Would we have the Illiad if the Greeks had copyrights? What about the bible? mythological stories? classical theatre plays?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Oh, you didn't mean that, did you. You meant "the lack of Copyrights didn't stop the Illiad from being made". To which my response is: how many Greek sagas were made at that time? How many novels are made now? Even normalizing by population size, we have a far greater production of creative work now than the Greeks did back then. Because unlike back then, where Homer needed a patron to eat, our authors can actually derive income from their handiwork. Thanks to copyrights.
Now to more of your mangled logic:
What if someone had a patent on columns? Chapels? Would your precious, uncopiable Sistine Chapel even existed? Maybe the Church would have waited until the patents had expired, but, by the time that happened, probably Michelangelo would be dead.
I think what you're trying to say is: "If there was a patent on columns, the Sistine chapel may never have been made", e.g., Patents Are Bad.
This betrays an almost incompetent lack of understanding of the history of patents, and why they exist. Patents freed us from trade guilds. A quick refresher for you: for thousands of years, specific trades had secrets which they refused to share with anyone except each other. The masons, the artists, the jugglers. This created a priesthood of knowledge which prevented people from learning about how things work and improving on them. Trade guilds very much existed in the Renaissance. And they have always, nearly universally, been evil. Trade guilds were part of many historically unfortunate things (serfdom society, the hierarchical control via the Catholic Church, denying literacy to anyone but the clergy, etc.) which held back the advancement of society.
Today only a few trade guilds exist: the most famous remaining guild is probably magicians. The rest have gone the way of history largely thanks to the patent system.
In summary: if there were a patent system in the Renaissance, in addition to other modern societal mechanisms, we might have had a lot more Leonardos than the single patron-fed one.
Re:Those are the *primaries*?
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
Dead wrong. Not the least of which is because T-Mobile and Cingular are GSM/TDMA, and Verizon is CDMA. Next you'll be telling me that to get a Mac, you just buy a Windows machine and stick in a Mac RAM SIMM.
Verizon has done whatever it can to prevent users from taking advantage of their own phones. Why? Because with the best coverage, they figure they can mess with their customers and they won't leave.
To whit:
Instead of Java, Verizon has insisted that its phone manufacturers install Qualcomm's noxious "BREW" standard, with its awful GUI and lack of portability. You cannot make a free BREW app. If you want to distribute an app for your company to run on its cell phones, for example, you have to pay Qualcomm and Verizon some serious money.
Various phones Verizon sells can run Java fine before Verizon tinkers with them. But in order to enforce its BREW money-maker, Verizon disables the Java and requires the manufacturer to run BREW instead.
Verizon is also careful to make certain that users cannot add their own ringtones. All ringtones must go through "Get It Now!", Verizon's BREW-based profit center.
Likewise for wallpapers on many (but not all) of the phones.
Verizon has intentionally disabled Bluetooth on a number of phones (like the Motorola v710 and E815). The one phone Verizon has which has full Bluetooth capability (the Nokia 6256i) Verizon refuses to sell in their stores or to repair. Verizon also deleted the Nokia's media player feature and arranged it that the 6256i can upload MP3 files but cannot play them as ringtones. The company has an open policy of refusing to allow perfectly good CDMA phones on its network if they are not broken in these regards.
The article is incorrect. Verizon has always allowed EVDO and RX1TT phones to use its data network. But to do so requires paying Verizon 1.5 cents per KILOBYTE. For those paying attention, that's $15 for a 1MB file. They offer various "plans", stuff like 10MB for $50, and now unlimited for $60. On top of your phone plan: verizon's minimum plan is $40 so you're talking $100 a month for the "faster" cellular data rates. Verizon still offers a 14.4Kbps modem option (actually about 10K) that just uses up your minutes. But it may be phased out.
And the Verizon UI. What can I say? Verizon is trying to force all its phone manufacturers to offer the same BREW-based UI, one which appears to have been invented by chimpanzees.
The reason for all of this is that Verizon wants the phones to be an extension of its cellular service. You must use their phone to use their plan, and thus must pay extra $$$ (big-time) for features that ordinarily you would have free for your phone. Many on/. are too young to remember the last company that did this. It was called AT&T. A long time ago if you wanted to make a phone call you had to rent one of their phones. They were the definition of "monopolistic predatory practice".
the current Oxford English Dictionary, the sole authority on the english language
I laughed out loud when I read that.
The brits haven't been the authority on the english language since the eighteenth century. Practically every addition to the English language in the past century has been from America. We have controlled and continue to control the language, much as the Brits want to make a fuss about it. And thanks to America, English now has a workable punctuation standard.
That aside, I always find it funny to hear Brits go on about the OED: because it is a terrible book. Its lexicography is often wrong, its history is *very* often wrong, and it has no standards whatsoever about what words are English and what aren't. Any lexicographer worth his salt uses Webster's Third Unabridged, which for all its faults (and age) is superior in most every way to the hell-let's-let-WYSIWYG-be-a-word approach that is the OED. Except the OED's use in building a snowball fort of course.
Re:What about C# on Mono
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
It appears you completely misread my posting! What's more, someone moderated a complete misreading as insightful.:-)
Those are the *primaries*?
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
Primaries include Ruby, Python, Groovy, and.NET (C# and VB.NET). Secondary contenders include Perl, Smalltalk, PHP and Lisp, which he summarizes as: "Perl's too loose and too messy, PHP is too close to the HTML, Lisp is not accessible, and Smalltalk wasn't Java".
Allow me to sum up the primaries: slow, slower, hillariously ad-hoc, and owned by Microsoft.
If this is all we got, Java's going to be around for a long, long time.
The decision in that case rested entirely on the 14th Amendment, on the grounds that it had been shown that racially segregated educational facilities could not be equal by their very nature.
The case rested on the court's interpretation of the law, in this case the 14th Amendment. You guys are trying to make it out like the Supremes had nothing to do with all this. They certainly did. If the configuration of the court had been different, Brown might have been settled rather differently.
The law, and certainly the Constitution, is not some fixed-in-stone, black-and-white document which Congress defines and/or modifies and that's that. This is ultraconservative crackpot thinking. The law is a highly vague text that is subject to significant interpretation. That's what the courts are for. They do have an absolutely crucial part in the final result of how a law affects people, no matter how much right-wing nutcases would like to call them activist for doing so.
The Supreme Court had nothing to do with enacting rights for either minorities or women. It was done correctly, through Constitutional amendment and legislation, and not by activist judges.
You had to sneak that in didn't you? Those patents (5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592) are completely and utterly obvious to somebody versed in the art at the time, despite what the airheads at the patent office might like to claim.
I think that is baloney: hindsight is 20/20. And apparently the Supremes think it's baloney as well, at least for part of the NTP claims. So you can go back to your hole now.
Those patents do not protect innovation or hard work in any shape or form, they just protect the USPTO's, and assorted other parasites', gravy train.
Seriously. You know literally nothing about how the USPTO works, right?
Every time an RIM story gets posted here, all we hear about is how evil NTP is, how its patents are going to be invalidated, how the patent system is evil, etc.
What's missed here is that NTP was formed largely because RIM was a first-rate jackass company.
Among NTP's primary shareholders are the actual inventors of the patents. Or perhaps I should say "were", as one of them recently died: RIM kept this bottled up in court that long. These inventors produced actual products at early computer tradeshows which ran email over a sophisticated wireless protocol to a PDA-like device. Sound familiar? The earliest such patents were filed in 1994 based on inventions several years earlier. Let's put this into context: the earliest Newton was in 1993, and the earliest similar device I am aware of was a PCMCIA pager card that could be put into the Newton circa 1995, enabling it to receive (but not send) messages over a pager network. This combination of technologies was both novel and original, and the inventors didn't just make them up to sell patents. But their company foundered.
Then came along RIM. RIM started selling the Blackberry and then started suing the daylights out of its competitors. Surely you remember this. RIM's nickname on The Register was "Lawsuits In Motion". When the original patent holders got wind of what RIM was selling, they realized it was largely a duplication of their patent. And so they contacted RIM and told them they were infringing. That's when RIM refused to return their calls. For a year.
This is not how ordinary companies operate. If someone owns a valid patent on your work, you don't refuse to even talk to them. So NTP was formed basically to force RIM to actually talk.
Legal battle ensues, and out come the slashdotters. NTP's patents are invalid and are getting all knocked down (um, the lynchpin ones are not). NTP is just a holding company to go after people (um, NTP was made to financially enable the original inventors to go after a specific company which was flagrantly violating their patent). Patents are evil (um, you know why patents exist, right? You're familiar with the evil that was the Trade Guild? No, I'm not talking about Star Wars).
RIM was repeatedly reprimanded in court by the judge for all sorts of obnoxious actions. And to top it off, RIM went to congress to ask them to override the judge because they'd given free blackberries to congress, and now wanted to claim that shutting RIM down would put the nation's security in jeopardy. I am not pulling your leg. Only Jack Abramoff could pull off a lobbying stunt more inappropriate.
And now the courts have sided... against the slashdotters! How could the Supremes have not been reading the/. comment stream? What were they thinking?
Short answer: RIM is a nasty, obnoxious company which violated patents and sued people's pants off for things they didn't own. They got what they deserve. Too bad one of the original inventors didn't live long enough to see a dime from them.
Untrue about the video cameras. You are confusing them with camcorders I believe. I meant: video cameras -- things that take video data and route it directly to firewire, which we use for high-end computer vision, robotics, etc. purposes.
As to the hard drives: how much data can, say, a 4500RPM drive pump out? I can say that my firewire 400 drives are slower in getting data to the Mac than my internal Powerbook drive at the same speed. So FW800 would help them, I imagine.
Let's not kid ourselves. OS 9 never had preemptive multitasking.
Late versions of OS 9 had a limited preemptive-ish thread model, but it was never a system-level thing, and the process level was never preemptive. Even if you agreed to go for a preemptive model in the threads you could still screw things up and take control, which rails against the very definition of "preemptive". You could still go crazy and steal all the cycles if you wanted. Background windows got a tiny sliver of time compared to the foreground window. Etc. Preemptive this is not. More importantly, OS 9 had zero memory protection.
One potential use for the MacBook's PC card slot is to add a FireWire 800 port
I believe, but am not certain, that this is incorrect. Firewire provides power as well as data. At least on cardbus and pcmcia, there's not enough juice given for a card to provide this power. If your firewire device gets its power off the bus -- as is the case for many hard drives and high-quality video cameras -- then you're out of luck. You have to plug something in, either the device or possibly a port on the card.
This "news" is a famous medical case which dates from the 1950s. I heard about it in elementary school. I think it is the tiredest piece of information which/. has ever reported on as "News for Nerds".
So I'm offering a contest. I will personally mail $5 to the person who comes up with a piece of "News" on/. that's older and more tired than this one. Whoever finds the oldest piece ever wins.
The rules:
You must respond directly this message, otherwise it doesn't count.
If only a few people respond, I will not mail out the $5, but I will still say who I think won.
I'm the judge and jury. No griping.
The item shouldn't be about something that's old: the news itself should be old.
The news only wins if it's provably old -- you need to provide evidence if it's not self-evident.
I will reply to the winner. To receive the $5 you must reply again giving me some way to identify who you are and send you some $$$. There are various ways to do this: you could post a snail-mail address to send it to; if you are worried people will carpet-bomb your address, we could work out a public-key encryption thingamajigger transaction. If you do not reply in a timely fashion (say, a day), I will go down the list and offer the $5 to the next person.
The author wants to show off an evolutionary computation (genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolution strategies, etc.) package in Java and he picks... jgap? Too simple. IMHO, and I think in the opinion of most EC Java coders, the system to beat is ECJ. [and I know]
How do I put this exactly. The Average American is not as.... above-average as the Average Canadian. Your "reject this ballot" examples run like a who's-who of things Americans have wound up losing entire elections over.
Those crazy rumors. The Freescale MPC7447A (the G4 in the Powerbooks) costs $150 for a single unit. The chance Apple could get it down to $30 in volume is very close to zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Why exactly are you citing 1994 and 1995 data? It's 2006.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Oh, you didn't mean that, did you. You meant "the lack of Copyrights didn't stop the Illiad from being made". To which my response is: how many Greek sagas were made at that time? How many novels are made now? Even normalizing by population size, we have a far greater production of creative work now than the Greeks did back then. Because unlike back then, where Homer needed a patron to eat, our authors can actually derive income from their handiwork. Thanks to copyrights.
Now to more of your mangled logic:
I think what you're trying to say is: "If there was a patent on columns, the Sistine chapel may never have been made", e.g., Patents Are Bad.This betrays an almost incompetent lack of understanding of the history of patents, and why they exist. Patents freed us from trade guilds. A quick refresher for you: for thousands of years, specific trades had secrets which they refused to share with anyone except each other. The masons, the artists, the jugglers. This created a priesthood of knowledge which prevented people from learning about how things work and improving on them. Trade guilds very much existed in the Renaissance. And they have always, nearly universally, been evil. Trade guilds were part of many historically unfortunate things (serfdom society, the hierarchical control via the Catholic Church, denying literacy to anyone but the clergy, etc.) which held back the advancement of society.
Today only a few trade guilds exist: the most famous remaining guild is probably magicians. The rest have gone the way of history largely thanks to the patent system.
In summary: if there were a patent system in the Renaissance, in addition to other modern societal mechanisms, we might have had a lot more Leonardos than the single patron-fed one.
Um. After all this time, Groovy still doesn't even have a remotely complete formal specification. Groovy is a classic example of an ad-hoc language.
Dead wrong. Not the least of which is because T-Mobile and Cingular are GSM/TDMA, and Verizon is CDMA. Next you'll be telling me that to get a Mac, you just buy a Windows machine and stick in a Mac RAM SIMM.
To whit:
- Instead of Java, Verizon has insisted that its phone manufacturers install Qualcomm's noxious "BREW" standard, with its awful GUI and lack of portability. You cannot make a free BREW app. If you want to distribute an app for your company to run on its cell phones, for example, you have to pay Qualcomm and Verizon some serious money.
- Various phones Verizon sells can run Java fine before Verizon tinkers with them. But in order to enforce its BREW money-maker, Verizon disables the Java and requires the manufacturer to run BREW instead.
- Verizon is also careful to make certain that users cannot add their own ringtones. All ringtones must go through "Get It Now!", Verizon's BREW-based profit center.
- Likewise for wallpapers on many (but not all) of the phones.
- Verizon has intentionally disabled Bluetooth on a number of phones (like the Motorola v710 and E815). The one phone Verizon has which has full Bluetooth capability (the Nokia 6256i) Verizon refuses to sell in their stores or to repair. Verizon also deleted the Nokia's media player feature and arranged it that the 6256i can upload MP3 files but cannot play them as ringtones. The company has an open policy of refusing to allow perfectly good CDMA phones on its network if they are not broken in these regards.
- The article is incorrect. Verizon has always allowed EVDO and RX1TT phones to use its data network. But to do so requires paying Verizon 1.5 cents per KILOBYTE. For those paying attention, that's $15 for a 1MB file. They offer various "plans", stuff like 10MB for $50, and now unlimited for $60. On top of your phone plan: verizon's minimum plan is $40 so you're talking $100 a month for the "faster" cellular data rates. Verizon still offers a 14.4Kbps modem option (actually about 10K) that just uses up your minutes. But it may be phased out.
- And the Verizon UI. What can I say? Verizon is trying to force all its phone manufacturers to offer the same BREW-based UI, one which appears to have been invented by chimpanzees.
The reason for all of this is that Verizon wants the phones to be an extension of its cellular service. You must use their phone to use their plan, and thus must pay extra $$$ (big-time) for features that ordinarily you would have free for your phone. Many onIt appears you completely misread my posting! What's more, someone moderated a complete misreading as insightful. :-)
If this is all we got, Java's going to be around for a long, long time.
The law, and certainly the Constitution, is not some fixed-in-stone, black-and-white document which Congress defines and/or modifies and that's that. This is ultraconservative crackpot thinking. The law is a highly vague text that is subject to significant interpretation. That's what the courts are for. They do have an absolutely crucial part in the final result of how a law affects people, no matter how much right-wing nutcases would like to call them activist for doing so.
As the sole poster, I declare you the winner. Snail mail address for the $5?
Yeah.
Gravy train. That slayed me.
What's missed here is that NTP was formed largely because RIM was a first-rate jackass company.
Among NTP's primary shareholders are the actual inventors of the patents. Or perhaps I should say "were", as one of them recently died: RIM kept this bottled up in court that long. These inventors produced actual products at early computer tradeshows which ran email over a sophisticated wireless protocol to a PDA-like device. Sound familiar? The earliest such patents were filed in 1994 based on inventions several years earlier. Let's put this into context: the earliest Newton was in 1993, and the earliest similar device I am aware of was a PCMCIA pager card that could be put into the Newton circa 1995, enabling it to receive (but not send) messages over a pager network. This combination of technologies was both novel and original, and the inventors didn't just make them up to sell patents. But their company foundered.
Then came along RIM. RIM started selling the Blackberry and then started suing the daylights out of its competitors. Surely you remember this. RIM's nickname on The Register was "Lawsuits In Motion". When the original patent holders got wind of what RIM was selling, they realized it was largely a duplication of their patent. And so they contacted RIM and told them they were infringing. That's when RIM refused to return their calls. For a year.
This is not how ordinary companies operate. If someone owns a valid patent on your work, you don't refuse to even talk to them. So NTP was formed basically to force RIM to actually talk.
Legal battle ensues, and out come the slashdotters. NTP's patents are invalid and are getting all knocked down (um, the lynchpin ones are not). NTP is just a holding company to go after people (um, NTP was made to financially enable the original inventors to go after a specific company which was flagrantly violating their patent). Patents are evil (um, you know why patents exist, right? You're familiar with the evil that was the Trade Guild? No, I'm not talking about Star Wars).
RIM was repeatedly reprimanded in court by the judge for all sorts of obnoxious actions. And to top it off, RIM went to congress to ask them to override the judge because they'd given free blackberries to congress, and now wanted to claim that shutting RIM down would put the nation's security in jeopardy. I am not pulling your leg. Only Jack Abramoff could pull off a lobbying stunt more inappropriate.
And now the courts have sided ... against the slashdotters! How could the Supremes have not been reading the /. comment stream? What were they thinking?
Short answer: RIM is a nasty, obnoxious company which violated patents and sued people's pants off for things they didn't own. They got what they deserve. Too bad one of the original inventors didn't live long enough to see a dime from them.
As to the hard drives: how much data can, say, a 4500RPM drive pump out? I can say that my firewire 400 drives are slower in getting data to the Mac than my internal Powerbook drive at the same speed. So FW800 would help them, I imagine.
The FSM put the snails on both sides of the Atlantic. To test our faith!
Late versions of OS 9 had a limited preemptive-ish thread model, but it was never a system-level thing, and the process level was never preemptive. Even if you agreed to go for a preemptive model in the threads you could still screw things up and take control, which rails against the very definition of "preemptive". You could still go crazy and steal all the cycles if you wanted. Background windows got a tiny sliver of time compared to the foreground window. Etc. Preemptive this is not. More importantly, OS 9 had zero memory protection.
So I'm offering a contest. I will personally mail $5 to the person who comes up with a piece of "News" on /. that's older and more tired than this one. Whoever finds the oldest piece ever wins.
The rules:
The author wants to show off an evolutionary computation (genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolution strategies, etc.) package in Java and he picks ... jgap? Too simple. IMHO, and I think in the opinion of most EC Java coders, the system to beat is ECJ. [and I know]
How do I put this exactly. The Average American is not as.... above-average as the Average Canadian. Your "reject this ballot" examples run like a who's-who of things Americans have wound up losing entire elections over.
Those crazy rumors. The Freescale MPC7447A (the G4 in the Powerbooks) costs $150 for a single unit. The chance Apple could get it down to $30 in volume is very close to zero.
Just to be clear, by "foreign", I meant "outside", not "located in Bangladesh".