Israel exists. That is the basis of its right to exist. On what basis do you base a right for a country to exist? And on what basis do you say it's right to destroy an existing country?
Only Jews have the "right of return". And right now there's serious debate about whether the wall should exclude "Israeli Arabs" as well as "Palestinians". Anyone suggesting Judaism isn't the state religion of the Jewish state is kidding, a Talmudist, a fool, or all of them.
Israel does not have the Bill of Rights. It does have borders completely surrounded by hostile neighbors, including daily rocket attacks and suicide bombs, many originating within its territory.
Israel has lots of unamerican "problems", like a state religion and the draft. We don't want those things here.
Clinton's blowjob came up in the context of the hyperextended Whitewater investigation. You know, the real estate system that turned out so legit, it got a president impeached over a blowjob?
Meanwhile, Republican Bob Packwood actually molested several women, the investigation of which revealed campaign finance fraud/theft, and all that happened to him was he resigned. The many (Republican) charges of sexual harassment against Clinton were all revealed to be groundless, but he got impeached.
Bush was a drunk cokehead, his top advisor Rove outed a CIA/WMD agent in conspiracy with several others in the office, but I guess that's OK with you. IOKIYAR.
The double standards that let Republicans get away with murder *cough* Joe Scarborough *cough* but crucify Democrats are well known. There's no point reversing them to try to fool we who have been paying attention all along.
You seem to think that impeachment is a way to rerun an election you didn't like. You really though Clinton should be kicked out of office because he lied about a blowjob? And you don't think Bush should be impeached for lying about Iraq or domestic spying, while running those programs?
Reagan was born poor, but became rich and connected through his Hollywood "anticommunist" agitation, including selling out his membership as president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Carter was an educated, poor peanut farmer who rose through the Navy to get the allies who made him Georgia governor, and US president in the wake of Nixon/Ford.
Ford came from humble beginnings in Omaha, and is probably the president who can claim the least credit for getting the office without the old boy network - the only one never elected to the White House.
Nixon we'ved discussed.
Johnson was born fairly poor, working through a Texas state teacher's college.
Kennedy's "aristocracy" was less than a generation old, his father having made their family rich and powerful by smuggling in Prohibition.
Eisenhower was born in the lower class in Texas, rising to power through the military.
Truman was a middle-class tailor who rose through the ranks due to party loyalty.
FDR was a genuine aristocrat, and the most powerful/popular president in history.
Hoover was a middle-class striver. Coolidge came from the lower/middle classes. Harding came from an upper-middle class family. Wilson came from the middle class. Taft was a product of the privileged political class. And T Roosevelt was from a rich family.
Presidents since the 20th Century, at least, have come from a fairly even distribution among society (upper class only slightly overrepresented). But it is clear that their power, and its most important benefit: perpetuation, is correlated with first their wealth, then their family's class. Those factors also give access to the tools reserved for the rich and powerful, not limited to rigged voting machines.
[US] Ambassador Khalilzad said that President Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari to be the next prime minister, according to Mr. Taki, a senior aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite bloc.
Even when Bush invades, creates a bubble government, controls the voting, he still creates a catastophe. No wonder we're planning to abandon them to civil war and Iranian annexation.
I generally agree with you. But Nixon's crimes (for which he was not impeached before he preemptively resigned) were "comparatively minor" compared only with Bush Jr's crimes. Nixon had completely subverted the government with many crimes, culminating in the coverup of the Watergate breakin. Even the breakin was a serious crime: CIA agents (like Gordon Liddy) and gangsters (like his "Cubans") teaming up to rob Democratic Party offices of strategic documents during a presidential election campaign? That's pretty serious, even compared to Nixon's Vietnam escalation and covert expansion into nearby countries, and the rest of his imperial transgressions. Clinton lying on TV about a blowjob is "comparatively minor" in any regard, but Nixon was a menace.
I note, in agreement with your points, that Nixon's Republican Party saw him resign without penalty for his crimes rather than even get impeached. While Clinton was impeached, and tried (and acquitted) in the Senate. The Republicans are much more of the "old boy network" than are the Democrats, so the comparative experiences are consistent.
However, I didn't post about the old boy network. I posted about whether presidents can come from classes lower than Bush's bluebloods, or even Reagan's millionaires. Clinton and Nixon prove that they can. And, as you point out, just being president isn't enough for privileged criminal immunity. That takes the kind of class that Bush was born into: lying us into war, destroying the Treasury, trashing the Constitution, stealing elections, dividing the country, elevating religious establishments to official status, spying on Americans, letting Osama go and neglecting the invaded Afghanistan to fester... Those are exactly the crimes impeachment is reserved for. And the only reason Bush isn't hanging on a traitor's gallows is because of his class privilege.
Both Clinton (D) and Nixon (R) were born poor, and made their political careers on their wits. Neither made any significant money outside their political careers, except books published after they left office. Even though they became rich by politics, they came from a disadvantaged underclass, exploiting America's class mobility to get power.
There's lots of class war in America, where capitalism is rigged to preserve its best opportunities for rich families. But the president themself is more of a pawn in that war than an emblem of it.
Clint Curtis, the Diebold programmer who says politicians paid him to rig voting machines in Florida, is running for Congress. If what he says he can do is true, who would have the guts to run against him? Alternately, since he was fired and the voting machine company has a grudge, how can he possibly win?
I wonder how much opposition we'd see to these "email stamp" systems if every message required a 1 cent stamp, recipients could whitelist anyone (which waived the stamp requirement) with a GUI in their own email client or in the sender's signup page, and the stamp proceeds were shared with the recipient?
Bulk email would be sent only to very high "welcome rate" recipients. And actual spam getting through would help pay its own cost. Why should AOL get all the profit off the spam it loads into your life?
Does that mean that spending 1/3 of my life in bed, but with my head angled 6 deg up, on a pillow, can prevent "bone and muscle loss, decreases in cardiovascular activity, and reduced capacity to exercise"?
Some of the vested interests are, in fact, hippies. When the government rejects valuable technology because it's not offered by the required jock or yuppie, whose own tech isn't good enough, the government has to change style, not the hippies. Or the government by, for and of the yuppies gets left behind.
Because unique business practices are not as much an advantage as are unique physical devices. Because business practices can be changed much more cheaply and quickly than can manufacturing to produce physical devices.
But most importantly, because society is not served with enough "progress in science and the useful arts" by unique business practices to justify violating competitors' liberty with even a temporary monopoly. In fact, society is served by competitors quickly adopting others' business practices, so industries can mature.
Patents, copyrights and trademarks are not instituted out of some abstract "fairness"; such fairness would be outweighed by the unfairness of monopoly infringements on liberty. They are instituted solely when necessary to protect society from practical malfunctions which would significantly retard invention. Beyond the minimum protections, the official monopolies retard that invention at least as much as the absence of protection, and much more than the alternative: trade secrets.
The patents you are using as your examples, and the business risk you present, all demonstrate what's wrong with our IP system.
Your simplified carriage patent would not be a valid patent, because it's too broad. And your 2-axle subsequent invention is not an infringement of the original invention, if its patent is sufficiently narrow to be valid. Because the second axle is not a "trivial" improvement, nor is it a repetition of the "essential" design in the original patent.
The ideas are not what's protected by patents. Patents protect from competition the commercialization of a device. Because without a temporary monopoly on commercializing the device, inventors can't compete with other parties who spend money on copying and commercializing rather than on inventing. Which would inhibit inventors, which would inhibit useful progress in society. That pragmatic compromise of liberty for temporary monopoly is based on economics of inventing devices. Market saturation, resource scaling, supply chains, manufacturing, decreasing marginal returns on investment: all different economics from the "idea economy". Protecting the communications of ideas is similar enough to protecting the production of devices that it also needs protection. But different enough that its protections, copyright and trademark, are significantly different from patents. Even copyright is different from its special case of trademark.
Business practice is not like any of those. The way to protect one's unique, novel business practice is to ensure that the business it practices is profitable. The practice of copying successful business practices is basic to every culture, making those societies workable. Patenting business processes interferes with that essential, universal system. It reduces industries to monopolies. It has no place in a working society.
There's lots wrong with patents even when they patent physical devices. There's lots wrong with copyright, and even some problems with trademark. But misusing any one of those systems to protect inappropriate creations makes everything worse. That misuse is not justified by the fact that the rest of the system is broken - the misuse makes it worse.
People defending business patents on principles either don't understand business, and what is necessary (as opposed to desirable) to compete, or they're not honest about whether the protection is necessary or fair. Sometimes both.
I think monopolies that attack the liberty of the mind are evil. Patents are exactly that kind of evil. Abuse of them is really evil. Any use beyond the recovery of investment to invent the patented device is abuse.
Using an evil system is evil. You might say it's a "necessary evil", but that's still evil.
RIM used everything it could. But NTP actually had the patent prior to RIM publishing any art. A better question might be "why didn't NTP use prior art?", since NTP registered first. You'll have to ask the lawyers: the case was pretty complex, expensive, and decided more on politics (like the US government's begging to hand it to RIM) than on any protection of an inventor's investment in inventing the Blackberry.
No, a patent monopolizes an inventionworking model of a unique invention. Judges, informed by expert witnesses, decide whether another device is close enough to the patented device, thereby infringing the patent. The "idea", the unique, novel design of a device, is protected only abstractly, by protecting a class of "similar devices", required to be a very narrow class. Any patent on an idea, description or instructions will be too broad when it is used to protect the idea itself. Use copyright instead - that's what it's for.
Only recently have patents been granted on anything as intangible as an idea, a practice, a pattern of relationships, a decisionmaking process. And it's created all kinds of terrible waste and constraints on inventors.
Patents just don't fit ideas and descriptions. Copyright and trademark fit them, as they have for centuries. The abberation monopoly of any kind is authorized by the Constitution only as a practical compromise with liberty, in recognition of the competitive advantage in producing machinery by merely copying novel designs. But since IP has been abused by IP owners and the legislators they bribe^Wsponsor, IP "protection" has become a product in its own right. Causing much more harm than protection.
It's the prior art that makes your company's case. If it had produced the prior art right away, it might have saved the $500K. The $10K to file a patent is extra, and doesn't protect people from your scenario: the main company licensing my (copyrighted/trademarked) IP right now owns some patented IP of its own, on a specific use of a well-known crypto technique. That's drawn all kinds of lawsuits from other corps hoping to "buy" the patent by blackmail or winning a bogus case and stealing it.
It's the bogus patents on software, business processes, and other instructions and descriptions, rather than working machines that is costing all the money. The patents are evil. And all the lawyers involved in your dispute are doing evil with those evil instruments.
As I (and others) have been posting frequently in this thread, a patent is not required to defend from another party preventing use of an "invention". Merely documenting "prior art" of use of an "invention" prohibits another party from later patenting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Israel exists. That is the basis of its right to exist. On what basis do you base a right for a country to exist? And on what basis do you say it's right to destroy an existing country?
Only Jews have the "right of return". And right now there's serious debate about whether the wall should exclude "Israeli Arabs" as well as "Palestinians". Anyone suggesting Judaism isn't the state religion of the Jewish state is kidding, a Talmudist, a fool, or all of them.
Israel does not have the Bill of Rights. It does have borders completely surrounded by hostile neighbors, including daily rocket attacks and suicide bombs, many originating within its territory.
Israel has lots of unamerican "problems", like a state religion and the draft. We don't want those things here.
Clinton's blowjob came up in the context of the hyperextended Whitewater investigation. You know, the real estate system that turned out so legit, it got a president impeached over a blowjob?
Meanwhile, Republican Bob Packwood actually molested several women, the investigation of which revealed campaign finance fraud/theft, and all that happened to him was he resigned. The many (Republican) charges of sexual harassment against Clinton were all revealed to be groundless, but he got impeached.
Bush was a drunk cokehead, his top advisor Rove outed a CIA/WMD agent in conspiracy with several others in the office, but I guess that's OK with you. IOKIYAR.
The double standards that let Republicans get away with murder *cough* Joe Scarborough *cough* but crucify Democrats are well known. There's no point reversing them to try to fool we who have been paying attention all along.
As soon as Bushworshipping Republicans roll over for unmanned drone spying over the US, Bush will stick RFIDs up our asses. Literally.
Moderation +2
50% Insightful
30% Interesting
20% Troll
Which rogue president's crimes are you trying to suppress, TrollMod? Dead Nixon, or still live & dangerous Bush?
You seem to think that impeachment is a way to rerun an election you didn't like. You really though Clinton should be kicked out of office because he lied about a blowjob? And you don't think Bush should be impeached for lying about Iraq or domestic spying, while running those programs?
The Bushes are America's most privileged dynasty.
Clinton we've discussed.
Reagan was born poor, but became rich and connected through his Hollywood "anticommunist" agitation, including selling out his membership as president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Carter was an educated, poor peanut farmer who rose through the Navy to get the allies who made him Georgia governor, and US president in the wake of Nixon/Ford.
Ford came from humble beginnings in Omaha, and is probably the president who can claim the least credit for getting the office without the old boy network - the only one never elected to the White House.
Nixon we'ved discussed.
Johnson was born fairly poor, working through a Texas state teacher's college.
Kennedy's "aristocracy" was less than a generation old, his father having made their family rich and powerful by smuggling in Prohibition.
Eisenhower was born in the lower class in Texas, rising to power through the military.
Truman was a middle-class tailor who rose through the ranks due to party loyalty.
FDR was a genuine aristocrat, and the most powerful/popular president in history.
Hoover was a middle-class striver. Coolidge came from the lower/middle classes. Harding came from an upper-middle class family. Wilson came from the middle class. Taft was a product of the privileged political class. And T Roosevelt was from a rich family.
Presidents since the 20th Century, at least, have come from a fairly even distribution among society (upper class only slightly overrepresented). But it is clear that their power, and its most important benefit: perpetuation, is correlated with first their wealth, then their family's class. Those factors also give access to the tools reserved for the rich and powerful, not limited to rigged voting machines.
[US] Ambassador Khalilzad said that President Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari to be the next prime minister, according to Mr. Taki, a senior aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite bloc.
Even when Bush invades, creates a bubble government, controls the voting, he still creates a catastophe. No wonder we're planning to abandon them to civil war and Iranian annexation.
I generally agree with you. But Nixon's crimes (for which he was not impeached before he preemptively resigned) were "comparatively minor" compared only with Bush Jr's crimes. Nixon had completely subverted the government with many crimes, culminating in the coverup of the Watergate breakin. Even the breakin was a serious crime: CIA agents (like Gordon Liddy) and gangsters (like his "Cubans") teaming up to rob Democratic Party offices of strategic documents during a presidential election campaign? That's pretty serious, even compared to Nixon's Vietnam escalation and covert expansion into nearby countries, and the rest of his imperial transgressions. Clinton lying on TV about a blowjob is "comparatively minor" in any regard, but Nixon was a menace.
I note, in agreement with your points, that Nixon's Republican Party saw him resign without penalty for his crimes rather than even get impeached. While Clinton was impeached, and tried (and acquitted) in the Senate. The Republicans are much more of the "old boy network" than are the Democrats, so the comparative experiences are consistent.
However, I didn't post about the old boy network. I posted about whether presidents can come from classes lower than Bush's bluebloods, or even Reagan's millionaires. Clinton and Nixon prove that they can. And, as you point out, just being president isn't enough for privileged criminal immunity. That takes the kind of class that Bush was born into: lying us into war, destroying the Treasury, trashing the Constitution, stealing elections, dividing the country, elevating religious establishments to official status, spying on Americans, letting Osama go and neglecting the invaded Afghanistan to fester... Those are exactly the crimes impeachment is reserved for. And the only reason Bush isn't hanging on a traitor's gallows is because of his class privilege.
Both Clinton (D) and Nixon (R) were born poor, and made their political careers on their wits. Neither made any significant money outside their political careers, except books published after they left office. Even though they became rich by politics, they came from a disadvantaged underclass, exploiting America's class mobility to get power.
There's lots of class war in America, where capitalism is rigged to preserve its best opportunities for rich families. But the president themself is more of a pawn in that war than an emblem of it.
Clint Curtis, the Diebold programmer who says politicians paid him to rig voting machines in Florida, is running for Congress. If what he says he can do is true, who would have the guts to run against him? Alternately, since he was fired and the voting machine company has a grudge, how can he possibly win?
I wonder how much opposition we'd see to these "email stamp" systems if every message required a 1 cent stamp, recipients could whitelist anyone (which waived the stamp requirement) with a GUI in their own email client or in the sender's signup page, and the stamp proceeds were shared with the recipient?
Bulk email would be sent only to very high "welcome rate" recipients. And actual spam getting through would help pay its own cost. Why should AOL get all the profit off the spam it loads into your life?
Does that mean that spending 1/3 of my life in bed, but with my head angled 6 deg up, on a pillow, can prevent "bone and muscle loss, decreases in cardiovascular activity, and reduced capacity to exercise"?
When I think about Apple rating Windows performance, the phrase "full blown member" takes on multiple meanings.
Some of the vested interests are, in fact, hippies. When the government rejects valuable technology because it's not offered by the required jock or yuppie, whose own tech isn't good enough, the government has to change style, not the hippies. Or the government by, for and of the yuppies gets left behind.
Because unique business practices are not as much an advantage as are unique physical devices. Because business practices can be changed much more cheaply and quickly than can manufacturing to produce physical devices.
But most importantly, because society is not served with enough "progress in science and the useful arts" by unique business practices to justify violating competitors' liberty with even a temporary monopoly. In fact, society is served by competitors quickly adopting others' business practices, so industries can mature.
Patents, copyrights and trademarks are not instituted out of some abstract "fairness"; such fairness would be outweighed by the unfairness of monopoly infringements on liberty. They are instituted solely when necessary to protect society from practical malfunctions which would significantly retard invention. Beyond the minimum protections, the official monopolies retard that invention at least as much as the absence of protection, and much more than the alternative: trade secrets.
The patents you are using as your examples, and the business risk you present, all demonstrate what's wrong with our IP system.
Your simplified carriage patent would not be a valid patent, because it's too broad. And your 2-axle subsequent invention is not an infringement of the original invention, if its patent is sufficiently narrow to be valid. Because the second axle is not a "trivial" improvement, nor is it a repetition of the "essential" design in the original patent.
The ideas are not what's protected by patents. Patents protect from competition the commercialization of a device. Because without a temporary monopoly on commercializing the device, inventors can't compete with other parties who spend money on copying and commercializing rather than on inventing. Which would inhibit inventors, which would inhibit useful progress in society. That pragmatic compromise of liberty for temporary monopoly is based on economics of inventing devices. Market saturation, resource scaling, supply chains, manufacturing, decreasing marginal returns on investment: all different economics from the "idea economy". Protecting the communications of ideas is similar enough to protecting the production of devices that it also needs protection. But different enough that its protections, copyright and trademark, are significantly different from patents. Even copyright is different from its special case of trademark.
Business practice is not like any of those. The way to protect one's unique, novel business practice is to ensure that the business it practices is profitable. The practice of copying successful business practices is basic to every culture, making those societies workable. Patenting business processes interferes with that essential, universal system. It reduces industries to monopolies. It has no place in a working society.
There's lots wrong with patents even when they patent physical devices. There's lots wrong with copyright, and even some problems with trademark. But misusing any one of those systems to protect inappropriate creations makes everything worse. That misuse is not justified by the fact that the rest of the system is broken - the misuse makes it worse.
People defending business patents on principles either don't understand business, and what is necessary (as opposed to desirable) to compete, or they're not honest about whether the protection is necessary or fair. Sometimes both.
Those are some pragmatic justifications for doing evil.
I think monopolies that attack the liberty of the mind are evil. Patents are exactly that kind of evil. Abuse of them is really evil. Any use beyond the recovery of investment to invent the patented device is abuse.
You can do the math on Google's patents.
Using an evil system is evil. You might say it's a "necessary evil", but that's still evil.
RIM used everything it could. But NTP actually had the patent prior to RIM publishing any art. A better question might be "why didn't NTP use prior art?", since NTP registered first. You'll have to ask the lawyers: the case was pretty complex, expensive, and decided more on politics (like the US government's begging to hand it to RIM) than on any protection of an inventor's investment in inventing the Blackberry.
No, a patent monopolizes an inventionworking model of a unique invention. Judges, informed by expert witnesses, decide whether another device is close enough to the patented device, thereby infringing the patent. The "idea", the unique, novel design of a device, is protected only abstractly, by protecting a class of "similar devices", required to be a very narrow class. Any patent on an idea, description or instructions will be too broad when it is used to protect the idea itself. Use copyright instead - that's what it's for.
Only recently have patents been granted on anything as intangible as an idea, a practice, a pattern of relationships, a decisionmaking process. And it's created all kinds of terrible waste and constraints on inventors.
Patents just don't fit ideas and descriptions. Copyright and trademark fit them, as they have for centuries. The abberation monopoly of any kind is authorized by the Constitution only as a practical compromise with liberty, in recognition of the competitive advantage in producing machinery by merely copying novel designs. But since IP has been abused by IP owners and the legislators they bribe^Wsponsor, IP "protection" has become a product in its own right. Causing much more harm than protection.
It's the prior art that makes your company's case. If it had produced the prior art right away, it might have saved the $500K. The $10K to file a patent is extra, and doesn't protect people from your scenario: the main company licensing my (copyrighted/trademarked) IP right now owns some patented IP of its own, on a specific use of a well-known crypto technique. That's drawn all kinds of lawsuits from other corps hoping to "buy" the patent by blackmail or winning a bogus case and stealing it.
It's the bogus patents on software, business processes, and other instructions and descriptions, rather than working machines that is costing all the money. The patents are evil. And all the lawyers involved in your dispute are doing evil with those evil instruments.
As I (and others) have been posting frequently in this thread, a patent is not required to defend from another party preventing use of an "invention". Merely documenting "prior art" of use of an "invention" prohibits another party from later patenting it.
Google does own the patents, as the filing employees assigned them to Google. Evil.