Maxwell's Demon only violates Thermodynamics if you don't count the energy required to sense the medium and switch gate. The demon in that case would be some externally powered system and thus the entropy is transferred from within the monitored containment out to the external apparatus and environment driving the process. Thus, no net loss of entropy.
So unless you can somehow put the 'demon' outside of our measurable universe, thermodynamics still applies.
The way to handle that used to be called "jobs". It has always been a challenge to create jobs, but the Obama administration has been increasing the difficulty and risk with job creation since it took office.
Job 'creation' is really about fostering an environment where people feel confident in investing their money/time into creating or doing something that someone else is willing to pay for.
Forcing people to directly or indirectly pay for something that they otherwise don't want/need (eg. the TSA security farce) or by removing competition with poorly implemented regulation (eg. granting infrastructure/insurance monopolies to private corporations) doesn't do much to help the situation. I suppose you might call the TSA a huge job creation program. But, the country would be just as well served (probably better IMO) by paying the vast majority of those TSA 'agents' to stay at home.
Having the government pay for unnecessary inefficiencies is just as bad or worse than simply doling out the cash to the 'needy'. It appears that the current government is further hampered by the current worldwide financial situation falling in a heap.
And, of course, there's a lot of obvious 'corruption' (i.e.. appeasing cronies/lobbies/special interests/etc) that could ideally be undone. But, would be pretty difficult to do without upsetting a lot of rich/powerful people or organisations - which would take cojones of epic proportion.
And by 'controversy', I think they mean...'interfere with the military industrial complex gravy train'.
I think you'll find the military spendin "gravy train" is over rated, and a fraction of what is spent on social welfare programs.
On the other hand, this link demonstrates that defense spending is on the order of 30 to 40% of the total government budget, and welfare programs including medicare/medicaid are below 50% (once the 'discretionary spending' component has been taken into consideration).
A "fraction", technically; but a small fraction relative to 'socialist' programs, definitely not. I suppose you could try to get rid of welfare programs, but then you have to spend more on prisons and other ways to "handle" the rabble and sudden rise in crime as people do whatever they can to feed themselves.
About 10 years ago, I was debugging some inherited code that we were given for an embedded database system. There was a header file with the magic numbers for various entities and positions. It quickly became obvious that they didn't do code reviews at that place. The reason I could tell:
The debug message? "The first time always hurts..." and the sleazy sexual innuendo kept coming. Some people just don't ever grow up, they'd still snicker at that in the retirement home...
As opposed to the dull boring retirement home where everyone just sits around complaining about everything and laughing about nothing?
Sign me up to one where they still snigger at the little things. The only way "growing up" could ever mean losing your sense of humour, is if it refers to the daisies that I'll be pushing up from six feet below ground.
A company I've worked with has a deployed fleet of over 50,000 embedded commercial vehicle monitoring units that all allow back connections (ie. act as hosts) to request immediate status updates and send messages to the driver. Unfortunately, the majority of carriers don't have IPv6, so we're forced to play all sorts of games to handle dynamic IP address changes. And even more annoyingly, most of the carriers dynamically assign 10.x.x.x addresses to the units, so we have to jump through even more routing hoops to connect with various units.
Don't you already do this as a matter of course when renting a car? If you have to walk around the car to inspect it, you may as well have your phone camera actively recording what you see.
Your assuming Anonymous isn't just a small number of guys that can behave relatively safely within a reasonable degree of trust. That kind of trust does not scale. That's my assumption.
You can assume that there will be a foreign agent pretending to be part of the 'army' using an equally secure link to send out the planned activities to the adversary.
And what happens if a large number of equally 'anonymous' agents are influencing the vote and then following through with counter actions to whatever is decided?
In Australia, we use an instant-run-off preference voting system. That means you can vote for your candidates in order of preference. The end effect is that if you really like the Pirate Party, but would be ok with the Greens, followed by the others, then you can put the Pirate Party candidate as #1, the Green candidate as #2, etc.
And when the votes are tallied, if the winner can't be automatically resolved with #1 votes (which only happens if a candidate has so many votes that no amount of further tallying would make a difference), then the #2 preferences are tallied in, followed by #3 and so on until the result is unambiguous and a winner is established. So your vote for the Greens at #2 will have the same effect as voting them at #1 assuming they have a chance of winning anyway. Voting systems don't get much fairer than this.
So no, another third party candidate does not dilute the vote tally of a major party. And even if the third party doesn't win, it sends a message to all the other voters and candidates that the party is getting more support than they'd otherwise get if the voting system was first-past-the-post. That means that the primary policies being put forward by these reasonably popular third parties are also more likely to be considered as important by the major parties themselves.
I'd also assume that any Pirate Party election 'blurb' would suggest that the Greens be preferenced in 2nd place, etc. So all Pirate Party subscribers could vote as a block - potentially biasing the vote away from one of the major parties, just due to recommended preferences. eg. put Labour before the Coalition or vice-versa. That could end up deciding the final result for / against a major party candidate, and thus giving the Pirate Party (or any given third party) indirect influence over government policy.
The issue with interference isn't always due to primary band spectral overlap.
If a high gain receiver is trying to receive a small signal within a wide bandwidth that contains other much higher power signals, then the receiver can be saturated by the non-desired transmissions - even though it isn't in the same narrow frequency band as the desired signal. This could happen to someone that lives next door to a 4G tower, while trying to receive a signal from a distant TV transmission tower. (Again, it's possible to design receivers to resist this, but most cheap TV receivers won't need to be, and thus engineers probably won't bother.)
A secondary problem is side-band interference that occurs when the out-of-band components of a high power interfering signal are large enough relative to the desired signal to cause direct in-band interference. These out of band harmonics and side-bands are reasonably well suppressed below a given threshold relative to the carrier - eg. 60dB below the carrier. However, if the interfering transmitter is next door and its signal into the receiver is significantly higher (eg. greater than 50dB higher than the desired signal), then the signal to noise ratio of the desired TV channel will be insufficient for 'clean' reception, and interference will be visible.
The same issues occur when your house is 'next door' to a high power local TV transmitter and you're trying to receive a program from a much more distant channel in a neighbouring band. But, that particular issue has been worked around since the dawn of TV broadcasting. OTOH, mobile phone towers are much more densely packed and have tighter beams that can be electrically steered to point right past (and thus be received by) a given TV antenna as it 'follows' the phones it's transmitting to.
For example, increase the threshold for obviousness, require better disclosures, etc.
You'd have thought that these would have already been requirements. But, sadly, you're far too correct.
And it is indeed scary to hear a judge make a ridiculous statement like this, when the real problems (and therefore solutions) are almost completely unrelated to what he perceives them to be.
It's known as "irony". But the reality is that patent lawyers have defined the word "obvious" to mean something completely different from what it means to most people. A patent lawyer once defined it for me as follows: "If you had to solve an engineering problem to do something, then it wasn't obvious." If it was a trivially easy engineering problem, and any competent engineer could have solved it in two minutes and produced a similar solution, that's irrelevant. That is what patent lawyers consider "obvious" to mean, and it's not what most people "having ordinary skill in the art" would consider it to mean.
This pretty much sums up the entire problem with the patent system: scope creep. Patents would not be a problem if the underlying patented methods couldn't otherwise be developed/discovered by someone else without a copy of the patent in front of them. The problem arises because far too many (most?) patented methods are routinely independently developed by engineers that have never seen or heard of the original patent in question. And in many cases with trivial effort / time / cost for anyone with ordinary skill in their respective fields of discipline.
Along with your above ideas, I'd also factor in the 'obviousness' of the method(s) under application.
Rather than the present system of drawing a hard line between 'obvious' and 'novel' (and getting it far too wrong far too often); a duration moderating factor would mitigate the 'damage' a bad patent could do, by instead granting it with a much shorter time frame.
At the moment, if an idea is barely patentable (and would be considered obvious to anyone that really knows what they're doing), it gets 20 years. Imagine if the idea was deemed of low (but not zero) novelty, then the patent could grant for 2 years instead. If, however, the idea is highly novel, took a lot of time/money to develop, and is well documented with good examples, then the full 20 years could issue.
The same ideas could be applied to copyrightable works. A full novel/movie/song taken in its entirety could be issued the full reasonable duration (and by reasonable I don't mean the current 70+ years). For short works or works that substantially draw on prior art, the duration could be reduced, possibly significantly in cases where the work took little to no effort (eg. a 4 line jingle).
So let me get this straight: You drive down to Best Buy, try out the product, drive home, order it online, and then drive back to Best Buy to pick it up so you don't have to wait 2 days for delivery.
In the end, you end up paying less for better service - why wouldn't you prefer that?
Actually, you'll be paying less for virtually no service. That's fine for generic products that are functionally equivalent and don't need to be viewed or tested in advance. But, not so good for product categories that have a lot of diversity.
Until the entire shop browsing / feeling / trying / testing aspects can be duplicated online, there will always be a place for brick and mortar stores. Unfortunately, diversity and price are likely to suffer greatly without a critical mass of consumers visiting (and remunerating) those establishments.
It seems the concept of 'preponderance of the evidence' has crept to a standard so low that it's difficult to continue seeing it as part of a justice system.
So true. Especially all those laws in random countries around the world that taken together would forbid pretty anything you'd ever want to do. Quick, we must declare worldwide martial law.
Oh, wait. Maybe the role of a disinterested courier actually is legitimate.
It's a pity the patent examiners don't seem to always have the resources (or skill?) to do a proper analysis. IMO, most ideas are only incremental improvements and even then it's pretty clear when something is a good idea even after you see it in hindsight.
The problem is finding a person skilled in the art that can be considered trustworthy and unbiased in giving their opinion on how novel something really is.
Another option would be to put a bunch of randomly selected engineers into a sealed room with a directive to brainstorm multiple solutions to the generic problem. (Kind of like jury duty for geeks.) And if they come up with the patented solution or describe a clear path to it, then the method as applied for in the patent can be assumed to be either obvious or derivable. Or at least be limited in damage to such specific detail that other similar solutions would not likely infringe on the finally granted patent.
IMO, it is far better for each industry overall that the occasional 'good' patent is rejected, than a 'bad' one get approved.
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Maxwell's Demon only violates Thermodynamics if you don't count the energy required to sense the medium and switch gate. The demon in that case would be some externally powered system and thus the entropy is transferred from within the monitored containment out to the external apparatus and environment driving the process. Thus, no net loss of entropy.
So unless you can somehow put the 'demon' outside of our measurable universe, thermodynamics still applies.
The way to handle that used to be called "jobs". It has always been a challenge to create jobs, but the Obama administration has been increasing the difficulty and risk with job creation since it took office.
Job 'creation' is really about fostering an environment where people feel confident in investing their money/time into creating or doing something that someone else is willing to pay for.
Forcing people to directly or indirectly pay for something that they otherwise don't want/need (eg. the TSA security farce) or by removing competition with poorly implemented regulation (eg. granting infrastructure/insurance monopolies to private corporations) doesn't do much to help the situation. I suppose you might call the TSA a huge job creation program. But, the country would be just as well served (probably better IMO) by paying the vast majority of those TSA 'agents' to stay at home.
Having the government pay for unnecessary inefficiencies is just as bad or worse than simply doling out the cash to the 'needy'. It appears that the current government is further hampered by the current worldwide financial situation falling in a heap.
And, of course, there's a lot of obvious 'corruption' (i.e.. appeasing cronies/lobbies/special interests/etc) that could ideally be undone. But, would be pretty difficult to do without upsetting a lot of rich/powerful people or organisations - which would take cojones of epic proportion.
And by 'controversy', I think they mean ...'interfere with the military industrial complex gravy train'.
I think you'll find the military spendin "gravy train" is over rated, and a fraction of what is spent on social welfare programs.
On the other hand, this link demonstrates that defense spending is on the order of 30 to 40% of the total government budget, and welfare programs including medicare/medicaid are below 50% (once the 'discretionary spending' component has been taken into consideration).
A "fraction", technically; but a small fraction relative to 'socialist' programs, definitely not. I suppose you could try to get rid of welfare programs, but then you have to spend more on prisons and other ways to "handle" the rabble and sudden rise in crime as people do whatever they can to feed themselves.
'interfere with the military industrial complex gravy train'.
It's a breath of fresh air to hear that.
About 10 years ago, I was debugging some inherited code that we were given for an embedded database system. There was a header file with the magic numbers for various entities and positions. It quickly became obvious that they didn't do code reviews at that place. The reason I could tell:
#define TEAM_SUPERVISOR 0x1BEA70FF
True story.
The debug message? "The first time always hurts..." and the sleazy sexual innuendo kept coming. Some people just don't ever grow up, they'd still snicker at that in the retirement home...
As opposed to the dull boring retirement home where everyone just sits around complaining about everything and laughing about nothing?
Sign me up to one where they still snigger at the little things. The only way "growing up" could ever mean losing your sense of humour, is if it refers to the daisies that I'll be pushing up from six feet below ground.
Use the courts.
That's a bit like telling a homeless guy to move in to a New York City penthouse, since you'd heard the owners were having trouble finding a tenant.
How so? I'm using the latest iWork on both Snow Leopard and Lion based machines. I expect it to still work when Mountain Lion is released too.
Mobile devices don't act as hosts.
A company I've worked with has a deployed fleet of over 50,000 embedded commercial vehicle monitoring units that all allow back connections (ie. act as hosts) to request immediate status updates and send messages to the driver. Unfortunately, the majority of carriers don't have IPv6, so we're forced to play all sorts of games to handle dynamic IP address changes. And even more annoyingly, most of the carriers dynamically assign 10.x.x.x addresses to the units, so we have to jump through even more routing hoops to connect with various units.
Don't you already do this as a matter of course when renting a car? If you have to walk around the car to inspect it, you may as well have your phone camera actively recording what you see.
Your assuming Anonymous isn't just a small number of guys that can behave relatively safely within a reasonable degree of trust. That kind of trust does not scale. That's my assumption.
You can assume that there will be a foreign agent pretending to be part of the 'army' using an equally secure link to send out the planned activities to the adversary.
And what happens if a large number of equally 'anonymous' agents are influencing the vote and then following through with counter actions to whatever is decided?
In Australia, we use an instant-run-off preference voting system. That means you can vote for your candidates in order of preference. The end effect is that if you really like the Pirate Party, but would be ok with the Greens, followed by the others, then you can put the Pirate Party candidate as #1, the Green candidate as #2, etc.
And when the votes are tallied, if the winner can't be automatically resolved with #1 votes (which only happens if a candidate has so many votes that no amount of further tallying would make a difference), then the #2 preferences are tallied in, followed by #3 and so on until the result is unambiguous and a winner is established. So your vote for the Greens at #2 will have the same effect as voting them at #1 assuming they have a chance of winning anyway. Voting systems don't get much fairer than this.
So no, another third party candidate does not dilute the vote tally of a major party. And even if the third party doesn't win, it sends a message to all the other voters and candidates that the party is getting more support than they'd otherwise get if the voting system was first-past-the-post. That means that the primary policies being put forward by these reasonably popular third parties are also more likely to be considered as important by the major parties themselves.
I'd also assume that any Pirate Party election 'blurb' would suggest that the Greens be preferenced in 2nd place, etc. So all Pirate Party subscribers could vote as a block - potentially biasing the vote away from one of the major parties, just due to recommended preferences. eg. put Labour before the Coalition or vice-versa. That could end up deciding the final result for / against a major party candidate, and thus giving the Pirate Party (or any given third party) indirect influence over government policy.
The issue with interference isn't always due to primary band spectral overlap.
If a high gain receiver is trying to receive a small signal within a wide bandwidth that contains other much higher power signals, then the receiver can be saturated by the non-desired transmissions - even though it isn't in the same narrow frequency band as the desired signal. This could happen to someone that lives next door to a 4G tower, while trying to receive a signal from a distant TV transmission tower. (Again, it's possible to design receivers to resist this, but most cheap TV receivers won't need to be, and thus engineers probably won't bother.)
A secondary problem is side-band interference that occurs when the out-of-band components of a high power interfering signal are large enough relative to the desired signal to cause direct in-band interference. These out of band harmonics and side-bands are reasonably well suppressed below a given threshold relative to the carrier - eg. 60dB below the carrier. However, if the interfering transmitter is next door and its signal into the receiver is significantly higher (eg. greater than 50dB higher than the desired signal), then the signal to noise ratio of the desired TV channel will be insufficient for 'clean' reception, and interference will be visible.
The same issues occur when your house is 'next door' to a high power local TV transmitter and you're trying to receive a program from a much more distant channel in a neighbouring band. But, that particular issue has been worked around since the dawn of TV broadcasting. OTOH, mobile phone towers are much more densely packed and have tighter beams that can be electrically steered to point right past (and thus be received by) a given TV antenna as it 'follows' the phones it's transmitting to.
For example, increase the threshold for obviousness, require better disclosures, etc.
You'd have thought that these would have already been requirements. But, sadly, you're far too correct.
And it is indeed scary to hear a judge make a ridiculous statement like this, when the real problems (and therefore solutions) are almost completely unrelated to what he perceives them to be.
It's known as "irony". But the reality is that patent lawyers have defined the word "obvious" to mean something completely different from what it means to most people. A patent lawyer once defined it for me as follows: "If you had to solve an engineering problem to do something, then it wasn't obvious." If it was a trivially easy engineering problem, and any competent engineer could have solved it in two minutes and produced a similar solution, that's irrelevant. That is what patent lawyers consider "obvious" to mean, and it's not what most people "having ordinary skill in the art" would consider it to mean.
This pretty much sums up the entire problem with the patent system: scope creep. Patents would not be a problem if the underlying patented methods couldn't otherwise be developed/discovered by someone else without a copy of the patent in front of them. The problem arises because far too many (most?) patented methods are routinely independently developed by engineers that have never seen or heard of the original patent in question. And in many cases with trivial effort / time / cost for anyone with ordinary skill in their respective fields of discipline.
Along with your above ideas, I'd also factor in the 'obviousness' of the method(s) under application.
Rather than the present system of drawing a hard line between 'obvious' and 'novel' (and getting it far too wrong far too often); a duration moderating factor would mitigate the 'damage' a bad patent could do, by instead granting it with a much shorter time frame.
At the moment, if an idea is barely patentable (and would be considered obvious to anyone that really knows what they're doing), it gets 20 years. Imagine if the idea was deemed of low (but not zero) novelty, then the patent could grant for 2 years instead. If, however, the idea is highly novel, took a lot of time/money to develop, and is well documented with good examples, then the full 20 years could issue.
The same ideas could be applied to copyrightable works. A full novel/movie/song taken in its entirety could be issued the full reasonable duration (and by reasonable I don't mean the current 70+ years). For short works or works that substantially draw on prior art, the duration could be reduced, possibly significantly in cases where the work took little to no effort (eg. a 4 line jingle).
So let me get this straight: You drive down to Best Buy, try out the product, drive home, order it online, and then drive back to Best Buy to pick it up so you don't have to wait 2 days for delivery.
Where do I sign up!?!?!
In the end, you end up paying less for better service - why wouldn't you prefer that?
Actually, you'll be paying less for virtually no service. That's fine for generic products that are functionally equivalent and don't need to be viewed or tested in advance. But, not so good for product categories that have a lot of diversity.
Until the entire shop browsing / feeling / trying / testing aspects can be duplicated online, there will always be a place for brick and mortar stores. Unfortunately, diversity and price are likely to suffer greatly without a critical mass of consumers visiting (and remunerating) those establishments.
http://pirateparty.org.au/
It seems the concept of 'preponderance of the evidence' has crept to a standard so low that it's difficult to continue seeing it as part of a justice system.
So true. Especially all those laws in random countries around the world that taken together would forbid pretty anything you'd ever want to do. Quick, we must declare worldwide martial law.
Oh, wait. Maybe the role of a disinterested courier actually is legitimate.
"Fuck me dead!"
Mod the parent +5 Informative.
It's a pity the patent examiners don't seem to always have the resources (or skill?) to do a proper analysis. IMO, most ideas are only incremental improvements and even then it's pretty clear when something is a good idea even after you see it in hindsight.
The problem is finding a person skilled in the art that can be considered trustworthy and unbiased in giving their opinion on how novel something really is.
Another option would be to put a bunch of randomly selected engineers into a sealed room with a directive to brainstorm multiple solutions to the generic problem. (Kind of like jury duty for geeks.) And if they come up with the patented solution or describe a clear path to it, then the method as applied for in the patent can be assumed to be either obvious or derivable. Or at least be limited in damage to such specific detail that other similar solutions would not likely infringe on the finally granted patent.
IMO, it is far better for each industry overall that the occasional 'good' patent is rejected, than a 'bad' one get approved.