Changing laws between legal entities (whether states, countries, continental unions or other orgs) to enable cooperation in catching criminals using telecom in their crimes sounds like an excellent idea.
The unique "license plate" is a harder sell, because privacy and anonymity in telecom is much more important than it was in automobiles. Even the automobile IDs have been shown to be easily abused, especially in telecom (ID wire fraud). So before jumping into the even more abusable telecom infrastructure with the already proven abused ID requirements, we have to clean up the ID requirements to protect people. Those fraud crimes are going to be made worse, and the FBI's job even harder (even if by just volume of caseload) if we just apply that particular artifact by metaphor to the new venue.
Probably we should improve the legal cooperation infrastructure, and the FBI's expertise in it, while reviewing and reforming the ID system (including the material systems that aren't telecom at all). By the time we see how much crime has been reduced by more effective legal interoperation (and less vulnerable IDs), we'll also have a better idea of how to translate the kind of mitigation IDs brought to roads now into telecom.
This is not to say we won't wind up doing it. Legally requiring accurate callerID on every voice/fax call would be a good start. Once that's tried in the new, unpredictable (and high stakes) environment, we can see whether just requiring the equivalent of "caller ID" for all data transmission (even if just a persistent network ID that preserves real world anonymity) can be sufficient, balanced against the need to protect privacy and anonymity. But we have to be very careful. Abuse of people using telecom can be so severe that once the identity cat is out of the bag, it can't be put back, and the cat is headed for cat on a stick from a lunch van.
I don't see why a fast ethernet card can't have its own DSPs and/or FPGAs for decoding packets, then sending them across PCI-e to XDR memory. For $500 or $1000, 100Gbps HW should be able to deliver.
How can it be a few years until "any breakthrough" in >10Gbps when we're discussing successful tests of 100Gbps across 2550Km already? Sounds like the breakthroughs have already arrived, but telcos are aiming for a totally different market than LANs. If it's working even most of the time at 2550Km, then it should be pretty close to commercial availability at 10m or 100m.
Well, it turned out that 10Gbps interfaces actually cost more than $50, probably more like $500 per port. But they don't require recoding apps to use the Infiniband fabric.
The point is really that there's a huge jump from a $15 1Gb-e (or $500 10Gb-e), if that jump can be made at all, while there's no 100Gb-e at any price. And instead of rolling out 100Gb-e that works for LANs, the industry is evidently waiting until it's good for continent-spanning WANs.
No, you clearly have no idea how to read. Or maybe just no concept that most patent analysis work is done in courts, especially in appeals courts, all of which operation is paid by taxpayers. Even the privately funded lawyers arguing in those courts are subsidized by the many services the lawyers consume in arguing their cases in those courts.
The main reason those court cases are so many and so long is that the PTO isn't vetting nearly enough bad patents at application time. My system would help defray those costs, both by feeding back revenue the patents generate into the system that manages them, and by reducing the amount of bad patents that get "examined" in the courts at taxpayer expense.
Get a clue. If you'd merely dropped your insulting intro, we could have had a friendly debate about this system. But since you're a clueless jerk, that's the last free clue you'll get from me.
Well, the problem is that increasing the filing fee will lock out small-scale inventors, who often produce quite a lot of the innovation, and who need patent protection a lot more than do the big, rich inventors who could also afford to market the invention before a competitor competes with them even without patent protection.
In fact, patent filing should be free, but would need at least a nominal fee to deter people from applying at ridiculous rates. Remember that the patent is supposed to protect an inventor with finite budget from having to spend money competing with someone without development expenses who'd just start spending on actual production of the invention, unfair competition. Burdening the inventor with a large filing fee would also set them back against a competitor, often forcing them to negotiate with a licensee at a disadvantage because they can't afford to market it themself without the filing fee to spend. Also, increasing the fee for multiple inventions is both a penalty for productive inventors, which is countersensible, and also encourages bundling inventions into monolithic components that won't be as easy to license for use separately in individual operating devices.
What really should be recognized is that the patent system's limits must be tied to the return on the invention investment, which is what the patent and copyright compromise with free speech in the Constitution is designed to address. Make the patent pay a fee annually that's a percentage of the revenue it generates to the patentholder. Since the patentholder is required to report revenue for income tax anyway, that revenue number should be available. Tie the cost of patenting to the economic return on it, not to the productivity in solely protected inventions.
The revenue amount should also trigger expiration of the patent. Make the patent application report the cost of development, which should also be available at least approximately from the filer's tax returns. Once a patent has returned say 10x, or even 100x, its cost of development, the patent should expire. Patents are not supposed to be licenses to print money out of a state-created artifical monpoly, but rather just "to promote progress in science and the useful arts". If 10x or 100x ROI doesn't promote that progress, nothing will, and greater than 10x ROI to to one exclusive exploiter tends to retard that progress in science and the useful arts, which often interdepend on many external inventions to make a new one. The actual ROI amount can be variable, set annually or similarly periodically by Congress as a matter of industrial policy.
I do like the idea of a bounty paid to anyone in the public who can defeat an application. Maybe assign them 10x the filing fee (which should still be fairly low, like $400) as a bonus, or some bounty derived from how much the government saves by outsourcing that work, and merely supervising/refereeing it. Probably savings + some percentage, to reflect the government's interest in fewer patents and freer commerce, which increases both government receipts (taxes and fees on commerce) and the better, less limited, promotion of science and useful arts that is the government's primary mission.
Since there's no other local interconnect faster than 10Gbps-e, I'd even settle for 100Gbps-e across 1m, for interconnecting in my rack without changing my software that all depends on ethernet between hosts.
I had found with Froogle a Sun 10G-e card (probably refurbished) for $35, but it's not available now on searching again. It does seem that 10G-e cards do cost something around $500 at least, and plenty up around $900+.
But the point is that I can't buy anything faster for even 10x or 100x, except multiple cards. And maybe some really exotic interconnect that's not ethernet, so apps have to be recoded to use it.
I'm running Linux on a Playstation3 with SPU video drivers in its Cell uP that can run at over 150GFLOPS. Since the PS3 has only 512MB RAM, it needs to be fed by the LAN and just buffer the LAN in its RAM. Even if SATA drives are delivering only 1.2Gbps, there's no reason I can't have multiple parallel drives on independent servers (if a single server's IO isn't fast enough for multiple SATA at full bore) on my SAN delivering multiple streams through my switch all to my Playstation. Now, the PS3's 1Gb-e is as hardwired to it as is its 512MB RAM, but the point is that there are already machines that can use that bandwidth. The total bandwidth doesn't have to reach 100Gbps, but only exceed 10Gbps, to require faster than 10G-e, which only 8-10 SATA drives in parallel could do today.
So the bottleneck is 10G-e. There are already supercomputer clusters using multiple parallel Cells, so I'm disappointed that they're not already widening the pipe.
Why do we need 100Gbps-e to arrive across 2550Km before it's "reality"? All I want is 100Gbps-e over maybe 100m, or even 10-30m to start. Since there's no other local interconnect faster than 10Gbps-e, I'd even settle for 100Gbps-e across 1m, for interconnecting in my rack without changing my software that all depends on ethernet between hosts.
What's surprising is that I can get 10Gbps-e for something like $50, but nothing faster for any higher price (except multiple 10G-e cards). AFAICT, there's nothing in the engineering pipeline, like the usual faster interconnects for supercomputers that can be ported to PC buses the way SCSI and optical ethernet (etc) were. Everyone's waiting on 100Gbps-e.
I know that the parties funding the 100Gbps-e research are telcos like Alcatel, which have WAN requirements for thousand-Km hops, and governments encouraging the industry at the top end. But broadband projects around the world are planning to roll out 1Gbps and even 15Gbps fiber to the home, which would completely saturate a 100Gbps trunk after much shorter neighborhood distance to a hub than 2500Km, even in the most rural areas. But what about all the LAN vendors, which have a real market for 100Gbps-e with only a few dozen or hundred meters required between nodes?
Can't we just declare success and start buying some fast ethernet without having to satisfy the telcos' 10 year plans, too?
That's why I started my proposal with increasing the fees on patents, as a percentage of their ROI, to fund the PTO increasing its hiring. A cycle of those people by connecting demand to supply with a monetized budget.
Of course it would require the current Executive to go (to hell), before the PTO could be rebuilt. The current priorities tend to corporate anarchy, with the PTO redesigned to print anticompetitive corporate IP documentation without the constraints that engineering would bring, with technically skilled people a threat to the faithy corporatist ideology.
But a new Executive is indeed coming. It's worth floating around good plans for reform now, because the next Executive (and the Congress that makes the laws it executes) are probably mainly as lazy as any other, preferring to just codify some other policy that's already been vetted and promoted in the industry it would govern. Pave the path for them, and if both the path and the government have a modicum of integrity, the government will ride it. Why should lobbyists have all the fun writing the laws?
Anonymous child molester Coward calls me antisemitic as they "calmly back away" from the discussion.
Perfect example of the Republican denial projectors who have spent all our money on the Iraq War while leaving the PTO in ruins. They don't want to confess that they voted twice for Bush, who created both those problems as a way of "drowning government in a bathtub" (named "Katrina").
Somehow just mentioning the CIA and Pentagon's $TRILLIONS in wasteful budgets drags out of them some bizarre bleating about Hitler and the Jews. The Halliburton (and even Hitler, probably, considering how Hitler squandered Germany's people and money in an insane crusade of foreign invasions) references are indeed good points - against this Republican Coward, and Bush. But what do the Jews have to do with it, except in the Republican Coward's foul mind?
Republicans have really become reliable little pain machines. Touch anything relevant to the country, and they jump like shocked frogs right out of their near-boiling water into your face, croaking wildly. It's all we can do to bat the slimy beasts back down into the mud the prefer to wallow in. Thanks for dancing your crazy little dance where everyone could see it. I couldn't have scripted your wacko lines for you better myself. Take a bow!
So what if patents are submitted by non-domestic entities? If they want their patents to stay registered in the US, they'll pay the fees, just like they pay the fees for registration.
Engineers are part of a service industry. They don't actually manufacture anything, they're info workers. Fresh engineers will come in greater numbers when their education budget is less risky from both scholarships and more jobs when they graduate.
It seems to me that the demand for patent examiners and the explosion of patent applications and money derived from them should add up to a lot bigger hire than just a few thousand more examiners. The PTO should charge an annual fee on patents that's a tiny percent of the revenue from their applications or licensing, which if enough to pay for enough examiners should still be under 1% of income under the patents. Then the amount of examiners will keep pace with the growth in the patents they have to examine.
In fact, the growth in patents and their revenue should even stimulate the production of American engineers. Offer full scholarships to engineers, funded by those fees, in exchange for them becoming paid examiners for a couple-few years at least, and returning for at least 6 months every 5-10 years for a couple-few decades. If they break that deal, they owe 2x their scholarship immediately, which can pay for more scholarships and paid examiners.
The patent system has many problems. Primary is that the American people subsidize the creation of intellectual property by paying for the expensive examination and challenge system, which we can ill afford with our current budget problems (and which was never fair to the public, anyway). Also too few examiners of too little quality and commitment. Calibrating a fee to hire examiners and create them by scholarship to the volume of applications should make the system more self-regulating. And good for engineers: Albert Einstein had most of his good ideas working in the Swiss patent office, which no doubt benefited from his talent and imagination. Let's see America protect both itself and its inventors with a simple device that balances both.
You may consider this design to be placed in the public domain:).
Yeah, and these newfangled "automobiles" make it so much harder for the cops to catch crooks, since the cops now have to move so much faster, and even cooperate with cops in the next county. Instead of the cops getting automobiles and some radios of their own, we should get rid of automobiles, make them illegal, and instead give everyone some other kind of automobiles that all have cutoff switches in their motors that cops can stop with their radios.
And no criminals will ever figure out how to wire around the cutoff switches. Then cops can just go back to being lazy again. Oh, and by the way, we should let the cops trample all over our rights that we discarded because protecting those rights was too much work.
I don't think you understand the difference between "easy" and "trivial". No matter how easy the technique is, most people don't ever get anywhere near the mode of changing any controls nearly as technical as DNS servers. What's going to prompt them to google for the technique? If they're not led to it by some personal intervention, they'll never even know that can do it, let alone why or how.
I really think you don't have any current experience with how computer/network devices are given UIs for the mass of regular people to use. For example, most cablemodems/DSLmodems have "web page" interfaces that change network settings. That's usually the only interface accessible by the customer, and includes all kinds of "risky" settings.
The skills and behavior of mass market consumers is very different from anyone with any amount of actual expertise or informedness. They need to be pulled by the hand through the fewest steps. That's "trivial". Which makes it a challenge to also be safe, because trivial changes can have serious consequences. But that's what has to be dealt with in this case.
Not quite. For one, most people don't know how to do what you described. It's "trivial" in the sense of "what's the middle name of the 17th president?" For another, those desktop settings are set by the DHCP from their cablemodem/DSLmodem, not just once at the desktop.
"Trivial" means they get an email from their ISP once a month with updates like their account info, and a link with simple but detailed description of "switching your DNS" that switches with a single click.
The central remedy to AT&T's abuse of its old telco monopoly was splitting long distance service from local service, and prohibiting one corp from bundling both to a single customer (the return of telco monopolies along with that bundling is case in point). That unbundling forced customers to exercise choice in telcos, and not leave choice just a theoretical construct. AT&T was also forced to let customers own their own phones, even the phone wiring in their house. Once the bundled advantage was lost to AT&T, it embraced that unbundling, because AT&T no longer had to lose money supporting that vulnerable equipment (within reach of the great unwashed masses). AT&T had abused the bundle to the point where it lost not just the bundle, but most of the market domination advantages of a monopoly.
Those same conditions now apply to ISPs. Already the FCC has barred cablecos from bundling cablemodems and set top boxes (though it's apparently not enforced yet), to force consumers to diversify away from a single dependency for our connection to the essential broadband resource. RoadRunner's DNS should be another unbundled service. It should be trivial for any user to switch to using someone else's DNS to get away from these abuses, even if they do choose to keep a bundled one. RoadRunner's DNS was already bad, just a slowdown in every connection, even before it was abusive and violating the standards to spam domain responses like this latest stunt. With luck, the abuse will force the unbundling in a showdown with these big ISPs. They should offer unbundled services only, and create a market for separate bundlers who compete with each other bundling services and selling them to consumers.
And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.
It's been a decade and there's still nobody that can be TiVo at its own game. Not ReplayTV, not Windows Media Center, and as much as I like it, not even MythTV.
The tuner may turn your PS3 into a competent little PVR -- if you live in a place where DVB transmission is standard -- but I doubt it will be an EXCELLENT PVR like TiVo's.
So because there hasn't been anything better than TiVo, there won't be? Even when Sony, the consumer electronics giant that people like because its products are easy to use, finally offers one? Or when all the different ways of doing it that regular people try have a chance in an open architecture. I guess that the only good PVR possible has already come in the TiVo, so everyone should just buy one.
A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.
And I'm sure Wii homebrewers would be fine with that, considering that it IS the 21st century right now.
I believe the RSX RAM hacks against the Hypervisor are a cat & mouse game with Sony winning at the moment. But with the PS3's fast IO, its RAM isn't really a problem is you stream from the network, and don't use the machine as a real desktop - just a media terminal. If you do want it as desktop, then run its X server against X clients on some other machine(s) with lots of RAM and their own CPUs, but let the PS3 do the rendering to your giant TV.
The TiVo game is "Internet TV". Since Linux doesn't (necessarily) have DRM, it's a much better platform than TiVo for that, once there's a critical mass of developers and audience on good, cheap HW. That's what PS3/Linux/PlayTV will be by this Summer, but even a USB TV tuner will be good if PlayTV is locked down.
I don't know whether Wiimote will work with standard Bluetooth. Why don't you try to get it working?
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Hmm, does IP over Infiniband run under Linux on a PC with PCI-e? Or any other <$5000 hardware?
Changing laws between legal entities (whether states, countries, continental unions or other orgs) to enable cooperation in catching criminals using telecom in their crimes sounds like an excellent idea.
The unique "license plate" is a harder sell, because privacy and anonymity in telecom is much more important than it was in automobiles. Even the automobile IDs have been shown to be easily abused, especially in telecom (ID wire fraud). So before jumping into the even more abusable telecom infrastructure with the already proven abused ID requirements, we have to clean up the ID requirements to protect people. Those fraud crimes are going to be made worse, and the FBI's job even harder (even if by just volume of caseload) if we just apply that particular artifact by metaphor to the new venue.
Probably we should improve the legal cooperation infrastructure, and the FBI's expertise in it, while reviewing and reforming the ID system (including the material systems that aren't telecom at all). By the time we see how much crime has been reduced by more effective legal interoperation (and less vulnerable IDs), we'll also have a better idea of how to translate the kind of mitigation IDs brought to roads now into telecom.
This is not to say we won't wind up doing it. Legally requiring accurate callerID on every voice/fax call would be a good start. Once that's tried in the new, unpredictable (and high stakes) environment, we can see whether just requiring the equivalent of "caller ID" for all data transmission (even if just a persistent network ID that preserves real world anonymity) can be sufficient, balanced against the need to protect privacy and anonymity. But we have to be very careful. Abuse of people using telecom can be so severe that once the identity cat is out of the bag, it can't be put back, and the cat is headed for cat on a stick from a lunch van.
Well, "100"Gbps is an arbitrary number. So long as it's significantly bigger than 10Gbps. 40Gbps would be good, too, but it's not available either.
The advantage of ethernet is that apps are already coded to use it. Including all the network mgmt apps.
I don't see why a fast ethernet card can't have its own DSPs and/or FPGAs for decoding packets, then sending them across PCI-e to XDR memory. For $500 or $1000, 100Gbps HW should be able to deliver.
How can it be a few years until "any breakthrough" in >10Gbps when we're discussing successful tests of 100Gbps across 2550Km already? Sounds like the breakthroughs have already arrived, but telcos are aiming for a totally different market than LANs. If it's working even most of the time at 2550Km, then it should be pretty close to commercial availability at 10m or 100m.
Well, it turned out that 10Gbps interfaces actually cost more than $50, probably more like $500 per port. But they don't require recoding apps to use the Infiniband fabric.
The point is really that there's a huge jump from a $15 1Gb-e (or $500 10Gb-e), if that jump can be made at all, while there's no 100Gb-e at any price. And instead of rolling out 100Gb-e that works for LANs, the industry is evidently waiting until it's good for continent-spanning WANs.
No, you clearly have no idea how to read. Or maybe just no concept that most patent analysis work is done in courts, especially in appeals courts, all of which operation is paid by taxpayers. Even the privately funded lawyers arguing in those courts are subsidized by the many services the lawyers consume in arguing their cases in those courts.
The main reason those court cases are so many and so long is that the PTO isn't vetting nearly enough bad patents at application time. My system would help defray those costs, both by feeding back revenue the patents generate into the system that manages them, and by reducing the amount of bad patents that get "examined" in the courts at taxpayer expense.
Get a clue. If you'd merely dropped your insulting intro, we could have had a friendly debate about this system. But since you're a clueless jerk, that's the last free clue you'll get from me.
Well, the problem is that increasing the filing fee will lock out small-scale inventors, who often produce quite a lot of the innovation, and who need patent protection a lot more than do the big, rich inventors who could also afford to market the invention before a competitor competes with them even without patent protection.
In fact, patent filing should be free, but would need at least a nominal fee to deter people from applying at ridiculous rates. Remember that the patent is supposed to protect an inventor with finite budget from having to spend money competing with someone without development expenses who'd just start spending on actual production of the invention, unfair competition. Burdening the inventor with a large filing fee would also set them back against a competitor, often forcing them to negotiate with a licensee at a disadvantage because they can't afford to market it themself without the filing fee to spend. Also, increasing the fee for multiple inventions is both a penalty for productive inventors, which is countersensible, and also encourages bundling inventions into monolithic components that won't be as easy to license for use separately in individual operating devices.
What really should be recognized is that the patent system's limits must be tied to the return on the invention investment, which is what the patent and copyright compromise with free speech in the Constitution is designed to address. Make the patent pay a fee annually that's a percentage of the revenue it generates to the patentholder. Since the patentholder is required to report revenue for income tax anyway, that revenue number should be available. Tie the cost of patenting to the economic return on it, not to the productivity in solely protected inventions.
The revenue amount should also trigger expiration of the patent. Make the patent application report the cost of development, which should also be available at least approximately from the filer's tax returns. Once a patent has returned say 10x, or even 100x, its cost of development, the patent should expire. Patents are not supposed to be licenses to print money out of a state-created artifical monpoly, but rather just "to promote progress in science and the useful arts". If 10x or 100x ROI doesn't promote that progress, nothing will, and greater than 10x ROI to to one exclusive exploiter tends to retard that progress in science and the useful arts, which often interdepend on many external inventions to make a new one. The actual ROI amount can be variable, set annually or similarly periodically by Congress as a matter of industrial policy.
I do like the idea of a bounty paid to anyone in the public who can defeat an application. Maybe assign them 10x the filing fee (which should still be fairly low, like $400) as a bonus, or some bounty derived from how much the government saves by outsourcing that work, and merely supervising/refereeing it. Probably savings + some percentage, to reflect the government's interest in fewer patents and freer commerce, which increases both government receipts (taxes and fees on commerce) and the better, less limited, promotion of science and useful arts that is the government's primary mission.
Infiniband isn't ethernet.
I had found with Froogle a Sun 10G-e card (probably refurbished) for $35, but it's not available now on searching again. It does seem that 10G-e cards do cost something around $500 at least, and plenty up around $900+.
But the point is that I can't buy anything faster for even 10x or 100x, except multiple cards. And maybe some really exotic interconnect that's not ethernet, so apps have to be recoded to use it.
I'm running Linux on a Playstation3 with SPU video drivers in its Cell uP that can run at over 150GFLOPS. Since the PS3 has only 512MB RAM, it needs to be fed by the LAN and just buffer the LAN in its RAM. Even if SATA drives are delivering only 1.2Gbps, there's no reason I can't have multiple parallel drives on independent servers (if a single server's IO isn't fast enough for multiple SATA at full bore) on my SAN delivering multiple streams through my switch all to my Playstation. Now, the PS3's 1Gb-e is as hardwired to it as is its 512MB RAM, but the point is that there are already machines that can use that bandwidth. The total bandwidth doesn't have to reach 100Gbps, but only exceed 10Gbps, to require faster than 10G-e, which only 8-10 SATA drives in parallel could do today.
So the bottleneck is 10G-e. There are already supercomputer clusters using multiple parallel Cells, so I'm disappointed that they're not already widening the pipe.
Why do we need 100Gbps-e to arrive across 2550Km before it's "reality"? All I want is 100Gbps-e over maybe 100m, or even 10-30m to start. Since there's no other local interconnect faster than 10Gbps-e, I'd even settle for 100Gbps-e across 1m, for interconnecting in my rack without changing my software that all depends on ethernet between hosts.
What's surprising is that I can get 10Gbps-e for something like $50, but nothing faster for any higher price (except multiple 10G-e cards). AFAICT, there's nothing in the engineering pipeline, like the usual faster interconnects for supercomputers that can be ported to PC buses the way SCSI and optical ethernet (etc) were. Everyone's waiting on 100Gbps-e.
I know that the parties funding the 100Gbps-e research are telcos like Alcatel, which have WAN requirements for thousand-Km hops, and governments encouraging the industry at the top end. But broadband projects around the world are planning to roll out 1Gbps and even 15Gbps fiber to the home, which would completely saturate a 100Gbps trunk after much shorter neighborhood distance to a hub than 2500Km, even in the most rural areas. But what about all the LAN vendors, which have a real market for 100Gbps-e with only a few dozen or hundred meters required between nodes?
Can't we just declare success and start buying some fast ethernet without having to satisfy the telcos' 10 year plans, too?
That's why I started my proposal with increasing the fees on patents, as a percentage of their ROI, to fund the PTO increasing its hiring. A cycle of those people by connecting demand to supply with a monetized budget.
Of course it would require the current Executive to go (to hell), before the PTO could be rebuilt. The current priorities tend to corporate anarchy, with the PTO redesigned to print anticompetitive corporate IP documentation without the constraints that engineering would bring, with technically skilled people a threat to the faithy corporatist ideology.
But a new Executive is indeed coming. It's worth floating around good plans for reform now, because the next Executive (and the Congress that makes the laws it executes) are probably mainly as lazy as any other, preferring to just codify some other policy that's already been vetted and promoted in the industry it would govern. Pave the path for them, and if both the path and the government have a modicum of integrity, the government will ride it. Why should lobbyists have all the fun writing the laws?
Anonymous child molester Coward calls me antisemitic as they "calmly back away" from the discussion.
Perfect example of the Republican denial projectors who have spent all our money on the Iraq War while leaving the PTO in ruins. They don't want to confess that they voted twice for Bush, who created both those problems as a way of "drowning government in a bathtub" (named "Katrina").
Somehow just mentioning the CIA and Pentagon's $TRILLIONS in wasteful budgets drags out of them some bizarre bleating about Hitler and the Jews. The Halliburton (and even Hitler, probably, considering how Hitler squandered Germany's people and money in an insane crusade of foreign invasions) references are indeed good points - against this Republican Coward, and Bush. But what do the Jews have to do with it, except in the Republican Coward's foul mind?
Republicans have really become reliable little pain machines. Touch anything relevant to the country, and they jump like shocked frogs right out of their near-boiling water into your face, croaking wildly. It's all we can do to bat the slimy beasts back down into the mud the prefer to wallow in. Thanks for dancing your crazy little dance where everyone could see it. I couldn't have scripted your wacko lines for you better myself. Take a bow!
Maybe so. That's why I specify how the PTO revenue is to be reinvested back into the PTO.
Maybe if every agency wasn't so busy pouring $TRILLIONS into the Pentagon and CIA budgets, there'd be more to go around.
So what if patents are submitted by non-domestic entities? If they want their patents to stay registered in the US, they'll pay the fees, just like they pay the fees for registration.
Engineers are part of a service industry. They don't actually manufacture anything, they're info workers. Fresh engineers will come in greater numbers when their education budget is less risky from both scholarships and more jobs when they graduate.
It seems to me that the demand for patent examiners and the explosion of patent applications and money derived from them should add up to a lot bigger hire than just a few thousand more examiners. The PTO should charge an annual fee on patents that's a tiny percent of the revenue from their applications or licensing, which if enough to pay for enough examiners should still be under 1% of income under the patents. Then the amount of examiners will keep pace with the growth in the patents they have to examine.
:).
In fact, the growth in patents and their revenue should even stimulate the production of American engineers. Offer full scholarships to engineers, funded by those fees, in exchange for them becoming paid examiners for a couple-few years at least, and returning for at least 6 months every 5-10 years for a couple-few decades. If they break that deal, they owe 2x their scholarship immediately, which can pay for more scholarships and paid examiners.
The patent system has many problems. Primary is that the American people subsidize the creation of intellectual property by paying for the expensive examination and challenge system, which we can ill afford with our current budget problems (and which was never fair to the public, anyway). Also too few examiners of too little quality and commitment. Calibrating a fee to hire examiners and create them by scholarship to the volume of applications should make the system more self-regulating. And good for engineers: Albert Einstein had most of his good ideas working in the Swiss patent office, which no doubt benefited from his talent and imagination. Let's see America protect both itself and its inventors with a simple device that balances both.
You may consider this design to be placed in the public domain
Yeah, and these newfangled "automobiles" make it so much harder for the cops to catch crooks, since the cops now have to move so much faster, and even cooperate with cops in the next county. Instead of the cops getting automobiles and some radios of their own, we should get rid of automobiles, make them illegal, and instead give everyone some other kind of automobiles that all have cutoff switches in their motors that cops can stop with their radios.
And no criminals will ever figure out how to wire around the cutoff switches. Then cops can just go back to being lazy again. Oh, and by the way, we should let the cops trample all over our rights that we discarded because protecting those rights was too much work.
I feel safer already. Don't you?
I don't expect a 1980s Soviet programmer to understand how to make money off sharing source code.
I also don't expect anyone working in SW since the end of the Cold War a generation ago to pay any mind to what he's saying.
I don't think you understand the difference between "easy" and "trivial". No matter how easy the technique is, most people don't ever get anywhere near the mode of changing any controls nearly as technical as DNS servers. What's going to prompt them to google for the technique? If they're not led to it by some personal intervention, they'll never even know that can do it, let alone why or how.
I really think you don't have any current experience with how computer/network devices are given UIs for the mass of regular people to use. For example, most cablemodems/DSLmodems have "web page" interfaces that change network settings. That's usually the only interface accessible by the customer, and includes all kinds of "risky" settings.
The skills and behavior of mass market consumers is very different from anyone with any amount of actual expertise or informedness. They need to be pulled by the hand through the fewest steps. That's "trivial". Which makes it a challenge to also be safe, because trivial changes can have serious consequences. But that's what has to be dealt with in this case.
Not quite. For one, most people don't know how to do what you described. It's "trivial" in the sense of "what's the middle name of the 17th president?" For another, those desktop settings are set by the DHCP from their cablemodem/DSLmodem, not just once at the desktop.
"Trivial" means they get an email from their ISP once a month with updates like their account info, and a link with simple but detailed description of "switching your DNS" that switches with a single click.
The central remedy to AT&T's abuse of its old telco monopoly was splitting long distance service from local service, and prohibiting one corp from bundling both to a single customer (the return of telco monopolies along with that bundling is case in point). That unbundling forced customers to exercise choice in telcos, and not leave choice just a theoretical construct. AT&T was also forced to let customers own their own phones, even the phone wiring in their house. Once the bundled advantage was lost to AT&T, it embraced that unbundling, because AT&T no longer had to lose money supporting that vulnerable equipment (within reach of the great unwashed masses). AT&T had abused the bundle to the point where it lost not just the bundle, but most of the market domination advantages of a monopoly.
Those same conditions now apply to ISPs. Already the FCC has barred cablecos from bundling cablemodems and set top boxes (though it's apparently not enforced yet), to force consumers to diversify away from a single dependency for our connection to the essential broadband resource. RoadRunner's DNS should be another unbundled service. It should be trivial for any user to switch to using someone else's DNS to get away from these abuses, even if they do choose to keep a bundled one. RoadRunner's DNS was already bad, just a slowdown in every connection, even before it was abusive and violating the standards to spam domain responses like this latest stunt. With luck, the abuse will force the unbundling in a showdown with these big ISPs. They should offer unbundled services only, and create a market for separate bundlers who compete with each other bundling services and selling them to consumers.
So because there hasn't been anything better than TiVo, there won't be? Even when Sony, the consumer electronics giant that people like because its products are easy to use, finally offers one? Or when all the different ways of doing it that regular people try have a chance in an open architecture. I guess that the only good PVR possible has already come in the TiVo, so everyone should just buy one.
Whoosh...
At $500 it's "pretty cheap", at $400 it's super cheap :).
The prices dropped while I wasn't looking, until someone else said the Wii is much cheaper.
I believe the RSX RAM hacks against the Hypervisor are a cat & mouse game with Sony winning at the moment. But with the PS3's fast IO, its RAM isn't really a problem is you stream from the network, and don't use the machine as a real desktop - just a media terminal. If you do want it as desktop, then run its X server against X clients on some other machine(s) with lots of RAM and their own CPUs, but let the PS3 do the rendering to your giant TV.
The TiVo game is "Internet TV". Since Linux doesn't (necessarily) have DRM, it's a much better platform than TiVo for that, once there's a critical mass of developers and audience on good, cheap HW. That's what PS3/Linux/PlayTV will be by this Summer, but even a USB TV tuner will be good if PlayTV is locked down.
I don't know whether Wiimote will work with standard Bluetooth. Why don't you try to get it working?