling in that comment. And if someone else can do that part cheaper, then let them - everyone gets cheaper widgets, and the company's real investment, the implementation, remains protected by copyright law. This also gives them an incentive to improve their implementation, whereas if they patented it, not only would they not need to improve it, they could keep others from improving it.Sig says it all. The Supreme Court has said that copyright law is compatible with the first ammendment only because of fair use. I'm cool with that (except that life plus seventy isn't limited in my book). But code is speech, not a machine. Patent law never stops you from communicating with someone, so it shouldn't be able to stop you from distributing your code - those actions are one and the same.
It is true that many projects could be continued elsewhere - look at Myth, formerly PlayFair, which moved overseas in response to legal theats. But driving useful software underground and overseas is still a bad thing - and good luck convincing your boss to let the company run software hosted in Elbonia for legal reasons.
And as a seperate problem, no, you can't "just" claim prior art. You have to be dragged into court, comply with C&D letters for several months, and give huge amounts of money to lawyers. Individuals simply can't afford this - for any project smaller than Linux itself, the maintainers would likely give up for financial reasons. Our legal system is too bloated and ineffective to rely on it as a safety valve for the chilling effects of patents.
The Vorbis format really is a godsend for gamers, because in the game programming world, the roadblocks which otherwise hinder it are gone. For one, the no license fee argument becomes applicable - Vorbis doesn't help portable player makers much, because they have to support MP3 and WMA anyway. But since the consumer doesn't care what format game audio is in, programmers can go for a cheap (BSD licensed), easy (good APIs), and very good (high quality) solution without worrying about making the game less useful. Many games already use Ogg Vorbis, like UT2003/4 - here's a complete list. (Well, it would be there, if the Wiki was up.)
*boggle*
The whole point of patents is that you don't have to reverse engineer them, they're published. Of course in practice, assembly language is often easier to read than legalese, but still...
Out of curiosity, just how dumb does the equipment need to be? Can you directly copy a commercial DVD onto a dual-layer consumer blank with only hacked firmware, or do you need special media or a commercial press?
I hate to burst your bubble, but it's quite likely no copyrighted material will enter the public domain again. Ever.
That may be true, but consider that your definition of 'friendly' is very subjective. We don't really know under what conditions life here started, but they would probably be rather extreme by our standards. And that's just our specific form of life - we label conditions as extreme because the processes we see in local life aren't portable - but it may not be the case for other lifeforms. I personally think the chances for life on Mars are slim, but we really have no idea what conditions are needed for life to form.
Out of curiosity, how did the laser surgery cause the retina to detach?
My point is that the money spent on space exploration isn't just buying pretty pictures, it's also creating a demand for educated Americans, among other helpful effects. Spending money on schools can't create this demand, it only helps supply it. The other way to do the same thing is through the military industrial complex, but isn't exploration more noble than war?