The primary principles of patent reform are switching the U.S. system from "first to invent" to "first to file" by replacing legal challenges to patents with a more administrative challenge process, and by practically eliminating injunctions through which a patent holder forces an infringer to stop using his intellectual property.
Much of the rest of the world already uses "first to file" patent systems. Of course, much of the rest of the world also ignores or gleefully violates patent law. "First to file" gives the advantage to any organization that has a good administrative system in place. Absent-minded inventors lose in this system, which also encourages patenting anything and everything just in case.
First of all, "the rest of the world" has had strong patent protection a lot longer than the US; US companies were infamous for flaunting patents.
Now, as for "first to invent", that's just bad policy. The patent system is supposed to encourage disclosure of inventions; if you don't disclose, you shouldn't get patent protection. But "first to invent" lets people sit on their ideas without disclosing them, and then sue people who actually went through the trouble of getting a patent. That just plain sucks.
It's just my opinion, but "first to file" looks like a good way to screw small inventors, of which I know quite a few.
Small inventors are already screwed under the current system; first to invent may help small inventors a little bit in a few cases, but it's a band aid on severed artery. In fact, you can bet that companies are already gaming the system with it, and that it's only going to get worse.
If we want to help small inventors (and I'm all for that, being one myself), we need to rethink fundamentally what we want patents to do and what we want patents to be. But a good first step is to make patent law more rational, and this bill seems to do that.
Changes the current "first to invent" standard to "first to file," which means patent rights go to the first inventor to file for a patent who can provide sufficient evidence for a claimed invention.
Biggest mistake, in my opinion. All of the patent infringement cases
I think it's not a mistake at all; my question would be: what took them so long? The patent system isn't supposed to reward invention, it's supposed to reward disclosure of inventions. If people sit on their inventions because they know they can still get a patent unter first-to-invent, then that rewards the kind of behavior that the patent system was supposed to discourage in the first place.
Reduces the scope of willful infringement by raising the standard of proof required, and limits the amount of damages a patentholder can collect from an infringer
Like any damage caps, this is good and bad. Good for the little guy getting sued by MegaCorp., terrible for the little company MegaCorp. is doing patent infringement on.
I suspect that the little guy will still get more than enough money under this from MegaCorp. But overall, this reduces risk, in particular for little guys, and that's a good thing.
Those DRM measures will do nothing to deter people who pirate video content commercially. It just isn't hard to hook up a high-speed A/D converter to a monitor (pirates don't have to worry about whether the monitor goes with their furniture, just whether it's easy to open and access) and reconstruct the video signal. The fact that they may get one generation of analog generation doesn't matter to them at all--one generation of degradation is basically invisible.
The whole DRM issue is a combination of greed, stupidity, and a desire for government control of everything. It won't protect the video, but it will let government turn lots more people into criminals. And for the privilege, we all have to pay for new monitors and video cards and all that. It's disgusting.
I'm still waiting to see whether we will be permitted to publish open, unprotected HD content; forbidding that would be the ultimate in government control and media monopolies.
This will then force the user to focus on the new information without being able to interact or be distracted by what is now backgrounded.
I think we have mostly Apple to thank for that kind of overexposure, since they were primarily responsible for introducing overburdened user interfaces with title bars, lots of little buttons, menu bars, desk accessories, etc. With Konfabulator, Dashboard, and Expose, we are actually getting back to the kind of window management styles that were popular before Apple came out with that. However, it will be a long road back, given that everybody is so used to it now.
Due to the various interactions between programs from multiple vendors, they may get blamed for system instability if there is a negative interaction with another app that a user has installed.
Welcome to the real world: that's what happens when you deliver desktop software to real users.
Microsoft, since they percieve Google to be a threat are very likely going to make this Dekstop thing break.
There are limits to what Microsoft can do technically without annoying a lot of other developers, and they are under legal scrutiny. Also, what's the risk to Google? It's not like GDS is the core of their business. If Microsoft did anything to break GDS, the cost and fallout to Microsoft would be much worse than the loss of business to Google.
Finally, they'd be better off designing a replacement shell for Windows if they really want to have a "Google Desktop".
If Google did that, they would really be entering dangerous territory and put themselves at risk. No, creating a standard Windows application is their safest bet.
Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification. [...] Now that Atom's attempt at replacing RSS has fallen flat, the syndication arena will likely see significant innovation and progress.
I suppose that's the usual Microsoft view, which means that we can only have innovation once Microsoft has moved and picked a standard that's substantially inferior to the state of the art.
I mean, the differences between RSS and Atom aren't that big (they are both XML), but within those constraints, RSS still manages to get a bunch of things wrong relative to Atom (see here for a discussion).
If you use System A for a couple of years and then use System B for 10 days, you are very likely to conclude that System B is far worse than System A. That has nothing to do with absolute quality of the two systems, it has to do with learning each of them. Even more so, it has to do with finding out about all the different add-ons, tricks, and applications that make each system usable.
If you are considering switching, your best bet is to do it gradually.
Start with switching to major cross-platform applications: Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse, etc. For programming, choose Java, Mono, Perl, Ruby, or Python. To get familiar with the UNIX command line (always useful), get a copy of Cygwin. and start using it. After you have gotten used to those applications, switching to Linux (or moving back and forth) will be much simpler and less disruptive.
It's amazing how many day-to-day operations require the inadvertent use of Windows in our daily lives."
Well, first of all, you won't be using Windows on your desktop "inadvertently".
Now, "require" is a pretty fuzzy term. There are some proprietary formats you can't easily access if you don't run Windows. What does that mean? It means that you have a choice: you can license Windows or you can make a choice not to access those formats and live with the consequences. In some lines of business, the consequences are nil, in others, they are significant.
As a home user, however, there is never any requirement to use Windows: it is trivial to function without running Windows, and it's still pretty easy to function even without a PC.
Now, the real question is: is this good for the community?
As long as it is under a reasonable open source license, it doesn't matter: the non-corporate version will continue to be developed and enhanced as long as users want it.
Remember: open source is the free market answer to corporate inefficiencies; it is succeeding because it is more efficient than proprietary software development.
I can't even tell the difference between VGA and DVI. And the only compatibility difference I have ever noticed (YMMV) between VGA and DVI is that some video modes are not available through DVI.
I suspect this new standard is driven by a desire for forcing DRM on users, not compatibility or meaningful improvements in quality. And the display manufacturers love it because everybody has to buy everything again. Unless we get DisplayPort-to-VGA adapters, of course...
Nah. For gravity, it's (kindof) been measured. It looks like it's the speed of light. Kinda. There are a couple caveats there. But it (kinda) was measured.
People have attempted to measure it, but the trouble is that there doesn't seem to be agreement on whether those results are correct. Until there is, the question remains open.
For strong and weak nuclear, they don't propagate at all (much more than a femtometer).
So?
The weak nuclear force is mediated by a massive boson, anyway, so it won't propagate at the speed of light at all.
While that is a plausible hypothesis, it's not a fact until it has actually been determined experimentally.
Sky rocketing markets, wars over energy rights, mass unemployment and rioting as a result of that unemployment
Except that those prognostications are utterly wrong: a reduction in energy usage doesn't produce unemployment or result in wars or rioting. If anything at all, in increases employment, both in the development of more energy efficient technologies, and ultimately in the service sector (where automation is replaced with manual labor).
Yes we have a tremendous amount to lose if we're wrong.
No, we (as in "the people") only have to gain from lowered carbon emissions: we get a cleaner environment, less risk from global warming, reduced chance of conflict over energy, and more employment. Who stands to lose are the existing energy companies and manufacturers, who have a huge investment in old energy technologies and production methods; any change to the status quo threatens their business big time.
I have no trouble accepting that carbon emissions could cause warming, however the evidence isn't there yet.
That's a highly imprecise statement. Are you claiming that there is no evidence? Are you saying that there is evidence, but it isn't strong enough to warrant action? Or are you saying that there is evidence, but it doesn't prove the theory beyond a reasonable doubt?
So, what level of evidence of anthropogenic global warming would you be satisfied with for taking strong immediate action? Do you have to be 100% certain? 90% certain? 50% certain? 10% certain? 1% certain?
Given the downside of global warming--hundreds of millions of people displaced, millions killed, and large parts of the most productive lands becoming uninhabitable--even if there is only a 1% chance given the evidence as it is, it warrants taking strong, immediate action. We spend much less on far sillier risks in daily life.
As far as decision makers and the public are concerned, the message that the media are presenting is accutate: global warming is sufficiently well proven to warrant action.
Information flow (see: Steven Hawking's theories) cannot propogate at faster than the speed of light, or causality is violated and we have (dead virgins/future grandfathers) all over the place.
Hawking didn't come up with that idea; why are you giving him credit for it?
All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear (not Nukular; bite me, George) forces propogate at the speed of light in their reference frame.
That has only been demonstrated for electromagnetism; for the other forces, it's a hypothesis.
Everyone say it together with me: "Phase velocity vs Group velocity" There are no photons in this experiment that are traveling faster than the speed of light.
That does seem like the most likley explanation, but if it is, why is this being hyped in the press? We have had experiments showing FTL phase velocity for decades, and they are useless for information transmission.
It's the US that's broke: it's borrowing half a trillion dollars per year abroad to finance its lifestyle and military.
As for following through, the EU has completed several Mars missions and the Galileo satellites are being readied for launch at the end of 2005. Europe also has a commercial space program with considerable lift capacity.
Researchers are looking into ultrasound, electric stimulation and wind pressure as potential technologies for touch. Such a TV would have a wide range of potential uses.
It has really only one use that most users would care about, and for those users, there are also low-frequency ("vibration") versions available.
Other than that, I think most people are grateful that they don't smell the smells at a football game with a zoom lens.
If everybody thought this way, then psychopaths would not rise so easily to the tops of power structures in both business and government.
If everybody thought that way, then everybody would be a sociopath. What sets apart normal people from sociopaths is that normal people trust in each other, forgive each other, and cooperate with each other and don't think everybody around them is out to get them.
There clearly are true sociopaths in corporations. But the solution to the problems they create is not psychology or gossip, the solution is to strictly enforce white collar crime laws, and to strengthen those laws where they are not adequate.
This is just about not letting sociopaths be in charge of other people
And who gets to determine whether someone is a "sociopath"? You? Some psychologist? The government?
in exactly the same way that pedophiles aren't allowed to be teachers
Pedophiles can and do become teachers all the time and there is nothing we can do to stop that; the people who can't become teachers are convicted pedophiles. By analogy, convicted sociopaths (e.g., violent criminals) are already being kept out of positions of authority.
No one has a right to be a CEO or a politician.
In our society, everybody has a right to the same kinds of opportunities, unless and until a court of law determines beyond a reasonable doubt that they are a menace to society.
Does this place you at risk? You bet. Living in a democracy and assuming that people are innocent until proven guilt isn't risk-free. But on balance, it's a whole lot better than the alternative: Nazi Germany locked people up because the population considered those people a threat, and you can see what happened there.
Move right along, there's nothing new to see here. A bunch of enterprising scientists have found a new name for the gradual maturation of biotechnology and genetic engineering.
There is neat stuff happening in this area, but there was neat stuff happening before people gave it a new name.
Between "terrorist", "child pornographer", and now "psychopath", people should be able to get anybody locked up they don't like. Those labels are just so much more convenient than the more traditional "witch", "Jew", "homosexual", and "communist"--even easier to apply and even harder to disprove.
Sure, it would be great if we could identify dangerous people before they can do harm. But centuries of experience with that have shown that giving government and society the power to label and lock up people in that way is even more dangerous than the people themselves.
They poked tiny holes into cells with a laser. Calling that "cell surgery" doesn't make it surgery; it's just operating a scientific instrument remotely over the Internet. People have been doing that for years.
Yahoo's strategy of late seems to be to look around for new areas where some new or expanding company has found an up and coming IT market, and then drop in beside them with a me-too product.
That's the strategy of most successful big businesses. The nicer ones at least buy startups, and they still invest in research themselves (even if a lot of their products don't come from it).
I fail to see where the "VoIP market" is supposed to be. The software is free, you don't need any central servers for VoIP, and you are already paying someone for your Internet connectivity.
The only services you might pay for are VoIP-to-POTS gateways (to talk to those stuck in the 20th century), and directory services. The former may have a brief growth phase but then will gradually disappear. The latter can be piggy-backed on all sorts of existing free services.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, "the rest of the world" has had strong patent protection a lot longer than the US; US companies were infamous for flaunting patents.
Now, as for "first to invent", that's just bad policy. The patent system is supposed to encourage disclosure of inventions; if you don't disclose, you shouldn't get patent protection. But "first to invent" lets people sit on their ideas without disclosing them, and then sue people who actually went through the trouble of getting a patent. That just plain sucks.
It's just my opinion, but "first to file" looks like a good way to screw small inventors, of which I know quite a few.
Small inventors are already screwed under the current system; first to invent may help small inventors a little bit in a few cases, but it's a band aid on severed artery. In fact, you can bet that companies are already gaming the system with it, and that it's only going to get worse.
If we want to help small inventors (and I'm all for that, being one myself), we need to rethink fundamentally what we want patents to do and what we want patents to be. But a good first step is to make patent law more rational, and this bill seems to do that.
Biggest mistake, in my opinion. All of the patent infringement cases
I think it's not a mistake at all; my question would be: what took them so long? The patent system isn't supposed to reward invention, it's supposed to reward disclosure of inventions. If people sit on their inventions because they know they can still get a patent unter first-to-invent, then that rewards the kind of behavior that the patent system was supposed to discourage in the first place.
Like any damage caps, this is good and bad. Good for the little guy getting sued by MegaCorp., terrible for the little company MegaCorp. is doing patent infringement on.
I suspect that the little guy will still get more than enough money under this from MegaCorp. But overall, this reduces risk, in particular for little guys, and that's a good thing.
Those DRM measures will do nothing to deter people who pirate video content commercially. It just isn't hard to hook up a high-speed A/D converter to a monitor (pirates don't have to worry about whether the monitor goes with their furniture, just whether it's easy to open and access) and reconstruct the video signal. The fact that they may get one generation of analog generation doesn't matter to them at all--one generation of degradation is basically invisible.
The whole DRM issue is a combination of greed, stupidity, and a desire for government control of everything. It won't protect the video, but it will let government turn lots more people into criminals. And for the privilege, we all have to pay for new monitors and video cards and all that. It's disgusting.
I'm still waiting to see whether we will be permitted to publish open, unprotected HD content; forbidding that would be the ultimate in government control and media monopolies.
This will then force the user to focus on the new information without being able to interact or be distracted by what is now backgrounded.
I think we have mostly Apple to thank for that kind of overexposure, since they were primarily responsible for introducing overburdened user interfaces with title bars, lots of little buttons, menu bars, desk accessories, etc. With Konfabulator, Dashboard, and Expose, we are actually getting back to the kind of window management styles that were popular before Apple came out with that. However, it will be a long road back, given that everybody is so used to it now.
Due to the various interactions between programs from multiple vendors, they may get blamed for system instability if there is a negative interaction with another app that a user has installed.
Welcome to the real world: that's what happens when you deliver desktop software to real users.
Microsoft, since they percieve Google to be a threat are very likely going to make this Dekstop thing break.
There are limits to what Microsoft can do technically without annoying a lot of other developers, and they are under legal scrutiny. Also, what's the risk to Google? It's not like GDS is the core of their business. If Microsoft did anything to break GDS, the cost and fallout to Microsoft would be much worse than the loss of business to Google.
Finally, they'd be better off designing a replacement shell for Windows if they really want to have a "Google Desktop".
If Google did that, they would really be entering dangerous territory and put themselves at risk. No, creating a standard Windows application is their safest bet.
Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification. [...] Now that Atom's attempt at replacing RSS has fallen flat, the syndication arena will likely see significant innovation and progress.
I suppose that's the usual Microsoft view, which means that we can only have innovation once Microsoft has moved and picked a standard that's substantially inferior to the state of the art.
I mean, the differences between RSS and Atom aren't that big (they are both XML), but within those constraints, RSS still manages to get a bunch of things wrong relative to Atom (see here for a discussion).
If you use System A for a couple of years and then use System B for 10 days, you are very likely to conclude that System B is far worse than System A. That has nothing to do with absolute quality of the two systems, it has to do with learning each of them. Even more so, it has to do with finding out about all the different add-ons, tricks, and applications that make each system usable.
If you are considering switching, your best bet is to do it gradually.
Start with switching to major cross-platform applications: Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse, etc. For programming, choose Java, Mono, Perl, Ruby, or Python. To get familiar with the UNIX command line (always useful), get a copy of Cygwin. and start using it. After you have gotten used to those applications, switching to Linux (or moving back and forth) will be much simpler and less disruptive.
It's amazing how many day-to-day operations require the inadvertent use of Windows in our daily lives."
Well, first of all, you won't be using Windows on your desktop "inadvertently".
Now, "require" is a pretty fuzzy term. There are some proprietary formats you can't easily access if you don't run Windows. What does that mean? It means that you have a choice: you can license Windows or you can make a choice not to access those formats and live with the consequences. In some lines of business, the consequences are nil, in others, they are significant.
As a home user, however, there is never any requirement to use Windows: it is trivial to function without running Windows, and it's still pretty easy to function even without a PC.
That's a nice idea, but the implementation looks like it really sucks.
For now, maybe I'll stick with this or this.
Now, the real question is: is this good for the community?
As long as it is under a reasonable open source license, it doesn't matter: the non-corporate version will continue to be developed and enhanced as long as users want it.
Remember: open source is the free market answer to corporate inefficiencies; it is succeeding because it is more efficient than proprietary software development.
I can't even tell the difference between VGA and DVI. And the only compatibility difference I have ever noticed (YMMV) between VGA and DVI is that some video modes are not available through DVI.
I suspect this new standard is driven by a desire for forcing DRM on users, not compatibility or meaningful improvements in quality. And the display manufacturers love it because everybody has to buy everything again. Unless we get DisplayPort-to-VGA adapters, of course...
Nah. For gravity, it's (kindof) been measured. It looks like it's the speed of light. Kinda. There are a couple caveats there. But it (kinda) was measured.
People have attempted to measure it, but the trouble is that there doesn't seem to be agreement on whether those results are correct. Until there is, the question remains open.
For strong and weak nuclear, they don't propagate at all (much more than a femtometer).
So?
The weak nuclear force is mediated by a massive boson, anyway, so it won't propagate at the speed of light at all.
While that is a plausible hypothesis, it's not a fact until it has actually been determined experimentally.
Sky rocketing markets, wars over energy rights, mass unemployment and rioting as a result of that unemployment
Except that those prognostications are utterly wrong: a reduction in energy usage doesn't produce unemployment or result in wars or rioting. If anything at all, in increases employment, both in the development of more energy efficient technologies, and ultimately in the service sector (where automation is replaced with manual labor).
Yes we have a tremendous amount to lose if we're wrong.
No, we (as in "the people") only have to gain from lowered carbon emissions: we get a cleaner environment, less risk from global warming, reduced chance of conflict over energy, and more employment. Who stands to lose are the existing energy companies and manufacturers, who have a huge investment in old energy technologies and production methods; any change to the status quo threatens their business big time.
I have no trouble accepting that carbon emissions could cause warming, however the evidence isn't there yet.
That's a highly imprecise statement. Are you claiming that there is no evidence? Are you saying that there is evidence, but it isn't strong enough to warrant action? Or are you saying that there is evidence, but it doesn't prove the theory beyond a reasonable doubt?
So, what level of evidence of anthropogenic global warming would you be satisfied with for taking strong immediate action? Do you have to be 100% certain? 90% certain? 50% certain? 10% certain? 1% certain?
Given the downside of global warming--hundreds of millions of people displaced, millions killed, and large parts of the most productive lands becoming uninhabitable--even if there is only a 1% chance given the evidence as it is, it warrants taking strong, immediate action. We spend much less on far sillier risks in daily life.
As far as decision makers and the public are concerned, the message that the media are presenting is accutate: global warming is sufficiently well proven to warrant action.
Information flow (see: Steven Hawking's theories) cannot propogate at faster than the speed of light, or causality is violated and we have (dead virgins/future grandfathers) all over the place.
Hawking didn't come up with that idea; why are you giving him credit for it?
All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear (not Nukular; bite me, George) forces propogate at the speed of light in their reference frame.
That has only been demonstrated for electromagnetism; for the other forces, it's a hypothesis.
Everyone say it together with me: "Phase velocity vs Group velocity" There are no photons in this experiment that are traveling faster than the speed of light.
That does seem like the most likley explanation, but if it is, why is this being hyped in the press? We have had experiments showing FTL phase velocity for decades, and they are useless for information transmission.
It's the US that's broke: it's borrowing half a trillion dollars per year abroad to finance its lifestyle and military.
As for following through, the EU has completed several Mars missions and the Galileo satellites are being readied for launch at the end of 2005. Europe also has a commercial space program with considerable lift capacity.
Researchers are looking into ultrasound, electric stimulation and wind pressure as potential technologies for touch. Such a TV would have a wide range of potential uses.
It has really only one use that most users would care about, and for those users, there are also low-frequency ("vibration") versions available.
Other than that, I think most people are grateful that they don't smell the smells at a football game with a zoom lens.
If everybody thought this way, then psychopaths would not rise so easily to the tops of power structures in both business and government.
If everybody thought that way, then everybody would be a sociopath. What sets apart normal people from sociopaths is that normal people trust in each other, forgive each other, and cooperate with each other and don't think everybody around them is out to get them.
There clearly are true sociopaths in corporations. But the solution to the problems they create is not psychology or gossip, the solution is to strictly enforce white collar crime laws, and to strengthen those laws where they are not adequate.
This is just about not letting sociopaths be in charge of other people
And who gets to determine whether someone is a "sociopath"? You? Some psychologist? The government?
in exactly the same way that pedophiles aren't allowed to be teachers
Pedophiles can and do become teachers all the time and there is nothing we can do to stop that; the people who can't become teachers are convicted pedophiles. By analogy, convicted sociopaths (e.g., violent criminals) are already being kept out of positions of authority.
No one has a right to be a CEO or a politician.
In our society, everybody has a right to the same kinds of opportunities, unless and until a court of law determines beyond a reasonable doubt that they are a menace to society.
Does this place you at risk? You bet. Living in a democracy and assuming that people are innocent until proven guilt isn't risk-free. But on balance, it's a whole lot better than the alternative: Nazi Germany locked people up because the population considered those people a threat, and you can see what happened there.
Move right along, there's nothing new to see here. A bunch of enterprising scientists have found a new name for the gradual maturation of biotechnology and genetic engineering.
There is neat stuff happening in this area, but there was neat stuff happening before people gave it a new name.
Between "terrorist", "child pornographer", and now "psychopath", people should be able to get anybody locked up they don't like. Those labels are just so much more convenient than the more traditional "witch", "Jew", "homosexual", and "communist"--even easier to apply and even harder to disprove.
Sure, it would be great if we could identify dangerous people before they can do harm. But centuries of experience with that have shown that giving government and society the power to label and lock up people in that way is even more dangerous than the people themselves.
The VoIP-to-POTS gateways are exactly why there is money to be made in VoIP.
Yes, and that market is well covered by several companies. What's Yahoo's contribution?
they would be trading a near 100% reliable voice communication network for a much less reliable one-off ISP gatewaying you to the Internet,
That's a myth. There is nothing "one-off" about IP-based communications, and many ISPs are quite reliable.
They poked tiny holes into cells with a laser. Calling that "cell surgery" doesn't make it surgery; it's just operating a scientific instrument remotely over the Internet. People have been doing that for years.
Yahoo's strategy of late seems to be to look around for new areas where some new or expanding company has found an up and coming IT market, and then drop in beside them with a me-too product.
That's the strategy of most successful big businesses. The nicer ones at least buy startups, and they still invest in research themselves (even if a lot of their products don't come from it).
I fail to see where the "VoIP market" is supposed to be. The software is free, you don't need any central servers for VoIP, and you are already paying someone for your Internet connectivity.
The only services you might pay for are VoIP-to-POTS gateways (to talk to those stuck in the 20th century), and directory services. The former may have a brief growth phase but then will gradually disappear. The latter can be piggy-backed on all sorts of existing free services.