I make my living with patents. I can either be pissed off at the level of ignorance on Slashdot, or try to educate. I still haven't given up hope on you.
You're right, there are problems. But you're looking under the wrong rocks.
I would argue that:
1) 2016-2024 is THE danger zone (again, not 2028 as the original summary said). Not hopeless, but a danger zone. 2) 7+ years of royalty free production of h264 videos to the standard published in 2003 is going to be a pretty big install base. It will be hard to suddenly switch away. 3) The best implementations may be patented well beyond 2024.
You keep bringing up what-ifs that are tangential to the video codec as it is today. If someone changes the standard, then they have to get people to adopt the new standard. That will always be the case. Hell, you could wrap DRM around AVI-RAW and patent the crap out of it. But that's a whole different issue.
Slashdot is famous for not understanding patents and often shouts "the sky is falling." My commentary was just to provide facts and a bit more understanding of how things really work.
I'm not going to disagree with your conclusion. But your first paragraph is off on several counts. First off, H264 is already a published standard. Doesn't matter if new material is incorporated into it. The old stuff still hits public domain the same time it always was. Now maybe if there is an H264v2 and everyone switches to that, you might have patents to deal with. And only on the differences.
But H264(v1) is unaffected. If someone finds a way to implement it by 2016 (meaning write software, engineer a squirrel, etc) based on public domain knowledge, no amount of fiddling with the H264 standard can prevent it.
Keep in mind that the H264 standard and how it is implemented are two different things. Which is good, and bad, as we'll see.
First, patents must be filed within 1 year of public disclose in the US, or before disclosure with PCTs. So any information you find will be unencumbered no more than 21 years after it was disclosed. Since H264 was finalized May 2003, the specification cannot be encumbered after 2024. And many aspects of it (draft specs, for example) will be available to anyone, license free, years before that. Probably some parts of it even now (though possibly such narrow, arbitrary steps that no one would care).
So the spec is available before 2028, but how about implementing it?
Well, certain implementations will be covered for many years. In fact, if you come up with a new way to encode or decode H264 today, you can still file a patent. For example: if you discover that by connecting two wires to a squirrel and sending uncompressed video into the squirrel through one wire results in H264 video out the other wire, that's patentable. Freaky, weird, but damn well worth a patent. If you figure out how to do it with a genetically altered squirrel 5000 years from now (hey, you've already go a digital squirrel, let's keep the weirdness going), then you could still get a patent. 5000 years after all the other implementations are free.
What this means is that over time, people will still file new implementations, but the older ones will also be opening up. Come 2016, there might be a way to do H264 without a patent license if someone clever figures out what pieces are free to use and figures out an alternative to the parts still under patent.
You mean the Russian, French, Dutch, Malaysian, French, and Angolan oil mongrels? Yeah, it's a pity the US couldn't get any action. Had the US been smart, they would have cut deals with Saddam like the Russians and French did. You know, the ones that said once Iraq could sell oil openly, the Russians and French would get first dibs (even though such negotiations were technically illegal). The Russians and French that's a quicker and more solid way of getting the oil than invading. Or maybe the US wasn't after oil and invaded for even dumber reasons.
Actually, if you could read, had any powers of logic, or knew any real history, you'd see that I wasn't blaming Saddam. I said he pursued a clever strategy that backfired when Al Qaeda used it to get the US to attack them. Our intelligence agencies didn't need to lie. Just like you, they were all too willing to come to a conclusion and ignore anything that contradicted it.
The point of a doomsday device is to make people fear you. For that to happen, they need to know about it.
Saddam took that one step further. Do you really need WMD, or just for people to think you have them? We certainly feared him. He certainly had chemical weapons at one time, and tinkered with other WMD's at other times. But in retrospect, that was all gone by 2003. So why did people think he still fear he had them? There is some anecdotal evidence his scientists mislead him to keep from being "replaced", but only for a few of the suspected programs. For Saddam, ambiguity was useful up until Iraq got invaded. Playing games with weapons inspectors kept everyone nervous and a little wary of what he might be capable of.
Then came the big prank. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda came up with a great idea: if you get caught, mention that there is a plot with Saddam to use WMD. Remember, Al Qaeda didn't like Saddam, so this was meant to get two enemies focused on each other. Combine this with Saddam's games, poor/biased intelligence, and an administration set on wiping out any potential threat, and you get a nice little clusterfuck.
You bring up a different debate (US R&D vs OUS R&D). Pharmaceutical research worldwide (US or not) is still dominated by for profit companies that are self funded. These companies rely on the patent system as part of their business model. Even India, famous for generic drugs, has patents on the manufacture of drugs.
Governments do fund basic research, and all of them have watchdogs (WHO being only one of many). But it is exceedingly rare for any chemical to go from the "Hey this does X in rats" to "This cures XX in humans without killing them" with only government funding. Some vaccines are government subsidized, and maybe that's a model. But I worry about politics intersecting with medicine.
But it sounds like you and I agree on one point: a lot of speculative research will go away, which could be good or bad. Which is why I pose the question to people the way I did: to get them to think of the secondary and maybe tertiary consequences of what they want to do.
Me, I think the current system is the worst, except for all the others.
All of those are pretty much in effect today except #2 and #5. For #2, a novel, non-obvious interaction is currently required by law, so we are part way there (and some drugs do dramatically when combined). For #5, you might have meant at production cost only, since some drugs really do cost thousands of dollars a dose to make, but only cost a few bucks to ship. There are some based on processing blood from thousands of donors to make a single dose that can even cost $100,000.
I think the big lesson is if you're going to get sick, don't get something rare.
When people start complaining about the high price of patented drugs, I ask them this: are you fine with just the drugs available today? Ok, then eliminate patents. You won't get any new drugs, but we don't need them. If you think new drugs are needed, then you might want to back off eliminating patents for pharmaceuticals.
Don't think you can rely on governments to pick up the slack. Seen any phase three clinical trials paid for by a government lately? Not to mention that government disease research funding is allocated by politics, not by need. That's unlikely to miraculously change with drugs.
I've always wondered how much CO2 could be pulled from the atmosphere in places like that. With or without added refrigeration. Completely impractical for global purposes, because where are you going to put billions of tons of dry ice? But still an interesting thought.
It depends on who dominates who. If the authoritarian government dominates the corporations, that's fascism. If the corporations direct the authoritarian government, then it's more like plutocracy.
Try this for an analogy: imagine a circular wall around us located one light-year radius away. Point your laser pointer at the wall, then sweep it so that it points to another spot 1 light year away on the same wall. Do that in 1 second.
1 year later, a dot of light will appear on the wall. The dot will then exceed the speed of light, traveling 1 light-year in 1 second. If that dot also induced an electric charge, it will look like some sort of current pulse just traveled along the wall millions of times the speed of light.
So, you've created a current, faster than the speed of light, that appears to carry information FTL, but not in a meaningful way.
Slashdot Mirror
I make my living with patents. I can either be pissed off at the level of ignorance on Slashdot, or try to educate. I still haven't given up hope on you.
You're right, there are problems. But you're looking under the wrong rocks.
I would argue that:
1) 2016-2024 is THE danger zone (again, not 2028 as the original summary said). Not hopeless, but a danger zone.
2) 7+ years of royalty free production of h264 videos to the standard published in 2003 is going to be a pretty big install base. It will be hard to suddenly switch away.
3) The best implementations may be patented well beyond 2024.
You keep bringing up what-ifs that are tangential to the video codec as it is today. If someone changes the standard, then they have to get people to adopt the new standard. That will always be the case. Hell, you could wrap DRM around AVI-RAW and patent the crap out of it. But that's a whole different issue.
Slashdot is famous for not understanding patents and often shouts "the sky is falling." My commentary was just to provide facts and a bit more understanding of how things really work.
I'm not going to disagree with your conclusion. But your first paragraph is off on several counts. First off, H264 is already a published standard. Doesn't matter if new material is incorporated into it. The old stuff still hits public domain the same time it always was. Now maybe if there is an H264v2 and everyone switches to that, you might have patents to deal with. And only on the differences.
But H264(v1) is unaffected. If someone finds a way to implement it by 2016 (meaning write software, engineer a squirrel, etc) based on public domain knowledge, no amount of fiddling with the H264 standard can prevent it.
Omnipotent dictators and hermits.
Keep in mind that the H264 standard and how it is implemented are two different things. Which is good, and bad, as we'll see. First, patents must be filed within 1 year of public disclose in the US, or before disclosure with PCTs. So any information you find will be unencumbered no more than 21 years after it was disclosed. Since H264 was finalized May 2003, the specification cannot be encumbered after 2024. And many aspects of it (draft specs, for example) will be available to anyone, license free, years before that. Probably some parts of it even now (though possibly such narrow, arbitrary steps that no one would care).
So the spec is available before 2028, but how about implementing it?
Well, certain implementations will be covered for many years. In fact, if you come up with a new way to encode or decode H264 today, you can still file a patent. For example: if you discover that by connecting two wires to a squirrel and sending uncompressed video into the squirrel through one wire results in H264 video out the other wire, that's patentable. Freaky, weird, but damn well worth a patent. If you figure out how to do it with a genetically altered squirrel 5000 years from now (hey, you've already go a digital squirrel, let's keep the weirdness going), then you could still get a patent. 5000 years after all the other implementations are free.
What this means is that over time, people will still file new implementations, but the older ones will also be opening up. Come 2016, there might be a way to do H264 without a patent license if someone clever figures out what pieces are free to use and figures out an alternative to the parts still under patent.
As a matter of fact, our water treatment plant uses sodium hypochlorite for our fresh water supply.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_purification#Chlorine_disinfection
Cheaper and safer than using chlorine gas.
Those chowderheads at the CDC must not have figured that out yet: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no3_supp/levy.htm
But give them time, and they will see the wisdom of your words.
I don't know which one he might be refer to, but this was a pretty cool failure: http://blogs.current.com/news/2009/12/10/spiral-light-over-oslo-norway-mystery-solved/
Ah crap! Yet another reason not to use Windows 7.
By your logic, my 8088 was running a version of Windows 7, just a different flavor of it.
You mean the Russian, French, Dutch, Malaysian, French, and Angolan oil mongrels? Yeah, it's a pity the US couldn't get any action. Had the US been smart, they would have cut deals with Saddam like the Russians and French did. You know, the ones that said once Iraq could sell oil openly, the Russians and French would get first dibs (even though such negotiations were technically illegal). The Russians and French that's a quicker and more solid way of getting the oil than invading. Or maybe the US wasn't after oil and invaded for even dumber reasons.
Actually, if you could read, had any powers of logic, or knew any real history, you'd see that I wasn't blaming Saddam. I said he pursued a clever strategy that backfired when Al Qaeda used it to get the US to attack them. Our intelligence agencies didn't need to lie. Just like you, they were all too willing to come to a conclusion and ignore anything that contradicted it.
Perfect is relative. If customers need to buy 4, 9, or 16 iPads to make a large enough screen, then that's perfect for Apple.
Saddam took that one step further. Do you really need WMD, or just for people to think you have them? We certainly feared him. He certainly had chemical weapons at one time, and tinkered with other WMD's at other times. But in retrospect, that was all gone by 2003. So why did people think he still fear he had them? There is some anecdotal evidence his scientists mislead him to keep from being "replaced", but only for a few of the suspected programs. For Saddam, ambiguity was useful up until Iraq got invaded. Playing games with weapons inspectors kept everyone nervous and a little wary of what he might be capable of.
Then came the big prank. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda came up with a great idea: if you get caught, mention that there is a plot with Saddam to use WMD. Remember, Al Qaeda didn't like Saddam, so this was meant to get two enemies focused on each other. Combine this with Saddam's games, poor/biased intelligence, and an administration set on wiping out any potential threat, and you get a nice little clusterfuck.
You must be North Korean. We've had fusion energy for almost 60 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
You bring up a different debate (US R&D vs OUS R&D). Pharmaceutical research worldwide (US or not) is still dominated by for profit companies that are self funded. These companies rely on the patent system as part of their business model. Even India, famous for generic drugs, has patents on the manufacture of drugs.
Governments do fund basic research, and all of them have watchdogs (WHO being only one of many). But it is exceedingly rare for any chemical to go from the "Hey this does X in rats" to "This cures XX in humans without killing them" with only government funding. Some vaccines are government subsidized, and maybe that's a model. But I worry about politics intersecting with medicine.
But it sounds like you and I agree on one point: a lot of speculative research will go away, which could be good or bad. Which is why I pose the question to people the way I did: to get them to think of the secondary and maybe tertiary consequences of what they want to do.
Me, I think the current system is the worst, except for all the others.
All of those are pretty much in effect today except #2 and #5. For #2, a novel, non-obvious interaction is currently required by law, so we are part way there (and some drugs do dramatically when combined). For #5, you might have meant at production cost only, since some drugs really do cost thousands of dollars a dose to make, but only cost a few bucks to ship. There are some based on processing blood from thousands of donors to make a single dose that can even cost $100,000.
I think the big lesson is if you're going to get sick, don't get something rare.
When people start complaining about the high price of patented drugs, I ask them this: are you fine with just the drugs available today? Ok, then eliminate patents. You won't get any new drugs, but we don't need them. If you think new drugs are needed, then you might want to back off eliminating patents for pharmaceuticals.
Don't think you can rely on governments to pick up the slack. Seen any phase three clinical trials paid for by a government lately? Not to mention that government disease research funding is allocated by politics, not by need. That's unlikely to miraculously change with drugs.
So, happy or want more? The choice is yours.
Don't worry, there will still be plenty of dispersion of information about suicide bombers and terrorist attacks.
I've always wondered how much CO2 could be pulled from the atmosphere in places like that. With or without added refrigeration. Completely impractical for global purposes, because where are you going to put billions of tons of dry ice? But still an interesting thought.
It depends on who dominates who. If the authoritarian government dominates the corporations, that's fascism. If the corporations direct the authoritarian government, then it's more like plutocracy.
The first law of thermodynamics is you do not talk about thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics is you do not talk about thermodynamics
Sort of.
Try this for an analogy: imagine a circular wall around us located one light-year radius away. Point your laser pointer at the wall, then sweep it so that it points to another spot 1 light year away on the same wall. Do that in 1 second.
1 year later, a dot of light will appear on the wall. The dot will then exceed the speed of light, traveling 1 light-year in 1 second. If that dot also induced an electric charge, it will look like some sort of current pulse just traveled along the wall millions of times the speed of light.
So, you've created a current, faster than the speed of light, that appears to carry information FTL, but not in a meaningful way.
No.
For a detailed explanation, see the next guy's post.
Looks both ways.
Yes.
2-D CAD drawing text is in all caps still. But can't think of any other use for caps lock.
Something interesting will happen in the next year or two: hard drive media will become cheaper than blank DVD media.
DVD+R's have been about $10 for 50 for a while. That's 23.5 GB/$.
1T Drives are as cheap as $70. 14.3 GB/$
1T drives won't get much cheaper, but the 2T drives are dropping fast. 13.3 GB/$ and falling.
If you include transcoding, then for some people, we've already crossed the threshold of HDDVD.