1) You have a hard time proving that the product caused you commercial loss if the allegedly injurious product was not sold commercially.
Not really - you just have to get a bunch of affadavits from developers willing to say that they decided not to buy your product because there was a free implementation (using your patented technology without a valid license) available. The way courts are ruling on things nowadays, that would probably be enough to argue that you "lost" that sale somehow.
2) The original author is almost always -not- the only author and often have contributed a minority of code, meaning you may need to involve all parties (authors) in the action and if they can get separate trials it becomes much more expensive.
Expense is a minor issue if you are a big company & your main goal is to crush competition, especially if you are trying to crush individuals who can't afford to mount a significant defense. Many of those big companies have teams of lawyers sitting around on retainer. If they have some free time, might as well give them something useful to do - like crushing the competition.
3) If you go after the "little guy" or worse after -every- contributor, it is a public relations disaster. Think SCO and make it even more aggravating to your customer base since at least SCO was going after commercial competition.
They just have to pick & choose their targets so that it doesn't bother the majority of their customers. Most of the customers will have the attitude "those idiots shouldn't have violated the big company's patents - what did you expect would happen?", and the public spectacle of geeky-looking engineers weeping as their life is destroyed will discourage other little wannabe competitors from taking their place.
I'm beginning to think that at sometime in the future, open-sourcers might have to use an anonymous-distribution system like Freenet to keep from presenting themselves as a target from corporate retribution. You'll have to check all the comments & ids inside the code (and in any compiled binaries) too, to make sure you don't give yourself away.
The conventions are more than a political rally, they are part of the election process. Why in the world would you think it's OK to disrupt the election process?
The conventions _should_ be just political rallies - really big, publicized ones, but rallies nonetheless. To the degree that they are officially supported by the government, just indicates how thoroughly the two primary parties have established their control over the U.S. government.
Frankly, all that stuff done under the guise of "encouraging public participation" - having the government pay for primaries, convention support, etc, should be illegal. As with its relationship to religion, the government should be party-blind - it shouldn't be allowed to provide any direct support to only 2 parties over the myriad of other potential representative groups.
If parties want to have a primary, fine - they have to pay for it themselves. (They're choosing their own damn candidate, why shouldn't they have to pay for it?!)
A person for personal freedom and more government programs is a liberal. A person for minimal government intrusion in economic life and more intruusion in personal life is a conservative.
I always thought those labels were being abused in the political sense - to me, a liberal is someone who follows a live-and-let-live policy (I don't give a damn what you do in your bedroom, as long as you don't look into mine), whereas a conservative is someone who tries to maintain the status quo (and is willing to use the government to enforce that). (Maintaining status quo also implies maintaining an existing economic class structure.)
The way you describe liberals, sounds more to me like a mix of liberal & "progressives" (trying to use the power of the government to solve social & economic problems).
N. Korea would not be hurt by a counter cyber attack
Actually, if hacking from NK is determined to be a problem, the most likely solution would be to cut off all access to the Internet from NK (I doubt they have too many redundant connections to the rest of the world). At that point, all the training that those "highly skilled" hackers received will be pretty much worthless, and the rest of the Internet will go about its business.
There are litterally thousands of steps involved using a variety of techniques specific to those sensors and the way they are combined. The odds that anyone else in the world is even close to the same approach are infinitessimal.
Absolute bull indeed.
While _you_ might perceive a large system as being indivisibly complex, by the time a good engineer gets done breaking it down into small processes, there aren't many pieces left that are truly innovative. In fact, a good engineer would probably be highly skeptical about the success of a project which depended on too many implementations which _weren't_ tried-and-true solutions.
Even with the contrived example you put together, if you described in detail each individual part of the process you are trying to accomplish: "we've got these types of sensors, they deliver this type of data, we're trying to extract this type of information", I can almost guarantee that different engineers are going to have very "standard" ways of solving that problem which will be completely obvious to each other.
Will you start feel withdrawal in the afternoon or evening, that is, your body asking for more coffee?
I've read somewhere that caffeine is also used as a mild pain reliever, which makes establishing whether or not it is addictive on a personal level somewhat confusing - did that headache show up because you stopped using the caffeine, or was the caffeine just covering up the headache while you were taking it?
So if you are thinking that the quad shot Americano (espresso and water) you get to impress you buddies is some superdrink then just put on a dress and change you name to Sally.
While it isn't as strong as a 4-cup equivalent of "normal" coffee, a quad-shot espresso still has enough caffeine to give you a decent buzz. (Yes, I have done the comparison:-)
That is about as far removed from the 'manly' coffee my dad drank in the navy that you can get and still call it the same drink.
Gah - "Navy coffee"! If this is the same stuff that one of my coworkers prepared and called Navy coffee - about 6 times the recommended amount of "Folgers" (or whatever cheapie instant equivalent was available), and allowed to boil down on the heating plate for 3-4 hours before consumption. (Apparently this "cooking" time was important to make sure that all of the essential coffee-flavoring oils were made rancid.) I guess you could call it manly - I called it a substitute wood stainer.
The engineers talk about this kind of stuff all the time - but the management always manages to put the kibosh on the ideas before it can get out of the brainstorming stage. Anything which might cause a major upheaval in NASA's internal bureaucracy structures is to be terminated with extreme prejudice:-(
Not sure whether you felt that article was an indictment of Kerry or not.
When you take into account the context that the article describes for each "flip" or "flop" position, then Kerry's reasoning for each position seems pretty "reasonable". I would definitely call it spin when the Bush administration leaves out that context, and repeatedly beats the public over the head with the simplified version of both positions.
Looking at the corresponding Slate article for Bush, _his_ flip/flops seem much more serious. In one, he says he'll go to the Security Council to see what they'd say. When it doesn't look like it will turn out the way he wanted, he doesn't bother waiting for the results - he goes straight to unilateral military action. In the other, he says he has a strong commitment to free trade. Then he turns around & implements a set of trade tariffs.
Unlike the Kerry "flip/flop", even when you take into account the context described in the article, it's still pretty apparent that often what Bush says & what he does aren't really related.
Of course, as far as I can tell, Slate isn't exactly a bastion of conservatism, so it could be argued that they have biased the explanation of their context to make Bush look bad. The overall pattern of decision-making pretty much fits the impression I've formed about both candidates from stuff I've read about them in the past, however.
I do not think, however, that this is a good time to take away the tools that the FBI and other agencies need to protect us
As long as you don't automatically _trust_ the "FBI and other agencies" to tell you what tools they need "to protect you". As a policy maker, you've got to take each request for power & balance it against the civil liberties that you're going to lose by implementing it. If there is significant potential for abuse, you've got to set up a truly effective & independent means of catching & punishing those "rogue elements" who might abuse that additional power.
Otherwise, that power _will_ be abused, and as the people using that additional power start taking it for granted (and are confident that they will never suffer any negative consequences for using such power), the abuses will grow until flagrant violations of civil liberties are commonplace.
Those senators of course included your beloved John Kerry.
I can only imagine the spin the Bush administration would be putting out about Kerry if he _had_ voted against the PATRIOT bill, considering what they've done with his "for-and-against" war bill vote: "Senator Kerry deliberately voted to help the terrorists." *sigh*
laws (and the accumulated federal code) are just about overwhelming, and have unintended consequences.
I believe this indicates a systemic problem - like the grotesque growth of spaghetti code in a legacy application. ("We don't know how the insides work anymore, so we'll keep building wrappers around everything to try and keep it from getting out of control.")
About the only thing I think the founders forgot when they tried to build a system of checks & balances was some kind of automatic expiration process for laws that aren't "maintained" anymore. There should've been some kind of mechanism that would force the legislators to keep reviewing existing laws, and to let them expire if the legislators didn't think it was worth keeping them around. If such a mechanism were required, I bet legislators would be a lot more focused on keeping the legal code "maintainable".
But the point of patents (and copyright) was to protect the individual from the industry.
Well, it looks like it didn't work. Time to clean up the mess & try something else.
Frankly, though, it doesn't really benefit society to allow any inventor, large or small, to keep an idea locked up for 17+ years while they try and figure out how to make a buck off it, especially if they're suppressing the half-a-dozen of other implementations that other individuals/companies came up with independently.
If you want to have a steady stream of inventions to help society, then use tax money to do research & development in both basic & applied science, creating public-domain information that any individual/company can use to help with their own businesses. This will have a much bigger beneficial effect for society than arbitrarily restricting the flow of ideas within it.
Oh dear, I've been put in my place. Your logic is quite obviously irrefutable & I have no chance against your superior intellect.
Oh wait a minute, _what_ logic?! All I've seen from you is an emotional argument of why you don't like Kerry solely based on your assumption that you know how to run a campaign better than he does (and your sole criteria seems to be whether he's kowtowing to _your_ particular whims), with no attempt at even _trying_ to analyze why a rational politican might be acting the way he is.
I have a much better, and more honest, answer. He doesn't have any specific policies.
Yep, yep, you sure know what you're talking about! *snicker*
Without a patent system, industry has no point to develop a product.
Yes they do. It's called making money. They will create ideas to help their business, or their competitors will eat them alive. The only difference is, instead of trying to make money based on a government-enforced monopoly of ideas, they'll have to make money by providing actual goods or services to their customers.
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Well, unless you breath particles of it somehow. There's no dead skin in your lungs (unless you're a heavy smoker).
And if they're willing to blindly run a.reg file on their system, they've demonstrated they'll run anything you ask them to - follow up with a Trojan (disguised as a thank you ecard) and pwn their system.
How far would a terrorist, or even a normal murderer or rapist, get in a well-armed society?
About as far as the falsely-accused terrorist, murder or rapist. There's a good reason why most civilized societies pick the "rule of law" over the rule of heavily-armed mobs (otherwise known as anarchy).
You're trying to tell me that a link to a PDF with some detailed information is too much to place on a website?
For a politician, yes. Giving too much information to the public & your critics is even worse than not giving enough information.
I'm not saying I'm happy about the reasoning, but I can understand why politicians do it.
there's no way in hell I'll vote for a candidate who hasn't clearly outlined his policies.
So you don't vote?
The only real clue you're going to get about any politician's policies is by who or what issues they've supported in the past (and for some politicans who are "for sale", you will only be able to guess what they're going to do by who is giving them the most money at the moment).
If you can't be bothered to do a little research about your choices (most of which is done for you on various web sites), then the democracy is better off if you don't take part in the voting proces.
Because his web site is just there for the media - the media (and the people who read the media) read his web site for sound bites (where the concept of sound bites can be extended to "catchy phrases"). The web site is just part of his campaign - it isn't to his advantage to put anything "complicated" on it, where his opponents will pull stuff out of it & write about it out of context.
If you really want to know what & how he thinks, you're going to have to get into a deep & long, face-to-face conversation with him, in a way that won't put him in "campaign" mode. Debate between the candidates would probably be a good idea, but in its limited for-TV form, probably quite useless except judging how comfortable the candidates are in front of a camera.
Since your typical voter isn't going to get a chance to have such a conversation for him, or to even observe such a conversation (since the media can't seem to report such things w/o reducing everything down to "sound bites"), all you can really fairly do is judge the candidates by their history - they handled situations in the past.
As far as I can tell, Bush Jr. has failed in just about everything major he has tried to do (and then was protected from consequences by his family), except for grabbing the Presidency (and even that wasn't a "clean" victory). Kerry seems to be quite methodical & analytical (even for very complex issues), and aggressive where he needs to be (military behavior). Unfortunately, he doesn't really have the charisma that he needs to easily overcome the partisan polarization that Newt, Bush & Co. have implanted firmly in American society.
However, Hitler had accidentally stumbled upon the idea of counter-cyclical economic policy--a government should spend big to get out of a depression, and save up during good times.
Too bad our politicans like doing the first thing, but don't like doing the second.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really - you just have to get a bunch of affadavits from developers willing to say that they decided not to buy your product because there was a free implementation (using your patented technology without a valid license) available. The way courts are ruling on things nowadays, that would probably be enough to argue that you "lost" that sale somehow.
Expense is a minor issue if you are a big company & your main goal is to crush competition, especially if you are trying to crush individuals who can't afford to mount a significant defense. Many of those big companies have teams of lawyers sitting around on retainer. If they have some free time, might as well give them something useful to do - like crushing the competition.
They just have to pick & choose their targets so that it doesn't bother the majority of their customers. Most of the customers will have the attitude "those idiots shouldn't have violated the big company's patents - what did you expect would happen?", and the public spectacle of geeky-looking engineers weeping as their life is destroyed will discourage other little wannabe competitors from taking their place.
I'm beginning to think that at sometime in the future, open-sourcers might have to use an anonymous-distribution system like Freenet to keep from presenting themselves as a target from corporate retribution. You'll have to check all the comments & ids inside the code (and in any compiled binaries) too, to make sure you don't give yourself away.
The conventions _should_ be just political rallies - really big, publicized ones, but rallies nonetheless. To the degree that they are officially supported by the government, just indicates how thoroughly the two primary parties have established their control over the U.S. government.
Frankly, all that stuff done under the guise of "encouraging public participation" - having the government pay for primaries, convention support, etc, should be illegal. As with its relationship to religion, the government should be party-blind - it shouldn't be allowed to provide any direct support to only 2 parties over the myriad of other potential representative groups.
If parties want to have a primary, fine - they have to pay for it themselves. (They're choosing their own damn candidate, why shouldn't they have to pay for it?!)
I always thought those labels were being abused in the political sense - to me, a liberal is someone who follows a live-and-let-live policy (I don't give a damn what you do in your bedroom, as long as you don't look into mine), whereas a conservative is someone who tries to maintain the status quo (and is willing to use the government to enforce that). (Maintaining status quo also implies maintaining an existing economic class structure.)
The way you describe liberals, sounds more to me like a mix of liberal & "progressives" (trying to use the power of the government to solve social & economic problems).
Actually, if hacking from NK is determined to be a problem, the most likely solution would be to cut off all access to the Internet from NK (I doubt they have too many redundant connections to the rest of the world). At that point, all the training that those "highly skilled" hackers received will be pretty much worthless, and the rest of the Internet will go about its business.
Absolute bull indeed.
While _you_ might perceive a large system as being indivisibly complex, by the time a good engineer gets done breaking it down into small processes, there aren't many pieces left that are truly innovative. In fact, a good engineer would probably be highly skeptical about the success of a project which depended on too many implementations which _weren't_ tried-and-true solutions.
Even with the contrived example you put together, if you described in detail each individual part of the process you are trying to accomplish: "we've got these types of sensors, they deliver this type of data, we're trying to extract this type of information", I can almost guarantee that different engineers are going to have very "standard" ways of solving that problem which will be completely obvious to each other.
I've read somewhere that caffeine is also used as a mild pain reliever, which makes establishing whether or not it is addictive on a personal level somewhat confusing - did that headache show up because you stopped using the caffeine, or was the caffeine just covering up the headache while you were taking it?
While it isn't as strong as a 4-cup equivalent of "normal" coffee, a quad-shot espresso still has enough caffeine to give you a decent buzz. (Yes, I have done the comparison :-)
Gah - "Navy coffee"! If this is the same stuff that one of my coworkers prepared and called Navy coffee - about 6 times the recommended amount of "Folgers" (or whatever cheapie instant equivalent was available), and allowed to boil down on the heating plate for 3-4 hours before consumption. (Apparently this "cooking" time was important to make sure that all of the essential coffee-flavoring oils were made rancid.) I guess you could call it manly - I called it a substitute wood stainer.
Are you including state-sponsored terrorism? Or does that not count?
Of all the places that I'd want something to produce scent, it definitely wouldn't be of a porn site...
The engineers talk about this kind of stuff all the time - but the management always manages to put the kibosh on the ideas before it can get out of the brainstorming stage. Anything which might cause a major upheaval in NASA's internal bureaucracy structures is to be terminated with extreme prejudice :-(
I think that, as long as the thieves know what they have to get through, there are easy ways to break through all of these materials.
Not sure whether you felt that article was an indictment of Kerry or not.
When you take into account the context that the article describes for each "flip" or "flop" position, then Kerry's reasoning for each position seems pretty "reasonable". I would definitely call it spin when the Bush administration leaves out that context, and repeatedly beats the public over the head with the simplified version of both positions.
Looking at the corresponding Slate article for Bush, _his_ flip/flops seem much more serious. In one, he says he'll go to the Security Council to see what they'd say. When it doesn't look like it will turn out the way he wanted, he doesn't bother waiting for the results - he goes straight to unilateral military action. In the other, he says he has a strong commitment to free trade. Then he turns around & implements a set of trade tariffs.
Unlike the Kerry "flip/flop", even when you take into account the context described in the article, it's still pretty apparent that often what Bush says & what he does aren't really related.
Of course, as far as I can tell, Slate isn't exactly a bastion of conservatism, so it could be argued that they have biased the explanation of their context to make Bush look bad. The overall pattern of decision-making pretty much fits the impression I've formed about both candidates from stuff I've read about them in the past, however.
As long as you don't automatically _trust_ the "FBI and other agencies" to tell you what tools they need "to protect you". As a policy maker, you've got to take each request for power & balance it against the civil liberties that you're going to lose by implementing it. If there is significant potential for abuse, you've got to set up a truly effective & independent means of catching & punishing those "rogue elements" who might abuse that additional power.
Otherwise, that power _will_ be abused, and as the people using that additional power start taking it for granted (and are confident that they will never suffer any negative consequences for using such power), the abuses will grow until flagrant violations of civil liberties are commonplace.
I can only imagine the spin the Bush administration would be putting out about Kerry if he _had_ voted against the PATRIOT bill, considering what they've done with his "for-and-against" war bill vote: "Senator Kerry deliberately voted to help the terrorists." *sigh*
I believe this indicates a systemic problem - like the grotesque growth of spaghetti code in a legacy application. ("We don't know how the insides work anymore, so we'll keep building wrappers around everything to try and keep it from getting out of control.")
About the only thing I think the founders forgot when they tried to build a system of checks & balances was some kind of automatic expiration process for laws that aren't "maintained" anymore. There should've been some kind of mechanism that would force the legislators to keep reviewing existing laws, and to let them expire if the legislators didn't think it was worth keeping them around. If such a mechanism were required, I bet legislators would be a lot more focused on keeping the legal code "maintainable".
Well, it looks like it didn't work. Time to clean up the mess & try something else.
Frankly, though, it doesn't really benefit society to allow any inventor, large or small, to keep an idea locked up for 17+ years while they try and figure out how to make a buck off it, especially if they're suppressing the half-a-dozen of other implementations that other individuals/companies came up with independently.
If you want to have a steady stream of inventions to help society, then use tax money to do research & development in both basic & applied science, creating public-domain information that any individual/company can use to help with their own businesses. This will have a much bigger beneficial effect for society than arbitrarily restricting the flow of ideas within it.
Oh dear, I've been put in my place. Your logic is quite obviously irrefutable & I have no chance against your superior intellect.
Oh wait a minute, _what_ logic?! All I've seen from you is an emotional argument of why you don't like Kerry solely based on your assumption that you know how to run a campaign better than he does (and your sole criteria seems to be whether he's kowtowing to _your_ particular whims), with no attempt at even _trying_ to analyze why a rational politican might be acting the way he is.
Yep, yep, you sure know what you're talking about! *snicker*
Yes they do. It's called making money. They will create ideas to help their business, or their competitors will eat them alive. The only difference is, instead of trying to make money based on a government-enforced monopoly of ideas, they'll have to make money by providing actual goods or services to their customers.
Well, unless you breath particles of it somehow. There's no dead skin in your lungs (unless you're a heavy smoker).
And if they're willing to blindly run a .reg file on their system, they've demonstrated they'll run anything you ask them to - follow up with a Trojan (disguised as a thank you ecard) and pwn their system.
No longer true.
Now it's: Republicans--Whatever the problem, make sure our buddies get more money.
About as far as the falsely-accused terrorist, murder or rapist. There's a good reason why most civilized societies pick the "rule of law" over the rule of heavily-armed mobs (otherwise known as anarchy).
For a politician, yes. Giving too much information to the public & your critics is even worse than not giving enough information.
I'm not saying I'm happy about the reasoning, but I can understand why politicians do it.
So you don't vote?
The only real clue you're going to get about any politician's policies is by who or what issues they've supported in the past (and for some politicans who are "for sale", you will only be able to guess what they're going to do by who is giving them the most money at the moment).
If you can't be bothered to do a little research about your choices (most of which is done for you on various web sites), then the democracy is better off if you don't take part in the voting proces.
Because his web site is just there for the media - the media (and the people who read the media) read his web site for sound bites (where the concept of sound bites can be extended to "catchy phrases"). The web site is just part of his campaign - it isn't to his advantage to put anything "complicated" on it, where his opponents will pull stuff out of it & write about it out of context.
If you really want to know what & how he thinks, you're going to have to get into a deep & long, face-to-face conversation with him, in a way that won't put him in "campaign" mode. Debate between the candidates would probably be a good idea, but in its limited for-TV form, probably quite useless except judging how comfortable the candidates are in front of a camera.
Since your typical voter isn't going to get a chance to have such a conversation for him, or to even observe such a conversation (since the media can't seem to report such things w/o reducing everything down to "sound bites"), all you can really fairly do is judge the candidates by their history - they handled situations in the past.
As far as I can tell, Bush Jr. has failed in just about everything major he has tried to do (and then was protected from consequences by his family), except for grabbing the Presidency (and even that wasn't a "clean" victory). Kerry seems to be quite methodical & analytical (even for very complex issues), and aggressive where he needs to be (military behavior). Unfortunately, he doesn't really have the charisma that he needs to easily overcome the partisan polarization that Newt, Bush & Co. have implanted firmly in American society.
Too bad our politicans like doing the first thing, but don't like doing the second.