I'm afraid you're mistaken--Diplomacy is zero-sum. It may teach cooperation in the short term (because none of the seven players alone has enough power to win, at the start of the game), but ultimately there can be only a single winner. How many pieces the game has has nothing to do with it.
See Nomic, a game about changing the Rules. Actually, Nomic typically begins as a zero-sum game (the stated goal is to reach a certain number of points), but since the rules can be changed, it often develops into a non-zero sum game.
Agora, one of the longest running nomics on the net, has had for long periods of its history no defined way to win the game at all. (Currently, it does, but most of its players seem supremely unconcerned about winning the game.)
(Note: if you've played other rule-changing games, Nomic is different from most of them in a subtle way. Most rule-changing games have a central unchangeable core of rules, which typically include the rules about how other rules are changed. In Nomic, all the rules, including those about how the rules are changed, are subject to change.)
Re:Ah, but the innocent have nothing to fear..
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 2
"I'd gladly give up a minor freedom if it would help catch criminals."
Pray tell, precisely what freedom (minor or major) are you giving up by the use of this system?
My only complaint about this category - cuz I think it is an important subject, and very germaine to/. - is the number of posts trying to illustrate the absurdity of the patents by saying they have a patent for water or whatever.
My recommendation is to downmoderate all such posts as redundant.
You don't own the right to do what the hell you like with them. "
Yes, I do. I do because that is fair use
No, that's first sale. The doctrine of first sale says that you can do what you like with the physical object you purchased, aside from making copies of it.
Fair use allows you to make copies of a work or portions thereof without the copyright holder's permission, depending on what you're going to use it for.
Almost certainly competitors of the companies owning the patents they're trying to invalidate.
and how much are these corporations paying for people like us to do the dirtywork?
Probably too much.
I do this sort of thing for a living--I'm a patent searcher at a Fortune 500 company. I work with patent attorneys and do prior art searches--both for our own patent applications, and sometimes in the hopes of invalidating a competitor's patent.
I estimate the cost to my company for me to do a prior art search--including my own time, and the cost of database searching (we use proprietary, for-pay patent databases which have many features not available through the free-on-the-internet databases such as USPTO and Delphion)--is typically in the range of $2000-$4000.
Why some corporations are willing to pay in excess of $10000 for something that someone like me could do for much less, I don't know. OK, that's not quite true--I do know, in some cases. It might be well worthwhile for things like the guy who had the old product brochure--things like that are virtually impossible to search by conventional methods. But in some fields, for a lot of the "bounties" that are up, if prior art exists, it is almost certain to be either in patents or in the research literature, both of which can be searched quite thoroughly by someone like me.
(Why don't I go and look for prior art on these bounties then? Well, for those in my field, BountyQuest's client is probably a competitor of my company's, and doing so would violate my employment agreement. I might try it at some point for some of the bounties in other fields, but I wouldn't expect to be too successful since the field is not my area of expertise.)
Not that I'm complaining--if you can get a company to pay you $10000 for information that they should be able to get for under $5000, more power to you.
How do we know that the dirt that we're digging up on existing patents, isn't simply going to be used for even more intrusive patents?
Because if prior art exists and they're aware of it, they must report it in their patent application. If they don't, it's grounds for invalidating the patent. Normally, it's very difficult to prove that a company knew about any given piece of prior art, so invalidations on these grounds are rare. However, if the prior art had been delivered to them by an outside company (and presumably this information could be subpoenaed), then it could be proven.
Can I say for sure that companies still won't use the information for their own patent and deliberately fail to cite the prior art they know about? No. But they're taking a very big risk if they do.
Oh yes, patent examiners have nothing better to do than to sit around reading "Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits are prior art!" Not to mention posts from well-meaning people who submit things they legitimately think are prior art, but are not because they don't have the first clue about the legal requirements for what is and is not prior art--and are subsequently upmoderated by equally well-meaning, equally clueless people.
...please, PLEASE, PLEASE read the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, particularly the "Issues for Comment" section.
The FCC is seeking comment on fairly specific issues. The FCC does not have the authority to choose to not enforce this law at all. Their hands are tied; they cannot overturn an act of congress.
So comments like "this law is stupid and unconstitional," while true, will have no effect on the FCC's rules. Even if you convince people at the FCC that it's unconstitutional, they must still enforce it. (Legally, a law is presumed constitutional unless and until declared unconstitutional by a court.) The place to challenge the law as a whole (rather than just the particular way in which it is implemented) is in the courts, which is already being done.
I'm sick and tired of the right ranting about small government and then pulling shit like that.
In [backhanded] defense of dubya, the right wasn't even pushing small government this election. In his campaign, dubya did not propose to cut a single government program. Smaller government has been a major campaign issue of Republicans in the past, but they seem to have dropped it completely in the 2000 election.
Of course, this caused many people (such as myself) who do want smaller government to vote for Harry Browne.
Hey, it's not as if librarians just recently jumped on the bandwagon. The Library Bill of Rights was first adopted by the ALA in 1948. Libertarians didn't even exist as a party until 1971.
Librarians have had an anti-censorship stance longer than Libertarians.
If M$ is snooping into "corporate secrets" could M$ be taken to court for theft or something.
That depends very much on the methods they're using. Poking through someone's trash (once the trash is on public property, so you're not trespassing) is legal. (Thus, most large companies place a high priority on proper disposal of confidential documents--e.g., shredding, burning, shredding and burning.) Tapping someone's phone is not. There are quite a few ethically-questionably-but-clearly-legal methods that corporations can use to find out information about their competitors.
Saw the parent comment in meta-mod, so I know I'm coming late to the discussion and few people will ever see this, but I couldn't help but respond.
I think the problem is that $2/month is far above the market rate for a single comic.
Consider: for $15/month, I can subscribe to a newspaper which has 30-40 comics a day, not to mention news, opinion, TV and movie listings, etc., etc. $0.10/month for a single comic would probably be more in line with market value, I imagine.
Two things: the slipshod search for prior art and the bizarre definition of prior art (if it wasn't published it didn't exist.)
On the first I will wholeheartedly agree with you. As to the second, pray tell me how patent examiners are supposed to find this unpublished prior art? Perhaps you expect them to be clairvoyant, so they know that Frederick Q. Warzelheimer actually invented the very thing described in the patent 15 years ago, but kept it in his basement and never told anyone? (The privacy zealots here would have a fit!)
Could they get damages assessed for use after the patent was granted but before they were notified of infringment? Isn't the responsibility of any possible infringing party to monitor and know what patents have been issued to avoid infringement? Just as one is legally responsible for knowing every law ("ignorance of the law is no excuse")?
Exactly right.
Doesn't sound logical, but law is not necessarily logical.
Well put. Too often science/engineering/tech types try to understand law by divining the general principles, and extrapolating what the specific laws ought to be from those general principles. But while this approach works well in science, it does not apply to law.
Imagine writing a application (search engine), and have it available for a year or more - after which a patent is accepted that means you owe money for a license on the previously released product?
No, it only means that you need a license if you want to continue to sell the product.
Assuming AV's patents are valid (I don't believe for a second they are) and that other search engines really are infringing on them, AV can demand that they either buy a license or stop what they're doing now, but they can't collect damages for what the search engines did before the patent was granted.
Since Bush Sr. gave the U.S.P.T.O. unlimited power ten years ago
WTF are you talking about? Let's see, what do/.ers most love to hate about USPTO? Business method patents, software patents (both of those granted by courts, not by any direct action of the executive or congressional branches), and poor examinations (unrelated to alleged "unlimited power".)
I know a bit about the history of the USPTO (granted, not everything), so I'd be interested to know what you're talking about.
These are not new (the three requirements you list, I mean--there are new rules, but those requirements have been there all along) so I wouldn't hold my breath for any great improvement in the quality of patent examinations due to these "new rules."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid you're mistaken--Diplomacy is zero-sum. It may teach cooperation in the short term (because none of the seven players alone has enough power to win, at the start of the game), but ultimately there can be only a single winner. How many pieces the game has has nothing to do with it.
Agora, one of the longest running nomics on the net, has had for long periods of its history no defined way to win the game at all. (Currently, it does, but most of its players seem supremely unconcerned about winning the game.)
(Note: if you've played other rule-changing games, Nomic is different from most of them in a subtle way. Most rule-changing games have a central unchangeable core of rules, which typically include the rules about how other rules are changed. In Nomic, all the rules, including those about how the rules are changed, are subject to change.)
Pray tell, precisely what freedom (minor or major) are you giving up by the use of this system?
How is this a loophole? Seems to me this is how it ought to work.
My recommendation is to downmoderate all such posts as redundant.
You don't own the right to do what the hell you like with them. "
Yes, I do. I do because that is fair use
No, that's first sale. The doctrine of first sale says that you can do what you like with the physical object you purchased, aside from making copies of it.
Fair use allows you to make copies of a work or portions thereof without the copyright holder's permission, depending on what you're going to use it for.
Two different legal principles.
They're not. At least not by lawyers, for precisely the reasons you state.
Almost certainly competitors of the companies owning the patents they're trying to invalidate.
and how much are these corporations paying for people like us to do the dirtywork?
Probably too much.
I do this sort of thing for a living--I'm a patent searcher at a Fortune 500 company. I work with patent attorneys and do prior art searches--both for our own patent applications, and sometimes in the hopes of invalidating a competitor's patent.
I estimate the cost to my company for me to do a prior art search--including my own time, and the cost of database searching (we use proprietary, for-pay patent databases which have many features not available through the free-on-the-internet databases such as USPTO and Delphion)--is typically in the range of $2000-$4000.
Why some corporations are willing to pay in excess of $10000 for something that someone like me could do for much less, I don't know. OK, that's not quite true--I do know, in some cases. It might be well worthwhile for things like the guy who had the old product brochure--things like that are virtually impossible to search by conventional methods. But in some fields, for a lot of the "bounties" that are up, if prior art exists, it is almost certain to be either in patents or in the research literature, both of which can be searched quite thoroughly by someone like me.
(Why don't I go and look for prior art on these bounties then? Well, for those in my field, BountyQuest's client is probably a competitor of my company's, and doing so would violate my employment agreement. I might try it at some point for some of the bounties in other fields, but I wouldn't expect to be too successful since the field is not my area of expertise.)
Not that I'm complaining--if you can get a company to pay you $10000 for information that they should be able to get for under $5000, more power to you.
How do we know that the dirt that we're digging up on existing patents, isn't simply going to be used for even more intrusive patents?
Because if prior art exists and they're aware of it, they must report it in their patent application. If they don't, it's grounds for invalidating the patent. Normally, it's very difficult to prove that a company knew about any given piece of prior art, so invalidations on these grounds are rare. However, if the prior art had been delivered to them by an outside company (and presumably this information could be subpoenaed), then it could be proven.
Can I say for sure that companies still won't use the information for their own patent and deliberately fail to cite the prior art they know about? No. But they're taking a very big risk if they do.
Oh yes, patent examiners have nothing better to do than to sit around reading "Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits are prior art!" Not to mention posts from well-meaning people who submit things they legitimately think are prior art, but are not because they don't have the first clue about the legal requirements for what is and is not prior art--and are subsequently upmoderated by equally well-meaning, equally clueless people.
Is everything programming with you? Expand your vision a bit--the Constitution is an open source project!!!
You're heading down a slippery slope here: if the FCC had the authority to ignore this bad law, what good laws would it also ignore?
The FCC is seeking comment on fairly specific issues. The FCC does not have the authority to choose to not enforce this law at all. Their hands are tied; they cannot overturn an act of congress.
So comments like "this law is stupid and unconstitional," while true, will have no effect on the FCC's rules. Even if you convince people at the FCC that it's unconstitutional, they must still enforce it. (Legally, a law is presumed constitutional unless and until declared unconstitutional by a court.) The place to challenge the law as a whole (rather than just the particular way in which it is implemented) is in the courts, which is already being done.
Absolutely! Because the majority of librarians oppose this law.
If you don't like what GPL allows, don't use it. Write your own license, don't borrow others'.
In [backhanded] defense of dubya, the right wasn't even pushing small government this election. In his campaign, dubya did not propose to cut a single government program. Smaller government has been a major campaign issue of Republicans in the past, but they seem to have dropped it completely in the 2000 election.
Of course, this caused many people (such as myself) who do want smaller government to vote for Harry Browne.
As has also been pointed out in that same separate thread, that statement is a bald-faced lie.
Librarians have had an anti-censorship stance longer than Libertarians.
That depends very much on the methods they're using. Poking through someone's trash (once the trash is on public property, so you're not trespassing) is legal. (Thus, most large companies place a high priority on proper disposal of confidential documents--e.g., shredding, burning, shredding and burning.) Tapping someone's phone is not. There are quite a few ethically-questionably-but-clearly-legal methods that corporations can use to find out information about their competitors.
I think the problem is that $2/month is far above the market rate for a single comic.
Consider: for $15/month, I can subscribe to a newspaper which has 30-40 comics a day, not to mention news, opinion, TV and movie listings, etc., etc. $0.10/month for a single comic would probably be more in line with market value, I imagine.
On the first I will wholeheartedly agree with you. As to the second, pray tell me how patent examiners are supposed to find this unpublished prior art? Perhaps you expect them to be clairvoyant, so they know that Frederick Q. Warzelheimer actually invented the very thing described in the patent 15 years ago, but kept it in his basement and never told anyone? (The privacy zealots here would have a fit!)
Exactly right.
Doesn't sound logical, but law is not necessarily logical.
Well put. Too often science/engineering/tech types try to understand law by divining the general principles, and extrapolating what the specific laws ought to be from those general principles. But while this approach works well in science, it does not apply to law.
No, it only means that you need a license if you want to continue to sell the product.
Assuming AV's patents are valid (I don't believe for a second they are) and that other search engines really are infringing on them, AV can demand that they either buy a license or stop what they're doing now, but they can't collect damages for what the search engines did before the patent was granted.
Here is a critique of California's "deregulation" of the power industry.
WTF are you talking about? Let's see, what do /.ers most love to hate about USPTO? Business method patents, software patents (both of those granted by courts, not by any direct action of the executive or congressional branches), and poor examinations (unrelated to alleged "unlimited power".)
I know a bit about the history of the USPTO (granted, not everything), so I'd be interested to know what you're talking about.
These are not new (the three requirements you list, I mean--there are new rules, but those requirements have been there all along) so I wouldn't hold my breath for any great improvement in the quality of patent examinations due to these "new rules."