Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
They still do. Most industrially sponsored academic research doesn't lead to ideas that are worth patenting and publication stops anyone else getting a monopoly on the idea if circumstances change a few years down the line.
Depending on the extent of sponsorship, the sponsor may not even have "first refusal". The benefit to them is simply that the research is done at all.
Unless someone has "foolishly" removed the requirement that the patent disclosure be sufficient to let anyone else make the invention, source code is already a requirement. However, "novelty" and "non-obviousness" are also mentioned in the various treaties that underpin the global patent system, and we know that courts don't bother themselves with either of those.
Perhaps the only real change necessary is that courts are instructed in the *basics* of patent law and told to forget everything they've ever learned about its complexities.
"This is about who gets the patent if two people both claim to have "invented" the same thing at about the same time."
Since the benefit to society in granting a monopoly (patent) is that inventions happen which would not otherwise, the *correct* resolution of this grey area is that neither inventor should be granted a monopoly. since *demonstrably* the invention is not non-obvious to those skilled in the art.
"And when you try to import them you're very much subject to the laws of the country you're bringing it into, even those in which you're re just switching planes and won't be leaving the airport, so the stuff may well get confiscated."
With a physical object, that's true even today if the purchase was made over the internet, since we've had mail order companies since forever. But if the Dear Commissioner would have that apply to Facebook, then she is presumably applying it to a service that is performed abroad (giving you a presence on a foreign web site) and in connection with which no physical object is ever imported. You don't bring services back. The analogy doesn't work.
And if you *really* want to carry your airport analogy further, that would imply that the service is subject to the laws of every country that packets hop through. Quite apart from being impractical to determine, if the packets are carried via multiple routes then who is to say which countries the *service* is carried through?
The only *practical* solution is the one that says business transactions take place in the country that hosts the server and any physical deliverables are subsequently imported *by the purchaser*. The commissioner's approach would mean that websites would have to determine the legal jurisdiction of their customers before they know if it is safe to do sell to them. Last I heard, IP-address geolocation wasn't something I'd want to rely on in a court of law.
"Block the traffic of those who seek to hide behind international borders. This obviously has many practical difficulties but can be done, especially to large companies with a well known addresses."
Umm, no. The *specification* of enforcement is simple, as you describe. However, the *method* is considerably harder, for several reasons. For one, the "well-known addresses" you speak of would have to be blocked at every border router in the legal jurisdiction trying to block. For another, they don't include the addresses of people mirroring or providing tunnels to the restricted content, and whilst *that* may be illegal in your country is certainly won't be in your neighbours, so you'd have to add "every foreign mirror and proxy" to that list of addresses you are blocking on every route in. For a third thing, the address you are trying to block might be a dynamically allocated one, so you'd have to snoop DNS servers to keep your huge list up to date.
So it *can* be done, but it is rather expensive. The Chinese seem to spend quite a lot of effort on it and after all that effort they still rely on "disincentives" for people who uncover errors and omissions in the block list.
Of course, if the IP address space were more cleanly aligned with legal jurisdiction, it would at least be possible for people to *know* whether the site they are doing business with is in the same jurisdiction, and therefore sue-able in the event of disappointment. However, that's solving a slightly different problem. Specifically, that's "giving users the tools to protect themselves from stuff they don't want" rather than "giving government the tools to protect people from stuff they do want". In a free society, the latter is impossible whereas the former is relatively simple once you've figured out that this is what you should be trying to do.
But you are right. The present situation is legally intolerable, so ultimately they will figure all this out and we will get an internet that is as safe as the street where you live. (Hmm...)
facebook.de takes me to http://de-de.facebook.com/.
I don't know where that's hosted, but I can't think of any reason to presume that it is within the EU. Even if it is, it doesn't affect the general principle that web sites don't have to be hosted in the country implied by their domain name.
I did. You didn't.
EU citizens are able to use the internet to communicate with foreign companies and can use various financial services to pay those companies money. This means that EU citizens can conduct business with those companies without those companies having any presence in the EU whatsoever, either legal or physical. (It's no different from buying stuff when you are on holiday. You are subject to the laws of the country where you bought it.)
If a company has no legal presence in the EU then you can sue them all you like but courts will be unable to extract fines or sentence directors simply because EU law doesn't apply in other parts of the world. Nor should it.
Still confused? Consider a North Korean buying something off your website? Are you now subject to North Korean law? Of course not, and if the Kims decided that you were and prosecuted you then you'd just laugh at them.
"The law is for everyone who does business on the territory of Europe, whatever the origin of the business might be. So you cannot hide anymore by saying ‘I do not have my headquarters in Europe’."
Does Facebook do business in the EU? That is, does it have a subsidiary through which it sells its products, or does it conduct all its business through its (US-based) website.
Companies that operate exclusively through the internet have no need to duplicate their points of presence in every country, as long as uncensored web access is available. Perhaps the commissioner hasn't caught up with this new reality. Or perhaps she wants to follow the Chinese model.
As bazza notes, the only quantum part of quantum cryptography is in the detector system. The moral of the story here is that whatever your system, the point of detection is likely to be a weak point since "observation" often goes hand in hand with a "return" to classical physics. It suggests that there may be a whole new class of weaknesses in any QC system.
I also second bazza's objection to the phrase "quantum cryptography". Perhaps we should start calling it "quantum transmission", to emphasise that it is wholly dependent on the quality of your engineering rather than your mathematics.
"HP alleges that Oracle sales reps take advantage of this shut-out by pitching a Sun box to handle the workload, offering them at below-cost or, in some cases, free of charge."
So when you report a bug, not only do they offer to give you a working version of the program, they offer to give you new hardware to run it on as well.
I think you should look up "brutal" in the dictionary. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Actually it's worse than that. By allowing a free-for-all in the top level namespace, they are almost certainly making it harder for future governing bodies to invent *recognisable* new TLDs for some truly useful purpose. (I don't count "dot brand" as useful.)
Our only hope is that the marketing executives of the world realise that there is no commercial value in paying a million bucks for a name that says "this website is a bit dodgy". I'm not optimistic.
Seen the reports from Greece this week? Notice the German vote against nukes?
The carousel will run out of money in the next year or two. The lights will start going out nearer the end of the decade. Jesters are fine for entertainment, but you can't build a system of government around them. At least, not for long.
"Warwick himself is already in at least two insitutions: in one, he is for some reason afforded the title Professor"
That's how academia works, with or without *formal* support for the idea of tenure. If you start sacking your professors as soon as they stray from your rather idea of sensible, you end up with mediocrity, which is generally considered a Bad Thing amongst elite institutions.
Finding Nobel laureates is an expensive business. Think of dear Kevin as a down-payment.
You want to think Really Hard about what those words mean before you proclaim that it is obviously illegal and warrants a jail term. To help you with your research...
Google not only links to all sorts of stuff, it actively crawls the net looking for stuff to link to. It also *hosts* a vast collection containing copyrighted material with no effective barriers to uploading it and take-downs considered only on a case-by-case basis. (A bit like a burglar emptying your house but offering to give back individual items as long as you can give them an itemised list.)
Just about any university Chemistry course will not just "link to" information on how to make a bomb, but let you practice the necessary techniques in the lab in the hope that you become really good at it.
You probably don't want to know what happens in medical courses. Suffice to say that some of their lectures are "closed" to those not on the actual course.
Information is not a crime.
I don't see anything in this announcement beyond an efficiency tweak.
If your only defence against over-powerful government is the fragmentation and general incompetence of its agencies, then you've already lost and are simply living on borrowed time. Don't worry. Your turn will come.
On the other hand, you object to the collection and storage of this information in the first place, or don't trust the regulation of its use, your complain is against those matters and you are unlikely to be placated by claims that the information is scattered across several agencies.
It's harder than you might think.
There are viruses out there that detect when they are running under surveillance (a virtual machine or a debugger) and "act innocent" under those circumstances. So you decide to decompile (as best as can be done) the app and search for "suspicious" code. What does that look like, exactly? Network access? Storage access? Asking for a password to access personal data? If you start banning apps that do these things, your end-user is going to conclude that your device can't do very much and s/he should have bought the Apple instead.
In fact, given the utterly shit nature of much of what passes for "legitimate code", I rather suspect that the task is impossible even for someone of above average human intelligence, let alone a machine.
I'm aware of their paper qualifications. I was speaking of the expertise demonstrated by their actions. Can you imagine any country solicitor suggesting that credentials that enable legally binding (on you) actions be stored on a foreign website run by someone with Zuckerberg's track record? Neither can I.
So what exactly happens to lawyers when they become MPs? Does it hurt? Are there videos?
I assume you are serious, but this point is really not appreciated widely enough. The requirement is to "authenticate the transaction" (http://www.schneier.com/essay-153.html) rather than "identify the person" and a deep understanding of the difference leads one to solutions that don't require shared ID at all. In fact, if you think you need an ID database, then you are probably in the middle of designing a broken system.
"to prove identity when accessing any public services [via the internet]"
Why would I want to do that, then? The only reason to bother proving my identity to a government website is so that the subsequent actions can be legally binding. I'm not going to trust a social networking site with *that* authority.
Coming up next: green paper suggests that everyone signs over power of attorney to their local MP so that we can be governed more easily. No-one in parliament spots the obvious flaw because none of them have any legal expertise.
"While likely some countries will no doubt try and block the xxx TLD there is also a risk even to those registered on xxx merely to secure the name used on their .com site censorious bodies may use the xxx TLD as a 'confessions list and block at IP level"
There's no "try" or "risk" about it. Several countries have already said they will block it and India has announced that they will use it as a "confessions" list. (http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelhumphrey/2011/03/24/indias-reaction-to-xxx-domain-exhibits-why-porn-industry-hates-it/) Even in the liberal west, there may be legal risks if employers don't block it and ISPs will certainly offer blocking to home users. It probably already IS the most heavily censored domain ever and it isn't "live" yet.
The only real question is how long the domain will last. The registrars will make a killing this year, but it will soon be clear that no-one is *using* their .xxx domains and so I don't expect many "brand owners" to renew in 2012. 2013 may not see enough renewals to cover costs. Do ICANN have a plan for keeping a TLD alive after its "parent" registrar goes bankrupt?
"It would make adult filtering for networks children will access easy as pie."
New around here, are you? It has been explained countless times in these forums that there is not a clear-cut and universally accepted definition of porn and therefore we'll never see "all the porn" conveniently housed under .xxx, leaving the rest of the web porn-free.
Obviously the converse probably *is* true. That is, I can't think of any good reason not to block .xxx on my own machines. That's one reason why the porn industry is mostly going to ignore it.
It's hard to prove anything, but MS dragged their heels a *lot* during the first standardisation effort (VC6->VC7) and then tried to push managed C++ on the world. Both efforts seem to have been dismal failures and I think they hurt themselves more than the language. (They have to use their own compiler to develop Windows, remember!)
They've been good in recent years and I feel confident that the "extended subset" supported by the current MS compiler reflects their release schedules and compatibility requirements more than anything else.
Of course, C++ is used by every other player in the industry, so it really shouldn't be surprising that the standard reflects more than Microsoft's interests. It's not like Microsoft are the only vendor and they can just switch off things if they want to, like they did with VB6 and might be doing with Silverlight.
Umm, C is not C++.
Half-decent C++ code hardly ever does explicit memory allocation and uses RAII to correctly dispose of that and all other resources and so not only does it not need GC, GC-ed languages end up needing RAII for all non-memory resource types. Buffer overruns don't happen if you are using the standard library's collection classes, and the only common reason for using raw arrays is because you are interfacing with code that requires them, such as your OS APIs if you haven't elected to use a toolkit.
The necessary features have been part of the old C++ for the last 15-20 years, so I'm afraid the new C++ has added almost nothing to help with your problem.
Perhaps the real problem is that the new C++ still accepts C-style programming and therefore tolerates C-style programmers. (If you are programming in a "safe" language, you can't cut-n-paste some crap C code that you found on the web. If you are programming in C++, you probably can.) Or perhaps the problem is program managers who don't use *any* static analysis tools (not even a decent compiler warning level) on the code that their sub-ordinates check in.
Or perhaps it is just true that native-mode programs tend to fail fast and noisily (crash), whereas managed ones are quietly kept alive in an indeterminate state. Amusingly, some people call the latter "recovery". Perhaps this is because "recovery" is what they will have to do to their data files next week, once they see what the program (now in an indeterminate state) went on to do to them.
It's not Linux unless you can change it.
Read the comments further down, where everyone is fretting over which app store it comes with and whether it is obsolete before it even reaches the market. If Hannspree had put a 'Buntu on the device, do you think anyone would be *worried* about which version? Of course not, because it would be a matter of an hour or so to put the right version on instead, or even change the distro.
Android is not Linux.
That's how I read it. There's no need for eye-rolling, though. Just make a list of all the must-have features that were added in Win7 and then imagine the kind of person who wouldn't be interested in any of them. (Or save yourself the effort and just imagine someone who isn't wowed by eye-candy and doesn't like having to relearn where everything is.)
Microsoft's official advice to OEM resellers is that they should use the 32-bit version of Office even on a 64-bit OS, to avoid incompatibilities with the *many* third party plug-ins that exist in the Office marketplace. If you have a problem with 64-bit Office, then you've been mis-sold, or mis-bought.
"Being a tech enthusiast i like to keep up to speed with the latest software (& hardware) - surprised at people on this site arguing the other way!"
Let me explain. We like shiny toys too, but the day job is "getting stuff done with non-shiny kit" or "writing software for non-shiny kit" or just plain "helping people who never asked to use a f@!<ing computer in the first place".
"Simple fact is that XP is too old. It was designed for an age before multiple cores were a common thing"
NT was designed for up to 32 cores right from the start in the late 80s. You might as well argue that the Linux kernel (only slightly younger and based on a design from 20 years earlier) was designed for a bygone age and we should all be chucking our penguins in the bin.
As opposed to this year's fresh, insecure, virus-riddled piece of crap?
If you look at the holes being patched through Windows Update, there's not much to choose between XP, Vista and 7 in terms of the number of patches they get. Furthermore, if properly managed, XP is no more virus-prone than a Linux or FreeBSD box. The annual black-hat conference has given up on their contest to crack the bare OS because even the very best can't do it now. Viable cracks now depend on having some flaky Adobe plug-in being used whilst surfing the web as root.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Sticking to the APIs available in XP is hardly limiting for most software and if you are writing the interface to an internet-based service (like iCloud or IE9) then it takes *real* effort to arrange for the code not to work on XP.
In Microsoft's case there's a clear, if not terribly worthy, incentive for them to make that effort and (since IE9 brings in no revenue) no great downside if people ignore the product as a result.
In Apple's case it is harder to see the rationale. They've just turned their backs on precisely those Windows users who hadn't rushed to upgrade and who therefore might have been persuaded to try a non-MS platform.
OK. Yes, IPv6 eliminates the need for a NAT. No, your router does not just become a dumb switch.
Most consumer IPv4 routers contain firewalls, but many people haven't paid much attention to them because NAT accomplishes *some* of the same things and there's probably a second firewall in your PC.
For IPv6, that firewall simply becomes an indispensable part of the package. If it is done even vaguely competently, outsiders needn't have any idea how many devices are behind it, let alone what they are.
Having said that ... packaging all this into a product that the average Joe can use appears to be beyond the likes of Netgear, Linksys et al. We're still waiting for "consumer" units under three figures that can do IPv6. Andrews and Arnold have a moan about this on their web-site.
Dissonance by arse. Its democracy plus the rule of law. You get to lobby for changes to the law, but until you are successful, you have to play by the old rules.
If you don't like it, there are a handful of places in the world where they don't have either and I'm sure if you offered to swap with one of the poor souls who live there, they'd readily agree.
I'm amused by the Supremes' decision that the burden of proof lies with the challenger. Perhaps no-one has told them that the law requires the USPTO to take the opposite view when granting them in the first place -- the benefit of the doubt goes to the applicant.
As for Microsoft, it would be lovely to think that they are currently running the numbers and deciding that the current system of legal Russian roulette has now reached the point of unbearability, but I won't hold my breath.
"And pay-per-bit is not the answer either, as this really stifles innovation."
If your "innovation" has disregarded the reality of your network infrastructure then you aren't a very good engineer. You probably haven't been as innovative as you like to pretend. It would probably be better for the rest of us if you were stifled.
1) Nuke the BRIC contries and get nuked back but save what's left of the planet, who will then be free to, er, industrialise and undo all our good genocide.
2) Maintain our own efforts, to no avail, and not be ready for that rise in global temperatures.
3) Give up our own efforts and spend the money mitigating that rise in global temperatures.
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