Here's a standard that would help fix the kind of behavior which, as you point out, does the opposite of the founding fathers' intention with patents.
When you show up with your idea that you think deserves protection, the patent examiner's first duty is to look at what evidence you provide that this idea has been economically feasible for 20 years, and no one has done it yet.
If it has been feasible for 20 years, then there is a market that could support it, and there are big players in that market, and the lone inventor knows that the minute he puts the idea out there, one of the established players will swoop in, copy it, and laugh at the inventor. The inventor, knowing this, just doesn't bother making it because going through all that work to have someone else come in and cash in on it doesn't make sense (not to most people, I mean).
We know the idea is clever and/or hard to come up with because no one has come up with it for 20 years, even though it has been feasible all this time.
Take the Chip Clip (a wide spring clip used for holding plastic bags of snacks closed after they have been opened to keep the remainder fresh). I have no idea whether it was patented or not, but it deserved patent protection, in my opinion, because it was clear that it had been within the ability of humans to make such a clip 20 years previous. Just no one did it. So we say "ok, it was feasible for 20 years, no one did it, you can have a monopoly on it for the next 20" or whatever the term is.
Now, Amazon's one-click--they just look at that and laugh, and say "sorry buddy, come back and tell us something interesting when the web has been around for 20 years, kthxbye."
3D modeling and video editing done right are VERY HARD AND TEDIOUS WORK, they require good spatial awareness and taste, and they contribute very little to one's knowledge. Done poorly they are much worse than painting, drawing or music done poorly, so they are deep in the area with diminishing returns when it comes to general education.
Mathematics done right is extremely exacting. It resembles what is done in school not one iota, except possibly the proofs done in geometry. 3D modeling and video editing at the professional level are, indeed, way beyond the range of the average student. So is what a professional mathematician does. Completely outside the realm of possibility for all but the most prodigious students. That doesn't matter. The point is that kids will learn what they are interested in learning, and they will not learn what they are not interested in learning. They may regurgitate it, temporarily cram it in, whatever, but by and large it's a waste of time.
If you have cool projects for kids to do that interest them, they will learn. It doesn't have to be professional level. It just has to be, as some people put it, "hard fun". That's the sweet spot for education. Interesting and challenging but doable.
3d modeling and video editing do belong in classrooms.
They belong in an art or trade school, kids have more widely applicable things to study -- like math, sciences, engineering, literature, etc.
No, we should do as much interesting stuff as early as possible. If you force kids to 'learn' what you term "widely applicable" (but, to them, pointless and boring) things like algebra, it fails. They don't really learn algebra. The only kids who learn algebra are the ones who go on to a science or similar career and would have learned it anyway in the course of their study/work in that field. What kids need is interesting, challenging stuff, including things like video editing and 3d modeling, that they will really sink their teeth into voluntarily. They will learn much, much more on projects they are interested on.
Before you argue back, keep in mind that your presence on slashdot probably means you were in the crowd that _was_ interested in math when they were pushing it in school. Unlike you, for most of your classmates, algebra class was worse than a waste of time.
Also no one should learn 3D modeling and video editing on a computer he can carry -- inexperienced user needs massive amount of resources and very large screen to be able to do anything with it.
I wasn't arguing whether they belong on a laptop, just in school. Having said that, I'll point out that you can use iMovie on a pretty small screen with good results. You can have very interesting 3d modeling applications running on small processors and screens, I'm sure. Just takes a little creativity and the realization that you won't be using an XO to produce the next Lord of the Rings.
Is that bob with an array of friends? Is that bob, an associative array, with a key "friend" whose value is "sally"?
Over and over and over again I've hit this in systems using XML. I hate that. JSON you can look at and you know how the program will be using it. XML you can't. Just a couple months ago I was working with a system and there was code all over the place checking to see if the parser had given back a single value, and if so, coercing it into an array.
Now, that's not the right solution, you should have a schema and then you would know...now you need a schema, the parser needs to interact with the schema to get it right, etc. So, my answer is
As far an engineering and tech types, I think I agree with you. However, I think that there is a certain segment of the science industry that really ought to be government sponsored (fundamental and long-range research that may not be carried out in private industry due to no apparent profit to motivate).
I understand how this seems to make sense, and it is possible that it does. But what that translates into is "the government should take some money from its citizens, and give it to academics/corporations/friends of congressmen to do things that the government realizes are important, and that the citizens don't". When you do that, you are saying "the people can't figure out the right thing to do with their money, so we, the benevolent government, must take their money and put it where it should go". And the problem with that is that you are claiming that the right way to go is to take private money and redistribute it according to some central plan. Which is what the Soviet Union did with their economy, and China as well.
If the people are too dumb to do a good job with their own money, how are they going to be smart enough to elect a government to do a good job with it? And monitor that government? And kick it out of office when it's not doing a good job any more?
It's not hard to get a group of people together who believe like you do and concentrate your money on the kind of research you believe should be done. You shouldn't be trying to take my money to fund the kind of research you think should be done. The amount of money that goes to that kind of research should be proportional to the amount of people that want to fund it. By having them fund it directly. Anything else is basically saying "Yoink! Thanks, I'll take that from you and put it where it should go! Don't argue with me, I'm the federal gov't and you'll go to prison!"
The founding fathers had very few things that they thought it was ok to do that for (and they definitely didn't include income tax as a way of getting money, either), and that's the way it should have stayed. Every group that comes after and says "Ah, and the federal gov't should also be taking our money and redistributing it this way!" is taking us closer to the glorious success of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Great Leap Forward.
Individually, without much thought, all these things seem like a good idea. "The federal government should fund the arts! There are certain arts that are not going to make it without federal support because there's no commercial market for it!" "The federal government should spend our money to 'fix education'!" "The federal government should take our money and give us all health care free!".
It doesn't work. When you realize that it doesn't work, and how obvious it is that schemes like that will never do anything but reduce our freedom (by taking our money) and use the proceeds of that freedom reduction to fund a bloated bureaucracy, and also pass laws to keep us from working around that bureaucracy, you will understand why there are "Google Ron Paul" signs everywhere. It really is a better way to run things. Not problem free, but we should have the exact problems that we have individually chosen, not the problems that some corporate or ideological special interest groups have managed to ram through the system.
The single most common predator for that entire time was members of other small groups of humans
Maybe
we think we're in an "us" group, so we're not concerned about the "them" eating us, as we're surrounded with other "us".
or
the people that thought they should run away screaming from situations like this all died out a long time ago having woken up screaming from sleep, swore never to do it again, lost their edge and got eaten.
or
(this is really a red herring, as it doesn't matter if someone is going to kill you to eat you or kill you for your territory or whatever) maybe cannibalism wasn't as big a deal as you assert: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060103183333.htm
or
the fact that a mere cell phone can bring you out of it tells you that something way more important, like the sound of approaching enemy footsteps, would clearly snap you to alertness
or
your assumption that we were dramatically more alert and felt the need to be so all the time is just incorrect, and due to your not having experienced life like that
Yeah, I read his thing on the suit against Creative Commons, and it looks like he's as dumb as they guy filing the suit. If you don't want your stuff used commercially, choose a different license. I am really sick of the way people try to use the courts to correct their own ineptitude.
Yeah, I think the "real answer" is more mundane. He works for a "real journalism" company as a "real journalist" and Groklaw isn't in his league. Automatically worthy of derision if it dares to question "real journalists".
Just basic job-specific arrogance, same thing you find in science, technology, religion, engineering, or any other profession with people in it.
Not really. I'll bet, collectively, the geeks in this thread have spent more time reading his books and waiting for a conclusion to his stories than his family did actually spending time with him.
Had he actually wrapped up anything in WoT, we'd all be a little more understanding
Look, if you're just going to reinforce the whole point of my argument, it's kind of deceptive to start out with "not really".
Pennsylvania should have just changed their laws such that a second or third offense within a given time window resulted in confiscation of poaching equipment, including things like vehicles. The fines a warning, the loss of your rifle(s) and vehicle hurts.
Great idea! Let's give the government another excuse to take people's property and force them into submission! You should run for senate.
If Jobs hadn't run into Woz you can be sure we would never have heard of Jobs.
You can probably also be sure we would never have heard of Woz.
But I would say that it's very, very hard to do "what if" with any level of certainty. What if the cpm (punctuate to taste) people hadn't been so unsure about signing over everything to ibm, which sent them looking for someone who would give up everything? Without that one break Gates might have not had the position to be able to do what he did (and I'm not denying that he did what he did well). It's just very, very hard to say what would have happened.
Without the anti-war media we might have a prosperous, happy South Viet Nam. But it's really hard to say. There are many, many stories where one little thing happened that tipped the scales and started a landslide of consequences (or maybe that stuff was probably going to happen anyway).
One thing I can say, though, is that I think the people who act like "if you work hard you can be a billionaire just like these guys" are in fact fooling themselves. Sometimes the better products fail, sometimes the harder workers just happen to be working in the wrong direction, sometimes someone like Microsoft engages in unfair/illegal business practices and kills your business model. I'm not saying that you shouldn't work hard, but I think we have to acknowledge the fact that outliers are outliers, and they are the hardest to model.
"Return to Oz" was a very enjoyable film on it's own merits, but the movie critics of the time were unable to judge it on those merits - and could only see it as the film that didn't have Judy Garland in it.
Stupid critics totally missed the boat on that trend. Almost every movie made nowadays doesn't have Judy Garland in it!
Bounty paper towels--when my kids were in diapers I was so thankful for a paper towel that would not tear even under heavy loads of goo. Very sturdy and much cheaper than diaper wipes, and in fact sturdy enough that you could get them wet, put them in a diaper wipe container, and they would be perfectly usable as wipes on the go ('course you could just bring them dry with a bottle of water too).
Then they came out with select-a-size where they perforated at half the normal size, which prevented me having to tear them in half.
Maybe not a big deal to you, but these facts about those paper towels were important innovations to me at that time.
The free market will fix it, make them pay for their mistakes just like every other professional body.
When the patent system is abused, it's not a free market. The people attacking the current abusive patent practices a trying to restore the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a standard that would help fix the kind of behavior which, as you point out, does the opposite of the founding fathers' intention with patents.
When you show up with your idea that you think deserves protection, the patent examiner's first duty is to look at what evidence you provide that this idea has been economically feasible for 20 years, and no one has done it yet.
If it has been feasible for 20 years, then there is a market that could support it, and there are big players in that market, and the lone inventor knows that the minute he puts the idea out there, one of the established players will swoop in, copy it, and laugh at the inventor. The inventor, knowing this, just doesn't bother making it because going through all that work to have someone else come in and cash in on it doesn't make sense (not to most people, I mean).
We know the idea is clever and/or hard to come up with because no one has come up with it for 20 years, even though it has been feasible all this time.
Take the Chip Clip (a wide spring clip used for holding plastic bags of snacks closed after they have been opened to keep the remainder fresh). I have no idea whether it was patented or not, but it deserved patent protection, in my opinion, because it was clear that it had been within the ability of humans to make such a clip 20 years previous. Just no one did it. So we say "ok, it was feasible for 20 years, no one did it, you can have a monopoly on it for the next 20" or whatever the term is.
Now, Amazon's one-click--they just look at that and laugh, and say "sorry buddy, come back and tell us something interesting when the web has been around for 20 years, kthxbye."
Mathematics done right is extremely exacting. It resembles what is done in school not one iota, except possibly the proofs done in geometry. 3D modeling and video editing at the professional level are, indeed, way beyond the range of the average student. So is what a professional mathematician does. Completely outside the realm of possibility for all but the most prodigious students. That doesn't matter. The point is that kids will learn what they are interested in learning, and they will not learn what they are not interested in learning. They may regurgitate it, temporarily cram it in, whatever, but by and large it's a waste of time.
If you have cool projects for kids to do that interest them, they will learn. It doesn't have to be professional level. It just has to be, as some people put it, "hard fun". That's the sweet spot for education. Interesting and challenging but doable.
No, we should do as much interesting stuff as early as possible. If you force kids to 'learn' what you term "widely applicable" (but, to them, pointless and boring) things like algebra, it fails. They don't really learn algebra. The only kids who learn algebra are the ones who go on to a science or similar career and would have learned it anyway in the course of their study/work in that field. What kids need is interesting, challenging stuff, including things like video editing and 3d modeling, that they will really sink their teeth into voluntarily. They will learn much, much more on projects they are interested on.
Before you argue back, keep in mind that your presence on slashdot probably means you were in the crowd that _was_ interested in math when they were pushing it in school. Unlike you, for most of your classmates, algebra class was worse than a waste of time.
I wasn't arguing whether they belong on a laptop, just in school. Having said that, I'll point out that you can use iMovie on a pretty small screen with good results. You can have very interesting 3d modeling applications running on small processors and screens, I'm sure. Just takes a little creativity and the realization that you won't be using an XO to produce the next Lord of the Rings.
What kind of processor ran Battlezone?
3d modeling and video editing do belong in classrooms.
Look up the Bayh-Dole act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
<friend>sally</friend>
</bob>
Is that bob with an array of friends? Is that bob, an associative array, with a key "friend" whose value is "sally"?
Over and over and over again I've hit this in systems using XML. I hate that. JSON you can look at and you know how the program will be using it. XML you can't. Just a couple months ago I was working with a system and there was code all over the place checking to see if the parser had given back a single value, and if so, coercing it into an array.
Now, that's not the right solution, you should have a schema and then you would know...now you need a schema, the parser needs to interact with the schema to get it right, etc. So, my answer is
(3) JSON
Um, it's Hara Kiri. See this slashdot post for a detailed explanation.
People make rubber dog shit?? COOL! You know where I can score some?
I understand how this seems to make sense, and it is possible that it does. But what that translates into is "the government should take some money from its citizens, and give it to academics/corporations/friends of congressmen to do things that the government realizes are important, and that the citizens don't". When you do that, you are saying "the people can't figure out the right thing to do with their money, so we, the benevolent government, must take their money and put it where it should go". And the problem with that is that you are claiming that the right way to go is to take private money and redistribute it according to some central plan. Which is what the Soviet Union did with their economy, and China as well.
If the people are too dumb to do a good job with their own money, how are they going to be smart enough to elect a government to do a good job with it? And monitor that government? And kick it out of office when it's not doing a good job any more?
It's not hard to get a group of people together who believe like you do and concentrate your money on the kind of research you believe should be done. You shouldn't be trying to take my money to fund the kind of research you think should be done. The amount of money that goes to that kind of research should be proportional to the amount of people that want to fund it. By having them fund it directly. Anything else is basically saying "Yoink! Thanks, I'll take that from you and put it where it should go! Don't argue with me, I'm the federal gov't and you'll go to prison!"
The founding fathers had very few things that they thought it was ok to do that for (and they definitely didn't include income tax as a way of getting money, either), and that's the way it should have stayed. Every group that comes after and says "Ah, and the federal gov't should also be taking our money and redistributing it this way!" is taking us closer to the glorious success of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Great Leap Forward.
Individually, without much thought, all these things seem like a good idea. "The federal government should fund the arts! There are certain arts that are not going to make it without federal support because there's no commercial market for it!" "The federal government should spend our money to 'fix education'!" "The federal government should take our money and give us all health care free!".
It doesn't work. When you realize that it doesn't work, and how obvious it is that schemes like that will never do anything but reduce our freedom (by taking our money) and use the proceeds of that freedom reduction to fund a bloated bureaucracy, and also pass laws to keep us from working around that bureaucracy, you will understand why there are "Google Ron Paul" signs everywhere. It really is a better way to run things. Not problem free, but we should have the exact problems that we have individually chosen, not the problems that some corporate or ideological special interest groups have managed to ram through the system.
or maybe you just figure that that's one of the 68.3% of statistics that are made up on the spot.
WhatHeSaid!
mnemonic: lose the extra "o".
Maybe
we think we're in an "us" group, so we're not concerned about the "them" eating us, as we're surrounded with other "us".
or
the people that thought they should run away screaming from situations like this all died out a long time ago having woken up screaming from sleep, swore never to do it again, lost their edge and got eaten.
or
(this is really a red herring, as it doesn't matter if someone is going to kill you to eat you or kill you for your territory or whatever) maybe cannibalism wasn't as big a deal as you assert: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060103183333.htm
or
the fact that a mere cell phone can bring you out of it tells you that something way more important, like the sound of approaching enemy footsteps, would clearly snap you to alertness
or
your assumption that we were dramatically more alert and felt the need to be so all the time is just incorrect, and due to your not having experienced life like that
Yeah, I read his thing on the suit against Creative Commons, and it looks like he's as dumb as they guy filing the suit. If you don't want your stuff used commercially, choose a different license. I am really sick of the way people try to use the courts to correct their own ineptitude.
Yeah, I think the "real answer" is more mundane. He works for a "real journalism" company as a "real journalist" and Groklaw isn't in his league. Automatically worthy of derision if it dares to question "real journalists".
Just basic job-specific arrogance, same thing you find in science, technology, religion, engineering, or any other profession with people in it.
Look, if you're just going to reinforce the whole point of my argument, it's kind of deceptive to start out with "not really".
Great idea! Let's give the government another excuse to take people's property and force them into submission! You should run for senate.
And also, maybe, to his family. What you meant to say is that the hearts of millions of grateful fans go out to his family, right?
You can probably also be sure we would never have heard of Woz.
But I would say that it's very, very hard to do "what if" with any level of certainty. What if the cpm (punctuate to taste) people hadn't been so unsure about signing over everything to ibm, which sent them looking for someone who would give up everything? Without that one break Gates might have not had the position to be able to do what he did (and I'm not denying that he did what he did well). It's just very, very hard to say what would have happened.
Without the anti-war media we might have a prosperous, happy South Viet Nam. But it's really hard to say. There are many, many stories where one little thing happened that tipped the scales and started a landslide of consequences (or maybe that stuff was probably going to happen anyway).
One thing I can say, though, is that I think the people who act like "if you work hard you can be a billionaire just like these guys" are in fact fooling themselves. Sometimes the better products fail, sometimes the harder workers just happen to be working in the wrong direction, sometimes someone like Microsoft engages in unfair/illegal business practices and kills your business model. I'm not saying that you shouldn't work hard, but I think we have to acknowledge the fact that outliers are outliers, and they are the hardest to model.
mod parent up. that's a very good idea. Same thing applies to libertarianism.
Stupid critics totally missed the boat on that trend. Almost every movie made nowadays doesn't have Judy Garland in it!
... have always considered him number 2.
*bows*
Bounty paper towels--when my kids were in diapers I was so thankful for a paper towel that would not tear even under heavy loads of goo. Very sturdy and much cheaper than diaper wipes, and in fact sturdy enough that you could get them wet, put them in a diaper wipe container, and they would be perfectly usable as wipes on the go ('course you could just bring them dry with a bottle of water too).
Then they came out with select-a-size where they perforated at half the normal size, which prevented me having to tear them in half.
Maybe not a big deal to you, but these facts about those paper towels were important innovations to me at that time.
When the patent system is abused, it's not a free market. The people attacking the current abusive patent practices a trying to restore the free market.
Yeah, they made a big fuss once when I took the principal's car out for a spin using keys that he left hanging in the office all the time.