That's not an answer. And I think you know it as well as I do.
First, I'm quite familiar with computability and Godel's incompleteness theorems, and they have nothing at all to do with the question. There is absolutely nothing in them that implies AI is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. In fact, most AI researchers probably understand those subjects far better than you do - and they still consider AI to be a worthwhile problem to study.
Second, the current state of the art in AI is irrelevant. You didn't just say there were things computers can't currently do. You said there are things no computer can ever do, no matter how powerful. That claim needs to be justified.
Third, AI has actually been making dramatic progress in recent years. After decades of following paths that didn't lead anywhere, researchers have finally found some techniques that enabled major breakthroughs. If you want to see practical applications of that, just look at Watson or Siri or the like. A mere five years ago, both of those would have been science fiction. Today they're real.
Actually, almost everything you just said is wrong. It might have been true back in the 1800's. Once upon a time, scientists thought of the universe as being made of "matter" and "energy" (whatever those were), and worried about whether there was an "objective physical world". But not many physicists, or at least not many cosmologists, think that way any more. Instead they regard the universe as being made of information. Essentially all the concepts you brought up and many more - matter, energy, consciousness, space, time, physical laws, subjective experience - are properties of that information. Physicists try to figure out what are the most fundamental bits of information, and how do they behave. And asking whether those bits of information exist in a quantum foam or a computer simulation or the mind of God or a completely abstract mathematical system of equations is ultimately meaningless. So is asking whether that information is "objective" or "subjective". Whatever is, is. We try to learn what we can learn about it.
I wouldn't call it "nonsense". It's very well documented that people who come near to dying have certain experiences, and the details of those experiences are very consistent between people. And we really don't understand what the origin of those experiences is. That makes it an interesting phenomenon to study. Some people propose religious explanations for them. If you don't believe those explanations are right, the very best thing you can do is study those experiences scientifically and figure out what is really going on. Then you'll know, and you'll have a legitimate response to people who tell you it's all about the soul escaping from the body. You won't convince them of course, but that's beside the point. What matters is that there's something we don't understand, and if scientists don't figure out what's really going on, no one else is likely to.
Actually we do understand that human minds can do things that computers cannot do, and that is currently fundamental, i.e. not a question of the power of the computer, but a lack of any implementable theory that could make a computer do these things.
Could you be more specific? What are some things a human can do that it is fundamentally impossible for any computer, no matter how powerful, to do?
You have some really strange preconceptions about what a "tablet" means. For example, you mentioned the lack of right click multiple times. Why do you assume a Windows or Linux based tablet would use a mouse any differently than any other Windows or Linux computer? A tablet is nothing but a form factor. It implies nothing about its capabilities or software. Much like "laptop" has for some years. I'm typing this on a laptop right now. It has an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor hooked up to it, and is functionally indistinguishable from a desktop... right up until the moment when I detach the keyboard and monitor and take it with me to a meeting. Try doing that with a desktop! That's why laptops have been steadily replacing desktops for years. And why tablets could easily do the same thing to laptops.
Let's consider the Transformer Prime, since it's one of the best examples of where I think tablets are going. USB? Check. HD? It has 64 GB internal storage, which was a standard size for laptop SSDs just a couple of years ago, and it has an SD card slot if you need more. HDMI? Check. Wireless ethernet? Check. Quad core processor, 1 GB RAM - that was a standard laptop not very many years ago. And people switched from desktops to laptops because the laptops were good enough for what they needed to do.
You're looking at a tablet and thinking, "Small screen with a touch based UI." Instead you need to look at it and think, "Computer." Aside from differences in storage, memory, and processing power (which are all increasing rapidly), it's really no different from any other computer. Except that it can be used as a tablet when you want to, which is very convenient in some cases. Sure, you could get a tablet and a laptop and a desktop, but that's more expensive and creates all sorts of complications with syncing your data and applications between them. Much easier to have a single device that works well as all three. As long as it's powerful enough to meet your needs (which is already true for many users, and will be true for many more within a couple of years), why would you do anything else?
Your point about relative versus absolute growth was based on fictional numbers that you just made up. Desktop sales have not been growing by 10% per year. They haven't even been growing by 0% per year. They've been shrinking. That means something's been displacing them. For a long time it's been laptops, but now laptop sales have stopped growing too. Three guesses where the sales are going now, and the first two don't count.
Tablet sales really don't mean much because people are not replacing desktops with tablets.
I think that remains to be seen. There's no question that tablet sales are booming while desktop/laptop sales are flat or even decreasing slightly.
It's very plausible that within a couple of years, many people will just be buying a single device that serves as everything. On its own, it's a tablet. Attach a keyboard and it becomes a netbook/laptop. Add an external monitor and mouse and it becomes a desktop. There are already devices that do this (like the Asus Transformer series), and more on their way (like the MS Surface). And what OS will those devices run? There's a lot of money riding on that question, but Windows, Android, iOS, ChromeOS, and (non-Android) Linux are all competing.
3. This work is correct in theory, but does not work in practice. Researchers will have an interesting time figuring out where the original theory of thermodynamics is flawed. And this will then hopefully lead to a better understanding of our universe.
If it works in theory but not practice, the flaw is almost certainly in quantum mechanics, not thermodynamics. Thermodynamics (or more accurately, statistical mechanics) is in some sense the most firmly grounded of all fields of physics. That's because it's really just pure math. It begins with some very general assumptions that are expected to be true for almost any physical theory, and then works out consequences that mathematically must follow from them for any physical theory.
In this case, they've worked out that math for quantum mechanics, and shown that the existence of entanglement leads to some unexpected consequences. But entanglement is itself a controversial and poorly understood concept. We have lots of experimental results that we explain using that concept. But what that "really means" is unclear. There are many, many competing interpretations of quantum mechanics, and they explain those experimental results in very different ways. So this paper's results might not apply to all of those interpretations.
The summary is very misleading. This work is purely theoretical. They have not actually succeeded in doing it, contrary to what the summary would make you think.
It will be interesting to see whether someone can actually make this work in practice.
Why is it that every time a story is posted about a new solar technology, someone replies to say, "We keep hearing about new solar technologies, but they won't make it onto the market for years." Wrong! All these new solar technologies you keep hearing about are making it onto the market. That's one of the reasons solar prices have been dropping like a rock in recent years.
You know the religious fanatics who stand in the middle of college campuses shouting at everyone passing by that the end of the world is coming, and they're all going to Hell, and generally making fools of themselves? And you know how people laugh at them, or shout back at them, or make jokes about them to the crowd, or point out loudly what absurd fools they are?
That's exactly what they want to happen.
You see, they aren't targeting those people who stand around and laugh at them. But somewhere in the crowd is someone who feels sorry for them. Someone who knows perfectly well they're a religious fanatic, but that still doesn't give people the right to laugh at them. And so afterward that person will go up and talk to the religious fanatic, just to be polite, just to say, "I wasn't one of the people laughing at you, and I don't approve of them doing it."
And that is who they're really targeting. That person who is trying to be polite, and is off their guard, and who suddenly finds the religious fanatic is actually a friendly person who can talk intelligently and doesn't sound like a fanatic at all anymore. By laughing at the fanatic, you helped them to lure in the person they were really after, and gave them a chance to give the real recruiting pitch.
Trolling fanatics may be fun, but it can easily have the opposite effect from what you intend.
That's exactly what we've got in California, and believe me, it is not a good thing. A major and unforeseen effect of term limits is that people in the state legislature have little interest in the long term health of the institutions they belong to. If you hope to be in office for many years to come, and you know the people you're working with may be there too, that affects what you do. Your desire to get what you want right now is moderated by the knowledge that whatever you do, you'll be living with the consequences for a long time.
But if you know you'll be out of there in another year or two because of term limits, that's much less of a concern. You won't be around to deal with the consequences of what you do. And if you know someone else will be out of there in another year or two because they'll hit their term limits, you don't care so much about destroying your working relationship with them.
The result is a dysfunctional legislature where nothing gets done. Including things that really desperately need to get done, like overhauling the state bureaucracy to reduce the massive amount of waste going on.
I haven't read that particular article, so I can't comment on that. I'll just point out that your objections aren't necessarily as serious as you think.
1. Raise taxes on everyone to give poor people guaranteed minimum incomes.
Well, clearly someone has to pay taxes to pay for this. But virtually every industrialized country already has a system where wealthy people pay taxes, and those fund social services that are given to the poor. The guaranteed basic income is simply one way of organizing that. It isn't necessarily more expensive than other ways, and may end up being less expensive if it reduces social problems that we currently spend a lot of money dealing with. This is a really complicated question, and if you think the answer is obvious, that just means you haven't thought about it enough yet.
2. Wages for unskilled workers must rise dramatically in order to make work a more compelling option than doing nothing and taking the guaranteed minimum income.
The system can be organized to limit this problem. For example, for every 1 Imperial Credit (IC) you earn, you receive 0.5 IC less from the government. That way you always have an incentive to work, because doing so will always increase your income. That is not true of the current systems found in many places, where you lose specific benefits at specific income levels. Those truly do discourage people from working, because they create situations where working more actually decreases your income. So this would be an improvement over how things are now.
3. Costs of all goods and services in the economy (like food) increase sharply.
I assume this is meant to be a consequence of #2? But since I don't accept that as true, I obviously don't accept this either. Or do you have some other, independent reason for thinking this is true?
With a standard USB port and Bluetooth support, it will be possible to use controllers and peripherals with it other than the one it comes with. What this also opens the door for is piracy and emulation. No doubt a chunk of the audience interested in PCs are those intrigued by the idea of having a box that hooks up to a TV and can run Super Nintendo or Genesis emulators. Others will look at the system's open nature as an invitation to play its games for free; if it's as open as advertised, it should not be difficult to obtain and run illegally downloaded copies of PC games.
Clearly no one will ever want to develop games for PCs.
It's certainly one problem with the patent system, but I'm not convinced it's the only problem. Even if you had to put in a lot of work to solve a problem, why does it automatically follow that the government should give you a monopoly on that idea, and no one else should be allowed to use it? The claim is that patents benefit society, but I think that's far more an article of faith than a firmly established fact. Hence my suggestion. Proponents of patents should have to justify that yes, granting monopolies on ideas really will benefit society. They should have to justify it independently for each category of invention: just because it's true for one category, that doesn't mean it's necessarily true for all other categories. And when in doubt, the default should be not to grant monopolies.
My belief is that when we really study the evidence, certain popular categories of patents (software patents, business method patents) will be found to do far more harm than good. But that's a question that needs to be settled based on evidence, and our current patent system doesn't even ask the question.
One problem with line-drawing like that is that it leads to edge cases and gaming the system.
We already have that problem. It's just that currently everything defaults to being on one side of the line, and I'm proposing it should default to the other side of the line.
Further, we have international treaty obligations that would make it very difficult to go to such a restrictive view of patentable subject matter
Treaties, like everything else in the world of law, can be changed. Let's figure out what the law (including treaties) should be, and then try to make it that way.
And anyway, the natural experiment that happened between the US (biotech patentable) and Europe & Japan (more restrictive view of patenting biotech) has shown that taking an expansive view of patentable subject matter seems to be beneficial.
Many people would dispute your conclusions, but putting that aside: all it shows is that patents are beneficial for this one specific type of invention. It doesn't automatically follow that they're also beneficial for computer algorithms, user interface gestures, business methods, agricultural techniques, or anything else. Each of those needs to be considered independently.
This is a misstatement. It must be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention.
It's known as "irony". But the reality is that patent lawyers have defined the word "obvious" to mean something completely different from what it means to most people. A patent lawyer once defined it for me as follows: "If you had to solve an engineering problem to do something, then it wasn't obvious." If it was a trivially easy engineering problem, and any competent engineer could have solved it in two minutes and produced a similar solution, that's irrelevant. That is what patent lawyers consider "obvious" to mean, and it's not what most people "having ordinary skill in the art" would consider it to mean.
How about this concept. Currently, the default assumption is that anything can be patented. Devices, processes, visual styles, anything. There are a few things that explicitly aren't allowed to be patented (such as mathematical algorithms - yes, laugh everyone), but as long as something doesn't fall into one of those categories, and meets some very minimal requirements (being original, useful, and non-obvious to a patent lawyer), it's patentable.
Let's reverse it. By default, things cannot be patented. The government shouldn't give out monopolies by default. Then we should consider specific categories and decide whether there's an overwhelming social interest in letting that type of invention - and only that type - be patented. And we should use a very high standard for making that decision. If there's any uncertainty in whether patents for a category of invention would really help society, we should err against giving out monopolies.
No, I'm not confusing them. People who believe global warming doesn't exist oppose spending any money at all on reducing CO2 - not one penny - because they don't believe the problem it causes actually exists. They see absolutely nothing wrong with burning fossil fuel.
I don't find that to be much of a problem with it, but YMMV. Note that the keys are larger and more evenly spaced than with most keyboards, which helps.
On the contrary: global warming is based on very simple thermodynamic arguments. The details get ferociously complicated, because the earth's climate is a huge chaotic system, but the simple fact that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces warming is incredibly well grounded in theory and experiment. In fact, it would be an incredible conclusion if we found that didn't happen, and it would upset some of our most basic understandings of the laws of physics.
That's why Arrhenius began studying it way back in the 1890s. Because even then, well over a century ago, it was clear we were adding a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere, and basic thermodynamics indicated that would affect the climate. This isn't some sort of modern political swindle created by the scientific establishment, much as the skeptics would like us to believe it is. And while the details of exactly how much the temperature will change, and where, and how quickly are very difficult to predict (but we've made a lot of progress on that too), the simple fact that it will change is very very easy to show.
No, actually that's a farcical parody invented to let you blow off the people you disagree with. It has no connection to what they actually say.
Even the way you refer to them - "AGW proponents" - shows just how misleading your thought processes are. They are not "proponents" of global warming. In fact, they are not as group in favor of anything at all. The only thing they have in common is that they accept the overwhelming body of evidence really does show what it shows. That is their defining quality, just as the defining quality of "AGW skeptics" is that they deny the evidence shows what it really does show. You're trying to conflate two completely different issues: what are the facts, and what is a sensible response to them? Accepting the reality of global warming does not imply any particular policy, but you can't intelligently choose a policy until you accept the facts. You don't like particular policies that have been proposed, and you are using that as an excuse to ignore the facts.
And contrary to what you say, lots of global warming skeptics believe we should stop all R&D toward reducing CO2 emissions. After all, they don't believe there's anything wrong with CO2, so why should we waste money trying to reduce it?
In other news, tobacco companies say the risks of smoking have been exaggerated, and gun manufacturers deny their products contribute to violent crime. Of course. What do you expect them to say?
These are complex issues with a lot to be said on both sides. But the CEO of an oil company downplaying the risks of burning oil and blaming the controversy on an illiterate public and a lazy press is not news. It contributes nothing valuable to the discussion, and doesn't teach us anything we didn't already know.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not an answer. And I think you know it as well as I do.
First, I'm quite familiar with computability and Godel's incompleteness theorems, and they have nothing at all to do with the question. There is absolutely nothing in them that implies AI is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. In fact, most AI researchers probably understand those subjects far better than you do - and they still consider AI to be a worthwhile problem to study.
Second, the current state of the art in AI is irrelevant. You didn't just say there were things computers can't currently do. You said there are things no computer can ever do, no matter how powerful. That claim needs to be justified.
Third, AI has actually been making dramatic progress in recent years. After decades of following paths that didn't lead anywhere, researchers have finally found some techniques that enabled major breakthroughs. If you want to see practical applications of that, just look at Watson or Siri or the like. A mere five years ago, both of those would have been science fiction. Today they're real.
Actually, almost everything you just said is wrong. It might have been true back in the 1800's. Once upon a time, scientists thought of the universe as being made of "matter" and "energy" (whatever those were), and worried about whether there was an "objective physical world". But not many physicists, or at least not many cosmologists, think that way any more. Instead they regard the universe as being made of information. Essentially all the concepts you brought up and many more - matter, energy, consciousness, space, time, physical laws, subjective experience - are properties of that information. Physicists try to figure out what are the most fundamental bits of information, and how do they behave. And asking whether those bits of information exist in a quantum foam or a computer simulation or the mind of God or a completely abstract mathematical system of equations is ultimately meaningless. So is asking whether that information is "objective" or "subjective". Whatever is, is. We try to learn what we can learn about it.
I wouldn't call it "nonsense". It's very well documented that people who come near to dying have certain experiences, and the details of those experiences are very consistent between people. And we really don't understand what the origin of those experiences is. That makes it an interesting phenomenon to study. Some people propose religious explanations for them. If you don't believe those explanations are right, the very best thing you can do is study those experiences scientifically and figure out what is really going on. Then you'll know, and you'll have a legitimate response to people who tell you it's all about the soul escaping from the body. You won't convince them of course, but that's beside the point. What matters is that there's something we don't understand, and if scientists don't figure out what's really going on, no one else is likely to.
Actually we do understand that human minds can do things that computers cannot do, and that is currently fundamental, i.e. not a question of the power of the computer, but a lack of any implementable theory that could make a computer do these things.
Could you be more specific? What are some things a human can do that it is fundamentally impossible for any computer, no matter how powerful, to do?
You have some really strange preconceptions about what a "tablet" means. For example, you mentioned the lack of right click multiple times. Why do you assume a Windows or Linux based tablet would use a mouse any differently than any other Windows or Linux computer? A tablet is nothing but a form factor. It implies nothing about its capabilities or software. Much like "laptop" has for some years. I'm typing this on a laptop right now. It has an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor hooked up to it, and is functionally indistinguishable from a desktop... right up until the moment when I detach the keyboard and monitor and take it with me to a meeting. Try doing that with a desktop! That's why laptops have been steadily replacing desktops for years. And why tablets could easily do the same thing to laptops.
Let's consider the Transformer Prime, since it's one of the best examples of where I think tablets are going. USB? Check. HD? It has 64 GB internal storage, which was a standard size for laptop SSDs just a couple of years ago, and it has an SD card slot if you need more. HDMI? Check. Wireless ethernet? Check. Quad core processor, 1 GB RAM - that was a standard laptop not very many years ago. And people switched from desktops to laptops because the laptops were good enough for what they needed to do.
You're looking at a tablet and thinking, "Small screen with a touch based UI." Instead you need to look at it and think, "Computer." Aside from differences in storage, memory, and processing power (which are all increasing rapidly), it's really no different from any other computer. Except that it can be used as a tablet when you want to, which is very convenient in some cases. Sure, you could get a tablet and a laptop and a desktop, but that's more expensive and creates all sorts of complications with syncing your data and applications between them. Much easier to have a single device that works well as all three. As long as it's powerful enough to meet your needs (which is already true for many users, and will be true for many more within a couple of years), why would you do anything else?
Your point about relative versus absolute growth was based on fictional numbers that you just made up. Desktop sales have not been growing by 10% per year. They haven't even been growing by 0% per year. They've been shrinking. That means something's been displacing them. For a long time it's been laptops, but now laptop sales have stopped growing too. Three guesses where the sales are going now, and the first two don't count.
Tablet sales really don't mean much because people are not replacing desktops with tablets.
I think that remains to be seen. There's no question that tablet sales are booming while desktop/laptop sales are flat or even decreasing slightly.
It's very plausible that within a couple of years, many people will just be buying a single device that serves as everything. On its own, it's a tablet. Attach a keyboard and it becomes a netbook/laptop. Add an external monitor and mouse and it becomes a desktop. There are already devices that do this (like the Asus Transformer series), and more on their way (like the MS Surface). And what OS will those devices run? There's a lot of money riding on that question, but Windows, Android, iOS, ChromeOS, and (non-Android) Linux are all competing.
3. This work is correct in theory, but does not work in practice. Researchers will have an interesting time figuring out where the original theory of thermodynamics is flawed. And this will then hopefully lead to a better understanding of our universe.
If it works in theory but not practice, the flaw is almost certainly in quantum mechanics, not thermodynamics. Thermodynamics (or more accurately, statistical mechanics) is in some sense the most firmly grounded of all fields of physics. That's because it's really just pure math. It begins with some very general assumptions that are expected to be true for almost any physical theory, and then works out consequences that mathematically must follow from them for any physical theory.
In this case, they've worked out that math for quantum mechanics, and shown that the existence of entanglement leads to some unexpected consequences. But entanglement is itself a controversial and poorly understood concept. We have lots of experimental results that we explain using that concept. But what that "really means" is unclear. There are many, many competing interpretations of quantum mechanics, and they explain those experimental results in very different ways. So this paper's results might not apply to all of those interpretations.
The summary is very misleading. This work is purely theoretical. They have not actually succeeded in doing it, contrary to what the summary would make you think.
It will be interesting to see whether someone can actually make this work in practice.
Why is it that every time a story is posted about a new solar technology, someone replies to say, "We keep hearing about new solar technologies, but they won't make it onto the market for years." Wrong! All these new solar technologies you keep hearing about are making it onto the market. That's one of the reasons solar prices have been dropping like a rock in recent years.
Actually, it is not a crime to lie to the police, except in a sworn statement. In contrast, it is a crime to lie to a federal agent.
You know the religious fanatics who stand in the middle of college campuses shouting at everyone passing by that the end of the world is coming, and they're all going to Hell, and generally making fools of themselves? And you know how people laugh at them, or shout back at them, or make jokes about them to the crowd, or point out loudly what absurd fools they are?
That's exactly what they want to happen.
You see, they aren't targeting those people who stand around and laugh at them. But somewhere in the crowd is someone who feels sorry for them. Someone who knows perfectly well they're a religious fanatic, but that still doesn't give people the right to laugh at them. And so afterward that person will go up and talk to the religious fanatic, just to be polite, just to say, "I wasn't one of the people laughing at you, and I don't approve of them doing it."
And that is who they're really targeting. That person who is trying to be polite, and is off their guard, and who suddenly finds the religious fanatic is actually a friendly person who can talk intelligently and doesn't sound like a fanatic at all anymore. By laughing at the fanatic, you helped them to lure in the person they were really after, and gave them a chance to give the real recruiting pitch.
Trolling fanatics may be fun, but it can easily have the opposite effect from what you intend.
If only we should be so lucky.
That's exactly what we've got in California, and believe me, it is not a good thing. A major and unforeseen effect of term limits is that people in the state legislature have little interest in the long term health of the institutions they belong to. If you hope to be in office for many years to come, and you know the people you're working with may be there too, that affects what you do. Your desire to get what you want right now is moderated by the knowledge that whatever you do, you'll be living with the consequences for a long time.
But if you know you'll be out of there in another year or two because of term limits, that's much less of a concern. You won't be around to deal with the consequences of what you do. And if you know someone else will be out of there in another year or two because they'll hit their term limits, you don't care so much about destroying your working relationship with them.
The result is a dysfunctional legislature where nothing gets done. Including things that really desperately need to get done, like overhauling the state bureaucracy to reduce the massive amount of waste going on.
I haven't read that particular article, so I can't comment on that. I'll just point out that your objections aren't necessarily as serious as you think.
1. Raise taxes on everyone to give poor people guaranteed minimum incomes.
Well, clearly someone has to pay taxes to pay for this. But virtually every industrialized country already has a system where wealthy people pay taxes, and those fund social services that are given to the poor. The guaranteed basic income is simply one way of organizing that. It isn't necessarily more expensive than other ways, and may end up being less expensive if it reduces social problems that we currently spend a lot of money dealing with. This is a really complicated question, and if you think the answer is obvious, that just means you haven't thought about it enough yet.
2. Wages for unskilled workers must rise dramatically in order to make work a more compelling option than doing nothing and taking the guaranteed minimum income.
The system can be organized to limit this problem. For example, for every 1 Imperial Credit (IC) you earn, you receive 0.5 IC less from the government. That way you always have an incentive to work, because doing so will always increase your income. That is not true of the current systems found in many places, where you lose specific benefits at specific income levels. Those truly do discourage people from working, because they create situations where working more actually decreases your income. So this would be an improvement over how things are now.
3. Costs of all goods and services in the economy (like food) increase sharply.
I assume this is meant to be a consequence of #2? But since I don't accept that as true, I obviously don't accept this either. Or do you have some other, independent reason for thinking this is true?
Let's just replace "Ouya" by "PCs"...
With a standard USB port and Bluetooth support, it will be possible to use controllers and peripherals with it other than the one it comes with. What this also opens the door for is piracy and emulation. No doubt a chunk of the audience interested in PCs are those intrigued by the idea of having a box that hooks up to a TV and can run Super Nintendo or Genesis emulators. Others will look at the system's open nature as an invitation to play its games for free; if it's as open as advertised, it should not be difficult to obtain and run illegally downloaded copies of PC games.
Clearly no one will ever want to develop games for PCs.
It's certainly one problem with the patent system, but I'm not convinced it's the only problem. Even if you had to put in a lot of work to solve a problem, why does it automatically follow that the government should give you a monopoly on that idea, and no one else should be allowed to use it? The claim is that patents benefit society, but I think that's far more an article of faith than a firmly established fact. Hence my suggestion. Proponents of patents should have to justify that yes, granting monopolies on ideas really will benefit society. They should have to justify it independently for each category of invention: just because it's true for one category, that doesn't mean it's necessarily true for all other categories. And when in doubt, the default should be not to grant monopolies.
My belief is that when we really study the evidence, certain popular categories of patents (software patents, business method patents) will be found to do far more harm than good. But that's a question that needs to be settled based on evidence, and our current patent system doesn't even ask the question.
One problem with line-drawing like that is that it leads to edge cases and gaming the system.
We already have that problem. It's just that currently everything defaults to being on one side of the line, and I'm proposing it should default to the other side of the line.
Further, we have international treaty obligations that would make it very difficult to go to such a restrictive view of patentable subject matter
Treaties, like everything else in the world of law, can be changed. Let's figure out what the law (including treaties) should be, and then try to make it that way.
And anyway, the natural experiment that happened between the US (biotech patentable) and Europe & Japan (more restrictive view of patenting biotech) has shown that taking an expansive view of patentable subject matter seems to be beneficial.
Many people would dispute your conclusions, but putting that aside: all it shows is that patents are beneficial for this one specific type of invention. It doesn't automatically follow that they're also beneficial for computer algorithms, user interface gestures, business methods, agricultural techniques, or anything else. Each of those needs to be considered independently.
This is a misstatement. It must be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention.
It's known as "irony". But the reality is that patent lawyers have defined the word "obvious" to mean something completely different from what it means to most people. A patent lawyer once defined it for me as follows: "If you had to solve an engineering problem to do something, then it wasn't obvious." If it was a trivially easy engineering problem, and any competent engineer could have solved it in two minutes and produced a similar solution, that's irrelevant. That is what patent lawyers consider "obvious" to mean, and it's not what most people "having ordinary skill in the art" would consider it to mean.
How about this concept. Currently, the default assumption is that anything can be patented. Devices, processes, visual styles, anything. There are a few things that explicitly aren't allowed to be patented (such as mathematical algorithms - yes, laugh everyone), but as long as something doesn't fall into one of those categories, and meets some very minimal requirements (being original, useful, and non-obvious to a patent lawyer), it's patentable.
Let's reverse it. By default, things cannot be patented. The government shouldn't give out monopolies by default. Then we should consider specific categories and decide whether there's an overwhelming social interest in letting that type of invention - and only that type - be patented. And we should use a very high standard for making that decision. If there's any uncertainty in whether patents for a category of invention would really help society, we should err against giving out monopolies.
No, I'm not confusing them. People who believe global warming doesn't exist oppose spending any money at all on reducing CO2 - not one penny - because they don't believe the problem it causes actually exists. They see absolutely nothing wrong with burning fossil fuel.
I don't find that to be much of a problem with it, but YMMV. Note that the keys are larger and more evenly spaced than with most keyboards, which helps.
On the contrary: global warming is based on very simple thermodynamic arguments. The details get ferociously complicated, because the earth's climate is a huge chaotic system, but the simple fact that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces warming is incredibly well grounded in theory and experiment. In fact, it would be an incredible conclusion if we found that didn't happen, and it would upset some of our most basic understandings of the laws of physics.
That's why Arrhenius began studying it way back in the 1890s. Because even then, well over a century ago, it was clear we were adding a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere, and basic thermodynamics indicated that would affect the climate. This isn't some sort of modern political swindle created by the scientific establishment, much as the skeptics would like us to believe it is. And while the details of exactly how much the temperature will change, and where, and how quickly are very difficult to predict (but we've made a lot of progress on that too), the simple fact that it will change is very very easy to show.
No, actually that's a farcical parody invented to let you blow off the people you disagree with. It has no connection to what they actually say.
Even the way you refer to them - "AGW proponents" - shows just how misleading your thought processes are. They are not "proponents" of global warming. In fact, they are not as group in favor of anything at all. The only thing they have in common is that they accept the overwhelming body of evidence really does show what it shows. That is their defining quality, just as the defining quality of "AGW skeptics" is that they deny the evidence shows what it really does show. You're trying to conflate two completely different issues: what are the facts, and what is a sensible response to them? Accepting the reality of global warming does not imply any particular policy, but you can't intelligently choose a policy until you accept the facts. You don't like particular policies that have been proposed, and you are using that as an excuse to ignore the facts.
And contrary to what you say, lots of global warming skeptics believe we should stop all R&D toward reducing CO2 emissions. After all, they don't believe there's anything wrong with CO2, so why should we waste money trying to reduce it?
There actually is a keyboard layout optimized for swiping. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it really is faster once you learn it.
The summary is misleading. From the linked article:
Approved applications for DBS include Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, depression, Tourette’s syndrome and even deep comatose patients.
Of those conditions, Parkinson's is the only one that is degenerative. None of the others are.
Thanks for the lecture, but you missed my point.
In other news, tobacco companies say the risks of smoking have been exaggerated, and gun manufacturers deny their products contribute to violent crime. Of course. What do you expect them to say?
These are complex issues with a lot to be said on both sides. But the CEO of an oil company downplaying the risks of burning oil and blaming the controversy on an illiterate public and a lazy press is not news. It contributes nothing valuable to the discussion, and doesn't teach us anything we didn't already know.
The CEO of an oil company tells us that burning oil isn't such a big problem! Well, I guess we can all stop worrying about that then.