I'm always curious what part of earth is in a shot from space. Suppose this picture is the only info you've got. How to go about and find the spot on earth visible in the picture? Is it doable with stuff accessible to anyone? I see roads (fields at the bottom) and ice/salt plane at the left. Now what?
In the Netherlands people marry rather late, and many women get their kids in their (late) thirties. A good portion of women of that age miss the boat. There is an enormous selection pressure going on. Ignoring the emerging trend of freezing eggs, one may expect that in a couple of generations Dutch women will be able to bear children at even older age, and may well live even longer than they do now.
I'm not reading a chapter in a bookstore (and don't appreciate buying books from a bookstore where my book has been fondled by others). And for the bookstore, I'd have to go there. And they have opening/closing times. And an iTunes bookstore could have recommendations. So, I think there are advantages.
While you need a decent studio to create a decent music quality, writers can create good-looking PDFs on their computer.
If there is going to be an iTunes book store, publishers and bookstores will take the hit. An author could charge a bit more, and the audience would pay way less. It would be more convenient to buy the book (one can read the first chapter before buying, not something you do in a bookstore. Nor do you have to go there).
Or use thereof. I've always wondered how - according to DNA analysis - humanity may have gone thru the eye of a needle, with only a small population at a particular point in time. Now, imagine that a group of ancestors lived near a volcano, or a region like you have in Yellowstone. The could cook their food there, in hot pockets (it is still being done). That would allow a group to stay in a single place for quite some time, interbreed, and thrive.
>>> Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.
>> Of "the" patent? You mean of all the granted patents, right?
> This was a reference to GP's argument that it was impossible to determine if you'd infringe a patent. Which I find a bit disingenuous, him allegedly being a patent attorney.
I meant to say that it is not easy to find because of the terminology used. With terms like "data storage means" etc. you get tons of hits, and it is hard to find relevant patent (applications). If you want to convince an investor that it is unlikely you're infringing a patent, that doesn't help. Secondly, I can easily read a claim of a software patent and think: What are they talking about? You rarely have that kind of problems with, say, mechanical inventions. And then, even for mechanical inventions it can take me a couple of hours PER PATENT to establish whether there is infringement or not, also because you have to check the description.
My arguments were logical, I think.
Society really wouldn't be helped with one word processor capable of showing pictures and another one capable of showing rich text. Customers want it all in one program. Because software is all developed by the company, every aspect is a potential thing that could mean a high risk of infringement. Want to try to license your way out of it? No problem to find 10 companies that think their software patent is important enough to earn them 1/5th of your profit.
This situation rarely arises for mechanical inventions. Say, you invent a new plastic coffee cup. You buy the molds, the plastic pellets etc and by the act of buying them from a legitimate source you are allowed to do what you want. There is no need to check whether there is a patent on the plastic's composition, or a patent on the molding machine. So, there is much less to check, and what needs to be checked, can be checked more easily.
I have to admit that there are pretty nifty software ideas that qualify as inventions worthy of a patent even in my book. But then, coming up with a program implementing the idea already gives the developer (be it person or company) a tremendous headstart. As I said, patents are a rather blunt tool. For software, I think society is better off without patents.
Patent attorney here. Yes, software patents shouldn't be there. Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas. Stopping people from sitting on their ideas helps society, because it give society more knowledge. However, for software there is no need for this mechanism. There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress. If one person doesn't think of it, another one will. Also, the first sale doctrine doesn't work. If I have a patent on a resistor, and I sell it to you and you put it in a computer, you're free to do that. You don't have that with software. I can't buy a piece of, say, Word, and use it in my own programs. For the same reason, it is very hard to figure out whether your program is off the hook. Any aspect of a program could be patented. Finally, software patents are bad (with so called "wish" claims). I have programs developed for my company. It takes me 5 seconds to come up with an idea, but it may take the programmer 5 days, or 5 weeks, to implement. If I go with a software patent to a programmer, no time is saved.
The patent system is open source avant la lettre. An inventor has to provide all his knowledge (provide the best mode), in a way that can be replicated by an ordinary person skilled in the art, and it is available on line from patent offices. The "license" it comes with is a peculiar one (territorial limited/time limited), but it expires sooner than any copyright. But it is a rough tool. Fine for many types of inventions, including medical drugs, but not for software (or business methods).
With help from Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin I wrote a tutorial on programming in Object-C, aimed at absolute newbies. It was released as a PDF and a great success. Over 200k copies were downloaded by people interested in programming for the Apple Macintosh (or perhaps iPhone). You can find it here:
You may do that, but I don't (and I'm in Europe too).
I guess car manufactures love the l/100 km because for small numbers all numbers look the comparable, which hides how insanely inefficient big cars are. km/l shows way more easily which cars are thrifty.
Neelie Kroes should demand that at the time of start-up, Microsoft lists the various browsers in any order Microsoft pleases, followed by HTML5 standard compliant or Not HTML 5 standard compliant
on this. Save this slashdot page repeatedly as any suggestion here is prior art and make sure it is in the public domain for a long time (e.g. as a time-stamped PDF).
With Shoemaker-Levy I could understand how Jupiter could catch a comet, but what I don't understand is that the comet subsequently can run into Jupiter. I mean, shouldn't it continue orbiting around Jupiter just like the other moons around Jupiter do?
In my opinion it should be. It means being negative about the rest. I don't see how that helps to all get along.
Bert Who was never brainwashed at school to pledge allegiance to a plot of territory (a ritual invented by a guy from a flag factory to sell more flags)
My father happened to tell me last week that cuckoos put their eggs in the nests of birds of the same kind in which they were raised, and that their eggs have the same speckle pattern as that of the bird they take advantage off. This could mean that cuckoos will also mate with cuckoos raised from the same type of nest, or the speckle pattern would be messed up. Alternatively, the speckle pattern is entirely female determined. In case of the former, speciation is on its way.
"When a book is sold it is out of the control of the book owner in the exact same manner. With neither patents nor copyrighted items are you are allowed to duplicate the effort. But you are allowed to apply the first sale doctrine."
Like your Kindle book, or your copy of 1984? Patented devices sold don't come with a EULA. As to paper books, I grant your point for paper books, but that's not where the greatest mess of copyright law is.
"As long as the patent isn't owned by a coorporation who can play the mutually assured destruction card" You're mixing things up with infringement.
"While the time limit is indeed shorter, the effect is much greater, as patents directly limit what others can do, and there is only a limited amount of ways to do any specific procedure. History is full of examples where patents have slowed down specific industrial advancements for 20 years." Apart from the fact that very few patents make it for the full 20 years (if they get granted in the first place), here's another one. If you improve on a patented invention and patent that yourself, you've taken a bite out of the cake of the first proprietor. While you cannot do what is covered by the first patent, the other party cannot do what you came up with. Talking generally resolves this to the benefit of both parties.
In my daily work, I point companies/inventors to patent literature and explain them how they can benefit from the information provided there. Patents are a rather blunt tool, but while it is easy to point out to cases where a (stupid, if I may add) company slowed down progress, the opposite is quite a bit harder to show. If an inventor reports with a new idea, who knows whether that inspiration came from from knowledge gained from patent literature as well? And patent literature is free in both meanings of the word. It is open source knowledge, with instead of a GPL a time and territorial restriction.
While still in for improvement, with patent law I can see the mechanism by which society benefits and that there is a somewhat fair balance between society and inventor. With copyright law, that is a tad or thousand harder.
If you studied both copyright law and patent law then - You must have noticed that with patents, once an item covered by the patent is sold, it is out of control of the patent proprietor. - You also must have noticed that there are very stringent requirements before a patent is granted (and if they were not met, you can do something about it), not to mention the cost involved, and comes with a territorial restriction. - You must have noticed that patents have a limit of 20 years (and maintenance fees have to be paid).
Don't throw copyright law and patent law together like they're equally bad. Yes, don't get me started on business patents and software patents, but those are problems of a completely different order of magnitude compared to the mess called copyright law.
I've been bitten in a judicial process, where the other party said one thing in one court and another thing in another. It would have worked greatly to our advantage if we'd been able to use this lying. Also, in one of the courts the judge acted like he was a member of the other party. With audio tapes .
I hope there is a lawyer here (and sticks around for a few rounds of discussion). Why do laws prohibit to make recordings in court? I think it would help to keep parties (and judges) honest. Any pointers to relevant websites are also welcome.
"So it seems to me there's a pretty strong logical case to be made that you should calculate the damages like this: 24x$1xNxBxLxD. N is the total number of people who downloaded the song (and, as argued above, not just the number who got a copy directly from the ones Thomas put up). "
OK, but that would also mean that a person who downloaded a song from her cannot be sued by the RIAA because it already received the damages for that. It seems fair to me that Jammie has a right of recourse on the downloader, although I doubt that would make her happy.
I think it is also fair that the RIAA proves that the 24 songs were not already paid for by someone else they had sued.
Bert Who no longer has any illegitimate songs (and movies), but does have CDs now from several of the tapes he had when he was a student. If that makes the RIAA happy, I've bad news. iTunes allowed me to buy several songs for which I'd never bought the CD, but now I've effectively stopped buying music.
By sending two students abroad at minimal cost, without having to need any spy training (expensive), two countries unknowingly have managed to not only take out a professor by preventing him from doing further research, but also by steering away part of the federal budget for defence towards the justice system and to prisons. In effect this is a double whammy, slowing down development of evil stuff.
Bert Who presumes that it is possible by finding Bin laden by listening for laughter from caves every time the TSA budget is published.
I'm a bit out of my league knowledge-wise here, but in my company I have a company web application that would benefit very much from being able to do something in the window of another site. Why can't a browser (not the web app) be set to very specifically allow a particular web application to make use of another specified website. E.g. that would allow me to fill out a form with data from the web app or vice versa to get data into my MySQL database without having to fill out the data manually, which is error-prone. Because it is a browser setting where both domains are set to specifically interact with each other, I don't see how it could be used to do anything malicious, but it would help web apps enormously.
Macs can run Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (duh). The machines themselves are crafted with attention to detail. Versatility in a neat package. What is not to like?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always curious what part of earth is in a shot from space. Suppose this picture is the only info you've got. How to go about and find the spot on earth visible in the picture? Is it doable with stuff accessible to anyone? I see roads (fields at the bottom) and ice/salt plane at the left. Now what?
Bert
In the Netherlands people marry rather late, and many women get their kids in their (late) thirties. A good portion of women of that age miss the boat. There is an enormous selection pressure going on. Ignoring the emerging trend of freezing eggs, one may expect that in a couple of generations Dutch women will be able to bear children at even older age, and may well live even longer than they do now.
Bert
Yes, but despite all the technological advancements made by humans that will save such a child, god is still necessary. To take the credit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxLR9hdorI
Bert
I'm not reading a chapter in a bookstore (and don't appreciate buying books from a bookstore where my book has been fondled by others). And for the bookstore, I'd have to go there. And they have opening/closing times. And an iTunes bookstore could have recommendations. So, I think there are advantages.
A better analogy would have been Amazon.
Bert
While you need a decent studio to create a decent music quality, writers can create good-looking PDFs on their computer.
If there is going to be an iTunes book store, publishers and bookstores will take the hit. An author could charge a bit more, and the audience would pay way less. It would be more convenient to buy the book (one can read the first chapter before buying, not something you do in a bookstore. Nor do you have to go there).
Bert
George Carlin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=MeSSwKffj9o&feature=related
Bert
Or use thereof. I've always wondered how - according to DNA analysis - humanity may have gone thru the eye of a needle, with only a small population at a particular point in time. Now, imagine that a group of ancestors lived near a volcano, or a region like you have in Yellowstone. The could cook their food there, in hot pockets (it is still being done). That would allow a group to stay in a single place for quite some time, interbreed, and thrive.
Mastering fire could come much later.
Bert
>>> Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.
>> Of "the" patent? You mean of all the granted patents, right?
> This was a reference to GP's argument that it was impossible to determine if you'd infringe a patent. Which I find a bit disingenuous, him allegedly being a patent attorney.
I meant to say that it is not easy to find because of the terminology used. With terms like "data storage means" etc. you get tons of hits, and it is hard to find relevant patent (applications). If you want to convince an investor that it is unlikely you're infringing a patent, that doesn't help. Secondly, I can easily read a claim of a software patent and think: What are they talking about? You rarely have that kind of problems with, say, mechanical inventions. And then, even for mechanical inventions it can take me a couple of hours PER PATENT to establish whether there is infringement or not, also because you have to check the description.
My arguments were logical, I think.
Society really wouldn't be helped with one word processor capable of showing pictures and another one capable of showing rich text. Customers want it all in one program. Because software is all developed by the company, every aspect is a potential thing that could mean a high risk of infringement. Want to try to license your way out of it? No problem to find 10 companies that think their software patent is important enough to earn them 1/5th of your profit.
This situation rarely arises for mechanical inventions. Say, you invent a new plastic coffee cup. You buy the molds, the plastic pellets etc and by the act of buying them from a legitimate source you are allowed to do what you want. There is no need to check whether there is a patent on the plastic's composition, or a patent on the molding machine. So, there is much less to check, and what needs to be checked, can be checked more easily.
I have to admit that there are pretty nifty software ideas that qualify as inventions worthy of a patent even in my book. But then, coming up with a program implementing the idea already gives the developer (be it person or company) a tremendous headstart. As I said, patents are a rather blunt tool. For software, I think society is better off without patents.
Bert
It is not either/OR. So, they get the copyright too. Double whammy.
Bert
Patent attorney here. Yes, software patents shouldn't be there. Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas. Stopping people from sitting on their ideas helps society, because it give society more knowledge. However, for software there is no need for this mechanism. There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress. If one person doesn't think of it, another one will. Also, the first sale doctrine doesn't work. If I have a patent on a resistor, and I sell it to you and you put it in a computer, you're free to do that. You don't have that with software. I can't buy a piece of, say, Word, and use it in my own programs. For the same reason, it is very hard to figure out whether your program is off the hook. Any aspect of a program could be patented. Finally, software patents are bad (with so called "wish" claims). I have programs developed for my company. It takes me 5 seconds to come up with an idea, but it may take the programmer 5 days, or 5 weeks, to implement. If I go with a software patent to a programmer, no time is saved.
The patent system is open source avant la lettre. An inventor has to provide all his knowledge (provide the best mode), in a way that can be replicated by an ordinary person skilled in the art, and it is available on line from patent offices. The "license" it comes with is a peculiar one (territorial limited/time limited), but it expires sooner than any copyright. But it is a rough tool. Fine for many types of inventions, including medical drugs, but not for software (or business methods).
Bert
Blind people die at a very young age because of starvation for not being able to clear their plate.
Bert
With help from Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin I wrote a tutorial on programming in Object-C, aimed at absolute newbies. It was released as a PDF and a great success. Over 200k copies were downloaded by people interested in programming for the Apple Macintosh (or perhaps iPhone). You can find it here:
http://www.cocoalab.com/?q=becomeanxcoder
It was translated by volunteers in several other languages, amongst which Chinese and Arabic. Cool!
Bert
You may do that, but I don't (and I'm in Europe too).
I guess car manufactures love the l/100 km because for small numbers all numbers look the comparable, which hides how insanely inefficient big cars are. km/l shows way more easily which cars are thrifty.
Bert
Neelie Kroes should demand that at the time of start-up, Microsoft lists the various browsers in any order Microsoft pleases, followed by HTML5 standard compliant or Not HTML 5 standard compliant
Bert
on this. Save this slashdot page repeatedly as any suggestion here is prior art and make sure it is in the public domain for a long time (e.g. as a time-stamped PDF).
Bert
With Shoemaker-Levy I could understand how Jupiter could catch a comet, but what I don't understand is that the comet subsequently can run into Jupiter. I mean, shouldn't it continue orbiting around Jupiter just like the other moons around Jupiter do?
Bert
In my opinion it should be. It means being negative about the rest. I don't see how that helps to all get along.
Bert
Who was never brainwashed at school to pledge allegiance to a plot of territory (a ritual invented by a guy from a flag factory to sell more flags)
My father happened to tell me last week that cuckoos put their eggs in the nests of birds of the same kind in which they were raised, and that their eggs have the same speckle pattern as that of the bird they take advantage off. This could mean that cuckoos will also mate with cuckoos raised from the same type of nest, or the speckle pattern would be messed up. Alternatively, the speckle pattern is entirely female determined. In case of the former, speciation is on its way.
Bert
"When a book is sold it is out of the control of the book owner in the exact same manner. With neither patents nor copyrighted items are you are allowed to duplicate the effort. But you are allowed to apply the first sale doctrine."
Like your Kindle book, or your copy of 1984? Patented devices sold don't come with a EULA. As to paper books, I grant your point for paper books, but that's not where the greatest mess of copyright law is.
"As long as the patent isn't owned by a coorporation who can play the mutually assured destruction card"
You're mixing things up with infringement.
"While the time limit is indeed shorter, the effect is much greater, as patents directly limit what others can do, and there is only a limited amount of ways to do any specific procedure. History is full of examples where patents have slowed down specific industrial advancements for 20 years."
Apart from the fact that very few patents make it for the full 20 years (if they get granted in the first place), here's another one. If you improve on a patented invention and patent that yourself, you've taken a bite out of the cake of the first proprietor. While you cannot do what is covered by the first patent, the other party cannot do what you came up with. Talking generally resolves this to the benefit of both parties.
In my daily work, I point companies/inventors to patent literature and explain them how they can benefit from the information provided there. Patents are a rather blunt tool, but while it is easy to point out to cases where a (stupid, if I may add) company slowed down progress, the opposite is quite a bit harder to show. If an inventor reports with a new idea, who knows whether that inspiration came from from knowledge gained from patent literature as well? And patent literature is free in both meanings of the word. It is open source knowledge, with instead of a GPL a time and territorial restriction.
While still in for improvement, with patent law I can see the mechanism by which society benefits and that there is a somewhat fair balance between society and inventor. With copyright law, that is a tad or thousand harder.
Bert
If you studied both copyright law and patent law then
- You must have noticed that with patents, once an item covered by the patent is sold, it is out of control of the patent proprietor.
- You also must have noticed that there are very stringent requirements before a patent is granted (and if they were not met, you can do something about it), not to mention the cost involved, and comes with a territorial restriction.
- You must have noticed that patents have a limit of 20 years (and maintenance fees have to be paid).
Don't throw copyright law and patent law together like they're equally bad. Yes, don't get me started on business patents and software patents, but those are problems of a completely different order of magnitude compared to the mess called copyright law.
Bert
I've been bitten in a judicial process, where the other party said one thing in one court and another thing in another. It would have worked greatly to our advantage if we'd been able to use this lying. Also, in one of the courts the judge acted like he was a member of the other party. With audio tapes .
I hope there is a lawyer here (and sticks around for a few rounds of discussion). Why do laws prohibit to make recordings in court? I think it would help to keep parties (and judges) honest. Any pointers to relevant websites are also welcome.
Bert
"So it seems to me there's a pretty strong logical case to be made that you should calculate the damages like this: 24x$1xNxBxLxD. N is the total number of people who downloaded the song (and, as argued above, not just the number who got a copy directly from the ones Thomas put up). "
OK, but that would also mean that a person who downloaded a song from her cannot be sued by the RIAA because it already received the damages for that. It seems fair to me that Jammie has a right of recourse on the downloader, although I doubt that would make her happy.
I think it is also fair that the RIAA proves that the 24 songs were not already paid for by someone else they had sued.
Bert
Who no longer has any illegitimate songs (and movies), but does have CDs now from several of the tapes he had when he was a student. If that makes the RIAA happy, I've bad news. iTunes allowed me to buy several songs for which I'd never bought the CD, but now I've effectively stopped buying music.
By sending two students abroad at minimal cost, without having to need any spy training (expensive), two countries unknowingly have managed to not only take out a professor by preventing him from doing further research, but also by steering away part of the federal budget for defence towards the justice system and to prisons. In effect this is a double whammy, slowing down development of evil stuff.
Bert
Who presumes that it is possible by finding Bin laden by listening for laughter from caves every time the TSA budget is published.
I'm a bit out of my league knowledge-wise here, but in my company I have a company web application that would benefit very much from being able to do something in the window of another site. Why can't a browser (not the web app) be set to very specifically allow a particular web application to make use of another specified website. E.g. that would allow me to fill out a form with data from the web app or vice versa to get data into my MySQL database without having to fill out the data manually, which is error-prone. Because it is a browser setting where both domains are set to specifically interact with each other, I don't see how it could be used to do anything malicious, but it would help web apps enormously.
Bert
Macs can run Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (duh). The machines themselves are crafted with attention to detail. Versatility in a neat package. What is not to like?
Bert