To my understanding, the USPTO is entirely aware and quite unhappy with the recent turn of events. For better or worse, it does not have much influence over how the system works, leaving the decisions to the political machinations of others-- ostensibly, well-funded lobbiers and greedy legislators. And the latter hold most of the blame.
You see, the USPTO used to be funded out of the general coffers, leaving the patent fees as a nice little christmas bonus that served mostly to keep people from wasting the PTO's time. Then, our legislators decided that it would make better fiscal sense to let the fees fuel the Office itself rather than shuffling things back and forth. But wait, there's more! The PTO only gets to charge the legislature-set rates, and then its coffers get raided for 10% of their earnings. So now the patent system gets screwed up because our Beloved Congressmen figured out a way to make a bit of money off the deal.
Thus, the PTO has to float itself off of fees-- but can't set the fees to costs, or even hold on to all the money once they've received it. This is why they have to work on a strict quota system; there's no space to make allowances for things like, say, the size of the patent application. A 20-page peanut de-sheller gets the same time as a 200-page biofuels refinery.
Oh, and if the party trying to get the patent appeals a decision? (implicitly, a negative one) That time doesn't get added to the quota. See the problem now? When they have to figure out some giant software patent (or other useless/obvious/previously designed idea), turning it down creates more work that they don't have time for. So the examiners don't have time relative to the size of the claim, nor do they get time allocated for them to go through and fight the appeal when they turn it down. The system naturally leads to allowing exactly the outcome seen here; the Office itself has merely responded to outside pressures and control.
So, if there's anybody who's been most directly screwed with the patent system, it's the PTO (and its stalwart examiners). And it's our fault, because the fundamental, systematic problems came because of greedy, reprehensible legislators riding high on massive voter apathy.
My best friend wants to do some kind of public-support work, e.g., education. Ignoring factors of qualification and interest, we could assume that this DARPA work is roughly equivalent. What would dissuade her from working at DARPA?
Like the real estate mantra, I find that much of hte problem with federal government work is its location, location, location. Sure, public work has terrible pay, but if you can get it in a decently cheap region you don't have to care so much. But working for DARPA likely means having to live in ugly, crowded, expensive regions in or about Washington DC. Why is this, exactly? A good share of the technological development is going on in places like Sillicon Valley, Boston, and Austin. My favorite is Austin, as it has all the tech and none of the expense. I can live a nice life in a safe neighborhood with a tiny commute on 20-30k a year. The others are expensive, but there are more justifications to live in those places than "oh hey look the government's offices are here".
Even contractors in random places about America are bound to be in nicer, or at least cheaper, places. So if you're trying to solve the two-body problem, how likely is it that one partner can get a job that pays just as well as two people working for low government pay? And the limited selection of those jobs in and around DC... means practical considerations alone make DARPA work (along with a lot of federal work) unimpressive.
The same goes for all the other slices of government work that are having a hard time getting qualified applicants like, say, the patent office. Why do examiners need to be in DC? Again, a significant number of the applicants are going to be in the tech centers. Why are there not satellite offices on the west and gulf coasts?
We can have a nice little debate about how big the American government has become, but until The Revolution comes, could we at least have it behave in a relatively efficient manner? The concentration of offices in DC, to the exclusion of offices elsewhere, is idiotic.
There are no quantifiers, only recursive functions. Not quite true-- the theorems don't display the quantifiers, but they're there if you look at the underlying logic. All ACL2 theorems are implicitly universally quantified over any "free variable" in the theorem. It would probably also be prudent to mention that ACL2 only accepts total (works on any input) and provably terminating (each recursion decreases some measure) recursive functions.
Your point about these items forcing it to be heavily constructive still stands, though, for the most part. I'll avoid getting into caveats about using "encapsulation".
I think you are actually agreeing with me there, not disagreeing. I was overall making the argument that the "physical prototype" requirement does not get rid of many annoying patents, and throws out considerable baby with the bath water to boot. As you mention, the courts and the PTO do what they can to weed out such shenanigans (it can't have been too clear, given the initial acceptance and long struggle against the one-click patent).
My point about one-click in particular is to show that prototyping in isolation would not eliminate vast classes of annoying, pointless patents. I think the example is important because the physical prototyping argument often gets presented as a silver bullet that will end all patent problems.
It always sounds tempting to go back to the physical-prototype model, but this would only cut out a small number of useless patents that could be thrown out just as easily with a rules change, such as business method patents. It would be easy to make prototypes of stupid computer patents (e.g., Amazon's one-click), so those are still in. And on the extreme end, you're going to throw out some of the patents that are truly useful and do well to justify the system. I have seen some recent patents on making clean energy on a massive scale using any kind of hydrocarbons, including fossil fuels. All the carbon can be fully sequestered back into the ground. It's a truly innovative and important methodology deserving of protection, but it's taken years and millions of dollars to even get a small prototype up. Do you really think an inventor should have to ship an entire refinery and power plant every time they have a great new idea in clean energy production?
I agree with the sentiment, but it's just not the right way to go about things any more. Too many of the truly useful ideas can't be roughed together with balsa wood and bailing wire any more.
Does anybody know how this patent even has jurisdiction? I understood space to be a legal no-man's land, so any action taken there can't fall under the laws of any nation. Perhaps they could track it back to "sending the signals from earth", at which point you could do the same thing from international waters or an apathetic country.
Heaven forbid a book challenge its reader. If you want porn, go get porn, it comes in many flavors.
Stephenson's hallmark is going into great detail, and when he does it right it has value of some kind. Plot, humor, exposition, etc. For example, the girl bursting into flames after sex was part of a whole exploration of computation-- it was an interesting bit of science fiction. The description of Waterhouse's sexual frustrations were amusing. The prostate-fingering set up character details and motivation that lasted to the end of the book. He dealt realistically with both health and political issues in 17th century west Europe, up to and including the mentioned surgery and fake sex.
I find it to be the exact opposite of how sex is treated by most other authors. It's not something stapled on to titillate; rather, it fits in just like all the other details and commentary. That's not to say everyone should like it. As with many of my other personal delights, I make no beefs that most of the population likely won't enjoy Stephenson as I do, and I am not a huge devotee of everything he's written. It seems to me that the singling out Stephenson's descriptions of sex is a reflection of the reader, not the writer, given that it is presented in the same manner as the rest of the book, like it or not.
The fundamental point of parent is not brought up nearly enough-- Stroustrup *is* C++. For those who are satisfied, it's nice to see where he's steering the ship. For everyone else, these kinds of interviews are just wanking, and tend to leave important questions unraised.
This/. post is the perfect example of fallout of such kid-glove treatment. Why make any noise over Stroustrup's intended educational goals with C++ until you know if he's any good at that? I attended the august institution and department where he is now a professor. While I never had the pleasure first-hand, I heard stories from some who experienced his freshman-intro computer programming course. The stories were not good. While always impressed by the sheer mastery Stroustrup had over the subject, he was most certainly not a shining beacon of pedagogy. Thus, no matter how great his direction of C++ is, why do we care about his teaching of it?
Of course, such questions are hard to raise because of Political Weight. The intro course for CS majors at aforementioned institution magically got set back to C++ after having been Java (sometimes with C++) for years. If they thought Java too high-level, straight C would have been a good intro language, given its simplicity. But then with Stroustrup thrown in the pot, it was literally a bygone conclusion. As in, I objected at the curriculum revision committee and got entirely cut off. I started in C++ (several times) and I think doing so damaged my programming education. But these people who learned to program in the era of punchcards thought the pedagogical input of Stroustrup was more valid. And then they complain about how students don't have the skills when they leave.
So yes, there are problems with C++, yet some people just don't seem to mind, and the product has become quite popular. That doesn't mean we give the creator a free ride on the subject, or any other.
Personal experience is definitely a factor, and the incisive point above needs to be addressed in any study of the opinions of such a transient and intermediate group such as college students.
On the other hand, college students are the best example of the "next generation" for sociological research. In a few years they *will* be the people with money, and are usually at least a bit clueful as they managed to graduate high school and stagger into a college somewhere. They are often exactly the crowd in the current society that is applying some amount of critical analysis to the world around them. Y'know, that educational mission that universities are supposed to serve in the broadest sense...
For example, a law professor recently pointed out that everyday IP usage, without *any* P2P access, one could rack up billions (with a B) in statutory infringement liability every year. Every time you forward an email to an external recipient or hum a pop tune in a public restroom, you are infringing (distribution and public performance rights, respectively). Really, a public restroom. Look it up, it's absurd. And as the recent media suits have shown, those statutory infringement penalties do see traction in court.
So, on the other side, college students are also the ones most likely to decide "I should be able to do this", and see the current legislation as crap. Old fogies who don't use the technology, or don't realize how their everyday activities are illegal, aren't as likely to express their discomfort with current laws.
I'll try to duck the spittle and bile and address the argument directly.
"It's jealousy, and it's greed." Which is exactly the motivation to fight a competitor. If companies weren't jelous of and greedy for the money made by another, we wouldn't get better products and services.
"It's not ethical. It's not reasonable."; "fuck the EU for even considering this" They appear to be following all the proper judicial procedures. Opera Software is not committing any illegal acts. They're pursuing legal recourse for a perceived grievance, not bombing Microsoft's offices. Looks like the paragon of ethics and reasonability.
"This is Microsoft's OS, and they can ship it however the hell they want. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Or are you forgetting that there are actually other options..." This is exactly the situation that is different for a monopoly, explaining why many bodies that govern economic action, like the EU, have laws to appeal to. This means that Microsoft cannot do whatever "the hell they want" any more than the grocery store can sell ebola-laced beef. We regulate economic action for our best interests.
"they are even worse than MS... what Microsoft would be like if it was run by people like this" Microsoft has been convicted of various crimes in various jurisdictions, including the US and the EU. Opera has not, and appears to have no such black marks on its record. I do not see how its attempts at legal recourse he are worse. Despite yourself, I think you're right that MS would be scary if it were run like Opera. Its illegal actions have caused significant damage to its financial position. If I were a stockholder, I'd love to have that massive EU fine dispersed in a dividend. And I'd be enamored with MS adopting anything close to Opera's quality of software engineering-- with MS' market position, it'd be unstoppable.
I too am getting sick of politics putting the sqeeze on American companies. As others discussed here, corporations aren't moral entities-- only people are. Corporations are just a convinient mechanism to organize large groups for economic activity. The moment we opened up the border to trade with China, we were giving them the OK to go over there and do business. If we don't want to give our implicit consent to their political system, then should not have allowed our economies to get entangled. It's a complete bait and switch-- we put the carrot of the gargantuan Chinese market in front of their eyes, and then we start beating them for going for it.
Even worse is how we're only putting the sqeeze on the most visible companies. Walk into anything but a local farmer's market and chances are that some to most of the manufactured goods are coming from China. Do you really think that the manufacturing sector is any more free than the other sectors? The Internet service companies just bring our dirty laundry out into the front yard, and the politicos start marching around the henhouse and flapping their wings. Irrespective of whether this gets passed, the companies who can't hide their involvement from the news will still get the damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't treatment.
What few people seem to talk about is a complete shift away from advertising. The whole point of ads is to raise awareness of a product, generally with the aim of aggrandizing it or simply perking up desire.
With the internet, it's getting pretty hard to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. With the internet and high-density media, it's no longer necessary to subsidize every kind of content distribution channel with advertising.
Take TV shows. Let's say we're working on a fairly big show with a season budget of $10 million. A DVD box set costs, say, $5 per to produce, and you can sell them for $45. We want to make 15% profit, so our target earnings are $11.5M. If we ship 400k sets, you get $1.6M gross. That leaves $5.5M for advertising, mastering the discs, etc.
Note how this is all *before* you throw a single episode on TV or the 'net. You could sell direct to DVD, and promise not to put them on air before everyone got their shot at the DVD. Then airing becomes the icing on the cake.
I don't know the industry averages, but I know this is a perfectly workable system for at least some shows. Babylon 5 was produced for $10M or less each season, and the DVD sales alone made more than $500M in revenue by 2006. For its 5 seasons, that means there has already been a 1,000%(!) profit margin, since they weren't losing too much money on the original broadcast. And for anybody who's counting the score for copyright lengths, that's before the first season would have left a 14 year protection.
So yes, there will always be advertising. Search engines are showing a great new form, and as news outlets move to digital they may capture something similar. But the idea that every piece of entertainment media has to be paid for by advertisers is a qaint idea of a bygone era.
This is already achieved without government intervention. It is called "first to market." Having an idea before others gives you a distinct advantage to capture the market for the goods or services you dreamt up. I recommend looking at Graham's "Hackers and Painters" for an inside look at this process in the industry.
Agreed. Much of the "cheesiness" can be explained through various routes. The Minbari ship prominently showed will definitely look cheezy at that resolution and compression. Each race has its own style in B5, and the Minbari's have a "lifelike" appearance, often compared to fish. Their exteriors have a skin-like sheen, and that definitely came across looking fairly ass in the trailer. The more standard metal exteriors weren't given much screen time, but you could see it on the Star Furies (human personal fighters).
Speaking of which, that seems to be another note that many people find odd about B5. Straczynski (the writer, usually called JMS) was always very good at making sure he and the other directors of the show kept a good reality check on the show. B5 had some of the first realistic space combat ever showed on a screen. Proper respect towards conservation of momentum in zero gravity and all. It leads to interesting, original, and even elegant combat. Many people brought up on Star Trek and Wars have a wonky idea of what space combat "should" look like. So as towards the Star Fury-- the design was made in consultation with aerospace engineers, and designed so well that when NASA was looking into a "space forklift" design for the ISS, they discovered that the Star Fury was already a correct design. JMS allowed NASA to use the design for free as long as they called it a Star Fury. It's amazing how close that piece of sci-fi came to being up in space...
To broaden the objections made earlier, the article is total shenanigans. The examples are blatantly ignorant when they're not just idle drivel.
He makes one valid point-- that in a lot of cases, old technology is pretty good at solving the problem. When is this the case? When you're solving an old problem. Yes, we still deliver water in pipes, cut food with knives, and cook with radiant energy. And yes, there are lots of people saying we're going to live in magical fairy land in twenty years where blah blah blah, and in the end such predictions are drivel of the same sort that this article is.
Let's look at that kitchen again. So I pick up a new knife, which looks like kives have looked since the Bronze Age. But I got to the store in a technologically advanced transportation device, as did all the material in it. It was scanned with a computer that communicates to a massive computer system tracking the sales and distribution of materials. New orders were sent over communication systems all around the world, to factories with high degrees of automation and quality control due to... more technological innovation.
Yes, we still read print on paper. That can now be printed at the snap of your fingers. We pick up produce from the local store, but it might have come from the opposite side of the earth before it spoiled. He can't see how things have changed because he's refused to look at it.
And the WWII argument is plain old BS. It was a true war-technology linchpin. The developments made before and during that war have set the standard for basically all that has come after it. True subs, mechanized cavalry/infantry, aerial bombing, jet airplanes, the assault rifle(!). I mean, just look at that last one. What army today doesn't issue just about every soldier some variant of the assault rifle? And the V2 rocket was plain ig'nant. Are you telling me guided missle technology hasn't massively altered the landscape of war? This guy obviously stuck his head in the sand during the assault on Iraq.
So, yeah, plenty of complaints against people who claim New Technology X will cure cancer, solve world hunger, do your laundry, and get you a date on Saturday. But It would help that such complaint-bringers know a bit more of what they are talking about.
Fuel cell technology is fun and all, but the inherent complexity makes fall quite short of a silver bullet. The ones without a huge overhead of heat and such are highly inefficient, and producing the lightest alcohols is less efficient than producing the larger ones. Speaking of which...
Just to inform, meth- and ethanol are farily ass as fuels. Ethanol burns nice and fast, which has its advantages, but mostly it's just a pain. It's toxic-- not just to your liver, but very seriously to the environment-- and not as energy dense as gasoline. It is better to use propanol and butanol (three and four carbons), as they burn almost the same as ethanol and have a much more economical energy density. I'm too lazy to look up the numbers, but they shouldn't be hard to find.
This is obviously a thinly researched fluff piece, considering it doesn't have National Instruments mentioned anywhere. It's been on the Forbes best 100 places to work list for eight years running. It's happy to send its employees to the University of Texas for additional education, and actively encourages its employees to move around within the company.
Okay, I call citations. That argument is bandied about quite a bit, but I've never seen it cited up. Whenever anybody bothers to talk to real-life scientists, they laugh off the idea. While phoney studies are regularly bandied about by PR departments, when you look at real scientific research, the realities are both less corrupt and more complex. Since there are so many people trying to study the relation between CO2 and climate change, lots of people find correlations of varying degrees. Yes, various industries like to point to the publications that show a low or minimal interaction, and all the environmental advocates point to studies on the other side of the spectrum. Neither are probably getting the whole picture right.
Neither repeating yourself nor citing a glorified Google search will convince a detractor. Nor should it, as neither your repeated assertions nor the cited article contain the information to do so.
The cited article talks about searching a database for the term "climate change" and reviewing the abstracts. Great leg-work guys, completely simplifying all the massive amounts of research into a summary of a bunch of summaries. Most importantly, a big part of the argument is *how much* CO2 and other human factors impact climate, not that it does so at all. That a paper says "yes, humans are contributing to global warming, but only 10% of it with an uncertain margin of error" would not be distinguished from a paper that says "my personal gasseous emissions are responsible for 95% of all climate change". Technically, they would both 'agree with the consensus.'
And let's look at the numbers. 75% of the papers were "explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, [or] mitigation proposals" The first category is dispensed with above, the second doesn't care what caused it, and I'd bet good money no mitigation proposal is going to start talking about Earth's unstable axial tilt. 25% of the numbers were "methods [or] paleoclimate analysis" Neither of which have anything to do with supporting any specific current model of climate change (paleoclimate deals with geologic time scales-- that means giggles at time spans smaller than a few thousand years)
Yes, there's good evidence humans made a huge contribution to global climate change. There's plenty that says it's moderate, and some that says it's mild. And plenty of good arguments that the first two categories are often using various terrible scientific techniques.
And you're simplifying the issue massively. As has been mentioned here and there, congratulations on being part of the Union, they get to follow the same rules as the rest of us. Equality for all citizens means that the "white lazy fat ass"es can't be punished for being white. We're talking about the consistency of the policies-- if the species is doing that whole "brink of extinction" thing, it may behoove us to ban its hunting. Also, whales are some of the most intelligent species on Earth-- they're quite arguably sentient. They have true communication and sentient emotions.
So let's look at the arguments "they've always done this" That is irrelevant. If hunting the animal is outlawed for ecological reasons, it makes no sense to allow exceptions. "they're subsistence hunter/gatherers, and need the food" Ignores external factors. The introduction of antiseptics (soap) and medicines has greatly improved and lengthened the human lifespan. It thus causes certain problems when the biosphere cannot support the additional population. Restricted, sustainable ecological practices are a cost of such benefits. "cultural reasons" Similar to the first argument. Nobody seems to be defending it here, but it is still upheld by Japan. They hunt whales in complete defiance of international agreements.
Human industry has had to change many times with developments in civilization. It's not just the music industry, kids-- remember the whole owning slave thing? It took a bit of work to pry that from those who economically benefitted from the exploitation of another race. Sometimes progress has a cost, and we have to decide if we want to pay it, and allowing exceptions is unreasonable.
unless I'm mistaken, a Church is private property and there are some laws having to deal with using private property items without the owners permission in a video/game.
I do believe you are quite mistaken. There may be some trickiness here I'm not aware of-- as the Anglican church has odd interactions with the government of England, I am not entirely sure what additional protections, rights, or even limitations it has garnered. However, you are painting the church with the brush of general private property rights. So let's look at the church and what rights it should have as private property.
The church as it stands today appears to have been started in the 1300's, with many additions over the intervening hundreds of years. The portions in question most likely were built by the 1500's, though they could have been later. (The Wikipedia entry isn't entirely illuminating.) So, the church has had control over the property of the church for quite a long time. Thus, if you were to criminally trespass into the church, their rights of private property would protect them. However, this appears to be a case of intellectual property rights. These are entirely different. Copyright didn't even work its way into English law until the early 1700's. Thus, even if there is some kind of extra-special perpetual copyright granted to the church's current endeavors, the fundamental structure of the building has been around for too long to call dibs on its appearance. Note also that they had to specifically cite the interior, rather than exterior, appearance, as public exteriors are pretty hard to keep in exclusivity.
Also, given the context of "ruined city" that the game is shooting for, I would have to guess that it most likely has not directly copied any current copyrightable works remaining in the church that may be protected. Thus, I see no reason for the claim. Now, as for the politeness, I can't really understand that, either. They are not portraying the church as an entity, only as a physical location. As another poster mentioned, the building has been a symbol of the area, and creating a convincing environment would basically require using a reasonbly close facsimilie. Now, if the game were using Anglican church as an entity in the game, I could see the argument about being polite (even if it didn't step on some kind of trademark issue). As other posters have mentioned, popular landmarks have been used in games and other media continuously. Did Independence Day have to get permission for every famous building it showed getting blown up? I would certainly hope not. They simply used those edifices as the well-accepted symbols of the cities being shown.
I think it's more important that it only runs on Windows, not less. It puts yet more pressure on the cross-platform and Linux developers to measure up.
Pretty much every tool I use would run the same or better on Linux, minus the gaming habit, except Trillian. It has all the all the features I use and a small and clean UI. Not to mention the multi-megabyte chat logs covering over a half-decade I have that would need to be cleanly imported to any replacement. It is emblematic of exactly the kind of small, nagging problem of rolling over to Linux gives. Oh, and when an IM client can run on 90+% of desktops, I think it can be reasonably counted as a "serious contender."
Does anybody know if there's been decent progress towards getting Trillian to run better under WINE? That would be a good stopgap, being just annoying enough to keep running to keep interest in Linux native replacements.
I am also not a lawyer, but I think I know an answer to you question.
Note how Microsoft claims that it knows of certain patents that have been violated. That means they know which patents are violated by whom. If they make no good faith effort to notify the violators (as you noted, large gaps of time between notification and lawsuit are accepted), they manage to cast aspersions on their open source competitors. The defense is then that Microsoft is intentionally waiting to even send out the notices to provide tortious interference. That is, they are intentionally allowing the patent violators to continue ignorant of the claimed violations in order to gain market share. That Microsoft doesn't plan on sueing is basically irrelevant to the tortious interference (in fact, it significantly helps that claim).
In fact, this may be the best way to finally pin down Microsoft for their FUD tactics. Most of the time it's just shady, but by invoking patent protections they may have finally made it a legally actionable offense.
I love how the whole context of the comment has been lost. This chain of comments gives the perfect example.
First off, it's cute, using the statistics only for America. How about we re-run those numbers on a global market? Custom-designing your game to appeal much more to a narrower demographic is always going to give you more spectacular results. Try this one instead*: http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php
Note how the Halos now have their asses kicked. Sure, they're still big sellers... but note how *most* of the games coming before Halo 2 are Miyamoto games. (this is where I'm getting back to the point)
What Miyamoto's saying is that by concentrating on making really awesome, original games he keeps pumping out great games. Sure, he has the skill to make Yet Another Game, but so does every other game developer out there with two and a half brain cells to rub together. The top of the line pop studios (id, Bungie, etc.) do have better success rates, but they still have to compete with other plain-jane studios. He's saying that he's not aiming for the cheeseburger market. Sure, it provides a big hit or two... but note how most of the big hits are those revolutionary games. Even on a strictly numerical game, he's winning hands-down. Why don't more studios do that? They can't or they won't. He never actually insulted Halo-- only that Bungie was pursuing a saturated market.
(*Also, how did Metroid Prime only ship 120K units in Japan? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. How accurate are these numbers?)
Why can't he just kick them in the pants with an FOIA*? Just because it's been contracted out doesn't exempt them from those rules, AFAIK. Unless the material has some secrecy about it, it's free for him to request. Their claims of lack of procedure means nothing in the face of the proper paperwork. It basically turns it from "you don't have a process for that" into "you will have a process for that because the federal government mandates it." Sure, it's an unnecessary inconvenience, but that's what bureaucracy is all about. One should expect nothing less when interacting with any governmental body, no matter how small the task.
*For the uninitiated, the Freedom Of Information Act allows you to formally request documents from any arm of the government. They must comply or give a really shiny excuse, like confidentiality, national security, etc.
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To my understanding, the USPTO is entirely aware and quite unhappy with the recent turn of events. For better or worse, it does not have much influence over how the system works, leaving the decisions to the political machinations of others-- ostensibly, well-funded lobbiers and greedy legislators. And the latter hold most of the blame.
You see, the USPTO used to be funded out of the general coffers, leaving the patent fees as a nice little christmas bonus that served mostly to keep people from wasting the PTO's time. Then, our legislators decided that it would make better fiscal sense to let the fees fuel the Office itself rather than shuffling things back and forth. But wait, there's more! The PTO only gets to charge the legislature-set rates, and then its coffers get raided for 10% of their earnings. So now the patent system gets screwed up because our Beloved Congressmen figured out a way to make a bit of money off the deal.
Thus, the PTO has to float itself off of fees-- but can't set the fees to costs, or even hold on to all the money once they've received it. This is why they have to work on a strict quota system; there's no space to make allowances for things like, say, the size of the patent application. A 20-page peanut de-sheller gets the same time as a 200-page biofuels refinery.
Oh, and if the party trying to get the patent appeals a decision? (implicitly, a negative one) That time doesn't get added to the quota. See the problem now? When they have to figure out some giant software patent (or other useless/obvious/previously designed idea), turning it down creates more work that they don't have time for. So the examiners don't have time relative to the size of the claim, nor do they get time allocated for them to go through and fight the appeal when they turn it down. The system naturally leads to allowing exactly the outcome seen here; the Office itself has merely responded to outside pressures and control.
So, if there's anybody who's been most directly screwed with the patent system, it's the PTO (and its stalwart examiners). And it's our fault, because the fundamental, systematic problems came because of greedy, reprehensible legislators riding high on massive voter apathy.
My best friend wants to do some kind of public-support work, e.g., education. Ignoring factors of qualification and interest, we could assume that this DARPA work is roughly equivalent. What would dissuade her from working at DARPA?
Like the real estate mantra, I find that much of hte problem with federal government work is its location, location, location. Sure, public work has terrible pay, but if you can get it in a decently cheap region you don't have to care so much. But working for DARPA likely means having to live in ugly, crowded, expensive regions in or about Washington DC. Why is this, exactly? A good share of the technological development is going on in places like Sillicon Valley, Boston, and Austin. My favorite is Austin, as it has all the tech and none of the expense. I can live a nice life in a safe neighborhood with a tiny commute on 20-30k a year. The others are expensive, but there are more justifications to live in those places than "oh hey look the government's offices are here".
Even contractors in random places about America are bound to be in nicer, or at least cheaper, places. So if you're trying to solve the two-body problem, how likely is it that one partner can get a job that pays just as well as two people working for low government pay? And the limited selection of those jobs in and around DC... means practical considerations alone make DARPA work (along with a lot of federal work) unimpressive.
The same goes for all the other slices of government work that are having a hard time getting qualified applicants like, say, the patent office. Why do examiners need to be in DC? Again, a significant number of the applicants are going to be in the tech centers. Why are there not satellite offices on the west and gulf coasts?
We can have a nice little debate about how big the American government has become, but until The Revolution comes, could we at least have it behave in a relatively efficient manner? The concentration of offices in DC, to the exclusion of offices elsewhere, is idiotic.
Your point about these items forcing it to be heavily constructive still stands, though, for the most part. I'll avoid getting into caveats about using "encapsulation".
I think you are actually agreeing with me there, not disagreeing. I was overall making the argument that the "physical prototype" requirement does not get rid of many annoying patents, and throws out considerable baby with the bath water to boot. As you mention, the courts and the PTO do what they can to weed out such shenanigans (it can't have been too clear, given the initial acceptance and long struggle against the one-click patent).
My point about one-click in particular is to show that prototyping in isolation would not eliminate vast classes of annoying, pointless patents. I think the example is important because the physical prototyping argument often gets presented as a silver bullet that will end all patent problems.
It always sounds tempting to go back to the physical-prototype model, but this would only cut out a small number of useless patents that could be thrown out just as easily with a rules change, such as business method patents. It would be easy to make prototypes of stupid computer patents (e.g., Amazon's one-click), so those are still in. And on the extreme end, you're going to throw out some of the patents that are truly useful and do well to justify the system. I have seen some recent patents on making clean energy on a massive scale using any kind of hydrocarbons, including fossil fuels. All the carbon can be fully sequestered back into the ground. It's a truly innovative and important methodology deserving of protection, but it's taken years and millions of dollars to even get a small prototype up. Do you really think an inventor should have to ship an entire refinery and power plant every time they have a great new idea in clean energy production?
I agree with the sentiment, but it's just not the right way to go about things any more. Too many of the truly useful ideas can't be roughed together with balsa wood and bailing wire any more.
Does anybody know how this patent even has jurisdiction? I understood space to be a legal no-man's land, so any action taken there can't fall under the laws of any nation. Perhaps they could track it back to "sending the signals from earth", at which point you could do the same thing from international waters or an apathetic country.
Heaven forbid a book challenge its reader. If you want porn, go get porn, it comes in many flavors.
Stephenson's hallmark is going into great detail, and when he does it right it has value of some kind. Plot, humor, exposition, etc. For example, the girl bursting into flames after sex was part of a whole exploration of computation-- it was an interesting bit of science fiction. The description of Waterhouse's sexual frustrations were amusing. The prostate-fingering set up character details and motivation that lasted to the end of the book. He dealt realistically with both health and political issues in 17th century west Europe, up to and including the mentioned surgery and fake sex.
I find it to be the exact opposite of how sex is treated by most other authors. It's not something stapled on to titillate; rather, it fits in just like all the other details and commentary. That's not to say everyone should like it. As with many of my other personal delights, I make no beefs that most of the population likely won't enjoy Stephenson as I do, and I am not a huge devotee of everything he's written. It seems to me that the singling out Stephenson's descriptions of sex is a reflection of the reader, not the writer, given that it is presented in the same manner as the rest of the book, like it or not.
The fundamental point of parent is not brought up nearly enough-- Stroustrup *is* C++. For those who are satisfied, it's nice to see where he's steering the ship. For everyone else, these kinds of interviews are just wanking, and tend to leave important questions unraised.
/. post is the perfect example of fallout of such kid-glove treatment. Why make any noise over Stroustrup's intended educational goals with C++ until you know if he's any good at that? I attended the august institution and department where he is now a professor. While I never had the pleasure first-hand, I heard stories from some who experienced his freshman-intro computer programming course. The stories were not good. While always impressed by the sheer mastery Stroustrup had over the subject, he was most certainly not a shining beacon of pedagogy. Thus, no matter how great his direction of C++ is, why do we care about his teaching of it?
This
Of course, such questions are hard to raise because of Political Weight. The intro course for CS majors at aforementioned institution magically got set back to C++ after having been Java (sometimes with C++) for years. If they thought Java too high-level, straight C would have been a good intro language, given its simplicity. But then with Stroustrup thrown in the pot, it was literally a bygone conclusion. As in, I objected at the curriculum revision committee and got entirely cut off. I started in C++ (several times) and I think doing so damaged my programming education. But these people who learned to program in the era of punchcards thought the pedagogical input of Stroustrup was more valid. And then they complain about how students don't have the skills when they leave.
So yes, there are problems with C++, yet some people just don't seem to mind, and the product has become quite popular. That doesn't mean we give the creator a free ride on the subject, or any other.
Personal experience is definitely a factor, and the incisive point above needs to be addressed in any study of the opinions of such a transient and intermediate group such as college students.
On the other hand, college students are the best example of the "next generation" for sociological research. In a few years they *will* be the people with money, and are usually at least a bit clueful as they managed to graduate high school and stagger into a college somewhere. They are often exactly the crowd in the current society that is applying some amount of critical analysis to the world around them. Y'know, that educational mission that universities are supposed to serve in the broadest sense...
For example, a law professor recently pointed out that everyday IP usage, without *any* P2P access, one could rack up billions (with a B) in statutory infringement liability every year. Every time you forward an email to an external recipient or hum a pop tune in a public restroom, you are infringing (distribution and public performance rights, respectively). Really, a public restroom. Look it up, it's absurd. And as the recent media suits have shown, those statutory infringement penalties do see traction in court.
So, on the other side, college students are also the ones most likely to decide "I should be able to do this", and see the current legislation as crap. Old fogies who don't use the technology, or don't realize how their everyday activities are illegal, aren't as likely to express their discomfort with current laws.
I'll try to duck the spittle and bile and address the argument directly.
... what Microsoft would be like if it was run by people like this"
"It's jealousy, and it's greed."
Which is exactly the motivation to fight a competitor. If companies weren't jelous of and greedy for the money made by another, we wouldn't get better products and services.
"It's not ethical. It's not reasonable."; "fuck the EU for even considering this"
They appear to be following all the proper judicial procedures. Opera Software is not committing any illegal acts. They're pursuing legal recourse for a perceived grievance, not bombing Microsoft's offices. Looks like the paragon of ethics and reasonability.
"This is Microsoft's OS, and they can ship it however the hell they want. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Or are you forgetting that there are actually other options..."
This is exactly the situation that is different for a monopoly, explaining why many bodies that govern economic action, like the EU, have laws to appeal to. This means that Microsoft cannot do whatever "the hell they want" any more than the grocery store can sell ebola-laced beef. We regulate economic action for our best interests.
"they are even worse than MS
Microsoft has been convicted of various crimes in various jurisdictions, including the US and the EU. Opera has not, and appears to have no such black marks on its record. I do not see how its attempts at legal recourse he are worse.
Despite yourself, I think you're right that MS would be scary if it were run like Opera. Its illegal actions have caused significant damage to its financial position. If I were a stockholder, I'd love to have that massive EU fine dispersed in a dividend. And I'd be enamored with MS adopting anything close to Opera's quality of software engineering-- with MS' market position, it'd be unstoppable.
I too am getting sick of politics putting the sqeeze on American companies. As others discussed here, corporations aren't moral entities-- only people are. Corporations are just a convinient mechanism to organize large groups for economic activity. The moment we opened up the border to trade with China, we were giving them the OK to go over there and do business. If we don't want to give our implicit consent to their political system, then should not have allowed our economies to get entangled.
It's a complete bait and switch-- we put the carrot of the gargantuan Chinese market in front of their eyes, and then we start beating them for going for it.
Even worse is how we're only putting the sqeeze on the most visible companies. Walk into anything but a local farmer's market and chances are that some to most of the manufactured goods are coming from China. Do you really think that the manufacturing sector is any more free than the other sectors? The Internet service companies just bring our dirty laundry out into the front yard, and the politicos start marching around the henhouse and flapping their wings. Irrespective of whether this gets passed, the companies who can't hide their involvement from the news will still get the damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't treatment.
What few people seem to talk about is a complete shift away from advertising. The whole point of ads is to raise awareness of a product, generally with the aim of aggrandizing it or simply perking up desire.
With the internet, it's getting pretty hard to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.
With the internet and high-density media, it's no longer necessary to subsidize every kind of content distribution channel with advertising.
Take TV shows. Let's say we're working on a fairly big show with a season budget of $10 million. A DVD box set costs, say, $5 per to produce, and you can sell them for $45. We want to make 15% profit, so our target earnings are $11.5M. If we ship 400k sets, you get $1.6M gross. That leaves $5.5M for advertising, mastering the discs, etc.
Note how this is all *before* you throw a single episode on TV or the 'net. You could sell direct to DVD, and promise not to put them on air before everyone got their shot at the DVD. Then airing becomes the icing on the cake.
I don't know the industry averages, but I know this is a perfectly workable system for at least some shows. Babylon 5 was produced for $10M or less each season, and the DVD sales alone made more than $500M in revenue by 2006. For its 5 seasons, that means there has already been a 1,000%(!) profit margin, since they weren't losing too much money on the original broadcast. And for anybody who's counting the score for copyright lengths, that's before the first season would have left a 14 year protection.
So yes, there will always be advertising. Search engines are showing a great new form, and as news outlets move to digital they may capture something similar. But the idea that every piece of entertainment media has to be paid for by advertisers is a qaint idea of a bygone era.
This is already achieved without government intervention. It is called "first to market." Having an idea before others gives you a distinct advantage to capture the market for the goods or services you dreamt up. I recommend looking at Graham's "Hackers and Painters" for an inside look at this process in the industry.
Agreed. Much of the "cheesiness" can be explained through various routes. The Minbari ship prominently showed will definitely look cheezy at that resolution and compression. Each race has its own style in B5, and the Minbari's have a "lifelike" appearance, often compared to fish. Their exteriors have a skin-like sheen, and that definitely came across looking fairly ass in the trailer. The more standard metal exteriors weren't given much screen time, but you could see it on the Star Furies (human personal fighters).
Speaking of which, that seems to be another note that many people find odd about B5. Straczynski (the writer, usually called JMS) was always very good at making sure he and the other directors of the show kept a good reality check on the show. B5 had some of the first realistic space combat ever showed on a screen. Proper respect towards conservation of momentum in zero gravity and all. It leads to interesting, original, and even elegant combat. Many people brought up on Star Trek and Wars have a wonky idea of what space combat "should" look like. So as towards the Star Fury-- the design was made in consultation with aerospace engineers, and designed so well that when NASA was looking into a "space forklift" design for the ISS, they discovered that the Star Fury was already a correct design. JMS allowed NASA to use the design for free as long as they called it a Star Fury. It's amazing how close that piece of sci-fi came to being up in space...
To broaden the objections made earlier, the article is total shenanigans. The examples are blatantly ignorant when they're not just idle drivel.
He makes one valid point-- that in a lot of cases, old technology is pretty good at solving the problem. When is this the case? When you're solving an old problem. Yes, we still deliver water in pipes, cut food with knives, and cook with radiant energy. And yes, there are lots of people saying we're going to live in magical fairy land in twenty years where blah blah blah, and in the end such predictions are drivel of the same sort that this article is.
Let's look at that kitchen again. So I pick up a new knife, which looks like kives have looked since the Bronze Age. But I got to the store in a technologically advanced transportation device, as did all the material in it. It was scanned with a computer that communicates to a massive computer system tracking the sales and distribution of materials. New orders were sent over communication systems all around the world, to factories with high degrees of automation and quality control due to... more technological innovation.
Yes, we still read print on paper. That can now be printed at the snap of your fingers. We pick up produce from the local store, but it might have come from the opposite side of the earth before it spoiled. He can't see how things have changed because he's refused to look at it.
And the WWII argument is plain old BS. It was a true war-technology linchpin. The developments made before and during that war have set the standard for basically all that has come after it. True subs, mechanized cavalry/infantry, aerial bombing, jet airplanes, the assault rifle(!). I mean, just look at that last one. What army today doesn't issue just about every soldier some variant of the assault rifle? And the V2 rocket was plain ig'nant. Are you telling me guided missle technology hasn't massively altered the landscape of war? This guy obviously stuck his head in the sand during the assault on Iraq.
So, yeah, plenty of complaints against people who claim New Technology X will cure cancer, solve world hunger, do your laundry, and get you a date on Saturday. But It would help that such complaint-bringers know a bit more of what they are talking about.
Fuel cell technology is fun and all, but the inherent complexity makes fall quite short of a silver bullet. The ones without a huge overhead of heat and such are highly inefficient, and producing the lightest alcohols is less efficient than producing the larger ones. Speaking of which...
Just to inform, meth- and ethanol are farily ass as fuels. Ethanol burns nice and fast, which has its advantages, but mostly it's just a pain. It's toxic-- not just to your liver, but very seriously to the environment-- and not as energy dense as gasoline. It is better to use propanol and butanol (three and four carbons), as they burn almost the same as ethanol and have a much more economical energy density. I'm too lazy to look up the numbers, but they shouldn't be hard to find.
This is obviously a thinly researched fluff piece, considering it doesn't have National Instruments mentioned anywhere. It's been on the Forbes best 100 places to work list for eight years running. It's happy to send its employees to the University of Texas for additional education, and actively encourages its employees to move around within the company.
Okay, I call citations. That argument is bandied about quite a bit, but I've never seen it cited up. Whenever anybody bothers to talk to real-life scientists, they laugh off the idea. While phoney studies are regularly bandied about by PR departments, when you look at real scientific research, the realities are both less corrupt and more complex. Since there are so many people trying to study the relation between CO2 and climate change, lots of people find correlations of varying degrees. Yes, various industries like to point to the publications that show a low or minimal interaction, and all the environmental advocates point to studies on the other side of the spectrum. Neither are probably getting the whole picture right.
Neither repeating yourself nor citing a glorified Google search will convince a detractor. Nor should it, as neither your repeated assertions nor the cited article contain the information to do so.
The cited article talks about searching a database for the term "climate change" and reviewing the abstracts. Great leg-work guys, completely simplifying all the massive amounts of research into a summary of a bunch of summaries. Most importantly, a big part of the argument is *how much* CO2 and other human factors impact climate, not that it does so at all. That a paper says "yes, humans are contributing to global warming, but only 10% of it with an uncertain margin of error" would not be distinguished from a paper that says "my personal gasseous emissions are responsible for 95% of all climate change". Technically, they would both 'agree with the consensus.'
And let's look at the numbers. 75% of the papers were "explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, [or] mitigation proposals"
The first category is dispensed with above, the second doesn't care what caused it, and I'd bet good money no mitigation proposal is going to start talking about Earth's unstable axial tilt.
25% of the numbers were "methods [or] paleoclimate analysis"
Neither of which have anything to do with supporting any specific current model of climate change (paleoclimate deals with geologic time scales-- that means giggles at time spans smaller than a few thousand years)
Yes, there's good evidence humans made a huge contribution to global climate change. There's plenty that says it's moderate, and some that says it's mild. And plenty of good arguments that the first two categories are often using various terrible scientific techniques.
And you're simplifying the issue massively. As has been mentioned here and there, congratulations on being part of the Union, they get to follow the same rules as the rest of us. Equality for all citizens means that the "white lazy fat ass"es can't be punished for being white. We're talking about the consistency of the policies-- if the species is doing that whole "brink of extinction" thing, it may behoove us to ban its hunting. Also, whales are some of the most intelligent species on Earth-- they're quite arguably sentient. They have true communication and sentient emotions.
So let's look at the arguments
"they've always done this"
That is irrelevant. If hunting the animal is outlawed for ecological reasons, it makes no sense to allow exceptions.
"they're subsistence hunter/gatherers, and need the food"
Ignores external factors. The introduction of antiseptics (soap) and medicines has greatly improved and lengthened the human lifespan. It thus causes certain problems when the biosphere cannot support the additional population. Restricted, sustainable ecological practices are a cost of such benefits.
"cultural reasons"
Similar to the first argument. Nobody seems to be defending it here, but it is still upheld by Japan. They hunt whales in complete defiance of international agreements.
Human industry has had to change many times with developments in civilization. It's not just the music industry, kids-- remember the whole owning slave thing? It took a bit of work to pry that from those who economically benefitted from the exploitation of another race. Sometimes progress has a cost, and we have to decide if we want to pay it, and allowing exceptions is unreasonable.
I do believe you are quite mistaken. There may be some trickiness here I'm not aware of-- as the Anglican church has odd interactions with the government of England, I am not entirely sure what additional protections, rights, or even limitations it has garnered. However, you are painting the church with the brush of general private property rights. So let's look at the church and what rights it should have as private property.
The church as it stands today appears to have been started in the 1300's, with many additions over the intervening hundreds of years. The portions in question most likely were built by the 1500's, though they could have been later. (The Wikipedia entry isn't entirely illuminating.) So, the church has had control over the property of the church for quite a long time. Thus, if you were to criminally trespass into the church, their rights of private property would protect them. However, this appears to be a case of intellectual property rights. These are entirely different. Copyright didn't even work its way into English law until the early 1700's. Thus, even if there is some kind of extra-special perpetual copyright granted to the church's current endeavors, the fundamental structure of the building has been around for too long to call dibs on its appearance. Note also that they had to specifically cite the interior, rather than exterior, appearance, as public exteriors are pretty hard to keep in exclusivity.
Also, given the context of "ruined city" that the game is shooting for, I would have to guess that it most likely has not directly copied any current copyrightable works remaining in the church that may be protected. Thus, I see no reason for the claim. Now, as for the politeness, I can't really understand that, either. They are not portraying the church as an entity, only as a physical location. As another poster mentioned, the building has been a symbol of the area, and creating a convincing environment would basically require using a reasonbly close facsimilie. Now, if the game were using Anglican church as an entity in the game, I could see the argument about being polite (even if it didn't step on some kind of trademark issue). As other posters have mentioned, popular landmarks have been used in games and other media continuously. Did Independence Day have to get permission for every famous building it showed getting blown up? I would certainly hope not. They simply used those edifices as the well-accepted symbols of the cities being shown.
I think it's more important that it only runs on Windows, not less. It puts yet more pressure on the cross-platform and Linux developers to measure up.
Pretty much every tool I use would run the same or better on Linux, minus the gaming habit, except Trillian. It has all the all the features I use and a small and clean UI. Not to mention the multi-megabyte chat logs covering over a half-decade I have that would need to be cleanly imported to any replacement. It is emblematic of exactly the kind of small, nagging problem of rolling over to Linux gives. Oh, and when an IM client can run on 90+% of desktops, I think it can be reasonably counted as a "serious contender."
Does anybody know if there's been decent progress towards getting Trillian to run better under WINE? That would be a good stopgap, being just annoying enough to keep running to keep interest in Linux native replacements.
I am also not a lawyer, but I think I know an answer to you question.
Note how Microsoft claims that it knows of certain patents that have been violated. That means they know which patents are violated by whom. If they make no good faith effort to notify the violators (as you noted, large gaps of time between notification and lawsuit are accepted), they manage to cast aspersions on their open source competitors. The defense is then that Microsoft is intentionally waiting to even send out the notices to provide tortious interference. That is, they are intentionally allowing the patent violators to continue ignorant of the claimed violations in order to gain market share. That Microsoft doesn't plan on sueing is basically irrelevant to the tortious interference (in fact, it significantly helps that claim).
In fact, this may be the best way to finally pin down Microsoft for their FUD tactics. Most of the time it's just shady, but by invoking patent protections they may have finally made it a legally actionable offense.
I love how the whole context of the comment has been lost. This chain of comments gives the perfect example.
First off, it's cute, using the statistics only for America. How about we re-run those numbers on a global market? Custom-designing your game to appeal much more to a narrower demographic is always going to give you more spectacular results. Try this one instead*:
http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php
Note how the Halos now have their asses kicked. Sure, they're still big sellers... but note how *most* of the games coming before Halo 2 are Miyamoto games. (this is where I'm getting back to the point)
What Miyamoto's saying is that by concentrating on making really awesome, original games he keeps pumping out great games. Sure, he has the skill to make Yet Another Game, but so does every other game developer out there with two and a half brain cells to rub together. The top of the line pop studios (id, Bungie, etc.) do have better success rates, but they still have to compete with other plain-jane studios. He's saying that he's not aiming for the cheeseburger market. Sure, it provides a big hit or two... but note how most of the big hits are those revolutionary games. Even on a strictly numerical game, he's winning hands-down. Why don't more studios do that? They can't or they won't. He never actually insulted Halo-- only that Bungie was pursuing a saturated market.
(*Also, how did Metroid Prime only ship 120K units in Japan? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. How accurate are these numbers?)
Why can't he just kick them in the pants with an FOIA*? Just because it's been contracted out doesn't exempt them from those rules, AFAIK. Unless the material has some secrecy about it, it's free for him to request. Their claims of lack of procedure means nothing in the face of the proper paperwork. It basically turns it from "you don't have a process for that" into "you will have a process for that because the federal government mandates it." Sure, it's an unnecessary inconvenience, but that's what bureaucracy is all about. One should expect nothing less when interacting with any governmental body, no matter how small the task.
*For the uninitiated, the Freedom Of Information Act allows you to formally request documents from any arm of the government. They must comply or give a really shiny excuse, like confidentiality, national security, etc.