people been changing the meaning of words since the beginning of time. Just deal and accept it.
You're missing the point. I don't have a problem with the meaning of the word pirate - neither the old meaning nor the new meaning. I just think it's folly to call yourself a pirate when that's exactly what your enemies want you to be called.
This is not a war that can be won without having the public on your side. It doesn't matter how many geeks on Slashdot or elsewhere think that pirates are cool. Most of the public hears the words "pirate" or "piracy" and thinks exactly what the MAFIAA wants them to think: criminal, thief, bad guy.
The real battle is getting the public to understand why they should give a shit about keeping the Internet free (as in speech). You're not doing yourself any favors by saying "Fuck yeah! I'm a pirate, bitches!"
That may be, but I don't see the "pirate" moniker working out very well for people fighting for Internet freedom. Despite the fact that a lot of geeks think that "pirates are cool", most members of our society hear the word "pirate" and think exactly what the MAFIAA wants them to think: criminals, thiefs, etc, etc.
I wish the people behind these anti-big-brother movements would stop calling themselves pirates. There are LOTS of good reasons to support file-sharing and a free-as-in-speech Internet, and to oppose abusive government intrusion and the commercialization of the Internet. Those who fight for this cause under the "pirate" banner are not only doing a disservice to their own cause, but to the rest of us who want a free Internet for reasons other than downloading the latest crappy summer blockbuster movie via BitTorrent.
At the very least, the word "pirate" should be avoided because that is the MAFIAA's loaded word of choice for painting file sharers as dangerous criminals. Why let your enemy frame the argument in his own terms? It's akin to the way the neocons in the U.S. frame the war debate as a question of whether or not you support the troops.
Sounds like you're overreacting a bit. The OP's comment sounds to me like a reasonable suggestion that would probably fit the needs of a significant percentage of Adobe Reader users. A solution doesn't have to be completely general in order to be useful.
I never said the video I saw was unique. In fact, I'm not at all unsurprised that there are apparently many more just like it, and probably even a few that are worse.
I'm not exactly sure what your point is, and I find it a bit disturbing that you've got so many links to this kind of stuff.
The usual warnings go: extremely graphic and violent, NSFW, don't blame me if you feel sick after watching it or start having bad dreams etc.
No need for the warnings. I assure you that I will not watch them. I've learned my lesson as far as that goes.
Whatever, douchebag. You're merely hiding behind the fact that this discussion has got my ire up to pretend that you're the calm, rational one, and trying to turn that into me being over emotional, etc. So drop the act - it's completely transparent. I am no less rational than you are, and on any other topic, I'd be just as calm.
This conversation isn't some dry, logical debate about whether ATI or Nvidia makes the best video card. We're talking about watching a human being die in sheer terror, and a bunch of know-it-all douchebags like you come along, who haven't even seen the video, and act like it's no big deal, just to try to make yourselves sound tough and calloused, when in reality you're probably just some fat geek like everyone else on here.
So pardon me for being a little riled up when someone calls me oversensitive and sheltered just because I couldn't stomach seeing someone get his head cut off with a hunting knife.
Fuck you and your faux-rationalism and feigned stoicism.
One thing that repulsed me was the string of shitty torture porn movies that were released in theaters (Saw series, Hostel, etc.). I bet if you showed the audiences a real beheading video instead of Saw, they would have a much different reaction than they would watching simulated torture and murder.
Absolutely right. The difference between horror movies and real-life murder videos is NOT merely that one is real and one is fake. Even the goriest Rob Zombie movie cannot hold a candle to the sheer unadulterated terror of a real murder. People seem to think that the tricky part about simulating a murder in a horror flick is getting all the gory special effects to look realistic enough, but the thing that make a real murder so horrific is not the blood and guts, but the real terror and fear that the victims experience. No actor, no matter how good, can even approach that. Unfortunately, this is something people don't seem to understand until they've actually seen a real murder video.
Nice double-standard you've got there. You label me as sheltered and overly sensitive because I didn't respond the way you did, and then you turn around and cry foul when I give you a label in return.
If someone had taken that footage and spliced it into a Hollywood film, you would have taken it completely in stride.
You're an idiot. There was no mistaking this as real. This was several minutes of pure terror, unlike any movie you've ever seen. If you really believe that bullshit, then you've obviously never seen the video I'm referring to.
WTF? Seriously, moderators... How the FUCK did you mod this guy insightful???? I was 30 years old when I saw that video, and have experienced more than my share of death and violence in my life - my father died in a head-on collision when I was 7, and my mother later married a violent, physically abusive alcoholic. Is that your definition of sheltered? That video left me trembling and nauseous, and to this day, I wish I could erase that from my mind. So here's a big "Fuck You" to whatever morons modded this bullshit dime-store psychology as "Insightful".
I think I saw the video you are talking about, the video of the Russian Neo Nazi's who beheaded those two jewish guys.
No, that definitely wasn't it. I think it may have been Daniel Pearl, but the video I'm thinking of wasn't the highly-edited version with all the Arabic subtitles and what not. The one I saw was a full length unedited version with full audio, that started with the victim on his knees pleading for his life, and ended with his head being cut completely off and held in front of the camera. The camera never panned away, and there were no edits. It showed every scream, every tear, every cut and slice, etc. They guy was in complete and utter terror from the time they made the first cut, and the only thing that made the poor guy stop screaming was when they sliced through his trachea and he started making these horrific gurgling sounds. And quite unlike the guillotine executions you might have seen in old black & white movies, this was no quick and clean beheading - it took several minutes before he was finally dead.
If you can watch that and be completely unaffected, well then congratulations - you're an asshole!
I thought the video was brutal, cruel, but it has no serious affect because I knew people were brutal and cruel before I saw the video.
People who are so sensitive that they cannot watch a person get beheaded, have psychological issues of their own to deal with because they have been sheltered from the real world.
I used to think I was one of those people, until I saw a full length, uncut video of some terrorists beheading a captured American.
I would advise anybody who thinks they're not one of those "overly sensitive" people to give it some serious thought before they decide to watch something like that, much less get a job doing it all day long. Some things you just cannot un-see - although you'll certainly wish you could.
At the time it began, the Iraq war had widespread favor across the political spectrum, with most of the Senate Democrats voting in favor of it, including the oh-so-very-far-right Hilary Clinton. Belief in WMD was similarly pervasive, since the intelligence community was saying they were there, and no evidence had come out yet to suggest this analysis was incorrect.
I'm not sure what part of the country you live in, but as I recall it, belief in WMD was anything but pervasive. I, along with numerous friends, acquaintances, family members, coworkers, etc, was absolutely appalled that we were actually going to invade Iraq based on such flimsy pretenses.
Mind you, I'm not exactly a liberal pacifist who was concerned about unjustly attacking poor ol' Saddam - my concerns about the WMD evidence mostly stemmed from the fact that invading Iraq was bound to be a decade-long (or longer) quagmire, which would cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers, not to mention countless billions of taxpayer dollars. I just wanted to be assured that there was a damn good reason for going through with all of that.
I kept asking the question, "Where's the hard evidence?". There never was any. All I ever saw was smoke and mirrors, lots of dog-and-pony shows with paper-thin wisps of "evidence", and "intelligence" reports that absolutely reeked of political spin and creative interpretation. Honestly, I probably would have found it more convincing if they'd just said that they'd consulted a witch-doctor who had divined the presence of WMDs in Iraq while in a peyote-induced trance.
And mind you, I'm not someone you would generally consider a liberal, so it's not as if my experience was due to my own political leanings, nor those of my peers. I live in the Los Angeles area, and my friends, family, and coworkers are roughly an equal mix of liberals, conservatives, and apolitical types. Even among my conservative friends, there seemed to be some palpable concern that the WMD evidence was a bit flimsy. I'd hardly call that a pervasive belief. Then again, that was just my own experience. YMMV.
Wow, how many ways can you be wrong in a single post???
First, you're wrong about this being the first ever BOP failure. As another poster has already noted, the IXTOC disaster in 1979 was also (at least partially) the result of a BOP failure. Furthermore, BOP failures are evidently not such a rare event. Apparently, they fail frequently enough during routine tests that at least a couple studies have been done on BOP failure. From this article:
Indeed, more than a year before Pleasant's frantic efforts to stop an inferno, a large study of BOP reliability in the Gulf of Mexico had warned industry experts and federal safety officials that balky control systems were by far the most common cause of BOP failure – and apparently getting worse.
Altogether, 63 percent of blowout preventer test failures cited in that 2009 study, a joint effort by the industry and the regulatory US Minerals Management Service (MMS), involved control systems. By contrast, a similar study a decade earlier had found control systems were responsible for 51 percent of BOP failures.
Hard data about the reliability of blowout preventers is hard to come by. But back in 2002, West Engineering conducted a test of seven BOPs "at the most demanding conditions to be expected." Five were successful in sealing the pipes, but two failed.
So although BOP failures may indeed be rare events, and full-blown catastrophes resulting from BOP failures may be even rarer, they still do fail frequently enough to merit some serious consideration, especially given the possible consequences when one does fail.
The probability of a massive catastrophe caused by a BOP failure is dozens of orders of magnitude greater than the probability of North America sinking into the ocean. It's much more akin to the probability that your house will burn down, and although having one's house burn down is an extremely rare event, it happens frequently enough, and the consequences are severe enough, that it absolutely justifies taking preventative measures and having contingency plans. That's why most of us have smoke alarms and at least one fire extinguisher in our homes.
Anecdotally speaking, I'm 37 years old, and my house has never burned down (or even caught fire), but in that same time there have been TWO major catastrophic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico caused by BOP failures.
Having a real contingency plan (complete with actual equipment, materials and personnel in place) when you're drilling 5000 ft. under the ocean is not like trying to plan for North America sinking into the ocean. It's a necessary and prudent safety measure.
When you're talking about contingency plans for an accident that has the potential to cause large-scale ecological AND economic disaster, it's not a question of whether or not it will be a "smooth operation". Your implication is that if we don't have a contingency plan that is guaranteed to go off without a hitch, then we shouldn't bother having one at all. That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day.
But for the 1-click patent it is obviously not so easy to find any documented prior art.
As far as prior art goes for 1-click shopping, I'm hard pressed to believe that Amazon was truly the first web company to ever have a 1-click checkout. I would guess that this had been done before, even if only by some mom and pop online store being run out of a garage.
However, for me, prior art (or lack thereof) is not the most important issue with the Amazon 1-click patent. By far the biggest issue I have with the 1-click patent is its complete and utter obviousness.
I'm sure I'll get the usual replies explaining how just because it seems obvious in retrospect, doesn't mean it was obvious at the time. That may in fact be true when you view Amazon 1-click purely as a marketing ploy - I'm sure it was quite the career-making insight for whatever marketing douche thought it up. However, when viewed as a software "algorithm", it is stupefyingly obvious and far too simple to deserve a patent. A software patent is supposed to be for actual software methodology, not marketing gimmicks.
Perhaps the 1-click patent would be more accurately described as a "business methodology" patent, and perhaps that has something to do with which of the specific claims were thrown out in 2006/2007 when the USPTO reexamined the 1-click patent. However, IMO the 1-click patent is still totally absurd, even if you view it as a business methodology patent, and I'm not convinced that business methodology patents should even exist at all.
The bottom line is, no matter what category you try to stuff it into, the idea of only having to click a single button to perform some action is ridiculously obvious and trite, and not deserving of any kind of patent whatsoever. And thanks to the USPTO, there are thousands upon thousands of patents floating around for "innovations" that aren't actually innovations - either because they've already been done or because they're ridiculously obvious.
The problem is not, that the patent offices only have incompetent examiners. Rather, the definition of "patentable innovation" is not suitable for software.
Nonsense. The parent was specifically referring to the current state of software patents in the U.S., and patents such as Amazon's 1-click patent have everything to do with incompetent examiners, and nothing to do with the difficulty of finding a suitable definition of patentability. The 1-click patent may just be the most egregious and/or the most often cited example, but it is not even close to being an isolated instance.
Like the parent poster, I have no problem with software patents in theory, provided that they are limited to ideas that are truly innovative. You're right that knowing where to draw that line is a difficult problem, but the current system in the U.S. is not merely struggling with difficult definitions - it's totally FUBAR. As a software developer, it really pisses me off to think that if I come up with a solution that is simple, elegant, efficient, and intuitive, that I might get sued out of existence by some patent troll, despite the fact that I was merely using my intellect and applying my skills to solve a relatively simple problem, and that the solution I came up with is roughly the same solution that tens of thousands of other software developers have (or would have, given the same problem) come up with.
To use your method of analogy between the software world and the physical world, allowing software patents on such simple ideas is akin to allowing a cabinet maker to patent the 90-degree angle. All this does is artificially enforce and sustain a market hegemony and makes it harder for people like me to do our jobs. And yes, this is absolutely indicative of incompetence at the USPTO.
That's a load of crap. Political correctness notwithstanding, there really is such a thing as a stupid comment. The difference between the average "+5 Insightful" comment, and the average "-1 Troll" comment is not merely a matter of different frames of reference, wherein there is not true right and wrong. Yes, moderators are only human and therefore some of them sometimes mod down comments simply because they disagree. But for the most part, comments that get modded down to "-1 Troll" or "-1 Flamebait" really are quite stupid and/or banal, not merely unpopular.
As for just scrolling on by, that advice is totally useless on an un-moderated forum, because for every halfway decent comment, you have to scroll past about 50 comments along the lines of "STFU, fag". On some sites, like Youtube or Digg, you really get the feeling that you're watching a bunch of dung-flinging chimps. If you really believe there is no such thing as a moron, and that all opinions are equally deserving of respect, then you've just drank too much Kool-Aid from the political correctness.
If you've got the time and the inclination to wade through pages and pages of moronic dribble, and entertain all the halfwit dung-flingers, just so you can pat yourself on the back for being so open-minded and egalitarian, go right ahead. But don't give the rest of us shit for not wanting to do the same, and don't delude yourself into thinking that doing so makes you somehow more enlightened or evolved than the rest of us. All you'll get for your trouble is a sore index finger from all that extra scrolling.
Not sure if this study has been featured (as a story) on Slashdot before, but I do know that it has been linked to dozens, if not hundreds, of times in the comment threads here on Slashdot.
Non-violent sociopaths can stay. They have enough self control, intellect, reasoning ability, and impulse control to be non-violent. Most of the sociopaths running fortune 500 companies aren't serial killers, or rapists.
Yeah, because we all know that as long as they're non-violent, they can't do any real harm, right? Then again, how exactly do you measure the harm done by non-violent sociopaths. How many lives, do you suppose, have been ruined by the executives of companies like AIG and Goldman Sachs? Are their crimes really so much less atrocious just because they didn't (directly, at least) kill someone?
Amen. The "may be viewed internationally" argument is monumentally stupid. First of all, if they already have a US patent and can show that van Rijn is infringing on it, then the "international" argument is completely moot. If they don't already have a US patent, then it comes down to the fact that international patents are not binding on US citizens hosting code on US servers, and once again the argument is moot. IANAL, but this strikes me as possibly being an attempt to expand the scope of foreign patents to include code/data hosted on US servers.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. I don't have a problem with the meaning of the word pirate - neither the old meaning nor the new meaning. I just think it's folly to call yourself a pirate when that's exactly what your enemies want you to be called.
This is not a war that can be won without having the public on your side. It doesn't matter how many geeks on Slashdot or elsewhere think that pirates are cool. Most of the public hears the words "pirate" or "piracy" and thinks exactly what the MAFIAA wants them to think: criminal, thief, bad guy.
The real battle is getting the public to understand why they should give a shit about keeping the Internet free (as in speech). You're not doing yourself any favors by saying "Fuck yeah! I'm a pirate, bitches!"
That may be, but I don't see the "pirate" moniker working out very well for people fighting for Internet freedom. Despite the fact that a lot of geeks think that "pirates are cool", most members of our society hear the word "pirate" and think exactly what the MAFIAA wants them to think: criminals, thiefs, etc, etc.
I wish the people behind these anti-big-brother movements would stop calling themselves pirates. There are LOTS of good reasons to support file-sharing and a free-as-in-speech Internet, and to oppose abusive government intrusion and the commercialization of the Internet. Those who fight for this cause under the "pirate" banner are not only doing a disservice to their own cause, but to the rest of us who want a free Internet for reasons other than downloading the latest crappy summer blockbuster movie via BitTorrent.
At the very least, the word "pirate" should be avoided because that is the MAFIAA's loaded word of choice for painting file sharers as dangerous criminals. Why let your enemy frame the argument in his own terms? It's akin to the way the neocons in the U.S. frame the war debate as a question of whether or not you support the troops.
Apparently he's never heard of Tipper Gore either.
Sounds like you're overreacting a bit. The OP's comment sounds to me like a reasonable suggestion that would probably fit the needs of a significant percentage of Adobe Reader users. A solution doesn't have to be completely general in order to be useful.
Oops, I meant not at all surprised. Lest you misunderstand.
I never said the video I saw was unique. In fact, I'm not at all unsurprised that there are apparently many more just like it, and probably even a few that are worse.
I'm not exactly sure what your point is, and I find it a bit disturbing that you've got so many links to this kind of stuff.
No need for the warnings. I assure you that I will not watch them. I've learned my lesson as far as that goes.
This conversation isn't some dry, logical debate about whether ATI or Nvidia makes the best video card. We're talking about watching a human being die in sheer terror, and a bunch of know-it-all douchebags like you come along, who haven't even seen the video, and act like it's no big deal, just to try to make yourselves sound tough and calloused, when in reality you're probably just some fat geek like everyone else on here.
So pardon me for being a little riled up when someone calls me oversensitive and sheltered just because I couldn't stomach seeing someone get his head cut off with a hunting knife.
Fuck you and your faux-rationalism and feigned stoicism.
Absolutely right. The difference between horror movies and real-life murder videos is NOT merely that one is real and one is fake. Even the goriest Rob Zombie movie cannot hold a candle to the sheer unadulterated terror of a real murder. People seem to think that the tricky part about simulating a murder in a horror flick is getting all the gory special effects to look realistic enough, but the thing that make a real murder so horrific is not the blood and guts, but the real terror and fear that the victims experience. No actor, no matter how good, can even approach that. Unfortunately, this is something people don't seem to understand until they've actually seen a real murder video.
Nice double-standard you've got there. You label me as sheltered and overly sensitive because I didn't respond the way you did, and then you turn around and cry foul when I give you a label in return.
In all sincerity, I envy you, sir. I wish I'd had enough foresight to refrain from watching it.
You're an idiot. There was no mistaking this as real. This was several minutes of pure terror, unlike any movie you've ever seen. If you really believe that bullshit, then you've obviously never seen the video I'm referring to.
WTF? Seriously, moderators... How the FUCK did you mod this guy insightful???? I was 30 years old when I saw that video, and have experienced more than my share of death and violence in my life - my father died in a head-on collision when I was 7, and my mother later married a violent, physically abusive alcoholic. Is that your definition of sheltered? That video left me trembling and nauseous, and to this day, I wish I could erase that from my mind. So here's a big "Fuck You" to whatever morons modded this bullshit dime-store psychology as "Insightful".
No, that definitely wasn't it. I think it may have been Daniel Pearl, but the video I'm thinking of wasn't the highly-edited version with all the Arabic subtitles and what not. The one I saw was a full length unedited version with full audio, that started with the victim on his knees pleading for his life, and ended with his head being cut completely off and held in front of the camera. The camera never panned away, and there were no edits. It showed every scream, every tear, every cut and slice, etc. They guy was in complete and utter terror from the time they made the first cut, and the only thing that made the poor guy stop screaming was when they sliced through his trachea and he started making these horrific gurgling sounds. And quite unlike the guillotine executions you might have seen in old black & white movies, this was no quick and clean beheading - it took several minutes before he was finally dead.
If you can watch that and be completely unaffected, well then congratulations - you're an asshole!
This moronic drivel doesn't deserve a response.
Thanks, Captain Obvious! You saved the day!
I used to think I was one of those people, until I saw a full length, uncut video of some terrorists beheading a captured American.
I would advise anybody who thinks they're not one of those "overly sensitive" people to give it some serious thought before they decide to watch something like that, much less get a job doing it all day long. Some things you just cannot un-see - although you'll certainly wish you could.
I'm not sure what part of the country you live in, but as I recall it, belief in WMD was anything but pervasive. I, along with numerous friends, acquaintances, family members, coworkers, etc, was absolutely appalled that we were actually going to invade Iraq based on such flimsy pretenses.
Mind you, I'm not exactly a liberal pacifist who was concerned about unjustly attacking poor ol' Saddam - my concerns about the WMD evidence mostly stemmed from the fact that invading Iraq was bound to be a decade-long (or longer) quagmire, which would cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers, not to mention countless billions of taxpayer dollars. I just wanted to be assured that there was a damn good reason for going through with all of that.
I kept asking the question, "Where's the hard evidence?". There never was any. All I ever saw was smoke and mirrors, lots of dog-and-pony shows with paper-thin wisps of "evidence", and "intelligence" reports that absolutely reeked of political spin and creative interpretation. Honestly, I probably would have found it more convincing if they'd just said that they'd consulted a witch-doctor who had divined the presence of WMDs in Iraq while in a peyote-induced trance.
And mind you, I'm not someone you would generally consider a liberal, so it's not as if my experience was due to my own political leanings, nor those of my peers. I live in the Los Angeles area, and my friends, family, and coworkers are roughly an equal mix of liberals, conservatives, and apolitical types. Even among my conservative friends, there seemed to be some palpable concern that the WMD evidence was a bit flimsy. I'd hardly call that a pervasive belief. Then again, that was just my own experience. YMMV.
Wow, how many ways can you be wrong in a single post???
First, you're wrong about this being the first ever BOP failure. As another poster has already noted, the IXTOC disaster in 1979 was also (at least partially) the result of a BOP failure. Furthermore, BOP failures are evidently not such a rare event. Apparently, they fail frequently enough during routine tests that at least a couple studies have been done on BOP failure. From this article:
And from this article:
So although BOP failures may indeed be rare events, and full-blown catastrophes resulting from BOP failures may be even rarer, they still do fail frequently enough to merit some serious consideration, especially given the possible consequences when one does fail.
The probability of a massive catastrophe caused by a BOP failure is dozens of orders of magnitude greater than the probability of North America sinking into the ocean. It's much more akin to the probability that your house will burn down, and although having one's house burn down is an extremely rare event, it happens frequently enough, and the consequences are severe enough, that it absolutely justifies taking preventative measures and having contingency plans. That's why most of us have smoke alarms and at least one fire extinguisher in our homes.
Anecdotally speaking, I'm 37 years old, and my house has never burned down (or even caught fire), but in that same time there have been TWO major catastrophic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico caused by BOP failures.
Having a real contingency plan (complete with actual equipment, materials and personnel in place) when you're drilling 5000 ft. under the ocean is not like trying to plan for North America sinking into the ocean. It's a necessary and prudent safety measure.
When you're talking about contingency plans for an accident that has the potential to cause large-scale ecological AND economic disaster, it's not a question of whether or not it will be a "smooth operation". Your implication is that if we don't have a contingency plan that is guaranteed to go off without a hitch, then we shouldn't bother having one at all. That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day.
As far as prior art goes for 1-click shopping, I'm hard pressed to believe that Amazon was truly the first web company to ever have a 1-click checkout. I would guess that this had been done before, even if only by some mom and pop online store being run out of a garage.
However, for me, prior art (or lack thereof) is not the most important issue with the Amazon 1-click patent. By far the biggest issue I have with the 1-click patent is its complete and utter obviousness.
I'm sure I'll get the usual replies explaining how just because it seems obvious in retrospect, doesn't mean it was obvious at the time. That may in fact be true when you view Amazon 1-click purely as a marketing ploy - I'm sure it was quite the career-making insight for whatever marketing douche thought it up. However, when viewed as a software "algorithm", it is stupefyingly obvious and far too simple to deserve a patent. A software patent is supposed to be for actual software methodology, not marketing gimmicks.
Perhaps the 1-click patent would be more accurately described as a "business methodology" patent, and perhaps that has something to do with which of the specific claims were thrown out in 2006/2007 when the USPTO reexamined the 1-click patent. However, IMO the 1-click patent is still totally absurd, even if you view it as a business methodology patent, and I'm not convinced that business methodology patents should even exist at all.
The bottom line is, no matter what category you try to stuff it into, the idea of only having to click a single button to perform some action is ridiculously obvious and trite, and not deserving of any kind of patent whatsoever. And thanks to the USPTO, there are thousands upon thousands of patents floating around for "innovations" that aren't actually innovations - either because they've already been done or because they're ridiculously obvious.
Nonsense. The parent was specifically referring to the current state of software patents in the U.S., and patents such as Amazon's 1-click patent have everything to do with incompetent examiners, and nothing to do with the difficulty of finding a suitable definition of patentability. The 1-click patent may just be the most egregious and/or the most often cited example, but it is not even close to being an isolated instance.
Like the parent poster, I have no problem with software patents in theory, provided that they are limited to ideas that are truly innovative. You're right that knowing where to draw that line is a difficult problem, but the current system in the U.S. is not merely struggling with difficult definitions - it's totally FUBAR. As a software developer, it really pisses me off to think that if I come up with a solution that is simple, elegant, efficient, and intuitive, that I might get sued out of existence by some patent troll, despite the fact that I was merely using my intellect and applying my skills to solve a relatively simple problem, and that the solution I came up with is roughly the same solution that tens of thousands of other software developers have (or would have, given the same problem) come up with.
To use your method of analogy between the software world and the physical world, allowing software patents on such simple ideas is akin to allowing a cabinet maker to patent the 90-degree angle. All this does is artificially enforce and sustain a market hegemony and makes it harder for people like me to do our jobs. And yes, this is absolutely indicative of incompetence at the USPTO.
That's a load of crap. Political correctness notwithstanding, there really is such a thing as a stupid comment. The difference between the average "+5 Insightful" comment, and the average "-1 Troll" comment is not merely a matter of different frames of reference, wherein there is not true right and wrong. Yes, moderators are only human and therefore some of them sometimes mod down comments simply because they disagree. But for the most part, comments that get modded down to "-1 Troll" or "-1 Flamebait" really are quite stupid and/or banal, not merely unpopular.
As for just scrolling on by, that advice is totally useless on an un-moderated forum, because for every halfway decent comment, you have to scroll past about 50 comments along the lines of "STFU, fag". On some sites, like Youtube or Digg, you really get the feeling that you're watching a bunch of dung-flinging chimps. If you really believe there is no such thing as a moron, and that all opinions are equally deserving of respect, then you've just drank too much Kool-Aid from the political correctness.
If you've got the time and the inclination to wade through pages and pages of moronic dribble, and entertain all the halfwit dung-flingers, just so you can pat yourself on the back for being so open-minded and egalitarian, go right ahead. But don't give the rest of us shit for not wanting to do the same, and don't delude yourself into thinking that doing so makes you somehow more enlightened or evolved than the rest of us. All you'll get for your trouble is a sore index finger from all that extra scrolling.
Not sure if this study has been featured (as a story) on Slashdot before, but I do know that it has been linked to dozens, if not hundreds, of times in the comment threads here on Slashdot.
Yeah, because we all know that as long as they're non-violent, they can't do any real harm, right? Then again, how exactly do you measure the harm done by non-violent sociopaths. How many lives, do you suppose, have been ruined by the executives of companies like AIG and Goldman Sachs? Are their crimes really so much less atrocious just because they didn't (directly, at least) kill someone?
Amen. The "may be viewed internationally" argument is monumentally stupid. First of all, if they already have a US patent and can show that van Rijn is infringing on it, then the "international" argument is completely moot. If they don't already have a US patent, then it comes down to the fact that international patents are not binding on US citizens hosting code on US servers, and once again the argument is moot. IANAL, but this strikes me as possibly being an attempt to expand the scope of foreign patents to include code/data hosted on US servers.
Indeed. I've found that one of the best ways to discover cool new open source projects is to go to Slashdot and search for "C&D".