>>If I'm lucky, I eventually do get the patent after a couple of years of legal wrangling and a fortune in fees, and now I can start manufacturing my super new hula hoop.
You might not be aware of it, but you pay reduced fees if you're a little guy.
>>Please name one example from the last 20 years where a "little guy" invented something, patented it, and made a fortune
Yes, that's why there's no such shows as "Everyday Edisons", dedicated to talking about little-guy inventors. (http://www.everydayedisons.com/default.aspx)
For example, one pair of parents invented the Gyro Bowl, which my sister loves with her kids.
>>Hammering your gold coins into leaf yourself and being able to credibly verify its mass, quality, and composition is not practical.
They're actually a fairly easy to handle currency at various libertarian festival type places. Hand someone a potato-chip sized bit of goal leaf, get a sandwich.
Hey, woah, woah. This is Krugman we're talking about here, not a real economist.
(And before you point out his Nobel, they were talking about giving a Nobel to David X. Li, too. Though to be fair, that was before his CDO risk assessment model destroyed the world's economy. And they DID give a Nobel to Merton and Scholes, who nearly destroyed the world's economy 10 years before.)
>>Hurray for patents then. Hurray for intellectual property in general. Stealing ideas from the public domain, staking an unfair claim on them, and profiting from day one.
While you may or may not be right, you certainly missed the Hudsucker Proxy reference.
>>In what way do patents, in ANY form, foster innovation?
I wouldn't bother going to the time and effort to bring a super cool new product (like, let's say, a hula hoop) to market if it was just going to get ripped off by a large corporation that has the resources to dump imitations at a loss until I go out of business.
The founding fathers understood this: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Sure, there have been inventions and discoveries in the past, but they've been faster and more impressive under our current patent regime than at any time before.
>>If you have sufficient air flow around the CPU, then you don't need the CPU fan to move much air specifically over the CPU.
Right, which is something a lot of people ignore. They'll make a silent PC and then stick it into a cramped airless cabinet beneath their TV, and then wonder why their new linux-based DVR keeps skipping as the CPU desperately tries to step down its power use to keep the temps under control.
>>How about charging their fellow sociopaths - in the Administration & Congress - as mobsters?
You laugh, but I actually listened in on this talk on CSPAN Radio (I know, I know). They want pretty much anyone in a hacking group to be vulnerable to RICO statutes. RICO, of course, was invented to deal with mobsters, but as since then been applied to people such as antiabortion activists and even in civil cases. Now being a "cybercriminal" will get you thrown in jail, more. Which is the point - Pablo was complaining the punishments for "cybercrime" (I have to use quotes, since the words leave a bad taste in my mouth) are too light, and not in line with their physical crime counterparts.
I also learned they have 300 DAs working on cybercrime these days. That's not insignificant.
But the biggest thing that scared me about the talk was Obama's administration proposing civil forfeiture laws for hacking activities.
First the drug dealers, then Gibson, now Laserblade, the tween script kiddie. Asset forfeiture is expanding rapidly (with something like 1000 forfeiture statues now on the books) - not only is forfeiture unconstitutional (deprived of property without due process) but also a clear conflict of interest for law enforcement, which gets to keep whatever they seize.
Agree with the previous AC about Mythical Man Month. Love the classic idea of a manager who needs a baby to meet a 1 month deadline throwing 9 women at the problem instead of one woman for 9 months. But I think you can get the gist without reading a whole book about it.
Dude, you can read the whole thing in like two hours.
Compared with the size of TAOCP or Tanenbaum or a lot of classic CS books, you can't kill anyone with the Mythical Man Month.
>>Yeah, blame the language for the incompetence of your coworkers...
Part of the design of a language is having to deal with idiots. Misaligned braces are a problem because C compilers will throw errors on the wrong line, sometimes the end of the file, if you have a missing brace. Invisible bugs are way worse though.
Sure, you can use compiler flags, or LINT, or whatever, but neither excuses bad design.
There's issues with every language... but people will still use the ones they like even with their flaws. It's like marriage.
>>most programmers are operating at a level of abstraction these days over the base operating system in a way that makes that knowledge less valuable.
Right up until they can't figure out why their code runs differently if it is writing to standard out as opposed to being piped into a file. Or use your Windows equivalent.
Sure, I guess beginning programmers can get away with using high level abstractions, but anyone who wants to be a good programmers needs to know how all this stuff works. Hell, even non-programming techie can benefit - look at all the people that kept complaining about their "memory all being in use" when they don't understand how prefetching and caching works.
If I had to reform education, I'd open up teaching to any person who has worked in the relevant industry for 10 years. The education "degree" teaches next to nothing, but serves as a barrier to getting good people in the classrom.
Studies have shown, in fact, students of teachers with education degrees do no better.:p
Who would be a better computer science teacher: a Google coder that has made his fortune, cashed out, and is looking to give back to society, or a person that went directly from high school into an education degree in college, with no more than a couple comp sci classes under his belt?
And why should we make it so hard to get good peoplWell, or fire the incompetent teachers?
>>Is there any adult person who doesn't realize things like crack and heroin are addictive?
Sure, and microtransactions are at the point that I now actively avoid F2P microtransaction-based games. Maybe it's unfair. Maybe there's some that do microtransactions in a reasonably ethical manner.
Maybe there's some forms of crack that are totally healthy for you and cure cancer.
But it doesn't matter. The reputation of crack and microtrannies are tainted beyond redemption now.
>>Carter may have been a screw-up, but he, at least, wasn't flat out evil. On the worst-presidents-of-all-time scale, I'd say Nixon, Bush and Obama easily surpass Carter.
I know. I used to work for a company that built HMDs for the military, maybe 15 years ago or so. We took the technology and built VR arcade games out of it.
>>Sadly, the effect isn't that great - you lack your peripheral vision
It depends on the HMD. Our $100k HMDs basically covered a pretty wide range of vision. (150 degrees square or so.) They were used in military flight simulators (which were a lot of fun to play in at lunch) as well as by people actually inside of the planes.
The biggest problem, actually, is that when you have a monitor strapped to your head, you can get crazy neckstrain.
Also, motion sickness is always a problem, especially when what you see and how you move your head don't sync up.
>>So for straight up flying it is interesting but doesn't add anything much.
Eh, the military would disagree with you, I guess.
Thats the second time you are spewing this bile. Alternative high schools are for people who don't "fit" with the regular high school system. They are most certainly not filled with criminals or people on probation. The people there might simply be gay or lesbian, or simply don't fit into the 9-4 school system. Personally, I had a job to support myself at a young age and found that alternative high school was the only way that I could continue to go to school and also put food on the table.
Alternative schools are some of the best schools available. They teach thinking outside the box and will tailor their curriculum to your needs.
Alternative schools are some of the worst schools around, if you, you know, look at the numbers. But it's good they worked out for you. I have friends that did well at them, so I know where you're coming from.
But to be fair to the GP, there IS a large contingent of losers (no other way to put it) at alt highs.
>>And that Microsoft could never pull off an Appstore like Apple did? (anyone remember the Windows Marketplace, haha?)
Hey, guess what Microsoft is bringing back for Windows 8?
The threat of the walled garden coming to the PC is a real one, but I see it being a lot harder to enforce in a PC environment.
For me, Steam meets the right balance of DRM, convenience, and pricing. So I use it, and generally prefer it over buying things at Best Buy, even if the cost is the same. Why? I've got enough game boxes lying around here, and if I ever get the itch to play a game while I'm on the road, Steam lets me re-download it to my laptop. iTunes, by contrast, didn't let you redownload music for the longest time, making it really irritating if you bought an album while you were on the road and wanted it on your main PC.
>>Yes, it's good to see that they've thrown in a feature available on pretty much every desktop Linux distro for ten years.
Anybody who trades ISOs on Windows can mount ISOs on Windows. It takes all of 30 seconds to download and install.
To me, this is kind of like when they built in.zip support for Windows so you didn't have to mess around with WinZip (you have been running your evaluation copy for 1219489 days!).
Also, I think Microsoft actually used to have a tool that did this. So it's not really new, more like a reintroduction of an old tool. Now if they'd just bring back winipconfig so I don't need to use cmd->ipconfig any more...
Slashdot Mirror
>>If I'm lucky, I eventually do get the patent after a couple of years of legal wrangling and a fortune in fees, and now I can start manufacturing my super new hula hoop.
You might not be aware of it, but you pay reduced fees if you're a little guy.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxr_1_27.htm
>>Burning coal has made fish uneatable due to mercury content.
Isn't it great then, that Germany is eliminating green nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal?
>>Please name one example from the last 20 years where a "little guy" invented something, patented it, and made a fortune
Yes, that's why there's no such shows as "Everyday Edisons", dedicated to talking about little-guy inventors. (http://www.everydayedisons.com/default.aspx)
For example, one pair of parents invented the Gyro Bowl, which my sister loves with her kids.
>>Hammering your gold coins into leaf yourself and being able to credibly verify its mass, quality, and composition is not practical.
They're actually a fairly easy to handle currency at various libertarian festival type places. Hand someone a potato-chip sized bit of goal leaf, get a sandwich.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/05/137534361/breakfast-at-libertarian-summer-camp
>>And from a real economist, too.
Hey, woah, woah. This is Krugman we're talking about here, not a real economist.
(And before you point out his Nobel, they were talking about giving a Nobel to David X. Li, too. Though to be fair, that was before his CDO risk assessment model destroyed the world's economy. And they DID give a Nobel to Merton and Scholes, who nearly destroyed the world's economy 10 years before.)
>>Hurray for patents then. Hurray for intellectual property in general. Stealing ideas from the public domain, staking an unfair claim on them, and profiting from day one.
While you may or may not be right, you certainly missed the Hudsucker Proxy reference.
>>In what way do patents, in ANY form, foster innovation?
I wouldn't bother going to the time and effort to bring a super cool new product (like, let's say, a hula hoop) to market if it was just going to get ripped off by a large corporation that has the resources to dump imitations at a loss until I go out of business.
The founding fathers understood this: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Sure, there have been inventions and discoveries in the past, but they've been faster and more impressive under our current patent regime than at any time before.
>>If you have sufficient air flow around the CPU, then you don't need the CPU fan to move much air specifically over the CPU.
Right, which is something a lot of people ignore. They'll make a silent PC and then stick it into a cramped airless cabinet beneath their TV, and then wonder why their new linux-based DVR keeps skipping as the CPU desperately tries to step down its power use to keep the temps under control.
>>You make it sound like the individual cops seizing the property get to keep it for themselves.
Police Departments do get to keep the seized cash for themselves, and the proceeds of the auctioned off assets.
This is a clear conflict of interest.
>>How about charging their fellow sociopaths - in the Administration & Congress - as mobsters?
You laugh, but I actually listened in on this talk on CSPAN Radio (I know, I know). They want pretty much anyone in a hacking group to be vulnerable to RICO statutes. RICO, of course, was invented to deal with mobsters, but as since then been applied to people such as antiabortion activists and even in civil cases. Now being a "cybercriminal" will get you thrown in jail, more. Which is the point - Pablo was complaining the punishments for "cybercrime" (I have to use quotes, since the words leave a bad taste in my mouth) are too light, and not in line with their physical crime counterparts.
I also learned they have 300 DAs working on cybercrime these days. That's not insignificant.
But the biggest thing that scared me about the talk was Obama's administration proposing civil forfeiture laws for hacking activities.
First the drug dealers, then Gibson, now Laserblade, the tween script kiddie. Asset forfeiture is expanding rapidly (with something like 1000 forfeiture statues now on the books) - not only is forfeiture unconstitutional (deprived of property without due process) but also a clear conflict of interest for law enforcement, which gets to keep whatever they seize.
Dude, you can read the whole thing in like two hours.
Compared with the size of TAOCP or Tanenbaum or a lot of classic CS books, you can't kill anyone with the Mythical Man Month.
>>Yeah, blame the language for the incompetence of your coworkers...
Part of the design of a language is having to deal with idiots. Misaligned braces are a problem because C compilers will throw errors on the wrong line, sometimes the end of the file, if you have a missing brace. Invisible bugs are way worse though.
Sure, you can use compiler flags, or LINT, or whatever, but neither excuses bad design.
There's issues with every language... but people will still use the ones they like even with their flaws. It's like marriage.
>>most programmers are operating at a level of abstraction these days over the base operating system in a way that makes that knowledge less valuable.
Right up until they can't figure out why their code runs differently if it is writing to standard out as opposed to being piped into a file. Or use your Windows equivalent.
Sure, I guess beginning programmers can get away with using high level abstractions, but anyone who wants to be a good programmers needs to know how all this stuff works. Hell, even non-programming techie can benefit - look at all the people that kept complaining about their "memory all being in use" when they don't understand how prefetching and caching works.
>>Just a pure shakedown.
If only the ICANN had done a request for comments from the public, maybe these problems could have been identified in advance.
Oh, wait, they did.
It was a terrible idea then, and a terrible idea now, which got rejected repeatedly, until a bunch of money got dangled in front of their face.
If I had to reform education, I'd open up teaching to any person who has worked in the relevant industry for 10 years. The education "degree" teaches next to nothing, but serves as a barrier to getting good people in the classrom.
Studies have shown, in fact, students of teachers with education degrees do no better. :p
Who would be a better computer science teacher: a Google coder that has made his fortune, cashed out, and is looking to give back to society, or a person that went directly from high school into an education degree in college, with no more than a couple comp sci classes under his belt?
And why should we make it so hard to get good peoplWell, or fire the incompetent teachers?
>>Is there any adult person who doesn't realize things like crack and heroin are addictive?
Sure, and microtransactions are at the point that I now actively avoid F2P microtransaction-based games. Maybe it's unfair. Maybe there's some that do microtransactions in a reasonably ethical manner.
Maybe there's some forms of crack that are totally healthy for you and cure cancer.
But it doesn't matter. The reputation of crack and microtrannies are tainted beyond redemption now.
>>Carter may have been a screw-up, but he, at least, wasn't flat out evil. On the worst-presidents-of-all-time scale, I'd say Nixon, Bush and Obama easily surpass Carter.
You're forgetting Martin Van Buren.
Here in California it's on the order of $800/year for a LLC, and a bonus 1.5% income tax if you're an S-Corp.
>>People have done this for a while.
I know. I used to work for a company that built HMDs for the military, maybe 15 years ago or so. We took the technology and built VR arcade games out of it.
>>Sadly, the effect isn't that great - you lack your peripheral vision
It depends on the HMD. Our $100k HMDs basically covered a pretty wide range of vision. (150 degrees square or so.) They were used in military flight simulators (which were a lot of fun to play in at lunch) as well as by people actually inside of the planes.
The biggest problem, actually, is that when you have a monitor strapped to your head, you can get crazy neckstrain.
Also, motion sickness is always a problem, especially when what you see and how you move your head don't sync up.
>>So for straight up flying it is interesting but doesn't add anything much.
Eh, the military would disagree with you, I guess.
>>as you see some of the intruders exploits crashed the kernel.
Ouch.
Well, that's ironic.
Alternative schools are some of the worst schools around, if you, you know, look at the numbers. But it's good they worked out for you. I have friends that did well at them, so I know where you're coming from.
But to be fair to the GP, there IS a large contingent of losers (no other way to put it) at alt highs.
>>see Connie Willis's Hugo and Nebula winning The Doomsday Book
Yeah, it was an absolutely terrifying book, but very well written.
That said, don't read her 2011 Hugo award-winning Blackout/All Clear. Same cast of characters from the Doomsday Book, but they're written like crap.
>>And that Microsoft could never pull off an Appstore like Apple did? (anyone remember the Windows Marketplace, haha?)
Hey, guess what Microsoft is bringing back for Windows 8?
The threat of the walled garden coming to the PC is a real one, but I see it being a lot harder to enforce in a PC environment.
For me, Steam meets the right balance of DRM, convenience, and pricing. So I use it, and generally prefer it over buying things at Best Buy, even if the cost is the same. Why? I've got enough game boxes lying around here, and if I ever get the itch to play a game while I'm on the road, Steam lets me re-download it to my laptop. iTunes, by contrast, didn't let you redownload music for the longest time, making it really irritating if you bought an album while you were on the road and wanted it on your main PC.
>>Yes, it's good to see that they've thrown in a feature available on pretty much every desktop Linux distro for ten years.
Anybody who trades ISOs on Windows can mount ISOs on Windows. It takes all of 30 seconds to download and install.
To me, this is kind of like when they built in .zip support for Windows so you didn't have to mess around with WinZip (you have been running your evaluation copy for 1219489 days!).
Also, I think Microsoft actually used to have a tool that did this. So it's not really new, more like a reintroduction of an old tool. Now if they'd just bring back winipconfig so I don't need to use cmd->ipconfig any more...
>>It's days like this that I miss the fine editing that CmdrTaco used to provide.
You must be new here.