That seems like a bad idea to me, for a very simple reason.
Think about it: companies are, first and foremost, interested in making money. Some may have ethical goals or values, too (let's call these "the good guys"), while others don't and care ONLY about money (the "bad guys"). Now, what kind of company would donate a patent they held?
Obviously, the bad guys wouldn't do it; after all, a patent, even if you're not using it right now and have no current plans to do so in the future, might still be valuable at some point, and giving up that value for nothing is a bad deal. The good guys, on the other hand, might do it - depending, of course, but in principle, they might.
If a patent gets donated, what happens? Either someone picks it up and creates a successful business, or it turns out to be a dud. In the latter case, the whole act of donating it was pretty useless, but since that's not what's supposed to happen, let's concentrate on the first case: here, someone actually demonstrates that there WAS more than just a theoretical value attached to the patent, so the company that donated it did lose REAL money when it did so.
Now think about that: the bad guys (who didn't donate anything) continued as usual, and the good guys, *by virtue of being good guys*, *lost money*. Therefore, this scheme is either useless (if the donated patents aren't useful for creating new businesses) or hurts the good guys and rewards the greedy.
As someone who's been taking various antidepressants daily for half a decade (not anymore nowadays, though, fortunately), I can assure you that they are not at all useless. Of course they do not *cure* anything, but they can provide a foundation upon which actual therapy can build, and that's quite invaluable.
Also, there is a reason why several different antidepressants exist: they have different effects and different side-effects on different people. For me, out of the 7 or 8 drugs I took overall, only two (sertraline and mirtazapine) worked, and sertraline ultimately turned out to have side effects that were so serious that I couldn't take it anymore.
Still, both of these help me a LOT, and while that's just an anecdotal story from one person, I think it's safe to say that they are not nearly as useless as you make them out to be.
Wasn't there a court decision regarding this in Germany at some point? I vaguely recall something about a company shipping phone books to China and having workers type them in there, then using that data to produce phone book CDs, and I also seem to recall that when they were sued for it, it was ultimately found that what they were doing was not illegal.
But I'm not sure about it anymore.
To paraphrase what my history teacher used to say, Wikipedia articles like this (in fact, any article in any encyclopedia!) should be as simple as possible, but at the same time as complex as necessary. In other words, simplifying the presentation of a concept or an object is good, but it shouldn't reach a point where the actual nature of the concept or object in question is warped.
That being said, there's always the option of having both a "thorough" and a "simple" version of an article, too; see e.g. [[M-theory]] and [[M-theory simplified]]. There's no reason why in addition to [[Lie group]], there shouldn't also be a [[Lie groups simplified]] or [[Lie groups for dummies]] or so.:)
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Pettifogger.
That seems like a bad idea to me, for a very simple reason.
Think about it: companies are, first and foremost, interested in making money. Some may have ethical goals or values, too (let's call these "the good guys"), while others don't and care ONLY about money (the "bad guys"). Now, what kind of company would donate a patent they held?
Obviously, the bad guys wouldn't do it; after all, a patent, even if you're not using it right now and have no current plans to do so in the future, might still be valuable at some point, and giving up that value for nothing is a bad deal. The good guys, on the other hand, might do it - depending, of course, but in principle, they might.
If a patent gets donated, what happens? Either someone picks it up and creates a successful business, or it turns out to be a dud. In the latter case, the whole act of donating it was pretty useless, but since that's not what's supposed to happen, let's concentrate on the first case: here, someone actually demonstrates that there WAS more than just a theoretical value attached to the patent, so the company that donated it did lose REAL money when it did so.
Now think about that: the bad guys (who didn't donate anything) continued as usual, and the good guys, *by virtue of being good guys*, *lost money*. Therefore, this scheme is either useless (if the donated patents aren't useful for creating new businesses) or hurts the good guys and rewards the greedy.
I once did see a "Vertex operator algebras for dummies" - just a spoof picture, of course, not a real book, but I thought it was cute.
As someone who's been taking various antidepressants daily for half a decade (not anymore nowadays, though, fortunately), I can assure you that they are not at all useless. Of course they do not *cure* anything, but they can provide a foundation upon which actual therapy can build, and that's quite invaluable.
Also, there is a reason why several different antidepressants exist: they have different effects and different side-effects on different people. For me, out of the 7 or 8 drugs I took overall, only two (sertraline and mirtazapine) worked, and sertraline ultimately turned out to have side effects that were so serious that I couldn't take it anymore.
Still, both of these help me a LOT, and while that's just an anecdotal story from one person, I think it's safe to say that they are not nearly as useless as you make them out to be.
Wasn't there a court decision regarding this in Germany at some point? I vaguely recall something about a company shipping phone books to China and having workers type them in there, then using that data to produce phone book CDs, and I also seem to recall that when they were sued for it, it was ultimately found that what they were doing was not illegal. But I'm not sure about it anymore.
To paraphrase what my history teacher used to say, Wikipedia articles like this (in fact, any article in any encyclopedia!) should be as simple as possible, but at the same time as complex as necessary. In other words, simplifying the presentation of a concept or an object is good, but it shouldn't reach a point where the actual nature of the concept or object in question is warped.
:)
That being said, there's always the option of having both a "thorough" and a "simple" version of an article, too; see e.g. [[M-theory]] and [[M-theory simplified]]. There's no reason why in addition to [[Lie group]], there shouldn't also be a [[Lie groups simplified]] or [[Lie groups for dummies]] or so.