With all the zombies out there and the ease of altering digital documents, it's near impossible to really verify the source of most things floating around nowadays.
When you download via a torrent, you are distributing the file. The penalties for illegally and possibly widely distributing copyrighted material are rightfully more harsh than just stealing a $20 item.
The jist of this article has been argued to death.
The BSD Daemon is cute and instantly recognizable (to anyone who's dealt with BSD), not to mention it's a creature from the underworld to appease the Netcraft folks. Why change?
If, on the other hand, you have to have your graphic designers use several graphics applications, you've got a problem.
You have to make the decision of whether to give them 2-4 disparate applications, each with its own learning curve and quite distinct UIs, or to just give them a handful of Adobe products they already know and use, which are all fairly similar UI-wise.
At some point $1000 worth of software really is cheaper.
I can see situations where this would be useful, but realistically this seems like just another feature that 90% of users wouldn't know about and the other 10% would almost never use. It hardly seems like something that's going to tip the scales towards Yahoo!
Patents are a reward for invention, plain and simple. They prevent someone from stealing your product idea, coming in and building said factories, and undercutting you because they didn't actually have to put forth the R&D to figure out how to design whatever widget, putting you out of business for innovating.
This ought to apply to software with significant R&D costs also. It may take an afternoon to implement RSA once you know the algorithm, but it took years to come up with the algorithm.
I fail to understand that logic. If you fry the mini while breaking the warranty, you have a paperweight you paid $500 for, not one you paid $50.
Also, you can bet that the reason this voids the warranty is that your system now has a higher than 1 in 10 chance of melting, and it's not worth the money to them.
I think the problem isn't with software patents, it's more with the quite obvious things that we allow to be patented.
Free software is an awesome cause, but for those brilliant minds out there who put in months of work to come up with some new idea, there should be other options than to have to let someone else steal the idea or to keep it completely secret.
I think ideally we'd have a patent system that protected such inventions as RSA and MPEG compression, but recognized that one click billing is not patentable.
What makes spending years coming up with an algorithm that solves the problem of key distribution in encryption unpatentable, but somehow makes it okay to patent the plastic packaging for a razor blade?
int main ()
{
printf("There are no viruses on your system\n");
return 0;
}
Now I'll happily sit and wait for 3 slashdotters to show me the multiple buffer overflow errors in the above code.
Enigma was smaller than a suitcase, was in common use 50 years before this manual was written, and it couldn't be broken using the methods in the manual.
You can bet key military communications were well encrypted at this point, including those coming from the front lines.
Slashdot Mirror
Because 'holographic television' sounds way cooler than 'beamer'
I don't know about you, but I design on a computer.
Making a big deal of it would have been a good thing!
With all the zombies out there and the ease of altering digital documents, it's near impossible to really verify the source of most things floating around nowadays.
If they didn't have the model train, they wouldn't have gotten the idea for the big trains
The worst one for me is this little app called "Firefox"
When you download via a torrent, you are distributing the file. The penalties for illegally and possibly widely distributing copyrighted material are rightfully more harsh than just stealing a $20 item.
The jist of this article has been argued to death.
Is a penguin any better? Is it a religious thing?
The BSD Daemon is cute and instantly recognizable (to anyone who's dealt with BSD), not to mention it's a creature from the underworld to appease the Netcraft folks. Why change?
If, on the other hand, you have to have your graphic designers use several graphics applications, you've got a problem.
You have to make the decision of whether to give them 2-4 disparate applications, each with its own learning curve and quite distinct UIs, or to just give them a handful of Adobe products they already know and use, which are all fairly similar UI-wise.
At some point $1000 worth of software really is cheaper.
My Prescott can barely heat my apartment. When I move into our new house, I'd like to have a more powerful heating solution. Will this do?
He should just run a power cable between the two points he wants to network, and every so often connect a wireless bridge to it.
I thought it was about the use of proprietary html to jazz things up when animated gifs just aren't working out.
I can see situations where this would be useful, but realistically this seems like just another feature that 90% of users wouldn't know about and the other 10% would almost never use. It hardly seems like something that's going to tip the scales towards Yahoo!
Patents are a reward for invention, plain and simple. They prevent someone from stealing your product idea, coming in and building said factories, and undercutting you because they didn't actually have to put forth the R&D to figure out how to design whatever widget, putting you out of business for innovating.
This ought to apply to software with significant R&D costs also. It may take an afternoon to implement RSA once you know the algorithm, but it took years to come up with the algorithm.
I fail to understand that logic. If you fry the mini while breaking the warranty, you have a paperweight you paid $500 for, not one you paid $50.
Also, you can bet that the reason this voids the warranty is that your system now has a higher than 1 in 10 chance of melting, and it's not worth the money to them.
To the contrary, if everyone did what you're doing we'd all be speaking "Latin" =P
I think the problem isn't with software patents, it's more with the quite obvious things that we allow to be patented.
Free software is an awesome cause, but for those brilliant minds out there who put in months of work to come up with some new idea, there should be other options than to have to let someone else steal the idea or to keep it completely secret.
I think ideally we'd have a patent system that protected such inventions as RSA and MPEG compression, but recognized that one click billing is not patentable.
What makes spending years coming up with an algorithm that solves the problem of key distribution in encryption unpatentable, but somehow makes it okay to patent the plastic packaging for a razor blade?
int main () { printf("There are no viruses on your system\n"); return 0; } Now I'll happily sit and wait for 3 slashdotters to show me the multiple buffer overflow errors in the above code.
It's already been patented and considering the possible implications, you can be sure they'll enforce it.
Why wouldn't a reflector work?
Enigma was smaller than a suitcase, was in common use 50 years before this manual was written, and it couldn't be broken using the methods in the manual.
You can bet key military communications were well encrypted at this point, including those coming from the front lines.
You guys are always so negative. With a global temperature rise of 10 degrees, think of all the places that would become inhabitable... like Canada.