Both parties are run by crooks and idiots. I don't appreciate your attempt to co-opt my post to make it seem like it favors one of the factions of the republicrat party over the other.
Should we all be forced to pay the higher prices for products produced in America due to the higher price of labor? What's the point of making $80,000 instead of $40,000, if everything costs twice as much?
Shouldn't there be a financial reward to living in a place with lower cost of living, especially given the fact that in our modern economy, a lot of what is produced is just information?
As an american, you can move to china or india and work for an american company, and benefit from a lower cost of living as well. One of my friends is in china doing that right now.
So we need inflated salaries to pay for our inflated tuitions/student debts? Makes sense...
I'm all for a robust global economy were all workers can earn a living in dignity, but not at the cost of losing the American middle class.
I imagine this looks to people from the 3rd world as "I don't mind helping poor people as long as I can remain in a privileged class of people whose only merit for being there is being born in the right place"
If you think rich people are gaming the system, fine. Fine, lets try to stop all the loopholes that allow it. I don't think artificially inflating the price of labor in the US is neither fair nor helpful to the people that actually pay for that labor (i.e. us).
Let's say that my salary drops in half because the labor market is flooded with people, but at the same time, costs of goods and services also drop in half because the price of labor is so cheap. What's the difference?
By this same token, importing all these people into the labor market also creates market demand for goods and services, raising the price of labor.
We could, in addition to importing foreign workers, also import foreign CEOs that do the same job for less money, and now no one has an inflated salary compared to anyone else.
First, because of the way the patent act is written - it says that if a patent application can't be shown to be obvious, then it will be issued. That makes sense logically, because proving that something is nonobvious after having disclosed it is going to be nigh-difficult if not impossible. What are you going to do, wipe everyone's memory and then quiz them?
I am making a normative claim (i.e. "this is how we should do it") rather than a descriptive claim (i.e. "this is how we do it now").
I am saying that a world where things are assumed to be obvious until proven non-obvious is a better world than one where things are assumed to be obvious until proven non-obvious. You so proving non-obviousness is next to impossible (I disagree), but just out of curiosity, how might one prove obviousness in your view? It seems to me to be at least equally difficult.
Second, even disregarding that, I've already met the burden of proof - I provided evidence in the form of "you admitted this is valuable" and "this didn't exist". Together, that indicates it was probably not obvious, or someone would have done it. It's your turn to rebut it, with evidence, not just saying "it's clearly obvious".
I am saying that I don't find this evidence convincing. What if an invention was both obvious and non-valuable, and the reason it was never invented was because it was non-valuable. Then all of a sudden this invention becomes valuable and it is quickly invented. Does it really make sense to assume it is non-obvious simply because it was just invented?
At a deeper level I have a fundamental problem with your logic. You say that if something were obvious it would have already been invented by someone. How can something *not* be "already invented by someone"? Whether something was invented by someone, going to be invented by someone, or never going to be invented, it could never be considered obvious because it didn't exist before it was invented.
However, once you can buy a Ferrari and take it apart, it's pretty easy to copy with a machine shop and some skilled workers. And since we're not talking about the engine, but the UI, it's even easier to make a body case of a Ferrari and build a fiberglass look-alike. I'd give a Hollywood special effects shop a week, tops.
Right and this would be a pretty thin copy. It would certainly not be a functional copy of a Ferrari, because copying Ferrari's is hard. If you actually did a functional copy it would probably be even more expensive than what a real one costs because you don't have all the machines that make it efficient for Ferrari to mass produce them.
Similarly, I'd give a team of Russian hackers a week or two to reverse engineer any UI you build, even if it took you months and months of trial and error and alternate designs to come up with the best one.
Firstly I don't know why you think Russian hackers (as opposed to software engineers trained in UI design) would be good at creating a functional copy of a UI design. Secondly, there is more to a UI than simply what you can see, and that's what makes it hard to copy cheaply. It is precisely because a team of Russian hackers *can't* copy your UI design in a couple weeks, that keeps Apple willing to spend money on their UI.
Maybe Google can copy your UI, but it is not that much harder for them to simply make their own, and they probably will if they think they can do it better.
Yeah, you can cheaply hack together some shit that looks nice until it sucks when you actually try to use it. Why bother? Who is in the market for cheap shitty software that looks nice at first glance?
You're confusing "new" and "nonobvious" - they're actually two different statutes. If something has never been done before, then it's new, by definition. However, if all of the pieces of it had been done separately and they could be readily combined, then it's obv
I'm pointing to the idea of popularity of an invention being nonobvious as an indicator that the idea was also nonobvious.
I don't see why the burden of proof is not on you for this claim.
And as of yet, you have pointed to no indicators as to whether something is obvious.
The indicator I am using is the metric that the invention in question could have been invented even if the patent had not been granted. We can never know this in the absolute sense that we can't change the past and see how it affects the future, but I think reasonable people can agree that a blue and gold polka dot smartphone could be invented even without a patent (i.e. the R&D costs of figuring out how to do it are negligible compared to a phone of any other color)
Tell that to Zynga, or any of the indie designers they've ripped off.
If this were not true, then no one would ever design any games or software seeing as how unprofitable it would be.
On the contrary, it's pretty easy. [youtube.com]
Writing an application that mimics some very small subsection of a much larger UI is not very hard. If this was all there was to Apple's UI, then they *really* don't deserve a patent. This software is an "easy copy" of Apple's UI like how a picture of a Ferrari is an "easy copy" of a real Ferrari. Is it easy to copy a Ferrari? Maybe yes, maybe no, but a picture of a Ferrari is not proof that it is easy (unless you have a very low standard for what counts as a Ferrari).
But they also come up with new aspects, which is why the UIs are evolving. Those new aspects that others copy, because they believe they're the best aspects, must not have been obvious, or they would already have been incorporated - since, as you say, they're acknowledged as the "best".
By this definition of obvious, *nothing* would ever be obvious because for anything, there was a point in time at which it didn't exist.
Not exactly... I'm asserting the claim that if no one has done something yet and it's commercially valuable to do so, then it's likely not obvious. Evidence of that is the fact that if it was obvious, someone would have taken the free money. Because no one has, that implies no one thought of it.
You're disputing this by saying "no, it's plainly obvious." Well, that's a fine conclusion, but where's your evidence?
I think you are confusing the idea of an invention being obvious and the idea of the popularity of an invention being obvious.
I am not saying that it is obvious whether any idea will be popular.
What I am saying is that patents should be granted to incentivize inventors to incur the costs of invention when they would not have otherwise.
Sure, let's go with that - the price of copying software is negligible, while the price of designing it is comparatively huge. In fact, the copying price is so small - a click and drag, in one scenario - that the ratio approaches or exceeds that of pharmaceuticals, where at least you have to make a physical product. So, software should be patentable, and expensive machines may not be patentable, depending on how closely the cost to build them approaches or exceeds the design cost.
The price of copying software verbatim is negligable, which is partly is why selling pirated software is illegal (i.e. copyright infringement). Why would someone go to the trouble of designing software, if someone else can just copy it for no cost and sell it at > $0 and profit.
But this is not what we are talking about. We are talking about copying the design of a piece of software, and incorporating it into your own software in order to sell. The cost of this is not negligible at all. In fact it is probably pretty close to the actual cost of designing it in the first place in many cases.
Go ask someone to recreate IOS or android or windows UI for use in your own product to sell. This cost will not be negligable. Nor can you just drag and drop some files to have that UI magically appear in your own application.
All of these UIs have copied the best aspects (from their point of view) of the others, which is why there is a lot of co-evolution happening among UI design. It is not unprofitable to come up with new UI ideas even with the possibility of being copied, because of the relatively low ratio of R&D costs to the cost of copying.
Kinect came out in Nov. 2010. It seems like you're admitting that it wasn't obvious until at least then, no?
In the same way that it wasn't obvious to have blue and gold polka dot smartphones before the first smartphone was created. However, if one was to suggest the possibility of smartphones before they existed, then I would think that the possibility of them being blue and gold polka dot should be obvious.
Was it? Here's the thing - you already admitted this was valuable. If making a smartphone in gold and blue polka dots meant that your profit would increase and you knew it, wouldn't you do it? Of course you would, you're a smart guy who likes money.
Or, conversely, if making a smartphone in gold and blue polka dots meant that your profit would increase and you didn't know it, then that would explain why you didn't do it.
So, when someone subsequently comes out with a gold and blue polkadot phone and their sales shoot up, you can't very well say "pff, that's obvious, I knew about that all along... I just didn't do it because I hate making money" and expect to be believed.
You seem to be reasserting the claim that something can not be obvious if no one has done it yet. It is this very claim that I am disputing.
While it may not be obvious that people will like a blue and gold polkadot phone, it should be plainly obvious that such a phone could be made and how it could be made, even if no one ever makes one.
Why would you spend hundreds of thousands or millions on UI design to create and test a UI only to have some other company copy it and undercut you? In fact, why would you spend any money on research, if someone can just steal yours freely (and you can steal theirs)?
Ask the people that do it. The fact is that plenty of people spend money on R&D for UI design knowing that it will be copied (assuming it's good), and drug companies are not willing to spend the money on R&D to make drugs without patent protections. Clearly it is still profitable to spend money on most UI design without patents, and it is simply not the case with most drugs.
Look at all the UI design that is created out there without any patent protection (i.e. a lot). Look at all the drugs that are developed without patent protection (i.e. almost none).
If X is the the price of R&D and Y is the price of copying it, we should allow patents on products with a high X:Y ratio.
Is it? If so, why don't we have it already in products?
For the same reason we didn't have smartphones until processors, batteries, screens, etc were at a level to make smartphones possible.
Once we had sensors like the kinect, the necessity for good ui drives the innovation.
Prove it - explain why it was so obvious that people already knew about it, but no one bothered making it.
Something doesn't need to exist for it to be obvious. I can make a smartphone that is some color that no one has ever used to make a smartphone. Should I be able to patent smartphones of a particular RGB value? Or was it obvious that it this was always possible to make a smartphone of any arbitrary color regardless of whether or when anyone actually did it?
Patents only on things that aren't valuable to produce? Why would people buy them? Or are you suggesting that with a patent will also come a mandate forcing the public to buy products they don't want? Please, we don't do that in this c-... well, we don't do that for anything except insurance.
Things that aren't valuable to produce can still be things that people want to buy. Things with extremely high R&D costs (e.g. pharmaceuticals, etc), are not cost effective to produce without patent protection. Why would you spend millions or billions of dollars to create and test a drug only to have some other company copy it and undercut you.
1. I think inventors will try different ways to use gestures regardless, but it will be based on their merits rather than whether they are simply different than the current patented ways.
2. Some money that could have been spend on innovation must now be spent on lawyers to analyze whether their new and different way of using gestures is different enough from the ways that are patented. Innovation would better thrive under an environment that isn't a legal minefield (i.e. one with a higher engineer:lawyer ratio).
I'm not saying this isn't innovation. It is. What I am saying is that it is not the kind of innovation that patents should protect. Patents automatically come with an innovation stifling cost. The way that patents drive innovation is by overcoming this cost by incentivizing innovations that would not have otherwise happened. The way to maximize innovation is to disseminate patents only to those that would not have been invented otherwise.
You'll notice that I was not arguing against patents in general. I was arguing that patents like *this* one do not drive innovation, specifically because "inventions" like this one are so obvious that they would have been invented without the incentive of a monopoly.
The question "is it more valuable to make this than not" drives innovation. Patents drive adding those innovations into the public domain, which eliminates the need for every competitor to waste time reinventing the same thing.
This particular "invention" would already be in the public domain by default had it not been patented because it is obvious.
This "invention" was already more valuable to make than not before the patent, and the right to sue other people on top of that simply makes it even more lucrative for the patent holder and lawyers on both sides, but these profits come as a cost to society with no additional benefit.
I am for granting patents that actually drive innovation (i.e. the ones that turn inventions from being less profitable to make to more).
The whole point of patents is to drive innovation. Being able to patent things like this is clearly not in the spirit of that goal. The question we should be asking is:
If a patent was not granted for this "invention" (i.e. a monopoly for selling this invention not granted), would it still have been invented (i.e. would a company still be willing to perform the R&D necessary to invent this invention without the reward of a monopoly).
It's pretty clear to me that the answer to this question is yes.
If this is the case, then granting a patent (i.e. a monopoly for selling this invention) actually stifles innovation.
Did anyone really think Bill Gates would have the opinion "We can never drink water molecules that used to have poop next to them. That's just gross."
People can be skeptical whether a particular water purification process is adequate, but anyone who thinks water can't be purified is just an idiot and probably also homophobic (i.e. the category of people who are compelled to irrationality regarding things that seem gross to them).
Say what you want about Bill Gates, but he doesn't seem like the type to be idiotically irrational.
Maybe if you are talking about each individual water molecule. But if you take any given glass of water, it no doubt contains water molecules that were part of Napoleon's piss.
There are more water molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the ocean.
I note you didn't touch the point I made about there being no advantage for us to make an AI if we couldn't enslave it with a ten foot pole.
I did respond to this point. I said "What is in it for us that Albert Einstein exists? We didn't need to enslave him to benefit from his intelligence. Certainly cooperation with an AI could definitely be rather productive." We benefit if we enslave other people. We can also benefit if we do not enslave other people. We benefit if we enslave machines, we can also benefit if we do not enslave machines. We can cooperate with other sentient beings for mutual benefit whether they are humans, aliens, or artificial.
Yes in modern times we have family planning but we don't really have children because we choose to. We are homo sapians, our children are homo sapians. They are a unique product of joining a cell from two people but the machine that builds the cell wasn't designed by us and we consciously had no part in the making of the cell. We haven't even successfully reverse engineered it. Pro-creation is more like pushing the button that triggers that nuclear explosion.
That was my point. Starting a sentient being is not the same as designing a sentient being. Starting them is relatively easy compared with designing one, which is why I think we will be able to start one well before we can design one. Starting an artificial sentient being is going to be harder than starting a natural homo sapien (procreating), but they are both easier than designing a sentient being as an end product.
Pro-creation isn't something we really choose to do it is our only known purpose. Einsteins parent's weren't trying to kickstart a being that redefines physics they were trying to survive in the form of a derivative child. Why do we exist? What is our purpose? The only thing we know is that we exist to survive both individually and as a species for as long as possible. To prove we are worthy of continuing to exist by right of succeeding in doing so.
I know many people who choose not to have children (Most of my friends). I know people who go out of their way to have children, even when they are not their biological children (i.e. adopting, egg/sperm donors, etc). Yes there is an evolutionary basis for our urge to procreate, but it does not overpower our higher mental capacities. I know Einsteins parents weren't intentionally trying to redefine physics, that's why I used that example. It is an example of taking actions that result in benefits without knowing how to actually achieve those benefits. By the same token we will probably create an AI without actually knowing how AI (or even just regular I) works.
In the case of an AI there would be no two existing parents combining existing biological machinery to combine and spawn a new instance of the same machine. The seed would be something new.
So what?
It has no purpose but whatever purpose we assign to it. Why does it exist? We can answer this question definitively, it is exists because we made it. What is it's purpose? It's purpose is to fulfill whatever end we sought to achieve in it's making. Those are very big differences.
You can say the same about a human. It exists because we started it, and yet the same conclusion doesn't follow. What I am saying is that starting a sentient being, artificial or natural, carries the same moral and ethical consequences. It doesn't matter that the being is made of carbon or silicon. If you think AI's can be enslaved because we made them, then I am saying that you should think we can enslave children because we "made" them in the same way (i.e. we started but did not design them).
You are confusing one individual being stronger than one individual being stronger than the group. Exploitation is simply an unbalanced flavor of cooperation.
I never put any words in your mouth, or attributed any ideas to you. You on the otherhand have done exactly that to me. You claim to know what I wish (when you say I wish that you had made that point). You then proceed to talk about "your (my) concept of freedom", when you have no idea what my concept of freedom is. It's ironic that you are the only one doing the thing that you are accusing me of.
I think the idea that the US is the sole evil force in the world, and all these other countries would be doing great if only we stopped messing with them, is romantic BS.
We have a pretty corrupt government. Lot's of less developed countries have even more corrupt governments. I think it is naive to think that local governments left to their own devices would not exploit their own people. Even if it is your view that free trade is the problem (and I'm not disagreeing), then it is precisely these local governments that are complicit in the selling out of their own people for personal profits.
I still maintain that these immigrants coming to the US are not a bad thing. There is no good reason that they should not have the protection of labor laws if they are working in this country. I see these people as potential contributing members to our ever more diverse society.
No we couldn't, and I agree that "100% secure" is not a realistic metric for any security measure. But that also doesn't imply 90% or 99% effective are good enough to be worth doing.
Just having a huge desert might be 98% effective already. So if the fence is keeping out 99% of people, it is possible that the fence is just a super expensive way to keep out a relatively small number of people.
I think it's important that you bring up Japan and Germany of examples of when we succeeded in "fixing" a country. We occupied those 2 countries after defeating them in a war. I think we could probably eventually fix Mexico if we invaded and occupied it. I was sort of assuming letting Mexico keep their sovereignty, but it is precisely doing this that makes it so difficult given how much of their government is corrupt.
I think if we had the task "Fix Mexico", and failure was not an option, I think we would *have* to invade and occupy it, and even then our chances of success would be questionable.
I think we do have the resources to do this. We had the resources in WW2, we had them when we invaded other countries (even if we didn't do such a great job), and we could probably have to resources to invade Mexico if the political will existed. But ultimately I nearly certain that the harm caused in likely scenarios would vastly outweigh the good for nearly everyone involved.
Mexico is going to be our neighbor for a long long time. It would behoove us to help them out.
It would, but sometimes you can't help. Sometimes helping makes things worse. How do you help a drug addict? Not by giving them money. Sometimes the best help you can give is nothing. Sometimes the best help you can give is to let them go to jail.
Maybe Mexico needs a revolution fix their problems. If that's true, us meddling in their affairs might taint any legitimacy of a revolution, or simply solidify and otherwise conflicted population against a common foreign enemy (us).
What are you counting as long term? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? I think *maybe* fixing Mexico is a better investment than manning a fence for 100 years, and that's a big maybe.
I don't think fixing Mexico would necessarily cost *that* much money, if the people fixing it knew what they were doing. Even if we (the U.S.A) knew what we were doing (which we don't, look at who our politicians are), sending Mexico a bunch of money to fix themselves will just be sending a bunch of money to drug cartels. We need our shit together in addition to Mexico having their shit together. It's quite the bootstrapping problem.
We have a long history of pouring money (and weapons) into fixing problems in foreign countries only to have all that money end up in the hands of exactly the people we didn't want it to.
Slashdot Mirror
Both parties are run by crooks and idiots. I don't appreciate your attempt to co-opt my post to make it seem like it favors one of the factions of the republicrat party over the other.
why would companies be desperate to hire workers with deceptive credentials? Why not just hire high school dropouts or homeless people instead?
Should we all be forced to pay the higher prices for products produced in America due to the higher price of labor? What's the point of making $80,000 instead of $40,000, if everything costs twice as much?
Shouldn't there be a financial reward to living in a place with lower cost of living, especially given the fact that in our modern economy, a lot of what is produced is just information?
As an american, you can move to china or india and work for an american company, and benefit from a lower cost of living as well. One of my friends is in china doing that right now.
So we need inflated salaries to pay for our inflated tuitions/student debts? Makes sense...
I'm all for a robust global economy were all workers can earn a living in dignity, but not at the cost of losing the American middle class.
I imagine this looks to people from the 3rd world as "I don't mind helping poor people as long as I can remain in a privileged class of people whose only merit for being there is being born in the right place"
If you think rich people are gaming the system, fine. Fine, lets try to stop all the loopholes that allow it. I don't think artificially inflating the price of labor in the US is neither fair nor helpful to the people that actually pay for that labor (i.e. us).
Let's say that my salary drops in half because the labor market is flooded with people, but at the same time, costs of goods and services also drop in half because the price of labor is so cheap. What's the difference?
By this same token, importing all these people into the labor market also creates market demand for goods and services, raising the price of labor.
We could, in addition to importing foreign workers, also import foreign CEOs that do the same job for less money, and now no one has an inflated salary compared to anyone else.
Well, if they are allowed to compete with us in the same labor market, then we are less expensive too.
How much effort does it take to do some research and verify whether a 10 second political ad is truthful?
If the power belongs to the people with the money to pay for TV commercials, it is only because the voters have voluntarily abdicated their power.
Like Alexis de Toqueville said (probably apocryphal):
In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
First, because of the way the patent act is written - it says that if a patent application can't be shown to be obvious, then it will be issued. That makes sense logically, because proving that something is nonobvious after having disclosed it is going to be nigh-difficult if not impossible. What are you going to do, wipe everyone's memory and then quiz them?
I am making a normative claim (i.e. "this is how we should do it") rather than a descriptive claim (i.e. "this is how we do it now").
I am saying that a world where things are assumed to be obvious until proven non-obvious is a better world than one where things are assumed to be obvious until proven non-obvious. You so proving non-obviousness is next to impossible (I disagree), but just out of curiosity, how might one prove obviousness in your view? It seems to me to be at least equally difficult.
Second, even disregarding that, I've already met the burden of proof - I provided evidence in the form of "you admitted this is valuable" and "this didn't exist". Together, that indicates it was probably not obvious, or someone would have done it. It's your turn to rebut it, with evidence, not just saying "it's clearly obvious".
I am saying that I don't find this evidence convincing. What if an invention was both obvious and non-valuable, and the reason it was never invented was because it was non-valuable. Then all of a sudden this invention becomes valuable and it is quickly invented. Does it really make sense to assume it is non-obvious simply because it was just invented?
At a deeper level I have a fundamental problem with your logic. You say that if something were obvious it would have already been invented by someone. How can something *not* be "already invented by someone"? Whether something was invented by someone, going to be invented by someone, or never going to be invented, it could never be considered obvious because it didn't exist before it was invented.
However, once you can buy a Ferrari and take it apart, it's pretty easy to copy with a machine shop and some skilled workers. And since we're not talking about the engine, but the UI, it's even easier to make a body case of a Ferrari and build a fiberglass look-alike. I'd give a Hollywood special effects shop a week, tops.
Right and this would be a pretty thin copy. It would certainly not be a functional copy of a Ferrari, because copying Ferrari's is hard. If you actually did a functional copy it would probably be even more expensive than what a real one costs because you don't have all the machines that make it efficient for Ferrari to mass produce them.
Similarly, I'd give a team of Russian hackers a week or two to reverse engineer any UI you build, even if it took you months and months of trial and error and alternate designs to come up with the best one.
Firstly I don't know why you think Russian hackers (as opposed to software engineers trained in UI design) would be good at creating a functional copy of a UI design. Secondly, there is more to a UI than simply what you can see, and that's what makes it hard to copy cheaply. It is precisely because a team of Russian hackers *can't* copy your UI design in a couple weeks, that keeps Apple willing to spend money on their UI.
Maybe Google can copy your UI, but it is not that much harder for them to simply make their own, and they probably will if they think they can do it better.
Yeah, you can cheaply hack together some shit that looks nice until it sucks when you actually try to use it. Why bother? Who is in the market for cheap shitty software that looks nice at first glance?
You're confusing "new" and "nonobvious" - they're actually two different statutes. If something has never been done before, then it's new, by definition. However, if all of the pieces of it had been done separately and they could be readily combined, then it's obv
I'm pointing to the idea of popularity of an invention being nonobvious as an indicator that the idea was also nonobvious.
I don't see why the burden of proof is not on you for this claim.
And as of yet, you have pointed to no indicators as to whether something is obvious.
The indicator I am using is the metric that the invention in question could have been invented even if the patent had not been granted. We can never know this in the absolute sense that we can't change the past and see how it affects the future, but I think reasonable people can agree that a blue and gold polka dot smartphone could be invented even without a patent (i.e. the R&D costs of figuring out how to do it are negligible compared to a phone of any other color)
Tell that to Zynga, or any of the indie designers they've ripped off.
If this were not true, then no one would ever design any games or software seeing as how unprofitable it would be.
On the contrary, it's pretty easy. [youtube.com]
Writing an application that mimics some very small subsection of a much larger UI is not very hard. If this was all there was to Apple's UI, then they *really* don't deserve a patent. This software is an "easy copy" of Apple's UI like how a picture of a Ferrari is an "easy copy" of a real Ferrari. Is it easy to copy a Ferrari? Maybe yes, maybe no, but a picture of a Ferrari is not proof that it is easy (unless you have a very low standard for what counts as a Ferrari).
But they also come up with new aspects, which is why the UIs are evolving. Those new aspects that others copy, because they believe they're the best aspects, must not have been obvious, or they would already have been incorporated - since, as you say, they're acknowledged as the "best".
By this definition of obvious, *nothing* would ever be obvious because for anything, there was a point in time at which it didn't exist.
Not exactly... I'm asserting the claim that if no one has done something yet and it's commercially valuable to do so, then it's likely not obvious. Evidence of that is the fact that if it was obvious, someone would have taken the free money. Because no one has, that implies no one thought of it. You're disputing this by saying "no, it's plainly obvious." Well, that's a fine conclusion, but where's your evidence?
I think you are confusing the idea of an invention being obvious and the idea of the popularity of an invention being obvious.
I am not saying that it is obvious whether any idea will be popular.
What I am saying is that patents should be granted to incentivize inventors to incur the costs of invention when they would not have otherwise.
Sure, let's go with that - the price of copying software is negligible, while the price of designing it is comparatively huge. In fact, the copying price is so small - a click and drag, in one scenario - that the ratio approaches or exceeds that of pharmaceuticals, where at least you have to make a physical product. So, software should be patentable, and expensive machines may not be patentable, depending on how closely the cost to build them approaches or exceeds the design cost.
The price of copying software verbatim is negligable, which is partly is why selling pirated software is illegal (i.e. copyright infringement). Why would someone go to the trouble of designing software, if someone else can just copy it for no cost and sell it at > $0 and profit.
But this is not what we are talking about. We are talking about copying the design of a piece of software, and incorporating it into your own software in order to sell. The cost of this is not negligible at all. In fact it is probably pretty close to the actual cost of designing it in the first place in many cases.
Go ask someone to recreate IOS or android or windows UI for use in your own product to sell. This cost will not be negligable. Nor can you just drag and drop some files to have that UI magically appear in your own application.
All of these UIs have copied the best aspects (from their point of view) of the others, which is why there is a lot of co-evolution happening among UI design. It is not unprofitable to come up with new UI ideas even with the possibility of being copied, because of the relatively low ratio of R&D costs to the cost of copying.
Kinect came out in Nov. 2010. It seems like you're admitting that it wasn't obvious until at least then, no?
In the same way that it wasn't obvious to have blue and gold polka dot smartphones before the first smartphone was created. However, if one was to suggest the possibility of smartphones before they existed, then I would think that the possibility of them being blue and gold polka dot should be obvious.
Was it? Here's the thing - you already admitted this was valuable. If making a smartphone in gold and blue polka dots meant that your profit would increase and you knew it, wouldn't you do it? Of course you would, you're a smart guy who likes money. Or, conversely, if making a smartphone in gold and blue polka dots meant that your profit would increase and you didn't know it, then that would explain why you didn't do it. So, when someone subsequently comes out with a gold and blue polkadot phone and their sales shoot up, you can't very well say "pff, that's obvious, I knew about that all along... I just didn't do it because I hate making money" and expect to be believed.
You seem to be reasserting the claim that something can not be obvious if no one has done it yet. It is this very claim that I am disputing.
While it may not be obvious that people will like a blue and gold polkadot phone, it should be plainly obvious that such a phone could be made and how it could be made, even if no one ever makes one.
Why would you spend hundreds of thousands or millions on UI design to create and test a UI only to have some other company copy it and undercut you? In fact, why would you spend any money on research, if someone can just steal yours freely (and you can steal theirs)?
Ask the people that do it. The fact is that plenty of people spend money on R&D for UI design knowing that it will be copied (assuming it's good), and drug companies are not willing to spend the money on R&D to make drugs without patent protections. Clearly it is still profitable to spend money on most UI design without patents, and it is simply not the case with most drugs.
Look at all the UI design that is created out there without any patent protection (i.e. a lot). Look at all the drugs that are developed without patent protection (i.e. almost none).
If X is the the price of R&D and Y is the price of copying it, we should allow patents on products with a high X:Y ratio.
Is it? If so, why don't we have it already in products?
For the same reason we didn't have smartphones until processors, batteries, screens, etc were at a level to make smartphones possible.
Once we had sensors like the kinect, the necessity for good ui drives the innovation.
Prove it - explain why it was so obvious that people already knew about it, but no one bothered making it.
Something doesn't need to exist for it to be obvious. I can make a smartphone that is some color that no one has ever used to make a smartphone. Should I be able to patent smartphones of a particular RGB value? Or was it obvious that it this was always possible to make a smartphone of any arbitrary color regardless of whether or when anyone actually did it?
Patents only on things that aren't valuable to produce? Why would people buy them? Or are you suggesting that with a patent will also come a mandate forcing the public to buy products they don't want? Please, we don't do that in this c-... well, we don't do that for anything except insurance.
Things that aren't valuable to produce can still be things that people want to buy. Things with extremely high R&D costs (e.g. pharmaceuticals, etc), are not cost effective to produce without patent protection. Why would you spend millions or billions of dollars to create and test a drug only to have some other company copy it and undercut you.
1. I think inventors will try different ways to use gestures regardless, but it will be based on their merits rather than whether they are simply different than the current patented ways.
2. Some money that could have been spend on innovation must now be spent on lawyers to analyze whether their new and different way of using gestures is different enough from the ways that are patented. Innovation would better thrive under an environment that isn't a legal minefield (i.e. one with a higher engineer:lawyer ratio).
I'm not saying this isn't innovation. It is. What I am saying is that it is not the kind of innovation that patents should protect. Patents automatically come with an innovation stifling cost. The way that patents drive innovation is by overcoming this cost by incentivizing innovations that would not have otherwise happened. The way to maximize innovation is to disseminate patents only to those that would not have been invented otherwise.
The question "is it more valuable to make this than not" drives innovation. Patents drive adding those innovations into the public domain, which eliminates the need for every competitor to waste time reinventing the same thing.
This particular "invention" would already be in the public domain by default had it not been patented because it is obvious.
This "invention" was already more valuable to make than not before the patent, and the right to sue other people on top of that simply makes it even more lucrative for the patent holder and lawyers on both sides, but these profits come as a cost to society with no additional benefit.
I am for granting patents that actually drive innovation (i.e. the ones that turn inventions from being less profitable to make to more).
The whole point of patents is to drive innovation. Being able to patent things like this is clearly not in the spirit of that goal. The question we should be asking is:
If a patent was not granted for this "invention" (i.e. a monopoly for selling this invention not granted), would it still have been invented (i.e. would a company still be willing to perform the R&D necessary to invent this invention without the reward of a monopoly).
It's pretty clear to me that the answer to this question is yes.
If this is the case, then granting a patent (i.e. a monopoly for selling this invention) actually stifles innovation.
Did anyone really think Bill Gates would have the opinion "We can never drink water molecules that used to have poop next to them. That's just gross."
People can be skeptical whether a particular water purification process is adequate, but anyone who thinks water can't be purified is just an idiot and probably also homophobic (i.e. the category of people who are compelled to irrationality regarding things that seem gross to them).
Say what you want about Bill Gates, but he doesn't seem like the type to be idiotically irrational.
Maybe if you are talking about each individual water molecule. But if you take any given glass of water, it no doubt contains water molecules that were part of Napoleon's piss.
There are more water molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the ocean.
If you are going to be drilling into any kind of stone or masonry (e.g. asteroids), you want to use a hammer drill rather than an impact drill.
The thief that always thinks everybody is stealing, because he assumes everyone is like him.
I note you didn't touch the point I made about there being no advantage for us to make an AI if we couldn't enslave it with a ten foot pole.
I did respond to this point. I said "What is in it for us that Albert Einstein exists? We didn't need to enslave him to benefit from his intelligence. Certainly cooperation with an AI could definitely be rather productive." We benefit if we enslave other people. We can also benefit if we do not enslave other people. We benefit if we enslave machines, we can also benefit if we do not enslave machines. We can cooperate with other sentient beings for mutual benefit whether they are humans, aliens, or artificial.
Yes in modern times we have family planning but we don't really have children because we choose to. We are homo sapians, our children are homo sapians. They are a unique product of joining a cell from two people but the machine that builds the cell wasn't designed by us and we consciously had no part in the making of the cell. We haven't even successfully reverse engineered it. Pro-creation is more like pushing the button that triggers that nuclear explosion.
That was my point. Starting a sentient being is not the same as designing a sentient being. Starting them is relatively easy compared with designing one, which is why I think we will be able to start one well before we can design one. Starting an artificial sentient being is going to be harder than starting a natural homo sapien (procreating), but they are both easier than designing a sentient being as an end product.
Pro-creation isn't something we really choose to do it is our only known purpose. Einsteins parent's weren't trying to kickstart a being that redefines physics they were trying to survive in the form of a derivative child. Why do we exist? What is our purpose? The only thing we know is that we exist to survive both individually and as a species for as long as possible. To prove we are worthy of continuing to exist by right of succeeding in doing so.
I know many people who choose not to have children (Most of my friends). I know people who go out of their way to have children, even when they are not their biological children (i.e. adopting, egg/sperm donors, etc). Yes there is an evolutionary basis for our urge to procreate, but it does not overpower our higher mental capacities. I know Einsteins parents weren't intentionally trying to redefine physics, that's why I used that example. It is an example of taking actions that result in benefits without knowing how to actually achieve those benefits. By the same token we will probably create an AI without actually knowing how AI (or even just regular I) works.
In the case of an AI there would be no two existing parents combining existing biological machinery to combine and spawn a new instance of the same machine. The seed would be something new.
So what?
It has no purpose but whatever purpose we assign to it. Why does it exist? We can answer this question definitively, it is exists because we made it. What is it's purpose? It's purpose is to fulfill whatever end we sought to achieve in it's making. Those are very big differences.
You can say the same about a human. It exists because we started it, and yet the same conclusion doesn't follow. What I am saying is that starting a sentient being, artificial or natural, carries the same moral and ethical consequences. It doesn't matter that the being is made of carbon or silicon. If you think AI's can be enslaved because we made them, then I am saying that you should think we can enslave children because we "made" them in the same way (i.e. we started but did not design them).
You are confusing one individual being stronger than one individual being stronger than the group. Exploitation is simply an unbalanced flavor of cooperation.
I guarantee I am not confusing anyth
I never put any words in your mouth, or attributed any ideas to you. You on the otherhand have done exactly that to me. You claim to know what I wish (when you say I wish that you had made that point). You then proceed to talk about "your (my) concept of freedom", when you have no idea what my concept of freedom is. It's ironic that you are the only one doing the thing that you are accusing me of.
I think the idea that the US is the sole evil force in the world, and all these other countries would be doing great if only we stopped messing with them, is romantic BS.
We have a pretty corrupt government. Lot's of less developed countries have even more corrupt governments. I think it is naive to think that local governments left to their own devices would not exploit their own people. Even if it is your view that free trade is the problem (and I'm not disagreeing), then it is precisely these local governments that are complicit in the selling out of their own people for personal profits.
I still maintain that these immigrants coming to the US are not a bad thing. There is no good reason that they should not have the protection of labor laws if they are working in this country. I see these people as potential contributing members to our ever more diverse society.
No we couldn't, and I agree that "100% secure" is not a realistic metric for any security measure. But that also doesn't imply 90% or 99% effective are good enough to be worth doing.
Just having a huge desert might be 98% effective already. So if the fence is keeping out 99% of people, it is possible that the fence is just a super expensive way to keep out a relatively small number of people.
I think it's important that you bring up Japan and Germany of examples of when we succeeded in "fixing" a country. We occupied those 2 countries after defeating them in a war. I think we could probably eventually fix Mexico if we invaded and occupied it. I was sort of assuming letting Mexico keep their sovereignty, but it is precisely doing this that makes it so difficult given how much of their government is corrupt.
I think if we had the task "Fix Mexico", and failure was not an option, I think we would *have* to invade and occupy it, and even then our chances of success would be questionable.
I think we do have the resources to do this. We had the resources in WW2, we had them when we invaded other countries (even if we didn't do such a great job), and we could probably have to resources to invade Mexico if the political will existed. But ultimately I nearly certain that the harm caused in likely scenarios would vastly outweigh the good for nearly everyone involved.
Mexico is going to be our neighbor for a long long time. It would behoove us to help them out.
It would, but sometimes you can't help. Sometimes helping makes things worse. How do you help a drug addict? Not by giving them money. Sometimes the best help you can give is nothing. Sometimes the best help you can give is to let them go to jail.
Maybe Mexico needs a revolution fix their problems. If that's true, us meddling in their affairs might taint any legitimacy of a revolution, or simply solidify and otherwise conflicted population against a common foreign enemy (us).
What are you counting as long term? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? I think *maybe* fixing Mexico is a better investment than manning a fence for 100 years, and that's a big maybe.
I don't think fixing Mexico would necessarily cost *that* much money, if the people fixing it knew what they were doing. Even if we (the U.S.A) knew what we were doing (which we don't, look at who our politicians are), sending Mexico a bunch of money to fix themselves will just be sending a bunch of money to drug cartels. We need our shit together in addition to Mexico having their shit together. It's quite the bootstrapping problem.
We have a long history of pouring money (and weapons) into fixing problems in foreign countries only to have all that money end up in the hands of exactly the people we didn't want it to.