1,160 karma · joined February 7, 2009
It is clear what the majority opinion here is, but I see well formulated comments supporting the minority opinion being voted down. If you think their arguments are wrong, don't vote them down. Instead, vote up the comments that explains why they are wrong.
So while, yes "the same applies", the cost/benefit ratio of the two situations is totally different.
Patents are (theoretically) a pragmatic compromise between 1) the benefits to society of having people publish their ideas, and 2) the drawbacks to society of giving someone a time limited monopoly on the exploitation of the idea.
For software I believe the drawbacks in general far outweigh the benefits. There might be examples of "nobody else would have thought of this within the patent period" inventions, but they are rare enough that it does not make sense to have special laws for those cases.
In the physical "better mousetrap" world the issue is different. The situation is similar to the Hacker News startup world in that ideas are plenty. However, the cost of productizing the ideas is high, and there is less of a first mover advantage, access to distribution channels is more important. So patents in the "better mousetrap" world protects not the idea, but the investment of turning the idea into a product. The drawbacks of patents here are also smaller, as you rarely build unrelated products upon the "better mousetrap", so the cost of a monopoly often stays limited to the specific market. Patents here might be a good compromise.
In medicine there is a similar situation in that many ideas are "free" from public funded research, but useless without the very expensive clinical trials. The patents basically protects the investment in clinical trials, and no so much original research. However the cost of patents is huge. People die because they can't afford patented medicine (which include initial cost for the clinical tests, marginal cost, distributed cost of failed products, and profit), even though they could easily afford the marginal cost alone. It would be good to get rid of patents here, but they must be replaced with another system to cover the cost of the clinical tests.
It can still become a "win" if the remaining contributors are able to manage the project more efficiently than Sun or Oracle did, and attract enough new contributors to compensate for the loss. But that is far from given.
I wouldn't expect PETA to stop with their off-putting campaigns ("Your Mommy Kill Animals"), it is what they genuinely believe, and for them keeping silent and advocating "a healthier lifestyle" would be so far from their viewpoint that it would practically be a lie, even if it might win them more friends and influence.
Same with RMS. His views are radical, and toning his messages to make them more palatable down would be dishonest to who he is. Let someone else play the moderate and practical.
Of course, moderate and practical people don't dedicate their life to a message, be it "a healthier lifestyle" or "a better way to develop software". The Open Source spokespeople like Michael Tiemann or Tim O'Reilly) tend to get distracted by having a life to live.
1. They diminish the value of Google Search as an advertising platform. And Google Search is likely the most valuable virtual estate on the net. I more often click on ads in Google Search than I click on ads on all other sites combined. This is because when I'm on Google Search I'm actually searching for something, so I might click on a relevant ad.
2. They diminish the value of AdWords content network ads. People pay Google to display their ads because they believe they get better return for their money there than on the alternatives (Yahoo and Microsoft). Ads on low quality sites are unlikely to be competitive, so these sites decrease the relative value of AdWords.
That is, high-ranked low quality sites with AdSense are a double threat to the main source of income for Google, and I expect Google to make it their main priority.
Why, then, aren't they more successful? My guess: Because the problem is a lot hard than any armchair designer would believe. Problems tend to be a lot simpler when you are not the one who must solve them.
But the main part of the discussion concerns a suggestion to replace Emacs Lisp with Perl. McCarthy's concern seems to be whether Emacs uses the ability of Lisp to treat code as data, and whether Perl has that facility.
A couple of answers gave examples of Emacs using that ability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID
Most public institutions as well as many private (including the banks) have switched to this system.
Our government already know just about everything about us (e.g. few people need to fill out tax forms), so this has not been very controversial. The largest controversy has been with the security.
My guess is that it is intended to cover any C or Fortran program that includes an ad-hoc interpreter, an ad-hoc dynamic type system, or an ad-hoc garbage collector. That would include e.g. sendmail (at least an ad-hoc interpreter) and GCC (all three).
My guess is that most C programs (I don't know about Fortran) we would intuitively call "complex" contains one of the three technologies, making it harder to come up with a clear counter-example. Some might avoid the "ad-hoc" part by linking with a generic extension language like tcl or lua. Or even Common Lisp.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg021...
I like the new policy, which seems to be one potentially disrupting new technology per major release. Previously, major releases tried to do too much at once, which lead to some very unstable and sometimes alienating .0 releases.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5815494/GW-Deutch.jpg
I cannot understand what heuristic would translate the complete German sentence "Nein." into "Yes.".
http://www.google.com/phone/detail/sony-ericsson-xperia-x10
If it is a marketing page, it is marketing for Android as a whole, not specifically for Google branded Android phones.
The marketing page for this particular phone is here:
The tech spec there doesn't list missing features
The story isn't that Netflix isn't on Android because of fragmentation. The story us that Netflix will cause fragmentation on Android phones.
XBox 360, Wii, PS3 and iPhone all have strong DRM build into the platform.
Android doesn't have strong DRM in the base version, so Netflix will (or can) not support that version.
However, individual Android phones may have Netflix because Android is Open Source, so individual manufacturers may add strong DRM to the platform.
Hence, the user experience will likely become (further) fragmented because of Netflix.
Does adding you as a friend on a social network site gives you an implicit moral permission to upload my "visible to friends" data to a third party web-site?
I guess what you are saying is that the answer to these two questions need not be the same.
[ The fact that Facebook will let you export my data to Yahoo (which will let you re-export it to anyone, just like GMail) kind of indicates that it is not the fine distinction above that governs Facebook's actions. ]
So I can certainly export my Google contact data. I don't have a Facebook account, so I don't know whether it can import it. But the data is there, in an easy to parse format.
Blame BBC for an ambiguous headline.
The conclusion of the study should be that the government should spend more effort fighting alcoholism than LSD abuse. Most likely, it already does. The conclusion should not be that young people should start experimenting with LSD instead of alcohol.
http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.p...
It will be interesting to see how much of his own advice he managed to follow.
I'd say you should start by contributing to a small project, where there usually isn't a lot of red tape to learn. And most large projects have extension mechanisms, so if you want to contribute to a large project, make a small stand-alone extension. Or contribute to someone else's stand-alone extension.
https://www.telmore.dk/t2/shop/shop.do?shopUrl=product.actio...
The slider let you choose between low initial price, high monthly payment (top position) and high initial price, no monthly payment (bottom position).
No matter what, the phone is always unlocked.
The only exception is this one
https://www.telmore.dk/t2/shop/shop.do?shopUrl=product.actio...
which is only sold with a high monthly payment, and locked for six months.
So I don't really see Apple as saving us from the tyranny of the carriers, in this part of the world.
It is in our long term interest to have as much control of our "digital assistants" (which includes both smartphones and personal computers) in order to ensure that they assist us, and not some other party.
A better GC was already mentioned by the OP as another option.