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US Report Sees Perils To America's Tech Future
dcblogs sends this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"The ability of the U.S. to compete globally is eroding, according to an Obama administration report released Friday. It described itself as a 'call to arms.' Titled 'The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States (PDF),' it points out a number of 'alarms,' including: the U.S. ran a trade surplus in 'advanced technology products,' which includes biotechnology products, computers, semiconductors and robotics, until 2002. In 2010, however, the U.S. 'ran an $81 billion trade deficit in this critically important sector.' In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%. It also says real median household income has stalled, and argues for policies that foster innovation."
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not just software. Biotechnology patents appear headed for the same sort of train wreck from what little I know of them.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Why limit it to software patents? Our country did so well at the beginning (in part) because we completely ignored the old world's patents. Patents exist to hinder competitors, and are slowing down our progress.
Folks have been shouting these warnings from the rooftops for quite a while. First we sent the factory, now we are sending the associated engineering/science jobs over too. Other countries are investing more in education, while we have been busy making mocking of smart people an art form.
I always become concerned about the objectivity of something when I see statistics like this: "In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%." That's pretty meaningless. the government could be giving 300% more than before but private entities are giving so much more it erodes the government's percent share. I'd take this report with a HUGE grain of salt.
1995 - Intel/MS and a few other US companies sold dell some parts, dell made a computer in texas and exported it
2011 - intel/ms and others ship the parts to china and the computer comes back to the US
the numbers only look at the cost of products coming in. it's been well established that apple and every other US company keeps most of the value of tech products and the manufacturing cost the chinese get is tiny. that's why acer and asus have net margins like food companies
What we need is to extend copyright, broader and stronger patents and generaly to beef up all IP laws. How about automatic injunctions for all accusations of patent infringement, like SOPA and PIPA gives copyright holders? That should spur on innovation!
Oh, and cut taxes and gov't spending!
Yeah, well maybe if large chunks of our congress and populace didn't spend time spouting how scientists and technical people are biased and corrupt and don't know any better than plain folks, and we didn't pass laws that strangled technical innovation in a fashion obvious to anyone with a technical background, more kids would be interested in those fields
Slick Willie gave our horses to the Chinese in the name of "free trade" and they are now raising and breeding their own horses. Shrub was also in Beijing's pocket since it was the only way he could keep the dollars flowing for his pet projects like Iraq and other things his neo-con handlers wanted. How can one be surprised that a country of motivated citizens would want to innovate themselves out of grunt assembly labor and into design?
Free trade is a levelling agent. It will pull up the lowest and pull down the highest. The anomaly of cheap Chinese imports at WalMart only exists as long as the American worker makes more than that world average. Once the wages are re-balanced the American worker will be no further ahead than he/she was before the flood gates to China opened. Also, trickle down economics works just fine -- money flows from the rich to the poor via the steepest slope. That path does not pass through the middle class American pocket book -- that's what the neo-cons and the corporate mouth pieces don't want you to realize. Put in a more geeky way, bad things happen when you dead short a battery -- free trade policies and speed trading eliminate the impedence and are going to lead to further economic problems -- maybe explosion and maybe just regression to the global mean (if we are lucky).
Surprised? You shouldn't be. When the patent system is such that innovators are punished by large corporations with bull**** patents and the gov't is run by the MPAA and RIAA, what did you expect? The system downright halts innovations, not encourages them. The system needs to be removed and re-thought, not added-to like the Nazi-style SOPA bill. That will make things 100x worse, I guarantee it.
30+ years chiseling away at workers rights, outsourcing skilled trade to other countries, and eviscerating education funding
only to reflect upon your work and remark, "gosh, people arent that smart and we dont do much with technology but consume it"
you chose it as a model of hypercapitalism. when we agreed to shuffle the working class, the middle class, into early retirement, fast food dead end jobs, and bankrupted private pensions it was a choice. when we caved the stock market and drained dry the last cent from the 401k of the middle class, we did so knowing it could only make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. as we danced in our lemon socialism and hapilly bailed out the wealthiest conglomerates and banks, we were instructed that the hardship would be socialized and the profit would be privatized. "americans," the ones that do most of the living and working in our society, dont do much because they cant do much; this has been assured by the government of the people, for the people, and it has no right to question its work.
we are reaping the benefit of generations of obscene wealth, fueled by trickle down reagonomics and stoked by politicians who consider market capitalism a golden calf that does no evil. Our society is driven by profit, and so long as the goal is profit, the outcome and returns will be consolidated to a plutocracy that doesnt care if little johnny learns to read or write, so long as he works enough hours at the walmart to consume the products at the walmart.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This one?
Make me remember Discworld's gods, that were pretty dumb in general because there is no evolutionary pressure when you are omnipotent. Why try to innovate if you can simply patent common sense and copyright culture forever, push your patent/copyright laws in all the world and take money from that?
An empire that is starting to buckle under its own weight of ridiculous spending and incessant world conquest. Sound familiar?
But it also does the opposite. Imagine spending years to bring a product to market only to see it reverse engineered and copied (and sold cheaper, to a wider audience) by a company with the resources to do it -- you're out of business before you even get started. You essentially just did their R&D for them.
The patent system has much room for improvement, but it does serve a useful purpose.
Instead they can spend a ton of money on research and development, produce a product, and a month later find themselves competing with a dozen competitors who invested nothing in research and developement and can therefor sell the product for a fraction of the cost and still make a profit. The innovators find themselves in a situation in which they made all the investment but cannot recoup the costs, while others are enriched without taking on the risk.
Explain to me how that fosters innovation.
There's a shade of grey in there to be discovered somewhere between everything and nothing.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
So we're saying that an increase in privately funded r&d is a *bad* thing?
But only with approved companies and countries. Doesn't that sound like a wonderful industry to be in - consulting who to trade aggressively with and who you shouldn't trade with (unless there's slim odds you'll get caught)?
In terms of household income, adjusted for inflation, the US has been going backwards for decades - not simply as wealth left he country, but as the means of generating GDP were pushed off shore.
Consider this: Workers at Company A buy goods from Companies B and C, while workers at Companies B and C buy from the companies other than their employers. Now, Company A lays off all but sales and marketing, putting manufacturing and packaging into offshore hands. Companies B and C have smaller pool to sell goods to. So... Company B lays off all but a few front office, outsourcing the remaining sales and marketing outside the region. The pool of those who can buy from Company A and Company B are mostly Company C. When Company C follows suit, who's left to buy from A, B and C?
Granted, that's rather simplified, but it is the exodus which has been ongoing since the first Transistor radios arrived from Japan, decades ago. A presence in the US isn't even necessary as almost every function but Board of Directors and CEO can be done elsewhere.
A grim prospect. But ... this should make US a fertile ground for moving back into, in theory.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Nobody can figure out why fewer Americans want to study for STEM careers, but everybody agrees that the solution is bring in more visa workers to take the jobs of US STEM workers.
In regard to STEM training, the report makes an argument for immigration reform that enables foreign students to remain in the U.S. It doesn't offer specifics on an approach for accomplishing this, or look at the debate around this issue. In 2010, there were 7.6 million STEM workers in the U.S., representing about one in 18 workers. Computer and math occupations account for close to half the STEM employment.
The U.S., the report said, produces fewer STEM graduates relative to other developed countries. Citing data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED), the report said that in 2009, nearly 13% of U.S. graduates with bachelor's degrees were in STEM fields, near the bottom of OCED countries.
"Significant economic competitors -- such as South Korea (26.3%), Germany (24.5%), Canada (19.2%), and the United Kingdom (18.1%) -- are on the long list of countries producing a much higher percentage of STEM graduates," the report said.
One in five STEM workers is foreign born, with 63% coming from Asia, the report said. The foreign-born share of STEM workers with graduate degrees is 44%.
NASA was doing small science on a big science budget, and was notoriously risk adverse, avoiding innovation in order to run the same tired old experiments.
The report on page 1-8 has a nice graph of average math scores. However it occurs to me that what matters most for innovation is not average scores but the number of students above a certain level of ability. Basically, if a country has enough high-scoring math students to fill the pipeline of scientists and engineers, it doesn't matter how many low-performing students are dragging down the mean. One of the reasons large Asian countries (China, India, and I would guess Indonesia) are well poised for technical progress is that they have a large population and hence a large talent pool. As long as they can efficiently discover and cultivate their talent they should be fine.
I have never seen anyone talk about the number of high-performing students a country really needs to fill its pipeline. But if you want to talk about being competitive, especially in the next decade where pressure on public budgets at all levels will go from bad to worse, doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on finding the good students and giving them opportunities (scholarships, etc.), and on bumping the above-average ones over that threshold into excellence, than to continue vain attempts to improve the average?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
In other breaking news, U.S. manufacturing has mostly been outsourced overseas, government regulation has been largely thrown out the window since the 80's, the deficit is too high, and we spend too much on our military.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
Yeah, just create a karma system and let your users identify and mute the trolls.
I8-D
The world is facing a major economic turmoil.
Basic manufacturing labor is in 2 forms
1) local construction this is non-portable and while modernization gains have happened. It is still taking many man hours to make a house.
2) assembly (this is gadgets or cars) the finished good is portable modernization has applied the Ford factor and there is incredible pressure to reduce the man/hour cost.
a) finished goods are globally transportable, means manpower is used where manpower is lowest cost
b) mechanization is reducting the needed manpower for assembly, every year there is less for someone to do to assemble 100 of something
c) this somewhat applies to farming
The great industrial revolution provided jobs for lots of people to move from farming to manufacturing. We are now facing the reverse prospect where the mechinical revolution is displacing manufacturing jobs. There really are no replacement jobs, "tech" jobs require education and there are not really enough demand.
The post-industrial age is upon us. There really are not places for most of the people to work.
So long as what you do doesn't look remotely like some else's patents....that they are just sitting on? Gov't out of the way? Out of the way OF WHAT? Private enterprise does not fund basic research anymore, they barely fund development of their own products. The rich making sure they get richer...and that NO ONE ELSE DOES is the problem, not the so-called 'nanny state.'
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
Might also want to see there are fewer tax breaks available to companies who shift work out of the country.
I spent a portion of my life in Michigan, where tax incentives were all over the place, trying to keep GM, Ford, Chrysler in the towns they were in, but even after all the tax breaks and assistance the companies still moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Japan, etc. Now almost everyone is moving manufacturing to Thailand, China or Vietnam - with reform efforts in Burma expect investment (read: moving manufacturing and research there as well.)
Discouraging the outright offshoring of everything isn't necessarily protectionist and certainly is in line when confronting countries like China, where they've pegged their currency artificially low to draw in research, manufacturing, etc. It's how they are growing their economy, not entirely unlike how the Japan government subsidised exports for decades, which drew jobs and wealth into Japan, by way of research, manufacturing, etc.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Anything that is trivial to reverse engineer and steal in such a manner probably didn't require that much R&D and isn't worth a patent, certainly for the length of time current patents grant a monopoly.
The current situation is that companies with lots of money can hold smaller competitors to ransom by abusing the patent system. The worst case of abolishing patents is that companies with lots of money can spend more on marketing than smaller competitors and therefore dominate the market. At least with the latter we have a system where more people can build upon those products and try to do something novel, rather than the absurd situation we end up with at the moment where you HAVE to have a valuable patent portfolio that you're willing to use in legal action on other companies in order to compete.
Why limit it to software patents? Our country did so well at the beginning (in part) because we completely ignored the old world's patents. Patents exist to hinder competitors, and are slowing down our progress.
Yes, we did better because we were able to ignore the "old world patents". Meaning, patents were bad when we weren't the ones that held them. I'm not sure that's really a good argument for getting rid of patents as it doesn't really speak to whether patents help or hinder innovation; it only shows that any nation not at the top of the patent pyramid has a vested interest in ignoring them.
Not saying I disagree with the premise that patents can actually hinder innovation, I just don't think your example provides any support for your claim. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I think that the larger issue with America these days is connected to our cultural tendency about measuring success in terms of money and power. In the newer generations, this is displacing the very values that made the nation great, and resulting in short term and immediate results kind of thinking. We are teaching our youth to think like a 5-year old with a tantrum, with an insane sense of entitlement and no responsibility. And the older generations are not much better. Add to this the fact that there are no visionaries among the people with power to make changes in the nation, be it the heads of large corporations, the congress, or elected officers. Long term is thought as "5 years down the road". That does not scale for the size and complexity of America today. We need a 100-year plan, not a "will do whatever necessary to get re-elected next year" plan. And this long term plan should not be based on controlling the rest of the world or waging wars when other countries do not submit to our might; we should use our resources wisely to take care of our own people instead, and shift to a sustainable economic model so we do not need resources from other countries. The only reason we have not collapsed onto ourselves is that the rest of the world is messed up too. But we can do so much better than that. My impression is that unless we start thinking long term and incorporate healthier values into education, to slowly revert this tendency, the decline of America will not only continue but accelerate in all areas, including technology, quality of life for the average citizen, and the position of our country in the world. At this rate, we will be a part of the 3rd world in 50 years. We can do better for our children.
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
You're overstating the problem. For 100 gold I can hire a fighter and a cleric. Problem solved.
Why make it illegal then? It seems like you're getting extra jobs just because of it.
FYI, the situation you describe is a good thing. The first company needs to keep innovating once competitors come out, not stop as you seem to think they should. Look to the fashion industry to see how it's done. There are TONS of copycats out there but good designers have no problem making products people will pay good $$$ for... why? Because they never stop innovating, and that's the key you are missing.
0) Most ideas are a dime a dozen, the difficult bit is actually doing it well and successfully. Despite all their efforts on copying China isn't going to get a man on the moon by next month. Why should someone who just happened to patent some obvious idea be able to stop others who could be better able at implementing the idea?
1) The patent system does not scale. It's too hard for the patent office to determine "nonobvious". It's much easier for them to just issue a patent and let the courts deal with it. The cost/punishment for filing obvious patents is not high enough to discourage a typical corporation - so they can just try different variations till they get what they want.
2) From what I see patents reward trolls and "one clicks" more than genuine innovators, and they slow down innovation more than encourage it. Can't be bothered finding that "shade of grey", as far as I'm concerned the "baby" is long dead and might as well be thrown out with the bathwater.
3) Much stuff is bought because of marketing, branding and distribution, not because there was lots of R&D on it.
Copyright on the other hand is fine, but for a much shorter time.
If it's that trivial to reverse engineer is it really worth the patent? For discussions sake let's take James Dyson's vacuum cleaners. They are of a novel design, likely took a fair bit of R&D, and by most standards are probably worth a patent (despite copying the basic principles from elsewhere and simply applying them to a vacuum cleaner).
How long a monopoly should he have been granted for that design? Ten years? Twenty? If the answer is one to two years then that is probably the lead time on designing a good product in that sector even when you are reverse engineering the design. That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market. Dyson would have been forced to compete on quality, value, and other traditional differentiators rather than being able to just benefit from the patent granted monopoly.
That introduction of competition soon after the initial release is actually likely to spur more innovation from many more companies and will ultimately benefit the consumer far more than granting any single entity a monopoly.
Perhaps a high quality patent system with a shorter time limit on patents is a lot better than the current system; but I would argue we are unlikely to ever get that, and that having no patent system at all is at worst the next best option.
Most things, software and mechanical, are trivial to reverse engineer.
A slight tweak on a screw can mean all the difference in a number of applications, leaving many engineers shaking their heads; this tweak, however, can easily be copied in a week's time.
Ease of replication is not a measure of effort, novelty, or invention.
I am John Hurt.
> Instead they can spend a ton of money on research and development, produce a product, and a month later ...
> find themselves competing with a dozen competitors who invested nothing in research and developement
This isn't an either/or -- regardless of what some comments here would imply. :) It's not a binary solution set: either we do away with all patents, or continue with the present system.
As originally envisioned, patents were to protect novel and unique ideas and inventions. The problem, of course, is that nowadays, virtually anything can be patented, regardless of prior art or lack of novelty.
So to answer your (implied) question: if you spend a ton of money on research and produce a product, it depends. If it's something truly new and unique, yes, you should have patent protection. But if it's just a slight rework of an older idea, no, I DON'T think taht should be patentable. In that case, yes, you WILL get killed by competition, but I would argue that if it took you "tons of research and development" to come up with something like that, your R&D department is incompetent and maybe economic darwinism ought to put YOU in its sights. :)
My own humble proposals are actually simple. This isn't rocket science.
1. Eliminate so-called "design" and "method" patents.
2. If it can be demonstrated that a person of similar intelligence could have developed the same idea in a "clean room" environment (i.e., without reverse engineering), the idea isn't patentable.
We could argue about this one, but here goes anyway:
3. No device that uses, as a primary component, a patented device, can itself then be patented. Example: I patent a new type of widget. You develop a way to use that widget in an airplane wing and try to patent that use. My patent is approved, but yours should be denied.
Finally, for the nth time: LOSER PAY LEGISLATION. The US is one of the few industrialized nations that doesn't have this OBVIOUS protection. If the loser of a spurious lawsuit had to pay the costs, this would take care of the remaining litigation surrounding scurrilous, stupid patents.
Just my opinion, and worth exactly what you paid for it. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
"The ability of the U.S. to compete globally is eroding."
That's fine with me. It's not a race.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
...the 1984 David Report on the sorry state of mathematics in the US, and it's followup (Renewing U.S. Mathematics: A Plan for the 1990s)?
Like last year's budget committee we assemble a team of experts in their field, have them analyze the problem and propose solutions. We then ignore everything they say and carry on with the behavior that got us into the current mess.
You must be new here.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Alright, reverse your thinking then:
Some of the best inventions are simple and elegant solutions to historically cumbersome problems. You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
In today's world you can spend $1000 and wait a few weeks to get a patent that will allow you to retire in style. Whereas with no patents, that big evil corporation can sick 10 coders(or engineers, or whatever, pick your industry) on your design and have the idea unraveled in a day or two and implemented in their code within a month. Your retirement is canceled. THAT is the worst case scenario if you abolish patents.
The possibilities for anyone EXCEPT the massive corporations really coming out well with no protections on invention are miniscule. With the funding available to those corporations they can take your idea and have it produced at 1000x the rate and quantity, strongarm distributors and retailers, and saturate the market with a cheaper product. Do you think a bank is going to give you a loan to roll that product out knowing full well that there will be mimics on the market within weeks of your release that are cheaper and probably better? Do you think you can sell your idea to a corporation? Why would they buy it knowing their competitors will steal it?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
So, Idiocracy was a prophetic documentary ;)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Actually, it might have something to do with the lack of NEED to use those loopholes. When the tax burden was higher, corporations had the choice of growing enterprise by investing in R&D or losing fraction of that money by paying taxes on it. This was a tax loop hole. Now that the tax burden is lower, they make more money by leveraging their lower borrowing cost to buy out smaller players. The theory is that the money which get spent on buying out smaller players gets reinvested in more new enterprises. So this makes the R&D cycle more agile (no connection to Agile(TM) intended).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You assume that the inventor is a corporation that can continue a trend of innovation, and not instead you or me in a garage somewhere.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
"In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%."
You mean to tell me that this is part of the beef? That Great God Government (beat head three times on the floor in the direction of Washington) now has less control over what people can research?
Can someone explain to me why this is a bad thing?
Regards;
"Why limit it to software patents? Our country did so well at the beginning (in part) because we completely ignored the old world's patents. Patents exist to hinder competitors, and are slowing down our progress."
Completely irrelevant. A patent in one country still isn't valid in another. Try again.
Make it so that websites can't be taken offline at the drop of a hat (or a suspected case of copyright infringement).
You can't have a thriving economy and strong "IP" protections, because the very purpose of said protections is to allow "temporary" monopolies. Monopolies do not create a thriving economy. Monopolies lead to stagnation and regression.
The purpose of the temporary monopoly is to give the creater or inventor incentive to create and invent. It is not to give the creater or inventor lifetime exclusivity to the creation or invention.
But none of your "advisors" is going to tell you that.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
> You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
Do you have any examples?
From my point of view, very little is done as a small, isolated invention these days. I would indicate, for example, Facebook. The idea of Facebook is trivial to reverse engineer, and numerous attempts at improved versions have been attempted, but most have failed with a few (LinkedIn springs to mind) carving out small niches for themselves. The secret ingredient is no longer in a single trivially replicated invention, but in a process (how Facebook has evolved as a platform has kept it ahead of the competition - although I'll admit getting market share early also helped a lot).
I'd also argue that if you simply have a eureka moment, why is that enough to let you retire? Surely we should be looking to reward effort expended over luck?
0) Most ideas are a dime a dozen, the difficult bit is actually doing it well and successfully. Despite all their efforts on copying China isn't going to get a man on the moon by next month. Why should someone who just happened to patent some obvious idea be able to stop others who could be better able at implementing the idea?
China wont be in the moon next month because they dont have the technology. If China had hands-on all of our space tech, they would most certainly be in a position to do anything we can do, and do it cheaper. That's the whole point. That's why we keep or space and military tech secret ; So that we remain dominant and the advantages inherent in our investment remain ours, at least for some period of time.
Why would an innovator not want to be protected in the same manner?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
There's a shade of grey in there to be discovered somewhere between everything and nothing.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
We need to make a law about who gets the patent. If all my hard work goes directly to my company, and i see nothing out of it, why should i bother? Prevent this, and i feel a lot more ideas will see the light. Also, make the process public and easy. Why do i need to hire a lawyer just to file a patent?
In the consumer market they do quite the opposite, but in science they do. Do I really need to explain further? The wheel's a lot harder to reinvent.
You assume that while Dyson is out talking to banks, pitching his plans, trying to reel in investors, and setting up his first assembly location, no one with readily available funding, manufacturing and distribution ties is paying attention.
Without patent protections there's nothing preventing one of the people he's pitched the idea to deciding that paying him for the idea is a hell of a lot less profitable than just doing it for themselves. And that's just one example of where his hopes and dreams could be derailed.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
And before that people were stealing each other's ideas from under their noses, a smart guy invents something, and a marketing fag steals it and makes a fortune. Idk wtf your talking about...
The innovators find themselves in a situation in which they made all the investment but cannot recoup the costs, while others are enriched without taking on the risk.
Why can't the innovator have investors? Also what if the innovator holds the patent (like most do)? The patent system is exactly designed anti your statement. Some are saying it's TOO effective.
They have to pretend it does promote innovation, but that doesn't mean they actually believe it does. They have to pretend that the CTEA promoted authorship, but I doubt anybody that voted for it actually believed that would be the result.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The poster didn't say kill *all* patents. Just software patents. That makes a HUGE difference.
For example, producing a useful drug costs a fortune and takes forever due to the ridiculous amount of experimentation involved. Software development does not have those costs.
Furthermore, the patents being granted are to very obvious things which are having a chilling effect on software development. Not a stimulating effect. Software patents are doing the *exact opposite* of what patents are supposed to do (to software).
So, your example doesn't apply in the context of software development, and software patents should absolutely be abolished in order to foster software innovation.
Could it have anything to do with us getting hacked 100x times. As an off-shore investor would you really wan the USA "cloud" when A. the government can pretty much commandeer your shit w/o a warrant. And the Chinese seem to have unlimited access to American data. Our IT market probably looks very very unattractive for off shore companies w all the "IT" stuff going on this country that's been strangling internet freedom.
Let me explain what I meant. Many liberals seems to be strongly influenced by sympathy for every member of society. I think this is the impetus for some U.S. public schools having eliminated "tracking", in which students are assigned into groups of like-performing individuals. What the GP seemed to be arguing for was, essentially, "tracking" (in the educational sense). That's why I expected it was anathema to many or most liberals.
Facebook : Perfect example.
Started in 2004 for a college kid and some roomates and classmates. Originally available to just his college campus.
At that time (2004) what was Microsoft worth?
How about IBM?
What about HP?
Wasnt that the year that Google became a publicly traded company?
I wonder if any of those entities would have had the ability to take the concept of facebook and roll it out exponentially bigger, faster, with greater resources....
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
If you go to a guy with a massive bankroll, a factory, a staff of engineers and ties to manufacturing, distrubution and marketing, and you show him a design for a brand new kind of widget, why would he make you a millionaire by funding it? You just gave him the idea. He can just start making it.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Its not the issue of racism. Its the wholesale destruction of entire sectors of the work force as companies look for ways to cut their bottom line. I'm looking for a tech job in the silicon valley. Over the last 3 months I have to say I'm getting sick and tired of not having spoken to a single person who is American, speaks without an intense Indian or Chinese accent (in fact I may have passed over perfectly good jobs because the person speaking to me was completely and I mean completely unintelligible.) I've worked with hundreds of people from India and China (hell I'm half Chinese, my Mother is Chinese, I was born in Taiwan.) I don't have a problem with these people's race, I like them, I like their food, I love their cultures. I have a problem with the fact that I've watched my salary slowly erode to about 50%. How am I supposed to compete with a tidal wave of HB-1 visas who come from a country with a billion people so the fact that they represent the top half a percentile and have a Masters degree, still means there are millions of them and they're perfectly willing to take my job at half the price. If it now takes a Masters Degree to get a job pushing a broom in the valley because of the glut of skilled foreign workers, there's no room for native workers, how is a native worker supposed to compete. there's no finance for older native workers to improve themselves (the collapsing state economy has steadily made going back to school harder and harder.) There's no market for young fresh native workers coming out of school. All the while, money that would be spent here to improve our State's economy is being pumped into making China or India more wealthy.
Out sourcing jobs in general and the tech market in particular is, in my opinion the very best way possible to implode both America's economy and future ability to determine it's own technological future. All you have to do to make something disappear in America is stop investing in it. Stop investing in skilled American workers, and surprise, in no time at all, they'll just go away. I have good friends who used to be happy engineers, engineering away. Now they cook food, or sell real estate (good luck with that), or they've moved into the health care industry. What they don't do is engineering. All it took was two massive economic busts since 2001. I look at the ads today on DICE, and its crazy what they're asking now for a customer support engineer. If you're tired of talking to people with Punjabi accents think enough to dull a knife when you call for technical support, tell the vendors you deal with, that you want to speak to an American support engineers in the future, in fact let them know you will now stop doing business with companies that outsource their support. OR, you won't have to worry any more, because very soon there won't be any here to do the job anyway.
Outsourcing makes sense for tiny start-ups paying to realize a dream out of there own packets in the midst of the bootstrap (though as our currency meets parity with the yuan and the rupee, even this use is quick disappearing.) I'm just saying, we need to provide serious tax incentives for companies that use native workers and even more serious tax liabilities for companies that heavily outsource. The world is flattening out economically, and that's probably a good thing at a number of levels. But until we reach that point, if we don't protect our working class, we'll destroy the American consumer, and then where's our economy? We're in the midst of the economic spasms caused by American corporations trying to squeeze the beast from both ends and killing off the American workforce in the process. Its time to say enough. its time to ensure that Americans have meaningful work first, because short-sighted runs to profit ultimately hurt everyone save a vanishingly small few. This blind free-fall to the bottom of the pig trough by Corporate America needs to come to a crashing halt, while there's something still left to save.
"We came up with a plan to increase competitiveness and innovation," an administration spokesman said, "but we discovered that the process had already been patented, so we had to cancel the project."
Proverbs 21:19
I currently translate Japanese academic documents to English for an Indian company while living in Seattle Washington for less than minimuim wage. This is your future folks. You as might as well get ready to sell your things now because you aren't going to be able to afford to keep any of it.
The thought of hanging myself at my student loan organization doesn't bug me as much when I think it might make a differ
Because your non-dumbass patented it before showing your idea to others. It's happened plenty the other way around, some inventors have just proven themselves to be absent minded when it comes to marketing, they barely relate sometimes. Nike swoosh guy is a perfect example (that one ended OK though after a few decades).
Actually, we weren't. There were indeed rich people who owned slaves, but slavery tends to act as an economic crutch, and there are actually solid economics arguments against slavery.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
so no one has to worry - heroes of Wall Street will save the day for everyone....
Sure. I was agreeing with you, albeit in a long-winded sort of way. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
The patent system exists as it does because established companies wish to inhibit innovation that could cause them economic harm and they have the pockets to buy legislators to do their bidding.
I failed to respond to that last line...
I work with many well-meaning morons. I also work with hard-working beauracrats, backstabbers, and miscreants. I don't care they put in massive effort, if the product of that is at best garbage and at worst cancerous self-service I dont believe reward is what they should recieve.
It's a natural law that those able to overcome are those rewarded with a continuation of their line. As much as the progressives would have you believe that everyone should get a participation award, Darwin would disagree.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
More like the exact opposite. People cannot innovate without education, without protection for those innovations (not being stolen by the chinese), and without some sort of a safety net that allows them to take risks. The government is therefore deeply invested in innovation, and, as the article points out, funds a lot of it.
I'm not in the US, but not far off. My graduate programme in comp sci is 85% foreign I think, so of 120 or so grad students we have less than 20 who are from canada. The rest are from india, china, the middle east (and I'm half indian). The same could be said for most programmes in the US of the same sort (engineering, comp sci etc.). The undergraduate programme is largely domestic, but those guys mostly get stuck implementing boring business process stuff, and not actually innovating.
You can't 'get out of the way' and hope it will all magically work out when other governments are investing in innovation. There are lots of different ways to do that, you could for example, directly fund solar power companies, you could subsidize power from solar sources, you could directly build solar power and a government enterprise and then sell it off if you are so inclined. Hell, you could just pay more money to people who are future innovators, rather than having science and engineering programmes be more expensive, make them less expensive, that sort of thing. You can provide local and provincial level (in the US these would be states but the effect is the same), building space for startup companies, 'innovation centres' as we call them, and so on.
Simply put, given the choice, no one with money is going to invest it in the US if they get a better deal elsewhere, they'll invest in china and india. They get multipliers from governments, they get better people, from better education systems and so on. The only reason to invest in the US is if you want into the US market and have to invest in the US for that, but with the way trade is, you invest somewhere other than the US, and then sell crap to the americans to take their money.
Sure, if you want to build something in europe you probably have more regulatory hurdles than the US. And, all else being equal, that makes the US more attractive. But if a government is chipping in 20 or 25% (or, in my case in the games business 40 or 50%), that makes the paperwork worth it.
The "we" you're talking about is actually just a handful of megacorporations that make those patented technologies in China and India. The "we" you should be talking about, small businesses that have no choice but to make their inventions locally, were thrown overboard decades ago and have no vested interest worth speaking of.
Any of those companies could have taken the concept of Facebook and implemented their own, but they would have remained playing catch-up with features in Facebook (as it moved from a college-centric system to a more generalised social media platform, as the API was released, etc.)
I would also point out that Facebook patent filings appear to have first been done in 2006 ( http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/01/facebook-patent-filings/ ), two years later.
As it stands, it took Google 7 years to get its own Facebook-clone out, and that's doing decidedly mixedly so far. I don't recall patents being amongst G+'s issues, though...
You can't 'get out of the way' and hope it will all magically work out when other governments are investing in innovation.
How many government 'investments in innovation' have ever produced any long-term benefit? I remember the Japanese government continually talking about the wonderful new computer technologies they were funding over the last couple of decades, yet those projects never actually seemed to produce anything.
There are lots of different ways to do that, you could for example, directly fund solar power companies, you could subsidize power from solar sources, you could directly build solar power and a government enterprise and then sell it off if you are so inclined.
Because American 'investments in solar power' have proven so wonderfully successful over the last couple of years.
In the real world history has shown that government is incredibly bad at picking winners.
Your company doesn't pay you? If you're doing your research on company time with the company's equipment, property, etc, then they rightfully get the patent. If it's not your job to invent/innovate at the company, then do it on your own time and get your own patent.
"Anything that is trivial to reverse engineer and steal in such a manner probably didn't require that much R&D and isn't worth a patent, certainly for the length of time current patents grant a monopoly."
Once a new drug is on the market its exact formulation is known, so reverse engineering is a trivial matter. However the required R&D for a new drug is typically around 10 years and $1 billion.
Define "easy": it might have taken a dozen man-years spent over the course of six months. Just because a large player has sufficient resources to make a task go quickly does not mean it was easily done. And to answer the other oart of that question: even if it took a week it still seems worthy. Not all good ideas need to be complex ideas. Conversely not all novel simple ideas are good ones - this doesn't mean they should not be patentable, only that those patents won't be worth a hell of a lot.
For your example: assuming that after inventing it, the vacuum was brought immediately to market without any delays due to finding funding or other concerns, a year or two might be enough to recoup some of the time spent. But it's disingenuous to say he can compete on other merits after that point: well-funded competition could beat him on every single point, especially if he's just a small operation.
Even as much as the current system benefits big players,*no* patent syste. would benefit them far more.
NAFTA opened up a lot of doorways to cheap labor in other countries. The manufacturing and tech sectors followed the cheap labor by off-shoring jobs and facilities. NAFTA basically sterilized the manufacturing and tech sector jobs in the US but it was *sick* profit for the corporations who were now setting up shop in every 2-bit town south of the border. The situation we're in now isn't a surprise to anyone who was in those sectors back in the 90s. "America's Tech Future" was decided on a long time ago.
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A piece of software can easily cost millions in development. Reverse engineering it would cost thousands. My example stands perefectly well.
There are sites for HP and IBM that are almost entirely R&D that each house 1000 to 3000 people, or more. A group might produce a product after an 18-24 month cycle, IF they come up with a workable idea. For every one product that makes it off the manufacturing floor and into the hands of a customer there are another 10 that failed during some part of the product lifecycle. Failure or not, that's investment that someone else need not put money into if they can just steal the workable idea after the fact.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
So all the competitors who spent millions on research and development and arrived at the same conclusions should just eat the loss? Please, patents make no sense for software and should be limited to machines and physically realized inventions.
Frankly, given how much innovation comes from publicly funded research in computer science and from startups that do not have a patent war chest, I find it difficult to believe that ending the age of software patents would somehow kill innovation in this country. Most of the major leaps forward in software have occurred because people could build on the work of others, and not have to worry about going to court because of an algorithm buried deep in their code. Just about all the software in use today is built on many layers of other software.
To put it another way, had TCP been patented, there would be no world wide web, no Google, and pretty much all the flashy technology that the news media loves to report on would never have been created.
Palm trees and 8
I spent a portion of my life in Michigan, where tax incentives were all over the place, trying to keep GM, Ford, Chrysler in the towns they were in, but even after all the tax breaks and assistance the companies still moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Japan, etc. Now almost everyone is moving manufacturing to Thailand, China or Vietnam - with reform efforts in Burma expect investment (read: moving manufacturing and research there as well.)
Of course this happens, and I don't know why anybody is surprised. Even with taxes at 0, the companies in the US would still need to pay the workers' wages, and comply with various environmental and work safety laws. All the kowtowing to corporations states and municipalities do is just pathetic and sad - states and municipalities don't use any stick and just don't have enough carrot, since even with no taxes at all, the balance sheet is still very much in favor of corporations moving their production elsewhere. That's a direct result of unfettered globalization, and that's why I think politicians peddling economic revival via tax cuts are mostly liars, and people buying into this concept are mostly idiots.
The taxes aren't and haven't been the problem (and neither are environmental regulations, no matter what the Wall Street Journal whines about). The problem is rather the fact that corporations are allowed to game the system. They use the freedom of trade to create jobs where wages and regulations are low, and to sell the merchandise where the money (still) is. The money corporations get isn't invested it back nor used to pay wages in the rich countries, where it comes from; instead corporations pay a pittance to the workers, some good bribes to a few select politicians, to make sure the status quo is maintained, and the rest is profit.
IMHO, the government should take a much harder look at outsourcing; a corporation that has outsourced its factories should be forced by law to respect the USA environmental and labor standards for any product it wants to sell back into the USA. This would go some way towards making production in the USA a more interesting alternative, and it would also help the workers everywhere. Unfortunately the government doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to even look askance at corporations
Actually, I started the arguments about facebook a little late in its history. 6 days after launching thefacebook.com Zuckerburg was accused of having mislead 3 other people into believing he was going to help them launch a social netoworking site. They accused Zuckerburg of using their ideas to produce thefacebook.com, and what later evolved into Facebook.
If only they had had a patent....
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Are you kidding me? Ir's always easier to reverse engineer something than it is to make it in the first place, especially in things like pharmaceuticals and mechanical designs. But that's not even important, because companies routinely outsource manufacturing. That would become corporate suicide in a world with no IP. Every company would need to produce everything itself. You couldn't have fabless semiconductor companies... instead every company would need to build its own multibillion dollar fab.
The abolishment of IP would be the death of engineering.
What's so sad about all this is that anyone outside of the government and the (pardon the term) 1% have known this was coming for a long time now. Hell, I'm sure they knew it was coming too, they just didn't care because they are traitors out to corrupt capitalism and democracy to line their own pockets. I have no problem with capitalism, it's the only viable economic system, but you cannot allow people to corrupt the system of government to tilt the playing field in their favor. That's not capitalism.
I love how the Republicans whine about liberals being in favor of "wealth redistribution" when their own policies are clearly aimed at wealth redistribution in the other direction. Neither strategy is capitalistic and neither strategy is viable in the long term. How, exactly, is propping up the music industry, an industry with a completely outdated business model and declining content quality, capitalism? How is it helpful to the country to do so? The answer, of course, is that it isn't. It's just what happens when you let executives of the failing industry bribe politicians legally. Meanwhile, the copyright legislation they have pushed for is wreaking havoc on the innovation which made America competitive in the first place. They sell this to voters under the illusion that the US will be on top of the food chain forever, regardless of what we do, and we can just dictate new rules when we don't like the old ones. It's not going to work that way for long.
There have been articles on the decline of basic research in this country for years now. I remember posting links to USENET on the same ever so long ago. It's the same thing that has happened to manufacturing that people have been decrying for decades. The US is moving towards an economy based entirely on gambling in the stock market. We don't produce things anymore, hell we don't even INVEST in things anymore, we just let bankers find new ways to wring more money out of the middle class. High frequency trading? Seriously? No one sees a problem with an industry that produces absolutely no value and no product whatsoever? This is all well and good for them...until the rest of the world catches on that they are adding no value they can continue to exploit them as well. However, they'll be driving their Mercedes through endless ghetto with bullets whizzing by their windows.
It's not a sustainable model for a society, but it is exactly what we are heading for and it's exactly what we deserve. We've chosen to become fat and stupid and to allow ourselves to support people who offer nothing in return. Liberals are certainly NO better, but where I see it the most is in the Republican party. People are willing to go to the mat for people who make more in a year than they will in their lifetime, even though those people are demonstrably bad at their jobs. Executives are leaving companies worse off than when they started and yet somehow still receive massive bonuses...and the right leaning middle class supports this! Their ostensibly "capitalism friendly" political opinions lead them into arguments with leftists...and they forget that they're not just supposed to oppose leftists, but they're supposed to be capitalists themselves and support capitalistic policies. They shout down people who decry poor copyright legislation and invest in companies which are just garbage. Look at the tech bubble. All you had to do was get an IT kid fresh out of college, pay him 40 grand a year, and he could tell you that investing in a company that had no product and provided no service, but had a nifty website, was a bad idea.
I could rant all day about this stuff. Won't do any good though. The stupid have won and the system is beyond hope. Hopefully I can eek out a decent living and die before the inevitable crash.
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
We'd see CEO's come up with some nice innovative ways to spend the extra millions, that's for sure.
Glancing through the "executive summary", I see a blatant case of bias right off the bat. The summary mentions three pillars: research, education, and infrastructure. It fails to mention the real pillar: healthy private enterprise. With that, you can fund the three pillars above. Without it, you're eventually going to fail. Even if you can find the funds to support the three pillars, you have no way to bring it to the market, meaning someone else will reap the rewards of your effort.
Second, it makes the assumption that government spending on these pillars works. As I noted in a recent thread about government funded engineering and research, there are vast differences of several orders of magnitude in how efficient research projects are from the best to the worst.
Perhaps the Obama administration has enough of a clue to set up effective research operations though I haven't seen any indication of that. But even if so, we still have to face that Congress, holder of the purse, has little interest in efficient research operations nor do most of the likely recipients of the funding.
This particularly holds for the least accountable of scientific research, so-called "blue sky" research. Obviously, the US government is quite capable of spending lots of money on blue sky research, but I don't grant that it is similarly capable of getting lots of blue sky research in return for that money.
We see similar problems with the other two pillars. Educational loans are notorious for having massively driven up the cost of education while simultaneously resulting in a drop in quality of many college degrees. And infrastructure building is a shifty past time that often results in near useless, overly expensive, or shoddy infrastructure that doesn't serve the role for which it was constructed.
This incidentally was the original topic of the thread when someone alleged that engineers are envious of China because of its ability to order massive engineering projects (which also happen to be infrastructure building projects). My original disagreement a few posts up that thread was that such projects had several serious problems with them, chiefly a deeply flawed implementation (but also bad economics) that made them unworthy of an engineer's consideration. That didn't go over well for some reason.
None of these address the gap between coming up with something in the lab and transporting that to something useful to society. It's not innovation, if that gap cannot be jumped.
You're overstating the problem. For 100 gold I can hire a fighter and a cleric. Problem solved.
A muscle bound men at arms is cheap... However, the last I checked, the price of a decent healer is a lot of money and keeps on going up every year.
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DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
If the answer is one to two years then that is probably the lead time on designing a good product in that sector even when you are reverse engineering the design. That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market.
Go in business for yourself, try to do all this in 24 months, succeed, then come back and say it's "enough time." Otherwise . . . recall that Dyson has been working on the cyclonic vacuum idea since the late 1970s, and introduced his first cyclonic vacuum in 1983. He's been at it a while. Two years' lead time? Pfft.
Besides, why shouldn't somebody be able to compete on innovation and better ways to do things? Why should everyone be "forced to compete on quality, value, and other traditional differentiators"? Personally, I like new, improved ways of doing things, and besides, isn't innovation a traditional differentiator, anyway?
Don't forget that Dyson neither invented nor patented the basic cyclonic separation principle used in his vacuums. It's an old idea, and hasn't been under patent protection for many decades; many other companies were free to implement the idea once Dyson showed that there was a market for it. He did patent some variations, in particular, "a vacuum cleaning appliance compris[ing] a lower efficiency cyclone unit and a high efficiency cyclone unit connected in series [that] enables both large and fine dirt particles to be dealt with." However, none of these patents seem to be constricting the market, since today at least five other major manufacturers make cyclonic vacuum cleaners for home use.
Reverse engineering is always trivial, compared to engineering from scratch. The tricks on engineering from scratch are (a) working on the right problem in the first place; (b) convincing yourself that the problem does, in fact, have a solution; (c) finding the solution; and (d) getting the solution into the market. Holding someone else's innovation in your hand does parts (a) through (c) for you; all you have to do is (d).
(Sarcasm) See? It's just that simple. But of course, outsourcing must be right because the market never makes mistakes. (End Sarcasm).
We lose a lot of engineering competence when college students see a 4-year engineering degree as a way to compete with folks making $10 an hour at most, while a business, law or medical degree are easier and almost guarantee a higher income. Not only that, we tend to give away what expertise we do have every time we outsource the manufacture of a new item to a foreign country.
So what do you *expect* to happen?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
...had TCP been patented, there would be no world wide web, no Google, and pretty much all the flashy technology that the news media loves to report on would never have been created.
Sure there would. There would just be a person, a group or a company that made a lot of money on that innovative idea. From our perspective the differences would be impercetable.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
we need to provide serious tax incentives for companies that use native workers and even more serious tax liabilities for companies that heavily outsource.
So should we apply tariffs on imported products as well? Or is it just a problem when it's YOUR ox being gored?
You assume that the inventor is a corporation that can continue a trend of innovation, and not instead you or me in a garage somewhere.
There are many independent individual inventors that have hundreds of patents and many successful products. Quantity (corporate cubical-farms of wage-slaves) doesn't always trump quality (a single individual with drive, talent, intellect, and ability). You may well get a higher number of patents from a cubical-farm, but the individual inventor is more likely IMHO to come up with something that is truly game-changing.
One big advantage a large business has is the marketing skills, capital, and ability to monetize an invention and/or patent. Sadly, even in situations where available capital isn't the issue, the single inventor suffers because most don't have the skills to develop and market their invention and/or use their patent(s) to best advantage.
One other point. The "Corporation(TM) VS Inventor" theme isn't always so pure and simple like the movies. Many corporations formed as a result of an inventor coming up with a product or idea and forming a corporation so as to gather people around to help with the development/marketing/monetization that he may not have the skills for, as I mentioned above. So, you may have a situation where a small inventor is selling his invention/patent to another, more-successful inventor who formed a corporation. Thus, the invention is more likely to see development and actual production than if it had languished in somebody's garage.
The problem isn't big corporations, it's corrupt government that's turned the patent/trademark/copyright systems into competition-suppression systems. History shows that in general, corruption in government tracks with the size of government, regardless of type of government, with few exceptions. Not how wealthy corporations or individuals are.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Some of the best inventions are simple and elegant solutions to historically cumbersome problems. You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
And the sooner these are in public domain, the better off the world will be.
But not you personally! Poor baby.
Your retirement is canceled. THAT is the worst case scenario if you abolish patents.
I'm honestly not sure if you're arguing for or against patents at this point.
Seriously? How first-world-problem is this? Retirement was never guaranteed, much less early retirement. A lot of modern companies got as large as they are today because they weren't founded by idiots who thought that the key to happiness in life was doing as little as possible.
But go ahead. Patent your idea so that others can't use it, explicitly so you don't have to contribute anything for the rest of your life. By all means.
The possibilities for anyone EXCEPT the massive corporations really coming out well with no protections on invention are miniscule. With the funding available to those corporations they can take your idea and have it produced at 1000x the rate and quantity, strongarm distributors and retailers, and saturate the market with a cheaper product.
If you gave away your idea for a software algorithm (the algorithm more than the code itself, mind you, as copyright still applies), it will almost certainly be included in open source projects. There's not a lot of cheaper products than free. Whether or not these are high enough quality to win in the market, who knows, but they'll exist.
So I really don't understand your point at all.
College does not tech the right skills and to many people are going to it who are not college material.
Why are college have lot's of filler classes that are not needed?
Why do people like jobs' who DON't have a college degrees get look down on? Job's did a lot with out the high cost piece of paper (and that was back in the day where less people where going to college)
Does does tech schools get look down on?
Why does tech not have apprenticeships?
Why was the PayPal founder Peter Thiel paying for entrepreneurs to skip college and work on startup's?
Why in CS is there a BIG GAP from what you learn in college and the real job? tech schools have alot more real job skills.
people who are not college material. but can do a tech schools or apprenticeships?
remove health plan for the job so people can go out on there own and come up with ideas.
I realize that many of my arguments have leaned toward a depiction of corporations being evil. That is not my intent, and I do not believe it. I use those arguments more as a means of reversing the argument on those who think the little guy would be better off if they were able to eliminate patent law.
The protections of patents rightly protect all parties. It's not a perfect system by any stretch (often promoting the filing of a patent on the 'who knows, someone might actually want this shit someday' line of thinking). But it's better than no system IMO.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Then let them build such a thing?
Granted above your post it was suggested they get a couple years of patent granted monopoly time... So theoretically this other 'investor' who steals the design must wait for those couple years to go by... But if their really is nothing 'special' about the thing 'invented' that this investor can just toss something together and roll it out, maybe it really wasn't worth a patent...?
Even so just demoing or even explaining a innovative process to someone isn't enough to just let them 'copy' it. So one way or another someone would have to try to make the same thing, spurring more development and providing more funds into the economy.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
A certain segment of the /. population loves to decry government involvement in anything, stating that business, unhindered, would naturally step-in to cure the various evils and ills that the government is so inept at dealing with, and the service would be better, people would be happier, and a modest profit could be made on the side.
Having seen the results of this sort of thinking first hand, I can honestly say that these people are delusional. Of course, I know that I won't ever convince them to change their minds (especially when I insult them), but I feel like typing, so here goes.
I used to be a lab assistant working in a large U.S. university's biomedical research facility. The area I worked was devoted to the keeping, raising, and study of cephalopods. We were the largest such facility in the US and among the top in the world for that type of science. Granted, it is a very specialized field, but the prestige was genuine and we attracted top talent.
Most of our funding came from government grants. The NSF and a few others were our bread and butter even though most of our research was directed toward marketable technologies and techniques. We also sold squid parts to commercial labs. Turns out, squid have a massive axion connecting their eye and the optical lobe of the brain. If humans had a T1 running from our eyes to our brains, squid have an OC-198. We also researched the color changing properties of cephalopod skin, their hydraulic muscle structure, their three heart circulatory system, their corneas and eye lenses (they match ours btw. If you've ever had eye surgery to replace a torn lens, thank a squid), their ink, and their behavior.
To keep all of these critters in one building took a lot of large equipment and a lot of highly skilled people; people that could have made buckets of cash in a commercial setting but chose the lab because we were figuring out thinks like why squid don't get cancer or suffer nearly as many degenerative diseases of the eye. We were trying to figure out why squid and octopuses suffered dementia near the end of their lives and how we could help prevent it. See, once we do that in squid, the way to doing it in people is considerably shorter.
Anyway, all that work took money and that meant begging Uncle Sam for more and more cash which seemed to take more and more paperwork every year. What the government couldn't or wouldn't fund, we supplemented with corporate donations and gifts. The whammy here is that a bunch of biologists who would rather be in 30 feet of water in the Caribbean watching squid fuck are notoriously terrible at convincing others of the need for their research. Still, it had to get done, and done it got. Once you knew the way to fill everything out for the government, it was much easier. They were concerned that you weren't fucking off with the money, that you weren't engaged in monkey torture or feeding rat poison to children, and that you were accounting for every penny. If they were going to give you money, they wanted to know what you did with it. Ok, cool, keep our receipts and stop feeding rat poison to the local children, easily done. The corporate "gifts" and donations were another kettle of squid. They too wanted to know that you weren't fucking off with the money, and wanted it accounted down to the penny, but they were neutral on most ethical subjects. They also wanted to give suggestions. Hey, it would really help out BigCo. if you could figure out a way to reliably and cheaply extract or synthesize cephalotoxin or some tetrodotoxin. In fact, it would help so much that your grant rides on your ability to do so.
And there is the hook. Sure, it is the corporation's money to do as they see fit, but when they step in to "help" they don't want base research, they don't want behavior studies, and they don't give a shit about learning to understand cephalopod communications or the possibility of sentience, they want something that will help their bottom line and they want it right god damn now.
No
This is wrong.
Slavery is cheap labor that you don't care about (you wouldn't give a shit about the quality of life of slaves when you determined your country's average quality of life of), and that doesn't cost the public much (don't need to factor those bodies in when building roads, hospitals, courts, schools, etc., etc.).
This is not wrong. Economics has been called The Dismal Science. A lot of people think it's called that because of all the boring numbers and supply and widgets and demand and aggregate statistics. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Economics was named The Dismal Science by Thomas Carlyle who was in favor of slavery. He got really frustrated by economists who kept publishing papers showing that slavery was economically inefficient. Carlyle wrote an article called Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question in which he advocated slavery as a means of regulating the labor market.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
And when was this? Because companies in the US currently enjoy some of the lowest tax rates in the developed world, and yet, still manage not to invest in community R&D projects.
The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
...
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet.
Result of the second hit on a Google search for "Revolutionary software invention"
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
The true big expense of companies now, is on lobbyists and bribery via telegraphed stock buybacks and insider-trading for politicians. This is why companies are not hiring workers or investing in R&D. The biggest bang for the buck now, is bribing politicians, to print money, to pay wealthy plutocrats, to bribe politicians.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If it's that trivial to reverse engineer is it really worth the patent?
It doesn't have to be trivial; it just has to be cheaper, and it usually is.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
AFAIK that's actually disputed evidence. I don't think we have a clear picture of what actually happened there. What IS clear, however, is that Mark took that concept and ran with it and created something that worked. AFTER it was successful, we have these accusers claiming that because they were in on the idea, that they should get to reap the profits of the EFFORT that Mark put in. A social networking site was NOT even close to an original idea. Even the individual features Facebook had were not original. Facebook worked hard to put together a complete package and market it better than their competitors. The end result is that Facebook became what it is because of work and adaptation, not an idea. Granted, ideas are important, but ideas themselves are only a piece of the puzzle.
Most of the funding is provided by US tax payers in the form of grants to Universities. Drug companies perform a very small fraction of the R&D that goes into the drugs they hold patents on. Universities then sell the patents generated by their students to these drug companies for fractions of the R&D costs to us taxpayers. Drug companies spend most of their budgets on marketing...commercials...sending reps to Doctor Offices to give them samples/tell them about the drugs/push them to use the drug in lieu of other solutions (wife's personal experience).
The backing of patenting an "IDEA" is ludicrous, sorry but there is no other way to describe it.
Do you think that only 1 person had the idea of using a shopping cart icon, or calling their on line store "a Shopping cart" back when the WWW became available to the average consumer? or even back during DARPA when we were dreaming of the WWW?
If you answer "yes", quite frankly you are a moron so please don't read any further. If you answer "no", then why would the USPTO give 1 company a patent for a shopping cart icon, an on-line store, or a name for an idea on a web page? Before you say "but.. but.. but.." it was done, and lawsuits have been flying ever since on the stupid things that they allow to be patented.
Microsoft is now suing B&N over 5 patents, all relate to either: Background downloading, Icons changing based on activity, or status bars and their placements. These are not things that should have ever been patented. It's like GM getting a patent on the wheel, and Ford getting a patent on the gear.
How can anyone think that it's beneficial? I'm baffled, and every person I talk to only likes patents for 2 reasons. 1, it gets their name on one and 2. they can now barter with other people that have patents. It does nothing for innovation and only protects people now a days from other people with patents.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You know, this is a really difficult problem and because everything is part of a larger dynamical system, so often pressure applied anywhere has unexpected results. that said, I'm less interested in punishing foreign products, and far more interested in splinting the break in our economic system. I believe the best thing to to do is applying firm but even pressure on corporations to do what in the end is actually in their own best interest (healthy workforce = healthy consumer = healthy economy = happy corporation), and explain to them openly, all along the way we're all trying to do 'X', because we want to create 'Y', and 'Y' is good for you and me both, so please don't struggle too much.
In the end its a little like being a good parent. You can't be your children's friend. A child will want to eat candy and not their vegetables. This is perfect childhood logic, candy is delicious. Its up to a responsible party (the Parent) to ensure the child does want is good for the child and good for society (grows up to be a good citizen.) For the exact same reason, a corporation (an entity with only one purpose, make profit), needs a responsible external party to make certain it does what's good for it and society. We do this by creating a body of laws and regulations. Just as a parent manages a child by regulating that which is important to the child, a government must regulate that which is important to the corporation, as we already said, that would be profit. If it profits a corporation to be responsible, they will be responsible. Just put the dots close together and point the way and let them figure it out for themselves.
And for the "Objectivists" among us who think there is something magical in the intelligence of the marketplace, I would posit that the average corporation is no brighter intrinsically than a 5 year old child. It will kill itself in the long term for short term profit, it happens every day. I'm somehow fascinated by people who'd never dream of letting an out of control 5 year old run amok, but would never dream of constraining corporate mischief and misbehavior. CAN YOU SAY CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP!!! We are now chewing on the broken dreams of greedy men and women. Its time for our society to grow a pair, and spank the wicked, reward the steadfast, and tell the entire class to be quiet and do as they are told.
You or me in a garage somewhere will never be able to file an acceptable patent, or defend the patent against infringement, or defend our use of the patent against patent trolls.
Better to just get rid of them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There would just be a person, a group or a company that made a lot of money on that innovative idea. From our perspective the differences would be impercetable.
No, there would have been substantial differences. Attempts to make things like web browsers or search engines would have been mired in patents and royalties. The success of the Internet is partly (perhaps primarily) due to the fact that anyone can implement the standard at any time -- you can connect any computer to the Internet, period. There is no lock-in, just a standard that everyone uses and that nobody has to pay for.
Have you noticed how many different audio and video codecs there are? Imagine if there were that many incompatible computer networks and technologies. In the best case, web browsers, search engines, and the systems being built on top of those technologies would have taken many more years to reach prominence while "the market" we all waited for patents to expire. In the more likely case, such things would have never existed; we would be using proprietary, incompatible systems and instead of one web browser we would need a plethora of different browsing programs, each with a different set of restrictions and royalty structures and each incompatible with every other.
Imagine the difficulty of creating a search engine that tried to provide results from across myriad networks, each with patented protocols. It would be so expensive to operate that advertising dollars could never keep it afloat, and that is assuming that the licensing terms even allow licensees to run such an operation. The world's search engines would all be behind paywalls, accessible only to university students and employees of wealthy businesses.
Remember that the Internet was formed by merging several different networks. If the protocols on which the Internet is built had been patented, those networks would not have truly merged; people would have computers that could connect to one or the other of those networks, and would have to pay to access gateways. The biggest advantage of the Internet is that you do not have to worry about which network you are on, and you do not have to pay to send messages across different networks. The networks that comprise the Internet would, in many cases, be incompatible without a common protocol (IP).
Palm trees and 8
I know a guy who works out of his garage (workshop) that owns a dozen patents, 2 of which he has successfully defended. He's got another 7 pending applications.
It's not the most friendly process, but far from unattainable.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
No, we need to go back to the rule that only landowners can vote. Of course, that's a little obsolete these days (lots of upper-middle-class people rent by choice because they're mobile, or live in NYC), so instead, there should be some kind of educational standard to vote, which doesn't discriminate based on race or sex, only educational level (i.e., if you can't understand Darwin's theory, regardless of whether you agree with it, you're too stupid to vote; also, if you don't understand the basic structure of the nation's government, and don't understand that the President doesn't make laws, you have no business voting). Things started really going downhill when any moron on the street could vote, and also when Senators were popularly elected.
I realize that the 'in' thing is to bash "big, bad inefficient" government, but do try to keep up with the times. 30 second search on Wikipedia.
From Wiki
1 NASA spin-off technologies
1.1 Health and medicine
1.1.1 Light-emitting diodes (LEDs)
1.1.2 Infrared ear thermometers
1.1.3 Ventricular assist device
1.1.4 Artificial limbs
1.2 Transportation
1.2.1 Aircraft anti-icing systems
1.2.2 Highway safety
1.2.3 Improved radial tires
1.2.4 Chemical detection
1.3 Public safety
1.3.1 Video enhancing and analysis systems
1.3.2 Fire-resistant reinforcement
1.3.3 Firefighting equipment
1.4 Consumer, home, and recreation
1.4.1 Temper foam
1.4.2 Enriched baby food
1.4.3 Portable cordless vacuums
1.4.4 Freeze drying
1.5 Environmental and agricultural resources
1.5.1 Water purification
1.5.2 Solar energy
1.5.3 Pollution remediation
1.6 Computer technology
1.6.1 Structural analysis software
1.6.2 Remotely controlled ovens
1.6.3 NASA Visualization Explorer
1.7 Industrial productivity
1.7.1 Powdered lubricants
1.7.2 Improved mine safety
1.7.3 Food safety
NASA even publishes a report of its spin-off technologies ( http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/ )
Here is a list from 2010;
NASA Technologies Benefiting Society
Health and Medicine
Burnishing Techniques Strengthen Hip Implants
Signal Processing Methods Monitor Cranial Pressure
Ultraviolet-Blocking Lenses Protect, Enhance Vision
Hyperspectral Systems Increase Imaging Capabilities
Transportation
Programs Model the Future of Air Traffic Management
Tail Rotor Airfoils Stabilize Helicopters, Reduce Noise
Personal Aircraft Point to the Future of Transportation
Ducted Fan Designs Lead to Potential New Vehicles
Winglets Save Billions of Dollars in Fuel Costs
Sensor Systems Collect Critical Aerodynamics Data
Coatings Extend Life of Engines and Infrastructure
Public Safety
Radiometers Optimize Local Weather Prediction
Energy-Efficient Systems Eliminate Icing Danger for UAVs
Rocket-Powered Parachutes Rescue Entire Planes
Technologies Advance UAVs for Science, Military
Inflatable Antennas Support Emergency Communication
Smart Sensors Assess Structural Health
Hand-Held Devices Detect Explosives and Chemical Agents
Terahertz Tools Advance Imaging for Security, Industry
Consumer, Home, and Recreation
LED Systems Target Plant Growth
Aeroge
Slavery is cheap labor that you don't care about (you wouldn't give a shit about the quality of life of slaves when you determined your country's average quality of life of)
First of all, this doesn't parse.
But if you're trying to say that slave owners don't care about the quality of life of their slaves, that's wrong too. Back in the days of slavery, it was normal for owners to take rather good care of their slaves, and buy decent (but practical) clothes for them. First of all, slaves were really expensive back then. $800 for a slave was a lot of money in 1800. Cheaper than paying a white person to be your full-time live-in servant, yes, but still expensive. Second, just like now, people always wanted to show off to their neighbors how much money they had, so they didn't let their slaves (esp. the domestic ones) run around in torn-up clothes, because when their neighbors visited, this would look bad. Slaves were considered possessions (obviously), but along with that came a certain amount of care, just like anyone would want to take good care of some expensive item they purchased (car, etc.) instead of neglecting it.
Now obviously, they didn't worry much about the slaves' mental well-being, if they felt fulfilled with their job, whether they were depressed, etc. But it's not like they gave them rags to wear and starved them to death (except perhaps for a few especially cruel and stupid owners--slaves in poor health aren't going to be very productive workers).
The only economic argument against slavery is that the cheap labor prevents people from inventing faster, easier, and more efficient ways of doing things.
The other economic argument is that it can greatly reduce employment for your lower classes in your normal population; it's a bit like outsourcing. If those lower classes can find other work to do (that's more profitable than picking crops), then it works out OK, but if not, you end up with a bad economy and discontent. From what I've read, the economy in the South before the Civil War wasn't very good, and part of the reason for the war was that their economy was on the verge of collapse anyway. There were tons of poor people who had little work because the slaves did the menial work, and there was no industrialization to employ the poor white people like in the North. But of course the rich people got the poor people to blame the North for their problems instead of their own leaders at home.
How come this isn't modded WAY up?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I think you're missing the point. If I'm going to get the same salary, why should I put in any extra effort to file patents or come up with better (patentable) ideas, rather than just doing the minimum to retain my paycheck? Or if I do have a brilliant idea, why should I give it to my company, instead of just sitting on it, quitting work, and patenting it myself after a couple of years? Or why should I not just sit on it and not tell anyone, since my company's only going to give me $500 for it, and only after going to a LOT of extra work (writing it up, dealing with the patent attorneys, etc.)? If my company were going to give me a 15% cut of any profits generated by the patent, then that would be incentive to come up with more patentable ideas; but companies don't do that, they just give you a crappy flat fee and expect you to do all the filing work on your own time. So why bother?
Here's another example for you: Ebay. There's nothing patentable there (if there are any patents, they're stupid Amazon-one-click type patents, not worthy patents). But Ebay isn't successful because of any great technology running on their servers, it's just that they were the first and now biggest. Lots of people have made Ebay clones, with very little success in taking marketshare away from Ebay (unfortunately).
It's the same with Facebook. You could make a site exactly like it if you wanted, but that's not going to bring in lots of users. Everyone's on Facebook, because all their friends are on Facebook. The only time people use the alternative sites is because either 1) they don't mind having social networking accounts on lots of different sites at once (meaning they have too much time on their hands), or 2) they hate Facebook (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you're the only one of your friends who refuses to use Facebook, you can't expect them all to create an account on the alternative site just to talk to you).
Probably because a real job in CS isn't what you (or a lot of CS graduates) think it is. CS is not a different way of saying Software Engineering. CS is about how computing works and more efficient ways to do it (like improving the algorithmic efficiency of sorting), not about how to efficiently and effectively produce 1 000 000 lines of code dedicated to special case X (e.g. flying a plane). Some fields are like that, there's a difference between being a physicist (perhaps a mathematician might be more accurate even in some contexts) and an engineer too.
The larger companies do not appear to invest in R&D because they do not do most of their R&D directly. Again, their investment in R&D happens through investment in R&D start ups (think medical research companies with market caps of 100M or less) and then buying them out when the smaller companies' products get regulatory approvals. This doesn't show up as R&D in the budgets of the S&P 500. It shows up as M&A. But it does amount to channeling money in the R&D direction. The direct R&D investment was higher before the 90s (when the tax rate was higher). I am not sure what's a "community" R&D project. Just keep in mind, that a large portion of the money that is received through the buy outs ends up sponsoring further start ups (so the R&D reinvestment cycle continues).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If you are filing a patent as part of your job then the "extra effort" becomes part of your duties doesn't it? As with anything your boss asks you to do, you need to allocate and schedule the time to do it. Why would anyone, employee or employer, expect this to be done on the filer's personal time? Does the scenario you are raging at actually exist?
Friend, its not dwindling salaries. Its NO SALARIES. In 1970 99% of the clothing Americans wore was made in the United States. Today 99% is made out of country. The clothing industrial for all intents and purposes has been eliminated from this country. So go right ahead, tell the American worker "Y'all have to live on 35% of your highest point wage and not only is your child not going to college, you'd better like the car you have because you're driving it till the wheels fall off, oh, and you need to sell the house and move into a 2 bedroom apartment because you sure as Jebus made little green apples aren't going to be able to afford the tax, insurance and maintenance." How fast do you think the rioting will start? How about we come up with a new product made from starving babies, nip the poor right in the bud as it were. We'll call it SoylentAC.
Now tell American workers "Guys, the world's economy is flattening out so for maybe 5 to 10 years, all the jobs are leaving the country. Don't worry, when the working wage of an American is the same as for a Somali street person, all the jobs will be back and you too can work 16 hours a day for all the gruel you can choke down. Actually it won't be that bad, because with 5 to 10 years of no income, most of you will be dead anyway, so with only a handful of workers left there'll be plenty of work to go around." Explain to me how any part of that is in any way acceptable.
You throw that comment off pretty glibly Mr. AC. What makes you think you won't be one the folks that starves on the street when there are ten guys in other countries happy to do your job for less than you can live on.
I am in business for myself and, depending on the industry, 2 years is enough time. Certainly if something can be trivially reverse engineered, as in the parents point, then 2 years is typically more than enough to bring that idea to market. I only used Dyson as an off the top of my head example so apologies if I made some assumptions.
But your own post kind of validates my point - Dyson has been hugely successful despite not having a patent stopping competitors from copying, despite taking many more than 2 years to bring the product to market, despite it taking many more than 2 years to catch on and take off, despite it being a new application of an old idea, and they have been competing using innovation again despite not having that blanket patent.
So quite by accident I guess this is a perfect example of where not having a patent hasn't held back an innovative company that makes products people want at a quality and price point that people are happy with.
Not to put too fine a point on it, It was immigrant Irish who cleaned up the swamps surrounding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, because nobody would consider using an expensive slave to do what was considered effectively a suicide job. The Irish who arrived fresh from the potato famines were considered less than human. They were used for all kinds of jobs ranging from clearing disease infested swamps to military cannon fodder. Any place where you wanted a steady supply of disposable human beings. Same with the Chinese building the railroad from the west. Slave were valuable. Immigrants, not so much.
Why should someone who just happened to patent some obvious idea be able to stop others who could be better able at implementing the idea?
It's too hard for the patent office to determine "nonobvious". It's much easier for them to just issue a patent and let the courts deal with it. The cost/punishment for filing obvious patents is not high enough to discourage a typical corporation - so they can just try different variations till they get what they want.
From what I see patents reward trolls and "one clicks" more than genuine innovators, and they slow down innovation more than encourage it.
The problem I see with your arguments is that you're basically arguing against the present-day patent system, not the way the patent system is supposed to be. After all, the law was "not obvious to a practitioner of the arts"; of course, just like the 4th Amendment, that law is simply being ignored by the government. Obviously, our present patent system is broken, and we'd be better off with no patents at all than what we have now. The question, however, is: would it be better to have no patents, or have a good system where obvious patents are actually thrown out, and the punishment for filing bad patents is very high? I don't know the answer to that, but I don't believe your assertion that it's "too hard" for the USPTO to determine obviousness. They just don't bother, since they get more money by collecting fees for awarding patents, and not for throwing them out.
Community R&D is funding provided through grants or gifts to non-corporately owned research groups, typically through universities or independent labs that get most of their funding through government programs (usually the National Science Foundation) and make up the short falls with funds from corporate donations foundations.
The work that comes out of these labs is usually publicly announced or contains research that would be difficult to capitalize but still has value as a starting point for further research.
I think we may be talking at cross purposes here. I understood the article to be more about the public side or perhaps even something like DARPA rather than purely corporate R&D efforts.
As an example, the Ford Motor Company has a pool of money reserved for a number of yearly grants and gifts for scientific research every year. This money is outside of their normal R&D efforts which are paid for by regular budgeting processes. Much like a company will make matching contributions to the United Way or other charity, Ford has supported a lot of independent research that has nothing to do with the automotive industry. Over the years though, that pool of money has shrunk, as have the pools normally available from other companies and foundations.
At the same time, the money the government invests in independent research has also shrunk, putting a huge squeeze on labs and scientists across the country.
Oh, and my apologies, after re-reading your original comment I realized that my response seems sort of bizarre. I think I skimmed too much and didn't really get the meat of what you were saying.
You've just answered your own question, haven't you? If all the competitors (aka not at the top) have an interest in ignoring them, then the top nation is competing with one hand tied behind its metaphorical back. That may be ok provided it's winning, but otherwise it's suboptimal.
Hell yes, and while we're at it stop women voting. They may get dumb ideas like running for president if we don't nip all this political correctness in the bud.
Why is the parent marked as "troll" when it should be marked as "sarcasm" or "funny"?
If you are filing a patent as part of your job then the "extra effort" becomes part of your duties doesn't it?
Nope. Not many employees have the job title "patent filer". Usually, they're doing something else in the realm of engineering, and they come up with some improved method to do something, and that turns into a patent filing. Their normal job is NOT to file patents, it's to do their normal job, such as RTL design, or whatever. That's the job that their time has been budgeted for.
As with anything your boss asks you to do, you need to allocate and schedule the time to do it.
Not if you don't tell the boss, "hey boss! I came up with this great new method to do X, and I think we should file a patent on it!!". Instead, if you say, "yes, I came up with an improved method to do X, which should save up a little time." and the boss asks, "do you think we should file a patent on it", and you reply after thinking "the last thing I need right now is more work piled on me!", "Sorry boss, I don't think so. I think it would fail the non-obvious test and in my professional opinion it's not patent-worthy.", then he's much less likely to push the issue.
Why would anyone, employee or employer, expect this to be done on the filer's personal time?
Because filing a patent takes a lot of extra time, and as I said before, the employee who invents something (to scratch an itch so to speak, to make their regular job easier) still has to do his normal job. You think they're going to push back all their schedules just so the employee can meet with the patent lawyer and go through draft after draft of his patent filing? No, they're going to ask you to do what you have to do to meet the schedule and also get the patent filed. "Yeah, I'm going to need you to come in on Sunday too..."
Sorry, I've spent too many years in corporate environments and have seen how it works. There's no big reward for filing patents, other than the "prestige" of having it on your resume (whoopee) and maybe a $500 or $1000 cash award, and the idea that management will rearrange a project's schedule just so an employee can file a patent is naive at best.
Universities and other publicly-funded research institutions perform basic research for the most part. We study disease X, and find targets Y and Z that might be exploited for drug discovery by pharmaceutical companies. Starting about 10 years ago, a few of the largest universities started small high-throughput screening labs where university researchers could learn how to do some of the screening work done in the private sector. I've used one such facility at the University of Wisconsin. However the number of compounds available for screening is at least an order of magnitude smaller than what is available to pharmaceutical companies. More important than the number of compounds available for testing is the funds to do it. Pharma has it, academia doesn't.
Even in the rare cases where the universities do come up with something that shows efficacy, that doesn't necessarily make it a good compound. How well does it inhibit? How easy is it to make? How stable is it? How soluble is it? What else does the compound inhibit? Does it show undesirable side effects? How easy is it to formulate? Modification of lead compounds is pretty much the middle third of drug discovery, and can take three years or more. Some universities have medicinal chemists, but at least in my experience they do not have time, interest (running their own labs they've naturally got their own projects and interests), personnel, or funds to take a compound discovered at a different lab and work it over for a few years. Even if they did, no university has the funds to get a compound through clinical trials.
Biotech and pharmaceuticals companies fund all the phase I, II, and III clinical trials. The amount of time and money spent on compound modification by biotech and pharma dwarfs the universities, to put it mildly. The same is true for the time and money spent on screening chemical libraries and preclinical trials. Biotech and pharma also have involvement in the very earliest stage of target identification and verification. Universities are important in the drug discovery process. They provide some of the targets, do the vast majority of the basic research needed before you can even tease out a target, and provide all of the early (BS/MS/PhD) and most of the middle (postdoctoral) training of the personnel that biotech and pharma need. But for the majority of drug or drug candidate the bulk of the time and money spent is from biotech and pharmaceuticals companies, not the universities.
"Explain to me how that fosters innovation. "
Because it causes deflation -- everything is cheaper, which makes it easier to live on less and have more free time for innovation.
After hundreds of years of innovation, we've now reached the point where most human labor is spent on "guarding", not "production".
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" by Dan Pink
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
And on how Bill Gates learned to program in part from dumpster diving to read other people's code:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
People like Eric von Hippel at MIT have written about how about 80% or so of innovation comes from customers, anyway...
What we really need is a "basic income" so anyone who wants to focus on innovating and giving away the results without enforcing "artificial scarcity" can afford to do so.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It is stupid to measure trade in scientific/engineering goods and say the US is losing its edge.
The key is scientific/engineering intellectual property - where are things designed rather than manufactured. The IP for the iPhone was developed in the US, and Apple reaps most of the profits from iPhone sales, despite manufacturing none of it.
Google is headquartered in the US, and most of its profit come from ideas hatched in the US. Microsoft and Intel as well.
Of course all of these US-headquartered companies also have operations outside the US, but then foreign-headquartered multinationals (Sony, ARM, etc.) also have US operations as well.
I will admit that a lot of consumer electronics design is being done in Japan (and increasingly Korea) and that the US is pretty far behind them.
And also we have a crazy amount of people doing non-STEM majors in college, often on loans that will never be repaid because they either won't get a paying job in their field of interpretive dance or if they do get a job it won't pay much.
1. Replace Government Research Funding With PDF's Posted Online
2. Use cool, hip lingo like "call to arms" to be cool like Warcraft
3. Make sure ad for CIA Intelligence Degree appears on discussion of said PDF
4. Make people pay you (tuition) to steal their ideas in college !!!
5. Profit* !!!
6. Use profits to control the world's oil !!!
*No profits are actually made in this sequence, just more national debt
I agree like most of the people here (assuming that the comments I read account for most of the people) that patents are a bad idea. (That makes me think, I should patent "patents" or the act of making one)
Anyway, maybe a different system to patents could allow the original creator/inventor to get credit for their works instead. Rather than having a patent which creates a legal bind and lawsuits, have simply a place where the name and ideas/diagrams/notes of the idea is stored. This idea being, make it just general attribution of an idea when you use it.
Example: If Person A invented the Wheel, Person B invented the Car which uses Person A's Wheel. Person B gives credit to Person A for inventing the Wheel. This could go on to a Person C who invents a Bus. Person C gives credit to Person B for the general idea and Person A for the Wheel.
This example is pretty crap though it could work. Simply giving credit to the original creator of the idea when you use it may work. If you had a business that invented something awesome, do you really think the competition would really want to say that the idea for the technology came from you? It isn't a rock solid idea by any means however maybe this needs to be looked at from a more licensing situation (ie. GPL, Public Domain, CC etc). While ideas can one way or another be free, building upon ideas needs to credit the right people.
Patents aren't a bad idea but they should be non-transferrable and any patent for which no product is sold should be null and void within a year or two. Using litigation as your sole business model should be outlawed as well. And patent examiners should be able to examine a working prototype in detail with an industry expert before granting the patent.
Software patents as a whole are evil and need to be abolished. Most of the world doesn't respect them anyway and there's too many of them covering very basic expected functionality in software applications. You shouldn't be able to patent numbers or a list of instructions. That's why we have copyright.
Tell that to BMW, BioWare and Ubisoft montreal, Airbus, Volkswagon, GM etc. All those game companies who set up shop in texas with local grants (notably in austin), and so on.
You don't see the long term benefit of japanese investments in computing? Remember floppy disks? How about RAM, lots of that stuff was Japan first in innovation. Innovation doesn't necessarily completely change the paradigm of how technology is used, it can be incremental and still be hugely valuable.
And then there's the whole internet. No, that wasn't useful to have been a government sponsored programme at all was it?
Even in the solar arena, the problem they have in the UK with subsidies for power from solar panels being subsidized at some ridiculous rate, is that the cost of solar is dropping so fast that the subsidies are basically free money, and they can't afford the programme. It was too successful. Who's making those innovations? The US.
And yes, american investments in solar have been enormously successful. You've increased solar generation by a factor of 5 in 4 years, brought the cost down by about that same factor per KW/h. Sure, on the scale of total US power generation it's still a drop in the bucket, but when you add a drop to a bucket, you're only going to get a drop. The way I do the math you're looking at doubling that capacity again in the next 3 or 4 years, if not more than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States).
Part of the thrust of the topic is that investment in the US has been inadequate. If I hire you to write a game engine for me, but I only offer you 500 bucks to do it, well guess what, it's going to be bad. The US can (not necessarily will) do a lot of things differently, and could throw a lot more money at the problem. How much is the 'right' amount I have no idea though.
American innovation is faltering! This is a call to arms!
1) Lower taxes on the rich
2) De-regulate corporations
3) Extend copyright
Whew! Problem solved!
I have to disagree most of this.
First, spending 1k on a patent is not realistic, not if you want it to stand. I've done this and seen it done. Try 40k with a lawyer to shepherd it through the entire process.
Next, the idea that a big team will just copy your innovation and wipe you out is just not an accurate picture of reality for a lot of reasons.
One is a team has its own confusions and pitfalls and no team escapes them. So rather than quickly copying you, actually, they'll be slow as this and that waits for approval and people fight and miscommunicate and priorities and funding changes and oh ...the meetings.
Then there's the fact that a knock off is never as good as the visionary's original. The reasons knock offs prevail in the physical world is because the overhead of manufacturing an original is about the same or even more than a knock off, so the visionary has no price advantage and perhaps a price disadvantage if the visionary expects to be compensated for her vision.
This is just the opposite in software where the marginal cost of producing another widget is effectively nil. Now the one with the overhead is the Microsoft with the fat overpaid hierarchy and the big team and the big building and the Congressional lobbying costs etc. etc.
finally visionaries continue to have vision. They are like artists and their products are cohesive and focused and consistent and intuitive in ways that Big Team in Big Companies have a hard time emulating long term.
Look at IntelliJ vs IBM or vs Borland or vs Oracle's offerings. It's all the same feature set on paper, but people love IntelliJ and willing pay for it in a world of free (their recent foray into open source notwithstanding) .
Why? Because it possesses that certain something ,that fine craftsmanship and quality that people who make their living writing code recognize and value.
In a certain sense, Apple is the same thing. Sure, they're up to the gills in patents now, but back in the day, before there was widespread patenting, they were the visionary product. People loved them and paid more for Apple computers. They had the manufacturing overhead problem- they weren't purely software- so they were more expensive and MS / IBM clones took market share, but even then they kept alive.
When Jobs came back, he had a vision and implemented it (or assembled a vision from his talented employees' separate visions and then took credit ) but anyway they competed on the basis of a unified vision. This is not what MS is or ever was.
You don't need patents to exist and do well in a competitive software environment. Patents definitely favor the big players since they're the only ones who can survive a patent fight . The only way to patent and make money in software without a few million already in the bank to back you up in an eastern district of Texas courtroom is if you exist as a patent troll- all lawsuit, no product.
Software developers today exist as serfs - at the pleasure of large or not so large companies who at any time can crush you completely. This isn't always at the forefront of their minds, but there's no good reason it shouldn't be.
I know of a more than a few software companies who quietly don't sell into the US markets anymore for just this reason. You can die at any moment for reasons that have nothing to do with legitimate competition. Who wants to spend ten years of their lives writing some genius piece of software only to be destroyed in a day by a knock at the door? That's the definition of anti-motivation- sudden death through lawyer. It plaques everyone I know who is thinking about starting a company.Mark Cuban recently said that every start up he knows is being sued by someone. This is the opposite of incentive to innovate and the opposite of value-based competition.
And the legislators know it. Sens. Kyl (AZ) and Schumer (NY) recently passed the most cynical bill
"Just for starters, if you proclaimed that a Z80 with a stripe on it was the most awesome thing ever, anyone who actually knows what a Z80 and carse what it does is would laugh at you, and they'd be right."
But what about an all white casing where the user cannot change the battery? Slam dunk, right?
That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wrong. They didn't cover ideas at all. The belief that they do (or should) is half the problem with the current system [see below].
What is a design patent? Or rather, what do you think it is? I don't see a problem with them myself, properly applied.
Please learn the difference between an idea and an invention. How could you possibly reverse engineer pattern of neurons? In any case, if I've even seen the device in action, it's not really a true cleanroom implementation, is it?
Agreed, that'd solve the other half of the problem [see above].
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So why bother inventing anything if all you can do is break even?
Actually, that's not all you can do. Breaking even would be the best you can do. Who's going to cover the losses for the inventions that don't work out? The taxpayer? You?
What's that even supposed to mean?
If I employ ten people to do a job that three could do, is that real? I don't have much of an incentive to be more efficient, do I - anything I gain will be taken away.
Essentially, you're proposing to legislate profit margins. This may sound noble, but it's another way of saying "cost plus". A lot of defense projects work on that basis. A lot of them go way over budget. Go figure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You or me in a garage somewhere will never be able to defend our patent anyway. Whatever we've discovered will be covered by one of IBM's or Microsoft's overly broad patents, and they'll sue us into bankruptcy.
You have this backwards. What happens is that big useless companies waste millions on small trivialities, and then somehow believe they have the right to harass everybody else who came up with the same thing in an evening. Well, currenlty, the law says that they have the right, and that is a problem.
And some companies spend a lot of money patenting everything they can in a given field, and then drop it in a whim of management. Now nobody can do anything in that field for twenty years.
You are also completely missing the point (also made by others here) that actually making a competitive product is the hard and expensive part, in particular for software.
Before pulling out the hanky for drying your tears, please pull out your head from wherever you have it and realize that except for a very small group of crazy people nobody is calling for the death of IP.
Oddly enough, *all* the valedictorians in my high school class were Koreans. IMO, there were sharper people in the school, but the Koreans were very meticulous about getting the A's. I don't see meticulous being the path to Nobel prizes or business glory.
Please accept my humblest apology for those who are in pain, and in their pain may be less than gracious to you and yours. There have always been immigrants to this country. For the most part, their arrival was met by anger and frustration at those whose jobs were impacted by their arrival. Its a normal thing here. Sadly that puts you at the bottom of the Schist List. Worse, you aren't taking low paying minimum wage service jobs, you're hitting us at the upper middle class region and for the first time people who normally never see the threat you impose, feel seriously put upon.
We have for generations been told by our political representatives that we have, if not the right, at least the expectation of good work available for all. Your coming here threatens this. You can't compare life here with life in India. We for the longest time were a nation with a low population density and a high natural resource level. That meant that anyone with even the slightest intent, a functioning frontal lobe and a smattering of gumption could fully expect to thrive and if lucky even become wealthy. By opening our economic borders to the world, our wealth has exploded out and the world's people have exploded in. The effect is to quickly make America a second and potentially a third world nation in what amounts to record time. We used to keep a very high economic wall around us to artificially maintain our standards of living. Of course that came at the price of keeping poorer nations poor.
You might want to have a little compassion for people being pinched in the adjustment. I don't blame you for wanting a better life. Some will. I blame short sighted, greedy men who have no vision and think that human beings are an interchangeable commodity. Since 1980 our way of life has been hijacked by blind corporate interest. Its been a slow motion car wreck for our environment, our middle class, and the body of laws and distinctions that form our system of civil rights. Business people simply can't distinguish an American engineer from an Indian engineer, its all head count to them. From my experience of Indian engineers, most of you are extremely well trained and at the top of your classes. However, to get there you often have a rather narrow technological focus (because that is what the market is looking for) and in the process of getting there you often neglect the kind of broader education that would provide you with the kind of fun, inventive and creative skills that I find so prevalent in American engineers. This makes Indian engineers a bit more rigid, less adaptable and less figurative in their undertakings. For a tenth run on a legacy product that's wonderful. For a first run at a start-up that's a disaster. The start-up doesn't need product X,00000000.000000. It needs product X +/- 4. You then dance with change as your customers tell you what they really want. This is the frustration you hear in the parent responses comment. Its often hard for artists to play with accountants and at their best, America's scientists and engineers have artistic souls.
So there is a place here for you and your son. You just want to notice for whom the bell tolls, because you best of all should know the benefits and dangers of the Karmic Wheel... those it raises today, it rolls over tomorrow. In the end if we feel entitled, its because for the longest time, our government was interested in protecting our working class, and we were entitled. Just as your government is now doing, so you should be very careful about who you are judging because once our economies reach parity, you may live to regret the very words you speak. And if your son grows up in this culture, who knows, you may find yourself with a rapper and not an engineer.
The only problem is...that leaves you with a system where the people that get elected then get to decide/influence who gets to vote the next time around.
Not to mention that there is a whole lot of people out there who may be frightfully stupid, but they work hard, pay their taxes, don't cause trouble for anyone and just want to live their lives. I guess you're suggesting that as they lose their representation, so too goes their taxation?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
You can tell other people (and companies are groups of people) what they should do when it's your money they're spending.
Ehmm, newsflash, that *IS* my money. IP law is just that, a set of laws. Written by public servants, upheld by public servants, judged by public servants. And if We, the People decide the law should be different, then it has to change. That might get us into a boatload of trouble with other countries and make it impossible to do business in ours, but it should still be our decision to make.
As voting members of a democracy, we can decide it is worthwhile to give inventors/creators an extra incentive, and we can just as well decide that it is doing more harm than good, and needs to be changed or abolished.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
The only problem is...that leaves you with a system where the people that get elected then get to decide/influence who gets to vote the next time around.
Um, how is that different from any other system? Lots of people complain about our first-past-the-post voting system, but the only people with the power to change it are our elected representatives, and of course they're not too interested in doing so since that would probably keep them from being re-elected. We see the same thing when they decide voting districts, it's called "gerrymandering".
Not to mention that there is a whole lot of people out there who may be frightfully stupid, but they work hard, pay their taxes, don't cause trouble for anyone and just want to live their lives. I guess you're suggesting that as they lose their representation, so too goes their taxation?
By letting them vote, we're getting the results we see now: candidates elected based on popularity, dumb voters who think "he says he'll protect us from all those terrorists that hate us for our freedom!", etc. Would you let 8-year-old children elect your leaders? Of course not, so why do we allow people who have the reasoning capacity of children to elect leaders?
"I just don't think your example provides any support for your claim"
Think twice. You already accepted patents are a problem for those not at the top, do you?
But that's as valid for any company as it's for countries: they are only good if you are already a big fish.
Now, do you really thing the way to promote innovation is by means of tools that favor the old statu quo farts the most?
Patents have two components, spreading risk, and creating profits. The first is necessary to foster innovation, the 2nd should be a very small priority. Here's why. If we're going to do the hypocritical hand wringing that usually benefits rich people, then we should also worry about risk minimization for small inventors. What does lowering risk for small entrepeneurs look like? Here's what stops me from starting a software company (not patents, that's for sure):
1. If I fail, I won't be able to afford health insurance, which given my health problems, isn't acceptable
2. I I fail, being a person of modest means, means I may not be able to afford basic necessities (food, shelter, etc.)
3. I I fail, unlike a corporation, I have very little bankruptcy protection. I can't discharge my personal debts (which is the majority of debt for small entrepeneurs), and as a result I could lose everything I own. Contrast that with large corporations where risk is neatly partitioned into the business, and the wealthy investor can easily live off their considerable wealth while waiting for another opportunity
4. I I succeed, I have much greater risk due to limited resources.
Given that the above applies to 99% of us, the best way to foster innovation and competition is to remove the above barriers to competition by creating a system that absorbs risks for small entrepeneurs, who need it most.
In terms of absorbing R&D risk, there a couple of things to keep in mind. First, many IP based businesses don't do much R&D. Quite a bit of drug research is paid for by government, and then given to corporations using technology transfer, so why worry about protecting leaches? Second, patents do little to protect individual risks, and do quite a bit more to ensure outsized gains for the patents that do succeed. This tends to reward (rich) people who can afford to get a bunch of patents and see which ones work. This isn't a hard problem to solve, it's just that patents aren't about fostering innovation, so they've been kept in a state that achieves their primary purpose, rewarding extremely wealthy people.
What's a good system look like?
1. Risk is spread to all companies that use a patent
2. Companies are forced to license patents at a reasonable cost to competitors. Squeezing out competition through patents shouldn't be allowed.
3. Licensees of said patent would have their total licensing fees limited to 20% of operating costs until all R&D for patents is paid for.
4. Once R&D is paid for, patents become public domain.
5. A small amount of extra profit off a patent may be allowed before letting it expire, but this should be limited to a reasonable percentage of R&D cost, not unlimited as it currently is.
6. Companies that are very small may be allowed an exemption from the patent tax, or given a break while they get set up.
7. Companies that are significantly larger than competitors may be barred from patenting items.
8. Technology transfer from public to private domain should only happen if companies that use it are willing to pay the above 20% licensing fee until costs are covered. No more free rides on publicly funded research.
How does a company make a profit? First, competitors are going to have an extra 20% overhead, so the original company can probably sell for a lower cost in the beginning. Trade secrets and greater experience would also allow them to sell goods for a lower cost. Beyond paying operating costs, how much profit does a company need? Operational costs pay the the salaries of true innovators so massive profits aren't required. Second, the patent system shouldn't concern itself with whether or not the creator can buy a yacht. This is a publicly created system, and while we should help with risk, it's not our job to make people rich.
The next, untapped area of innovation involves workplace efficiency gains. Those gains should be at minimum split between workers and companies. Regulations should be put on salary reduction in the event of efficiency gains, so that everyone benefits.
I agree. The people granting patents are fucking morons. That's precisely why I said that there is a grey area between everything and nothing.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
2 years is typically more than enough to bring that idea to market
Yeah, but that's not what you said. You said, "That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market." Bringing that idea to market is only the beginning. Recouping your R&D costs, and successfully competing against entrenched multinational corporations, after entering the market is the difficult part to do in two years.
Dyson has been hugely successful despite not having a patent stopping competitors from copying
Oh, no -- he has many patents stopping competitors from copying his products -- in fact, he won US$5 million from Hoover in a patent infringement case. The point is, his patents have forced his competitors to innovate, and produce different products, that do not read on his patents, thereby giving consumers more choice, and improving the state of the art.
...so instead, there should be some kind of educational standard to vote, which doesn't discriminate based on race or sex, only educational level...
Why stop there? If education is used as a metric to qualify (or disenfranchise) voters, then require basic education limits to serve in a jury. What's next? Maybe a certain education level needs to be attained to drive. Or to use the internet. When does it stop? You have to be a college grad to own a company? Or land?
Honestly, I once pondered that having certain education levels to access certain parts of society might be a good way to solve some problems. That was a brief thought. Some college dropouts went on to be the richest and most-influential people in the world. Limiting peoples' access to parts of the Constitution is something that the 1% does to the rest --Not what the 99% suggests be done to the very same 99%. Creating new social barriers and issues within the 99%, by the 99%, is something that probably makes the top power brokers squeal in delight.
I've come to believe that the real problem is education; specifically, the lack of a good, general education within the American populace. We need a massive reeducation project. Although, considering how school boards make it so difficult for teachers to actually teach, or the bureaucracy-riddled DOEdu and their one-size-fits-all standardization, or the ever-lowering funds actually dedicated to the act of teaching, it would appear that no one really wants an educated populace.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Why stop there? If education is used as a metric to qualify (or disenfranchise) voters, then require basic education limits to serve in a jury.
Given the horrendously stupid decisions we see from juries these days, that's a good idea.
Maybe a certain education level needs to be attained to drive.
Also a very good idea, since so many drivers are so dangerous, resulting in thousands of needless deaths every year. We're supposed to have a licensing system so that drivers have to get instruction (aka "education") in driving techniques, and then testing, in order to get the license, but something's not working there.
Similarly, if you want to be a pilot, you have to pay a LOT of money and get a lot of instruction, and then go through rigorous testing, in order to get a pilot's license (and higher-rated licenses, like ones allowing you to fly for money or transport passengers, are even harder and more expensive).
Why would you want some uneducated fool piloting an aircraft or operating a piece of heavy machinery?
Now, some moron will probably jump in here and try to argue that training != education, and that's horseshit. Training is just a highly-focused form of education, but it generally relies on the student having a certain amount of background education. You can't go to pilot school without being able to read and write, do a certain amount of math, understand certain concepts about science, etc. When you're "training" to be a pilot, you learn a lot of things about aerodynamics that other people don't normally learn, unless they take college courses in aerodynamics; that's not simply "training" (as in learning how to operate the controls), that's education. Even in much more direct training, there's basic assumptions of education present, namely basic literacy which you only get through a general education.
When does it stop?
It doesn't. Letting incompetent, uneducated people do dangerous things and make important decisions leads to death and destruction. Letting some illiterate yahoo jump in an airplane and fly it will lead to him crashing it, killing himself and anyone else that happens to be in the way. It's the same with sitting on juries and voting. Stupid people sitting on juries leads to innocent people being imprisoned for decades or executed. Stupid people voting leads to a corrupt government and destruction of society.
Some college dropouts went on to be the richest and most-influential people in the world.
News flash: college dropouts are "educated", just not quite as much as the ones who stayed long enough to complete their degree. What the hell do you think they were doing from grades K-12? If they weren't goofing off, and were in a decent school, they were being educated. Then they received even more education in their first couple years of college. As a college grad myself, I think I got far more education in my first two years there than my last 2 years; the last two years was extremely focused on my major, whereas the first two years was much more broad-based, including humanities electives, English comp, freshman chemistry, physics, etc. I rarely think about anything I learned in the last two years, but the stuff I learned in the first two years has been useful for all kinds of different things. I could have easily quit after 2-3 years and still been just as successful in what I've done after college, if employers didn't care about me actually having the degree.
Limiting peoples' access to parts of the Constitution is something that the 1% does to the rest
No one's proposing limiting anyone's "access to the Constitution" be limited, just that they not be allowed to choose our leaders if they're Jerry Springer guests. Indeed, (in theory) the Constitution applies to everyone on US soil, including voting citizens, illegal aliens, foreign visitors, etc. The 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech isn't limited to US citizens, it applies everywhere where the US government has autho