If NTP had actually created a competing product to the Blackberry then I would support their challenge of RIM. If one bona fide maker of telecom devices creates something new and innovative, they should be able to patent it and protect it from imitators. That NTP only generated paper, not products, makes me less supportive of their claim.
A working model requirement (besides being quite hard to implement) does not fix the patenting system. I'm sure these people http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/02/23/0159230.shtml would not have had such huge problems showing a working model of online rich media creation... especially since they wouldn't need to show a good product, a cheap ugly web portal with a few features covering the claims would be enough. How about the amazon 1-click shopping patent? totally trivial. Blackberry? designing a good portable email gadget is hard, but implementing a proof of concept is something I could probably do on a Symbian phone with a couple days' work.
There are so many flaws in the system... and allowing software patents is the root of half of them. The other half comes from not giving the patent offices enough resources or incentives to properly screen patents for prior art, obviosity etc. All of which is much harder for software patents, so the 2 problems compound.
well, it's not quite as cool as the holographic interface Tom Cruise was using in minority report, but still the tabletop interface the doctor was using in recent sci-fi movie "the island" was pretty awesome.
I think if they manage to make large, durable touch screens at reasonable prices (and to do a lot of good UI engineering) it would make a very powerful and intuitive interface.
The three most boring activities:
Listening to someone describing their dreams
Listening to someone describe their workout routine
Watching someone else play video games.
I agree wholheatedly on items 2 and 3, but actually dreams are quite interesting. Even though you can't usually make rational sense out of them (except sometimes when you know the dreamer very well) they often are imaginative, absurd, and witty.
making a cartoon of jesus is not as offensive as a cartoon of allah because religious iconography is OK in most flavours of christianity: you have christ icons all over churches, but there are no visual representations of allah or the prophet allowed in muslim faith...
So an offensive allah cartoon is twice offesive: once for the offence and once for representing him at all.
That said, it's true there is more extremism in the islamic world right now than in the christian world (although there were times in history when quite the opposite was true).
The "American Public" could remove the CIA from existence in the next pair of elections if it wanted
I find that notion rather naive.
Aside from that, free elections alone do not make a country a democracy. Governments must be accountable to the public: if the people who are supposed to vote do not know what the government does, how can they decide if they want to vote them back into office?
Or are we just supposed to vote whoever looks fatherly and reassuring on tv?
..we can always run our free OS of choice, which leaves us in control.
Then websites will start requiring TC based remote attestation to work (which totally breaks any expectation of anonymity you may have had, and won't work unless you are using their closed OS of choice). And then one day the BIOS will decide that your free OS is not allowed to load anymore, and you'll be screwed.
institutions volontarily sign up for this program, no one is forcing them (of course they do get a bunch of funding for it)
From TFA (yes, I actually read it!):
``We will start to receive applications next week. After screening candidate cities and universities, the test beds are likely to be decided by late March, MIC director Lee Do-kyu said.
currently, choice of windows vs linux is biased in favour of windows by corporate mentality, advertisement and PR from microsoft, and general habit-driven lazyness from people who are used to having windows on their pcs and want more of the same.
So a little bit of bias in the other direction, here and there, certainly won't hurt.
you're doing IT in a university, so it makes sense to take that kind of class (although I wouldn't say everyone in IT has to take it)
But if we're talking school kids I say it's a big waste of time..
The drop is not caused by supply exhaustion. But this does not make it any less hard to reverse: as you extract more and more oil the remaining oil becomes harder to extract.
I don't think a videogame attitude is a good thing for soldiers. Of course it helps them lose awareness that what they are doing, really, is killing people. Reminds me of some of those videos we've seen of US military in action in Iraq: their comments really sounded like they thought they were kicking ass at some LAN party. Or the guys interviewed in the Michael Moore movie telling what music they listened to in their tank to pump up during the fights.
Soldiers should remember that they are fighting wars, and killing people: if they forget that they become (expendable) tools that can be used for any purpose.
I have my name on a couple of patent submissions, and have helped review others previously submitted by my colleagues, and it's true that getting a patent approved takes a certain --as you say-- non-technical effort. But this just means it is hard for small buisnesses to do it. Big buisnesses (like the one I work in) have patent lawyers in the bunches, and have no problem getting patents approved.
When you submit an invention for patenting you get an international search report, which usually lists completely irrelevant "prior art" which supposedly invalidates the claims but really has nothing to do with them, proving the patent officers did not understand the invention. Then you reply explaining why they are wrong. In the end you patent some slightly modified version of the original proposal, regardless of whether the invention has the "inventive step" required by EU law or the "non-obviousness" required by US law (or is it the other way around?). The patenting offices nitpick on the details but miss the point that they are allowing people to patent very wide formulations of obvious ideas.
A further issue with submarine patents is that under older US copyright laws patents were valid 17 years from APPROVAL and were not published until APPROVAL. So a company could deliberately delay the approval of their patent so that when it is published, it is too late, the technology is old and ubiquitous, and they can extort from everyone who uses it. This is what happened with the microsoft FAT patents that were recently on slashdot.
The digital media watermark used in the Fraunhofer system also contains a 'hash value', which creates a link between the content provider and registered purchaser. "The hash value is like a fingerprint; it contains unique information about the user"
So the trick is do not give them any personal information to go by. Do not let them identify you. Even assuming they watermarked physical CDs and DVDs too (not just downlaods), and were able to track each one all the way to the shop where it is sold (which adds a lot of useless complexity IMHO). If I buy a physical CD in cash, they'll never know who they sold it to. Or just rent it, which is what people who rip dvds mostly do: they can't change the watermark on the DVD once it's at blockbuster.
So all their fancy technique becomes useless unless they violate your privacy first.
It seems to me that what you suggest would imply that anything not filed as a patent application would not count as prior art..
So everyone would have to attempt to patent every stupid little concept in their products/research to avoid someone else doing it. Right now at least if you have a patent on X but my product doing X has come out before your patent was filed, your patent is void (should have been denied by patenting office, and will be in court if you try to sue me).
Bit torrent has the problem of opening a lot of connections (the larger the torrent storm, the more connections). While each of these connections to other seeders/leechers may only be passing small amounts of information, they tend to take up a lot of the routers memory (especially for very slow connections that stay open even though they don't pass much if not any information). This kills a router. You might not ever notice it at your own home but having a lot of people on torrents can take drop a router, and make the internet slow for all of the other users using your ISP.
A router has no need to keep connection state: it does not need any memory of past connections to route packets. Firewalls are another matter, because they keep state to distinguish between outcoming and incoming connections (at the very least). But my ISP should not have a firewall between my home and the internet anyhow (I pay for full, unrestricted access).
Bit torrent has a rather poorly designed (for packet efficiency) protocol. It is terrific for other things, but not packet efficiency.
I don't know what you mean exactly with 'packet efficiency' but in my book, bittorred uses a lot of bandwidth because it is efficient at getting your downloads fast: if you look at protocol overhead percentages in your bittorrent client (whether overhead in bytes or in packets) I don't think the numbers you will see are very big (don't have my client here at work so I can't give you numbers).
The fact bittorrent uses a lot of bandwidth is no justification for throttling it: it just means it does it's job well.
The idea of patents is [snip] to get them [the inventors] to publish what they've invented, and turn it over to the public in general after a (fairly) limited period of time.
If the "fairly limited" amount of time is 20 years, this is useless for everything regarding IT where any really good idea will have been reimplemented 100 times over by the time the patent expires.. yes, that might require reverse engineering, which is perfectly legal under any reasonable legal system.
Also I have been doing some amount of patent reading, and it is quite clear that none of it is written in a way to be of any use: typically, problems get patented rather than solutions, or anyhow the details of how it works are omitted (they shouldn't be, according to patent law) so to this date I have not read a single patent that added anything useful to my knowledge.
Oh and how about the older US patenting system, where patents were valid 17 years after APPROVAL (rather than 20 after submission as it is now), and patents were not published until approval? The trick is that the applicant could deliberately delay the approval of the patent for 10, 15 years, to have the patent come out as a surprise bomb when the subject covered had already become an industry standard (example: microsoft's FAT patent: ever wonder wy it was in the news this month, after so many years?)
Currently one of the requirements for a patent to be accepted is that the invention is not obvious (to someone "skilled in the art"). In practice, a lot of obvious patents are allowed by the patent office (in the US as well as in europe).
From TFA: "That exam would take less time than a regular patent examination, because obviousness would not be considered."
A patent would get examinated only when challenged, but obviousity would NOT be taken into account.. what these people propose is to make a law of the current bad practice of allowing obvious patents.
Also the guy seems to think that the reason we have such bad software patents around is that in the past software developers were not patenting their ideas, so now there is no prior art for old ideas. This is extremely stupid since somthing doesn't have to be in a patent application to be prior art: if an academic paper described an idea ten years ago it is prior art for new patents even if nobody patented it. The same should be true for an idea implemented in the linux kernel ten years ago, although in this case I am not sure it would meet the USPTO's documental requirements for prior art.
What really would have happened if the US patenting system had allowed "techniques from the early period of computer applications" to be patented, is that IT would not have had anywhere close the development it has had, and the US would be lagging behind the rest of the high-tech world because innovation would have been stifled.
RTFA. He spends a fair amount of time on exactly this.
He just says that it's been done before and didn't work, because people tried to use copyright to obtain the same protection. His point is moot: when people who are against software patents say that copyright is enough protection for software developers (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/basics/inde x.html), they do not mean that copyright should protect ideas. They mean ideas should not be protected period. Copyright protects specific implementations, and that has worked quite well so far.. it's not like Bill Gates didn't manage to get rich without software patents.
If a patent on some variation of "sending email over RF" is overturned on the basis of new prior art, it does not mean the system works.
Such a patent should not be valid based on the much more basic fact that patents which just combine a bunch of known things shouldn't be allowed. Using well known technology A to solve problem B does not have an "inventive step".
And the much more basic problem is you shouldn't be allowed (and you aren't allowed in europe) to patent ideas, algorithms, protocols, math, etcetera. All of that is software patents. Patents such as the many ones on MP3, or the LZW compression patent (that affected the GIF format) do cover innovative ideas (LZW is pretty cool!), but they still shouldn't be allowed.
Hell, it is incompatible with freedom of speech too.
The only way you can stop streams of bits from being freely copied around is a combination of legislation and cryptographic hardware (treacherous computing) which (assuming it would work) effectively would take the flow of ALL information into the control of some entity (the guys who have the root keys to the world trusted hardware).. probably a private, unelected entity that national jurisdictions would have a lot of trouble controlling.
A real "trusted computing" environment, on the other hand, where the owner of the computer can choose which software is allowed to run and enforce it with digitally signed binaries verified by hardware, is just good security. The GPL3 draft does not stop anyone from doing this.
I think another issue with previous versions of the GPL is addressed by requiring not just distribution of source code, but of anything necessary to make the code actually work, including encryption keys. Quoting from the draft:
"Complete Corresponding Source Code also includes any encryption or authorization codes necessary to install and/or execute the source code of the work, perhaps modified by you, in the recommended or principal context of use, such that its functioning in all circumstances is identical to that of the work, except as altered by your modifications. It also includes any decryption codes necessary to access or unseal the work's output."
This is very important if treacherous computing schemes become widespread (that is, "trusted computing" where the owner of the computer cannot get code of his choosing to execute).
The reason is that if I write code and release it under the old GPL, company A can port it to a treacherous computing platform, compile it and sign the binary with a digital signature enabling it on the platform. Company A then distributes it with the source code. But when another user takes the code, modifies it, and compiles he is unable to sign it (unless he is also a big company with a TCP-enabling key) and is therefore unable to run it on the platform. Company A has therefore effectively stolen a user's right to further modify derivations of a GPL work.
The proposed changes stops Company A distributing a derivative work for a treacherous computing platform, unless they also publish their TC private key (which they can't). It doesn't stop Company A from using GPL code on a trusted computing platform, where anyone can use their own key to enable code to run on their own computer, so Company A does not need to give us their key.
If US congress is in such bad state that it decides people in america aren't even allowed to record tv onto a VCR (or technological equivalent) you guys in the states just have to either move to canada, or download stuff from us lucky guys in europe (or elsewhere) who can. Encrypted so that nothing short of man in the middle will allow it to be intercepted by the bad guys..
Slashdot Mirror
There are so many flaws in the system... and allowing software patents is the root of half of them. The other half comes from not giving the patent offices enough resources or incentives to properly screen patents for prior art, obviosity etc. All of which is much harder for software patents, so the 2 problems compound.
In the basic tools that SHOULD be bundled department, when are they going to add ssh? at least the friggin' client!!
well, it's not quite as cool as the holographic interface Tom Cruise was using in minority report, but still the tabletop interface the doctor was using in recent sci-fi movie "the island" was pretty awesome.
I think if they manage to make large, durable touch screens at reasonable prices (and to do a lot of good UI engineering) it would make a very powerful and intuitive interface.
making a cartoon of jesus is not as offensive as a cartoon of allah because religious iconography is OK in most flavours of christianity: you have christ icons all over churches, but there are no visual representations of allah or the prophet allowed in muslim faith...
So an offensive allah cartoon is twice offesive: once for the offence and once for representing him at all.
That said, it's true there is more extremism in the islamic world right now than in the christian world (although there were times in history when quite the opposite was true).
Aside from that, free elections alone do not make a country a democracy. Governments must be accountable to the public: if the people who are supposed to vote do not know what the government does, how can they decide if they want to vote them back into office?
Or are we just supposed to vote whoever looks fatherly and reassuring on tv?
..we can always run our free OS of choice, which leaves us in control.
Then websites will start requiring TC based remote attestation to work (which totally breaks any expectation of anonymity you may have had, and won't work unless you are using their closed OS of choice). And then one day the BIOS will decide that your free OS is not allowed to load anymore, and you'll be screwed.
institutions volontarily sign up for this program, no one is forcing them (of course they do get a bunch of funding for it)
From TFA (yes, I actually read it!):
``We will start to receive applications next week. After screening candidate cities and universities, the test beds are likely to be decided by late March, MIC director Lee Do-kyu said.
currently, choice of windows vs linux is biased in favour of windows by corporate mentality, advertisement and PR from microsoft, and general habit-driven lazyness from people who are used to having windows on their pcs and want more of the same.
So a little bit of bias in the other direction, here and there, certainly won't hurt.
How is this a troll?
He just stated his opinion, that he would rather live in china than in the US (and in fact, he apparently now lives in china).
Now I don't agree either but that doesn't make him a troll..
you're doing IT in a university, so it makes sense to take that kind of class (although I wouldn't say everyone in IT has to take it) But if we're talking school kids I say it's a big waste of time..
The drop is not caused by supply exhaustion. But this does not make it any less hard to reverse: as you extract more and more oil the remaining oil becomes harder to extract.
I don't think a videogame attitude is a good thing for soldiers. Of course it helps them lose awareness that what they are doing, really, is killing people. Reminds me of some of those videos we've seen of US military in action in Iraq: their comments really sounded like they thought they were kicking ass at some LAN party. Or the guys interviewed in the Michael Moore movie telling what music they listened to in their tank to pump up during the fights.
Soldiers should remember that they are fighting wars, and killing people: if they forget that they become (expendable) tools that can be used for any purpose.
I have my name on a couple of patent submissions, and have helped review others previously submitted by my colleagues, and it's true that getting a patent approved takes a certain --as you say-- non-technical effort. But this just means it is hard for small buisnesses to do it. Big buisnesses (like the one I work in) have patent lawyers in the bunches, and have no problem getting patents approved.
When you submit an invention for patenting you get an international search report, which usually lists completely irrelevant "prior art" which supposedly invalidates the claims but really has nothing to do with them, proving the patent officers did not understand the invention. Then you reply explaining why they are wrong. In the end you patent some slightly modified version of the original proposal, regardless of whether the invention has the "inventive step" required by EU law or the "non-obviousness" required by US law (or is it the other way around?). The patenting offices nitpick on the details but miss the point that they are allowing people to patent very wide formulations of obvious ideas.
A further issue with submarine patents is that under older US copyright laws patents were valid 17 years from APPROVAL and were not published until APPROVAL. So a company could deliberately delay the approval of their patent so that when it is published, it is too late, the technology is old and ubiquitous, and they can extort from everyone who uses it. This is what happened with the microsoft FAT patents that were recently on slashdot.
So all their fancy technique becomes useless unless they violate your privacy first.
It seems to me that what you suggest would imply that anything not filed as a patent application would not count as prior art..
So everyone would have to attempt to patent every stupid little concept in their products/research to avoid someone else doing it. Right now at least if you have a patent on X but my product doing X has come out before your patent was filed, your patent is void (should have been denied by patenting office, and will be in court if you try to sue me).
The fact bittorrent uses a lot of bandwidth is no justification for throttling it: it just means it does it's job well.
only thing I buy "expensive" computers for (as in a 200$ midrange graphics card) is videogames. That's also the main reason to have a windows OS..
Also I have been doing some amount of patent reading, and it is quite clear that none of it is written in a way to be of any use: typically, problems get patented rather than solutions, or anyhow the details of how it works are omitted (they shouldn't be, according to patent law) so to this date I have not read a single patent that added anything useful to my knowledge.
Oh and how about the older US patenting system, where patents were valid 17 years after APPROVAL (rather than 20 after submission as it is now), and patents were not published until approval? The trick is that the applicant could deliberately delay the approval of the patent for 10, 15 years, to have the patent come out as a surprise bomb when the subject covered had already become an industry standard (example: microsoft's FAT patent: ever wonder wy it was in the news this month, after so many years?)
Currently one of the requirements for a patent to be accepted is that the invention is not obvious (to someone "skilled in the art"). In practice, a lot of obvious patents are allowed by the patent office (in the US as well as in europe).
From TFA: "That exam would take less time than a regular patent examination, because obviousness would not be considered."
A patent would get examinated only when challenged, but obviousity would NOT be taken into account.. what these people propose is to make a law of the current bad practice of allowing obvious patents.
Also the guy seems to think that the reason we have such bad software patents around is that in the past software developers were not patenting their ideas, so now there is no prior art for old ideas. This is extremely stupid since somthing doesn't have to be in a patent application to be prior art: if an academic paper described an idea ten years ago it is prior art for new patents even if nobody patented it. The same should be true for an idea implemented in the linux kernel ten years ago, although in this case I am not sure it would meet the USPTO's documental requirements for prior art.
What really would have happened if the US patenting system had allowed "techniques from the early period of computer applications" to be patented, is that IT would not have had anywhere close the development it has had, and the US would be lagging behind the rest of the high-tech world because innovation would have been stifled.
If a patent on some variation of "sending email over RF" is overturned on the basis of new prior art, it does not mean the system works.
Such a patent should not be valid based on the much more basic fact that patents which just combine a bunch of known things shouldn't be allowed. Using well known technology A to solve problem B does not have an "inventive step".
And the much more basic problem is you shouldn't be allowed (and you aren't allowed in europe) to patent ideas, algorithms, protocols, math, etcetera. All of that is software patents. Patents such as the many ones on MP3, or the LZW compression patent (that affected the GIF format) do cover innovative ideas (LZW is pretty cool!), but they still shouldn't be allowed.
DRM is totally incompatible with free software.
Hell, it is incompatible with freedom of speech too.
The only way you can stop streams of bits from being freely copied around is a combination of legislation and cryptographic hardware (treacherous computing) which (assuming it would work) effectively would take the flow of ALL information into the control of some entity (the guys who have the root keys to the world trusted hardware).. probably a private, unelected entity that national jurisdictions would have a lot of trouble controlling.
A real "trusted computing" environment, on the other hand, where the owner of the computer can choose which software is allowed to run and enforce it with digitally signed binaries verified by hardware, is just good security. The GPL3 draft does not stop anyone from doing this.
I think another issue with previous versions of the GPL is addressed by requiring not just distribution of source code, but of anything necessary to make the code actually work, including encryption keys. Quoting from the draft:
"Complete Corresponding Source Code also includes any encryption or
authorization codes necessary to install and/or execute the source code of
the work, perhaps modified by you, in the recommended or principal context
of use, such that its functioning in all circumstances is identical to that
of the work, except as altered by your modifications. It also includes any
decryption codes necessary to access or unseal the work's output."
This is very important if treacherous computing schemes become widespread (that is, "trusted computing" where the owner of the computer cannot get code of his choosing to execute).
The reason is that if I write code and release it under the old GPL, company A can port it to a treacherous computing platform, compile it and sign the binary with a digital signature enabling it on the platform. Company A then distributes it with the source code. But when another user takes the code, modifies it, and compiles he is unable to sign it (unless he is also a big company with a TCP-enabling key) and is therefore unable to run it on the platform. Company A has therefore effectively stolen a user's right to further modify derivations of a GPL work.
The proposed changes stops Company A distributing a derivative work for a treacherous computing platform, unless they also publish their TC private key (which they can't). It doesn't stop Company A from using GPL code on a trusted computing platform, where anyone can use their own key to enable code to run on their own computer, so Company A does not need to give us their key.
If US congress is in such bad state that it decides people in america aren't even allowed to record tv onto a VCR (or technological equivalent) you guys in the states just have to either move to canada, or download stuff from us lucky guys in europe (or elsewhere) who can. Encrypted so that nothing short of man in the middle will allow it to be intercepted by the bad guys..