You've got all the worst features of bad languages rolled into one -- a massive amount of confusing syntax, (extremely!) complicated semantics, almost always utterly unhelpful error behavior, and an extremely high barrier to entry even to get programs to compile, much less run, to say nothing of them actually working correctly.
Don't forget the linker....
Non-inline function definitions belong in the.cpp file... unless they're template definitions, in which case they belong in the.h file... unless they have the export keyword, but I don't know how many compilers support that. Constants are defined in the.h file, but static variables and have to be initialized in the.cpp file. And every file has to be wrapped in #ifdef... #endif to prevent it from being #included twice.
And when you're dealing with the Microsoft compiler, the compiler sends as little information to the linker as it can get away with... so link-time errors, rather than providing clues about where to hunt for the problem in source code, refer to object files, pre-compiled header files, and munged function names. (Is g++ more helpful in this respect?) --
see this essay by Brad DeLong, an economist at UC Berkeley. He claims that "eighty percent of the acceleration of measured productivity growth in [1995-99] can be credited to information technology investment."
He also suggests that information tech has the following unmeasured effects on things that economists find interesting:
Companies can keep better track of their inventory; this improves economic efficiency in general (since goods are spending less time "in the pipeline" between manufacture and sale) and may moderate the boom-and-bust cycle.
Perhaps unemployment is so low because the wage increases that employees expect are equal to their growth in productivity -- and therefore, employers don't need a higher unemployment rate to keep workers' aspirations in check.
If historical macroeconomic patterns don't apply, then this creates trouble for national banks (such as the US Federal Reserve), because they can't depend on comparisons with past business cycles to decide whether to raise or lower interest rates.
If deposits at commercial banks become less significant as a means of payment, then central banks might not be able to affect interest rates (since right now, they operate by selling and buying bonds at those banks).
If you have some ivory tower ideal in which bug are found as soon as possible, then you end up spending all of your time fixing these bugs
And the alternative is what, not fixing bugs?
and trying to satisfy vocal Linux "hackers" who want feature X, compatibility with program/desktop/window manager Y or whatever by spending additional time doing this in an attempt to deliver
"I want feature X."
"I don't care so much about feature X, but if you want it, then you write the code for it."
If memory serves,.uucp doesn't represent any central registry -- if the mail software on the user's host machine knows the bang path to foo over UUCPNET, it will translate fred@foo.uucp to quux!baz!bar!foo!fred.
(Links to the Jargon File provided for you kids who don't remember what it was like in the old days, when we had to carve email messages on clay tablets and haul them to the server room, two miles away in the snow, uphill both ways....) --
IANAL, but according to articles I recall seeing earlier today, the DOJ or the judge can have the case appealed to the Supremes -- after MS files with the Appeals Court. So if the DOJ wants the Supremes to take over the case, the Supremes can do so now, without having to wait for any action by the Appeals Court.
(This is a special rule for Big Important Antitrust Cases, and does not apply to most criminal and civil cases in the US, which must go through regular appeals-court channels. Kids, don't try this at home.) --
My wife opined that immigrants working with classified material are probably, on average, more conscientious about security than the native-born Amurricans -- because the immigrants know they're under suspicion. The person responsible for this theft is probably a nice red-blooded American boy who did the job in exchange for nice green-inked American dollars. --
Economists have some standard arguments for why free trade in goods is a Good Thing (see, for example, Paul Krugman's essay "In Praise of Cheap Labor". Basically, the idea is that if companies can locate their factories wherever they want and export their products to wherever they want, then it creates an efficient market which benefits everyone.
For example, if the US dropped its tariffs protecting cane sugar, and Europe dropped its policies restricting broadcast of American movies, then some American cane-sugar growers would lose their jobs -- but [NOTE WEASEL WORDS HERE] in the long run, (a) they could go work in Hollywood instead; (b) the price of cane sugar would go down, which would benefit everyone who likes sugar; (c) the demand for American movies and TV shows would go up, which would benefit Americans working in Hollywood.
I don't think free trade is an unmitigated good thing, but after reading enough work by level-headed people like Krugman, I'm convinced by the arguments that it's a generally good thing.
However... what's sauce for the factory-owner is sauce for the labor-owner, too. If a corporation can have the right to move a factory from the US to Mexico, and take advantage of cheaper labor, then a worker should have the right to move from Mexico to the US, and take advantage of the higher wages. (And if Mexican workers had this freedom, Mexican factories -- particularly the maquiladora factories just over the border -- would have better wages and working conditions.) --
You can teach the basic concepts behind regular expressions (just using letters and *?[-]()^$) in a few minutes, and then challenge kids with questions like:
Does/ban*a*/ match "banana"? Why or why not?
Write a regular expression that matches both "knife" and "knives".
How many regular expressions can you come up with that will match both "cookie" and "cake"?
(For kids who are taking Spanish:) Write a regular expression that will match as many forms as possible of the Spanish verb "hablar".
Go back to one of the regular expressions that you wrote when answering a previous question. What other English words does it match?
You can do a lot of exploring, brainstorming, and analysis with paper, pencil, and blackboard. Then you can sit down at a computer and type grep 'ban*a*'/usr/dict/words, or a Perl one-liner that does something similar, and look at the results. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
When I got out of college, I didn't have a CS degree. Although I had done a little hacking in C, Emacs-lisp, and perl, I didn't think I had the skill required for an entry-level programming job. (Now that I have a closer view of the software industry, I think maybe I was too hard on myself, but I digress.:-) So... a few years after graduating, I started working for a hospital as a tape transcriptionist.
I did my transcription on a DOS machine running WordPerfect 4.1. My predecessor had defined some WordPerfect macros for commonly-used medical terms. After a while on the job, I wondered: "With so many medical terms being used here, what is the optimum set of macros to use for my job?"
And then I thought: "I have a computer. There must be a way to solve this problem with a computer program."
So I copied a week's worth of typing into one file, brought it down to BU (where I was going to graduate school), and after some hacking with C, emacs, and WordPerfect's macro language, I had a few hundred macros.
Now I'm working as a technical writer, and there are several repetitive tasks at my job that make me think: "There must be a way to solve these problems with computer programs... in fact, there must be a way to write tools that will make many of these problems easier to deal with." Unfortunately, most of these problems take more than a few days of hacking to solve; fortunately, my manager says that after I deal with the projects currently on my plate, I'll have more time to focus on coding tools to help out our group.
So, in the short run, I want to identify the repetitive information-processing tasks in my life, and treat them as opportunities to capture the repetitive aspects in code, rather than endure them as part of life's drudgery. And to the extent that my employer permits, I want to share that code with other people.
In the long run, I want to help other people do the same thing with the repetitive tasks that dominate their lives, find out why so many people either ignore or misuse the programming tools that are already available to help them, and use that information to make better tools. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Freedom of speech is absolute. There are no exceptions. You have the right to say whatever you want, unless you are infringing someone else's rights.
I just love that "unless" part. With a sufficiently (ahem) liberal definition of "infringing someone else's rights", that bold statement can be a prelude to justifying any kind of censorship one might desire.
Stanley Fish wrote a fascinating essay called "There's No Such Thing As Free Speech.. and It's a Good Thing, Too," which is reprinted in a book of essays with the same title. His basic point is that defenders of free speech always delimit the boundaries of what kind of speech is acceptable. For example, Milton's Aeropagitica, a 1643 essay in favor of religious tolerance, goes through pro-free-speech arguments that any modern reader would find very familiar, and then, about three-quarters of the way through, says that of course, none of this applies to the Catholics.
Thus, "free speech" is like "fairness" or "merit". Different political factions present their spin on what the term means. Whichever faction gets its definition widely accepted then gets to present itself as the champions of virtue and can put its opponents on the defensive.
Fish's essay is not available online, but I found an interview excerpt here with his main points. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
It all comes down to incentives. Sure, the artists may not have a "right" to be paid...but a starving artist isn't going to make much music...
Lots (perhaps most) artists have "day jobs" that pay the rent and food, and don't make enough from their art (even with copyright and all that) to afford being able to create art full-time.
If every artist had to have a day job, how much worse a place would the world be? Even if some artists should receive financial rewards for their work, is the copyright system the best practical way to allocate those rewards? -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Artists definitely have a right to be paid for their work....
Lots of people seem to be throwing around this claim without bothering to defend it. Why do artists have a right to collect revenue from their creations?
The fact that an artist put a lot of effort into creation does not, in and of itself, establish a right to be paid. A simple counterexample: Parents put a great deal of effort and expense into raising children, but nobody suggests that this effort entitles them to make a financial profit on the venture. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
What other open-source products are similar (i.e., solve similar problems) to the ArsDigita Community System? What are the strengths and weaknesses of those other products? What features or implementation tricks, if any, did the ACS borrow from those systems, and vice versa? -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
If in reading this introduction, you've come to realize that "Hey, Tcl is just like Lisp, but without a brain, and with syntax on steroids", you might wonder why Lisp isn't a more popular scripting language than Tcl. Lisp hasn't been a complete failure, by the way; it is used as an extension language by users of some popular programs, notably AutoCAD. But Tcl has been much more successful. It has been compiled into hundreds of larger programs, including AOLserver, which is why we wrote this book.
As a software developer, you're unlikely to get rich. So you might as well try to get through your life in such a way that you make a difference to the world. Tcl illustrates one way:
make something that is simple enough for almost everyone to understand
give away your source code
explain how to weave your source code in with other systems
In the case of AOLserver, for example, Jim Davidson and Doug McKee had only a few months to build the whole server from scratch. They wanted users to be able to write small programs that ran inside the server process. They therefore needed a safe interpreted language so that a programming error by one user didn't crash the server and bring down all the Web services for an organization.
Tcl was available. Tcl was easy to download and designed to fit inside larger application programs. But the Tcl interpreter as distributed had one terrible bug: it wasn't thread safe, i.e., you couldn't have two copies of the Tcl interpreter running inside the same program at the same time. Doug and Jim had to read through the Tcl source code and modify it to be thread safe. So it was critically important for them that Tcl was open-source and simple enough so as to not require months or years of study to understand the whole system. Compare this to Lisp. Some of the best and brightest computer scientists raised money to build commercial Lisp implementations that they then went out and hawked in an indifferent and confused marketplace. They succeeded only in breaking their hearts and their investors' wallets. A handful of academics produced free open-source implementations, notably CMU Common Lisp (see http://www.cons.org/cmucl/) and various versions of Scheme (see http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/scheme-hom e.html; Scheme 48 is the closest to Tcl in spirit). But these multi-megabyte monsters weren't designed to fit neatly into someone else's program. Nor was there any document explaining how to do it.
Lisp developers have the satisfaction of knowing that they got it right 30 years before anyone else. But that's about all they have to show for 40 years of hard work and hundreds of millions of dollars in government and private funding. These days, most former Lisp programmers are stuck using Unix and Microsoft programming environments and, not only do they have to put up with these inferior environments, but they're saddled with the mournful knowledge that these environments are inferior.
-- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I think the program is aimed at smart people with bachelor's degrees in a non-technical field. I got out of college with a bachelor's in political science from MIT, and nobody was offering me a $125k job. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Re:How 1000 page book = 2 hr movie
on
Battlefield Earth
·
· Score: 2
If Heinlein had written this story (before he got old and started to ramble),
I believe you misspelled "before his publisher discovered that his books sold just as well without any editorial trimming". -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Don't use 'em. I never knew a real-life computer crime cop or investigator who paid any attention to deciphering encryption. I regard this as a 99% theoretical form of "security." Using big number-crunching high-tech to protect the brief transmission of Internet email gives people a false sense of security. If you get in trouble, it won't be because you were tapped and cracked by the NSA. It'll be because somebody you trusted ratted on you (or because you bragged). Trust me on this. If you're really worried about your privacy, stop using credit cards and shred your trash.
(Hmm, this also ties in with the discussion of WAVE...) -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
The crux of the case against Microsoft is: Netscape and Java threatened Microsoft's monopoly by presenting OS-independent "middleware" APIs that other developers could code against. Microsoft, by trying to crush Netscape and Java, illegally protected (and, in the case of the browser market, extended) its monopoly.
So a "punishment that fits the crime" is: When Microsoft offers technical information to developers, it must offer them to all developers in a non-discriminatory fashion. For example: Netscape should get information about the Internet Explorer APIs that are "integrated with" Windows, on the same terms as any other software company. A company that develops word-processing software should get information about the Microsoft Office APIs and file formats, on the same terms as a company that develops a bibliography plug-in.
A possible refinement of the above: For every case in which Microsoft both sells program X to the general public and sells technical information on program X to developers, it must offer an unrestricted license, under some non-negotiable terms, for all publishable technical information on program X, and not sell this information in any other fashion. For example, Microsoft might license a complete package of Windows 2000 API and file format information for $1 million per year. Several competing companies could buy this information and resell portions of it to third-party developers; they would offer partial information about the APIs and file formats based on the market value of the information, not based on how the third-party developers might threaten Microsoft's monopoly. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Hal Varian, an economist at UC-Berkeley, suggested a simple way around the problem: Repeal state sales taxes, and increase state income taxes to make up for the lost revenue.
If an income tax exempts savings and charitable donations, then it has almost the same economic effect as a sales tax -- any income that you didn't save (or give away) was, by definition, spent on something. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Consider the pharmaceutical industy: a major pharma company may file a hundred or more patent applications a year for new drugs. They need to file them in the very early stages of development, usually before they've even begun animal studies. They have no way of knowing, at that point, which ones will be successful.
Now, of those hundred, one may be a major, billion-dollar-a-year blockbuster. (Actually, a pharma company is lucky if it can get a blockbuster every 3-4 years.) A few others will turn a lesser profit. Most will turn out to be worthless.
The bids on the patent would take risk into account, just like the bids on any uncertain investment. To oversimplify a little:
Suppose interest rates are 5% on T-bills (bonds issued by the US Treasury), and I believe that patent #7,000,000 has a 1% chance of making $1e9 per year. Therefore, owning that patent is worth as much as owning T-bills that pay $1e7 per year. To buy T-bills that pay that much, I'd have to spend $2e8 ($1e7 divided by 5%). Therefore, it would be rational for me to bid $2e8 on patent #7,000,000.
If I already own patent #7,000,000 and it's up for auction, I should bid $2e8 on it. Then, one of three things will happen:
I get the high bid and win the coin toss. I "pay myself", hang on to the patent, and see how much money it really does make me.
I get the high bid but lose the coin toss. I get $2e8 from the government, which I can plow into T-bills, or more research, or whatever.
I don't get the high bid, because someone else thinks it's worth even more. I lose the patent or get it put in public domain, but I also get more than $2e8, so why should I complain?
-- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
...is presented in this article. It's slightly tangential to the Amazon patents, since it's designed to make better use of legitimately patentable innovations, but y'all might be interested in it.
The basic idea is that whenever a patent is issued, it should be put up for auction. When the auction is over, flip a coin. Heads: the highest bidder buys the patent. Tails: the government buys the patent and puts it in the public domain.
This would benefit society through wider use of patented technology, while still letting people who sponsor patentable innovations get rewarded. If the auctions price the patents fairly, the benefits to consumers through having better and cheaper products will outweigh the taxes they have to pay to get the government to buy the patents. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
A common theme in the answers seems to be "that complaint is based on outdated information; get a new compiler that follows the standard and use the STL."
For the benefit of us C++ newbies, does anyone maintain a chart showing which currently-available "C++" compilers violate which sections of the C++ standard? -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
When television came out, didn't forward-thinking people predict the death of radio? -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I agree that this requires the parents to do a lot of work, but if enough people sign onto the system, the parents who don't want to do a lot of work can just place their trust in a few of the more active folks. (Open-source censorship, er, editorial review, so to speak.) -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Maybe we need a publicly accessed "blocker"... kind of like NoCeMs in usenet - you basically pick a set of "trusted" people who you rate as being able to block stuff. The christian fundies can all subscribe to christian fundie blockers for all the categories, whereas a merely concerned parent might just go with someone a bit less radical.
Parents could set up a proxy server for every computer their kid has access to, which remembers every URL the kid visits; later, the parents could review the list (perhaps previewing a list of thumbnails) and flag URLs containing pr0n, racism, advertising, bad grammar, or whatever else they didn't want their kids to see. They could then digitally sign the list of flagged URLs and send it to some central server.
Then, the parents could tell the proxy server which other reviewers they trusted, and the proxy would block access to any URL that had been flagged by either the parents or their trustees.
The technology for doing all this seems pretty simple... the biggest programming challenge, I think, would be the interface. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Slashdot Mirror
Non-inline function definitions belong in the .cpp file ... unless they're template definitions, in which case they belong in the .h file ... unless they have the export keyword, but I don't know how many compilers support that. Constants are defined in the .h file, but static variables and have to be initialized in the .cpp file. And every file has to be wrapped in #ifdef ... #endif to prevent it from being #included twice.
And when you're dealing with the Microsoft compiler, the compiler sends as little information to the linker as it can get away with ... so link-time errors, rather than providing clues about where to hunt for the problem in source code, refer to object files, pre-compiled header files, and munged function names. (Is g++ more helpful in this respect?)
--
He also suggests that information tech has the following unmeasured effects on things that economists find interesting:
--
"I don't care so much about feature X, but if you want it, then you write the code for it."
Where's the problem?
--
(Links to the Jargon File provided for you kids who don't remember what it was like in the old days, when we had to carve email messages on clay tablets and haul them to the server room, two miles away in the snow, uphill both ways....)
--
(This is a special rule for Big Important Antitrust Cases, and does not apply to most criminal and civil cases in the US, which must go through regular appeals-court channels. Kids, don't try this at home.)
--
My wife opined that immigrants working with classified material are probably, on average, more conscientious about security than the native-born Amurricans -- because the immigrants know they're under suspicion. The person responsible for this theft is probably a nice red-blooded American boy who did the job in exchange for nice green-inked American dollars.
--
For example, if the US dropped its tariffs protecting cane sugar, and Europe dropped its policies restricting broadcast of American movies, then some American cane-sugar growers would lose their jobs -- but [NOTE WEASEL WORDS HERE] in the long run, (a) they could go work in Hollywood instead; (b) the price of cane sugar would go down, which would benefit everyone who likes sugar; (c) the demand for American movies and TV shows would go up, which would benefit Americans working in Hollywood.
I don't think free trade is an unmitigated good thing, but after reading enough work by level-headed people like Krugman, I'm convinced by the arguments that it's a generally good thing.
However ... what's sauce for the factory-owner is sauce for the labor-owner, too. If a corporation can have the right to move a factory from the US to Mexico, and take advantage of cheaper labor, then a worker should have the right to move from Mexico to the US, and take advantage of the higher wages. (And if Mexican workers had this freedom, Mexican factories -- particularly the maquiladora factories just over the border -- would have better wages and working conditions.)
--
- Does
/ban*a*/ match "banana"? Why or why not? - Write a regular expression that matches both "knife" and "knives".
- How many regular expressions can you come up with that will match both "cookie" and "cake"?
- (For kids who are taking Spanish:) Write a regular expression that will match as many forms as possible of the Spanish verb "hablar".
- Go back to one of the regular expressions that you wrote when answering a previous question. What other English words does it match?
You can do a lot of exploring, brainstorming, and analysis with paper, pencil, and blackboard. Then you can sit down at a computer and type grep 'ban*a*'--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I did my transcription on a DOS machine running WordPerfect 4.1. My predecessor had defined some WordPerfect macros for commonly-used medical terms. After a while on the job, I wondered: "With so many medical terms being used here, what is the optimum set of macros to use for my job?"
And then I thought: "I have a computer. There must be a way to solve this problem with a computer program."
So I copied a week's worth of typing into one file, brought it down to BU (where I was going to graduate school), and after some hacking with C, emacs, and WordPerfect's macro language, I had a few hundred macros.
Now I'm working as a technical writer, and there are several repetitive tasks at my job that make me think: "There must be a way to solve these problems with computer programs ... in fact, there must be a way to write tools that will make many of these problems easier to deal with." Unfortunately, most of these problems take more than a few days of hacking to solve; fortunately, my manager says that after I deal with the projects currently on my plate, I'll have more time to focus on coding tools to help out our group.
So, in the short run, I want to identify the repetitive information-processing tasks in my life, and treat them as opportunities to capture the repetitive aspects in code, rather than endure them as part of life's drudgery. And to the extent that my employer permits, I want to share that code with other people.
In the long run, I want to help other people do the same thing with the repetitive tasks that dominate their lives, find out why so many people either ignore or misuse the programming tools that are already available to help them, and use that information to make better tools.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Stanley Fish wrote a fascinating essay called "There's No Such Thing As Free Speech .. and It's a Good Thing, Too," which is reprinted in a book of essays with the same title. His basic point is that defenders of free speech always delimit the boundaries of what kind of speech is acceptable. For example, Milton's Aeropagitica, a 1643 essay in favor of religious tolerance, goes through pro-free-speech arguments that any modern reader would find very familiar, and then, about three-quarters of the way through, says that of course, none of this applies to the Catholics.
Thus, "free speech" is like "fairness" or "merit". Different political factions present their spin on what the term means. Whichever faction gets its definition widely accepted then gets to present itself as the champions of virtue and can put its opponents on the defensive.
Fish's essay is not available online, but I found an interview excerpt here with his main points.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
If every artist had to have a day job, how much worse a place would the world be? Even if some artists should receive financial rewards for their work, is the copyright system the best practical way to allocate those rewards?
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
The fact that an artist put a lot of effort into creation does not, in and of itself, establish a right to be paid. A simple counterexample: Parents put a great deal of effort and expense into raising children, but nobody suggests that this effort entitles them to make a financial profit on the venture.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
What other open-source products are similar (i.e., solve similar problems) to the ArsDigita Community System? What are the strengths and weaknesses of those other products? What features or implementation tricks, if any, did the ACS borrow from those systems, and vice versa?
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I think the program is aimed at smart people with bachelor's degrees in a non-technical field. I got out of college with a bachelor's in political science from MIT, and nobody was offering me a $125k job.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
So a "punishment that fits the crime" is: When Microsoft offers technical information to developers, it must offer them to all developers in a non-discriminatory fashion. For example: Netscape should get information about the Internet Explorer APIs that are "integrated with" Windows, on the same terms as any other software company. A company that develops word-processing software should get information about the Microsoft Office APIs and file formats, on the same terms as a company that develops a bibliography plug-in.
A possible refinement of the above: For every case in which Microsoft both sells program X to the general public and sells technical information on program X to developers, it must offer an unrestricted license, under some non-negotiable terms, for all publishable technical information on program X, and not sell this information in any other fashion. For example, Microsoft might license a complete package of Windows 2000 API and file format information for $1 million per year. Several competing companies could buy this information and resell portions of it to third-party developers; they would offer partial information about the APIs and file formats based on the market value of the information, not based on how the third-party developers might threaten Microsoft's monopoly.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
If an income tax exempts savings and charitable donations, then it has almost the same economic effect as a sales tax -- any income that you didn't save (or give away) was, by definition, spent on something.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Suppose interest rates are 5% on T-bills (bonds issued by the US Treasury), and I believe that patent #7,000,000 has a 1% chance of making $1e9 per year. Therefore, owning that patent is worth as much as owning T-bills that pay $1e7 per year. To buy T-bills that pay that much, I'd have to spend $2e8 ($1e7 divided by 5%). Therefore, it would be rational for me to bid $2e8 on patent #7,000,000.
If I already own patent #7,000,000 and it's up for auction, I should bid $2e8 on it. Then, one of three things will happen:
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
The basic idea is that whenever a patent is issued, it should be put up for auction. When the auction is over, flip a coin. Heads: the highest bidder buys the patent. Tails: the government buys the patent and puts it in the public domain.
This would benefit society through wider use of patented technology, while still letting people who sponsor patentable innovations get rewarded. If the auctions price the patents fairly, the benefits to consumers through having better and cheaper products will outweigh the taxes they have to pay to get the government to buy the patents.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
For the benefit of us C++ newbies, does anyone maintain a chart showing which currently-available "C++" compilers violate which sections of the C++ standard?
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
When television came out, didn't forward-thinking people predict the death of radio?
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I agree that this requires the parents to do a lot of work, but if enough people sign onto the system, the parents who don't want to do a lot of work can just place their trust in a few of the more active folks. (Open-source censorship, er, editorial review, so to speak.)
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Then, the parents could tell the proxy server which other reviewers they trusted, and the proxy would block access to any URL that had been flagged by either the parents or their trustees.
The technology for doing all this seems pretty simple ... the biggest programming challenge, I think, would be the interface.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."