Children can't be created without human intervention, so the "parents patenting children" argument still stands as valid as the cd copying argument.
As far as the seeds, it's generally the same thing. They are planted, sown, planted again, etc. Humans intervene.
Many video cards these days have TV capabilities...it would be entirely possible to feed it the video line from a console (instead of, say, a VCR or antenna) and play it right on the monitor (and even record it, fiddle with it, etc.)
I've done this before, and had a reasonable amount of luck with it.
Software has a tendency to reproduce as well. When Microsoft sells a copy of Windows XP, they do it knowing full well that people are going to make copies of it to give to their friends. To say that a company that produces Super Seed XYZ has no rights to further (identical) seeds that are grown from it is the same as saying that Microsoft only has rights to that first CD, but that the copies are free-for-alls.
It's plausible that they have that right, depending on what sort of paperwork your parents signed. If they purchased the rights to your physical characteristics, then you can sell whatever bits of yourself you please.
Whether something is living or dead is irrelevant. If it is created by someone's effort, thought, and money, they have a right to patent it. Personally, I believe that parents should be able to patent their children, and children should be able to patent mud pies.
Yeah, I've got plenty of rants and raves from the days when, for lack of anything better to do, I used to complain about Mormons (since there were a lot of them in my community).
Now I *am* Mormon, so naturally it's a bit disconcerting knowing that all those feeble attempts at logical argument made in my uninformed youth are still floating around out there!
If a company pours a ton of money into create a new type of plant, why shouldn't they be able to patent it? This article seems to be spinning this news as if it were absurd, but it actually makes as much sense as somebody patenting a new invention or copywriting something they wrote.
When "Timmy's 3r337 Perl Hax0ring Site!!!" gets ranked #1 for a search on "duck mating habits", we'll all get a good idea what would go wrong with a system like this.
The existing Google ranking system is already exploited by users who set up hundreds of dummy sites that all link to a certain site using a variety of keywords, thus feeding the G! machine bogus "popularity" information.
A ranking system will just make this easier to do. Your average skript kiddie could easily bombard Google with a heap of "Yeah this is great!" ratings for his site, thus bumping it up many notches.
User-ranking systems work as long as there's no huge desire to do so. Slashdot doesn't have *too* many problems because nobody really cares that much if they get rated "+6 - Rad!"...however, there's a much greater motivation to have one's website come up tops in one of the most popular search engines....
I wonder if that was the same "official" that e-mailed me last week asking me to surrender my passwords and credit-card numbers in the name of national security.
Can you imagine if this was all just an elaborate project dreamed up by some guy who just sits at his house all day long dreaming up ways to get access to people's information so he can sell it? It's a brilliant idea. By the time everyone realizes this whole thing is a put-on, the culprits will have made off with everything they need.
Unless, of course, it's not a put-on. But by the time we realize that, the government will have made off with everything they need too...
Why must everything be "under siege" these days? Slashdot is seeming less and less like a tech magazine and more and more like a bunch of rebellious teenagers sitting in there basement writing manifestoes about government conspiracies.
Sorry to go against the party line kids, but I'm just getting tired of all this talk of oppression, big brother, etc., etc., etc., and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
This may be a little of topic, but please bear with me. I have been trying to get any news about the crash on all the major news websites. Thank goodness for Slashdot. All the other "news" organizations are swamped. One would think, in this age of the internet and the relatively cheap hardware out there, that the major news sites would be able to handle the traffic of a serious disaster. Remember 9/11? Did they learn nothing from the sudden influx of traffic? People want to know what is going on. These sites claim to be news leaders. Yet anytime there is a serious need or desire for news, the site goes down.
Any armchair anthropologists want to toss up ideas as to whether or not spoken language (a necessary precursor to the recent anomoly known as civilization) was alive & kicking 70,000 years ago?"
70,000 years ago? What about whether or not it's alive and kicking today?
Altavista did have a few good strong points...their search features were excellent, letting users form complex queries just short of regular expressions...
In Google, when you search for a phrase, it tells you half the words are two common, and then gives you the rest out of order.
This is not MS trying to inflict a toll on development -- this is MS trying to make money by selling a service. The.NET My Services is a service that interfaces with MSN Messanger to allow instant communication with your users and also authentication. Seriously people, every time MS charges for something it becomes news on slash...
Hell, anytime Microsoft *sneezes* it becomes news here. You know, if Bill Gates himself were to proclaim the value of open source, release all the code for Windows, and slash the prices of everything by 75%, I bet there'd be an article on here within fifteen minutes calling it a "draconian conspiracy."
The last company I was working for was going to authenticate financial transactions. Let me tell you that they were not going to do it for free. How is this any different? Or maybe the phone company charging for setting up your phone lines and billing your company monthly?
It's like asking someone why a certain college football game is important. "Because they're our rivals!" "Why?" "I don't know, they just are!" We don't care if other companies do it, it's just news when Microsoft does it.
MS is charging for a service and you can choose to use it or not.
Slashdot is still stuck in the Microsoft = Big Brother mindset that doesn't allow for the possibility that human beings can make decisions.
Perhaps the open source community can get together and create a distributed authentication system to compete with it.
I doubt it. Instead, they'll just try to emulate the Microsoft one, and then complain when they start suing...
Seems steep to me,.If you need to yous Windows apps that badly why not just boot up windows? and save yourself 99 bucks?
Because that wouldn't be very geeky, would it? A large percentage of Slashdot readers would love the opportunity to strike a pose ("I run Linux!") and still use their precious Windows games....
I attempted to create a new open source Content Management System (CMS) for an online magazine. I set up a source forge project, developed design documents, recruited a whole gang of very talented programmers, and then spent the next two months trying to make something, *anything*, happen.
They just kept asking, "Where's the source code?"
It really is tricky to get an open source, distributed programming project started, because the new people don't have anything to hack on. There's no jumpstart or catalyst.
I wound up just writing the whole thing myself, and never got around to opening the source. It's a loss, because it'd be much better and much more widely used had the idealistic methodology actually worked.
Am I the only person who, upon reading this, thought what the hell kind of Ask Slashdot question is this?
I've submitted a dozen hard-hitting, insightful, and clever Ask Slashdot questions that have been immediately rejected, and then I see stuff like "Is there room for quirky gurus?"
WTF??
Oh, well, that's what makes it Slashdot I suppose...
As Rob Carlsen is quoted at the article's close, though: "(Gregg) said he was definitely supporting it. Now he says he's definitely not. Maybe he'll say he's definitely supporting it again."
Don't you just love politicians who stand by their positions?
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably because you're resentful of being one of those drones.
Children can't be created without human intervention, so the "parents patenting children" argument still stands as valid as the cd copying argument. As far as the seeds, it's generally the same thing. They are planted, sown, planted again, etc. Humans intervene.
I've done this before, and had a reasonable amount of luck with it.
Software has a tendency to reproduce as well. When Microsoft sells a copy of Windows XP, they do it knowing full well that people are going to make copies of it to give to their friends. To say that a company that produces Super Seed XYZ has no rights to further (identical) seeds that are grown from it is the same as saying that Microsoft only has rights to that first CD, but that the copies are free-for-alls.
It's plausible that they have that right, depending on what sort of paperwork your parents signed. If they purchased the rights to your physical characteristics, then you can sell whatever bits of yourself you please.
Uhhh...huh?
Whether something is living or dead is irrelevant. If it is created by someone's effort, thought, and money, they have a right to patent it. Personally, I believe that parents should be able to patent their children, and children should be able to patent mud pies.
Now I *am* Mormon, so naturally it's a bit disconcerting knowing that all those feeble attempts at logical argument made in my uninformed youth are still floating around out there!
(This is on topic because it's nearing the Xmas season...) Is it "hot cocoa" or "hot chocolate"? What's the difference?
If a company pours a ton of money into create a new type of plant, why shouldn't they be able to patent it? This article seems to be spinning this news as if it were absurd, but it actually makes as much sense as somebody patenting a new invention or copywriting something they wrote.
The existing Google ranking system is already exploited by users who set up hundreds of dummy sites that all link to a certain site using a variety of keywords, thus feeding the G! machine bogus "popularity" information.
A ranking system will just make this easier to do. Your average skript kiddie could easily bombard Google with a heap of "Yeah this is great!" ratings for his site, thus bumping it up many notches.
User-ranking systems work as long as there's no huge desire to do so. Slashdot doesn't have *too* many problems because nobody really cares that much if they get rated "+6 - Rad!"...however, there's a much greater motivation to have one's website come up tops in one of the most popular search engines....
Can you imagine if this was all just an elaborate project dreamed up by some guy who just sits at his house all day long dreaming up ways to get access to people's information so he can sell it? It's a brilliant idea. By the time everyone realizes this whole thing is a put-on, the culprits will have made off with everything they need.
Unless, of course, it's not a put-on. But by the time we realize that, the government will have made off with everything they need too...
Sorry to go against the party line kids, but I'm just getting tired of all this talk of oppression, big brother, etc., etc., etc., and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
What is it with airport security these days?
We've got your news coverage right here.
We've got some reliable linkage online here. Check comments there for further updates.
70,000 years ago? What about whether or not it's alive and kicking today?
Why must Slashdot always post the articles without photos? D'oh! Here's one, for those who were wondering.
In Google, when you search for a phrase, it tells you half the words are two common, and then gives you the rest out of order.
Hell, anytime Microsoft *sneezes* it becomes news here. You know, if Bill Gates himself were to proclaim the value of open source, release all the code for Windows, and slash the prices of everything by 75%, I bet there'd be an article on here within fifteen minutes calling it a "draconian conspiracy."
The last company I was working for was going to authenticate financial transactions. Let me tell you that they were not going to do it for free. How is this any different? Or maybe the phone company charging for setting up your phone lines and billing your company monthly?
It's like asking someone why a certain college football game is important. "Because they're our rivals!" "Why?" "I don't know, they just are!" We don't care if other companies do it, it's just news when Microsoft does it.
MS is charging for a service and you can choose to use it or not.
Slashdot is still stuck in the Microsoft = Big Brother mindset that doesn't allow for the possibility that human beings can make decisions.
Perhaps the open source community can get together and create a distributed authentication system to compete with it.
I doubt it. Instead, they'll just try to emulate the Microsoft one, and then complain when they start suing...
Because that wouldn't be very geeky, would it? A large percentage of Slashdot readers would love the opportunity to strike a pose ("I run Linux!") and still use their precious Windows games....
More brilliance from the guy who brought us MP3.com, your favorite source for spam and poor music. Just who want to make a new name for Linux....
They just kept asking, "Where's the source code?"
It really is tricky to get an open source, distributed programming project started, because the new people don't have anything to hack on. There's no jumpstart or catalyst.
I wound up just writing the whole thing myself, and never got around to opening the source. It's a loss, because it'd be much better and much more widely used had the idealistic methodology actually worked.
I've submitted a dozen hard-hitting, insightful, and clever Ask Slashdot questions that have been immediately rejected, and then I see stuff like "Is there room for quirky gurus?"
WTF??
Oh, well, that's what makes it Slashdot I suppose...
Don't you just love politicians who stand by their positions?