I have several devices running Qt/Embedded and it's nothing short of evil. A device running Qt/Embedded cannot be used with other standard Linux GUI toolkit: Qt/Embedded takes over the entire window system. The justification for this is that Qt/Embedded is supposedly an efficient system for embedded devices, but nothing could be further from the truth: compared to X11 with an embedded X11 toolkit, Qt/Embedded is a resource hog, slow, and has a UI that is poorly adapted to small screen devices. The Qtopia applications built on top of if suck compared to Palm and even PocketPC. I won't even go into the licensing issues with Qt/Embedded, which is a whole separate discussion.
I think Troll Tech should be kept as far away from embedded and handheld Linux as possible. I would argue that Troll Tech is largely responsible for the fact that Linux handhelds have not taken off more. Fortunately, on the desktop, their ambitions are kept in check by the fact that they are forced to build on top of X11 so that they can't monopolize the drivers and screen, but on handhelds, they are out to take over, and that's bad.
Since Qt is licensed under the GPL, I would REALLY like to know what makes you think that it's a "proprietary solution"? Or is free software, licenced under the GPL as written by the Free Software Foundation really "proprietary software"? if GPL'ed software is in reality "proprietary", what, pray tell, is free software?
Qt is "free software" in the narrow sense of conforming to the free software license. It is also "proprietary software" in the sense that it is wholly owned and controlled by a single entity. The two terms are not always mutually exclusive.
But I'd suggest we don't get hung up on terminology. What matters is that Qt development is essentially different from that of most other open source projects because a commercial entity both owns the entire codebase and drives the development. That does have consequences for the direction the project is taking. To maintain ownership and dual-license status, for example, Troll Tech cannot simply accept code contributions under the GPL, like a normal GPL'ed software project can; for a long time, the Windows and Macintosh versions were only available commercially; and, Qt/Embedded and Qtopia exclude other toolkits from the devices it runs and Troll Tech makes no efforts to fix that.
Finally, just because something is under a free software license doesn't mean it's under the correct free software license. The GNU project, for example, deliberately does not use the pure GPL for things like the standard C library because it would limit commercial adoption of GNU, while Troll Tech deliberately chose the GPL for their no-pay version for just that reason.
Its odd that we had a significant free project (XFree86) change the license on its product, and the whole community easily forked to X.org in response...... yet supposedly if Trolltech did the same with their licensing it would be a disaster and mass slavery would ensue.
That analogy doesn't work. Forks and license changes aren't inherently bad. The X.org fork resulted in a better license. The adoption by Troll Tech of the GPL as part of their dual licensing scheme was an improvement on what they had before.
That Ximian or similar companies could try the same thing seems to be of no concern to the Gnome flamebaiters.
It is impossible for Ximian to adopt the kind of dual-licensing scheme that Troll Tech has because Ximian doesn't own all the copyrights on the code. For Gtk+, all users, commercial and otherwise, have the same rights and obligations. For Qt, however, Troll Tech has retained full commercial rights to the Qt codebase, and that's a problem, because it means that Troll Tech's commercial interests enter in the direction of Qt's development; one consequence of this is, for example, that embedded Linux devices based on Qt/Embedded do not permit you to use any other toolkit.
KDE already screwed up big time when they picked Qt under the original license and was bailed out only because Troll Tech changed its license. That alone is evidence that the KDE developers simply aren't particularly smart when it comes to licenses. That's a shame, because technically, they are doing good work and technically, KDE is better at this point than Gnome.
If you want to restore credibility, follow through on the commitment you made 10 years ago and make Java into an ISO/ANSI standard, with no strings attached.
Stop worrying about Microsoft trying to take away Java from you--that has already happened, and you only have yourself to blame for it.
Stop interfering with open source projects and drop your compatibility requirements--they are unenforceable, nobody gives a damn, and you only hurt yourself by antagonizing people with them.
When it comes to Java toolkits, either put up or shut up--either open source Swing or stop whining when people roll their own (SWT).
Let the market decide on APIs, not some bloated self-appointed "standards" body (the JCP).
Fix Java's numerical problems.
Face the facts: C# and the CLR are here and there are here to stay; if you want to have any relevance again, figure out how to integrate C#, Java, CLR, and JVM. You might start with a port of Java's APIs and a Java compiler to the CLR, and, conversely, support C# on the JVM. Eventually, you might create a dual JVM/CLR implementation (it's not that hard).
Stop bad-mouthing open source--it only pisses of the few potential supporters you still have. You could start gaining some credibility by firing Schwartz.
Stop trying to do user interface work--every single Sun UI project has been a dismal failure; leave window systems, toolkits, and programming environments to other people.
Stop being such gearheads; nobody really cares anymore whether your kernel is any better--you aren't going to rise back to glory with a better kernel.
Oh, McNealy, by the way, you aren't Bill Gates and you never will be.
Frankly, while those recommendations may improve your chances, I still think Sun's future is bleak. Sun got big early on because they sold cheap machines with software that did stuff nobody else did, and they sold it to people like me who then, for about a decade, were loyal customers. But all of that is history. If Sun doesn't want to disappear completely, they still need a better strategy than selling Opterons.
Firefox on Windows is good because it weans people off a proprietary solution (IE); that benefit outweighs the concern that the presence of Firefox contributes to the value of a proprietary solution (Windows).
However, KDE additions to Troll Tech's platform don't wean people off any proprietary solution, they only strengthen it.
Yes, just not under the same conditions as Troll Tech. So, if I try to build an (open source) business around my forked version of Qt and try to compete with Troll Tech, I'll be at a grave disadvantage compared to Troll Tech.
All contributors to Qt have all the freedoms granted by the GPL.
True. But Troll Tech has additional freedoms and additional rights, and that's a problem.
One of the consequences of this is that Troll Tech has managed to take over the user interface of several Linux-based PDAs, excluding other toolkits from those devices. You cannot realistically run a Gtk+ or FLTK-based application on a Qtopia-based handheld. And because Troll Tech makes money with that kind of software, they have a strong incentive not to make their systems interoperable and open to other toolkits. That sort of thing hurts open source, and it also hurts Linux, because Qtopia just isn't very good (it suffers from many of the same problems as Pocket PC, and it is also dreadfully inefficient).
The way the Qt/KDE relationship is structured, all this work porting KDE components to Troll Tech's platforms adds value primarily to the product from one company: Troll Tech.
Assume Troll Tech's products are as good as people working with them say they are and that they should take over the world. What would we end up with? A single company monopolizing the commercial GUI development space, plus lots of people contributing free labor. How is that different from what we get with Microsoft? As far as I'm concerned, dual licenses are bad because they inhibit competition. All contributors to an open source project should work on equal footing.
Fortunately, enough people seem to have figured this out so that there are plenty of alternatives and that Troll Tech isn't taking over the world. But people who do contribute free labor to Troll Tech should reflect on what they are doing and why they are doing it.
each side has to present an argument (with supporting facts) and ideally, they should also be able to rebut criticisms of thier viewpoint before their opponent has a chance to make them.
Of course, opponents of patents have to argue and present evidence. But there are many kinds of arguments they can present. And the argument is simple: we should only have a patent system if it demonstrably benefits us; since there is no evidence that the patent system benefits us, it should be abolished.
I'm just going to refer you to this post because your statement reflects a basic misunderstanding of how a debate is held.
The misunderstanding is yours. You assume that one side gets to frame the debate and then the other has to fall within that frame. Debates and arguments don't work that way. Just because the prosecutor may try to argue that I'm guilty doesn't mean that I have to argue that I'm innocent; I just have to argue that he hasn't supported his case. Just because Apple wants to argue that I must buy an iPod to achieve happiness doesn't mean that I need to make a counterargument that I don't need an iPod, I can just tell them that they haven't convinced me.
Lemme flip your statement around: if opponents can't provide a clear justification, patents should exist.
They have provided a clear justification that patents should not exist. It just turns out that that argument doesn't even require proving that patents do harm, it's sufficient to show that nobody has proven that patents do any good.
Yes, I know, this is/. & we have a million examples of patents stifling innovation... but no legitimate analysis.
No such analysis is needed--that's the whole point of the Adelphi principles--the burden of proof isn't symmetric.
Patent proponents want society to give them something truly extraordinary: a 20 year monopoly on the exploitation of an idea. That demand requires justification by people who want that kind of monopoly. No counterargument is needed--if proponents can't provide a clear justification, patents should not exist.
The new iPod is indeed not very good for video, but that doesn't matter: none of the other video devices are very good either. By adding video to their MP3 player now, in a simple way, Apple will get exposure and feedback that they will use to improve the device. Give them a couple of iterations to get it right.
Yes, I admit it was the wrong thing to do to post it as a reply to ur post, but the least u should before you start insulting somebody is to read carefully what he wrote.
That's something you should take to heart.
Research in HCI and Security has been interesting and well respected by the security research community simply because it takes a careful look at what the end-user of the security protocol can and cannot do.
You can't seriously be citing the Tygar and SRP paper as an example of applying HCI to security problems.
Designing protocols to correctly place humans in the authentication loop is not as easy as u may thing.
Well, it sure isn't as easy as Tygar and the SRP designers seem to think.
Look, next time pay attention to what you respond to; you may have wanted to sell SRP and visual hashes, but your posting had nothing to do with what I was saying.
But since you are so eager to push Tygar's paper and SRP, let me say this much: as long as researchers waste their time on such trivial and useless stuff, it's not surprising that computer security remains so poor.
The solution is for the government to quit using our money to subsidise something that we'll be charged huge prices for eventually anyway. The solution is for the pharma corporations and other medical reasearch companies to pay their own way,
That's a stupid solution because the free market does not work for health-related R&D or services. Health is properly a government function, not a free market function, because market mechanisms provably produce the wrong (suboptimal) outcomes. No amount of wishful thinking by ideologues changes that fact.
Furthermore, we have decades of practical experience with government sponsored research: it works well--a lot better than anything private companies have been doing.
The assumption being that since government monopolies have failed to produce cost-effective innovation so many times before, the model is due for a success?
Your premise is wrong; in fact, governments are responsible for almost all medical and biotech innovation.
Furthermore, nobody is talking about a government monopoly, we are talking about the removal of corporate monopolies. Any private company is still free to do whatever research they want, they should just not be able to get patents on the resulting medical treatments.
While the thought may be uncomfortable to many techies, people aren't sterile machines, and we don't live in sterile environments. You have more bacteria in your gut than you have cells in your body. Your body is full of persistent viral infection. There are fungi and parasites growing on your skin and in your hair. If you are a normal adult, your body has no trouble coping with it, and many of those microorganisms actually also have beneficial functions, not the least of which is to keep more harmful organisms from colonizing the same niches.
As for pillows, you clean them and air them regularly, and replace them every few years. And if you don't know how do deal with your household, you should marry someone who does.
Until governments foot the bill for all medical R&D and clinical testing, patents are a crucial part of the medical device & pharma industry.
Governments (i.e., tax payers) effectively already foot the bill for a lot of drug and medical device development, even development that leads to proprietary, patented, commercial products. Furthermore, since the monopoly prices that result from patents end up being paid by government-supported health-care plans, they end up paying the rest of it, too, many times over.
In addition, the market is doing a piss poor job in creating incentives for companies to create the drugs that people actually need; companies have an incentive to create useless variations on medicines that treat symptoms of common diseases but don't cure them. What we actually need are medicines for currently untreatable diseases and medicines that cure.
Finally, a lot of the costly approval process is only in place because of the commercial development model; for many reasons, private companies are prone to bringing dangerous drugs to market without close government supervision. For drugs and devices developed with public funds, the approval process can be greatly simplified.
Overall, it would almost certainly be more cost effective for everybody to abolish drug and medical device patents altogether, have government and scientists set the goals for what to develop, and have all research, development, and testing of such devices paid for by the tax payer. Private companies can still get involved through contract work and work-for-hire.
Obviously this solution is expensive and inconvenient because users have to get their hands on specialized hardware and carry it.
All they need to carry is a SHEET OF PAPER; it can be mailed with the montly statement. (Can't you be bothered to read THREE sentences before you reply?)
All the user has to do to verify a site is to compare images that are derived as visual hashes of a common secret session key (used for encryption) and exchanged random data.
Using a visual hash to protect against keylogging is about as effective as putting a condom on your nose is against pregnancy. Visual hashes protect against impersonation/phishing, one-time passwords protect against eavesdropping/keylogging.
One time passwords (printed or electronic) aren't intended to protect against phishers, they are intended to protect against keyloggers and eavesdropping.
The patents basically mean that for the next 20 years, nobody else can even do research on the patent without the permission of the patent holder.
The patent holder will only give that permission if the people doing the research sign over patent rights to the company owning the original patent.
Effectively, a lot of research is going to take at least 40 years to happen, with the results being patented out to 60 years. That's when you may start seeing useful stuff finally making it into the public domain.
That is, of course, provided that other nations give a damn; US patents are valid only in the US, and there are about 150 other nations to choose from where you can do research and treat patients. In many of those, patenting genes is either impossible, or they are considered too small right now to bother patenting in.
Python, C#, and OCaml were also designed by [huge committees of self-appointed experts.]
The "also" is false. The Python, Mono, and OCaml platforms are driven by market choice: some people develop libraries, others choose. That's why there are half a dozen XML libraries for Python, for example, with end users making the choice. For Java, the JCP decides, and when they make a bad choice (as they do more often than not), the Java world is effectively stuck with it; any non-JCP alternative is going to be a second class citizen.
I want out of the entire structured lexical programming paradigm.
Have a look at Smalltalk. Even the 1980 version of Smalltalk is still far ahead of Java and Java IDEs. If the industry had unified behind Smalltalk 25 years ago, we'd be much futher along than we are now. Among other things, in Smalltalk, all implementations, all code, and all documentation is always available, there is no separate compilation step, and you can inspect and modify running applications. Also, its syntax encourages highly readable code; even people with no programming experience can generally at least get the gist of what Smalltalk code is doing by reading it.
I don't understand why US and UK banks make two factor authentication so complicated. A printed list of one-time passwords is excellent protection against keyloggers and requires no extra hardware. Banks in continental Europe have been using them for years, and users seem to be able to get along with them just fine.
There are almost no A-frame roof trusses in my neighborhood here in California either; apparently, in many climates, you just don't need them.
As for durability, the goal of the Greeks wasn't to create buildings that would survive without maintenance for thousands of years; if a building lasts 30-50 years with regular maintenance, it's good enough for most uses.
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I have several devices running Qt/Embedded and it's nothing short of evil. A device running Qt/Embedded cannot be used with other standard Linux GUI toolkit: Qt/Embedded takes over the entire window system. The justification for this is that Qt/Embedded is supposedly an efficient system for embedded devices, but nothing could be further from the truth: compared to X11 with an embedded X11 toolkit, Qt/Embedded is a resource hog, slow, and has a UI that is poorly adapted to small screen devices. The Qtopia applications built on top of if suck compared to Palm and even PocketPC. I won't even go into the licensing issues with Qt/Embedded, which is a whole separate discussion.
I think Troll Tech should be kept as far away from embedded and handheld Linux as possible. I would argue that Troll Tech is largely responsible for the fact that Linux handhelds have not taken off more. Fortunately, on the desktop, their ambitions are kept in check by the fact that they are forced to build on top of X11 so that they can't monopolize the drivers and screen, but on handhelds, they are out to take over, and that's bad.
Since Qt is licensed under the GPL, I would REALLY like to know what makes you think that it's a "proprietary solution"? Or is free software, licenced under the GPL as written by the Free Software Foundation really "proprietary software"? if GPL'ed software is in reality "proprietary", what, pray tell, is free software?
Qt is "free software" in the narrow sense of conforming to the free software license. It is also "proprietary software" in the sense that it is wholly owned and controlled by a single entity. The two terms are not always mutually exclusive.
But I'd suggest we don't get hung up on terminology. What matters is that Qt development is essentially different from that of most other open source projects because a commercial entity both owns the entire codebase and drives the development. That does have consequences for the direction the project is taking. To maintain ownership and dual-license status, for example, Troll Tech cannot simply accept code contributions under the GPL, like a normal GPL'ed software project can; for a long time, the Windows and Macintosh versions were only available commercially; and, Qt/Embedded and Qtopia exclude other toolkits from the devices it runs and Troll Tech makes no efforts to fix that.
Finally, just because something is under a free software license doesn't mean it's under the correct free software license. The GNU project, for example, deliberately does not use the pure GPL for things like the standard C library because it would limit commercial adoption of GNU, while Troll Tech deliberately chose the GPL for their no-pay version for just that reason.
Its odd that we had a significant free project (XFree86) change the license on its product, and the whole community easily forked to X.org in response...... yet supposedly if Trolltech did the same with their licensing it would be a disaster and mass slavery would ensue.
That analogy doesn't work. Forks and license changes aren't inherently bad. The X.org fork resulted in a better license. The adoption by Troll Tech of the GPL as part of their dual licensing scheme was an improvement on what they had before.
That Ximian or similar companies could try the same thing seems to be of no concern to the Gnome flamebaiters.
It is impossible for Ximian to adopt the kind of dual-licensing scheme that Troll Tech has because Ximian doesn't own all the copyrights on the code. For Gtk+, all users, commercial and otherwise, have the same rights and obligations. For Qt, however, Troll Tech has retained full commercial rights to the Qt codebase, and that's a problem, because it means that Troll Tech's commercial interests enter in the direction of Qt's development; one consequence of this is, for example, that embedded Linux devices based on Qt/Embedded do not permit you to use any other toolkit.
KDE already screwed up big time when they picked Qt under the original license and was bailed out only because Troll Tech changed its license. That alone is evidence that the KDE developers simply aren't particularly smart when it comes to licenses. That's a shame, because technically, they are doing good work and technically, KDE is better at this point than Gnome.
Frankly, while those recommendations may improve your chances, I still think Sun's future is bleak. Sun got big early on because they sold cheap machines with software that did stuff nobody else did, and they sold it to people like me who then, for about a decade, were loyal customers. But all of that is history. If Sun doesn't want to disappear completely, they still need a better strategy than selling Opterons.
Firefox on Windows is good because it weans people off a proprietary solution (IE); that benefit outweighs the concern that the presence of Firefox contributes to the value of a proprietary solution (Windows).
However, KDE additions to Troll Tech's platform don't wean people off any proprietary solution, they only strengthen it.
You can fork Qt whenever you want.
Yes, just not under the same conditions as Troll Tech. So, if I try to build an (open source) business around my forked version of Qt and try to compete with Troll Tech, I'll be at a grave disadvantage compared to Troll Tech.
All contributors to Qt have all the freedoms granted by the GPL.
True. But Troll Tech has additional freedoms and additional rights, and that's a problem.
One of the consequences of this is that Troll Tech has managed to take over the user interface of several Linux-based PDAs, excluding other toolkits from those devices. You cannot realistically run a Gtk+ or FLTK-based application on a Qtopia-based handheld. And because Troll Tech makes money with that kind of software, they have a strong incentive not to make their systems interoperable and open to other toolkits. That sort of thing hurts open source, and it also hurts Linux, because Qtopia just isn't very good (it suffers from many of the same problems as Pocket PC, and it is also dreadfully inefficient).
QT is GPL'd you are free to fork at any time,
Yes, but not under the same conditions as Troll Tech; Troll Tech still retains the right to sell it under non-GPL'ed licenses.
This horse has been beaten to death several times before, either you are trolling or simply very ignorant.
All the more sad that people like you still don't get it.
The way the Qt/KDE relationship is structured, all this work porting KDE components to Troll Tech's platforms adds value primarily to the product from one company: Troll Tech.
Assume Troll Tech's products are as good as people working with them say they are and that they should take over the world. What would we end up with? A single company monopolizing the commercial GUI development space, plus lots of people contributing free labor. How is that different from what we get with Microsoft? As far as I'm concerned, dual licenses are bad because they inhibit competition. All contributors to an open source project should work on equal footing.
Fortunately, enough people seem to have figured this out so that there are plenty of alternatives and that Troll Tech isn't taking over the world. But people who do contribute free labor to Troll Tech should reflect on what they are doing and why they are doing it.
each side has to present an argument (with supporting facts) and ideally, they should also be able to rebut criticisms of thier viewpoint before their opponent has a chance to make them.
Of course, opponents of patents have to argue and present evidence. But there are many kinds of arguments they can present. And the argument is simple: we should only have a patent system if it demonstrably benefits us; since there is no evidence that the patent system benefits us, it should be abolished.
I'm just going to refer you to this post because your statement reflects a basic misunderstanding of how a debate is held.
The misunderstanding is yours. You assume that one side gets to frame the debate and then the other has to fall within that frame. Debates and arguments don't work that way. Just because the prosecutor may try to argue that I'm guilty doesn't mean that I have to argue that I'm innocent; I just have to argue that he hasn't supported his case. Just because Apple wants to argue that I must buy an iPod to achieve happiness doesn't mean that I need to make a counterargument that I don't need an iPod, I can just tell them that they haven't convinced me.
Lemme flip your statement around: if opponents can't provide a clear justification, patents should exist.
They have provided a clear justification that patents should not exist. It just turns out that that argument doesn't even require proving that patents do harm, it's sufficient to show that nobody has proven that patents do any good.
Yes, I know, this is /. & we have a million examples of patents stifling innovation... but no legitimate analysis.
No such analysis is needed--that's the whole point of the Adelphi principles--the burden of proof isn't symmetric.
Patent proponents want society to give them something truly extraordinary: a 20 year monopoly on the exploitation of an idea. That demand requires justification by people who want that kind of monopoly. No counterargument is needed--if proponents can't provide a clear justification, patents should not exist.
The new iPod is indeed not very good for video, but that doesn't matter: none of the other video devices are very good either. By adding video to their MP3 player now, in a simple way, Apple will get exposure and feedback that they will use to improve the device. Give them a couple of iterations to get it right.
He was quoted by one TV station as saying he was surprised the snake disappeared because it wasn't that kind of snake.
Guys always say that. It's a lame excuse.
Yes, I admit it was the wrong thing to do to post it as a reply to ur post, but the least u should before you start insulting somebody is to read carefully what he wrote.
That's something you should take to heart.
Research in HCI and Security has been interesting and well respected by the security research community simply because it takes a careful look at what the end-user of the security protocol can and cannot do.
You can't seriously be citing the Tygar and SRP paper as an example of applying HCI to security problems.
Designing protocols to correctly place humans in the authentication loop is not as easy as u may thing.
Well, it sure isn't as easy as Tygar and the SRP designers seem to think.
Look, next time pay attention to what you respond to; you may have wanted to sell SRP and visual hashes, but your posting had nothing to do with what I was saying.
But since you are so eager to push Tygar's paper and SRP, let me say this much: as long as researchers waste their time on such trivial and useless stuff, it's not surprising that computer security remains so poor.
The solution is for the government to quit using our money to subsidise something that we'll be charged huge prices for eventually anyway. The solution is for the pharma corporations and other medical reasearch companies to pay their own way,
That's a stupid solution because the free market does not work for health-related R&D or services. Health is properly a government function, not a free market function, because market mechanisms provably produce the wrong (suboptimal) outcomes. No amount of wishful thinking by ideologues changes that fact.
Furthermore, we have decades of practical experience with government sponsored research: it works well--a lot better than anything private companies have been doing.
The assumption being that since government monopolies have failed to produce cost-effective innovation so many times before, the model is due for a success?
Your premise is wrong; in fact, governments are responsible for almost all medical and biotech innovation.
Furthermore, nobody is talking about a government monopoly, we are talking about the removal of corporate monopolies. Any private company is still free to do whatever research they want, they should just not be able to get patents on the resulting medical treatments.
While the thought may be uncomfortable to many techies, people aren't sterile machines, and we don't live in sterile environments. You have more bacteria in your gut than you have cells in your body. Your body is full of persistent viral infection. There are fungi and parasites growing on your skin and in your hair. If you are a normal adult, your body has no trouble coping with it, and many of those microorganisms actually also have beneficial functions, not the least of which is to keep more harmful organisms from colonizing the same niches.
As for pillows, you clean them and air them regularly, and replace them every few years. And if you don't know how do deal with your household, you should marry someone who does.
OOo and (La)TeX are similarly efficient in terms of input. But (La)TeX is the de-facto standard; there is no reason to use anything else.
Until governments foot the bill for all medical R&D and clinical testing, patents are a crucial part of the medical device & pharma industry.
Governments (i.e., tax payers) effectively already foot the bill for a lot of drug and medical device development, even development that leads to proprietary, patented, commercial products. Furthermore, since the monopoly prices that result from patents end up being paid by government-supported health-care plans, they end up paying the rest of it, too, many times over.
In addition, the market is doing a piss poor job in creating incentives for companies to create the drugs that people actually need; companies have an incentive to create useless variations on medicines that treat symptoms of common diseases but don't cure them. What we actually need are medicines for currently untreatable diseases and medicines that cure.
Finally, a lot of the costly approval process is only in place because of the commercial development model; for many reasons, private companies are prone to bringing dangerous drugs to market without close government supervision. For drugs and devices developed with public funds, the approval process can be greatly simplified.
Overall, it would almost certainly be more cost effective for everybody to abolish drug and medical device patents altogether, have government and scientists set the goals for what to develop, and have all research, development, and testing of such devices paid for by the tax payer. Private companies can still get involved through contract work and work-for-hire.
Obviously this solution is expensive and inconvenient because users have to get their hands on specialized hardware and carry it.
All they need to carry is a SHEET OF PAPER; it can be mailed with the montly statement. (Can't you be bothered to read THREE sentences before you reply?)
All the user has to do to verify a site is to compare images that are derived as visual hashes of a common secret session key (used for encryption) and exchanged random data.
Using a visual hash to protect against keylogging is about as effective as putting a condom on your nose is against pregnancy. Visual hashes protect against impersonation/phishing, one-time passwords protect against eavesdropping/keylogging.
One time passwords (printed or electronic) aren't intended to protect against phishers, they are intended to protect against keyloggers and eavesdropping.
The patents basically mean that for the next 20 years, nobody else can even do research on the patent without the permission of the patent holder.
The patent holder will only give that permission if the people doing the research sign over patent rights to the company owning the original patent.
Effectively, a lot of research is going to take at least 40 years to happen, with the results being patented out to 60 years. That's when you may start seeing useful stuff finally making it into the public domain.
That is, of course, provided that other nations give a damn; US patents are valid only in the US, and there are about 150 other nations to choose from where you can do research and treat patients. In many of those, patenting genes is either impossible, or they are considered too small right now to bother patenting in.
Python, C#, and OCaml were also designed by [huge committees of self-appointed experts.]
The "also" is false. The Python, Mono, and OCaml platforms are driven by market choice: some people develop libraries, others choose. That's why there are half a dozen XML libraries for Python, for example, with end users making the choice. For Java, the JCP decides, and when they make a bad choice (as they do more often than not), the Java world is effectively stuck with it; any non-JCP alternative is going to be a second class citizen.
I want out of the entire structured lexical programming paradigm.
Have a look at Smalltalk. Even the 1980 version of Smalltalk is still far ahead of Java and Java IDEs. If the industry had unified behind Smalltalk 25 years ago, we'd be much futher along than we are now. Among other things, in Smalltalk, all implementations, all code, and all documentation is always available, there is no separate compilation step, and you can inspect and modify running applications. Also, its syntax encourages highly readable code; even people with no programming experience can generally at least get the gist of what Smalltalk code is doing by reading it.
I don't understand why US and UK banks make two factor authentication so complicated. A printed list of one-time passwords is excellent protection against keyloggers and requires no extra hardware. Banks in continental Europe have been using them for years, and users seem to be able to get along with them just fine.
There are almost no A-frame roof trusses in my neighborhood here in California either; apparently, in many climates, you just don't need them.
As for durability, the goal of the Greeks wasn't to create buildings that would survive without maintenance for thousands of years; if a building lasts 30-50 years with regular maintenance, it's good enough for most uses.