Ending supply management means our farmers will be fucked and our grocery prices will soar. That's not a "good" thing for anyone except the US who would now be able to undercut our farmers (though likely still at a higher price for goods than our current system.)
I mean you can throw all the capitalism and "if they can't complete, good riddance" rhetoric at our local farmers that you want.. at the end of the day though, food prices going up is going to be the end result and there's nobody who can just stop eating when it gets too expensive, which is a significant difference from most other purchases when you want to start talking economic theory.
Well if their participation in NAFTA is any indication, the US will happily just ignore the courts when things don't go in their favor, or will slap the plaintiff company in some unrelated area and use that to essentially force a settlement.
And unfortunately, unless your name is China, there's probably shit all you can do about it. The US is too big of an economic force to ignore and you aren't so they have nearly all of the leverage all of the time (or will manufacture some elsewhere as noted above) and don't seem to have any moral qualms about using it.
how VG caused the citizens to vote a tax increase upon themselves
Typically it works like: 1) Promise shitloads of "job creation" to get the vote. 2) Hire the few dozen/hundred manual laborers you need at the lowest wage you can possibly pay in the area, for the period of construction. 3) Bring in your own staff for any skilled jobs. 4) Lay off all of the locals once construction is done.
It happens time and again everywhere -- the town will lay down massive incentives that they'll be paying off for decades in order to get a couple years of shit jobs for a small portion of their population because nobody stops to think about the fact that a) construction ends eventually and b) your locals probably don't have the skills needed for the long-term skilled jobs.
There'll be a handful of janitors and other scrub jobs remaining even after construction is done of course, but it almost never works out when the town gives away that much on the promise of "jobs." That $76m could probably have been better used promoting local businesses.. building an attraction in the hopes of some tourism (you'll get a lot more from 1000 random normal tourists than a single rich dude..) or hell just fund your citizens' move to a bigger city and disband the town if "jobs" is your only goal.
software patents are broken and there is no way to fix it.
No, my "frigging" point is that they're broken and _could_ be fixed. They probably won't be of course, but I firmly believe that they could be.
"Catch mice" patents
You truly can't see the difference between "an algorithm that sorts things" with no further detail, and "an algorithm that sorts things by selecting a pivot, dividing the items into sublists around the pivot and recursively sorting the sublists"? The first one could cover any sorting algorithm on the planet. The second one fairly explicitly only covers the specific algorithm used by quicksort.
If you flat out refuse to see the difference in scope there well.. I suppose you can enjoy your zealotry as I don't know how to be any more clear short of actually building a working patent system to show you, which is somewhat beyond my abilities as I'm not the dictator of any countries.
Exactly my point. _THAT_ kind of patent (algorithm or otherwise) is horrible, because it covers way more than it should. The fact that the USPTO has been allowing those kind of patents means that the _current_ patent system is broken. It doesn't necessarily follow that the _idea_ of patents is bad.
And what algorithm is it anyway?
The quicksort algorithm. If you've been a programmer for 23 years you should recognize that that is a well-known, defined name for a specific algorithm (as opposed to say a bubble sort or a merge sort or any number of other sorting algorithms.) Its not _just_ "sort quickly," but a specific method for doing so.
Someone can come along with a spring loaded mousetrap that uses a different trap door form and be a different patent.
Depends how different it is. If its the exact same mechanism but closes from the left instead of the right or uses a 3" bolt instead of a 2.5" bolt but otherwise identical, you're probably not going to get a new patent granted even if it doesn't _exactly_ match the original patent's blueprints.
Why not? It used to.
No it didn't. The blueprints were used as a reference, not as the only possible construction covered.
any reasonable analogue of a patent of software would be "the code"
Now that actually brings up an interesting idea -- require a pseudocode "blueprint" to be included in the patent description. Not sure entirely how much that will solve (since the worst software patents are pretty easy to duplicate anyway even without original source) but it might give companies a slight bit more pause before filing a junk patent, if for no other reason than someone will have to spend the time distilling their code down to the core algorithm.
But they need to be proper patents, not "Catch a mouse" patenting of the goal of the software
Which is exactly what I've been saying. I'm not sure why you're sounding like this is contradicting my previous statements.
surely that would be "better code"
By what reasoning? Chances are someone who spent a year coming up with perfecting an algorithm to patent is probably going to have written a better implementation than some guy who goes "that's a good idea" and hacks some shit together that does basically the same thing. For a real world example.. I'm assuming you know what a mouse trap looks like and how it works. Could you go out and build one from scratch that works as well as the ones built by a manufacturer who has been building them for 50 years? Probably not.
least DIFFERENT code, therefore would get a DIFFERENT patent
Only if its different enough that you can justify it not being covered by the existing patent. Writing essentially the same algorithm in BASIC where the original implementation was in C++ isn't exactly what anyone (with a brain, which doesn't necessarily include USPTO) would consider "novel."
they don't require invention to make
Come again? You've never had to stop and spend half a day thinking about what approach you need to take to solve a particular problem? You're either the most godlike programmer that ever existed, or your claim of 23 years programming experience is going to get called into question.
And anything patentable (legitimately patentable not "does something with a computer" type crap) would likely take far far longer than half a day to invent, distill down into a core algorithm, prove its complexity category, etc. I suspect a simple algorithm meeting all that criteria would take at least 6 months to file properly, not even counting delays imposed by USPTO's red tape.
You're obviously not a programmer. A 50,000 line program is far far far more complex than your average gear box.
When the patent says "Catch mice"
This is precisely issue (a) I stated -- overly vague patents. You're absolutely correct that a patent for "catch mice" is crap (and absolutely correct that those kind of patents have been regularly granted in the software space!)
But "Spring-loaded mechanism to catch mice using a baited pad" is a lot more realistic for a patent claim (though even that could be considered overly broad. Obviously I'm referring to your standard snap trap.. but what about a humane trap that just happens to use a spring mechanism to drop the door?)
There will always be some interpretation involved because patenting "this exact blueprint" isn't going to serve the purpose of patents (not even the original, well-intentioned purpose.)
I'll give you that an "algorithm" is somewhat grey though. Take a quicksort for example (probably a poor example as I don't know the real development history but try to bear with me..) Whoever first came up with the idea for quicksort probably spent many many hours trying to figure out the most efficient way he could come up with to sort a list of items. Is that worth a patent? Well he certainly put a lot of time and thought into it. Its certainly a novel idea (or would have been at the time.) So probably? But then is the patent invalid when someone takes the time to prove that its a theoretically optimal algorithm (and makes it "math," which isn't patentable?)
Its certainly a bit muddy exactly what should be patentable.. but saying "no algorithms" is kind of silly. Just because you're writing lines of code rather than drilling holes in sheet metal (or whatever) doesn't mean your "invention" is any less novel or creative.
But on the other hand there are certainly classes of algorithms that are fundamental to computer operation in general and locking them up in a patent is absurd.
Of course those classes change over time -- many things that we consider "fundamental" now didn't even exist 20 years ago. Which gets back to my (c) point -- software patents really need to expire within about 2-5 years. Keeping anything that's still critical in 5 years locked up is probably holding back the entire industry as its likely attained the status of "fundamental" and anything that isn't still critical in 5 years is ancient history by internet time.
I'm sure someone can come up with examples (probably from small vertical markets) where a primary algorithm in that market is still profitable after 5 years without being considered fundamental on a wider scale, but I'm not sure that justifies stagnating the entire rest of the software industry.
I don't know that I'd call it "clear cut," given that it would be fairly difficult to prove you had completed your invention before I filed. As I understand it, it doesn't matter if you're one bolt away from completion when I file, I still win (and hopefully USPTO at least uses the postmark date to judge filing order rather than just crossing your fingers that your papers don't get stuck in the postal system for a week or whatever!)
Though your point is definitely still valid. Whether I win legitimately or by a technicality, the cost to challenge it are definitely prohibitive and the end result is typically the same.
Yep, your numbers look correct (according to a quick Google search! Though I certainly had thought the opposite,) but I still think Google will be more of a codec driver than Netflix though due to having their fingers in the client side of things as well.
I don't know about actual research, but our bodies are pretty damned adept at maintaining themselves through low levels of damned near anything.. from a purely intuitive point of view, it would hardly require the kool-aid to assume that we've managed to adapt to small amounts of radiation given that well, the whole world is filled with small amounts of radiation naturally and we seem to survive in it.
Of course that depends entirely on your definition of "safe." If you mean "absolutely could never kill a single person ever in history," then yeah.. probably not "safe." But neither is breathing (airborne toxins, viruses, bacteria, etc..) so I don't really consider that to be a terribly useful definition in general.
Figuring out exactly where to draw the line for a useful definition is obviously challenging (and probably impossible to be strictly accurate.. everyone will have slightly tolerances as with most things) but I would hazard to guess that its higher than 0% over background (though likely somewhat less than 1%. 1% is a lot when you add it up over a lifetime!)
Define "all your money?" From everything I've seen, fusion is getting less and less funding by the year, while solar and wind are getting more and more.
And even ignoring that fact.. what's wrong with trying all possible approaches? Solar and wind "work" but its still rather questionable how well they'll scale without a more traditional power plant around to take over when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
As with almost everything thing in life, taking the middle road is far more likely to be sustainable over the long term as you don't end up with all of your eggs in one basket. If we go all solar for example and then end up with a supervolcano eruption that reduces solar energy input by say 0.1% global average with no backup power source to pick up the slack, it would be disastrous.
The only thing we really can say with near-certainty (and it isn't even 100% certainty) is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at the rate we're doing isn't sustainable. We really need to investigate all potential alternatives and start moving towards them as soon as possible.
Depending on how widely you'd like to interpret the definition, "Linux on the desktop" is essentially already here: Android. A right shitload of people are using Linux on a daily basis via their phones and tablets.
Its not on "the desktop" strictly speaking, but given the way things are trending its far more likely that "the desktop" will be displaced in general before Windows is displaced.
And once that happens then Linux on the desktop is almost assured because it will be the only OS that's still maintained for those people who absolutely can't replace their desktop with a phone or a tablet. MS and Apple may still have a token offering but without the install base, third party developers won't really be making much for the desktop anymore and Linux' biggest barrier to entry will be removed.
Of course we're still many many years from that. The desktop might be getting replaced with phones and tablets in the home somewhat rapidly but there's a boatload of corporate infrastructure that isn't going anywhere any time soon.
In the meantime, just bask in the fact that Android has mostly taken over the mobile market and call it a win for Linux since mobile is certainly looking to be "the future" for at least a decade or so (unless wearables really take off fast but so far those are mostly addons to or miniaturized versions of mobile devices anyway so not much difference from an OS perspective.)
All fusion reactors absolutely generate energy. What they don't do is generate more energy than they consume (ie: they're net-negative.)
It would certainly be nice if they can make it commercially viable, but there's plenty of science you can do in an net-negative reactor and advancing the tech is still an overall benefit to mankind -- just not necessarily a financial benefit.
You could argue everything in the world boils down to math and physics, and that ALL patents should therefore be invalid.
That's a pretty obvious red herring. Of course everything is physics (math is an abstraction we use to describe physics.. nothing in the real world is "made of" math.) Not that physics isn't patentable. You can't patent a physical law, but you can certainly patent a device you invent that makes use of said law.
As for algorithms.. yes algorithms probably should be patentable. The concept really isn't all that bad. Where things get ugly in the real world is that currently: a) They're allowed to be extremely vague and thus often cover many many similar algorithms that aren't actually the same. b) They have an extremely narrow interpretation of "obvious." c) They have absurdly long lifespans. 20 years may be reasonable for real world engineering advances but software changes so fast that 20 months might be closer to a useful exclusion period. 20 years ago, "the internet" was barely a known word outside academia and nerds. We're still working around patents from an era where you could choose to solder in your own math co-processor. 20 years for a software patent is just insane, regardless of how well the system is implemented.
Of these, I would say (c) is by far the worst. (a) and (b) are definitely issues as well, but both of them would be significantly mitigated if (c) was dealt with in a reasonable manner.
That's always been the case. There's no shortage of stories and anecdotes about two people who invented similar contraptions at similar times and one happened to win the race to the patent office.
The difference is that software patents are so ubiquitous and so generalized that you pretty much can't write "Hello, World!" without stepping on the toes of some software giant or other.
When your patent is for "storage, transmission and playback of a sequence of digitally encoded images," you potentially cover everything from a 1980s ASCII art up to the latest quarter-billion-dollar blockbuster, depending on how widely you interpret the phrase "digitally encoded images."
If non-software patents were allowed to be that vague, you'd see things like a patent for "Ice cream machine" cover everything from the cone you scoop it in all the way back to milking the damned cow.
Really, Google is the only company that matters. And maybe Netflix.
Those two companies probably handle as much video in a day as Philips and Samsung and all of the other traditional video companies do in a year.
Google in particular is uniquely positioned to sway the entire industry since they provide both the most popular video service (Youtube) and one of the most popular video clients (Chrome browser.)
Whatever codec Google decides to adopt, its simply going to take over the world. Youtube is too big an entity in the video space to be ignored by other browsers (playback support,) by video editing software (production support,) etc.
Of course that's not to say Samsung and Philips and whoever can't do their own thing and run with whatever codecs they feel like in the traditional video domain (disc players, etc) but that's all "behind the scenes" anyway for most people. You plug in a disc and unless you're trying to rip it or something, it generally just works. Its only when you get online that codecs and whatever crap start cropping up and getting in your way.
(There's a third pseudo-entity that can promote a chosen codec.. the video rippers. Nobody with half a brain thinks video piracy is going away any time soon and whatever those guys do is by far the most in-your-face when it comes to codec selection since there's absolutely no intervening entity between the video file and the decoder except the user.. Youtube only has to convince Microsoft, Apple and Firefox to support their codec. The rippers have to convince everybody. But they have the advantage of not having to pander to their audience -- the audience panders to them for the most part. So they do whatever the they feel like and if you want to download the latest movie its your own problem to know what the fuck a codec is and find the appropriate one.)
If it becomes popular, they'll also be in a unique position of holding whatever "defensive" patents that may come about from this effort.
If they run into a quarter that isn't performing as well, and they're sitting on this super popular technology that can't be (easily) converted to alternatives.. it might start smelling like a gold mine.
But whatever.. making an effort is better than not making an effort, and as long as the license (or patents) isn't too restrictive there's nothing stopping someone from forking the project should they decide to close it in future.
Clean room gets around copyright. Patent is a whole other ball of wax. In particular, even if you created a design entirely on your own, if someone else beats you to the punch with a similar enough design to fall under the patent, you're still screwed.
That's why software patents are so reviled, combined with the relatively loose standards the USPTO puts towards software patents (or at least did in the past.. wasn't there some supposed reforms recently?) If I patent "icon with rounded corners," then you basically can't build any software that includes an icon with a rounded corner without running afoul of my software, even if you had no idea that I existed never mind seeing my code or copying my algorithm.
And to make things even worse, since you probably think "rounded corners" is a pretty mundane design idea (its been around for many thousands of years in the not-computer part of the world after all,) you probably aren't even going to bother with a patent search until my lawyers come knocking on your door making outrageous "damages" claims.
I don't want cheaper, nobody does. We want better instead.
Sadly, only for a very tightly constrained definition of "we." Far too many people are either too poor or too stupid to buy quality products when they can save 20% and buy a similar product, even if it will only last 50% as long.
Even those that fall more to the "poor" side of the argument are stuck banking on the fact that the 30% difference is a future cost and buy the cheap shit anyway, because its that or nothing.
Its a well-known and well-documented phenomena. Unfortunately its also well-ignored. All "simple" economic arguments (ie: the only ones the people in power care about) start along the lines of "assume two equivalent competing products" and proceed to draw out pretty graphs showing marginal profits at various price points. You very rarely see quality difference being used as a pricing measure in these arguments (just like you rarely see irrational consumers in them.)
I mean I'm sure all of this stuff is covered as you get more in-depth into economic theory but very few politicians, never mind lay people, have degrees in economics. Most people know the major talking points from ECON101, if that, and precious little else.
Generally speaking, that should be an obvious "yes."
Very few of us outsiders deal directly (in a business sense) with any individual American people so when we bitch about "America" we are almost always referring to their generally horrific foreign policy rather than any specific person.
We all read/. and other news sources. We're well aware that much of your internal policy sucks as much if not more for Americans than your foreign policy sucks for non-Americans. But we've all got our own internal problems to bitch about so we generally only rant about America's foreign policy since that's the part that affects us (somewhat) directly.
they have a responsibility to pay the developer whatever is necessary to fix it
Says who? Last I checked the only responsibility we assign to corporations is "maximize profit," barring the odd edge case where a court requires them to do something above and beyond that (usually cleaning up some mess that they wrought and hoped nobody would notice.)
Its a pretty shitty deal for us normal citizens but unfortunately its the way the world works these days (and well, pretty much always.. money has never been far from power nor ever had much trouble getting its way regardless of the cost to the citizenry.) And unfortunately simply asserting otherwise won't change that fact.
The trouble with that line of thinking is that you don't really have any other option. Even when there actually is competition in the market for the device you need, their ToS is around 100% guaranteed to be just as bad.
As a consumer, our options these days basically amount to "go back to 1800s lifestyle" or "bend over and enjoy it" because every piece of tech sold, up to and including your phone, car, stereo, etc, all come with these types of strings attached and there's a whole lot of jack all you can do about it.
You can't even say "I'll go back to 1980s or 1960s lifestyle" because while primitive by today's standards, the main difference between those eras and the 1800s was the tech available -- and any of that that still exists will have had a consumer-unfriendly ToS attached to it by now.
Hell try ordering a bloody pizza online. I have to agree to a fucking ToS button just to have Panago take my money. Its insane. But its the world we live in and until/unless some sort of guardian angel comes forward with both the motivation and the deep pockets to actually fight Sony or Apple or whoever in court to set a proper precedent over ToS (rather than just accepting a settlement,) its pretty damned unlikely that we'll see any significant improvement for a long time to come.
(And thanks to copyright, vendor lock-in and other BS, "competition" is even a lot narrower of a term than we expect from more classic products. Linux or even Mac just isn't a replacement for Windows if you absolutely can't live without some piece of Windows-only software. Nor is an nSync album really in direct competition with a Pearl Jam album even though they're both music.
Its like saying a motorcycle and a bicycle are in direct competition with each other because they're both two-wheeled vehicles. Sure that's probably true if you're within peddling distance of everywhere you need to go but its pretty disingenuous to suggest that either one could completely fill the role of the other.)
So may as well bitch about it on the internet. Just make sure you click that ToS button on the way there.
Looking in the "ugliest corners" doesn't necessarily mean you're looking for the ugliest acts -- just that you have to be in the same vicinity of them.
The Twitter reference is just to garner eyeballs. I mean I'm sure they ARE watching Twitter (while most grandstanders are too stupid to follow through with their threats, some may actually have the capability and decide to make the attempt so you can't just ignore them even if the S/N ratio is pretty low.)
Chances are any serious (non-grandstanding) plot involving multiple people (and thus requiring a communications channel) will be hiding in the worst areas of the net right beside the child pornographers and other nasties. So yes, they will have to dig into the "ugliest" parts of the net -- Twitter just isn't that particular part and the article writer is being intentionally vague in order to draw attention.
Similarly, they're probably not just Googling for "Obama AND assassination" and calling it a day. They'll be looking for code phrases and questionable purchase patterns and other indicators of a serious plot made by people who are intelligent enough to at least attempt evading detection.
Absolutely, which is why "pull out" is another option if they feel they can't comply. My real point is that attempting to subvert the law is probably not going to be the choice they make. Taking that tack is a lot of risk for very little payoff, which may be worthwhile for political reformists but less so for businesses.
Though that brings up a more interesting issue -- what happens if they decide to comply in some way other than "no encryption?" Do they now have to figure out ways to generate separate key sets for every government? What happens when the UK decides that they don't want China being able to snoop on their communications, but China demands this same kind of back dooring that they're demanding? Encryption keys don't give two craps about the global political situation.. never mind figuring out how to later add or revoke keys as that political situation changes.
As for complying with laws in different countries.. its not THAT hard -- for communication that's purely within the one country. It becomes extremely difficult for communication that leaves the country (and then the whole issue of messages that just happen to bounce to a foreign router even though both the source and the destination are local -- an issue we have great interest in here in Canada since most of our traffic still goes through US routers. We have no control over what they do and they have no interest in protecting non-American rights, so we get the worst of both worlds and essentially have no digital privacy rights at all thanks to that border hop.)
I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to assume that in most cases, if I think something's up.. probably my competitor will be thinking something's up as well. Sure there's the occasional deep investigative effort that requires months or years of sifting through clues and evidence to find facts but the vast majority of the news is just "hey look something happened and we managed to be first to print."
Sure under the current system chances are both parties will file their own FOIA requests, but it becomes a bit of a first-mover race at that point and that's where the problem lies. It would be like nVidia publishing their preliminary chip design that won't be completed for 2 years and then hoping AMD doesn't take it and beat them to the punch. Sure they're a bit ahead of the game at that point but if they get slowed down for some reason and AMD doesn't, they're still going to lose. Why take that risk when there's no benefit to yourself for doing so?
Uhhh no? Even if copyright applies to public documents, selling a use of the document does not imply selling the copyright. We wouldn't have all the issues with RIAA/MPAA that we do if the world worked like that!
The government has to keep it a secret?
Uhhh no? There's nothing stopping somebody else filing their own FOIA request for the same document.
Doesn't matter who is paying to gather them together.
Yes it does. It matters if "nobody" is paying to gather them together, which is what you'll see happen (or at least a lot closer to it) if there's no chance for a return on investment. The only people making FOIA requests without an ROI opportunity is public advocacy groups, and they tend to have limited resources to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
Ending supply management means our farmers will be fucked and our grocery prices will soar. That's not a "good" thing for anyone except the US who would now be able to undercut our farmers (though likely still at a higher price for goods than our current system.)
I mean you can throw all the capitalism and "if they can't complete, good riddance" rhetoric at our local farmers that you want.. at the end of the day though, food prices going up is going to be the end result and there's nobody who can just stop eating when it gets too expensive, which is a significant difference from most other purchases when you want to start talking economic theory.
Well if their participation in NAFTA is any indication, the US will happily just ignore the courts when things don't go in their favor, or will slap the plaintiff company in some unrelated area and use that to essentially force a settlement.
And unfortunately, unless your name is China, there's probably shit all you can do about it. The US is too big of an economic force to ignore and you aren't so they have nearly all of the leverage all of the time (or will manufacture some elsewhere as noted above) and don't seem to have any moral qualms about using it.
how VG caused the citizens to vote a tax increase upon themselves
Typically it works like:
1) Promise shitloads of "job creation" to get the vote.
2) Hire the few dozen/hundred manual laborers you need at the lowest wage you can possibly pay in the area, for the period of construction.
3) Bring in your own staff for any skilled jobs.
4) Lay off all of the locals once construction is done.
It happens time and again everywhere -- the town will lay down massive incentives that they'll be paying off for decades in order to get a couple years of shit jobs for a small portion of their population because nobody stops to think about the fact that a) construction ends eventually and b) your locals probably don't have the skills needed for the long-term skilled jobs.
There'll be a handful of janitors and other scrub jobs remaining even after construction is done of course, but it almost never works out when the town gives away that much on the promise of "jobs." That $76m could probably have been better used promoting local businesses.. building an attraction in the hopes of some tourism (you'll get a lot more from 1000 random normal tourists than a single rich dude..) or hell just fund your citizens' move to a bigger city and disband the town if "jobs" is your only goal.
software patents are broken and there is no way to fix it.
No, my "frigging" point is that they're broken and _could_ be fixed. They probably won't be of course, but I firmly believe that they could be.
"Catch mice" patents
You truly can't see the difference between "an algorithm that sorts things" with no further detail, and "an algorithm that sorts things by selecting a pivot, dividing the items into sublists around the pivot and recursively sorting the sublists"? The first one could cover any sorting algorithm on the planet. The second one fairly explicitly only covers the specific algorithm used by quicksort.
If you flat out refuse to see the difference in scope there well.. I suppose you can enjoy your zealotry as I don't know how to be any more clear short of actually building a working patent system to show you, which is somewhat beyond my abilities as I'm not the dictator of any countries.
the ALGORITHM patent *IS* "To catch a mice"
Exactly my point. _THAT_ kind of patent (algorithm or otherwise) is horrible, because it covers way more than it should. The fact that the USPTO has been allowing those kind of patents means that the _current_ patent system is broken. It doesn't necessarily follow that the _idea_ of patents is bad.
And what algorithm is it anyway?
The quicksort algorithm. If you've been a programmer for 23 years you should recognize that that is a well-known, defined name for a specific algorithm (as opposed to say a bubble sort or a merge sort or any number of other sorting algorithms.) Its not _just_ "sort quickly," but a specific method for doing so.
Someone can come along with a spring loaded mousetrap that uses a different trap door form and be a different patent.
Depends how different it is. If its the exact same mechanism but closes from the left instead of the right or uses a 3" bolt instead of a 2.5" bolt but otherwise identical, you're probably not going to get a new patent granted even if it doesn't _exactly_ match the original patent's blueprints.
Why not? It used to.
No it didn't. The blueprints were used as a reference, not as the only possible construction covered.
any reasonable analogue of a patent of software would be "the code"
Now that actually brings up an interesting idea -- require a pseudocode "blueprint" to be included in the patent description. Not sure entirely how much that will solve (since the worst software patents are pretty easy to duplicate anyway even without original source) but it might give companies a slight bit more pause before filing a junk patent, if for no other reason than someone will have to spend the time distilling their code down to the core algorithm.
But they need to be proper patents, not "Catch a mouse" patenting of the goal of the software
Which is exactly what I've been saying. I'm not sure why you're sounding like this is contradicting my previous statements.
surely that would be "better code"
By what reasoning? Chances are someone who spent a year coming up with perfecting an algorithm to patent is probably going to have written a better implementation than some guy who goes "that's a good idea" and hacks some shit together that does basically the same thing. For a real world example.. I'm assuming you know what a mouse trap looks like and how it works. Could you go out and build one from scratch that works as well as the ones built by a manufacturer who has been building them for 50 years? Probably not.
least DIFFERENT code, therefore would get a DIFFERENT patent
Only if its different enough that you can justify it not being covered by the existing patent. Writing essentially the same algorithm in BASIC where the original implementation was in C++ isn't exactly what anyone (with a brain, which doesn't necessarily include USPTO) would consider "novel."
they don't require invention to make
Come again? You've never had to stop and spend half a day thinking about what approach you need to take to solve a particular problem? You're either the most godlike programmer that ever existed, or your claim of 23 years programming experience is going to get called into question.
And anything patentable (legitimately patentable not "does something with a computer" type crap) would likely take far far longer than half a day to invent, distill down into a core algorithm, prove its complexity category, etc. I suspect a simple algorithm meeting all that criteria would take at least 6 months to file properly, not even counting delays imposed by USPTO's red tape.
they require invention to IMPLEMENT
So if I dream up a new mouse trap, jot down so
You're obviously not a programmer. A 50,000 line program is far far far more complex than your average gear box.
When the patent says "Catch mice"
This is precisely issue (a) I stated -- overly vague patents. You're absolutely correct that a patent for "catch mice" is crap (and absolutely correct that those kind of patents have been regularly granted in the software space!)
But "Spring-loaded mechanism to catch mice using a baited pad" is a lot more realistic for a patent claim (though even that could be considered overly broad. Obviously I'm referring to your standard snap trap.. but what about a humane trap that just happens to use a spring mechanism to drop the door?)
There will always be some interpretation involved because patenting "this exact blueprint" isn't going to serve the purpose of patents (not even the original, well-intentioned purpose.)
I'll give you that an "algorithm" is somewhat grey though. Take a quicksort for example (probably a poor example as I don't know the real development history but try to bear with me..) Whoever first came up with the idea for quicksort probably spent many many hours trying to figure out the most efficient way he could come up with to sort a list of items. Is that worth a patent? Well he certainly put a lot of time and thought into it. Its certainly a novel idea (or would have been at the time.) So probably? But then is the patent invalid when someone takes the time to prove that its a theoretically optimal algorithm (and makes it "math," which isn't patentable?)
Its certainly a bit muddy exactly what should be patentable.. but saying "no algorithms" is kind of silly. Just because you're writing lines of code rather than drilling holes in sheet metal (or whatever) doesn't mean your "invention" is any less novel or creative.
But on the other hand there are certainly classes of algorithms that are fundamental to computer operation in general and locking them up in a patent is absurd.
Of course those classes change over time -- many things that we consider "fundamental" now didn't even exist 20 years ago. Which gets back to my (c) point -- software patents really need to expire within about 2-5 years. Keeping anything that's still critical in 5 years locked up is probably holding back the entire industry as its likely attained the status of "fundamental" and anything that isn't still critical in 5 years is ancient history by internet time.
I'm sure someone can come up with examples (probably from small vertical markets) where a primary algorithm in that market is still profitable after 5 years without being considered fundamental on a wider scale, but I'm not sure that justifies stagnating the entire rest of the software industry.
I don't know that I'd call it "clear cut," given that it would be fairly difficult to prove you had completed your invention before I filed. As I understand it, it doesn't matter if you're one bolt away from completion when I file, I still win (and hopefully USPTO at least uses the postmark date to judge filing order rather than just crossing your fingers that your papers don't get stuck in the postal system for a week or whatever!)
Though your point is definitely still valid. Whether I win legitimately or by a technicality, the cost to challenge it are definitely prohibitive and the end result is typically the same.
Yep, your numbers look correct (according to a quick Google search! Though I certainly had thought the opposite,) but I still think Google will be more of a codec driver than Netflix though due to having their fingers in the client side of things as well.
I don't know about actual research, but our bodies are pretty damned adept at maintaining themselves through low levels of damned near anything.. from a purely intuitive point of view, it would hardly require the kool-aid to assume that we've managed to adapt to small amounts of radiation given that well, the whole world is filled with small amounts of radiation naturally and we seem to survive in it.
Of course that depends entirely on your definition of "safe." If you mean "absolutely could never kill a single person ever in history," then yeah.. probably not "safe." But neither is breathing (airborne toxins, viruses, bacteria, etc..) so I don't really consider that to be a terribly useful definition in general.
Figuring out exactly where to draw the line for a useful definition is obviously challenging (and probably impossible to be strictly accurate.. everyone will have slightly tolerances as with most things) but I would hazard to guess that its higher than 0% over background (though likely somewhat less than 1%. 1% is a lot when you add it up over a lifetime!)
Define "all your money?" From everything I've seen, fusion is getting less and less funding by the year, while solar and wind are getting more and more.
And even ignoring that fact.. what's wrong with trying all possible approaches? Solar and wind "work" but its still rather questionable how well they'll scale without a more traditional power plant around to take over when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
As with almost everything thing in life, taking the middle road is far more likely to be sustainable over the long term as you don't end up with all of your eggs in one basket. If we go all solar for example and then end up with a supervolcano eruption that reduces solar energy input by say 0.1% global average with no backup power source to pick up the slack, it would be disastrous.
The only thing we really can say with near-certainty (and it isn't even 100% certainty) is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at the rate we're doing isn't sustainable. We really need to investigate all potential alternatives and start moving towards them as soon as possible.
Depending on how widely you'd like to interpret the definition, "Linux on the desktop" is essentially already here: Android. A right shitload of people are using Linux on a daily basis via their phones and tablets.
Its not on "the desktop" strictly speaking, but given the way things are trending its far more likely that "the desktop" will be displaced in general before Windows is displaced.
And once that happens then Linux on the desktop is almost assured because it will be the only OS that's still maintained for those people who absolutely can't replace their desktop with a phone or a tablet. MS and Apple may still have a token offering but without the install base, third party developers won't really be making much for the desktop anymore and Linux' biggest barrier to entry will be removed.
Of course we're still many many years from that. The desktop might be getting replaced with phones and tablets in the home somewhat rapidly but there's a boatload of corporate infrastructure that isn't going anywhere any time soon.
In the meantime, just bask in the fact that Android has mostly taken over the mobile market and call it a win for Linux since mobile is certainly looking to be "the future" for at least a decade or so (unless wearables really take off fast but so far those are mostly addons to or miniaturized versions of mobile devices anyway so not much difference from an OS perspective.)
All fusion reactors absolutely generate energy. What they don't do is generate more energy than they consume (ie: they're net-negative.)
It would certainly be nice if they can make it commercially viable, but there's plenty of science you can do in an net-negative reactor and advancing the tech is still an overall benefit to mankind -- just not necessarily a financial benefit.
You could argue everything in the world boils down to math and physics, and that ALL patents should therefore be invalid.
That's a pretty obvious red herring. Of course everything is physics (math is an abstraction we use to describe physics.. nothing in the real world is "made of" math.) Not that physics isn't patentable. You can't patent a physical law, but you can certainly patent a device you invent that makes use of said law.
As for algorithms.. yes algorithms probably should be patentable. The concept really isn't all that bad. Where things get ugly in the real world is that currently:
a) They're allowed to be extremely vague and thus often cover many many similar algorithms that aren't actually the same.
b) They have an extremely narrow interpretation of "obvious."
c) They have absurdly long lifespans. 20 years may be reasonable for real world engineering advances but software changes so fast that 20 months might be closer to a useful exclusion period. 20 years ago, "the internet" was barely a known word outside academia and nerds. We're still working around patents from an era where you could choose to solder in your own math co-processor. 20 years for a software patent is just insane, regardless of how well the system is implemented.
Of these, I would say (c) is by far the worst. (a) and (b) are definitely issues as well, but both of them would be significantly mitigated if (c) was dealt with in a reasonable manner.
That's always been the case. There's no shortage of stories and anecdotes about two people who invented similar contraptions at similar times and one happened to win the race to the patent office.
The difference is that software patents are so ubiquitous and so generalized that you pretty much can't write "Hello, World!" without stepping on the toes of some software giant or other.
When your patent is for "storage, transmission and playback of a sequence of digitally encoded images," you potentially cover everything from a 1980s ASCII art up to the latest quarter-billion-dollar blockbuster, depending on how widely you interpret the phrase "digitally encoded images."
If non-software patents were allowed to be that vague, you'd see things like a patent for "Ice cream machine" cover everything from the cone you scoop it in all the way back to milking the damned cow.
Really, Google is the only company that matters. And maybe Netflix.
Those two companies probably handle as much video in a day as Philips and Samsung and all of the other traditional video companies do in a year.
Google in particular is uniquely positioned to sway the entire industry since they provide both the most popular video service (Youtube) and one of the most popular video clients (Chrome browser.)
Whatever codec Google decides to adopt, its simply going to take over the world. Youtube is too big an entity in the video space to be ignored by other browsers (playback support,) by video editing software (production support,) etc.
Of course that's not to say Samsung and Philips and whoever can't do their own thing and run with whatever codecs they feel like in the traditional video domain (disc players, etc) but that's all "behind the scenes" anyway for most people. You plug in a disc and unless you're trying to rip it or something, it generally just works. Its only when you get online that codecs and whatever crap start cropping up and getting in your way.
(There's a third pseudo-entity that can promote a chosen codec.. the video rippers. Nobody with half a brain thinks video piracy is going away any time soon and whatever those guys do is by far the most in-your-face when it comes to codec selection since there's absolutely no intervening entity between the video file and the decoder except the user.. Youtube only has to convince Microsoft, Apple and Firefox to support their codec. The rippers have to convince everybody. But they have the advantage of not having to pander to their audience -- the audience panders to them for the most part. So they do whatever the they feel like and if you want to download the latest movie its your own problem to know what the fuck a codec is and find the appropriate one.)
If it becomes popular, they'll also be in a unique position of holding whatever "defensive" patents that may come about from this effort.
If they run into a quarter that isn't performing as well, and they're sitting on this super popular technology that can't be (easily) converted to alternatives.. it might start smelling like a gold mine.
But whatever.. making an effort is better than not making an effort, and as long as the license (or patents) isn't too restrictive there's nothing stopping someone from forking the project should they decide to close it in future.
Clean room gets around copyright. Patent is a whole other ball of wax. In particular, even if you created a design entirely on your own, if someone else beats you to the punch with a similar enough design to fall under the patent, you're still screwed.
That's why software patents are so reviled, combined with the relatively loose standards the USPTO puts towards software patents (or at least did in the past.. wasn't there some supposed reforms recently?) If I patent "icon with rounded corners," then you basically can't build any software that includes an icon with a rounded corner without running afoul of my software, even if you had no idea that I existed never mind seeing my code or copying my algorithm.
And to make things even worse, since you probably think "rounded corners" is a pretty mundane design idea (its been around for many thousands of years in the not-computer part of the world after all,) you probably aren't even going to bother with a patent search until my lawyers come knocking on your door making outrageous "damages" claims.
I don't want cheaper, nobody does. We want better instead.
Sadly, only for a very tightly constrained definition of "we." Far too many people are either too poor or too stupid to buy quality products when they can save 20% and buy a similar product, even if it will only last 50% as long.
Even those that fall more to the "poor" side of the argument are stuck banking on the fact that the 30% difference is a future cost and buy the cheap shit anyway, because its that or nothing.
Its a well-known and well-documented phenomena. Unfortunately its also well-ignored. All "simple" economic arguments (ie: the only ones the people in power care about) start along the lines of "assume two equivalent competing products" and proceed to draw out pretty graphs showing marginal profits at various price points. You very rarely see quality difference being used as a pricing measure in these arguments (just like you rarely see irrational consumers in them.)
I mean I'm sure all of this stuff is covered as you get more in-depth into economic theory but very few politicians, never mind lay people, have degrees in economics. Most people know the major talking points from ECON101, if that, and precious little else.
Generally speaking, that should be an obvious "yes."
Very few of us outsiders deal directly (in a business sense) with any individual American people so when we bitch about "America" we are almost always referring to their generally horrific foreign policy rather than any specific person.
We all read /. and other news sources. We're well aware that much of your internal policy sucks as much if not more for Americans than your foreign policy sucks for non-Americans. But we've all got our own internal problems to bitch about so we generally only rant about America's foreign policy since that's the part that affects us (somewhat) directly.
they have a responsibility to pay the developer whatever is necessary to fix it
Says who? Last I checked the only responsibility we assign to corporations is "maximize profit," barring the odd edge case where a court requires them to do something above and beyond that (usually cleaning up some mess that they wrought and hoped nobody would notice.)
Its a pretty shitty deal for us normal citizens but unfortunately its the way the world works these days (and well, pretty much always.. money has never been far from power nor ever had much trouble getting its way regardless of the cost to the citizenry.) And unfortunately simply asserting otherwise won't change that fact.
The trouble with that line of thinking is that you don't really have any other option. Even when there actually is competition in the market for the device you need, their ToS is around 100% guaranteed to be just as bad.
As a consumer, our options these days basically amount to "go back to 1800s lifestyle" or "bend over and enjoy it" because every piece of tech sold, up to and including your phone, car, stereo, etc, all come with these types of strings attached and there's a whole lot of jack all you can do about it.
You can't even say "I'll go back to 1980s or 1960s lifestyle" because while primitive by today's standards, the main difference between those eras and the 1800s was the tech available -- and any of that that still exists will have had a consumer-unfriendly ToS attached to it by now.
Hell try ordering a bloody pizza online. I have to agree to a fucking ToS button just to have Panago take my money. Its insane. But its the world we live in and until/unless some sort of guardian angel comes forward with both the motivation and the deep pockets to actually fight Sony or Apple or whoever in court to set a proper precedent over ToS (rather than just accepting a settlement,) its pretty damned unlikely that we'll see any significant improvement for a long time to come.
(And thanks to copyright, vendor lock-in and other BS, "competition" is even a lot narrower of a term than we expect from more classic products. Linux or even Mac just isn't a replacement for Windows if you absolutely can't live without some piece of Windows-only software. Nor is an nSync album really in direct competition with a Pearl Jam album even though they're both music.
Its like saying a motorcycle and a bicycle are in direct competition with each other because they're both two-wheeled vehicles. Sure that's probably true if you're within peddling distance of everywhere you need to go but its pretty disingenuous to suggest that either one could completely fill the role of the other.)
So may as well bitch about it on the internet. Just make sure you click that ToS button on the way there.
Its called word play and sensationalism.
Looking in the "ugliest corners" doesn't necessarily mean you're looking for the ugliest acts -- just that you have to be in the same vicinity of them.
The Twitter reference is just to garner eyeballs. I mean I'm sure they ARE watching Twitter (while most grandstanders are too stupid to follow through with their threats, some may actually have the capability and decide to make the attempt so you can't just ignore them even if the S/N ratio is pretty low.)
Chances are any serious (non-grandstanding) plot involving multiple people (and thus requiring a communications channel) will be hiding in the worst areas of the net right beside the child pornographers and other nasties. So yes, they will have to dig into the "ugliest" parts of the net -- Twitter just isn't that particular part and the article writer is being intentionally vague in order to draw attention.
Similarly, they're probably not just Googling for "Obama AND assassination" and calling it a day. They'll be looking for code phrases and questionable purchase patterns and other indicators of a serious plot made by people who are intelligent enough to at least attempt evading detection.
Absolutely, which is why "pull out" is another option if they feel they can't comply. My real point is that attempting to subvert the law is probably not going to be the choice they make. Taking that tack is a lot of risk for very little payoff, which may be worthwhile for political reformists but less so for businesses.
Though that brings up a more interesting issue -- what happens if they decide to comply in some way other than "no encryption?" Do they now have to figure out ways to generate separate key sets for every government? What happens when the UK decides that they don't want China being able to snoop on their communications, but China demands this same kind of back dooring that they're demanding? Encryption keys don't give two craps about the global political situation.. never mind figuring out how to later add or revoke keys as that political situation changes.
As for complying with laws in different countries.. its not THAT hard -- for communication that's purely within the one country. It becomes extremely difficult for communication that leaves the country (and then the whole issue of messages that just happen to bounce to a foreign router even though both the source and the destination are local -- an issue we have great interest in here in Canada since most of our traffic still goes through US routers. We have no control over what they do and they have no interest in protecting non-American rights, so we get the worst of both worlds and essentially have no digital privacy rights at all thanks to that border hop.)
I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to assume that in most cases, if I think something's up.. probably my competitor will be thinking something's up as well. Sure there's the occasional deep investigative effort that requires months or years of sifting through clues and evidence to find facts but the vast majority of the news is just "hey look something happened and we managed to be first to print."
Sure under the current system chances are both parties will file their own FOIA requests, but it becomes a bit of a first-mover race at that point and that's where the problem lies. It would be like nVidia publishing their preliminary chip design that won't be completed for 2 years and then hoping AMD doesn't take it and beat them to the punch. Sure they're a bit ahead of the game at that point but if they get slowed down for some reason and AMD doesn't, they're still going to lose. Why take that risk when there's no benefit to yourself for doing so?
the requester gets copyright on the documents?
Uhhh no? Even if copyright applies to public documents, selling a use of the document does not imply selling the copyright. We wouldn't have all the issues with RIAA/MPAA that we do if the world worked like that!
The government has to keep it a secret?
Uhhh no? There's nothing stopping somebody else filing their own FOIA request for the same document.
Doesn't matter who is paying to gather them together.
Yes it does. It matters if "nobody" is paying to gather them together, which is what you'll see happen (or at least a lot closer to it) if there's no chance for a return on investment. The only people making FOIA requests without an ROI opportunity is public advocacy groups, and they tend to have limited resources to work with.