The free market is far better at both optimising the use of resources, matching them with people's desires and making investment decisions than government is.
Except when it isn't. It turns out that if the free market is focused on making the CEO and his cronys rich, it can do that quite well without making good investment decisions. If the CEO's investment horizon is much shorter than the company's - and the guy's a crook - you'd be amazed at the awful investments he'll make. So free market, sure. But you'd better at least have a good and powerful cop on the beat.
I agree. We use AIX at work. No X or GUI of any kind, but the systems are rock-solid and essentially never need to be rebooted - even for fairly serious filesystem changes. My only complaint about AIX vs Linux for our server-based apps is that it's harder to find pre-built binaries when I want to incorporate a new open source library into our system. Sometimes it's hard even to get the code to build with the standard 'configure - make' process (though I've always been able to get it to work eventually). In any case, I assume that's just a function of mindshare, not technology.
I would assume that this idea falls under the category of 'thought experiment'. The point being to highlight that the coal industry accounts for 'only' 50 billion dollars worth of assets, which is a smaller portion of our economy and total assets than the hysteria of 'anything you do to attempt to phase out coal will destroy America' would suggest.
Now if the country could shift to renewables for a mere 50 billion it might well be worth it. Of course, as others have pointed out, buying up all the coal plants won't accomplish that.
Could be. But did anybody ask her if she'd have preferred a Windows 7 laptop plus a nexus 7 tablet for the same price? Then she wouldn't have to lug around this 11 or 13 inch ultrabook just to look at recipes in the kitchen. It sounds like she's using it as though it's two separate devices - which it kind of is (that's the problem with Windows 8 and Metro). I'm sure you (assuming you bought the Christmas gift) thought it was a great solution, but unless there's little to no price premium for these things, they really don't make much sense as all-in-one's.
Unlikely. But your post points out the real situation. It's Microsoft that wants dual-booting phones. They can't get anybody to buy their phones, so they hope to use dual boot to encourage people to at least try their OS. Apple or Google have nothing to gain there, so Apple would never cooperate. Google has less control in this case.
But this article is about convertible laptop/tablets, and in that market, I imagine it's Asus that wants dual-booting. Anybody who would buy one of these is buying it for the Windows laptop capability. And Asus wants them to pay a premium for it to be convertible into a tablet. Other than the possibility that Asus has made it easy to share files between the Android tablet and the Windows laptop worlds, there'd be no advantage to this over a cheap laptop plus a Nexus tablet. Microsoft would probably prefer Asus to build an all Windows convertible, since again, the buyer's buying the Windows laptop. If MS can give their unpopular tablet OS a boost, that'd be preferable to them over a Windows/Android hybrid. Google might prefer an all Android convertible, though. But even they probably realize Android laptops at this point are a stretch.
In any case, we're talking about the high-end (i.e. expensive) laptop market. That's not a happy place to be these days. Cheap laptops or even Chromebooks serve the real laptop market better. Power hungry games and productivity apps do better on a desktop (and for the most part, a cheap one will do fine there too). The rest of the market is for phones and 7" tablets, and I don't see Asus pushing for dual booting there...
As far as I know you're allowed to include competing services on a Google-blessed Android device. I think Verizon at one point was selling Motorola devices with Bing as their primary search engine - they just didn't sell. Sure, Google doesn't want to allow 'real Android' to be a platform for excluding Google services (as with the Nokia X devices), but they don't (or can't) try to prevent you from including other services in addition to Google's.
On the other hand, I think even after their anti-trust sanctions, Microsoft still doesn't allow OEM's to include, say Firefox or Chrome to be installed (let alone as the default browser) - or Google preset as the default search engine. Sure, they've been forced to allow users to jump through hoops of their design to get Google as the default search, but still. And don't tell me only idiots consider those hoops too much trouble. I've seen enough users at work typing in google.com to get to google search rather than using the Bing search bar. They're either too lazy or intimidated to change the default, but they're all too glad to have me change it for them...
And had the nuclear plant not melted down, another 20,000 people could've moved back into the area and attempted to devise ways to survive the next tsunami. But as it is, the meltdown has rendered a big swath of land uninhabitable. The tsunami would've killed those 20,000 either way. But the nuke didn't have to be there making things worse.
Fair enough. I would at least hope, though, that the finger tap combinations that correspond to an alphabet in this invention are not themselves patentable. It's one thing to patent the input mechanism, but an entirely different thing to patent the input itself. Imagine a world where millions learned to 'type' this way, and somebody came up with another mechanism for processing finger taps that didn't infringe Samsung's mechanism. There'd be a huge barrier to adoption if everybody had to learn a new alphabet in order to use the new input device. Kind of like patenting the QUERTY keyboard (or was that patented in its day?).
That may be, but once the behavior was observed, the observer didn't have to find the owner of the code to get it diagnosed. They may have, but the point is that anybody who found this behavior could've gone into the code and found out what caused the problem. Of course, if a black hat happened to be the one that found the bad behavior, they could've gone into the code to figure out how best to exploit it. So, the situation's not perfect, but still, it's probably a good thing that there were lots of eyes allowed to diagnose and fix the problem once it displayed itself.
...as opposed to another Windows Phone OEM making a loss?
the only winners at Nokia are the ones that got bonuses for engineering the MS buyout. It's an all-too-common business plan. 1. Put out a largely vaporous business plan. 2. Operate for a few years as though that plan can work. 3. Sell the company to company B that you've duped into believing that success is just around the corner.
rinse, repeat...
The company I work for is currently on step 6: 4. Company B realizes they've bought a lemon, outsources all development so the financials look okay short term. 5. Sell off at a big loss to a private equity firm. 6. Private equity firm cooks up a new, largely vaporous business plan...
If it were unlocked, possibly. Besides price, my main reason for going Nexus is that I know that once Google stops producing updates for the phone, I can turn to Cyanogenmod to extend my phone's life. And if I want additional functionality, I can root and/or go CM earlier. My Nexus One was well on its way to uselessness until I loaded it up with CM - which held me until the lure of new hardware became too great. So far, I'm still stock on my Nexus 4. I had originally rooted it, but had to revert to get the next Android version. The only feature I really used root for was a one-touch toggle for data. But I found battery life was good enough with the data radio left on, so I'm okay with unrooted stock so far.
I suppose iOS fans would claim that none of this is necessary for the iPhone - Apple upgrades are quick and work on older hardware than Android upgrades. And that's true - to a point. Of course when Apple stops issuing upgrades - or upgrades render your device flaky, there are no options. Same goes, I guess, for Windows phones. WP7 was a particularly nasty dead end. 8 may be better, but there's no track record like Apple's to point to a longer lifespan for a WP device than a Nexus device.
...oh. And fundamentalist religious people do indeed get to (and deserve to) vote. Unfortunately, this leads politicians to pander to them and introduce bogus science into school curricula. Perhaps if rational people spoke out (and voted in huge numbers), the politicians would pander to them, but contradicting religionists is a political and social minefield. Back to our biology lesson...
The Controversy: Fundamentalist religious people don't like the fact that natural selection (and the time frames required for evolution to have produced life on Earth) conflict with what the bible says. So they've made up a Creation 'science' to create 'controversy' about whether evolutionary science is in fact correct.
They've found scientists to amplify the aspects of evolution that we don't fully understand and then used that 'uncertainty' to pretend that it's evidence for their religious beliefs.
Any question? Okay, now class, lets teach the other side of the controversy. Get out your biology textbooks, please.
...like not being a Windows-only book format. That's over. Kindle and Nook books can be read on just about any device. If Microsoft thinks they can introduce a new ebook format at this stage of the game that's Windows only, they're in worse shape than even Slashdot-level schadenfreude could imagine.
I didn't say they should run existing Win32 as is. But they should've provided a toolset to build 'Modern' apps using existing Win32 code. If not all of that code could be supported safely, then provide workarounds - or sandbox the apps - or whatever it takes. The Win32 API's can't be so insecure that it's worth throwing out the huge base of existing Win32 code as opposed to supporting most of it as a way to seed Metro with new, secure apps.
As it is, WinRT is not selling at all, so the full-blown, insecure version of Win32 is still there on all Windows 8 devices. Way to 'improve' security...
Not quite. Windows 8 required completely new apps to use the 'modern' half of the OS. Gnome 3, Unity, KDE and the rest can all run ALL apps (except maybe some applets that are desktop-specific) on the same desktop. Whether you like that particular desktop is a different issue altogether. But on Windows 8, even if you like the new desktop, you can't use it to run Win32 apps. That was Microsoft's biggest mistake. They should've made it so Win32 apps could be rejiggered to work in the new environment - even if some UI changes were required. But they were trying to leverage their control of the desktop OEM's to seed their late-to-market tablet and phone system.
Of course, they can. But the whole point of storage is to offset the intermittent nature of solar and wind plants. Storing nuclear energy can do that, but once you can to generate enough solar and wind when it's available to store enough for when it's not, why use nuclear to do it. Nuclear has its own set of environmental problems, so building nuclear plants to store the energy kind of defeats the purpose of getting to clean (and safe - including waste products) energy generation.
I imagine the point of nuclear advocates is that, even with storage, solar and wind can't scale to the task yet. But apparently they're improving quickly. So which is better - continuing coal and gas generation while solar and wind catch up, or building new nucs that will still be running and generating waste 50 years from now.
That's a cute, facile jab at Obamacare, but it's probably false. The kinds of plans that get cancelled under Obamacare are the kinds that Republicans think we should all have. High-deductable, catastrophic plans that lead you to believe you have insurance - and may actually help in a catastrophe, but in fact provide very little day-to-day coverage at all. HMO's are probably fine - though I suppose a particular one may need to be tweaked for specific requirements.
Obamacare plans still stink compared to the best employer-offered plans, but let's not pretend that they don't provide coverage. That coverage is too expensive, has too many deductables and too little choice in terms of providers. But, with the exception of some good employer-provided group plans, they're probably better than what was available to individuals before.
Well, that's pretty stupid. I use Adblock, but at least I'm aware enough to not rationalize it by making irrelevant arguments. You pay your ISP for the delivery pipe, not the content - and your ISP does not forward one cent of your fees to the websites you're accessing. So, if you want the content to be there, you should want at least some of the advertising that supports it to be shown.
Where you're right is about the bandwidth-sucking and privacy ruining. Because ad viewing is technically voluntary (in the sens that software you *still* have some control over is required to download the ads and show them to you), websites have to learn to balance the demands of making a living with the reality that you don't have to view their ads if they're too obtrusive. Theoretically, that puts me in the camp that thinks ad blockers should allow ads by default and have you blacklist sites that overdo them. That's in theory. In practice, I just download easylist and life is beautiful. But at least I feel bad about it...
I don't suppose any of them considered keeping the legroom, making a little less profit per ticket, and making it up by not flying half-empty...
No, instead they just cancel your flight if it's half empty and make you wait a few hours to be crammed onto the next flight. But if they weren't able to do that - say, by law - you might have competition based on cheap prices for shitty service and tons of profit. There's a place for regulation of industry, and there's a reasonable balance between profit and the general good. Total protectionism is bad, but so is a wide open race to the bottom. Striking an appropriate balance is the hard work of government - much harder than ideological hard-lining.
For developers, I think tablets restore the viability of the desktop. Development should still be done on a desktop machine with a good keyboard, mouse and a big screen. Using a laptop for this is a pretty bad compromise. Sure, if you need the portability of your dev environment, there's no other good choice. But you probably already have a laptop that can do this stuff perfectly well - why buy another pricey 'all in one' device for that. It's just an evey worse compromise. Most developers work either at an office or at home - or can RDP into one of those desktops to work, either of which will certainly be more productive than a laptop or a 10 inch tablet (unless it's docked to desktop peripherals, which kind of makes my point...).
For stuff other than work, a tablet (yes, pure data consumption mode) makes more sense than a laptop. And a small, cheap tablet with a high-res screen (i.e. nexus 7) is perfect. You don't want your big dev machine on your lap to check your email or watch Netflix. Just because you can use a Windows 8 'tab-top' in this way, doesn't mean it's ideal in any sense of the word. Unless you absolutely need to run MSOffice or PowerPoint on the go (and I guess there are some that do), a cheap tablet beats trying to lug an X86 Windows device of any kind around with you. It's too big, too heavy, and too expensive.
Way to miss the point. Without having made the thing, I didn't have an 'invention' worthy of patent. Far from complaining that 'somebody else stole my glory', I'm saying there was no glory to steal. Everyday pipe dreams are not inventions - though I guess our patent system can be manipulated to treat them as if they were.
Slashdot Mirror
The free market is far better at both optimising the use of resources, matching them with people's desires and making investment decisions than government is.
Except when it isn't. It turns out that if the free market is focused on making the CEO and his cronys rich, it can do that quite well without making good investment decisions. If the CEO's investment horizon is much shorter than the company's - and the guy's a crook - you'd be amazed at the awful investments he'll make. So free market, sure. But you'd better at least have a good and powerful cop on the beat.
I agree. We use AIX at work. No X or GUI of any kind, but the systems are rock-solid and essentially never need to be rebooted - even for fairly serious filesystem changes. My only complaint about AIX vs Linux for our server-based apps is that it's harder to find pre-built binaries when I want to incorporate a new open source library into our system. Sometimes it's hard even to get the code to build with the standard 'configure - make' process (though I've always been able to get it to work eventually). In any case, I assume that's just a function of mindshare, not technology.
I would assume that this idea falls under the category of 'thought experiment'. The point being to highlight that the coal industry accounts for 'only' 50 billion dollars worth of assets, which is a smaller portion of our economy and total assets than the hysteria of 'anything you do to attempt to phase out coal will destroy America' would suggest.
Now if the country could shift to renewables for a mere 50 billion it might well be worth it. Of course, as others have pointed out, buying up all the coal plants won't accomplish that.
Could be. But did anybody ask her if she'd have preferred a Windows 7 laptop plus a nexus 7 tablet for the same price? Then she wouldn't have to lug around this 11 or 13 inch ultrabook just to look at recipes in the kitchen. It sounds like she's using it as though it's two separate devices - which it kind of is (that's the problem with Windows 8 and Metro). I'm sure you (assuming you bought the Christmas gift) thought it was a great solution, but unless there's little to no price premium for these things, they really don't make much sense as all-in-one's.
Unlikely. But your post points out the real situation. It's Microsoft that wants dual-booting phones. They can't get anybody to buy their phones, so they hope to use dual boot to encourage people to at least try their OS. Apple or Google have nothing to gain there, so Apple would never cooperate. Google has less control in this case.
But this article is about convertible laptop/tablets, and in that market, I imagine it's Asus that wants dual-booting. Anybody who would buy one of these is buying it for the Windows laptop capability. And Asus wants them to pay a premium for it to be convertible into a tablet. Other than the possibility that Asus has made it easy to share files between the Android tablet and the Windows laptop worlds, there'd be no advantage to this over a cheap laptop plus a Nexus tablet. Microsoft would probably prefer Asus to build an all Windows convertible, since again, the buyer's buying the Windows laptop. If MS can give their unpopular tablet OS a boost, that'd be preferable to them over a Windows/Android hybrid. Google might prefer an all Android convertible, though. But even they probably realize Android laptops at this point are a stretch.
In any case, we're talking about the high-end (i.e. expensive) laptop market. That's not a happy place to be these days. Cheap laptops or even Chromebooks serve the real laptop market better. Power hungry games and productivity apps do better on a desktop (and for the most part, a cheap one will do fine there too). The rest of the market is for phones and 7" tablets, and I don't see Asus pushing for dual booting there...
As far as I know you're allowed to include competing services on a Google-blessed Android device. I think Verizon at one point was selling Motorola devices with Bing as their primary search engine - they just didn't sell. Sure, Google doesn't want to allow 'real Android' to be a platform for excluding Google services (as with the Nokia X devices), but they don't (or can't) try to prevent you from including other services in addition to Google's.
On the other hand, I think even after their anti-trust sanctions, Microsoft still doesn't allow OEM's to include, say Firefox or Chrome to be installed (let alone as the default browser) - or Google preset as the default search engine. Sure, they've been forced to allow users to jump through hoops of their design to get Google as the default search, but still. And don't tell me only idiots consider those hoops too much trouble. I've seen enough users at work typing in google.com to get to google search rather than using the Bing search bar. They're either too lazy or intimidated to change the default, but they're all too glad to have me change it for them...
And had the nuclear plant not melted down, another 20,000 people could've moved back into the area and attempted to devise ways to survive the next tsunami. But as it is, the meltdown has rendered a big swath of land uninhabitable. The tsunami would've killed those 20,000 either way. But the nuke didn't have to be there making things worse.
Fair enough. I would at least hope, though, that the finger tap combinations that correspond to an alphabet in this invention are not themselves patentable. It's one thing to patent the input mechanism, but an entirely different thing to patent the input itself. Imagine a world where millions learned to 'type' this way, and somebody came up with another mechanism for processing finger taps that didn't infringe Samsung's mechanism. There'd be a huge barrier to adoption if everybody had to learn a new alphabet in order to use the new input device. Kind of like patenting the QUERTY keyboard (or was that patented in its day?).
That may be, but once the behavior was observed, the observer didn't have to find the owner of the code to get it diagnosed. They may have, but the point is that anybody who found this behavior could've gone into the code and found out what caused the problem. Of course, if a black hat happened to be the one that found the bad behavior, they could've gone into the code to figure out how best to exploit it. So, the situation's not perfect, but still, it's probably a good thing that there were lots of eyes allowed to diagnose and fix the problem once it displayed itself.
...as opposed to another Windows Phone OEM making a loss?
the only winners at Nokia are the ones that got bonuses for engineering the MS buyout. It's an all-too-common business plan.
1. Put out a largely vaporous business plan.
2. Operate for a few years as though that plan can work.
3. Sell the company to company B that you've duped into believing that success is just around the corner.
rinse, repeat...
The company I work for is currently on step 6:
4. Company B realizes they've bought a lemon, outsources all development so the financials look okay short term.
5. Sell off at a big loss to a private equity firm.
6. Private equity firm cooks up a new, largely vaporous business plan...
If it were unlocked, possibly. Besides price, my main reason for going Nexus is that I know that once Google stops producing updates for the phone, I can turn to Cyanogenmod to extend my phone's life. And if I want additional functionality, I can root and/or go CM earlier. My Nexus One was well on its way to uselessness until I loaded it up with CM - which held me until the lure of new hardware became too great. So far, I'm still stock on my Nexus 4. I had originally rooted it, but had to revert to get the next Android version. The only feature I really used root for was a one-touch toggle for data. But I found battery life was good enough with the data radio left on, so I'm okay with unrooted stock so far.
I suppose iOS fans would claim that none of this is necessary for the iPhone - Apple upgrades are quick and work on older hardware than Android upgrades. And that's true - to a point. Of course when Apple stops issuing upgrades - or upgrades render your device flaky, there are no options. Same goes, I guess, for Windows phones. WP7 was a particularly nasty dead end. 8 may be better, but there's no track record like Apple's to point to a longer lifespan for a WP device than a Nexus device.
...oh. And fundamentalist religious people do indeed get to (and deserve to) vote. Unfortunately, this leads politicians to pander to them and introduce bogus science into school curricula. Perhaps if rational people spoke out (and voted in huge numbers), the politicians would pander to them, but contradicting religionists is a political and social minefield. Back to our biology lesson...
The Controversy:
Fundamentalist religious people don't like the fact that natural selection (and the time frames required for evolution to have produced life on Earth) conflict with what the bible says. So they've made up a Creation 'science' to create 'controversy' about whether evolutionary science is in fact correct.
They've found scientists to amplify the aspects of evolution that we don't fully understand and then used that 'uncertainty' to pretend that it's evidence for their religious beliefs.
Any question? Okay, now class, lets teach the other side of the controversy. Get out your biology textbooks, please.
...like not being a Windows-only book format. That's over. Kindle and Nook books can be read on just about any device. If Microsoft thinks they can introduce a new ebook format at this stage of the game that's Windows only, they're in worse shape than even Slashdot-level schadenfreude could imagine.
I didn't say they should run existing Win32 as is. But they should've provided a toolset to build 'Modern' apps using existing Win32 code. If not all of that code could be supported safely, then provide workarounds - or sandbox the apps - or whatever it takes. The Win32 API's can't be so insecure that it's worth throwing out the huge base of existing Win32 code as opposed to supporting most of it as a way to seed Metro with new, secure apps.
As it is, WinRT is not selling at all, so the full-blown, insecure version of Win32 is still there on all Windows 8 devices. Way to 'improve' security...
Not quite. Windows 8 required completely new apps to use the 'modern' half of the OS. Gnome 3, Unity, KDE and the rest can all run ALL apps (except maybe some applets that are desktop-specific) on the same desktop. Whether you like that particular desktop is a different issue altogether. But on Windows 8, even if you like the new desktop, you can't use it to run Win32 apps. That was Microsoft's biggest mistake. They should've made it so Win32 apps could be rejiggered to work in the new environment - even if some UI changes were required. But they were trying to leverage their control of the desktop OEM's to seed their late-to-market tablet and phone system.
Of course, they can. But the whole point of storage is to offset the intermittent nature of solar and wind plants. Storing nuclear energy can do that, but once you can to generate enough solar and wind when it's available to store enough for when it's not, why use nuclear to do it. Nuclear has its own set of environmental problems, so building nuclear plants to store the energy kind of defeats the purpose of getting to clean (and safe - including waste products) energy generation.
I imagine the point of nuclear advocates is that, even with storage, solar and wind can't scale to the task yet. But apparently they're improving quickly. So which is better - continuing coal and gas generation while solar and wind catch up, or building new nucs that will still be running and generating waste 50 years from now.
That's a cute, facile jab at Obamacare, but it's probably false. The kinds of plans that get cancelled under Obamacare are the kinds that Republicans think we should all have. High-deductable, catastrophic plans that lead you to believe you have insurance - and may actually help in a catastrophe, but in fact provide very little day-to-day coverage at all. HMO's are probably fine - though I suppose a particular one may need to be tweaked for specific requirements.
Obamacare plans still stink compared to the best employer-offered plans, but let's not pretend that they don't provide coverage. That coverage is too expensive, has too many deductables and too little choice in terms of providers. But, with the exception of some good employer-provided group plans, they're probably better than what was available to individuals before.
Let me guess. Somebody else got a stupid patent on 'search nearby' functionality?
Well, that's pretty stupid. I use Adblock, but at least I'm aware enough to not rationalize it by making irrelevant arguments. You pay your ISP for the delivery pipe, not the content - and your ISP does not forward one cent of your fees to the websites you're accessing. So, if you want the content to be there, you should want at least some of the advertising that supports it to be shown.
Where you're right is about the bandwidth-sucking and privacy ruining. Because ad viewing is technically voluntary (in the sens that software you *still* have some control over is required to download the ads and show them to you), websites have to learn to balance the demands of making a living with the reality that you don't have to view their ads if they're too obtrusive. Theoretically, that puts me in the camp that thinks ad blockers should allow ads by default and have you blacklist sites that overdo them. That's in theory. In practice, I just download easylist and life is beautiful. But at least I feel bad about it...
oops. I meant "...competition based on something other that..."
I don't suppose any of them considered keeping the legroom, making a little less profit per ticket, and making it up by not flying half-empty...
No, instead they just cancel your flight if it's half empty and make you wait a few hours to be crammed onto the next flight. But if they weren't able to do that - say, by law - you might have competition based on cheap prices for shitty service and tons of profit. There's a place for regulation of industry, and there's a reasonable balance between profit and the general good. Total protectionism is bad, but so is a wide open race to the bottom. Striking an appropriate balance is the hard work of government - much harder than ideological hard-lining.
For developers, I think tablets restore the viability of the desktop. Development should still be done on a desktop machine with a good keyboard, mouse and a big screen. Using a laptop for this is a pretty bad compromise. Sure, if you need the portability of your dev environment, there's no other good choice. But you probably already have a laptop that can do this stuff perfectly well - why buy another pricey 'all in one' device for that. It's just an evey worse compromise. Most developers work either at an office or at home - or can RDP into one of those desktops to work, either of which will certainly be more productive than a laptop or a 10 inch tablet (unless it's docked to desktop peripherals, which kind of makes my point...).
For stuff other than work, a tablet (yes, pure data consumption mode) makes more sense than a laptop. And a small, cheap tablet with a high-res screen (i.e. nexus 7) is perfect. You don't want your big dev machine on your lap to check your email or watch Netflix. Just because you can use a Windows 8 'tab-top' in this way, doesn't mean it's ideal in any sense of the word. Unless you absolutely need to run MSOffice or PowerPoint on the go (and I guess there are some that do), a cheap tablet beats trying to lug an X86 Windows device of any kind around with you. It's too big, too heavy, and too expensive.
If that firmware is loaded by the driver, then it's essentially the same thing, isn't it?
Way to miss the point. Without having made the thing, I didn't have an 'invention' worthy of patent. Far from complaining that 'somebody else stole my glory', I'm saying there was no glory to steal. Everyday pipe dreams are not inventions - though I guess our patent system can be manipulated to treat them as if they were.