six dollars a month equals 72 dollars a year. Why anybody would prefer to pay twice as much "in smaller, spread out ammounts" is beyond me.
Why is this any different from:
* Getting a 5-yr car loan instead of a 3-yr car loan.
* Buying stuff on credit card and then paying ONLY the required minimum or a little bit more
* Financing almost any kind of moderately large purchase (TV, DVD player, etc) that is not insanely expensive enough to require a loan (car, house, etc.)
There is a strong pscyhological motive to *NOT* pay a lot of money upfront, or to pay less money over a longer term than more money over a shorter term, even if it makes better financial sense to do otherwise.
Doesn't anyone realize that neural nets CANNOT magically determine whether something is "objectionable" or not??!?!?!
The good people at RuleSpace have either a) propelled neural net research lightyears into the future with a new advanced multi-thousand (million? billion?) neuron neural net on some new kind of computer capable of training it in non-exponential time to look at an image and determine if it is "pornographic" or not, or b) have a typical perceptron-with-backpropagation which is reasonably good at broad pattern matching but probably couldn't distinguish between a picture of two adults copulating and two adults wearing beige suits hugging.
Does this neural net look at heavily translated ASCII data to look for statistical patterns that pornographic sites tend to exhibit? Does it look at JPEG/GIF/TIFF/etc images for essentially a large quotient of "skin" color? How is the image presented to the net? Most data has to be heavily reformatted/translated to be fed to a neural net (because anything more than several dozen inputs to a net tends to make it untrainable). So how are they 'translating' the data they send it? FFTs or DCTs? I mean what are they doing?
Likely they like to bandy about a term like "neural net" so it makes it seem like this filtering software is "intelligent". Sorry folks but neural nets are about as intelligent as regular ol' expert systems. They do not even remotely begin to approach the 'intelligence' level of your average rat, except that they can be hyper-optimized to find very good solutions in a very limited problem domain. They also tend to give a large quantity of false positives outside their limited problem domain (e.g., if you have a neural net that can identify pictures-of-tanks-on-fields vs pictures-of-no-tanks-on-fields, then if you feed it pictures-of-cars-on-highways it or pictures-of-hummingbirds-near-flowers it will just give you wacky answers like "well that brownish hummingbird near a tulip is DEFINITELY a tank in a field, but that blue hummingbird on the trellis is definitely NOT a tank in a field").
If they can patent something, they absolutely DO need to. It's up to the Patent office to not allow patents of ridiculous things.
This is the typical defense of any unethical action taken by a business enterprise, and probably by any unethical person trying to justify their behavior: "If I can do it then I should do it. It's up to the Patent Office/Congress/police to not let me." It's a bit like the old "It's not wrong unless I get caught." There is a growing movement in America today that decries the lack of personal responsibility many people take for their own actions. And yet many of the people expressing moral outrage at this lack of responsibility go on to excuse corporate unresponsiblity --- "they have a fiduciary responsibility, they need a competitive advantage, whatever..."
That argument simply is not a valid defense of unethical behavior.
Of course, the question here is whether the patent on one-click shopping is wrong or unethical. Or whether Amazon is justified in an injunction against B&N for their one-click shopping method.
If B&N did indeed just copy, verbatim, Amazon's method for one-click shopping, then I'd have to say they got what they deserved. They're a big company with plenty of lawyers and the two can duke it out in whatever way they want.
But you have to consider: is the mere idea of storing credit card & shipping information on a server, that does not have to be typed in every time by a consumer, up for ownership by an entity (individual or corporation)? That is essentially what a patent gives protection over. And I don't see how that idea is in any way revolutionary or innovative; and I doubt there really was an investment of millions of dollars to invent a system to do that. (I take that back, given the ridiculous salaries people make to write cruddy code, and given the billions of dollars being made over ridiculous business plans on the Web, maybe they did spend millions of dollars on it.)
I could create the same sort of system myself in probably a week's full time (though such a system would not be secure enough or bug-free enough for serious use). But I wouldn't be allowed to since Amazon isn't simply afforded the protection against blatant verbatim copying of their system, but is afforded the protection, basically, against any sort of system that allows customers to buy stuff by clicking a button once without typing all their billing/shipping info in again. Perhaps I could "innovate" and invent some convoluted method of performing the same thing (that would not, by the narrow standards of patent law, be considered the "same" as Amazon's patent). But one has to wonder: 1) how many variations on a theme can you "invent" that all basically do the same thing, and 2) doesn't this just end up reducing the overall quality of these "inventions" since you are prevented from using the optimal solution if it has been patented?
Slashdot Mirror
six dollars a month equals 72 dollars a year. Why anybody would prefer to pay twice as much "in smaller, spread out ammounts" is beyond me.
Why is this any different from:
* Getting a 5-yr car loan instead of a 3-yr car loan.
* Buying stuff on credit card and then paying ONLY the required minimum or a little bit more
* Financing almost any kind of moderately large purchase (TV, DVD player, etc) that is not insanely expensive enough to require a loan (car, house, etc.)
There is a strong pscyhological motive to *NOT* pay a lot of money upfront, or to pay less money over a longer term than more money over a shorter term, even if it makes better financial sense to do otherwise.
The good people at RuleSpace have either a) propelled neural net research lightyears into the future with a new advanced multi-thousand (million? billion?) neuron neural net on some new kind of computer capable of training it in non-exponential time to look at an image and determine if it is "pornographic" or not, or b) have a typical perceptron-with-backpropagation which is reasonably good at broad pattern matching but probably couldn't distinguish between a picture of two adults copulating and two adults wearing beige suits hugging.
Does this neural net look at heavily translated ASCII data to look for statistical patterns that pornographic sites tend to exhibit? Does it look at JPEG/GIF/TIFF/etc images for essentially a large quotient of "skin" color? How is the image presented to the net? Most data has to be heavily reformatted/translated to be fed to a neural net (because anything more than several dozen inputs to a net tends to make it untrainable). So how are they 'translating' the data they send it? FFTs or DCTs? I mean what are they doing?
Likely they like to bandy about a term like "neural net" so it makes it seem like this filtering software is "intelligent". Sorry folks but neural nets are about as intelligent as regular ol' expert systems. They do not even remotely begin to approach the 'intelligence' level of your average rat, except that they can be hyper-optimized to find very good solutions in a very limited problem domain. They also tend to give a large quantity of false positives outside their limited problem domain (e.g., if you have a neural net that can identify pictures-of-tanks-on-fields vs pictures-of-no-tanks-on-fields, then if you feed it pictures-of-cars-on-highways it or pictures-of-hummingbirds-near-flowers it will just give you wacky answers like "well that brownish hummingbird near a tulip is DEFINITELY a tank in a field, but that blue hummingbird on the trellis is definitely NOT a tank in a field").
This is the typical defense of any unethical action taken by a business enterprise, and probably by any unethical person trying to justify their behavior: "If I can do it then I should do it. It's up to the Patent Office/Congress/police to not let me." It's a bit like the old "It's not wrong unless I get caught." There is a growing movement in America today that decries the lack of personal responsibility many people take for their own actions. And yet many of the people expressing moral outrage at this lack of responsibility go on to excuse corporate unresponsiblity --- "they have a fiduciary responsibility, they need a competitive advantage, whatever..."
That argument simply is not a valid defense of unethical behavior.
Of course, the question here is whether the patent on one-click shopping is wrong or unethical. Or whether Amazon is justified in an injunction against B&N for their one-click shopping method.
If B&N did indeed just copy, verbatim, Amazon's method for one-click shopping, then I'd have to say they got what they deserved. They're a big company with plenty of lawyers and the two can duke it out in whatever way they want.
But you have to consider: is the mere idea of storing credit card & shipping information on a server, that does not have to be typed in every time by a consumer, up for ownership by an entity (individual or corporation)? That is essentially what a patent gives protection over. And I don't see how that idea is in any way revolutionary or innovative; and I doubt there really was an investment of millions of dollars to invent a system to do that. (I take that back, given the ridiculous salaries people make to write cruddy code, and given the billions of dollars being made over ridiculous business plans on the Web, maybe they did spend millions of dollars on it.)
I could create the same sort of system myself in probably a week's full time (though such a system would not be secure enough or bug-free enough for serious use). But I wouldn't be allowed to since Amazon isn't simply afforded the protection against blatant verbatim copying of their system, but is afforded the protection, basically, against any sort of system that allows customers to buy stuff by clicking a button once without typing all their billing/shipping info in again. Perhaps I could "innovate" and invent some convoluted method of performing the same thing (that would not, by the narrow standards of patent law, be considered the "same" as Amazon's patent). But one has to wonder: 1) how many variations on a theme can you "invent" that all basically do the same thing, and 2) doesn't this just end up reducing the overall quality of these "inventions" since you are prevented from using the optimal solution if it has been patented?