They charged me 3 times in a month for each of my 3 phones, then disconnected me for being late when I contested the multiple charges - and billed me 3 times for the 3 early disconnects. 2 years on they still call occasionally & tell me I owe on the 2nd & 3rd billings.
It's not Verizon that is pushing that metric. It's the outsourced company that is trying to make a buck off Verizon. Not saying that Verizon's own people is better.
When I worked for RCN in the call center, this was the metric they cared most about (ignoring 30% of QA was 'did you verbally confirm the customer's phone number') - average call time for a tech call was supposed to be under 10 minutes. Training for most call center reps consisted of being instructed to have the customer reboot the modem & the computer, then call back. I saw notes where some slob talked to 5 or 6 reps with stupid solutions tried, & checking the system showed that the modem was never provisioned.
When it's outsourced it's even worse, the company RCN used charged by the call minute - so you can imagine exactly how much RCN was pushing for low call times.
Just open Pandora in a tab & leave it there for a week. I have to close the browser at least every 3-4 days & reboot the computer every other week or so because it's running @ 90% physical & 80% cache memory.
This week, I had a new problem where, with 5% cpu usage, my system was running @ a load of 4 & started increasing by.2 for every tab I opened. Closing all the instances & killing the processes didn't help, but the only thing affecting the load was opening & closing tabs. A reboot later & everything is back to normal.
A scheme like that would be terrible for open-source. So you write your program and GPL it, don't pay the property tax. Someone takes it and modifies it, does pay the property tax. Now they've turned your GPL software into proprietary software.
The code in question would be X number of years out of date
If you don't pay the tax, it goes Public Domain - that means everyone else can use your code as a starting block just like company A did.
If you want reasonable copyright lengths on other things, then you're going to have to accept that it applies to you also.
Um, most of Micky's value it tied up in Trademark not Copyright. Even if Steamboat Willy & the early Disney works went public domain, you still wouldn't be able to use Micky in a new work - because he's bound up in Disney's trademark collection.
I think this is probably the most reasonable course - in the US it takes about $4K (before lawyers) to register a patent properly, and it can cost as much as 20K to get the full 20 year run out of a patent. Now given that the work that goes into most patented ideas is much greater than what goes into a copyrighted piece, why is the copyright free & lifelong, while the patent is 20 years max & expensive? Are things like Oops I did it again actually of such cultural value that we must ensure that the artists grandchildren are guaranteed income while items such as the heart lung machine are of much more limited value?
I don't object to a free copyright period of say 7 years, tax scale for 7 year extensions. At each renewal period, you pay based on either the 7 year aggregate income or half of the highest previous aggregate income. This ensures that those items which had a high cultural relevance (major works which influenced culture) become available sooner as it's more expensive to maintain them than piddling works that never sold well.
This structure provides for the protection of the creators, but only so long as they are willing to pay to maintain that protection. At the same time, it ensures that the vast majority of works that are not actually of any significant financial value are released back to the public domain where they belong.
Note this judge awarded about 20,000 USD. That, i feel is appropriate given the blatant copyright violation and commercial use. What I don't think is appropriate is 150,000 USD for downloading a song of P2P for solely personal use that the MAFIAA demand. Note they don't go for 'up to' 150k, they demand EXACTLY 150K.
I disagree on the appropriate portion of your statement. This is a company that deliberately lied & attempted to mislead the judge. They attempted to obtain a certification on their copyright through fraudulent means. They used copyrighted material for profit. Given those circumstances, I have a hard time with twice the penalty of downloading a song.
Under what exact circumstances would this judge have upheld the maximum statutory penalty? I can only envision a few situations more blatantly and exemplary of deliberate and willful copyright infringement for profit. $20K for a financial institution? They spend that on lunch for a board meeting. The fine is insignificant to the point of mockery.
Why don't we set up these polls that will have the hardware on top!
We just need to space them out nice and evenly, and we wouldn't have to worry (as much) about weather effects. Heck, why limit our selves to just just traditional internet access. I bet I could rig up some sort of portable radio that could make use of these polls.
Yep indeedee, that would be a Paula Bean Brillant idea, why it wouldn't take more than a pole every 20 miles in wide open spaces to handle that - how many square miles is Texas?. Every mile in rough terrain if you don't mind dead spots in the low points.
Or you can pop a balloon up into the atmosphere, get better coverage over a larger area and not pay rent. The balloons are cheap, the hardware is expensive. If you can replace the equipment on 4 towers with 1 piece that's twice as expensive, you still have a lot of cash on hand to buy & maintain balloons. There are companies that already do this with blimps for special events that lack adequate coverage, so I can certainly see the potential to be cost effective.
A patent troll is immune to being sued because it does not distribute anything, it just makes money through royalties and lawsuits, and so can't really be sued for anything. It is actually a very dangerous entity, because it has nothing to lose.
Actually it's worse than that. A large number of patent trolls are shell companies that own nothing but the single patent being sued over. So Patent Holdings Inc has 200 patents. If they sue Acme with one of them & get slapped down big, they could end up having to sell off some of the other 199 to pay for a settlement. If however they set up Patent 563821 inc. and give it just patent #563821, the the only assets available for judgement is the patent that was just invalidated anyway.
Google is a content provider that makes money on returning the kind of results their customers are looking for, just like any other Web content provider.
Um, on what planet? None of the search engines, in their search function, generate actual content. They display the locations of content which may be potentially relevant to your search parameters. Listing content isn't the same as generating content.
Google's search routines have options to exclude categories ( - 'porn') , and you can set up your preferences to include the existing safesearch feature. So a parent can easily register the computer login & set the preferences for the children. That not good enough for a parent, then let them go out & buy filtering software for their computer. Time to stop the NannyState.
If those choices are too hard for a parent, tough, either sell the kid for medical experiments or grow some balls & set some rules. If their willing to break the rules to view porn, then hand them the consequences. Don't go shoving your responsibility off on someone else.
My point is there are plenty of options, but they basically involve not overselling your bandwidth (which is a common but dirty practice) - and allow each customer to chose what they want to use their connection for.
Here in MA, one of the cable companies so oversold their network that you could set your clock by the throughput crash when everyone go home from work - from 0 to 85% packet loss in a 15 minute period every day on every UBR with an apartment complex.
As for the limits on bandwidth, sorry, the telco's have gotten close to $23B in grants & tax breaks since the mid 90's for expanding/upgrading the network - and they've posted record profits & dividends during that period without providing the services - for you or me that's fraud, for them it's business as usual.
Several of the telcos add & drop port filtering depending on the current virus situation. A lot of companies shut down port 80 incomming when Code Red was infecting every Windows install w/ IIS running. Some of them are blocking outgoing port 25 other than to the corporate servers.
RCN offered both residential & commercial cable modem service. The price difference was $30-50 vs $300. What did you get for that difference? - pushed to the head of the repair and call center queues.
The US constitution prohibits people from being prosecuted for actions that were legal at the time, but have subsequently become illegal - you couldn't be charged with selling alcohol prior to prohibition. However the government has always held the right to not prosecute people under either a repealed/updated/active law.
I'm not sure how this law could grant the telco's immunity anyway - you can't legislate away the 4th amendment. The law can be construed to prohibit criminal prosecution (the government asking for an illegal act then prosecuting under it would be entrapment anyway), but I don't see how they can prohibit civil prosecution.
My big hope is that the 60' court case codifying the 'national security' defense comes back to bite the Shrub. In that case, which the AG is parading around, the govt refused to be sued for a plane crash - claiming that the crash report reveled information about classified electronics etc.... - when the report was de-classified later, the only secret was that the Air Force hadn't done proper maintenance on the plane. The whole defense was a fraud. To me that seems to be an important reason to not accept the defense without an in camera review of the reasoning and supporting documentation.
There is at lease 1 state in the US that recognizes both common-law & statutory weddings. Under the statutory process there is a minimum of 16, there is none for the common-law process. So, you can get married under common law, but be denied an application for a marriage license to have it documented for out of state travel.
So, pardon me, if I don't object to Customs Agents copying (not "confiscating") data for examination too much
I realize it's slashdot so you didn't read the article, however, it does quote a woman who's laptop was taken with the assurance it would be returned in 10-15 DAYS. That was a year ago and she's still waiting & being stonewalled. I don't know about you, but if I was on a business trip & had my laptop taken for 10-15 days - my trip is pretty much shot.
Further reading of the article shows someone detained for 1.5 hours while the entire contents of their phone was reviewed --- and then missed call logs deleted for the time in question. Add to this the refusal of the department to provide any information via FOIA requests and you have a very fishy situation.
The obvious questions are:
Who reviews it and for what?
Under what circumstances is it passed to whom?
What safeguards are in place to ensure the security of the data?
What happens to that data?
How long is it retained?
What recourse is available if the data is released to the wild?
None of those questions have ever been answered by Customs, and that's a frightening prospect. The only comment that they had was that their agents are 'trained to handle confidential data'. Of course, according to the last GAO report, they lost over 400 of their own laptops the previous year.
I know several people who carry data on laptops that, due to legal restrictions, cannot be shared without a court order. So, where does that leave them? Even Federal employees cannot demand that you break the law.
As for the briefcase argument, I do not believe that they sit there with a photocopier & copy the entire contents of a phone book, but they have copied SIMM cards.
As for your argument about money & following the peoples wishes, well, perhaps if the government hadn't lost $1B in cash in Iraq, we could afford to actually fund the school projects that are already mandated. Also, I doubt that 'the people' are wishing that the government continues to increase the restrictions on copyright. That is definitely a big business wish. Pay attention to where the money comes from and goes, big business has more influence right now than the people in terms of what is actually being passed into law.
Patents are not really about broad idea, but about very specific inventions/implementations.
Almost right. Patents are supposed to be about very specific inventions/implementations. However they, especially software patents, have become broad claims to wide swaths of general concepts. The original requirement was that a working model or plans had to be submitted along with the patent to prove it worked - eliminating the 'concept' patent. Business method and software patents tend to encompass solution concepts instead of implementations. Thus a patent for a new screw mfg system would include details on the process - and why it's different from the existing method. A patent for software is often a broad concept solution with no or very vague implementation details. Thus, any solution is in violation of the patent.
If I were to patent a specific assembly language module to perform multi-tiered indexed sorts on an array, I don't think anyone would object. If however I patent 'A software implementation for the sorting of a data structure using the multi-tiered sorting algorithm' then the patent is overly broad in terms of the real world, but perhaps not in terms of what the patent office will allow.
Right now Baracuda is being sued for using anti-virus software in a gateway router, the concept of this was not new in '95, BBS had been virus checking files on upload for years. The patent office granted the patent as novel because it specifically named SMTP & FTP as protocols, even though the concept of checking general data transfers at the gateway was presented as prior art both in working software & design manuals.
The specifics for SMTP are it is supposedly non-obvious to UUDecode attachments to email & run them through the commodity AV software you already have which is designed to do that, rather than create custom AV software that UUEncodes the virus patterns & scans the message intact.
Under this patent, any use of a border-proxy to scan FTP transfers for viri is infringing, and any border-proxy scanning email attachments by extracting the attachments & passing the resulting files to AV software is infringing. I do not consider myself of 'average experience' in network design, but as soon as the basic concept of a gateway-firewall is presented, it becomes apparent that that is the first place incoming data should be scanned for viri.
These guys are supposed to review 4 new patents & 5 backlogged patent applications every week. Half the time it takes me 4 hours to figure out what the hell these lawyers are obscuring, let alone start looking for prior art.
As for the guy above who said they need better experts, these are usually guys out of college - often lawyers waiting to pass the bar. For the most part they have no experience in the field that the patent is in. Hence what is novel to them is quite frequently common sense to people in the field. To present an example, the moron who managed to get a triple linked list patented. How traversing a list in 3 modes using object references is novel when traversing in 1 & 2 modes using object references is standard 1st year programming I don't know.
The probabilities of four, 4, FOUR, cables being taken out is astronomical.
No so astronomical as you would think. The first 2 cables appear to have been damaged by ships anchors when those ships were instructed to wait out storms outside the normal parking areas. Assuming that that is the true cause, the remaining 2 cables going down can be classed as cascade failures. That type of collapse happens frequently - look at the blackout patterns for the electrical companies. One grid goes down, the ones surrounding it pick up the slack & eventually one of those fails... again and again.
There's no evidence out there that people in general spend more because of torrents etc, only less.
Um, actually the 2 academic studies I've seen don't show any correlation between downloading and purchasing. Note the any. I have yet to see a peer reviewed study that shows that downloading has any direct effect on sales numbers.
The knee-jerk reaction is to state that it absolutely must, but the reality is that people only have so much disposable income to put towards entertainment - in essence, entertainment economics is a zero sum game. Yes, the movie/music industry has taken a big hit over the last decade, however online paid-gaming has come out of nowhere to become a major player in the economics of entertainment. With 4 accounts in the house, I put almost $90/month into online gaming. That money didn't just pop out of my ass, it came from another portion of the entertainment budget - mostly from my go-to-the-movies column, so online gaming has cost the movie industry around $1000 annually from just my family. My local library has an excellent selection of DVDs, and access to an even larger selection through inter-library loan - so I have seen just about every movie within a month of it's DVD release, and the movie industry hasn't seen a penny more than if I had downloaded every one of them - all legal like.
So, while the industry has several reports out that downloading is costing them $XX B each year, none of those reports (to my knowledge) has ever been submitted to be reviewed by an economics journal for review & publishing. Given this weeks admission of a 300% overstatement, and another statement that the numbers might be off by an order of magnitude in another study, it doesn't really surprise me.
I REALLY DON'T CARE HOW THEY FIND TERRORISTS... just as long as they catch and kill every goddamn one of them.
The problem is 90% of the stuff they do isn't designed to catch terrorists. It'd designed to look like they are doing something to catch terrorists. According to the latest penetration tests against the airports we are probably less safe than prior to 9/11. The mass influx of tech and new recruits to the screening process has dropped the catch rate from 85+% to as low as 65% in some places. You have a bunch of new people who don't know how to do anything but watch the system & wait for the beep. You look safer because there is all the security. You want to feel safer because otherwise it's so much wasted time, but the reality is that nothing has changed in how safe you actually are.
Tell me: how might serving a search warrant might have averted 9/11?
It absolutely wouldn't have. Nor would this whole realID plan that the government is pushing. Everyone involved was in the US legally & had legally valid ID. A fact that the govt conveniently ignores every time they push that Real ID will make us safer.
but I kinda think it's a pretty good idea for my government to try and find out how best to prevent terrorist attacks in the future, and as long as my constituional rights don't get outright trampled on,
Define trampled on....
From where I am looking, the expansion of foreign wiretap rules to include US citizens appears to be a clear trampling of the 4th amendment, but hey I agreed with Nitke that laws designed to -as SCOTUS stated - 'have a chilling effect on expression' were unconstitutional under the first amendment.
Having listened to a lot of the discussion on prevention etc, the one thing proven to work - actually having enough local cops doing real cop work - just doesn't spark enough political interest to get the kind of money that a proposal to install the latest gizmo at every airport does.
Still purporting to reaffirm Chimel, the Court in New York v. Belton* held that police officers who had made a valid arrest of the occupant of a vehicle could make a contemporaneous search of the entire passenger compartment of the automobile, including containers found therein. Believing that a fairly simple rule understandable to authorities in the field was desirable, the Court ruled "that articles inside the relatively narrow compass of the passenger compartment of an automobile are in fact generally, if not inevitably, within 'the area into which an arrestee might reach in order to grab a weapon or evidentiary ite[m]."'**
* 453 U.S. 454 (1981).
** Id. at 460 (quoting Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 763 (1969)). In this particular instance, Belton had been removed from the automobile and handcuffed, but the Court wished to create a general rule removed from the fact-specific nature of any one case. "'Container' here denotes any object capable of holding another object. It thus includes closed or open glove compartments, consoles, or other receptacles located anywhere within the passenger compartment, as well as luggage, boxes, bags, clothing, and the like. Our holding encompasses only the interior of the passenger compartment of an automobile and does not encompass the trunk." Id. at 460-61 n.4.
Under that interpretation, they could search the battery compartment of your cellphone or laptop and check the CD drive of the laptop, but not the stored contents of the phone or laptop itself. Doing that would exceed the authority granted by Chimel & Belton - both of which explicitly define narrow terms and areas under which warrantless searches are permitted.
When we purchase music we purchase a license to listen to the songs we paid for.
That really depends on which argument the RIAA/MPAA is spouting at the moment. The 'you purchased a license' argument is used when they are trying to expand copyright to extend past things like 'right of first sale'. However the 'you purchased the CD' is used to try and block format shifting & force you to buy the MP3/ringtone/whatever.
So what exactly you purchased when you bought that CD is somewhat mutable.
The FSF claim that you cannot circumvent the GPL by distributing proprietary (or in this case, free under an incompatible license) as separate modules,with the expectation that the user does the link.
That might be what Stallman says, but Linus has explicitly stated that's not the interpretation used for the Kernel. They build APIs, you use them, you're good. If you wrote it directly into the kernel, then you would have an issue - probably more likely from SUN than from KernelDev who would most likely just roast you over your own burning sourcecode.
The web is a publishing medium only in the sense that television and radio are publishing mediums. While format & time shifting radio and tv are considered fair use, photo copying a pinup & putting the copy on the wall isn't.
You can put your pinup or clippings on the wall or in a scrapbook because you haven't duplicated the work - you've simply manipulated an existing copy - hence no copyright violation. Format & time shifting are exceptions to copyright. New desktop backgrounds don't currently have that protection.
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They charged me 3 times in a month for each of my 3 phones, then disconnected me for being late when I contested the multiple charges - and billed me 3 times for the 3 early disconnects. 2 years on they still call occasionally & tell me I owe on the 2nd & 3rd billings.
When I worked for RCN in the call center, this was the metric they cared most about (ignoring 30% of QA was 'did you verbally confirm the customer's phone number') - average call time for a tech call was supposed to be under 10 minutes. Training for most call center reps consisted of being instructed to have the customer reboot the modem & the computer, then call back. I saw notes where some slob talked to 5 or 6 reps with stupid solutions tried, & checking the system showed that the modem was never provisioned.
When it's outsourced it's even worse, the company RCN used charged by the call minute - so you can imagine exactly how much RCN was pushing for low call times.
The ESN number of the phone itself is registered with the network - not the SIMM identification information.
Just open Pandora in a tab & leave it there for a week. I have to close the browser at least every 3-4 days & reboot the computer every other week or so because it's running @ 90% physical & 80% cache memory.
This week, I had a new problem where, with 5% cpu usage, my system was running @ a load of 4 & started increasing by .2 for every tab I opened. Closing all the instances & killing the processes didn't help, but the only thing affecting the load was opening & closing tabs. A reboot later & everything is back to normal.
If you want reasonable copyright lengths on other things, then you're going to have to accept that it applies to you also.
I think this is probably the most reasonable course - in the US it takes about $4K (before lawyers) to register a patent properly, and it can cost as much as 20K to get the full 20 year run out of a patent. Now given that the work that goes into most patented ideas is much greater than what goes into a copyrighted piece, why is the copyright free & lifelong, while the patent is 20 years max & expensive? Are things like Oops I did it again actually of such cultural value that we must ensure that the artists grandchildren are guaranteed income while items such as the heart lung machine are of much more limited value?
I don't object to a free copyright period of say 7 years, tax scale for 7 year extensions. At each renewal period, you pay based on either the 7 year aggregate income or half of the highest previous aggregate income. This ensures that those items which had a high cultural relevance (major works which influenced culture) become available sooner as it's more expensive to maintain them than piddling works that never sold well.
This structure provides for the protection of the creators, but only so long as they are willing to pay to maintain that protection. At the same time, it ensures that the vast majority of works that are not actually of any significant financial value are released back to the public domain where they belong.
I disagree on the appropriate portion of your statement. This is a company that deliberately lied & attempted to mislead the judge. They attempted to obtain a certification on their copyright through fraudulent means. They used copyrighted material for profit. Given those circumstances, I have a hard time with twice the penalty of downloading a song.
Under what exact circumstances would this judge have upheld the maximum statutory penalty? I can only envision a few situations more blatantly and exemplary of deliberate and willful copyright infringement for profit. $20K for a financial institution? They spend that on lunch for a board meeting. The fine is insignificant to the point of mockery.
Yep indeedee, that would be a Paula Bean Brillant idea, why it wouldn't take more than a pole every 20 miles in wide open spaces to handle that - how many square miles is Texas?. Every mile in rough terrain if you don't mind dead spots in the low points.
Or you can pop a balloon up into the atmosphere, get better coverage over a larger area and not pay rent. The balloons are cheap, the hardware is expensive. If you can replace the equipment on 4 towers with 1 piece that's twice as expensive, you still have a lot of cash on hand to buy & maintain balloons. There are companies that already do this with blimps for special events that lack adequate coverage, so I can certainly see the potential to be cost effective.
Um, on what planet? None of the search engines, in their search function, generate actual content. They display the locations of content which may be potentially relevant to your search parameters. Listing content isn't the same as generating content.
Google's search routines have options to exclude categories ( - 'porn') , and you can set up your preferences to include the existing safesearch feature. So a parent can easily register the computer login & set the preferences for the children. That not good enough for a parent, then let them go out & buy filtering software for their computer. Time to stop the NannyState.
If those choices are too hard for a parent, tough, either sell the kid for medical experiments or grow some balls & set some rules. If their willing to break the rules to view porn, then hand them the consequences. Don't go shoving your responsibility off on someone else.
Here in MA, one of the cable companies so oversold their network that you could set your clock by the throughput crash when everyone go home from work - from 0 to 85% packet loss in a 15 minute period every day on every UBR with an apartment complex.
As for the limits on bandwidth, sorry, the telco's have gotten close to $23B in grants & tax breaks since the mid 90's for expanding/upgrading the network - and they've posted record profits & dividends during that period without providing the services - for you or me that's fraud, for them it's business as usual.
Several of the telcos add & drop port filtering depending on the current virus situation. A lot of companies shut down port 80 incomming when Code Red was infecting every Windows install w/ IIS running. Some of them are blocking outgoing port 25 other than to the corporate servers.
RCN offered both residential & commercial cable modem service. The price difference was $30-50 vs $300. What did you get for that difference? - pushed to the head of the repair and call center queues.
The US constitution prohibits people from being prosecuted for actions that were legal at the time, but have subsequently become illegal - you couldn't be charged with selling alcohol prior to prohibition. However the government has always held the right to not prosecute people under either a repealed/updated/active law.
I'm not sure how this law could grant the telco's immunity anyway - you can't legislate away the 4th amendment. The law can be construed to prohibit criminal prosecution (the government asking for an illegal act then prosecuting under it would be entrapment anyway), but I don't see how they can prohibit civil prosecution.
My big hope is that the 60' court case codifying the 'national security' defense comes back to bite the Shrub. In that case, which the AG is parading around, the govt refused to be sued for a plane crash - claiming that the crash report reveled information about classified electronics etc .... - when the report was de-classified later, the only secret was that the Air Force hadn't done proper maintenance on the plane. The whole defense was a fraud. To me that seems to be an important reason to not accept the defense without an in camera review of the reasoning and supporting documentation.
There is at lease 1 state in the US that recognizes both common-law & statutory weddings. Under the statutory process there is a minimum of 16, there is none for the common-law process. So, you can get married under common law, but be denied an application for a marriage license to have it documented for out of state travel.
I realize it's slashdot so you didn't read the article, however, it does quote a woman who's laptop was taken with the assurance it would be returned in 10-15 DAYS. That was a year ago and she's still waiting & being stonewalled. I don't know about you, but if I was on a business trip & had my laptop taken for 10-15 days - my trip is pretty much shot.
Further reading of the article shows someone detained for 1.5 hours while the entire contents of their phone was reviewed --- and then missed call logs deleted for the time in question. Add to this the refusal of the department to provide any information via FOIA requests and you have a very fishy situation.
The obvious questions are:
- Who reviews it and for what?
- Under what circumstances is it passed to whom?
- What safeguards are in place to ensure the security of the data?
- What happens to that data?
- How long is it retained?
- What recourse is available if the data is released to the wild?
None of those questions have ever been answered by Customs, and that's a frightening prospect. The only comment that they had was that their agents are 'trained to handle confidential data'. Of course, according to the last GAO report, they lost over 400 of their own laptops the previous year.I know several people who carry data on laptops that, due to legal restrictions, cannot be shared without a court order. So, where does that leave them? Even Federal employees cannot demand that you break the law.
As for the briefcase argument, I do not believe that they sit there with a photocopier & copy the entire contents of a phone book, but they have copied SIMM cards.
As for your argument about money & following the peoples wishes, well, perhaps if the government hadn't lost $1B in cash in Iraq, we could afford to actually fund the school projects that are already mandated. Also, I doubt that 'the people' are wishing that the government continues to increase the restrictions on copyright. That is definitely a big business wish. Pay attention to where the money comes from and goes, big business has more influence right now than the people in terms of what is actually being passed into law.
Almost right. Patents are supposed to be about very specific inventions/implementations. However they, especially software patents, have become broad claims to wide swaths of general concepts. The original requirement was that a working model or plans had to be submitted along with the patent to prove it worked - eliminating the 'concept' patent. Business method and software patents tend to encompass solution concepts instead of implementations. Thus a patent for a new screw mfg system would include details on the process - and why it's different from the existing method. A patent for software is often a broad concept solution with no or very vague implementation details. Thus, any solution is in violation of the patent.
If I were to patent a specific assembly language module to perform multi-tiered indexed sorts on an array, I don't think anyone would object. If however I patent 'A software implementation for the sorting of a data structure using the multi-tiered sorting algorithm' then the patent is overly broad in terms of the real world, but perhaps not in terms of what the patent office will allow.
Right now Baracuda is being sued for using anti-virus software in a gateway router, the concept of this was not new in '95, BBS had been virus checking files on upload for years. The patent office granted the patent as novel because it specifically named SMTP & FTP as protocols, even though the concept of checking general data transfers at the gateway was presented as prior art both in working software & design manuals.
The specifics for SMTP are it is supposedly non-obvious to UUDecode attachments to email & run them through the commodity AV software you already have which is designed to do that, rather than create custom AV software that UUEncodes the virus patterns & scans the message intact.
Under this patent, any use of a border-proxy to scan FTP transfers for viri is infringing, and any border-proxy scanning email attachments by extracting the attachments & passing the resulting files to AV software is infringing. I do not consider myself of 'average experience' in network design, but as soon as the basic concept of a gateway-firewall is presented, it becomes apparent that that is the first place incoming data should be scanned for viri.
These guys are supposed to review 4 new patents & 5 backlogged patent applications every week. Half the time it takes me 4 hours to figure out what the hell these lawyers are obscuring, let alone start looking for prior art. As for the guy above who said they need better experts, these are usually guys out of college - often lawyers waiting to pass the bar. For the most part they have no experience in the field that the patent is in. Hence what is novel to them is quite frequently common sense to people in the field. To present an example, the moron who managed to get a triple linked list patented. How traversing a list in 3 modes using object references is novel when traversing in 1 & 2 modes using object references is standard 1st year programming I don't know.
Um, actually the 2 academic studies I've seen don't show any correlation between downloading and purchasing. Note the any. I have yet to see a peer reviewed study that shows that downloading has any direct effect on sales numbers.
The knee-jerk reaction is to state that it absolutely must, but the reality is that people only have so much disposable income to put towards entertainment - in essence, entertainment economics is a zero sum game. Yes, the movie/music industry has taken a big hit over the last decade, however online paid-gaming has come out of nowhere to become a major player in the economics of entertainment. With 4 accounts in the house, I put almost $90/month into online gaming. That money didn't just pop out of my ass, it came from another portion of the entertainment budget - mostly from my go-to-the-movies column, so online gaming has cost the movie industry around $1000 annually from just my family. My local library has an excellent selection of DVDs, and access to an even larger selection through inter-library loan - so I have seen just about every movie within a month of it's DVD release, and the movie industry hasn't seen a penny more than if I had downloaded every one of them - all legal like.
So, while the industry has several reports out that downloading is costing them $XX B each year, none of those reports (to my knowledge) has ever been submitted to be reviewed by an economics journal for review & publishing. Given this weeks admission of a 300% overstatement, and another statement that the numbers might be off by an order of magnitude in another study, it doesn't really surprise me.
The problem is 90% of the stuff they do isn't designed to catch terrorists. It'd designed to look like they are doing something to catch terrorists. According to the latest penetration tests against the airports we are probably less safe than prior to 9/11. The mass influx of tech and new recruits to the screening process has dropped the catch rate from 85+% to as low as 65% in some places. You have a bunch of new people who don't know how to do anything but watch the system & wait for the beep. You look safer because there is all the security. You want to feel safer because otherwise it's so much wasted time, but the reality is that nothing has changed in how safe you actually are.
It absolutely wouldn't have. Nor would this whole realID plan that the government is pushing. Everyone involved was in the US legally & had legally valid ID. A fact that the govt conveniently ignores every time they push that Real ID will make us safer.
Define trampled on....
From where I am looking, the expansion of foreign wiretap rules to include US citizens appears to be a clear trampling of the 4th amendment, but hey I agreed with Nitke that laws designed to -as SCOTUS stated - 'have a chilling effect on expression' were unconstitutional under the first amendment.
Having listened to a lot of the discussion on prevention etc, the one thing proven to work - actually having enough local cops doing real cop work - just doesn't spark enough political interest to get the kind of money that a proposal to install the latest gizmo at every airport does.
Under that interpretation, they could search the battery compartment of your cellphone or laptop and check the CD drive of the laptop, but not the stored contents of the phone or laptop itself. Doing that would exceed the authority granted by Chimel & Belton - both of which explicitly define narrow terms and areas under which warrantless searches are permitted.
That really depends on which argument the RIAA/MPAA is spouting at the moment. The 'you purchased a license' argument is used when they are trying to expand copyright to extend past things like 'right of first sale'. However the 'you purchased the CD' is used to try and block format shifting & force you to buy the MP3/ringtone/whatever.
So what exactly you purchased when you bought that CD is somewhat mutable.
That might be what Stallman says, but Linus has explicitly stated that's not the interpretation used for the Kernel. They build APIs, you use them, you're good. If you wrote it directly into the kernel, then you would have an issue - probably more likely from SUN than from KernelDev who would most likely just roast you over your own burning sourcecode.
The web is a publishing medium only in the sense that television and radio are publishing mediums. While format & time shifting radio and tv are considered fair use, photo copying a pinup & putting the copy on the wall isn't. You can put your pinup or clippings on the wall or in a scrapbook because you haven't duplicated the work - you've simply manipulated an existing copy - hence no copyright violation. Format & time shifting are exceptions to copyright. New desktop backgrounds don't currently have that protection.