While you Americans may vote in incumbents a lot (for whatever reason), don't be too quick to want what we have in Canada, where people rarely vote for anyone, instead opting to vote against them. Neither extreme leads, I think, to particularly informed voting.
My boss uses Dragon Natural Speaking in his office. It's quite a nice product once fully trained; out of the box it's pretty spotty. It's also quite a resource hog, but that's pretty much to be expected with that sort of software.
My point is this, however. While it may be fine for my boss, a touch typer and not much of a speller, in his office, alone, it's not much use in a public or semi-public space. I'm not much of a visionary, but it seems pretty obvious that sooner or later, computers will be everywhere and we'll have to be inputting stuff everywhere as well. I'm not sure how speech recognition will scale in those cases.
Not to mention that at this point, as far as I know (and feel free to correct me on this), speech recognition is not good enough out of the box to recognise all sorts of voices. Not everyone has clear natural diction.
I like #8 a lot. It would prevent submarine patents quite well. But also, you could add to it that if a patent is infringed upon, the patenter must protect his patent. Much like trademarks. If you just leave it lying around, well, your loss.
I don't really have any arguments, as I think you points are fairly insightful (had I any mod points and had I not, you know, started this thread, I'd donate some to your most laudable cause). That said,
1. Could you develop this further? How would you incentivise the public -- or more likely, corporations -- to do the legwork on this? Do you see people being interested simply because they don't want a patent to be granted?
2. I like this. Although I disagree somewhat in that I can see cases where things covered by copyright would also deserve to be patented.
3. Absolutely.
4. Why? The patent office makes money every time they invalidate a patent and it is re-filed. It's not really in the patent office or the patenter's best interest to do this, I think.
5. Could work, but could also be infeasible in a lot of cases that I can think of.
Instead of asking if speech recognition is "good enough", maybe we should be asking whether or not it's actually useful for anything in the first place. I mean, is it good enough... to do what?
Can you imagine being in a cubicle farm full of people talking to their computers? Or trying to talk to your computer on the bus? You have to imagine that as computers become more ubiquitous, input methods will have to adjust alongside, and I simply can't see (or hear) speech recognition doing that very well.
Maybe the problem is that lawmakers simply don't understand that software is not an analog to the real world. They don't understand that it moves faster, and that software development often simply doesn't have to bear the cost of traditional inventions and innovations. Not to say that there aren't software products or implementations worthy of patenting, but rather to say that patents in a software world are simply different.
Or maybe, just maybe, non-technical people are so used to being explained things in terms of analogy they tend to lose sight of the fact that simply because an analogy is the most useful or expedient method of explaining a concept the concept itself isn't bound by the realities an analogy might suggest.
Yes. I have a cousin who is a patent officer in Canada (and we have some stimulating discussions on patent-related subjects when we see eachother), which I imagine is at least somewhat similar to being a patent examiner in the US. I also have a close friend who is a patent lawyer, though we don't talk about that stuff much because it bums out all our other friends.
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.
I mean, you're probably not a dumb guy, but imagine yourself presented with a sheaf of materials that you only vaguely know about from college five years ago. It's written in technical language that, even though broken down as much as it can be, is still pretty arcane. How are you going to judge if that patent application represents something truly innovative, something truly worth granting a patent for?
We can all say, "Well, they should know," but that's much harder said than done. Another problem is that the people truly qualified to judge the patent's worthiness are often very expensive people. While the patent office may pay a lot of money to their examiners, they still don't, as far as I am aware, pay as well as private industry.
One thing I've always wondered is how bad a patent has to be before patent examiners reject it out of hand. Something tells me that if the rules were tightened on just plain bad submissions, a bunch of patents would be tossed in the trash. And maybe the patent office would make some money on the submissions and re-submissions... so a win for everybody?
Instead of invalidating software patents, we could shorten their term to a reasonable period (two or three years generally ensures obsolescence for most software products), and drastically expand the criteria against which a particular software patent is judged invalid. Would that not be at least a workable compromise?
I hear a lot of moaning and bitching about the patent office. I can see where it comes from, as the laws they operate under are pretty broken, all told. But seriously, how would you fix the patent office? These are people that have to deal with patents on subjects they might not even have a tenuous grasp on, much less fully understand. And not just a few patents, lots and lots of them.
The question remains: how would you fix the patent office?
I have patented several products and have a patent pending (in manufacturing, not in software, so please no-one try to dissolve me in acid) for products and techniques I think are at least fairly innovative. That said, it's no use blaming the lawyers for the state of affair in the US and Canada. The fact that they're needed at every step of the process -- truly and absolutely needed -- is a testament not to lawyers greed but to legislative bloat.
Now, you can argue that lawyers and lawmakers form a recursive loop, but I'll leave that for people smarter than I.
See, here's the thing. Real Things are really hard to make. Research, development, testing, certification, more testing, marketing, shipping, storing, selling, and maybe even shipping one more time make for a lot of money invested to not a lot of return, considering all the effort that goes into them. Sure, you might say that Sears makes a lot of Real Things and has a lot of Real Assets and employs a lot of Real People, but at the end of the day, are its profits in line with the amount of money invested to do all this Real Stuff?
For an investor, your ROI in Google is higher (now) than Sears because Google doesn't have as much Real Whatever to build and maintain. Sears does. Are the amounts of money pouring into these databases and websites inflated right now? Yeah, probably. But the returns are at least theoretically there. The same thing happened with railroads and electricity around the turn of the century, but these things are now so legacy and so embedded that they've become nothing but commodities.
The web is essentially the boomtown of the 21st century, like all the other industries (manufacturing or service) that have passed into the sphere of commodity. After information has -- and it will, I think, someday -- become a commodity, we'll find something else to form another speculative bubble around with a high ROI. It's the way of things. Today is no different from yesterday. The numbers just look bigger now.
...and we'll have ourselves a robot named "Bender".
Then we can cue the jokes.
Do any of those things matter?
on
FCC Approves iPhone
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· Score: 2, Interesting
At the end of the day, do you think people will care about any of those things? I mean the people who actually buy these kinds of phones?
Personally I think it'll come down to style and price. They'll win on style, but the price will stop your average joe from picking one up. But who knows, maybe that's what Apple wants.
Their computer division has been competing on style for a long time now. They make a profit on each box they sell. I imagine they want the same thing with the phone, because maybe, just maybe, Apple doesn't consider a checklist of features or complete domination of every market "winning".
Unlike a certain other company that shall remain nameless.
Yeah, I can't really see how this is a good idea. Maybe a convenient idea, but it seems that with every convenience comes some sort of multiplied danger.
What would be interesting to know is how much information about you is kept on that magnetic strip? I imagine the licensing office only has some sort of binary hash on there that can be read as a straight number and applied to a debit account, seeing how each number would be unique. So even if someone managed to swipe that data, they'd still just have a unique number, not your actual identity.
Or, if they stole the card, they'd have your license, but not your PIN. You show me someone merging a driver's license and a credit card and then I'll go ahead and tell you where they can stuff that idea.
Throughout history some Christians have believed the end times are right around the corner. Not all. Not even a lot. In fact, if you look at the history a bit, the "end times" craze of what I believe is called premillenialism is quite a recent phenomenon.
In fact, there seems to be quite a large faction of Christianity that doesn't believe the end times are anywhere close, because the Christian religion is not yet dominant across the earth. And while agnostics tend to be distracted by all the flag-waving and chanting of the "get ready for the rapture" types, there's an entire other class you should find much more threatening: the ones who believe that one day their religion will triumph over the entire globe.
On the other hand, from what I can tell, most of these believe that Christianity will achieve this as a "victory of love", and most of them tent to be non-violent, anti-war types. Either way.
You are completely correct in that information is the new currency. But the United States is wrong in how it deals with that currency.
Manufacturing has always been plagued by scarcity. For instance, in the US and Canada and Europe, there's a scarcity of cheap labour. So stuff that can be sent overseas is sent overseas. But overseas, there's a scarcity of knowledge in areas of research, development, automation, and quality control. So anything that is heavy on those things either have a heavy knowledge and personnel export, or they are kept at home.
My background is manufacturing in Canada, and I can tell you this: typical tool and die, mould-makers and other rather simple (comparatively) stuff is going to China and India, and complicated, highly technical, highly automated products like aerospace are staying here. In fact, traditional trades are slowing right down, but aerospace is absolutely booming in Ontario.
The problem is that information has no such scarcity and flows easily away. Whether this information is media or trade knowledge. While we may have the cultural upper hand right now, and while we may have the automation and quality control upper hand right now, information like that won't take long to get to China and other low-wage regions.
So in all their wisdom, our lawmakers have collectively decided to stop that flow as best they can. Whether they can stop it is yet to be seen, but from what I can see, it's doomed to fail. Or, put another way, artificial scarcity is just that: artificial and easily overcome.
If Firefox is really about being a slim browser, why doesn't the team behind it build and "Official Add-On Pack" that has code-reviewed extensions or themes or whatever?
Then, instead of everyone complaining about bloat (even though I don't really see it, as the browser is still the slimmest of the pack, afaict), they could optionally download extra features that the Mozilla team would like to see in the browser but doesn't feel have a good enough cost/benefit ration.
Or, optionally, they could just go ahead and not download said pack.
Maybe what you need to ask yourself is whether you are a former skeptic convinced by the evidence, or just another in the "global warming is happening and caused by dirty capitalists, nyaah nyaah nyaah I can't hear you" crowd.
I mean, if all skeptics must be convinced of the evidence you're seemingly so certain of, instead of just picking a belief system and filling their ears with sand, you must admit that concept works both ways, yes?
I mean, come on. In 3012, Slashdot headlines are going to read something like, "Scientists Trap a Solar Flare Inside Small Tupperware Container", and someone's going to come along and go, "Oy, is that a good idea?"
But then, potential power sources always get consideration despite the consequences. Exhibit A: the internal combustion engine.
Really, what this comes down to it Microsoft, having or claiming to have some rather nice cards, not wanting to show them off.
The first and hopeful reason for this is because most of their patents are pure rubbage. The second and also somewhat hopeful reason is they don't want anyone coming up with a strategy to overcome theirs. The third and less optimistic reason is that they're trying to maximise the amount of damage they can do.
Comedy option number four is that they're afraid of IBM, FOSS patents, and they're simply full of hot air.
Slashdot Mirror
While you Americans may vote in incumbents a lot (for whatever reason), don't be too quick to want what we have in Canada, where people rarely vote for anyone, instead opting to vote against them. Neither extreme leads, I think, to particularly informed voting.
My boss uses Dragon Natural Speaking in his office. It's quite a nice product once fully trained; out of the box it's pretty spotty. It's also quite a resource hog, but that's pretty much to be expected with that sort of software.
My point is this, however. While it may be fine for my boss, a touch typer and not much of a speller, in his office, alone, it's not much use in a public or semi-public space. I'm not much of a visionary, but it seems pretty obvious that sooner or later, computers will be everywhere and we'll have to be inputting stuff everywhere as well. I'm not sure how speech recognition will scale in those cases.
Not to mention that at this point, as far as I know (and feel free to correct me on this), speech recognition is not good enough out of the box to recognise all sorts of voices. Not everyone has clear natural diction.
I like #8 a lot. It would prevent submarine patents quite well. But also, you could add to it that if a patent is infringed upon, the patenter must protect his patent. Much like trademarks. If you just leave it lying around, well, your loss.
I don't really have any arguments, as I think you points are fairly insightful (had I any mod points and had I not, you know, started this thread, I'd donate some to your most laudable cause). That said,
1. Could you develop this further? How would you incentivise the public -- or more likely, corporations -- to do the legwork on this? Do you see people being interested simply because they don't want a patent to be granted?
2. I like this. Although I disagree somewhat in that I can see cases where things covered by copyright would also deserve to be patented.
3. Absolutely.
4. Why? The patent office makes money every time they invalidate a patent and it is re-filed. It's not really in the patent office or the patenter's best interest to do this, I think.
5. Could work, but could also be infeasible in a lot of cases that I can think of.
I'll be honest with you, Vista is way better at coming up with hilarious new Madlibs than you are.
Instead of asking if speech recognition is "good enough", maybe we should be asking whether or not it's actually useful for anything in the first place. I mean, is it good enough... to do what?
Can you imagine being in a cubicle farm full of people talking to their computers? Or trying to talk to your computer on the bus? You have to imagine that as computers become more ubiquitous, input methods will have to adjust alongside, and I simply can't see (or hear) speech recognition doing that very well.
Most governments and most people, it would seem.
Maybe the problem is that lawmakers simply don't understand that software is not an analog to the real world. They don't understand that it moves faster, and that software development often simply doesn't have to bear the cost of traditional inventions and innovations. Not to say that there aren't software products or implementations worthy of patenting, but rather to say that patents in a software world are simply different.
Or maybe, just maybe, non-technical people are so used to being explained things in terms of analogy they tend to lose sight of the fact that simply because an analogy is the most useful or expedient method of explaining a concept the concept itself isn't bound by the realities an analogy might suggest.
Yes. I have a cousin who is a patent officer in Canada (and we have some stimulating discussions on patent-related subjects when we see eachother), which I imagine is at least somewhat similar to being a patent examiner in the US. I also have a close friend who is a patent lawyer, though we don't talk about that stuff much because it bums out all our other friends.
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.
I mean, you're probably not a dumb guy, but imagine yourself presented with a sheaf of materials that you only vaguely know about from college five years ago. It's written in technical language that, even though broken down as much as it can be, is still pretty arcane. How are you going to judge if that patent application represents something truly innovative, something truly worth granting a patent for?
We can all say, "Well, they should know," but that's much harder said than done. Another problem is that the people truly qualified to judge the patent's worthiness are often very expensive people. While the patent office may pay a lot of money to their examiners, they still don't, as far as I am aware, pay as well as private industry.
America is made of dreams, or something :)
One thing I've always wondered is how bad a patent has to be before patent examiners reject it out of hand. Something tells me that if the rules were tightened on just plain bad submissions, a bunch of patents would be tossed in the trash. And maybe the patent office would make some money on the submissions and re-submissions... so a win for everybody?
So I imagine then that you would want the number of patent examiners increased even further, or the criteria for rejection broadened?
Instead of invalidating software patents, we could shorten their term to a reasonable period (two or three years generally ensures obsolescence for most software products), and drastically expand the criteria against which a particular software patent is judged invalid. Would that not be at least a workable compromise?
I hear a lot of moaning and bitching about the patent office. I can see where it comes from, as the laws they operate under are pretty broken, all told. But seriously, how would you fix the patent office? These are people that have to deal with patents on subjects they might not even have a tenuous grasp on, much less fully understand. And not just a few patents, lots and lots of them.
The question remains: how would you fix the patent office?
I have patented several products and have a patent pending (in manufacturing, not in software, so please no-one try to dissolve me in acid) for products and techniques I think are at least fairly innovative. That said, it's no use blaming the lawyers for the state of affair in the US and Canada. The fact that they're needed at every step of the process -- truly and absolutely needed -- is a testament not to lawyers greed but to legislative bloat.
Now, you can argue that lawyers and lawmakers form a recursive loop, but I'll leave that for people smarter than I.
See, here's the thing. Real Things are really hard to make. Research, development, testing, certification, more testing, marketing, shipping, storing, selling, and maybe even shipping one more time make for a lot of money invested to not a lot of return, considering all the effort that goes into them. Sure, you might say that Sears makes a lot of Real Things and has a lot of Real Assets and employs a lot of Real People, but at the end of the day, are its profits in line with the amount of money invested to do all this Real Stuff?
For an investor, your ROI in Google is higher (now) than Sears because Google doesn't have as much Real Whatever to build and maintain. Sears does. Are the amounts of money pouring into these databases and websites inflated right now? Yeah, probably. But the returns are at least theoretically there. The same thing happened with railroads and electricity around the turn of the century, but these things are now so legacy and so embedded that they've become nothing but commodities.
The web is essentially the boomtown of the 21st century, like all the other industries (manufacturing or service) that have passed into the sphere of commodity. After information has -- and it will, I think, someday -- become a commodity, we'll find something else to form another speculative bubble around with a high ROI. It's the way of things. Today is no different from yesterday. The numbers just look bigger now.
That means we'll have to go there twice?
Dammit. I've only got one FTL drive, and it took me a good twenty-five years of watching Star Trek to build that one!
...and we'll have ourselves a robot named "Bender".
Then we can cue the jokes.
At the end of the day, do you think people will care about any of those things? I mean the people who actually buy these kinds of phones?
Personally I think it'll come down to style and price. They'll win on style, but the price will stop your average joe from picking one up. But who knows, maybe that's what Apple wants.
Their computer division has been competing on style for a long time now. They make a profit on each box they sell. I imagine they want the same thing with the phone, because maybe, just maybe, Apple doesn't consider a checklist of features or complete domination of every market "winning".
Unlike a certain other company that shall remain nameless.
Yeah, I can't really see how this is a good idea. Maybe a convenient idea, but it seems that with every convenience comes some sort of multiplied danger.
What would be interesting to know is how much information about you is kept on that magnetic strip? I imagine the licensing office only has some sort of binary hash on there that can be read as a straight number and applied to a debit account, seeing how each number would be unique. So even if someone managed to swipe that data, they'd still just have a unique number, not your actual identity.
Or, if they stole the card, they'd have your license, but not your PIN. You show me someone merging a driver's license and a credit card and then I'll go ahead and tell you where they can stuff that idea.
Throughout history some Christians have believed the end times are right around the corner. Not all. Not even a lot. In fact, if you look at the history a bit, the "end times" craze of what I believe is called premillenialism is quite a recent phenomenon.
In fact, there seems to be quite a large faction of Christianity that doesn't believe the end times are anywhere close, because the Christian religion is not yet dominant across the earth. And while agnostics tend to be distracted by all the flag-waving and chanting of the "get ready for the rapture" types, there's an entire other class you should find much more threatening: the ones who believe that one day their religion will triumph over the entire globe.
On the other hand, from what I can tell, most of these believe that Christianity will achieve this as a "victory of love", and most of them tent to be non-violent, anti-war types. Either way.
You are completely correct in that information is the new currency. But the United States is wrong in how it deals with that currency.
Manufacturing has always been plagued by scarcity. For instance, in the US and Canada and Europe, there's a scarcity of cheap labour. So stuff that can be sent overseas is sent overseas. But overseas, there's a scarcity of knowledge in areas of research, development, automation, and quality control. So anything that is heavy on those things either have a heavy knowledge and personnel export, or they are kept at home.
My background is manufacturing in Canada, and I can tell you this: typical tool and die, mould-makers and other rather simple (comparatively) stuff is going to China and India, and complicated, highly technical, highly automated products like aerospace are staying here. In fact, traditional trades are slowing right down, but aerospace is absolutely booming in Ontario.
The problem is that information has no such scarcity and flows easily away. Whether this information is media or trade knowledge. While we may have the cultural upper hand right now, and while we may have the automation and quality control upper hand right now, information like that won't take long to get to China and other low-wage regions.
So in all their wisdom, our lawmakers have collectively decided to stop that flow as best they can. Whether they can stop it is yet to be seen, but from what I can see, it's doomed to fail. Or, put another way, artificial scarcity is just that: artificial and easily overcome.
If Firefox is really about being a slim browser, why doesn't the team behind it build and "Official Add-On Pack" that has code-reviewed extensions or themes or whatever?
Then, instead of everyone complaining about bloat (even though I don't really see it, as the browser is still the slimmest of the pack, afaict), they could optionally download extra features that the Mozilla team would like to see in the browser but doesn't feel have a good enough cost/benefit ration.
Or, optionally, they could just go ahead and not download said pack.
Maybe what you need to ask yourself is whether you are a former skeptic convinced by the evidence, or just another in the "global warming is happening and caused by dirty capitalists, nyaah nyaah nyaah I can't hear you" crowd.
I mean, if all skeptics must be convinced of the evidence you're seemingly so certain of, instead of just picking a belief system and filling their ears with sand, you must admit that concept works both ways, yes?
Clearly if you don't look like RMS and drive a Volkswagen van and organize love-ins, you're not contributing to the Free Software Movement!
I mean, come on. In 3012, Slashdot headlines are going to read something like, "Scientists Trap a Solar Flare Inside Small Tupperware Container", and someone's going to come along and go, "Oy, is that a good idea?"
But then, potential power sources always get consideration despite the consequences. Exhibit A: the internal combustion engine.
Really, what this comes down to it Microsoft, having or claiming to have some rather nice cards, not wanting to show them off.
The first and hopeful reason for this is because most of their patents are pure rubbage. The second and also somewhat hopeful reason is they don't want anyone coming up with a strategy to overcome theirs. The third and less optimistic reason is that they're trying to maximise the amount of damage they can do.
Comedy option number four is that they're afraid of IBM, FOSS patents, and they're simply full of hot air.