This is just impractical. You would just get millions of bullshit reports for millions of bullshit patents. If the Patent Office is not able to examine the patent submissions properly in the first place, I doubt they would be able to examine the reports either.
There was a better suggestion involving copyrights that could apply to patents as well:
1) The patent submitter would have to set a price-tag on his patent from the get go - a license price.
2) When it is accepted, the patent holder would have to pay a yearly tax for the patent (a percentage of the price he set up for it)
3) Anyone could pay the posted license price to the patent holder to use the technology
4) If anyone is found to be infringing on a patent, he would be required to pay the patent holder a sum relative to the price tag (such as 200% of the price per year infringed)
The tax could be really small - like 1% so it would not bother real inventors while at the same time would stop patent trolls from clinging onto thousands of patents demanding unreasonable payments for the technologies.
Not sure what your problem is with Cowboys and Aliens. I though Lindelof did a pretty good job on it. Most people just don't like the premise of the story - but that was not Lindelof's idea, he just had to adapt a comic book.
Apart from the premise and setting, there was nothing wrong with the writing. The motivations of each character are clear (no 'why the fk would you try to pet a hissing alien cobra' moment), you have a reasonable character development, plot devices are properly set up and the film has a satisfying conclusion. There are no ridiculous attempts at philosophy either. At most you could complain at the cliches about the natives.
If all works like this in the new Star Wars, I will be satisfied.
but if I end up spending that greater amount, that is money I do not have to spend on something else
Sure. But somebody else will get to spend that amount. Hopefully someone who is able to spend money more efficiently than you do. See how this works?
The optimal pricing structure is one where merchants sell their goods at the same price to everyone and set that price at the lowest price that makes it worth their while to bring the goods to market.
That sounds like what socialist economist in Karl Marx mold like to say. I'm not trying to offend you - you probably didn't even realize the similarity. The problem with this kind of thinking is that while it looks good on paper, it's impossible to realize in the real world.
In the real world the prices are driven down by informed customers and inflated by uninformed customers. Expecting the merchants to willingly minimalize their profit is like expecting the river to flow uphill. Would you personally willingly cut your salary to 'the lowest number that it makes you worth your while to offer your services'?
In any case, if you are aspiring to be the uninformed customer you are not doing yourself a favor. If you would like everybody to become an uninformed customer, it would not help the efficiency of the economy - to the contrary - it would become horribly inefficient.
I don't get this animosity towards price setting. It's been around since forever. The traders 10 000 years ago knew their individual customers well enough to sell at different prices, too. I understand that you want to pay as little as possible but what's wrong about any transaction that both parties willingly accept?
It's not even bad for customers as a group. For instance, I can buy a Volkswagen Polo (in Europe) with basic equipment at a price with a minimal profit margin for VW because VW is selling the 'luxuriously' outfitted models and Audis with outrageous profit margins to others. So I definitely profit from people who are willing to pay 2500 EUR for a built in navigation system in their already price inflated A4.
If you are not willing to educate yourself about the common price of something before you click 'buy' on Amazon then tough luck - you'll pay premium and make things cheaper for us. On the other hand, Amazon can only do this within the limits of the market lest its customers run away to their competition (eBay, Wall Mart, Newegg etc.)
The problem is - it's not just the manufacturing. Pretty much all low-skilled jobs are disappearing. If your job doesn't require creativity or empathy, it's bound to be handed over to a machine.
We're still well on the curve of Moore's law with exponential increases in transistor counts
We are only on the curve because we are assembling processor units called as 'cores' into one processor. Look at the curve yourself. In the 70's it has 8088 on it, goes through 286 and 386 in the 80's and then the pentium and its numbered offsprings (2, 3, 4) all lying neatly on the curve. As of 2012 the curve is propped up by the Intel's 10-core Xeon Westmere-EX. Who uses that thing? It's great for servers where each web request spawns a thread but your regular Joe does not need 10 cores. That's quite a change from the times your regular Joe did need to upgrade from 8086 to 286 or from the pentium to pentium 2.
What's worse, a single computer program is hard to do right in such a way that it would milk all the processors. And what's the next step in Moore's curve? The 62-core Xeon Phi. What AI algorithm is going to make use of that? A web server with thousands of requests per second? Sure! Integrated neural network? Nope! It's going to race its neurons down to a permanent lock.
It's much more than just the material needed. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm not even suggesting we shouldn't try. I'm just saying that what looked like the natural next step in space exploration 40 years ago turned out to be much more difficult than imagined by the fans and experts of all kind.
People in Kurzweil's mold like to expect the boom in any area of technology to continue to develop at the same speed forever. They saw the man on the moon and expected man to get around the solar system really soon. They saw robotics creep into the factories and expected that each family would have a personal robot to cook their dinners and do their laundries by the year 2000.
But booms slow down, priorities shift to other fields and the future becomes more mundane than expected.
This is what I expect to happen with the development of a strong AI
we have some decent algorithms that will increase in accuracy the more power we throw at it
And that's the problem. Throwing faster CPUs might do it, but they are not getting fast enough. Throwing more CPUs makes the problem scale badly.
I believe computing might have reached the same situation that space travel did in the late sixties - it went through fast mind-boggling development and now will be slowing down. The experts in the late 60's were entirely justified to think that the colonization of the Solar system will occur within the coming 50 years. Yet it slowed down - because of reaching some of the limits of technology as well as dying interest of the public.
Computing is reaching technological limits in transistor size and clock speeds. Also the general public now does not need more processing power anymore. Making Siri more accurate does not bring much more value to the user. Unless new technology replaces the old one (quantum computing), computing power will continue to be used more and more broadly but don't expect it to bring something deep and complex like a strong AI. Again - just like the rockets started bringing more civilian hardware into the orbit but nobody put a man on Mars.
I really meant to say that the problems themselves grow exponentially, though I admit they are not easily quantifiable because it's not just that existing problems grow, but new ones arise. With longer space journey, the harmful radiation becomes a problem as well as longer zero gravity exposure and the probability of a collision with interplanetary debris - all of which are lethal problems that don't really pose a threat in shorter journeys.
Talking about AI, you have similar issues
As processors of the current design seem to be hitting the physical limits of speed, the only way to expand processing power right now is parallel processing. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to do right and almost impossible to debug. If you need a lot of processing power and use dozens or hundreds of processors, you are introducing a lot of new points of failure. Also, the more complicated the system should be the greater the number of fallible humans work on it introducing new points of failure in their communication and programming styles
Right now these problems are solved by strictly separating the tasks for each parallel thread of the program and keeping their interaction very basic. This does not mesh well with the idea of a 'self aware' AI.
Some things don't scale well. Like with the space race - humanity went from sending a pound of metal into low orbit to putting a man on the moon within 12 years. Everybody assumed that by 2012 we would be colonizing the moons of Jupiter. Yet it turned out human space travel becomes exponentially difficult with the distance.
I'm afraid the same thing goes for software. The more complicated it gets the more fragile it is.
Have people submit their presentation proposal anonymously with the explicit request that the proposals should not contain any information on the presenter's gender or skin color and then pick the best ones. You could even let the community vote which ones they want to see.
Given the location and the topic it's quite possible there will just be white male presenters but if some self proclaimed moral guardians start crying about the selection, you can prove you had no bias.
If each passenger has to pay $1.50 per hour of flight more then before they would not even notice a difference. The crew on the other hand - with 30 passengers on average and 6 hours of flight a day, 5 days a week that would add up to about $70K to split up between the two pilots.
To be fair, the fact that the way the characters are hitting the keyboard does not match with what's going on on the screen, is the least of all problems that annoy me about the representation of IT in the movies.
If music was to be butchered by a blockbuster the way hacking is, it would probably include:
- grotesquely disfigured instruments (exploding when played wrong)
- musico-babble: "I've got an idea - let's transpose the C Minor Major scale into the Midichlorian mode and play it allegro al dente!"
- musical prodigies identifying Yankee Doodle as Rachmaninov's prelude no. 221
- musical notation represented as large colorful rotating symbols
- etc.
No. Don't stop calling them 'patents'. Because this one has 'brought to you by a patent lawyer' written all over it! It's as broad and vague in the scope as it can be. Look at the picture in TFA - the patent claims that the protected features on a 'portable display device' are the ones outlined by the unbroken line - and there's only one. It doesn't even mention proportions. Apple could claim infringement on any display device with a flat surface and rounded rectangular shape of any proportions.
If you look at traditional trademarked or patented design - say the coke bottle or the x-box - the designers went out of their way to create a unique shape. The author of this patent went out of his way to create a generic shape. The fact that it 'only applies to appearance' only makes it worse!
I don't really know if MS is breaking any privacy terms or laws by this. In any case, if you ever hear 'Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law', it's probably better to shut up. If it's in the EULA, it's probably better to look for alternatives.
I'm afraid we are too deep in the OT territory - and I didn't mean to defend the "don't give a fuck" crowd anyway. If you are fluent in three languages, good for you. I bet you didn't start using them in public only after your grammar was flawless. Any one of them.
With this approach you are never going to learn a foreign language. Heck, you would not learn how to talk your mother language or anything more complicated than breathing for that matter.
Why do so many people have trouble believing that just because they are skilled in one area, everybody should be? Again - I'm not against correcting somebody, but is it really *that* surprising to you that most people don't speak flawless English? Welcome to teh internets, I guess...
Understanding it is one thing (though there are confusing exceptions such as - what's the possessive form from the plural noun "wolves"?), not having an 'eye' for spotting errors is another. A wrong usage of the word "its" does not get picked up by spell-checking and a foreigner can easily overlook it while skimming through his/her text.You are probably better at this because in Finland people get spoon-fed English language from the TV from an early age.
Heh, as a non-native English speaker living in Germany I find that Germans make these kind of errors often;-) Even worse, sometimes young people use the apostrophe as a possessive form in the German language, where it should not be used.
However, a lot of languages don't use apostrophe at all (Slavic languages, Asian languages etc) and those people tend to confuse its usage much more.
Why do so many non-native English speakers who write broken English are surprised and annoyed when people make them notice their errors ? Learn from your errors.
That may very well be. But the OP was not just correcting a particular person, he was bewildered why there are so many people with imperfect grammar skills.
Well, Microsoft has a history of busting botnets. I would not be surprised if they mined Skype data for related topics. However, I do think they deserve to get negative backlash for scanning private conversations.
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This is just impractical. You would just get millions of bullshit reports for millions of bullshit patents. If the Patent Office is not able to examine the patent submissions properly in the first place, I doubt they would be able to examine the reports either.
There was a better suggestion involving copyrights that could apply to patents as well:
1) The patent submitter would have to set a price-tag on his patent from the get go - a license price.
2) When it is accepted, the patent holder would have to pay a yearly tax for the patent (a percentage of the price he set up for it)
3) Anyone could pay the posted license price to the patent holder to use the technology
4) If anyone is found to be infringing on a patent, he would be required to pay the patent holder a sum relative to the price tag (such as 200% of the price per year infringed)
The tax could be really small - like 1% so it would not bother real inventors while at the same time would stop patent trolls from clinging onto thousands of patents demanding unreasonable payments for the technologies.
I was talking about Cowboys and Aliens
Not sure what your problem is with Cowboys and Aliens. I though Lindelof did a pretty good job on it. Most people just don't like the premise of the story - but that was not Lindelof's idea, he just had to adapt a comic book.
Apart from the premise and setting, there was nothing wrong with the writing. The motivations of each character are clear (no 'why the fk would you try to pet a hissing alien cobra' moment), you have a reasonable character development, plot devices are properly set up and the film has a satisfying conclusion. There are no ridiculous attempts at philosophy either. At most you could complain at the cliches about the natives.
If all works like this in the new Star Wars, I will be satisfied.
Standardized, published, prices is COMMUNISM now? WTF?
And FWIW, airlines have plenty of areas in which they can compete rather than just on ticket price.
Yes. Standardized prices is 'communism' (planned economy,to be more precise).
but if I end up spending that greater amount, that is money I do not have to spend on something else
Sure. But somebody else will get to spend that amount. Hopefully someone who is able to spend money more efficiently than you do. See how this works?
The optimal pricing structure is one where merchants sell their goods at the same price to everyone and set that price at the lowest price that makes it worth their while to bring the goods to market.
That sounds like what socialist economist in Karl Marx mold like to say. I'm not trying to offend you - you probably didn't even realize the similarity. The problem with this kind of thinking is that while it looks good on paper, it's impossible to realize in the real world.
In the real world the prices are driven down by informed customers and inflated by uninformed customers. Expecting the merchants to willingly minimalize their profit is like expecting the river to flow uphill. Would you personally willingly cut your salary to 'the lowest number that it makes you worth your while to offer your services'?
In any case, if you are aspiring to be the uninformed customer you are not doing yourself a favor. If you would like everybody to become an uninformed customer, it would not help the efficiency of the economy - to the contrary - it would become horribly inefficient.
I don't get this animosity towards price setting. It's been around since forever. The traders 10 000 years ago knew their individual customers well enough to sell at different prices, too. I understand that you want to pay as little as possible but what's wrong about any transaction that both parties willingly accept?
It's not even bad for customers as a group. For instance, I can buy a Volkswagen Polo (in Europe) with basic equipment at a price with a minimal profit margin for VW because VW is selling the 'luxuriously' outfitted models and Audis with outrageous profit margins to others. So I definitely profit from people who are willing to pay 2500 EUR for a built in navigation system in their already price inflated A4.
If you are not willing to educate yourself about the common price of something before you click 'buy' on Amazon then tough luck - you'll pay premium and make things cheaper for us. On the other hand, Amazon can only do this within the limits of the market lest its customers run away to their competition (eBay, Wall Mart, Newegg etc.)
The problem is - it's not just the manufacturing. Pretty much all low-skilled jobs are disappearing. If your job doesn't require creativity or empathy, it's bound to be handed over to a machine.
We're still well on the curve of Moore's law with exponential increases in transistor counts
We are only on the curve because we are assembling processor units called as 'cores' into one processor. Look at the curve yourself. In the 70's it has 8088 on it, goes through 286 and 386 in the 80's and then the pentium and its numbered offsprings (2, 3, 4) all lying neatly on the curve. As of 2012 the curve is propped up by the Intel's 10-core Xeon Westmere-EX. Who uses that thing? It's great for servers where each web request spawns a thread but your regular Joe does not need 10 cores. That's quite a change from the times your regular Joe did need to upgrade from 8086 to 286 or from the pentium to pentium 2.
What's worse, a single computer program is hard to do right in such a way that it would milk all the processors. And what's the next step in Moore's curve? The 62-core Xeon Phi. What AI algorithm is going to make use of that? A web server with thousands of requests per second? Sure! Integrated neural network? Nope! It's going to race its neurons down to a permanent lock.
It's much more than just the material needed. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm not even suggesting we shouldn't try. I'm just saying that what looked like the natural next step in space exploration 40 years ago turned out to be much more difficult than imagined by the fans and experts of all kind.
People in Kurzweil's mold like to expect the boom in any area of technology to continue to develop at the same speed forever. They saw the man on the moon and expected man to get around the solar system really soon. They saw robotics creep into the factories and expected that each family would have a personal robot to cook their dinners and do their laundries by the year 2000.
But booms slow down, priorities shift to other fields and the future becomes more mundane than expected.
This is what I expect to happen with the development of a strong AI
we have some decent algorithms that will increase in accuracy the more power we throw at it
And that's the problem. Throwing faster CPUs might do it, but they are not getting fast enough. Throwing more CPUs makes the problem scale badly.
I believe computing might have reached the same situation that space travel did in the late sixties - it went through fast mind-boggling development and now will be slowing down. The experts in the late 60's were entirely justified to think that the colonization of the Solar system will occur within the coming 50 years. Yet it slowed down - because of reaching some of the limits of technology as well as dying interest of the public.
Computing is reaching technological limits in transistor size and clock speeds. Also the general public now does not need more processing power anymore. Making Siri more accurate does not bring much more value to the user. Unless new technology replaces the old one (quantum computing), computing power will continue to be used more and more broadly but don't expect it to bring something deep and complex like a strong AI. Again - just like the rockets started bringing more civilian hardware into the orbit but nobody put a man on Mars.
I really meant to say that the problems themselves grow exponentially, though I admit they are not easily quantifiable because it's not just that existing problems grow, but new ones arise. With longer space journey, the harmful radiation becomes a problem as well as longer zero gravity exposure and the probability of a collision with interplanetary debris - all of which are lethal problems that don't really pose a threat in shorter journeys.
Talking about AI, you have similar issues
As processors of the current design seem to be hitting the physical limits of speed, the only way to expand processing power right now is parallel processing. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to do right and almost impossible to debug. If you need a lot of processing power and use dozens or hundreds of processors, you are introducing a lot of new points of failure. Also, the more complicated the system should be the greater the number of fallible humans work on it introducing new points of failure in their communication and programming styles
Right now these problems are solved by strictly separating the tasks for each parallel thread of the program and keeping their interaction very basic. This does not mesh well with the idea of a 'self aware' AI.
Some things don't scale well. Like with the space race - humanity went from sending a pound of metal into low orbit to putting a man on the moon within 12 years. Everybody assumed that by 2012 we would be colonizing the moons of Jupiter. Yet it turned out human space travel becomes exponentially difficult with the distance.
I'm afraid the same thing goes for software. The more complicated it gets the more fragile it is.
Just treat everyone fairly, how hard is that?
It's quite easy actually
Have people submit their presentation proposal anonymously with the explicit request that the proposals should not contain any information on the presenter's gender or skin color and then pick the best ones. You could even let the community vote which ones they want to see.
Given the location and the topic it's quite possible there will just be white male presenters but if some self proclaimed moral guardians start crying about the selection, you can prove you had no bias.
If each passenger has to pay $1.50 per hour of flight more then before they would not even notice a difference. The crew on the other hand - with 30 passengers on average and 6 hours of flight a day, 5 days a week that would add up to about $70K to split up between the two pilots.
Did Julian Assange then publish these secrets, knowing that he has zero way of predicting the consequences? Yes: he's guilty.
Guilty of what? Releasing foreign documents of unknown validity? Since when is that illegal?
...is going to result in a government that will be totally adversarial to us and will hide a lot of secrets..
As opposed to the way it is now where the government has no secrets at all?
To be fair, the fact that the way the characters are hitting the keyboard does not match with what's going on on the screen, is the least of all problems that annoy me about the representation of IT in the movies.
If music was to be butchered by a blockbuster the way hacking is, it would probably include:
- grotesquely disfigured instruments (exploding when played wrong)
- musico-babble: "I've got an idea - let's transpose the C Minor Major scale into the Midichlorian mode and play it allegro al dente!"
- musical prodigies identifying Yankee Doodle as Rachmaninov's prelude no. 221
- musical notation represented as large colorful rotating symbols
- etc.
No. Don't stop calling them 'patents'. Because this one has 'brought to you by a patent lawyer' written all over it! It's as broad and vague in the scope as it can be. Look at the picture in TFA - the patent claims that the protected features on a 'portable display device' are the ones outlined by the unbroken line - and there's only one. It doesn't even mention proportions. Apple could claim infringement on any display device with a flat surface and rounded rectangular shape of any proportions.
If you look at traditional trademarked or patented design - say the coke bottle or the x-box - the designers went out of their way to create a unique shape. The author of this patent went out of his way to create a generic shape. The fact that it 'only applies to appearance' only makes it worse!
I don't really know if MS is breaking any privacy terms or laws by this. In any case, if you ever hear 'Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law', it's probably better to shut up. If it's in the EULA, it's probably better to look for alternatives.
I'm afraid we are too deep in the OT territory - and I didn't mean to defend the "don't give a fuck" crowd anyway. If you are fluent in three languages, good for you. I bet you didn't start using them in public only after your grammar was flawless. Any one of them.
With this approach you are never going to learn a foreign language. Heck, you would not learn how to talk your mother language or anything more complicated than breathing for that matter.
Why do so many people have trouble believing that just because they are skilled in one area, everybody should be? Again - I'm not against correcting somebody, but is it really *that* surprising to you that most people don't speak flawless English? Welcome to teh internets, I guess...
Understanding it is one thing (though there are confusing exceptions such as - what's the possessive form from the plural noun "wolves"?), not having an 'eye' for spotting errors is another. A wrong usage of the word "its" does not get picked up by spell-checking and a foreigner can easily overlook it while skimming through his/her text.You are probably better at this because in Finland people get spoon-fed English language from the TV from an early age.
Heh, as a non-native English speaker living in Germany I find that Germans make these kind of errors often ;-) Even worse, sometimes young people use the apostrophe as a possessive form in the German language, where it should not be used.
However, a lot of languages don't use apostrophe at all (Slavic languages, Asian languages etc) and those people tend to confuse its usage much more.
Why do so many non-native English speakers who write broken English are surprised and annoyed when people make them notice their errors ? Learn from your errors.
That may very well be. But the OP was not just correcting a particular person, he was bewildered why there are so many people with imperfect grammar skills.
Well, Microsoft has a history of busting botnets. I would not be surprised if they mined Skype data for related topics. However, I do think they deserve to get negative backlash for scanning private conversations.