DISQUS

This is by far the best theme ever created. The quality of the photos is astounding you can even make out the subtleties of her lingerie's texture. Amazing.

‘Make Education Fair’ lol.

Try asking any academic in the faculty of business what they think the role of unions in the workplace should be.

Nooses should not be joked about at all, at least in the U.S. where we have a grave history of lynching that still effects us today.

It does seem like the killer feature of recommendation services from Last.fm through Netflix is to introduce you to treasures you wouldn't otherwise have found. The idea that location based services can help you chart out a more detailed map of your own local territory is a compelling one.


I'm looking forward to the mashups between attention data aggregators, recommendation engines, and location based services. e.g., I want to be able to rock up in Berlin, and automatically get a Google map with everything from clubs to design shops and everything in between, pre-filtered based on my previously expressed tastes, those of my trusted friends, and a few "hot trends" thrown in for serendipity's sake.



I guess the only downside is for those people that do find that super cool obscure little coffee shop, it may not be obscure for very long...

Check out the last five or six postings on the Senator Corder hit job on Idablue's blog to see just how much he hasn't learned- especially the "everyone else's fault" theme that permeates every sentence he writes.

Haha, good stuff.

just come to cable already, dammit

If ESPN takes over Setanta and they change the format, I'll be really, really pissed.

Buy it, put it on cable for less money and keep everything else the same.

I'm a United fan, but I've got to disagree vehemently with this. City was phenomenal. The fans, the production, their kit, everything. The whole pregame ceremony was fantastic and the minute's silence brought shivers. United played terribly, but I have to hand City their due, they played a good game and deserved the 3 points. Saying their kit wasn't retro enough, thereby labeling them as disrespectful, is ridiculous.

I'm in Dubai with my iPhone. Google.com thinks that I really want to be on google.ae/m which my poor iPhone really hates displaying lots of square boxes :-(

as linked above, you blind? http://www.dailymotion.com/thefootie/video/x3kl...

MOTD doesn;t come out until late tonight!

Actually, in response to Kevin S. and others... Jesus was very clear about the priorities of Christians, and trying to create a nation where the laws revolve around our moral values was not one of them. The example Christ set for us was that of living a grace-filled life, one which works to bring justice and hope to people in the midst of whatever political system we happen to find ourselves.


Grace triumphs over law is not just a spiritual truth, it is a pragmatic one as well. The problem is that often we don't really believe that. Many great Christian writers (Bonhoeffer, Ellul, Yancey, etc) have pointed this out. It is time that more Christians (I'm including myself here) actually took our faith seriously instead of relying on a political system to make Christianity easy for us.



Geoff>

These sorts of issues may be data points along the way to collecting evidence that software patents are more costly than beneficial, but the existence of challenges like Apple's hardly leads to your conclusion that software patents are, well, patently ridiculous. The appropriate question is, if these sorts of behavior are costly (and it is not at all clear that they are -- after all, as you note, most often we're in a world of detente. The "cost" then is application, processing, and some deterrence (not zero, of course), but the benefit might be the enabling of substantial innovation and, more importantly, profitable exploitation of innovation) -- anyway, as I was saying, the appropriate question is, if these sorts of behavior are costly, is the cost worth the benefit? Your theory is that "software patents are little more than legal harrassment devices," but where's the evidence for that? Sure, sometimes, ex post, they are used to harrass. But there is also, of course, some evidence that software patents contribute to innovation (although the evidence is weak (on both sides) and more empirics are needed), and these "legal harrassments" are surely sometimes not mere harrassment but actual enforcement of actual, valuable and worthwhile patents. As to the question about why Apple might sit on its IPRs until sued, I'm sure you can imagine that the costs of suit might, in particular cases, outweigh the benefits -- particularly where it is, again as you suggest, perhaps important to establish a reputaiton for patent enforcement following a tit-for-tat strategy (but no more -- no preemptive enforcement). In the end, this is simply woefully insufficient evidence to condemn software patents outright.

There's as big a flaw in your reasoning that competition is good as there is that software patents stifle competition.




As you point out:
"Competition is cutthroat, and businesses who stop innovating shrivel up and die."





What about a small start-up software company who make their great new piece of software and try to sell it, only to have some big player (Microsoft, say) copy the ideas and then integrate them for free in their existing products? This is great for the consumer (so long as the consumer wants nothing more than cheap products) but the bigger, badder, corporation can quite easily kill the smaller competition. Microsoft have been doing this for years and despite numerous attempts to have them done for anti-competitive behaviour, they've hardly been scratched by the law suits. A completely free-market is never going to be the solution.





In truth, patents ARE anti-competitive. This is widely recognised. Nevertheless, patents have existed in all fields of technology for several centuries and have enabled the ideas people to get a head start in using their ideas before everyone copies them. This is their reward, and I see no reason why such people shouldn't be rewarded. Yet patents can also be damaging, so a balance must always be found between their inherently anti-competitive nature and the reward that is given to the inventor.





Looking at the practice in the US where they have:
1. Piss poor searching for (and application of) prior art;
2. Assumption of validity of a granted patent, combined with virtually useless re-examination system mean that you have to go to court to fight your case, and you're always fighting an uphill battle;
3. Punitive triple damages, making patents a weapon rather than a shield





I think that it is easy to see that the balance is all wrong. Patents, in any field of technology, are too powerful in the US and this is what's damaging, not that software patents exist.





In Europe, things are quite different and while I can't say whether the balance is right, it's certainly better:
1. No assumption of validity of a granted patent.
2. Slightly better searching of the prior art combined with the requirement for a "technical effect" meaning that the Europeans don't even have to try looking for prior art to show that it's obvious to use a computer to remind you when to walk your dog.
3. Opportunities for opposing granted patents at the Patent Office directly. This helps correct for mistakes, which every patent office will make - even the EPO granted a patent based on Amazon's "one-click" application (although not for that particular invention) which is currently under serious opposition from several parties.
4. Non-punitive damages.





Nevertheless, court costs are still high, which protects the big business over the small inventor. Maybe more should be done in Europe and the US to combat this problem.





I would also point out that the software field is a lot different today than it was in the 1970's not just because of software patents, but also because copying software is immeasurably easier. You could argue that software patents are a necessary change to combat the ever-increasing threat of piracy.





What I'm trying to say is that software patents are only evil to the extent that all patents are evil. But their perniciousness lies not in the fact that they exist, but in that the power afforded to patent-wielders is too high.

never seen it before. :-)