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Lawmakers Debate Patent Immunity For Banks
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Now that a small Texas company has a patent on scanning and archiving checks — something every bank does — that has survived a USPTO challenge, lawmakers feel they have to do something about it. Rather than reform patent law, they seem to think it wiser to protect the banks from having to pay billions in royalties by using eminent domain to buy the patent for an estimated $1 billion in taxpayer money, immunizing the banks. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)."
Can't really say more than that, unfortunately.
Problem is, in this case it might be required as such a distinction in law might not exist.
They can cashier the USPTO Commissioner, appoint a new one, and order a comprehensive review.
A billion dollars. Talk about misuse of taxpayer funds.
I mean, it's not like substantive patent reform -- in particular reform that as a side effect fixes this specific case -- is something they can exactly toss together before the term is up. And now that pretty much everyone realizes our economy is treading water before a recession, keeping the banks up seems like a good idea. I mean if we're going to be spending billions in tax payer money to keep banks afloat after the subprime mortgage fiasco, this doesn't seem like that big a deal.
Sometimes a band aid is better than a hastily planned and thus ill-conceived surgery.
The enemies of Democracy are
If you consider that pretty much all money in existence today is backed solely by debt, is anyone really surprised?
Why does anyone entertain the idea that the banks need to be bailed out? I would be inclined to let the economy finally crumble, and rebuild it. Sure, it'll suck, but we'll be better off because of it, if we fix it the right way.
...oooh! Those pesky activist judges!
Towards the Singularity.
Our legal system reminds me of when you write a huge undocumented, uncommented program in C and have other people do additions and debugging.
Weaksauce as they say...
I'd rather get my canceled checks back anyway.
I love my computer -- You make me feel alright (Bad Religion)
Lawnmaker...
WTF?
Patents are supposed to benefit the common good. That's their only purpose. Now that they recognize one case (in many) where patents are crippling productivity, harming the economy, and working against the common good, they do nothing to address the problem of people abusing the patent system. Instead, they take more money from the people, harming the common good further, in order to bail out banks.
That is completely absurd.
To quote the most important person in the universe, I say:
"Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it... fix it, fix it, fix it!"
Or:
Congress: "We've blown out our patent system."
Citizens: "Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it... fix it, fix it, fix it!"
Congress: "That makes too much sense, you bastards!"
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
let's give them a nice long list of other stupid patents that they ought to pay off from the public purse. They will eventually get the idea that what they are proposing is stupid ... unless they get large 'research grants' from banks and/or patent trolls in which case they will keep their eyes tightly shut.
The US government has consistently demonstrated innovation in this area. I think the ideal course of action would be to bomb the headquarters of the patent troll company. End of bank cheque problem. End of patent troll problem. Zero litigation.
-1 not first post
A more general strategic review is required.
There may be some tragedy involved, of course, but the conclusion at 3:19 in this clip holds true:
"This town needs an enema!"
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
But how many of the patents discussed in /. reveal anything in the patent application that any programmer or engineer couldn't figure out just by hearing the idea of the patent?
For example, are developers of web commerce sites going to look to the Amazon patent to see how to develop a one-click purchase procedure?
My idea is that a patent should not prevent anyone else from developing the same thing, as long as they don't use the detailed implementation described in the patent to do it.
How do you tell that? Keep the patent details a secret.
That is, if someone wants to know the implementation details of a patent (before it expires), they should have to submit an application. The details won't be publicly available.
Of course, this proposal would never be allowed in the real world, because companies want to use patents to prevent other companies from having the same ideas, no matter if they are trivial to implement or not.
Except AL is Alabama. Alaska is AK.
I saw equipment at Recognition Equipment Inc. in 1982 or 1983 ago that did exactly that--scan checks and store the images. How can they have issued a patent on this.
So in effect, the banks are stealing technology, asking Congress to litigate their loses, and now this Senator is front-man for a huge expenditure of _our_ money to bail them out?
Something is amiss here, because I'm still paying for my checks. Let the banks and their huge reservoir of money pay for their technologies. With interest.
I don't care one bit if the banks invested so much of their capital into inflated mortgage loans. That's their problem for not making _sound_ investments. They freaking have _economists_ working in those high-rise offices.
$1,000,000,000 in licensing * = 478,5000,000 in interest over the next x years.
A better use for that money would be to hire people who have demonstrated strong work experience and education in technical fields. When he's up for retirement, a close relative of mine would be a great pick. He has experience in a number of very, very technical areas of Computer Science, and if you gave him a research staff to work under him, and good pay, he could easily rip patents like these to shreds. The problem is, the government would never pay an engineer with the depth of education and work experience that he has a salary commensurate with what he could bring to bear at an agency like the USPTO.
Nothing will change until two things happen: the government conforms to private sector at-will employment, and it stops being stingy with pay for qualified people. Then again, this is the same institution that will try to save money on the military by spending $1B on a stealth bomber, and then haggle over the salary of the pilots.
If I understand correctly, Ballard claims to have developed these techniques and methods in the mid-90's, at a time when physical transfer of checks was required - federal law would not have allowed those methods at that time.
Then, the world turned upside-down - and his invention became a necessity.
DataTreasury has negotiated licencing with some financial institutions, but there are others that seem to feel that they shouldn't have to pay and aren't afraid to try to make the US taxpayer pay instead.
While it may be possible to characterise DataTreasury as a "patent troll" by some readings of the term, Ballard appears to be the first to have come up with and documented those methods and techniques and that's been upheld by the USPTO. DataTreasury claims to have attempted to sell the patent-protected system to the banks, who went ahead and ran with their own implementations. Isn't the patent system supposed to be about providing a limited-term monopoly for those who come up with ideas, whether it's an idea for a better mousetrap or a method of performing financial transfers? Isn't it possible that the banks are trying to use their sheer size and influence to avoid paying for something that they really ought to?
Charge people for depositing their money.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Was it the Banks' idea? Was it the patent troll's?
It's moronic. Congress can simply act to invalidate the patent to favor public interest or need. They don't need to BUY it! "Eminent Domain" is about actual property, not Intellectual property! The concept of Intellectual Property is about TEMPORARY monopoly or ownership of something that is to be later claimed, owned or otherwise available for public or private use. It's a privilege given to people by the government. When that privilege is misused or otherwise to the detriment of the public interest, that privilege should simply be REVOKED.
The biggest problem is that nobody wants to stop the party.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
... and it's not pretty.
Giving a patent holder a billion dollars to buy their patent will encourage patent trolls to come out in force. The government's giving away billions here, why not give it a go? You can patent something obvious, sue the banks and donate to the political parties. Soon enough someone will buy you out, and you get to retire a very wealthy person!
Sure, it may not work out so easily, but what's to stop anyone from trying?
Patents are good for, what, 17-20 years. I have a hard time believing that banks weren't scanning at least some checks 20+ years ago (or photographing/microfilming them). How is this patent not invalidated by prior art (scanning) or obviousness (photograph/microfilm)?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
way to go though, take a broken system and suggest a worse alternative.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
While I despise patent trolls, if you read the article this guy had a business with 150 people developing and selling this technology. SOME not all banks ripped him off, several of the large banks did license the technology. Others just ripped him off. To stay in business in 2001 he had to lay most of his people off, and sell most of the company.
Now after a proper legal vetting the banks that just ripped him off are crying and asking the government to save them. Piss on them. They knew exactly what they were doing. This is not a submarine patent. What about the companies that did play the license fee?
What will the guy who actually developed this get? 2% of the money, less all the legal fees. Just remember, it could have been yhou that developed this.
I'm all for patent change, but even if they pass it, it won't help this case.
You can't retroactively change the laws. The laws may be lousy, but the fact is that these people got their patent legally under the current system. Now that they've got it, Congress can't all of a sudden decide they don't like the law and tell them, "well, on second thought maybe you can't have this patent." Any change would only apply to new patents. If they tried to apply it retroactively, the courts would shoot it down in a heartbeat.
On the other hand, maybe a billion-dollar bailout will turn some heads and lead to some real reform down the road. This is $1B that our Congress-Critters can't spend on their own pet projects, and that's a language that they can all understand.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Wow. Even if they give the banks immunity, what would happen to those companies that provide cheque processing services to banks?? Or those such as NCR that actually provide the imaging equipment?? For instance, Fiserv Inc. operates over 50 centers worldwide doing item processing and archiving for upwards of 1700 client organisations. I worked for the Australian division which provides item processing and archiving services for 3 of the 4 largest banks here, and for one of those banks before we were outsourced. Banks here have been doing electronic exchange under the auspices of the Australian Payments Clearing Association since before I started in 2002. Trust me, they don't exactly need an increase in costs right now due to a patent troll.
Has anyone checked out whether Sessions has any personal interest in this bill, or whether he might be getting a kickback?
Isn't there a "Triviality" clause in patent laws somewhere? This is something no one needs to invent. It's an obvious application of available technology.
If someone has patented "Taking a Photo", but no one's patented "Taking a Photo of a Bicycle" can I?
This CRAZY check scanning idea is a trivial extension of Scanning and Archiving documents,
which is a trivial extension of Scanning and Archiving paper items,
which is a trivial extension of Scanning and Archiving Physical Objects Digitally,
which is a trivial combination of Scanning and Archiving
What does that gray line that defines when something is an actual innovation look like?
Can't we just do the same thing and create a trivial extension to this patent?
Here, if anyone wants to get rich, steal this idea:
Patent Scanning and Archiving a Bank Check While Wearing Pants.
At least then, if you catch someone else using this innovation, you can sue their pants of.
Slashdot, keep us posted on this. I want to see how my Senators vote on this bill. I would also like people to suggest letters to write their Senators that don't include insults. It isn't as easy as you'd think because patent reform can be complex depending on how you look at it.
God spoke to me.
Great. Whatever happened to the party of the free market?
When Democrats spend tax dollars propping up "unsuccessful" citizens its called welfare-state communism.
When Republicans spend tax dollars propping up "unsuccessful" corporations its called...what exactly?
The patent system may be knackered but the answer isn't this absurd gesture of government largesse.
You can email Sessions here: http://sessions.senate.gov/email/contact.cfm
IBM owns the bank check processing business (I did check payment programming for four years and have a 3lb MICR reader decorating my metallic file cabinet to prove it). I'm pretty sure IBM has a patent that covers this. If an IBM patent won't cover it then check with NCR (Bought by AT&T then released into the wild again as NCR).
That being said,
I believe what has been patented here is the method to process checks directly just like a debit card (Those little merchant machines that scan and process your check directly and/or the debit payment inserted into the network from a check by phone payment). Unlike a check which travels through the FED/ACH system, this transaction goes through the debit network (STAR, PULSE, HONOR) etc. There is no FLOAT time for the purchaser.
This claim isn't exactly a software patent, and its sort of unique. Its not revolutionary (more like evolutionary) the banking industry shouldn't pay a dime for it (neither should congress).
If I could find my notebook from 1995/1996 I could show prior art from designing a system to accept payments via users check routing/account info directly into the debit network via a web browser. And no, my design wasn't secure. Note that with this claim (I have no proof without the notebook) and a dime will still equal a dime.
My two cents,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
After scanning through the claims in both patents, this is about routing scanned images onto hierarchical storage. Even back in 1997 this shouldn't have passed the obviousness test.
Banking provides a decent amount of money to Sessions campaign coffers, but not an overwhelming amount. See http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?CID=N00003062&cycle=2008
And that includes 1-click, etc. BofA has a patent on "Keep the Change," an admittedly clever idea,
and so Wachovia has to opt for the less user-friendly: take a dollar on every transaction. (Actually,
they could presumably go for the "X% of the transaction value")
Were that I say, pancakes?
Banks have been bilking customers on "fees" for years to the tune of billions. A legitimate claim comes around and they get to lobby their way out of it. Bah, I'd say turn about is fair play if they weren't gonna just use it as an excuse to raise fees for their customers. Any time a big money patent is mentioned it seems a knee jerk reaction to scream "Patent Troll!". As was mentioned the inventor has been battling for his fair shake in saving banks and (if they ever bothered to pass on the savings) their customers time and money. He's the little guy in this scenario. Seems if the patent system was actually set up to protect innovation this guy would get his due.
and looked at the re-exam history, and looked to see if there is any obvious payola going into the good senator's pockets, I have to support the earlier conclusion.
That is just fucking retarded.
Seriously retarded. A billion taxpayer dollars on the line after the banks have spent, by my estimate, around 30k. I guess it's cheaper to send a teenage male hooker to the senate chambers than to fight this thing. More seriously, there are good reasons to fight this thing in court. Write your senator. Here's a few points:
KSR v. Teleflex modified the definition of obvious. Making the banks fight will pull in that case law.
eBay v. MercExchange will make it harder for the patent holder to enjoin the banks from scanning and transmitting check data. so, there's no real danger of banking being shut down as the case is tried.
It's doubtful that this technology saves the banks a billion dollars. They can always turn to low tech fax machines if they don't want to ship pallets of checks. You can fax an awful lot of checks for a billion dollars.
If the senate wants to pass a law, pass one that legalizes something else that the banks can do without infringement.
The banks can easily afford a billion dollars. Bankers award themselves more than that each year as annual bonuses. Furthermore, it gives the banks a legitimate excuse (for a change) to raise fees. The reason will only last a year or two and after that they can use the money to fund reelection campaigns.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
"I'll patent a technology employing 'computers' to 'scan' checks, thereby holding the whole banking industry hostage... for ONE MILLION DOLLARS!"
Number 2, "uh, one Billion, sir."
"Thanks, Number Two.... ahem... for ONE BILLION DOLLARS!"
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
So, let's see... a patent troll company (they have to be... there was prior art and there seems to be little question about the "obviousness") gets a patent on a lucrative process somehow -- apparently against the normal rules of the PTO -- and a short while later some Senator from a nearby state offers a billion dollar buyout?
Yeah right. It's all coincidence. Sure it is. Must be. Uh-huh.
There must be something special about the check 21 aspect of this. We have been scanning and indexing checks in an imaging system and mentioned in the patents, since 1991. We've used ASCII and EBCDIC, Optical Jukeboxes, etc as described by the patent. Some of the checks use overlays so we can save disk space by storing the ASCII text separate from the check image. All of this since 1991.
So what is so special about the Check 21 (check truncation) that warrants a patent?
Another Session of blind-dogmatists leading clueless-idolaters to super-secret wisdom.
....
...) it is a daily fact we accept as Shakespearian sick-comedy or a Euripides tragedy of hubris and profligacy that gods/rulers are less-than mere mortals and far less-than heroic warriors. Our gods/rulers are cruel, petty, spiteful, meaningless and silly, why meaningless and silly, because Citizens do not consider them to be a threat, boon, or any historical/personal value (no WWIII or GME yet). The meaningless and silly gods/rulers are out in Neverland ... the new pseudo-Olympia/Asgard for the vain, vapid, vacant cult-vultures of spin-values, faux-truths, easy-honors .... My commentary on the pitiful majority of evil plutocrat dogma cults seeking and selecting the best to rule slaves, but never to serve humanity.
Political-Poops while Public-scoops and scoot as the masters of US toot on root-flutes for loot.
The above line is jaundiced entertainment as in no longer news worthy, but still a valued joke
In the USA/EU (... from Vatican to Moscow/Peking
A Geia GME Zeitgeist, "Global Mass Extinction" is just a crash and reboot. In this analogy humanity is like Microsoft Windows/Vista. I sure Geia will remove the *problem and install GNU-Linux or BSD.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
In come the regulators. They say, "You can loan the money back out, but you have to keep 10% of it on hand." So you get your $10 in deposits and loan out $9 to another person. He spends the $9 and it trickles back to you. Of that $9, you can loan out another $8.10. Eventually, you asymptotically approach zero dollars loaned out (and you've loaned out $100 for your original 10). At the end of it all, you have a balance sheet that looks like this:
Assets: $100 (Loans: People owe you $100, so that's an asset.)
Liabilities: $90 (Savings accounts: *You* owe your depositors $100, which they could choose to withdraw at any time.)
Equity: $10 (You're holding $10 in a drawer somewhere.)
Here's where your thought experiment goes wrong: Let's say people decide not to pay $50 worth of loans back to you. Where are you now?
Assets: $50 (Loans: People owe you $100, but you'll only ever see $50 of it.)
Liabilities: $90 (Savings accounts: *You* owe your depositors $100, which they could choose to withdraw at any time.)
Equity: $-40 (You're in some serious shit if people decide to pull their money out. Your business is worthless now.)
In the real world, odds are good that your depositors aren't going to eat it because the government will bail them out, but you can bet that you're going to get shut down. You see, the banks didn't "create" the money so much as they borrowed it. Even if borrowers don't pay back their debt to the banks, you can bet that demand deposit account holders are going to want the banks to pay them back. This is why the banking industry is regulated. It's a huge leverage machine. There's nothing wrong with that in general, but it's inherently risky. That's why there's all manner of risk pooling and rules about what banks can and can't do with the money they control.
The real world, obviously, is more complicated, but this is a rough illustration of the money multiplier effect. In the US, normal banks don't "create" money as much as they multiply it. For every $1 that the Fed creates, banks multiply the effect in the real economy. It's not any sort of a trick. It's just how the system works.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Debt-backed money is still money. What is difference is that there is no corresponding creation of value which leads to inflation. The impact of inflation can be pushed out by further debt, but eventually it must bite. Basically this means spending now and leaving future generations with the bills.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What you say is true, but the fix is simple: make the retirement age variable, and adjust it each year it so that a fixed percentage of the population receives benefits. If you live longer on average, you should work longer on average.
So now the banks have decided that patents only hinder human progress (at least in the industry that rapes people of there money), so hopefully now the full extent of patent bondage can be realized by a large majority. But who the f*** are we kidding the only reason this is going to fly for banks is because they have a hell of a lot of power in the US political(aka fight for domination) structure. Drug patents, Water purification or desalinization patents, Medical device patents, and a whole lot more are really just a why to slow down progress of humanity so that money can be sucked out of a populace. Wait extraction of wealth is the whole idea behind the structure of capitalism, were f***ed!
I would recommend a little reading about the period 1929 thru 1940.
See if it sounds like fun.
CmdrTaco's Law: You will never have mod points when someone posts something intelligent, only when morons post something stupid.
:)
So, if I had the mod points I had 2-3 days ago you would have one
--
Why is it that whenever someone mentions "banks" on Slashdot, the gold bugs start coming out?
Fait currency actually works pretty well as long as everyone just agrees that it works.
Not a typewriter
Suits get to uphold two abuse-prone causes for action in one fell swoop. Well done, ol' pal, well done. See you at Davos.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Commerce Department has objected to the amendment, including in a letter last week to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the Judiciary Committee chairman. "Limiting patent holders' rights and remedies in this instance could reduce innovation in this technology area," wrote Assistant Secretary Nathaniel F. Wienecke. "The Administration does not support exceptions to patent protection based on a particular technology."
This just continues a pattern we have come to expect from the Bush administration. Needless to say, a costly pattern for US society, except for a select few who have befriended Bush's inner circle.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I assume for a patent on scanning and reading info off checks, one would own the patent for the scanner and for OCR technology. Otherwise, who the hell gives someone a patent based on putting two completely related technologies together.
A lot of things "work well" as long as everyone agrees that they work well.
Until people start believing that those things are real, and try to maximize their benefit because heck, if it works it must be real, and if you can make it out of thin air, it's ok to make an unlimited amount.
In reality for fiat currency to work banks should be under control so tight, they would have to be nonprofits, and being an executive of a bank would be a very hard job that pays large salary but with no actual power or wealth and huge amount of following massive shitloads of rules. What is not in itself bad, but this is not how US financial system works.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Patent trolls attack open source, no problem. Patent trolls attack banks, SHIT!! PASS A LAW!
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I'm going to be classy and reply to myself here... I was fixated enough on the grandparent's common misunderstanding of how money multiplication works that I forgot to address a more fundamental point: My example above doesn't really illustrated what happened with the mortgage crisis accurately. It's an illustration of what happens to banks when people don't pay back the "fake" money that they loaned out.
In the case above, the bank got shut down and the FDIC member banks lost out because they had to cover the demand deposits for a failed bank. In the case of the mortgage crisis, the loans weren't paying back into savings accounts. The debt was owned by investors all over the place (check your 401k). Anybody who bought a mortgage backed security lost some value on this one, and there's no FDIC to step in to pay you back. The issue here is the same, though: Somebody paid some money to buy some debt and then the debt became worthless. In the first example, the bank and the bank's insurer got screwed. In the second case, some insurers got screwed along with anybody holding the debt. No matter how you slice it, this mortgage crisis thing is going to hurt a lot of people. It does, however, have the nice side effect of me being able to afford a house and say "I told you so" to people who advised me to buy one when the market was clearly dangerously screwed up. I just feel like a bad guy for enjoying it so much.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
... Where do they want me to mail that rebate check they're sending me to pay for this damn thing?
One of these days I'm going to visit Washington again. When I get to Washington I'll walk over to where the government does its business and the only thing I'd find there is a deep pit where all the money went. And a large sucking sound will draw me in and I'll never see my friends or family again because of the black hole thats government spending.
Don't tell me it's a drop in the bucket either. All these little drops can add up to a big splash eventually.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
You still use what to pay with? If I went to any store here in northern Europe and handed the cashier a check, that person would look at me as if I were some neanderthal, and probably refuse it outright. Actually I have no idea if any store around here would accept a check anymore, and it has been more than ten years since I last saw a check.
For all its modern technology and massive research budgets, the US of A is really backwards in some areas, and especially in banking and mobile phones.
The problem is that noone WANTS old workers. There's just not enough work to keep them occupied until retirement, there's not even enough work to employ all the young people. Well, okay, there is work but they aren't qualified for it. The vacancies require qualifications that a large part of the population just is not fit to reach (not everyone is smart enough to get a degree and then you still have to subtract those who can't get higher education for social or economic reasons) while a huge surplus of unqualified people exists.
By replacing manual labor with machines that require skilled workers to operate you reduce the job pool for the low skilled and increase the pool for the high skilled but we already lack high-skilled workers and have to import them from other countries. I see three ways out of this: 1. reverse machinisation to create more manual labor jobs (bad idea. Well, it happens if you count jobs created in China but that's not the goal of this), 2. Communism (unfeasible, maybe if we could get the machinisation to a point where it's self-sufficient and we don't need any workers anyway) or 3. Gene boosting all babies to make sure they are capable of becoming highly skilled workers (probably the most attainable if we ignore the major religions that condemn that strategy).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Oh yes, they do. Have a look into the regulations, it is explicit there.
Wrong again, there is more milk. If the society doesn't want that extra milk, for any price, it will add no extra value. If society wants the extra milk, the sum of money paid to the milk producers will increase, just not linearly.
At some time the bank (or its owner) will want some kind of real good. When that happens, the bank will create debit within itself and give it to you. That is the debit you'll use to pay the interest on your loan.
Rethinking email
I am sorry, but this is NOT an example of conservatism. This is assuming someone has not defined a new type of conservatism to explain it, which happens too often. Spending lots of money on stupid ideas is not a conservative value.
;)
Unfortunately, it does seem a lot of "fiscal conservatives" have stolen the title from the real fiscal conservatives. Too bad that truth in advertising is outlawed in politics.
Deleted
This is an example of the No true Scottsman fallacy, a type of equivocation and begging the question. Someone says, "Conservatives do such and so," and the defenders of conservatism retort with, "Well, no true conservative would do that! They aren't conservatives!" Sorry, no. This is what conservatives do. You don't get to redefine conservatism as, "That part of conservatism I happen to agree with." Liberals do a hell of a lot of things I don't agree with, but I try not to say things like "Hillary and Obama are no true liberals." Sadly, this is what liberalism and conservatism have come to. Maybe we need to drop political labels altogether and look at what candidates actually stand for.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A couple points:
1. Most Americans _are_ high skilled workers, at least when compared to other nations. We're a nation of skilled, high productivity workers. We're also the worlds 3rd (or second, depending upon how you slice it) largest exporter. Is everyone a rocket scientist? Of course not. But are most Americans only qualified for bulk manual labor? No.
2. There's nothing wrong with "old" workers in general. The problem is fat, unhealthy, old workers. Obesity is an epidemic in this country, and although the morbidly obese don't end up "old", the overweight do, and they end up unhealthy. Unable to walk properly, wracked with pain, and generally having several chronic conditions which preclude working. If we aged gracefully in this country there wouldn't be any problem with working till 70-75, since life expectancies would _easily_ go up to 90+. And, most people would _easily_ be mostly functional until 85+.
Seriously, these days, the difference between being 55 and 70 is vastly overwhelmed by the difference between being a normal weight and obese. If we solved our obesity epidemic, we wouldn't have these problems, our health care bill would be smaller, and people would (happily!) work longer.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
They're sure to abuse that power somehow. Would you really want the feds "free beer eminent domaining" any patent they felt like? You seem to forget the domestic wiretapping program, so, with the current trend of noting almost anything as "a threat to national security", this "free beer eminent domaining" would amount to nothing more than defacto arbitrary seizure and forfeiture.
Better to put some competent people in the USPTO and give all the asshats there the boot.
I think you should have a PhD in engineering to work at the USPTO. It would probably help cut down the number of bad patents. And if bad patents cease (or at least slow down), then we won't have problems like this in the first place.
It isn't so much a trick in a magic sense as it is in being duped. What you've described is basically a Ponzi scheme. Sure, there's a difference. In the banking system, your deposits are FDIC insured. There will be no depression era "run on the bank" because the government is happy to print lots of little green IOUs for anyone who wants them. The problem will be that there are so many little green IOUs floating around, a can of Coke will cost you 50 of them. So technically, you weren't robbed. Your medium simply became worthless thanks to massive inflation.
Fractional reserve lending also has the added "Sold my soul to the government store" effect, since borrowers end up owing more money than the actual amount of money in existence.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The situation gets even more interesting as in certain states, if you owe more than your house is worth, the bank can't go after you for the difference. That makes defaulting on your loan a very rational decision in many cases, even if you can afford to pay it. That's a recipe for some really ugly results.
Anyway, to account for collateral just add some houses to the assets part of the equation, but value them at less than the overall value of the loans. You still end up with low (or negative) owner's equity and an undercapitalized lender.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Do you really want to live in a world where all new discoveries are held as trade secrets, where companies rip off one another's designs, and there is a race to the bottom? Who is going to spend money to invest in R&D, even in large companies, if someone can reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply not having to recoup the cost to initially develop the product?
Sure it helps the consumer in the short term, but I think such a world would stagnate technological development, outside of the realm of tinkers and guilds.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
qwerty
Honestly, do YOU want to pay for the health care of someone who lives an unhealthy lifestyle?
We don't even know if obesity IS unhealthy. So far all we have is correlation, which isn't enough to me to take state action. For example, an obesity tax will catch most athletes. How's that right?
Martin Luther King apparently lived an unhealthy lifestyle, as he got shot for his behavior. So's being President and being in the Armed Forces. I'm happy to pay for all their healthcare.
Like state-provided education, the state has extra responsibilities to support the freedom of its society.
After reading the news story on how this came about, I'm more upset with the idea of the bailout than the patent. The plaintif got a patent under the rules provided, showed it to people who might license it, and in spite of non-disclosure they just implemented the system. The patent was attacked on terms of prior art and revalidated.
The original inventor has now lost 98% of his company, and while I think that the patent is obvious and that business method patents should run for only a short time (five years?) from first implementation, the inventor played by the rules, and is entitled to collect under them.
Patent law should be changed, but one patent at a time isn't the way to do it.