The Google patent search beta could be big news. If anybody can get relevant patent search results out of that mass of legal speak, it's Google. I expect it wouldn't constitute a legally valid patent search but it could be Very Helpful.
Pure research without obvious practical application seldom happens in the commercial sector - there are too many incentives to put the money elsewhere.
This is the rational behind government funded research, and I think it is very logical. Businesses simply do not think long term as a group. Individual ones might but there are powerful financial incentives to go for the immediate rewards.
"State-run" education is not failing because it is state run - the state is essentially an enabler of the research. It is the lack of $$ in the system that is the biggest problem - there are many interesting problems competing for a very small resource pool, and as a result a lot of very good work goes undone.
Prizes are not the answer - fund the NSF!
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Saving U.S. Science
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Prizes help spur research towards specific, known, targeted goals. That's not a bad thing (ethical research is almost never a bad thing) but it's only a small part of the problem, and probably not the most important part.
So called "pie in the sky" research with no application in sight seems to be increasingly difficult to justify to those with the purse strings. If someone isn't solving a problem, defending it as worthwhile is difficult. From the article:
"Dangling prizes in front of innovators has benefits not found in the typical funding process. By offering a prize, government pays for success instead of rewarding a research proposal, as occurs with grants."
Research is not just success - in fact, it's not even mostly success. You can't budget just to pay for the successes, or no one will be able to afford to go after the prizes. Plus, failures can often teach as much or more than successes.
Fortunately, Kalil acknowledges that prizes are not all that's needed. Personally I am wary of ANY prizes being introduced since there is a temptation to be "budget minded" in the future by paring down to just the prizes, which sound good while being less effective in reality. Also, institutions might pressure researchers to head for goals that have a prize rather than pursuing something more interesting to the researcher.
"Optimism about the current proposal to double the NSF budget in ten years is tempered by the failure of recent legislation to double the NSF budget in five years. The National Science Authorization Act of 2002, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, called for a doubling of the NSF budget from FY 2002 to FY 2007. The annual appropriations bills have fallen far short of the doubling path specified in the NSF Authorization Act. The FY 2007 budget request for NSF is nearly $4 billion below the level authorized in the last doubling initiative."
There has been some movement in the House: http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=1182 but now we will see what happens in reality. Apparently it is possible to sound good without actually putting the money into it, we'll hope that doesn't happen again. The recent shift in power in the House and Senate might be helpful - we will see.
I don't know if the US as a population is supportive of research though. I would be very interested in a survey which attempts to gauge the public's interest and support for general research funding - does anybody know of a good one?
I don't understand why this fascination with electronic voting exists in the first place. I voted in the midterms and I was horrified to see that there was absolutely no physical record that indicated the black box had in fact recorded my votes correctly.
If one wants to "solve" the problem of ambiguous voting I suppose the idea of a printed paper result that the voter verifies and then places in a box isn't bad, but I think it's overly complex given the issues at hand. I will concede the advantage that a printed result at least stands a very good chance of being completely non-ambiguous in a recount, but why not use some form of punch card and have a mechanical punch the button to stamp your card device in-booth so that there is no variability due to individuals not using proper strength? The card itself will have all relevant information printed on the card surface, but just fit into a purely mechanical device designed to ensure non-ambiguous punching of the result. What's so hard about this?
Of course there are all sorts of less-than-ethical motivations that can be brought up if we assume the worst about folks in power, that would prompt support for non-verifiable votes. Since assuming dishonest motives is the safe thing to do when transfer of power is at stake, I think we should assume the worst and ditch electronic voting altogether. Just my opinion, and perhaps a disservice to those who really think it would help, but sometimes newer really isn't better.
Also, I want a voting BOOTH, that precludes anyone seeing how I vote. Those machines I used this time were basically on stands with minimal visual guards. NOT the sort of thing I remember from when I was young, where the voting booth was fully enclosed. I would prefer to see a return to a healthy skepticism of the system on the part of the public - if people want changes that weaken privacy and verification, look for reasons why.
The technology I think has been stabilizing, each new processor/component doesn't introduce the user visible performance leap its predecessor did. The changes are more incremental now, and older machines have longer lives before they are outpaced by the demands of software (and I have a feeling a lot of those demands aren't really necessary, but that's another issue). Rather than making cheap disposable boxes, I would advocate a return to engineering for durability, robustness, and future proofing (many older machines are built like tanks - I prefer that durable approach to computers personally. My IBM PS/2 keyboard is probably 20 years old, but still works like a champ. There is no excuse for keyboards that don't last - it is a solved problem and the evidence is out there.) Start to make a big deal about 5 or 10 year warranties on computers, and convince the public that they SHOULD be able to use this machine for that period of time. (First of course you must design and build a machine that is actually a reasonable machine to use for such a period, but I doubt that is an insurmountable obstacle - open hardware projects might help.)
Vista's longevity has actually helped consumers I think, because it broke the whole "upgradeupgradeupgrade" mantra that had come before it and provided some real product stability. I doubt this was the original intent, but I'm glad it happened. Perhaps consumer expectations for stability and robustness can be increased, and we can start to engineer operating systems, standards, and APIs that are intended to be bulletproof and last for decades or even centuries.
OK, first remark - I want to see this as an official press release on Sun's website, with a link to the code. Then I'll be confident it will really happen.
Second remark - I think the GPL is a good choice for this. Consider what Sun might gain from open source Java under any license:
1) Excellent integration with Linux, *BSD, and any other platform out there they haven't integrated into fully yet (except maybe Windows). They would get all the work done for free, too - distributions would be chomping at the bit to work long and hard on making everything work Just So.
2) Much better realization of cross platform "write once, run everywhere" goals. Well integrated Java everywhere can only help this.
3) Possible improvements as people get a chance to fix anything that's been annoying them for the last several years.
All very logical reasons to open source, IMHO - Java is already freely downloadable. Sun owns the Java trademark, so they have no fear of forks which mean anything in terms of threatening Java mind share - Java has to be one of the most publicly recognizable programming language brand names in the world. Sun will always provide the "only" Java, whatever else out there might run Java programs.
Now, what does GPL do for them, that other licenses might not?
1) Credibility - rather than inventing Yet Another License, making things simple using already established (and I think functional for this purpose) licenses.
2) Prevents commercial forking. Whatever open source Java becomes, it is unlikely that someone would try and compete commercially against Sun when Sun has the commercial code base and original developers. Any work any commercial developer did in competition (that they want to distribute anyway) would have to be offered free to the world under GPL, and even if Sun can't use it directly the ideas alone would be enough to allow them to keep up and maybe get there first in some cases.
3) Allows maximal code sharing in the open world. GPL has its own momentum, as a sort of "logical end point" - free except for the ability to become non-free. That would seem to make a lot of sense to me for Java, particularly since I would expect (like OpenOffice) that most of the best code would come out of Sun and be copyright Sun. Sun can put out what it wants, and still license commercially if they so choose.
Downsides for Sun primarily seem to be the "radical" image associated with GPL in some circles (yes that's a disadvantage if you want to look like a reasonable, sane business to some PHBs) and the inability to combine developments based on GPL Java back into their commercial Java without discussing it with the author. But since this very restriction is also a reassurance to the community in some ways, it might not be all bad.
Anyway, I will watch developments with interest and look forward hopefully to the day when Java on Gentoo can be well integrated and smooth.
Given current raw material supply lines, I believe there might indeed be some limitations on raw materials. However, what I'm not sure of (and the really important question) is whether raw materials supplies could scale to meet the demand while remaining cost effective.
Most materials involved with production of computers have had their refinement processes perfected over a long period of time. Indium, at least in the quantities needed for large scale solar panel construction, may still be an open question. How much is there on the Earth? Of that, how much is usable/obtainable economically? Once the first generation of panels is done, can they be recycled effectively?
It is a concern, but I would like to see real hard core studies done of available raw materials availability and extraction costs before I conclude Indium is or is not viable in the long run.
If you look at road surfaces, you will see that they are "clean" only in the sense of being free of large scale obstacles. Tire marks, dirt, oil, and other random stuff is all over the road surface.
Solar panels need optical transparency in their protective layer. Keeping roads clean enough to provide that level of optical clarity is just not going to be workable, except possible with nanotechnology.
When we get self rebuilding roadbeds then solar roadbeds might be practical, but for now roofs are much more practical as targets - most are slanted, don't have cars running over them, and get rained on periodically to help with self cleaning.
I used to know one of the guys who went to work at Miasolé. He was a sharp guy with a lot of experience in CIGS and related materials.
Slashdot has had a habit of posting the "next big solar breakthrough" which, in the fine print, is not so big yet but will be RSN. CuInGaSe2, on the other hand, has a long track record and previous commercial attempts have produced some solar panels with usable efficiencies (not great, but usable).
CIGS has the advantage of being a direct band gap material, but there are some limits to how far you can push it in efficiency as a single layer device that have not been overcome. One serious advantage is that this material has a fairly wide tolerance on relative elemental composition - different ratios of material in the film will still produce a working cell within a fairly wide range. This is important because industrial process control has tolerances, and wider tolerances mean less expensive production. CuInSe2 and related compositions have some rather interesting electrical properties with respect to defect behavior that allow them to work in this fashion. Anyone with a real interest in this should look at some dense but extremely interesting work by Zunger at NREL.
The biggest problem with CIGS as a production material is probably that it can't "piggyback" on the industry built up for the computer industry. I know that sounds strange, since its lack of reliance on that source of material is also its advantage, but tools to work with CIGS have to be developed more or less from scratch. That's expensive, and the reason that these initial investments are important. The process must be bootstrapped.
CIGS of course doesn't address other problems with solar adoption, such as durability over time, public acceptance and investment, etc. But CIGS is a real material with real potential, and not simply IPO vaporware.
Also of longer term interest is the idea of multijunction solar cells, which use different wavelengths of light on each layer and thus can push efficiencies much higher. Unfortunately they are also an EXTREMELY difficult practical challenge for production. However, there is a lot that can still be done. We REALLY need more funding for solar research in this country, and more basic research in general, but that's another post.
Anybody who didn't see this step coming didn't pay attention to Napster. The very elements that made YouTube popular were the elements that they are now having to avoid - Free Content from Everywhere.
Really, I think the **AA folks should be cheering Google for this one - it may just save them a lot of legal costs going after people as YouTube cleans up on its own.
This will just keep happening - people want free stuff and the copyright holders don't want free stuff. Nothing complicated here, folks.
The only Long Term Solution is to have both online content distribution AND FREE CONTENT. Free as in freedom, not "free as in someone uploaded it without permission."
We need some kind of "Non-commercial Crap Filtration" process that works similar to the system used by commercial folk to screen bad content. OK, so theirs doesn't work but they do avoid the "10000 videos of people being dweebs in their living rooms" problem. We need to find a way to identify commercial quality free content and highlight it.
There is no ambiguity here - the copyright holders are in the right. If we want to fight a war against Big Media dominating our culture, we need to establish a legitimate free movement "open source entertainment?" to provide an alternative where all parties are happy with things being free. The fact that we keep infringing commercial copyrights means something is messed up. We need a Better Way, and to do that we need Good Free Content. Is there any? I'm not talking about flash movies of poorly drawn cartoons (like some of that Adult Swim oddness) but Real Honest Good Content with production values, good storylines, and talent.
If we want free entertainment, let's do it the way that allows us the moral high ground. Napster, YouTube, and other such entities are no solution to anything, and the pattern of startup->popular->dead(voluntary cleanup/lawsuit) will just continue indefinitely if we don't break the centralized control of content filtration. Original Star Trek is popular after decades despite cheap sets and somewhat over the top acting - surely that level of production (or better even) is possible fairly easily today. Things like Duality and other Star Wars fanfic are indications that the technical ability (not necessarily the acting or scripting ability, granted...) is out there to do effects that are "good enough" to make decent shows. Elephant Dreams helped push the open source tools for such shows further along, although IIRC there are still fairly significant holes... Let's proceed in a direction that is postitive, legal and creative.
I don't know if it's cause or effect, but I'm not surprised those with intense, focused pursuits have problems with human interaction on average. Interacting with people is a subtle and complex skill and it takes practice to be good. "Non-specialist" people have more time to interact with a wider spectrum of people, and as a result they are better at interaction. No surprise there - intense subjects like mathematics take lots of time to master and are not very social in nature. It's all about what people devote their time and energy to. (Insert usual caveot that statistical summarizations of trends are never binding or even useful when considering individuals.)
"Happiness" is a bit hard to make quantitative, so studies will be a little hard to evaluate or reproduce, but since human beings are designed to be social I would expect that a lack of social interaction would have a negative impact on their "happiness." There are fairly good survival reasons for people to prefer being with the group, although that is less true now than throught most of human history (where being the odd loner would most likely earn one the title "Box Lunch.") Modern civilization opens up opportunities for specialization, and in doing so also introduces relative isolation into the human social framework. How this will play out is not clear, but it's not surprising that there will be changes - human social controls and group socializations depend on knowledge of individual people and personalities. They don't scale well to cities of millions of people.
I fear Google is going to step into a hornet's nest here, sooner or later.
YouTube has the same problem Napster used to have, back when it was wildly successful - its success rests on a lot of material being present on the site, but a lot of that material has copyright problems. (A guess would be that a lot of the higher quality material has copyright problems, for a few reasonable definitions of "higher quality".)
I think any online site of this nature is going to have the same problem. The availability of vast amounts of copyrighted material is one of the things that will build the popularity of this type of site. But if the copyright holders didn't release that video then it will just make trouble in the end.
I don't think people are really all that interested in 1000 videos of people in their living rooms trying to act. TV shows, music videos, natural disaster footage, and all the usual stuff that gets put on TV will be what draws people to any online video site (why do you think it got put on TV in the first place?) Google is making a few deals with some of the big players, who perhaps have realized that it is better to try and cope with this in its current form than have it move somewhere more underground, but there are undoubtedly thousands of copyright holders who would have a case and not all of them will agree. A massive scrubbing will have to take place, and I think once it is over YouTube will be about as interesting to people as Napster was after the lawsuit dust settled. It might do slightly better since there are a few types of home video that people find interesting (uploaded individual videos from major world events, for example) and a few companies are making deals to provide content but I think the "buzz" will fade. The very elements of Napster that made it popular were also what made it illegal, and I'm afraid the same thing will happen here.
These comments are very broad, and thus rather difficult to evaluate, but I'm dubious. The evaluation of political statements is heavily involved with the context in which they are spoken. More important, many "truths" that must be delt with in politics are not "truth" in any absolute, scientific sense. Abortion, for example - people will argue until the end of time whether it should or shouldn't be allowed, and there is no real objective truth to be had there because it is a strictly moral question. You might be able to check concrete facts but that too runs smack into the problem of locating trusted sources, particularly about topics that are politically charged. Average internet opinion does not a fact make.
Also, take the case where a politician is taloring their statements to local concerns. They may make generalizations that do apply on a local scale but make a lot less sense (and are a lot less accurate) in a broader context.
More to the point perhaps, how would the US react to the knowledge that politicians can't be depended on for accuracy in statements? I think it would be a collective "well, duh" type of response.
He says the amount of information we are creating is staggering. That's probably true, but it is dwarfed by the amount of crap and uninformed opinions we are creating (see: slashdot). And on the internet, how does one tell? Deciding what to trust and who to trust is a problem that Google can't solve in general.
One thing that might be more useful is a way to use google to quickly locate references that assert facts, and allow an author to add a citation to that source if they think it is legit (or maybe re-think things if no legit source supports an assertion). But that gets back to what is a legit source? The public is unlikely to know for the range of topics involved ("well, the name sounds legit so I"ll believe them") and if they trust bogus sources being cited then the utility falls apart again, and may even be a step backwards (people sounding "legit" without really being legit, and backing each other up). I'd be happier to see politicians cite a source for their facts more often, but how many people will still agree with the person saying what they want to hear whether or not they have sources to back it up? Or dismiss cited sources that don't support their point of view?
No, in general it can't work without people doing the real work: critical thinking. There is no easy path to accuracy. Objectivity must be evaluted both for speaker and sources, and that always falls on the person asked to listen.
There are degrees of support, and I think you aren't making an apples to apples comparison here.
Point #1: When you talk about support on the scale of the contracts you are describing, the scale is MASSIVE. These are the juicy contracts - provide broad support for systems which are relatively uniform and well maintained. The level of support these setups need is much greater than that available or possible to home users, and since downtime is so expensive they can (and do) pay $$$$ to be very sure and avoid it.
Point #2: OEM licensing for Windows and other consumer products does not have support anything close to the situation described above. The user base is as diverse as you can get, there may be a thousand unanticipiated and unknown combinations that could be installed on any given customer's machine, and you are supposed to make sense out of it. Oh, and there is no incremental reward for dealing with ever more difficult problems - just that same initial flat fee, or perhaps a $/minute phone charge. Yay. That's not what big companies need - they need someone out to fix the problem, NOW. They shell out big bucks for that service, and for good reason. That level of support is not easy.
Why do you think OSS support is so often held up as a big advantage? Because FOR MOST USERS the level of support and help that can be found in the community is far beyond anything they will ever be able to afford in the commercial marketplace. The high end support contracts you are seeing are designed for corporate customers with uniform needs and deep pockets. Buying home or even "Pro" versions of software and not paying a big chunk of cash means you quite simply won't get the kind of support you would get with the big $$. Very, very small vendors MIGHT provide it, but people need to eat if they are doing software as a business and believe me good people aren't cheap. Open source short circuits this with a completely different model, and it just so happens that the benefits trickle down to those who don't pay large $$ too (because $$ aren't the motivator). But you won't get guarantees. Guarantees are EXTREMELY expensive, because they are incredibly hard to support and make real.
Commercial or OS, you get what you pay for in support because in-person help cannot be duplicated at close to zero cost.
I'm not a medical person so perhaps there is some criteria I'm not familiar with, but isn't addictive behavior pretty much the same regardless of what someone is addicted to? Is the question whether the "addiction" is chemically based vs. simply being socially based? (For example, if a nerd likes playing Quake for 16 hours a day instead of interacting normally with the human race, does that constitute addiction or just different mental software?)
I mean really, if addiction is defined as depending on the chemicals that are generated when we feel "good" wouldn't an excess of ANYTHING that makes us feel "good" be a candidate for a cause? And wouldn't it be expected that potential causes of addiction depend on the individual? Some are obvious and would impact virtually anyone (chemical manipulation) but other behaviors which don't directly alter mood via chemical means I would intuitively expect to be more subtle.
Heh, maybe anti-social people (not the angry, dangerous wackos but those who are just indifferent to and/or dislike social situations) would argue that the rest of us are addicted to social interaction.;-) The rest of us would probably take issue with that, but really what objective criteria would be used to have the argument?
Anybody with a medical degree around here that can point to some definitive definition of the word "addiction" and what it means, medically?
There is no evidence that will quiet those people. Any contradiction to their already formed conclusion will simply be part of the "conspiracy".
It's the same with anyone who has already made their decision without the need for evidence - more evidence doesn't do a thing to them.
I have a feeling you could take some of those people who think NASA faked the moon landing to the moon IN PERSON and they would still conclude that it's an externally imposed delusion, because they are starting from the basic premise that they are right. Facts will need to fit that preconception. Same thing here.
I use and like Gentoo Linux, primarily because it is a distribution that lets me install virtually anything, including odd obscure scientific software, with a minimum of fuss. Additionally, many times when things work, they REALLY work because the distribution doesn't get in the way.
But I'm considering trying KUbuntu for my next go-around. In addition to the new software compile requirements gradually outrunning my computer's hardware, I must agree that the smoothness of massive universal upgrades just hasn't felt "as clean" of late. The most important environments for my linux box I will usually wind up building myself anyway (Maxima, Axiom, BRL-CAD, various Lisp packages) and for the rest of it I'm less interested in building for hours upon end for minor upgrades. Particularly if there is a decent chance of introducing problems.
Conceptually, I like the idea of a system that can build itself from source code - there's something clean about it, and also self sufficient. If a system can build itself, it means most everything on the system is pretty solid as far as having what it needs in place. But waning horse power and a focus on things other than endless system tweaking may motivate me to shift.
Originally, I loved that Gentoo let me turn on exactly what I needed to get my hardware to work well, and that was my primary motivation for using it. I still love its documentation, and that I suspect may someday outlive the main Gentoo project itself. But I think it might be time to check out the alternatives again, and lower my monthly power bill;-)
I would estimate that Freenode was responsible for more realtime communication between developers and between users/support than any other single medium, and as such it was and is a major asset to the open source movement. It has undoubtedly helped make many projects much better than would have otherwise been possible/workable.
As a legacy, I'd say that's a pretty good one to leave.
The very best software doesn't die, it re-invents itself over time.
I point to TeX as the poster child of "do it right, use it forever". There are others. Most major computer algebra systems today have a history back to 20 years or more.
If you separate the graphical goodies from the core logic, the core logic can be done right and last as long as there are people to maintain it. I think that's part of the genious of literate programming - it attempts to ensure that people can fix, update, and extend code forever.
Most software is not designed to last forever, so it's no surprise it doesn't. That does NOT mean that software in inevitably thrown in the dust bin after X years. It shouldn't be that way. Re-inventing the wheel over and over needs to stop - it's a waste of programming talent. I grant it takes a while to figure out how to do hard things correctly, but once we DO know we should do it right and build off of it, not scrap it in 20 years and do it over. Doing it right takes time and is seldom profitable in a commercial setting (or even possible - people want something now rather than 20 years from now and will accept problems to get it sooner.) That's where open source might be an answer - it answers the problem of deliberate forced retirement of code by letting the code out - but we have yet to see if the quality necessary for TeX like staying power will emerge.
I would argue that a panel not knowing any details of the patent application, presented only with a problem description and instructed to suggest ways to solve it, is not an analysis with knowledge of the proposed solution but a clean look at the problem by "people skilled in the art."
People often don't write down obvious applications. Particularly in software, where the theoretical application of some technique is almost literally limitless. You could have thousands upon thousands of pages listing applications for a particular GUI structure, because it is general enough to apply to a plethora of problems. Claiming and monopolizing a specific one devalues the use of the technique by robbing it of the general power that makes it interesting in the first place, and is a serious disservice to the general community. If we're constantly worrying about stepping on patents that cover the solution any programmer would arrive at the instant they started trying to solve a problem, we're simply going to fall far behind the rest of the world economically when it comes to software development and usage. Many of the best and brightest won't tolerate such an environment, and will move to work where they CAN work without such fetters on their creativity.
We need a standard of obviousness that is biased against granting monopolies on ideas willy-nilly, not towards it. Getting a monopoly should be a hard thing to do, because it is always to the benefit of the individual and not the community. The eventual reward to the community has to outweigh any temporary harm done by the monopolizing of the idea, and I would argue that is most definitely not true in the case of software patents.
"What if I design a new type of engine for a car that allows it to get 100 MPG? Do I get some fraction of the revenue from the sale of the entire car, or just the portion that could be considered the cost of the engine?"
I would say the entire car, or products marketed as any sort of package or incentive with the car. Obviously those fine points would have to be designed with care by lawyers who know how they themselves would try and get around it.
"The car is free if you buy our Auto Care Package for 60 months at $500 a month! No revenue from the car, so no royalties. Hardly seems fair."
Oh, agreed. There would need to be provisions to prevent that sort of thing, and no doubt lawyers would have something new to argue about for a while.
"Imagine that we are competitors. I patent something really cool, and that is my main revenue stream. You want me to stop competing with your product, so you take my invention, give it away for free, (which doesn't affect your main revenue stream), and destroy my revenue stream causing my business to lose money, shut down and stop competing in your market. Does that seem fair? We complain about Microsoft doing things like this, but it's OK for OSS to do it? I don't think so."
Some might argue that was Sun's whole reason for buying and open sourcing OpenOffice. In general the effect you describe can be unfortunate, I grant you. Software is a special case, because if you give away code and not just binaries (which in the case of software should be a requirement) then the product doesn't disappear. I think OpenOffice did more good for more people than it did harm to Microsoft, so I am in favor of it. Also, giving inventions in the physical world away for free should not be easy or inexpensive to do, in general. Material goods always have a fixed cost that must be paid, and that's quite a drain. That software does not have these problems is good evidence for why different types of thinking are needed there.
Remember, the original purpose of this entire system is to benefit the public. Freely available software can live on indefinitely and has virtually zero duplication cost, so it gives back indefinitely to the public. Microsoft, on the other hand, does not normally release source code to the world and could in theory kill a product by letting it age and allowing no one to maintain it, or resume charging an arm and a leg for it to provide it again. I would say those two situations are materially different.
"So, if I invent something that will take many years to get into production, I should have to pay more money before I can profit from it? This is also unfair to smaller companies or individuals that don't have the resources of a corporation. $50k for year 20 of the patent is fine for IBM, but would make most individual broke."
Yes, you should. If you wish to control an idea, you should pay for the privilege. Controlling ideas is normally to the benefit of the individual rather than society in general, which is why patents exist as an idea in the first place. Give people enough incentive to create, but in the end it should benefit society as a whole.
"Think of RFID. It took a long time for manufacturing to catch up to the idea. The patent has already expired, but what if it hadn't?"
If it hadn't, they probably would have waited another few years.
Take a group of people "skilled in the art", pose the problem to solve, give them (say) two or three hours, and record their proposed solutions. If what they come up with is similar to what the patent is trying to describe, it's obvious. If they want suggestions, solicite them and don't rely on nobody having bothered to write down the obvious.
By the way, what is "skilled in the art", anyway? If we on slashdot find a lot of these patents silly, what would actual people with training in the specific fields of these patents be saying?
We should also fix the "20 year death grip" on these things. What about this?
Limit the amount of money that can be paid from one company to another for a patent to some fraction of the revenue stream related to that product from the company wanting to use the idea. Allow lump sum payments if the one using the patent prefers to negociate, but have the mandated available option of, say, 15% of the total revenue after taxes (not profit, revenue) being brought in by this product as an option. To prevent companies ganging up on one guy and getting over 100% of his revenue based on multiple patents, make it so that the cap is 50% of total revenue after taxes for the product to all parties who might sue, and they get appropriate fractions of that pie. Make this an "up-front only" option so that if the licensee doesn't want to do it, they can't enter negociations and then fall back on this if they go badly.
This way:
* Big businesses can do what they do now, since they won't want to give up large percentages of their gross revenue
* Smaller businesses can opt for this option since it would cost them less than a fight, and let them stay in business
* It forces businesses not to price too high no matter what, since the patents are not a complete and final barrior to entry for a market. Good for consumers.
* It discourages excessive litigation and collusion between companies to take out small players, since the financial rewards for doing so get less and less the more litigation is piled on - after four companies sue and get their revenue stream, everybody starts getting less of the pie as more people pile on. At some point, it no longer becomes profitible to sue the guy. If he can get buy on 50% of the gross sale price of his product, he can no longer be driven out of business by litigation. The logic being if he can do this, someone else had profit margins that are not good for the consumers and the industry. Of course, you can still make him keep paying legal costs to fight it out, but after four companies get to him he can just not contest anything and let the pieces of the pie get smaller. Then, ironically enough, we could make the companies who are already getting fed out of this pie head off any new patent challenges because they stand to lose financially. This makes the incentive stronger to have only patents that are actually worth something filed, because the potential muscle available to break them becomes greater.
* Patent holders still get money from licensing, although perhaps not as much as they would like (although if the little guy becomes big they are sitting pretty). It should decrease the incentive to file stupid patents because they won't keep people out of the market. Indeed, it will encourage small players to enter and stay small, which is where capitalism works best.
* Open source software without revenue streams can stop worrying about infringing on patents, since 15% of $0 is still $0.
This might be able to provide incentives to innovate while keeping the system functional.
Another idea - expiring patents. Have the patent holder pay a yearly fee to keep the patent in play, and have that fee increase each year. (I think someone suggested something similar for copyright actually - after 30 years, start having people pay more every year to continue to monopolize the rights to it.) That way, if someone isn't making enough money with a patent to support it, it doesn't become an anti-competitive tool and limit someone else being innovative.
No, I hadn't. Ugh. Well, I guess the pay for crawling around in the gutter is good...
On the other hand, if he answered all of those questions already honestly and in the negative, it would still seem to me like a waste of time. If they already tried that attack (it was allowed in circumstances where they DIDN'T have free reign? Wow) and he met it, why would they think it would succeed the second time around, when he's even more prepared for it having heard it the first time?
Slashdot Mirror
The Google patent search beta could be big news. If anybody can get relevant patent search results out of that mass of legal speak, it's Google. I expect it wouldn't constitute a legally valid patent search but it could be Very Helpful.
= hjwMAAAAEBAJ&dq=swinging+on+a+swing
= OfwkAAAAEBAJ&dq=exercising+a+cat
The usual favorites:
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6368227&id
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5443036&id
Pure research without obvious practical application seldom happens in the commercial sector - there are too many incentives to put the money elsewhere.
This is the rational behind government funded research, and I think it is very logical. Businesses simply do not think long term as a group. Individual ones might but there are powerful financial incentives to go for the immediate rewards.
"State-run" education is not failing because it is state run - the state is essentially an enabler of the research. It is the lack of $$ in the system that is the biggest problem - there are many interesting problems competing for a very small resource pool, and as a result a lot of very good work goes undone.
Prizes help spur research towards specific, known, targeted goals. That's not a bad thing (ethical research is almost never a bad thing) but it's only a small part of the problem, and probably not the most important part.
So called "pie in the sky" research with no application in sight seems to be increasingly difficult to justify to those with the purse strings. If someone isn't solving a problem, defending it as worthwhile is difficult. From the article:
"Dangling prizes in front of innovators has benefits not found in the typical funding process. By offering a prize, government pays for success instead of rewarding a research proposal, as occurs with grants."
Research is not just success - in fact, it's not even mostly success. You can't budget just to pay for the successes, or no one will be able to afford to go after the prizes. Plus, failures can often teach as much or more than successes.
Fortunately, Kalil acknowledges that prizes are not all that's needed. Personally I am wary of ANY prizes being introduced since there is a temptation to be "budget minded" in the future by paring down to just the prizes, which sound good while being less effective in reality. Also, institutions might pressure researchers to head for goals that have a prize rather than pursuing something more interesting to the researcher.
Perhaps a good summary of recent problems can be found at the end of this ( http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=985 ) article:
"Optimism about the current proposal to double the NSF budget in ten years is tempered by the failure of recent legislation to double the NSF budget in five years. The National Science Authorization Act of 2002, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, called for a doubling of the NSF budget from FY 2002 to FY 2007. The annual appropriations bills have fallen far short of the doubling path specified in the NSF Authorization Act. The FY 2007 budget request for NSF is nearly $4 billion below the level authorized in the last doubling initiative."
There has been some movement in the House: http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=1182 but now we will see what happens in reality. Apparently it is possible to sound good without actually putting the money into it, we'll hope that doesn't happen again. The recent shift in power in the House and Senate might be helpful - we will see.
I don't know if the US as a population is supportive of research though. I would be very interested in a survey which attempts to gauge the public's interest and support for general research funding - does anybody know of a good one?
I don't understand why this fascination with electronic voting exists in the first place. I voted in the midterms and I was horrified to see that there was absolutely no physical record that indicated the black box had in fact recorded my votes correctly.
If one wants to "solve" the problem of ambiguous voting I suppose the idea of a printed paper result that the voter verifies and then places in a box isn't bad, but I think it's overly complex given the issues at hand. I will concede the advantage that a printed result at least stands a very good chance of being completely non-ambiguous in a recount, but why not use some form of punch card and have a mechanical punch the button to stamp your card device in-booth so that there is no variability due to individuals not using proper strength? The card itself will have all relevant information printed on the card surface, but just fit into a purely mechanical device designed to ensure non-ambiguous punching of the result. What's so hard about this?
Of course there are all sorts of less-than-ethical motivations that can be brought up if we assume the worst about folks in power, that would prompt support for non-verifiable votes. Since assuming dishonest motives is the safe thing to do when transfer of power is at stake, I think we should assume the worst and ditch electronic voting altogether. Just my opinion, and perhaps a disservice to those who really think it would help, but sometimes newer really isn't better.
Also, I want a voting BOOTH, that precludes anyone seeing how I vote. Those machines I used this time were basically on stands with minimal visual guards. NOT the sort of thing I remember from when I was young, where the voting booth was fully enclosed. I would prefer to see a return to a healthy skepticism of the system on the part of the public - if people want changes that weaken privacy and verification, look for reasons why.
The technology I think has been stabilizing, each new processor/component doesn't introduce the user visible performance leap its predecessor did. The changes are more incremental now, and older machines have longer lives before they are outpaced by the demands of software (and I have a feeling a lot of those demands aren't really necessary, but that's another issue). Rather than making cheap disposable boxes, I would advocate a return to engineering for durability, robustness, and future proofing (many older machines are built like tanks - I prefer that durable approach to computers personally. My IBM PS/2 keyboard is probably 20 years old, but still works like a champ. There is no excuse for keyboards that don't last - it is a solved problem and the evidence is out there.) Start to make a big deal about 5 or 10 year warranties on computers, and convince the public that they SHOULD be able to use this machine for that period of time. (First of course you must design and build a machine that is actually a reasonable machine to use for such a period, but I doubt that is an insurmountable obstacle - open hardware projects might help.)
Vista's longevity has actually helped consumers I think, because it broke the whole "upgradeupgradeupgrade" mantra that had come before it and provided some real product stability. I doubt this was the original intent, but I'm glad it happened. Perhaps consumer expectations for stability and robustness can be increased, and we can start to engineer operating systems, standards, and APIs that are intended to be bulletproof and last for decades or even centuries.
The JabRef program is extremely useful - http://jabref.sourceforge.net/
Others that spring readily to mind are Jedit - http://jedit.sourceforge.net/ and Jmol - http://jmol.sourceforge.net/ (I usually prefer the application version to the applet version).
There's also Jaxodraw (for Feynman diagrams) http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/
I guess it depends on what you are doing, but there are indeed very useful Java programs out there.
OK, first remark - I want to see this as an official press release on Sun's website, with a link to the code. Then I'll be confident it will really happen.
Second remark - I think the GPL is a good choice for this. Consider what Sun might gain from open source Java under any license:
1) Excellent integration with Linux, *BSD, and any other platform out there they haven't integrated into fully yet (except maybe Windows). They would get all the work done for free, too - distributions would be chomping at the bit to work long and hard on making everything work Just So.
2) Much better realization of cross platform "write once, run everywhere" goals. Well integrated Java everywhere can only help this.
3) Possible improvements as people get a chance to fix anything that's been annoying them for the last several years.
All very logical reasons to open source, IMHO - Java is already freely downloadable. Sun owns the Java trademark, so they have no fear of forks which mean anything in terms of threatening Java mind share - Java has to be one of the most publicly recognizable programming language brand names in the world. Sun will always provide the "only" Java, whatever else out there might run Java programs.
Now, what does GPL do for them, that other licenses might not?
1) Credibility - rather than inventing Yet Another License, making things simple using already established (and I think functional for this purpose) licenses.
2) Prevents commercial forking. Whatever open source Java becomes, it is unlikely that someone would try and compete commercially against Sun when Sun has the commercial code base and original developers. Any work any commercial developer did in competition (that they want to distribute anyway) would have to be offered free to the world under GPL, and even if Sun can't use it directly the ideas alone would be enough to allow them to keep up and maybe get there first in some cases.
3) Allows maximal code sharing in the open world. GPL has its own momentum, as a sort of "logical end point" - free except for the ability to become non-free. That would seem to make a lot of sense to me for Java, particularly since I would expect (like OpenOffice) that most of the best code would come out of Sun and be copyright Sun. Sun can put out what it wants, and still license commercially if they so choose.
Downsides for Sun primarily seem to be the "radical" image associated with GPL in some circles (yes that's a disadvantage if you want to look like a reasonable, sane business to some PHBs) and the inability to combine developments based on GPL Java back into their commercial Java without discussing it with the author. But since this very restriction is also a reassurance to the community in some ways, it might not be all bad.
Anyway, I will watch developments with interest and look forward hopefully to the day when Java on Gentoo can be well integrated and smooth.
Given current raw material supply lines, I believe there might indeed be some limitations on raw materials. However, what I'm not sure of (and the really important question) is whether raw materials supplies could scale to meet the demand while remaining cost effective.
Most materials involved with production of computers have had their refinement processes perfected over a long period of time. Indium, at least in the quantities needed for large scale solar panel construction, may still be an open question. How much is there on the Earth? Of that, how much is usable/obtainable economically? Once the first generation of panels is done, can they be recycled effectively?
It is a concern, but I would like to see real hard core studies done of available raw materials availability and extraction costs before I conclude Indium is or is not viable in the long run.
If you look at road surfaces, you will see that they are "clean" only in the sense of being free of large scale obstacles. Tire marks, dirt, oil, and other random stuff is all over the road surface.
Solar panels need optical transparency in their protective layer. Keeping roads clean enough to provide that level of optical clarity is just not going to be workable, except possible with nanotechnology.
When we get self rebuilding roadbeds then solar roadbeds might be practical, but for now roofs are much more practical as targets - most are slanted, don't have cars running over them, and get rained on periodically to help with self cleaning.
I used to know one of the guys who went to work at Miasolé. He was a sharp guy with a lot of experience in CIGS and related materials.
Slashdot has had a habit of posting the "next big solar breakthrough" which, in the fine print, is not so big yet but will be RSN. CuInGaSe2, on the other hand, has a long track record and previous commercial attempts have produced some solar panels with usable efficiencies (not great, but usable).
CIGS has the advantage of being a direct band gap material, but there are some limits to how far you can push it in efficiency as a single layer device that have not been overcome. One serious advantage is that this material has a fairly wide tolerance on relative elemental composition - different ratios of material in the film will still produce a working cell within a fairly wide range. This is important because industrial process control has tolerances, and wider tolerances mean less expensive production. CuInSe2 and related compositions have some rather interesting electrical properties with respect to defect behavior that allow them to work in this fashion. Anyone with a real interest in this should look at some dense but extremely interesting work by Zunger at NREL.
The biggest problem with CIGS as a production material is probably that it can't "piggyback" on the industry built up for the computer industry. I know that sounds strange, since its lack of reliance on that source of material is also its advantage, but tools to work with CIGS have to be developed more or less from scratch. That's expensive, and the reason that these initial investments are important. The process must be bootstrapped.
CIGS of course doesn't address other problems with solar adoption, such as durability over time, public acceptance and investment, etc. But CIGS is a real material with real potential, and not simply IPO vaporware.
Also of longer term interest is the idea of multijunction solar cells, which use different wavelengths of light on each layer and thus can push efficiencies much higher. Unfortunately they are also an EXTREMELY difficult practical challenge for production. However, there is a lot that can still be done. We REALLY need more funding for solar research in this country, and more basic research in general, but that's another post.
Good luck to the Miasolé team!
Anybody who didn't see this step coming didn't pay attention to Napster. The very elements that made YouTube popular were the elements that they are now having to avoid - Free Content from Everywhere.
Really, I think the **AA folks should be cheering Google for this one - it may just save them a lot of legal costs going after people as YouTube cleans up on its own.
This will just keep happening - people want free stuff and the copyright holders don't want free stuff. Nothing complicated here, folks.
The only Long Term Solution is to have both online content distribution AND FREE CONTENT. Free as in freedom, not "free as in someone uploaded it without permission."
We need some kind of "Non-commercial Crap Filtration" process that works similar to the system used by commercial folk to screen bad content. OK, so theirs doesn't work but they do avoid the "10000 videos of people being dweebs in their living rooms" problem. We need to find a way to identify commercial quality free content and highlight it.
There is no ambiguity here - the copyright holders are in the right. If we want to fight a war against Big Media dominating our culture, we need to establish a legitimate free movement "open source entertainment?" to provide an alternative where all parties are happy with things being free. The fact that we keep infringing commercial copyrights means something is messed up. We need a Better Way, and to do that we need Good Free Content. Is there any? I'm not talking about flash movies of poorly drawn cartoons (like some of that Adult Swim oddness) but Real Honest Good Content with production values, good storylines, and talent.
If we want free entertainment, let's do it the way that allows us the moral high ground. Napster, YouTube, and other such entities are no solution to anything, and the pattern of startup->popular->dead(voluntary cleanup/lawsuit) will just continue indefinitely if we don't break the centralized control of content filtration. Original Star Trek is popular after decades despite cheap sets and somewhat over the top acting - surely that level of production (or better even) is possible fairly easily today. Things like Duality and other Star Wars fanfic are indications that the technical ability (not necessarily the acting or scripting ability, granted...) is out there to do effects that are "good enough" to make decent shows. Elephant Dreams helped push the open source tools for such shows further along, although IIRC there are still fairly significant holes... Let's proceed in a direction that is postitive, legal and creative.
I don't know if it's cause or effect, but I'm not surprised those with intense, focused pursuits have problems with human interaction on average. Interacting with people is a subtle and complex skill and it takes practice to be good. "Non-specialist" people have more time to interact with a wider spectrum of people, and as a result they are better at interaction. No surprise there - intense subjects like mathematics take lots of time to master and are not very social in nature. It's all about what people devote their time and energy to. (Insert usual caveot that statistical summarizations of trends are never binding or even useful when considering individuals.)
"Happiness" is a bit hard to make quantitative, so studies will be a little hard to evaluate or reproduce, but since human beings are designed to be social I would expect that a lack of social interaction would have a negative impact on their "happiness." There are fairly good survival reasons for people to prefer being with the group, although that is less true now than throught most of human history (where being the odd loner would most likely earn one the title "Box Lunch.") Modern civilization opens up opportunities for specialization, and in doing so also introduces relative isolation into the human social framework. How this will play out is not clear, but it's not surprising that there will be changes - human social controls and group socializations depend on knowledge of individual people and personalities. They don't scale well to cities of millions of people.
I fear Google is going to step into a hornet's nest here, sooner or later.
YouTube has the same problem Napster used to have, back when it was wildly successful - its success rests on a lot of material being present on the site, but a lot of that material has copyright problems. (A guess would be that a lot of the higher quality material has copyright problems, for a few reasonable definitions of "higher quality".)
I think any online site of this nature is going to have the same problem. The availability of vast amounts of copyrighted material is one of the things that will build the popularity of this type of site. But if the copyright holders didn't release that video then it will just make trouble in the end.
I don't think people are really all that interested in 1000 videos of people in their living rooms trying to act. TV shows, music videos, natural disaster footage, and all the usual stuff that gets put on TV will be what draws people to any online video site (why do you think it got put on TV in the first place?) Google is making a few deals with some of the big players, who perhaps have realized that it is better to try and cope with this in its current form than have it move somewhere more underground, but there are undoubtedly thousands of copyright holders who would have a case and not all of them will agree. A massive scrubbing will have to take place, and I think once it is over YouTube will be about as interesting to people as Napster was after the lawsuit dust settled. It might do slightly better since there are a few types of home video that people find interesting (uploaded individual videos from major world events, for example) and a few companies are making deals to provide content but I think the "buzz" will fade. The very elements of Napster that made it popular were also what made it illegal, and I'm afraid the same thing will happen here.
These comments are very broad, and thus rather difficult to evaluate, but I'm dubious. The evaluation of political statements is heavily involved with the context in which they are spoken. More important, many "truths" that must be delt with in politics are not "truth" in any absolute, scientific sense. Abortion, for example - people will argue until the end of time whether it should or shouldn't be allowed, and there is no real objective truth to be had there because it is a strictly moral question. You might be able to check concrete facts but that too runs smack into the problem of locating trusted sources, particularly about topics that are politically charged. Average internet opinion does not a fact make.
Also, take the case where a politician is taloring their statements to local concerns. They may make generalizations that do apply on a local scale but make a lot less sense (and are a lot less accurate) in a broader context.
More to the point perhaps, how would the US react to the knowledge that politicians can't be depended on for accuracy in statements? I think it would be a collective "well, duh" type of response.
He says the amount of information we are creating is staggering. That's probably true, but it is dwarfed by the amount of crap and uninformed opinions we are creating (see: slashdot). And on the internet, how does one tell? Deciding what to trust and who to trust is a problem that Google can't solve in general.
One thing that might be more useful is a way to use google to quickly locate references that assert facts, and allow an author to add a citation to that source if they think it is legit (or maybe re-think things if no legit source supports an assertion). But that gets back to what is a legit source? The public is unlikely to know for the range of topics involved ("well, the name sounds legit so I"ll believe them") and if they trust bogus sources being cited then the utility falls apart again, and may even be a step backwards (people sounding "legit" without really being legit, and backing each other up). I'd be happier to see politicians cite a source for their facts more often, but how many people will still agree with the person saying what they want to hear whether or not they have sources to back it up? Or dismiss cited sources that don't support their point of view?
No, in general it can't work without people doing the real work: critical thinking. There is no easy path to accuracy. Objectivity must be evaluted both for speaker and sources, and that always falls on the person asked to listen.
There are degrees of support, and I think you aren't making an apples to apples comparison here.
Point #1: When you talk about support on the scale of the contracts you are describing, the scale is MASSIVE. These are the juicy contracts - provide broad support for systems which are relatively uniform and well maintained. The level of support these setups need is much greater than that available or possible to home users, and since downtime is so expensive they can (and do) pay $$$$ to be very sure and avoid it.
Point #2: OEM licensing for Windows and other consumer products does not have support anything close to the situation described above. The user base is as diverse as you can get, there may be a thousand unanticipiated and unknown combinations that could be installed on any given customer's machine, and you are supposed to make sense out of it. Oh, and there is no incremental reward for dealing with ever more difficult problems - just that same initial flat fee, or perhaps a $/minute phone charge. Yay. That's not what big companies need - they need someone out to fix the problem, NOW. They shell out big bucks for that service, and for good reason. That level of support is not easy.
Why do you think OSS support is so often held up as a big advantage? Because FOR MOST USERS the level of support and help that can be found in the community is far beyond anything they will ever be able to afford in the commercial marketplace. The high end support contracts you are seeing are designed for corporate customers with uniform needs and deep pockets. Buying home or even "Pro" versions of software and not paying a big chunk of cash means you quite simply won't get the kind of support you would get with the big $$. Very, very small vendors MIGHT provide it, but people need to eat if they are doing software as a business and believe me good people aren't cheap. Open source short circuits this with a completely different model, and it just so happens that the benefits trickle down to those who don't pay large $$ too (because $$ aren't the motivator). But you won't get guarantees. Guarantees are EXTREMELY expensive, because they are incredibly hard to support and make real.
Commercial or OS, you get what you pay for in support because in-person help cannot be duplicated at close to zero cost.
I'm not a medical person so perhaps there is some criteria I'm not familiar with, but isn't addictive behavior pretty much the same regardless of what someone is addicted to? Is the question whether the "addiction" is chemically based vs. simply being socially based? (For example, if a nerd likes playing Quake for 16 hours a day instead of interacting normally with the human race, does that constitute addiction or just different mental software?)
;-) The rest of us would probably take issue with that, but really what objective criteria would be used to have the argument?
I mean really, if addiction is defined as depending on the chemicals that are generated when we feel "good" wouldn't an excess of ANYTHING that makes us feel "good" be a candidate for a cause? And wouldn't it be expected that potential causes of addiction depend on the individual? Some are obvious and would impact virtually anyone (chemical manipulation) but other behaviors which don't directly alter mood via chemical means I would intuitively expect to be more subtle.
Heh, maybe anti-social people (not the angry, dangerous wackos but those who are just indifferent to and/or dislike social situations) would argue that the rest of us are addicted to social interaction.
Anybody with a medical degree around here that can point to some definitive definition of the word "addiction" and what it means, medically?
There is no evidence that will quiet those people. Any contradiction to their already formed conclusion will simply be part of the "conspiracy".
It's the same with anyone who has already made their decision without the need for evidence - more evidence doesn't do a thing to them.
I have a feeling you could take some of those people who think NASA faked the moon landing to the moon IN PERSON and they would still conclude that it's an externally imposed delusion, because they are starting from the basic premise that they are right. Facts will need to fit that preconception. Same thing here.
I use and like Gentoo Linux, primarily because it is a distribution that lets me install virtually anything, including odd obscure scientific software, with a minimum of fuss. Additionally, many times when things work, they REALLY work because the distribution doesn't get in the way.
;-)
But I'm considering trying KUbuntu for my next go-around. In addition to the new software compile requirements gradually outrunning my computer's hardware, I must agree that the smoothness of massive universal upgrades just hasn't felt "as clean" of late. The most important environments for my linux box I will usually wind up building myself anyway (Maxima, Axiom, BRL-CAD, various Lisp packages) and for the rest of it I'm less interested in building for hours upon end for minor upgrades. Particularly if there is a decent chance of introducing problems.
Conceptually, I like the idea of a system that can build itself from source code - there's something clean about it, and also self sufficient. If a system can build itself, it means most everything on the system is pretty solid as far as having what it needs in place. But waning horse power and a focus on things other than endless system tweaking may motivate me to shift.
Originally, I loved that Gentoo let me turn on exactly what I needed to get my hardware to work well, and that was my primary motivation for using it. I still love its documentation, and that I suspect may someday outlive the main Gentoo project itself. But I think it might be time to check out the alternatives again, and lower my monthly power bill
I would estimate that Freenode was responsible for more realtime communication between developers and between users/support than any other single medium, and as such it was and is a major asset to the open source movement. It has undoubtedly helped make many projects much better than would have otherwise been possible/workable.
As a legacy, I'd say that's a pretty good one to leave.
This is a really creative and possibly practical idea. I'm quite impressed! Whoever thought that one up deserves the Hacker label, in the good sense!
The very best software doesn't die, it re-invents itself over time.
I point to TeX as the poster child of "do it right, use it forever". There are others. Most major computer algebra systems today have a history back to 20 years or more.
If you separate the graphical goodies from the core logic, the core logic can be done right and last as long as there are people to maintain it. I think that's part of the genious of literate programming - it attempts to ensure that people can fix, update, and extend code forever.
Most software is not designed to last forever, so it's no surprise it doesn't. That does NOT mean that software in inevitably thrown in the dust bin after X years. It shouldn't be that way. Re-inventing the wheel over and over needs to stop - it's a waste of programming talent. I grant it takes a while to figure out how to do hard things correctly, but once we DO know we should do it right and build off of it, not scrap it in 20 years and do it over. Doing it right takes time and is seldom profitable in a commercial setting (or even possible - people want something now rather than 20 years from now and will accept problems to get it sooner.) That's where open source might be an answer - it answers the problem of deliberate forced retirement of code by letting the code out - but we have yet to see if the quality necessary for TeX like staying power will emerge.
"impermissible ex post facto analyais"
I would argue that a panel not knowing any details of the patent application, presented only with a problem description and instructed to suggest ways to solve it, is not an analysis with knowledge of the proposed solution but a clean look at the problem by "people skilled in the art."
People often don't write down obvious applications. Particularly in software, where the theoretical application of some technique is almost literally limitless. You could have thousands upon thousands of pages listing applications for a particular GUI structure, because it is general enough to apply to a plethora of problems. Claiming and monopolizing a specific one devalues the use of the technique by robbing it of the general power that makes it interesting in the first place, and is a serious disservice to the general community. If we're constantly worrying about stepping on patents that cover the solution any programmer would arrive at the instant they started trying to solve a problem, we're simply going to fall far behind the rest of the world economically when it comes to software development and usage. Many of the best and brightest won't tolerate such an environment, and will move to work where they CAN work without such fetters on their creativity.
We need a standard of obviousness that is biased against granting monopolies on ideas willy-nilly, not towards it. Getting a monopoly should be a hard thing to do, because it is always to the benefit of the individual and not the community. The eventual reward to the community has to outweigh any temporary harm done by the monopolizing of the idea, and I would argue that is most definitely not true in the case of software patents.
"What if I design a new type of engine for a car that allows it to get 100 MPG? Do I get some fraction of the revenue from the sale of the entire car, or just the portion that could be considered the cost of the engine?"
I would say the entire car, or products marketed as any sort of package or incentive with the car. Obviously those fine points would have to be designed with care by lawyers who know how they themselves would try and get around it.
"The car is free if you buy our Auto Care Package for 60 months at $500 a month! No revenue from the car, so no royalties. Hardly seems fair."
Oh, agreed. There would need to be provisions to prevent that sort of thing, and no doubt lawyers would have something new to argue about for a while.
"Imagine that we are competitors. I patent something really cool, and that is my main revenue stream. You want me to stop competing with your product, so you take my invention, give it away for free, (which doesn't affect your main revenue stream), and destroy my revenue stream causing my business to lose money, shut down and stop competing in your market. Does that seem fair? We complain about Microsoft doing things like this, but it's OK for OSS to do it? I don't think so."
Some might argue that was Sun's whole reason for buying and open sourcing OpenOffice. In general the effect you describe can be unfortunate, I grant you. Software is a special case, because if you give away code and not just binaries (which in the case of software should be a requirement) then the product doesn't disappear. I think OpenOffice did more good for more people than it did harm to Microsoft, so I am in favor of it. Also, giving inventions in the physical world away for free should not be easy or inexpensive to do, in general. Material goods always have a fixed cost that must be paid, and that's quite a drain. That software does not have these problems is good evidence for why different types of thinking are needed there.
Remember, the original purpose of this entire system is to benefit the public. Freely available software can live on indefinitely and has virtually zero duplication cost, so it gives back indefinitely to the public. Microsoft, on the other hand, does not normally release source code to the world and could in theory kill a product by letting it age and allowing no one to maintain it, or resume charging an arm and a leg for it to provide it again. I would say those two situations are materially different.
"So, if I invent something that will take many years to get into production, I should have to pay more money before I can profit from it? This is also unfair to smaller companies or individuals that don't have the resources of a corporation. $50k for year 20 of the patent is fine for IBM, but would make most individual broke."
Yes, you should. If you wish to control an idea, you should pay for the privilege. Controlling ideas is normally to the benefit of the individual rather than society in general, which is why patents exist as an idea in the first place. Give people enough incentive to create, but in the end it should benefit society as a whole.
"Think of RFID. It took a long time for manufacturing to catch up to the idea. The patent has already expired, but what if it hadn't?"
If it hadn't, they probably would have waited another few years.
Take a group of people "skilled in the art", pose the problem to solve, give them (say) two or three hours, and record their proposed solutions. If what they come up with is similar to what the patent is trying to describe, it's obvious. If they want suggestions, solicite them and don't rely on nobody having bothered to write down the obvious.
By the way, what is "skilled in the art", anyway? If we on slashdot find a lot of these patents silly, what would actual people with training in the specific fields of these patents be saying?
We should also fix the "20 year death grip" on these things. What about this?
Limit the amount of money that can be paid from one company to another for a patent to some fraction of the revenue stream related to that product from the company wanting to use the idea. Allow lump sum payments if the one using the patent prefers to negociate, but have the mandated available option of, say, 15% of the total revenue after taxes (not profit, revenue) being brought in by this product as an option. To prevent companies ganging up on one guy and getting over 100% of his revenue based on multiple patents, make it so that the cap is 50% of total revenue after taxes for the product to all parties who might sue, and they get appropriate fractions of that pie. Make this an "up-front only" option so that if the licensee doesn't want to do it, they can't enter negociations and then fall back on this if they go badly.
This way:
* Big businesses can do what they do now, since they won't want to give up large percentages of their gross revenue
* Smaller businesses can opt for this option since it would cost them less than a fight, and let them stay in business
* It forces businesses not to price too high no matter what, since the patents are not a complete and final barrior to entry for a market. Good for consumers.
* It discourages excessive litigation and collusion between companies to take out small players, since the financial rewards for doing so get less and less the more litigation is piled on - after four companies sue and get their revenue stream, everybody starts getting less of the pie as more people pile on. At some point, it no longer becomes profitible to sue the guy. If he can get buy on 50% of the gross sale price of his product, he can no longer be driven out of business by litigation. The logic being if he can do this, someone else had profit margins that are not good for the consumers and the industry. Of course, you can still make him keep paying legal costs to fight it out, but after four companies get to him he can just not contest anything and let the pieces of the pie get smaller. Then, ironically enough, we could make the companies who are already getting fed out of this pie head off any new patent challenges because they stand to lose financially. This makes the incentive stronger to have only patents that are actually worth something filed, because the potential muscle available to break them becomes greater.
* Patent holders still get money from licensing, although perhaps not as much as they would like (although if the little guy becomes big they are sitting pretty). It should decrease the incentive to file stupid patents because they won't keep people out of the market. Indeed, it will encourage small players to enter and stay small, which is where capitalism works best.
* Open source software without revenue streams can stop worrying about infringing on patents, since 15% of $0 is still $0.
This might be able to provide incentives to innovate while keeping the system functional.
Another idea - expiring patents. Have the patent holder pay a yearly fee to keep the patent in play, and have that fee increase each year. (I think someone suggested something similar for copyright actually - after 30 years, start having people pay more every year to continue to monopolize the rights to it.) That way, if someone isn't making enough money with a patent to support it, it doesn't become an anti-competitive tool and limit someone else being innovative.
No, I hadn't. Ugh. Well, I guess the pay for crawling around in the gutter is good...
On the other hand, if he answered all of those questions already honestly and in the negative, it would still seem to me like a waste of time. If they already tried that attack (it was allowed in circumstances where they DIDN'T have free reign? Wow) and he met it, why would they think it would succeed the second time around, when he's even more prepared for it having heard it the first time?