That's a false dichotomy: the fact that something is fraud doesn't rule out that it's SOP, and the fact that something's SOP doesn't rule out that it's fraud. It's perfectly possible for actions to be fraudulent to be SOP at the same time.
But still, there are so many things being patented, in such esoteric fields, that even smart people with training in related fields or tangential field or whatever don't have the technical knowledge to grasp the subject at hand, or -- and this is pretty important -- don't have a way to access the information that would give them a better grasp of it.
Then the application should be forwarded to a different examiner, and if it turns out that noone can assess it, then I'm sorry, but the patent shouldn't be granted at all.
There's a big flaw in that reasoning, though - namely that if the current copyright law "farse" [sic] was indeed abolished, people could use your work in proprietary products as well. You'd be free to copy those products then, of course, but do you think the source code would magically appear out of nowhere? Think again.
On a side note, I should also note that your statement that "[i]f you release it public domain, people can use it in copyrighted works, thus (indirectly) copyrighting your work" contains several rather glaring errors. First of all, *all* works are copyrighted (at least a priori, issues of creativity etc. nonwithstanding); what you're thinking of is propietary works. And second, you can't copyright someone else's work, neither directly nor indirectly; you can copy it and use it as part of your own works, but while those works will then be copyrighted to you as a whole, the individual parts' copyright still belongs to the original copyright holder.
You've got a couple of very good points, but, pray, why is questioning and reevaluating your morals a "scary" thing? You seem to be under the assumption that everyone who does so will automatically turn into some sort of super-villain (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit there), but I frankly don't see that.
This gets modded funny, but the poster actually has a point. "Back in the day" when the USA were founded, a militia of sufficient size made up of random armed citizens would've been able to hold back any army, or at least - depending on the exact numbers on either side - slow them down severely and decimate them quite a bit. The right to bear arms was supposed to ensure that things would stay this way.
Today, nothing could be further from the truth anymore. Does that mean that people should be able to just buy tactical nukes at Wal*Mart? Of course not (well, at least *I* don't think so), but it's an interesting thing to keep in mind. Next time someone drones on about "from my cold, dead hands", you may wish to consider this.
(And just for the record, I'm not even against gun ownership, myself; I'm just against irresponsible gun owners.)
A website is a collection of urls... grouped by what?
Is a website unit a domain? A sub-domain? A directory? A virtual directory? If I have a web-application co-hosted under a domain as foo.bar.com/me/, is my website? Or is it the domain owner's? What if I have a subdomain as me.foo.bar.com? What if I do not have that, but the domain owner fakes it through url rewrites? Does that make a difference?
Think semantics, not syntax. A website isn't defined by the URLs of its individual pages; it's defined by how they are connected, how they form a coherent (or incoherent:)) whole, how there is a specific party (or group of parties) responsible for them, and so on. It's a malleable concept, of course, but it's not impossible to define.
That's pretty stupid. Imagine that you live in a universe that's expanding at a speed faster than that of light (I'm not a physicist, not even an armchair one, so I don't know whether that's actually true for ours). In this universe, everything that is more than a certain distance away from you cannot interact with you in any way whatsoever. Would you say that these things do not exist anymore, then?
Now suppose that the rate of expansion goes down until it's below the speed of light; now things suddenly *can* interact again (even though depending on the exact parameters, it might take a long time for them to do so). Have things that previously popped out of existence magically popped back into it now?
(If you don't like this example, consider something that's crossed the event horizon of a black hole. Sure, it'll eventually come back as Hawking radiation, but has it vanished from existence in the meantime?)
The mere fact that you cannot observe something does not mean that it automatically doesn't exist or doesn't have a physical reality. In fact, the first example shows that even if something is *fundamentally unobservable*, it can still exist and have a physical reality.
I'm not saying that I necessarily believe in a universe that goes beyond the "physical" universe (and the emergent dynamics of the physical universe, which ultimately include things like the mind and possibly the soul - things that exist for all practical purposes without necessarily having an existence unis et separato), but you obviously haven't thought things through completely yet.
And for our current president they seem to be doing a good job, seeing as most of the world hates bush and yet he lives on.
Here's a hint: not everyone who hates the guy wants to personally kill him. Many people would celebrate if he died, and many would gladly piss on his grave given the opportunity, but that's a far cry from actually killing him yourself.
Given that Russian and Estonian are about as closely related as English is to Polish [...]
Actually, Polish and English are much more closely-related than Estonian and Russian - it only makes your point even stronger, of course, but I still wanted to point it out.
This suggestion reminds me of an anecdote my English teacher once related to us in school in order to illustrate the attitude of the British towards Europe; according to that anecdote, when, at some time in the 19th century or so, the telegraph lines that connected Britain to mainland Europe were destroyed by a particularly heavy storm or something similar, newspapers in London had the following title the next day: "Telegraph lines destroyed - continent cut off!"
Whimsical, isn't it? The attitude that was (supposedly; I'm not sure just HOW true it is) being illustrated here, of course, was that the British didn't think of *themselves* being cut off from the mainland, but rather as the mainland being cut off from them.
What you're advocating reminds me of that, too. If you start cutting off all countries that don't take cybercrime "seriously" from the Internet, then I'm wondering if the end result won't be that you've isolated yourself and a few others while the entire rest of the world continues to exchange data just fine.
In other words, have you really cut them off, or have you cut yourself off? And what's more, will you realise what you've done, or will you insist that it's the continent that was cut off from you?
I'm just speculating here, but I think it might also have to do with the fact that Estonia has been trying to strengthen its bond with the Nordic countries. Estonian as a language is closely related to Finnish, and Estonian culture is related to the culture of the Nordic countries as well. And don't forget that Estonia has been a member of the EU and the NATO since 2004, too.
Here's an article (from the Finnish Helsingin Sanomat newspaper) mentioning that one of the worst agitators on Russian-language message boards is believed to have ties to the FSB (one of Russia's intelligence agencies), too.
To pick a nit, I think you're confusing unauthorised copying and copyright infringement. If you copy something without permission of the copyright holder (e.g. when you're exercising fair use rights or using a compulsory license), you're making an unauthorised copy insofar as that you weren't authorised to do so, but you're not infringing on the copyright owner's copyright as long as what you're doing is within your legal rights.
But that being said, I fully agree with you. Copyright infringement is neither piracy nor stealing, and shouldn't be referred to as such, just like terms like "intellectual property" should not be used. In all these cases, unrelated concepts are being conflated in a manner that can only serve to confuse those participating in the discussion.
Oh, come on. They couldn't cover up that blow job because they didn't want to - it was all just a carefully staged farce conducted by the Democratic-Republican Party to convince you that they're still incompetent and that you have nothing to fear, and at the same time, it was also an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes and convince you that there really still are two parties fighting each other and that the secret meetings that were held where the parties effectively (de facto, if not de jure) merged didn't happen.
Aye, I hear you. I once went to a small, newly-opened local cinema that's not part of a big franchise a while ago to see an old movie ("Yellow Submarine"), and boy, did it ever suck - the film was out of focus most of the time, the projector wasn't set up correctly so the top 20% of the screen were cut off (at least until a group of fed up people went to the lobby to complain), the sound wasn't great (certainly less immersive than what you'd get from a 5.1 system at home), and to top it all off, there was an idiot sitting right behind me who was constantly commenting on the film.
The last thing's not the cinema's fault, of course, but the whole experience was so entirely unpleasant that I will never go to that cinema again, and if I had downloaded the movie from the pirate bay or so, I would've gotten a much better experience. I'm not doing that, of course, since I'm a good guy, but the MPAA's notion that cinema provides you with a better movie-watching experience is, unfortunately, ridiculous.
That's not a fair competition, though - unless by "fair" you mean "meant to allow pretty much any half-decent human player to win against pretty much every computer".
The "poisoning" part is stupid, yes, but as for your second point - TFA says that the study showed that angry faces can apparently be seen as rewarding if they're shown briefly (as opposed to for extended periods of time), so it seems reasonable to assume that similar angry reactions might be similar. It's totally unproven, of course, but it makes sense.
So what if an idea comes by a stroke of pure genius?
Then you still have to flesh it out into an actual invention - the devil, as usual, will be in the details. An overall idea of how to accomplish something is good, but it's not enough for an invention, and certainly isn't/shouldn't be enough for a patent.
Use medicine, for example. If you're a biochemist working for a large drug company, maybe you'll think "hey, why don't we use substance X to achieve effect Y, which would cure disease Z" some day, but it's a long, long way from there to a marketable product. Strokes of "pure genius" where all the details suddenly coalesce in your mind like a Nethack map just don't happen.
LaTeX3 is being developed actively. I don't really know anything about it, and I don't know if it gets rid of (La)TeX's quirks, but... one can hope, and it might be worth looking into.
As Bruce Schneier would say, security holes ultimately aren't a security problem as much as they are an economical problem, and this is a perfect example: the vendor does not care about whether their customers are secure; they only care about how acknowleding holes, putting out patches etc. will affect their bottom line.
The solution to this is to make sure that unpatched security holes DO affect their bottom line; for example, there could be a fine for leaving known holes unpatched intentionally. Once you shift the financial burdens to those in a position to fix the problem, the problem WILL get fixed, but if you don't do that... good luck; you'll need it.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just perfectly summed up the fundamental attitude of the USA.
That's a false dichotomy: the fact that something is fraud doesn't rule out that it's SOP, and the fact that something's SOP doesn't rule out that it's fraud. It's perfectly possible for actions to be fraudulent to be SOP at the same time.
Then the application should be forwarded to a different examiner, and if it turns out that noone can assess it, then I'm sorry, but the patent shouldn't be granted at all.
There's a big flaw in that reasoning, though - namely that if the current copyright law "farse" [sic] was indeed abolished, people could use your work in proprietary products as well. You'd be free to copy those products then, of course, but do you think the source code would magically appear out of nowhere? Think again.
On a side note, I should also note that your statement that "[i]f you release it public domain, people can use it in copyrighted works, thus (indirectly) copyrighting your work" contains several rather glaring errors. First of all, *all* works are copyrighted (at least a priori, issues of creativity etc. nonwithstanding); what you're thinking of is propietary works. And second, you can't copyright someone else's work, neither directly nor indirectly; you can copy it and use it as part of your own works, but while those works will then be copyrighted to you as a whole, the individual parts' copyright still belongs to the original copyright holder.
You've got a couple of very good points, but, pray, why is questioning and reevaluating your morals a "scary" thing? You seem to be under the assumption that everyone who does so will automatically turn into some sort of super-villain (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit there), but I frankly don't see that.
This gets modded funny, but the poster actually has a point. "Back in the day" when the USA were founded, a militia of sufficient size made up of random armed citizens would've been able to hold back any army, or at least - depending on the exact numbers on either side - slow them down severely and decimate them quite a bit. The right to bear arms was supposed to ensure that things would stay this way.
Today, nothing could be further from the truth anymore. Does that mean that people should be able to just buy tactical nukes at Wal*Mart? Of course not (well, at least *I* don't think so), but it's an interesting thing to keep in mind. Next time someone drones on about "from my cold, dead hands", you may wish to consider this.
(And just for the record, I'm not even against gun ownership, myself; I'm just against irresponsible gun owners.)
I can understand bathrooms to some extent, but... shared kitchens?
Think semantics, not syntax. A website isn't defined by the URLs of its individual pages; it's defined by how they are connected, how they form a coherent (or incoherent :)) whole, how there is a specific party (or group of parties) responsible for them, and so on. It's a malleable concept, of course, but it's not impossible to define.
That's pretty stupid. Imagine that you live in a universe that's expanding at a speed faster than that of light (I'm not a physicist, not even an armchair one, so I don't know whether that's actually true for ours). In this universe, everything that is more than a certain distance away from you cannot interact with you in any way whatsoever. Would you say that these things do not exist anymore, then?
Now suppose that the rate of expansion goes down until it's below the speed of light; now things suddenly *can* interact again (even though depending on the exact parameters, it might take a long time for them to do so). Have things that previously popped out of existence magically popped back into it now?
(If you don't like this example, consider something that's crossed the event horizon of a black hole. Sure, it'll eventually come back as Hawking radiation, but has it vanished from existence in the meantime?)
The mere fact that you cannot observe something does not mean that it automatically doesn't exist or doesn't have a physical reality. In fact, the first example shows that even if something is *fundamentally unobservable*, it can still exist and have a physical reality.
I'm not saying that I necessarily believe in a universe that goes beyond the "physical" universe (and the emergent dynamics of the physical universe, which ultimately include things like the mind and possibly the soul - things that exist for all practical purposes without necessarily having an existence unis et separato), but you obviously haven't thought things through completely yet.
Here's a hint: not everyone who hates the guy wants to personally kill him. Many people would celebrate if he died, and many would gladly piss on his grave given the opportunity, but that's a far cry from actually killing him yourself.
Actually, Polish and English are much more closely-related than Estonian and Russian - it only makes your point even stronger, of course, but I still wanted to point it out.
That being said, great comment.
This suggestion reminds me of an anecdote my English teacher once related to us in school in order to illustrate the attitude of the British towards Europe; according to that anecdote, when, at some time in the 19th century or so, the telegraph lines that connected Britain to mainland Europe were destroyed by a particularly heavy storm or something similar, newspapers in London had the following title the next day: "Telegraph lines destroyed - continent cut off!"
Whimsical, isn't it? The attitude that was (supposedly; I'm not sure just HOW true it is) being illustrated here, of course, was that the British didn't think of *themselves* being cut off from the mainland, but rather as the mainland being cut off from them.
What you're advocating reminds me of that, too. If you start cutting off all countries that don't take cybercrime "seriously" from the Internet, then I'm wondering if the end result won't be that you've isolated yourself and a few others while the entire rest of the world continues to exchange data just fine.
In other words, have you really cut them off, or have you cut yourself off? And what's more, will you realise what you've done, or will you insist that it's the continent that was cut off from you?
I'm just speculating here, but I think it might also have to do with the fact that Estonia has been trying to strengthen its bond with the Nordic countries. Estonian as a language is closely related to Finnish, and Estonian culture is related to the culture of the Nordic countries as well. And don't forget that Estonia has been a member of the EU and the NATO since 2004, too.
Here's an article (from the Finnish Helsingin Sanomat newspaper) mentioning that one of the worst agitators on Russian-language message boards is believed to have ties to the FSB (one of Russia's intelligence agencies), too.
You could just say "US-American" (both as a noun and an adjective) - that's what I do, for example.
To pick a nit, I think you're confusing unauthorised copying and copyright infringement. If you copy something without permission of the copyright holder (e.g. when you're exercising fair use rights or using a compulsory license), you're making an unauthorised copy insofar as that you weren't authorised to do so, but you're not infringing on the copyright owner's copyright as long as what you're doing is within your legal rights.
But that being said, I fully agree with you. Copyright infringement is neither piracy nor stealing, and shouldn't be referred to as such, just like terms like "intellectual property" should not be used. In all these cases, unrelated concepts are being conflated in a manner that can only serve to confuse those participating in the discussion.
Oh, come on. They couldn't cover up that blow job because they didn't want to - it was all just a carefully staged farce conducted by the Democratic-Republican Party to convince you that they're still incompetent and that you have nothing to fear, and at the same time, it was also an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes and convince you that there really still are two parties fighting each other and that the secret meetings that were held where the parties effectively (de facto, if not de jure) merged didn't happen.
:))
(Seriously, I'm just joking. Or am I?
Aye, I hear you. I once went to a small, newly-opened local cinema that's not part of a big franchise a while ago to see an old movie ("Yellow Submarine"), and boy, did it ever suck - the film was out of focus most of the time, the projector wasn't set up correctly so the top 20% of the screen were cut off (at least until a group of fed up people went to the lobby to complain), the sound wasn't great (certainly less immersive than what you'd get from a 5.1 system at home), and to top it all off, there was an idiot sitting right behind me who was constantly commenting on the film.
The last thing's not the cinema's fault, of course, but the whole experience was so entirely unpleasant that I will never go to that cinema again, and if I had downloaded the movie from the pirate bay or so, I would've gotten a much better experience. I'm not doing that, of course, since I'm a good guy, but the MPAA's notion that cinema provides you with a better movie-watching experience is, unfortunately, ridiculous.
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "clit mouse", doesn't it?
That's not a fair competition, though - unless by "fair" you mean "meant to allow pretty much any half-decent human player to win against pretty much every computer".
The "poisoning" part is stupid, yes, but as for your second point - TFA says that the study showed that angry faces can apparently be seen as rewarding if they're shown briefly (as opposed to for extended periods of time), so it seems reasonable to assume that similar angry reactions might be similar. It's totally unproven, of course, but it makes sense.
"A is braver than B is" may or may not be frowned upon, but it certainly isn't strictly incorrect. Of course, neither is "A is braver than B".
Then you still have to flesh it out into an actual invention - the devil, as usual, will be in the details. An overall idea of how to accomplish something is good, but it's not enough for an invention, and certainly isn't/shouldn't be enough for a patent.
Use medicine, for example. If you're a biochemist working for a large drug company, maybe you'll think "hey, why don't we use substance X to achieve effect Y, which would cure disease Z" some day, but it's a long, long way from there to a marketable product. Strokes of "pure genius" where all the details suddenly coalesce in your mind like a Nethack map just don't happen.
LaTeX3 is being developed actively. I don't really know anything about it, and I don't know if it gets rid of (La)TeX's quirks, but... one can hope, and it might be worth looking into.
Actually, Finnish isn't bizarre at all; Indo-European languages like English are. ;) It's all a matter of perspective.
As Bruce Schneier would say, security holes ultimately aren't a security problem as much as they are an economical problem, and this is a perfect example: the vendor does not care about whether their customers are secure; they only care about how acknowleding holes, putting out patches etc. will affect their bottom line.
The solution to this is to make sure that unpatched security holes DO affect their bottom line; for example, there could be a fine for leaving known holes unpatched intentionally. Once you shift the financial burdens to those in a position to fix the problem, the problem WILL get fixed, but if you don't do that... good luck; you'll need it.