You can buy a cheap laptop and have UPS and plenty of power for most internal tasks. Servers are also cheap nowadays and have plenty of power.
Of course, if you want hosting, then having a hosting company makes sense. But if your local, it may not be as clear-cut. Right tool for the right job still applies.
I'm afraid this hyped-up trend will just make our IT infrastructure more fragmented and arbitrarily centralized. Then the governments can go to "cyberwar", after having made everything so brittle and vulnerable.
Spying: It must be so much more easy to get many companies data, just by getting hired by the "cloud" company or otherwise crack into their system.
Sabotage: This is even better, with one centralized datacenter and the knowledge which companies and government branches are using it, one directed attack will be enough to create HUGE damage. There are so many attack vectors, even bunkered datacenters should fear this route.
This is just a change in the name of saving a few bucks, but it is another pebble making society that much more vulnerable and easy to manipulate. I'm not buying "cloud" at all..
Have you read the statement [amazon.com]? It says they withdrew hosting because they believe Wikileaks doesn't own the rights to the content. They also say they are worried about the verification of the 250K cables they are publishing (not: have published).
What do you do when they worry about you?
An ISP should not have to "worry" about customers content. This is a matter of law, except when some people abuse the law and circumvent it for their own benefit.
Hollywood IT industry The PC era The Constitution Freedom of press Big Cars California Texas Research and Science Freedom of love / preference of gender Freedom of religion Opportunities Fantastic Nature Great Personalities Strength and Commitment
USA has been the focus of the World now for at least 50 years.
Now it's time to take advantage of what internet can truly mean for democracy, and get rid of some practices which are undermining true representative democracy. And yeah, getting rid of the two-party system would be cool too, but if you'd like to keep getting screwed over, that's your choice.
Don't mistake critique of hatred, like islamic fundamentalists are crying about whenever someone mentions women's plight in islamic countries.
It's because we care. Truly.
(Yeah, I know you were being sarcastic, but this is a good reply nonetheless I think)
But this isn't free speech anymore, it's just mob justice and there's no due process in mob justice.
Following that logic, USA would never have become independent. Protests against the Vietnam war would never change official policy. Public outrage should only be met with cudgels and swords (guns and bombs in modern times). If the public doesn't matter, we might as well live under a dictatorship, at least that way, we're honest about it.
However, I agree, violence should be last resort. People should find peaceful means to perform due civil disobedience, if that doesn't work, bring on the flamethrowers!
Amazon? PayPal? The Swiss Bank? EasyDNS? The list goes on and on.
These are not just random companies realizing they suddenly don't want Julian Assange as customer. Obviosuly, there are invisible connections and strings playing behind the scenes here.
They were ordered to terminate his accounts. This abuse of power should be exposed for what it is.
Next time, it might be yourself losing all rights to live and being shut out of business.
Here is the excerpt: The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak," says Assange. It's a chilling statistic, but then he states: "On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased."
So, because of the truth, 1,300 people were killed, not because of corruption and a unstable region?
Hiding the truth is good, because we fear the truth?
Julian Assange was arrested in London, by Interpol, for crimes committed in Sweden. This makes the US guilty of doublespeak on this because... well, I guess they said some mean things, at one point?
Officially yes.
Unofficially, you know who is pulling all the strings. Or maybe we really don't..
Of course it's not true. I was really speaking hypothetically, given the same situation as we're in today regarding patent legislation, but I may have been a bit unclear about that.
I was aware there were alot of cooperation between IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Xerox, etc in those early years of immature technology. It only shows how good cooperation and competiveness is for business. I did not mean to say everything GUI and related we have today is thanks to Apple only. Thanks for the history lesson though.
As software patents are now legal in the US however, it is not so hypothetical anymore. Sadly, a likely scenario is that software patents may slow down the innovation and competitiveness in the IT industry, in such countries legislating software patents as legally enforcable.
Not that I am able to foretell the future, but it just seems very likely to me, given the increase of nonsensical / "defensive" patents being granted each year. To me personally though, having to consider legal issues for what I consider my own ideas, is just a stress and a hassle I'd rather not go through with.
Single cases or single threats, law-enforcers and lawmakers can make go away easily.
Yes, it remains to be seen if competitors have simply copied Apple's implementation verbatim, or if they have reinvented the wheel. I wouldn't want to begin to speculate on such a specific case. As before, I'm more concerned about the overall picture, and the real threat a high number of patents pose to society.
I can very much understand why Apple is going down the patent-shaft though: If they've patented all their innovations, Microsoft would never have had the opportunity to become successful while they were small. Apple could've had a stranglehold on most of the booming IT-industry, and we would've probably been several years behind our current developments. The whole industry would've been much more fragmented and non-standard, which would line the pockets of already established corporations like Apple and IBM. Just imagine if IBM could've used patents against clone-makers in the early "PC" era..
Is it really that clear? The way many corporations have gotten away with already having been _granted_ "software patents" in EU is that the claims include texts such as: "an apparatus to operate in so and so manner", while it really is about some embedded program being part of a bigger unit, wether stored in a chip or on a harddrive. The invention itself is typically described as an "apparatus", which could be a microchip, an embedded device or a more generic computer (what's the difference?), interfacing with both hardware and software.
An apparatus is of course hardware and have been patentable since the start. All programs, software, are totally dependent on hardware, so you can never leave hardware out of the equation. Thousands of such patents tying hardware and software have already been granted in EU, but are as of yet, unenforcable since they really are software patents in disguise. There is a big corporate push, especially from USA corporations, to change the laws in EU to make these patents enforcable overnight though. So the minefield has already been prepared for EU. An entry point to this issue can be found here: http://eupat.ffii.org/
Software is simply an extension controlling hardware ("apparatus") in an algorithmic manner. Corporations are just pushing the limit of "apparatus" to include more and more generic implementations. Corporate goals however, conflicts in this case with the benefits of society and the mutual contracts we agree on.
As stated, when concerning an "invention", the borders between hardware and software becomes "fuzzy", however if I cannot convince you, then I must assume you are taking a more theoretical approach to understanding this issue. My understanding is concerning real-life decisions: Which patents should be granted and not granted by the Patent Offices, and what are the consequences of the current patents being granted every year, in both USA and Europe.
I'm by no means an expert, but this is the gist of my understanding of it, how "apparatus" have been abused to extend inventions to software. As a starting point, you could check out Bitlaw's history of software patents:
Software patents are as of now fully patentable in the USA and EU, and are also fully enforcable in USA contrary to the ambiguous status in EU.
Where to go from here? If only hardware is restricted by patents, corporations would try to put more control into hardware, which is both wasteful and backwards, contrary to the current trend of minimizing costs by putting more and more logic into software. Here, the patent system is holding back the progress and evolution of our society, and probably in many more ways than I've mentioned here.
In my understand "multi touch" is not patentable. However a specific implementation of it could be patentable. At least that is how the patent system is supposed to work, although attempts to pervert it is always attempted, ie. by Amazon's One Click Patent.
I agree with you copyright law should be enough for software. However, the distinction between hardware and software is completely arbitrary and doesn't resolve the issue legally.
Rationale: For whatever you can built in software, you can build the equivalent in hardware and vica versa. So what is "software" anyways. Is it RAM, or ROM, or wires? In reality, the limits are blurred, and the push from companies is to extend further and further into territory of algorithmic, mathematics and ideas, which were never supposed to be patentable.
How I see it, when patents start making broad claims and prevents me from doing my job or inventing new things, it is actually hurting society. Reading gibberish patent claims doesn't help me either, so I see no value in the system, at least for my field which is also IT. I don't want it, but I can understand perfectly well why huge megacorporations with armies of lawyers wants them.
As we're now witnessing, these thousands of patents that are granted each year, is not just for "defense". If you enter a contract, do you not judge wether to agree to it or not before agreeing? Why should we tolerate the destructive potential of the current arsenal of patents that now exists and threaten our society, which are so shamelessly approved by the patent office?
So we need to strike a balance, which works for the best for each industry. It's just that the distinction between hardware and software is impossible, revealing that the whole patent system is being undermined by reality, how things actually are. We should figure it out before it's too late. For the Western world anyways.
My stance is that for some industries, especially IT, the patents are not helpful, but harming progress. IT has such a low bar to innovation, even kids can launch something becoming big, and we have many examples of just that. There is thus simply no reason to restrict people in what they can create, and there is very little value to impose the patent system as overhead, since so much knowledge and development is already available in the field. IT is also full of independent research coming to similar results.
I just have no idea how to make the distinction hardware-wise versus software.
I also can't see how anyone can justify business method patents. Success in IT is also dependent on successful business practice, maybe more so than mere technical advances (which are often oblivious to users). Why do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot as society by monopolizing business methods?
I was more looking into the bigger picture of software patents. "Irrelevant" was more meant to turn the focus to the bigger picture, rather than commenting on your particular comment, which stands within the scope it was meant I think.
However, if this development continues, it looms over the industry as the innovative small companies may become squashed. As history shows, innovation do not come from big dinosaurs like Microsoft, IBM or Apple, although their merit is having the Big Guns to take unto large projects, and to buy up the small innovative fish.
My concern is not with one company holding the industry ransom, but rather, everybody sinking down into the patent-swamp and destroying the very foundations of creativity.
What is it with these companies, that they cannot stand having to compete on equal terms?
Irrelevant. If companies can hold entire industries for "patently absurd ransoms", then it doesn't matter if it is for "self-defence" or not. The presedence has been set, not just hypothetically, but according to law. This will have a chilling effect on all innovation and economical competitiveness in the US.
Countries that disregard these types of laws will benefit and take over as the intellectual emmigration sets in. Just too bad for the "industrial countries", this is all the resources they've got left.
Politicians, "diplomats", lawyers and huge international megacorporations will take the profits and move to other countries, once this land has been plundered barren.
Plant some WMDs? You know WMD = Weapons Of Mass Destruction, right? They are heavily regulated. They are HUGE, and way technically advanced. You can't just find such weapons, and assume sand-dwelling people made them from rocks and sticks. You've got to explain what they really did.
Besides, the US military were NOT looking for weapons, really, they were looking for factories. They found none, just as the inspectors, ie. Blix, had warned about was most probable.
Nuclear weapons? Made in Russia? USA? You've got to be kidding me. Do you know how hard it is to operate something nuclear covertly, and how risky it is if someone blows the whistle? Do you know all the controls there are on such facilities and weapons?
Richard Nixon learned the hard way that getting your hands dirty is a bad idea. Much better to just use misinformation to push your political and military agenda. "Our boys" got rich, yay. They made it, on the cost of another country and countless lives, but they're millionaires now. Enjoy it while you can.
Oh, we made an "error". You just don't invade another country, risk thousands of lives, to "save their people", due to an unspecified, unproven "intelligence report" that were in error. All while every other country but UK were protesting. If you really believe this wasn't a calculated strategy, and that they would be "forgiven" once the world was rid of Saddam, then pardon me, but that's very very naive.
I see you've failed to talk about any of my other points I raised, so I'll quit conversation here, because it seems we're both believing different things, and no way to reconcilliate those views.
Read my sig, really, educate yourself. These are crimes that have gone unpunished, and is not what democratically elected politicians should be supporting.
Look, I'm sorry about calling you a troll. Was a bit frustrated about how a whole country can be so duped, but ok, there's probably reasonable reasons for it once you dig more into it.
Planting massive facilities for creating WMDs is not that easy. Intelligence can be anything though, and then you just have to push the agenda hard enough. All the "hawks" needed was a go for military action, and then the country would be committed. It worked like a charm, literally. An entire country duped into believing it, while the rest of the world were condemning the whole agenda.
When GWB was on media arguing that he had intelligence for WMDs, then and there, I _knew_ he was lying. The inspectors were protesting. It was all part of a their (the "hawks'") plans from several years back of taking out GWB senior's arch enemy, Saddam, a former CIA plant. For whatever reasons, axis of evil or whatever christian bullshit and / or oil-dollars, GWB had decided in his alcoholic mind to go through with it no matter what, and he did. It's incredible what one leader can do to wreck damage to a once so great country.
Planting is something you see in movies. I don't believe whacko stories about shadow governments, illumnati or airplanes dumping millions of gallons of gas over us (ever heard of condensing?), or something like that.
In the real world, the covering up is pretty shallow and very high level. It just needs some nods and shrugs from your political peers, and of course you want to leave minimal tracks.
It does us more harm than good though, when politicians circumvent the democratic processes. It's like a dictatorship where a small elite controls the few, and it IS there, no matter how much you don't wanna believe it. But it's more real than those whacko stories, and it's eroding our democracies and ethical judgements.
You DO know Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was trained by CIA and put in power, right?
US soldiers found no WMFDs. European countries, especially Norway, who was heading inspections, found no evidence of WMDs. They clamoured for peaceful solutions to the stubbornness of Mr. Hussein. Although they did get access, it was "never enough". Either the reasons were military or political, but such were the situation, and none of us know enough to judge that, none of us. Since this information is kept from us intentionally.
Now, why did USA attack Iraq despite outrage in the rest of the whole goddamn world?
Some months earlier Saddam Hussein had declared to change currency from dollar to euro, for oil exports. GWB of course went for the threat-route against "one of their boys" (Saddam). Saddam didn't comply. US demoted "their guy" (you can find the CIA-quote by googling my sig text. If you're too lazy, then fuck off, troll).
What is truly sad, is that people like you believe USA invaded Iraq because Iraq was not "cooperating fully". So naive, easily exploitable, like the rest of the sheep.
And yes, the ties between Sweden and USA is pretty obvious. There's Swedens new copyright laws, wiretapping on internet cables, and now warrants without arrests. More ties will probably be leaked pretty soon, only question is, who in Swedish leadership is really gaining from them?
So either you're a troll or a retard. Choose wisely, ignore or evolve.
A distributed system can of course support a hierarchical namespace. If you need.com or.org, just tie it with the name-string, if required.
The issue with P2P-DNS is that it is inherently insecure, since any peer can be a potential hijacker. So you never know if the IP receieved is the real IP, or a hijacked IP with spoofed websites and services and all.
This can be mitigated by generating false DNS requests indistingushable from the real ones (no Tor's method is not there yet), and generating a web-of-trust of trustworthy peers.
However, for people requiring true anonymity, this can be less of a threat than being tortured and brought to final silence, which is why Tor already supports P2P DNS. I believe they route the requests to the exitnodes, for extra "safety", although if the exitnode is compromised or hostile, that can bring problems.
Another issue is who will have authority to allocate new names, and there hierarchy can bring problems as well.
I believe I2P has already solved the issue with its eepsites and tunnels. It does require a competely dark net like I2P though, since exitnodes are inherently untrustworthy and hierarchical in nature.
Yet Tor supports DNS out of the box with just a quick option in torrc: DNSPort 51
Set your DNS-host on all interfaces to localhost, removing everything else, and off you go.. Anonymous DNS.
Yes, it's slow, it often fails and the system can be tricked to produce false IPs, although there are some simple measurements against it. However, if you want anonymity from dedicated adversaries, it's crucial to know how to properly hide DNS lookups. If anonymity is important to you, the suckiness will matter less to you.
For most of us, it's too insecure and overkill, but for some, it's a viable option since the alternatives can mean torture and death.
I'm sure it is possible to improve on this considerably. You will never reach 100% security, but it can become tolerable for private usage.
That's your opinion, but it's someone else's rights you are talking about.
Then who will defend that right? If there is no defender of the rights, why argue about the rights of someone who deceased?
The public have a right to retain their culture also. If nobody is profiting from the works, only scumbag lawyer sharks will be interested in further restrictions.
Look, I just offered an alternate view, not that I know what will happen in the future. Of course references to 1984 is just meant to shake people a little. Chill out dude.
Wether Assange is important or not, I think I'll let history be the judge of that. People like him, or more importantly, people willing to leak important material, COULD become an important part of true representative democracy, if we let them. Or, we can murder, torture and threaten them into oblivion with new draconian laws, anyways, it is OUR responsibility as a society.
Don't kill the message just because you don't like the messenger personally. If nothing else, MORE people should stand up like him, for something they believe in, and using peaceful means. The world will be a better place for it.
Wether Osama Bin Laden was a real enemy or not, and why he was never captured.. You DO know he and Saddam Hussein was trained and set in power by CIA, right?
Osama Bin Laden gave GWB and his cronies more power and riches than any country could, due to a series of lies, deception and crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
You can buy a cheap laptop and have UPS and plenty of power for most internal tasks.
Servers are also cheap nowadays and have plenty of power.
Of course, if you want hosting, then having a hosting company makes sense. But if your local, it may not be as clear-cut. Right tool for the right job still applies.
I'm afraid this hyped-up trend will just make our IT infrastructure more fragmented and arbitrarily centralized. Then the governments can go to "cyberwar", after having made everything so brittle and vulnerable.
Simply, it's idiotic.
Until Amazon drops you as a customer that is, or the net goes down..
What comes up in my mind is sabotage and spying.
Spying: It must be so much more easy to get many companies data, just by getting hired by the "cloud" company or otherwise crack into their system.
Sabotage: This is even better, with one centralized datacenter and the knowledge which companies and government branches are using it, one directed attack will be enough to create HUGE damage. There are so many attack vectors, even bunkered datacenters should fear this route.
This is just a change in the name of saving a few bucks, but it is another pebble making society that much more vulnerable and easy to manipulate.
I'm not buying "cloud" at all..
Have you read the statement [amazon.com]? It says they withdrew hosting because they believe Wikileaks doesn't own the rights to the content. They also say they are worried about the verification of the 250K cables they are publishing (not: have published).
What do you do when they worry about you?
An ISP should not have to "worry" about customers content. This is a matter of law, except when some people abuse the law and circumvent it for their own benefit.
Hollywood
IT industry
The PC era
The Constitution
Freedom of press
Big Cars
California
Texas
Research and Science
Freedom of love / preference of gender
Freedom of religion
Opportunities
Fantastic Nature
Great Personalities
Strength and Commitment
USA has been the focus of the World now for at least 50 years.
Now it's time to take advantage of what internet can truly mean for democracy, and get rid of some practices which are undermining true representative democracy. And yeah, getting rid of the two-party system would be cool too, but if you'd like to keep getting screwed over, that's your choice.
Don't mistake critique of hatred, like islamic fundamentalists are crying about whenever someone mentions women's plight in islamic countries.
It's because we care. Truly.
(Yeah, I know you were being sarcastic, but this is a good reply nonetheless I think)
But this isn't free speech anymore, it's just mob justice and there's no due process in mob justice.
Following that logic, USA would never have become independent. Protests against the Vietnam war would never change official policy. Public outrage should only be met with cudgels and swords (guns and bombs in modern times). If the public doesn't matter, we might as well live under a dictatorship, at least that way, we're honest about it.
However, I agree, violence should be last resort. People should find peaceful means to perform due civil disobedience, if that doesn't work, bring on the flamethrowers!
Amazon? PayPal? The Swiss Bank? EasyDNS? The list goes on and on.
These are not just random companies realizing they suddenly don't want Julian Assange as customer. Obviosuly, there are invisible connections and strings playing behind the scenes here.
They were ordered to terminate his accounts. This abuse of power should be exposed for what it is.
Next time, it might be yourself losing all rights to live and being shut out of business.
Then you should send that to the press.
After all, weren't Clinton put out of office because of a supposed lie, because he didn't regard oral-sex as Sex?
Here is the excerpt:
The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak," says Assange. It's a chilling statistic, but then he states: "On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased."
So, because of the truth, 1,300 people were killed, not because of corruption and a unstable region?
Hiding the truth is good, because we fear the truth?
Coward.
Julian Assange was arrested in London, by Interpol, for crimes committed in Sweden.
This makes the US guilty of doublespeak on this because... well, I guess they said some mean things, at one point?
Officially yes.
Unofficially, you know who is pulling all the strings. Or maybe we really don't..
Of course it's not true. I was really speaking hypothetically, given the same situation as we're in today regarding patent legislation, but I may have been a bit unclear about that.
I was aware there were alot of cooperation between IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Xerox, etc in those early years of immature technology. It only shows how good cooperation and competiveness is for business. I did not mean to say everything GUI and related we have today is thanks to Apple only. Thanks for the history lesson though.
As software patents are now legal in the US however, it is not so hypothetical anymore. Sadly, a likely scenario is that software patents may slow down the innovation and competitiveness in the IT industry, in such countries legislating software patents as legally enforcable.
Not that I am able to foretell the future, but it just seems very likely to me, given the increase of nonsensical / "defensive" patents being granted each year. To me personally though, having to consider legal issues for what I consider my own ideas, is just a stress and a hassle I'd rather not go through with.
Peak oil anyone?
Single cases or single threats, law-enforcers and lawmakers can make go away easily.
Yes, it remains to be seen if competitors have simply copied Apple's implementation verbatim, or if they have reinvented the wheel. I wouldn't want to begin to speculate on such a specific case. As before, I'm more concerned about the overall picture, and the real threat a high number of patents pose to society.
I can very much understand why Apple is going down the patent-shaft though: If they've patented all their innovations, Microsoft would never have had the opportunity to become successful while they were small. Apple could've had a stranglehold on most of the booming IT-industry, and we would've probably been several years behind our current developments. The whole industry would've been much more fragmented and non-standard, which would line the pockets of already established corporations like Apple and IBM. Just imagine if IBM could've used patents against clone-makers in the early "PC" era..
Is it really that clear? The way many corporations have gotten away with already having been _granted_ "software patents" in EU is that the claims include texts such as: "an apparatus to operate in so and so manner", while it really is about some embedded program being part of a bigger unit, wether stored in a chip or on a harddrive. The invention itself is typically described as an "apparatus", which could be a microchip, an embedded device or a more generic computer (what's the difference?), interfacing with both hardware and software.
An apparatus is of course hardware and have been patentable since the start. All programs, software, are totally dependent on hardware, so you can never leave hardware out of the equation. Thousands of such patents tying hardware and software have already been granted in EU, but are as of yet, unenforcable since they really are software patents in disguise. There is a big corporate push, especially from USA corporations, to change the laws in EU to make these patents enforcable overnight though. So the minefield has already been prepared for EU. An entry point to this issue can be found here: http://eupat.ffii.org/
Software is simply an extension controlling hardware ("apparatus") in an algorithmic manner. Corporations are just pushing the limit of "apparatus" to include more and more generic implementations. Corporate goals however, conflicts in this case with the benefits of society and the mutual contracts we agree on.
As stated, when concerning an "invention", the borders between hardware and software becomes "fuzzy", however if I cannot convince you, then I must assume you are taking a more theoretical approach to understanding this issue. My understanding is concerning real-life decisions: Which patents should be granted and not granted by the Patent Offices, and what are the consequences of the current patents being granted every year, in both USA and Europe.
I'm by no means an expert, but this is the gist of my understanding of it, how "apparatus" have been abused to extend inventions to software. As a starting point, you could check out Bitlaw's history of software patents:
http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/history.html
Software patents are as of now fully patentable in the USA and EU, and are also fully enforcable in USA contrary to the ambiguous status in EU.
Where to go from here? If only hardware is restricted by patents, corporations would try to put more control into hardware, which is both wasteful and backwards, contrary to the current trend of minimizing costs by putting more and more logic into software. Here, the patent system is holding back the progress and evolution of our society, and probably in many more ways than I've mentioned here.
Business patents are indeed ridiculous, I agree. But they are very real as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busine
In my understand "multi touch" is not patentable. However a specific implementation of it could be patentable. At least that is how the patent system is supposed to work, although attempts to pervert it is always attempted, ie. by Amazon's One Click Patent.
I agree with you copyright law should be enough for software. However, the distinction between hardware and software is completely arbitrary and doesn't resolve the issue legally.
Rationale: For whatever you can built in software, you can build the equivalent in hardware and vica versa. So what is "software" anyways. Is it RAM, or ROM, or wires? In reality, the limits are blurred, and the push from companies is to extend further and further into territory of algorithmic, mathematics and ideas, which were never supposed to be patentable.
How I see it, when patents start making broad claims and prevents me from doing my job or inventing new things, it is actually hurting society. Reading gibberish patent claims doesn't help me either, so I see no value in the system, at least for my field which is also IT. I don't want it, but I can understand perfectly well why huge megacorporations with armies of lawyers wants them.
As we're now witnessing, these thousands of patents that are granted each year, is not just for "defense". If you enter a contract, do you not judge wether to agree to it or not before agreeing? Why should we tolerate the destructive potential of the current arsenal of patents that now exists and threaten our society, which are so shamelessly approved by the patent office?
So we need to strike a balance, which works for the best for each industry. It's just that the distinction between hardware and software is impossible, revealing that the whole patent system is being undermined by reality, how things actually are. We should figure it out before it's too late. For the Western world anyways.
My stance is that for some industries, especially IT, the patents are not helpful, but harming progress. IT has such a low bar to innovation, even kids can launch something becoming big, and we have many examples of just that. There is thus simply no reason to restrict people in what they can create, and there is very little value to impose the patent system as overhead, since so much knowledge and development is already available in the field. IT is also full of independent research coming to similar results.
I just have no idea how to make the distinction hardware-wise versus software.
I also can't see how anyone can justify business method patents. Success in IT is also dependent on successful business practice, maybe more so than mere technical advances (which are often oblivious to users). Why do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot as society by monopolizing business methods?
I was more looking into the bigger picture of software patents. "Irrelevant" was more meant to turn the focus to the bigger picture, rather than commenting on your particular comment, which stands within the scope it was meant I think.
However, if this development continues, it looms over the industry as the innovative small companies may become squashed. As history shows, innovation do not come from big dinosaurs like Microsoft, IBM or Apple, although their merit is having the Big Guns to take unto large projects, and to buy up the small innovative fish.
My concern is not with one company holding the industry ransom, but rather, everybody sinking down into the patent-swamp and destroying the very foundations of creativity.
What is it with these companies, that they cannot stand having to compete on equal terms?
Nice! But where do grammar nazi's fit in?
Maybe a car analogy will be better?
Irrelevant. If companies can hold entire industries for "patently absurd ransoms", then it doesn't matter if it is for "self-defence" or not. The presedence has been set, not just hypothetically, but according to law. This will have a chilling effect on all innovation and economical competitiveness in the US.
Countries that disregard these types of laws will benefit and take over as the intellectual emmigration sets in. Just too bad for the "industrial countries", this is all the resources they've got left.
Politicians, "diplomats", lawyers and huge international megacorporations will take the profits and move to other countries, once this land has been plundered barren.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Plant some WMDs? You know WMD = Weapons Of Mass Destruction, right? They are heavily regulated. They are HUGE, and way technically advanced. You can't just find such weapons, and assume sand-dwelling people made them from rocks and sticks. You've got to explain what they really did.
Besides, the US military were NOT looking for weapons, really, they were looking for factories. They found none, just as the inspectors, ie. Blix, had warned about was most probable.
Nuclear weapons? Made in Russia? USA? You've got to be kidding me. Do you know how hard it is to operate something nuclear covertly, and how risky it is if someone blows the whistle? Do you know all the controls there are on such facilities and weapons?
Richard Nixon learned the hard way that getting your hands dirty is a bad idea. Much better to just use misinformation to push your political and military agenda. "Our boys" got rich, yay. They made it, on the cost of another country and countless lives, but they're millionaires now. Enjoy it while you can.
Oh, we made an "error". You just don't invade another country, risk thousands of lives, to "save their people", due to an unspecified, unproven "intelligence report" that were in error. All while every other country but UK were protesting. If you really believe this wasn't a calculated strategy, and that they would be "forgiven" once the world was rid of Saddam, then pardon me, but that's very very naive.
I see you've failed to talk about any of my other points I raised, so I'll quit conversation here, because it seems we're both believing different things, and no way to reconcilliate those views.
Read my sig, really, educate yourself. These are crimes that have gone unpunished, and is not what democratically elected politicians should be supporting.
Look, I'm sorry about calling you a troll. Was a bit frustrated about how a whole country can be so duped, but ok, there's probably reasonable reasons for it once you dig more into it.
Planting massive facilities for creating WMDs is not that easy. Intelligence can be anything though, and then you just have to push the agenda hard enough. All the "hawks" needed was a go for military action, and then the country would be committed. It worked like a charm, literally. An entire country duped into believing it, while the rest of the world were condemning the whole agenda.
When GWB was on media arguing that he had intelligence for WMDs, then and there, I _knew_ he was lying. The inspectors were protesting. It was all part of a their (the "hawks'") plans from several years back of taking out GWB senior's arch enemy, Saddam, a former CIA plant. For whatever reasons, axis of evil or whatever christian bullshit and / or oil-dollars, GWB had decided in his alcoholic mind to go through with it no matter what, and he did. It's incredible what one leader can do to wreck damage to a once so great country.
Planting is something you see in movies. I don't believe whacko stories about shadow governments, illumnati or airplanes dumping millions of gallons of gas over us (ever heard of condensing?), or something like that.
In the real world, the covering up is pretty shallow and very high level. It just needs some nods and shrugs from your political peers, and of course you want to leave minimal tracks.
It does us more harm than good though, when politicians circumvent the democratic processes. It's like a dictatorship where a small elite controls the few, and it IS there, no matter how much you don't wanna believe it. But it's more real than those whacko stories, and it's eroding our democracies and ethical judgements.
You DO know Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was trained by CIA and put in power, right?
US soldiers found no WMFDs. European countries, especially Norway, who was heading inspections, found no evidence of WMDs. They clamoured for peaceful solutions to the stubbornness of Mr. Hussein. Although they did get access, it was "never enough". Either the reasons were military or political, but such were the situation, and none of us know enough to judge that, none of us. Since this information is kept from us intentionally.
Now, why did USA attack Iraq despite outrage in the rest of the whole goddamn world?
Some months earlier Saddam Hussein had declared to change currency from dollar to euro, for oil exports. GWB of course went for the threat-route against "one of their boys" (Saddam). Saddam didn't comply. US demoted "their guy" (you can find the CIA-quote by googling my sig text. If you're too lazy, then fuck off, troll).
What is truly sad, is that people like you believe USA invaded Iraq because Iraq was not "cooperating fully". So naive, easily exploitable, like the rest of the sheep.
And yes, the ties between Sweden and USA is pretty obvious. There's Swedens new copyright laws, wiretapping on internet cables, and now warrants without arrests. More ties will probably be leaked pretty soon, only question is, who in Swedish leadership is really gaining from them?
So either you're a troll or a retard. Choose wisely, ignore or evolve.
A distributed system can of course support a hierarchical namespace. If you need .com or .org, just tie it with the name-string, if required.
The issue with P2P-DNS is that it is inherently insecure, since any peer can be a potential hijacker. So you never know if the IP receieved is the real IP, or a hijacked IP with spoofed websites and services and all.
This can be mitigated by generating false DNS requests indistingushable from the real ones (no Tor's method is not there yet), and generating a web-of-trust of trustworthy peers.
However, for people requiring true anonymity, this can be less of a threat than being tortured and brought to final silence, which is why Tor already supports P2P DNS. I believe they route the requests to the exitnodes, for extra "safety", although if the exitnode is compromised or hostile, that can bring problems.
Another issue is who will have authority to allocate new names, and there hierarchy can bring problems as well.
I believe I2P has already solved the issue with its eepsites and tunnels. It does require a competely dark net like I2P though, since exitnodes are inherently untrustworthy and hierarchical in nature.
Yet Tor supports DNS out of the box with just a quick option in torrc:
DNSPort 51
Set your DNS-host on all interfaces to localhost, removing everything else, and off you go.. Anonymous DNS.
Yes, it's slow, it often fails and the system can be tricked to produce false IPs, although there are some simple measurements against it. However, if you want anonymity from dedicated adversaries, it's crucial to know how to properly hide DNS lookups. If anonymity is important to you, the suckiness will matter less to you.
For most of us, it's too insecure and overkill, but for some, it's a viable option since the alternatives can mean torture and death.
I'm sure it is possible to improve on this considerably. You will never reach 100% security, but it can become tolerable for private usage.
The greatest accomplishments were never easy.
That's your opinion, but it's someone else's rights you are talking about.
Then who will defend that right? If there is no defender of the rights, why argue about the rights of someone who deceased?
The public have a right to retain their culture also. If nobody is profiting from the works, only scumbag lawyer sharks will be interested in further restrictions.
Look, I just offered an alternate view, not that I know what will happen in the future. Of course references to 1984 is just meant to shake people a little. Chill out dude.
Wether Assange is important or not, I think I'll let history be the judge of that. People like him, or more importantly, people willing to leak important material, COULD become an important part of true representative democracy, if we let them. Or, we can murder, torture and threaten them into oblivion with new draconian laws, anyways, it is OUR responsibility as a society.
Don't kill the message just because you don't like the messenger personally. If nothing else, MORE people should stand up like him, for something they believe in, and using peaceful means. The world will be a better place for it.
Wether Osama Bin Laden was a real enemy or not, and why he was never captured.. You DO know he and Saddam Hussein was trained and set in power by CIA, right?
Osama Bin Laden gave GWB and his cronies more power and riches than any country could, due to a series of lies, deception and crimes.