Who said anything about patents being bad? The words "information" and "business process" do not jive with what the patent system was intended to be used for. Nor do they happen to cost millions or billions in R&D.
For the amount that Amazon's One-Click patent gets bashed, I've heard about far worse. I keep hearing commercials about a bank's "Keep the Change" program. It consists of this pseudocode:
// charge is the amount that's being charged to your credit/debit card change = ceiling(charge) - charge checking_account -= (charge + change) savings_account += change
That's right, all it does is round charges up to the next dollar, and transfers the extra amount from your checking account to your savings account. And at the end of the commercial, I hear "Patent pending".
So if I invent a whole new replacement for the transistor that can reduce the scale in the same way the original transistor improved on the vacuum tube, but I have no capacity to fabricate it in any useful way, I should derive no benefit? Bit harsh, don't you think?
I'm pretty sure you can patent it, even if you don't have the manufacturing center to produce it. Your patent would have to include exact instructions for someone that does have the manufacturing center, though. Of course, without any kind of production ability, I'd be surprised if you'd be able to figure out all of the details in the first place.
What you can't patent is "a transistor that is one tenth the size of normal transistors" without giving any details about how you would create such a device.
...the intended purpose of copyright - to reduce the freedoms of the end user of software.
Wow, the writers of the U.S. Constitution were so brilliant that they knew that 200 years after their time, companies would be releasing compiled computer programs without including the source code?
Sarcasm aside, one could argue that you have it completely wrong. The intended purpose of copyright was to protect the author of a work from having the work taken and redistributed without compensating the author, thereby discouraging people from continuing to write, compose, etc., because they couldn't earn enough money to buy food. Ideally, with perfect enforcement of copyright, software companies could release all of their source code without any fear of not getting enough money to continue to pay the programmers. The original goal of copyrights and patents was that everything would become public knowledge and help advance art and science, because the alternative was making everything a trade secret, which would be a much worse situation.
Now if we could just get the laws to match the intended purpose.
How in the world does a 100+ year copyright term "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
It doesn't, which is why there are many of us reasonable people that think the most important piece of copyright reform that could be legislated right now is returning the copyright period to something sane (generally in the 10-25 year range).
In this case, though, it's because Maine really knows what they're talking about when it comes to mercury. The amount of mercury in the rivers, I believe primarily from the paper mills, led the state to recommend limiting how much fish people eat so that they don't overdose on mercury.
No, the surprising thing here is that one company broke the law to drive other companies out of business, and that law was not effectively enforced. A good analogy would be a law that says you can't go rob liquor stores with a gun and if you do you go to prison and can't own a gun (the means of your crime) for the rest of your life. So some guy goes and robs a liquor store, and when he's dragged into court he donates half the money to the judge and sheriff's re-election fund. Then they decide to waive the jail time and let him keep his gun. He then goes on a robbery spree, and continues his donations. He gets sued and loses, but the settlement is less money than he's making as a robber. He gets arrested in Germany, but they give him a warning and ship him back to the states. The robber shopkeepers complain, but he takes out ads in the paper calling them whiners and says they are suing him about a wage dispute, when he really just robber them. He pays a few people to spread word of mouth and write editorials about how people are unfairly picking on him, saying he shouldn't be able to own a gun, when other people own guns.
Linux isn't an operating system, Linux is a kernel
If you want to be precise, being "just a kernel" is exactly what makes it an operating system. The difference between all of the Linux distributions is in the software that runs on top of the kernel.
Following this argument linearly, wouldn't linux be better off with just one version?
Or are we omitting the fact that Windows is aimed towards the stupid people?
Is there more than one edition (I don't want to use the word version, for hopefully obvious reasons) of the Linux kernel? Did you mean distributions, which are generally done by entirely separate organizations?
What about the assurances in the fact that protons with energies on the order of the energy in the LHC, and several orders of magnitude larger, have been bombarding the planet for billions of years without any stable black hole forming, ever?
Actually, do we know that? As has been pointed out several times, a black hole only has the mass/energy of the matter/energy that's been absorbed, so a black hole formed from a couple protons would be incredibly small. If there were a couple thousand of these in the upper atmosphere, could we detect them? Their gravitational effects wouldn't be much, if any, different from the original protons (I'm thinking in terms of something like photon deflection). Would the Hawking radiation be distinctive enough to be able to pick it out of the general background noise?
It's like using software on new versions of Windows: usually, software that works in Windows 95 will still work in Windows 98, but software written for Windows 98 probably won't work on Windows 95. The newer version can still work with partitions from the old version, but the old version can't understand partitions made with the new version.
There's also nothing to prevent me from using wh.whatever@gmail.com and sending fake orders out.
This is something I'm not really clear on, even after reading the Washington Times piece. Is the staff really using the GMail accounts for all of their normal work-related communications, or were the accounts just created for the general public to send stuff to, which will then be forwarded to the regular accounts when they come online? The piece even explicitly says that official press releases will not be sent from any GMail accounts, which leads me to believe that the accounts are "receive-only".
If users had to pay for their traffic, then spam might end, but at the cost of everyone would switch away from Windows so that they wouldn't have to pay for the spam.
To be fair, as painful as it is in this case, switching away from Windows probably wouldn't solve the problem. I could pretty easily write a script that would run on any Linux distribution to send out tons of email (after all, that's basically what mailing list software is), and convincing an idiot to run the script would be trivial. As numerous as Windows' security problems are, there really isn't any operating system that can always protect users from themselves.
Straight out of the MS FUD manual. Like, let then use 'free' software as long as they us our Intellectual Property and Patent dues. When does your shift on slashdot finish ?
I'm confused. Are you trying to imply that there would be open standards that are burdened by patents and/or copyright? Wouldn't that not really be open?
IP is entirely at the software level (level 3 for you OSI folks out there). The only part that's really hardware is OSI level 1, which describes the physical medium (e.g. copper wire or radio waves).
Slashdot Mirror
Who said anything about patents being bad? The words "information" and "business process" do not jive with what the patent system was intended to be used for. Nor do they happen to cost millions or billions in R&D.
For the amount that Amazon's One-Click patent gets bashed, I've heard about far worse. I keep hearing commercials about a bank's "Keep the Change" program. It consists of this pseudocode:
That's right, all it does is round charges up to the next dollar, and transfers the extra amount from your checking account to your savings account. And at the end of the commercial, I hear "Patent pending".
So if I invent a whole new replacement for the transistor that can reduce the scale in the same way the original transistor improved on the vacuum tube, but I have no capacity to fabricate it in any useful way, I should derive no benefit? Bit harsh, don't you think?
I'm pretty sure you can patent it, even if you don't have the manufacturing center to produce it. Your patent would have to include exact instructions for someone that does have the manufacturing center, though. Of course, without any kind of production ability, I'd be surprised if you'd be able to figure out all of the details in the first place.
What you can't patent is "a transistor that is one tenth the size of normal transistors" without giving any details about how you would create such a device.
...the intended purpose of copyright - to reduce the freedoms of the end user of software.
Wow, the writers of the U.S. Constitution were so brilliant that they knew that 200 years after their time, companies would be releasing compiled computer programs without including the source code?
Sarcasm aside, one could argue that you have it completely wrong. The intended purpose of copyright was to protect the author of a work from having the work taken and redistributed without compensating the author, thereby discouraging people from continuing to write, compose, etc., because they couldn't earn enough money to buy food. Ideally, with perfect enforcement of copyright, software companies could release all of their source code without any fear of not getting enough money to continue to pay the programmers. The original goal of copyrights and patents was that everything would become public knowledge and help advance art and science, because the alternative was making everything a trade secret, which would be a much worse situation.
Now if we could just get the laws to match the intended purpose.
How in the world does a 100+ year copyright term "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
It doesn't, which is why there are many of us reasonable people that think the most important piece of copyright reform that could be legislated right now is returning the copyright period to something sane (generally in the 10-25 year range).
but the media didn't make over 500 campaign promises. He did.
Making him different than every other presidential candidate because...
but only one of us (apparently) knows the form all those things will take.
Isn't it going to be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?
Have you ever seen a river of shit and waste with a plank over it leading to someone's home?
I live near Boston, so yes.
In this case, though, it's because Maine really knows what they're talking about when it comes to mercury. The amount of mercury in the rivers, I believe primarily from the paper mills, led the state to recommend limiting how much fish people eat so that they don't overdose on mercury.
Is it so hard to think of honest, decent behaviour these days?
You don't leave the basement much, do you?
2. Configure the bundled Outlook Express with your POP3 settings.
And when an antitrust case forces Microsoft to remove Outlook Express from the default installation of Windows?
No! I want a officesuite to come with every system, like Linux does.
The kernel comes with a word processor, spreadsheet editor, etc.? Damn, I must have missed that in the change log.
No, the surprising thing here is that one company broke the law to drive other companies out of business, and that law was not effectively enforced. A good analogy would be a law that says you can't go rob liquor stores with a gun and if you do you go to prison and can't own a gun (the means of your crime) for the rest of your life. So some guy goes and robs a liquor store, and when he's dragged into court he donates half the money to the judge and sheriff's re-election fund. Then they decide to waive the jail time and let him keep his gun. He then goes on a robbery spree, and continues his donations. He gets sued and loses, but the settlement is less money than he's making as a robber. He gets arrested in Germany, but they give him a warning and ship him back to the states. The robber shopkeepers complain, but he takes out ads in the paper calling them whiners and says they are suing him about a wage dispute, when he really just robber them. He pays a few people to spread word of mouth and write editorials about how people are unfairly picking on him, saying he shouldn't be able to own a gun, when other people own guns.
-1, Analogy Does Not Have Any Cars
I do very little copying, but I'm pretty sure, if it's harming your body, you're doing something very, very wrong.
Wait, where's the disc supposed to go then?
Linux isn't an operating system, Linux is a kernel
If you want to be precise, being "just a kernel" is exactly what makes it an operating system. The difference between all of the Linux distributions is in the software that runs on top of the kernel.
Following this argument linearly, wouldn't linux be better off with just one version? Or are we omitting the fact that Windows is aimed towards the stupid people?
Is there more than one edition (I don't want to use the word version, for hopefully obvious reasons) of the Linux kernel? Did you mean distributions, which are generally done by entirely separate organizations?
Just remember, if you're buying Windows and you're at all, just go for anything that has "Ultimate" in it and you'll probably come out OK.
Sure, but should I go for Ultimate, Ultimate Basic, Ultimate Home, Ultimate Business, Ultimate Premium, or Ultimate for Workgroups?
Dude, you have to go for Ultimate Ultimate.
What about the assurances in the fact that protons with energies on the order of the energy in the LHC, and several orders of magnitude larger, have been bombarding the planet for billions of years without any stable black hole forming, ever?
Actually, do we know that? As has been pointed out several times, a black hole only has the mass/energy of the matter/energy that's been absorbed, so a black hole formed from a couple protons would be incredibly small. If there were a couple thousand of these in the upper atmosphere, could we detect them? Their gravitational effects wouldn't be much, if any, different from the original protons (I'm thinking in terms of something like photon deflection). Would the Hawking radiation be distinctive enough to be able to pick it out of the general background noise?
It's like using software on new versions of Windows: usually, software that works in Windows 95 will still work in Windows 98, but software written for Windows 98 probably won't work on Windows 95. The newer version can still work with partitions from the old version, but the old version can't understand partitions made with the new version.
There's also nothing to prevent me from using wh.whatever@gmail.com and sending fake orders out.
This is something I'm not really clear on, even after reading the Washington Times piece. Is the staff really using the GMail accounts for all of their normal work-related communications, or were the accounts just created for the general public to send stuff to, which will then be forwarded to the regular accounts when they come online? The piece even explicitly says that official press releases will not be sent from any GMail accounts, which leads me to believe that the accounts are "receive-only".
Copyright eventually runs out
You must be old here.
If users had to pay for their traffic, then spam might end, but at the cost of everyone would switch away from Windows so that they wouldn't have to pay for the spam.
To be fair, as painful as it is in this case, switching away from Windows probably wouldn't solve the problem. I could pretty easily write a script that would run on any Linux distribution to send out tons of email (after all, that's basically what mailing list software is), and convincing an idiot to run the script would be trivial. As numerous as Windows' security problems are, there really isn't any operating system that can always protect users from themselves.
Do the words "raging hormones" mean nothing to legislators and prosecutors?
Dear Lord, I hope so.
What about six-legged turkeys?
Don't you mean five-assed turkeys?
Straight out of the MS FUD manual. Like, let then use 'free' software as long as they us our Intellectual Property and Patent dues. When does your shift on slashdot finish ?
I'm confused. Are you trying to imply that there would be open standards that are burdened by patents and/or copyright? Wouldn't that not really be open?
IP is entirely at the software level (level 3 for you OSI folks out there). The only part that's really hardware is OSI level 1, which describes the physical medium (e.g. copper wire or radio waves).