Slashdot Mirror

Student loans are not forgiveable in a bankruptcy.

Not true. According to a 2011 study, 40% of people who included student loans in their bankruptcy filings were granted a discharge by the judge:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
You just have to prove undue hardship. Also, the study found a lot of people didn't ask for it, and those who did not hire a lawyer were less likely to ask for it. So the bigger problem is this misinformation that people think it's not forgivable.

Kruschke and Liddell have a preprint out on this topic:

"The Bayesian New Statistics: Two Historical Trends Converge"

They first confiscate it from you and me, whether we want it or not.

A common misconception, but one that doesn't match reality. Governments create money through the treasury and central bank (a.k.a. federal reserve in the US). Government spending doesn't proceed from money taken in by taxation; rather, money is created ex nihilo and electronically credited to appropriate accounts, then spent. There's no constitutional requirement that the money removed from circulation by taxation has to balance spending in pretty much any developed country in the world: the two are not operationally linked. Indeed, one of the major purposes of taxation (besides reducing the money supply) is enforcing the use of the official national currency -- and that's why you can only pay your taxes in that currency. Tax "revenue" is not for extinguishing debt. And the debt issue itself is another one attracting misunderstanding, because of the tendency by people to apply microeconomic "common sense" to macroeconomics, which is a well-known fallacy. The majority of the debt of a nation like the US is just a number registered between treasury and central bank/fed, and is like debt between husband and wife, pretty much an accounting fiction that doesn't have to be repaid (reducing it, however, makes for good politics); of the rest, much is held by nationals, not foreigners/foreign governments. This configuration gives governments great power to influence their economies through control of the money supply, something they have exclusive legal power to as monetary sovereigns**. Whether this is generally done correctly, incompetently, or abused, is a matter of politics. I'll point out this, however: the common argument against government spending -- inflation -- only applies when you're close to full employment; otherwise, spending feeds aggregate demand rather than inflation.

** The glaring exception being, of course, the euro currency, which nicely shows how attempting a monetary union without having a fiscal and economic union only benefits those who can maintain a trade surplus (Germany), thus beggaring their neighbors in classic mercantilist manner.

Some further reading: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n...

Disclaimer: my post is descriptive, not prescriptive. I'm simply pointing out how things are, not passing judgment on whether this is how they ought to be, and will keep my opinion to myself as I've no interest in a political discussion on Slashdot.

HFT most certainly does both of those things.

Maybe you should go educate yourself. Here's a great place to start:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Abstract: This paper examines the relation between high-frequency trading (HFT) and extreme price movements (jumps). Some market observers allege that HFT exacerbates or even causes price jumps, thus contributing to market instability. Contrary to these allegations, we find that during extreme price movements high-frequency traders act as net liquidity suppliers, while non-high-frequency traders act as net liquidity demanders. Moreover, high-frequency traders are active liquidity providers during price jumps that result in permanent price changes, absorbing the most informed order flow. Our evidence is consistent with HFT performing a stabilizing function in modern markets.

I'll wait right here for you to come back and apologize.

Since the daughter of Hitler's finance minister is suing the publishers in Germany, it's German law that matters.

IANAL, but... While the EU copyright directive allows states to legislate for Fair Use, it seems that German statute law does not include such a provision. However, German courts have in the past relied on provisions in the German Constitution which state that Art and Research are free, to allow some reuse of portions of a work (see paper). However it's not necessarily clear how the court might rule in this case. And besides, there is the issue of the publisher having previously agreed to pay, and then deciding not to. There could be questions of the validity and enforceability of such an agreement. And there is the question of whether the lady concerned is in fact the copyright owner.

So there is plenty for lawyers to fight over.

But I find it quite distasteful that research could be blocked, or charged for in this way. That's why much of the world DOES have [fairly] clear "Fair Use" or "Fair Dealing" exceptions in copyright law.

"After controlling for time trends, weather, road conditions, and other factors, we attribute an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month to additional road travel undertaken in response to 9/11."
It's highly likely that more people have died due to the response to terrorism than from actual terrorism in the US.

Well, had you read the article .../quote>

Had you read the article? The article to read was not in a newspaper, but the original publication http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... , in the Social Science Research Network.

1. Association is not causation.

2. It hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was presented at a conference, and uploaded to an archive. There were no reviewers to point out any obvious flaws that would be obvious to a specialist in the field that a newspaper reporter might not notice (assuming he had indeed read the entire study).

3. They are economists, not scientists. Scientists in psychology, psychiatry, and other related fields have been doing studies like this for generations. Economists sometimes make big mistakes in science. They make mistakes in conceptualizing problems and figuring out how to apply their data to the real world. They don't know how to correct for confounding factors, like, were the students who had access to cannabis similar to the students who didn't? Maybe foreign students were better students than native students.

Most significantly, scientific (particularly medical) studies have a higher standard of evidence than economic studies. They make their authors prove more details, link by link, in the chain of argument. For example, this study assumes that the native students actually did smoke more cannabis than the foreign students. How do they know that? Did they do blood tests? (No.) They surveyed students on their cannabis consumption, discussed starting on p. 22, but they didn't use the survey to answer the obvious question, which is, did the native students actually smoke more cannabis than the foreign students? What were the percentages? Were they statistically significant? From my first read of the paper, I don't see that they got that data. Maybe the law had no effect. If somebody can find it in there, let me know.

In a medical drug study, researchers might assign one group of patients a drug for treating, say, AIDS. Sometimes the drug has uncomfortable side effects and the patients don't take it (without telling the doctor). They'll count pills to see whether patients are taking the drug. If it's important enough, they'll take blood tests.

4. As a science journalist, I can say that, in my professional opinion, the author of this news story is incompetent. It doesn't follow the generally-accepted best practices for medical journalism http://www.healthnewsreview.or... or any professional journalism, unless you want to use the definition that anybody who calls himself a journalist is one.

The howling mistake that the author, Jamie Doward, made is that he didn't get comment from a knowledgeable source with a different view http://www.healthnewsreview.or... If I was his editor, I would tell him to go back and get a comment. If he didn't routinely get a second comment for a controversial story like this, I would fire him. If I were teaching him in a journalism course, I would give him an F, until he gets the lesson (if ever).

There have been many studies comparing marijuana smokers and non-smokers, and they've found small effects on cognitive performance (sometimes in both directions), but never anything as dramatic as this. This requires an explanation from some of the researchers who have been studying this question for a long time.

There's a reason for this. Science journalists don't have to be smart. They just have to know their limitations. If I write a story about something as controversial as whether cannabis lowers your college grades, and interview one guy, I may not know enough to understand it. So I call up somebody else, who knows more than me, and may disagree with the first source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

High level drug dealer and money launderer.

15 month sentence, didn't even serve all of it.

Male privilege indeed.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap:0:...

Explain anti vaxxers

Anti-vaxxers are spread pretty evenly across the political spectrum. In fact a study published in December 2014 found that conservative Republicans are very slightly more likely to hold anti-vax views than liberal Democrats.

Uh, yeah, but only one side is yelling "anti-science" at the other. There should be *no* liberal Democrats on the anti-vax side if I were to believe the bullshit coming from that side.

Both sides are anti-science, just in different ways. But it's only the Democrats who try to use this as a political point.

Explain anti vaxxers

Anti-vaxxers are spread pretty evenly across the political spectrum. In fact a study published in December 2014 found that conservative Republicans are very slightly more likely to hold anti-vax views than liberal Democrats. You can see the pretty graph here.

I don't know about the harsher sentences; could you give references? It strikes me as a very difficult thing to measure.

A quick search led to this study.

(There is a great reluctance to go after women who rape men, but that's a lot less common than the reverse.)

Why the "but"? What does it matter how common a crime is? Are we not equal before the law? Is rape not a crime? Why should there be "reluctance" to persecute someone for committing a crime over the gender of the suspect/defendant?

School teachers may give boys lower marks, but they don't call on girls as often

So you're saying girls are getting better grades not because they earned it through their own merit, but only because the teachers, who are mostly women, don't discriminate against them as much?

My impression is that specifically female medical problems have been rather neglected by medical research (breast cancer is an exception, perhaps because there are boobs involved), so if there's more funding going to them that may be catch-up. Without knowing where your numbers come from and mean, it's difficult to judge them.

You say it's difficult to judge, but you're already judging before you even see the numbers ."Your impression" is that he is wrong, that there are reasons to explain the disparity.

Why won't you believe a man? We're told by feminists time and again to just believe a woman when she protests about misogyny. Why the different standard and expectation of rigor if it's a man complaining about men's issues?

The big difference between renting and buying is that instead of throwing away money to pay someone else's mortgage, you are building equity in your own property.

This was common sense in the 1960s and 1970s. Now with debt consolidation, second/third mortgages and other similar schemes, home equity is frequently tiny or illusory.

there's an excellent report on this matter that was published more than 10 years ago.

A Home Without Equity is Just a Rental with Debt:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

The concern is that Emails while *intended* to be private by it's users, Emails are traditionally sent plaintext without any sort of envelope to prevent casual snooping while it changes hands across possibly dozens of devices that are designed explicitly to inspect said data for various purposes. Further, there is typically not signing employed to detect "tampering" or outright forgery on legitimate emails. Under the eyes of the law, there must be an expectation of privacy for privacy to exist. A plaintext, non-direct, persistent communication mechanism that relies on various other devices inspecting it at various levels of detail to determine whether it is suitable for delivery to the recipient doesn't technically qualify in the eyes of the law.

The Fourth Amendment in Cyberspace: Can Encryption Create a Reasonable Expectation of Privacy?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

The short answer is no; encryption does not create a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Sounds like what the FCC will do in the US eventually. Just give it some time until "for the children" or to fight "the terrorists" the FCC will require real names etc.

Yep, I was just about to say, that as much as we in the US bash China for lack of privacy and personal rights (including the right 'not to be seen')....there are a lot in the US government (fed and state) just salivating over ending anonymous access to the internet just as much as the Chinese.

Have you not been paying attention? The 'real names' thing was invented here. Except it was started by the private sector, not government.

Before you claim there's any difference between the two, I will direct you to The Dangers of Surveillance, a paper that first appeared in the Harvard Law Review, and is required reading for anyone who's interested in the legal principles at play here. I too used to think, 'Yeah, but you can walk away from a business, but you can't walk away from government.' The paper makes an excellent point that real name policies, no matter where they originate, are detrimental to human liberty:

[W]e must recognize that surveillance transcends the public-private divide. Even if we are ultimately more concerned with government surveillance, any solution must grapple with the complex relationships between government and corporate watchers.

In a nutshell, if a corporation has your data, then by hook or by crook, the government can get it too, often voluntarily, often in circumvention of the law.

The franchise laws which bug auto manufacturers including Tesla and GM were passed to limit the power of GM and Ford, mostly in the 1930s and the 1950s. It's weird that you think prohibiting General Motors from engaging selling the cars the way they used to is "pro big business". The purpose was to protect small family businesses from those big bad corporations.

Section 2 of this paper has a good summary of how those come about:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Here is a (freely accessible) paper on the matter: 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy.

And here is the Slashdot thread on the paper.

According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

> If I want to include an RCMP officer in full dress uniform in a stage play even in the country where they come from then I have to get permission from Disney to use the image.

That was almost true for a few years, from 1995-2000. The RCMP had a merchandising contract wherein Disney Canada would manage whatever rights RCMP had to the mountie image. They figured Disney is pretty good at managing the branding of a character, so they contracted with Disney to manage the Mountie character.

Does the RCMP have the right to control whether or not you have an RCMP officer in a play? Probably not. The image wasn't a registered trademark, and you're allowed to use other people's trademarks in certain ways. Therefore, they couldn't have Disney manage that right for them.

To the extent they did have Disney managing their licensing for merchandising, that deal ended fourteen years ago.

Thank you for informing me that the deal is over. However it would not at all surprise me if there are deals that are not public knowledge currently in force. Our conservative government does this sort of thing all the time and the management decisions of the Mounties are under their direct control, unlike in the US where the FBI was a distorted organization run by a Tzar that was appointed essentially for life because he had dirt on all the political parties.

What is really disgusting is that Corbis has essentially done damage long term to the free dissemination of digital images of the worlds great art. I am sure that all the artists who painted the masterpieces are turning in their graves. As are Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, George Szell and a host of other greats who produced great recorded arts that are now owned by the assholes at Sony.

My original statement still stands, these assholes are doing more damage to the arts than they are good, period.

The riot Index. Everything is in balance.

Correlation does not prove causation, but interesting paper none-the-less reading the summary: "Copyright and Creativity -- Evidence from Italian Operas"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

But even if it was true, should most of humanity be denied access to most of human knowledge via the internet that could otherwise be available right now (like via Google Books) so we might get a few more operas and other such thing?

Beside, current research (even by the US Federal Reserve) shows reward is not motivator for creative works (or sometimes even has a negative correlation of causing artists to just rehash more of the same old thing). Lot of studies are cited in these works by Alfie Kohn and Dan Pink to support my point:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Also: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

A better answer to the issue of people having enough time to do quality work (including learning to do it) is to have a "basic income" for everyone (so, for example, monthly Social Security payments in the USA from birth, not just for those 65 and older).
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

There are plenty of reasons copyrights stifle creativity these days, because artists can't easily remix.
https://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/...

Most, as in 99%+ (my guess), of artistic people are only held back by copyright, because very, very few people can make a living at licensing creative works as authors or composers or whatever, but they instead generally have to pay for access to contemporary novels and music and such. Some of that is discussed here:
http://www.thepublicdomain.org...

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
http://www.justice.gov/crimina...

It took about 2 minutes of Google to find this.

The null hypothesis is now "corporations have committed crimes for which an individual would face prison time."

If you disagree, the burden is fully on you to justify that.

So far only the Eleventh Circuit has heard anything relating to the production of passwords and they went with the doctrine of the mental cognition from producing decrypted data more demanding because it is "more akin to requiring the production of a combination". The Supreme Court has found that being compelled to produce the key to a safe was not a violation of the 5th but producing a combination is. I will refer you to this paper which shows why applying the key-combination algorithm shouldn't apply to encrypted drives.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

I agree with the author's final assessment:

Alternatively, courts could explicitly incorporate interest balancing into the calculus. So the decrypted data could be compelled only if there is a significant state need for compulsion. Drawing this line in practice would not be difficult. Imagine the government subpoenas the accused for the production of decrypted data and the accused moves to quash on Fifth Amendment grounds. Under this approach, the motion would be denied if the government shows it could not realistically obtain the data through investigatory effort. This procedure would not be uncommon, as similar iterations exist elsewhere in criminal procedure. Obtaining a search warrant, for example, requires the government first show the existence of probable cause, and a later determination that cause was deficient may result in excluding any evidence obtained under the warrant.

The two most prominent examples are Modern Monetary Theory and Monetary Realism. Here's a pretty detailed paper to get you started: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

The reason it is difficult to handle the load swings is that coal and nuclear plants can not be quickly turned off and on. For example, it can take a full day or two for a coal power plant to go from cold start to full power output. We do have some power plants that can react quickly, natural gas can react in a few minutes with the newest plants to an hour with the older ones. Hydro is very fast and can be switched off and on in seconds.

  So take a typical grid that is getting half it's power from coal, maybe 10% from nuclear, and the rest from natural gas and hydro. Now do what Germany did and put in enough solar PV that 5% of the total energy of the year is coming from solar PV. As the previous article showed, the instantaneous peak that results from this is as high as 50% of the total demand. In Germany's case, when that happens, all the gas and hydro plants are off and all their power is coming from coal, nuclear, and solar. And there is the breaking point. If solar increases any more in Germany, when solar is peaking, they either have to start rejecting some of the solar power, the coal power, or the nuclear. The solar can not be rejected under current German law, which leaves only coal or nuclear. And those boys really can't turn off their plants very well. The result is that they push the spot price down to encourage anyone who can respond to the spot market to take power.

  Germany has already experienced negative electricity prices in the spot market because of this problem.

  Now imagine Germany doubles the amount of solar PV they have. This would result in them getting around 10% of their total electrical energy from solar PV. The instantaneous peaks would be as high as 100% of total demand. What is supposed to happen then? The obvious thing to do is to simply cap solar PV to an instantaneous peak of around 50% of total demand. That happens infrequently enough that Germany could still probably get 9.5% of their total energy from solar PV. That only would reject about 5% of the power the solar panels could have collected. That's reasonable technically, but illegal under current German law.

  If you look at this paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

  The authors introduce the concept of system-LCOE. LCOE is levelized Cost Of Energy. It is a common utility term. The idea is to sum up every single cost to produce electricity and reduce it to a single number. Historically, LCOE ignores any issues with integrating with the grid. System LCOE is meant to try to incorporate both LCOE and grid integration issues. If you look at their graph on page 19, you can see how the cost of integrating solar PV increases quite dramatically as the share of energy coming from solar increases. If their graph is correct, Germany is paying in the ballpark of 15% extra to integrate into the grid.

...The defendant always as the advantage in US criminal law.

That's hilarious! I wish I had mod points this is definitely a +5 Funny!

Masterfully crafted after being purchased by lobbyists for the companies. The financial return of lobbying is massive -- more than making cool products people love.

We find firms lobbying for this provision have a return in excess of $220 for every $1 spent on lobbying, or 22,000%.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

That said, I think the nature of the parties in this instance is clouding /.'s judgment. Let's say it was a secure email provider who stored all data offshore, but was a US company. Would /. in general really be so willing to side with the Feds? I doubt it, and I see a lot of potential problems that could hurt real people as a result of this decision surviving appeals.

What do you mean by "immune"? Are you suggesting that wind turbine developers should be brought to justice because building owners also get habitually prosecuted whenever one of these birds hits a glass pane on their buildings and gets injured or killed?

Also, shouldn't wind power plant owners instead get medals for preventing more bird deaths than they cause?

Is it a problem in the first place? Why country demographics should be mirrored in a company?

"should" might not be the right word. Although affirmative action means "push for it". Are we entering in an era where it is not important what you decide to do but how many individuals with some of your characteristics are in the country you live in order to find a job?

Are you creating other problems? Because quotas have been introduced in other countries (management quotas)" and the effects measured:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
"the average effect of gender diversity on firm performance is negative [my emphasis]. This negative effect is driven by companies with fewer takeover defences. Our results suggest that mandating gender quotas for directors can reduce firm value for well-governed firms."

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
"The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards "

It is good that quotas happened. We now have studies showing their effects.

Also quotas go against many management principles, if mirroring demographics is a problem:
- Don’t push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.
- An underlying problem generates symptoms that demand attention. But the underlying problem is difficult for people to address, either because it is obscure or costly to confront. So people “shift the burden” of their problem to other solutions—well-intentioned, easy fixes which seem extremely efficient. (
- The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
- The cure can be worse than the disease. (poor company performance after adding inadequate candidates).
- Faster is slower. (Fixed the percentages right away, didn't fix the root cause and now it is hidden and nobody cares)
- Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. (The people being hired right now were trained and decided their careers many years ago).
- Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole. The same is true for organizations. (It is not just balance genders in management, it affects many other things in a company).
- There is no blame. (Blame priviledge: male, white... whatever that allows you to shift the blame instead of improving to meet the requirements of the job)

Is it a problem in the first place? Why country demographics should be mirrored in a company?

"should" might not be the right word. Although affirmative action means "push for it". Are we entering in an era where it is not important what you decide to do but how many individuals with some of your characteristics are in the country you live in order to find a job?

Are you creating other problems? Because quotas have been introduced in other countries (management quotas)" and the effects measured:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
"the average effect of gender diversity on firm performance is negative [my emphasis]. This negative effect is driven by companies with fewer takeover defences. Our results suggest that mandating gender quotas for directors can reduce firm value for well-governed firms."

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
"The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards "

It is good that quotas happened. We now have studies showing their effects.

Also quotas go against many management principles, if mirroring demographics is a problem:
- Don’t push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.
- An underlying problem generates symptoms that demand attention. But the underlying problem is difficult for people to address, either because it is obscure or costly to confront. So people “shift the burden” of their problem to other solutions—well-intentioned, easy fixes which seem extremely efficient. (
- The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
- The cure can be worse than the disease. (poor company performance after adding inadequate candidates).
- Faster is slower. (Fixed the percentages right away, didn't fix the root cause and now it is hidden and nobody cares)
- Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. (The people being hired right now were trained and decided their careers many years ago).
- Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole. The same is true for organizations. (It is not just balance genders in management, it affects many other things in a company).
- There is no blame. (Blame priviledge: male, white... whatever that allows you to shift the blame instead of improving to meet the requirements of the job)

what is your proposed alternative solution to the free rider problem [wikipedia.org]?

Tragedy of the commons doesn't apply to the intangible. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Simply tossing out patents without some alternative way to mitigate the free rider problem will almost certainly do more harm than good.

If the patent system is a net harm, then doing nothing is a superior alternative.

You obviously think that reading what I responded to you is the only possible response I could have made in the thread, which is foolish.

Link to the reference comment here.

Link to PDF here.

I refuse to link to all of the studies referenced in the link above because you refuse to look for answers and continue to argue from ignorance (intentionally or otherwise).

The problem is also that the USPO granted the patent in the first place :/

I heartily agree. Improving the process of litigating patents is nice, but we really need to improve the quality of granted patents. I believe that this problem is solvable, if we can muster the courage to admit that we have made mistakes in managing the patent office. In my opinion, the most important of these mistakes are:

1) More patents are not better than fewer patents.

Patents are not Innovation. Patents are not Progress. Patents are simply grounds to file a lawsuit against an industry. More Patents are simply more grounds for more lawsuits. An occasional lawsuit might spur innovation. BUT LAWSUITS DO NOT PRODUCE. Lawsuits are parasitic on innovation and production. Reform must recognize that patents are dangerous monopolies. Reform must place hard limits on the number of patents.

2) Running the US Patent Office as a cost-recovery operation is a mistake.

The US Patent Office is a very small, but critical component of the US economy. It's purpose was "..to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.." (US Constitution Article One, Section 8(8).) But, once the USPTO became completely cost recovery (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Title X, Subtitle B), that primary goal became overshadowed by the more pressing goal of securing funding via patent fees. The primary effect of cost recovery has been to promote the collection of patent fees.

Reform is painful, but simple. Admit cost recovery is a failed experiment. Revert the funding model to the model used for the first 200 years. The USPTO must be centrally funded by the US government. Any collected fees should be returned to the US Government.

3) It is a mistake to organize the US Patent Office to create economic incentives to grant poor patents.

Currently most of the revenue of the US Patent Office comes from GRANTING patents. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget page 37: www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy13pbr.pdf "..More than half of all patent fee collections are from issue and maintenance fees, which essentially subsidize examination activities." A recent study by the Richmond School of Law found that the USPTO's actual grant rate is currently running at about 89%. In 2001, it was as high as 99%. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... page 9. In 2001, it didn't matter if an application was overbroad, obvious, trivial, a duplicate, or unreasonable, they ALL got granted. Things haven't improved much since then.

Reform could come in many forms, but the simplest and most reliable would be to eliminate and unify the Patent office fees into a single filing fee. This fee would provide no guarantee of receiving a patent, only a guarantee that your patent would be considered. This would free the Patent Office to be able to deny poor patents. The filing fee should be high enough to discourage spurious patent applications.

4) Scaling up the Patent Office to produce more poor quality patents is a mistake.

Currently, we expand the number of patent examiners based on demand. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget, page 60, Gap Assessment: "Meeting this commitment assumes efficiency improvements brought about by reengineering many USPTO management and operational processes (e.g., the patent examination process) and systems, and hiring about 3,000 patent examiners in the two-year period FY 2012 and FY 2013 (including examiners for Three-Track Examination)." Again, the assumption is, more patents are better, even if it means decreasing examination, and increasing the number of untrained examiners. Poor quality is an inevitable result of this patent process.

Reform must tightly control and limit the number of patent examiners.

5) It is a mistake to grant all patents that meet minimum standards.

A review of the last couple

No, I'm assuming that independent invention is the norm, most patented inventions are incremental changes from the prior art, and the only exceptions are almost universally accidents that there is no way to incentivize.

Mark Lemly covered this quite well: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Google is only offering Fiber in High density Urban areas. Most of the customers in those areas already had access to 15mb > service. The problem is the other 99.9% of the country that lives in areas that are less dense and therefor incredibly expensive to serve.

If you're going to bash a legitimate attempt to introduce a modicum of competition to US broadband, you should at least use credible numbers. By concentrating on urbanized areas, Google is ignoring almost 20% of the country.

If you want to live 20 miles from the nearest intersection, low bandwidth may be one of the sacrifices you have to make.

Um... Google is serving a few thousand customers at most right now. That's well under 0.1% of the country.

And we're not talking about "20 miles from the nearest intersection" The equipment that provides you with internet all costs the same. It's irrelevant where you live, or what you are paying for. Laying Fiberoptic or copper costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile, interruption of peoples lives and property and is generally a nightmare. This doesn't even account for the equipment in the actual remote. The most sophisticated tech out there can deliver DSL/Cable over copper to about 45k feet max. So the real question is, How many people live within 45k feet of you? That's how many people that remote can serve. In the areas Google is offering its service the density per remote is in the thousands. The majority of the country its at most 200.

So if you owned a business, with 200 customers paying $35/month for your service, and of that about $6 was profit, would you spend $500k to upgrade that remote? Even $100k? What if your 2 competitors in town only had to serve people that lived in the areas where there were 5k+ per remote? How would you like that?

Ok, lets say the feds showed up and PAID to upgrade the remote. Fantastic! But the feds paid you $200k... which was enough to upgrade it to 20mb of total bandwidth but the feds also required you to meet their standards that all 200 people on that remote could get at least 5mb service? And most of your customers log on to netflix on Friday evenings... Are the feds going to stick around for that bit? No. And ISPs have been burned by this over and over again. So even though the feds are willing to pay for the upgrade the ISP will still refuse to take it because they don't want to be accept the further regulation of their service. The regulation is far more expensive than what the feds are offering in return. Yes, they'll take the cash in certain areas where the density is high enough.

  I think the last stat I heard on this was that Obamas broadband Stimulus plan cost about $350k per customer. And no, I'm not kidding.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Being an ISP is not cheap, and certainly not the way to make lots of money quickly.

May I suggest that you try asking some, or at least enquire where your source is?

Because I happen to have had BJUP science textbooks in school, and I read Ken Ham as well as Gould, and the claim that literalists are geocentrists doesn't sound at all like any of the books I've read.
On the other hand, that claim does sound like a claim I've heard before, which is discussed in a paper by Lindgren (2014).

At least in America, "the press" means "the printing press" and by extension any technology which accomplishes the same purpose as the printing press, i.e. the dissemination of information. Blogs would certainly fall into this category. You can either believe me or read this very convincing paper by Eugene Volokh: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... So sorry, "media," you aren't "the press." The protection is for the medium, not a particular type of messenger.

That is nonsense because you are applying a retrospective view of the problem. If it was so easy to accomplish and so obvious then why wasn't it done previously?

There are several possible reasons. The problem or the solution may not have been available before or may have been impractical. For example, the Raspberry Pi has enabled people do a lot of really cool things. The Raspberry Pi doesn't have superior functionality to computers that previously existed, but it is a lot cheaper. Someone could use a general purpose computer for practically every application it is seeing now, but a lot of them would be ridiculous since you are dropping hundreds of dollars.

Remember, even with something obvious, somebody is going to be the first to do so.

Most Americans cant tell you how many states we have, and they will gladly sign a petition to ban the use of H2O, So please do not judge global IQ based on the land of morons I live in.

I think we're a good stand in for global ignorance. Where we stand out is willful ignorance/ideologically motivated cognition in otherwise educated and numerate people. If you want to see an educated conservative republican lie about the answer to or subconsciously misunderstand a simple math problem, just phrase it as a gun control question. Figure 7:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992

The argument primatologists are putting forwards, Jane Goodall for example, is that Chimpanzees and other Great Apes should be accorded at least some rights of personhood, similar to the rights accorded to young children and the mentally disabled, which they cognitively exceed e.g. self awareness, empathy, complex planning, theory of mind etc.

Kolber, A.J. 2001. Standing Upright: The Moral and Legal Standing of Humans and Other Apes, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, p. 163. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=675851

Here is an in-depth analysis of this: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1326743

Unfortunately you can't just legislate it away. That doesn't work, has never worked, and will never work.

Well, it works very well in Europe. So while this particular case is example of police idiocy, the law in UK is not crazy. But I agree that it would be extremely hard to do in USA.

Doesn't stop them from trying, though.

I'm not going to get into it beyond that though - I'm not an expert, but it doesn't take an expert to recognize that something is broken. I really don't think just taking them away is the answer. As other incidents have spotlit, the act will not change, only the tools. Children (and adults too) committing violence against their peers and authority figures is the symptom, the gun (or knife etc) is just the vehicle, and the real problem is something else that I can't really identify personally. People are losing hope, getting restless, frustrated, and angry. We need to determine (and fix) the cause of that, not the results. But good luck with that, because the people in charge only care about looking like they are fixing things. Which only compounds the problem.

With that logic every kind of weapon should be legalised. Why bother banning nerve gas and explosives ? After all this will only change tools, not the act itself.

Read the Wake Forest Law Review document "Imagining Gun Control In America" that goes into depth about why "just ban them" won't work.

Here is the link if you want it: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1326743

One would think though that a bunch of people saying "we'll kill you if you try" running around would be enough to make it clear it won't work. Here in the US, trying to ban them, is essentially starting a war. Which is a good thing in my opinion.

I don't personally care that much about the NSA snooping through my e-mails.

Then this paper was written just for you: I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy.

The notion of a great inventor is a myth. There are people who contribute more than others, but it is a function of the flow of information and some other factor more than the greatness. Basically, we are standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. That said, Edison was nothing special even amongst those, certainly not to the extent that school children are taught about him.

A recent study by the Richmond School of Law found that the USPTO's actual grant rate is currently running at about 89%. In 2001, it was as high as 99%. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2225781 page 9. In 2001, it didn't matter if an application was overbroad, obvious, trivial, a duplicate, or unreasonable, they ALL got granted.

On the contrary, 80-90% of patents are initially rejected.. Yes, the rate at which patents are eventually granted is 90%, but that's after they've been substantially amended and narrowed. Pointing at the eventual grant rate and claiming "it didn't matter if an application was overbroad, obvious, trivial, a duplicate, or unreasonable" while hiding the rejection rate is disingenuous.

Furthermore, the fact that you mention "duplicate" indicates you may not actually know what you're talking about. There are no duplicate patents, as double patenting is a rejection under 35 USC 101. There are continuation applications, in which one application gets filed and then later, another application with the same specification, title, and figures gets filed, claiming priority to the first one. So, to someone who doesn't understand what's going on, they may look like duplicates... however, (i) the claims are different, and (ii) the second application, even though filed later, expires on the same day the first one expires. They're really just offshoots of the same application, and not "duplicates" at all. My guess is that you heard that terrible episode of This American Life where they mentioned that several applications (all continuations of a first application) had the same name, and were as equally confused as their "journalists".
This also explains your later complaint:

6) Finally, I suggest that it is a mistake to allow patent applicants to modify or extend their patents after submission. This complicates the patent pipeline. It facilitates ‘submarine’ patents. It enables capturing Standards. It also enables gaming the patent system. Reform must simplify and reduce the patent process. Patents should be quickly evaluated. Most should be denied. If an applicant wishes to modify a denied patent, they should alter it, resubmit, and pay a new filing fee.

None of this is true - patent applications cannot be extended after submission, and any entry of additional material is "new matter" and rejected immediately. Applications can currently be altered, resubmitted, and filed with a new filing fee, and then they have the same title, as mentioned above when you were complaining about duplicates. Submarine patents are an entirely different thing, where a patent is granted and first published years after filing. Patents are now published after 18 months, and so submarine patents are mostly a thing of the past.

Most of your complaints are based on misunderstandings of the process and half-truths or outright falsehoods spread by poor journalists. A few minutes of research before you post would clarify them.

You're missing the point. A lot of this was unintentional. They made the USPTO run on fees that were charged for patents which gave the USPTO and incentive to rubber stamp patents while not receiving sufficient funding to cover the cost of having patent examiners that could do the investigation that they used to do.

I'd like to think that this mess is unintentional. But many of the recent changes to the USPTO appear to have optimized it to create lots of poor quality patents. I believe that we could reverse these changes. But, we would need to muster the political will to admit we have made mistakes. I have listed some of these obvious structural problems at: https://plus.google.com/b/101806809558932714222/101806809558932714222/about

I believe that the most serious problems with the structure of the USPTO are:

• 1) More patents are not better than fewer patents. Patents are not Innovation. Patents are not Progress. Patents are simply grounds to file a lawsuit against an industry. More Patents are simply more grounds for more lawsuits. An occasional lawsuit might spur innovation. BUT LAWSUITS DO NOT PRODUCE. Lawsuits are parasitic on innovation and production. Reform must recognize that patents are dangerous monopolies. Reform must place hard limits on the number of patents.
• 2) Running the US Patent Office as a cost-recovery operation is a mistake. The US Patent Office is a very small, but critical component of the US economy. It's purpose was "..to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.." (US Constitution Article One, Section 8(8).) But, once the USPTO started to become completely cost recovery, (See: Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Title X, Subtitle B), that primary goal became overshadowed by the more pressing goal of securing funding via patent fees. The primary effect of cost recovery has been to promote the collection of patent fees. Reform is painful, but simple. Admit cost recovery is a failed experiment. Revert the funding model to the model used for the first 200 years. The USPTO must be centrally funded by the US government. Any collected fees should be returned to the US Government.
• 3) It is a mistake to organize the US Patent Office to create economic incentives to grant poor patents. Currently most of the revenue of the US Patent Office comes from GRANTING patents. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget page 37: www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy13pbr.pdf "..More than half of all patent fee collections are from issue and maintenance fees, which essentially subsidize examination activities." A recent study by the Richmond School of Law found that the USPTO's actual grant rate is currently running at about 89%. In 2001, it was as high as 99%. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2225781 page 9. In 2001, it didn't matter if an application was overbroad, obvious, trivial, a duplicate, or unreasonable, they ALL got granted. Things haven't improved much since then. Reform could come in many forms, but the simplest and most reliable would be to eliminate and unify the Patent office fees into a single filing fee. This fee would provide no guarantee of receiving a patent, only a guarantee that your patent would be considered. This would free the Patent Office to be able to deny poor patents. The filing fee should be high enough to discourage spurious patent applications.
• 4) Scaling up the Patent Office to produce more poor quality patents is a mistake. Currently, we expand the number of patent examiners based on demand. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget, page 60, Gap Assessment: "Meeting this commitment assumes efficiency improvements brought about by reengineering many USPTO management and operational processes (e.g., the patent examination process) and systems, and hiring about 3,00

> Citation?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=323661

which I got just by following links in the original post. I'm always amazed by people who criticize others on hearsay when the source material is readily available.

Even though, by your own admission ("following links in the original post..." Which post? Which links? there were a lot), the information wasn't all that easily accessible.

> Good thing I never said that, huh?

I never said you said it. This thread ain't all about you.

You were directly responding to my comment. If that was not your intent, i.e. you were making a global reference, then you failed to make whom was being addressed clear.

Anyway, I read the paper... and stand by my convictions.

From the paper, regarding the type of frivolous litigation I referenced:

If this is a genuine risk, it might make sense to respond, not by banning those lawsuits,
but by forcing those who bring frivolous ones to pay the defendants’ attorneys fees. Of
course there would be issues in deciding on the identity of representatives and choosing
the people who would pick them. But we are not yet in especially controversial territory.

So, basically, his rationale is "well, they might have to pay the defendant's court costs, but it's not worth discussing because it hasn't happened yet."

As someone who has been wrongfully sued over total bullshit, found innocent, and was still unable to force the offending party to pay for my unnecessary defense, I find the first claim dubious at best. As a person capable of cogent reasoning, I have the same feeling about his second statement - it doesn't take a soothsayer to know what kind of shady shit terrorist groups like PETA would get involved with if they were legally able.

The fact that he subsequently goes on to claim that all hunting should be banned out of a lack of (what he considers) necessity, and suggests a similar ban on the eating of meat, only further serves to solidify my belief that Cass Sunstein is a tin-foil-hat-covered-in-guano nutjob, who is obsessed with the sound of his own words.

> Citation?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=323661

which I got just by following links in the original post. I'm always amazed by people who criticize others on hearsay when the source material is readily available.

> Good thing I never said that, huh?

I never said you said it. This thread ain't all about you.

> "Then again, can you explain how it's not a completely insane idea?"

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that by "completely insane"you just mean "bad". Since I don't agree with Sunstein, and since I've already linked to his article, I won't argue with you about it.

He's also written a paper on the "value of a statistical life year" suggesting that the government apply a formula to evaluate the value of someone's life when deciding how many benefits they should get.

That is a HUGE set of assumptions. You would need to go do some real research to find out if that was remotely valid.

That's fair. Interestingly enough, there is such a study conducted by the Indiana University, Bloomington on the correlation between voting patterns and tweets. I'll skip to the findings here:-

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this question using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided
by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composition.

Theres also a WashPo article discussing the same research paper.

So, there is some scientific basis for the assumptions stated in the earlier post.

Happy Birthday is the poster child for why copyright is broken. Cultural ubiquity is so high, it should be considered to have lost all copyright.

Well it's probably not under valid copyright anyway, for a number of reasons. A company asserts that it owns a valid copyright to the song, and collects royalties. The royalty amount is probably not high enough to be worth fighting in court, since the situation is pretty complicated, so someone would have to do it on principle. There was a lawsuit along these lines filed earlier this year, but it was dropped in July by the plaintiff for unknown reasons.

So yeah, there a couple bad cops, but what about the other 934,976 cops that never get in trouble or do bad stuff?

That's the problem. The 99% cover for the 1%.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1810012
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10439460500071721

I guarantee you if you ask your mother or your uncle, "Did you ever do anything cooked?" They'll tell you "No." But ask them, "Did you ever know a crooked cop?" they'll say "Oh, yeah, there was that one...."

And if you ask them, "Did you report it?" They'll say "No."

That's why this is needed.