101–110 of 128 posts
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Compassion...sure. Human rights? No.
Why?
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Take it to the extreme: say IBM patented the `operating system software`, for example. Would Microsoft and/or Apple have come to exist as projects out of a basement or dorm? Say someone patented a media player that could hold a library in the cloud and could stream it to the user via a network / internet... would Spotify, Rdio, or any other competitors exist today? Software patents are suffocating innovators, rather…
Misconceptions abound. You cannot patent "operating system software" because it is an abstract concept with no embodiment, like "flying car" or "hyperdrive spaceship". And people did patent "media player with music in the cloud", or more accurately, various aspects thereof. Spotify famously got sued over a patent on a specific way to do DRM for streaming music, for example, when they entered the US. They just license…
Exactly why I started my sentence with _take it to the extreme_.
Innovation in the US may not have slowed down (I would argue that it has, although I'm not in the US), but it has definitely become quite expensive. In my opinion, that's a barrier for independent software developers.
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You are asserting that extreme poverty and the absence of welfare or assistance does not lead to crime? I find your position dubious.
Yeah. Have you ever heard of peer to peer assistance? you know, that thing called charity that used to exist before governments started to take care of it themselves? How about Mother Theresa? How about the Red Cross? About about the religious associations who live on donations only? In your little world everything comes from the government, as well as your ideology it seems.
I suspect we may well share some sentiments, but you're coming off as needlessly argumentative. Yeah, sometimes I do too :p
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Nordic countries are ridden with wellfare and are doing quite OK, I'd say. The problems Greeks and others are having are not related to wellfare.
Well welfare has a threshold effect. Nordic countries have very small populations to take care of. You'll see that countries where welfare becomes an issue are usually larger ones in the dozens of millions. But I wouldn't put all the nordic countries in the same basket. Last I know Sweden is not doing too well compared to Finland.
I don't know if that's the case, but if so, it just might be related to Sweden having shitloads of more Somalis than Finland.
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[partisan alert] I wouldn't go too far on that. If you're poor and unemployed here you probably don't feel like the govt. are working for you all that much.
I'm continuously amazed by all of the major political parties here in New Zealand who keep using logic and facts instead of merely political stances. Our process of making laws is open, listens to the people as well as lobbyists, and yet allows room for policy differences.
We recently covered patents and basic copyright law in a technical writing class. What my professors taught me was that 'patent is a contract between society and inventors to encourage progress'. And it seems fair on certain levels. I am a huge proponent of FOSS, I respect Stallman, I've read his book and I think patent trolls are dicks. However, is it a good idea to make software not patentable ? Will we as a commun…
The problem is that the vast amount of computer software doesn't contain an inventive step. The vast majority of software development is taking existing, well-understood techniques and solutions, and applying them to an equally-well-understood problem. Implementation, rather than innovation. The parts of software development that are genuinely inventive (and thus could be considered worthy of patent protection) are e…
So a genuinely inventive idea can be independent created over and over again. A email sorting algorithm could had firstly been made in then 1950, again in the 1970, 3 times in the 1990, and then claimed in a patent in the 2000. Even if source code was public, a patent examiner would have to compare and understand billions of line of codes to even try to grasp what is genuinely inventive, and was has already been done before.
Examining software patents is an unsolvable problem. Society can either have them an accept that any review is a token effort at best, and a rubber stamp in the common case, or they can avoid the whole mess by not allowing those kinds of patents.
We recently covered patents and basic copyright law in a technical writing class. What my professors taught me was that 'patent is a contract between society and inventors to encourage progress'. And it seems fair on certain levels. I am a huge proponent of FOSS, I respect Stallman, I've read his book and I think patent trolls are dicks. However, is it a good idea to make software not patentable ? Will we as a commun…
Yes, because there was no innovation until patent protection came to be. Do you seriously think we would have invented and shared the secret of making fire over 10,000 years ago without patents to protect the original inventors? Or the wheel or the steam engine or telescopes? LOL
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Couldn't one simply split countries up into smaller countries, if being a small country makes things better?
Greece is a rather small country, so are Portugal and Ireland. If anything, being small makes things worse, as it is more likely that there is less economical diversification.
"Commerce Minister Craig Foss said today that following industry consultation he had decided to remove the patentability of software from the Patents Bill, which is currently before Parliament." If anyone is going to support Free and Open Source Software, it's going to be a guy named Foss. The government asked its citizens their thoughts "a recent poll of more than 1000 Kiwi IT professionals found 94 per cent wanted…
"Commerce Minister Craig Foss said today that following industry consultation he had decided to remove the patentability of software from the Patents Bill, which is currently before Parliament." If anyone is going to support Free and Open Source Software, it's going to be a guy named Foss. The government asked its citizens their thoughts "a recent poll of more than 1000 Kiwi IT professionals found 94 per cent wanted…
This sounds suspiciously like a government that works for its people.