So far the main responses seem to be that it would be too time consuming and hard to write better laws.
Hold on -- we're talking about laws here: the things that literally make and break lives, and infringe or protect our personal liberty. It seems to me a no-brainer that lawmakers could spend a little time and procedure making laws better. To argue otherwise is essentially to say you want more laws regardless of quality. This is strange, because I don't think of the country as a law-factory, whereby we succeed by producing the most laws for the lowest cost. The quality of the laws is serious issue and I'm disappointed (though not actually surprised) to see so many people dismiss it as "too hard".
I guess that's the answer to most things today -- it's "too hard" so we might as well just stall out right here and forego progress.
Hold on... I'm not going to let you take the word "environmentalist", which means "a person who advocates the protection of the environment" and turn it into "idiot who mindlessly jumps on to every green-tinted bandwagon, hates science, distrusts technology, etc."
I'm an environmentalist. It means that I think that preserving our environment (literally, the environment required for our survival) is important. I don't have all the answers to our energy crisis. I never really liked biofuel because it seemed an odd use arable land. I think nuclear is a pretty good option. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I think we're cutting down trees too quickly. Maybe I'm wrong about that too. The only thing I know I'm right about is this: the earth is finite and there is a limit to the rate at which we can chew things up before we bring pain on ourselves.
I do think that with technology and a little care we can all enjoy ourselves, be comfortable, and make this last for the foreseeable future.
I'm an environmentalist, and I want to figure this stuff out together. Still hate me?
Yes, blind faith is scary. So is declaring all passion "blind faith".
As to your second comment -- are you serious? You think you can judge the merits of supporters by their level of passion? So, for example, people who passionately support slavery and those who passionately support human rights?
If by "merits" you simply mean "effectiveness", well sure. But that's just a tautology.
It sounds to me like you're so irritated by passion that you assume anyone displaying it has not the ability to reason and understand what they are supporting or opposing. I hope you can take a moment and realize that is simply not true. People with very nuanced understandings of issues can be passionate about them.
So you're basically saying that if people in group A are as passionate as people in group B, the merits of their ideas must be similar.
It's that type of wholly empty thinking that helps to make political discourse in the US (and maybe everywhere) nigh impossible.
Sigh.
I won't be surprised to find you complaining in four years when things are roughly the same as they are now. But, you know, don't let any scary new ideas challenge what you're comfortable with, even if it doesn't actually work.
You missed the original comment. It wouldn't matter if they did that since neither party would know what the other was going to say.
So, after a sale completes:
1. either or both parties can leave feedback, but _nobody_ can see what the feedback was 2. after say 30 days all feedback appears but no further feedback can be left
That seems to solve the problem ebay wants to solve in a better way that sweeping it under the carpet, which is what it sounds like they're doing.
That's what I'm most looking for in a president - the ability to separate what is best for the country, and what his duties and limitations in his position are from what he personally wants.
Agreed 100% on that.
You're probably right about drawing too much from the quote -- he's probably just referring to his captors. But using the word "gooks" is pretty stupid. "I hate the motherfuckers" would have been a lot better. By singling them out with a racial slur he's really showing some sloppy thinking or at least sloppy speaking. That kind of thing can really alienate people. By the way, my wife is Asian, so maybe I'm a little sensitive to it.
In general, he just has a tendency to generalize a bit much for me. In the discussion about trading with middle eastern nations he made the "I don't want to trade with Al-Qaeda, they just want to trade Burkas" comment. Yeah, it's a joke. Ha ha. I know he doesn't really think all middle eastern people are part of Al-Qaeda. But, seriously: what the fuck is his problem? I want to elect a statesperson, not Andrew Dice Clay.
Still, I'd rather have him than some of the other candidates. So I understand how one can overlook this in favor of him overall.
My god, do some research people: Paul's positions on just about all of this is available on his site. And in the Google interview he answers most of these too. He has got to be one of the least evasive politicians around.
Most politicians answer these questions to some degree, too. But you have to dig. It sounds like you're upset that the media doesn't talk about issues like these, and there I agree with you. The established media has totally failed to raise the bar in public political discourse. In fact it's just about completely buggered it up. Everyone should know exactly where all the candidates stand on all the questions you mention. The fact that so few do is pretty sad. But since the info is out there, you're a bit to blame too. Don't just sit back and complain that nobody brought the info to your doorstep. Go out and learn about these things. And then vote what you believe.
In any case, hope you find some good answers. Cheers.
Sure, I'd vote for no president or your cat over Bush any day. But that's what I'm saying: it matters who ends up in office. If you believe that (and it sounds like you do since you disapprove of Bush) then you're still better off voting for the one that you think will abuse power the least.
You can't not play politics -- it happens with or without your input -- so if you don't play you just lose. Your input can make it better, if ever so slightly.
I guess I'd say that doesn't line up with my interpretation of his approach at all;
On borders, you've just got it wrong. He's for strong border security. In fact, his immigration policy is too restrictive for my tastes, but I'm still voting for him.
On international stuff, I can at least understand your concern, but I don't take it as a "head in the sand" thing at all. He accepts war is necessary in some cases and that a formal declaration of war can be a sound move. The key is to wage war only when it threatens our national security, or I suppose if the populous wants to intervene and congress authorizes it.
My take on his foreign policy is "if you don't go fucking with people, you don't have as many problems". And I wholeheartedly agree with this. A huge amount of our trouble is sourced to our arrogant meddlesome activities. Really it is: there's not a lot of serious disagreement about this. The only disagreement is whether the benefits of manipulating other countries outweighs the liabilities. I believe that the best approach is to be less meddlesome. It is, in fact, the democratic approach: the ideas of individual responsibility, even when the "individuals" are other nations.
Are there exception cases? Sure -- there always are. Yes, we needed to get involved in WWII. But that doesn't suddenly mean we need to get involved in every dispute around the globe, or topple governments that don't serve our national interest. It's a filthy business that builds enormous resentment. Paul is the only one who sees this, and it is the main reason I'm a supporter. Even if he loses the nomination, I'm just so inspired to see that other people are waking up to this idea -- that we don't have to micro-manage other nations. That we should tend to ourselves first.
I'm sorry, but given that so few people have even heard of Mike Gravel, it's not exactly reasonable to claim his message has been heard and rejected. I'm not a fan of his, and in fact I'd agree that if he got more airtime he probably wouldn't see any gains in the polls. But I find this notion that we have to determine which candidates are the "real" candidates before the election takes place to be absurd and undermining of democracy.
Think how much time was wasted on discussing and following Giuliani because he was determined to be a "real" candidate, when in fact he was not. The only reasonable strategy that helps to support democracy is to give all candidates the presumption of viability until actual votes are taken. It's already hard enough to get on the ballot in all 50 states that the true loonies are usually filtered out. And in the case some get through, can you humor the people for a few months so that actual, you know, democracy, can take place?
Nobody minds if you make your choice. Criticize the candidate all you want. Don't vote for them if you don't like them. But don't exclude them from coverage or discussion because you don't like them. Promote the idea of fair coverage and an actual election. Pre-judging them on viability creates unhealthy feedback in the system and undermines democracy.
And your comments about McCain and Obama being written off are from an alternate universe: these names had big media attention from the outset, and continuous coverage. Neither of them were excluded from debates, and if they took second place in a big state, you'd have heard about it. Not so for other candidates you mention.
I would say then at this point that discussing Giuliani was a waste of time too. However, people like yourself who are too impatient to wait for an actual vote told us all that it was important to talk about him since he was the frontrunner. It's just that you were wrong.
Now, I agree Gravel has a slim chance. And I'd even go so far as to say if he got more coverage, his chances would be slimmer. But I want him to have a fair and full shot of it because nobody knows until the vote happens who mattered, and who was really a waste of time to talk about.
Obama, for all his talk of hope, won't be a better President than Clinton, Huckabee, McCain, Paul, et al. He's only human, and thus unfit to govern anybody but himself.
Despite the kernel of truth to it, I really dislike this reasoning. Just because leaders are all flawed does not mean they are all equally flawed. If you think so, then it doesn't matter at all who runs the country. There's no reason whatsoever to take Bush out of office. Just let him run things indefinitely, then he can pass it to his kids. Some places do this: it's called a monarchy and historically they've proven to be far worse off than more democratic nations.
So, one might reasonably deduce that it does matter who is in office. And that the attractive, simplistic cynicism of "they're all unfit" doesn't resolve this important issue at all.
I vote in every election, but I only write myself in.
That's really a shame. Because voting (like investing) is one of those things that if you don't play you still play, you just lose.
As a Christian, I'll give you an example of how foolish it sounds to me: I don't like God as described in the bible, so I'm not going to play his games. Of course, assuming that there is a God, I'm still playing: I'm just going to be punished. Obviously there really is voting and we really do end up with a president. So you're just losing. Don't get caught up in the religious example, just consider it a rough illustration.
As to force being evil, sure. So why not vote for the candidate who wants to use the least force. By not voting you're voting for the majority. Which, as it turns out, is very favorable towards force. So, you know, you're part of the problem.
This is for discussion of candidates who having a chance of winning the nomination.
This is a seriously fucked up notion that has become all too accepted in modern politics. The fact is that the VOTE determines who has a chance of winning, and nothing else.
For instance, Giuliani was a "frontrunner" by all accounts until people started actually voting. Then it turned out he was even less likely a winner than Ron Paul. Yet Giuliani got an absolutely huge amount of air time because he was a "legitimate" candidate. Wouldn't it have been nice if people had been given a little more information on the other candidates who, as it turned out, had just as much a chance of winning as Giuliani?
Doesn't it also seem strange that coming out of the Democratic Nevada caucus, which tallied a total of just over 10,000 votes (less than half the number of people living in the tiny suburban town I grew up in) we draw conclusions as to who is viable or not? And the media then starts excluding candidates from debates, people like you start implying that there only need to be discussion of the frontrunners? Based on... 10,000 votes? From Nevada? In a varied nation of 300 million people?
Please, now and in the future, until the people vote, promote the idea that all candidates get equal treatment. Anyone who can get themselves on the ballot in all 50 states should be heard. You'll get better choices. We'll get better presidents. It matters.
Ah, I see. Like so many tech people, you seem to forget that the final product matters. Yes, all the ingredients for everything we'll ever invent are already at our fingertips, one only has to put them together. But putting them together is still work and requires ingenuity.
Tivo isn't just a hard disk VCR. I indeed thought it would be nice to have hard disk recording at home -- A VCR with better quality and random access would have been sweet. But I didn't think about having it know the schedules and predictively scour the channels to find all the episodes it could without any intervention. It fundamentally changed the way people watch TV: nobody with a VCR or a $15K UNIX station could truly ignore broadcast scheduling. Now people with Tivos routinely do, and it is an amazing feat.
I never said anything about the frontrunners. I maintain there _are_ interesting candidates. Just because they don't win, (at least in part because of cynical people like yourself) doesn't mean they're not there.
Since I worked in digital video from 1994 to 1997, including with hard disk recorders in a production environment, and yet I never heard anyone even suggest anything like a Tivo, I'm going to claim it's non-obvious.
And I agree: the point of patents is to get things out in the open. As far as I know, nobody else was working on the idea until after the Tivo came out. I think that working out the Tivo took substantial time and money, and they were encouraged to make it because they thought they could patent it. So I think that a patent in that case caused innovation. Maybe it doesn't need to be as long, but I argue that without patent protection no company would have taken the risk of designing, building, and marketing such a thing.
I understand the that it's foolish to let someone patent all the possible uses of a new technology. I've been on the wrong side of patent lawsuits where we had to cough up money for "storing customer data in a file on disk". But Tivo does not strike me as such. It's one of a small number of devices I've come across in the last decade that made me say "huh, that's really clever". Call me a fool, but it seems like just about everyone thought so when they first saw the Tivo. I think it makes sense to reward for that, for a limited time.
1) Can you show me the analog device that does what Tivo does? 2) I was working in digital video, including with hard disk video recorders from 1994 through 1997 and it didn't occur to me. In fact I didn't hear anyone ever mention anything like it.
I'm going to plug my little non-partisan politics page that features substantial interviews with each of the candidates. There is an interesting crop of people to choose from this time, moreso than in the past couple elections, it seems. Or maybe it's just because the stakes seem so much higher now?
I'm curious to see if I get flamed for this, but I'm going to say that on some philosophical level, Tivo should win this.
I've been very critical of patents in the past, and in general I think they are overused by trolls and big corps to squash competition on obvious ideas. But most people admit that somewhere underneath all that crap is the ideal of a little guy being able to spend a bunch of time and money to invent and bring something to market without having someone else immediately copy them and usurp the benefits of all their hard work. There's a valid, society benefitting reason for patents, it's just that they're almost never used in that way these days any more.
I think Tivo is an example of what patents should protect. My understanding is that Tivo was a pretty clever idea, and they spent a lot of time and money creating something very cool and unique. I never owned one myself, but friends did, and it seemed to me that if anything was patentable it would be Tivo. I was later a bit weirded out when all these competing DVRs appeared. In fact I took it to mean that the patent system was broken in both directions: it encouraged patent trolling over obvious ideas and it failed to protect inventors.
Now I hear that they may be getting patent protection after all, and for the first time since Dyson protected himself against the vacuum manufacturers that refused to license his work, I'm seeing patents do what they were meant to do: encourage actual invention.
If you think Tivo was not worthy of a patent, then I don't know what to tell you. It's not just a VCR, and if it were people would be including VCRs in cable boxes. They came up with something cool that nobody else was doing, and if I understand the market at the time, something nobody else wanted to do. And before they could turn a profit they were slammed by knockoffs from several sides.
Anyways: I just want to call out that while I generally gag at the patent cases I see, this is not one of them. I think Tivo brought something unique to market and they should have a (truly) limited time to exclusively benefit from it.
Slashdot Mirror
How about you ask them which European country Budapest is the capital of. If they get it wrong, they are an adult.
So far the main responses seem to be that it would be too time consuming and hard to write better laws.
Hold on -- we're talking about laws here: the things that literally make and break lives, and infringe or protect our personal liberty. It seems to me a no-brainer that lawmakers could spend a little time and procedure making laws better. To argue otherwise is essentially to say you want more laws regardless of quality. This is strange, because I don't think of the country as a law-factory, whereby we succeed by producing the most laws for the lowest cost. The quality of the laws is serious issue and I'm disappointed (though not actually surprised) to see so many people dismiss it as "too hard".
I guess that's the answer to most things today -- it's "too hard" so we might as well just stall out right here and forego progress.
Cheers.
Hold on... I'm not going to let you take the word "environmentalist", which means "a person who advocates the protection of the environment" and turn it into "idiot who mindlessly jumps on to every green-tinted bandwagon, hates science, distrusts technology, etc."
I'm an environmentalist. It means that I think that preserving our environment (literally, the environment required for our survival) is important. I don't have all the answers to our energy crisis. I never really liked biofuel because it seemed an odd use arable land. I think nuclear is a pretty good option. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I think we're cutting down trees too quickly. Maybe I'm wrong about that too. The only thing I know I'm right about is this: the earth is finite and there is a limit to the rate at which we can chew things up before we bring pain on ourselves.
I do think that with technology and a little care we can all enjoy ourselves, be comfortable, and make this last for the foreseeable future.
I'm an environmentalist, and I want to figure this stuff out together. Still hate me?
Yes, blind faith is scary. So is declaring all passion "blind faith".
As to your second comment -- are you serious? You think you can judge the merits of supporters by their level of passion? So, for example, people who passionately support slavery and those who passionately support human rights?
If by "merits" you simply mean "effectiveness", well sure. But that's just a tautology.
It sounds to me like you're so irritated by passion that you assume anyone displaying it has not the ability to reason and understand what they are supporting or opposing. I hope you can take a moment and realize that is simply not true. People with very nuanced understandings of issues can be passionate about them.
Cheers.
So you're basically saying that if people in group A are as passionate as people in group B, the merits of their ideas must be similar.
It's that type of wholly empty thinking that helps to make political discourse in the US (and maybe everywhere) nigh impossible.
Sigh.
I won't be surprised to find you complaining in four years when things are roughly the same as they are now. But, you know, don't let any scary new ideas challenge what you're comfortable with, even if it doesn't actually work.
Cheers.
I've always thought the Five-SeveN was a pretty sweet, with well-designed light armor piercing rounds. Plus you can swap them into the P90 FTW.
:)
Yeah, I played too much Counter-Strike
But in all seriousness, it is some well-thought-out weaponry. I particularly like the promo video.
Cheers.
You missed the original comment. It wouldn't matter if they did that since neither party would know what the other was going to say.
So, after a sale completes:
1. either or both parties can leave feedback, but _nobody_ can see what the feedback was
2. after say 30 days all feedback appears but no further feedback can be left
That seems to solve the problem ebay wants to solve in a better way that sweeping it under the carpet, which is what it sounds like they're doing.
Cheers.
That's what I'm most looking for in a president - the ability to separate what is best for the country, and what his duties and limitations in his position are from what he personally wants.
Agreed 100% on that.
You're probably right about drawing too much from the quote -- he's probably just referring to his captors. But using the word "gooks" is pretty stupid. "I hate the motherfuckers" would have been a lot better. By singling them out with a racial slur he's really showing some sloppy thinking or at least sloppy speaking. That kind of thing can really alienate people. By the way, my wife is Asian, so maybe I'm a little sensitive to it.
In general, he just has a tendency to generalize a bit much for me. In the discussion about trading with middle eastern nations he made the "I don't want to trade with Al-Qaeda, they just want to trade Burkas" comment. Yeah, it's a joke. Ha ha. I know he doesn't really think all middle eastern people are part of Al-Qaeda. But, seriously: what the fuck is his problem? I want to elect a statesperson, not Andrew Dice Clay.
Still, I'd rather have him than some of the other candidates. So I understand how one can overlook this in favor of him overall.
Cheers.
I guess I'd like to have a president who can maintain that level of subtlety in the face of adversity.
I recognize, with regret, that most Americans probably don't care about that.
Cheers.
My god, do some research people: Paul's positions on just about all of this is available on his site. And in the Google interview he answers most of these too. He has got to be one of the least evasive politicians around.
Most politicians answer these questions to some degree, too. But you have to dig. It sounds like you're upset that the media doesn't talk about issues like these, and there I agree with you. The established media has totally failed to raise the bar in public political discourse. In fact it's just about completely buggered it up. Everyone should know exactly where all the candidates stand on all the questions you mention. The fact that so few do is pretty sad. But since the info is out there, you're a bit to blame too. Don't just sit back and complain that nobody brought the info to your doorstep. Go out and learn about these things. And then vote what you believe.
In any case, hope you find some good answers. Cheers.
Then I guess my grandfather was better than god. He was whisked away to a secret Polish prison without trial and tormented for five years, and yet he doesn't hate Polish people. Or communists. Amazing what a little perspective will do.
Cheers.
Sure, I'd vote for no president or your cat over Bush any day. But that's what I'm saying: it matters who ends up in office. If you believe that (and it sounds like you do since you disapprove of Bush) then you're still better off voting for the one that you think will abuse power the least.
You can't not play politics -- it happens with or without your input -- so if you don't play you just lose. Your input can make it better, if ever so slightly.
Cheers.
I guess I'd say that doesn't line up with my interpretation of his approach at all;
On borders, you've just got it wrong. He's for strong border security. In fact, his immigration policy is too restrictive for my tastes, but I'm still voting for him.
On international stuff, I can at least understand your concern, but I don't take it as a "head in the sand" thing at all. He accepts war is necessary in some cases and that a formal declaration of war can be a sound move. The key is to wage war only when it threatens our national security, or I suppose if the populous wants to intervene and congress authorizes it.
My take on his foreign policy is "if you don't go fucking with people, you don't have as many problems". And I wholeheartedly agree with this. A huge amount of our trouble is sourced to our arrogant meddlesome activities. Really it is: there's not a lot of serious disagreement about this. The only disagreement is whether the benefits of manipulating other countries outweighs the liabilities. I believe that the best approach is to be less meddlesome. It is, in fact, the democratic approach: the ideas of individual responsibility, even when the "individuals" are other nations.
Are there exception cases? Sure -- there always are. Yes, we needed to get involved in WWII. But that doesn't suddenly mean we need to get involved in every dispute around the globe, or topple governments that don't serve our national interest. It's a filthy business that builds enormous resentment. Paul is the only one who sees this, and it is the main reason I'm a supporter. Even if he loses the nomination, I'm just so inspired to see that other people are waking up to this idea -- that we don't have to micro-manage other nations. That we should tend to ourselves first.
Cheers, and please vote!
I'm sorry, but given that so few people have even heard of Mike Gravel, it's not exactly reasonable to claim his message has been heard and rejected. I'm not a fan of his, and in fact I'd agree that if he got more airtime he probably wouldn't see any gains in the polls. But I find this notion that we have to determine which candidates are the "real" candidates before the election takes place to be absurd and undermining of democracy.
Think how much time was wasted on discussing and following Giuliani because he was determined to be a "real" candidate, when in fact he was not. The only reasonable strategy that helps to support democracy is to give all candidates the presumption of viability until actual votes are taken. It's already hard enough to get on the ballot in all 50 states that the true loonies are usually filtered out. And in the case some get through, can you humor the people for a few months so that actual, you know, democracy, can take place?
Nobody minds if you make your choice. Criticize the candidate all you want. Don't vote for them if you don't like them. But don't exclude them from coverage or discussion because you don't like them. Promote the idea of fair coverage and an actual election. Pre-judging them on viability creates unhealthy feedback in the system and undermines democracy.
And your comments about McCain and Obama being written off are from an alternate universe: these names had big media attention from the outset, and continuous coverage. Neither of them were excluded from debates, and if they took second place in a big state, you'd have heard about it. Not so for other candidates you mention.
Cheers.
I would say then at this point that discussing Giuliani was a waste of time too. However, people like yourself who are too impatient to wait for an actual vote told us all that it was important to talk about him since he was the frontrunner. It's just that you were wrong.
Now, I agree Gravel has a slim chance. And I'd even go so far as to say if he got more coverage, his chances would be slimmer. But I want him to have a fair and full shot of it because nobody knows until the vote happens who mattered, and who was really a waste of time to talk about.
Cheers.
Obama, for all his talk of hope, won't be a better President than Clinton, Huckabee, McCain, Paul, et al. He's only human, and thus unfit to govern anybody but himself.
Despite the kernel of truth to it, I really dislike this reasoning. Just because leaders are all flawed does not mean they are all equally flawed. If you think so, then it doesn't matter at all who runs the country. There's no reason whatsoever to take Bush out of office. Just let him run things indefinitely, then he can pass it to his kids. Some places do this: it's called a monarchy and historically they've proven to be far worse off than more democratic nations.
So, one might reasonably deduce that it does matter who is in office. And that the attractive, simplistic cynicism of "they're all unfit" doesn't resolve this important issue at all.
Cheers.
His foreign policy is the _only_ one that makes any sense to me at all. I'm really curious as to why you think it's wacked?
I vote in every election, but I only write myself in.
That's really a shame. Because voting (like investing) is one of those things that if you don't play you still play, you just lose.
As a Christian, I'll give you an example of how foolish it sounds to me: I don't like God as described in the bible, so I'm not going to play his games. Of course, assuming that there is a God, I'm still playing: I'm just going to be punished. Obviously there really is voting and we really do end up with a president. So you're just losing. Don't get caught up in the religious example, just consider it a rough illustration.
As to force being evil, sure. So why not vote for the candidate who wants to use the least force. By not voting you're voting for the majority. Which, as it turns out, is very favorable towards force. So, you know, you're part of the problem.
Cheers.
This is for discussion of candidates who having a chance of winning the nomination.
This is a seriously fucked up notion that has become all too accepted in modern politics. The fact is that the VOTE determines who has a chance of winning, and nothing else.
For instance, Giuliani was a "frontrunner" by all accounts until people started actually voting. Then it turned out he was even less likely a winner than Ron Paul. Yet Giuliani got an absolutely huge amount of air time because he was a "legitimate" candidate. Wouldn't it have been nice if people had been given a little more information on the other candidates who, as it turned out, had just as much a chance of winning as Giuliani?
Doesn't it also seem strange that coming out of the Democratic Nevada caucus, which tallied a total of just over 10,000 votes (less than half the number of people living in the tiny suburban town I grew up in) we draw conclusions as to who is viable or not? And the media then starts excluding candidates from debates, people like you start implying that there only need to be discussion of the frontrunners? Based on... 10,000 votes? From Nevada? In a varied nation of 300 million people?
Please, now and in the future, until the people vote, promote the idea that all candidates get equal treatment. Anyone who can get themselves on the ballot in all 50 states should be heard. You'll get better choices. We'll get better presidents. It matters.
Cheers.
Ah, I see. Like so many tech people, you seem to forget that the final product matters. Yes, all the ingredients for everything we'll ever invent are already at our fingertips, one only has to put them together. But putting them together is still work and requires ingenuity.
Tivo isn't just a hard disk VCR. I indeed thought it would be nice to have hard disk recording at home -- A VCR with better quality and random access would have been sweet. But I didn't think about having it know the schedules and predictively scour the channels to find all the episodes it could without any intervention. It fundamentally changed the way people watch TV: nobody with a VCR or a $15K UNIX station could truly ignore broadcast scheduling. Now people with Tivos routinely do, and it is an amazing feat.
Cheers.
I never said anything about the frontrunners. I maintain there _are_ interesting candidates. Just because they don't win, (at least in part because of cynical people like yourself) doesn't mean they're not there.
Cheers.
Since I worked in digital video from 1994 to 1997, including with hard disk recorders in a production environment, and yet I never heard anyone even suggest anything like a Tivo, I'm going to claim it's non-obvious.
And I agree: the point of patents is to get things out in the open. As far as I know, nobody else was working on the idea until after the Tivo came out. I think that working out the Tivo took substantial time and money, and they were encouraged to make it because they thought they could patent it. So I think that a patent in that case caused innovation. Maybe it doesn't need to be as long, but I argue that without patent protection no company would have taken the risk of designing, building, and marketing such a thing.
I understand the that it's foolish to let someone patent all the possible uses of a new technology. I've been on the wrong side of patent lawsuits where we had to cough up money for "storing customer data in a file on disk". But Tivo does not strike me as such. It's one of a small number of devices I've come across in the last decade that made me say "huh, that's really clever". Call me a fool, but it seems like just about everyone thought so when they first saw the Tivo. I think it makes sense to reward for that, for a limited time.
Cheers.
1) Can you show me the analog device that does what Tivo does? 2) I was working in digital video, including with hard disk video recorders from 1994 through 1997 and it didn't occur to me. In fact I didn't hear anyone ever mention anything like it.
So, I guess I don't agree with your assessment.
I'm going to plug my little non-partisan politics page that features substantial interviews with each of the candidates. There is an interesting crop of people to choose from this time, moreso than in the past couple elections, it seems. Or maybe it's just because the stakes seem so much higher now?
I'll refrain from my opinion.
Cheers.
I'm curious to see if I get flamed for this, but I'm going to say that on some philosophical level, Tivo should win this.
I've been very critical of patents in the past, and in general I think they are overused by trolls and big corps to squash competition on obvious ideas. But most people admit that somewhere underneath all that crap is the ideal of a little guy being able to spend a bunch of time and money to invent and bring something to market without having someone else immediately copy them and usurp the benefits of all their hard work. There's a valid, society benefitting reason for patents, it's just that they're almost never used in that way these days any more.
I think Tivo is an example of what patents should protect. My understanding is that Tivo was a pretty clever idea, and they spent a lot of time and money creating something very cool and unique. I never owned one myself, but friends did, and it seemed to me that if anything was patentable it would be Tivo. I was later a bit weirded out when all these competing DVRs appeared. In fact I took it to mean that the patent system was broken in both directions: it encouraged patent trolling over obvious ideas and it failed to protect inventors.
Now I hear that they may be getting patent protection after all, and for the first time since Dyson protected himself against the vacuum manufacturers that refused to license his work, I'm seeing patents do what they were meant to do: encourage actual invention.
If you think Tivo was not worthy of a patent, then I don't know what to tell you. It's not just a VCR, and if it were people would be including VCRs in cable boxes. They came up with something cool that nobody else was doing, and if I understand the market at the time, something nobody else wanted to do. And before they could turn a profit they were slammed by knockoffs from several sides.
Anyways: I just want to call out that while I generally gag at the patent cases I see, this is not one of them. I think Tivo brought something unique to market and they should have a (truly) limited time to exclusively benefit from it.
Cheers.