What would also need to be added to your proposal is to supplement with SRP or other secure password system that allows two users to easily exchange relatively insecure passwords out of band to verify the exchanged verifier. This also applies to SSH, especially when remotely connected to a box under your direct control.
You'd use this to supplement the base line protection of using a PKI system to verify the verifiers.
Once the public key has been reliably transferred, it can then safely be used to securely receive any communications without a man-in-the-middle or passive listener being able to decrypt it.
Another solution is to further supplement the above with the use of multiple cert authorities to sign/exchange your certificate (and multiple revocation lists). The more channels it comes in through, the more it can be trusted. So to properly fake out the system, you'd have compromise more than just a single authority. And you'd need the shared out of band password. Compromising any one of those channels does the attacker no good; they'd need to hack all of them (or hack your system, steal your private keys and/or trojan your system and/or eavesdrop at the endpoints).
Far better to just say nothing (or "I don't know, officer" to a direct question like "Do you know how fast you were going?").
"I don't know, officer" is effectively an admission of guilt. If you don't know your speed, you are basically acceding to the officer's 'evidence' that you were speeding. That is why, as you say, it's far better to say nothing. If he has valid evidence, then you're going down. If not, then you walk.
You don't want to appear rude to the police if you can avoid it, but you need to be careful to not answer any question, direct or otherwise, with anything but verifiable facts (ie. your name, address, etc). It doesn't help anyone if the police get lazy and try to prosecute with no real evidence beyond a vague statement that gets twisted into an implication that you've committed some random criminal act that you weren't even aware existed.
Death of the unvaccinated and susceptible increases herd immunity. It's called 'biology.'
Herd immunity only oscillates around the point where a balance is reached and the casualty rate no longer affects the viability of the species as a whole. This is true even when assuming a 100% mortality rate, where new susceptible children are born, eventually contract the disease (or get eaten) and die. Vaccination (or acquiring weapons) takes that rate far closer to zero than just letting 'natural selection' take its course. And that is ignoring all the non-fatal symptoms and permanent disabilities caused by diseases that are not 100% fatal.
For example, the death rate of infants due to Whooping cough prior to the vaccine being introduced was nearly a thousand times higher than it is now. Even if you ignore the fact that continuous 'acceptable losses' and general misery would be thousands of times higher than necessary, your premise remains faulty.
We can solve those traveling salesman problems that have been plaguing our society for hundreds of years!
I realize you're joking, but they actually are important problems to solve. If you have 10,000 solder points, and you need your equipment to solder as fast as possible, what route do you take?
Solving this type of real world problem with a mathematically perfect solution usually isn't necessary. A far simpler and quicker statistical method that produces a solution that is only 99.99% of optimal is generally more than adequate. Same applies to other areas of manufacturing such as quality assurance, in other disciplines such as physical layer communications systems, and even in mathematics such as prime generation.
It always comes down to how perfect the solution actually needs to be, and how easy it is to get close to or reach that perfect solution.
Since you can't buy the same track more than once on iTunes, it is a much better indicator of popularity than SMS or online votes where votes can be made hundreds of times over (by friends, family or other coordinated efforts).
And if you really like the performance, why waste money SMSing a vote or two, when you can download the track you like and have it in your collection for about the same amount of money?
That kind of reasoning is only true for huge primarily government funded/controlled projects with long life cycles that have no mainstream applications (eg. stealth fighter planes).
For computer era hardware, the vast majority of research dollars goes into consumer and business grade devices. Any new piece of technology that a secret government project may have created is at most a generation (i.e. a year at most) ahead of mainstream. And more than likely, by the time it is implemented into a usable system, is a generation or two behind. That is purely due to the lead times to get a huge project like that operational.
Unless of course you subscribe to conspiracy theories where the government is somehow hiding a large scale quantum computer system. And meanwhile, all the top university professors and engineers working in the civilian sector flounder around for decades trying to catch up. That would be extremely unlikely IMO.
Tell them broad strokes, not enough to figure it out. Remember that they're called Angel Investors because they can swoop in, take your idea, and do it themselves with their own money. Otherwise, most advice here is solid. They want to see how you develop it, what the exits are, and how much they can reasonably make.
Remember that they're called Angel Investors because they can swoop in, take your idea, and do it themselves with their own money.
This happens far less often than you'd think. That same investor still needs a platform to implement the 'stolen' ideas, so if you've already done the initial hard yards, why not use you.
Unfortunately, in so many cases the 'ideas' are obvious enough to be already in the pipeline of one or more companies already operating in that industry (one of which might be part of an investor's portfolio). Approach enough investors, and the probability of this being true approaches certainty.
Investors generally don't run on building up 'ideas', but on implementing solid viable business plans that they can profit from. The 'investor stole my idea' assumption comes from very little understanding of how the industry works. And usually from someone that didn't patent the inventive part of the plan in the first place.
(Side note: If an invention is truly novel, it's not that hard to patent it without huge expense. If you're having trouble getting the patent, it is usually because the 'invention' is either blatantly obvious, or similar ideas have recently crossed the desks of the patent examiners. A patent attorney can help obfuscate and 'enhance' the application sufficiently to allow an otherwise obvious idea to survive examination. That's when patents get expensive.)
I agree completely. And Dutch auctions would be perfect for this. Keeps the price consistent across the board, so early purchases don't get cheap tickets while late comers (10 minutes later) pay through the nose.
Re:Automation of repetitive tasks on a smartphone
on
The Eternal Mainframe
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· Score: 1
A smartphone is a computer, but from what I've seen, its automation framework isn't quite as rich as that of a PC.
That's because it's pretty much already automated everything that the average user cares about. Which is basically the definition of ease of use.
We're not quite at the stage where a general user can simply say: "computer, consider the following..." And get a functionally useful response.
But, when that does finally happen, it is more than likely that the resulting system will not resemble today's 'desktop' computers.
This is due to lazy investigative techniques and incompetent use of forensic evidence. If you have multiple independent indicators that are individually only partially reliable, then you need to use a number of these in conjunction to produce a more accurate result.
For example if I have 5 separate unrelated pieces of evidence that all point to the same person, and each test has a non-systematic error of 5% (ie. 95% reliable), then the resulting accuracy becomes 99.9999%.
The problem is lazy police work. It's easier to stop investigating once you've got your first piece of evidence and someone to pin it on. Then, just let the courts sort it out.
The expression, "better that a hundred guilty persons escape, than one innocent party suffers", must be reversed in the minds of any detective/prosecutor/judge/juror too lazy to do their job properly and obtain or expect sufficient evidence.
What's to stop the jailers from going on a rampage and killing or otherwise brutalising 'inmates'?
And when the police start attacking anything that moves, that makes them the problem, not the solution. You'd then have to have special police to police the police... recurse ad infinitum.
I'd rather take the infinitesimal risk of getting killed by a mentally ill serial killer or terrorist than the certainty of having my life ruined by a power hungry jailer/guard/cop taking things too far.
If you have to change the law to make an otherwise criminal act 'legal', just to reduce the 'crime rate' metric, then you've failed. Why not go the other way and remove all laws making nothing a crime? Is anarchy any worse or better than being held in captivity?
Even if the automation is better on average than a human, there is still a responsibility issue. Who is at fault when a car swerves to avoid a trash bag in the street and hits a child? The drive? The auto manufacturer? The programmer who designed the image recognition system? The cars will not be perfect - thousands of people will die, and there will be constant lawsuits.
The insurance companies will pick up the tab. The same way they pick up the tab now. In all likelihood, the insurance companies will come out ahead as the total accident rate involving driverless vehicles would be far lower. Whether the insurance is taken out by the auto manufacturer, the driver, the programmer, (and/or all of the the above), the insurance companies still end up paying.
Right now, the law suits go to the deepest pockets in the chain. And those pockets are usually heavily insured against public liability.
Premiums may go up for the manufacturers and get reduced for 'drivers', but all that does is increase the cost of the cars by the amount saved by paying for insurance yourself. Basically, just a reapportioning of costs rather than an overall increase.
The hard part is still making a cost effective driverless car that does work as advertised. Once that happens, all the other problems will fall into line (legislation, rental/taxis/buses, insurance, infrastructure, etc).
Why bother. The offence would simply be something to the effect of "tampering with an automated vehicular safety / control system". And anything that the monitoring network determines are "out of parameter" activities would just trigger a more thorough investigation. eg. changing a vehicle to go faster (or fall outside any other specification) than allowed by the road's mandated control algorithm, would be so easily detected that you may as well broadcast the fact that your car is malfunctioning.
In fact, the most obvious course of action when detecting a faulty vehicle would be to remotely command it to enter the safety stop state. If that doesn't work, the rest of the vehicles on the street could be alerted to the danger of the rogue vehicle, and an enforcement/safety/emergency strategy could be implemented along with a unit dispatched to intercept the faulty vehicle.
In the end, intentionally 'modifying/hacking/rooting' your own autonomous vehicle to circumvent safety protocols would be as useful as walking into a police station and pissing on the front desk.
Actually, there were. At least one of the other people on the jury had a patent, and two others did during voir dire. They were even in computer related professions.
So instead of one juror with a vested interest in keeping the patent system broken, they had two?
That is truly scary. What proportion of the population in CA would have to hold patents for a 'randomly' selected sample to uncover 4 patent holders during jury empanelment? Those odds are like selecting a jury from a prison ward and finding a handful had been previously convicted of the same crime, and letting a couple still serve on the panel.
There are very few patents that would survive a full scrutiny in the face of reasonable limits on obviousness and similarity to prior art. And far too many patents are simply milking the system. Anyone with a patent either knows this to be true and plays along, or is deluding themselves into believing they are so much cleverer than everyone else in the field. So it's in the interest of those jurors to perpetuate the system by upholding as many claims as they can get away with.
When courts started ruling that any inventive step no matter how minuscule/obvious is fair game, the small players were screwed.
My previous company spent a few hundred grand defending itself against a patent troll - and we weren't even infringing on any of their claims. I assume they were hoping that we'd settle before the verdict (and they surely must have known they didn't have a valid case). The judge actually told them off in the end, but they played dumb and somehow avoided being forced to pay our legal costs. I'm sure the lawyers on both sides were more than happy with the result.
This applies to regular juries where there is a single source of (potentially faulty) external knowledge being introduced into the jury box. In that situation there is a good chance that the introduced 'external testimony' will go unchallenged. That is what happened in the Apple/Samsung case - the jury basically listened to one guy who was able to gain their trust as being an impartial expert on the issue at hand. In reality he was heavily biased and didn't properly understand the issues. But, since there weren't 11 other people on the jury that could refute his claims or offer alternative interpretations, the final decision naturally leant towards whatever his biases were.
A purely non-expert jury sounds good in theory if you don't mind allowing the trial to continue for 3 years while the jury learns all the necessary background knowledge to be able to understand and decide on the technical issue at hand - and that's assuming the jury is even capable. That is why these things should not be handled by jury trials where the jury has no background in the technical area(s) at hand.
The 'facts' in this case could very well be presented to an expert panel (randomly chosen from people working in the appropriate field(s)), and have the technical issue decided there. Then the lay jury could decide on the remaining facts. But, why have two juries, when the expert jury could easily decide on both. Even a half-and-half jury of randomly selected experts and laymen would be better than having a jury entirely composed of men and women unable to properly understand the facts.
The idea of a jury of non-engineers deciding on their novelty is at best weird.
There are expert witnesses on both sides who are saying that the patents are either novel or not. Really, the jury is deciding on the credibility of those witnesses, and you don't need an engineer for that.
Actually, you do. Expert witnesses are picked based on their ability to convince a layman that they are more credible than the opposing 'expert witness'. And on more than one occasion, I've personally butted heads against an opposing 'expert' that was so far out of his depth that any random slashdotter would have put him to shame. However, he always sounded very convincing and sincere when in his 'expert opinion', he strongly disagreed with his "learned colleague's" assertions. I have no idea how this guy got his technical 'qualifications', but it was clear he is chosen for his presentability and not his engineering expertise. I also assume that, in general, this guy (and all those like him) just say whatever they're being paid to say.
What's a jury to do when they are faced with that? Decide credibility based on whichever one reminded them more of their favourite uncle?
Without any ability to be able to understand the technical merits of what is being presented, there is no way a jury can make an appropriate determination between two opposing 'paid-for' experts.
Because 'right wingers' are generally about curtailing "other people's" freedom. And without them there guns (and pitch forks), how else are they going to be able to form a posse to enforce their fundamentalist prejudices.
Luckily, there aren't too many that far to the right.
Again, no. It's like someone claiming/annexing the public park land next door to their house without any due process that they are actually entitled to it.
Property is not assumed just because someone claims it as their own. Due process must be considered. And the safe 'default' for any property, especially 'intellectual property' is that it belongs to the public trust until appropriate measures have been taken to reassign it. (Which is what the patent office is supposed to do.)
The way the patent system is run at present is more like a frenzied land grab. Where someone will claim park land that actually belongs to the community centre next door, and then proceed to abuse that status to prosecute for trespass anyone within a 1 kilometre radius of that land - including you, because you parked your car in the pre-existing community centre parking lot.
Physical property is easy to define, generally simple to 'prove' title or trespass, and has very specific boundaries with no overlap. Whereas, a patent is hard to define, requires a large effort to 'prove' or defend against infringement claims, and has highly generalised boundaries with large areas of overlap to other public or private art. In fact, the word "property" has almost no bearing to the rights granted to a patent holder.
No. The latter is the State taking away property rights from everyone else; in this case due process must be applied in the reverse direction to make the analogy work. Without the granted patent, no one loses access to the 'property' in question.
Slashdot Mirror
What would also need to be added to your proposal is to supplement with SRP or other secure password system that allows two users to easily exchange relatively insecure passwords out of band to verify the exchanged verifier. This also applies to SSH, especially when remotely connected to a box under your direct control.
You'd use this to supplement the base line protection of using a PKI system to verify the verifiers.
Once the public key has been reliably transferred, it can then safely be used to securely receive any communications without a man-in-the-middle or passive listener being able to decrypt it.
Another solution is to further supplement the above with the use of multiple cert authorities to sign/exchange your certificate (and multiple revocation lists). The more channels it comes in through, the more it can be trusted. So to properly fake out the system, you'd have compromise more than just a single authority. And you'd need the shared out of band password. Compromising any one of those channels does the attacker no good; they'd need to hack all of them (or hack your system, steal your private keys and/or trojan your system and/or eavesdrop at the endpoints).
Far better to just say nothing (or "I don't know, officer" to a direct question like "Do you know how fast you were going?").
"I don't know, officer" is effectively an admission of guilt. If you don't know your speed, you are basically acceding to the officer's 'evidence' that you were speeding. That is why, as you say, it's far better to say nothing. If he has valid evidence, then you're going down. If not, then you walk.
You don't want to appear rude to the police if you can avoid it, but you need to be careful to not answer any question, direct or otherwise, with anything but verifiable facts (ie. your name, address, etc). It doesn't help anyone if the police get lazy and try to prosecute with no real evidence beyond a vague statement that gets twisted into an implication that you've committed some random criminal act that you weren't even aware existed.
Death of the unvaccinated and susceptible increases herd immunity. It's called 'biology.'
Herd immunity only oscillates around the point where a balance is reached and the casualty rate no longer affects the viability of the species as a whole. This is true even when assuming a 100% mortality rate, where new susceptible children are born, eventually contract the disease (or get eaten) and die. Vaccination (or acquiring weapons) takes that rate far closer to zero than just letting 'natural selection' take its course. And that is ignoring all the non-fatal symptoms and permanent disabilities caused by diseases that are not 100% fatal.
For example, the death rate of infants due to Whooping cough prior to the vaccine being introduced was nearly a thousand times higher than it is now. Even if you ignore the fact that continuous 'acceptable losses' and general misery would be thousands of times higher than necessary, your premise remains faulty.
And I'm sure my grandparents found them very delicious.
I read that too quickly and thought, like Soylent Green, that you found your grandparents very delicious.
We can solve those traveling salesman problems that have been plaguing our society for hundreds of years!
I realize you're joking, but they actually are important problems to solve. If you have 10,000 solder points, and you need your equipment to solder as fast as possible, what route do you take?
Solving this type of real world problem with a mathematically perfect solution usually isn't necessary. A far simpler and quicker statistical method that produces a solution that is only 99.99% of optimal is generally more than adequate. Same applies to other areas of manufacturing such as quality assurance, in other disciplines such as physical layer communications systems, and even in mathematics such as prime generation.
It always comes down to how perfect the solution actually needs to be, and how easy it is to get close to or reach that perfect solution.
Since you can't buy the same track more than once on iTunes, it is a much better indicator of popularity than SMS or online votes where votes can be made hundreds of times over (by friends, family or other coordinated efforts).
And if you really like the performance, why waste money SMSing a vote or two, when you can download the track you like and have it in your collection for about the same amount of money?
That kind of reasoning is only true for huge primarily government funded/controlled projects with long life cycles that have no mainstream applications (eg. stealth fighter planes).
For computer era hardware, the vast majority of research dollars goes into consumer and business grade devices. Any new piece of technology that a secret government project may have created is at most a generation (i.e. a year at most) ahead of mainstream. And more than likely, by the time it is implemented into a usable system, is a generation or two behind. That is purely due to the lead times to get a huge project like that operational.
Unless of course you subscribe to conspiracy theories where the government is somehow hiding a large scale quantum computer system. And meanwhile, all the top university professors and engineers working in the civilian sector flounder around for decades trying to catch up. That would be extremely unlikely IMO.
Tell them broad strokes, not enough to figure it out. Remember that they're called Angel Investors because they can swoop in, take your idea, and do it themselves with their own money. Otherwise, most advice here is solid. They want to see how you develop it, what the exits are, and how much they can reasonably make.
Remember that they're called Angel Investors because they can swoop in, take your idea, and do it themselves with their own money.
This happens far less often than you'd think. That same investor still needs a platform to implement the 'stolen' ideas, so if you've already done the initial hard yards, why not use you.
Unfortunately, in so many cases the 'ideas' are obvious enough to be already in the pipeline of one or more companies already operating in that industry (one of which might be part of an investor's portfolio). Approach enough investors, and the probability of this being true approaches certainty.
Investors generally don't run on building up 'ideas', but on implementing solid viable business plans that they can profit from. The 'investor stole my idea' assumption comes from very little understanding of how the industry works. And usually from someone that didn't patent the inventive part of the plan in the first place.
(Side note: If an invention is truly novel, it's not that hard to patent it without huge expense. If you're having trouble getting the patent, it is usually because the 'invention' is either blatantly obvious, or similar ideas have recently crossed the desks of the patent examiners. A patent attorney can help obfuscate and 'enhance' the application sufficiently to allow an otherwise obvious idea to survive examination. That's when patents get expensive.)
You did patent it, right? It isn't obvious or just a combination of existing ideas, right?
Since when has being obvious or a direct copy of prior art stopped the patent office from approving a patent?
Sadly, not for a long long time.
I agree completely. And Dutch auctions would be perfect for this. Keeps the price consistent across the board, so early purchases don't get cheap tickets while late comers (10 minutes later) pay through the nose.
A smartphone is a computer, but from what I've seen, its automation framework isn't quite as rich as that of a PC.
That's because it's pretty much already automated everything that the average user cares about. Which is basically the definition of ease of use.
We're not quite at the stage where a general user can simply say: "computer, consider the following..." And get a functionally useful response.
But, when that does finally happen, it is more than likely that the resulting system will not resemble today's 'desktop' computers.
This is due to lazy investigative techniques and incompetent use of forensic evidence. If you have multiple independent indicators that are individually only partially reliable, then you need to use a number of these in conjunction to produce a more accurate result.
For example if I have 5 separate unrelated pieces of evidence that all point to the same person, and each test has a non-systematic error of 5% (ie. 95% reliable), then the resulting accuracy becomes 99.9999%.
The problem is lazy police work. It's easier to stop investigating once you've got your first piece of evidence and someone to pin it on. Then, just let the courts sort it out.
The expression, "better that a hundred guilty persons escape, than one innocent party suffers", must be reversed in the minds of any detective/prosecutor/judge/juror too lazy to do their job properly and obtain or expect sufficient evidence.
What's to stop the jailers from going on a rampage and killing or otherwise brutalising 'inmates'?
And when the police start attacking anything that moves, that makes them the problem, not the solution. You'd then have to have special police to police the police ... recurse ad infinitum.
I'd rather take the infinitesimal risk of getting killed by a mentally ill serial killer or terrorist than the certainty of having my life ruined by a power hungry jailer/guard/cop taking things too far.
If you have to change the law to make an otherwise criminal act 'legal', just to reduce the 'crime rate' metric, then you've failed. Why not go the other way and remove all laws making nothing a crime? Is anarchy any worse or better than being held in captivity?
Even if the automation is better on average than a human, there is still a responsibility issue. Who is at fault when a car swerves to avoid a trash bag in the street and hits a child? The drive? The auto manufacturer? The programmer who designed the image recognition system? The cars will not be perfect - thousands of people will die, and there will be constant lawsuits.
The insurance companies will pick up the tab. The same way they pick up the tab now. In all likelihood, the insurance companies will come out ahead as the total accident rate involving driverless vehicles would be far lower. Whether the insurance is taken out by the auto manufacturer, the driver, the programmer, (and/or all of the the above), the insurance companies still end up paying.
Right now, the law suits go to the deepest pockets in the chain. And those pockets are usually heavily insured against public liability.
Premiums may go up for the manufacturers and get reduced for 'drivers', but all that does is increase the cost of the cars by the amount saved by paying for insurance yourself. Basically, just a reapportioning of costs rather than an overall increase.
The hard part is still making a cost effective driverless car that does work as advertised. Once that happens, all the other problems will fall into line (legislation, rental/taxis/buses, insurance, infrastructure, etc).
Why bother. The offence would simply be something to the effect of "tampering with an automated vehicular safety / control system". And anything that the monitoring network determines are "out of parameter" activities would just trigger a more thorough investigation. eg. changing a vehicle to go faster (or fall outside any other specification) than allowed by the road's mandated control algorithm, would be so easily detected that you may as well broadcast the fact that your car is malfunctioning.
In fact, the most obvious course of action when detecting a faulty vehicle would be to remotely command it to enter the safety stop state. If that doesn't work, the rest of the vehicles on the street could be alerted to the danger of the rogue vehicle, and an enforcement/safety/emergency strategy could be implemented along with a unit dispatched to intercept the faulty vehicle.
In the end, intentionally 'modifying/hacking/rooting' your own autonomous vehicle to circumvent safety protocols would be as useful as walking into a police station and pissing on the front desk.
2" x 4"
Turns out I was wrong. There seems to be a 1/4" shaved off each edge, so 2by4 should really be called 1andahalfby3andahalf.
No one says "kilometerage". People still say 'mileage', and just report a different set of units. ie. litres/100km instead of miles/gallon.
This may be true, but 2x4 (50.8mm x 101.6mm) is much closer to 50x100, than 45x90.
Actually, there were. At least one of the other people on the jury had a patent, and two others did during voir dire. They were even in computer related professions.
So instead of one juror with a vested interest in keeping the patent system broken, they had two?
That is truly scary. What proportion of the population in CA would have to hold patents for a 'randomly' selected sample to uncover 4 patent holders during jury empanelment? Those odds are like selecting a jury from a prison ward and finding a handful had been previously convicted of the same crime, and letting a couple still serve on the panel.
There are very few patents that would survive a full scrutiny in the face of reasonable limits on obviousness and similarity to prior art. And far too many patents are simply milking the system. Anyone with a patent either knows this to be true and plays along, or is deluding themselves into believing they are so much cleverer than everyone else in the field. So it's in the interest of those jurors to perpetuate the system by upholding as many claims as they can get away with.
When courts started ruling that any inventive step no matter how minuscule/obvious is fair game, the small players were screwed.
My previous company spent a few hundred grand defending itself against a patent troll - and we weren't even infringing on any of their claims. I assume they were hoping that we'd settle before the verdict (and they surely must have known they didn't have a valid case). The judge actually told them off in the end, but they played dumb and somehow avoided being forced to pay our legal costs. I'm sure the lawyers on both sides were more than happy with the result.
This applies to regular juries where there is a single source of (potentially faulty) external knowledge being introduced into the jury box. In that situation there is a good chance that the introduced 'external testimony' will go unchallenged. That is what happened in the Apple/Samsung case - the jury basically listened to one guy who was able to gain their trust as being an impartial expert on the issue at hand. In reality he was heavily biased and didn't properly understand the issues. But, since there weren't 11 other people on the jury that could refute his claims or offer alternative interpretations, the final decision naturally leant towards whatever his biases were.
A purely non-expert jury sounds good in theory if you don't mind allowing the trial to continue for 3 years while the jury learns all the necessary background knowledge to be able to understand and decide on the technical issue at hand - and that's assuming the jury is even capable. That is why these things should not be handled by jury trials where the jury has no background in the technical area(s) at hand.
The 'facts' in this case could very well be presented to an expert panel (randomly chosen from people working in the appropriate field(s)), and have the technical issue decided there. Then the lay jury could decide on the remaining facts. But, why have two juries, when the expert jury could easily decide on both. Even a half-and-half jury of randomly selected experts and laymen would be better than having a jury entirely composed of men and women unable to properly understand the facts.
The idea of a jury of non-engineers deciding on their novelty is at best weird.
There are expert witnesses on both sides who are saying that the patents are either novel or not. Really, the jury is deciding on the credibility of those witnesses, and you don't need an engineer for that.
Actually, you do. Expert witnesses are picked based on their ability to convince a layman that they are more credible than the opposing 'expert witness'. And on more than one occasion, I've personally butted heads against an opposing 'expert' that was so far out of his depth that any random slashdotter would have put him to shame. However, he always sounded very convincing and sincere when in his 'expert opinion', he strongly disagreed with his "learned colleague's" assertions. I have no idea how this guy got his technical 'qualifications', but it was clear he is chosen for his presentability and not his engineering expertise. I also assume that, in general, this guy (and all those like him) just say whatever they're being paid to say.
What's a jury to do when they are faced with that? Decide credibility based on whichever one reminded them more of their favourite uncle?
Without any ability to be able to understand the technical merits of what is being presented, there is no way a jury can make an appropriate determination between two opposing 'paid-for' experts.
Because 'right wingers' are generally about curtailing "other people's" freedom. And without them there guns (and pitch forks), how else are they going to be able to form a posse to enforce their fundamentalist prejudices.
Luckily, there aren't too many that far to the right.
The number we obviously need to work on is the 11.5k gun homicides, especially when you compare us to other countries.
Get rid of the 'war on drugs' and I'm willing to hazard a guess that number would drop significantly.
Again, no. It's like someone claiming/annexing the public park land next door to their house without any due process that they are actually entitled to it.
Property is not assumed just because someone claims it as their own. Due process must be considered. And the safe 'default' for any property, especially 'intellectual property' is that it belongs to the public trust until appropriate measures have been taken to reassign it. (Which is what the patent office is supposed to do.)
The way the patent system is run at present is more like a frenzied land grab. Where someone will claim park land that actually belongs to the community centre next door, and then proceed to abuse that status to prosecute for trespass anyone within a 1 kilometre radius of that land - including you, because you parked your car in the pre-existing community centre parking lot.
Physical property is easy to define, generally simple to 'prove' title or trespass, and has very specific boundaries with no overlap. Whereas, a patent is hard to define, requires a large effort to 'prove' or defend against infringement claims, and has highly generalised boundaries with large areas of overlap to other public or private art. In fact, the word "property" has almost no bearing to the rights granted to a patent holder.
No. The latter is the State taking away property rights from everyone else; in this case due process must be applied in the reverse direction to make the analogy work. Without the granted patent, no one loses access to the 'property' in question.