Only the second was a constructed outlier--the first was the only scenario in which I've looked up laptop rental companies to make sure I had a backup plan in place. I don't actually have a profile of laptop rental use, so I extrapolated. =)
How do we know that? There hasn't been an audit of the Federal Reserve gold in over 60 years. This audit they're doing now is nothing more than a joke for those who understand how the Fed works.
Sure, they could be faking it. But I find it unlikely.
First, it is gold belonging to a lot of different countries--I am sure if any country seriously believed there were a problem, it could examine--or even claim--its own gold.
Second, I've been in the vault. It is pretty damn secure, and there was a lot of gold there when I visited.
Got news for you, before WWII, our solders pointed broomsticks at cars ("tanks") and said, "eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh", to simulate firing an imaginary weapon. During WWI, gunners trained by using their finger and pointing at imaginary targets while spinning in a swivel chair. The US absolutely did NOT become a super power until after the close of WWII. And in large part, that was thanks to the Germans (including Nazis) absorbed by the US.
At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, we had forty aircraft carriers: 8 fleet, 8 light, and 18 escort. Plus a dozen battleships and over a hundred fifty other ships.
Forty fucking aircraft carriers.
We were a super power--and the only nuclear power--before the end of World War 2.
Effectively, the problem is that given inflation, inventories earn more than they cost, so there is profit. In deflation, inventories cost more than they earn, so there is loss. *technically* that isn't exactly true--the value of the dollar is changing--but it certainly messes a lot of things up, like our whole national tax infrastructure.
Deflation also makes it more expensive to borrow... unless you adjust for the time value of money in the borrowing, which frankly is more complex and probably more expensive (transaction costs are higher for more complexity).
Our currency more than doubling in value is what you consider inflation? Are you... oh... you're posting AC. Nevermind. If filling out a registration form is too taxing for you, which-number-is-biggeristics is way too advanced. Knowing when to properly apply the concept is even harder than that. No, even economics 101 is out of your reach.
Don't be mean; the guy just used the wrong sign in his head.
I believe that the knights were required to buy their own armor. And if you could afford that, you could probably afford a horse too.
Generally, but there were many times they did not have horses. For example, during one of the crusades it is estimated that tens of thousands of horses left Europe and effectively none made it back alive. The knights who survived, if they kept their armor, walked in it.
'The US wasn't scared of France then.' no they where too busy repainting the White house to care.
Interestingly, US Schools teach that the British torched the White House, but they usually omit that it was done in retaliation for the U.S.'s burning the houses of Parliament in Canada--which is why the Canadian capital was moved to Ottawa.
While it has long been assumed that heavy medieval armor limited mobility, and that this contributed to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415
Nonsense. It's well established that being French contributes to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt. The effects of armor is minor in comparison.
Actually, the English won at Agincourt (despite being outnumbered) because they had longbows. The battle signals the end of the era of the mounted knight and the rise of the infantry revolution, one of a few fundamental shifts in warfare. (Basic Training [Romans]; Infantry [Longbows shoot through armor]; Gunpowder [major infrastructure required], Modern [Machine Gun, Mechanized Warfare, WMDs]). It also made nationalism more important--you needed the loyalty of the people with the longbows, not just of the people wealthy enough to own armor.
Agincourt is also the battle Shakespeare wrote his "Band of Brothers" bit for--in a play which Data performed on the holodeck for Captain Picard. (The scene where the King is going hidden among his subjects.)
It may simply not make sense to buy--if, for example, a laptop under warranty breaks, you aren't in a place where you can borrow one, and you need a laptop for that day due to commitments. Or perhaps if your computing habits were such that you didn't use a laptop except for once every two or three years--maybe you use desktops at home and work and usually rely on a blackberry when traveling.
We RTO'ed my son's trombone and 100% of the payment went to the balance. Maybe you're thinking about electronics.
It can be done legitimately. But it is also a common scam. There have been several contract law cases about this, but most people, obviously, just get taken advantage of.
Are you kidding? This is PROOF that current laws are more than enough for law enforcement to track down and arrest hackers.
Whether they can convict them, and of what, is another question.
There are a few issues standing in the way, and some of them we *Want* to stand in the way (in certain cases), of law enforcement arresting crackers.
(1) There may be lots of multijurisdictional issues in any given case. Crimes may involve computers in many countries, and standard legal and investigative mechanisms available in the United States, as well as constitutional protections, may not be available in those countries. There needs to be good international law on this point, but it is tricky to work out because countries have different laws on what may or may not be legal in the way of online activities. European and North American Truth-in-advertising laws, for example, are very different. Some countries ban certain imports other countries may sell. Some countries are run by warlords. Some countries like free speech--is hacking a repressive regime to reveal human rights abuses something every country in the world would agree to criminalize? I would expect to see some interesting cases on the Constitutionality of international jurisdiction of computer crimes in the next fifty years or so, and some interesting treaties.
(2) Information illegally or unconstitutionally obtained, which our government has a lot of, cannot be used in court. (Whether it can be used to *impeach* someone's testimony in court is a more interesting question.)
(3) Encryption.
Basically, we don't want to make citizens of country A liable for breaking county B's laws, unless Country A has no laws for something everyone agrees is bad to do and Country B's laws aren't batshit crazy. But we do want to ensure some measure of corporate privacy (unless we give up on trade secrets entirely and switch to an entirely patent and copyright based system) and government privacy (there will be military secrets until there is no need for militaries, and for a while longer). But only some measure--because there are virtues to transparency, too.
You mean to say that you don't think other human beings are smart enough to enter into contracts of their own choice when you think those agreements are not a good idea. How you got so smart that you can figure out what they can't is left unclear.
I could see some mandatory disclosures to help people make informed decisions, including having a neutral third-party explain exactly what they are getting into. I know I would never buy into a HOA property. I just can't stand the idea that because I don't like it then others shouldn't be able to chose differently -- it assumes far too much.
This argument has been used to justify almost every contract and practice that exploits people. Sweatshops, no minimum wage law, no child labor laws, no overtime laws, no OSHA laws, no requirement that homes have to be habitable, etc... Not to mention abhorrent practices like payday loans, etc...
I'm confused, how does the other house not facing the street affect your house's value? I can think of a couple reasons why it would affect the value of that house (look out the front window and have a nice scenic view of... the side of your house), but nothing that should matter to someone looking to buy your house.
That's often a justification for covenants in neighborhoods, zoning laws, HOA rules, etc...
The orientation of the other house usually will not matter, and for that matter will not be prescribed by zoning laws, etc..., I believe. But things like lot coverage (Are they build right up to all four property lines?) accessory uses (Are they keeping a dozen cows in their front yard for a small farm?) runoff (Are they eroding your yard with all the water from theirs) and signage (Ah, neon profanity. Just what I always wanted in a neighbor) can hurt your property values.
Who exactly is "that kid" that you're talking about? The minority youth whose only ambition in life is to become a "thug"? The one who goes out of his way to avoid getting any sort of an education? The one who speaks his native language like he's a fucking moron? The one who wears his pants at his ankles? The one who intentionally seeks out violence, and abuses drugs and alcohol?
No, nothing can be done for him. He's a failure. Some kids just are. Don't blame greater society, the schools or the educators for such youth doing everything in their power to fail at every aspect of life.
Yes, the answer is to marginalize such youth. There is no hope for them, and they are not worth our time to try to save. There are many more deserving youth who should get such attention instead. You know, the ones who come from impoverish backgrounds, but who actually want to learn.
Not sure if you're trying to be satirical.
Anyway, such things can be improved. Go into an inner-city school and watch a good talk on gender abuse. Boys who otherwise think it's normal to abuse their girlfriends often have a major breakthrough when they make the connection to child abuse--and pretty much everyone in that environment is familiar with child abuse. Lives can improve. People can improve.
Of course it's easier to marginalize, and to avoid that segment of society altogether, for the individual. But for society as a whole, we are far better off if we don't.
The point is that it's evidence of overprescription, not of excessive psychotic behavior.
There is also a problem in the observations in the summary--notably, the mere fact that we are expanding our clinical definitions of psychological diagnoses is NOT a bad thing--the problem is when people treat them wrong. The good thing about expanding and re-working the definitions is that it lets you describe and identify conditions better in each generation than you did in the generation before, and maybe learn something more about how they should be best treated.
The problem is that almost nobody does real psychotherapy anymore (except for the filthy rich), so in most cases all people do is prescribe medication as if that would treat the problem. There are cases where it will, and there are more cases where it will treat the symptoms, but it often is very much the wrong approach. You can't sit down with someone and cure a psychological issue with a talking-to or folk medicine--they can be complex and very time-consuming and difficult for people to learn to live with or move past or adapt to the world in spite of--but conversations, activities, and the development of a support network in almost every case I have seen has made a bigger impact by far than the use of drugs.
Using code other people write is just lazy and shows your inability to code.
That's why I wrote the web browser I'm using in C, a C compiler in assembler, an assembler assembler in machine code, and my microcode I wrote in ones and zeros that I entered manually onto my CPU with a paper-clip, a voltage divider, and some double-A batteries.
(I have High Dexterity and Int. Very low Wisdom.)
PS - modularity has advantages and disadvantages. Use it when it's the right tool for the job. Sounds like you just had a bad experience with a professor or a project where the granularity of the modules created transaction costs that outweighed the benefits.
No, it's not fair. They should have let both sets "win."
They should have, but they probably couldn't have legally--at least not easily. Even a court (as opposed to the issuing agency) doesn't have the power to overrule a Congressional statute--the only real option would have been to find a Constitutional basis for letting both sides win that overruled the statute in this instance. Maybe you could call it a due process right--if it were appealed, though, it would probably be reversed, and judges don't like to be reversed.
Border guards in this country have about thirty seconds per person. Similarly, in the TSA context, if you can decrease the time you spend on low-risk individuals, you will increase the time you can spend screening people more likely to be dangerous. That means everyone but the people whom you evaluate as the lowest risk individuals will be harassed more, and you will have a better chance of catching people because you have more time to spend on high-risk individuals, if you ever actually catch people and if your ability to realize someone is a terrorist is a function of time spent with them.
It's not looking at it more closely that I'm concerned with (in that point--looking at it more closely does have other costs). A higher obviousness bar usually gives examiners much more discretion to reject things unless it is done incredibly well. It's also not written entirely by the defendant [i.e. applicant]--the office also conducts a search, and the examiner rejects applications with enough detail that the applicant has to respond if he has a prayer of getting the patent until the examiner is satisfied, and if the applicant deliberately omits things the consequences are quite high. (i.e. inequitable conduct.)
Raising the obviousness bar is not looking more closely at the applications--it is fundamentally changing the standard. That's an important distinction. In one case, things that were patentable are no longer patentable. It is conceivable you could raise it in a nonambiguous way, but it is extremely unlikely that that is what actually will happen. KSR was probably the right ruling on that combination of patents, but the result is a lot of obviousness rejections and a lot of discretion on the part of the PTO, which makes the whole process more problematic for anyone who actually wants a patent, including good guys.
The problem with going the other way--fully active evaluation rather than a mix between active and passive evaluation--is that it increases delay times at the patent office, increases the administrative burden of getting patents (making it much harder for individual inventors or small entities), decreases the incentivization for actual invention, increases the amount of ambiguity in the rejection process, and wastes many more man-hours for EVERY patent application, without significantly mitigating the number of man-hours involved during actual litigation. It is possible that the transaction costs of having unenforceable patents outweigh those costs--but absent a really good economic analysis to that effect, my tendency is to believe that the problems outweight the gains. I think we need patent reform--but we should be very careful about raising the obviousness bar too high. (We might try a different approach--e.g. at application time, ask a person of skill in the art how he would solve the problem. What he comes up, if close enough to the invention, might influence the obviousness determination, absent evidence that the invention was already known in the field based on the inventor's work.)
Even if poster were right and the prior art applied, what would be the big deal? An unenforceable patent is hardly anything more than no patent at all. You might pay someone a little money just to get it out of your face (i.e. it's not worth your time), but you know it'll almost certainly be defeated in court if push comes to shove. The USPTO rejects more than half of the patent applications they receive--but if litigation ever arises, prior art gets a MUCH more thorough review.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the second was a constructed outlier--the first was the only scenario in which I've looked up laptop rental companies to make sure I had a backup plan in place. I don't actually have a profile of laptop rental use, so I extrapolated. =)
How do we know that? There hasn't been an audit of the Federal Reserve gold in over 60 years. This audit they're doing now is nothing more than a joke for those who understand how the Fed works.
Sure, they could be faking it. But I find it unlikely.
First, it is gold belonging to a lot of different countries--I am sure if any country seriously believed there were a problem, it could examine--or even claim--its own gold.
Second, I've been in the vault. It is pretty damn secure, and there was a lot of gold there when I visited.
Got news for you, before WWII, our solders pointed broomsticks at cars ("tanks") and said, "eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh", to simulate firing an imaginary weapon. During WWI, gunners trained by using their finger and pointing at imaginary targets while spinning in a swivel chair. The US absolutely did NOT become a super power until after the close of WWII. And in large part, that was thanks to the Germans (including Nazis) absorbed by the US.
At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, we had forty aircraft carriers: 8 fleet, 8 light, and 18 escort. Plus a dozen battleships and over a hundred fifty other ships.
Forty fucking aircraft carriers.
We were a super power--and the only nuclear power--before the end of World War 2.
We have 10% of the world's official gold reserve sitting in a basement in NY, 50 feet below sea level. It's just sitting there. (NY Fed.)
Good point.
Effectively, the problem is that given inflation, inventories earn more than they cost, so there is profit. In deflation, inventories cost more than they earn, so there is loss. *technically* that isn't exactly true--the value of the dollar is changing--but it certainly messes a lot of things up, like our whole national tax infrastructure.
Deflation also makes it more expensive to borrow... unless you adjust for the time value of money in the borrowing, which frankly is more complex and probably more expensive (transaction costs are higher for more complexity).
Our currency more than doubling in value is what you consider inflation? Are you... oh... you're posting AC. Nevermind. If filling out a registration form is too taxing for you, which-number-is-biggeristics is way too advanced. Knowing when to properly apply the concept is even harder than that. No, even economics 101 is out of your reach.
Don't be mean; the guy just used the wrong sign in his head.
I believe that the knights were required to buy their own armor. And if you could afford that, you could probably afford a horse too.
Generally, but there were many times they did not have horses. For example, during one of the crusades it is estimated that tens of thousands of horses left Europe and effectively none made it back alive. The knights who survived, if they kept their armor, walked in it.
reenactors are hobbyists, and not real medieval soldiers...
I feel a great disturbance, as if millions of SCA fans reached out in terror...
While it may take some of the weight while standing still, it won't do anything to help lift the legs while walking.
And if you transfer the weight onto the pelvis, what supports the pelvis?
You move your legs more than you move your Pelvis, so putting the weight on your Pelvis is better--think about it.
'The US wasn't scared of France then.' no they where too busy repainting the White house to care.
Interestingly, US Schools teach that the British torched the White House, but they usually omit that it was done in retaliation for the U.S.'s burning the houses of Parliament in Canada--which is why the Canadian capital was moved to Ottawa.
While it has long been assumed that heavy medieval armor limited mobility, and that this contributed to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415
Nonsense. It's well established that being French contributes to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt. The effects of armor is minor in comparison.
Actually, the English won at Agincourt (despite being outnumbered) because they had longbows. The battle signals the end of the era of the mounted knight and the rise of the infantry revolution, one of a few fundamental shifts in warfare. (Basic Training [Romans]; Infantry [Longbows shoot through armor]; Gunpowder [major infrastructure required], Modern [Machine Gun, Mechanized Warfare, WMDs]). It also made nationalism more important--you needed the loyalty of the people with the longbows, not just of the people wealthy enough to own armor.
Agincourt is also the battle Shakespeare wrote his "Band of Brothers" bit for--in a play which Data performed on the holodeck for Captain Picard. (The scene where the King is going hidden among his subjects.)
It may simply not make sense to buy--if, for example, a laptop under warranty breaks, you aren't in a place where you can borrow one, and you need a laptop for that day due to commitments. Or perhaps if your computing habits were such that you didn't use a laptop except for once every two or three years--maybe you use desktops at home and work and usually rely on a blackberry when traveling.
We RTO'ed my son's trombone and 100% of the payment went to the balance. Maybe you're thinking about electronics.
It can be done legitimately. But it is also a common scam. There have been several contract law cases about this, but most people, obviously, just get taken advantage of.
Are you kidding? This is PROOF that current laws are more than enough for law enforcement to track down and arrest hackers.
Whether they can convict them, and of what, is another question.
There are a few issues standing in the way, and some of them we *Want* to stand in the way (in certain cases), of law enforcement arresting crackers.
(1) There may be lots of multijurisdictional issues in any given case. Crimes may involve computers in many countries, and standard legal and investigative mechanisms available in the United States, as well as constitutional protections, may not be available in those countries. There needs to be good international law on this point, but it is tricky to work out because countries have different laws on what may or may not be legal in the way of online activities. European and North American Truth-in-advertising laws, for example, are very different. Some countries ban certain imports other countries may sell. Some countries are run by warlords. Some countries like free speech--is hacking a repressive regime to reveal human rights abuses something every country in the world would agree to criminalize? I would expect to see some interesting cases on the Constitutionality of international jurisdiction of computer crimes in the next fifty years or so, and some interesting treaties.
(2) Information illegally or unconstitutionally obtained, which our government has a lot of, cannot be used in court. (Whether it can be used to *impeach* someone's testimony in court is a more interesting question.)
(3) Encryption.
Basically, we don't want to make citizens of country A liable for breaking county B's laws, unless Country A has no laws for something everyone agrees is bad to do and Country B's laws aren't batshit crazy. But we do want to ensure some measure of corporate privacy (unless we give up on trade secrets entirely and switch to an entirely patent and copyright based system) and government privacy (there will be military secrets until there is no need for militaries, and for a while longer). But only some measure--because there are virtues to transparency, too.
It's not a simple problem.
Yeah, make home owners associations illegal.
You mean to say that you don't think other human beings are smart enough to enter into contracts of their own choice when you think those agreements are not a good idea. How you got so smart that you can figure out what they can't is left unclear.
I could see some mandatory disclosures to help people make informed decisions, including having a neutral third-party explain exactly what they are getting into. I know I would never buy into a HOA property. I just can't stand the idea that because I don't like it then others shouldn't be able to chose differently -- it assumes far too much.
This argument has been used to justify almost every contract and practice that exploits people. Sweatshops, no minimum wage law, no child labor laws, no overtime laws, no OSHA laws, no requirement that homes have to be habitable, etc... Not to mention abhorrent practices like payday loans, etc...
I'm confused, how does the other house not facing the street affect your house's value? I can think of a couple reasons why it would affect the value of that house (look out the front window and have a nice scenic view of... the side of your house), but nothing that should matter to someone looking to buy your house.
That's often a justification for covenants in neighborhoods, zoning laws, HOA rules, etc...
The orientation of the other house usually will not matter, and for that matter will not be prescribed by zoning laws, etc..., I believe. But things like lot coverage (Are they build right up to all four property lines?) accessory uses (Are they keeping a dozen cows in their front yard for a small farm?) runoff (Are they eroding your yard with all the water from theirs) and signage (Ah, neon profanity. Just what I always wanted in a neighbor) can hurt your property values.
Then why make a 64 bit version at all? If the company has no idea what people expect, then they don't need to be messing with it in first place.
Hurray! With 64 bits, Firefox might be able to address all the memory it uses...
Who exactly is "that kid" that you're talking about? The minority youth whose only ambition in life is to become a "thug"? The one who goes out of his way to avoid getting any sort of an education? The one who speaks his native language like he's a fucking moron? The one who wears his pants at his ankles? The one who intentionally seeks out violence, and abuses drugs and alcohol?
No, nothing can be done for him. He's a failure. Some kids just are. Don't blame greater society, the schools or the educators for such youth doing everything in their power to fail at every aspect of life.
Yes, the answer is to marginalize such youth. There is no hope for them, and they are not worth our time to try to save. There are many more deserving youth who should get such attention instead. You know, the ones who come from impoverish backgrounds, but who actually want to learn.
Not sure if you're trying to be satirical.
Anyway, such things can be improved. Go into an inner-city school and watch a good talk on gender abuse. Boys who otherwise think it's normal to abuse their girlfriends often have a major breakthrough when they make the connection to child abuse--and pretty much everyone in that environment is familiar with child abuse. Lives can improve. People can improve.
Of course it's easier to marginalize, and to avoid that segment of society altogether, for the individual. But for society as a whole, we are far better off if we don't.
The point is that it's evidence of overprescription, not of excessive psychotic behavior.
There is also a problem in the observations in the summary--notably, the mere fact that we are expanding our clinical definitions of psychological diagnoses is NOT a bad thing--the problem is when people treat them wrong. The good thing about expanding and re-working the definitions is that it lets you describe and identify conditions better in each generation than you did in the generation before, and maybe learn something more about how they should be best treated.
The problem is that almost nobody does real psychotherapy anymore (except for the filthy rich), so in most cases all people do is prescribe medication as if that would treat the problem. There are cases where it will, and there are more cases where it will treat the symptoms, but it often is very much the wrong approach. You can't sit down with someone and cure a psychological issue with a talking-to or folk medicine--they can be complex and very time-consuming and difficult for people to learn to live with or move past or adapt to the world in spite of--but conversations, activities, and the development of a support network in almost every case I have seen has made a bigger impact by far than the use of drugs.
Exactly. These modern folks have it easy!
Using code other people write is just lazy and shows your inability to code.
That's why I wrote the web browser I'm using in C, a C compiler in assembler, an assembler assembler in machine code, and my microcode I wrote in ones and zeros that I entered manually onto my CPU with a paper-clip, a voltage divider, and some double-A batteries.
(I have High Dexterity and Int. Very low Wisdom.)
PS - modularity has advantages and disadvantages. Use it when it's the right tool for the job. Sounds like you just had a bad experience with a professor or a project where the granularity of the modules created transaction costs that outweighed the benefits.
No, it's not fair. They should have let both sets "win."
They should have, but they probably couldn't have legally--at least not easily. Even a court (as opposed to the issuing agency) doesn't have the power to overrule a Congressional statute--the only real option would have been to find a Constitutional basis for letting both sides win that overruled the statute in this instance. Maybe you could call it a due process right--if it were appealed, though, it would probably be reversed, and judges don't like to be reversed.
Border guards in this country have about thirty seconds per person. Similarly, in the TSA context, if you can decrease the time you spend on low-risk individuals, you will increase the time you can spend screening people more likely to be dangerous. That means everyone but the people whom you evaluate as the lowest risk individuals will be harassed more, and you will have a better chance of catching people because you have more time to spend on high-risk individuals, if you ever actually catch people and if your ability to realize someone is a terrorist is a function of time spent with them.
It's not looking at it more closely that I'm concerned with (in that point--looking at it more closely does have other costs). A higher obviousness bar usually gives examiners much more discretion to reject things unless it is done incredibly well. It's also not written entirely by the defendant [i.e. applicant]--the office also conducts a search, and the examiner rejects applications with enough detail that the applicant has to respond if he has a prayer of getting the patent until the examiner is satisfied, and if the applicant deliberately omits things the consequences are quite high. (i.e. inequitable conduct.)
Raising the obviousness bar is not looking more closely at the applications--it is fundamentally changing the standard. That's an important distinction. In one case, things that were patentable are no longer patentable. It is conceivable you could raise it in a nonambiguous way, but it is extremely unlikely that that is what actually will happen. KSR was probably the right ruling on that combination of patents, but the result is a lot of obviousness rejections and a lot of discretion on the part of the PTO, which makes the whole process more problematic for anyone who actually wants a patent, including good guys.
The problem with going the other way--fully active evaluation rather than a mix between active and passive evaluation--is that it increases delay times at the patent office, increases the administrative burden of getting patents (making it much harder for individual inventors or small entities), decreases the incentivization for actual invention, increases the amount of ambiguity in the rejection process, and wastes many more man-hours for EVERY patent application, without significantly mitigating the number of man-hours involved during actual litigation. It is possible that the transaction costs of having unenforceable patents outweigh those costs--but absent a really good economic analysis to that effect, my tendency is to believe that the problems outweight the gains. I think we need patent reform--but we should be very careful about raising the obviousness bar too high. (We might try a different approach--e.g. at application time, ask a person of skill in the art how he would solve the problem. What he comes up, if close enough to the invention, might influence the obviousness determination, absent evidence that the invention was already known in the field based on the inventor's work.)
Even if poster were right and the prior art applied, what would be the big deal? An unenforceable patent is hardly anything more than no patent at all. You might pay someone a little money just to get it out of your face (i.e. it's not worth your time), but you know it'll almost certainly be defeated in court if push comes to shove. The USPTO rejects more than half of the patent applications they receive--but if litigation ever arises, prior art gets a MUCH more thorough review.