Effectively, it removes privacy in the long term. Once its been around long enough that it stops being a "convenience" and starts being a "requirement" that you have some form of ID, you can then be tracked with relative ease.
And that's generally considered a bad thing. The old "nothing to hide" argument against unrestricted privacy invasion is stupid -- everyone has something that they'll eventually need to hide from someone else. Whether its a religious belief, their political preferences, their porn surfing habits, or yes, criminal behavior. You a democrat? Wouldn't the republicans like to know. You a republican? Wouldn't the democrats like to know.
What I don't understand is how anyone thinks that this doesn't already exist? Between federal and state governments, most people have at least 2 cards (SSN and driver's license). Military issues their own ID as well. Add in passports, credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, mortgage records, loyalty program cards, club membership cards, etc and your average person probably has over a dozen records in both public and private databases for which they intentionally carry around their ID card, and at least a couple are (almost) to the level of "required" in order to operate in today's society.
What we don't have (that I know of!) is any sort of centralized database which records all information related to an individual. Each database is maintained seperately and anyone trying to put together a full profile of a person would need to contact multiple database operators.
Which is pretty irrelevant when you think about it. Having a single shared key might make such searches slightly easier (don't have to look through 8 dozen "John Smith" entries to find the one you're looking for) but it doesn't strictly imply that the databases themselves have to be linked. In the US they probably would be (why go to the effort if you can't invade peoples' privacy?) but there's no technical reason for that to be the case.
In order to do such a thing in a private way you would need to (minimally, I'm sure I haven't thought it through completely!):
- Keep the individual databases seperate. They can share a key (ie: your ID number) but they shouldn't be able to share any other data beyond that without your authorization (already questionable anyways but still...)
- Allow people to obtain a new key that cannot be traced back to your old key (except perhaps a tightly controlled database that can only be accessed with a warrant for criminal investigations.. again this is already questionable with warrantless wiretapping and other such privacy-destroying laws becoming more common).
I know what I'm giving up, and I give it up gladly for the services I receive. You may disagree. But who are you to tell the rest of us what we should and shouldn't do?
I'm not anyone to tell you what to do. And nor is anyone else.
Where the problem comes in is with the people who DON'T know what they're giving up when they're using these services.
And that's the issue that repeatedly gets associated with Facebook -- the information is gathered, but there's little or no indication of that fact. I'm sure there's some overly broad clauses in some ToS somewhere but lets face it, some 180 page legal document is not going to be read or understood by the vast majority of Facebook users.
And worst of all, they're happy to sell your information (including personal information) to anyone willing to pay, regardless of how shady they are and your only way to opt out is to delete your account.
And deleting your account is getting hard to do if you want to keep up with your social circles (at least it is around here -- Facebook is the social networking app in my area of the world).
They've been getting better over the years, but its always been at the "urging" of third parties. That is, someone makes a big enough stink that they're forced to take notice either via legislation or to save face from a PR standpoint.
This is a stupid argument. Rewriting a product the size of Office in an entirely differently language is a massive undertaking, even for a company the size of Microsoft. Never mind all of the other hundreds of programs that they've got laying around that just don't happen to have the visibility of their two flagship products.
I'm sure they would love to completely abandon 25 years of crud and start fresh, but its just not practical. Not to mention it would require porting.NET to the Mac in order to support the Mac version of Office (and any other systems they might support), which may be stopped by more than the simple time and technical challenges (ie: Microsoft might not want.NET to be portable for sales reasons).
Newer stuff that they're doing DOES support.NET, and in fact a lot of it is built on.NET. XNA is a C# derivative for developing Xbox/Windows games in a somewhat cross-platform manner..NET is the platform of choice for Windows Phone 7, etc.
As for a 'must have'.NET application... who cares? Its not that hard to include the redistributable with your application. If you're really worried about your users having.NET pre-installed, then just use an older version of.NET rather than hoping some random third party developer has already done the installation for you. Its extremely easy to switch your target output between 2.0/3.0/3.5/4.0 from within the Visual Studio project settings.
It might sound interpreted, but its not. Its actually a 2-stage compilation.
Stage 1 is compiling from source code to byte code and is done with the standalone compiler.
Stage 2 is compiling from byte code to native code, and is done as a just-in-time step. This step is generally cached so that it only has to be redone when the byte code changes (in the same way that you usually only recompile a "normal" program when you modify the source).
Interpreters on the other hand perform the actions themselves.
A compiler sees "print x" and spits out something like "PUSH x; CALL [print]" (or the equivalent code bytes if it skips the assembly language step).
An interpreter sees "print x" and spits out "7" (or whatever value x happens to hold).
No, its not. A JIT actually compiles the code to native bytes just as a regular compiler does. The only difference is when that compilation is done.
Interpreted languages on the other hand are never converted to a native format. An interpeter actually performs the commands as it reads them from the input stream.
Think of it in terms of natural language. An "interpreter" is used when you need to speak directly to someone who doesn't understand your language, whereas a translation of a written work is more in line with what a compiler does. A "JIT translator" would be say a scribe who writes in German while you dictate in Finnish -- blurs the lines a bit maybe, but still a lot closer to a translation than an interactive conversation via an interpreter.
(Of course the English language is full of ambiguities and we often use the phrase "translator" when we mean "interpreter").
Or a niche app. Not every application in the world is intended to be used by 6billion people for.. who knows what we all have in common. Never mind that any non-niche app probably already has 1000 clones to split the market with anyway.
Only in theory. In practice, a real gravitational field is centered on a point, and you can use tidal forces to determine if such a point exists (and if you want, triangulate where it lies).
The theoretical concept that Einstein laid out is only true if you have a flat version of gravity. This can be approximated by simply having the gravitational field be so large relative to the sensitivity of the measurement device that the (truly spherical) surface appears flat. But all you need to break that scenario is a more sensitive measurement device.
Only if you have the ability to leave a marker at that point. However, the marker you dropped off would be moving with approximately the same velocity you are, so you've lost the ability to measure velocity relative to the original object.
You might still be able to compute the velocity relative to the original object (just add up your velocity relative to the original object plus the velocity relative to the marker), but you can't measure it by using an object you yourself left in space.
Yes, but this can be compensated for mathematically if you know the appropriate constants (primarily Hubble's constant), which we've measured with pretty good accuracy. Also, "incredibly" distorted is a bit dramatic. The force due to expansion is so tiny that its only really noticeable on the scale of hundreds of millions of lightyears. General relativity has a far greater affect on our measurements. But again, it can be compensated for mathematically.
Of course, you get the same phenomena with simple special relativity. Look up in the sky on a clear night and try to determine which stars are the closest. Its not possible without some better theory than just "how they look". Thats where things like standard candles, redshift measurements, gravitational lensing, etc are all used (even simple geometric triangulation for objects close enough to get a good angular measurement over the course of the earth's revolution around the sun). Basically anything the cosmologists can use to measure distances, they use.
And yes there's definitely some uncertainty. Slashdot posts a story about some completely new phenomena that astronomers have run across every couple months. There's lots we don't know. But there's also lots we do know with high to very high accuracy.
Any sort of Aether/"fabric" theory has been pretty much completely ruled out by experiment over a century ago.
There are lots of other explanations proposed however, though the Wikipedia page doesn't list any of the more crackpot theories like alien tampering.
One of these is dark matter, which could somewhat sound like what you're suggesting, but DM is definitely not a "fabric" of spacetime in any sense. Its "normal" matter that happens to not interact with the electromagnetic, weak or strong forces. That leaves gravity as its only interaction and we're just barely cracking the surface of gravitational telescopes. Once those have got a decent resolution though, DM should be confirmed or denied once and for all. In the meantime its just a theory that happens to fit certain data sets.
People studying Pioneer would prefer a more concrete solution that doesn't rely on unproven physics.
Constant velocity is not detectable without a frame of reference. This is relativity (extremely simplified of course!)
Change in velocity (ie: acceleration) IS detectable. You can detect forces acting upon you and therefore compute acceleration (F=ma). If you can measure the force acting on you (which you can if have the right equipment), and you know your mass, then its pretty trivial to calculate your acceleration without needing any external reference frame.
For a real world example, go ride a train (preferably between two stops seperated by a relatively straight run of track.) You definitely feel a backward "pull" as the train speeds up, and a forward "pull" as the train slows again for the next stop (plus some sideways pulls if the track curves, but for the sake of simplicity lets assume it doesn't).
During the middle of the trip -- when the train is maintaining a constant velocity -- you don't feel any different than you do when you're standing on solid ground, give or take a factor of imprecision such as a rough track or the operator not maintaining exactly constant speed.
Your entire knowledge of motion is based on a) looking out the window and b) previous experience with trains -- what they sound like, what they look like, how they move relative to the earth (which is the frame of reference you generally care about if you're taking a train somewhere) and so on. None of these factors have anything to do with the train's frame of reference however.
As for creating a frame of reference, you only need two points. Yourself (the observer) and a target (reference point) that you assume to be fixed (or you can consider yourself fixed and the target as moving -- the math is the same, you just get an extra minus sign).
You just continually monitor the distance between yourself and the target and can compute both your speed and your acceleration by comparing the distances over specific time intervals. As you take the interval times to zero, you get better and better approximations of your exact acceleration curve (that's pretty standard calculus -- sample and integrate.)
And finally, for an object in empty space. You're kind of correct. Its not so much that it doesn't have a velocity as much as velocity is simply undefined. You can still have an acceleration (F=ma as above) but what speed you accelerate from and what speed you accelerate to both have absolutely no meaning without a point of reference.
Of course in the real universe, forces (at least the ones we know about) are actions between objects, so the fact that you have an acceleration implies that there's something around that could be used as a reference point (but you have to be able to find it to use it!)
Netflix isn't like ANY cable in one extremely important sense -- convenience. You get exactly what you want when you want it (at least with the streaming service).
The closest cable comes to Netflix is VOD. Which is pretty much what Netflix is doing but over the internet instead of over a cable transmission (though the lines between those two are getting pretty blurry on a technical level!) And I'm pretty sure Netflix is a hell of a lot cheaper than any cable company's VOD service.
That's a huge lesson that all of these content companies really need to learn (yet seem to be incapable of). Price isn't the biggest issue. Convenience is the biggest issue. Most people are actually willing to pay more for convenience. That's why 7-11 exists.
The fact that pirated content is free is only an added bonus -- the big draw is that its really really convenient. You get what you want when you want it. And there's usually no annoying unskippable FBI warnings that most of us can probably recite by heart as they haven't really changed since 1980. Or worse, unskippable ads/intros/etc.
Of course pricing does have some impact. If you charge $100 for your movie, most people aren't going to buy it. Hell I refuse to even pay the $45 that seems to be turning into the standard for new Blu-ray releases up where I live. Most of the time I'll just wait until Amazon has a sale and pick it up for $20. If I still remember to care by the time that happens. $45 is 3 months of time in most MMO games, and you get a hell of a lot more hours of enjoyment out of an MMO (assuming MMOs are your thing of course).
And we're pushing $35 for a new CD that can be purchased for $10-15 on iTunes. Providing someone wants to buy the entire album. Its even less if you only want a couple of songs. And I don't have to leave my house to get it. And I don't have to find storage space for yet another jewel case. And so on. And I've circled back to convenience again.
By measuring the relative velocities of all of the galaxies, it can be extrapolated that everything (at least, everything within our visible radius) expanded from a single point. Which is not to say a central point -- for all observational purposes, the earth is the center of the universe thanks to the fixed speed of light. We can see back 13ish billion years in every direction -- there's no directional bias that would suggest we're not at the center.
However, the same thing happens in alpha centauri as well -- they'll be able to see a few lightyears further in one direction than we can, and a few lightyears less in the opposite direction because they're also at the "center" of the universe from their perspective. Of course, we can't make use of this feature by say, having an observatory in Alpha Centauri because the time it would take for AC to send their data to us would be no less than amount of time it would take the light from that piece of the universe to reach us directly. But in as much as we can imagine a universal "now", AC will have a slightly different view of the universe than we do -- yet we're both still justified in claiming we're at the center, thus eliminating any fundamental concept of "center" beyond just calling it an observational bias.
So back on topic, there's another couple of things that we can figure out: - There is stuff we cannot see. Anything beyond our past lightcone is forever lost to us unless the universe turns around and starts collapsing again. It may well be that the universe is larger, perhaps many many orders of magnitude larger than what we can observe. Its possible that our specific singularity is a minor fluctuation in some phenominally larger structure (Ekpyrotic). But short of inventing FTL travel, we'll never be able to confirm that experimentally.
- The universe will eventually disappear. This is a combination of the finite speed of light with eternal expansion. Eventually the expansion even between the nearest pair of "objects" will exceed the speed of light (Observable Universe). At that point, there will simply be no universe left. I say "objects" as I'm not entirely sure at what scale gravity is able to overwhelm expansion and keep things held together. Definitely within a single galaxy, but to the scale of clusters and superclusters is something I'm less certain of. So the whole universe wouldn't disappear beyond the light cone horizon, just most of it. We're not at this point yet however -- we can see back to a time when the universe was completely opaque to light (Surface of Last Scattering) and we'll need to develop instruments that measure gravitational waves in order to see back any further.
- If expansion is speeding up as the big rip theory proposes, then it will eventually get to the point where the "force" of expansion exceeds gravity, then EM and finally the strong force, ripping everything apart even down to the subatomic level and there will literally be nothing left until the next big bang.
To sum up, we can make a pretty good estimate of how far back our observable universe goes, but whatever might be outside of our observable universe is entirely up for grabs, and the only way we can ever investigate it is to discover FTL travel, which has a very good chance of being fundamentally impossible (basically, we'd need not only new physics, but new physics that can be applied to macroscopic objects such as probes or people.)
Whether you/should/ take ACs less seriously is debatable, but its fairly common for most people to ignore them (even the filter option for level 1 is "most ACs" -- its so engrained in slashdot's collective consciousness that taking ACs less seriously is actually an interface option).
And this is actually a pretty decent system overall. You retain physical anonymity but you still connect a user with an identity that they have to attach themselves to and build trust with. Anyone who hasn't built up that trust with the community in question is, by default, taken less seriously.
This even happens in the real world. Try moving into any small town (small enough where most people recognize each other at least by face.. a couple thousand at most). You'll be treated with suspicion (or possibly even outright scorn if that town's had problems with outsiders before) until you've been there long enough to build up a reputation.
Yes an online identity is a lot easier to change than say, your face.. but you also lose any history you had associated with your old identity. And anyone who changes their identity frequently will be mostly ignored no matter what they spew.
Its not a perfect system, but it works. Most people prefer being "in" than "out". And those that prefer being "out" for whatever reason are free to do so. And heck, you can have people who do both -- choosing who they want to be depending on the nature of their post (again, slashdot handles this concept outright in the form of the "Post Anonymously" checkbox).
Overall, slashdot has a pretty good setup. It builds community where people who want to be asses are welcome to be asses without overly affecting those of us who prefer (semi-) useful conversation.
Yes we'll probably miss a gem that got downrated inappropriately (to our minds) and there'll be the odd nightmare that gets upranked inappropriately (again, to our minds) but overall the combination of a desire to maintain a reputation (Karma) with a reasonably good filtering system (Moderation) allows the S/N ratio to remain fairly high. Unless you like the dark places.. but the system lets you visit the trolls as well for those so inclined.
You're saying there's a point to running a model that you've already seen is incorrect?
When something is proven incorrect, you fix it. That's basic science. Tuning parameters is a perfectly acceptable way of doing that, especially when you know ahead of time that the parameters have wide variability and will probably need to be tuned.
Scientific models don't just magically appear in someone's head fully complete. They go through iterations and adjustments just like everything else. The only thing science requires that few other things in life does is a strong logical basis for doing what you're doing, whether that be introducing an entire new framework or simply tweaking an existing one a bit.
Science is: 1) Observe something 2) Model it (rigorous logic needed) 3) Check if your model fits further observations ("prediction") 4) If no, then adjust model and go to step 2.
How long each of these steps takes is irrelevant. Step 3 for Newton's gravity took a few hundred years -- but that wasn't be cause he was right, it was simply because observational techniques weren't good enough to see that he was wrong. We might have had general relativity a few centuries before Einstein if our observation techniques could have kept up. And Einstein himself could well be wrong at some even harder-to-observe level (in fact its quite possible -- we already know GR and QM don't play nice together so something's got to give).
Does that suddenly make Newton's or Einstein's work not "science"? Is there perhaps a specific time interval you require between steps 2 and 3 before it can be called science?
I've got a very simple argument against that sort of logic: Consider the consequences! Two possible negative outcomes:
1) AGW is correct. The whole planet burns up sooner or later and while I don't see microbial life ending, us more complex beasts would have to undergo some pretty serious physiological changes or simply perish.
2) AGW is not correct. A few large companies with too much money anyway puts some of it towards reducing emissions. It might not have been necessary to save the world, but things like smog and other pollution would still be reduced, increasing the quality of life for those in the affected areas.
I don't understand the "don't worry about it" crowd. The only people with an excuse to be in that group are those heavily invested in large polluters. For everyone else, there's NO negative results for playing it safe, and lots of possible benefits ranging from simply cleaner air and water all the way up to having a planet left for our great grandchildren to live on.
As for validating the models, there's one sure-fire way to do so. Keep polluting the planet and see how fast we push it over the top. Of course by that time, we're screwed and there's no going back. Is that really a risk you'd like to take? For the sake of preventing Shell's stock price from dropping a few cents?
People tend to give more of a damn about things that affect them directly than things happening in other countries. Even if the "other country" thing is comparatively horrific (as in the case of copyright here vs war and killing there).
Whether anyone knows this is happening or understands the consequences is a much bigger concern. The media and other copyright promoters do everything in their power to convince everyone that "we've got to stop the pirates" when in reality most of what they're doing will have little to no impact on pirates but will affect average users severely.
Take a really simple example. How many pirates bother watching the 2-minute (per language up here in Canada!) FBI/Interpol warning on their movies? Probably very few -- its either stripped off or at least the "unskippable" flag is removed on almost every torrent. Yet legitimate viewers have to watch the thing over and over and over again.
And don't even start on those DVDs where they decided to mark the ads and previews as unskippable.
Or all of those various CD "protection" hacks in the late 90s/early 2000s that did little more than prevent the discs from playing on older (legitimate) CD players. Yet it didn't stop them from showing up on Napster within a day or two of release.
No he wouldn't. He looks back and sees the stationary guy 1000km away, but the light took a certain amount of time to get to him, negating any possibility of seeing the "future". The further out into the universe he looks, the further back in time he looks -- the same as happens to us when we stare really far into the sky from Earth -- if we're looking at something 1000 light years away, we know that it happened 1000 years ago (or more, if something managed to slow down the light for part of the journey). We can NEVER see the future (or for that matter, the present). Even reading this on your screen is old news by a tiny fraction of a second as the light moves from your screen to your eye.
Basically from the moving observer's perspective, nothing unusual is happening at all until the tidal forces kick in.
As he gets closer and closer to the singularity the tidal forces would rip him into atoms, then the atoms get ripped apart layer by layer until you end up with individual quarks (and who knows what it means to rip a quark or an electron apart.. ie: what happens when space is so warped that a signal can't make it from one side of a quark to the other without exceeding c.)
All that said, the stationary observer would NOT see the moving guy forever. As others have noted, along with seeing him slow down indefinitely, we'd also see him redshift indefinitely. Eventually he'd be so redshifted that he'd no longer be detectable by the instruments of the stationary observer. He'd still "be there" but could no longer be seen. A more sensitive instrument could see him for a longer period of time, but he'd still fade out eventually as all instruments no matter how good will have a finite cutoff for what they can detect.
- Each "damage" will only affect one specimen for any given damage pattern. The chance that two individuals of species get genetically damaged in exactly the same way is pretty slim.
- If the "damage" is detrimental to the species, the genetic change isn't likely to last long on evolutionary time scales.
- Each "damage" will only affect a small number of genes -- likely only one or two. Geneticists create families of species by comparing the various genetic similarities. So if you have two very simple viruses that have 9 of their 10 genes in common, there's a good chance that they're fairly closely related.
- And even that one gene is probably only slightly modified (a C replaced with a T in the DNA or something along those lines), so there's an even deeper comparative level for genetic matching.
The probability of a catastrophic genetic change to the extent that we couldn't recognize its origin still producing a viable creature is so unbelievably small as to be ignored -- at best, it would get lost in the midst of basic human error.
Of course its theoretically possible. In the same sense that its theoretically possible for all of the atoms in your body to simultaneously quantum tunnel in exactly the right way such that you pass through the nearest wall in-tact.
Depends on the game. Steam has a cloud save ability, but its up to the individual games to use it.
All Steam's DRM does is ensure that the game is only being used on one computer at a time (at least in terms of gameplay.. I'm sure it collects some "non-identifying" information or whatever as well cause lets face it.. who doesn't these days..)
If you grab any old game from Steam, it comes exactly as if you'd installed it from a CD, but with a modified executable that adds in the link to Steam's DRM (and removes older DRM as applicable.. I'm talking things like code wheels and whatnot from 80s/90s games).
I'm a bit surprised with the stories about EA DRM being used on top of Steam DRM.. but I guess EA has enough influence and enough disrespect for their customers to force such things, so really its a mild surprise at best..
Don't be daft. Just because someone grouped the bytes into triplets and interpreted them as RGB values doesn't mean that the information contained is any different.
You can argue that an encryption key should or should not be copyrightable, but trying to tell me that because you wrote those same bytes in a different style is as stupid as trying to defend copyright infringement by saying "I'm not a pirate because pirates have eye patches". All the pedantry in the world regarding choice of words (or for the case of the key, choice of encoding) doesn't change the fact of what it is.
They certainly shouldn't need to know the RFCs or Facebook's code, or how a JPG is compressed. But they sure as hell should know that if they entrust their pictures completely to a third party, the availability of those pictures will be restricted to the availability of that third party.
This isn't even a technological issue. If I had the only copy of my paper-and-ink photos to some random third party with nothing more than a wink and a nod towards the protection and privacy of those pictures, I shouldn't be terribly surprised if they get lost one day. The only difference is that on a computer, that same "trusted" entity can efficiently handle thousands and thousands of pictures from millions and millions of people. The premise is the same.
Let me repeat. This isn't a technological issue. Its a social issue. And the so-called "social" generation sure as hell should understand that aspect of it! Whether its Facebook or Flickr or the creepy guy down the street, the base line is you're entrusting your pictures to an entity that you have no control over.
But of course, that's the whole problem with the current generation of youth -- they use all of these things on trust with no understanding of how, when or why that trust might be abused. Cause you know, companies are good for everybody and they'd NEVER do anything underhanded because.... oh right no actual reason we just have to believe. Corporate trust is almost becoming a religion in its own right, which is odd given that they (in general) are doing evil things more and more frequently (or at least, being caught and publicized more frequently for doing them!)
And Facebook is a huge example. Having a few people get in trouble cause their boss or girlfriend was able to look up their dirty profile secrets that they thought were safe might not be to the scale of an Enron scam, but its still pretty damned horrible for the people in question. And when "a few" is in the scale of 10s or 100s of thousands, its definitely a cause for concern.
Someone (with more motivation than me;)) needs to organize a nice big public education campaign with regards to privacy and information security (with a focus towards the digital world of course, as that's the primary domain where privacy violations can occur en masse). I suspect someone eventually will, but the sooner the better.
"Common sense" tells me that there's plenty of stuff in the world that we don't understand yet on a scientific level. The whole ghost/paranormal phenomenon has been researched from here to hell and back right now, and for the most part the conclusion is "probably nothing but we can't rule it out" (averaged across all investigations;))
The same argument applies to religion, magic and any other non-corporeal system you can imagine. There's a lack of hard evidence for any of these things to be sure, but there's also a lot of soft evidence for them, and no way of 100% "proving" a non-existence. It could always be "somewhere else" and you're just looking in the wrong spot.
Who knows.. maybe ghosts can see into our brains and run away from anyone with a reasonable analytic powers so only those predisposed to superstition will ever find them!
Main point is though, "common sense" has little or nothing to do with scientific inquiry (and in these days of quantum mechanics and high-dimensional manifolds and whatnot, common sense can actually be highly detrimental to scientific understanding!)
Its not that much different from a patent to "allow variable speeds" by "using A GEARBOX!!!" Of course, back in the days when transmissions would be getting patented, "A GEARBOX" wouldn't be sufficient -- they'd have to get into the details of how the gearbox worked.. details that software patents don't usually contain (or are left pretty vague when they do).
Really though, I think there's three things that need to happen. - Tighter controls on patenting software mechanics. Everyone talks about this. Problem is (as also everyone's mentioned), the USPTO doesn't have the manpower to do this.
- Make it easier to invalidate patents for prior art. Right now this has to go through gigantic legal proceedings even if its terribly obvious that the prior art was indeed prior. There's no way as an individual that I could possibly manage that, even if by some chance I'd tossed together something 16 years ago that happened to fit the patent specifically. There would need to be a separate body created (an "anti-patent" office) which would take any prior art claims from the public and do at least a basic follow up on them, and have the authority to either a) deny the claim outright, b) approve the claim outright and invalidate all or part of the patent in question or c) declare the claim too vague or unsupported to make a decision. Of course in any of those cases, the claimant or the defender would be free to pursue further action through the (current) legal route as an appeal (though we'd want to structure it so that when a defender gets their patent invalidated they can't just automatically appeal every claim. Would have to make sure that an individual claimant in these cases would have a fair chance against a large, well-financed defender should it be brought to court.) This office would primarily be creating a quick, low-cost summary ruling in the cases of very obvious prior art (or very obvious frauds just trying to get their favorite patent invalidated out of spite.. perhaps add a penalty fee of $100-200 for each prior art claim that gets outright denied in order to reduce the number of fraudulent claims).
- And lastly, add some controls against vagueness. Any software patent application that can't be read and understood by a software developer should be returned for resubmission. Inventors and innovators should be writing patents for the things they create, not passed off to lawyers to obfuscate to the point that its completely unrecognizable. The "can I read it" rule would probably significantly reduce the amount of pressure on the USPTO as well as they'd actually be able to make sense of the claims without spending hours and hours trying to find the meat of the subject through all of the embellishments. (It wouldn't surprise me if the current rule of thumb was to give up and just approve if you don't understand it within 2 hours or something:P).
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Effectively, it removes privacy in the long term. Once its been around long enough that it stops being a "convenience" and starts being a "requirement" that you have some form of ID, you can then be tracked with relative ease.
And that's generally considered a bad thing. The old "nothing to hide" argument against unrestricted privacy invasion is stupid -- everyone has something that they'll eventually need to hide from someone else. Whether its a religious belief, their political preferences, their porn surfing habits, or yes, criminal behavior. You a democrat? Wouldn't the republicans like to know. You a republican? Wouldn't the democrats like to know.
What I don't understand is how anyone thinks that this doesn't already exist? Between federal and state governments, most people have at least 2 cards (SSN and driver's license). Military issues their own ID as well. Add in passports, credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, mortgage records, loyalty program cards, club membership cards, etc and your average person probably has over a dozen records in both public and private databases for which they intentionally carry around their ID card, and at least a couple are (almost) to the level of "required" in order to operate in today's society.
What we don't have (that I know of!) is any sort of centralized database which records all information related to an individual. Each database is maintained seperately and anyone trying to put together a full profile of a person would need to contact multiple database operators.
Which is pretty irrelevant when you think about it. Having a single shared key might make such searches slightly easier (don't have to look through 8 dozen "John Smith" entries to find the one you're looking for) but it doesn't strictly imply that the databases themselves have to be linked. In the US they probably would be (why go to the effort if you can't invade peoples' privacy?) but there's no technical reason for that to be the case.
In order to do such a thing in a private way you would need to (minimally, I'm sure I haven't thought it through completely!):
- Keep the individual databases seperate. They can share a key (ie: your ID number) but they shouldn't be able to share any other data beyond that without your authorization (already questionable anyways but still...)
- Allow people to obtain a new key that cannot be traced back to your old key (except perhaps a tightly controlled database that can only be accessed with a warrant for criminal investigations.. again this is already questionable with warrantless wiretapping and other such privacy-destroying laws becoming more common).
I know what I'm giving up, and I give it up gladly for the services I receive. You may disagree. But who are you to tell the rest of us what we should and shouldn't do?
I'm not anyone to tell you what to do. And nor is anyone else.
Where the problem comes in is with the people who DON'T know what they're giving up when they're using these services.
And that's the issue that repeatedly gets associated with Facebook -- the information is gathered, but there's little or no indication of that fact. I'm sure there's some overly broad clauses in some ToS somewhere but lets face it, some 180 page legal document is not going to be read or understood by the vast majority of Facebook users.
And worst of all, they're happy to sell your information (including personal information) to anyone willing to pay, regardless of how shady they are and your only way to opt out is to delete your account.
And deleting your account is getting hard to do if you want to keep up with your social circles (at least it is around here -- Facebook is the social networking app in my area of the world).
They've been getting better over the years, but its always been at the "urging" of third parties. That is, someone makes a big enough stink that they're forced to take notice either via legislation or to save face from a PR standpoint.
MS didn't even use it for their own products
This is a stupid argument. Rewriting a product the size of Office in an entirely differently language is a massive undertaking, even for a company the size of Microsoft. Never mind all of the other hundreds of programs that they've got laying around that just don't happen to have the visibility of their two flagship products.
I'm sure they would love to completely abandon 25 years of crud and start fresh, but its just not practical. Not to mention it would require porting .NET to the Mac in order to support the Mac version of Office (and any other systems they might support), which may be stopped by more than the simple time and technical challenges (ie: Microsoft might not want .NET to be portable for sales reasons).
Newer stuff that they're doing DOES support .NET, and in fact a lot of it is built on .NET. XNA is a C# derivative for developing Xbox/Windows games in a somewhat cross-platform manner. .NET is the platform of choice for Windows Phone 7, etc.
As for a 'must have' .NET application... who cares? Its not that hard to include the redistributable with your application. If you're really worried about your users having .NET pre-installed, then just use an older version of .NET rather than hoping some random third party developer has already done the installation for you. Its extremely easy to switch your target output between 2.0/3.0/3.5/4.0 from within the Visual Studio project settings.
It might sound interpreted, but its not. Its actually a 2-stage compilation.
Stage 1 is compiling from source code to byte code and is done with the standalone compiler.
Stage 2 is compiling from byte code to native code, and is done as a just-in-time step. This step is generally cached so that it only has to be redone when the byte code changes (in the same way that you usually only recompile a "normal" program when you modify the source).
Interpreters on the other hand perform the actions themselves.
A compiler sees "print x" and spits out something like "PUSH x; CALL [print]" (or the equivalent code bytes if it skips the assembly language step).
An interpreter sees "print x" and spits out "7" (or whatever value x happens to hold).
No, its not. A JIT actually compiles the code to native bytes just as a regular compiler does. The only difference is when that compilation is done.
Interpreted languages on the other hand are never converted to a native format. An interpeter actually performs the commands as it reads them from the input stream.
Think of it in terms of natural language. An "interpreter" is used when you need to speak directly to someone who doesn't understand your language, whereas a translation of a written work is more in line with what a compiler does. A "JIT translator" would be say a scribe who writes in German while you dictate in Finnish -- blurs the lines a bit maybe, but still a lot closer to a translation than an interactive conversation via an interpreter.
(Of course the English language is full of ambiguities and we often use the phrase "translator" when we mean "interpreter").
Or a niche app. Not every application in the world is intended to be used by 6billion people for.. who knows what we all have in common. Never mind that any non-niche app probably already has 1000 clones to split the market with anyway.
Only in theory. In practice, a real gravitational field is centered on a point, and you can use tidal forces to determine if such a point exists (and if you want, triangulate where it lies).
The theoretical concept that Einstein laid out is only true if you have a flat version of gravity. This can be approximated by simply having the gravitational field be so large relative to the sensitivity of the measurement device that the (truly spherical) surface appears flat. But all you need to break that scenario is a more sensitive measurement device.
Only if you have the ability to leave a marker at that point. However, the marker you dropped off would be moving with approximately the same velocity you are, so you've lost the ability to measure velocity relative to the original object.
You might still be able to compute the velocity relative to the original object (just add up your velocity relative to the original object plus the velocity relative to the marker), but you can't measure it by using an object you yourself left in space.
Yes, but this can be compensated for mathematically if you know the appropriate constants (primarily Hubble's constant), which we've measured with pretty good accuracy. Also, "incredibly" distorted is a bit dramatic. The force due to expansion is so tiny that its only really noticeable on the scale of hundreds of millions of lightyears. General relativity has a far greater affect on our measurements. But again, it can be compensated for mathematically.
Of course, you get the same phenomena with simple special relativity. Look up in the sky on a clear night and try to determine which stars are the closest. Its not possible without some better theory than just "how they look". Thats where things like standard candles, redshift measurements, gravitational lensing, etc are all used (even simple geometric triangulation for objects close enough to get a good angular measurement over the course of the earth's revolution around the sun). Basically anything the cosmologists can use to measure distances, they use.
And yes there's definitely some uncertainty. Slashdot posts a story about some completely new phenomena that astronomers have run across every couple months. There's lots we don't know. But there's also lots we do know with high to very high accuracy.
Any sort of Aether/"fabric" theory has been pretty much completely ruled out by experiment over a century ago.
There are lots of other explanations proposed however, though the Wikipedia page doesn't list any of the more crackpot theories like alien tampering.
One of these is dark matter, which could somewhat sound like what you're suggesting, but DM is definitely not a "fabric" of spacetime in any sense. Its "normal" matter that happens to not interact with the electromagnetic, weak or strong forces. That leaves gravity as its only interaction and we're just barely cracking the surface of gravitational telescopes. Once those have got a decent resolution though, DM should be confirmed or denied once and for all. In the meantime its just a theory that happens to fit certain data sets.
People studying Pioneer would prefer a more concrete solution that doesn't rely on unproven physics.
Constant velocity is not detectable without a frame of reference. This is relativity (extremely simplified of course!)
Change in velocity (ie: acceleration) IS detectable. You can detect forces acting upon you and therefore compute acceleration (F=ma). If you can measure the force acting on you (which you can if have the right equipment), and you know your mass, then its pretty trivial to calculate your acceleration without needing any external reference frame.
For a real world example, go ride a train (preferably between two stops seperated by a relatively straight run of track.) You definitely feel a backward "pull" as the train speeds up, and a forward "pull" as the train slows again for the next stop (plus some sideways pulls if the track curves, but for the sake of simplicity lets assume it doesn't).
During the middle of the trip -- when the train is maintaining a constant velocity -- you don't feel any different than you do when you're standing on solid ground, give or take a factor of imprecision such as a rough track or the operator not maintaining exactly constant speed.
Your entire knowledge of motion is based on a) looking out the window and b) previous experience with trains -- what they sound like, what they look like, how they move relative to the earth (which is the frame of reference you generally care about if you're taking a train somewhere) and so on. None of these factors have anything to do with the train's frame of reference however.
As for creating a frame of reference, you only need two points. Yourself (the observer) and a target (reference point) that you assume to be fixed (or you can consider yourself fixed and the target as moving -- the math is the same, you just get an extra minus sign).
You just continually monitor the distance between yourself and the target and can compute both your speed and your acceleration by comparing the distances over specific time intervals. As you take the interval times to zero, you get better and better approximations of your exact acceleration curve (that's pretty standard calculus -- sample and integrate.)
And finally, for an object in empty space. You're kind of correct. Its not so much that it doesn't have a velocity as much as velocity is simply undefined. You can still have an acceleration (F=ma as above) but what speed you accelerate from and what speed you accelerate to both have absolutely no meaning without a point of reference.
Of course in the real universe, forces (at least the ones we know about) are actions between objects, so the fact that you have an acceleration implies that there's something around that could be used as a reference point (but you have to be able to find it to use it!)
Netflix isn't like ANY cable in one extremely important sense -- convenience. You get exactly what you want when you want it (at least with the streaming service).
The closest cable comes to Netflix is VOD. Which is pretty much what Netflix is doing but over the internet instead of over a cable transmission (though the lines between those two are getting pretty blurry on a technical level!) And I'm pretty sure Netflix is a hell of a lot cheaper than any cable company's VOD service.
That's a huge lesson that all of these content companies really need to learn (yet seem to be incapable of). Price isn't the biggest issue. Convenience is the biggest issue. Most people are actually willing to pay more for convenience. That's why 7-11 exists.
The fact that pirated content is free is only an added bonus -- the big draw is that its really really convenient. You get what you want when you want it. And there's usually no annoying unskippable FBI warnings that most of us can probably recite by heart as they haven't really changed since 1980. Or worse, unskippable ads/intros/etc.
Of course pricing does have some impact. If you charge $100 for your movie, most people aren't going to buy it. Hell I refuse to even pay the $45 that seems to be turning into the standard for new Blu-ray releases up where I live. Most of the time I'll just wait until Amazon has a sale and pick it up for $20. If I still remember to care by the time that happens. $45 is 3 months of time in most MMO games, and you get a hell of a lot more hours of enjoyment out of an MMO (assuming MMOs are your thing of course).
And we're pushing $35 for a new CD that can be purchased for $10-15 on iTunes. Providing someone wants to buy the entire album. Its even less if you only want a couple of songs. And I don't have to leave my house to get it. And I don't have to find storage space for yet another jewel case. And so on. And I've circled back to convenience again.
By measuring the relative velocities of all of the galaxies, it can be extrapolated that everything (at least, everything within our visible radius) expanded from a single point. Which is not to say a central point -- for all observational purposes, the earth is the center of the universe thanks to the fixed speed of light. We can see back 13ish billion years in every direction -- there's no directional bias that would suggest we're not at the center.
However, the same thing happens in alpha centauri as well -- they'll be able to see a few lightyears further in one direction than we can, and a few lightyears less in the opposite direction because they're also at the "center" of the universe from their perspective. Of course, we can't make use of this feature by say, having an observatory in Alpha Centauri because the time it would take for AC to send their data to us would be no less than amount of time it would take the light from that piece of the universe to reach us directly. But in as much as we can imagine a universal "now", AC will have a slightly different view of the universe than we do -- yet we're both still justified in claiming we're at the center, thus eliminating any fundamental concept of "center" beyond just calling it an observational bias.
So back on topic, there's another couple of things that we can figure out:
- There is stuff we cannot see. Anything beyond our past lightcone is forever lost to us unless the universe turns around and starts collapsing again. It may well be that the universe is larger, perhaps many many orders of magnitude larger than what we can observe. Its possible that our specific singularity is a minor fluctuation in some phenominally larger structure (Ekpyrotic). But short of inventing FTL travel, we'll never be able to confirm that experimentally.
- The universe will eventually disappear. This is a combination of the finite speed of light with eternal expansion. Eventually the expansion even between the nearest pair of "objects" will exceed the speed of light (Observable Universe). At that point, there will simply be no universe left. I say "objects" as I'm not entirely sure at what scale gravity is able to overwhelm expansion and keep things held together. Definitely within a single galaxy, but to the scale of clusters and superclusters is something I'm less certain of. So the whole universe wouldn't disappear beyond the light cone horizon, just most of it. We're not at this point yet however -- we can see back to a time when the universe was completely opaque to light (Surface of Last Scattering) and we'll need to develop instruments that measure gravitational waves in order to see back any further.
- If expansion is speeding up as the big rip theory proposes, then it will eventually get to the point where the "force" of expansion exceeds gravity, then EM and finally the strong force, ripping everything apart even down to the subatomic level and there will literally be nothing left until the next big bang.
To sum up, we can make a pretty good estimate of how far back our observable universe goes, but whatever might be outside of our observable universe is entirely up for grabs, and the only way we can ever investigate it is to discover FTL travel, which has a very good chance of being fundamentally impossible (basically, we'd need not only new physics, but new physics that can be applied to macroscopic objects such as probes or people.)
Whether you /should/ take ACs less seriously is debatable, but its fairly common for most people to ignore them (even the filter option for level 1 is "most ACs" -- its so engrained in slashdot's collective consciousness that taking ACs less seriously is actually an interface option).
And this is actually a pretty decent system overall. You retain physical anonymity but you still connect a user with an identity that they have to attach themselves to and build trust with. Anyone who hasn't built up that trust with the community in question is, by default, taken less seriously.
This even happens in the real world. Try moving into any small town (small enough where most people recognize each other at least by face.. a couple thousand at most). You'll be treated with suspicion (or possibly even outright scorn if that town's had problems with outsiders before) until you've been there long enough to build up a reputation.
Yes an online identity is a lot easier to change than say, your face.. but you also lose any history you had associated with your old identity. And anyone who changes their identity frequently will be mostly ignored no matter what they spew.
Its not a perfect system, but it works. Most people prefer being "in" than "out". And those that prefer being "out" for whatever reason are free to do so. And heck, you can have people who do both -- choosing who they want to be depending on the nature of their post (again, slashdot handles this concept outright in the form of the "Post Anonymously" checkbox).
Overall, slashdot has a pretty good setup. It builds community where people who want to be asses are welcome to be asses without overly affecting those of us who prefer (semi-) useful conversation.
Yes we'll probably miss a gem that got downrated inappropriately (to our minds) and there'll be the odd nightmare that gets upranked inappropriately (again, to our minds) but overall the combination of a desire to maintain a reputation (Karma) with a reasonably good filtering system (Moderation) allows the S/N ratio to remain fairly high. Unless you like the dark places.. but the system lets you visit the trolls as well for those so inclined.
You're saying there's a point to running a model that you've already seen is incorrect?
When something is proven incorrect, you fix it. That's basic science. Tuning parameters is a perfectly acceptable way of doing that, especially when you know ahead of time that the parameters have wide variability and will probably need to be tuned.
Scientific models don't just magically appear in someone's head fully complete. They go through iterations and adjustments just like everything else. The only thing science requires that few other things in life does is a strong logical basis for doing what you're doing, whether that be introducing an entire new framework or simply tweaking an existing one a bit.
Science is:
1) Observe something
2) Model it (rigorous logic needed)
3) Check if your model fits further observations ("prediction")
4) If no, then adjust model and go to step 2.
How long each of these steps takes is irrelevant. Step 3 for Newton's gravity took a few hundred years -- but that wasn't be cause he was right, it was simply because observational techniques weren't good enough to see that he was wrong. We might have had general relativity a few centuries before Einstein if our observation techniques could have kept up. And Einstein himself could well be wrong at some even harder-to-observe level (in fact its quite possible -- we already know GR and QM don't play nice together so something's got to give).
Does that suddenly make Newton's or Einstein's work not "science"? Is there perhaps a specific time interval you require between steps 2 and 3 before it can be called science?
I've got a very simple argument against that sort of logic: Consider the consequences! Two possible negative outcomes:
1) AGW is correct. The whole planet burns up sooner or later and while I don't see microbial life ending, us more complex beasts would have to undergo some pretty serious physiological changes or simply perish.
2) AGW is not correct. A few large companies with too much money anyway puts some of it towards reducing emissions. It might not have been necessary to save the world, but things like smog and other pollution would still be reduced, increasing the quality of life for those in the affected areas.
I don't understand the "don't worry about it" crowd. The only people with an excuse to be in that group are those heavily invested in large polluters. For everyone else, there's NO negative results for playing it safe, and lots of possible benefits ranging from simply cleaner air and water all the way up to having a planet left for our great grandchildren to live on.
As for validating the models, there's one sure-fire way to do so. Keep polluting the planet and see how fast we push it over the top. Of course by that time, we're screwed and there's no going back. Is that really a risk you'd like to take? For the sake of preventing Shell's stock price from dropping a few cents?
People tend to give more of a damn about things that affect them directly than things happening in other countries. Even if the "other country" thing is comparatively horrific (as in the case of copyright here vs war and killing there).
Whether anyone knows this is happening or understands the consequences is a much bigger concern. The media and other copyright promoters do everything in their power to convince everyone that "we've got to stop the pirates" when in reality most of what they're doing will have little to no impact on pirates but will affect average users severely.
Take a really simple example. How many pirates bother watching the 2-minute (per language up here in Canada!) FBI/Interpol warning on their movies? Probably very few -- its either stripped off or at least the "unskippable" flag is removed on almost every torrent. Yet legitimate viewers have to watch the thing over and over and over again.
And don't even start on those DVDs where they decided to mark the ads and previews as unskippable.
Or all of those various CD "protection" hacks in the late 90s/early 2000s that did little more than prevent the discs from playing on older (legitimate) CD players. Yet it didn't stop them from showing up on Napster within a day or two of release.
The rabbit foot and shamrock industries would like to have a word.
No he wouldn't. He looks back and sees the stationary guy 1000km away, but the light took a certain amount of time to get to him, negating any possibility of seeing the "future". The further out into the universe he looks, the further back in time he looks -- the same as happens to us when we stare really far into the sky from Earth -- if we're looking at something 1000 light years away, we know that it happened 1000 years ago (or more, if something managed to slow down the light for part of the journey). We can NEVER see the future (or for that matter, the present). Even reading this on your screen is old news by a tiny fraction of a second as the light moves from your screen to your eye.
Basically from the moving observer's perspective, nothing unusual is happening at all until the tidal forces kick in.
As he gets closer and closer to the singularity the tidal forces would rip him into atoms, then the atoms get ripped apart layer by layer until you end up with individual quarks (and who knows what it means to rip a quark or an electron apart.. ie: what happens when space is so warped that a signal can't make it from one side of a quark to the other without exceeding c.)
All that said, the stationary observer would NOT see the moving guy forever. As others have noted, along with seeing him slow down indefinitely, we'd also see him redshift indefinitely. Eventually he'd be so redshifted that he'd no longer be detectable by the instruments of the stationary observer. He'd still "be there" but could no longer be seen. A more sensitive instrument could see him for a longer period of time, but he'd still fade out eventually as all instruments no matter how good will have a finite cutoff for what they can detect.
Absolutely. However, there's a few caveats:
- Each "damage" will only affect one specimen for any given damage pattern. The chance that two individuals of species get genetically damaged in exactly the same way is pretty slim.
- If the "damage" is detrimental to the species, the genetic change isn't likely to last long on evolutionary time scales.
- Each "damage" will only affect a small number of genes -- likely only one or two. Geneticists create families of species by comparing the various genetic similarities. So if you have two very simple viruses that have 9 of their 10 genes in common, there's a good chance that they're fairly closely related.
- And even that one gene is probably only slightly modified (a C replaced with a T in the DNA or something along those lines), so there's an even deeper comparative level for genetic matching.
The probability of a catastrophic genetic change to the extent that we couldn't recognize its origin still producing a viable creature is so unbelievably small as to be ignored -- at best, it would get lost in the midst of basic human error.
Of course its theoretically possible. In the same sense that its theoretically possible for all of the atoms in your body to simultaneously quantum tunnel in exactly the right way such that you pass through the nearest wall in-tact.
Depends on the game. Steam has a cloud save ability, but its up to the individual games to use it.
All Steam's DRM does is ensure that the game is only being used on one computer at a time (at least in terms of gameplay.. I'm sure it collects some "non-identifying" information or whatever as well cause lets face it.. who doesn't these days..)
If you grab any old game from Steam, it comes exactly as if you'd installed it from a CD, but with a modified executable that adds in the link to Steam's DRM (and removes older DRM as applicable.. I'm talking things like code wheels and whatnot from 80s/90s games).
I'm a bit surprised with the stories about EA DRM being used on top of Steam DRM.. but I guess EA has enough influence and enough disrespect for their customers to force such things, so really its a mild surprise at best..
Don't be daft. Just because someone grouped the bytes into triplets and interpreted them as RGB values doesn't mean that the information contained is any different.
You can argue that an encryption key should or should not be copyrightable, but trying to tell me that because you wrote those same bytes in a different style is as stupid as trying to defend copyright infringement by saying "I'm not a pirate because pirates have eye patches". All the pedantry in the world regarding choice of words (or for the case of the key, choice of encoding) doesn't change the fact of what it is.
They certainly shouldn't need to know the RFCs or Facebook's code, or how a JPG is compressed. But they sure as hell should know that if they entrust their pictures completely to a third party, the availability of those pictures will be restricted to the availability of that third party.
This isn't even a technological issue. If I had the only copy of my paper-and-ink photos to some random third party with nothing more than a wink and a nod towards the protection and privacy of those pictures, I shouldn't be terribly surprised if they get lost one day. The only difference is that on a computer, that same "trusted" entity can efficiently handle thousands and thousands of pictures from millions and millions of people. The premise is the same.
Let me repeat. This isn't a technological issue. Its a social issue. And the so-called "social" generation sure as hell should understand that aspect of it! Whether its Facebook or Flickr or the creepy guy down the street, the base line is you're entrusting your pictures to an entity that you have no control over.
But of course, that's the whole problem with the current generation of youth -- they use all of these things on trust with no understanding of how, when or why that trust might be abused. Cause you know, companies are good for everybody and they'd NEVER do anything underhanded because.... oh right no actual reason we just have to believe. Corporate trust is almost becoming a religion in its own right, which is odd given that they (in general) are doing evil things more and more frequently (or at least, being caught and publicized more frequently for doing them!)
And Facebook is a huge example. Having a few people get in trouble cause their boss or girlfriend was able to look up their dirty profile secrets that they thought were safe might not be to the scale of an Enron scam, but its still pretty damned horrible for the people in question. And when "a few" is in the scale of 10s or 100s of thousands, its definitely a cause for concern.
Someone (with more motivation than me;)) needs to organize a nice big public education campaign with regards to privacy and information security (with a focus towards the digital world of course, as that's the primary domain where privacy violations can occur en masse). I suspect someone eventually will, but the sooner the better.
"Common sense" tells me that there's plenty of stuff in the world that we don't understand yet on a scientific level. The whole ghost/paranormal phenomenon has been researched from here to hell and back right now, and for the most part the conclusion is "probably nothing but we can't rule it out" (averaged across all investigations;))
The same argument applies to religion, magic and any other non-corporeal system you can imagine. There's a lack of hard evidence for any of these things to be sure, but there's also a lot of soft evidence for them, and no way of 100% "proving" a non-existence. It could always be "somewhere else" and you're just looking in the wrong spot.
Who knows.. maybe ghosts can see into our brains and run away from anyone with a reasonable analytic powers so only those predisposed to superstition will ever find them!
Main point is though, "common sense" has little or nothing to do with scientific inquiry (and in these days of quantum mechanics and high-dimensional manifolds and whatnot, common sense can actually be highly detrimental to scientific understanding!)
Its not that much different from a patent to "allow variable speeds" by "using A GEARBOX!!!" Of course, back in the days when transmissions would be getting patented, "A GEARBOX" wouldn't be sufficient -- they'd have to get into the details of how the gearbox worked.. details that software patents don't usually contain (or are left pretty vague when they do).
Really though, I think there's three things that need to happen.
- Tighter controls on patenting software mechanics. Everyone talks about this. Problem is (as also everyone's mentioned), the USPTO doesn't have the manpower to do this.
- Make it easier to invalidate patents for prior art. Right now this has to go through gigantic legal proceedings even if its terribly obvious that the prior art was indeed prior. There's no way as an individual that I could possibly manage that, even if by some chance I'd tossed together something 16 years ago that happened to fit the patent specifically. There would need to be a separate body created (an "anti-patent" office) which would take any prior art claims from the public and do at least a basic follow up on them, and have the authority to either a) deny the claim outright, b) approve the claim outright and invalidate all or part of the patent in question or c) declare the claim too vague or unsupported to make a decision. Of course in any of those cases, the claimant or the defender would be free to pursue further action through the (current) legal route as an appeal (though we'd want to structure it so that when a defender gets their patent invalidated they can't just automatically appeal every claim. Would have to make sure that an individual claimant in these cases would have a fair chance against a large, well-financed defender should it be brought to court.) This office would primarily be creating a quick, low-cost summary ruling in the cases of very obvious prior art (or very obvious frauds just trying to get their favorite patent invalidated out of spite.. perhaps add a penalty fee of $100-200 for each prior art claim that gets outright denied in order to reduce the number of fraudulent claims).
- And lastly, add some controls against vagueness. Any software patent application that can't be read and understood by a software developer should be returned for resubmission. Inventors and innovators should be writing patents for the things they create, not passed off to lawyers to obfuscate to the point that its completely unrecognizable. The "can I read it" rule would probably significantly reduce the amount of pressure on the USPTO as well as they'd actually be able to make sense of the claims without spending hours and hours trying to find the meat of the subject through all of the embellishments. (It wouldn't surprise me if the current rule of thumb was to give up and just approve if you don't understand it within 2 hours or something:P).