And his rhetoric since the election has me unsure if we'd really have been better off with him instead of Bush.
We wouldn't have been! How many fucking times do you have to hear "the parties are on the same side"? How many times do you have to watch the parties vote the same way before you believe it???
Get the whole series. I've read How to Own a Box, Continent, and Identity and will hopefully get Shadow soon. Only Identity and Shadow are still up there, though, you'll have to go to Amazon for How to Own the Box and How to Own a Continent, both of which I highly recommend. You can read a chapter from each of How to Own a Continent and How to Own an Identity on insecure.org.
The difference is that the Russian dude didn't contribute anything to society, while the people who were granted patents did. If a big company employs someone who invents something wonderful that helps society (or an open-source author invents something wonderful that helps society), there's no reason you should be able to take away his glory just because you made the same thing without realizing it. His invention had already (presumably) bettered the world, and your "me too!" would add nothing.
Why exactly single out commercial development as valuable to society and discount the value of releasing work to public domain?
I don't. Any action that makes it available to the world furthers technological growth. Unless, of course, the patent lasts too long, which is a legitimate problem. I think the problem with your attitude is in "I have an option of doing the work myself." The work of inventing is far greater than the work needed to manufacture, and reproducing it would generally lead to a different invention, assuming the work was indeed novel and nonobvious.
It's not just the incompetent that think that way, I'd go so far as to say a vast majority of computer-interested people do. Which is more entertaining to read, and think about: Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent, with its stories of master programmers writing the best rootkits ever made over the course of two weeks to install on the systems they're about to root with their 0days for the purpose of bouncing their traffic around the internet while they use IPv6 to get around firewalls on Japanese military computers as a test to find out if they're worthy to hack the computers of several African banks for a mysterious man named Knuth in conjunction with a phreak gaining access to an African telephone switch by use of a stolen cell phone so that Knuth can intercept the phone calls of an enemy while a third hacker, who happens to be a very attractive female drunk and recently returned from shagging a random good-looking but smart computer nerd she met at the club while on Ecstasy, uses steganography software to send a message across the globe to a chick she met a while back (who is also a good-looking female computer nerd), all this happening at the same time a 16-year-old college sophomore (with a hot, nerdy asian girlfriend) is pulling a sweet hack involving duct-taping a laptop to the back of a computer cabimet and using it to intercept all traffic to a lab computer for the purpose of concealing his SSN-stealing activities on the school's network so that Knuth can sufficiently conceal his identity for his trip to South America where he'll live comfortably off the interest for the rest of his life, free from any government oppression................ or a study showing that almost all botnets are built using one of two common worms?
People want something to aspire to, and the idea of the existence of a superhacker controlling every aspect of the internet at a moment's notice is pretty good at taking up brain space.
There's no reason an inventor has to make his inventions available to the "open source community". That's the sort of thing a patent allows you to restrict if you wish. And if your algorithm is really different and better than MP3, you're perfectly correct about your contribution and are indeed deserving of a patent, with which you can release your work to the open source community. But if you just independently reinvent MP3, you've made no contribution to the knowledge and/or technological progress of the world, and deserve no patent. The system WORKS (when it's not being raped by the USPTO).
MP3 is actually a pretty bad example for this discussion. As we are both, I'm sure, aware, audio compression is widely known to be essentially stripping off bits of the waveform, and probably isn't that deserving of patent protection. However, let's pretend it's a true innovation.
If the inventor of MP3 had worked away from the audio encoding community and had not been published nor contributed to audio encoding technologies in any way, and you had reproduced the essentials of the work independently, you would and should have been granted a patent, yes. You'd have made a very important contribution to the world through your own work, a contribution which did not and would not have happened from the work of the earlier inventor, and your invention would have been protecte for a time. That's the way it's supposed to work.
Don't link Wikipedia pages without reading them first, dumbass. And, given the comment you've just posted, I'd advise you to be veeeeeeery careful whenever assuming you know something.
Do you know there was a time when people would see a hack like this and say "coooooool" instead of spending 10 minutes rattling off the various illegalities?
Most of the energy humans use is returned right back into the atmosphere either as heat or simple particle motion. Cars heat the air and fight against nonmoving air, computers produce heat and light, and feeding people allows them to create heat, for examples.
I should point out that heroin doesn't merely cause chemicals in your brain to change. Heroin replaces certain chemicals in your brain, stimulating mu-opioid receptors. That causes the number of mu-opioid receptors in the brain to increase, and I believe it also decreases production of natural opioids. Hallucinogenic/psychadelic drugs aren't generally addictive, so that likely wouldn't be a problem with stored trips either.
You compare trusting a method discovered, fully described in terms of known nuclear structure, and used by countless thousands of scientists for half a century to believing the words a pissed-off Jew wrote a couple thousand years ago, because you "experienced God's grace"? You are what is wrong with the world.
Nobody cares what you believe. We're trying to keep coastal areas habitable. You need to shut the fuck up; you don't know what you're talking about, and you're fueling men who will cause major problems in the future. I'm aware that the evidence for global warming isn't as conclusive as some rabid environmentalists would have you believe, but to assume that means everything is peachy and you should keep as many lights as you can on at night is flat-out retarded. Also, the predictions of global cooling was based on a flawed model, one whose errors have been found, explained, and fixed. If you can find the same sort of errors in the current models, great, otherwise learn to judge the maturity of a science before commenting on it.
Wow, rtfa, a watch battery can power the thing for thousands of transitions, and each transition can last for up to 30 days. Also, think of the other uses the technology could have. It sure is a good thing there isn't people like you running important research facilities.
Right, so if 10,000 people buy them and get bored, with, say, a few hundred of those having legitimate need, that's another almost 10,000 watch batteries made, charged, and thrown away. Probably the sunglasses too; who wants a useless knob on their sunglasses? Much better to throw them away and buy normal sunglasses than look slightly different than other people. So there's also energy wasted on manufacturing the sunglasses, and some crap dumped into the atmosphere in the process. Yay modern technology.
You have a point about there being possible other uses for the technology. The article mentioned energy-efficient smart windows. Maybe that'll offset the waste of energy and resources the sunglasses create. I'd probably still find a reason to bitch about it, though.
Electric sunglasses?
on
Smart Sunglasses
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
With inventions like this, does anyone wonder why the world is dying of pollution? Do we really need electricity running our sunglasses, simply for the dubious pleasure of changing the color a few times before getting bored with it?
If you have ever believed that voting Republican was really a vote for smaller government, I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you.
I don't want your bridge, but I'm sure some of the Republican voters, the people I was actually talking about, would be interested.
4 months and we aren't out of Iraq yet, how shameful. Considering that congress only controls spending, and that the Constitution doesn't explicitly give them the right to end a war, the only effective way to get our troops out is to either attach timetables to a spending bill (done), and/or Impeach the President (they are working on it, but it needs more public support, and we need to get rid of Cheney first
And the paranoia and moralism? Nothing done. You can't tell me Congress can't pass a bill requiring the TSA to allow liquids and gels on planes, for example.
However never say that a vote doesn't matter at all, but one should keep in mind that an ordinary individual vote only matters a little. A strong, focused, well heard voice can make a real difference, if it can be heard above the pseudo-intellectual crap, which only seems to drag real change to a crawl.
No matter how strong and focused a voice may be, it can rarely be heard above the gossip and prattle that always have and always will make up the majority of people's lives. That's not even the point anyway, your original post said going to the ballot box would make a difference. Going to the ballot box != a strong, focused, well heard voice making a real difference.
Oh, it's a change, is it? When American voters fed up with big government and voted in a Republican in 2000, they didn't get the change they wanted. And since the 2006 midterms, when American voters fed up with war, paranoia, and moralism in government voted in Democrats, they haven't gotten that changed. And when American voters in 1892 realized the Republicrats weren't helping them and voted for the Populists, they didn't change anything. Et cetera, et cetera, and others. Voting doesn't do shit except allow you to complain without people saying "you didn't vote, don't complain."
As a metric for the security of the OS, it is wrong. Most bots are infected by publicly known vulnerabilities with missing patches. The size of a botnet speaks for the insecurity of humans, not computers.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.syngress.com/books/
Get the whole series. I've read How to Own a Box, Continent, and Identity and will hopefully get Shadow soon. Only Identity and Shadow are still up there, though, you'll have to go to Amazon for How to Own the Box and How to Own a Continent, both of which I highly recommend. You can read a chapter from each of How to Own a Continent and How to Own an Identity on insecure.org.
The difference is that the Russian dude didn't contribute anything to society, while the people who were granted patents did. If a big company employs someone who invents something wonderful that helps society (or an open-source author invents something wonderful that helps society), there's no reason you should be able to take away his glory just because you made the same thing without realizing it. His invention had already (presumably) bettered the world, and your "me too!" would add nothing.
It's not just the incompetent that think that way, I'd go so far as to say a vast majority of computer-interested people do. Which is more entertaining to read, and think about: Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent, with its stories of master programmers writing the best rootkits ever made over the course of two weeks to install on the systems they're about to root with their 0days for the purpose of bouncing their traffic around the internet while they use IPv6 to get around firewalls on Japanese military computers as a test to find out if they're worthy to hack the computers of several African banks for a mysterious man named Knuth in conjunction with a phreak gaining access to an African telephone switch by use of a stolen cell phone so that Knuth can intercept the phone calls of an enemy while a third hacker, who happens to be a very attractive female drunk and recently returned from shagging a random good-looking but smart computer nerd she met at the club while on Ecstasy, uses steganography software to send a message across the globe to a chick she met a while back (who is also a good-looking female computer nerd), all this happening at the same time a 16-year-old college sophomore (with a hot, nerdy asian girlfriend) is pulling a sweet hack involving duct-taping a laptop to the back of a computer cabimet and using it to intercept all traffic to a lab computer for the purpose of concealing his SSN-stealing activities on the school's network so that Knuth can sufficiently conceal his identity for his trip to South America where he'll live comfortably off the interest for the rest of his life, free from any government oppression................ or a study showing that almost all botnets are built using one of two common worms?
People want something to aspire to, and the idea of the existence of a superhacker controlling every aspect of the internet at a moment's notice is pretty good at taking up brain space.
There's no reason an inventor has to make his inventions available to the "open source community". That's the sort of thing a patent allows you to restrict if you wish. And if your algorithm is really different and better than MP3, you're perfectly correct about your contribution and are indeed deserving of a patent, with which you can release your work to the open source community. But if you just independently reinvent MP3, you've made no contribution to the knowledge and/or technological progress of the world, and deserve no patent. The system WORKS (when it's not being raped by the USPTO).
MP3 is actually a pretty bad example for this discussion. As we are both, I'm sure, aware, audio compression is widely known to be essentially stripping off bits of the waveform, and probably isn't that deserving of patent protection. However, let's pretend it's a true innovation.
If the inventor of MP3 had worked away from the audio encoding community and had not been published nor contributed to audio encoding technologies in any way, and you had reproduced the essentials of the work independently, you would and should have been granted a patent, yes. You'd have made a very important contribution to the world through your own work, a contribution which did not and would not have happened from the work of the earlier inventor, and your invention would have been protecte for a time. That's the way it's supposed to work.
From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Invent:
invent
1.to originate or create as a product of one's own ingenuity, experimentation, or contrivance: to invent the telegraph.
The groups that invented them in '62 definitely created LEDs as a product of their own ingenuity, experimentation, and contrivance.
And loving children is a sin punishable by the Inquisition!
I think the word you're looking for is "child rapist", if you were trying to put an emotional spin on children learning about NASA.
Or "Knows Music Jupiter".
Don't link Wikipedia pages without reading them first, dumbass. And, given the comment you've just posted, I'd advise you to be veeeeeeery careful whenever assuming you know something.
Do you know there was a time when people would see a hack like this and say "coooooool" instead of spending 10 minutes rattling off the various illegalities?
Go over your logic again. I'll help.
"We can't let people who want to restrict speech into the government! That's why the government has to restrict speech!"
Dumbass.
Most of the energy humans use is returned right back into the atmosphere either as heat or simple particle motion. Cars heat the air and fight against nonmoving air, computers produce heat and light, and feeding people allows them to create heat, for examples.
I should point out that heroin doesn't merely cause chemicals in your brain to change. Heroin replaces certain chemicals in your brain, stimulating mu-opioid receptors. That causes the number of mu-opioid receptors in the brain to increase, and I believe it also decreases production of natural opioids. Hallucinogenic/psychadelic drugs aren't generally addictive, so that likely wouldn't be a problem with stored trips either.
I agree. Remember when Gentoo announced they were switching portage to RPM in 2003?
You compare trusting a method discovered, fully described in terms of known nuclear structure, and used by countless thousands of scientists for half a century to believing the words a pissed-off Jew wrote a couple thousand years ago, because you "experienced God's grace"? You are what is wrong with the world.
Nobody cares what you believe. We're trying to keep coastal areas habitable. You need to shut the fuck up; you don't know what you're talking about, and you're fueling men who will cause major problems in the future. I'm aware that the evidence for global warming isn't as conclusive as some rabid environmentalists would have you believe, but to assume that means everything is peachy and you should keep as many lights as you can on at night is flat-out retarded. Also, the predictions of global cooling was based on a flawed model, one whose errors have been found, explained, and fixed. If you can find the same sort of errors in the current models, great, otherwise learn to judge the maturity of a science before commenting on it.
You have a point about there being possible other uses for the technology. The article mentioned energy-efficient smart windows. Maybe that'll offset the waste of energy and resources the sunglasses create. I'd probably still find a reason to bitch about it, though.
With inventions like this, does anyone wonder why the world is dying of pollution? Do we really need electricity running our sunglasses, simply for the dubious pleasure of changing the color a few times before getting bored with it?
The point was, Vista is making all files hard to copy.... including copyrighted ones. Perhaps they've found a way around Schneier's statements, eh?
Oh, it's a change, is it? When American voters fed up with big government and voted in a Republican in 2000, they didn't get the change they wanted. And since the 2006 midterms, when American voters fed up with war, paranoia, and moralism in government voted in Democrats, they haven't gotten that changed. And when American voters in 1892 realized the Republicrats weren't helping them and voted for the Populists, they didn't change anything. Et cetera, et cetera, and others. Voting doesn't do shit except allow you to complain without people saying "you didn't vote, don't complain."
Why not go after the least necessary ones first?
As a metric for the security of the OS, it is wrong. Most bots are infected by publicly known vulnerabilities with missing patches. The size of a botnet speaks for the insecurity of humans, not computers.