Translation: I don't care how other people do it because I am certain I can't be wrong. Do you realize how insane an argument from ignorance looks when the very people you are arguing with aren't ignorant on the topic?
...allowed in the European Union? It really compromises the image of the whole entity that they have no problem with this absurd level of corruption. This is obviously another censorship/media control ploy by Berlusconi, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was specifically designed to hurt Wikipedia.
Oh, get over your bullshit partisanship. Look around here. I don't see a single person, except maybe Canadians, who aren't outraged at this. And let me try to remember, slashdot has a very liberal slant according to certain people, does it not? Add it up; there is no vast conspiracy against the poor little Republicans here.
Censorship makes it look like you have something to hide. Trying to keep people from denying the holocaust just gives them ammunition. In the process, you give up what you ought to consider your inalienable human rights.
Canada (and Europe) likes to believe they're freer, and verbosely proclaim so, but I think they have it backwards. Americans complain about their freedoms so often because they actually value them, while Europeans (and Canadians are very culturally similar) do not.
One or two of them opposing slavery does absolutely nothing to change the fact that it took over half a century and another war for slavery to end, and almost two centuries for women to get rights. The founding fathers didn't want the British involved in their affairs; there was not a whole lot to do with freedom going on, except a few people with pet projects. They might have done some things we can agree on as good, but that doesn't make them immortal bastions of all that is righteous, like many people seem to believe. We can improve upon them, and indeed, we already have.
In a hundred years people may look back and think many things, that doesn't make any of them accurate.
Are you seriously claiming that things were better then than they are now? Would you prefer to live under the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution? To claim we haven't gotten closer to some general good is insanity. Unless, of course, you're one of the people who would have benefited from the system we originally had; why do I have the feeling that is the case?
Many ideas that are patented require millions of dollars to develop. So help me understand if there is no way to protect your innovations, what incentive is there to do them if anyone can copy?
Because we all know there was no innovation before patents. Uh huh.
How about:
First-to-market advantage.
Copies being reverse engineered, ie probably not as good a product.
The fact most products are undeserving of nor need patents in the first place.
Or, maybe the whole system just shouldn't exist. Just because something might have a minor benefit economically doesn't mean it should exist, and if you strain your mind, you can think of at least one major case of this that I will not mention. The question that needs asked, and people like you never consider, is this: how many businesses are being damaged or all-together prevented so that those few businesses that "need" patents can preserve their business model?
You're right that it's not the cause of the financial problems, but I was not speaking of financial problems. Almost all western countries are facing mass unemployment due to a shift to a service/IP economy. Problem is, there will come a day when no one respects our IP, and that unemployment is going to look like nothing compared to the second great depression.
We have overvalued intangible (ie, imaginary property), and that is why we are looking at economic downturns. Now, I will say, it doesn't take a Ph.D in anthropology to draw connections between that and the credit bubble, but I'll leave it to your imagination.
Sadly, this is a form of fascism that was enshrined into law by the founders, who apparently feared a full implementation of their ideology to governance.
The founders were wrong about almost everything, from the voting system which discourages alternative candidates, down to women's rights and slavery. They really ought to not be worshiped as they are; most were criminals in it for their own gain, and are only "good" by comparison to those they were fighting against.
In this specific case, the founders were taken in by the Romanticist myth of "creation from nothingness," which unsurprisingly was a lie created by authors to defame their critics and printers (who was it that started the Renaissance again?). Sadly, it went unquestioned for so long that the common American sheep is unable to question the concept any longer. Even worse, the idea of simply giving someone control over publishing has morphed into author (and family, because their copyright long outlives them) welfare and a tool for censorship. It needs to end. Now.
In a hundred years, people will look back on copyright like we do on serfdom, slavery, and patriarchal and/or landed voting systems. It is an archaic system, built upon lies and greed, which needs to die for the betterment of humanity.
"I'm not going to claim to be a patent expert, but I do know a couple of things: 1) The patent has to be actively protected."
Patents do NOT need to be protected, or necessarily even filed before the patent was violated, to be enforced. Patents, copyright, and trademarks - they're all different things.
...the western world's economy is collapsing. When you make ideas property, everyone gets hurt, even the big guys (but more so, the little guys). We already have patents and copyright strangling the market and preventing innovation, and now we're seeing more and more their use to undermine technology that is already a basis part of out society.
This is just another example in an infinitely long chain of abuses, and still there is essentially no proof that either patents or copyright actually encourage much of anything. So, are we going to abolish imaginary property, or fade into legally enforced obscurity? Because I know China won't give a crap about our patents once they no longer need to sell us cheap junk. If all we export is old ideas and lawsuits, there will reach a point when other powerful countries just shut down that trade all together.
Wake up, people, now is the time to elect people who are going to do something about this untenable situation. You aren't going to get another chance.
Of course it isn't what is responsible for Apple's success. The one and only cause of that is marketing. Marketing like no marketing has ever been accomplished before. What other business has the same level of blind following from their users as Apple? None I can think of. Factual and ideological arguments alike seem to have no effect on them, because the reason to buy an Apple device is cultural. iAnything is a status symbol, and therefore, actually becomes more valuable as the price goes up.
Of course, it helps that "Macs are good for graphics|music|grandma|etc" and that they are supposedly easier to use, but it is being a status symbol that makes Apple the most valuable company in technology, not better technology.
And a PC that runs rings around an Apple-branded PC costs about 2k$. Seriously, when I built this computer, I cut a lot of corners, and it was still far higher in every spec than the best Apple had on the market. You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.
"Macs are popular in business"
Graphics, music, and some small forays into movie production (although the real work still happens on Windows and the processing on Linux). Business-business, that being, engineering, finance, healthcare, point of sale, etc, still are Windows or Linux only clubs. For very, very good reason.
The question remains, if it was only Firefox doing it (a reasonable assumption in this case), why do you not think it is Firefox's job to fix it? In the real world, you can't expect everything to be perfect. Sometimes systems misbehave, sometimes users misbehave. Just like you sterilize input, you need to account for known problems in your subsystems. Passing the buck, especially to people extremely unlikely to do anything, just makes you and your software look bad. This is why open source is slowly going down the tubes.
Nice excuse. That's the kind of thinking that ran me away from Linux back to Windows, after having been a Linux user and open source proponent for several years. My ATI drivers do not (and do not) work properly, and despite my best efforts, cannot be made to. Developers don't care- "it's ATI's fault [and yours for having an ATI card]".
I'm sorry, but that's not a professional or serious answer. If your software is so poorly designed it breaks the systems underlying it, and indeed breaks around half of the video drivers out there, then your software is the problem. If Firefox is crashing his Nvidia drivers (which I do not see as unlikely with the level of atrocious design in open source these days), then it is Firefox's problem. Claiming it isn't just makes open source looks like amateur hour.
Stand by your software, or people will go elsewhere. Real developers stand by their code and by refusing to do so, you just show you aren't taking it seriously.
Yes, just never have sex. Uh huh. How about you head back to the pulpit, where people feel obliged to listen to you (and then ignore what you said afterwards).
I don't know about that, but I have a sure-fire way to not die from HIV. You see, it is simple. If you find you have contracted HIV, jump off the nearest bridge. You will no longer need to worry about HIV! Of course, this process only has about a 99% success rate, so you might need to repeat it a few times to ensure you are cured of HIV.
Yes, that was sarcasm. I know it's hard to tell with some of the idiots out there on this topic.
Which is why computer science is a useless degree to have.
I have found that the vast majority of the people in and coming out of those programs come back asking me questions about memory and such; I never got a degree in computer science, never would, and haven't seriously programmed in 3 years. Yet, I still know more than recent graduates. Maybe it's time we drop the drudgery and stop spending billions on turning out people who can barely make Java function.
There is a lot of very useful math that most colleges totally ignore. I am yet to see any college teach quaternions at an undergraduate level, at least to non math-majors, and yet they are one of the most important aspects of math to programming. Calculus? Entirely useless. It is practically impossible to implement calculus in a computer program, which is fine, because there is only call for it in a tiny fraction of programs.
We need to stop teaching the outliers, or just drop "Computer Science" as a field altogether and move on with life. As it is, it isn't helping.
Most certainly not. I wouldn't go there if I had the option; being an engineer, I'd much rather CMU or MIT... however, I do often hear people mixing up Pennsylvania State and University of Pennsylvania. It's not a hard mistake to make, honestly.
I kind of think the whole idea of using a sporting league as a measure of academic quality is a bit off. That there are "accepted" terms, apparently, for good colleges that are not in the Ivy League to be "Ivy" just strikes me as entirely backwards. But then, it is higher education, quite a bit is.
I see this more of a case of people in glass houses throwing stones. Apple cannot be the bully and not expect to eventually have someone stand up to them. Patent trolls will be trolled themselves, it's just how it works out. However, the number of patent and copyright trolls is definitely increasing, with even semi-respectable companies joining the fray.
This is yet another incident resulting in death where a seemingly large number of people were involved in shooting Youtube video or snapping photos when the spectators could have provided assistance to the injured.
There were several hundred people already there. Had everyone present "helped" the injured, they would have been trampled to death.
The individual in the SUV later complained about breaking the window, etc. (even through his vehicle was totaled), and threatened a lawsuit (me).
There is some serious desensitization taking place and I feel social media may be the catalyst.
You go and give a story in which the real cause is readily apparent (nay, the moral), and then blame social media?
German motorists weren't concerned about lawyers or Youtube during the accident, but were focused on the victim and clearing the motorway first and foremost (not lawyers).
Are you implying that lawyers are caused by youtube? Vice-versa? Your argument is entirely incoherent; what relationship exists between lawyers, social media, and people not trampling the injured?
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: I don't care how other people do it because I am certain I can't be wrong. Do you realize how insane an argument from ignorance looks when the very people you are arguing with aren't ignorant on the topic?
...allowed in the European Union? It really compromises the image of the whole entity that they have no problem with this absurd level of corruption. This is obviously another censorship/media control ploy by Berlusconi, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was specifically designed to hurt Wikipedia.
Oh, get over your bullshit partisanship. Look around here. I don't see a single person, except maybe Canadians, who aren't outraged at this. And let me try to remember, slashdot has a very liberal slant according to certain people, does it not? Add it up; there is no vast conspiracy against the poor little Republicans here.
Censorship makes it look like you have something to hide. Trying to keep people from denying the holocaust just gives them ammunition. In the process, you give up what you ought to consider your inalienable human rights.
Canada (and Europe) likes to believe they're freer, and verbosely proclaim so, but I think they have it backwards. Americans complain about their freedoms so often because they actually value them, while Europeans (and Canadians are very culturally similar) do not.
Are you seriously claiming that things were better then than they are now? Would you prefer to live under the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution? To claim we haven't gotten closer to some general good is insanity. Unless, of course, you're one of the people who would have benefited from the system we originally had; why do I have the feeling that is the case?
Because we all know there was no innovation before patents. Uh huh.
How about:
First-to-market advantage.
Copies being reverse engineered, ie probably not as good a product.
The fact most products are undeserving of nor need patents in the first place.
Or, maybe the whole system just shouldn't exist. Just because something might have a minor benefit economically doesn't mean it should exist, and if you strain your mind, you can think of at least one major case of this that I will not mention. The question that needs asked, and people like you never consider, is this: how many businesses are being damaged or all-together prevented so that those few businesses that "need" patents can preserve their business model?
You're right that it's not the cause of the financial problems, but I was not speaking of financial problems. Almost all western countries are facing mass unemployment due to a shift to a service/IP economy. Problem is, there will come a day when no one respects our IP, and that unemployment is going to look like nothing compared to the second great depression.
We have overvalued intangible (ie, imaginary property), and that is why we are looking at economic downturns. Now, I will say, it doesn't take a Ph.D in anthropology to draw connections between that and the credit bubble, but I'll leave it to your imagination.
The founders were wrong about almost everything, from the voting system which discourages alternative candidates, down to women's rights and slavery. They really ought to not be worshiped as they are; most were criminals in it for their own gain, and are only "good" by comparison to those they were fighting against.
In this specific case, the founders were taken in by the Romanticist myth of "creation from nothingness," which unsurprisingly was a lie created by authors to defame their critics and printers (who was it that started the Renaissance again?). Sadly, it went unquestioned for so long that the common American sheep is unable to question the concept any longer. Even worse, the idea of simply giving someone control over publishing has morphed into author (and family, because their copyright long outlives them) welfare and a tool for censorship. It needs to end. Now.
In a hundred years, people will look back on copyright like we do on serfdom, slavery, and patriarchal and/or landed voting systems. It is an archaic system, built upon lies and greed, which needs to die for the betterment of humanity.
Everyone copies. Try to do something that is totally original. Just try it. It is not physically possible.
"I'm not going to claim to be a patent expert, but I do know a couple of things: 1) The patent has to be actively protected."
Patents do NOT need to be protected, or necessarily even filed before the patent was violated, to be enforced. Patents, copyright, and trademarks - they're all different things.
...the western world's economy is collapsing. When you make ideas property, everyone gets hurt, even the big guys (but more so, the little guys). We already have patents and copyright strangling the market and preventing innovation, and now we're seeing more and more their use to undermine technology that is already a basis part of out society.
This is just another example in an infinitely long chain of abuses, and still there is essentially no proof that either patents or copyright actually encourage much of anything. So, are we going to abolish imaginary property, or fade into legally enforced obscurity? Because I know China won't give a crap about our patents once they no longer need to sell us cheap junk. If all we export is old ideas and lawsuits, there will reach a point when other powerful countries just shut down that trade all together.
Wake up, people, now is the time to elect people who are going to do something about this untenable situation. You aren't going to get another chance.
Except, you know, people who think we should have laws against neither.
Yeah, I know it's easy to generalize, but that just means you'll be wrong most of the time.
Of course it isn't what is responsible for Apple's success. The one and only cause of that is marketing. Marketing like no marketing has ever been accomplished before. What other business has the same level of blind following from their users as Apple? None I can think of. Factual and ideological arguments alike seem to have no effect on them, because the reason to buy an Apple device is cultural. iAnything is a status symbol, and therefore, actually becomes more valuable as the price goes up.
Of course, it helps that "Macs are good for graphics|music|grandma|etc" and that they are supposedly easier to use, but it is being a status symbol that makes Apple the most valuable company in technology, not better technology.
And a PC that runs rings around an Apple-branded PC costs about 2k$. Seriously, when I built this computer, I cut a lot of corners, and it was still far higher in every spec than the best Apple had on the market. You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.
"Macs are popular in business"
Graphics, music, and some small forays into movie production (although the real work still happens on Windows and the processing on Linux). Business-business, that being, engineering, finance, healthcare, point of sale, etc, still are Windows or Linux only clubs. For very, very good reason.
The question remains, if it was only Firefox doing it (a reasonable assumption in this case), why do you not think it is Firefox's job to fix it? In the real world, you can't expect everything to be perfect. Sometimes systems misbehave, sometimes users misbehave. Just like you sterilize input, you need to account for known problems in your subsystems. Passing the buck, especially to people extremely unlikely to do anything, just makes you and your software look bad. This is why open source is slowly going down the tubes.
Nice excuse. That's the kind of thinking that ran me away from Linux back to Windows, after having been a Linux user and open source proponent for several years. My ATI drivers do not (and do not) work properly, and despite my best efforts, cannot be made to. Developers don't care- "it's ATI's fault [and yours for having an ATI card]".
I'm sorry, but that's not a professional or serious answer. If your software is so poorly designed it breaks the systems underlying it, and indeed breaks around half of the video drivers out there, then your software is the problem. If Firefox is crashing his Nvidia drivers (which I do not see as unlikely with the level of atrocious design in open source these days), then it is Firefox's problem. Claiming it isn't just makes open source looks like amateur hour.
Stand by your software, or people will go elsewhere. Real developers stand by their code and by refusing to do so, you just show you aren't taking it seriously.
Abstinence can also cure cancer, if we can get everyone on board. Wonder why that hasn't been tried!
Yes, just never have sex. Uh huh. How about you head back to the pulpit, where people feel obliged to listen to you (and then ignore what you said afterwards).
I don't know about that, but I have a sure-fire way to not die from HIV. You see, it is simple. If you find you have contracted HIV, jump off the nearest bridge. You will no longer need to worry about HIV! Of course, this process only has about a 99% success rate, so you might need to repeat it a few times to ensure you are cured of HIV.
Yes, that was sarcasm. I know it's hard to tell with some of the idiots out there on this topic.
Which is why computer science is a useless degree to have.
I have found that the vast majority of the people in and coming out of those programs come back asking me questions about memory and such; I never got a degree in computer science, never would, and haven't seriously programmed in 3 years. Yet, I still know more than recent graduates. Maybe it's time we drop the drudgery and stop spending billions on turning out people who can barely make Java function.
There is a lot of very useful math that most colleges totally ignore. I am yet to see any college teach quaternions at an undergraduate level, at least to non math-majors, and yet they are one of the most important aspects of math to programming. Calculus? Entirely useless. It is practically impossible to implement calculus in a computer program, which is fine, because there is only call for it in a tiny fraction of programs.
We need to stop teaching the outliers, or just drop "Computer Science" as a field altogether and move on with life. As it is, it isn't helping.
Most certainly not. I wouldn't go there if I had the option; being an engineer, I'd much rather CMU or MIT... however, I do often hear people mixing up Pennsylvania State and University of Pennsylvania. It's not a hard mistake to make, honestly.
I kind of think the whole idea of using a sporting league as a measure of academic quality is a bit off. That there are "accepted" terms, apparently, for good colleges that are not in the Ivy League to be "Ivy" just strikes me as entirely backwards. But then, it is higher education, quite a bit is.
"A good one. A public ivy"
There is no such thing. The Ivy League is a specific organization, not a classification of quality. That organization consists of 8 members, ALL of them private universities.
People who claim they went/are at/are going to X Ivy League school, which does not appear on that list, never cease to amaze me.
This sounds more like it would work at any time, making it not a vaccine, but a cure; which is far, far better.
I see this more of a case of people in glass houses throwing stones. Apple cannot be the bully and not expect to eventually have someone stand up to them. Patent trolls will be trolled themselves, it's just how it works out. However, the number of patent and copyright trolls is definitely increasing, with even semi-respectable companies joining the fray.
There were several hundred people already there. Had everyone present "helped" the injured, they would have been trampled to death.
You go and give a story in which the real cause is readily apparent (nay, the moral), and then blame social media?
Are you implying that lawyers are caused by youtube? Vice-versa? Your argument is entirely incoherent; what relationship exists between lawyers, social media, and people not trampling the injured?