I live in Denmark, and here strikes have really helped reaching a reasonable balance between the rights of employers and employees.
We now have a 37 hour work week, and 5 week of paid vacation.
The last (like most previous) extra week of paid vacation was due to a general strike. It basically shut down our country for a few weeks, but most people in Denmark were supportive of the strike.
As an employer (owning part of a company employing some employees) I guess I am supposed to oppose this. But I am also employed by the company I own a part of, so I also gain the advantages.
I understand why Mozilla does not want to delay security updates. Of course Redhat would like that at it would look like they are less behind on security updates.
Unfortunately it looks like Redhat has persuaded other Open Source projects to delay their security updates.
And now Redhat is using these other Open Source projects to attempt to pressure Mozilla into also delaying their security updates by claiming that Mozilla doesn't play by the rules.
The reason educated people were not allowed to leave the Soviet Union was that the government did not want to "export" their knowledge. Only if the Soviet government really trusted that an educated person would come back would he be allowed to temporarily leave.
Today this "export restriction" only applies to some foreigners. But how long will this restriction last? After all, US citicens could also leave their country with potentially dangerous information in their minds, and thus "export" this potentially dangerous information.
You may think I am trolling, but I am really worried about this and a lot of other new developments in the US during the last few years.
At least patents work better than copyrights, and have a much more rational term
I don't agree. Unlike copyrights patents can act as land mines, as somebody doing an independent innovation can be hit by the patent without even knowing that the patent existed. This problem is worse in the case of software patents than in most other kinds of patents.
And the special language that patents are written in makes this problem a lot worse. A patent is expected to be understood by anybody skilled in the application area of the patent, but almost no software engineers understand software patents.
When patents were introduced they were a deal between the public and the inventor: In exchange for the publication of the invention, the inventor got a time-limited monopoly on the invention.
But if nobody skilled understands the patents issues today, where does that deal leave us?
Your claim that this happened in the US 150 years ago only makes me wonder why the US hasn't reformed their patent system a long time ago.
In Denmark where I live we also have also a relatively non-litigious society.
We have anti-spam laws, but these are constructed so that it is almost impossible for an individual or a company to start a court case against a possible spammer.
OTOH we have a public institution Forbrugerombudsmanden (in danish). They accept complaints on any kind of possible spam originating from Denmark.
When too many spam complaints are directed to them they go to court against the spammer. I don't think they have ever lost a court case against spammers, and in the cases where they have won the fines have been high enough to stop the spammer and stop other possible spammers from even starting.
In two cases I know that danish spammers have stopped after I have threathened to tell Forbrugerombudsmanden.
Does it help? Well, just look at the amount of spam originating from Denmark.
After re-reading the patent I have to agree with you. I already knew that software patents were not written in normal english language, but in a special patent-jargon hard (near to impossible) to understand for both software engineers and other english-speaking people.
It took me a lot of time to learn the special patent language. I read hundreds of patents, but eventually I was able to understand most of the software patents I read.
But this... are we getting into a state where only people skilled in the special patent language are able to understand the meaning of a patent?
This is protectionism, and protectionism is a Bad Thing.
This isn't really protectionism. It would have been if the chinese government had imposed high taxes on the import of software.
The chinese government has decided that they do not want to buy imported software. This decision imposes no restrictions on any other chinese companies.
The chinese government is a software customer. As a customer they have the right to decide where they want to purchase their software.
In the country where I live it is extremely hard to get the address of somebody from any government (or other public) office. The only place where you can get an address is from our public cencus office. They will give you the address for a small fee unless they have been asked to keep the address secret (in which case you cannot get the address at all).
You may ask why. This came about after a few cases of abused women trying to flee husbands and starting a new life in another part of the country, but being found and battered by their former husbands. When the media found out that the former husbands had gotten the new address of their former wifes from public offices, we had a sensible political reaction.
But then, I live in a european country. In Europe we have a very different attitude to, and better laws on the treatment of personal information compared to the US.
Moderators may moderate my patent post "troll", but this grammar error really worries me.
Errors like this really should have been corrected before the patent was granted, and this indicates that there has been spent too little time examining the patent.
This is not just a grammar error somewhere in the patent. It is a grammar error in the only independent claim of the patent. Without the sentence that contains this grammar error the entire patent would be useless in court (and would probably not have been granted).
No, this patent does (IMHO, IANOPL) not cover a simple email address object like javax.mail.Address.
There is way too much prior art for that.
It looks that what they are trying to patent is a mail address object that calls another server to see if the mail address is known.
So if, for example, you had a mail address object that did a call to your company LDAP server to implement a method isCompanyMailAddress() you might infringe on their patent.
It is a sad thing. Even though there might be no prior art published, this is obvious to a trained software developer. How else would you implement the isCompanyMailAddress() example above?
Have we reached a point, technologically speaking that is, where the major issues could actually be voted on by the people directly?
Technologically speaking the US is ready to change their presidential election laws.
At the time the US introduced their current presidential election system the country was almost too big for a central government. This is the major reason the US was created as a union of states. When the US was founded it could take weeks and months for information to travel from one end of the US to the other end. Because of this the US voters could not make a meaningful vote for president, as most voters would vote based on information several weeks old. And the US was created as a union of states, so it made sense to let the states each send a a number of electors to form an electoral college to elect the president.
Today communications delay in the US is measured in milliseconds instead of weeks. And the time it takes to travel across the nation is measured in hours instead of weeks. The US is no longer almost too big for a central government because of these technological advances.
Changing the US presidential election system to direct popular elections would make sense because of these technological advances. Instead of effectively having 50 weighted votes for president a direct election would have millions of equal votes for president. This IMHO would cause less waste of votes and better democracy in the US.
(Please note that I am not a US citizen. I do not want to tell the US people how to run their country. I am only trying to point out what I think is a technical problem in the US election system.)
It looks to me like they are developing software for finding a trail of links between two different documents.
Most likely this will be abused to shut up dissidents by saying: "Your web page links to a web page that links to a web page that links to a web page by someone we consider terrorists. Shut down your home page or go to jail on terrorist charges."
I thought I was a small child when I first saw Packman, but it looks like I have been at least 13 years old.
Great game though.
Too bad I won't see a Free implementation of the game in my lifetime though, unless I am lucky to live to be 103 (and no new copyright term extensions happen).
Simply suggesting that copyright should be abandoned is a sure way for your hearing comments to end up in the paper bin without consideration.
It really helps to say that you want a reasonable balance between the rights of the general public and the rights that society has given to copyright holders to further the arts and sciences.
IMHO a reasonable balance would be something like:
It is allowed for private individuals to take limited numbers of copies, and to give such copies to personal friends and family. Mass-copying, commercial copying and distribution is not allowed without permission from the copyright holders. Corporations may take copies for backup and archiving purposes only, and are not allowed to distribute such copies.
It is allowed to convert copyrighted content to other formats and media. Converted copyrighted content is still copyrighted.
It is allowed to use parts of copyrighted content for purposes like critizism and parody.
Only literary works can be copyrighted. Story plots, story characters and binary-only software cannot be copyrighted. Binary copies of software with published source code is considered converted from the copyrighted source.
It is legal for individuals to circumvent DRM for personal use. It It is legal to publically discuss how to circumvent DRM, and even to distribute devices for circumvention if such devices have a considerable legal use.
Copyrighted contents must be clearly marked as copyrighted, and must be registered before copyright violations can be enforced in court.
Copyrighted contents is protected for 10 years after creation. After 10 years the contents enters the public domain.
Copyright is lost if:
It is not sold in the market for over a year.
The copyright holder goes into bankruptsy.
The copyright holder sues or repeatedly threathens to sue for copyright violations without a proper case.
This is already beginning to happen. The money comes from sales of service and support, not from voluntary contributions.
I would like to give you a real world example:
In the company where I work we are selling a (closed source) mission critical J2EE application suited for thousands of simultaneous users.
This application run on the Open Source (LGPL license) J2EE server JBoss. The reason we selected JBoss instead on one of the many closed source competitors was quality, not price. The price of even the most expensive J2EE servers is peanuts compared to the price of our application.
But a company like where I work (where mission critical applications are deployed on top of Open Source software) needs the best possible technical service and support for the Open Source software it runs on top of. One day of downtime is estimated to cost up to about US$3 million for the average installation of our software.
For JBoss a group of core developers saw the need for technical service and support for companies like mine. They formed a company to give service, support and application development advice.
Of course the company I work for is a customer of JBoss Inc., and we are very happy with their services. In one case we reported a problem with JBoss server clusters. After some communication we got down to the root cause of the problem, and within a few hours they had a patch ready that solved a race that could lead to a distributed deadlock condition.
I don't think that JBoss Inc. directly contributes money to the JBoss project. But they contribute a lot of resources. They have most of the core JBoss developers on their payroll, and these developers are also working on the JBoss project. They host the bug database of JBoss, and recently they also starting hosting the CVS repository.
Disclaimer: I may be biased since I contributed code to JBoss years ago, but I have never been affiliated with JBoss Inc. (except that I work for a company that is a customer of them).
I wonder why they apply some kind of nanotechnology to get the RNA into the cells.
Why not piggyback on nature and use some relatively harmless virus for transporting the RNA into the cells? Would it be too hard to create the virus with the RNA, or to grow the virus without it mutating into something not containing the RNA?
Yes, I think Microsoft is making a big mistake doing this. You do not want to present an error in red - even if it is really bad - to a user as an explanation of why he just lost a few hours of work.
The basic psychology of colors tells you why. The user is going to get more angry and is more likely to do something radical - like changing to another operating system. A more soothing color like blue or green would be better.
But then, this is just another Micro$oft mistake that is going to help us Linux (or OSX) zealots;-)
And this statement made me think about his credability. Somebody working for Microsoft at this level is obviously a Microsoft guy.
I think is really makes sense for them to employ a guy that knows how FOSS works, and I think he knows that and how FOSS is a threath to Microsoft.
From reading the article it looks to me like he is the guy running the department in Microsoft doing the real benchmarks on Microsoft products versus FOSS products. Not the flawed benchmarks we see, but the benchmarks that upper Microsoft management needs to see to know how they really compare to the only real competition they have left. The benchmarks where the same things are benchmarked and where both the compared products are fully optimized.
That is really what is is - otherwise they would have used it themselves.
It is good PR for Microsoft. It makes them appear innovative and willing to share their technology.
And most likely this is without risk for them. They probably only allow other small companies to work on these failed projects under conditions that would allow them to get full control of anything usefull developed.
But truth be told, Al Gore did more to bolster the internet then any other politician. Without his work, it's doubtful that many people outside the scientific, academic & military community would be using the Internet today.
You don't really think that the development of the internet would have stopped without his work, do you?
Even if he instead had gotten the internet banned in the US, the development of the internet would have continued in the rest of the world.
He helped to give the high-bandwidth internet we know today a kickstart in the US. This helped to make the US a focal point in the internet business, helping the US to export internet based services.
Unfortunately for the US the rest of the world is now having a faster internet development rate, and if that continues for the next ten years, the US will be left hopelessly behind.
Slashdot Mirror
In Denmark they have threathened to fire 800 employees at Navision if software patents are not legalized in Europe.
We now have a 37 hour work week, and 5 week of paid vacation.
The last (like most previous) extra week of paid vacation was due to a general strike. It basically shut down our country for a few weeks, but most people in Denmark were supportive of the strike.
As an employer (owning part of a company employing some employees) I guess I am supposed to oppose this. But I am also employed by the company I own a part of, so I also gain the advantages.
Unfortunately it looks like Redhat has persuaded other Open Source projects to delay their security updates.
And now Redhat is using these other Open Source projects to attempt to pressure Mozilla into also delaying their security updates by claiming that Mozilla doesn't play by the rules.
Shame on Redhat.
The reason educated people were not allowed to leave the Soviet Union was that the government did not want to "export" their knowledge. Only if the Soviet government really trusted that an educated person would come back would he be allowed to temporarily leave.
Today this "export restriction" only applies to some foreigners. But how long will this restriction last? After all, US citicens could also leave their country with potentially dangerous information in their minds, and thus "export" this potentially dangerous information.
You may think I am trolling, but I am really worried about this and a lot of other new developments in the US during the last few years.
And the special language that patents are written in makes this problem a lot worse. A patent is expected to be understood by anybody skilled in the application area of the patent, but almost no software engineers understand software patents.
When patents were introduced they were a deal between the public and the inventor: In exchange for the publication of the invention, the inventor got a time-limited monopoly on the invention.
But if nobody skilled understands the patents issues today, where does that deal leave us?
Your claim that this happened in the US 150 years ago only makes me wonder why the US hasn't reformed their patent system a long time ago.
Even if you do not want to keep your address secret at the danish cencus office, they have to unlist your address if you ask them.
We have anti-spam laws, but these are constructed so that it is almost impossible for an individual or a company to start a court case against a possible spammer.
OTOH we have a public institution Forbrugerombudsmanden (in danish). They accept complaints on any kind of possible spam originating from Denmark.
When too many spam complaints are directed to them they go to court against the spammer. I don't think they have ever lost a court case against spammers, and in the cases where they have won the fines have been high enough to stop the spammer and stop other possible spammers from even starting.
In two cases I know that danish spammers have stopped after I have threathened to tell Forbrugerombudsmanden.
Does it help? Well, just look at the amount of spam originating from Denmark.
It took me a lot of time to learn the special patent language. I read hundreds of patents, but eventually I was able to understand most of the software patents I read.
But this... are we getting into a state where only people skilled in the special patent language are able to understand the meaning of a patent?
The chinese government has decided that they do not want to buy imported software. This decision imposes no restrictions on any other chinese companies.
The chinese government is a software customer. As a customer they have the right to decide where they want to purchase their software.
You may ask why. This came about after a few cases of abused women trying to flee husbands and starting a new life in another part of the country, but being found and battered by their former husbands. When the media found out that the former husbands had gotten the new address of their former wifes from public offices, we had a sensible political reaction.
But then, I live in a european country. In Europe we have a very different attitude to, and better laws on the treatment of personal information compared to the US.
If they had hired Hugh Hefner as a consultant for the love scenes I might have considered watching this movie...
Errors like this really should have been corrected before the patent was granted, and this indicates that there has been spent too little time examining the patent.
This is not just a grammar error somewhere in the patent. It is a grammar error in the only independent claim of the patent. Without the sentence that contains this grammar error the entire patent would be useless in court (and would probably not have been granted).
It looks that what they are trying to patent is a mail address object that calls another server to see if the mail address is known.
So if, for example, you had a mail address object that did a call to your company LDAP server to implement a method isCompanyMailAddress() you might infringe on their patent.
It is a sad thing. Even though there might be no prior art published, this is obvious to a trained software developer. How else would you implement the isCompanyMailAddress() example above?
Did somebody at USPTO really read this, or have they begun to simply rubber-stamp "granted" on all applications?
Unlike the Microsoft systems, Unix has not changed significantly. This is a good story about getting the design right from the start.
At the time the US introduced their current presidential election system the country was almost too big for a central government. This is the major reason the US was created as a union of states. When the US was founded it could take weeks and months for information to travel from one end of the US to the other end. Because of this the US voters could not make a meaningful vote for president, as most voters would vote based on information several weeks old. And the US was created as a union of states, so it made sense to let the states each send a a number of electors to form an electoral college to elect the president.
Today communications delay in the US is measured in milliseconds instead of weeks. And the time it takes to travel across the nation is measured in hours instead of weeks. The US is no longer almost too big for a central government because of these technological advances.
Changing the US presidential election system to direct popular elections would make sense because of these technological advances. Instead of effectively having 50 weighted votes for president a direct election would have millions of equal votes for president. This IMHO would cause less waste of votes and better democracy in the US.
(Please note that I am not a US citizen. I do not want to tell the US people how to run their country. I am only trying to point out what I think is a technical problem in the US election system.)
Most likely this will be abused to shut up dissidents by saying: "Your web page links to a web page that links to a web page that links to a web page by someone we consider terrorists. Shut down your home page or go to jail on terrorist charges."
Great game though.
Too bad I won't see a Free implementation of the game in my lifetime though, unless I am lucky to live to be 103 (and no new copyright term extensions happen).
It really helps to say that you want a reasonable balance between the rights of the general public and the rights that society has given to copyright holders to further the arts and sciences.
IMHO a reasonable balance would be something like:
I would like to give you a real world example:
In the company where I work we are selling a (closed source) mission critical J2EE application suited for thousands of simultaneous users.
This application run on the Open Source (LGPL license) J2EE server JBoss. The reason we selected JBoss instead on one of the many closed source competitors was quality, not price. The price of even the most expensive J2EE servers is peanuts compared to the price of our application.
But a company like where I work (where mission critical applications are deployed on top of Open Source software) needs the best possible technical service and support for the Open Source software it runs on top of. One day of downtime is estimated to cost up to about US$3 million for the average installation of our software.
For JBoss a group of core developers saw the need for technical service and support for companies like mine. They formed a company to give service, support and application development advice.
Of course the company I work for is a customer of JBoss Inc., and we are very happy with their services. In one case we reported a problem with JBoss server clusters. After some communication we got down to the root cause of the problem, and within a few hours they had a patch ready that solved a race that could lead to a distributed deadlock condition.
I don't think that JBoss Inc. directly contributes money to the JBoss project. But they contribute a lot of resources. They have most of the core JBoss developers on their payroll, and these developers are also working on the JBoss project. They host the bug database of JBoss, and recently they also starting hosting the CVS repository.
Disclaimer: I may be biased since I contributed code to JBoss years ago, but I have never been affiliated with JBoss Inc. (except that I work for a company that is a customer of them).
Why not piggyback on nature and use some relatively harmless virus for transporting the RNA into the cells? Would it be too hard to create the virus with the RNA, or to grow the virus without it mutating into something not containing the RNA?
The basic psychology of colors tells you why. The user is going to get more angry and is more likely to do something radical - like changing to another operating system. A more soothing color like blue or green would be better.
But then, this is just another Micro$oft mistake that is going to help us Linux (or OSX) zealots ;-)
I think is really makes sense for them to employ a guy that knows how FOSS works, and I think he knows that and how FOSS is a threath to Microsoft.
From reading the article it looks to me like he is the guy running the department in Microsoft doing the real benchmarks on Microsoft products versus FOSS products. Not the flawed benchmarks we see, but the benchmarks that upper Microsoft management needs to see to know how they really compare to the only real competition they have left. The benchmarks where the same things are benchmarked and where both the compared products are fully optimized.
It is good PR for Microsoft. It makes them appear innovative and willing to share their technology.
And most likely this is without risk for them. They probably only allow other small companies to work on these failed projects under conditions that would allow them to get full control of anything usefull developed.
Even if he instead had gotten the internet banned in the US, the development of the internet would have continued in the rest of the world.
He helped to give the high-bandwidth internet we know today a kickstart in the US. This helped to make the US a focal point in the internet business, helping the US to export internet based services.
Unfortunately for the US the rest of the world is now having a faster internet development rate, and if that continues for the next ten years, the US will be left hopelessly behind.