So, the person operating the telepresence robot could very well be in India, or Japan or Botswana. And they are signed in and running a "robot" in the USA, taking the place of a US worker or (insert any other country here.)
I can only hope this will resolve to the conclusion that these would then be considered people working in the USA, and would require a visa, and that the robot operators must be in the same country or have a visa to work in this country.
Extrapolate one more level, and I believe the next logical conclusion is that the people in overseas call centers who help people in the USA via technology are also "dialed in" and therefore require visas.
It's possible that this can bring sanity back to offshoring jobs.
A strong immune system keeps cancer at bay - this is a duh. But our lifestyles are increasingly focused on pathogen and stressor avoidance instead of encountering and overcoming them. Most people look at me as if I'm crazy when I say I like going out in the cold because it's good for me, and as many think I'm a kook when I ask them if they have ever drank water from a stream. Activities in the outside world boost our immunity, and we perform them less and less, and de-germ our environments more and more. I, for one, think there is a correlation.
let's let math drive the specification process! Because human opinion and behavior is so predictable there must be a wave function for our target market segment. Wait, I have it! BeN+d = oVEr
you aren't doing much on your computer. Try doing special effects graphics, or stock market analysis. Or even just start up an Android emulator - it's excruciatingly slow.
I didn't understand the obviousness test and now I do, thanks.
And therefore it is the name of test itself that is one of the horrific failures in this debacle.
What you described is not at all an obviousness test, it's a prior-patent test. It simply asks, has this been patented before in other ways? So it has nothing to do with whether it is obvious to someone skilled in the art. It's a red herring to think that this is testing obviosity. (ahem, new word.)
And hence when you say " maybe it's not obvious, even if in hindsight it looks simple. Maybe the solution is brilliant in its elegance and simplicity." Right, and the answer to your Big Maybe is - unmeasurable, unreproducible, and based utterly on opinion. And therefore is a farce and incites argument from the get-go, no matter what the USPTO calls it, to try to test for it that way.
But thanks for helping me to understand why the software obviousness test has failed so badly - because it doesn't test obviousness and therefore hasn't failed. It only tests to see if it is already patented in a different form. But that makes me wonder if the test itself can be challenged, because it doesn't test at all what it implies that it tests. And if the intent is truly that obvious things should not be patentable, then the definition of the test can be proved faulty - it's obvious to me that it can;)
" Copyright is next to useless for smaller programmers, because it's protecting the wrong thing. Basically, copyright protects the exact work,
In my never-to-be-humble-opinion, it's the exact work that should be protected, not the idea that lead to it. Because there's only two things in my job - the idea I'm trying to implement, and the code that implements it. If I'm not protecting the code, then I'm protecting the idea. So software patents are idea patents, because they are all ideas with "on a computer" appended to them.
Event-driven programming is HELL, except for interfaces. Every once in a while a DB trigger is justified, but event-driven languages have failed time and time again because... it's impossible to predict what will happen when and avalanche of eventual complexity causes the system to implode under its own weight.
For a programming language to make the cut, it must be utterly predictable down to the last side-effect.
I would love to agree with you, because to me they are all obvious. But the problem lies in the test itself - it is not at all measurable. It is based entirely on opinion, and thus it varies based on the particular "expert" testimony. And what is obvious this year may not have been obvious last year, and that makes it un-pin-downable to me. To me it is a losing battle to try to strike down patent by patent on obviousness. They can go either way, and so it is a never-ending battle, and the lawyers get richer. The only realistic way to approach obviousness is to argue its fallibility, bias-proneness, and slippery-slopedness in general, and strike it down as an untennable test, which must be either replaced with an unbiased, independently-reproducible test, or the system must be revoked as a whole as unfair.
And since you are obliviously experience and open-minded about this, what do you think of that approach?
It seems I meant "undue hardship" - I didn't know that was different from "undue burden," because I'm not a lawyer, but it sound like you are - that's great.:) And this makes more sense because it seemed weird that it was a constitutional test.
So if undue hardship is "Special or specified circumstances that partially or fully exempt a person from performance of a legal obligation so as to avoid an unreasonable or disproportionate burden or obstacle." then how could that be applied? Do you think it could it be used as a defense in an infringement case?
From what I could find, it seems patent litigation is implicitly excluded from normal E&O insurance, and on new policies for tech firms is explicitly excluded, due to the high cost of patent litigation and the scale of the potential damages. Also, it is excluded from commercial general liability (CGL) insurance, and this has been upheld by the courts.
Interestingly, you -can- specifically get patent infringement insurance, but it is "generally considered too expensive to be worth the cost." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement#Patent_infringement_insurance)
And insurance seems like such a reasonable idea and a great solution. I wish it were practical. But hell. if the insurance companies won't even insure us for it at reasonable rates, then that is the "we ain't touchin' this cause it will make us broke" stamp that provides the undeniable proof that this system is an impractical nightmare.
1) the interest to create and sell a software product of my own choosing, and derive my livelihood from it. 2) the interest of the government to foster innovation and progress
If I can't create -anything of significance- without impinging on a patent (and I believe that to be true), then the system prevents me from creating anything of significance and both of these interests are destroyed.
far too low. Most of what is patented, in my opinion is obvious. Even the MP3 encoding algorithm to me is obvious. I can barely imagine something software-related that is not obvious.
Does that make the system wrong, or does that make me someone with extra-ordinary skill, or does that make me delusional? Along with a million other coders?
And is the bar for ordinary skill static in the software industry? No, it changes every year. So if a patent is contested on this basis, how is it verifiable years later? These things seem obvious to me, but I guess I have above-average skill, just like almost everyone else.
that the simpler or more generic the idea, the more time-consuming the search becomes. Because 1) the simpler the idea, the more likely it is that it has already been thought of, and therefore more likely to be patented, and 2) the simpler and more generic the search terms are, the more hits are returned in a search. So this means the simplest of ideas are the hardest ones to verify, and there are many many more of them in a program.
I tested my theory by searching the USPTO database to see if the idea of a calculator program is covered by any patents. Using the Google patent search engine, the search results were overwhelming:
I tried reading the first one and gave it an honest try to determine if it covers a generic calculator program, and it seemed to in places, and in other places it seemed not to cover it, But that leaves me with an even larger quandary, if parts of it encompass the generic calculator, does it encompass the generic calculator? So even on the very first one, I would need legal opinion. This is out of my league; in no way can I be expert enough nor have time enough nor resources enough to perform a patent analyses encompassing enough to determine if I should write my generic calculator program. The programming is far more trivial than the search.
Using the USPTO search tool was even worse, I could not even verify that my search was finding what I was looking for.
You could argue that I should then \hire an expert to determine this, but that seems to corroborate that this is an undue burden with somewhat similar legal president, because the IRS is required to make tax filings for individuals able to be reasonably filled out by the individual and not be required to hire an expert to file their taxes for them. Of course a business is different, but to me the burden here is orders of magnitude higher than with a tax filing.
It seems a fait-de-complete that this -is- an undue burden. But sincerely, how could this not have been challenged already by giant corporations on this basis?
As a developer of original software products, I consider it impossible - just my opinion - to determine if any software I create infringes on existing patents. There are usually thousands and often tens of thousands of ideas, algorithms and design approaches in a product that would need to be checked, and patents are so wordy that the time it would take to determine if there was infringement would always far exceed the time it takes to make the product. This seems to me to pose an undue burden, and is therefore unconstitutional?
Slashdot Mirror
So, the person operating the telepresence robot could very well be in India, or Japan or Botswana. And they are signed in and running a "robot" in the USA, taking the place of a US worker or (insert any other country here.)
I can only hope this will resolve to the conclusion that these would then be considered people working in the USA, and would require a visa, and that the robot operators must be in the same country or have a visa to work in this country.
Extrapolate one more level, and I believe the next logical conclusion is that the people in overseas call centers who help people in the USA via technology are also "dialed in" and therefore require visas.
It's possible that this can bring sanity back to offshoring jobs.
TFA says the statue is being donated, the money is for transportation.
More accurate headline: "Artist proposes, donates personal time and money to make statues, Assange hosts fundraiser to transport and display works."
Maybe Assange would have been more circumspect to remain completely out of the mix. But that's his call, maybe he liked the idea.
Maybe all the flamers here would like the idea too if someone offered to make a bronze statue of them. But no-one did. ;)
and that this will probably soon change, you'll realize how quick we are to judge others without due consideration for the individual.
Please complete this sentence:
I think they already [are/are not] in the wrong hands.
We really hope you'll contribute a lot more in the distant future.
anecdotal or otherwise, because maybe you feel this is so obvious that none is needed?
A strong immune system keeps cancer at bay - this is a duh.
But our lifestyles are increasingly focused on pathogen and stressor avoidance instead of encountering and overcoming them. Most people look at me as if I'm crazy when I say I like going out in the cold because it's good for me, and as many think I'm a kook when I ask them if they have ever drank water from a stream. Activities in the outside world boost our immunity, and we perform them less and less, and de-germ our environments more and more. I, for one, think there is a correlation.
let's let math drive the specification process! Because human opinion and behavior is so predictable there must be a wave function for our target market segment. Wait, I have it! BeN+d = oVEr
you aren't doing much on your computer. Try doing special effects graphics, or stock market analysis. Or even just start up an Android emulator - it's excruciatingly slow.
Because you can never have too many cores that you aren't using most of the time.
How about more speed? Or is that too hard?
still believed Slashdot was worth reading...
past tense intended.
and some that doesn't.
I didn't understand the obviousness test and now I do, thanks.
And therefore it is the name of test itself that is one of the horrific failures in this debacle.
What you described is not at all an obviousness test, it's a prior-patent test. It simply asks, has this been patented before in other ways? So it has nothing to do with whether it is obvious to someone skilled in the art. It's a red herring to think that this is testing obviosity. (ahem, new word.)
And hence when you say " maybe it's not obvious, even if in hindsight it looks simple. Maybe the solution is brilliant in its elegance and simplicity."
Right, and the answer to your Big Maybe is - unmeasurable, unreproducible, and based utterly on opinion. And therefore is a farce and incites argument from the get-go, no matter what the USPTO calls it, to try to test for it that way.
But thanks for helping me to understand why the software obviousness test has failed so badly - because it doesn't test obviousness and therefore hasn't failed. It only tests to see if it is already patented in a different form. But that makes me wonder if the test itself can be challenged, because it doesn't test at all what it implies that it tests. And if the intent is truly that obvious things should not be patentable, then the definition of the test can be proved faulty - it's obvious to me that it can ;)
" Copyright is next to useless for smaller programmers, because it's protecting the wrong thing. Basically, copyright protects the exact work,
In my never-to-be-humble-opinion, it's the exact work that should be protected, not the idea that lead to it. Because there's only two things in my job - the idea I'm trying to implement, and the code that implements it. If I'm not protecting the code, then I'm protecting the idea. So software patents are idea patents, because they are all ideas with "on a computer" appended to them.
Event-driven programming is HELL, except for interfaces. Every once in a while a DB trigger is justified, but event-driven languages have failed time and time again because... it's impossible to predict what will happen when and avalanche of eventual complexity causes the system to implode under its own weight.
For a programming language to make the cut, it must be utterly predictable down to the last side-effect.
I would love to agree with you, because to me they are all obvious. But the problem lies in the test itself - it is not at all measurable. It is based entirely on opinion, and thus it varies based on the particular "expert" testimony. And what is obvious this year may not have been obvious last year, and that makes it un-pin-downable to me. To me it is a losing battle to try to strike down patent by patent on obviousness. They can go either way, and so it is a never-ending battle, and the lawyers get richer. The only realistic way to approach obviousness is to argue its fallibility, bias-proneness, and slippery-slopedness in general, and strike it down as an untennable test, which must be either replaced with an unbiased, independently-reproducible test, or the system must be revoked as a whole as unfair.
And since you are obliviously experience and open-minded about this, what do you think of that approach?
Snowden leaked NSA opinion on TOR here:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-stinks-nsa-presentation-document
Slashdot reporting here:
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/162254/how-the-nsa-targets-tor
let's hear it for American Exceptionalism...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eooXNd0heM
It seems I meant "undue hardship" - I didn't know that was different from "undue burden," because I'm not a lawyer, but it sound like you are - that's great. :) And this makes more sense because it seemed weird that it was a constitutional test.
So if undue hardship is "Special or specified circumstances that partially or fully exempt a person from performance of a legal obligation so as to avoid an unreasonable or disproportionate burden or obstacle." then how could that be applied? Do you think it could it be used as a defense in an infringement case?
From what I could find, it seems patent litigation is implicitly excluded from normal E&O insurance, and on new policies for tech firms is explicitly excluded, due to the high cost of patent litigation and the scale of the potential damages. Also, it is excluded from commercial general liability (CGL) insurance, and this has been upheld by the courts.
Interestingly, you -can- specifically get patent infringement insurance, but it is "generally considered too expensive to be worth the cost." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement#Patent_infringement_insurance)
And insurance seems like such a reasonable idea and a great solution. I wish it were practical. But hell. if the insurance companies won't even insure us for it at reasonable rates, then that is the "we ain't touchin' this cause it will make us broke" stamp that provides the undeniable proof that this system is an impractical nightmare.
1) the interest to create and sell a software product of my own choosing, and derive my livelihood from it.
2) the interest of the government to foster innovation and progress
If I can't create -anything of significance- without impinging on a patent (and I believe that to be true), then the system prevents me from creating anything of significance and both of these interests are destroyed.
far too low. Most of what is patented, in my opinion is obvious. Even the MP3 encoding algorithm to me is obvious. I can barely imagine something software-related that is not obvious.
Does that make the system wrong, or does that make me someone with extra-ordinary skill, or does that make me delusional? Along with a million other coders?
And is the bar for ordinary skill static in the software industry? No, it changes every year. So if a patent is contested on this basis, how is it verifiable years later? These things seem obvious to me, but I guess I have above-average skill, just like almost everyone else.
that the simpler or more generic the idea, the more time-consuming the search becomes. Because 1) the simpler the idea, the more likely it is that it has already been thought of, and therefore more likely to be patented, and 2) the simpler and more generic the search terms are, the more hits are returned in a search. So this means the simplest of ideas are the hardest ones to verify, and there are many many more of them in a program.
I tested my theory by searching the USPTO database to see if the idea of a calculator program is covered by any patents. Using the Google patent search engine, the search results were overwhelming:
https://www.google.com/search?num=100&site=&tbm=pts&source=hp&q=calculator+program+&oq=calculator+program+&gs_l=hp.3..0l10.6707.22776.0.23191.31.23.6.2.2.1.221.3044.5j17j1.23.0....0...1c.1.32.hp..6.25.2141.3USxvlIs4TQ
I tried reading the first one and gave it an honest try to determine if it covers a generic calculator program, and it seemed to in places, and in other places it seemed not to cover it, But that leaves me with an even larger quandary, if parts of it encompass the generic calculator, does it encompass the generic calculator? So even on the very first one, I would need legal opinion. This is out of my league; in no way can I be expert enough nor have time enough nor resources enough to perform a patent analyses encompassing enough to determine if I should write my generic calculator program. The programming is far more trivial than the search.
Using the USPTO search tool was even worse, I could not even verify that my search was finding what I was looking for.
You could argue that I should then \hire an expert to determine this, but that seems to corroborate that this is an undue burden with somewhat similar legal president, because the IRS is required to make tax filings for individuals able to be reasonably filled out by the individual and not be required to hire an expert to file their taxes for them. Of course a business is different, but to me the burden here is orders of magnitude higher than with a tax filing.
fashioned by the Supreme Court. The test was developed in the 19th century and is widely used to determine if a law or requirement is constitutional.
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undue_burden_standard
It seems a fait-de-complete that this -is- an undue burden. But sincerely, how could this not have been challenged already by giant corporations on this basis?
As a developer of original software products, I consider it impossible - just my opinion - to determine if any software I create infringes on existing patents. There are usually thousands and often tens of thousands of ideas, algorithms and design approaches in a product that would need to be checked, and patents are so wordy that the time it would take to determine if there was infringement would always far exceed the time it takes to make the product. This seems to me to pose an undue burden, and is therefore unconstitutional?
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?