Google does provide customer support but the end user is not the customer. The customer is the consumer of the data that is gathered on the usage data that is collected from the end user.
I lost an gmail email account, and I had no recourse. In all fairness I was not actively using it. I had registered and received the account so I could have my name. When I decided to start using it, the password no longer worked.
I also had an issue with Skype and I was paid customer. No tech support. I discontinued that account
I have a Google voice account and I use it as my primary phone number. It would hurt to lose or have issues with this account.
I'm a chemist and a software engineer. With all due respect there are a lot of similarities. People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property, whether its patents, copyrights, and or reasonable license fees, etc...
"People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property"
Define "ground-breaking".
This is the myth of the patent system: the lone inventor doing dazzling unprecedented work that they can only recoup by being granted a patent. Those people don't exist. You may find one or two, but not enough to justify the overbearing patent system.
And to extend the argument (as in the article), if those same people can't actually sell their inventions because of interlocking patents held by competitors then the patents they do hold aren't much use.
The idea of a patent is heavily predicated on one novel advance in an otherwise freely implementable design. But in software that is (or threatens to become) a myth rather than a reality.
How many patentable steps are there in useful chemical production paths?
I expect that any trivial software application has many (many) orders of magnitude more patent-vulnerable elements than the most complex commercially produced chemicals.
Software is much more free to include complexity because of the low cost of each element - there's no need to create a physical plant that implements the software.
This makes progress in software much more vulnerable to impedance by patents, because patents cause a greater increase in the relative cost of each element and because there are more elements involved.
And I think if we only allowed patents on "ground breaking" inventions, there would be many fewer patents and much less basis for anti-patent opinions.
Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry, I'll comment that synthetic biochemistry (and now metabolic engineering) have a substantial number of patent vulnerable steps, perhaps comparable to software.
It's kind of neat actually; synthetic chemistry in many ways shares its algorithmic and design-oriented nature with software engineering. Rational drug design will only add to the similarities and overlaps going forward.
>This makes progress in software much more vulnerable to impedance by patents, because patents cause a greater increase in the relative cost of each element and because there are more elements involved.
I think you're possibly understating the problem. The idea that there are "more elements" implies that there are something like ten or a hundred times as many in software as in other industries, but it's worse than that.
The problem is that software uses categories where other industries use instances. Everything is designed as an abstraction on purpose. The result is that patent claim limitations that would be actual limitations in other industries are in software de facto claims of the entire class.
For example, if a claim limitation requires a network connection -- even a specific kind of network connection (e.g. stream sockets or unix domain sockets) -- and you're writing a piece of software intended for use with files on disk, you might think you're safe because you can't infringe that claim. But you're not, because the system calls that work on file descriptors also work on socket descriptors, and socket descriptors can be associated with any supported kind of connection. Your users can run your program and give it the name of a "file" which is really a socket and wham, your software is infringing. The abstractions we use to make things scalable and efficient also cause a combinatorial explosion in the scope of possible infringement.
In the extreme case, general purpose programming tools can in concept infringe any software patent. A user merely needs to type the claim limitations into the source file and the interpreter is happy to infringe. Naturally that case is probably too extreme to find much sympathy in the courts (or they'll come up with something like "substantial non-infringing use"), but the problem is that there is no line. Can we really draw a reasoned distinction between a bash interpreter that allows you to infringe a software patent by typing a twelve line shell script, and a web page that allows you to infringe a software patent with twelve mouse clicks?
It reminds me of this (http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html) re: DRM. "Make me a general purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out." That's not how computers work. It's not how software works, and it's not how software is designed. You make software to have all the features users want by abstracting everything and making it modular so that anyone can plug in alternatives as they come about. Software patents come in and say "make the software have all possible combinations of features in the world, except this one combination which is covered by these claims." It just doesn't work that way.
Patents (at least as defined in the US Constitution) weren't created to protect intellectual property. The idea that they were is a recent invention that is at odds with history.
Patents no longer serve their original purpose and the current system should be dismantled (though I know it won't be, because the big money is on the side of keeping the broken system).
I'm okay with the idea of something new being created to give protection to intellectual property (on a much shorter timescale, say 2-5 years), but the current patent system is incredibly broken.
> People who do groundbreaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property...
Why? Because you want to give them incentives to invest in costly research that wouldn't pay off without a limited monopoly.
But what if research paid off even without such protection? And, more importantly, what if research is not even research at all, let alone costly?
I know little of other industries, but practically none of the recent software patents are a result of costly research, and therefore deserve no protection.
Whatever the legal framework, if you don't tell anyone an idea, then you can keep it. If you tell people, then you have to negotiate if you don't want them to run off and do it too. If your idea needs lots of capital and labour to get it off the ground, then you always have to negotiate anyway, just to do it in the first place.
For me the question isn't, 'how do we protect the intellectual property of the people who do research', because the term intellectual property is a legal one that varies massively in time and geography. I would probably be more inclined to ask the question 'how do we make sure that the people who do research get paid really well and are really well resourced', and work from there.
Slashdot was one of the first weblog frameworks, written in Perl, and was very similar in the beginning to the vibe I get from Hacker News. It (slashcode) was also Open Source. These days I feel Hacker New has more of an edge and, like Slashdot used to be, is "right there" when it comes to technology.
Slashdot was one of the few sites that could handle the load when 911 went down and it was my main source of information that day. About a week later they posted a detailed report on how they handled the load - It was excellent.
Things have changed for them, they were bought out and the founders have moved on, but its still a decent site and I find it easier to use than HN.
I read an article years back and I think it was in the Wall Street Journal. My understanding was that an unexpected grandmaster-level move at a point where Kasparov was expecting to see a different move occurred.
Kasparov suspected user intervention. Unfortunately the event was sponsored by IBM, so ther was potential for a conflict of interest.
He requested to see the source code and the game logs which was denied by IBM. IBM also disassembled the computer immediately after the match to re-purpose the computer for protein folding.
I think this book is rewriting history. Kasparov was devastated.
I remember that incident as well; it was the next game after the random rook move and Kasparov was already unsettled about the computer's capabilities. By my memory, it went like this:
In a complicated midgame, Kasparov moved a pawn to a square under attack. He intended to sacrifice it for positional gain, opening up his attack lines and compromising the opponent's defensive structure. Kasparov expected that a computational chess engine would seize the calculable material gain and not see the deeper positional subtleties. (Deep Blue 'only' searched ahead about 10 to 15 moves, not nearly as deep as today's computers.) Deep Blue did in fact decline the pawn sacrifice, causing Kasparov to accuse IBM of intervention, that only a human grandmaster would see the response.
It was a little different from what you recall. 37. Be4 (instead of 37. Qb6) is the move that really made Garry suspect human intervention. Be4 is a much more positional move than Qb6.
Yup, there was an agreement in place that Kasparov could see the analysis that Deep Blue output. The outcome has never been decided, in my opinion, because of IBM violating the terms of the agreement.
When K requested it, he was put off. This went on, and I tracked it closely at the time, waiting for IBM to give it up. They kept saying they would, but never did to my knowledge.
Kasparov was concerned that IBM could encounter a bug, or simply a losing situation, and would have the chance to intervene with Deep Blue's calculations without anyone knowing. Deep Blue made more than one move that made Kasparov suspicious during the match. (Years later, humans interacting with computers was shown to produce much stronger results than just computers alone, even when the computers were much stronger at chess than the humans assisting them.)
Many Grandmasters have pointed out that at top-level matches, particularly world championships, psychology is the MOST important factor in deciding the outcome. This makes IBM's behavior all the worse, regardless of their reason.
(My friend Mike Valvo, now passed away, was the arbiter at the match http://www.computerhistory.org/chess/full_record.php?iid=stl... When I first met Mike, I said "There's something I always wanted to say to you!" He said "What's that?" and I said "e4" to which he responded "c5" and we proceeded to play a few moves of a Sicilian. Mike was one of a few people who had played and beaten Bobby Fischer in casual play.)
Here's an article with quotes from Kasparov that supports the thesis. The site is a classic 90's setup, and Kasparov's reaction is about halfway down the page(search for "Suicide?" without the quotes).
Great little article bootstrapping the start-up. I hope to see a follow-up if the company gets traction. These article help me keep in touch with the technology that is currently being used. I was unaware of SendGrid until I read this. On a side note, I'd like to see complete solutions a la Google Mail - Send & Receive Grid.
I liked the article title but the article is weak. First of all, there are many ways to create a viable tablet. Apple's approach to enumerate the challenges/problems associated with the new form factor and then to solve them not come up with an ad hoc hack and to protect their unique patentable solutions.
At the same time, other companies were creating netbooks because they were to lazy to figure out how to design a fully functional computer and cram it into a notebook form factor.
Probably one of the key breakthroughs was their realization that it didn't need to be a full computer. Seems so obvious now doesn't it? Also that they needed to augment the current state of the touch based UI. All very obvious in retrospect.
If there is prior art then it will remove some of the violations. If you are going to post stuff like this, do the necessary research on when the iPad IP was patented.
Its appalling to see companies blatantly copying better technology and then selling it. They should respect it, either license the technology, develop their own or work on something that Apple hasn't done yet and isn't in the process of doing.
This isn't news, its just a random rant. I agree that as OS X adds complex features we lose flexibility in other areas. Many of these are are not frequently visited but its still annoying and unacceptable. Fortunately, if Tim knows where to find these files and really wants to delete them, an "rm -rf" from the offending directory would do the trick - I'd like to think that 99% of the people reading this forum know this. Ditching mail.app for GMail? Seriously??
I lost an gmail email account, and I had no recourse. In all fairness I was not actively using it. I had registered and received the account so I could have my name. When I decided to start using it, the password no longer worked.
I also had an issue with Skype and I was paid customer. No tech support. I discontinued that account
I have a Google voice account and I use it as my primary phone number. It would hurt to lose or have issues with this account.