Well, I doubt they know as much about patents as I do.
The problems with US patents mostly arise because the USPTO is operated as a cash cow and flat doesn't care whether the patents they issue are valid or not, where valid means something like "issued according to law, defensible under the law, not obvious, not already patented, not existing in prior art." They just cash the check and send the money on to Congress. Consequently a US patent is only as valid as its most recent court victory.
Yes there are folks who work just for the common good. Priests, I guess, and of course computer programmers.
Patents are supposed to be a (time-limited) barrier to competition. They're supposed to be the way the inventor gets payed for his invention. Without patents there's little incentive to develop inventions into technologies --- technologies that would be quickly copied. People who don't understand this probably would really suck as businessmen.
The present patent system is a travesty, a farce, an outrage --- not much more than a license for lawyers to steal. But the answer to a broken patent system is a fixed patent system, not no patent system.
IMHO a root problem with Wikipedia is that there is no effective check on the so-called Wikignomes --- people who mindlessly edit for form instead of content, claiming they are enforcing wikipedia rules. Some no doubt do a good job but many misunderstand those rules, or willfully distort them for their own perverse ends, as happened in the original post. There's no efficient way to police these sick little gnomes, or wasn't the last time I encountered them.
mpol, you say " I'm back at my volunteer job as web developer" and "for this year I'm quite happy where I am, but next year I might go searching for a salaried job again."
The reason for a"second screen" GUI is that the first screen isn't big enough. To serve well as a GUI a distant TV screen should subtend a solid angle comparable to that of a (close) computer monitor screen. At 10 or 15 feet distance that's a pretty big TV screen. Bigger than 60 inches. So big that what you really want instead is a projector TV shining on most of a wall.
I think that rather than watch TV on an otherwise pretty much useless tablet, I'll wait for that projector.
Dang. 138 comments so far and unless I missed it not a single Chordite reference.
I've noticed that everyone in the world has strong opinions on chording keyboards. It's obvious that chording is slow and difficult to learn. It's also obvious that chording is easy to learn and fast. It will never catch on and it's completely inevitable. Every chording scheme is superior to every other one. Everything is obvious. No actual data are required.
Jeez. They're actually having a contest to try and find something useful to do with this thing.
It's really true: once institutions gets big enough all they can manage are incremental improvements. Game changing breakthroughs, should they accidently arise internally, are actively put down by beneficiaries of the status quo.
Why not work toward solving a known problem like, say, the miserable state of mobile input technology. The main reason you can't do as much on a smart phone as you can on a desktop computer is your lousy phone keyboard.
I dunno, sometimes I think civilization depends on apathy. Imagine a nation that's 100% activist. Everybody, no matter how ignorant and irrational, energetically promoting half-baked solutions and manufactured heroes.
Scares me to death.
Re:Evidence that learning/benefit ratio is too low
on
Five Finger Keyboards
·
· Score: 1
Mobility is the motivation. If you can mobilize the full range of desktop functionality it's certainly worth learning to type a new way. In fact people seem willing to learn rather tortuous input methods just to mobilize little text messages on their portable telephones.
Re:If you want to press four keys...
on
Five Finger Keyboards
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You are quite right. It's hard to type with fingers that must grip the keyboard at the same time. Stiff keys make it worse but the difficulty doesn't vanish even as the key force goes to zero. It's much better to use braces or straps of some sort to free the typing fingers from grip duty. That's why guitars, saxophones, etc. have neck straps, thumb hooks, etc.
And while I'm up here on my soapbox: it's just NOT that hard to learn to chord. Some people declare confidently that the learning curve is the barrier to widespread adoption of chording but it's not. Learning to chord, at least on my prototypes, was way easier than learning to touch type on a qwerty --- at which latter I never succeeded. You don't need such complex schemes as the blogger writes about.
The real barrier, IMHO, has been the lack of motivation. Why learn ANY efficient new way to type unless you are sufficiently rewarded? The reward is (or will be) mobility. Not just mobility for exchanging cryptic little text messages but mobility for the full range of desktop functionality.
'Why can't people just say, "Hell.. I'm not sure which side I believe yet."'
I was scholar.googling the other day on the genetic determinents of political orientation and learned that people who describe themselves as conservatives tend to be made uncomfortable by ambiguity. Liberals are OK not having definite answers to everything but it causes pain on the right. I used to say "an engineer is a scientist with math phobia" but since my professors tended left and every engineer I know tends right, I think I'll add "an engineer is a scientist with ambiguity phobia."
Yeah. Anyone with a background or even a long-standing interest in biochemistry and molecular biology can spin out lots of _plausible_ chemical interactions that could connect most any biochemical cause with any health effect of interest. The hard part, the part that takes time and money, is finding which of these reaction chains are real. But there are so many possible mechanisms, all reasonable, all with pieces previously observed in some other context, that it's insane to assume some GE product is safe until proven otherwise.
You seem to be implying that until we understand a mechanism in detail we should proceed as if there are no ill effects. That would maybe be OK if we understood a bigger fraction of the stunningly complex interrelationships at work in living things. But we don't so caution, even extreme caution is wise.
And I don't think Greenpeace has ever profited from anything.
Look: personal keyboards are like watches, eyewear and clothes, all of which visit the patient along with the doctor: cleaner and more cleanable are better but rules of good practice (personal habits) are pretty much all there is. Do you propose hygiene police armed with disinfectant sprays patrol the halls and pounce on doctors and nurses? It might work but it won't happen.
Well, I'm thinking that as staff acquired more skill with their personal keyboards, they'd develop rules, like "leave the keyboard in your pocket during the visitation" and "don't rub the keyboard on the wound."
Voice recognition still has problems, e.g., it's relatively power hungry and noise sensitive. It's also not private enough.
A better way to improve keyboard hygiene in hospitals would be for everyone to have his own personal keyboard, operated by the hand that holds it and carried in a pocket, wireless of course. Something like mine at chordite.com:-)
But what hospitals really need is a way to sterilize hands up to the elbows in about 3 seconds. Think of boxes in the halls with holes you stick your arms into. When you press a foot pedal the boxes somehow magically *poof* and you're clean. Not perfectly clean of course but as clean as a current surgical scrub. If the boxes were handy enough and safe enough for doctors and nurses to use between visits on their rounds, hospitals wouldn't be infecting everybody like they are now.
Look around. The world is big and complicated. It's even possible that "the free software community" is doing a little leeching, or being payed back in currencies other than contributed software.
It looks to me like FreeBSD is going to rule, just because they don't rule themselves out.
What I wonder is how so many people who pride themselves on being clever could simultaneously come to pretend that restriction (of how I can use my software improvement) is freedom. It has a 1984 quality to it.
This all seems pretty simple: (1a) there are lots of things that need doing before volunteers will get around to doing them, (1b) those things have to be done by people who are payed, (2) their salaries must come from customers, (3) the customers won't pay unless the software is proprietary, (4) the software must therefore not call anything GPL'd. So it follows, as the night follows the day, that anything with a GPL is of use only to hobbyists who trail along several years behind the commercial world, duplicating established functionalities.
That's not bad, it's just not enough. When people start waving the free software flag and talking about evil, it's a good idea to check that your wallet is still in your pants.
The patent office's site, http://www.uspto.gov/ has improved tremendously over the last year and does not presuppose a lot of knowledge about the internal structure of obscure government bureaus. I recommend it, even though its search engine is kind of sucky (way too many stop words).
At the opposite end of the scale is the fcc. Their site has stunk for years and still does.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I doubt they know as much about patents as I do.
The problems with US patents mostly arise because the USPTO is operated as a cash cow and flat doesn't care whether the patents they issue are valid or not, where valid means something like "issued according to law, defensible under the law, not obvious, not already patented, not existing in prior art." They just cash the check and send the money on to Congress. Consequently a US patent is only as valid as its most recent court victory.
Yes there are folks who work just for the common good. Priests, I guess, and of course computer programmers.
Patents are supposed to be a (time-limited) barrier to competition. They're supposed to be the way the inventor gets payed for his invention. Without patents there's little incentive to develop inventions into technologies --- technologies that would be quickly copied. People who don't understand this probably would really suck as businessmen.
The present patent system is a travesty, a farce, an outrage --- not much more than a license for lawyers to steal. But the answer to a broken patent system is a fixed patent system, not no patent system.
IMHO a root problem with Wikipedia is that there is no effective check on the so-called Wikignomes --- people who mindlessly edit for form instead of content, claiming they are enforcing wikipedia rules. Some no doubt do a good job but many misunderstand those rules, or willfully distort them for their own perverse ends, as happened in the original post. There's no efficient way to police these sick little gnomes, or wasn't the last time I encountered them.
mpol, you say " I'm back at my volunteer job as web developer" and "for this year I'm quite happy where I am, but next year I might go searching for a salaried job again."
Just curious: who pays your bills?
Is it me?
The reason for a"second screen" GUI is that the first screen isn't big enough. To serve well as a GUI a distant TV screen should subtend a solid angle comparable to that of a (close) computer monitor screen. At 10 or 15 feet distance that's a pretty big TV screen. Bigger than 60 inches. So big that what you really want instead is a projector TV shining on most of a wall.
I think that rather than watch TV on an otherwise pretty much useless tablet, I'll wait for that projector.
Dang. 138 comments so far and unless I missed it not a single Chordite reference.
I've noticed that everyone in the world has strong opinions on chording keyboards. It's obvious that chording is slow and difficult to learn. It's also obvious that chording is easy to learn and fast. It will never catch on and it's completely inevitable. Every chording scheme is superior to every other one. Everything is obvious. No actual data are required.
... Teensy Chordite.
Jeez. They're actually having a contest to try and find something useful to do with this thing.
It's really true: once institutions gets big enough all they can manage are incremental improvements. Game changing breakthroughs, should they accidently arise internally, are actively put down by beneficiaries of the status quo.
Why not work toward solving a known problem like, say, the miserable state of mobile input technology. The main reason you can't do as much on a smart phone as you can on a desktop computer is your lousy phone keyboard.
I dunno, sometimes I think civilization depends on apathy. Imagine a nation that's 100% activist. Everybody, no matter how ignorant and irrational, energetically promoting half-baked solutions and manufactured heroes.
Scares me to death.
Mobility is the motivation. If you can mobilize the full range of desktop functionality it's certainly worth learning to type a new way. In fact people seem willing to learn rather tortuous input methods just to mobilize little text messages on their portable telephones.
You are quite right. It's hard to type with fingers that must grip the keyboard at the same time. Stiff keys make it worse but the difficulty doesn't vanish even as the key force goes to zero. It's much better to use braces or straps of some sort to free the typing fingers from grip duty. That's why guitars, saxophones, etc. have neck straps, thumb hooks, etc.
And while I'm up here on my soapbox: it's just NOT that hard to learn to chord. Some people declare confidently that the learning curve is the barrier to widespread adoption of chording but it's not. Learning to chord, at least on my prototypes, was way easier than learning to touch type on a qwerty --- at which latter I never succeeded. You don't need such complex schemes as the blogger writes about.
The real barrier, IMHO, has been the lack of motivation. Why learn ANY efficient new way to type unless you are sufficiently rewarded? The reward is (or will be) mobility. Not just mobility for exchanging cryptic little text messages but mobility for the full range of desktop functionality.
It's not me, it's just what I read. But you sorta fit what I'm talking about.
... be comfortable with realistically defining the boundary between what they do and don't know."
Mr. Engineer says "Scientists have to
Dr. Scientist says scientists are comfortable not being able to define such a boundary.
'Why can't people just say, "Hell.. I'm not sure which side I believe yet."'
I was scholar.googling the other day on the genetic determinents of political orientation and learned that people who describe themselves as conservatives tend to be made uncomfortable by ambiguity. Liberals are OK not having definite answers to everything but it causes pain on the right. I used to say "an engineer is a scientist with math phobia" but since my professors tended left and every engineer I know tends right, I think I'll add "an engineer is a scientist with ambiguity phobia."
Yeah. Anyone with a background or even a long-standing interest in biochemistry and molecular biology can spin out lots of _plausible_ chemical interactions that could connect most any biochemical cause with any health effect of interest. The hard part, the part that takes time and money, is finding which of these reaction chains are real. But there are so many possible mechanisms, all reasonable, all with pieces previously observed in some other context, that it's insane to assume some GE product is safe until proven otherwise.
You seem to be implying that until we understand a mechanism in detail we should proceed as if there are no ill effects. That would maybe be OK if we understood a bigger fraction of the stunningly complex interrelationships at work in living things. But we don't so caution, even extreme caution is wise.
And I don't think Greenpeace has ever profited from anything.
Look: personal keyboards are like watches, eyewear and clothes, all of which visit the patient along with the doctor: cleaner and more cleanable are better but rules of good practice (personal habits) are pretty much all there is. Do you propose hygiene police armed with disinfectant sprays patrol the halls and pounce on doctors and nurses? It might work but it won't happen.
Well, I'm thinking that as staff acquired more skill with their personal keyboards, they'd develop rules, like "leave the keyboard in your pocket during the visitation" and "don't rub the keyboard on the wound."
Voice recognition still has problems, e.g., it's relatively power hungry and noise sensitive. It's also not private enough.
A better way to improve keyboard hygiene in hospitals would be for everyone to have his own personal keyboard, operated by the hand that holds it and carried in a pocket, wireless of course. Something like mine at chordite.com :-)
But what hospitals really need is a way to sterilize hands up to the elbows in about 3 seconds. Think of boxes in the halls with holes you stick your arms into. When you press a foot pedal the boxes somehow magically *poof* and you're clean. Not perfectly clean of course but as clean as a current surgical scrub. If the boxes were handy enough and safe enough for doctors and nurses to use between visits on their rounds, hospitals wouldn't be infecting everybody like they are now.
Look around. The world is big and complicated. It's even possible that "the free software community" is doing a little leeching, or being payed back in currencies other than contributed software. It looks to me like FreeBSD is going to rule, just because they don't rule themselves out.
What I wonder is how so many people who pride themselves on being clever could simultaneously come to pretend that restriction (of how I can use my software improvement) is freedom. It has a 1984 quality to it. This all seems pretty simple: (1a) there are lots of things that need doing before volunteers will get around to doing them, (1b) those things have to be done by people who are payed, (2) their salaries must come from customers, (3) the customers won't pay unless the software is proprietary, (4) the software must therefore not call anything GPL'd. So it follows, as the night follows the day, that anything with a GPL is of use only to hobbyists who trail along several years behind the commercial world, duplicating established functionalities. That's not bad, it's just not enough. When people start waving the free software flag and talking about evil, it's a good idea to check that your wallet is still in your pants.
The patent office's site, http://www.uspto.gov/ has improved tremendously over the last year and does not presuppose a lot of knowledge about the internal structure of obscure government bureaus. I recommend it, even though its search engine is kind of sucky (way too many stop words). At the opposite end of the scale is the fcc. Their site has stunk for years and still does.