I pretty much agree. I guess I'm just hoping for a catastrophic patent crisis brought on by this company. Unlikely, sure, but our only chance to improve things in anything like a reasonable timeframe. And if other nations surpass us, well, more power to them I guess. We let ourselves be overtaken.
The patent system will not be changed until it wreaks havoc across the land. It will be a painful process, but isn't change always such? Right now we're stuck water torture mode, and it's hard to convince people that patents are a net loss for society. I know they are because the company I work for is dealing with frivolous patent issues regularly now. It's just crazy how abused the whole thing is.
So I'm hoping this company goes after all the big boys and wins. I want to see IBM, NCR, and any other company with a patent litigation strategy to get nailed. And everyone else and their little dogs, too: Apple, Microsoft, etc. When they've all had their hands tied and/or had billions in revenue funnelled off to these trolls, when jobs start getting lost, when markets start crashing, maybe just maybe the issue will get the treatment it deserves.
I was wondering when someone would solve that. As small a thing as it may seem, I think the main problem with video chat is that you can't look into the other person's eyes. Even with the iChat built into the bezel on the new macs, there's still this disconcerting thing about a person looking at your neck while you talk. It's probably hard coded in our brain to be suspicous of such folks.
I've seen your posts before and skimmed over the well prepared documents on your COSA project. However I don't get the sense that even a tiny bit has been put into practice? Is there somewhere one could see anything implemented in this system you describe? If not, why not?
But there's the fact that despite all the configurable style sheet stuff, underlined links are still the convention. It's not a technical limitation, it's stored in the minds of millions of users. There nothing on the web as instantly clickable as underlined text. You can get all stylish and ignore that, but since most websites make their bread and butter off of functionality and not aesthetics, you're usually better off checking the wanna-be graphic artist tendancies and building an app that behaves as people expect. Of course, if your site's not about bread & butter then do whatever you like:)
Cheers.
Not needed -- already free
on
Public Patents?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I actually met with several people from the patent office last week. They were visiting companies in Nevada to learn how patents effect our business. First thing I want to say is that they weren't a bunch of idiots and they took their job seriously.
Anyways, we discussed the idea of public patents, and there's a simple solution already. You don't have to patent anything to make it public. You just have to publish it. That's all. If you have something that could be patentable and you want to make sure that it's free for public use, just write up a whitepaper, date it, and make it available publicly on the web. Make sure it gets into the WayBack machine. They use these resources when researching patents, so it should prevent them getting granted. If not, it would still function as prior art.
otherwise, how can you tell if they're doing their job or not
By having real managers that observe their employees, form a good working relationship, and encourage them to do a great job, which isn't always measurable.
But very few companies want to do that which is why we hate so many of them. You can tell you're just a number. The call center for the place I work doesn't have quotas on call time or upsells. The metric is happy customers. That's it. They find good employees and empower them, monitor random call, and tend to the human aspects. It works very well for us.
I just wanted to say something about the idea that everything must be a measurable metric. Metrics can be useful in some cases (like we track call response time (average 18 seconds)) but I personally think that metrics usually encourage poor work in the interest of the quota, and people trying to game the system.
First I have to plug the Hofstadter books Godel, Escher, Bach, and to a lesser extent, Metamagical Themas. These books are as close to hard science as you're going to get talking about conciousness. Anyone with any interest in these topics really owes it to themselves to read these (sometimes challenging) books.
Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly. And as a creative emotional person I didn't want that to be true. But after digging as far as I could, in I've come to peace with the idea that reductionism will not reveal the man behind the curtain, so to speak. Maybe I'll be proved wrong someday, but to me, loosely speaking, the combinations of uncertainty, incompleteness, chaos, and feedback effects result in the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. I'm not saying that there's some magical soul that exists outside our physical selfs, but rather that there is some higher level network effect in complex systems such as our brain where something exists on top of the physical parts, is wholly made from them, but is only loosely determined by them. That is the "I" to me.
a) it has been delayed for years already, and they're delaying it again
b) the words "complete rewrite" have been thrown around, before and after this delay
c) they're pulling people in from other divisions to get it done sooner (mythical man month anyone?)
They may not be doomed, but these taken together make it seem like a pretty rough road ahead. I'm not against MS. I think they've done some good work, and Vista may be good too. But this sounds like one of those downward spiral projects and I feel sort of bad for them. They've got a lot of talented people who just aren't being led with a solid vision. All software companies go through this if they're around for any length of time. MS has done it before, just not on this scale.
Very good point. You're right about the intent of patents. I think that the ability to recoup the cost of R&D is sort of an unspoken goal. Otherwise it's hard to encourage people to invent.
But in any case, we really need to get down to this core idea of "public good". As you said, all the IP law has drifted way far afield of the "public good" doctrine and has become a way to secure an empire. Create a piece of popular art or useful invention and retire, because you and your children's children are set for life. How is that for the "public good"? And I question that even for the good art and inventions! Much moreso for the useless crap.
Yeah, agreed. I will mention that. Isn't it 20 years now anyways? It gets complicated anyways... different markets move at different speeds. 5 years is an eternity in software, but a blink for drug companies. And I really question the idea that it's a race with only one winner. If several people work on something at the same time, and one beats the other to a patent by a minute (this happened with the phone, i think) what is the social benefit to giving a monopoly to that one person? It was going to get invented anyways.
Is there anything stopping them from taking out a 2nd mortgage and trying to do it themselves?
Yes, decades of precedent. The market is not really open to independents. Sure, once in a while you hear a success story like Dyson and his vacuum, but those stand out because they are so rare. Why? Because if you do it on your own your idea will likely get stolen and reimplemented by a large company anyways. In Dyson's case that didn't happen because they didn't want his idea.
Anyways, you could say that the security is what the company provides. But I see that analogous to mafia security. These predatorial superpower-type companies have made the environment dangerous, and now they're offering to take your invention in exchange for a little security.
I'm being over dramatic here, but I do take exception at the pure capitalist view that it seems to be working on some vague level so it must be as good as it gets. In the end I think companies do provide opportunity to develop ideas, and that's good. And good companies reward their inventors. But my original point is that the patent system doesn't seem to do much in encouraging this. It's just a big legal mess that has little to do with promoting invention, research, or benefiting society.
the big corps could steal others innovations whenever they feel like it. Oh wait, they already do that
And there you've nailed the real problem with patents: they don't do what they were intended. They don't protect the little guy at all. The little guy inventors always get reamed anyways because just about any verdict can be purchased with enough money. Patents just make it easier for the rich corporations that are on equal financial footing to hammer each other in court, see RIM, etc.
The philosophy of patents makes sense: provide a way to reward invention and help recoup the cost of research and development. I don't see modern patents doing this at all. Most inventors are not actually rewarded (the company they work for is) and research is usually distributed across different competing companies and then the patent holder sues whoever comes out on top.
It's just a mess. A messy mess.
I have a meeting with the USPTO this on Wednesday, and I have no idea what to say that could have any positive effect.
I'd be willing to put money that I know the Bible as well as you. I certainly know it far better than most people who call themselves Christians. Of course, it's so ambiguous and believers are so comfortable with loose interpretation that you can never really demonstrate a contradiction to a believer's satisfaction, but if you spend a few minutes trying to reconcile the laws of the old testament with the attituded of the new testament, you'll see what I mean. Of course someone will always say that the new replaces the old, but Jesus himself said he did not come to change the law. And some will say that the old only applied to the Jews. But in any case if I saw Jews stoning their children for misbehaving, even before Christ came, I'd have a problem with that, as would you. And the idea of a God who punishes generation after generation for the sins of the parents, yet is somehow called merciful and loving. And even the very core idea of someon dying on a cross cleansing other people's sins. As if a crucifiction several thousand years ago has anything to do with some guy beating his wife today. It doesn't make a lick of sense.
But it doesn't have to. People just want some static framework for life so they don't have to try to fit the complexity of the world in their heads. And religion does a pretty good job of that for the most part. But it's pretty obvious that's all it's for if you think about it.
There's no contradiction: I don't blame anything on the creator. I'm just saying there isn't one. If there was, he'd be a jerk, not a good guy as most religions claim. That's the contradiction and it doesn't fall on my side of the fence:)
You obviously don't know many athiests. Athiests have a wide range of philosophical beliefs -- being an athiest doesn't mean one believes any particular thing, just that one doesn't believe in a god. And that is most certainly the case for me. Yet without god I can still form concepts of good and evil and have great compassion towards my fellow man. I don't believe in destiny but I don't believe in everything being random either: I believe in will, which man exercises to great effect. I believe in responsibility for ones actions.
The world seems far to big and complex for any single minded God. That's just our only easy way of comprehending things: to project a personality onto the natural world. But it just doesn't line up once you dig down.
But I don't get the authority from God. I get it naturally as a birthright. I can choose to be good or evil. And I've chosen good. Of course I try to spread this to others, but that doesn't change my original point: that life on earth is a terrible thing for some innocent people and I can't fathom a creator who would allow such things to happen.
That may all be the case. It doesn't really matter to me, though. All Christian religions can be found in conflict with the bible on a point or two since it has conflicting information in itself. My reason for not believing is more fundamental than that. I don't believe because it just doesn't seem true.
Might as well fully disclose too: I was born and raised in a strong Christian environment: my grandfather was the pastor of the Pentecostal church in the town I grew up in. He was a good man, too. But by the time I was 18 and had read most of the Bible, the whole thing made a lot more sense as a work of man. And the way the world functioned made much more sense without any guiding force. I'm 32 now, and as time goes on I find more and more peace in my naturalistic beliefs. Even facing death, I'm at peace with the idea of my one brief life. I try to make the most of it, and to help others make the most of theirs.
I never said I was unhappy with my life. Actually, I'm quite happy and at peace. I would even say such feelings of peace and hapiness increased when I stopped trying to fit what I saw as contradictions into my head.
I agree that I have authority to rule over evil in my life, and I do my best to keep it under control. The evil I was talking about in my post isn't in my life. Right this very moment there is a child being raped. There is a man being tortured for speaking the truth. There is an adulterer ruining a family and enjoying it. The last light is leaving someone's eyes from starvation, and they never had a chance to experience great joy. And a million more tiny crimes, too. That is the evil I was talking about.
And I agree that this life is important. I believe so quite strongly since I think it's all we have. But I have often heard from Christians, that the attrocities of this life are inconsequential next to the afterlife. As I said, that explanation seems a cop-out.
This is dead on. You nailed it: a) the process has been demonstrated b) it is not in conflict with god or the bible.
Why are we still arguing about this? Honestly I don't know. As I said in another post people have an emotional reaction to this for some reason and I don't expect any amount of truth to dissuade them. Yes, like with Galelio. Maybe another hundred years from now we'll be past it as people die off.
And that's the ultimate purpose of death: to clean house.
You're kidding, right? This would have no bearing on our day to day life. Of course we must judge what is right and wrong outside ourselves. I'm sure you do. And when you're living in a way that lines up, more or less, with your beliefs, then you don't really believe them.
Microsoft is a company with a lot of talent, if they wanted to write a good new OS, they could do it
As ex-Microsoft I can confirm the former, but I don't agree with the latter.
Any development project that size takes a lot more than talent. It takes a cohesive vision, it takes a lot of sacrafices and tradeoffs, and amazing organization, communication, and cooperation. In my experience Microsoft lacks all these things internally. Which is a shame because again, they have a lot of very talented people there.
Slashdot Mirror
I pretty much agree. I guess I'm just hoping for a catastrophic patent crisis brought on by this company. Unlikely, sure, but our only chance to improve things in anything like a reasonable timeframe. And if other nations surpass us, well, more power to them I guess. We let ourselves be overtaken.
Cheers.
That's what I figured, I was just curious what he'd say.
Cheers.
The patent system will not be changed until it wreaks havoc across the land. It will be a painful process, but isn't change always such? Right now we're stuck water torture mode, and it's hard to convince people that patents are a net loss for society. I know they are because the company I work for is dealing with frivolous patent issues regularly now. It's just crazy how abused the whole thing is.
So I'm hoping this company goes after all the big boys and wins. I want to see IBM, NCR, and any other company with a patent litigation strategy to get nailed. And everyone else and their little dogs, too: Apple, Microsoft, etc. When they've all had their hands tied and/or had billions in revenue funnelled off to these trolls, when jobs start getting lost, when markets start crashing, maybe just maybe the issue will get the treatment it deserves.
Cheers.
I was wondering when someone would solve that. As small a thing as it may seem, I think the main problem with video chat is that you can't look into the other person's eyes. Even with the iChat built into the bezel on the new macs, there's still this disconcerting thing about a person looking at your neck while you talk. It's probably hard coded in our brain to be suspicous of such folks.
Cheers.
Just a logic question -- if minors can't be held to a contract, then what's the point of making them agree as the terms do that they are over 18?
Cheers.
All creativity is shackled by constraints. Arbitrary or not it hardly matters.
Cheers.
I've seen your posts before and skimmed over the well prepared documents on your COSA project. However I don't get the sense that even a tiny bit has been put into practice? Is there somewhere one could see anything implemented in this system you describe? If not, why not?
Cheers.
But there's the fact that despite all the configurable style sheet stuff, underlined links are still the convention. It's not a technical limitation, it's stored in the minds of millions of users. There nothing on the web as instantly clickable as underlined text. You can get all stylish and ignore that, but since most websites make their bread and butter off of functionality and not aesthetics, you're usually better off checking the wanna-be graphic artist tendancies and building an app that behaves as people expect. Of course, if your site's not about bread & butter then do whatever you like :)
Cheers.
I actually met with several people from the patent office last week. They were visiting companies in Nevada to learn how patents effect our business. First thing I want to say is that they weren't a bunch of idiots and they took their job seriously.
Anyways, we discussed the idea of public patents, and there's a simple solution already. You don't have to patent anything to make it public. You just have to publish it. That's all. If you have something that could be patentable and you want to make sure that it's free for public use, just write up a whitepaper, date it, and make it available publicly on the web. Make sure it gets into the WayBack machine. They use these resources when researching patents, so it should prevent them getting granted. If not, it would still function as prior art.
Cheers.
otherwise, how can you tell if they're doing their job or not
By having real managers that observe their employees, form a good working relationship, and encourage them to do a great job, which isn't always measurable.
But very few companies want to do that which is why we hate so many of them. You can tell you're just a number. The call center for the place I work doesn't have quotas on call time or upsells. The metric is happy customers. That's it. They find good employees and empower them, monitor random call, and tend to the human aspects. It works very well for us.
I just wanted to say something about the idea that everything must be a measurable metric. Metrics can be useful in some cases (like we track call response time (average 18 seconds)) but I personally think that metrics usually encourage poor work in the interest of the quota, and people trying to game the system.
Cheers.
First I have to plug the Hofstadter books Godel, Escher, Bach, and to a lesser extent, Metamagical Themas. These books are as close to hard science as you're going to get talking about conciousness. Anyone with any interest in these topics really owes it to themselves to read these (sometimes challenging) books.
Anyways: I am a big fan of digging down and understanding everything we can about how our minds work. But I always had a fear that at some point we'd know that we were powerless machines who could do nothing but react deterministicly. And as a creative emotional person I didn't want that to be true. But after digging as far as I could, in I've come to peace with the idea that reductionism will not reveal the man behind the curtain, so to speak. Maybe I'll be proved wrong someday, but to me, loosely speaking, the combinations of uncertainty, incompleteness, chaos, and feedback effects result in the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. I'm not saying that there's some magical soul that exists outside our physical selfs, but rather that there is some higher level network effect in complex systems such as our brain where something exists on top of the physical parts, is wholly made from them, but is only loosely determined by them. That is the "I" to me.
Cheers.
It's not that it's delayed, it's that:
a) it has been delayed for years already, and they're delaying it again
b) the words "complete rewrite" have been thrown around, before and after this delay
c) they're pulling people in from other divisions to get it done sooner (mythical man month anyone?)
They may not be doomed, but these taken together make it seem like a pretty rough road ahead. I'm not against MS. I think they've done some good work, and Vista may be good too. But this sounds like one of those downward spiral projects and I feel sort of bad for them. They've got a lot of talented people who just aren't being led with a solid vision. All software companies go through this if they're around for any length of time. MS has done it before, just not on this scale.
Cheers.
Very good point. You're right about the intent of patents. I think that the ability to recoup the cost of R&D is sort of an unspoken goal. Otherwise it's hard to encourage people to invent.
But in any case, we really need to get down to this core idea of "public good". As you said, all the IP law has drifted way far afield of the "public good" doctrine and has become a way to secure an empire. Create a piece of popular art or useful invention and retire, because you and your children's children are set for life. How is that for the "public good"? And I question that even for the good art and inventions! Much moreso for the useless crap.
Cheers.
Yeah, agreed. I will mention that. Isn't it 20 years now anyways? It gets complicated anyways... different markets move at different speeds. 5 years is an eternity in software, but a blink for drug companies. And I really question the idea that it's a race with only one winner. If several people work on something at the same time, and one beats the other to a patent by a minute (this happened with the phone, i think) what is the social benefit to giving a monopoly to that one person? It was going to get invented anyways.
Cheers.
Is there anything stopping them from taking out a 2nd mortgage and trying to do it themselves?
Yes, decades of precedent. The market is not really open to independents. Sure, once in a while you hear a success story like Dyson and his vacuum, but those stand out because they are so rare. Why? Because if you do it on your own your idea will likely get stolen and reimplemented by a large company anyways. In Dyson's case that didn't happen because they didn't want his idea.
Anyways, you could say that the security is what the company provides. But I see that analogous to mafia security. These predatorial superpower-type companies have made the environment dangerous, and now they're offering to take your invention in exchange for a little security.
I'm being over dramatic here, but I do take exception at the pure capitalist view that it seems to be working on some vague level so it must be as good as it gets. In the end I think companies do provide opportunity to develop ideas, and that's good. And good companies reward their inventors. But my original point is that the patent system doesn't seem to do much in encouraging this. It's just a big legal mess that has little to do with promoting invention, research, or benefiting society.
Cheers.
the big corps could steal others innovations whenever they feel like it. Oh wait, they already do that
And there you've nailed the real problem with patents: they don't do what they were intended. They don't protect the little guy at all. The little guy inventors always get reamed anyways because just about any verdict can be purchased with enough money. Patents just make it easier for the rich corporations that are on equal financial footing to hammer each other in court, see RIM, etc.
The philosophy of patents makes sense: provide a way to reward invention and help recoup the cost of research and development. I don't see modern patents doing this at all. Most inventors are not actually rewarded (the company they work for is) and research is usually distributed across different competing companies and then the patent holder sues whoever comes out on top.
It's just a mess. A messy mess.
I have a meeting with the USPTO this on Wednesday, and I have no idea what to say that could have any positive effect.
Cheers.
I'd be willing to put money that I know the Bible as well as you. I certainly know it far better than most people who call themselves Christians. Of course, it's so ambiguous and believers are so comfortable with loose interpretation that you can never really demonstrate a contradiction to a believer's satisfaction, but if you spend a few minutes trying to reconcile the laws of the old testament with the attituded of the new testament, you'll see what I mean. Of course someone will always say that the new replaces the old, but Jesus himself said he did not come to change the law. And some will say that the old only applied to the Jews. But in any case if I saw Jews stoning their children for misbehaving, even before Christ came, I'd have a problem with that, as would you. And the idea of a God who punishes generation after generation for the sins of the parents, yet is somehow called merciful and loving. And even the very core idea of someon dying on a cross cleansing other people's sins. As if a crucifiction several thousand years ago has anything to do with some guy beating his wife today. It doesn't make a lick of sense.
But it doesn't have to. People just want some static framework for life so they don't have to try to fit the complexity of the world in their heads. And religion does a pretty good job of that for the most part. But it's pretty obvious that's all it's for if you think about it.
Cheers.
There's no contradiction: I don't blame anything on the creator. I'm just saying there isn't one. If there was, he'd be a jerk, not a good guy as most religions claim. That's the contradiction and it doesn't fall on my side of the fence :)
You obviously don't know many athiests. Athiests have a wide range of philosophical beliefs -- being an athiest doesn't mean one believes any particular thing, just that one doesn't believe in a god. And that is most certainly the case for me. Yet without god I can still form concepts of good and evil and have great compassion towards my fellow man. I don't believe in destiny but I don't believe in everything being random either: I believe in will, which man exercises to great effect. I believe in responsibility for ones actions.
The world seems far to big and complex for any single minded God. That's just our only easy way of comprehending things: to project a personality onto the natural world. But it just doesn't line up once you dig down.
Cheers.
But I don't get the authority from God. I get it naturally as a birthright. I can choose to be good or evil. And I've chosen good. Of course I try to spread this to others, but that doesn't change my original point: that life on earth is a terrible thing for some innocent people and I can't fathom a creator who would allow such things to happen.
Cheers.
That may all be the case. It doesn't really matter to me, though. All Christian religions can be found in conflict with the bible on a point or two since it has conflicting information in itself. My reason for not believing is more fundamental than that. I don't believe because it just doesn't seem true.
Cheers.
Might as well fully disclose too: I was born and raised in a strong Christian environment: my grandfather was the pastor of the Pentecostal church in the town I grew up in. He was a good man, too. But by the time I was 18 and had read most of the Bible, the whole thing made a lot more sense as a work of man. And the way the world functioned made much more sense without any guiding force. I'm 32 now, and as time goes on I find more and more peace in my naturalistic beliefs. Even facing death, I'm at peace with the idea of my one brief life. I try to make the most of it, and to help others make the most of theirs.
Cheers.
I guess I didn't make a very clear post there.
I never said I was unhappy with my life. Actually, I'm quite happy and at peace. I would even say such feelings of peace and hapiness increased when I stopped trying to fit what I saw as contradictions into my head.
I agree that I have authority to rule over evil in my life, and I do my best to keep it under control. The evil I was talking about in my post isn't in my life. Right this very moment there is a child being raped. There is a man being tortured for speaking the truth. There is an adulterer ruining a family and enjoying it. The last light is leaving someone's eyes from starvation, and they never had a chance to experience great joy. And a million more tiny crimes, too. That is the evil I was talking about.
And I agree that this life is important. I believe so quite strongly since I think it's all we have. But I have often heard from Christians, that the attrocities of this life are inconsequential next to the afterlife. As I said, that explanation seems a cop-out.
Cheers.
This is dead on. You nailed it: a) the process has been demonstrated b) it is not in conflict with god or the bible.
Why are we still arguing about this? Honestly I don't know. As I said in another post people have an emotional reaction to this for some reason and I don't expect any amount of truth to dissuade them. Yes, like with Galelio. Maybe another hundred years from now we'll be past it as people die off.
And that's the ultimate purpose of death: to clean house.
Cheers.
You're kidding, right? This would have no bearing on our day to day life. Of course we must judge what is right and wrong outside ourselves. I'm sure you do. And when you're living in a way that lines up, more or less, with your beliefs, then you don't really believe them.
Cheers.
Microsoft is a company with a lot of talent, if they wanted to write a good new OS, they could do it
As ex-Microsoft I can confirm the former, but I don't agree with the latter.
Any development project that size takes a lot more than talent. It takes a cohesive vision, it takes a lot of sacrafices and tradeoffs, and amazing organization, communication, and cooperation. In my experience Microsoft lacks all these things internally. Which is a shame because again, they have a lot of very talented people there.
Cheers.