Are you seriously suggesting that with revenues of $4m, TPB could instead run a server farm that maintains a collection of html files sufficient to store the results of every single Google search for an entire year? And that people would continue to use it when their searches are not restricted to a set of.torrent files but run against the entire internet? And that it would be a good technical solution for the use case?
If you think TPB is exactly the same as Google, you have no brain.
1) I use file sharing. I've never set up a web site to earn $4m pa that depends on copyright infringement. Clearly these are different things, therefore that is no basis to set legal considerations aside.
2) To be a "moral prosecutor" you must have formed and acted upon a moral judgement. To tell the potential client to instead change their business model, clearly the moral judgement has found the business model wanting. You are clearly fond of moral relativism because you think the trial is waste of time when there are "folks committing actual evil acts" to be found. My inference with respect to TPB may have been wrong, but then I didn't realise you'd already decided the outcome of the case on the basis of such weak logic, and assumed you were making the same mistake you'd already demonstrated.
"Should have no stake in securing business models that are clearly flawed" has bugger all to do with morals, so if that's what you meant it certainly isn't what you said. In fact governments and the courts do have a stake in securing business models, flawed or not. If it's legal, they should secure it. If it's illegal, they should stop it. If it's disputed, they should support the legal process and then secure things as appropriate. They should not follow your approach of forming a personal judgement and then applying only when it suits them.
3) "I want everybody to decide what is moral, provided they don't mind me disagreeing with them." Disagreeing is one thing, you're doing something completely different. You're forming a moral judgement of someone, claiming to know the will of the people, and expecting the legal process to back you up. I don't like ideologues myself. I prefer attitudes that support balancing freedom with responsibility, not wishing the system enforced my own sense of morality because I know "the will of the people". The totalitarian bias just doesn't work for me, even when violence and oppression aren't involved.
I'd say the difference if that the torrent is a file. For instance, a search engine typically only returns a page of links, and doesn't host any files at all. So this may be the technical way to differentiate a search engine like Google for a service like TPB that provides a search function as part of its operations.
You're assuming malice, rather than checking the definition of "through". In the sense of "by the agency of", as compared to the concept of some form of physical passage, describing the downloads as being through TPB is entirely valid. TPB is the central agent in the process.
It's easy to come up with real world uses of the word to understand how it applies e.g. "Through talking to Alice, he was able to get hold of a stolen car from Bob. Alice was a key accomplice in the crime."
If TPB wins the case, it is not likely to be through Alberto Gonzales-style dissembling. At least I hope not, because the world becomes a worse place when people can only justify their actions through weasel words and technicalities, and a spirit of honesty is discouraged. Whether or not Alice and the TPB are in the wrong is a separate discussion, but the use of "through" is good English.
RIAA may lose, but that's a facile argument. It is possible under the law to differentiate between the nature of the business and where it gets its revenues from. Google is also an advertising company, however their business as a search engine is vital to e.g. being a safe harbour under the DMCA in the US.
There's no evidence out there that people in general spend more because of torrents etc, only less. Individual anecdotal evidence barely passes the sniff test (you spend thousands but have only managed to find ten things you didn't like?!), and certainly shouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of an online forum otherwise so keen on the scientific method.
Bonds as a way to fund pilots?! How can you sell a bond when the investment is expected to lose all its money? Bonds are fixed income investment vehicles, and completely inappropriate for what you're talking about, unless you think the market economy is an excuse to mislead and deceive if you can get away with it. Trailers get to draw on the content of an incredibly expensive production. Why should that be any cheaper than a pilot? Where's your evidence that companies aren't already trying to make pilots cost-effective, when they know most of them will fail?
If people love the production, they'll pay for it. We do. Many of our friends do. Most of my family does.
It starts off as a positive statement. Then mainly positive. Then mostly positive. In other words, not entirely true. Why not just come out with it and state that in your experience, a lot of the time people in fact do not pay? I guess you're no more capable of being honest than the corporates.
A moral prosector would of course tell the record companies to find a business model that doesn't depend on supply of expensive physical media
Complete and utter bullshit. Any prosecutor who did such a thing should be thrown out of the legal profession immediately. For starters, moral relativism (i.e. TPB is innocent because the record companies are worse) is well known as a bad moral argument. Second, what the fuck do morals have to do with business models per se? They don't want to make money, that's their choice.
Third and most importantly, who the fuck apart from religious fundamentalists and ideologues wants prosecutors to start deciding what is and isn't moral? There's an incredible irony in someone taking a "moral" stand in favour of freedom that has as its basis such an totalitarian bias.
I know guys who write songs and paintings on creative commons terms and I've seen thousands of GNU documentation - licensed books.
A fair response to the way the GP phrased the question, but the general point has to be addressed in terms of equivalents.
I know people that help out their neighbours with stuff, but it doesn't mean that gardening firms and removals companies are ripping people off. The fact that some people do things for free (bringing home cooked food into the office, giving a statue to the public, a band more in need of publicity that record sales, etc) does not mean that it is reasonable to expect it of everybody. How many of the guys you know create these works as their primary activity, and make a living from it? How does the quality of those recordings compare to professionals? Do the painters actually give away the paintings or just a digitised image that doesn't compare to the original? Have you ever seen a high quality, full length movie under a creative commons license?
So what you're saying is that everyone should make the safe choices in life, not for instance start an innovative business that isn't guaranteed to make money? What a sad, pathetic vision you have of life.
Paying a few bucks for something you enjoy is bending over backwards? You're just piling on the pathetic today!
Now on to pathetic logic:
There is no right to profit from your work. There is a right to try to profit from your work. The difference is subtle but very important; and frankly, I'm starting to get more than a bit sick of the copyright creeps demanding that all society and technology bend over backwards to help them profit.
So what's the difference between trying a case in a court of law and trying to profit from your work? The difference is subtle but not important - it boils down to exactly the same thing. You have a right to charge for your work. People may or may not pay, consequently you may or may not make a profit. But if a business sets itself up to profit from your work without paying, then there are courts to enforce your right to charge for that work.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of idiots like you demanding that society and the courts bend over backwards to support these companies. If The Pirate Bay can't figure out how to make a profit without screwing someone else, let them go out of business. They have no right to profit, remember?
The next time a singer asks you personally for a million dollars for a performance and expects to get paid, let us all know so that we can laugh at the singer for having all the brains of a small fish. I be curious if you even managed to find any reference at all to a singer being paid that kind of fee for singing a song.
And paying a cop directly is more like bribery - the normal method is for you to pay taxes to support the police. And I bet you don't support the idea of paying extra tax to support musicians, do you?
On balance, maybe it's you with the brains of a small fish if you think that's a good argument.
you are definitely going to need help from a change management specialist
You have just failed the basic test of giving advice to a non-profit. It is never guaranteed that taking on the cost of external people is a worthwhile spend of budget. "A bit more chaotic" does not describe a situation so bad that it qualifies for the "throw money at it" approach.
My experience is that although process is important, the best place to start is by documenting what resources are available (whether people, websites, stationery) so that people can figure things out for themselves. Consider only a few processes, have only a few key stages in each, and to start with do not document those processes for people to see - this is just for your reference planning the wiki or other data store. Document the essential information that would support a review at those stages. If the processor or stage wouldn't warrant a review meeting, it's not important enough to document anyway. Make sure pressure is on from the top that things are being signed-off at the meetings or other appropriate checkpoint e.g. approving an e-mailed document. The incentive to managers is getting budget approval, avoid hassling phone calls from their peers, and generally getting a reputation for being against the cause of the non-profit as compared to helping it. This can all be kept very positive - this is where the senior buy-in becomes important so that participation is encouraged.
This is why wikis do well. Processes, flowcharts, Visio diagrams - these are all time consuming to produce. And many people (including myself) often find them useless and clearly put together by someone with an inflated view of their importance in the grand scheme of things (sorry - that's the perception you risk creating). However, bullet lists, easy-to-fill forms, useful phone numbers and web-sites: easy to maintain, far more benefit than cost, and can genuinely make a difference in terms of getting people to do things the right way. It certainly helps them do their job, which is the key thing.
So my suggestion is: process improvement takes time. Get people on board by first providing a really useful information store for them. Go down the wiki route, populate it it with as much information as you can, solicit key information from a selection of leaders and "switched on" administrators, dedicate time to maintaining it. Make it the default homepage on everyone's machine if you can. Get explicit permission to be spending time on it, give progress reports that praise the managers that help and gently chide the teams that don't contribute. Don't just focus on efficient operations, which other teams will not find as inherently satisfying as would a good IT shop - collect content that enables you to produce a monthly highlight of their achievements. If you're the guy that lets the field staff and the back-office staff know what a great job they're both doing, for instance, they'll be much more on your side.
You should find yourself fairly quickly in possession of something genuinely useful that hasn't take up anyone's time much or pissed them off talking about processes they'd rather ignore. If the people are committed to the success of the endeavour (I'd hope so in a non-profit!), you're then in a far better situation to consider process documentation. You'll also know a lot more, and be able to frame more specific questions - your initial post is to be honest a bit vague.
"other than introduce a new style of gameplay it's not really that groundbreaking."
Wow. Tough standard you set there. What's more important to a game than gameplay?
I don't think the link that you see is the one that is proposed. When the paper says a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" - 'why argue when there is one best solution' then I think they are talking about dangers at the level of fundamental assumptions. You can see how those traits conflict with your assumptions that people are allowed to determine their own destiny, or that nonconsensual violence is wrong.
Bear in mind that this paper specifically excludes scientists and doctors, who are also more than capable of taking a logical approach of, "given this set of beliefs and this scenario, then these acts of terrorism make a good solution". So applying "scientific and engineering thought patterns" to "follow something to its logical conclusion" doesn't apply. People on this thread are very keen to see this report as a validation of the engineering discipline, rather than taking it on the chin as a cautionary tale of the downside of many an engineer's way of thinking.
This should be marked funny, not insightful - this question is dealt with on p16 of the report.
The significant majority do not enroll to study engineering. Don't forget that many parents are disappointed their children to not choose (or are not good enough) to study for the careers they've picked out for their offspring. That's gotta be some kind of universal rule!
For a pragmatic mindset, that was in incredibly long post to make a simple point:)
That argument doesn't really stand up, though. There's plenty of computer scientists, doctors, physicists, geologists, chemists etc who are pragmatic individuals, who are also studying things with practical applicability in the Middle East. You also ignore the references to extremism in the US and China.
Just face up to it - if this is true, it's a negative thing to learn from, not something to turn into something to be proud of.
Let me get this straight. You're seriously answering a question about "masquerading as science" by using anecdotal evidence?
Incidentally, the summary misquotes the paper. The full quote is "Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, and whether due to selection or field socialisation, a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" - 'why argue when there is one best solution' - and of "simplism" - 'if only people were rational, remedies would be simple'. "
If you haven't met a single engineer who hasn't presented either of those traits (especially the second one), you definitely have not had much exposure to engineers. Or read an entire Slashdot thread.
I Googled it ("U2 Stage Crew Services union") but only found a single reference after a few pages (http://www.mlkclc.org/winter_1998.htm) which is pro-union, talking about how Stage Crew Services got rid of union employees and activists that were unsurprisingly let go after they tried to infiltrate and unionise the place. Did you manage to find anything vaguely objective?
It's just basic English. Writing code describes the act of programming, simple as that. If you are also inventing e.g. a new algorithm, great, but you could instead be maintaining code, optimising code, porting code, etc.
If I wrote a new text editor, I'd own the copyright to it, but imagine the reaction I'd get if I claimed I'd invented text editing? (insert Al Gore / internet joke here)
Before too many hysterical reactions kick in, bear in mind the actual rules have not changed here, and software patents as such are still disallowed in Europe. If you follow the link in TFA you'll get the current definitions (emphasis added):
"(1) European patents shall be granted for any inventions which are susceptible of industrial applications, which are new and which involve an inventive step.
(2) The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of paragraph 1:
a. discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
b. aesthetic creations; c. schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers; d. presentations of information."
In that context, the test is then to decide whether claims such as the following are industrial applications which involve an inventive step, or purely programs for computers. I don't think they're all equal. The SurfKitchen sounds like a computer program to me, while I have some sympathy for the thought of Astron Clinica having invented a new overall way of carrying out surgery and wanting to patent the method, including the part that is carried out on a computer: it is not obvious, nor a business process, or something as basically stupid as the whole "One Click" thing. Also, note that these are mostly not software companies. You might still disagree with judge's conclusion and have further points to make, but please no more mindless nonsense about the imminent death of the UK software industry and a shift to the American system.
1. Software 2000: a method of generating bit masks for use with laser printers which results in higher quality images.
2. Astron Clinica: a system and process for generating realistic images representing the results of planned cosmetic or surgical interventions which change the actual or apparent distribution of underlying skin chomophores.
3. Inrotis: methods of identifying groups of target proteins for drug theray by processing proteome data defining proteins and protein interactions.
4. SurfKitchen: an invention to improve the ability of mobile telephones to access services on the Internet by pre-storing a program on a mobile telephone memory or by downloading the program from the Internet.
5. Cyan Technology: a method of generating data for configuring micro-prodcts which greatly simplifies chip design and programming.
If someone else buys a particular lottery ticket before you, you can still buy the exact same numbers yourself. If you don't register a free domain name when you see it, however, you might find it gone by the time you get budget approval or whatever.
I promptly switched off the "I'm willing to test the new discussion system" flag. If they implement it, I'll stop using Slashdot.
Suggestion - post to this thread if you think likewise, and we can take an opportunity to express displeasure at screwing up a discussion system due to an utterly misguided attempt at threading adverts in amongst our own posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you seriously suggesting that with revenues of $4m, TPB could instead run a server farm that maintains a collection of html files sufficient to store the results of every single Google search for an entire year? And that people would continue to use it when their searches are not restricted to a set of .torrent files but run against the entire internet? And that it would be a good technical solution for the use case?
If you think TPB is exactly the same as Google, you have no brain.
1) I use file sharing. I've never set up a web site to earn $4m pa that depends on copyright infringement. Clearly these are different things, therefore that is no basis to set legal considerations aside.
2) To be a "moral prosecutor" you must have formed and acted upon a moral judgement. To tell the potential client to instead change their business model, clearly the moral judgement has found the business model wanting. You are clearly fond of moral relativism because you think the trial is waste of time when there are "folks committing actual evil acts" to be found. My inference with respect to TPB may have been wrong, but then I didn't realise you'd already decided the outcome of the case on the basis of such weak logic, and assumed you were making the same mistake you'd already demonstrated.
"Should have no stake in securing business models that are clearly flawed" has bugger all to do with morals, so if that's what you meant it certainly isn't what you said. In fact governments and the courts do have a stake in securing business models, flawed or not. If it's legal, they should secure it. If it's illegal, they should stop it. If it's disputed, they should support the legal process and then secure things as appropriate. They should not follow your approach of forming a personal judgement and then applying only when it suits them.
3) "I want everybody to decide what is moral, provided they don't mind me disagreeing with them." Disagreeing is one thing, you're doing something completely different. You're forming a moral judgement of someone, claiming to know the will of the people, and expecting the legal process to back you up. I don't like ideologues myself. I prefer attitudes that support balancing freedom with responsibility, not wishing the system enforced my own sense of morality because I know "the will of the people". The totalitarian bias just doesn't work for me, even when violence and oppression aren't involved.
Interesting point.
I'd say the difference if that the torrent is a file. For instance, a search engine typically only returns a page of links, and doesn't host any files at all. So this may be the technical way to differentiate a search engine like Google for a service like TPB that provides a search function as part of its operations.
You're assuming malice, rather than checking the definition of "through". In the sense of "by the agency of", as compared to the concept of some form of physical passage, describing the downloads as being through TPB is entirely valid. TPB is the central agent in the process.
It's easy to come up with real world uses of the word to understand how it applies e.g. "Through talking to Alice, he was able to get hold of a stolen car from Bob. Alice was a key accomplice in the crime."
If TPB wins the case, it is not likely to be through Alberto Gonzales-style dissembling. At least I hope not, because the world becomes a worse place when people can only justify their actions through weasel words and technicalities, and a spirit of honesty is discouraged. Whether or not Alice and the TPB are in the wrong is a separate discussion, but the use of "through" is good English.
RIAA may lose, but that's a facile argument. It is possible under the law to differentiate between the nature of the business and where it gets its revenues from. Google is also an advertising company, however their business as a search engine is vital to e.g. being a safe harbour under the DMCA in the US.
There's no evidence out there that people in general spend more because of torrents etc, only less. Individual anecdotal evidence barely passes the sniff test (you spend thousands but have only managed to find ten things you didn't like?!), and certainly shouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of an online forum otherwise so keen on the scientific method.
Bonds as a way to fund pilots?! How can you sell a bond when the investment is expected to lose all its money? Bonds are fixed income investment vehicles, and completely inappropriate for what you're talking about, unless you think the market economy is an excuse to mislead and deceive if you can get away with it. Trailers get to draw on the content of an incredibly expensive production. Why should that be any cheaper than a pilot? Where's your evidence that companies aren't already trying to make pilots cost-effective, when they know most of them will fail?
It starts off as a positive statement. Then mainly positive. Then mostly positive. In other words, not entirely true. Why not just come out with it and state that in your experience, a lot of the time people in fact do not pay? I guess you're no more capable of being honest than the corporates.
Fail!
Google is a general search engine that endeavours for neutrality, for instance with specific mechanisms for removing search results.
Pirate Bay is not a general search engine and is specifically intended to earn money from copyrighted material.
Complete and utter bullshit. Any prosecutor who did such a thing should be thrown out of the legal profession immediately. For starters, moral relativism (i.e. TPB is innocent because the record companies are worse) is well known as a bad moral argument. Second, what the fuck do morals have to do with business models per se? They don't want to make money, that's their choice.
Third and most importantly, who the fuck apart from religious fundamentalists and ideologues wants prosecutors to start deciding what is and isn't moral? There's an incredible irony in someone taking a "moral" stand in favour of freedom that has as its basis such an totalitarian bias.
A fair response to the way the GP phrased the question, but the general point has to be addressed in terms of equivalents.
I know people that help out their neighbours with stuff, but it doesn't mean that gardening firms and removals companies are ripping people off. The fact that some people do things for free (bringing home cooked food into the office, giving a statue to the public, a band more in need of publicity that record sales, etc) does not mean that it is reasonable to expect it of everybody. How many of the guys you know create these works as their primary activity, and make a living from it? How does the quality of those recordings compare to professionals? Do the painters actually give away the paintings or just a digitised image that doesn't compare to the original? Have you ever seen a high quality, full length movie under a creative commons license?
So what you're saying is that everyone should make the safe choices in life, not for instance start an innovative business that isn't guaranteed to make money? What a sad, pathetic vision you have of life.
Paying a few bucks for something you enjoy is bending over backwards? You're just piling on the pathetic today!
Now on to pathetic logic:
So what's the difference between trying a case in a court of law and trying to profit from your work? The difference is subtle but not important - it boils down to exactly the same thing. You have a right to charge for your work. People may or may not pay, consequently you may or may not make a profit. But if a business sets itself up to profit from your work without paying, then there are courts to enforce your right to charge for that work.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of idiots like you demanding that society and the courts bend over backwards to support these companies. If The Pirate Bay can't figure out how to make a profit without screwing someone else, let them go out of business. They have no right to profit, remember?
The next time a singer asks you personally for a million dollars for a performance and expects to get paid, let us all know so that we can laugh at the singer for having all the brains of a small fish. I be curious if you even managed to find any reference at all to a singer being paid that kind of fee for singing a song.
And paying a cop directly is more like bribery - the normal method is for you to pay taxes to support the police. And I bet you don't support the idea of paying extra tax to support musicians, do you?
On balance, maybe it's you with the brains of a small fish if you think that's a good argument.
You have just failed the basic test of giving advice to a non-profit. It is never guaranteed that taking on the cost of external people is a worthwhile spend of budget. "A bit more chaotic" does not describe a situation so bad that it qualifies for the "throw money at it" approach.
My experience is that although process is important, the best place to start is by documenting what resources are available (whether people, websites, stationery) so that people can figure things out for themselves. Consider only a few processes, have only a few key stages in each, and to start with do not document those processes for people to see - this is just for your reference planning the wiki or other data store. Document the essential information that would support a review at those stages. If the processor or stage wouldn't warrant a review meeting, it's not important enough to document anyway. Make sure pressure is on from the top that things are being signed-off at the meetings or other appropriate checkpoint e.g. approving an e-mailed document. The incentive to managers is getting budget approval, avoid hassling phone calls from their peers, and generally getting a reputation for being against the cause of the non-profit as compared to helping it. This can all be kept very positive - this is where the senior buy-in becomes important so that participation is encouraged.
This is why wikis do well. Processes, flowcharts, Visio diagrams - these are all time consuming to produce. And many people (including myself) often find them useless and clearly put together by someone with an inflated view of their importance in the grand scheme of things (sorry - that's the perception you risk creating). However, bullet lists, easy-to-fill forms, useful phone numbers and web-sites: easy to maintain, far more benefit than cost, and can genuinely make a difference in terms of getting people to do things the right way. It certainly helps them do their job, which is the key thing.
So my suggestion is: process improvement takes time. Get people on board by first providing a really useful information store for them. Go down the wiki route, populate it it with as much information as you can, solicit key information from a selection of leaders and "switched on" administrators, dedicate time to maintaining it. Make it the default homepage on everyone's machine if you can. Get explicit permission to be spending time on it, give progress reports that praise the managers that help and gently chide the teams that don't contribute. Don't just focus on efficient operations, which other teams will not find as inherently satisfying as would a good IT shop - collect content that enables you to produce a monthly highlight of their achievements. If you're the guy that lets the field staff and the back-office staff know what a great job they're both doing, for instance, they'll be much more on your side.
You should find yourself fairly quickly in possession of something genuinely useful that hasn't take up anyone's time much or pissed them off talking about processes they'd rather ignore. If the people are committed to the success of the endeavour (I'd hope so in a non-profit!), you're then in a far better situation to consider process documentation. You'll also know a lot more, and be able to frame more specific questions - your initial post is to be honest a bit vague.
I'm sure your scientific insight would make the researchers feel bad for conducting experiments rather than simply making assumptions.
"other than introduce a new style of gameplay it's not really that groundbreaking." Wow. Tough standard you set there. What's more important to a game than gameplay?
I don't think the link that you see is the one that is proposed. When the paper says a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" - 'why argue when there is one best solution' then I think they are talking about dangers at the level of fundamental assumptions. You can see how those traits conflict with your assumptions that people are allowed to determine their own destiny, or that nonconsensual violence is wrong.
Bear in mind that this paper specifically excludes scientists and doctors, who are also more than capable of taking a logical approach of, "given this set of beliefs and this scenario, then these acts of terrorism make a good solution". So applying "scientific and engineering thought patterns" to "follow something to its logical conclusion" doesn't apply. People on this thread are very keen to see this report as a validation of the engineering discipline, rather than taking it on the chin as a cautionary tale of the downside of many an engineer's way of thinking.
This should be marked funny, not insightful - this question is dealt with on p16 of the report.
The significant majority do not enroll to study engineering. Don't forget that many parents are disappointed their children to not choose (or are not good enough) to study for the careers they've picked out for their offspring. That's gotta be some kind of universal rule!
For a pragmatic mindset, that was in incredibly long post to make a simple point :)
That argument doesn't really stand up, though. There's plenty of computer scientists, doctors, physicists, geologists, chemists etc who are pragmatic individuals, who are also studying things with practical applicability in the Middle East. You also ignore the references to extremism in the US and China.
Just face up to it - if this is true, it's a negative thing to learn from, not something to turn into something to be proud of.
Let me get this straight. You're seriously answering a question about "masquerading as science" by using anecdotal evidence?
Incidentally, the summary misquotes the paper. The full quote is "Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, and whether due to selection or field socialisation, a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" - 'why argue when there is one best solution' - and of "simplism" - 'if only people were rational, remedies would be simple'. "
If you haven't met a single engineer who hasn't presented either of those traits (especially the second one), you definitely have not had much exposure to engineers. Or read an entire Slashdot thread.
You say the world isn't black and white, and yet each time you refer to the GP you only provide two extreme, simplistic, clearly biased options.
By your own argument - you're a fucking retard. Seriously.
I Googled it ("U2 Stage Crew Services union") but only found a single reference after a few pages (http://www.mlkclc.org/winter_1998.htm) which is pro-union, talking about how Stage Crew Services got rid of union employees and activists that were unsurprisingly let go after they tried to infiltrate and unionise the place. Did you manage to find anything vaguely objective?
It's just basic English. Writing code describes the act of programming, simple as that. If you are also inventing e.g. a new algorithm, great, but you could instead be maintaining code, optimising code, porting code, etc.
If I wrote a new text editor, I'd own the copyright to it, but imagine the reaction I'd get if I claimed I'd invented text editing? (insert Al Gore / internet joke here)
Before too many hysterical reactions kick in, bear in mind the actual rules have not changed here, and software patents as such are still disallowed in Europe. If you follow the link in TFA you'll get the current definitions (emphasis added):
"(1) European patents shall be granted for any inventions which are susceptible of industrial applications, which are new and which involve an inventive step.
(2) The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of paragraph 1:
a. discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
b. aesthetic creations;
c. schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;
d. presentations of information."
In that context, the test is then to decide whether claims such as the following are industrial applications which involve an inventive step, or purely programs for computers. I don't think they're all equal. The SurfKitchen sounds like a computer program to me, while I have some sympathy for the thought of Astron Clinica having invented a new overall way of carrying out surgery and wanting to patent the method, including the part that is carried out on a computer: it is not obvious, nor a business process, or something as basically stupid as the whole "One Click" thing. Also, note that these are mostly not software companies. You might still disagree with judge's conclusion and have further points to make, but please no more mindless nonsense about the imminent death of the UK software industry and a shift to the American system.
1. Software 2000: a method of generating bit masks for use with laser printers which results in higher quality images.
2. Astron Clinica: a system and process for generating realistic images representing the results of planned cosmetic or surgical interventions which change the actual or apparent distribution of underlying skin chomophores.
3. Inrotis: methods of identifying groups of target proteins for drug theray by processing proteome data defining proteins and protein interactions.
4. SurfKitchen: an invention to improve the ability of mobile telephones to access services on the Internet by pre-storing a program on a mobile telephone memory or by downloading the program from the Internet.
5. Cyan Technology: a method of generating data for configuring micro-prodcts which greatly simplifies chip design and programming.
Bad analogy.
If someone else buys a particular lottery ticket before you, you can still buy the exact same numbers yourself. If you don't register a free domain name when you see it, however, you might find it gone by the time you get budget approval or whatever.
If you're using the domains, you're not domain parking. What's the problem?
Yup, same here.
I promptly switched off the "I'm willing to test the new discussion system" flag. If they implement it, I'll stop using Slashdot.
Suggestion - post to this thread if you think likewise, and we can take an opportunity to express displeasure at screwing up a discussion system due to an utterly misguided attempt at threading adverts in amongst our own posts.