To the moderator: A troll is when someone says something flame-inducing that they don't actually believe in order to get a rise out of someone. I assure you, I believe what I said fully. Truth is not trolling. But truth can be offensive. Deal with it.
When I say "My Pontiac" I'm not implying I own Pontiac- just that I own an instance of a Pontiac, and I'm referring to that instance right now (as opposed to someone else's) "Red Hat's Linux" can very easily mean the same type of thing. Learn English.
Only in the alternate universe where the afadavit claimed that the election was rigged that would be a red flag against it. That may have been a claim of one of the articles talking about it, but it was never a claim of the afadavit itself. All it claimed is that the software was requested, and that some words were exchanged that made the programmer believe it was planned to be a prototype for something that could really be used in the future. (As opposed to his assumption that it was a proof of concept to show a flaw in the voting process.) It never made the claim that the software was being used this soon, in this election.
Your last paragraph is an example of precisely the same kind of second-guessing conspiracy theory thinking that you spent the entire post complaining about. It hypocritically nulled out the value of your post in my eyes.
What *causes* a claim to be extraordinary is that it doesn't already have a huge pile of circumstantial evidence built up behind it. What makes a claim ordinary is that it does. The ordinary claim that I am eating a ham sandwich is ordinary because you already have the evidence to know that some entity exists that is typing this message, and that it is likely to be an entity that eats, and that ham sandiches are a common thing that can be eaten.
So you don't really need less evidence for an ordinary claim, its just that much of the evidence was already provided before you began, so you don't need to add as much to the pile that was already there. With extra-ordinary evidence, you are having to build a lot more of it up from scratch.
The answer is obviously no. In the alternate universe where I was claiming you *ALWAYS* get what you pay for, rather than just saying that it is the case with Photoshop, your comment would have maybe been relevant.
There was no context in your original post that I could use to guess that by "process patent" you were talking only about patenting processes performed by human beings and not "processes performed by devices. I wasn't splitting hairs. Your post didn't make the distinction you are claiming it did. Now, your *NEW* point, that I would agree with - you should not be able to patent that actions taken by a human being to perform a task.
and GIMP will die out, except for the extreamists.
Wrong. Totally 100% wrong. You are right that Photoshop does a better job. But you are wrong that if it was on linux then Gimp would die out. You seem to be forgetting that an awful lot of people who use Gimp are doing it because it's cheap and their needs are cheap. That won't change when Photoshop becomes available. You get what you pay for with Photoshop, but unless you use it professionally, you typically dont need most of what you paid for. Gimp does the task for stuff like "Take this image, maybe crop it a bit, reduce the number of colors it uses, add a layer for some text annotations on top of it, and export it as jpeg for my webpage." What it doesn't do well is stuff that a lot of casual users aren't going to shell out the money for.
In fact, if Photoshop got ported to Linux, Gimp usage would not be affected at all - because the people who find photoshop's features worth the price are not currently using Gimp. Gimp is used by people doing it on the cheap, and that audience won't move to photoshop.
Gimp does work on Windows, you know. And it has an audience there too. If people didn't pirate Photoshop, Gimp would have a larger audience on Windows.
Automatic updating can be very annoying because "fixes" sometimes break things. Now, granted in a multiplayer game it's a bit different because all the clients in use have to be compatable, but I think that's a failing of the game's protocol design. After all, HTTP works with different clients, why does a multiplayer game have to be less tolarant of that? If a hacked together client manages to break security on a website, it's the web server's fault for being badly set up or designed. But if a hacked client manages to break security on a game site, it's the considered the client's fault. That seems to be too fraggile a protocol for my tastes.
Anyway, not *wanting* updates without asking for them first is a very falid reason not to like steam, that is seperate from piracy.
Microsoft has a known history of tying services to needing their products. That's one reason that them being in charge of your entire identity scared some people - it's because if they succeeded then say goodbye to using non-MS-approved products to browse popular websites. Not everyone agrees that their products are pleasant to use, to say the least. Now, this idea still has OTHER problems in common with Microsoft Passport, but it doesn't have that particular one.
I hate that you can't cut&paste from acrobat reader. But here is the relevant part of that link, re-typed by me: "This invention relates in general to a fastener for holding a plurality of objects. More specificlaly, an improved method for holding a plurality of objects."
Note it is "an improved method for holding".... that's the thing being patented - the "imrpoved method for".
Your argument that it does seems to boil down to nothing more than "I think it should".
No. My argument boils down to showing you there is no rigidly definable difference between "unspecified amount of time" and "so far it's been permanent up til now". For example, a usenet server that expires posts after 15 years, but only got started 10 years ago still fits the definition of both, so far. I wholeheatedly believe usenet's archive will not be permanent. If nothing else, it will go away when the sun becomes a red giant. For your argument to make sense there has to have been a defined ending time for usenet caches, and there NEVER WAS.
You're going to beat us to it, just like in the previous thread. Some specific points are brought up below.
2. "The system" of usenet is a system where it is left undefined what the client is that is viewing the posts. When I posted some of my first usenet posts, Microsoft did not have a usenet reader yet. Now they do. Does that mean I can complain that users have no right to use Outlook's news reader to access posts I made back then? No, of course not. Now, what is the definitional, legally enforcable difference between (A) Using a new client I hadn't heard of at the time to access my posts by showing them to the user directly, and (B) using a new client I hadn't heard of at the time to access my posts by showing them to a web browser that shows them to the user? The fact that it shunts through a web browser on the way to the user's eyeballs doesn't really change anything about the setup of who's showing things to who under what rights.
3. There is no hard and fast definition that separates a cache from an archive. An archive is exactly the same thing as a cache with a lot of space and is slow to purge. Therefore if permission is given to cache usenet posts (which it obviously is since that's how it works) then permission is also being given to archive them. The only way to refute this is to come up with a rigid legalistic definition of what the difference between a cache that is open to the public and an archive that is open to the public is.
And note that a usenet news server can legally be open to the public to connect to (and some were, once upon a time when usenet was smaller and cheaper to spool). So that's not a difference either between the usenet system before and after dejajnews/google got into it.
(By the way, posts do NOT "normally" expire after several days. They "normally" expire whenever the local news spool admin damn well feels like making them expire - which is a function of disk space mostly. I've participated in groups where the posts were archived for many months back on the server run by the ISP. How long they take to expire can be set on a per-group basis too - basically it varies from one group to the next even on the same news spool.)
5. The problem is that you have still failed to show the legal difference between what google is doing and what a news server is allowed to do. Therefore the "onus" on Google, while it is true that it exists, is already satisfied by simply pointing out that it is in the exact same legal position as a news server, which is already permitted to do what it does.
If you are ignorant of the difference between "this is how it is typically done" (posts expire to save disk space) and "this is how it is defined that it MUST be done" (posts may or may not expire, it's the choice of the admin running the local usenet spool), then that's not our problem.
While it is true that you still own the copyright to the work, it is also true that you gave up the right to stop others from copying that work the moment you chose to put it on usenet. Much like Linus still owns copyrights to his parts of the Linux kernel, but because he already released it he can't turn around and ask for everyone to delete their copies now.
Software simply implements math or a business method,
So do many inventions.
Patents will keep people from being able to do things that are obvious and easy to implement by other means. One click shopping is a great example. Software patents are inherntly abusive, whether open or closed.
This is only because they are violating the two things I already mentioned in my post you are replying to. "One click shopping" should not have been awarded a patent because is not a specific enough description of what is being done to make it any different than a zillion other things people already know how to do. The reason it passed is that the patent office doesn't know how to check if something is already common knowlege among the programmer community or not.
You can't patent "some round object that looks like this (show picture of a wheel)". The wheel patent has to specify the process the object is used for. (I'm not going to go look it up, but if you do, I'll guarantee you the patent would talk about the use of the wheel to move things over a distance. The reason this is needed is that so many objects are identical to each other, and so many inventions are just cases of applying the same old previously existing objects in some new way, to perform some new process.
A pie pan, turned into a flying toy by turning it upside down and throwing it while spinning it, is a completely different invention from a pan to hold pies.
Look at the way patents are phrased. It's NEVER "this is the device I am patenting." It's aways "A process for doing blah blah by means of blah blah." A paperclip patent, to use your example, would be titled something like "A process for fastening a small number of thin sheets of something together by use of a bent wire." The reason it's like this is that what an invention is, is largely a function of what it does. A small thin bit of wire, used to, say, act as a crude thermal fuse in an electric device, would not violate a paperclip patent, even if it was made from the exact same type of wire, was the exact same length, and was coiled in the exact same way.
Also, if a patent expires in 3 years, it doesn't matter too much if it was a poor patent to start with.
I agree about patents lasting too long (because they were invented at a time when technology was more slow paced). But the above quote has a big problem. Look at the following two time periods:
1 - The time it takes for a bad patent to be damaging and thus "matter much".
2 - The time it takes for a patent to be profitable to the filer and worth doing.
The problem is that these two time periods are necessarily identical in length. The only way for patent time periods to be short enough that bad patents don't matter is for them to be short enough that they aren't worth filing. Whatever breakpoint that is (and really, it varies by which industry you are talking about), it is the same breakpoint for both 1 and 2.
So no matter how you shorten patents, no matter what you arrive at, presuming it is still a useful period of time, then it will still be necessary to watch out for bad patents, becuase they will still be damaging.
I won't bother to read points where people won't do me the courtesy of breaking things up into paragraphs. I don't have the time to waste on reading a long ramble where my eyes keep losing their place.
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To the moderator: A troll is when someone says something flame-inducing that they don't actually believe in order to get a rise out of someone. I assure you, I believe what I said fully. Truth is not trolling. But truth can be offensive. Deal with it.
When I say "My Pontiac" I'm not implying I own Pontiac- just that I own an instance of a Pontiac, and I'm referring to that instance right now (as opposed to someone else's) "Red Hat's Linux" can very easily mean the same type of thing. Learn English.
Would a undetecable application that is mneant to be cross platform be written in VB?
Of course not. And your reason for claiming that this was intended to be cross platform was what, again?
Only in the alternate universe where the afadavit claimed that the election was rigged that would be a red flag against it. That may have been a claim of one of the articles talking about it, but it was never a claim of the afadavit itself. All it claimed is that the software was requested, and that some words were exchanged that made the programmer believe it was planned to be a prototype for something that could really be used in the future. (As opposed to his assumption that it was a proof of concept to show a flaw in the voting process.) It never made the claim that the software was being used this soon, in this election.
Your last paragraph is an example of precisely the same kind of second-guessing conspiracy theory thinking that you spent the entire post complaining about. It hypocritically nulled out the value of your post in my eyes.
What *causes* a claim to be extraordinary is that it doesn't already have a huge pile of circumstantial evidence built up behind it. What makes a claim ordinary is that it does. The ordinary claim that I am eating a ham sandwich is ordinary because you already have the evidence to know that some entity exists that is typing this message, and that it is likely to be an entity that eats, and that ham sandiches are a common thing that can be eaten.
So you don't really need less evidence for an ordinary claim, its just that much of the evidence was already provided before you began, so you don't need to add as much to the pile that was already there. With extra-ordinary evidence, you are having to build a lot more of it up from scratch.
Thank you for providing an illustrative example of the kind of sanctimonious asshole he was talking about.
Read the farking afidavit. The person who wrote it is a republican.
The fact that they all have different policies from each other proves my point, not yours.
Your point is true, but I don't understand how you thought it relates to anything I said.
The answer is obviously no. In the alternate universe where I was claiming you *ALWAYS* get what you pay for, rather than just saying that it is the case with Photoshop, your comment would have maybe been relevant.
There was no context in your original post that I could use to guess that by "process patent" you were talking only about patenting processes performed by human beings and not "processes performed by devices. I wasn't splitting hairs. Your post didn't make the distinction you are claiming it did. Now, your *NEW* point, that I would agree with - you should not be able to patent that actions taken by a human being to perform a task.
and GIMP will die out, except for the extreamists.
Wrong. Totally 100% wrong. You are right that Photoshop does a better job. But you are wrong that if it was on linux then Gimp would die out. You seem to be forgetting that an awful lot of people who use Gimp are doing it because it's cheap and their needs are cheap. That won't change when Photoshop becomes available. You get what you pay for with Photoshop, but unless you use it professionally, you typically dont need most of what you paid for. Gimp does the task for stuff like "Take this image, maybe crop it a bit, reduce the number of colors it uses, add a layer for some text annotations on top of it, and export it as jpeg for my webpage." What it doesn't do well is stuff that a lot of casual users aren't going to shell out the money for.
In fact, if Photoshop got ported to Linux, Gimp usage would not be affected at all - because the people who find photoshop's features worth the price are not currently using Gimp. Gimp is used by people doing it on the cheap, and that audience won't move to photoshop.
Gimp does work on Windows, you know. And it has an audience there too. If people didn't pirate Photoshop, Gimp would have a larger audience on Windows.
Automatic updating can be very annoying because "fixes" sometimes break things. Now, granted in a multiplayer game it's a bit different because all the clients in use have to be compatable, but I think that's a failing of the game's protocol design. After all, HTTP works with different clients, why does a multiplayer game have to be less tolarant of that? If a hacked together client manages to break security on a website, it's the web server's fault for being badly set up or designed. But if a hacked client manages to break security on a game site, it's the considered the client's fault. That seems to be too fraggile a protocol for my tastes.
Anyway, not *wanting* updates without asking for them first is a very falid reason not to like steam, that is seperate from piracy.
Microsoft has a known history of tying services to needing their products. That's one reason that them being in charge of your entire identity scared some people - it's because if they succeeded then say goodbye to using non-MS-approved products to browse popular websites. Not everyone agrees that their products are pleasant to use, to say the least. Now, this idea still has OTHER problems in common with Microsoft Passport, but it doesn't have that particular one.
Not the manufacturing process for the method.
I didn't *SAY* manufacturing process. I just said "process". Thank you for the strawman fallacy.
I hate that you can't cut&paste from acrobat reader. But here is the relevant part of that link, re-typed by me:
"This invention relates in general to a fastener for holding a plurality of objects. More specificlaly, an improved method for holding a plurality of objects."
Note it is "an improved method for holding".... that's the thing being patented - the "imrpoved method for".
Your argument that it does seems to boil down to nothing more than "I think it should".
No. My argument boils down to showing you there is no rigidly definable difference between "unspecified amount of time" and "so far it's been permanent up til now". For example, a usenet server that expires posts after 15 years, but only got started 10 years ago still fits the definition of both, so far. I wholeheatedly believe usenet's archive will not be permanent. If nothing else, it will go away when the sun becomes a red giant. For your argument to make sense there has to have been a defined ending time for usenet caches, and there NEVER WAS.
OK, before anyone else posts ill-informed rubbish
You're going to beat us to it, just like in the previous thread. Some specific points are brought up below.
2. "The system" of usenet is a system where it is left undefined what the client is that is viewing the posts. When I posted some of my first usenet posts, Microsoft did not have a usenet reader yet. Now they do. Does that mean I can complain that users have no right to use Outlook's news reader to access posts I made back then? No, of course not. Now, what is the definitional, legally enforcable difference between (A) Using a new client I hadn't heard of at the time to access my posts by showing them to the user directly, and (B) using a new client I hadn't heard of at the time to access my posts by showing them to a web browser that shows them to the user? The fact that it shunts through a web browser on the way to the user's eyeballs doesn't really change anything about the setup of who's showing things to who under what rights.
3. There is no hard and fast definition that separates a cache from an archive. An archive is exactly the same thing as a cache with a lot of space and is slow to purge. Therefore if permission is given to cache usenet posts (which it obviously is since that's how it works) then permission is also being given to archive them. The only way to refute this is to come up with a rigid legalistic definition of what the difference between a cache that is open to the public and an archive that is open to the public is.
And note that a usenet news server can legally be open to the public to connect to (and some were, once upon a time when usenet was smaller and cheaper to spool). So that's not a difference either between the usenet system before and after dejajnews/google got into it.
(By the way, posts do NOT "normally" expire after several days. They "normally" expire whenever the local news spool admin damn well feels like making them expire - which is a function of disk space mostly. I've participated in groups where the posts were archived for many months back on the server run by the ISP. How long they take to expire can be set on a per-group basis too - basically it varies from one group to the next even on the same news spool.)
5. The problem is that you have still failed to show the legal difference between what google is doing and what a news server is allowed to do. Therefore the "onus" on Google, while it is true that it exists, is already satisfied by simply pointing out that it is in the exact same legal position as a news server, which is already permitted to do what it does.
If you are ignorant of the difference between "this is how it is typically done" (posts expire to save disk space) and "this is how it is defined that it MUST be done" (posts may or may not expire, it's the choice of the admin running the local usenet spool), then that's not our problem.
While it is true that you still own the copyright to the work, it is also true that you gave up the right to stop others from copying that work the moment you chose to put it on usenet. Much like Linus still owns copyrights to his parts of the Linux kernel, but because he already released it he can't turn around and ask for everyone to delete their copies now.
Software simply implements math or a business method,
So do many inventions.
Patents will keep people from being able to do things that are obvious and easy to implement by other means. One click shopping is a great example. Software patents are inherntly abusive, whether open or closed.
This is only because they are violating the two things I already mentioned in my post you are replying to. "One click shopping" should not have been awarded a patent because is not a specific enough description of what is being done to make it any different than a zillion other things people already know how to do. The reason it passed is that the patent office doesn't know how to check if something is already common knowlege among the programmer community or not.
You can't patent "some round object that looks like this (show picture of a wheel)". The wheel patent has to specify the process the object is used for. (I'm not going to go look it up, but if you do, I'll guarantee you the patent would talk about the use of the wheel to move things over a distance. The reason this is needed is that so many objects are identical to each other, and so many inventions are just cases of applying the same old previously existing objects in some new way, to perform some new process.
A pie pan, turned into a flying toy by turning it upside down and throwing it while spinning it, is a completely different invention from a pan to hold pies.
Look at the way patents are phrased. It's NEVER "this is the device I am patenting." It's aways "A process for doing blah blah by means of blah blah." A paperclip patent, to use your example, would be titled something like "A process for fastening a small number of thin sheets of something together by use of a bent wire." The reason it's like this is that what an invention is, is largely a function of what it does. A small thin bit of wire, used to, say, act as a crude thermal fuse in an electric device, would not violate a paperclip patent, even if it was made from the exact same type of wire, was the exact same length, and was coiled in the exact same way.
Also, if a patent expires in 3 years, it doesn't matter too much if it was a poor patent to start with.
I agree about patents lasting too long (because they were invented at a time when technology was more slow paced). But the above quote has a big problem. Look at the following two time periods:
1 - The time it takes for a bad patent to be damaging and thus "matter much".
2 - The time it takes for a patent to be profitable to the filer and worth doing.
The problem is that these two time periods are necessarily identical in length. The only way for patent time periods to be short enough that bad patents don't matter is for them to be short enough that they aren't worth filing. Whatever breakpoint that is (and really, it varies by which industry you are talking about), it is the same breakpoint for both 1 and 2.
So no matter how you shorten patents, no matter what you arrive at, presuming it is still a useful period of time, then it will still be necessary to watch out for bad patents, becuase they will still be damaging.
I won't bother to read points where people won't do me the courtesy of breaking things up into paragraphs. I don't have the time to waste on reading a long ramble where my eyes keep losing their place.