why we're trying to over-complicate this? Take the odometer reading at annual inspection and be done with it.
Do phone companies track every second you use your land line phone for local calls and bill you based on that? No! It's far more efficient to charge a reasonable, flat fee.
My guess is, the people behind this law are evil. They want a detailed log of your driving activities, for illegal purposes they won't disclose. And this law is the first step towards that goal. They invented this law as an excuse, just so they could spy on you. Once everyone is used to it, it will be passed in other states.
If Google started charging licensing fees to manufacturers, and attempted to clamp down so that Google Play served as the only hub for Android apps
Android is just Linux + mobile UI + Java. If Google were to charge manufacturers for Android OS, shouldn't Oracle be within its rights to charge for Java on Android?
"A quick Google for the âoexmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtideâ string turns up only a single Russian forum post from a few years ago, which notes that this is an âoeinteresting lineâ inside the/bin/webs binary. Iâ(TM)d have to agree."
Is it this page? They even disassembled the firmware where the string is used.
As long as MariaDB is requiring copyright assignment, there's every reason to believe it will be sold off again the same way MySQL was.
It's okay if he wants to sell it again as long as the developers who submitted production level code to MariaDB be given at least a small portion of the profits. Does the MCA cover profit distribution or does one person (or organization) get it all?
Since a patent is a government granted privilege, if you don't market your patented device, you must allow somebody to do so at a reasonable price, set by the government, if need be.
The government and the public are getting the better end of the patent deal -- free, useful ideas after 20 years. Plus, it's anti-competitive to force a patent holder to license his patent -- drastic reduction in patent holder's profits if he is forced to license them to a competitor.
If you want to consider patents as property, let's levy taxes on it and use eminent domain where necessary.
Once a patent is granted, the patent holder has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals to the USPTO. So it's already taxed. If he doesn't pay the fees, any competitor can use it without compensation to the inventor.
Not all businesses are rent seeking. The grocer does not seek rent...
If the grocer does not receive a minimum amount X per month (the rent) from his business to cover his business and personal costs, he will have to shut down his business.
...nor is salary anything like rent. It is a simple exchange of time for money.
Yeah, right. You forgot to mention the skills needed to obtain that salary. The job skills are learnt once and reused throughout the career. Skilled labor -- people collecting rent on supplying skills to customers through their employers. Why should programmers draw a salary of $30-$100/hr when burger flippers pull in only $7.50 or similar? It's about the skills the programmer possesses that allows him/her to be more productive than the blue collar worker.
Newsflash! All businesses are rent seeking. This does not mean rent seeking is illegal/immoral. A professional also seeks rent (salary) based on his knowledge and skill, but he has to put in additional labor himself to extract that rent, whereas business get that labor done with machinery and/or employees.
If you work as an employee and reuse the same knowledge and skills over and over again to perform your job, you are rent seeking. Businesses are just more efficient at rent collecting than employees.
Wrong, you're twisting their words. This is what they say:
This is what some media commentators ignore when they try to tar all non-practicing entities with the same brush as abusive patent trolls.
NPEs (non-practicing entities) are people who don't manufacture products based on their patents, they just license the patents. Patent trolls are a subset of NPEs who abuse the patent system by blackmailing the public and companies with obvious, non-innovative and/or overly broad patents. The point being, not all NPEs and their patents are evil.
Apologize for what? Everything they say is true. Fingerprint systems should not be used by casual consumers. It's only when the general public discovers illegal use of these fingerprints will the do something about. By then, it will be too late.
They may not be storing the passwords in database today, but if a certain terrible incident were to happen, and thereafter it would be legal to store fingerprints, all it would require would be an update to iOS to now store fingerprints. I don't think commercial companies should have access to fingerprints.
A single, unchangeable password system where the password is not hidden is, in essence, weak. There are also privacy concerns: won't the car companies (and NSA and other secret agencies) now have a database of brainwaves of a large segment of the population? This database could be put to other (illegal) uses than just unlocking a car in the future.
Not really actually. RMS actually even has admitted in emails that the lack of modularity, and rather spaghettish code in gcc is a deliberate attempt to make it hard for tools authors to integrate it, because he feared that a modular compiler would easily be used to make closed IDEs.
Isn't hard to read code more or less the same as closed source code?
Usenet used to fill the niche quite well and wasn't subject to the whims of a single for-profit company.
You said it -- Usenet is not generally profitable. Many ISPs view it as a big cost and others don't provide access. Web forums have largely replaced usenet because they are more profitable.
Are the new Lenovo laptops any good? I saw some models recently and they all had the "chiclet" style keyboards -- not very good, not sturdy. Maybe IBM should have retained design of these laptops.
Of course, there are many good and essential software patents, which most people know nothing about unless they were in the business of creating a specific product.
The patent troll problem could be easily solved by enforcing the "obviousness" test. Arrival time and current time status have been used for decades by bus stations, train stations and airports. Did ArrivalStar get a patent because the system was "implemented on a computer?"
BTW, it seems this or similar ArrivalStar patents appear to have been invalidated or settled.
It would be nearly impossible to create a game that didn't utilize multiple "game patents" (ie. preexisting ideas) and as a result would quickly exceed 100% of their revenue in payments to "game patent" holders. Your analogy to an app store cut is just idiotic, the two aren't even anywhere near comparable.
It's a slashdot comment, not a lawyer's contract.
The reason I mentioned the app store model is because you never pay more than 30% to the publisher. Similarly, the indy game dev would not pay more than 25% of its revenue regardless how many game patents they used. And that's worst case. Usually, you would just pay 5% or less if it's minor innovation they are using. For example, if you clone Tetris or Pacman, it's 10%. These are just example numbers that can be tweaked so both patent holder and user are satisfied.
First you claim 3 to 5 years, then you go off the deep end and say the duration of a "game patent" should be the same as copyright. Seriously? Copyright duration currently flies well past the century mark. How on Earth does that make sense for a "game patent"?
3 to 5 years is a period of exclusivity, like a utility patent. The original game developer would not want a clone to hit the market six months after his original game is released. After that period, the patent is usable by anyone who is willing to pay the royalties.
As a fledgling indy game developer myself, I'd just like to say "screw your ideas and the horse they rode in on". Far better to suffer Zynga and its ilk than lock down the industry with the kind of draconian measures you're proposing, which wouldn't help anyone who's not already a financial juggernaut.
Zynga screwed a lot of game devs, most of whom had no money to fight them, except EA. You are either not a game dev, or big into infringing game designs if you support Zynga.
As much as I hate what Zynga does (they don't iterate and move forward, they simply clone), there actually is a great deal of benefit to being able to make a game that is inspired by a previous game yet makes improvements to an overall theme. What you propose would effectively cripple game development and stifle the industry.
It doesn't have to be as stringent and exclusive as utility patents where a patent holder can bar others from creating a product that infringes on the patent. Instead, 3 to 5 years after the game-idea-patent is granted, a competitor could build a game based on many game patents but would have to distribute 5-20% of his game revenue to all the game patents used in his game. This model is similar to how developers pay a portion of their app revenue to app stores. The duration of these game patents would be the same as copyrights currently hold.
See yesterday's slashdot article where the article author claims that no one will steal your ideas. No-reverse-engineering clauses in EULAs exist to prevent competitors from cloning software by disassembling and studying its internals. Did the researchers break a (valid) contract?
Good ideas are easy to have and hard to execute - and I don't necessarily mean complex to execute.
Doesn't good execution require a foundation of good ideas (ideas to properly execute), among other things? These ideas are secondary in nature to the main idea, but they are still ideas. So are ideas still trivial or useless?
No, nobody is going to steal your board game design. Or play it.
Sure, in your imaginary world, they won't copy it. But reality is different. One instance of copying is the EA vs Zynga lawsuit (google it). Zynga wholesale copied many different successful games. They made small changes to the game play and interface, redesigned new graphics for background and sprites and voila, lotsa money for a while. EA could not successfully defeat Zynga because copyright protection only protects exact copy of a product.
So copyright protection is not enough to protect game ideas and patent protection is too narrow. The USPTO needs a new category of protection for game design. Once a product is successful and other publishers figure they could make money from it, they will copy it. But there are no clear guidelines of what can be copied and what is to be protected.
It seems to me that music for which a written score exists is open source by definition, the score being the "source code" for the music.
It is, indeed. The lyrics and sheet music for most music are easily available. But/.'s definition of open source also requires that nobody has exclusive right over the content they created. It should be also be free, public property.
It's a trap! The prism folks want a standard interface to your cars, so their tenterhooks into your car can not only monitor your activity but also manipulate your car.
Slashdot Mirror
why we're trying to over-complicate this? Take the odometer reading at annual inspection and be done with it.
Do phone companies track every second you use your land line phone for local calls and bill you based on that? No! It's far more efficient to charge a reasonable, flat fee.
My guess is, the people behind this law are evil. They want a detailed log of your driving activities, for illegal purposes they won't disclose. And this law is the first step towards that goal. They invented this law as an excuse, just so they could spy on you. Once everyone is used to it, it will be passed in other states.
Android is just Linux + mobile UI + Java. If Google were to charge manufacturers for Android OS, shouldn't Oracle be within its rights to charge for Java on Android?
Is it this page? They even disassembled the firmware where the string is used.
It's okay if he wants to sell it again as long as the developers who submitted production level code to MariaDB be given at least a small portion of the profits. Does the MCA cover profit distribution or does one person (or organization) get it all?
So the people who designed TouchID are dumb or they simply don't care about security.
The government and the public are getting the better end of the patent deal -- free, useful ideas after 20 years. Plus, it's anti-competitive to force a patent holder to license his patent -- drastic reduction in patent holder's profits if he is forced to license them to a competitor.
Once a patent is granted, the patent holder has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals to the USPTO. So it's already taxed. If he doesn't pay the fees, any competitor can use it without compensation to the inventor.
Not all businesses are rent seeking. The grocer does not seek rent ...
If the grocer does not receive a minimum amount X per month (the rent) from his business to cover his business and personal costs, he will have to shut down his business.
...nor is salary anything like rent. It is a simple exchange of time for money.
Yeah, right. You forgot to mention the skills needed to obtain that salary. The job skills are learnt once and reused throughout the career. Skilled labor -- people collecting rent on supplying skills to customers through their employers. Why should programmers draw a salary of $30-$100/hr when burger flippers pull in only $7.50 or similar? It's about the skills the programmer possesses that allows him/her to be more productive than the blue collar worker.
Newsflash! All businesses are rent seeking. This does not mean rent seeking is illegal/immoral. A professional also seeks rent (salary) based on his knowledge and skill, but he has to put in additional labor himself to extract that rent, whereas business get that labor done with machinery and/or employees.
If you work as an employee and reuse the same knowledge and skills over and over again to perform your job, you are rent seeking. Businesses are just more efficient at rent collecting than employees.
This is what some media commentators ignore when they try to tar all non-practicing entities with the same brush as abusive patent trolls.
NPEs (non-practicing entities) are people who don't manufacture products based on their patents, they just license the patents. Patent trolls are a subset of NPEs who abuse the patent system by blackmailing the public and companies with obvious, non-innovative and/or overly broad patents. The point being, not all NPEs and their patents are evil.
Apologize for what? Everything they say is true. Fingerprint systems should not be used by casual consumers. It's only when the general public discovers illegal use of these fingerprints will the do something about. By then, it will be too late.
They may not be storing the passwords in database today, but if a certain terrible incident were to happen, and thereafter it would be legal to store fingerprints, all it would require would be an update to iOS to now store fingerprints. I don't think commercial companies should have access to fingerprints.
A single, unchangeable password system where the password is not hidden is, in essence, weak. There are also privacy concerns: won't the car companies (and NSA and other secret agencies) now have a database of brainwaves of a large segment of the population? This database could be put to other (illegal) uses than just unlocking a car in the future.
... and receive according to their needs.
Why not receive proportional to what the give instead?
Isn't hard to read code more or less the same as closed source code?
Usenet used to fill the niche quite well and wasn't subject to the whims of a single for-profit company.
You said it -- Usenet is not generally profitable. Many ISPs view it as a big cost and others don't provide access. Web forums have largely replaced usenet because they are more profitable.
Are the new Lenovo laptops any good? I saw some models recently and they all had the "chiclet" style keyboards -- not very good, not sturdy. Maybe IBM should have retained design of these laptops.
oops.. Here's the settlement link
Of course, there are many good and essential software patents, which most people know nothing about unless they were in the business of creating a specific product.
The patent troll problem could be easily solved by enforcing the "obviousness" test. Arrival time and current time status have been used for decades by bus stations, train stations and airports. Did ArrivalStar get a patent because the system was "implemented on a computer?"
BTW, it seems this or similar ArrivalStar patents appear to have been invalidated or settled.
It would be nearly impossible to create a game that didn't utilize multiple "game patents" (ie. preexisting ideas) and as a result would quickly exceed 100% of their revenue in payments to "game patent" holders. Your analogy to an app store cut is just idiotic, the two aren't even anywhere near comparable.
It's a slashdot comment, not a lawyer's contract. The reason I mentioned the app store model is because you never pay more than 30% to the publisher. Similarly, the indy game dev would not pay more than 25% of its revenue regardless how many game patents they used. And that's worst case. Usually, you would just pay 5% or less if it's minor innovation they are using. For example, if you clone Tetris or Pacman, it's 10%. These are just example numbers that can be tweaked so both patent holder and user are satisfied.
First you claim 3 to 5 years, then you go off the deep end and say the duration of a "game patent" should be the same as copyright. Seriously? Copyright duration currently flies well past the century mark. How on Earth does that make sense for a "game patent"?
3 to 5 years is a period of exclusivity, like a utility patent. The original game developer would not want a clone to hit the market six months after his original game is released. After that period, the patent is usable by anyone who is willing to pay the royalties.
As a fledgling indy game developer myself, I'd just like to say "screw your ideas and the horse they rode in on". Far better to suffer Zynga and its ilk than lock down the industry with the kind of draconian measures you're proposing, which wouldn't help anyone who's not already a financial juggernaut.
Zynga screwed a lot of game devs, most of whom had no money to fight them, except EA. You are either not a game dev, or big into infringing game designs if you support Zynga.
As much as I hate what Zynga does (they don't iterate and move forward, they simply clone), there actually is a great deal of benefit to being able to make a game that is inspired by a previous game yet makes improvements to an overall theme. What you propose would effectively cripple game development and stifle the industry.
It doesn't have to be as stringent and exclusive as utility patents where a patent holder can bar others from creating a product that infringes on the patent. Instead, 3 to 5 years after the game-idea-patent is granted, a competitor could build a game based on many game patents but would have to distribute 5-20% of his game revenue to all the game patents used in his game. This model is similar to how developers pay a portion of their app revenue to app stores. The duration of these game patents would be the same as copyrights currently hold.
See yesterday's slashdot article where the article author claims that no one will steal your ideas. No-reverse-engineering clauses in EULAs exist to prevent competitors from cloning software by disassembling and studying its internals. Did the researchers break a (valid) contract?
Doesn't good execution require a foundation of good ideas (ideas to properly execute), among other things? These ideas are secondary in nature to the main idea, but they are still ideas. So are ideas still trivial or useless?
No, nobody is going to steal your board game design. Or play it.
Sure, in your imaginary world, they won't copy it. But reality is different. One instance of copying is the EA vs Zynga lawsuit (google it). Zynga wholesale copied many different successful games. They made small changes to the game play and interface, redesigned new graphics for background and sprites and voila, lotsa money for a while. EA could not successfully defeat Zynga because copyright protection only protects exact copy of a product.
So copyright protection is not enough to protect game ideas and patent protection is too narrow. The USPTO needs a new category of protection for game design. Once a product is successful and other publishers figure they could make money from it, they will copy it. But there are no clear guidelines of what can be copied and what is to be protected.
It seems to me that music for which a written score exists is open source by definition, the score being the "source code" for the music.
It is, indeed. The lyrics and sheet music for most music are easily available. But /.'s definition of open source also requires that nobody has exclusive right over the content they created. It should be also be free, public property.
Server-side encryption is for the stupid and naive people. The cloud is just a lame service designed to spy and steal your data.
It's a trap! The prism folks want a standard interface to your cars, so their tenterhooks into your car can not only monitor your activity but also manipulate your car.