> I'm confused when you say "none of your postdictions was true." What Marlin wrote is an accurate statement of what happened.
Really, this happened?:
>> the PC and its BIOS. Only IBM would be making them to this day and they'd cost $5000 for a base model. >> Only major corporations and well heeled geeks would own them. >> The Internet would likely still be Darpanet go on
I'm pretty sure you can get a PC from Walmart for under $300, and that we're using the internet right now. So no, what he said did not happen.
IBM had a number of patents on the BIOS, such as the way it loaded BIOS modules from adapter cards. Compaq and some other manufacturers found a different way of accomplishing the task in order to steer around the patents. Other manufacturers used IBM's BIOS and paid for it.
Your prediction might have been reasonable in 1972. Now, we know what did happen. IBM did in fact get over 50,000 patents, making them one of the top patent holders in the world. Yet, none of your postdictions was true.
Most certainly the patent office needs to train their examiners better in applying the law to the types of inventions they see today (and non-inventions). For example, the law says that a mechanism can be patented. It doesn't say that the result of that mechanism can be patented. It says it must be a new invention. As this case made clear, an old invention being done on a computer doesn't magically become a new invention. It's still an old invention. USPTO needs to train their people on that. Still, many of IBM's 50,000 patents are for new ways of doing things that happened to be done in software. Manufacturers of competing systems had to find new ways of doing those things, or license the patents.
It's not speculation at all, I pretty much quoted the discussion that led to the fork. I just added a very brief explanation of the terms ABI and API.
> and I look at any attempt at embracing or forking
It appears that you refused to look at it at all, preferring to apply your preconceived conclusion without bothering to take 60 to read what is happening and why.
If you were an alien reading our newspaper headlines, you'd see that the bulk of headlines are about people who make several million dollars per year. Based on bulk of the stories mentioning physical feats or physical attributes, you'd think most of us throw a football 65 yards and run a mile in 80 seconds. These things make the news precisely because they are UNUSUAL. If you look at news stories about patents, you'll read about the most unusual ones. The normal ones aren't newsworthy.
- why? they are just using tools (i.e. a milling machine) and building a machine / mechanism to lift people to higher floors safely.
If they build a new, and useful way of getting something done, in a way that nobody would have thought of, those are they key requirements for a patent.
> you are using already existing ingredients.
Gears, levers, shafts and cams already exist, and have for many years. If you build a new, useful idea out of these existing parts, that's patentable (if it's non-obvious).
LibreSSL maintains API and ABI compatibility with OpenSSL, so you can upgrade your encryption without rewriting all of your applications. That's one reason that people in general use LibreSSL rather than something completely different. Also, it's on its way to becoming the most thoroughly audited SSL/TLS library in the world.
Google doesn't mind recompiling their software, so they need only API compatibility, not ABI compatibility.
"Largest consumer" means they buy more than ANYONE else, not more than EVERYONE else.
Does the world's largest man account for over half the weight of all humans? No, he's bigger than any other man, not bigger than all other men put together. A lot of people buy Android phones. Can you name a consumer who buys more than the US government.
> Why not just help the OpenSSL folks strengthen an already great product and assist in regression testing and validation as well?
OpenSSL can't do alot of things they'd like to do because it would break binary compatibility with the old ABI. There are also a number of improvements that would change the API. OpenSSL has committed to sticking with not only the old API, but the old ABI, so you an old program can use the new openssl without even recompiling.
Google isn't restricted by those two things because they recompile Android daily or weekly anyway. Therefore, there's no reason they wouldn't make improvements that change the binary interface. They'd be forgoing significant improvements just for the sake of us the same bad abi that someone designed many years ago, which has no benefit in their products.
They can still send over improvements that they devfolks In some cases, it will be up to the OpenSSL folks to decide if they want to contort the new improvements to fit in the legacy ABI or API.
Agreed, that was a bad change. I think we should go back to requiring a specific description of the implementation, either engineering drawings or the equalivent. Shelf space is no longer an issue since a 3TB drive could hold at least a million such patents in pdf or other format. A broom closet with a storage server in it would be sufficient to hold all US patents.
I somewhat disagree that copyright covers a mechanism. Copyright covers a specific DESCRIPTION of a mechanism, but not the mechanism itself. Gears and levers are one way of performing multiplication. Software code is another way of doing the same thing. Realizing that a gear is a piece that does multiplication, a button is input, and a light bulb or flag is output, you can compile any mechanism to either hardware or software. The nature of the mechanism exists apart from any particular description of it or compilation of it. It's the mechanism that should be patentable, and that's true even though it means we have to provide patent examiners with training in how to recognize a mechanism vs a material (wooden lever vs multiply the force) or a goal.
Certainly no one should be granted a patent on "make files smaller", that would be a patent on the goal rather than the mechanism. A certain method of compression may certainly be new, useful, an non-obvious. However, given a file compressed in a certain way, the mechanism to uncompress it is probably obvious to one skilled in the art. Therefore, decompression is not patentable under current law, because you anything obvious to one skilled in the art is not patentable.
Of course, the patent office sometimes messes up and issues patents on things that are not patentable under established law. They need to do a better job. Perhaps someone could come up with a system to encourage people knowledgeable about a subject to assist by pointing out these problems, crowdsourcing in a way. Maybe something like a bounty - if you're the first to file a valid reason a patent application is patentable under law, you get half of the filing fee. I'm sure something that simple wouldn't quite work, but maybe something along those lines.
> You can patent an elevator because it isn't obvious. You cannot patent a spring because it is. > Everything in mathematics is ultimately obvious.
The number of unsolved problems in mathematics demonstrates how very false that is. For thousands of years, thousands of people have been trying to come up with an efficient way to find the square root of a large number. Despite a few million man-hour hours being devoted to the problem, the method has not yet been found. Therefore, it is decidedly not obvious.
Like square root, people not only haven't been able to find solutions to the halting problem, they have't even been able to figure out if there IS a solution. We can't figure out if there is a method, much less find it. Certainly the solution isn't obvious.
> You can patent an elevator because you invented it. Nothing in mathematics is invented, only discovered. (You cannot patent Antarctica, either.)
Someone discovered that if you attach a pump to a hose, then to a hydraulic cylinder and... you end up with a mechanism that will usefully lift people. That was true before it was discovered. Someone discovered if you count the number of web pages, and count the number of links on each web page... you end up with a mechanism that will usefully find high quality web pages.
There's no qualitative difference between the two. "If you put this mechanism together and operate it in this way, it will do this thing" is true whether the mechanism is made of wood, iron, or electrons.
The law is is that you can't patent the laws of nature, you can patent using them in a particular way o accomplish a particular useful thing. I happen to think that's about right. We just need to follow that law, to not grant a patent unless it's new, non-obvious, and useful.
The law is that to be patentable, it must be a new, non-obvious invention. Snow shoes are not new. "Snow shoes for the moon", if somehow new, would probably be obvious under your scenario.
Most certainly the goal or result "a way to walk on the moon" isn't supposed to be patentable, which is what this thread is about.
> in Southern states where peak demand is during daylight hours.
Specifically, 11AM-2PM. Human eyes see brightness log(n), so we don't realize that the sunshine is a hundred times brighter at some times than at others. It would suck if noon appeared to be a hundred times as bright as morning, so our eyes compress the difference. Solar panels DO notice that, and don't produce much at all during what we call daylight 7AM-10AM and 3PM-8PM. Same with cloudy days. What looks to be a little bit less bright is actually FAR less energy.
So what you end up with is "southern states, for a few hours per day while everyone is at work, on sunny days". Peak usage in most cases when people get home from work, turn on the TV and start cooking dinner. At that time, there's no solar available. Also in the morning when everyone is rushing around blow-drying their hair, microwaving breakfast, etc. Solar is AWESOME in theory, at first glance. Beyond that first glance, looking at the details, it starts to look like we've wasted a few billion dollars that could have saved about 200 million hungry people.
Certainly those types of patents are bad, and potentially invalid. The scenario you described, where someone attempts to patent result rather than the mechanism is invalid and should be held invalid. Note that this is true whether the mechanism uses gears to perform multiplication or transistors. That problem is completely separate from and unrelated to software or math. It's a bad patent because there's no invention, just a goal or result.
I don't know that anyone has done an analysis to see whether or not more invalid "result" patents have been issued for bit-based "inventions" than molecule-based inventions. Whether the mechanism is made of wood or of bits, I know patents that are too broad have been issued in both.
Of course it's conceivable that some patent examiners could have had trouble distinguishing between the result of a software mechanism (find quality web pages) and a particular mechanism for doing so (PageRank). "High quality" web pages could be determined by any number of mechanisms and PageRank is just one of many different mechanisms that might be invented.
The judgement reflects current law. The article uses the weasel word "if" to continue to promote the anti-patent lobby's favorite lie:
"If a sequence of conventional mathematical operations isn't patentable,
Okay, if, but the first half is false. The idea that inventions based on math is simply a falsehood detained to confuse those who a) don't know any better and are too busy or two lazy to read the couple of paragraphs that is the actual law.
The law says what isn't patentable is "the laws of nature, including the laws of mathematics".
That laws of physics aren't patentable. Does that mean that any invention based on the laws of physics is unpatentable? Obviously not. An elevator is an application of the laws of physics. You can patent an elevator design. You can't patent gravity. PageRank is an invention that is an application of the laws of mathematics. You can patent PageRank. You can't patent the associative law of addition.
That's the law. Some people want to change the law, and that's fine. Current law is that you can't patent the fundamental natural laws of a science, and can patent an invention which makes use of the science.
> the IPMI interface is configured with a non-public IP address... so while this is some sloppy-ass stuff on Supermicro's part, I am personally not that concerned.
In my case, those non-public IPs are part of a management network that is only accessible via a VPN. So we're safe UNLESS the VPN endpoint happens to have a flaw, or someone mistakenly plugs one of the management interfaces into the internet, not realizing that the "security" on the interface doesn't actually work.
> there has been a huge reduction in government employees [census.gov]
Your link says: > Looking back to the previous census, the number of full-time equivalent state and local government employees decreased 1.3 percent from the 2007 Census of Governments to 16.2 million in the 2012 Census of Governments.
A decrease of 1.3%. Wow, that's huge. Over the same period of time, the unemployment rate jumped from 4.6% to 8.1%. In the private sector, 4% of people lost their jobs. That's THREE times as many as the 1.3% in government. So over that time period, government's share of employment INCREASED - a higher percentage of jobs were government jobs in 2012 then were in 2007.
So, you look at an increase and call it a "huge decrease". You then come to conclusions that make just as much sense.
I work for a government agency that gets awards for efficiency. We're one of the most efficient government agencies in the country. I've never seen a private business nearly as inefficient as this agency, though I'm sure there are some. That's not a bad thing, though, democracy isn't SUPPOSED to be efficient.
The government of North Korea is efficient. Lil Kim issues an order and it's done. If you get in the way, he can just kill you, no problem. That's not the American way. The US government is supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be accountable. The US government respects the religious, racial, other sexual identity traditions of it's employees and citizens. We're make sure that we are fair to the transgender community. Do you think North Korea's government employees have annual sensitivity training? Our way of government is not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to respect the rights and opinions of each individual. We have public hearings, approval processes that sometimes take years. That's so that members of the public can come and voice their opinion. That's good. Criminal cases can spend years to make it through various levels of hearings and appeals to ensure fairness. That's not efficient - it's not supposed to be.
Don't ask for efficient government. Efficient government would spend a few minutes to convict you of a felony. Ask for fair and open government. That also means that when you do want efficiency, don't look to the government for that. They are set up for fairness, for democracy, not for efficiency. Efficient government would run like an efficient business - where the boss is the boss and what the boss says goes. You don't have 435 people argue about each decision if you want efficiency.
I guess you stopped paying attention to this story quite a while ago, which is understandable. They only made that argument for a week or two. They have since admitted wrong-doing, first blaming it on a field office, but later documents showed to orders came from Washington. I don't recall the EXACT numbers offhand, but something like 342 conservative groups were targeted and 4 liberal groups ended up being sent over in the stack. It has now been shown conclusively that the order was to target conservative and libertarian groups. The question now is who gave the order. Nobody active in politics on the left brings up the few liberal groups who got mixed in the the conservatives and libertarians anymore - they know that's not just a losing argument, but one that makes them look like liars when the numbers are mentioned.
There is a similarity, and also a very, very important difference. What you normally see in the US is that the politicians take money from the people, then "buy votes" through spending the people's own money. Obama doesn't buy Obama phones" and give them away - you pay for those. He didn't withdraw several billion from his bank account and give it to his campaign bundlers who own solar companies. He had you and I withdraw billions from OUR bank accounts to give to his top supporters.
The current American system is about taking from one group and "giving" what's taken to another group. The native system I referred to is about the potential leader giving away his own possessions. It's about both generosity and competence, effectiveness. A guy who spent the year trying to grow rice in the dry earth will have nothing to give away. The guy who planted a variety of beans,maize, etc will have some grow well and have bags of food to give away. This is good for the community, that fools do not become leaders. Those who make effective decisions get and keep leadership positions, since the requirement for getting the position is that you effectively manage your resources to produce the maximum amount of goods to give out. The US system has no such constraint - politicians can be wasteful and ineffective. When they waste resources, they just take more from the taxpayers.
Last time I looked, the civil service act only had a few sentences on the topic. It says you can't require federal employees to make political donations. You can still fire them for any other reason, or for no reason at all without violating the act. Of course other legislation says you can't hire and fire based on race or religion, etc.
That would be good for everyone but Comcast. With high speed fiber for free, there's little reason not to dump cable switch to Hulu, Amazon, or Netflix. If Comcast wanted to guarantee that they lost the entire Portland market, they could raise prices, rather than reducing prices as has happened elsewhere in similar situations.
Slashdot Mirror
Your nick indicates your favorite drinky is something other than sugared soda. Two Slashdotters one cup?
A few billion for Sun Microsystems, a few billion for Micros System. I just renamed my company Micro System. Hello, Oracle? Anyone there?
Yes indeed. People will SAY that advertising doesn't affect them. Then they immediately put on their Nike shoes to head to McDonald's for a Coke.
Coke isn't a billion times tastier than Joe's cola. It sells a billion times as much because it's been advertised a billion times as much.
> I'm confused when you say "none of your postdictions was true." What Marlin wrote is an accurate statement of what happened.
Really, this happened?:
>> the PC and its BIOS. Only IBM would be making them to this day and they'd cost $5000 for a base model.
>> Only major corporations and well heeled geeks would own them.
>> The Internet would likely still be Darpanet go on
I'm pretty sure you can get a PC from Walmart for under $300, and that we're using the internet right now. So no, what he said did not happen.
IBM had a number of patents on the BIOS, such as the way it loaded BIOS modules from adapter cards. Compaq and some other manufacturers found a different way of accomplishing the task in order to steer around the patents. Other manufacturers used IBM's BIOS and paid for it.
Your prediction might have been reasonable in 1972. Now, we know what did happen. IBM did in fact get over 50,000 patents, making them one of the top patent holders in the world. Yet, none of your postdictions was true.
Most certainly the patent office needs to train their examiners better in applying the law to the types of inventions they see today (and non-inventions). For example, the law says that a mechanism can be patented. It doesn't say that the result of that mechanism can be patented. It says it must be a new invention. As this case made clear, an old invention being done on a computer doesn't magically become a new invention. It's still an old invention. USPTO needs to train their people on that. Still, many of IBM's 50,000 patents are for new ways of doing things that happened to be done in software. Manufacturers of competing systems had to find new ways of doing those things, or license the patents.
It's not speculation at all, I pretty much quoted the discussion that led to the fork. I just added a very brief explanation of the terms ABI and API.
> and I look at any attempt at embracing or forking
It appears that you refused to look at it at all, preferring to apply your preconceived conclusion without bothering to take 60 to read what is happening and why.
> the bulk of the patents out there
If you were an alien reading our newspaper headlines, you'd see that the bulk of headlines are about people who make several million dollars per year. Based on bulk of the stories mentioning physical feats or physical attributes, you'd think most of us throw a football 65 yards and run a mile in 80 seconds. These things make the news precisely because they are UNUSUAL. If you look at news stories about patents, you'll read about the most unusual ones. The normal ones aren't newsworthy.
- why? they are just using tools (i.e. a milling machine) and building a machine / mechanism to lift people to higher floors safely.
If they build a new, and useful way of getting something done, in a way that nobody would have thought of, those are they key requirements for a patent.
> you are using already existing ingredients.
Gears, levers, shafts and cams already exist, and have for many years. If you build a new, useful idea out of these existing parts, that's patentable (if it's non-obvious).
LibreSSL maintains API and ABI compatibility with OpenSSL, so you can upgrade your encryption without rewriting all of your applications. That's one reason that people in general use LibreSSL rather than something completely different. Also, it's on its way to becoming the most thoroughly audited SSL/TLS library in the world.
Google doesn't mind recompiling their software, so they need only API compatibility, not ABI compatibility.
"Largest consumer" means they buy more than ANYONE else, not more than EVERYONE else.
Does the world's largest man account for over half the weight of all humans? No, he's bigger than any other man, not bigger than all other men put together. A lot of people buy Android phones. Can you name a consumer who buys more than the US government.
> Why not just help the OpenSSL folks strengthen an already great product and assist in regression testing and validation as well?
OpenSSL can't do alot of things they'd like to do because it would break binary compatibility with the old ABI. There are also a number of improvements that would change the API. OpenSSL has committed to sticking with not only the old API, but the old ABI, so you an old program can use the new openssl without even recompiling.
Google isn't restricted by those two things because they recompile Android daily or weekly anyway. Therefore, there's no reason they wouldn't make improvements that change the binary interface. They'd be forgoing significant improvements just for the sake of us the same bad abi that someone designed many years ago, which has no benefit in their products.
They can still send over improvements that they devfolks In some cases, it will be up to the OpenSSL folks to decide if they want to contort the new improvements to fit in the legacy ABI or API.
Agreed, that was a bad change. I think we should go back to requiring a specific description of the implementation, either engineering drawings or the equalivent. Shelf space is no longer an issue since a 3TB drive could hold at least a million such patents in pdf or other format. A broom closet with a storage server in it would be sufficient to hold all US patents.
I somewhat disagree that copyright covers a mechanism. Copyright covers a specific DESCRIPTION of a mechanism, but not the mechanism itself. Gears and levers are one way of performing multiplication. Software code is another way of doing the same thing. Realizing that a gear is a piece that does multiplication, a button is input, and a light bulb or flag is output, you can compile any mechanism to either hardware or software. The nature of the mechanism exists apart from any particular description of it or compilation of it. It's the mechanism that should be patentable, and that's true even though it means we have to provide patent examiners with training in how to recognize a mechanism vs a material (wooden lever vs multiply the force) or a goal.
Certainly no one should be granted a patent on "make files smaller", that would be a patent on the goal rather than the mechanism. A certain method of compression may certainly be new, useful, an non-obvious. However, given a file compressed in a certain way, the mechanism to uncompress it is probably obvious to one skilled in the art. Therefore, decompression is not patentable under current law, because you anything obvious to one skilled in the art is not patentable.
Of course, the patent office sometimes messes up and issues patents on things that are not patentable under established law. They need to do a better job. Perhaps someone could come up with a system to encourage people knowledgeable about a subject to assist by pointing out these problems, crowdsourcing in a way. Maybe something like a bounty - if you're the first to file a valid reason a patent application is patentable under law, you get half of the filing fee. I'm sure something that simple wouldn't quite work, but maybe something along those lines.
> How many patents have flooded the system that are nothing more than column and row name descriptions with simplest data base functions applied.
I'll bite. Is the answer zero? One?
> You can patent an elevator because it isn't obvious. You cannot patent a spring because it is.
> Everything in mathematics is ultimately obvious.
The number of unsolved problems in mathematics demonstrates how very false that is. For thousands of years, thousands of people have been trying to come up with an efficient way to find the square root of a large number. Despite a few million man-hour hours being devoted to the problem, the method has not yet been found. Therefore, it is decidedly not obvious.
Like square root, people not only haven't been able to find solutions to the halting problem, they have't even been able to figure out if there IS a solution. We can't figure out if there is a method, much less find it. Certainly the solution isn't obvious.
> You can patent an elevator because you invented it. Nothing in mathematics is invented, only discovered. (You cannot patent Antarctica, either.)
Someone discovered that if you attach a pump to a hose, then to a hydraulic cylinder and ... you end up with a mechanism that will usefully lift people. That was true before it was discovered. ... you end up with a mechanism that will usefully find high quality web pages.
Someone discovered if you count the number of web pages, and count the number of links on each web page
There's no qualitative difference between the two. "If you put this mechanism together and operate it in this way, it will do this thing" is true whether the mechanism is made of wood, iron, or electrons.
The law is is that you can't patent the laws of nature, you can patent using them in a particular way o accomplish a particular useful thing. I happen to think that's about right. We just need to follow that law, to not grant a patent unless it's new, non-obvious, and useful.
The law is that to be patentable, it must be a new, non-obvious invention. Snow shoes are not new. "Snow shoes for the moon", if somehow new, would probably be obvious under your scenario.
Most certainly the goal or result "a way to walk on the moon" isn't supposed to be patentable, which is what this thread is about.
> in Southern states where peak demand is during daylight hours.
Specifically, 11AM-2PM. Human eyes see brightness log(n), so we don't realize that the sunshine is a hundred times brighter at some times than at others. It would suck if noon appeared to be a hundred times as bright as morning, so our eyes compress the difference. Solar panels DO notice that, and don't produce much at all during what we call daylight 7AM-10AM and 3PM-8PM. Same with cloudy days. What looks to be a little bit less bright is actually FAR less energy.
So what you end up with is "southern states, for a few hours per day while everyone is at work, on sunny days". Peak usage in most cases when people get home from work, turn on the TV and start cooking dinner. At that time, there's no solar available. Also in the morning when everyone is rushing around blow-drying their hair, microwaving breakfast, etc. Solar is AWESOME in theory, at first glance. Beyond that first glance, looking at the details, it starts to look like we've wasted a few billion dollars that could have saved about 200 million hungry people.
Certainly those types of patents are bad, and potentially invalid. The scenario you described, where someone attempts to patent result rather than the mechanism is invalid and should be held invalid. Note that this is true whether the mechanism uses gears to perform multiplication or transistors. That problem is completely separate from and unrelated to software or math. It's a bad patent because there's no invention, just a goal or result.
I don't know that anyone has done an analysis to see whether or not more invalid "result" patents have been issued for bit-based "inventions" than molecule-based inventions. Whether the mechanism is made of wood or of bits, I know patents that are too broad have been issued in both.
Of course it's conceivable that some patent examiners could have had trouble distinguishing between the result of a software mechanism (find quality web pages) and a particular mechanism for doing so (PageRank). "High quality" web pages could be determined by any number of mechanisms and PageRank is just one of many different mechanisms that might be invented.
The judgement reflects current law. The article uses the weasel word "if" to continue to promote the anti-patent lobby's favorite lie:
"If a sequence of conventional mathematical operations isn't patentable,
Okay, if, but the first half is false. The idea that inventions based on math is simply a falsehood detained to confuse those who a) don't know any better and are too busy or two lazy to read the couple of paragraphs that is the actual law.
The law says what isn't patentable is "the laws of nature, including the laws of mathematics".
That laws of physics aren't patentable. Does that mean that any invention based on the laws of physics is unpatentable? Obviously not. An elevator is an application of the laws of physics. You can patent an elevator design. You can't patent gravity. PageRank is an invention that is an application of the laws of mathematics. You can patent PageRank. You can't patent the associative law of addition.
That's the law. Some people want to change the law, and that's fine. Current law is that you can't patent the fundamental natural laws of a science, and can patent an invention which makes use of the science.
> the IPMI interface is configured with a non-public IP address ... so while this is some sloppy-ass stuff on Supermicro's part, I am personally not that concerned.
In my case, those non-public IPs are part of a management network that is only accessible via a VPN. So we're safe UNLESS the VPN endpoint happens to have a flaw, or someone mistakenly plugs one of the management interfaces into the internet, not realizing that the "security" on the interface doesn't actually work.
> there has been a huge reduction in government employees [census.gov]
Your link says:
> Looking back to the previous census, the number of full-time equivalent state and local government employees decreased 1.3 percent from the 2007 Census of Governments to 16.2 million in the 2012 Census of Governments.
A decrease of 1.3%. Wow, that's huge. Over the same period of time, the unemployment rate jumped from 4.6% to 8.1%. In the private sector, 4% of people lost their jobs. That's THREE times as many as the 1.3% in government. So over that time period, government's share of employment INCREASED - a higher percentage of jobs were government jobs in 2012 then were in 2007.
So, you look at an increase and call it a "huge decrease". You then come to conclusions that make just as much sense.
I work for a government agency that gets awards for efficiency. We're one of the most efficient government agencies in the country. I've never seen a private business nearly as inefficient as this agency, though I'm sure there are some. That's not a bad thing, though, democracy isn't SUPPOSED to be efficient.
The government of North Korea is efficient. Lil Kim issues an order and it's done. If you get in the way, he can just kill you, no problem. That's not the American way. The US government is supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be accountable. The US government respects the religious, racial, other sexual identity traditions of it's employees and citizens. We're make sure that we are fair to the transgender community. Do you think North Korea's government employees have annual sensitivity training? Our way of government is not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to respect the rights and opinions of each individual. We have public hearings, approval processes that sometimes take years. That's so that members of the public can come and voice their opinion. That's good. Criminal cases can spend years to make it through various levels of hearings and appeals to ensure fairness. That's not efficient - it's not supposed to be.
Don't ask for efficient government. Efficient government would spend a few minutes to convict you of a felony. Ask for fair and open government. That also means that when you do want efficiency, don't look to the government for that. They are set up for fairness, for democracy, not for efficiency. Efficient government would run like an efficient business - where the boss is the boss and what the boss says goes. You don't have 435 people argue about each decision if you want efficiency.
I guess you stopped paying attention to this story quite a while ago, which is understandable. They only made that argument for a week or two. They have since admitted wrong-doing, first blaming it on a field office, but later documents showed to orders came from Washington. I don't recall the EXACT numbers offhand, but something like 342 conservative groups were targeted and 4 liberal groups ended up being sent over in the stack. It has now been shown conclusively that the order was to target conservative and libertarian groups. The question now is who gave the order. Nobody active in politics on the left brings up the few liberal groups who got mixed in the the conservatives and libertarians anymore - they know that's not just a losing argument, but one that makes them look like liars when the numbers are mentioned.
There is a similarity, and also a very, very important difference. What you normally see in the US is that the politicians take money from the people, then "buy votes" through spending the people's own money. Obama doesn't buy Obama phones" and give them away - you pay for those. He didn't withdraw several billion from his bank account and give it to his campaign bundlers who own solar companies. He had you and I withdraw billions from OUR bank accounts to give to his top supporters.
The current American system is about taking from one group and "giving" what's taken to another group. The native system I referred to is about the potential leader giving away his own possessions. It's about both generosity and competence, effectiveness. A guy who spent the year trying to grow rice in the dry earth will have nothing to give away. The guy who planted a variety of beans,maize, etc will have some grow well and have bags of food to give away. This is good for the community, that fools do not become leaders. Those who make effective decisions get and keep leadership positions, since the requirement for getting the position is that you effectively manage your resources to produce the maximum amount of goods to give out. The US system has no such constraint - politicians can be wasteful and ineffective. When they waste resources, they just take more from the taxpayers.
Last time I looked, the civil service act only had a few sentences on the topic. It says you can't require federal employees to make political donations. You can still fire them for any other reason, or for no reason at all without violating the act. Of course other legislation says you can't hire and fire based on race or religion, etc.
That would be good for everyone but Comcast. With high speed fiber for free, there's little reason not to dump cable switch to Hulu, Amazon, or Netflix. If Comcast wanted to guarantee that they lost the entire Portland market, they could raise prices, rather than reducing prices as has happened elsewhere in similar situations.