In the Netherlands, most houses are concrete/brick based. And they are very energy efficient, because there are two walls, the space between them being filled with insulating foam.
Ceramic knives, because they're not made of metal you can walk with them thru the Electronic Security Gates (not the first time I notice that Gates and security are mentioned in one sentence and that there's something bad with the security, but I disgress). And they're extremely sharp (yes, Gates too, but I meant the ceramic knives). Of course, you don't need to buy an expensive knive, you just take your heavy glass bottle with liquor, which can serve as a multipurpose weapon and doesn't need to be concealed. Don't bring mother's milk in bottles. TSA wants it in the natural packaging.
I have a nice dad and we go on holidays some times. On one of those occasions after 9/11 he noticed in the airplane that he'd forgotton to take his pocket knife out of his carry-on luggage. Here, that shows how nice a person he is. I didn't have to convince him not to hijack the plane knowing that nobody else had a knife.
If he'd been a "researcher" he would have written the mistake on a piece of paper and stuck it with the knife on the cockpit door.
Bert Although I suddenly found the notion that in Jesus' time people were stoned in a different light. And Jesus said that it wasn't good if people were stoned. So, the Christians are right. LOL
I'd like to offer Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion" as evidence that religions do not deserve a special treatment when it comes to free speech. Even if you only read up to (and including) Chapter 1, that should be enough to quickly get mr Star back to more deserving causes, such as the trial against monopoly abuse.
"If someone found the cure to cancer, that knowledge and application is NOT their own property. Such property belongs to Man,"
Yes, and the good thing about the patent system is that it gives an incentive to make sure it belongs to Man. There is an incentive to share the info (monopoly) and after 20 years (max), that . Even before that, any one is free to build upon the knowledge. As a side note, compare that to the copyright law where the artist 75 years after his death still has an incentive to create new works.
"As for the individual who finds the cure to cancer, he doesn't need to pull a patent on it. He would be very well taken care of,"
Sorry, it doesn't work that way in real life. Want to know how many shareware authors earn? Most people settle for "free", and "nothing in return". Not to mention the people that dare to harass the developer about new features and bugs.
Conversely, and more likely: Would he be held liable if he installed IE and it contained a leak?
Bert Who loves living in a country where blaming others rarely goes with sueing them Who also believes that it would be more appropriate if the person who breached would be sued
Despite having written/co-authored 2 booklets on programming (AppleScript for Absolute Starters and Become an X-coder), I've never mastered programming and I keep an eye out for easy to learn language, allowing me to focus on the programming instead of on keeping straining my brain with the grammar side of it. One of the earliest languages I learned was Pascal, which wasn't that bad, but doesn't appear to be as popular as it used to be (TurboPascal and all). But Scheme looks like one of the many programming languages developed for parsers and compilers, instead of for the people. Programming languages should be easy to read for humans too.
Recently I read about a programming language (Python?) where global variables and local variables had a different starting thingie ($ and, I forgot). Now things like that DO help to make sure you're not a writer of a collection of bugs.
Bert Just the number of parentheses rules out Scheme for me
It is important, because the services and hardware that Apple introduces have quite a chance to end up in the software/hardware for your preferred system. This even happens if Apple isn't the first to come up with it (for example, USB took off only with the bondi iMac, which had no other option). This dates back a long time (even the 3.5" floppies; CD-ROM). So, while you may not be a Mac user, looking at what Apple does may give you a glimp of what you may use in the future.
Of course, practically speaking you're absolutely correct that you don't need to read about it if you don't want to add a Mac to your fleet of computers. After all, when it is available for your system, you'll read about it anyway.
But then, all the people who installed it will know better how to handle it in case of a problem and may not need to run to IT staff to solve little problems.
I like it too, and that includes the bright orange. It might become my first Linux computer (guaranteed without implicit MS tax). I'm willing to pay double price if that gets a kid one for free. Will probably buy one for my nieces and nephew too. They only get computer savvy if they see that more than one computer-system exists.
I favoured the orange iBook when it came out, but when the time to buy one came, they were upgraded and the upgrade wasn't available in orange. The fact that these new puppies are better can't be held against Apple. The old coloured iBooks are, well, old.
Bert Macintosh user. The only colour I'm afraid of is beige. Boring! Why can't computers just look cool? Fortunately Macs do. For a device you spend a thousand hours looking at, do the math of cost per hour to see whether that is worth a couple of bucks more.
"Nobody would have predicted that most people would now take pictures by holding the camera out in front of them and look at the preview screen to frame a shot."
Perhaps they would be just be surprised that if all you need is frosted glass, people these days go thru all the hoopla to achieve basically the same thing.
I'm a Mac OS X user, so I can generate a PDF of everything and I do use it quite a bit. But for my business, PDF is very limiting. I would like to be able to generate PDF files from within a web-application. However, internally a PDF document is a mess. I for one would welcome an overlord who gave us a open alternative.
In regular use, I do encounter various problems when copying text from a PDF. Spaces may be missing between words (you really don't want that) and yesterday I saw two big fat dots instead of spaces. Again, if there is an alternative, I'm off.
So, now MS comes up with an XML based standard, but I will not use what they come up with until it is both good AND they behave themselves.
The first problem with software is that it usually IS novel. In real life we have photo's, digitize it and you can process it in a digital dark room, a.k.a. Photoshop. You've brought something into a virtual world. And in virtual worlds just about anything is possible. You don't require even a glass of beer to come up with new ideas (the problem is never to come up with new ideas, the problem is to implement the ideas. It took MicroSoft until 1995 until they had a workable copy of Mac OS of 1984; Linux hasn't reached that point yet; OpenOffice hasn't reached the ease of use of MS Office (fortunately they haven't reached the level of bugs either). Ordinary inventions do have to be described in a way that an ordinary person skilled in the art can work the invention without undue effort. For software inventions he has to do just about the same amount of effort.
Because there is no prior art, you would satisfy the criterion of novelty. No prior art? Well, you know how software is documented, don't you. And
Usefulness is not a criterion of any patent law, as far as I know (PCT, EPO and Dutch patent law don't require this).
The only software-related inventions I can think of are those that have to do with compression. I can tell a program to write any program I want, but I can't ask him to write a program that compresses x times while maintaing a certain amount of quality. Only if he has the algorithm can he do it. But algorithms are excluded from patentability too.
There is no such thing as fair licensing. We used to have that in the Netherlands, it could rarely be used. These days the criteria to get such a license are even harder.
As you say, the whole point of patents is that inventions go into the public domain. Well, for software there is no indication that people would sit on it if they couldn't get a patent on it. So, the patent law doesn't need to be there, and certainly not for 20 years, because there will be very very few software-related "inventions" that are still important after 20 years. So, society would never benefit from the invention going into the public domain.
I'm a patent agent, and I don't see any reason why software should be patented, and I'm quite upset that they EPO interprets this article in such a way that software patents are possible.
Bert Photoshop takes veeerrrrrryyyyy long to start up, but that is just because of all the patent numbers Adobe wants to show you.
Slashdot Mirror
In the Netherlands, most houses are concrete/brick based. And they are very energy efficient, because there are two walls, the space between them being filled with insulating foam.
Bert
Ceramic knives, because they're not made of metal you can walk with them thru the Electronic Security Gates (not the first time I notice that Gates and security are mentioned in one sentence and that there's something bad with the security, but I disgress). And they're extremely sharp (yes, Gates too, but I meant the ceramic knives). Of course, you don't need to buy an expensive knive, you just take your heavy glass bottle with liquor, which can serve as a multipurpose weapon and doesn't need to be concealed. Don't bring mother's milk in bottles. TSA wants it in the natural packaging.
I have a nice dad and we go on holidays some times. On one of those occasions after 9/11 he noticed in the airplane that he'd forgotton to take his pocket knife out of his carry-on luggage. Here, that shows how nice a person he is. I didn't have to convince him not to hijack the plane knowing that nobody else had a knife.
If he'd been a "researcher" he would have written the mistake on a piece of paper and stuck it with the knife on the cockpit door.
Bert
Yes, thanks for the clear explanation.
Bert
Although I suddenly found the notion that in Jesus' time people were stoned in a different light. And Jesus said that it wasn't good if people were stoned. So, the Christians are right. LOL
There is no hell, silly.
Bert
Dear Supreme Court,
I'd like to offer Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion" as evidence that religions do not deserve a special treatment when it comes to free speech. Even if you only read up to (and including) Chapter 1, that should be enough to quickly get mr Star back to more deserving causes, such as the trial against monopoly abuse.
Bert
What does his statement mean?
Bert
"If someone found the cure to cancer, that knowledge and application is NOT their own property. Such property belongs to Man,"
Yes, and the good thing about the patent system is that it gives an incentive to make sure it belongs to Man. There is an incentive to share the info (monopoly) and after 20 years (max), that . Even before that, any one is free to build upon the knowledge. As a side note, compare that to the copyright law where the artist 75 years after his death still has an incentive to create new works.
"As for the individual who finds the cure to cancer, he doesn't need to pull a patent on it. He would be very well taken care of,"
Sorry, it doesn't work that way in real life. Want to know how many shareware authors earn? Most people settle for "free", and "nothing in return". Not to mention the people that dare to harass the developer about new features and bugs.
Bert
So at some point it ends up in the hands of someone who puts it to good use. Your point is?
Bert
Of course, it is called DNA. But code sharing is another matter.
Bert
That is a 50% increase on this website.
Bert
Conversely, and more likely: Would he be held liable if he installed IE and it contained a leak?
Bert
Who loves living in a country where blaming others rarely goes with sueing them
Who also believes that it would be more appropriate if the person who breached would be sued
Despite having written/co-authored 2 booklets on programming (AppleScript for Absolute Starters and Become an X-coder), I've never mastered programming and I keep an eye out for easy to learn language, allowing me to focus on the programming instead of on keeping straining my brain with the grammar side of it. One of the earliest languages I learned was Pascal, which wasn't that bad, but doesn't appear to be as popular as it used to be (TurboPascal and all). But Scheme looks like one of the many programming languages developed for parsers and compilers, instead of for the people. Programming languages should be easy to read for humans too.
Recently I read about a programming language (Python?) where global variables and local variables had a different starting thingie ($ and, I forgot). Now things like that DO help to make sure you're not a writer of a collection of bugs.
Bert
Just the number of parentheses rules out Scheme for me
It is important, because the services and hardware that Apple introduces have quite a chance to end up in the software/hardware for your preferred system. This even happens if Apple isn't the first to come up with it (for example, USB took off only with the bondi iMac, which had no other option). This dates back a long time (even the 3.5" floppies; CD-ROM). So, while you may not be a Mac user, looking at what Apple does may give you a glimp of what you may use in the future.
Of course, practically speaking you're absolutely correct that you don't need to read about it if you don't want to add a Mac to your fleet of computers. After all, when it is available for your system, you'll read about it anyway.
Bert
But then, all the people who installed it will know better how to handle it in case of a problem and may not need to run to IT staff to solve little problems.
Bert
Vista will have this, but the commands are the other way around. (Cancel is one knock). A demo will be given shortly.
Bert
A couple of knockers on a computer. What else is new?
Bert
Who learned his slang from a James Bond movie (the one with Famke Jansen)
on being second.
Bert
That must be because they're badly trained. Somehow.
Bert
I like it too, and that includes the bright orange. It might become my first Linux computer (guaranteed without implicit MS tax). I'm willing to pay double price if that gets a kid one for free. Will probably buy one for my nieces and nephew too. They only get computer savvy if they see that more than one computer-system exists.
I favoured the orange iBook when it came out, but when the time to buy one came, they were upgraded and the upgrade wasn't available in orange. The fact that these new puppies are better can't be held against Apple. The old coloured iBooks are, well, old.
Bert
Macintosh user. The only colour I'm afraid of is beige. Boring! Why can't computers just look cool? Fortunately Macs do. For a device you spend a thousand hours looking at, do the math of cost per hour to see whether that is worth a couple of bucks more.
"Nobody would have predicted that most people would now take pictures by holding the camera out in front of them and look at the preview screen to frame a shot."
Perhaps they would be just be surprised that if all you need is frosted glass, people these days go thru all the hoopla to achieve basically the same thing.
Bert
I'm a Mac OS X user, so I can generate a PDF of everything and I do use it quite a bit. But for my business, PDF is very limiting. I would like to be able to generate PDF files from within a web-application. However, internally a PDF document is a mess. I for one would welcome an overlord who gave us a open alternative.
In regular use, I do encounter various problems when copying text from a PDF. Spaces may be missing between words (you really don't want that) and yesterday I saw two big fat dots instead of spaces. Again, if there is an alternative, I'm off.
So, now MS comes up with an XML based standard, but I will not use what they come up with until it is both good AND they behave themselves.
Bert
I hear all about outsourcing to India, but how do you find a (cocoa) programmer?
Bert
Thanks for sharing. And again, I think it is very nice.
Bert
A .doc??? That is hardly a cross-platform standard is it? And why is it a .doc? Because we're free to edit out the stuff we don't like?
Bert
The first problem with software is that it usually IS novel. In real life we have photo's, digitize it and you can process it in a digital dark room, a.k.a. Photoshop. You've brought something into a virtual world. And in virtual worlds just about anything is possible. You don't require even a glass of beer to come up with new ideas (the problem is never to come up with new ideas, the problem is to implement the ideas. It took MicroSoft until 1995 until they had a workable copy of Mac OS of 1984; Linux hasn't reached that point yet; OpenOffice hasn't reached the ease of use of MS Office (fortunately they haven't reached the level of bugs either). Ordinary inventions do have to be described in a way that an ordinary person skilled in the art can work the invention without undue effort. For software inventions he has to do just about the same amount of effort.
Because there is no prior art, you would satisfy the criterion of novelty. No prior art? Well, you know how software is documented, don't you. And
Usefulness is not a criterion of any patent law, as far as I know (PCT, EPO and Dutch patent law don't require this).
The only software-related inventions I can think of are those that have to do with compression. I can tell a program to write any program I want, but I can't ask him to write a program that compresses x times while maintaing a certain amount of quality. Only if he has the algorithm can he do it. But algorithms are excluded from patentability too.
There is no such thing as fair licensing. We used to have that in the Netherlands, it could rarely be used. These days the criteria to get such a license are even harder.
As you say, the whole point of patents is that inventions go into the public domain. Well, for software there is no indication that people would sit on it if they couldn't get a patent on it. So, the patent law doesn't need to be there, and certainly not for 20 years, because there will be very very few software-related "inventions" that are still important after 20 years. So, society would never benefit from the invention going into the public domain.
I'm a patent agent, and I don't see any reason why software should be patented, and I'm quite upset that they EPO interprets this article in such a way that software patents are possible.
Bert
Photoshop takes veeerrrrrryyyyy long to start up, but that is just because of all the patent numbers Adobe wants to show you.