I think you're right (and some other posters have said this, too.)
Most of MS' patent portfolio is taken out defensively because they're a big fat deep-pocket target.
Recall some version of DOS where MS had infringed upon someone else's compression technology and, among other things, had to re-release their product after legal action that was taken against them.
There's cases where MS has transgressed others technology, and sometimes they've gotten bitten for it, but they've certainly learned to patent everything to protect their butts. (And to keep a sharp lookout for new technology that could be really important to their business and to buy it out, eg, Citrix).
As long as MS owns the technology, it's usually no skin off their nose to rent it out to others. It's not like anyone else has the same kind of marketing leverage that MS does.
The whole idea of patents is to increase the overall benefit to society at large by balancing special protection to the inventor to encourage innovation (which costs society and provides extra value to the patent holder) with ultimate release into the public domain (which benefits society and provides no special value to the patent holder).
There's a balance in there somewhere and there's a lot of different opinions about where the line should be drawn in terms of the length of time that patent protection is extended.
My opinion is that 17 years was fine for cotton gin technology in the 18th century but far too long for software in the 21st century.
I'm not aware of any studies on how the economics of supply and demand work for IP protection and innovation, but I suspect that a lot of cost-effective innovation would still occcur with shorter patent protection time windows.
what exactly causes frequency deviation? I'm not terribly familiar with it
Glad you asked.
It's a highly technical term that refers to the frequency of the AC sine wave of electric power that is delivered over your lines.
This frequency is related to the 60 Hz rate of revolution maintained by most generators.
Occassionally, something will happen to upset this steady rate of revolution of the generators.
In particular, Homer, a donut that falls into the space between the stator and armature will cause this problem.
Lubrication from jelly-filling in the donut can help stave off the inevitable disaster of frequency deviation, but it is simply an old-wive's tale to believe that pouring coffee into the space will ungunk the works in time.
Depending on cost and weight considerations, this looks like a ripe opportunity for some aftermarket performance-boosting capacitors. They could be charging up whenever there's not a direct load on the IC engine.
The boost would really help, too, for those other situations where people would be apprehensive about not having 300hp at their immediate disposal - accelerating from 50-70 mph (90-110 kph) fast enough to avoid becoming grill decoration for the oncoming truck.
What if only one best-of-breed
browser could run embedded plug-ins, applets, ActiveX controls, or anything
like them, and it wasn't IE? How competitive would the other browsers be
without those capabilities? How would that change the current dynamics in
the Industry?"
Good points to think about.
I'd settle for eliminating plug-ins entirely, but solidifying support for W3C standards such as SVG and X3D.
With some work in ECMAscript (Javascript), dynamic illustrations in SVG could be turned into the various widgets that people expect from a modern GUI, but they'd be built-in to a browser and be cross-platform.
Then IE, Mozilla, Opera and anyone else would be free to implement renderers and interactors without fearing whether they're infringing on someone's patent.
Widespread adoption of these standards for interactive and scalable graphics would be a tremendous benefit in getting rid of all the various paper-centric publishing solutions that plague us today.
I'd like it even better if it would permit me to maintain multiple identities, as well as the public/private authorization (and the little box that I keep in my position to cut down on trojans - that sure looks like a bona fide Windows password dialog box to me - guess I'll type in my passphrase!).
That way, sleazy_4of12 could buy porn, while upstanding_4of12 could pay his utility bill, etc.
There's really no need for the utility company to be able to know anything except that I want some service and that I am capable of paying for it.
Unfortunately, the powers that be would not like losing correlatable information about me that exists presently, so I doubt my multiple identities with authorization scheme would fly. But it's technically feasible.
So I'm curious whether the end of the line development of IE for Mac OS X will be extended to achieve some compliance with what MS feels are its legal obligations to avoid infringing on Eolas patent, or whether that issue will be up to Apple and its support of Safari?
The only issue with PO box is getting packages (UPS obviously won't deliver to one).
Talk to whereever you send outbound packages via UPS.
In my rural area they'll accept packages for delivery to you, call you when something comes in, but charge a couple of dollars for the privilege.
[BTW, as bad as identity theft is, the closely related ultra-hassle is being the victim of stalking. It will happen to about 1 in 12 women and 1 in 50 men at some point in their lives. If you have been or know someone who has been the victim of this kind of harassment, you can appreciate the importance of guarding personal information at levels that most people would consider paranoia.]
Public records are better if you want to be a crook because the Freedom of Information Act makes them completely available.
Cringely was quite correct when he identified two parts of the problem: the ubiquity of using SSN as both an identifier and as authorization (or using credit card numbers this way).
It would really be much better if the institutions we dealt with would accept identities and authorizations that were only valid for the specific transactions we conducted with them.
But no, "people can't remember all those numbers". Well, people ought to have a private key that is really private, and public keys that anyone can use to verify that person X really authorized some transaction Y.
But rely upon government to come out with a bad solution to this problem.
The FoIA safeguards, which are important to keeping government transparent and more accountable to the people, will be abolished (as they have already been for various cases deemed to involve national security or "terrorism"), to "increase security for the citizens".
We'll be trading a great deal in terms of liberty and knowledge of whether our government is acting properly for very little in the way of security.
Sure wish there was more economic incentive for Poland, Romania, and Brazil not to crack systems, but to help build out and defend networks instead.
The problem is that putting up a compromisable host on the Internet is relatively easy and the costs of the compromised system are not born entirely by the owner of the system, but are shared by everyone else on the network that might become victim of a DDoS, congestion, spam, etc.
I really only see a couple of ways of dealing with this.
One, have a central authority scan for vulnerabilities and have the authority to fine and/or shutdown net access for systems that endanger network health.
Two, institute distributed white hat scans that either shutdown the host, install patches forcible after some time.
It makes sense to require anyone using a common resource like the Internet to agree to responsible behavior and accept punishment for irresponsible behavior, such as running vulnerable systems. Just like food service workers that get tested for communicable diseases or drivers that require licenses, the commons of the Internet should also be protected.
Will electrons fall out of orbit and cause atoms to collapse
Probably not, since most electrons live in their lowest allowable quantum state already, unless you're in a plasma.
This really is an achievement, getting down to a nanokelvin.
Our experience is using degrees or Kelvin to measure temperature and people tend not to be impressed that the coldest temperature went from a microK to a nanoK, because the upper end of the scale is millions and billions of degrees - so who cares about changing temperature from 10^-3 K to 10^-9 K?
It was explained once to me that if the temperature scale were redefined using a logarithmic mapping (T_new = log(T_old)) that we'd be a lot more impressed with low temperatures and with the asympototically unreachable nature of "absolute zero" that sits at a finite and seemingly reachable value.
I find it intersting that Richard Stallman supports Kucinich.
The bit about removing the "profit component" from medicine could be interpreted as pure socialism.
But what is consistent with RMS's message is that much of the fantastic profit in the pharmaceutical industry can be attributed to the lengthy periods of patent protection they get for their products.
In that sense, the situation is similar to what he's ranted against in the software industry.
When industries or companies become unusually profitable, the public at large owes it to itself to ask questions about whether there are imbalances in the marketplace that hinder competition, increase prices, reduce quality, etc. Doesn't matter whether it's software, drugs, cars, electric power, cell-phone service, recorded music, consumer credit, or battlefield defense systems.
While, here in the good ole USA -- guess what? -- non-citizens can be easily shafted!
I don't think citizens of the U.S. have much of leg to stand on until we get our own house in order.
That would include all the nudging and winking about hiring illegal immigrants and not cracking down harder on those U.S. employers abusing their non-citizen employees.
But faulty laws have been with us throughout history and are not likely to go away anytime soon.
Examples might include speeding, jaywalking, failure to obey lane restrictions, prohibitions on the use of narcotics and various sexual activity.
I recall living in a city with such a shortage of parking spaces that citizens regarded the "parking fine" more in the way of a tax or service fee.
We'd give more credit and responsibility to individual citizens if they were assessed taxes and penalites based on their actual cost to society, rather than perceived cost.
If you look at most open source software, its development was not the prime objective of the research project.
Rather, the objective is to do something new, interesting and different from what has been done before.
Your proposal should combine some ingredients that would make the medical records system better in a signficant way. It doesn't have to be rocket science, but it can include some ideas that you have to make it a different project than just wrapping up a SQL engine with a GUI.
My own suggestion is wrapping in some traceability mechanism, so that everyone that reads or writes the record leaves a signature with the records.
These days a lot of people are concerned about their sensitive data becoming compromised, spied upon, etc. A medical records system with a well-designed access system could become popular if it is also easy to use and has flexible interfaces (XML).
I'm hoping the benefits of these performance improvements aren't limited to single-purpose embedded devices.
Better interactive response (framebuffer, keyboard, mouse) would help desktop users, while some of the enterprise warehouse folks could use less interruption of important I/O tasks.
Maybe those aims can be achieved somewhat by these kernel improvements.
President Eisenhower warned us of the problems with the military industrial complex that had been created in response to the Cold War.
The "War on Terrorism" has simply become the new justification for spending.
Not that there aren't genuine security needs for the U.S. government. It's just that an accurate picture of those needs is clouded by misinformation from those who stand to gain.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're right (and some other posters have said this, too.)
Most of MS' patent portfolio is taken out defensively because they're a big fat deep-pocket target.
Recall some version of DOS where MS had infringed upon someone else's compression technology and, among other things, had to re-release their product after legal action that was taken against them.
There's cases where MS has transgressed others technology, and sometimes they've gotten bitten for it, but they've certainly learned to patent everything to protect their butts. (And to keep a sharp lookout for new technology that could be really important to their business and to buy it out, eg, Citrix).
As long as MS owns the technology, it's usually no skin off their nose to rent it out to others. It's not like anyone else has the same kind of marketing leverage that MS does.
only problem with software patents
Not the only problem.
The whole idea of patents is to increase the overall benefit to society at large by balancing special protection to the inventor to encourage innovation (which costs society and provides extra value to the patent holder) with ultimate release into the public domain (which benefits society and provides no special value to the patent holder).
There's a balance in there somewhere and there's a lot of different opinions about where the line should be drawn in terms of the length of time that patent protection is extended.
My opinion is that 17 years was fine for cotton gin technology in the 18th century but far too long for software in the 21st century.
I'm not aware of any studies on how the economics of supply and demand work for IP protection and innovation, but I suspect that a lot of cost-effective innovation would still occcur with shorter patent protection time windows.
what exactly causes frequency deviation? I'm not terribly familiar with it
Glad you asked.
It's a highly technical term that refers to the frequency of the AC sine wave of electric power that is delivered over your lines.
This frequency is related to the 60 Hz rate of revolution maintained by most generators.
Occassionally, something will happen to upset this steady rate of revolution of the generators.
In particular, Homer, a donut that falls into the space between the stator and armature will cause this problem.
Lubrication from jelly-filling in the donut can help stave off the inevitable disaster of frequency deviation, but it is simply an old-wive's tale to believe that pouring coffee into the space will ungunk the works in time.
loses some umph in to 30-60 range,
Depending on cost and weight considerations, this looks like a ripe opportunity for some aftermarket performance-boosting capacitors. They could be charging up whenever there's not a direct load on the IC engine.
The boost would really help, too, for those other situations where people would be apprehensive about not having 300hp at their immediate disposal - accelerating from 50-70 mph (90-110 kph) fast enough to avoid becoming grill decoration for the oncoming truck.
What if only one best-of-breed browser could run embedded plug-ins, applets, ActiveX controls, or anything like them, and it wasn't IE? How competitive would the other browsers be without those capabilities? How would that change the current dynamics in the Industry?"
Good points to think about.
I'd settle for eliminating plug-ins entirely, but solidifying support for W3C standards such as SVG and X3D.
With some work in ECMAscript (Javascript), dynamic illustrations in SVG could be turned into the various widgets that people expect from a modern GUI, but they'd be built-in to a browser and be cross-platform.
Then IE, Mozilla, Opera and anyone else would be free to implement renderers and interactors without fearing whether they're infringing on someone's patent.
Widespread adoption of these standards for interactive and scalable graphics would be a tremendous benefit in getting rid of all the various paper-centric publishing solutions that plague us today.
I like your solution.
I'd like it even better if it would permit me to maintain multiple identities, as well as the public/private authorization (and the little box that I keep in my position to cut down on trojans - that sure looks like a bona fide Windows password dialog box to me - guess I'll type in my passphrase!).
That way, sleazy_4of12 could buy porn, while upstanding_4of12 could pay his utility bill, etc.
There's really no need for the utility company to be able to know anything except that I want some service and that I am capable of paying for it.
Unfortunately, the powers that be would not like losing correlatable information about me that exists presently, so I doubt my multiple identities with authorization scheme would fly. But it's technically feasible.
So I'm curious whether the end of the line development of IE for Mac OS X will be extended to achieve some compliance with what MS feels are its legal obligations to avoid infringing on Eolas patent, or whether that issue will be up to Apple and its support of Safari?
The only issue with PO box is getting packages (UPS obviously won't deliver to one).
Talk to whereever you send outbound packages via UPS.
In my rural area they'll accept packages for delivery to you, call you when something comes in, but charge a couple of dollars for the privilege.
[BTW, as bad as identity theft is, the closely related ultra-hassle is being the victim of stalking. It will happen to about 1 in 12 women and 1 in 50 men at some point in their lives. If you have been or know someone who has been the victim of this kind of harassment, you can appreciate the importance of guarding personal information at levels that most people would consider paranoia.]
Public records are better if you want to be a crook because the Freedom of Information Act makes them completely available.
Cringely was quite correct when he identified two parts of the problem: the ubiquity of using SSN as both an identifier and as authorization (or using credit card numbers this way).
It would really be much better if the institutions we dealt with would accept identities and authorizations that were only valid for the specific transactions we conducted with them.
But no, "people can't remember all those numbers". Well, people ought to have a private key that is really private, and public keys that anyone can use to verify that person X really authorized some transaction Y.
But rely upon government to come out with a bad solution to this problem.
The FoIA safeguards, which are important to keeping government transparent and more accountable to the people, will be abolished (as they have already been for various cases deemed to involve national security or "terrorism"), to "increase security for the citizens".
We'll be trading a great deal in terms of liberty and knowledge of whether our government is acting properly for very little in the way of security.
Sure wish there was more economic incentive for Poland, Romania, and Brazil not to crack systems, but to help build out and defend networks instead.
The problem is that putting up a compromisable host on the Internet is relatively easy and the costs of the compromised system are not born entirely by the owner of the system, but are shared by everyone else on the network that might become victim of a DDoS, congestion, spam, etc.
I really only see a couple of ways of dealing with this.
One, have a central authority scan for vulnerabilities and have the authority to fine and /or shutdown net access for systems that endanger network health.
Two, institute distributed white hat scans that either shutdown the host, install patches forcible after some time.
It makes sense to require anyone using a common resource like the Internet to agree to responsible behavior and accept punishment for irresponsible behavior, such as running vulnerable systems. Just like food service workers that get tested for communicable diseases or drivers that require licenses, the commons of the Internet should also be protected.
Will electrons fall out of orbit and cause atoms to collapse
Probably not, since most electrons live in their lowest allowable quantum state already, unless you're in a plasma.
This really is an achievement, getting down to a nanokelvin.
Our experience is using degrees or Kelvin to measure temperature and people tend not to be impressed that the coldest temperature went from a microK to a nanoK, because the upper end of the scale is millions and billions of degrees - so who cares about changing temperature from 10^-3 K to 10^-9 K?
It was explained once to me that if the temperature scale were redefined using a logarithmic mapping (T_new = log(T_old)) that we'd be a lot more impressed with low temperatures and with the asympototically unreachable nature of "absolute zero" that sits at a finite and seemingly reachable value.
Or IIRC Exchange 2003+Outlook 2003, which works fully over HTTP
I think I'm beginning to detect a trend here.
With the way things are going, the whole damn Internet will be running over HTTP soon.
Routers will simply discard any packets not on ports 80 or 443 as "malformed".
I find it intersting that Richard Stallman supports Kucinich.
The bit about removing the "profit component" from medicine could be interpreted as pure socialism.
But what is consistent with RMS's message is that much of the fantastic profit in the pharmaceutical industry can be attributed to the lengthy periods of patent protection they get for their products.
In that sense, the situation is similar to what he's ranted against in the software industry.
When industries or companies become unusually profitable, the public at large owes it to itself to ask questions about whether there are imbalances in the marketplace that hinder competition, increase prices, reduce quality, etc. Doesn't matter whether it's software, drugs, cars, electric power, cell-phone service, recorded music, consumer credit, or battlefield defense systems.
Like these DivX-inspired zombie critters from Disney, for example.
Others have mentioned the problem where source code comparison needs to account for variable renaming, the difference between
int i;
int j;
and
int i,j;
so why not compare chunks of compiled code (using the same compiler, options, etc.)?
In India non-citizens can be easily shafted!
While, here in the good ole USA -- guess what? -- non-citizens can be easily shafted!
I don't think citizens of the U.S. have much of leg to stand on until we get our own house in order.
That would include all the nudging and winking about hiring illegal immigrants and not cracking down harder on those U.S. employers abusing their non-citizen employees.
being into science could also make you very unpopular.
Yes, I became a scientist despite being presented with the image of Simon Barsinister, villian of Underdog, at an early age.
Edward Teller was an extraordinary individual, both quirky and brilliant. And he kind of looked a bit like Simon Barsinister, too.
How to present a political agenda whilst masquerading as a news piece.
Roger Ailes has already done that in a much larger more effective way than Project Censored could ever dream of doing.
people appreciate the right to BEND the law.
A symptom of faulty laws.
But faulty laws have been with us throughout history and are not likely to go away anytime soon.
Examples might include speeding, jaywalking, failure to obey lane restrictions, prohibitions on the use of narcotics and various sexual activity.
I recall living in a city with such a shortage of parking spaces that citizens regarded the "parking fine" more in the way of a tax or service fee.
We'd give more credit and responsibility to individual citizens if they were assessed taxes and penalites based on their actual cost to society, rather than perceived cost.
A much smarter method, in my opinion, would be to check vehicle mileage of registered vehicles, and tax based on that.
Or do away with the mileage inspectors entirely and simply tax fuel. And guess what they do....?
intern.
Interns!
Definitely Red Hat should come out with some adds like Dell's, with "interns".
I can just see the scenarios... a lot more realistic and not so squeaky clean as the Dell interns...
Sounds like the guy in question had unofficially let someone else use his computer, account, etc.
I kind of like the idea of RIAA making a big fuss and pursuing legal action and then turning out to be wrong.
It helps shine a light on their gestapo tactics.
It may not slow them down too much, but the publicity helps to make them look like ravenous wolves out to get "whoever".
That kind of PR will erode their support from government.
If you look at most open source software, its development was not the prime objective of the research project.
Rather, the objective is to do something new, interesting and different from what has been done before.
Your proposal should combine some ingredients that would make the medical records system better in a signficant way. It doesn't have to be rocket science, but it can include some ideas that you have to make it a different project than just wrapping up a SQL engine with a GUI.
My own suggestion is wrapping in some traceability mechanism, so that everyone that reads or writes the record leaves a signature with the records.
These days a lot of people are concerned about their sensitive data becoming compromised, spied upon, etc. A medical records system with a well-designed access system could become popular if it is also easy to use and has flexible interfaces (XML).
I'm hoping the benefits of these performance improvements aren't limited to single-purpose embedded devices.
Better interactive response (framebuffer, keyboard, mouse) would help desktop users, while some of the enterprise warehouse folks could use less interruption of important I/O tasks.
Maybe those aims can be achieved somewhat by these kernel improvements.
President Eisenhower warned us of the problems with the military industrial complex that had been created in response to the Cold War.
The "War on Terrorism" has simply become the new justification for spending.
Not that there aren't genuine security needs for the U.S. government. It's just that an accurate picture of those needs is clouded by misinformation from those who stand to gain.