1) My idea has a market--enough people would care enough to pay for the improved version that it would cover the cost of improvement and pay me a royalty.
2) My idea doesn't have a market--not enough people would care enough/pay enough
If 2 is the case, it probably doesn't matter. Much of what you are discussing is about changes being too expensive or impractical to make. If you're right about it being too expensive to make the change, then we are in case 2, and maybe I could get a patent but I don't think I would bother because it wouldn't make me any money anyway. "Hey, phillips screw heads made of diamond so they don't strip!". If it's not feasible, not one is going to do it, so patented/patentable or not is not a question of interest.
Now assume for the sake of argument that the idea is good enough and cheap enough that it would make me money. You make, essentially, this argument:
"Other people are just as clever, they would come up with the same thing if they thought about it, it's not fair to lock them out of doing this."
You assert that many people have probably already thought of the idea I thought of and just never said anything, and that I seem to think cleverness is a lot rarer than it is.
In actuality, I am sure that there are (for this particular idea) thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people that, when you suggest how the product might be improved, will come up with exactly the same thing I am thinking of. It's not really a matter of cleverness, in this case, as much as it is get-off-your-but-and-do-something-about-it-ness. Cleverness is pretty widespread, but get-off-your-butt-and-do-something-about-it-ness is very, very rare. It's because of that very fact that I think a clever idea that has been feasible for 20 years and yet no one has brought it to market should warrant patent protection. Strictly because doing that will get more stuff out to more people that not doing it will.
The minute you see what I am talking about you will think "I could have thought of that". There may be a hundred or a thousand other people who say "Man, I thought of doing that, too.". But they never got off their butts and did anything about it. When the opportunity has been sitting there for someone to make a useful improvement for 20 years and no one has done anything about it, that means that the improvement is not getting to the public. For the price of a 20 year monopoly, it could go to the public. It will still be useful 20 years later, and then, like Phillips screw heads, it will be free to use for everyone (if it's not useful 20 years later, it doesn't matter that it's.
(One more aside about it preventing other people from using it. It's not practical to pursue small time infringers. You could take every single patented technology, reproduce it in your basement, invite your friends over and show them, nothing would happen. The only thing that the patent does is keep a big company from realizing, when they see some upstart with a good idea, that they can just take the idea and put the upstart out of business.)
The real question is, does it make sense for society to grant a limited monopoly on things like this? Is the society better off with limited monopolies or without? And the founding fathers believed "with". That doesn't make it correct, I realize that. But my claim is that, if you use my standard of "obviousness", you don't interfere with people's ability to do their jobs (like one click does now), and you will get products/improvements in the market that you wouldn't have otherwise.
Suppose that people, for whatever reason, all built their shopping cart interaction the exact same way and it was always click heavy, and people just accepted it, and it stayed that way for 20 years. And then one day someone says "hey, we could cache information and let people check out with one click". Suppose they are not in the busines
I understood what he said (although I do appreciate your being helpful in the case that I might not have--it was a good idea to make the comparison he did, I thought). I was actually just making an apparently too-obscure joke about the exchange rate between Canadian and US dollar.:)
Note also that I am refraining from making a snide remark about how we would use a more efficient storage mechanism and get the same percentage of our population into said shoebox. I think I deserve some diplomacy points for that.
I think you are possibly making the common mistake of thinking that everyone thinks/acts/is like you. I have a wife and four kids to feed (soon to be "four teenage boys to feed" actually). I have a huge number of worthwhile projects I would like to pursue, strictly based on their worthwhileness, some of which you can read about at http://leftoverpi.com/blog. I don't have time for half of them. I don't have time for a tenth of them.
The other day my wife was doing a home improvement project and she encountered a frustrating aspect of a fairly simple existing technology (which I'm sure was patented when it was introduced, because it was itself a pretty clever idea at the time). We came up with an improvement that would be a significant improvement, but would be impossible to keep secret. The only possible way I am going to spend any time on a project that would be sold in a hardware store is if I think I could get significant money out of it, because then I would have funding to do the other worthwhile projects I don't have time for now (supposing it didn't take all my time to get the other thing going and keep it going, of course). Therefore, the only way that this idea is going to get out is if there is a legal framework that lets me make some money off of it, for a while. I'm not going to spend time evangelizing it, and if I did, no one would listen anyway. It's a good idea, but until someone at $big_company sees it taking market share away from their unimproved product, no player with the ability to make any dent in the market is going to listen to me.
Even if you think "selfish bastard! you should just release it under a creative commons license!", well, it's fine if you think of me that way, but my point is that some people, many people, in fact, are selfish, and some people are just busy, or just happen to need the money, or whatever. It's not about "the government should reward clever people", it's about setting up a legal framework that encourages good ideas to get to the market and improve people's lives.
Money and a limited time monopoly do not tangle the system if the system is done well. Millions of people all over the world can now have the benefit of the Phillips head screwdriver for free. If Phillips hadn't been able to patent it, there's a good chance he would never have bothered going anywhere with the idea, knowing that if he did it would just be copied by the big car makers and he wouldn't get anything out of it. He might have gone on and worked on some other technology that would be easier to keep secret. People might create secret manufacturing facilities and keep their techniques secret far longer than the patent gives them the monopoly.
If you want a more practical argument, put on one side of a line every movie, book, and music album that was produced by someone hoping to profit from the limited time monopoly granted by copyright, and on the other sign, everyone that just produced something and put it in the public domain because they enjoyed being clever. Can you see from that that a legal framework allowing limited time monopoly encourages the production of works of value?
About 15-20 years ago, IIRC, someone in Ottawa, Canada, dumped a shoebox containing microfiche tax records for 16 million Canadians. That'd be the equivalent of perhaps 150-some million American citizens' tax records.
I think you've got your exchange rate the wrong way round.
I agree that this is a good way to decide if it is obvious how to do a thing once someone has described the thing. However, I don't really like the idea of not allowing a patent on something like that. If you want, call it an "innovation patent" or something else. The point of making something patentable is so that information/ideas that wouldn't get out there otherwise will get out there. Just because it's obvious how to do something, it's not necessarily obvious to do it.
For example, suppose someone submits a patent for an improved screw head that prevents the screwdriver from slipping out or whatever. The five patent examiners in your standard might indeed come up with the Phillips screw. But would they have thought of doing it in the first place? And, more to the point, would Phillips have bothered bringing his idea to market if it couldn't be protected by a patent?
(I did a quick google search to make sure I was spelling Phillips right, and this Ask Yahoo article: http://ask.yahoo.com/20021107.html explains that some Canadian came up with a screw head with a recessed square in it a couple decades earlier than Phillips' work. If someone had wanted to do it they could have used it instead of his patented technology. That's funny, and goes somewhat to the idea of "let the best marketer win". But I still don't think Phillips would have been interested in trying to go to market with it when all those big car companies could copy it for nothing, so I think my argument still holds in light of this.)
Part of the logic of my standard is that the market has been living without it for 20 years already. It's obviously not the only possible way to do the business, and it's obviously not the first thing people think of when they get into the business. So granting the patent probably won't hold the business back from normal progress. It just rewards the person who came up with the good idea and encourages him to bring it to market.
Basically, I'm saying that there is more to "what ought to be patentable" than "things that are hard to implement". The point, I think, was to encourage innovators to share their ideas. One standard of it being an innovation is that it's hard to figure out how to do it until someone shows you. My claim is that we should be willing to reward people who come up with even "simple" ideas that no one has come up with despite time being "ripe" for it (meaning it has been feasible to do) for 20 years now.
sorry to reply to my own post. I should have said that this is based on something someone said about the problem with software patents being that the field is too new, and you need a shakeout time to let the obvious stuff get invented. I was just trying to think of a way to codify that idea by picking a time. I don't know who said that originally, maybe perens talking about the pixar patent or lessig? But I'm sure one of you is going to flame me with it, so I just wanted to post this to thank you in advance:).
Hi, I have a standard for obviousness that I think would work better. Here is the deal--you come up with something that could, feasibly, have been done at any time in the last 20 years, and you get it exclusively for the next 20 years. It's non-obviousness is derived from the fact that no one has done it. You would have to come up with a definition of "feasible", but I think you could do it.
The point is, I don't think the intent of patents was to spur a land rush into previously unexplored territory and reward the people with the fastest wagons. The idea is that if you find something that might not otherwise have been done, we'll let you have an exclusive right to it for a while if you tell us how it's done. How do you know it might not otherwise have been done? Well, we pick an arbitrary period of time and say "if it has been feasible for this long, and hasn't been done by now, it doesn't seem obvious, so we'll call it non-obvious".
I know the people that got a patent on auctioning municipal bonds over the internet. Auctioning things over the internet was already done. Auctioning by fax machine was already done. Does it really make sense for them to have an exclusive right to that? I like them, and they are the "small inventor getting rewarded for their innovation" types. But it could just as easily have been done by one of the big guys and they would have been locked out. I just don't think that is what patents are for. Fifty different implementations would be running by now if they hadn't gotten there first.
Think about it this way--if you used this rule, the people that want to patent their inventions would really have to be thinking hard. What can I do that no one has done even though it's been feasible to do it for 20 years? That is waaaaay harder than just being the first guy to the PTO with one-click. And that's the real point--give people an incentive to think really hard.
Yes, it's similar, but that similarity probably means that it's no big deal in terms of whether the "juggernaut is stumbling". Microsoft had recovered from many high profile flops. (Although I think there is an interesting question about whether a failure like this hastens brain drain. That's probably been explored quite a bit though, with people really interested in innovation going to Google, and MS turning into IBM, with many good people, a relatively permanently solid market position, occasional very good ideas, etc.)
But you're effectively pointing out that it isn't random. Only less savvy users will be included. More savvy users won't be tricked/forced into installing the software, so the user base isn't random. Instead, it is only including a subset of less sophisticated users who don't notice, AND would be willing to install those piggybacked applications, AND don't have something like SpyBot installed to remove malware.
So, it's only "the market"? I think that's exactly the people they are after. Your "subset" is practically everyone.
ok, you do that. I'm going to discard the idea that he is a good businessman. (Not necessarily for any other reason than that you sounded so cool when you discarded yours, I wanted to discard one, too. And maybe because he said that if he was running apple at the time Jobs went back there that he would shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders. But, seriously, I might just be bringing that up because it's so funny.)
It's no surprise that I agree with most of what you are saying because you were agreeing with me in the first place:). I think you should slightly modify this, though:
However, this would offset one of the problems that liberals often complain about: urban sprawl. If you chose to move outside the current population density areas, you would have to give up the best in internet access.
Rather than "would", I would use "might" or "could". When you remove government force from the equation, what you can be (relatively) sure of is more liberty. You can't really be sure of what people will do with that liberty. Maybe someone will specialize in wiring suburbs and make them even more attractive, for example.
(Hope you don't feel like I'm too nitpicky here. I am a strong believer in deregulation, and I believe that one of the weaknesses of the way de-regulatarians generally argue their points is that they often make it sound like if you could just take away the government force things would be idyllic. What we really can logically assume is that people will have more liberty. Which, I think, is all that we should assume, and is worth the effort to work for. We cannot assume that people will behave a certain way given that liberty, because liberty by definition is the ability to behave in whatever way you want.)
Reporting bad things about the war is not the problem. Reporting only bad things is. You think that there are only bad things to report. That's because you believe what they say. They also believe what they say, because they don't believe anything good could come of it (like freedom for Kurds, for example, end of tyranny by Sunni minority, etc.) They aren't looking for the rest of the story, only the part of the story that is important for the public to know--people are getting killed. That's what we need to hear about, because we need to be informed about what is going on so we will vote to stop it.
There are very brief moments when they recognize other sides to the story, like when someone like the Boston Globe or the Washington Post ran a story with a bunch of interviews from veterans who didn't recognize the war as it was reported in the papers. But they don't follow through and hold on to those points because they run counter to the groupthink. Similarly with the fact that they will continue to bring up the faked document about yellowcake but just let the fact that there is plenty of evidence that Hussein was looking for uranium be conveniently forgotten.
A real journalist would follow up on the reports of an investigator being shut down when he found evidence that WMD had been trucked into Syria. That's what reporters are supposed to do, try to find out the stuff that the politicians for whatever reason don't think we need to know or truncate the investigations of due to political expediency. However, if you are part of a large group of people that were already sure that the whole WMD thing was bogus, you wouldn't bother following that lead, would you, because that part of the story has already been dealt with.
You should read Goldberg's Bias, and really objectively ask yourself if he sounds like a person with a political agenda (as Rather and friends spun it) or a person who just observed something very frustrating about where he worked. Anyone who claims that the idea of media bias is a myth and hasn't read that book is deluded about their objectivity. Read that and explain to me where he goes wrong in his claims or his logic.
I have thought a lot lately about the lunch counter issue. I think forcing the racists to let blacks eat at their establishment probably robbed would-be black business owners from the opportunity to make an inclusive or all-black establishment and instead of having a generation of prosperous black business owners we got the expectation that the government should force us to be civil to each other.
I think we should be civil to each other, and that if a business isn't living up to that consumers should boycott it. Putting that responsibility on government is a short sighted abdication and resort to force that should have been avoided.
Now, if there was some kind of illegal business practice, or a practice that should have been illegal, that stopped black would-be business owners from being able to start businesses, that could and should have been very aggressively dealt with. I'm not saying that we should have ignored the situation completely. But the bus stuff changed by a boycott, didn't it? So presumably actions like that could have fixed other situations, and people who refused to do business with blacks would end up rewarding those who would.
> I'm sure that for sites with dozens (or hundreds) of servers, it's more problematic
Although in those cases I'd hope that they'd have everything nicely automated so that pushing out updates is just a matter running some utility that executes the update on all the machines. As Zed Shaw says, "if you're ssh'ing in to your servers more than once a week, you haven't automated things enough."
Uh, dude, I think the point is that they don't have to--we can just write a worm that installs the patch for them...
IMHO, Intel should admit they made a mistake and pay him for his legal fees. Ever since I heard about this case, I have always steered any purchasing I could toward AMD simply because of the case. If enough people did that, and told Intel about it, maybe they would do the honorable thing. Or at least make a donation in the same amount to the perl foundation or whatever.
Whether humans are the cause or not is, in some sense, 100% of the question. If laws are going to be made that cripple economies, they will be made based on the idea that we are causing it. At least half of what people are screaming about on the right is that people on the left trot out "climate expert" after "climate expert" who can only show evidence that it's warming, but they present them as if they are proof that we cause it. So they claim that science is on their side and everyone else is drooling, when in fact they are making the most obvious of novice mistakes.
People who are really experts on whether we even know if we caused it are a lot less sure, because it's a really hard problem, but the left is so busy crusading that they don't want to hear about truth. They know the truth. Just like the right.
The term "Dominion of Canada" was never officially recognized and has not been in regular use in government documents since the 50's or 60's so as not to intimidate our neighbour to the south.
I don't think Mexico's all that worried--for one thing, they've got that whole "buffer country" thing going that the Soviet Union used so successfully to keep western Europe from invading.
I agree that a lot, or maybe most, of the disparity may very well be due to just what the female sex is naturally interested in vs what the male sex is naturally interested in. However, suppose that, say, five percent of women would actually really like this type of geeky stuff, but only one percent are in it. And suppose that the reason for that is that the subset of the male sex that likes geeky stuff is also bitterly sarcastic, antisocial, and competitive by nature. And suppose that the other 4 percent, when they get to about mild interest, see these hideous specimens of supposed humanity and just go "ew" and find something else to be interested in.
If those things were true, a program like the one proposed (I didn't even rtf summary in detail, much less tfa, btw) might serve to get those 4 percent. And if you got them all, it would be five times the current number that are in there, and those 4% would actually get a better chance to be happy doing this stuff, etc. Might translate to happy career situations for many women who don't have happy ones now, or have less happy ones than they might have had if they had found their true calling in life or whatever.
In short, a lot of good could come of it, and she's only talking about corporations supporting it, not taking tax money from people or setting up a new cabinet position or anything.
I agree, in general, with what you're saying--I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at the efforts people make to avoid realizing that men and women are very different things. But that fact could be contributing to kicking girls out of the club due to the very same genderosocial reasons. So the fundamentals from which you are arguing could be used to support the idea of having a program like this. Maybe if I worked on it a little longer I would just argue that this is exactly what is going on. A woman is communicating an idea about finding consensus to overcome a social issue, or whatever. But to do that I would have to rtfa, and I am too old school for that.:)
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I think you continue to miss the point.
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Let's just look at these two possibilities:
1) My idea has a market--enough people would care enough to pay for the improved version that it would cover the cost of improvement and pay me a royalty.
2) My idea doesn't have a market--not enough people would care enough/pay enough
If 2 is the case, it probably doesn't matter. Much of what you are discussing is about changes being too expensive or impractical to make. If you're right about it being too expensive to make the change, then we are in case 2, and maybe I could get a patent but I don't think I would bother because it wouldn't make me any money anyway. "Hey, phillips screw heads made of diamond so they don't strip!". If it's not feasible, not one is going to do it, so patented/patentable or not is not a question of interest.
Now assume for the sake of argument that the idea is good enough and cheap enough that it would make me money. You make, essentially, this argument:
"Other people are just as clever, they would come up with the same thing if they thought about it, it's not fair to lock them out of doing this."
You assert that many people have probably already thought of the idea I thought of and just never said anything, and that I seem to think cleverness is a lot rarer than it is.
In actuality, I am sure that there are (for this particular idea) thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people that, when you suggest how the product might be improved, will come up with exactly the same thing I am thinking of. It's not really a matter of cleverness, in this case, as much as it is get-off-your-but-and-do-something-about-it-ness. Cleverness is pretty widespread, but get-off-your-butt-and-do-something-about-it-ness is very, very rare. It's because of that very fact that I think a clever idea that has been feasible for 20 years and yet no one has brought it to market should warrant patent protection. Strictly because doing that will get more stuff out to more people that not doing it will.
The minute you see what I am talking about you will think "I could have thought of that". There may be a hundred or a thousand other people who say "Man, I thought of doing that, too.". But they never got off their butts and did anything about it. When the opportunity has been sitting there for someone to make a useful improvement for 20 years and no one has done anything about it, that means that the improvement is not getting to the public. For the price of a 20 year monopoly, it could go to the public. It will still be useful 20 years later, and then, like Phillips screw heads, it will be free to use for everyone (if it's not useful 20 years later, it doesn't matter that it's
(One more aside about it preventing other people from using it. It's not practical to pursue small time infringers. You could take every single patented technology, reproduce it in your basement, invite your friends over and show them, nothing would happen. The only thing that the patent does is keep a big company from realizing, when they see some upstart with a good idea, that they can just take the idea and put the upstart out of business.)
The real question is, does it make sense for society to grant a limited monopoly on things like this? Is the society better off with limited monopolies or without? And the founding fathers believed "with". That doesn't make it correct, I realize that. But my claim is that, if you use my standard of "obviousness", you don't interfere with people's ability to do their jobs (like one click does now), and you will get products/improvements in the market that you wouldn't have otherwise.
Suppose that people, for whatever reason, all built their shopping cart interaction the exact same way and it was always click heavy, and people just accepted it, and it stayed that way for 20 years. And then one day someone says "hey, we could cache information and let people check out with one click". Suppose they are not in the busines
So that's where they are.
I understood what he said (although I do appreciate your being helpful in the case that I might not have--it was a good idea to make the comparison he did, I thought). I was actually just making an apparently too-obscure joke about the exchange rate between Canadian and US dollar. :)
Note also that I am refraining from making a snide remark about how we would use a more efficient storage mechanism and get the same percentage of our population into said shoebox. I think I deserve some diplomacy points for that.
I think you are possibly making the common mistake of thinking that everyone thinks/acts/is like you. I have a wife and four kids to feed (soon to be "four teenage boys to feed" actually). I have a huge number of worthwhile projects I would like to pursue, strictly based on their worthwhileness, some of which you can read about at http://leftoverpi.com/blog. I don't have time for half of them. I don't have time for a tenth of them.
The other day my wife was doing a home improvement project and she encountered a frustrating aspect of a fairly simple existing technology (which I'm sure was patented when it was introduced, because it was itself a pretty clever idea at the time). We came up with an improvement that would be a significant improvement, but would be impossible to keep secret. The only possible way I am going to spend any time on a project that would be sold in a hardware store is if I think I could get significant money out of it, because then I would have funding to do the other worthwhile projects I don't have time for now (supposing it didn't take all my time to get the other thing going and keep it going, of course). Therefore, the only way that this idea is going to get out is if there is a legal framework that lets me make some money off of it, for a while. I'm not going to spend time evangelizing it, and if I did, no one would listen anyway. It's a good idea, but until someone at $big_company sees it taking market share away from their unimproved product, no player with the ability to make any dent in the market is going to listen to me.
Even if you think "selfish bastard! you should just release it under a creative commons license!", well, it's fine if you think of me that way, but my point is that some people, many people, in fact, are selfish, and some people are just busy, or just happen to need the money, or whatever. It's not about "the government should reward clever people", it's about setting up a legal framework that encourages good ideas to get to the market and improve people's lives.
Money and a limited time monopoly do not tangle the system if the system is done well. Millions of people all over the world can now have the benefit of the Phillips head screwdriver for free. If Phillips hadn't been able to patent it, there's a good chance he would never have bothered going anywhere with the idea, knowing that if he did it would just be copied by the big car makers and he wouldn't get anything out of it. He might have gone on and worked on some other technology that would be easier to keep secret. People might create secret manufacturing facilities and keep their techniques secret far longer than the patent gives them the monopoly.
If you want a more practical argument, put on one side of a line every movie, book, and music album that was produced by someone hoping to profit from the limited time monopoly granted by copyright, and on the other sign, everyone that just produced something and put it in the public domain because they enjoyed being clever. Can you see from that that a legal framework allowing limited time monopoly encourages the production of works of value?
I think you've got your exchange rate the wrong way round.
I agree that this is a good way to decide if it is obvious how to do a thing once someone has described the thing. However, I don't really like the idea of not allowing a patent on something like that. If you want, call it an "innovation patent" or something else. The point of making something patentable is so that information/ideas that wouldn't get out there otherwise will get out there. Just because it's obvious how to do something, it's not necessarily obvious to do it.
For example, suppose someone submits a patent for an improved screw head that prevents the screwdriver from slipping out or whatever. The five patent examiners in your standard might indeed come up with the Phillips screw. But would they have thought of doing it in the first place? And, more to the point, would Phillips have bothered bringing his idea to market if it couldn't be protected by a patent?
(I did a quick google search to make sure I was spelling Phillips right, and this Ask Yahoo article: http://ask.yahoo.com/20021107.html explains that some Canadian came up with a screw head with a recessed square in it a couple decades earlier than Phillips' work. If someone had wanted to do it they could have used it instead of his patented technology. That's funny, and goes somewhat to the idea of "let the best marketer win". But I still don't think Phillips would have been interested in trying to go to market with it when all those big car companies could copy it for nothing, so I think my argument still holds in light of this.)
Part of the logic of my standard is that the market has been living without it for 20 years already. It's obviously not the only possible way to do the business, and it's obviously not the first thing people think of when they get into the business. So granting the patent probably won't hold the business back from normal progress. It just rewards the person who came up with the good idea and encourages him to bring it to market.
Basically, I'm saying that there is more to "what ought to be patentable" than "things that are hard to implement". The point, I think, was to encourage innovators to share their ideas. One standard of it being an innovation is that it's hard to figure out how to do it until someone shows you. My claim is that we should be willing to reward people who come up with even "simple" ideas that no one has come up with despite time being "ripe" for it (meaning it has been feasible to do) for 20 years now.
sorry to reply to my own post. I should have said that this is based on something someone said about the problem with software patents being that the field is too new, and you need a shakeout time to let the obvious stuff get invented. I was just trying to think of a way to codify that idea by picking a time. I don't know who said that originally, maybe perens talking about the pixar patent or lessig? But I'm sure one of you is going to flame me with it, so I just wanted to post this to thank you in advance :).
Hi, I have a standard for obviousness that I think would work better. Here is the deal--you come up with something that could, feasibly, have been done at any time in the last 20 years, and you get it exclusively for the next 20 years. It's non-obviousness is derived from the fact that no one has done it. You would have to come up with a definition of "feasible", but I think you could do it.
The point is, I don't think the intent of patents was to spur a land rush into previously unexplored territory and reward the people with the fastest wagons. The idea is that if you find something that might not otherwise have been done, we'll let you have an exclusive right to it for a while if you tell us how it's done. How do you know it might not otherwise have been done? Well, we pick an arbitrary period of time and say "if it has been feasible for this long, and hasn't been done by now, it doesn't seem obvious, so we'll call it non-obvious".
I know the people that got a patent on auctioning municipal bonds over the internet. Auctioning things over the internet was already done. Auctioning by fax machine was already done. Does it really make sense for them to have an exclusive right to that? I like them, and they are the "small inventor getting rewarded for their innovation" types. But it could just as easily have been done by one of the big guys and they would have been locked out. I just don't think that is what patents are for. Fifty different implementations would be running by now if they hadn't gotten there first.
Think about it this way--if you used this rule, the people that want to patent their inventions would really have to be thinking hard. What can I do that no one has done even though it's been feasible to do it for 20 years? That is waaaaay harder than just being the first guy to the PTO with one-click. And that's the real point--give people an incentive to think really hard.
Yes, it's similar, but that similarity probably means that it's no big deal in terms of whether the "juggernaut is stumbling". Microsoft had recovered from many high profile flops. (Although I think there is an interesting question about whether a failure like this hastens brain drain. That's probably been explored quite a bit though, with people really interested in innovation going to Google, and MS turning into IBM, with many good people, a relatively permanently solid market position, occasional very good ideas, etc.)
So, it's only "the market"? I think that's exactly the people they are after. Your "subset" is practically everyone.
ok, you do that. I'm going to discard the idea that he is a good businessman. (Not necessarily for any other reason than that you sounded so cool when you discarded yours, I wanted to discard one, too. And maybe because he said that if he was running apple at the time Jobs went back there that he would shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders. But, seriously, I might just be bringing that up because it's so funny.)
I mean, I searched for boobies and found this.
I would think video of that would be very educational. What are you guys on about? You don't think zoology is cerebral?
thanks man, now I'm starving!
Rather than "would", I would use "might" or "could". When you remove government force from the equation, what you can be (relatively) sure of is more liberty. You can't really be sure of what people will do with that liberty. Maybe someone will specialize in wiring suburbs and make them even more attractive, for example.
(Hope you don't feel like I'm too nitpicky here. I am a strong believer in deregulation, and I believe that one of the weaknesses of the way de-regulatarians generally argue their points is that they often make it sound like if you could just take away the government force things would be idyllic. What we really can logically assume is that people will have more liberty. Which, I think, is all that we should assume, and is worth the effort to work for. We cannot assume that people will behave a certain way given that liberty, because liberty by definition is the ability to behave in whatever way you want.)
Reporting bad things about the war is not the problem. Reporting only bad things is. You think that there are only bad things to report. That's because you believe what they say. They also believe what they say, because they don't believe anything good could come of it (like freedom for Kurds, for example, end of tyranny by Sunni minority, etc.) They aren't looking for the rest of the story, only the part of the story that is important for the public to know--people are getting killed. That's what we need to hear about, because we need to be informed about what is going on so we will vote to stop it.
There are very brief moments when they recognize other sides to the story, like when someone like the Boston Globe or the Washington Post ran a story with a bunch of interviews from veterans who didn't recognize the war as it was reported in the papers. But they don't follow through and hold on to those points because they run counter to the groupthink. Similarly with the fact that they will continue to bring up the faked document about yellowcake but just let the fact that there is plenty of evidence that Hussein was looking for uranium be conveniently forgotten.
A real journalist would follow up on the reports of an investigator being shut down when he found evidence that WMD had been trucked into Syria. That's what reporters are supposed to do, try to find out the stuff that the politicians for whatever reason don't think we need to know or truncate the investigations of due to political expediency. However, if you are part of a large group of people that were already sure that the whole WMD thing was bogus, you wouldn't bother following that lead, would you, because that part of the story has already been dealt with.
You should read Goldberg's Bias, and really objectively ask yourself if he sounds like a person with a political agenda (as Rather and friends spun it) or a person who just observed something very frustrating about where he worked. Anyone who claims that the idea of media bias is a myth and hasn't read that book is deluded about their objectivity. Read that and explain to me where he goes wrong in his claims or his logic.
Yeah, but when you have the huge budgets of the MSM campaigning against the war, you might get a distorted outcome.
I have thought a lot lately about the lunch counter issue. I think forcing the racists to let blacks eat at their establishment probably robbed would-be black business owners from the opportunity to make an inclusive or all-black establishment and instead of having a generation of prosperous black business owners we got the expectation that the government should force us to be civil to each other.
I think we should be civil to each other, and that if a business isn't living up to that consumers should boycott it. Putting that responsibility on government is a short sighted abdication and resort to force that should have been avoided.
Now, if there was some kind of illegal business practice, or a practice that should have been illegal, that stopped black would-be business owners from being able to start businesses, that could and should have been very aggressively dealt with. I'm not saying that we should have ignored the situation completely. But the bus stuff changed by a boycott, didn't it? So presumably actions like that could have fixed other situations, and people who refused to do business with blacks would end up rewarding those who would.
Maybe.
...is "what tv?" :)
Not to me, but I respect your diversity.
Uh, dude, I think the point is that they don't have to--we can just write a worm that installs the patch for them...
IMHO, Intel should admit they made a mistake and pay him for his legal fees. Ever since I heard about this case, I have always steered any purchasing I could toward AMD simply because of the case. If enough people did that, and told Intel about it, maybe they would do the honorable thing. Or at least make a donation in the same amount to the perl foundation or whatever.
:)
blogosphere: go
Whether humans are the cause or not is, in some sense, 100% of the question. If laws are going to be made that cripple economies, they will be made based on the idea that we are causing it. At least half of what people are screaming about on the right is that people on the left trot out "climate expert" after "climate expert" who can only show evidence that it's warming, but they present them as if they are proof that we cause it. So they claim that science is on their side and everyone else is drooling, when in fact they are making the most obvious of novice mistakes.
People who are really experts on whether we even know if we caused it are a lot less sure, because it's a really hard problem, but the left is so busy crusading that they don't want to hear about truth. They know the truth. Just like the right.
I agree that a lot, or maybe most, of the disparity may very well be due to just what the female sex is naturally interested in vs what the male sex is naturally interested in. However, suppose that, say, five percent of women would actually really like this type of geeky stuff, but only one percent are in it. And suppose that the reason for that is that the subset of the male sex that likes geeky stuff is also bitterly sarcastic, antisocial, and competitive by nature. And suppose that the other 4 percent, when they get to about mild interest, see these hideous specimens of supposed humanity and just go "ew" and find something else to be interested in.
:)
If those things were true, a program like the one proposed (I didn't even rtf summary in detail, much less tfa, btw) might serve to get those 4 percent. And if you got them all, it would be five times the current number that are in there, and those 4% would actually get a better chance to be happy doing this stuff, etc. Might translate to happy career situations for many women who don't have happy ones now, or have less happy ones than they might have had if they had found their true calling in life or whatever.
In short, a lot of good could come of it, and she's only talking about corporations supporting it, not taking tax money from people or setting up a new cabinet position or anything.
I agree, in general, with what you're saying--I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at the efforts people make to avoid realizing that men and women are very different things. But that fact could be contributing to kicking girls out of the club due to the very same genderosocial reasons. So the fundamentals from which you are arguing could be used to support the idea of having a program like this. Maybe if I worked on it a little longer I would just argue that this is exactly what is going on. A woman is communicating an idea about finding consensus to overcome a social issue, or whatever. But to do that I would have to rtfa, and I am too old school for that.