Patents only benefit _crappy_ inventors who can only come up with one or two good ideas in their lifetime or companies that enslave them (have you ever seen those contracts nowadays - your ideas, past, present and future become the property of the companies - and you thought slavery was abolished already).
Real inventors know that ideas are a dime a dozen (heck I can think of tons of ways to make my company's (or other) stuff better, there just isn't enough time and resources to do them all). Building stuff and convincing people to buy it, or even getting them to "get it" is the hard part. Go ask poor Douglas Engelbart and his team. At least 20 years ahead of their time. Longer patents to reward people like them would make things worse, because statistically speaking there are lots more patent trolls and idiots who find obvious stuff unobvious, than there are real inventors and innovators.
I bet golfers spent a lot of time learning about good golf swings. I don't see the field of Golf being improved if people could patent golf swings, stances and grips. And the last I checked it people are still competing to do really well at it. If someone copies you, you just try to make sure you do it better. And you keep trying to do better than your previous best.
Unlike Microsoft with Vista. They obviously didn't feel a strong need to do better than Windows XP, with copyrights and all "innovation encouraging laws".
If you need a government granted monopoly to survive in a field, maybe you should be doing something else. You should go find something you're actually good at, rather than wasting everybody's time and resources. It's basic economics - if you are good at A, do A, then let people who are good at B do B, then you all trade.
"spending an inordinate amount of time learning how to design, develop (to include programming), test software"
Hey, if you're spending an _inordinate_ amount of time (and it feels like so much effort), perhaps you might not be that good at it?
If you're worse, copy, learn and do better, if you can't maybe you should be doing something else.
Mice = 1970s? Earlier than that, and far far more than just mice too:
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
That's when they demonstrated the stuff they had been working on for _years_.
Now progress is just "wow what a great GUI theme". Yes I'm looking at the Linux Desktop bunch too - a lot of what they make are basically cutscenes that get in the way of doing stuff- very nice cutscenes I suppose, but lets have better "gameplay" already. Wobbling, translucent windows, fancy animations are all crap when you're trying to do real work quickly.
And look at the aerospace field:
1961/1962 - missions to Venus 1969 - 747 ( still see them around), Concorde, Apollo Project 1973 - Skylab (spacestation) 1974 - Mariner (spacecraft to Mercury) 1976 - Viking program (mission to mars)
Whereas after the 1980, NASA was pumping billions of dollars into preventing the shuttle from blowing up. And doing or planning reruns of the past.
The past 20-25 years haven't been very impressive actually.
As for nuclear fusion and AI... We might actually get Duke Nukem 3D first;).
"Even if the patent is questionable, the larger company is on the defensive because if for some reason it does get upheld in a court, its the end of their business."
Actually it's more ridiculous than that.
If the smaller company actually makes stuff, the larger company might have more patents that it can use to threaten the smaller company with. Defensive. Think IBM vs small corps.
But if the smaller company doesn't actually make stuff at all, then yes they can do that.
Yes, long copyright and patent terms slow down progress. A reasonable term nowadays is 7 years.
With long copyright terms you don't have to compete against your old stuff - you can make stuff like Vista or Office 2007;).
With long patent terms, even if you can't implement something (because you suck) you can prevent other people from making progress or slow them down.
Long copyrights are for people who can only come up with one good song in their lifetime, or the companies that enslave them. Long patents are for people who can only come up with one good idea in their lifetime or the companies that enslave them.
I bet people like Douglas Engelbart (and his team) would still have innovated without patents. And patents don't even help real innovators and inventors like them - the Mother of all Demos was in _1968_, and naturally they came up with a lot of stuff years before that. Most people only kind of "got it" in the 1980s (and most people still don't fully understand what he was trying to demonstrate - he inventing the mouse wasn't the biggest deal:) ).
Extending the length of patents to reward such true inventors will reward the far far more numerous patent trolls more than the true inventors.
Plus it seems immoral to me that just because you come up with a brilliant idea, you get granted a _monopoly_ over it for decades. That's greed.
Have prizes for "inventors of the year" and award them if you still want to reward innovators. I suggest that we only award the prizes for the stuff that has been around for at least 10 years, then you might have a better idea of how good it really was- hindsight is better:). So if you give out an award in 2008 it's for stuff that was invented in 1998 and before.
After all you don't want to reward vaporware inventors. Or the inventor of some cure for cancer that turns into a plague;).
Plus the rewards should NOT be a monopoly from the patent office.
The last I checked, top golfers aren't patenting their swings, or stances, or grips. I don't think people would tolerate a troll patenting a swing and preventing the top 10 players from using it. Do people seriously think that sort of thing will encourage progress?
Maybe we still need patents and copyrights, but the terms should be a lot shorter.
Yeah. Many of the cops in my country (Malaysia) are corrupt.
The cops here are too busy harassing the sheep who are naughty than the wolves. Not surprising since the wolves often bite back. But hey if you signed up to be a cop that's what you get.
What next? Garbagemen only choosing to collect less smelly trash?
No surprise if the whole country starts to stink after a while.
"when older versions of Office are faced with the Office 2007 format, they ask to download patches that let them deal with it"
It means I or someone else would have to go to the _other_ person's house too, and help do that;).
I might have to figure a way to do offline patching if they don't have a good connection to the Internet.
Maybe the 2007 UI is better in some ways, BUT point is the big corporations who used to say we can't switch to OpenOffice because: 1) We have to train staff all over again - major cost in time and resources. 2) It saves into a incompatible format (yes both can be made to save to the 97/2003 format with varying degrees of success)
They now have the same problem with 2007.
It might actually be cheaper for companies to switch to OpenOffice than to Office 2007.
A long time ago a customer sent in an Cisco 508 CS access server (older than the cisco 2500 series- yep _old_ ) for repair to a company I worked for (we were a Cisco reseller).
So I contacted Cisco TAC - told them it was really dead. The Cisco TAC guy got us sent a new one - well as new as something like that can be - because it was obsolete and the replacement was from old stock.
I asked them how much it'll cost - the TAC guy didn't appear to care. I guess his job was to close cases and make people happy.
In the end we told the customer - "yep free" (boss made that call). So customer was happy, we were happy.
I think the customer would have been biased to buying cisco equipment again... and maybe via us:).
I guess their margins were high enough then to justify such stuff, maybe they aren't anymore.
Yes OpenOffice sucks. But have you tried Microsoft Office 2007?
I have tried it albeit for a short while. I installed it for a friend who bought a legit copy for his wife's new computer (I also had to download the updates etc - to fix stuff like the infamous, ridiculous and stupid 65535=>100000 excel bug)
I didn't like it. He didn't like it (he's glad his company - a really big one, is sticking to 2003 for now). She didn't like it.
They changed the interface so much that Open Office is probably more like Microsoft Office 2003 than 2007 is;).
And the story gets better:
1) Word 2007 saves in a 2007 format which older versions can't open. 2) In the default "menu/ribbon/whatever", a lot of people can't find the "save as" option to save stuff in older versions:). Right- there's no longer a File->Save As. You have to click the "Office button" which is this logo thingy.
There are even 3rd party add-ons from people to give you back a classic view - Whoopee...
So, OpenOffice is more like Office 2003 than Office 2007 is like Office 2003.
Conclusion: if the OpenOffice bunch do a bit of marketing they might gain quite a lot of share.
Plus bring up an option during install to select a "compat mode" where OpenOffice will save files in 2003/97 format by default - sure I know how to do it after install, but I don't think people like my friend would even know that they might want to do such stuff.
$5 is too much for an O/S that makes your computer slower for games and other stuff. So much so that you have to spend more money to buy more RAM and a faster video card.
Perhaps the interest in Vista in the "pirate" market is a lot lower than previous versions of Windows, and Microsoft has got the "market research" results...;)
When you make something that crap, even the nongeeks notice.
Actually just because something doesn't stop all mexicans doesn't mean it's a waste.
If you do immigration right, you get _some_ choice over who stays (yes some will still sneak in).
Depending on your criterion that might actually be good for your country.
Naturally if your criterion is just lots of $$$ (e.g. Australia has a policy like that) then you get a bunch of people who got rich some how, which might not be that great long term - after all the USA has lots of rich people already. But hey if that's what a country wants, it's up to them.
Could be brains, looks, or could even be "niceness" if you can figure out a way to put a number to it:).
In the past I think the US took a lot of scientists from Germany and other places, and while some were dubious people, many did contribute to making US a leader in science and technology.
In contrast residentship/citizenship by birth is quite random:).
I'm against patents and copyrights, if any they should last for a very short time, maybe 7 years at most. Patents don't work well nowadays- if we want a rapid pace of innovation.
Take the example of Douglas Engelbart - he and his team were really innovative. Do you think that it was patents that encouraged that innovation? I doubt it.
If you are as innovative as they were, you will be so far ahead of your time that any patents would have long expired by the time people "got it";). They made lots of stuff that people reinvented 20 to 30 years later. Even so, some of the stuff they made were already hinted at by people before them - e.g. Vannevar Bush.
Extending the lifespan of patents to benefit people like that won't work since it'll reward numerous patent trolls more than the very very few _real_ innovators. So the concept of patents is rather broken.
Patents are only good for people who can only come up with one good idea in a lifetime. Or for companies that enslave such people. I'm exaggerating a bit, but really.
There are lots of people who patent stuff even if they aren't good at implementing them.
Imagine if tennis/golf players went around patenting novel and effective moves. Even if someone copies the top players, they aren't a bunch of wusses and cry babies - they just try to be better.
The fact that many big legit companies patent stuff more as a defensive or bargaining measure indicates that it's pretty broken.
Patents slow the pace of progress and innovation. They might have been useful when things were really slow, but I think things are moving faster now.
I can come up with plenty of ideas, but the hard part is implementing and getting it to market.
"that any kind of government sanction, expenditure, funding and protection of science is worthless"
There were plenty of advances. The atom bomb and fission reactors (Manhattan project etc). The Apollo project got people to the moon. There were missions to Mars, Mercury, Venus etc. The Internet kind of works - except they should have not gone for 32 bit IP addresses.
Unfortunately after about 1980 we've been mostly seeing "reruns";).
I think people started spending a lot more time and resources trying to patent crap (or sue people) instead of actually coming up with something new.
"The laws need to be encoded deeply into the robots brain in some fundamental way so that they cannot be broken"
I suspect that's near impossible if you want real intelligence.
So you'll have to "correct" things after the fact. After you have bred or trained a suitable AI that appears to be certifiably compliant to the various tests 99.999% of the time, you make copies of it and roll it out.
Actually I think there aren't that very many spammers, at least very many rich ones - just follow the trail of money - there'll always be some site where people hand over money to them- request for the bank transaction details then pick the richest few to go after.
The spammers who keep losing money should go away eventually - once they hear the rich ones getting smacked down.
Not 100% of the spammers will be deterred, but it will drop.
If the RIAA and BSA can go around chasing so many people, I don't see why the FBI can't even nab spammers operating in the USA on a regular basis - despite the talk of "Spam from China" there are obviously many spammers operating in the USA.
"it's so pervasive really tells us that the way intellectual property has been viewed for a couple of centuries is gone."
Coup of centuries? I think it's only been viewed as IP for a much shorter time than that.
IP slows down progress. It's only good for 1) People who can only come up with one good idea/CD in their entire life. 2) Companies that enslave such people
OK, I exaggerate and maybe we might need copyright, but it should be a lot shorter, say 7 or 10 years. That way Microsoft will be too afraid of releasing crap like Vista, because they will have to compete against themselves in the form of Win2K. If you say "But then Microsoft wouldn't have bothered to come out with stuff like Windows", answer is companies like Apple would have been happy to fill the need.
Q: How many Economists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Economists don't change lightbulbs- they sit in the darkness writing academic papers and wait for Adam Smith's Invisible hand to do it.
Q: How many Internet Fans does it take to bypass restrictions? A: They talk about "nuke proof", "routes around censorship" and hope someone else does it.
Hurting encrypted P2P without hurting nonP2P users is not immensely hard as long as nonP2P users never have lots of encrypted connections to many destinations at the same time.
What you do is rotate a user's bandwidth allocation on encrypted traffic to/from the various different _destinations_ of a user. So if you are using encryption to 8 different destinations, say only the first gets bandwidth for a few seconds, then _only_ the second, then the third and so on. If lots of ISPs do that, the odds of connections amongst affected users being "unsquished" drops with the number of destinations with encrypted traffic they have.
If you are only using encryption to one destination that's not going to hurt you at all. If you're an https user, sure only pages and stuff from one server at a time will be downloaded quickly, but I doubt most people will notice.
If Copyright wasn't so broken, ISPs would be able to cache copyrighted material - they could set up "super peers" give them priority, and when they detect something being torrented, they get their super peers to fetch it fast and seed it to everyone in their network.
"that way there aren't any poor bastards that have to die for their countries just because the people in charge don't like the other people in charge."
In the old days, real leaders rode out to battle and risked their lives along with the grunts they sent out.
While this is impractical nowadays given all the fancy tech, something in that spirit would be good, so I have proposed the following to help discourage unnecessary killing and death:
If political leaders wish to send troops to battle for _offensive_ (not defense) purposes (or risk lives of a substantial number of civilians), they have to put their own lives at risk as well. Repeat: defensive wars are different of course.
This could be done in the following manner: A referendum is held. If there is an insufficient majority, the proposers' lives are forfeit. They are put on deathrow.
For the people on deathrow, at a convenient time there could be a "redemption" referendum, and their lives depend on the results.
A similar referendum is also held if at any time it is found that a politician caused the public to be deceived/misinformed (even unknowingly) and "justify" a war or similar military action.
If a leader's life is not successfully redeemed (i.e. gets executed), but later it is found the war was justified, the leader will get the equivalent of a "purple heart" (and we'll try to say nice things about them in some ceremony with their family and loved ones).
The idea is that even leaders who have no qualms about lying about "caring about the lives of soldiers" would then actually think twice about sending soldiers to risk their lives. Even amoral people without a conscience would be inclined to take things a bit more seriously when it's not just a matter of losing the next election, or going to jail for a few years.
After all if a leader thinks it is worth risking the lives of soldiers and civilians, that leader should also be willing to risk his/her life. That's only fair right?
Also, if 66% of Nation A thinks it's worth attacking Nation B, then it might be easier for people in Nation B to decide whether to kill people in Nation A. If you want a war, you get a real war.
Otherwise, why kill people who have nothing against you, who may not even want to harm anyone, but are dragged into a war just because of a minority at the top?
They're not just fictional. I don't see how there will ever be a way to implement them practically.
How would such laws be enforced? You are going to put an entire "Law Court" and a Punisher/Executioner in every robot?
By the time the act is judged as breaking the laws and the punishment enforced the robot could probably have done a fair amount of damage. Either that or the robot is going to be rather slow...
With IE6 I can launch a new browser in a different process, and so I can kill stuff and free up memory without affecting other sessions.
I can't seem to do this with FF2 - everything ends up in the same process. Closing tabs and windows often doesn't reduce the memory footprint at all - you have to kill everything.
If Firefox can't get memory management right at least let make windows/tabs run in separate processes so that we can kill instances we don't care about, rather than keep ending up in a "all 1GB or nothing" situation.
It's quite ridiculous when an entire Windows XP vmware virtual machine running IE6 uses less memory than a FF2 instance running on the host.
Sure I sometimes still need to close IE6 browser windows when I run out of mem on the XP VM, but point is - the other IE6 sessions remain unaffected.
One of the few things about Vista that I consider an improvements is the per app sound control.
That sort of thing is very useful - for example if you're listening to some classical music, and someone buzzes you on your IM app you don't go deaf...
Slashdot Mirror
"I shudder to think of how many trees died so my wife could know what was on sale each week at Zellers and Walmart."
:).
Would it matter so much if trees grown for making paper were chopped down, if they keep growing more trees for that?
If you landfill/store the resulting paper, then it'll take CO2 out of the atmosphere
OK perhaps the whole process (logging, manufacturing, transportation) burns up lots of oil, so there's net CO2 gain.
Patents only benefit _crappy_ inventors who can only come up with one or two good ideas in their lifetime or companies that enslave them (have you ever seen those contracts nowadays - your ideas, past, present and future become the property of the companies - and you thought slavery was abolished already).
Real inventors know that ideas are a dime a dozen (heck I can think of tons of ways to make my company's (or other) stuff better, there just isn't enough time and resources to do them all). Building stuff and convincing people to buy it, or even getting them to "get it" is the hard part. Go ask poor Douglas Engelbart and his team. At least 20 years ahead of their time. Longer patents to reward people like them would make things worse, because statistically speaking there are lots more patent trolls and idiots who find obvious stuff unobvious, than there are real inventors and innovators.
I bet golfers spent a lot of time learning about good golf swings. I don't see the field of Golf being improved if people could patent golf swings, stances and grips. And the last I checked it people are still competing to do really well at it. If someone copies you, you just try to make sure you do it better. And you keep trying to do better than your previous best.
Unlike Microsoft with Vista. They obviously didn't feel a strong need to do better than Windows XP, with copyrights and all "innovation encouraging laws".
If you need a government granted monopoly to survive in a field, maybe you should be doing something else. You should go find something you're actually good at, rather than wasting everybody's time and resources. It's basic economics - if you are good at A, do A, then let people who are good at B do B, then you all trade.
"spending an inordinate amount of time learning how to design, develop (to include programming), test software"
Hey, if you're spending an _inordinate_ amount of time (and it feels like so much effort), perhaps you might not be that good at it?
If you're worse, copy, learn and do better, if you can't maybe you should be doing something else.
Mice = 1970s? Earlier than that, and far far more than just mice too:
;).
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
That's when they demonstrated the stuff they had been working on for _years_.
Now progress is just "wow what a great GUI theme". Yes I'm looking at the Linux Desktop bunch too - a lot of what they make are basically cutscenes that get in the way of doing stuff- very nice cutscenes I suppose, but lets have better "gameplay" already. Wobbling, translucent windows, fancy animations are all crap when you're trying to do real work quickly.
And look at the aerospace field:
1961/1962 - missions to Venus
1969 - 747 ( still see them around), Concorde, Apollo Project
1973 - Skylab (spacestation)
1974 - Mariner (spacecraft to Mercury)
1976 - Viking program (mission to mars)
Whereas after the 1980, NASA was pumping billions of dollars into preventing the shuttle from blowing up. And doing or planning reruns of the past.
The past 20-25 years haven't been very impressive actually.
As for nuclear fusion and AI... We might actually get Duke Nukem 3D first
"Even if the patent is questionable, the larger company is on the defensive because if for some reason it does get upheld in a court, its the end of their business."
Actually it's more ridiculous than that.
If the smaller company actually makes stuff, the larger company might have more patents that it can use to threaten the smaller company with. Defensive. Think IBM vs small corps.
But if the smaller company doesn't actually make stuff at all, then yes they can do that.
And so how does this encourage innovation?
It doesn't.
Yes, long copyright and patent terms slow down progress. A reasonable term nowadays is 7 years.
;).
:) ).
:). So if you give out an award in 2008 it's for stuff that was invented in 1998 and before.
;).
With long copyright terms you don't have to compete against your old stuff - you can make stuff like Vista or Office 2007
With long patent terms, even if you can't implement something (because you suck) you can prevent other people from making progress or slow them down.
Long copyrights are for people who can only come up with one good song in their lifetime, or the companies that enslave them.
Long patents are for people who can only come up with one good idea in their lifetime or the companies that enslave them.
I bet people like Douglas Engelbart (and his team) would still have innovated without patents. And patents don't even help real innovators and inventors like them - the Mother of all Demos was in _1968_, and naturally they came up with a lot of stuff years before that. Most people only kind of "got it" in the 1980s (and most people still don't fully understand what he was trying to demonstrate - he inventing the mouse wasn't the biggest deal
Extending the length of patents to reward such true inventors will reward the far far more numerous patent trolls more than the true inventors.
Plus it seems immoral to me that just because you come up with a brilliant idea, you get granted a _monopoly_ over it for decades. That's greed.
Have prizes for "inventors of the year" and award them if you still want to reward innovators. I suggest that we only award the prizes for the stuff that has been around for at least 10 years, then you might have a better idea of how good it really was- hindsight is better
After all you don't want to reward vaporware inventors. Or the inventor of some cure for cancer that turns into a plague
Plus the rewards should NOT be a monopoly from the patent office.
The last I checked, top golfers aren't patenting their swings, or stances, or grips. I don't think people would tolerate a troll patenting a swing and preventing the top 10 players from using it. Do people seriously think that sort of thing will encourage progress?
Maybe we still need patents and copyrights, but the terms should be a lot shorter.
Antisymmetric is when you hate Jews and they don't hate you for it.
Yeah. Many of the cops in my country (Malaysia) are corrupt.
The cops here are too busy harassing the sheep who are naughty than the wolves. Not surprising since the wolves often bite back. But hey if you signed up to be a cop that's what you get.
What next? Garbagemen only choosing to collect less smelly trash?
No surprise if the whole country starts to stink after a while.
"when older versions of Office are faced with the Office 2007 format, they ask to download patches that let them deal with it"
;).
It means I or someone else would have to go to the _other_ person's house too, and help do that
I might have to figure a way to do offline patching if they don't have a good connection to the Internet.
Maybe the 2007 UI is better in some ways, BUT point is the big corporations who used to say we can't switch to OpenOffice because:
1) We have to train staff all over again - major cost in time and resources.
2) It saves into a incompatible format (yes both can be made to save to the 97/2003 format with varying degrees of success)
They now have the same problem with 2007.
It might actually be cheaper for companies to switch to OpenOffice than to Office 2007.
A long time ago a customer sent in an Cisco 508 CS access server (older than the cisco 2500 series- yep _old_ ) for repair to a company I worked for (we were a Cisco reseller).
:).
So I contacted Cisco TAC - told them it was really dead. The Cisco TAC guy got us sent a new one - well as new as something like that can be - because it was obsolete and the replacement was from old stock.
I asked them how much it'll cost - the TAC guy didn't appear to care. I guess his job was to close cases and make people happy.
In the end we told the customer - "yep free" (boss made that call). So customer was happy, we were happy.
I think the customer would have been biased to buying cisco equipment again... and maybe via us
I guess their margins were high enough then to justify such stuff, maybe they aren't anymore.
"Granted, OpenOffice sucks compared to MS Office"
;).
:). Right- there's no longer a File->Save As. You have to click the "Office button" which is this logo thingy.
Yes OpenOffice sucks. But have you tried Microsoft Office 2007?
I have tried it albeit for a short while. I installed it for a friend who bought a legit copy for his wife's new computer (I also had to download the updates etc - to fix stuff like the infamous, ridiculous and stupid 65535=>100000 excel bug)
I didn't like it. He didn't like it (he's glad his company - a really big one, is sticking to 2003 for now). She didn't like it.
They changed the interface so much that Open Office is probably more like Microsoft Office 2003 than 2007 is
And the story gets better:
1) Word 2007 saves in a 2007 format which older versions can't open.
2) In the default "menu/ribbon/whatever", a lot of people can't find the "save as" option to save stuff in older versions
There are even 3rd party add-ons from people to give you back a classic view - Whoopee...
So, OpenOffice is more like Office 2003 than Office 2007 is like Office 2003.
Conclusion: if the OpenOffice bunch do a bit of marketing they might gain quite a lot of share.
Plus bring up an option during install to select a "compat mode" where OpenOffice will save files in 2003/97 format by default - sure I know how to do it after install, but I don't think people like my friend would even know that they might want to do such stuff.
$5 is too much for an O/S that makes your computer slower for games and other stuff. So much so that you have to spend more money to buy more RAM and a faster video card.
;)
Perhaps the interest in Vista in the "pirate" market is a lot lower than previous versions of Windows, and Microsoft has got the "market research" results...
When you make something that crap, even the nongeeks notice.
Well I think some Cisco warranties aren't lifetime, and keeping cheap "spares/standbys" around might get rather tempting ;).
Actually just because something doesn't stop all mexicans doesn't mean it's a waste.
:).
:).
If you do immigration right, you get _some_ choice over who stays (yes some will still sneak in).
Depending on your criterion that might actually be good for your country.
Naturally if your criterion is just lots of $$$ (e.g. Australia has a policy like that) then you get a bunch of people who got rich some how, which might not be that great long term - after all the USA has lots of rich people already. But hey if that's what a country wants, it's up to them.
Could be brains, looks, or could even be "niceness" if you can figure out a way to put a number to it
In the past I think the US took a lot of scientists from Germany and other places, and while some were dubious people, many did contribute to making US a leader in science and technology.
In contrast residentship/citizenship by birth is quite random
I'm against patents and copyrights, if any they should last for a very short time, maybe 7 years at most. Patents don't work well nowadays- if we want a rapid pace of innovation.
;). They made lots of stuff that people reinvented 20 to 30 years later. Even so, some of the stuff they made were already hinted at by people before them - e.g. Vannevar Bush.
Take the example of Douglas Engelbart - he and his team were really innovative. Do you think that it was patents that encouraged that innovation? I doubt it.
If you are as innovative as they were, you will be so far ahead of your time that any patents would have long expired by the time people "got it"
Extending the lifespan of patents to benefit people like that won't work since it'll reward numerous patent trolls more than the very very few _real_ innovators. So the concept of patents is rather broken.
Patents are only good for people who can only come up with one good idea in a lifetime. Or for companies that enslave such people. I'm exaggerating a bit, but really.
There are lots of people who patent stuff even if they aren't good at implementing them.
Imagine if tennis/golf players went around patenting novel and effective moves. Even if someone copies the top players, they aren't a bunch of wusses and cry babies - they just try to be better.
The fact that many big legit companies patent stuff more as a defensive or bargaining measure indicates that it's pretty broken.
Patents slow the pace of progress and innovation. They might have been useful when things were really slow, but I think things are moving faster now.
I can come up with plenty of ideas, but the hard part is implementing and getting it to market.
"that any kind of government sanction, expenditure, funding and protection of science is worthless"
;).
There were plenty of advances.
The atom bomb and fission reactors (Manhattan project etc).
The Apollo project got people to the moon. There were missions to Mars, Mercury, Venus etc.
The Internet kind of works - except they should have not gone for 32 bit IP addresses.
Unfortunately after about 1980 we've been mostly seeing "reruns"
I think people started spending a lot more time and resources trying to patent crap (or sue people) instead of actually coming up with something new.
Yeah I was sleepy... Woke up early. Mornings are overrated.
:).
I'll try better next time
"The laws need to be encoded deeply into the robots brain in some fundamental way so that they cannot be broken"
;).
I suspect that's near impossible if you want real intelligence.
So you'll have to "correct" things after the fact. After you have bred or trained a suitable AI that appears to be certifiably compliant to the various tests 99.999% of the time, you make copies of it and roll it out.
And hope it's not been super sneaky
Actually I think there aren't that very many spammers, at least very many rich ones - just follow the trail of money - there'll always be some site where people hand over money to them- request for the bank transaction details then pick the richest few to go after.
The spammers who keep losing money should go away eventually - once they hear the rich ones getting smacked down.
Not 100% of the spammers will be deterred, but it will drop.
If the RIAA and BSA can go around chasing so many people, I don't see why the FBI can't even nab spammers operating in the USA on a regular basis - despite the talk of "Spam from China" there are obviously many spammers operating in the USA.
"it's so pervasive really tells us that the way intellectual property has been viewed for a couple of centuries is gone."
Coup of centuries? I think it's only been viewed as IP for a much shorter time than that.
IP slows down progress. It's only good for
1) People who can only come up with one good idea/CD in their entire life.
2) Companies that enslave such people
OK, I exaggerate and maybe we might need copyright, but it should be a lot shorter, say 7 or 10 years. That way Microsoft will be too afraid of releasing crap like Vista, because they will have to compete against themselves in the form of Win2K. If you say "But then Microsoft wouldn't have bothered to come out with stuff like Windows", answer is companies like Apple would have been happy to fill the need.
Zero please.
Q: How many Economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Economists don't change lightbulbs- they sit in the darkness writing academic papers and wait for Adam Smith's Invisible hand to do it.
Q: How many Internet Fans does it take to bypass restrictions?
A: They talk about "nuke proof", "routes around censorship" and hope someone else does it.
Hurting encrypted P2P without hurting nonP2P users is not immensely hard as long as nonP2P users never have lots of encrypted connections to many destinations at the same time.
What you do is rotate a user's bandwidth allocation on encrypted traffic to/from the various different _destinations_ of a user. So if you are using encryption to 8 different destinations, say only the first gets bandwidth for a few seconds, then _only_ the second, then the third and so on. If lots of ISPs do that, the odds of connections amongst affected users being "unsquished" drops with the number of destinations with encrypted traffic they have.
If you are only using encryption to one destination that's not going to hurt you at all. If you're an https user, sure only pages and stuff from one server at a time will be downloaded quickly, but I doubt most people will notice.
If Copyright wasn't so broken, ISPs would be able to cache copyrighted material - they could set up "super peers" give them priority, and when they detect something being torrented, they get their super peers to fetch it fast and seed it to everyone in their network.
If ISPs tried that now, they'll get sued.
"that way there aren't any poor bastards that have to die for their countries just because the people in charge don't like the other people in charge."
In the old days, real leaders rode out to battle and risked their lives along with the grunts they sent out.
While this is impractical nowadays given all the fancy tech, something in that spirit would be good, so I have proposed the following to help discourage unnecessary killing and death:
If political leaders wish to send troops to battle for _offensive_ (not defense) purposes (or risk lives of a substantial number of civilians), they have to put their own lives at risk as well. Repeat: defensive wars are different of course.
This could be done in the following manner:
A referendum is held. If there is an insufficient majority, the proposers' lives are forfeit. They are put on deathrow.
For the people on deathrow, at a convenient time there could be a "redemption" referendum, and their lives depend on the results.
A similar referendum is also held if at any time it is found that a politician caused the public to be deceived/misinformed (even unknowingly) and "justify" a war or similar military action.
If a leader's life is not successfully redeemed (i.e. gets executed), but later it is found the war was justified, the leader will get the equivalent of a "purple heart" (and we'll try to say nice things about them in some ceremony with their family and loved ones).
The idea is that even leaders who have no qualms about lying about "caring about the lives of soldiers" would then actually think twice about sending soldiers to risk their lives. Even amoral people without a conscience would be inclined to take things a bit more seriously when it's not just a matter of losing the next election, or going to jail for a few years.
After all if a leader thinks it is worth risking the lives of soldiers and civilians, that leader should also be willing to risk his/her life. That's only fair right?
Also, if 66% of Nation A thinks it's worth attacking Nation B, then it might be easier for people in Nation B to decide whether to kill people in Nation A. If you want a war, you get a real war.
Otherwise, why kill people who have nothing against you, who may not even want to harm anyone, but are dragged into a war just because of a minority at the top?
They're not just fictional. I don't see how there will ever be a way to implement them practically.
How would such laws be enforced? You are going to put an entire "Law Court" and a Punisher/Executioner in every robot?
By the time the act is judged as breaking the laws and the punishment enforced the robot could probably have done a fair amount of damage. Either that or the robot is going to be rather slow...
Well I must admit blowing yourself up is a sure way of becoming handicapped :)
With IE6 I can launch a new browser in a different process, and so I can kill stuff and free up memory without affecting other sessions.
I can't seem to do this with FF2 - everything ends up in the same process. Closing tabs and windows often doesn't reduce the memory footprint at all - you have to kill everything.
If Firefox can't get memory management right at least let make windows/tabs run in separate processes so that we can kill instances we don't care about, rather than keep ending up in a "all 1GB or nothing" situation.
It's quite ridiculous when an entire Windows XP vmware virtual machine running IE6 uses less memory than a FF2 instance running on the host.
Sure I sometimes still need to close IE6 browser windows when I run out of mem on the XP VM, but point is - the other IE6 sessions remain unaffected.
Linux sound is still primitive.
One of the few things about Vista that I consider an improvements is the per app sound control.
That sort of thing is very useful - for example if you're listening to some classical music, and someone buzzes you on your IM app you don't go deaf...