One of the oddities of the former Soviet Union was the arrangements they had (at least on paper) for inventors.

The default position more or less was that exploitation rights went to the state, but if the inventor got an 'inventor's certificate', it meant that s/he had a few useful rights. One of them was the right to be employed in connection with exploitation of the invention (that is, only if any use was made of it). They were eligible for housing preference and there was even an award title of 'Honored Inventor of the Soviet Union'.

Sure, whether any of that worked in reality is another question, but the concept seems interesting.

There are free/libre software projects with great records in opening up interoperability and keeping backwards compatibility. On the other hand, fashions among proprietary s/w makers seem to change, and about now there is a tendency to stop worrying about existing users and just abandon past formats.

Any number of folk will say things like "shouldn't be difficult at all to reverse engineer", but that doesn't make anything happen. On the other hand, there are plenty of apostles of the latest version ready to heap abuse on anyone bold enough to ask for backwards compatibility, and that attitude is a big source of problems.

Longterm readability is helped when software developers take the trouble to maintain backwards compatibility across different versions of popular tools and across competing applications that have broadly similar uses. That doesn't directly help with hardware barriers, but at least it would be good if the number of needless software barriers is kept down.

[...] Most of these things will be readable just as long as the applications that created them are around, but not longer.
[...]
Incidentally, all my decades old LeTeX documents still compile and can also be read directly. So can my 20 year old ASCII-coded measurement data.

TrashGod wrote:
> The article is touting a potentially more effective delivery system (gun), rather than a particular fragment (bullet).

Yes, that looks like a fair assessment. But the story as posted and linked is still essentially incomplete, because it doesn't mention what useful thing they propose to deliver. There has to be some beneficial payload in order to make this delivery system any use at all, assuming of course that it works as a delivery system.

The possible example of a 'payload' that you mention (not mentioned in the original article or links), for which you provided a separate link, is of something to down-regulate the production of protein(s) that induce cellular senescence in chronic wounds. This looks as if it could even be actually harmful if added to a wound, because the article you linked explains that the (natural) induction of this senescence restricts fibrosis in wound-healing. But, fibrosis "can be defined as the replacement of the normal structural elements of the tissue by distorted, non-functional and excessive accumulation of scar tissue" and gives rise to "many clinical problems" http://www.math.pitt.edu/~cbsg/Materials/Wound_Healing_Overview.pdf (such as keloids, hypertrophic scars, strictures and a whole list of problems). Thus, downregulating this senescence-inducing protein would be expected to increase the level of fibrosis in the healing wound, and to increase those problems: a harm, not a benefit.

There are plenty of technical 'solutions' around that might be wonderful if there was actually a problem of the right shape for them to solve -- read: they are of no real use because there is no useful application for what they might do. As pure science this one may have interest, but as a useful product, there's no sign here of that.

Obviously one crucial element in the safety/efficacy of anything like this is the identity of the gene/protein involved:-- what exactly is being 'silenced' here and taken away from the wound-healing process?

Whatever, it's not mentioned in either the /. summary or either of the links referred to. So there's no real clue in the story, or in the links, about whether the application of this delivery technique is likely to be beneficial or the reverse.

Informative reportage?

It is worth adding that both of the Monsanto patents mentioned in the Supreme Court judgment either are, or will shortly become, history. The Supreme Court judgment itself can be read at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf.

One of the Monsanto patents is U.S. Patent 5,352,605, issued October 4, 1994 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,352,605.PN.&OS=PN/5,352,605&RS=PN/5,352,605

and the other is U.S. Patent RE 39,247E, a reissue of U.S. Patent Number 5,633,435, originally issued May 27, 1997
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,633,435.PN.&OS=PN/5,633,435&RS=PN/5,633,435.

Both these were filed before mid-1995 (see linked information at US Patent Office website) , and so they seem to have arisen from the 'old-law' US patent regime, when the patent term used to be '17 years from issue date'. Under that old regime the normal expiry dates for these two patents would be October 2011 and May 2014 (unless Monsanto manages for any reason to obtain some patent-term extension).

(The current patent-term regime doesn't seem to apply to these two, but if the last patent applications in the chains leading to these patents had been filed under the current law, with a 20-year term from application date, then the normal expiry dates would have been determined from the earliest dates in the chains of patent applications from which the two patents eventually issued. These chains began in 1983 and 1990, and would have led to normal expiry dates in 2003 and 2010, so the patents would on that basis already have been history for some time now.)

-wb-

What was once a standard[...]

Mod parent up.

Yes, IMO it's realistic right to talk of the 'standard' in the past tense. Now many web-pages seem to have been affected by a 'tower of Babel' syndrome, with everyone asking their visitors to use their favorite subsidiary language upgrade -- but each new 'sub-standard' seems to have its undocumented variants.

-wb-

I don't see where the articles address the "reversing of losses" that the GGP cited. HFT may be flawed, but I don't see the items I questioned being addressed.

Yes, the questions were raised: Look in the '247wallst' article at http://247wallst.com/2012/12/04/high-frequency-trading-a-grave-threat-to-the-markets-and-the-economy/ and search for 'why' as in 'Why were the orders canceled?'

In other words, by some unknown mechanism, certain market participants were able to have second thoughts about their trades.

Their profit, or their cancellation of loss, was someone else's non-cushioned loss.

-wb-

The more specific and narrow you make your requirements, the more people you exclude.

anybody making a stink about it is either really not thinking the problem through and just grumbling because it bothers them (a curmudgeon), or just trying to start trouble (a troll.)

That attitude to an educational/outreach site and your repetition of name-calling speak for themselves.

A significant principle of the 'rule of law' and 'freedom under the law' for a long time has been that there should be no penalty without a law that imposes it. The principle is so old it was there in Latin too, "nulla poena sine lege", and some (including me) regard it as one of the important foundation-stones of a free society.

What the maxim didn't spell out (maybe because it was thought obvious, or should be) is that the law needs to be one that makes it clear and specific enough so that people know in advance what the penalty-earning conduct is going to be.

The ingenuity of some modern legislators subverts this principle while pretending to respect it. They design and pass blanket laws -- such as, arguably, the CFAA -- which are so broad, that they generically criminalize harmful and harmless conduct alike (or, harmful conduct along with other conduct that ought to be considered harmless except it goes against the interests of the legislators' friends). It seems to be assumed (occasionally said right out) that the harmless acts swept up into the breadth of the law will be treated as 'de minimis'. Then it is left to the discretion of prosecutors to pick the cases 'really' deserving of punishment.

Of course one big question about these blanket laws is whether prosecutors should be trusted with that kind of power (I'd answer 'no', and point to the recent Aaron Swartz case).

But an even bigger issue is that the result of subverting the principle of 'nulla poena sine lege' in this way is, that no-one really knows any more what conduct is going to be forbidden in practice. A whole lot of folk get theoretically criminalised for the harmless actions swept up into the over-broad laws, and can only rely on the legal system ignoring the 'de minimis' actions. This is obnoxious for so many reasons, including that harmless acts ought not to be criminalized even theoretically. But it is worse when the blanket law becomes used as justification or pretext for punishment when a prosecutor wants to really get nasty with somebody for some quite ulterior reason not made publicly known. Then the real motivation for punishment can become deceitfully concealed under a veneer of sanctimony '. . .but he broke the law'.

I can hardly think of any subversion of the legal system more poisonous to freedom and the rule of law than this.

-wb-

Since I'm a software developer at Harvard (I did not work on this project,) I believe my response was quite appropriate.

You obviously feel strongly about this, with 'curmudgeon', 'trollish', an exaggerated caricature of the view you disagreed with, and false placement of the caricature within quotes.

Educational websites such as those discussed here clearly mean to reach out to a wide audience. The intended users can be expected to come from a wide range of situations with a wide variety of resources from 'luxury' to 'struggling'. There can hardly be a clearer or more obvious case of need for site software to match users' potential needs: the obvious desideratum is for a broadly accessible robust site with no more complexity than necessary.

When it turns out that the site software on the contrary has narrow technical constraints limiting the breadth of its accessibility, it does squarely raise questions about the designers' competence or motives.

Unfortunately yours is not the only voice of scorn for those with limited resources. (And for those who would post reminders that much of the new software is cost-free, they need reminding in turn that to run it often requires high-spec hardware that is not.)

Pretty, but time consuming.

. . . and maybe those 'pretty' things also had to be coded with software features that stop those pages being read with a bunch of nearly-new browsers.

'KISS' is good.

. . . if your definition of "open" requires supporting curmudgeons that arbitrarily decided to stop updating their browser at some point, because it's what you did, . . .

It's not so very long since backwards compatibility was considered a good feature of software. Now, just mentioning the desirability of it seems to be a sure-fire way to collect some personal insults.
 

Modern browsers, all free to download on a wide variety of platforms, are hardly "the latest gizmos".

Well if not the latest, then pretty recent.

The questions about them are not about their cost-freedom but about their functionality: memory leaks, aspects of their operation newly outside the control of the user, the fragmentation of the 'standards' with which they comply.

But the point is that educational course materials don't intrinsically require any of this specialism or exclusivity. There are plenty of sites for many analogous purposes which have a broad spectrum of toleration for browsers. Why not equally, and more widely accessibly, these educational sites too?

One thing I noticed about edX, coursera, and a few others with similar aims, is that technically their websites seem very exclusive to the latest and snappiest version of any tool that might be used to try and view them.

I have frozen one browser, crashed another, trying to look at their contents without success yet.

Ok 'open' refers to the liberated character of the software, but how open is this at user-level? Did their designers never hear of backwards compatibility? Or do they just want to exclude access by anybody without the latest gizmos?