Investigative hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee over the political dismissal of US attorneys lead directly to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Others have jumped on your examples, and I will too. Fact of the matter is that there are political reasons why cars can't become twice as efficient, and political reasons why farming can't double in efficiency as well - in addition to whatever limits laws of nature, natural resources, etc put on it.
If food efficiency doubled every two years, there would be a glut of food, and prices would drop drastically. This actually happened in the early 20th century, and its why we have agricultural subsidies, and price floors.
What it comes down to, I think, is demand. There is a constant demand for more computational power, but not so for food (people don't starve for lack of food, but lack of money). While gas prices are low (admit it, even 5 dollars a gallon is pretty cheap for the amount of power you get out of it), there's little incentive to invest in gas efficiency. But, you may have noticed the trend of increasing gas efficiency (but not doubling) with increasing gas costs. Just goes to show that demand seems to be the driving force.
Okay, so you're a libertarian. Fine. But don't fool yourself into thinking that what you believe is what everyone in America believed back when the Constitution was written. There's quite a bit in your post that I disagree with you about (example: the Constitution was written to consolidate political power in the national government; the context it was written in was the Articles of Confederation which had an amazingly weak national government and essentially sovereign states), but I'm going to focus on one thing:
In fact, the only thing the Feds really can do is to make sure the individual States don't trample on the individual's rights to act non-violently how they want to act. You do realize that that interpretation of the power of the federal government is the result of "activist" justices in Gitlow v. New York (1925), right? The national government had absolutely no power to enforce individual rights until the bill of rights was "incorporated" by the Supreme Court through the 14th Amendment. Read up on it yourself:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporatio n_(Bill_of_Rights). Yes, that means that before 1925, the national government could do nothing to prevent states from squashing freedom of speech. Yes, that means that protection of the freedom of speech by the national government against transgressions by the states is NOT in the Constitution. The First Amendment (hell, every amendment) applies only to the national government, and only when the Supreme Court (through "judicial activism") incorporates those amendments using a liberal reading of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, do they apply to the states as well.
While I'd like to second you what you said in your post, I also want to add something. What you said about muckrakers is right and important, but its all missing a crucial element. The press in the past was more free because a) it wasn't backed/directed by large economic powers (Rupert Murdoch) and b) there were a ton of newspapers, most of the them independent. I think Alexis de Tocqueville's perspective on this is still informative and insightful - check out chapter 11, book 1. Most relevant to this discussion, while speaking of newspapers/"the media": "the Americans have nowhere established any central direction of opinion.". It useful to bear in mind that FOX News is nowhere near as biased as the small time newspapers of the 18th and 19th century - but every newspaper had its own amateur and highly opinionated editor, so that bias didn't aggregate well.
The best news sources are independent or small chain papers. The ones that don't have an overlord looking over their shoulder when they're writing editorials.
I wrote my senior thesis in College on a related topic - in part, the development of the 1909 copyright law, which had a big impact on records, phonographs, etc. Prior to 1909, records, piano rolls, and so on actually had no copyright at all. Piano roll and talking machine companies (which is what record companies were known as back then) actually fought to keep records and rolls uncopyright-able as a way of preventing them from having to pay royalties to composers. The idea that composers - the writers of music - would get royalties from records or piano rolls (in addition to sheet music, which is what they traditionally got royalties for) was established in law in 1909 too.
This is interesting in the modern copyright debate, because it was the start of the notion that the producers of derivative works (for example, a recording of a composition) owe royalties to the producer of the original work (sheet music). Furthermore, the 1909 law determined that records and so on would be treated nearly exactly like books (minus the statutory license), in terms of duration, etc. There was an opportunity to set up a totally different copyright system for audio works (which are fundamentally different from the written word), but rather than innovate, Congress established the system that is so abused today.
The 1909 (and 1891, which had to do with recognizing international copyright) copyright laws had very interesting impacts on the development of copyright. Did you know that in 1906, the Aeolian Company (the major producers of player pianos and rolls) was working to set up what was essentially a statutory monopoly based on the exclusive property of traditional copyrights? To put it simply (and oversimplify), they attempted to create a situation very similiar to what the RIAA has been enjoying in American for a while now - exclusive control over most/all popular (money-making) music. It's because of their attempted monopoly that statutory licensing was developed in America.
So in relation to the main topic - if those old records were made before 1909, they actually had no copyright at all - you'll see no copyright notice on it anywhere. However, these kinds of things were thought to be covered in some degree by patents, and the 1909 law also established where patent-rights ended and copyrights began in regards to records.
disclaimer - I studied the political, not legal, aspects of copyright development.
Thats not quite how it works. Unlike the House, which has a draconian rules committee that determines when and for how long something is debated and voted on, the senate has no authority structure along those lines. Instead, anything that happens in the Senate happens according to a UCA - Unanimous Consent Agreement. That means that everything that happens in the senate (in terms of scheduling) must be agreed to by everyone in the senate. A hold essentially means that one or more senators do not agree, and therefore the UCA isn't unanimous. The whole system rides on the back of filibusters, which, while overturnable with cloture votes, could theoretically be used by an obstinate senator at every opportunity to totally obstruct any action in the senate (for example, filibustering a debate on whether or not to vote, whether or not to take a break, whether or not to adjourn for the night, etc. and all of these filibusters, even if immediately clotured, could last up to 30 hours... and the senator could demand quorum, thus requiring 50 senators to constantly be in the senate during the filibuster).
So which way is better, the House Rules committee, which has near ultimate power over legislation in a legislating body in which its members (other than the speaker) ought to be peers, or the UCA system, which is pretty much egalitarian, even though it leads to secretive holds?
I'm going to argue with you, though not about democracy vs. republics. Claiming that early US was not a democracy is incorrect. It was very much a democracy, though we may be uncomfortable admitting it. The point of the matter is that "the people," outside the political system, are determining who gets power in the political system. That large swaths of the populence are excluded is irrelevent. See ancient Athens.
In fact, it would be more understandable to claim the the US is not longer a democracy today, since so many important decisions are not made by elected officials. I'm referring to the national bureaucracy, through which laws are filtered and interpreted before being executed by technocrats.
As for your points about protecting minority rights, that is also incorrect. Democracy, as a political system, has in itself nothing to say about minority rights. Likewise, a republican government (by which I mean, a government that derives its power or legitimacy from "the people" of the state) has little to say about minority rights as well. The problem with your argument is that you're confusing democracy with liberalism (in the classic meaning of the word), and republic with republicanism.
Any republic, by necessity, has elements of republicanism, which is (this is mostly from Roger Smith's Civic Ideals) the notion that the people in a republic are or ought to be a community, and to take it further, that the community is "above" the people and therefore the people must sacrifice their best interests to serve the community's best interest. That the people form some kind of community, and that the government serves that community is the basis for claiming a state is a republic. Typically, republican thinkers claim that certain people are better at leading the community than others. The republican tradition is essential to ascriptive (read: prejudiced or racist) claims of superiority of certain people over others, i.e., whites over other races, men over women.
Liberalism on the other hand refers to the notion that each individual is possesive of natural (or otherwise inalienable) rights. This kind of individualism pretty much requires notions of equality, and is where minority rights comes from. You can see the tension between republicanism and liberalism: which is more important, the individual and his rights, or the community? The United States as long had this debate. The Constitution is largely a republican document, however, the bill of rights is decidedly liberal. You can read more about this in Gordon S. Wood's book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776--1787.
From a political science perspective, you're incorrect. A republic is a nation state that derives its legitimacy and identity from "the people" - as in, the citizens of the nation. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a democracy, though it would be hard to legitimize a state based on the people in most other political systems. (I would argue that claiming a state is a republic when it doesn't utilize some form of democracy is just propaganda - for example, North Korea is the doubly false "Democracy Republic of Korea. But thats a normative argument.) Monarchies, for instance, draw their legitimacy from the power of the monarch, tpyically because the monarch is chosen or presents or just is God. There isn't a "republic" political system, that's noise that's picked up in modern culture, like games like civilization. There is a republican tradition of government, or form or type of state (as described above). As for democracy, it isn't a type a state, its a type of political system.
The history of copyright pre-Berne is probably a lot less interesting than you think. Copyright before then really only applied to written works and maps, whereas they now apply to nearly everything - photos, movies, even archecture (It makes me wonder if speech is copyrighted... and if not, why not? justification for why everything written or recorded is copyrighted easily extends to speech). Additionally, the modern "creative industry" that relies on copyright didn't really exist then, except perhaps in few large publishers/stationers.
If you're looking for some papers that go over historical copyright,
"Whats good for the goose is good for the gander: an argument for the consistent interpretation of the patent and copyright clause" by J.A. Lorengo, in the journal of the patent and trademark office society, january 2003;
"Its an Original! (?): In pursuit of Copyright's elusive essence" by Diane Leenheer Zimmerman, in the Columbia Journal of Law and Arts winter 2005;
Are good articles with historical detail, thought they focus on American copyright (Which I think is an interesting divergence from international copyright - the US didn't sign the berne convention until 1989; US laws were totally different from world standards until 1976). But, I think you'll find that the issues of copyright today, and the issues then, are wildly different. Not only has the frame of thought about copyright changed, and the interested players, but also the issues facing it are wildly different. Total ease of infringement by consumers, rather than racketeers, in the digital age requires different modes of thought.
The patent office has actively fought against business method patents. In 1998, when it was forced to consider them by the DC federal court of appeals in the case State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, it adopted an unusual "second set of eyes" policy, requiring all patents be approved by two examiners. It also adopted policies requiring computer or mechanical components to the method. This persisted until Ex parte Lundgren, Appeal No. 2003-2088 (BPAI 2005), which was actually decided by the Patent Board, the internal quasi-judicial structure in the patent office, which did away with the technological arts requirements because the courts hadn't required it.
Yes, the patent office is broken, but part of that breaking was done by the courts, which have constantly supported expanding what can be patented.
You're a prolific patenter, I'm a Poli Sci student in the middle of writing a research paper about the bureaucratic pathologies of the patent office.
on point one, you're wrong. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05720.pdf , a report by the Government Accountibility Office, details that examiners are expected to review 87 patents a year, spending 19 hours each on them, on average. Other sources, including congressional testimony by the undersecretary of commerce on intellectual property and the head of POPA, the examiner's union, describe examiners having between 11 and 22 hours for each patent, depending on the complexity of the field (agricultural inventions vs. telecommunications, for example).
On point two, a real problem is the "continuing education" of examiners. For the most part, experienced examiners are at the top of the field simply because they're constantly exposed to it. New examiners, of which there are a lot, are not, for reasons you describe. There are a ton of new examiners because the patent office has been hiring more to deal with the pendency problem, and also because it has the highest firing rate in the federal government. In addition, turnover for examiners is usually 2 years - the patent office can't keep its examiners. Probably because it trains them so well that they can get better jobs outside the patent office, not to mention the horrible labor conditions at the office.
On point 4, that sounds like total conjecture. Unlike what you describe, there's an incentive for examiners to approve patents, not reject them. Approved patents are added to the examiner's "count"; rejected patents aren't added to the count if they are challenged. This leads to examiners approving patents they aren't sure about. Don't believe me? check out the GAO report above.
on point 5, what you're talking about is challenging a rejection, in which case a second examiner reviews the patent.
Finally, the amount of money the patent office makes, and that congress takes (which, by the way, it didn't for last year; excess money was spent on internal improvements) is a drop in the bucket for the federal government.
Not what you want to hear, but turnout was so high in around the turn of the century because of political machines. Everyday people relied on parties for jobs and social interaction, especially in cities, but many other places too, and they "paid" for it by voting for their party. So 80% sounds like a lot of people were actively engaged in their nation's political debates, but if you cut out the people voting purely because their boss (political) told them to, the percentage probably would be around 30 to 40 percent.
So which is better? Voting because the party helps you get a job, or because you believe in the party's agenda?
This guy Vernon isn't an idiot, he thought of that too. Read the website and you'll find:
"Screenshots were automatically recorded at times randomly selected by the screen capture utility. The installer of said utility had no control over the randomly selected times...
Periods of computer inactivity on the part of the user de-activated the utility until such time that user input was detected. This feature prevented generation of redundant screenshots at night, weekends, holidays, days off, etc...
Also, A minimum time interval of approximately 30 minutes transpired between screenshots to prevent a large volume of redundant images. The purpose of the utility was to take a representative sample of computer activity. The pattern of computer usage on the part of the user ultimately governed the interval between screenshots. When no activity was detected, screenshots were halted."
If you think you're a non-traditional student, go to a non-traditional college. Like New College of Florida, which has essentially no required classes, so you don't have to take stupid, boring, and irrelevant to your interests classes; no grades, so you can't compare intelligence by GPA; only 650 students, so you can actually meet everyone on campus, and get to be friends with everyone with the same interests; the ability to create your own classes ("tutorials") and research projects ("Independant Study Project" or ISP); and you graduate based on a final thesis and baccalaurate exam - in other words, if you graduate, it means that you learned something and could demonstrate it in a 100 thesis and hour(s) long oral defense.
New College ain't the only school like this out there. Schools like this exist because some students don't do as well as they potentially can in a academically strict environment (like highschool and early college). Get more out of your education than a diploma. Spend four (or more!) years being yourself and growing from it.
If this becomes a trend, and "Secutiry Visuallization Tools" become widespread... then people will begin to say that movies like Hackers and such were just "before their time."
Regardless of your claim that corporations are more efficient than nation states (which is a whole other argument, and is like comparing apples to oranges), I dispute that we should accept corporations as our government. Why? Because I believe that the best government is that which is for the people, and responsible to them. Efficiency is totally irrelevant - the question of what is the best government is a question of morals, beliefs, passions, and theology, not mathematics and work-motion studies.
Furthurmore, resolving that, since you are an individual, you have neither influence nor potential for influence at a national level is dead-end thinking and as repulsive a philosophy as handing government over to corporations. I could point out that people in power are individuals, and such an empirical argument is enough refutation, but taking it to a normative level is more satisfying: You can say that small scale things, like helping people out of a burning building, or giving directions to lost people, are good and important, but involving yourself in a cause you believe will improve everyones lives, like participating in a campaign to roll back the influence of corporations in national politics, is inherently superior in goodness and importance. I hate to quote a movie here, but "The greatest evil is the indifference of good men."
And finally, it isn't social evolution, it'd be political evolution.
"android (n.) antedating 1727 (From the Chambers Cyclopedia)"
What? Who in 1727 came up with the idea of an android (ie, a robot in the form of a human)? And how, considering that "robot" wasn't thought up to the early 1900s? I wish the site was a bit more specific about such an oddity in their listing.
Technology increases productivity, which means you can do more. So, instead of having an accounting department, you have one guy responsible for payroll, accounts receivable, preparing for audits....
Technology makes work more stressful because you have to do a job that ten years ago might have been ten jobs.
The IDSA's "aggressive copyright enforcement" includes going after abandonware. You may have a different opinion about this, but I don't see abandonware as a threat against game publishers/developers. Abandonware - old games (Usually five years or older) that are no longer published or supported, and are hard to find - is a service, and doesn't hurt anyone. You can't buy, they arn't selling it, and in many cases, its unclear how actually owns it. I don't see why the IDSA should pursue the harmless profliferation of old classics, otherwise unobtainable.
Slashdot Mirror
Investigative hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee over the political dismissal of US attorneys lead directly to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Spain actually did fix a lot of problems at home before funding the Columbus expeditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista
I managed to find a screenshot for Deus Ex 3! Based on your description, I mean. Oh, and a release date of 1980.
Others have jumped on your examples, and I will too. Fact of the matter is that there are political reasons why cars can't become twice as efficient, and political reasons why farming can't double in efficiency as well - in addition to whatever limits laws of nature, natural resources, etc put on it.
If food efficiency doubled every two years, there would be a glut of food, and prices would drop drastically. This actually happened in the early 20th century, and its why we have agricultural subsidies, and price floors.
What it comes down to, I think, is demand. There is a constant demand for more computational power, but not so for food (people don't starve for lack of food, but lack of money). While gas prices are low (admit it, even 5 dollars a gallon is pretty cheap for the amount of power you get out of it), there's little incentive to invest in gas efficiency. But, you may have noticed the trend of increasing gas efficiency (but not doubling) with increasing gas costs. Just goes to show that demand seems to be the driving force.
While I'd like to second you what you said in your post, I also want to add something. What you said about muckrakers is right and important, but its all missing a crucial element. The press in the past was more free because a) it wasn't backed/directed by large economic powers (Rupert Murdoch) and b) there were a ton of newspapers, most of the them independent. I think Alexis de Tocqueville's perspective on this is still informative and insightful - check out chapter 11, book 1. Most relevant to this discussion, while speaking of newspapers/"the media": "the Americans have nowhere established any central direction of opinion.". It useful to bear in mind that FOX News is nowhere near as biased as the small time newspapers of the 18th and 19th century - but every newspaper had its own amateur and highly opinionated editor, so that bias didn't aggregate well.
The best news sources are independent or small chain papers. The ones that don't have an overlord looking over their shoulder when they're writing editorials.
I wrote my senior thesis in College on a related topic - in part, the development of the 1909 copyright law, which had a big impact on records, phonographs, etc. Prior to 1909, records, piano rolls, and so on actually had no copyright at all. Piano roll and talking machine companies (which is what record companies were known as back then) actually fought to keep records and rolls uncopyright-able as a way of preventing them from having to pay royalties to composers. The idea that composers - the writers of music - would get royalties from records or piano rolls (in addition to sheet music, which is what they traditionally got royalties for) was established in law in 1909 too.
This is interesting in the modern copyright debate, because it was the start of the notion that the producers of derivative works (for example, a recording of a composition) owe royalties to the producer of the original work (sheet music). Furthermore, the 1909 law determined that records and so on would be treated nearly exactly like books (minus the statutory license), in terms of duration, etc. There was an opportunity to set up a totally different copyright system for audio works (which are fundamentally different from the written word), but rather than innovate, Congress established the system that is so abused today.
The 1909 (and 1891, which had to do with recognizing international copyright) copyright laws had very interesting impacts on the development of copyright. Did you know that in 1906, the Aeolian Company (the major producers of player pianos and rolls) was working to set up what was essentially a statutory monopoly based on the exclusive property of traditional copyrights? To put it simply (and oversimplify), they attempted to create a situation very similiar to what the RIAA has been enjoying in American for a while now - exclusive control over most/all popular (money-making) music. It's because of their attempted monopoly that statutory licensing was developed in America.
So in relation to the main topic - if those old records were made before 1909, they actually had no copyright at all - you'll see no copyright notice on it anywhere. However, these kinds of things were thought to be covered in some degree by patents, and the 1909 law also established where patent-rights ended and copyrights began in regards to records.
disclaimer - I studied the political, not legal, aspects of copyright development.
Thats not quite how it works. Unlike the House, which has a draconian rules committee that determines when and for how long something is debated and voted on, the senate has no authority structure along those lines. Instead, anything that happens in the Senate happens according to a UCA - Unanimous Consent Agreement. That means that everything that happens in the senate (in terms of scheduling) must be agreed to by everyone in the senate. A hold essentially means that one or more senators do not agree, and therefore the UCA isn't unanimous. The whole system rides on the back of filibusters, which, while overturnable with cloture votes, could theoretically be used by an obstinate senator at every opportunity to totally obstruct any action in the senate (for example, filibustering a debate on whether or not to vote, whether or not to take a break, whether or not to adjourn for the night, etc. and all of these filibusters, even if immediately clotured, could last up to 30 hours... and the senator could demand quorum, thus requiring 50 senators to constantly be in the senate during the filibuster).
So which way is better, the House Rules committee, which has near ultimate power over legislation in a legislating body in which its members (other than the speaker) ought to be peers, or the UCA system, which is pretty much egalitarian, even though it leads to secretive holds?
I'm going to argue with you, though not about democracy vs. republics. Claiming that early US was not a democracy is incorrect. It was very much a democracy, though we may be uncomfortable admitting it. The point of the matter is that "the people," outside the political system, are determining who gets power in the political system. That large swaths of the populence are excluded is irrelevent. See ancient Athens.
In fact, it would be more understandable to claim the the US is not longer a democracy today, since so many important decisions are not made by elected officials. I'm referring to the national bureaucracy, through which laws are filtered and interpreted before being executed by technocrats.
As for your points about protecting minority rights, that is also incorrect. Democracy, as a political system, has in itself nothing to say about minority rights. Likewise, a republican government (by which I mean, a government that derives its power or legitimacy from "the people" of the state) has little to say about minority rights as well. The problem with your argument is that you're confusing democracy with liberalism (in the classic meaning of the word), and republic with republicanism.
Any republic, by necessity, has elements of republicanism, which is (this is mostly from Roger Smith's Civic Ideals) the notion that the people in a republic are or ought to be a community, and to take it further, that the community is "above" the people and therefore the people must sacrifice their best interests to serve the community's best interest. That the people form some kind of community, and that the government serves that community is the basis for claiming a state is a republic. Typically, republican thinkers claim that certain people are better at leading the community than others. The republican tradition is essential to ascriptive (read: prejudiced or racist) claims of superiority of certain people over others, i.e., whites over other races, men over women.
Liberalism on the other hand refers to the notion that each individual is possesive of natural (or otherwise inalienable) rights. This kind of individualism pretty much requires notions of equality, and is where minority rights comes from. You can see the tension between republicanism and liberalism: which is more important, the individual and his rights, or the community? The United States as long had this debate. The Constitution is largely a republican document, however, the bill of rights is decidedly liberal. You can read more about this in Gordon S. Wood's book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776--1787.
From a political science perspective, you're incorrect. A republic is a nation state that derives its legitimacy and identity from "the people" - as in, the citizens of the nation. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a democracy, though it would be hard to legitimize a state based on the people in most other political systems. (I would argue that claiming a state is a republic when it doesn't utilize some form of democracy is just propaganda - for example, North Korea is the doubly false "Democracy Republic of Korea. But thats a normative argument.) Monarchies, for instance, draw their legitimacy from the power of the monarch, tpyically because the monarch is chosen or presents or just is God. There isn't a "republic" political system, that's noise that's picked up in modern culture, like games like civilization. There is a republican tradition of government, or form or type of state (as described above). As for democracy, it isn't a type a state, its a type of political system.
The history of copyright pre-Berne is probably a lot less interesting than you think. Copyright before then really only applied to written works and maps, whereas they now apply to nearly everything - photos, movies, even archecture (It makes me wonder if speech is copyrighted... and if not, why not? justification for why everything written or recorded is copyrighted easily extends to speech). Additionally, the modern "creative industry" that relies on copyright didn't really exist then, except perhaps in few large publishers/stationers.
If you're looking for some papers that go over historical copyright,
"Whats good for the goose is good for the gander: an argument for the consistent interpretation of the patent and copyright clause" by J.A. Lorengo, in the journal of the patent and trademark office society, january 2003;
"Its an Original! (?): In pursuit of Copyright's elusive essence" by Diane Leenheer Zimmerman, in the Columbia Journal of Law and Arts winter 2005;
Are good articles with historical detail, thought they focus on American copyright (Which I think is an interesting divergence from international copyright - the US didn't sign the berne convention until 1989; US laws were totally different from world standards until 1976). But, I think you'll find that the issues of copyright today, and the issues then, are wildly different. Not only has the frame of thought about copyright changed, and the interested players, but also the issues facing it are wildly different. Total ease of infringement by consumers, rather than racketeers, in the digital age requires different modes of thought.
The patent office has actively fought against business method patents. In 1998, when it was forced to consider them by the DC federal court of appeals in the case State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, it adopted an unusual "second set of eyes" policy, requiring all patents be approved by two examiners. It also adopted policies requiring computer or mechanical components to the method. This persisted until Ex parte Lundgren, Appeal No. 2003-2088 (BPAI 2005), which was actually decided by the Patent Board, the internal quasi-judicial structure in the patent office, which did away with the technological arts requirements because the courts hadn't required it.
Yes, the patent office is broken, but part of that breaking was done by the courts, which have constantly supported expanding what can be patented.
You're a prolific patenter, I'm a Poli Sci student in the middle of writing a research paper about the bureaucratic pathologies of the patent office.
on point one, you're wrong. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05720.pdf , a report by the Government Accountibility Office, details that examiners are expected to review 87 patents a year, spending 19 hours each on them, on average. Other sources, including congressional testimony by the undersecretary of commerce on intellectual property and the head of POPA, the examiner's union, describe examiners having between 11 and 22 hours for each patent, depending on the complexity of the field (agricultural inventions vs. telecommunications, for example).
On point two, a real problem is the "continuing education" of examiners. For the most part, experienced examiners are at the top of the field simply because they're constantly exposed to it. New examiners, of which there are a lot, are not, for reasons you describe. There are a ton of new examiners because the patent office has been hiring more to deal with the pendency problem, and also because it has the highest firing rate in the federal government. In addition, turnover for examiners is usually 2 years - the patent office can't keep its examiners. Probably because it trains them so well that they can get better jobs outside the patent office, not to mention the horrible labor conditions at the office.
On point 4, that sounds like total conjecture. Unlike what you describe, there's an incentive for examiners to approve patents, not reject them. Approved patents are added to the examiner's "count"; rejected patents aren't added to the count if they are challenged. This leads to examiners approving patents they aren't sure about. Don't believe me? check out the GAO report above.
on point 5, what you're talking about is challenging a rejection, in which case a second examiner reviews the patent.
Finally, the amount of money the patent office makes, and that congress takes (which, by the way, it didn't for last year; excess money was spent on internal improvements) is a drop in the bucket for the federal government.
Not what you want to hear, but turnout was so high in around the turn of the century because of political machines. Everyday people relied on parties for jobs and social interaction, especially in cities, but many other places too, and they "paid" for it by voting for their party. So 80% sounds like a lot of people were actively engaged in their nation's political debates, but if you cut out the people voting purely because their boss (political) told them to, the percentage probably would be around 30 to 40 percent.
So which is better? Voting because the party helps you get a job, or because you believe in the party's agenda?
"Screenshots were automatically recorded at times randomly selected by the screen capture utility. The installer of said utility had no control over the randomly selected times...
Periods of computer inactivity on the part of the user de-activated the utility until such time that user input was detected. This feature prevented generation of redundant screenshots at night, weekends, holidays, days off, etc...
Also, A minimum time interval of approximately 30 minutes transpired between screenshots to prevent a large volume of redundant images. The purpose of the utility was to take a representative sample of computer activity. The pattern of computer usage on the part of the user ultimately governed the interval between screenshots. When no activity was detected, screenshots were halted."
If you think you're a non-traditional student, go to a non-traditional college. Like New College of Florida, which has essentially no required classes, so you don't have to take stupid, boring, and irrelevant to your interests classes; no grades, so you can't compare intelligence by GPA; only 650 students, so you can actually meet everyone on campus, and get to be friends with everyone with the same interests; the ability to create your own classes ("tutorials") and research projects ("Independant Study Project" or ISP); and you graduate based on a final thesis and baccalaurate exam - in other words, if you graduate, it means that you learned something and could demonstrate it in a 100 thesis and hour(s) long oral defense.
New College ain't the only school like this out there. Schools like this exist because some students don't do as well as they potentially can in a academically strict environment (like highschool and early college). Get more out of your education than a diploma. Spend four (or more!) years being yourself and growing from it.
If this becomes a trend, and "Secutiry Visuallization Tools" become widespread... then people will begin to say that movies like Hackers and such were just "before their time."
Do we really want that?
People did drop out and dig ditches. The age expectancy was around fifty. These days, people drop out and found microsoft. Progress.
I may be going out on a limb here (but no less than you, I think) when I say that that textbook wasn't for public schools.
Bullshit.
Regardless of your claim that corporations are more efficient than nation states (which is a whole other argument, and is like comparing apples to oranges), I dispute that we should accept corporations as our government. Why? Because I believe that the best government is that which is for the people, and responsible to them. Efficiency is totally irrelevant - the question of what is the best government is a question of morals, beliefs, passions, and theology, not mathematics and work-motion studies.
Furthurmore, resolving that, since you are an individual, you have neither influence nor potential for influence at a national level is dead-end thinking and as repulsive a philosophy as handing government over to corporations. I could point out that people in power are individuals, and such an empirical argument is enough refutation, but taking it to a normative level is more satisfying: You can say that small scale things, like helping people out of a burning building, or giving directions to lost people, are good and important, but involving yourself in a cause you believe will improve everyones lives, like participating in a campaign to roll back the influence of corporations in national politics, is inherently superior in goodness and importance. I hate to quote a movie here, but "The greatest evil is the indifference of good men."
And finally, it isn't social evolution, it'd be political evolution.
"android (n.) antedating 1727 (From the Chambers Cyclopedia)"
What? Who in 1727 came up with the idea of an android (ie, a robot in the form of a human)? And how, considering that "robot" wasn't thought up to the early 1900s? I wish the site was a bit more specific about such an oddity in their listing.
Technology increases productivity, which means you can do more. So, instead of having an accounting department, you have one guy responsible for payroll, accounts receivable, preparing for audits....
Technology makes work more stressful because you have to do a job that ten years ago might have been ten jobs.
Ironically, you cannot see the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or Declaration of Independance, as they are closed for "restoration" and "re-encasement."
The IDSA's "aggressive copyright enforcement" includes going after abandonware. You may have a different opinion about this, but I don't see abandonware as a threat against game publishers/developers. Abandonware - old games (Usually five years or older) that are no longer published or supported, and are hard to find - is a service, and doesn't hurt anyone. You can't buy, they arn't selling it, and in many cases, its unclear how actually owns it. I don't see why the IDSA should pursue the harmless profliferation of old classics, otherwise unobtainable.
What are you talking about? I'm sharing my precious bandwidth. And they're sharing theirs.