E-mails along those lines do count as prior art, provided that the e-mail was to a public forum. E-mail from one person to another does not count as a public disclosure.
Yes, this is an additional constraint on my challange. I had thought I had made that implict in my wording, but review shows I did not. Thank you for pointing that out.
It is not required that an invention was already implemented.
Indeed. My entire post was in refutation that you did, including the challange. If you missed this point than we may simply be talking orthoganal to each other.
In addition, if you can show that at the date of filing the invention would have been 'obvious', the patent is also invalid.
And indeed, a consideration of such is supposed to be part of the initial process for granting a patent in the first place. There is a hint of begging the question.
you usually need to have a disclosure that comes close (saw, using a mirror and sunlight to make a cat go crazy)
Well, you'd have a hard time showing that cats go crazy using a mirror and sunlight, because typically they don't. A flashlight is a bit closer, but still easy to show that only a limited number of cats go crazy over them. Only a laser has the peculiar quality of making nearly every cat on earth go crazy.
In any case, such argument is unecessary if you can show the obviousness of the direct case, which we all know was obvious (the definition of "obvious" in the first place) and b) ubiquitously implemented
Except in this case the "implementation" is computer code, a mathmatical algorithm.
In other words, nothing but an idea.
This is the sort of sticky wicket that was opened up by allowing the patenting of algorithms and business plans (again, nothing but an idea. There is no "thing" attached to a business plan).
The idea that you had to show a working implementation died many, many years ago. See the Seldon Patents and the modern allowance of perpetual motion machines. This is the sort of nonsense that ensues when you don't demand a working implementation before granting a patent.
As an exercise for the student I challenge you to demonstrate prior art on the ever popular "Cat Exercise Device," because it is nothing but an idea and one well implemented almost at the instant of the invention of manipulable laser devices.
Emails along the lines of "Hey, my cat goes crazy chasing the laser) will not count. You must demonstrate that the implementation existed at the time.
Prior art on ideas such as this, an idea which is simple, was nearly ubiquitous at the time of filing and relies strictly on the use of an existing item (Hey, I can use a hammer to hit screws too. PATENT that puppy!")is nearly impossible to prove because they are nothing but simple ideas.
And granted patents.
Jefferson got the patent system nearly perfect right out of the box. Since his time the system has slowly become dafter and dafter. In the 1960s it began its slide from merely pretty daft to criminally insane.
Let the buyer beware is a maxim of age old wisdom that applie in all business dealings of any kind. If someone asks you for money, beware.
It is not a tenet of American law. Far from it. The tenet of American law is "Good faith," the exact opposite of let the buyer beware. Assumption of innocence until proven guilty, as it were, applied to civil matters, but the onus is not on the buyer to not get taken. Not getting taken is the legal assumption of the buyer.
However doofey it is to leave the keys in the ignition of your car it is your car and your keys. You may do with them as you will. Anyone who sees your keys in the ignition and takes your car is what we call "a thief."
When one party violates good faith that is called "fraud." If the fraud comes to various dollar amounts than various forces of law and penalties come in to play.
Failing to deliver promised goods when one has accepted payment for such and when one never intended to deliver such goods is fraud.
Lying about a payment you don't deserve in order to recieve it is fraud.
Both are "well orchestrated" scams. Both are equal in the eyes and ears of the law. Only the relative dollar amounts differentiate the two from that point on.
There are certain items of the arcana that are only available to the wise. Ok, some MCSEs know them too, but only a few.
Do wish to have arcane knowledge and be the envy of your 133t friends? How on earth those spammers, well know for deep knowledge of the darkside, produce a cent sign when it isn't on the keyboard?
You (sir/madam) have been carefully selected as one the few who have what it takes to secret forces and such power right at your fingertips!
Don't be a clueless dork anymore. Just send $19.95. Your seat at the table of the Illuminati is waiting. . . for you (sir/madam)!!!
Oh yeah? Well you,. . . ummmmmmmmmm, what I mean to say is. ..
NAZI!!!!!
Yeah, I think that's it.
Oh, wait. I can't talk now, there's an important message on the TV just for me and they're waving something shiney that goes "Ping!" It's not even $100, just 79 payments of $19.95.
I might also point out that crime and violence are seperate issues. One is a behaviour and the other is a violation of a code of behaviour.
Boxing is not a crime. Boxing is violent.
Violence can increase as violent crime decreases. There is no logical connection between crime and violence, only a social connection based on local mores.
Please note that I made no argument as to the "casue" of violent crime. I made an anecdotal reference to a known phenomenon and understand it as such.
It is a mistake to consider that people are rats, or dogs, or chimpanzees. This does not preclude the idea that studying the behaviour of such cannot reveal to us clues about our own behaviours.
Nor did I even imply that violence is the only possible response to overcrowding and local shortages. Since it is not there is no reason to imply direct proportionality between crowding and violence, and I did not do so. It is, however, demonstrably one of the expected responses in virtually all of the mammals, especially those that are carnivorous.
As crowding goes up and shortages occur there is a certain probability of violence increasing, as there is a certain probability of certain other phenomenon as well.
Our own cultural view of suicide is the anomoly and derives, essentially, from Jewish tradition and thus Christian. Even if one does not subscribe to any religion and does not believe in God the social culture that you grew up in, and thus absorbed, is at its heart based on Judeo-Christian ethics and morality.
Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not kill.
Etc.
If you believe you belong to God than harming yourself, God's property, is a sin. I have a friend who cannot be buried in his family plot because he has tatoos. This is selfmutilation and a sin against God. Imagine if you are outcast by a tatoo what suicide must mean.
Most cultures do not have such an underlying belief structure and actually "glorify" suicide, or at least hold it as a valid personal choice.
Chingachgook's selfinflicted death in fire has deep social significance that is difficult to understand unless one abandon's one's own cultural biases and adopts the point of view of the North Eastern Native American.
Suicide is perfectly understandable, especially that done in the name of cultural selfdefense.
What do you suppose Thermopylae was?
Do we not have our own fallen war heros for "God, Honor and Country"?
Even in the "steady state" western nations you can have local overpopulations with dramatic consequences.
Gang violence, school shootings, "going postal"?
We pack a lot of large, predatory animals with a complex social structure based on submission/dominance into small spaces with artificial local shortages.
Can you say, "Too may rats in the cage," boys and girls? I knew you could.
Thiz is alright, as long as Mandarin Chinese is your first language. For everyone else, Thiz is a pain in the butt.
Well damn. See what happens when you learn Cantonese? I use Mu on my laptop. It's alright as long as your first language is sphegetti western Italiaish.
Well, I guess I'm not people then. This is exactly what I want in a laptop. Tablets suck because of the lack of keyboard and I don't want one at all. Laptops suck because of the form, I want to be able to hold it flat and hold it like a book or clipboard when I'm reading text, or just scanning data. Throw in a little stand and it even functions as an electronic picture frame.
This looks just about right.
The Linux part is good. Linux on my desktop, Linux on my laptop.
Lycoris. Oh man. Icky poo! Linux for Windows users for dummies. Who is the intended market for this thing?
Who woulda thunk that they'd make a computer with Linux preloaded that the first thing you had to do was wipe the drive so you could install Linux?
You kids these days have all the high tech stuff, sure, but when I was a kid we had toys that were so incredibly cool that the government has banned their manufacture and actually requested that all existing instantiations be destroyed.
We had toys that could kill, now how cool is that?
http://www.jarts.com/
It's fun until someone loses an eye, or heart, but then it becomes twice as much fun for everyone else.
Well, let us dig down the logic tree a little deeper, shall we?:)
If you are physically "ept" enough to handle a gamepad you are not too physically inept to participate in sports. Football != sports. Perhaps Zen Archery is your ideal sport, or Sumo Wrestling, bowling, Jarts, Hide and Seek,pretending to fish while really taking a nap, whatever.
In any case, sports are just a subcatagory of gaming really, so if your gamepad makes you happy, go for it.
And in my book a whiz with a gamepad is every bit the wonder that a whiz with a basketball is.
I'd only point out that televised sports must, at some point, involve participants. They aren't (except for maybe professional wrestling) movies.
Perhaps the fact that the subject came up in the context of television helped cloud the issue, but I've found the same confusion exists in general anyway.
When I was speaking of sports and games I was not at all talking about watching sports or games. I was talking about sports, which are inherently participatory.
Television is media, primarily entertainment, not sports.
I RTFA. It says that gaming and the online experience, even that not attached to gaming, is a more compelling experience than watching TV.
In other words, comparitively, TV is crap.
I'd point out that because of the biased point of view of the article (this does not mean bad, simply that their interest if very specific) they don't really understand what's going on anyway, as most of the media doesn't.
For instance, there is strong implication that the article doesn't really have anything to so with me, a physicist, businessman, family oriented guy of 46 who happens to work with computers. The sort of guy like the author says "wouldn't be interested in Counter Strike." And I suppose he'd right. I'm into AoE, Red Baron 3D, Grand Prix Legends and NASCAR, and I'm looking into what sort of upgrades I'd have to make to run IL-2 Sturmovik properly.
I not only game online several hours a week but take my Grand Prix Legends racing just as seriously as do people who participate in Karting or Formula Ford. As far as I'm concerned marginalizing such serious computer gaming is just as daft as marginalinzing Wimbeldon, The PGA or the World Cup would be. They're all just "games," and all of them only draw their import from the fact that people give them import.
I also watch a fair amount of TV, often while I'm gaming, so if the content is compelling the one does not necessarily prclude the other. But I'm one of those guys that Nielson says "doesn't count," because I can't even remember the last time I watched a network show. C-Span, The Science Channel, Discovery (when they're not pretending that UFOs and Jesus are science), TLC (when they're not pretending that dating reality shows are educational), National Geographic, The Comedy Channel, Sci-Fi, BBC America. . . more good stuff on there in a few hours than all the networks put together broadcast in a month.
Nielson needs to recognize people like me, so do the networks.
Put on good shit and I'll watch it, even though I spend hours a day online.
I just came back from making a deposit in my checking account. This took rather longer than it might have. In front of me in line was a young girl and her mother trying to open a junior passbook account.
For those that don't know in America we have program to teach school aged children savings, banking and the benfits thereof. (Everyone sing, "Tupence, carfully, prudently. . ")
These poor people were unable to open said account because the child did not have a driver's license. The Patriot Act imposes certain requirements on the mere opening of an account ( a simple, contractual business transaction involing a matter of cents) even applying to accounts available to only schoolchildren.
The mother was not allowed to swear for her own child and use her own ID, even though the law makes her the legal custodian of the account.
In the opinion of the bank's lawyers only a driver's license in out state complies with the Patriot Act's requirements. Specifically even the child's Federally issued Social Security card or Passport did not comply with the Federal ID law for opening any banking account.
Recently Howard Dean and his closest associates were directed to go stand in a "Free Speech Zone" corral while on their way to a political function, because they were carrying signs that said "I'm For Dean" and this was deemed to be a protest and thus restricted for "security" reasons. The security personel were, of course, were in error, but actually the law allows this sort of behaviour. The fact that security personel can even think that supporters of the leading Democratic Party candidate, and the candidate himself, for President is "protesting" for supporting himself is scary, nevermind issues of the right to assemble and protest.
Ashcroft is promoting laws that would allow the government to take into custody, without warrant and even without a charge, anyone whom they held to be "under suspicion" and such people could be held indefinately, without representation, indeed without any necessity on the part of the government that they had done so.
There's a word for such people: Desaparecidos
Go ahead. Google on it.
You're right, Ashcroft isn't a Nazi, but that's rather like saying you've just been eaten by a leopard, not a panther.
Think things can't get worse? This is America, after all. Well, I would argue that protections that this can't happen in America if the very protections that are designed to prevent it from happening are held to be void.
I would also suggest you Google on leopard+spots+change.
A focus group that does its own editing in a peer reviewed manner.
This might be a useful concept for businesses and publicly accessable reference materials such as web based encyclopedias, but all the documents it's going to produce are going to read like corporate brouchures and encyclopedias.
Unless of course the document is a work of literary art. Then it will read like the script for a really bad generic TV show written to please focus groups because this is the exact process used to produce such scripts, only this is done. ..
Slashdot Mirror
E-mails along those lines do count as prior art, provided that the e-mail was to a public forum. E-mail from one person to another does not count as a public disclosure.
Yes, this is an additional constraint on my challange. I had thought I had made that implict in my wording, but review shows I did not. Thank you for pointing that out.
It is not required that an invention was already implemented.
Indeed. My entire post was in refutation that you did, including the challange. If you missed this point than we may simply be talking orthoganal to each other.
In addition, if you can show that at the date of filing the invention would have been 'obvious', the patent is also invalid.
And indeed, a consideration of such is supposed to be part of the initial process for granting a patent in the first place. There is a hint of begging the question.
you usually need to have a disclosure that comes close (saw, using a mirror and sunlight to make a cat go crazy)
Well, you'd have a hard time showing that cats go crazy using a mirror and sunlight, because typically they don't. A flashlight is a bit closer, but still easy to show that only a limited number of cats go crazy over them. Only a laser has the peculiar quality of making nearly every cat on earth go crazy.
In any case, such argument is unecessary if you can show the obviousness of the direct case, which we all know was obvious (the definition of "obvious" in the first place) and b) ubiquitously implemented
KFG
Ah yes, patenting ftp and email to store your own files is sooooooooo much better.
KFG
They were just afraid to violate the IP on "Earth, Wind & Fire."
KFG
Except in this case the "implementation" is computer code, a mathmatical algorithm.
In other words, nothing but an idea.
This is the sort of sticky wicket that was opened up by allowing the patenting of algorithms and business plans (again, nothing but an idea. There is no "thing" attached to a business plan).
The idea that you had to show a working implementation died many, many years ago. See the Seldon Patents and the modern allowance of perpetual motion machines. This is the sort of nonsense that ensues when you don't demand a working implementation before granting a patent.
As an exercise for the student I challenge you to demonstrate prior art on the ever popular "Cat Exercise Device," because it is nothing but an idea and one well implemented almost at the instant of the invention of manipulable laser devices.
Emails along the lines of "Hey, my cat goes crazy chasing the laser) will not count. You must demonstrate that the implementation existed at the time.
Prior art on ideas such as this, an idea which is simple, was nearly ubiquitous at the time of filing and relies strictly on the use of an existing item (Hey, I can use a hammer to hit screws too. PATENT that puppy!")is nearly impossible to prove because they are nothing but simple ideas.
And granted patents.
Jefferson got the patent system nearly perfect right out of the box. Since his time the system has slowly become dafter and dafter. In the 1960s it began its slide from merely pretty daft to criminally insane.
KFG
KFG
Q.E.D.
KFG
Look at how many more of them we need just to tell us how to store things on magnetic and optical media.
KFG
But he needs an editor, or at least a nap.
KFG
Let the buyer beware is a maxim of age old wisdom that applie in all business dealings of any kind. If someone asks you for money, beware.
It is not a tenet of American law. Far from it. The tenet of American law is "Good faith," the exact opposite of let the buyer beware. Assumption of innocence until proven guilty, as it were, applied to civil matters, but the onus is not on the buyer to not get taken. Not getting taken is the legal assumption of the buyer.
However doofey it is to leave the keys in the ignition of your car it is your car and your keys. You may do with them as you will. Anyone who sees your keys in the ignition and takes your car is what we call "a thief."
When one party violates good faith that is called "fraud." If the fraud comes to various dollar amounts than various forces of law and penalties come in to play.
Failing to deliver promised goods when one has accepted payment for such and when one never intended to deliver such goods is fraud.
Lying about a payment you don't deserve in order to recieve it is fraud.
Both are "well orchestrated" scams. Both are equal in the eyes and ears of the law. Only the relative dollar amounts differentiate the two from that point on.
KFG
There are certain items of the arcana that are only available to the wise. Ok, some MCSEs know them too, but only a few.
Do wish to have arcane knowledge and be the envy of your 133t friends? How on earth those spammers, well know for deep knowledge of the darkside, produce a cent sign when it isn't on the keyboard?
You (sir/madam) have been carefully selected as one the few who have what it takes to secret forces and such power right at your fingertips!
Don't be a clueless dork anymore. Just send $19.95. Your seat at the table of the Illuminati is waiting. . . for you (sir/madam)!!!
KFG
Oh yeah? Well you,. . . ummmmmmmmmm, what I mean to say is. . .
NAZI!!!!!
Yeah, I think that's it.
Oh, wait. I can't talk now, there's an important message on the TV just for me and they're waving something shiney that goes "Ping!" It's not even $100, just 79 payments of $19.95.
Wow! I can afford $19.95
Gotta go.
KFG
I might also point out that crime and violence are seperate issues. One is a behaviour and the other is a violation of a code of behaviour.
Boxing is not a crime. Boxing is violent.
Violence can increase as violent crime decreases. There is no logical connection between crime and violence, only a social connection based on local mores.
KFG
Please note that I made no argument as to the "casue" of violent crime. I made an anecdotal reference to a known phenomenon and understand it as such.
It is a mistake to consider that people are rats, or dogs, or chimpanzees. This does not preclude the idea that studying the behaviour of such cannot reveal to us clues about our own behaviours.
Nor did I even imply that violence is the only possible response to overcrowding and local shortages. Since it is not there is no reason to imply direct proportionality between crowding and violence, and I did not do so. It is, however, demonstrably one of the expected responses in virtually all of the mammals, especially those that are carnivorous.
As crowding goes up and shortages occur there is a certain probability of violence increasing, as there is a certain probability of certain other phenomenon as well.
KFG
Our own cultural view of suicide is the anomoly and derives, essentially, from Jewish tradition and thus Christian. Even if one does not subscribe to any religion and does not believe in God the social culture that you grew up in, and thus absorbed, is at its heart based on Judeo-Christian ethics and morality.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not kill.
Etc.
If you believe you belong to God than harming yourself, God's property, is a sin. I have a friend who cannot be buried in his family plot because he has tatoos. This is selfmutilation and a sin against God. Imagine if you are outcast by a tatoo what suicide must mean.
Most cultures do not have such an underlying belief structure and actually "glorify" suicide, or at least hold it as a valid personal choice.
Chingachgook's selfinflicted death in fire has deep social significance that is difficult to understand unless one abandon's one's own cultural biases and adopts the point of view of the North Eastern Native American.
Suicide is perfectly understandable, especially that done in the name of cultural selfdefense.
What do you suppose Thermopylae was?
Do we not have our own fallen war heros for "God, Honor and Country"?
KFG
Even in the "steady state" western nations you can have local overpopulations with dramatic consequences.
Gang violence, school shootings, "going postal"?
We pack a lot of large, predatory animals with a complex social structure based on submission/dominance into small spaces with artificial local shortages.
Can you say, "Too may rats in the cage," boys and girls? I knew you could.
KFG
You don't need commas between prepositional phrases.
But I may, if I wish, for poetical form.
Where an em dash won't do, a comma will perform.
It denotes a cadence, in a graphical way,
and I hear that GUIs are the rage, or so they say.
If you don't like my commas, well, what can I say?
Non-rhyming verse isn't everybody's cup of tea anyway so bugger off mate.
KFG
Thiz is alright, as long as Mandarin Chinese is your first language. For everyone else, Thiz is a pain in the butt.
Well damn. See what happens when you learn Cantonese? I use Mu on my laptop. It's alright as long as your first language is sphegetti western Italiaish.
KFG
And some of them have been using computers, to produce text, for decades. Scarey, isn't it?
KFG
Well, I guess I'm not people then. This is exactly what I want in a laptop. Tablets suck because of the lack of keyboard and I don't want one at all. Laptops suck because of the form, I want to be able to hold it flat and hold it like a book or clipboard when I'm reading text, or just scanning data. Throw in a little stand and it even functions as an electronic picture frame.
This looks just about right.
The Linux part is good. Linux on my desktop, Linux on my laptop.
Lycoris. Oh man. Icky poo! Linux for Windows users for dummies. Who is the intended market for this thing?
Who woulda thunk that they'd make a computer with Linux preloaded that the first thing you had to do was wipe the drive so you could install Linux?
KFG
Oh my, you're young, aren't you?
You kids these days have all the high tech stuff, sure, but when I was a kid we had toys that were so incredibly cool that the government has banned their manufacture and actually requested that all existing instantiations be destroyed.
We had toys that could kill, now how cool is that?
http://www.jarts.com/
It's fun until someone loses an eye, or heart, but then it becomes twice as much fun for everyone else.
KFG
Well, let us dig down the logic tree a little deeper, shall we? :)
If you are physically "ept" enough to handle a gamepad you are not too physically inept to participate in sports. Football != sports. Perhaps Zen Archery is your ideal sport, or Sumo Wrestling, bowling, Jarts, Hide and Seek,pretending to fish while really taking a nap, whatever.
In any case, sports are just a subcatagory of gaming really, so if your gamepad makes you happy, go for it.
And in my book a whiz with a gamepad is every bit the wonder that a whiz with a basketball is.
KFG
I'd only point out that televised sports must, at some point, involve participants. They aren't (except for maybe professional wrestling) movies.
Perhaps the fact that the subject came up in the context of television helped cloud the issue, but I've found the same confusion exists in general anyway.
When I was speaking of sports and games I was not at all talking about watching sports or games. I was talking about sports, which are inherently participatory.
Television is media, primarily entertainment, not sports.
KFG
I RTFA. It says that gaming and the online experience, even that not attached to gaming, is a more compelling experience than watching TV.
In other words, comparitively, TV is crap.
I'd point out that because of the biased point of view of the article (this does not mean bad, simply that their interest if very specific) they don't really understand what's going on anyway, as most of the media doesn't.
For instance, there is strong implication that the article doesn't really have anything to so with me, a physicist, businessman, family oriented guy of 46 who happens to work with computers. The sort of guy like the author says "wouldn't be interested in Counter Strike." And I suppose he'd right. I'm into AoE, Red Baron 3D, Grand Prix Legends and NASCAR, and I'm looking into what sort of upgrades I'd have to make to run IL-2 Sturmovik properly.
I not only game online several hours a week but take my Grand Prix Legends racing just as seriously as do people who participate in Karting or Formula Ford. As far as I'm concerned marginalizing such serious computer gaming is just as daft as marginalinzing Wimbeldon, The PGA or the World Cup would be. They're all just "games," and all of them only draw their import from the fact that people give them import.
I also watch a fair amount of TV, often while I'm gaming, so if the content is compelling the one does not necessarily prclude the other. But I'm one of those guys that Nielson says "doesn't count," because I can't even remember the last time I watched a network show. C-Span, The Science Channel, Discovery (when they're not pretending that UFOs and Jesus are science), TLC (when they're not pretending that dating reality shows are educational), National Geographic, The Comedy Channel, Sci-Fi, BBC America. . . more good stuff on there in a few hours than all the networks put together broadcast in a month.
Nielson needs to recognize people like me, so do the networks.
Put on good shit and I'll watch it, even though I spend hours a day online.
KFG
. . .indeed without any necessity on the part of the government to inform anyone that they had done so.
I'm tired. I've been standing in line at a busy bank. I'm going to go have a cup of coffee and a lie down, thank you very much.
KFG
I just came back from making a deposit in my checking account. This took rather longer than it might have. In front of me in line was a young girl and her mother trying to open a junior passbook account.
For those that don't know in America we have program to teach school aged children savings, banking and the benfits thereof. (Everyone sing, "Tupence, carfully, prudently. . ")
These poor people were unable to open said account because the child did not have a driver's license. The Patriot Act imposes certain requirements on the mere opening of an account ( a simple, contractual business transaction involing a matter of cents) even applying to accounts available to only schoolchildren.
The mother was not allowed to swear for her own child and use her own ID, even though the law makes her the legal custodian of the account.
In the opinion of the bank's lawyers only a driver's license in out state complies with the Patriot Act's requirements. Specifically even the child's Federally issued Social Security card or Passport did not comply with the Federal ID law for opening any banking account.
Recently Howard Dean and his closest associates were directed to go stand in a "Free Speech Zone" corral while on their way to a political function, because they were carrying signs that said "I'm For Dean" and this was deemed to be a protest and thus restricted for "security" reasons. The security personel were, of course, were in error, but actually the law allows this sort of behaviour. The fact that security personel can even think that supporters of the leading Democratic Party candidate, and the candidate himself, for President is "protesting" for supporting himself is scary, nevermind issues of the right to assemble and protest.
Ashcroft is promoting laws that would allow the government to take into custody, without warrant and even without a charge, anyone whom they held to be "under suspicion" and such people could be held indefinately, without representation, indeed without any necessity on the part of the government that they had done so.
There's a word for such people: Desaparecidos
Go ahead. Google on it.
You're right, Ashcroft isn't a Nazi, but that's rather like saying you've just been eaten by a leopard, not a panther.
Think things can't get worse? This is America, after all. Well, I would argue that protections that this can't happen in America if the very protections that are designed to prevent it from happening are held to be void.
I would also suggest you Google on leopard+spots+change.
KFG
A focus group that does its own editing in a peer reviewed manner.
.
This might be a useful concept for businesses and publicly accessable reference materials such as web based encyclopedias, but all the documents it's going to produce are going to read like corporate brouchures and encyclopedias.
Unless of course the document is a work of literary art. Then it will read like the script for a really bad generic TV show written to please focus groups because this is the exact process used to produce such scripts, only this is done. .
on the web!
Quick Ian. File a patent.
KFG