The author is an I.P. Address. Now if the plaintiffs slander a specific individual person on the basis of an I.P. Address in their lawsuits, they will be ironically and foolishly sealing their own fates on the exact same grounds upon which they were complaining. Then they will be slandered, dumb, have slandered others themselves, and without any future career in law.
Somebody contact the Duke University faculty to send a letter of support for the Jane Does and a writ of Guilty on a couple people behind some random I.P. Address.
IP Addresses are not Persons. I'm sure the IP Addresses will be saddened that they cannot begin their tour of lawsuit assault on the internets. Quick, sell the internet short, it's about to lose its law license!
What's next, suing victims that have swastikas painted on their garages with hate crimes? Look, there's a swastika painted on the garage of these people living at this street address! Proof! Guilty!
Most advertisements are basic trolling psychology. They have to be outrageous and annoying to be heard and seen nowadays. They have to scream in all caps "look at me!, pay attention to me!, feed me!, buy me!" People are tuning them out on a massive never before seen scale from AdBlock to dvr recorders, to subconsciously adjusted brain focus. Advertisements are out of place. They don't focus on sites that might be pertinent, but mass spam all channels.
Moderation is web evolution in action. It started because of spam and trolls.
That doesn't mean advertisements can't be quality and focused. Everybody is always advertising on some level all the time, whether they are looking for a job, looking for a mate, or trying to make a point in conversation. But all that advertising content is competing with advertising free "open source" individual generated content. And advertising content is getting it's clock cleaned by "open source" internet content as evidenced by the average hours people now spend on the internet that they used to spend watching commercial television.
The supply of ads is way up, the demand (sold eyeballs) for ads is way down. That means the value of advertising is going to crash and burn. On the internet every company can start it's own "channel", it's own website, and attract users to their sites with paid quality content with advertisements. If it's good, people will go to coca-cola.com to watch a nature episode on polar bears "brought to you by the sponsor". That's going to be far more effective in the long term than dragnet commercial advertising trolling spam which is causing people to hate the companies and its products.
The companies are being gouged by sleaze ball used car salesmen middleman advertising agencies and choked monopoly broadcasting networks. And they are going to realize it sooner or later, and cut out Madison Avenue and hire artists in their place. People using AdBlock are currently a leading economic indicator. Eventually a helluva lot more people are going to start using it too. But there is still plenty of room and space to sell ads on the internet.
A high quality site like slashdot will be able to sell a small space of a tasteful ad for prices that mimic "Boardwalk", while a lesser quality site with lesser quality content will bring in "Baltic Avenue" ad rates. So better quality sites will end up being paid more for less intrusive annoying ads. The market will, and is, adjusting.
Any form of currency that evolved in the free market and from free banking would do. Any number of commodity-backed currencies would likely win out. Anybody and everybody could start their own currency whenever they wished to. It would only be accepted if it was valued. If it was valued it would attempted to be mass produced to the limit of its capability, just like all other things of value.
It's not likely that the free market would long value those monopoly money notes which are created from fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking transfers wealth from savers to those who first spend the newly created money. This is why the government took it over. And this is why the *private banking corporations* Federal Reserve took it over from the government.
And they have a government enforced monopoly on creating money. Any you end up paying higher prices for everything, including higher prices from not seeing lower prices which would come about from increased productivity gains. This is a criminal + criminal conspiracy racket. Trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth has literally been thieved from the masses to the bankers.
You have to keep in mind that monetary theory is fundamentally flawed and the "science" of economics is unfortunately currently full of vast swaths of macroeconomic myths, as are the stories of the past which were incorrectly diagnosed from faulty economic theory.
Why is is such a stretch that something that has value costs money?
See Air. Air + Breathing = Carbon Based Oxygen Breathing Life
See Clothing. Wearing clothing has value, and everyone wearing clothing is copying others. If you want to sell software, stop wearing clothing. Except you'd be copying people by not wearing clothing too, so you are SOL.
Currency, such as the US dollar can also be copied pretty easily due to technology (and technology will only get better). Should we allow this too?
Yes we should! Why should the Central Bank be the only one to counterfeit dollars? If anybody and everybody could copy as many dollars as they wanted to whenever they wanted, this inherently unstable volatile fiat currency would quickly disappear as worthless in the market, and real money would evolve to take its place.
The artificial scarcity forced existence of fiat currency is causing serious economic distortions throughout the world. It's how wars are financed, it's how governments spend beyond their means, it's how debt contracts trap billions of people. The sooner the criminal counterfeiting Federal Reserve and fiat currency is killed, the better.
In any such system, blaming one person is extremely easy but utterly futile.
Or perhaps that, in a nutshell, is the Platonic (at least political realm) bread and circuses "Lie" upon which Society is founded, and thus not futile. Sitting in a jail cell is the perfect time to ask, "What is Justice"? Otherwise we can pretty much apply those charges almost universally all the way from the very top to the very bottom.
Except that you cannot create anything that doesn't copy the ideas of others on multiple levels. By copying letters, by copying language, you forfeit any claims of exclusive creativity. You seem to think that if you kick a football on somebody's roof, you then own their house. If you a build a house that extends above ground into the air that doesn't give you ownership of the air. Your copyright claims are circumscribing the creations of others within the claim. Your claims are infringing on the real property of others. You are trying to use violence to tell others what cannot be done with their hard drives, what they can't do with their own personal property. You have no such right. The copyright claim is therefore null and void.
You didn't invent language. You didn't invent the pages you write or type upon. You didn't invent book bindings. You didn't invent compact discs. You didn't invent musical notes. You copied those ideas. You seem to think that if you paint somebody's wall a different color, that then becomes your wall. Sorry, it doesn't. Copyright is the claim of lunatics and tyrants.
If you really had rights and ownership, then why can't you prevent people from deleting cds, why can't you prevent people from burning books, why can't you prevent people from doing innumerable things to stuff you created? Because you have no rights or ownership. Plain and simple.
Not to mention everything upon which copyright is claimed or granted, has been created first. Copyright does nothing to enhance those productions which are already done. Copyright is completely unnecessary. And even if something is created, it doesn't mean anybody else cares or wants what was created. Copyright does nothing for quality, which is completely subjective.
Stop getting you hair cut. Stop bathing. Stop wearing clothes. You are copying the ideas of others. Start wandering around mumbling gibberish. Oh wait, never mind, you'll still be copying others. But at least you won't be copying as many others. Maybe one day you can find a nice island upon which to be marooned.
We uncover more and more stuff which amazes us. Last History Channel program I watched about the excavation of Caligula's floating pleasure palace ships from Lake Nemi even had ball bearings being used.
There were many engineering marvels, aqueducts, military weapons. Are we going to pretend Newton's Laws weren't know then? They were aiming canon fire, heating water in baths, plumbing, pumps, medicine, etc. It doesn't seem a stretch to think that the scientific method steps had to be redeveloped after the burning of the Library at Alexandria, and it wasn't until well into the Industrial Revolution that ancient achievements were starting to finally be surpassed. Sure some Roman uses of technology are borrowed from the Greeks, but it's not like those Greeks in the Roman Empire stopped working on intellectual pursuits. Rome was rich because it embraced merchant trade.
And why were the ancients so advanced? Perhaps one reason is that all ships which entered the harbor of Alexandria were *required* by law to turn over all books for copying by the scribes.
Maybe Einstein's 'c' constant was just a symbol for copyright. You take the original 14 year term, square it, and arrive at a period of 196 years! But if somebody produces this novel copyright term length model, shouldn't they be entitled to control it? Aren't all the musicians who set the copyright term lengths the same as the first person to invent the copyright in fact copying his idea? How is more than one lawyer supposed to make a living if every lawyer can just copy his lawsuit methodology? Your Honor, motion to dismiss based on violation of grounds of copying the lawsuits of others.
So really, it's just E=M, but you are not allowed to use the E=M formula until the c^2 copyright term length expires. But as the universe is expanding, so too must the base c expand to keep the proper balance. Otherwise all the art which ever would have been produced in the future might be sucked into a black hole in the past. And we would never even know it!
Work is intermittent (Jon Pertwee used to say actors spend 95% of their time unemployed)
Then that means they can simultaneously work other jobs 95% of the time instead of sleeping, sitting on their asses, or partying. Only the most successful richest artists are going to have people still interested in their music decades later. This is pure welfare for the richest musicians, musicians that live in mansions, ride around in limousines, and snort and fuck everything that moves.
Total Patent Applications in 1991: 177,830, Granted 106,696, 40% Approval Rate
Oops, that's 60% Approval Rate. You can see the the Patent Approval Rate has declined dramatically, yet the number of patent applications continues to surge. This is a sure sign that the price of patent applications is too low. They are corporate lottery tickets for both trolls and businesses producing products actually for sale, and they are also defensive mechanisms used in (anti-trust violation) mutual do not sue agreements (but eliminate small players). There's no way the cost of the lawyers producing the patent applications should be less than the patent application fee paid to the examiners. This is why patent examiners are being bamboozled by obfuscatory legalese language.
This is why the fee should be raised to $100,000. That gives the patent office a tenfold increase to a $50 billion budget to hire enough examiners to *thoroughly* comb through all claims, or hire outside area expertise, such as $10K public domain bounties paid to those who demonstrate prior art by posting patent applications on-line for open source testing, along with bi-lingual lawyer language translators to convert the applications into English. Nobody is going to go through the patent process for truly innovative society enriching ideas that have market value less than $100K. Now if you were to start factoring in the costs of policing, enforcing, and prosecuting patent disputes, that should raise the patent application fee to $1M. Inventors can still demonstrate prior art, sell their ideas directly to corporations, or get private market venture capital financing to pay the price of patenting their ideas. In an a multi-TRILLION dollar economy, 7-figure patent fees aren't anywhere out of line. If the max an idea can produce is less than $10M of GDP economic benefit in today's economy, the idea is small change impractical or obvious *shit* that society doesn't need. The legal implementation and enforcement costs aren't worth the benefit.
One argument used to argue for patents is that of disclosure. If we don't allow patents, ideas will get lost and disappear forever. There are however problems with this argument. First of all, most ideas are easily copied/replicated by observation.
Not to mention they will be making ZERO market profit unless they by definition are trading products to others. Still, how many people make their own secret formula brand Coca-Cola in the privacy of their own home? Coca-Cola has been going strong for over a century even though people could, if they wanted to, brew their own Coca-Cola in their own homes. And Coca-Cola wouldn't make any money if they didn't by definition give their products away through trade.
Sorry, but I don't see any lone generational geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci carrying technological innovation upon his back. And even if there were a couple now and then, they sure as hell aren't the ones reaping rewards from patents granted for their work.
These companies are so cheap, they can't even manage to keep the loyalty of their own employees who created the technological innovations upon which they profit. Some 5-figure lolbonus while management gets millions of options for doing diddly? A few percent of the population of society has somehow imposed its will on the other 95% through deception, abuse, bribery, corruption, and violence. But the times, they are a changing. The RIAA is just a little taste. We've seen how weak they are when they cannot enforce laws against illegal immigration, win a war against disheveled peasant terrorists, and have to run and hide from Ron Paul because they are too terrified to address policy questions with respect and civility. They don't have enough money to enforce IP laws anymore.
You do realize that these two statements are contradictions. If a company won't pursue a cure that can't be patented, and you effectively eliminate the patents, then they're not going to pursure any cures at all. I do agree that the industry could live on as a subcontractor to government R&D, and actually I think that this might be the best future for the industry.
No, I meant drug companies could get patient financed investment the same way musicians could seek payment in advance to produce. Obviously the future expected drug sales profits are going to come from sick patients. If you can transfer payments received after a patent is awarded to before research and development commence, you solve the incentive problem.
Surely the drug industry as it currently exists would not be doing any of the R&D they are doing if it weren't for patents.
That's a real contradiction. The R&D is finished completely before any patents are awarded. Why should the drug company be awarded a single dollar beyond recouping its R&D costs? There's no economic reason whatsoever. They can continue selling their brand name drugs at inflated prices. Profits off name brand blockbuster drugs don't suddenly plummet to zero when the patent ends.
The scientists doing the work actually do benefit, since the industry profits are what give them their paychecks
That's not true. The R&D has 100% been paid for before a patent is issued.
A patent is a contract society makes with an inventor - it says that if you spend a billion dollars and come up with a really great idea, that society will pay you enough to make back the billion and a nice profit on top of that. The only other way to get a billion dollars for R&D is to have government fund the work and tax people for it.
That billion and a nice profit can only come from, be recouped from, one source -- sick patients. You could spend 50 billion on R&D to cure a rare disease that only 100 people in the world have, but you would have to ultimately collect 500 million on average from each person with that disease.
The contracts society have been voided by abuse and corruption, granting of frivolous patents, extension of length of term, even though the term should go do when information spreads faster, and now spreads instantaneously. Society has been unnecessarily obscenely gouged. Payback will be coming to the pharmaceutical industry the same way it is coming back to the music industry, and if you were to poll younger generations, only a small minority of them will feel the slightest bit guilty. A barely visible tsunami of changing public opinion is out in the middle of the ocean heading for shore.
The big problem with that is while I can give you a million reasons why the government should be able to do a better job than industry, for whatever reason they seem to get it wrong quite a bit of the time. And if you think that government regulators go easy on industry, just look at how well the government polices itself - if a company had the environmental impact of Hanford there would probably be people in jail.
Government and business backed by government is the problem. They are attempting to enforce artificial scarcity on the marketplace. That model is *destined* to fail. They will be a huge black market for pharmaceutical drugs just like there's a huge black market for illegal downloads and illegal drugs like cocaine and marijuana. They'd better start making serious negotiated capitulations right now (and instead they are seeking further abuse) or they are going to have their products tainted the way RIAA music is tainted. You think the RIAA takes bad PR hits from suing grandmothers? Wait until the drug industry tries to sue grandmothers who are dying from taking generic street versions of drugs keeping them alive. The drug industry had better get prepared to be seriously undercut from
The benefit to society is clear...by granting a temporary monopoly on an innovation, individuals and companies are incented to invest in areas that would otherwise not have a decent return on investment due to the ease of duplicating any innovation.
Thus the research and development investment was paid for in its entirety before a patent is granted! Why shouldn't there also be a dollar limit clause on all patent grants? Why should any patent earn $1 past the research and development costs? Isn't the patent rewarded fully if the research and development costs are fully funded? Shouldn't the patent then automatically enter the public domain after sales compensate the costs? Why not incentivize these corporations to commit accounting fraud so we can throw the executives in jail and seize their assets?
Return on investment would be the head start the company gets selling the product before competitors. And it's not like brand name blockbuster drugs sales go to zero after the patents expire.
8,913 employees, of those 5477 are patent examiners, $489,688 per employee, but lets cap the "support staff" at $75K or $258M of the budget, leaving the average patent examiner salary at just a tad under $800K!
I think we definitely need a Congressional Criminal Investigation into the USPTO.
But we can see the $10K *pittance* fees could easily be changed to $100K to bringing the USPTO budget to $50B per year. None of those patent applications would be for "small change" advancements expected to add less than $100K to the economy so its doubtful there would be any effect on the number of applications (or it would be tiny).
Let's say each patent examiner averages 200 days of work per year, each patent examiner is averaging 88 patents reviewed per year, or gives each patent an average attention span of 2 and a third working days.
I'm sure you could also search an estimate for average number of billable lawyer hours spent per patent application. But let's guess it's one month, or 120 hours, billed at $200/hour, or $24,000 per patent (which sounds really low), but that's an additional $11.6B in lawyer fees for fiscal 2007.
So when is the FBI going to start investigating the lawyers the way they investigate mortgage brokers? How come no charges for fraud are filed for any patent applications?
And as it is, the currently expensive research costs come from trying to avoid copying the process methods of others, duplicated by every firm. If it can't be patented it's scrapped, or an extra $500 million is spent on making a simple ideas complex enough to qualify for a patent.
Pharmaceutical companies do exactly what Monsanto does; take public domain genetic information and introduce a slight change to completely control use over that public domain genetic information.
People are living in a dream world if they think it really costs $800M to develop a new drug. It only costs $800M to obfuscate and make a simple process complex enough so that others can't copy.
Want proof? When is that last time any pharmaceutical company introduced any product that was not patented, but just being used in a different derivative way than some plant has been used in the public domain for thousands of years? What products don't have any copyrights or patents on them? Only things which can be *monopolized* have research expenses devoted to problems.
And what is up with the pretending of it taking 20 years to recoup costs? Puhlease. Like those costs aren't recuperated in the very first year! What are we too stupid to look at the growing market cap of the pharmaceutical industry companies? We're supposed to pretend they are mom and pop stores that make just enough to pay their bills each year? Their *shit* drugs spam every fucking television station advertising segments 24/7 so much that their advertising is actually killing television as a broadcast medium, as people tune on the low quality content just as much as they tune out the drug industry spam. How much money has been spent on marketing erectile dysfunction drugs versus how much money was spent on research and development of those drugs? And if those drugs were such innovations, why are there 3 or 4 patented versions all competing on sales with each other at the same time?
You can't wish human nature away. In the absence of compulsion there will always be freeloaders.
That's exactly why people don't talk or write posts on message boards. Ever since we removed copyright and patents on letters of the alphabet, conversation has completely dried up, especially on the internet. People got tired of free-loaders who did nothing but read the posts of others without contributing. The internet ended. There was nothing new to ever see everyday like before.
You wouldn't be allowed to patent the idea of a one click webshop, but you would be allowed to patent a certain implementation of that idea. Anyone else would be allowed to make their own implementation of the same idea, as long as their implementation isn't identical to yours.
Wrong. You forgot the phrase "non-obvious". And that's exactly the problem. 90% of the patents granted are for *obvious* ideas which anyone with average skill in the discipline can easily duplicate. The patent just prevents competition, allows for monopoly rents, and puts innovation out of business because if you move the slightest bit forward you will be committing the foul from touching the tip of my finger which is a quarter inch away from your eye.
Thus instead of having an operating system that combines the best ideas of Windows, Linux, Mac, etc., consumers pay monopoly prices for some lower quality product, and competition is prevented from ever getting started, eliminating the future innovations all those eliminated competitive firms would have piecemeal produced.
Take 10,000 people on slashdot, and they would put Microsoft out of business in a few years by being able to undercut Microsoft by 80% with a far higher quality operating system. They can't because Microsoft has *thousands* of obvious patents which prevent exactly that competition. We have a broken window fallacy operating system for the majority monopoly subject market which sucks away money which would have otherwise been spent on other stuff (increased productivity) or other research and development (increased innovation).
We need the patent fees to cover paying for people of ordinary skill to attempt to construct the idea claimed to be worthy of a patent, and only if they cannot replicate it, can the idea by given patent protection. Patents were supposed to be for *genius* production eventually benefiting society, not second rate hacks who keep journals of their daily routine work activities who pay lawyers to translate that into obfuscatory legalese to be submitted to the patent office.
See Microsoft with over 5,000 patent applications per year. Microsoft should be charged with fraud and conspiracy for bad faith patent claims, and have their corporate charter to act as a business in the United State revoked upon that business. Also hold the executives guilty with forfeiture of personal civil assets under Sarbanes-Oxley. I encourage EU regulators to do the same in the EU.
If Microsoft wishes to remain in business, perhaps a settlement can be reached with a 15 billion dollar infusion of cash to initially fund the patent office review board of people of average skill replicating all patent claims as submitted with working models. Henceforth, all patent applications must pay the market rate fees of having their inventions obviousness tested by funding a team of people of ordinary average skill duplicating their product. This should relieve the inefficient burdens faced by moron patent examiners.
Or vote for me for district attorney, and I'll charge Microsoft with fraud and conspiracy to defraud the American public by submitting bogus patent claims. Of course, if they wish to fight the charges, I'll back up the dump truck with additional charges. (No, that sound is not your cell phone battery dying, it's the dump truck backing up:P).
Oh really? When is the last a small startup with less than a million dollars in capitalization produced anything innovative? These "small start up firms" are already capitalized with millions by venture capitalists. What is anybody going to do with a patent they paid $10k for, and now have no money left over to start their business?
It's a *pittance* between $10k and $100k, and a *pittance* between* $100k and $1M. Nobody has time or means to seriously "innovate" without tens of millions if not 100s of millions in venture capital, unless you start calling "method to press computer mouse once" 'innovation', which is the absurdity mire we now find ourselves in. If it's really an "innovation", the fees will pay for themselves.
Go get a bank loan, or a government loan, if you are a lone ranger inventor living in poverty. You should be pissing away your house if you waste peoples time with your patent application spam. If not, then the patent grant rewards more than pay for the fee, many many, too many times over.
Drug companies would just sit and wait for somebody else to invent drugs and then find a new way to make them, and there would be no new drugs unless the government did all the work.
Wrong. Why do drug companies develop drugs in the first place? Because a population has a demand for a cure or alleviation to an illness. Drug companies can function perfectly as a service industry by selling their expertise to develop new drugs. Or do you think drug companies are working on methods to prevent finger nail growth disease? The obscene drug prices and profit these companies get front front running on people with disease is outrageous. They also recycle prior art with impunity into their methods and patent claims. They won't pursue any type of cure that cannot be patented (hence the high research costs to find something that not only works, but works in a way that doesn't violate any 1 of another million patent infringing processes). Drug company propaganda is right up there with RIAA propaganda.
Patents are still useful in certain industries and situations. If you're going to make it really easy to get around them you might as well get rid of them, which can actually hamper innovation. Patents have advantages and disadvantages - the goal is to maximize the one and minimize the other. What we don't want to do is toss out the baby with the bath water...
Patents only have disadvantages for society as a whole. They only have advantages for an extremely few number who benefit at the expense of the rest of society (and also make the wealth pie area of the rest of society fall by much more than the few benefit). Patents just allow for the massively inefficient construction of hangers on industries; drug company management, lawyers, government. It doesn't effect in the least the few brilliant scientists who are devoted to solving problems, and patents only get in the way of those people.
although patent (and trademark especially) fees help offset some of the cost of running the USPTO, it is in no way profitable. The USPTO cannot make up for it with volume, to rehash the old joke.
That's because the fees are insanely low. Reduce the fees to a cup of coffee through massive inflation devaluation of the US dollar, and you will be swamped with garbage that wastes your time even if only 1 of every 100 applicants slips under the radar to win the 50M to 1B patent grant lottery from which they can troll and extort. Just Microsoft alone, sends over 5,000 patent applications PER YEAR! Send a message by putting those application in the spam "Rejection" garbage bin.
It's patent application SPAM, plain and simple, afforded by too low application fees. Those figures need to be 6 figures MINIMUM, and preferably 7 figures. It's a complete waste of everybody's time to examine and/or grant a patent on some technology that isn't returning 100s of millions MINIMUM.
that includes USPTO management, which loudly and often proclaims its goal of raising its rates of rejection.
That's what they should do. There has never been a valid patent granted, and there never will be. Raise those rejection rates to as close to as 100% as possible. Raise the fees, dramatically, like adding two zeros to them, to decrease the number of applications. Double the fees each time an additional patent is applied for by the same corporate group in the same year ($100,000, $200,000, $400,000...)
You'll never look like a fool rejecting any patent (just like business managers and mutual fund managers chimed "you can't go wrong buying IBM"), but these patent examiners and their management are looking like complete idiots whenever a "one click" patent makes it into a courtroom or the press.
And what happens if the real world businesses stopped anti-trust colluding on agreements not to sue each other and one of them pressed a patent war button (like Yahoo or Google)? The system will collapse, and patent examiners and management will be pulled in front of congress to face the consequences and kiss their public service careers goodbye.
And it is a fact: if you are a patent examiner and not rejecting 100%, you are by definition not doing your job. You don't understand innovation, and how ideas build upon each other. You are missing the ways in which prior art is being recycled into monopoly competition killing (thus, innovation killing) licenses to conduct business (shutting down economic activity to a large degree) merely by obfuscating ideas in the language of garbage legalese. How many times can you stamp a "Reject" stamp per day? Hire me, and I'll have everyone else fired for not being able to stamp "Reject" at a relative pace. It is government work, so let's say 4 per hour (so we have time to say post to slashdot while locating the next application folder), with a two hour lunch, so 4 times 6 is 24 applications reviewed per day.
In real estate the mantra is "location, location, location". The Patent Office mantra should be "Reject, Reject, Reject". Why bother subjecting yourself to reading intentionally obfuscatory legalese garbage? Just reject that "shit", garbage in, garbage out.
No, there's plenty of solid Blue and solid Red states. If you can get significant percentages to vote third party in those states, you can raise their profiles for the future. So if you are in a solid blue or a solid red state, vote Green or Libertarian. You won't thus be stuck voting for a lesser of two evils, but expanding the influence of new voices for the future. If you are in a swing state, you can be excused for needing to influence the outcome, but everyone else, vote third party out of principle. And voting for Green or Libertarian is better than voting for individuals who are one and done, like Nader or Perot. Parties have at least a beginning of organization capability.
Maybe we can cause a shock and stir by having big percentages vote not Republican and not Democrat. We, and They, will notice, if the votes come in 55-40-5, or even 54-36-10. That's a good goal for seeking a sign of hope for the future. That's Change we can see on the election night television screens.
Slashdot Mirror
The author is an I.P. Address. Now if the plaintiffs slander a specific individual person on the basis of an I.P. Address in their lawsuits, they will be ironically and foolishly sealing their own fates on the exact same grounds upon which they were complaining. Then they will be slandered, dumb, have slandered others themselves, and without any future career in law.
Somebody contact the Duke University faculty to send a letter of support for the Jane Does and a writ of Guilty on a couple people behind some random I.P. Address.
IP Addresses are not Persons. I'm sure the IP Addresses will be saddened that they cannot begin their tour of lawsuit assault on the internets. Quick, sell the internet short, it's about to lose its law license!
What's next, suing victims that have swastikas painted on their garages with hate crimes? Look, there's a swastika painted on the garage of these people living at this street address! Proof! Guilty!
Most advertisements are basic trolling psychology. They have to be outrageous and annoying to be heard and seen nowadays. They have to scream in all caps "look at me!, pay attention to me!, feed me!, buy me!" People are tuning them out on a massive never before seen scale from AdBlock to dvr recorders, to subconsciously adjusted brain focus. Advertisements are out of place. They don't focus on sites that might be pertinent, but mass spam all channels.
Moderation is web evolution in action. It started because of spam and trolls.
That doesn't mean advertisements can't be quality and focused. Everybody is always advertising on some level all the time, whether they are looking for a job, looking for a mate, or trying to make a point in conversation. But all that advertising content is competing with advertising free "open source" individual generated content. And advertising content is getting it's clock cleaned by "open source" internet content as evidenced by the average hours people now spend on the internet that they used to spend watching commercial television.
The supply of ads is way up, the demand (sold eyeballs) for ads is way down. That means the value of advertising is going to crash and burn. On the internet every company can start it's own "channel", it's own website, and attract users to their sites with paid quality content with advertisements. If it's good, people will go to coca-cola.com to watch a nature episode on polar bears "brought to you by the sponsor". That's going to be far more effective in the long term than dragnet commercial advertising trolling spam which is causing people to hate the companies and its products.
The companies are being gouged by sleaze ball used car salesmen middleman advertising agencies and choked monopoly broadcasting networks. And they are going to realize it sooner or later, and cut out Madison Avenue and hire artists in their place. People using AdBlock are currently a leading economic indicator. Eventually a helluva lot more people are going to start using it too. But there is still plenty of room and space to sell ads on the internet.
A high quality site like slashdot will be able to sell a small space of a tasteful ad for prices that mimic "Boardwalk", while a lesser quality site with lesser quality content will bring in "Baltic Avenue" ad rates. So better quality sites will end up being paid more for less intrusive annoying ads. The market will, and is, adjusting.
Any form of currency that evolved in the free market and from free banking would do. Any number of commodity-backed currencies would likely win out. Anybody and everybody could start their own currency whenever they wished to. It would only be accepted if it was valued. If it was valued it would attempted to be mass produced to the limit of its capability, just like all other things of value.
It's not likely that the free market would long value those monopoly money notes which are created from fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking transfers wealth from savers to those who first spend the newly created money. This is why the government took it over. And this is why the *private banking corporations* Federal Reserve took it over from the government.
And they have a government enforced monopoly on creating money. Any you end up paying higher prices for everything, including higher prices from not seeing lower prices which would come about from increased productivity gains. This is a criminal + criminal conspiracy racket. Trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth has literally been thieved from the masses to the bankers.
You have to keep in mind that monetary theory is fundamentally flawed and the "science" of economics is unfortunately currently full of vast swaths of macroeconomic myths, as are the stories of the past which were incorrectly diagnosed from faulty economic theory.
Why is is such a stretch that something that has value costs money?
See Air. Air + Breathing = Carbon Based Oxygen Breathing Life
See Clothing. Wearing clothing has value, and everyone wearing clothing is copying others. If you want to sell software, stop wearing clothing. Except you'd be copying people by not wearing clothing too, so you are SOL.
Currency, such as the US dollar can also be copied pretty easily due to technology (and technology will only get better). Should we allow this too?
Yes we should! Why should the Central Bank be the only one to counterfeit dollars? If anybody and everybody could copy as many dollars as they wanted to whenever they wanted, this inherently unstable volatile fiat currency would quickly disappear as worthless in the market, and real money would evolve to take its place.
The artificial scarcity forced existence of fiat currency is causing serious economic distortions throughout the world. It's how wars are financed, it's how governments spend beyond their means, it's how debt contracts trap billions of people. The sooner the criminal counterfeiting Federal Reserve and fiat currency is killed, the better.
In any such system, blaming one person is extremely easy but utterly futile.
Or perhaps that, in a nutshell, is the Platonic (at least political realm) bread and circuses "Lie" upon which Society is founded, and thus not futile. Sitting in a jail cell is the perfect time to ask, "What is Justice"? Otherwise we can pretty much apply those charges almost universally all the way from the very top to the very bottom.
First college paper I ever wrote was an argument that Socrates' capitulation was itself unethical.
Except that you cannot create anything that doesn't copy the ideas of others on multiple levels. By copying letters, by copying language, you forfeit any claims of exclusive creativity. You seem to think that if you kick a football on somebody's roof, you then own their house. If you a build a house that extends above ground into the air that doesn't give you ownership of the air. Your copyright claims are circumscribing the creations of others within the claim. Your claims are infringing on the real property of others. You are trying to use violence to tell others what cannot be done with their hard drives, what they can't do with their own personal property. You have no such right. The copyright claim is therefore null and void.
You didn't invent language. You didn't invent the pages you write or type upon. You didn't invent book bindings. You didn't invent compact discs. You didn't invent musical notes. You copied those ideas. You seem to think that if you paint somebody's wall a different color, that then becomes your wall. Sorry, it doesn't. Copyright is the claim of lunatics and tyrants.
If you really had rights and ownership, then why can't you prevent people from deleting cds, why can't you prevent people from burning books, why can't you prevent people from doing innumerable things to stuff you created? Because you have no rights or ownership. Plain and simple.
Not to mention everything upon which copyright is claimed or granted, has been created first. Copyright does nothing to enhance those productions which are already done. Copyright is completely unnecessary. And even if something is created, it doesn't mean anybody else cares or wants what was created. Copyright does nothing for quality, which is completely subjective.
Stop getting you hair cut. Stop bathing. Stop wearing clothes. You are copying the ideas of others. Start wandering around mumbling gibberish. Oh wait, never mind, you'll still be copying others. But at least you won't be copying as many others. Maybe one day you can find a nice island upon which to be marooned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology
We uncover more and more stuff which amazes us. Last History Channel program I watched about the excavation of Caligula's floating pleasure palace ships from Lake Nemi even had ball bearings being used.
http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=322620
There were many engineering marvels, aqueducts, military weapons. Are we going to pretend Newton's Laws weren't know then? They were aiming canon fire, heating water in baths, plumbing, pumps, medicine, etc. It doesn't seem a stretch to think that the scientific method steps had to be redeveloped after the burning of the Library at Alexandria, and it wasn't until well into the Industrial Revolution that ancient achievements were starting to finally be surpassed. Sure some Roman uses of technology are borrowed from the Greeks, but it's not like those Greeks in the Roman Empire stopped working on intellectual pursuits. Rome was rich because it embraced merchant trade.
And why were the ancients so advanced? Perhaps one reason is that all ships which entered the harbor of Alexandria were *required* by law to turn over all books for copying by the scribes.
Maybe Einstein's 'c' constant was just a symbol for copyright. You take the original 14 year term, square it, and arrive at a period of 196 years! But if somebody produces this novel copyright term length model, shouldn't they be entitled to control it? Aren't all the musicians who set the copyright term lengths the same as the first person to invent the copyright in fact copying his idea? How is more than one lawyer supposed to make a living if every lawyer can just copy his lawsuit methodology? Your Honor, motion to dismiss based on violation of grounds of copying the lawsuits of others.
So really, it's just E=M, but you are not allowed to use the E=M formula until the c^2 copyright term length expires. But as the universe is expanding, so too must the base c expand to keep the proper balance. Otherwise all the art which ever would have been produced in the future might be sucked into a black hole in the past. And we would never even know it!
Work is intermittent (Jon Pertwee used to say actors spend 95% of their time unemployed)
Then that means they can simultaneously work other jobs 95% of the time instead of sleeping, sitting on their asses, or partying. Only the most successful richest artists are going to have people still interested in their music decades later. This is pure welfare for the richest musicians, musicians that live in mansions, ride around in limousines, and snort and fuck everything that moves.
Total Patent Applications in 1991: 177,830, Granted 106,696, 40% Approval Rate
Oops, that's 60% Approval Rate. You can see the the Patent Approval Rate has declined dramatically, yet the number of patent applications continues to surge. This is a sure sign that the price of patent applications is too low. They are corporate lottery tickets for both trolls and businesses producing products actually for sale, and they are also defensive mechanisms used in (anti-trust violation) mutual do not sue agreements (but eliminate small players). There's no way the cost of the lawyers producing the patent applications should be less than the patent application fee paid to the examiners. This is why patent examiners are being bamboozled by obfuscatory legalese language.
This is why the fee should be raised to $100,000. That gives the patent office a tenfold increase to a $50 billion budget to hire enough examiners to *thoroughly* comb through all claims, or hire outside area expertise, such as $10K public domain bounties paid to those who demonstrate prior art by posting patent applications on-line for open source testing, along with bi-lingual lawyer language translators to convert the applications into English. Nobody is going to go through the patent process for truly innovative society enriching ideas that have market value less than $100K. Now if you were to start factoring in the costs of policing, enforcing, and prosecuting patent disputes, that should raise the patent application fee to $1M. Inventors can still demonstrate prior art, sell their ideas directly to corporations, or get private market venture capital financing to pay the price of patenting their ideas. In an a multi-TRILLION dollar economy, 7-figure patent fees aren't anywhere out of line. If the max an idea can produce is less than $10M of GDP economic benefit in today's economy, the idea is small change impractical or obvious *shit* that society doesn't need. The legal implementation and enforcement costs aren't worth the benefit.
One argument used to argue for patents is that of disclosure. If we don't allow patents, ideas will get lost and disappear forever. There are however problems with this argument. First of all, most ideas are easily copied/replicated by observation.
Not to mention they will be making ZERO market profit unless they by definition are trading products to others. Still, how many people make their own secret formula brand Coca-Cola in the privacy of their own home? Coca-Cola has been going strong for over a century even though people could, if they wanted to, brew their own Coca-Cola in their own homes. And Coca-Cola wouldn't make any money if they didn't by definition give their products away through trade.
Sorry, but I don't see any lone generational geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci carrying technological innovation upon his back. And even if there were a couple now and then, they sure as hell aren't the ones reaping rewards from patents granted for their work.
These companies are so cheap, they can't even manage to keep the loyalty of their own employees who created the technological innovations upon which they profit. Some 5-figure lolbonus while management gets millions of options for doing diddly? A few percent of the population of society has somehow imposed its will on the other 95% through deception, abuse, bribery, corruption, and violence. But the times, they are a changing. The RIAA is just a little taste. We've seen how weak they are when they cannot enforce laws against illegal immigration, win a war against disheveled peasant terrorists, and have to run and hide from Ron Paul because they are too terrified to address policy questions with respect and civility. They don't have enough money to enforce IP laws anymore.
You do realize that these two statements are contradictions. If a company won't pursue a cure that can't be patented, and you effectively eliminate the patents, then they're not going to pursure any cures at all. I do agree that the industry could live on as a subcontractor to government R&D, and actually I think that this might be the best future for the industry.
No, I meant drug companies could get patient financed investment the same way musicians could seek payment in advance to produce. Obviously the future expected drug sales profits are going to come from sick patients. If you can transfer payments received after a patent is awarded to before research and development commence, you solve the incentive problem.
Surely the drug industry as it currently exists would not be doing any of the R&D they are doing if it weren't for patents.
That's a real contradiction. The R&D is finished completely before any patents are awarded. Why should the drug company be awarded a single dollar beyond recouping its R&D costs? There's no economic reason whatsoever. They can continue selling their brand name drugs at inflated prices. Profits off name brand blockbuster drugs don't suddenly plummet to zero when the patent ends.
The scientists doing the work actually do benefit, since the industry profits are what give them their paychecks
That's not true. The R&D has 100% been paid for before a patent is issued.
A patent is a contract society makes with an inventor - it says that if you spend a billion dollars and come up with a really great idea, that society will pay you enough to make back the billion and a nice profit on top of that. The only other way to get a billion dollars for R&D is to have government fund the work and tax people for it.
That billion and a nice profit can only come from, be recouped from, one source -- sick patients. You could spend 50 billion on R&D to cure a rare disease that only 100 people in the world have, but you would have to ultimately collect 500 million on average from each person with that disease.
The contracts society have been voided by abuse and corruption, granting of frivolous patents, extension of length of term, even though the term should go do when information spreads faster, and now spreads instantaneously. Society has been unnecessarily obscenely gouged. Payback will be coming to the pharmaceutical industry the same way it is coming back to the music industry, and if you were to poll younger generations, only a small minority of them will feel the slightest bit guilty. A barely visible tsunami of changing public opinion is out in the middle of the ocean heading for shore.
The big problem with that is while I can give you a million reasons why the government should be able to do a better job than industry, for whatever reason they seem to get it wrong quite a bit of the time. And if you think that government regulators go easy on industry, just look at how well the government polices itself - if a company had the environmental impact of Hanford there would probably be people in jail.
Government and business backed by government is the problem. They are attempting to enforce artificial scarcity on the marketplace. That model is *destined* to fail. They will be a huge black market for pharmaceutical drugs just like there's a huge black market for illegal downloads and illegal drugs like cocaine and marijuana. They'd better start making serious negotiated capitulations right now (and instead they are seeking further abuse) or they are going to have their products tainted the way RIAA music is tainted. You think the RIAA takes bad PR hits from suing grandmothers? Wait until the drug industry tries to sue grandmothers who are dying from taking generic street versions of drugs keeping them alive. The drug industry had better get prepared to be seriously undercut from
The benefit to society is clear...by granting a temporary monopoly on an innovation, individuals and companies are incented to invest in areas that would otherwise not have a decent return on investment due to the ease of duplicating any innovation.
Thus the research and development investment was paid for in its entirety before a patent is granted! Why shouldn't there also be a dollar limit clause on all patent grants? Why should any patent earn $1 past the research and development costs? Isn't the patent rewarded fully if the research and development costs are fully funded? Shouldn't the patent then automatically enter the public domain after sales compensate the costs? Why not incentivize these corporations to commit accounting fraud so we can throw the executives in jail and seize their assets?
Return on investment would be the head start the company gets selling the product before competitors. And it's not like brand name blockbuster drugs sales go to zero after the patents expire.
http://www.uspto.gov/go/taf/reports.htm
Total Patent Applications in 1991: 177,830, Granted 106,696, 40% Approval Rate
Total Patent Applications in 2006: 452,633, Granted 196,404, 43% Approval Rate
Total Patent Applications in 2007: 484,955, Granted 182,901, 37% Approval Rate
If the average patent costs $10k to file, that represents a budge of almost $5 BILLION for 2007.
Take out 10% of the budget to the general fund.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USPTO
8,913 employees, of those 5477 are patent examiners, $489,688 per employee, but lets cap the "support staff" at $75K or $258M of the budget, leaving the average patent examiner salary at just a tad under $800K!
I think we definitely need a Congressional Criminal Investigation into the USPTO.
But we can see the $10K *pittance* fees could easily be changed to $100K to bringing the USPTO budget to $50B per year. None of those patent applications would be for "small change" advancements expected to add less than $100K to the economy so its doubtful there would be any effect on the number of applications (or it would be tiny).
Let's say each patent examiner averages 200 days of work per year, each patent examiner is averaging 88 patents reviewed per year, or gives each patent an average attention span of 2 and a third working days.
I'm sure you could also search an estimate for average number of billable lawyer hours spent per patent application. But let's guess it's one month, or 120 hours, billed at $200/hour, or $24,000 per patent (which sounds really low), but that's an additional $11.6B in lawyer fees for fiscal 2007.
So when is the FBI going to start investigating the lawyers the way they investigate mortgage brokers? How come no charges for fraud are filed for any patent applications?
And as it is, the currently expensive research costs come from trying to avoid copying the process methods of others, duplicated by every firm. If it can't be patented it's scrapped, or an extra $500 million is spent on making a simple ideas complex enough to qualify for a patent.
Pharmaceutical companies do exactly what Monsanto does; take public domain genetic information and introduce a slight change to completely control use over that public domain genetic information.
People are living in a dream world if they think it really costs $800M to develop a new drug. It only costs $800M to obfuscate and make a simple process complex enough so that others can't copy.
Want proof? When is that last time any pharmaceutical company introduced any product that was not patented, but just being used in a different derivative way than some plant has been used in the public domain for thousands of years? What products don't have any copyrights or patents on them? Only things which can be *monopolized* have research expenses devoted to problems.
And what is up with the pretending of it taking 20 years to recoup costs? Puhlease. Like those costs aren't recuperated in the very first year! What are we too stupid to look at the growing market cap of the pharmaceutical industry companies? We're supposed to pretend they are mom and pop stores that make just enough to pay their bills each year? Their *shit* drugs spam every fucking television station advertising segments 24/7 so much that their advertising is actually killing television as a broadcast medium, as people tune on the low quality content just as much as they tune out the drug industry spam. How much money has been spent on marketing erectile dysfunction drugs versus how much money was spent on research and development of those drugs? And if those drugs were such innovations, why are there 3 or 4 patented versions all competing on sales with each other at the same time?
You can't wish human nature away. In the absence of compulsion there will always be freeloaders.
That's exactly why people don't talk or write posts on message boards. Ever since we removed copyright and patents on letters of the alphabet, conversation has completely dried up, especially on the internet. People got tired of free-loaders who did nothing but read the posts of others without contributing. The internet ended. There was nothing new to ever see everyday like before.
And I believe in fairies.
Well that's obvious.
You wouldn't be allowed to patent the idea of a one click webshop, but you would be allowed to patent a certain implementation of that idea.
Anyone else would be allowed to make their own implementation of the same idea, as long as their implementation isn't identical to yours.
Wrong. You forgot the phrase "non-obvious". And that's exactly the problem. 90% of the patents granted are for *obvious* ideas which anyone with average skill in the discipline can easily duplicate. The patent just prevents competition, allows for monopoly rents, and puts innovation out of business because if you move the slightest bit forward you will be committing the foul from touching the tip of my finger which is a quarter inch away from your eye.
Thus instead of having an operating system that combines the best ideas of Windows, Linux, Mac, etc., consumers pay monopoly prices for some lower quality product, and competition is prevented from ever getting started, eliminating the future innovations all those eliminated competitive firms would have piecemeal produced.
Take 10,000 people on slashdot, and they would put Microsoft out of business in a few years by being able to undercut Microsoft by 80% with a far higher quality operating system. They can't because Microsoft has *thousands* of obvious patents which prevent exactly that competition. We have a broken window fallacy operating system for the majority monopoly subject market which sucks away money which would have otherwise been spent on other stuff (increased productivity) or other research and development (increased innovation).
We need the patent fees to cover paying for people of ordinary skill to attempt to construct the idea claimed to be worthy of a patent, and only if they cannot replicate it, can the idea by given patent protection. Patents were supposed to be for *genius* production eventually benefiting society, not second rate hacks who keep journals of their daily routine work activities who pay lawyers to translate that into obfuscatory legalese to be submitted to the patent office.
See Microsoft with over 5,000 patent applications per year. Microsoft should be charged with fraud and conspiracy for bad faith patent claims, and have their corporate charter to act as a business in the United State revoked upon that business. Also hold the executives guilty with forfeiture of personal civil assets under Sarbanes-Oxley. I encourage EU regulators to do the same in the EU.
If Microsoft wishes to remain in business, perhaps a settlement can be reached with a 15 billion dollar infusion of cash to initially fund the patent office review board of people of average skill replicating all patent claims as submitted with working models. Henceforth, all patent applications must pay the market rate fees of having their inventions obviousness tested by funding a team of people of ordinary average skill duplicating their product. This should relieve the inefficient burdens faced by moron patent examiners.
Or vote for me for district attorney, and I'll charge Microsoft with fraud and conspiracy to defraud the American public by submitting bogus patent claims. Of course, if they wish to fight the charges, I'll back up the dump truck with additional charges. (No, that sound is not your cell phone battery dying, it's the dump truck backing up :P).
Oh really? When is the last a small startup with less than a million dollars in capitalization produced anything innovative? These "small start up firms" are already capitalized with millions by venture capitalists. What is anybody going to do with a patent they paid $10k for, and now have no money left over to start their business?
It's a *pittance* between $10k and $100k, and a *pittance* between* $100k and $1M. Nobody has time or means to seriously "innovate" without tens of millions if not 100s of millions in venture capital, unless you start calling "method to press computer mouse once" 'innovation', which is the absurdity mire we now find ourselves in. If it's really an "innovation", the fees will pay for themselves.
Go get a bank loan, or a government loan, if you are a lone ranger inventor living in poverty. You should be pissing away your house if you waste peoples time with your patent application spam. If not, then the patent grant rewards more than pay for the fee, many many, too many times over.
Drug companies would just sit and wait for somebody else to invent drugs and then find a new way to make them, and there would be no new drugs unless the government did all the work.
Wrong. Why do drug companies develop drugs in the first place? Because a population has a demand for a cure or alleviation to an illness. Drug companies can function perfectly as a service industry by selling their expertise to develop new drugs. Or do you think drug companies are working on methods to prevent finger nail growth disease? The obscene drug prices and profit these companies get front front running on people with disease is outrageous. They also recycle prior art with impunity into their methods and patent claims. They won't pursue any type of cure that cannot be patented (hence the high research costs to find something that not only works, but works in a way that doesn't violate any 1 of another million patent infringing processes). Drug company propaganda is right up there with RIAA propaganda.
Patents are still useful in certain industries and situations. If you're going to make it really easy to get around them you might as well get rid of them, which can actually hamper innovation. Patents have advantages and disadvantages - the goal is to maximize the one and minimize the other. What we don't want to do is toss out the baby with the bath water...
Patents only have disadvantages for society as a whole. They only have advantages for an extremely few number who benefit at the expense of the rest of society (and also make the wealth pie area of the rest of society fall by much more than the few benefit). Patents just allow for the massively inefficient construction of hangers on industries; drug company management, lawyers, government. It doesn't effect in the least the few brilliant scientists who are devoted to solving problems, and patents only get in the way of those people.
although patent (and trademark especially) fees help offset some of the cost of running the USPTO, it is in no way profitable. The USPTO cannot make up for it with volume, to rehash the old joke.
That's because the fees are insanely low. Reduce the fees to a cup of coffee through massive inflation devaluation of the US dollar, and you will be swamped with garbage that wastes your time even if only 1 of every 100 applicants slips under the radar to win the 50M to 1B patent grant lottery from which they can troll and extort. Just Microsoft alone, sends over 5,000 patent applications PER YEAR! Send a message by putting those application in the spam "Rejection" garbage bin.
It's patent application SPAM, plain and simple, afforded by too low application fees. Those figures need to be 6 figures MINIMUM, and preferably 7 figures. It's a complete waste of everybody's time to examine and/or grant a patent on some technology that isn't returning 100s of millions MINIMUM.
that includes USPTO management, which loudly and often proclaims its goal of raising its rates of rejection.
That's what they should do. There has never been a valid patent granted, and there never will be. Raise those rejection rates to as close to as 100% as possible. Raise the fees, dramatically, like adding two zeros to them, to decrease the number of applications. Double the fees each time an additional patent is applied for by the same corporate group in the same year ($100,000, $200,000, $400,000 ...)
You'll never look like a fool rejecting any patent (just like business managers and mutual fund managers chimed "you can't go wrong buying IBM"), but these patent examiners and their management are looking like complete idiots whenever a "one click" patent makes it into a courtroom or the press.
And what happens if the real world businesses stopped anti-trust colluding on agreements not to sue each other and one of them pressed a patent war button (like Yahoo or Google)? The system will collapse, and patent examiners and management will be pulled in front of congress to face the consequences and kiss their public service careers goodbye.
And it is a fact: if you are a patent examiner and not rejecting 100%, you are by definition not doing your job. You don't understand innovation, and how ideas build upon each other. You are missing the ways in which prior art is being recycled into monopoly competition killing (thus, innovation killing) licenses to conduct business (shutting down economic activity to a large degree) merely by obfuscating ideas in the language of garbage legalese. How many times can you stamp a "Reject" stamp per day? Hire me, and I'll have everyone else fired for not being able to stamp "Reject" at a relative pace. It is government work, so let's say 4 per hour (so we have time to say post to slashdot while locating the next application folder), with a two hour lunch, so 4 times 6 is 24 applications reviewed per day.
In real estate the mantra is "location, location, location". The Patent Office mantra should be "Reject, Reject, Reject". Why bother subjecting yourself to reading intentionally obfuscatory legalese garbage? Just reject that "shit", garbage in, garbage out.
No, there's plenty of solid Blue and solid Red states. If you can get significant percentages to vote third party in those states, you can raise their profiles for the future. So if you are in a solid blue or a solid red state, vote Green or Libertarian. You won't thus be stuck voting for a lesser of two evils, but expanding the influence of new voices for the future. If you are in a swing state, you can be excused for needing to influence the outcome, but everyone else, vote third party out of principle. And voting for Green or Libertarian is better than voting for individuals who are one and done, like Nader or Perot. Parties have at least a beginning of organization capability.
Maybe we can cause a shock and stir by having big percentages vote not Republican and not Democrat. We, and They, will notice, if the votes come in 55-40-5, or even 54-36-10. That's a good goal for seeking a sign of hope for the future. That's Change we can see on the election night television screens.