[...and they spend 20 seconds doing a global find-and-replace.]
Assuming they have the source.
But this whole problem can only arise in the context of compiling source code. If you don't have source code, this entire scenario can't arise. Even the partially-precompiled, IL language code can't feature an "ISNOT" operator.
IMO patent law should be changed to somehow prevent this purely obstructionist usage of patents.
There is - there's a growing doctrine called patent abuse: people can't patent stuff solely to withhold it from the public for 20 years.
Many other countries require patentees to commercialize their technology within a reasonable time. If they don't, as you suggest, a compulsory-licensing scheme falls into place: the patentee is obligated to grant licenses to the technology for fair market value.
However, even if asserted as you suggest - Microsoft's tactic isn't "purely obstructionist," since its own compiler embodies it. It has made the "invention" (and I use that term generously here, since I don't view it as such) available to the public, and it is making proper use of the patent.
I have many solutions, but one I'll toss to you is this: Put together a publication of currently known but unpatented software technologies. That journal will become prior art against any future patent applicant. I further assert that some of this is already being done - e.g., Don Knuth's excellent Art of Computer Programming series.
It is obvious that the compression waves for a sound can be described by a sequence of numbers.... That leaves one thing: the psycoacoustic model.... That is the novel/engineering component of the system, and that is the part that is reasonable to get a patent on.
But I think you're making not for abolishing software patents, but only for heightening the bar. You wrote it yourself - "There is no reason that large corporations should get to purchase monopoly control of an easy idea." And I agree with you. The general concept of audio stream compression/decompression has been around for 50+ years; no reason why the particular format chosen for MP3 should qualify for patent protection.
The patent system also agrees with you. People aren't awarded patents on a general concept, e.g. audio compression, simply by showing one way of doing it. Their patent is limited to their particular technique, which has to be novel, non-obvious, etc.
I think we're getting to the point where the "easy" concepts, as you put it, are well-documented - and thus unpatentable. I'm hoping that a rising percentage of software patents demonstrate greater novelty - e.g., "A method of implementing a psychoacoustic model for sound, comprising..." At least on the surface, it sounds like you agree with this.
That the examiners don't understand this nature of computation is part of the cause of the problems. That policy and law-makers consult only those with something to gain (and thus pay them off with those gains) is the real cause.
That is sadly true - the "erosion of the commons," economists call it. The public domain has no government advocate. Nowhere is this more true than in the copyright industry. I don't have a solution for this problem.
I don't believe the judge in the case you mention ruled that the USPTO had to start granting such patents as a matter of policy, just that that sort of patent should be upheld if they were granted.
The ruling was that a patent application could not be rejected simply because it claimed software. The USPTO had taken the view that software was not "statutory subject matter" - that it did not meet the requirement of 35 USC 101 that patents are only awarded for "machines, manufactures, compositions of matter, and processes" (and improvements, combinations, certain kinds of plants and ornamental designs, etc.) Accordingly, the USPTO had only awarded patents for software that had a "real-world impact" or that acted on "real-world inputs."
The Federal Circuit stomped on this line of reasoning. The USPTO had no choice but to start granting software patents unless they could cobble together a rejection on the usual grounds: anticipation, obviousness, non-enabling disclosure, etc. So, yes, this ruling did create "software patents" as a new field of patentable subject matter.
The rest of us cannot set up our small companies to join in.
On the contrary, software patents are a huge boon to software companies that want to compete with Microsoft. How can a small startup ever get venture capital if Microsoft can eat their technology for lunch?
Exhibit A: Stac Electronics - a small startup that won a $120MM judgment against Microsoft, who commandeered its Stacker drive compression technology for its own DoubleSpace software. Microsoft's current, zealous approach to software patents stems directly from such decisions.
Like all the other patent lawyers (as I gather you are from another of your posts) you are trying to maintain your income...
First, that's presumptuous and ad hominem, and you know it.
I am a patent attorney, but I don't practice software patents. I am a patent attorney for a large hospital - we create, patent, and license biotechnology. 0% of my income is derived from software patents.
I am an ardent advocate of software patents because (a) I understand the patent system, (b) I understand software (I'm one semester awa
I'm willing to grant that sometimes software patents can motivate innovation.
That's a relief (in this forum), though I'd encourage you to upgrade this to "often." Consider that you rarely hear about the software patents that are good and productive - they're not as newsworthy as "Amazon patents OneClick, oh no!"
It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone)...
"Making money" has such a bad taste to it, doesn't it?
Money derived from commercial sofware doesn't go (100%) into the pockets of a greedy CEO. Much of it goes simply to pay the salaries of the programmers, and the operating costs of the business. I harbor the overly idealistic, probably naive view that professional programmers are motivated by (1) the desire to create cool sofware and (2) a deep-seated love of programming. They can only pursue those goals if they get a paycheck.
Sometimes, a patent is needed to secure the business capital to create this environment. That's where business realities, like patents, become important.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued.
I completely share your concern. Any time someone sucessfully patents an old or silly computing concept, it drags down everything.
But I attribute it to the infancy of the software patent field. People are still floundering with this new concept, what it can accomplish, how it should be used. Over time, sofware business people become more familiar with the nature of patents - and patent attorneys become more familiar with the nature of software. There will be a focusing of the field on truly useful and worthwhile software patents. Anything else - patenting ISNOT, for example - is simply a waste of everyone's time, money, and reputation.
That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme.
Absolutely. In fact, the RSA patent encourages competing software companies to find alternative methods. Maybe those methods will be better - more secure, less computationally taxing, offering features not found in RSA, etc. - and they'll separately patent and commercialize their better algorithm. Encouraging competition and "designing-around" has always been a goal of the patent system.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's also pretty subjective, though. At least I can offer this: All patents - good and bad - expire 20 years after filing. That's an eternity in the software industry (though it's much less offensive than the copyright industry's "life of the author + 70-95 years" schtick), but at least it's a backstop time limit to really egregious conduct.
I consider it a classic case of theft from the taxpayers of the US that they (RSA) did the research with gov't funding then patented the results so that nobody but them could use it.
You must be unfamiliar with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - in which the government encourages recipients of government funding to do exactly this. I don't believe that something the government encourages people do with government property can be construed as "theft."
(True, the RSA patent predates the Bayh-Dole Act, but there's no evidence of anything inappropriate in its patenting. You'll have to point to something particular in its history - and I don't believe any such backstory exists.)
It looks like you're relying on the general concept of patenting government-funded inventions. You must be unaware that the government has a hideous track record of commercializing its own technologies. Before the Bayh-Dole Act, the government retained ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happened, sat on a shelf completely unused. They had no commercial proponent, and so they were never used.
Your principle ignores the realities of business. Software is primarily a business - even the open-source kind. This is understandable; most Slashdotters know computers much better than business. Just be aware that virtually all of the software on your computer was written in a business context, and that the realities of commerce might play an important role.
The inherent value in ISNOT is that Microsoft's Basic (the defacto standard used by the vast majority of Basic programmers) supports it. With this patent, other Basic implementations will be forbidden from supporting it. Only Microsoft will be able to produce Basic interpreters that are fully compatible with Microsoft's implementation.
That's a pretty interesting assessment - and it would make a valid business rationale. The obvious target would be mbas - Mono's visual BASIC compiler.
But seriously - show me two commercial compilers from different vendors that ever demonstrate 100% intercompatibility. Most compilers properly parse the language standard, e.g., ANSI C, and then tack on some proprietary language features. It's an inherent trait of the compiler industry - and not necessarily a bad one, except in the rare case where you want to switch compilers in the middle of a project.
So what would be the impact of this? Mono disables support for the ISNOT operator. Users compiling code containing an ISNOT operator receive the following message:
* Error: ISNOT operator not supported; use "!(IS)" instead
...and they spend 20 seconds doing a global find-and-replace. An annoyance, to be sure, but hardly a crippling blow.
I can suggest several solutions to this problem, but I suspect this isn't the right venue.
You're misreading: I wrote that base-30 can be adequately represented by 10 digits + 26 letters - not that all of these 36 symbols were needed to represent base-30 numbers.
Presumably, they felt that base-(10 * something) was somehow more convenient than base-36. Had I written the technology, I would have asserted base-32 - which would have eased the computational burden of half of the conversion, of course.
So wait. You think that the "monopoly-cementing power of software patents" is "a boon for the [software] industry"? Or did you mean they were a boon for the software-patent-attourney industry?
Like any tool, software patents can be used well or poorly. Guns are a boon for national security, but can also be used to cement the power of the mafia.
I would like to know of a single instance where a patented "truly useful novel algorthim" was a boon for the software industry.
Okay - RSA encryption. This novel encryption method is the mathematical basis for most encrypted web browser communication. Without such a technique, most of e-commerce would be untenable - either the encryption mechanism would be prohibitively cumbersome, or it would be riddled with holes.
This algorithm wasn't created in the vacuum of academia. It was developed as a way of allowing easy, encrypted communication among businesses. Without a business incentive to develop it - i.e., if other companies had been permitted to just steal the technology after it was created - no one would have created it.
So what happened once it was patented? Did the company take on the Darth-Vader-esque visage that most Slashdotters imagine? No, it had the good business judgment to promote RSA across the board, and to reap a reasonable profit through licensing to big companies like Verisign. The industry didn't grind to a halt.
And what would have happened without a strong, business-savvy proponent of RSA? Internet technology in general is a hideous swamp of competing standards and compatibility issues. Ask any web developer how much time they spend on IE/Firefox/Netscape/Opera compatibility issues, or on Java version compatibility, or on security issues between or among various technologies and standards. It's insanity. The explosion of web development has occurred not because of these myriad and disparate technologies, in spite of them.
Yet, in the midst of this sea of chaos, encryption technology just magically seems to work - automatically, unobtrusively, without a security update every 25 seconds. That technology works. I assert that this is because we gave one company some breathing room to develop it.
So what exactly do you attribute the tendency for such fucking obvious patents sliding through? I'd guess bribes if I didn't believe that you should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity...
Why not just chalk it up to inexperience? The software patent system was suddenly dumped on the USPTO by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1998, along with this whole "business method" thing (an awful decision.) The USPTO hasn't had time to put together a system of examining such patents: hiring a fleet of examiners familiar with software, assembling a prior art database, etc.
The biotech industry went through a similar panic back when the USPTO started issuing patents on DNA, proteins, and novel organisms (e.g., knockout mice.) Many experts predicted an industrial catastrophe of monopolization, obstacles to daily research, bad patents arising from examiner incompetence, etc. Surprisingly, none of this occurred. And have you noticed the explosion of new pharmaceuticals on the market in the past decade? That's directly attributable to the R&D incentive of biotech patents.
Er, uh, just taking a stab in the dark: because you can represent it with 30 symbols - i.e., 10 digits + 26 letters. Of course, they could go all the way up to base-60 by using both uppercase and lowercase, but presumably case-sentivity would be much more painful ("3A4B" is always spoken aloud as "3A4B" if it's case-insensitive, but "3-capital-A-4-capital-B" if not.) Takes longer, more error-prone, etc.
That's just my guess, but I feel pretty good about it...
If my memory serves, both the USPTO and the EPO are receiving money for each granted patent as their funding. Hence, neither patent office is very eager to reject any application.
Nonsense.
You are correct in asserting that the USPTO makes money from issance - as per their fee schedule, they get $300 (plus extra fees for various things like multiple independent claims) when the app is filed, and $1,400 when it issues.
But the examiners - the people who make the allow-vs-reject decision - aren't responsible for the fiscal well-being of the USPTO. Were that the case, virtually every application would slide through to issuance with barely any examination. We'd be back to the patent registration scheme of the early 1800's, where you got a patent simply by filling out the right paperwork.
We don't have that system - in name or in practice. The examiners do a hell of a lot of rejecting, with backing references to other patents, journal articles, etc. They don't have the resources for an exhaustive search - but the typical application garners at least two separate rejections from the examiners.
But this is a classic catch-22 example: people often examiners for spending too much time on examination, and thereby contributing to the 2.5-year average pendency of patent applications.
Ahh, so Microsoft is NOT going to use patents against the perceived open source threat because... Why exactly? Just because they haven't used patents as a weapon yet, doesn't mean they won't in the future.
Well, it helps that the junk they're patenting has no actual value. I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers.:shakes head: Woodcock Washburn (the typically excellent law firm that drafted that patent application) should the hang its head in shame over that one.
I'm a patent attorney. More specifically, I'm a software patent attorney, and I truly believe that allowing patents for truly useful novel algorithms is a boon for the industry. But I feel that the quality of many software patents is an embarrassment to the field. Worse, it's an embarrassment to the patentee: it's a sign that they have no ability to evaluate the usefulness of their software - no talent to determine which pieces of their products are both new and critically important.
But the/. community should be glad about one thing: As long as Microsoft's choices of technologies to patent remain befuddled, it won't be able to tap the true, strong, monopoly-cementing power of software patents.
- David Stein
Offline games require online reporting = BOGUS
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The other big problem is that while the Steam network is down even the offline games are unplayable.
Absolutely. This is the most insane thing about Steam: When I can't reach Steam - either because it's down, or because I happen to be in a location with no network access (which, in fact, is a common scenario) - I can't play the offline games I purchased. Like Half-Life 2. And Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Even Codename Gordon - a dinky freeware platformer, reminiscent of id software's classic game Abuse - is unplayable.
So I paid $80 for package including many excellent single-player games, but I can't play any of them without getting express consent from Valve every time. When that consent is unavailable, I can't play the games I bought. This is bogus. This is outrageous.
I cannot imagine how this possibly benefits Valve in any way. Surely the p1r@t3s who don't wanna pay (na na why don't you get a job?) are merrily playing their hacked-installer versions. All this mechanism accomplishes is giving the pointy-headed marketroids at Valve some academic (useless) data on who plays which games. Meanwhile, actual customers get surveilled, and sometimes denied access to their paid-for games.
In sum, this scheme presents spurious value to Valve, and no value to customers, while also pissing customers off. Valve is too smart a company not to realize this. Why they persist is a fucking mystery.
I found Half-Life 1 to be infinitely creepy. After a long gaming session, I got up to get something from the fridge. Along the way, I happened to run into a single strand of spider-web hanging down from the ceiling. My barnacle-avoidance instincts kicked in and I twisted my body out of the way - it took me a second to figure out what the hell I was doing.
Of course, I have all of the usual stories of seeing stuff when trying to fall asleep after late-night gaming - falling Tetris pieces, Super Puzzle Fighter blocks, Puzzle Bobble bubbles, even minesweeper scenarios. I think it's especially prevalent with games featuring lots of visual elements that your brain can abstract into functional pieces...?
I really don't think the problem is with RSS itself, but with most RSS readers. They suck. And they are not very well integrated with the browsers. Even Firefox's live bookmark feature isn't very good (IMHO). Great, I can see the titles. Woop-te-do!
Remember ICQ? ICQ ran like Windows 3.1 junkware - ads, dinky icons, reliability that can only be described as squidgy. Yet people still used it, in droves, until AOL came out with a client more suited to this decade. Ditto Netscape, by the way - I think Netscape 2.x used to crash on one out of every three webpages.
So it's not the quality of the application (and I agree with you that most RSS newsreaders are pretty clumsy and awful.) The primary determinant of success is simply: How useful is it?
RSS has the potential to be useful. I should be able to type in my top twelve news/blog sites, and have an aggregator constantly fetch new articles from them. My computer should always have the full text of top articles, bookmarkable and archivable, site/keyword/topic searchable, automatically categorized according to some standard hierarchy (across sites, even.) I'd love my computer to be a capable archive of every interesting thing I've read.
RSS does nothing like this. It's primitive and crippled. If I see an interesting headline, I don't want to have to go to another site to read it, or bookmark it so I can read it when I have a connection again. I just want to read the damn article. RSS doesn't let me, so I don't use RSS.
Few things are more disappointing than failed potential. RSS is just groundwork for the more capable technology that will likely follow it.
58%? That's it? I expected more like a 200% increase, this being "the year of the blog" and all. I think this quote from the article is more insightful: "Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found."
Don't get me wrong - I read about six blogs a day, and I truly believe they're the future portal of the Internet. Without blogs, the WWW is mostly comprised of organization websites (companies and universities being the top two), and frankly, that's hideously boring. Blogs are the spiritual successor to Netscape's "What's Cool?" feature, and due to the huge number of blogs, you can probably find two dozen that specifically cater to your interests.
However, I believe that blogs run the risk of being a flash in the pan - of being a trend that seemed really promising, but just never achieved cultural critical mass. I posit that many of these new readers are people who latched onto the buzzword and wanted to jump on the zeitgeist bandwagon. When the next shiny thing comes along in twenty minutes, they'll hop off and scurry away. Basically, I'm wondering if many of those new readers will vanish in 2005, and may take with them some of the momentum that drives the community. Remember that many predicted in 1998 that VRML would revolutionize the Internet.
As I see it, greater cultural (mainstream) adoption of blogs is hampered by two factors:
Absence of a central, well-known blog directory. It's difficult to find new blogs that cater to your interests. It's like an Internet without search engines - in 1995, finding new websites involved stumbling upon them via links from other sites. Imagine if we didn't have telephone books, and if ordering pizza usually involved asking your friends for the number of some good pizza places. That's pretty low-yield, but I feel that's how most need-a-new-blog scavenging missions go. Quite simply, this inefficiency loses readers.
Now, yes, I am aware of sites like Blogwise, which offers some rudimentary blog indexes. My point is that they're not central pillars of the blog community - they're not well-known, indispensible resources. They're not the Google of the blog community. That niche is currently unfilled.
An overriding interest in new blog technologies that seem to appeal mostly to other bloggers. Seriously, guys. RSS is a good first-draft effort, but it feels extremly dinky and lightweight. I don't understand why bloggers are so enthralled with the concept of immediately receiving the first 50 characters of an update to another blog. For most of us, this is more trouble than it's worth. We'd love to have a service that grabbed entire articles and posts for offline reading, but no such mechanism exists. Similarly, all of the momentum around trackback/pingback is kind of baffling.
I don't really mean to disparage the general interest in these new technologies. But there seems to be a disproportionate amount of attention paid to them, compared with their practical value, and that momentum could be redirected toward technologies that more of us find genuinely useful.:shrug:
These comments are meant strictly as constructive criticism. For a few years, the Internet seemed like it was mostly an electronic storefront for the corporate world, which is pathetic. Blogs are the best hope for bringing life back to the net, and have admirably succeeded. But I want to see this trend continue, not fade away into obscurity.
I couldn't give a damn if they use features from other software. Even if they take features from open source to make Windows better. That's the whole point of software development, and why software patents are a bad idea.
Yeah, I'm really glad we have all of this freedom to innovate. I mean, look at how far the word processor market has advanced, give ten years of freedom. Since Office 95, Word has improved by... um... well, at least the paperclip is 3D now.
Okay, Word is stagnant. But - but - but we have freedom to operate! Without this, we wouldn't've had the flood of new competitors in the word processor market who've striven to dethrone Word by heavily pushing the development edge and offering great, innovative alternatives!... Er, wait, that hasn't happened either.
Face reality. In most software markets, "freedom to innovate" means that everyone sits around and waits for someone to develop an improvement, and then they copy that improvement. So what's the point of wasting money on R&D when your competitors will do it for you? Specifically, what's the point of creating a whole new product to take on Microsoft, the king of stolen innovation?
And so, the word processor market has stagnated for a decade. Ditto spreadsheets. Ditto small database software, too, and PowerPoint, and Media Player. We've seen the same apps banged out with 1995+(x) labels, the same price tags, and no new features. It's likely to continue.
This cycle of stagnation is exactly what software patents are designed to break. It gives companies to invest in researching new ways of doing things, on the promise that their competitors won't immdiately copy them. Yes, the bleeding edge is likely to be dulled by patent concerns. But it spurs development in commodity applications, which, in fact, comprise most of the software market.
Keep in mind that biotechnologists raised the same chicken-little cry when the USPTO started issuing biotech patents: an end to biotech innovation, interference with daily activities, and general calamity for the future of biotech. Thirty years later, biotech looks amazingly vibrant - one of the few bright spots in our post-industrial economy.
Ladies and gentlemen, may i present the new Slashdot soap opera: Asteroid 2004 MN4!!!
...with the requisite theme song of course:
That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane -
Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn -
world serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs. Feed it up a knock,
speed, grunt no, strength no. Ladder structure clatter with fear of height,
down height. Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for
hire and a combat site. Left her, wasn't coming in a hurry with the furies
breathing down your neck. Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tethered
crop. Look at that low plane! Fine then. Uh oh, overflow, population,
common group, but it'll do. Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its
own needs, listen to your heart bleed. Tell me with the rapture and the
reverent in the right - right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright
light, feeling pretty psyched.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign tower. Slash and burn,
return, listen to yourself churn. Lock him in uniform and book burning,
blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. Light a candle,
light a motive. Step down, step down. Watch a heel crush, crush. Uh oh,
this means no fear - cavalier. Renegade and steer clear! A tournament,
a tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives
and I decline.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide. Mount St. Edelite.
Leonard Bernstein. Leonid Breshnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs.
Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You symbiotic, patriotic,
slam, but neck, right? Right.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine...fine...
True. But by the same token, game sales are only part of the gaming industry - consider:
Faster PCs to run more recent games.
Peripherals - video cards, sound cards, speakers, bigger hard drives (Myst IV is seven gigabytes!), joysticks. I'm sure console sales were included in the $10B tally, but I doubt PC sales were.)
Broadband connections, a significant portion of which are used for Counter-Strike, XBox Live, etc.
Arcade machine sales. Granted, arcades are very different from the '80s geek emporiums, but experience games - e.g., Dance Dance Revolution - still have a significant arcade draw. Dave 'n' Buster's is always crowded.
And, of course, consider the back-and-forth between the movie and videogame industries. On the one hand: movies like Tomb Raider, House of the Dead, Resident Evil, and the upcoming Metroid film. On the other hand: The Lord of the Rings games (primarily inspired by the films), James Bond games, and of course the Star Wars game franchise (a stand-alone industry by now, but inspired by the films.)
(Now, to be fair - you might similarly inflate movie industry tallies with TV and home theater sales. My point is that it's hard to draw clear lines around "the industry," and that these metrics are a lot more subjective than they first appear.)
Technically, yes. It's a liquid with an incredibly high viscosity, such that its flow is only observable on a geologic time frame.
Realistically, no. It has none of the normal properties of liquids. It retains its shape for hundreds of years. It's hard (try rapping your knuckles on a typical liquid.) It doesn't noticeably expand or contract with temperature and pressure differences. You can't dissolve anything in it in its normal state (maybe when it's molten, but not at 20C.) And it's got almost no heat capacity - heat passes through it almost as if it weren't there.
So uh... it's liquid, right? And liquids have some annoying tendencies... freezing, boiling, expanding/contracting, leaking, drying up? Liquids respond much more dynamically to temperature changes than solids, especially glass.
Even if they won't freeze or boil within normal operating temperatures - they're still running current through it, right? Even if the liquid is stable and inert from -10C to +40C, an electric problem could cause it to heat up in a hurry.
I guess they also have a legitimate purpose monitoring any middle eastern student studying physics, or nuclear engineering, or American born muslim students in chemical engineering, or korean students studying aerospace engineering.
Down, boy. I said monitoring, not strip-searching.
I am a huge civil liberties wonk - both for Americans and for foreigners (e.g., the Gitmo fiasco is a blight on the legal system.) But I also recognize that (a) the U.S. has an interest in tightening up its efforts against terrorism, and (b) in that regard, it might be wise to pay more attention to countries with a publicly-stated grudge against America. Now, that doesn't mean forcing North Koreans into internment camps. It does mean that the NSA should pay a little closer attention to them - discreetly and within limits.
It's not just graduation rates; it's also tuition.
Oh, I completely agree with you. Grad school tuition has similarly ballooned - most lawyers (including me) who attend schools in the top one or two tiers finish with more than $80,000 in debt. That's an awful way to start one's career. Schools are a financial racket - an easy way to make a ridiculous amount of money - and this is a huge problem.
But you'll have to connect the dots between tuition and federal surveillance of individual students. I can't even imagine a connection.
What, really, is the point in stopping them or tracking them at American Universities?
One of the interesting things about terrorism is that it's damn hard to stop. Look at Israel - even with a police state, huge racial profiling, etc., they still have trouble stopping very low-tech bombers.
But in the wake of 9/11, we know that we have to take extra steps somehow. May as well take the easy, relatively unintrusive steps first. One such step involves trying not to assist terrorists - as you wrote, not making it easy on them. Scrutinize who we let into flight schools; scrutinize who we let work with nuclear materials. That sort of thing.
It's not likely to be terribly effective. Sadly, though, neither are most of the alternatives, and the alternatives are much more expensive, impractical, and intrusive.:shrug:
From the article: "The idea, proposed by a research wing of the Department of Education, is designed to improve federal oversight of students' enrollment rates, graduation rates, and tuition. Currently, that information is provided only in summary form by universities, leaving gaps in national college statistics. When students transfer from one college to another, for example, they show up in the federal rolls as dropouts."
Apparently, metrics on student graduation rates are the lifeblood of our government. We can't tolerate even small inaccuracies.
(Of course, we can tolerate small inaccuracies in, say, our voting system. But that's just a different story.)
I can't imagine any legitimate purpose for this. Even if you argue that the government allocates public university funding based on education rates, the aggregate metrics generated by each institution should be more than sufficient. If a university isn't providing accurate data, then you need to force it to comply - not usurp its job with hideous spyware.
I imagine that the real purpose is to track foreign students at American universities. In fact, the government does have a legitimate purpose in monitoring, say, Iranian exchange students who are studying nuclear physics. But I can't imagine why they wouldn't bolt that duty to visa enforcement, rather than just brazenly spying on the population.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming they have the source. But this whole problem can only arise in the context of compiling source code. If you don't have source code, this entire scenario can't arise. Even the partially-precompiled, IL language code can't feature an "ISNOT" operator.
IMO patent law should be changed to somehow prevent this purely obstructionist usage of patents.
There is - there's a growing doctrine called patent abuse: people can't patent stuff solely to withhold it from the public for 20 years.
Many other countries require patentees to commercialize their technology within a reasonable time. If they don't, as you suggest, a compulsory-licensing scheme falls into place: the patentee is obligated to grant licenses to the technology for fair market value.
However, even if asserted as you suggest - Microsoft's tactic isn't "purely obstructionist," since its own compiler embodies it. It has made the "invention" (and I use that term generously here, since I don't view it as such) available to the public, and it is making proper use of the patent.
I have many solutions, but one I'll toss to you is this: Put together a publication of currently known but unpatented software technologies. That journal will become prior art against any future patent applicant. I further assert that some of this is already being done - e.g., Don Knuth's excellent Art of Computer Programming series.
- David Stein
But I think you're making not for abolishing software patents, but only for heightening the bar. You wrote it yourself - "There is no reason that large corporations should get to purchase monopoly control of an easy idea." And I agree with you. The general concept of audio stream compression/decompression has been around for 50+ years; no reason why the particular format chosen for MP3 should qualify for patent protection.
The patent system also agrees with you. People aren't awarded patents on a general concept, e.g. audio compression, simply by showing one way of doing it. Their patent is limited to their particular technique, which has to be novel, non-obvious, etc.
I think we're getting to the point where the "easy" concepts, as you put it, are well-documented - and thus unpatentable. I'm hoping that a rising percentage of software patents demonstrate greater novelty - e.g., "A method of implementing a psychoacoustic model for sound, comprising..." At least on the surface, it sounds like you agree with this.
That the examiners don't understand this nature of computation is part of the cause of the problems. That policy and law-makers consult only those with something to gain (and thus pay them off with those gains) is the real cause.
That is sadly true - the "erosion of the commons," economists call it. The public domain has no government advocate. Nowhere is this more true than in the copyright industry. I don't have a solution for this problem.
I don't believe the judge in the case you mention ruled that the USPTO had to start granting such patents as a matter of policy, just that that sort of patent should be upheld if they were granted.
The ruling was that a patent application could not be rejected simply because it claimed software. The USPTO had taken the view that software was not "statutory subject matter" - that it did not meet the requirement of 35 USC 101 that patents are only awarded for "machines, manufactures, compositions of matter, and processes" (and improvements, combinations, certain kinds of plants and ornamental designs, etc.) Accordingly, the USPTO had only awarded patents for software that had a "real-world impact" or that acted on "real-world inputs."
The Federal Circuit stomped on this line of reasoning. The USPTO had no choice but to start granting software patents unless they could cobble together a rejection on the usual grounds: anticipation, obviousness, non-enabling disclosure, etc. So, yes, this ruling did create "software patents" as a new field of patentable subject matter.
The rest of us cannot set up our small companies to join in.
On the contrary, software patents are a huge boon to software companies that want to compete with Microsoft. How can a small startup ever get venture capital if Microsoft can eat their technology for lunch?
Exhibit A: Stac Electronics - a small startup that won a $120MM judgment against Microsoft, who commandeered its Stacker drive compression technology for its own DoubleSpace software. Microsoft's current, zealous approach to software patents stems directly from such decisions.
Like all the other patent lawyers (as I gather you are from another of your posts) you are trying to maintain your income...
First, that's presumptuous and ad hominem, and you know it.
I am a patent attorney, but I don't practice software patents. I am a patent attorney for a large hospital - we create, patent, and license biotechnology. 0% of my income is derived from software patents.
I am an ardent advocate of software patents because (a) I understand the patent system, (b) I understand software (I'm one semester awa
That's a relief (in this forum), though I'd encourage you to upgrade this to "often." Consider that you rarely hear about the software patents that are good and productive - they're not as newsworthy as "Amazon patents OneClick, oh no!"
It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone)...
"Making money" has such a bad taste to it, doesn't it?
Money derived from commercial sofware doesn't go (100%) into the pockets of a greedy CEO. Much of it goes simply to pay the salaries of the programmers, and the operating costs of the business. I harbor the overly idealistic, probably naive view that professional programmers are motivated by (1) the desire to create cool sofware and (2) a deep-seated love of programming. They can only pursue those goals if they get a paycheck.
Sometimes, a patent is needed to secure the business capital to create this environment. That's where business realities, like patents, become important.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued.
I completely share your concern. Any time someone sucessfully patents an old or silly computing concept, it drags down everything.
But I attribute it to the infancy of the software patent field. People are still floundering with this new concept, what it can accomplish, how it should be used. Over time, sofware business people become more familiar with the nature of patents - and patent attorneys become more familiar with the nature of software. There will be a focusing of the field on truly useful and worthwhile software patents. Anything else - patenting ISNOT, for example - is simply a waste of everyone's time, money, and reputation.
That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme.
Absolutely. In fact, the RSA patent encourages competing software companies to find alternative methods. Maybe those methods will be better - more secure, less computationally taxing, offering features not found in RSA, etc. - and they'll separately patent and commercialize their better algorithm. Encouraging competition and "designing-around" has always been a goal of the patent system.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's also pretty subjective, though. At least I can offer this: All patents - good and bad - expire 20 years after filing. That's an eternity in the software industry (though it's much less offensive than the copyright industry's "life of the author + 70-95 years" schtick), but at least it's a backstop time limit to really egregious conduct.
- David Stein
You must be unfamiliar with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - in which the government encourages recipients of government funding to do exactly this. I don't believe that something the government encourages people do with government property can be construed as "theft."
(True, the RSA patent predates the Bayh-Dole Act, but there's no evidence of anything inappropriate in its patenting. You'll have to point to something particular in its history - and I don't believe any such backstory exists.)
It looks like you're relying on the general concept of patenting government-funded inventions. You must be unaware that the government has a hideous track record of commercializing its own technologies. Before the Bayh-Dole Act, the government retained ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happened, sat on a shelf completely unused. They had no commercial proponent, and so they were never used.
Your principle ignores the realities of business. Software is primarily a business - even the open-source kind. This is understandable; most Slashdotters know computers much better than business. Just be aware that virtually all of the software on your computer was written in a business context, and that the realities of commerce might play an important role.
- David Stein
That's a pretty interesting assessment - and it would make a valid business rationale. The obvious target would be mbas - Mono's visual BASIC compiler.
But seriously - show me two commercial compilers from different vendors that ever demonstrate 100% intercompatibility. Most compilers properly parse the language standard, e.g., ANSI C, and then tack on some proprietary language features. It's an inherent trait of the compiler industry - and not necessarily a bad one, except in the rare case where you want to switch compilers in the middle of a project.
So what would be the impact of this? Mono disables support for the ISNOT operator. Users compiling code containing an ISNOT operator receive the following message:
* Error: ISNOT operator not supported; use "!(IS)" instead
I can suggest several solutions to this problem, but I suspect this isn't the right venue.
- David Stein
You're misreading: I wrote that base-30 can be adequately represented by 10 digits + 26 letters - not that all of these 36 symbols were needed to represent base-30 numbers.
Presumably, they felt that base-(10 * something) was somehow more convenient than base-36. Had I written the technology, I would have asserted base-32 - which would have eased the computational burden of half of the conversion, of course.
- David Stein
Like any tool, software patents can be used well or poorly. Guns are a boon for national security, but can also be used to cement the power of the mafia.
- David Stein
Okay - RSA encryption. This novel encryption method is the mathematical basis for most encrypted web browser communication. Without such a technique, most of e-commerce would be untenable - either the encryption mechanism would be prohibitively cumbersome, or it would be riddled with holes.
This algorithm wasn't created in the vacuum of academia. It was developed as a way of allowing easy, encrypted communication among businesses. Without a business incentive to develop it - i.e., if other companies had been permitted to just steal the technology after it was created - no one would have created it.
So what happened once it was patented? Did the company take on the Darth-Vader-esque visage that most Slashdotters imagine? No, it had the good business judgment to promote RSA across the board, and to reap a reasonable profit through licensing to big companies like Verisign. The industry didn't grind to a halt.
And what would have happened without a strong, business-savvy proponent of RSA? Internet technology in general is a hideous swamp of competing standards and compatibility issues. Ask any web developer how much time they spend on IE/Firefox/Netscape/Opera compatibility issues, or on Java version compatibility, or on security issues between or among various technologies and standards. It's insanity. The explosion of web development has occurred not because of these myriad and disparate technologies, in spite of them.
Yet, in the midst of this sea of chaos, encryption technology just magically seems to work - automatically, unobtrusively, without a security update every 25 seconds. That technology works. I assert that this is because we gave one company some breathing room to develop it.
- David Stein
Why not just chalk it up to inexperience? The software patent system was suddenly dumped on the USPTO by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1998, along with this whole "business method" thing (an awful decision.) The USPTO hasn't had time to put together a system of examining such patents: hiring a fleet of examiners familiar with software, assembling a prior art database, etc.
The biotech industry went through a similar panic back when the USPTO started issuing patents on DNA, proteins, and novel organisms (e.g., knockout mice.) Many experts predicted an industrial catastrophe of monopolization, obstacles to daily research, bad patents arising from examiner incompetence, etc. Surprisingly, none of this occurred. And have you noticed the explosion of new pharmaceuticals on the market in the past decade? That's directly attributable to the R&D incentive of biotech patents.
- David Stein
Er, uh, just taking a stab in the dark: because you can represent it with 30 symbols - i.e., 10 digits + 26 letters. Of course, they could go all the way up to base-60 by using both uppercase and lowercase, but presumably case-sentivity would be much more painful ("3A4B" is always spoken aloud as "3A4B" if it's case-insensitive, but "3-capital-A-4-capital-B" if not.) Takes longer, more error-prone, etc.
That's just my guess, but I feel pretty good about it...
- David Stein
Nonsense.
You are correct in asserting that the USPTO makes money from issance - as per their fee schedule, they get $300 (plus extra fees for various things like multiple independent claims) when the app is filed, and $1,400 when it issues.
But the examiners - the people who make the allow-vs-reject decision - aren't responsible for the fiscal well-being of the USPTO. Were that the case, virtually every application would slide through to issuance with barely any examination. We'd be back to the patent registration scheme of the early 1800's, where you got a patent simply by filling out the right paperwork.
We don't have that system - in name or in practice. The examiners do a hell of a lot of rejecting, with backing references to other patents, journal articles, etc. They don't have the resources for an exhaustive search - but the typical application garners at least two separate rejections from the examiners.
But this is a classic catch-22 example: people often examiners for spending too much time on examination, and thereby contributing to the 2.5-year average pendency of patent applications.
- David Stein
Well, it helps that the junk they're patenting has no actual value. I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers. :shakes head: Woodcock Washburn (the typically excellent law firm that drafted that patent application) should the hang its head in shame over that one.
I'm a patent attorney. More specifically, I'm a software patent attorney, and I truly believe that allowing patents for truly useful novel algorithms is a boon for the industry. But I feel that the quality of many software patents is an embarrassment to the field. Worse, it's an embarrassment to the patentee: it's a sign that they have no ability to evaluate the usefulness of their software - no talent to determine which pieces of their products are both new and critically important.
But the /. community should be glad about one thing: As long as Microsoft's choices of technologies to patent remain befuddled, it won't be able to tap the true, strong, monopoly-cementing power of software patents.
- David Stein
Absolutely. This is the most insane thing about Steam: When I can't reach Steam - either because it's down, or because I happen to be in a location with no network access (which, in fact, is a common scenario) - I can't play the offline games I purchased. Like Half-Life 2. And Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Even Codename Gordon - a dinky freeware platformer, reminiscent of id software's classic game Abuse - is unplayable.
So I paid $80 for package including many excellent single-player games, but I can't play any of them without getting express consent from Valve every time. When that consent is unavailable, I can't play the games I bought. This is bogus. This is outrageous.
I cannot imagine how this possibly benefits Valve in any way. Surely the p1r@t3s who don't wanna pay (na na why don't you get a job?) are merrily playing their hacked-installer versions. All this mechanism accomplishes is giving the pointy-headed marketroids at Valve some academic (useless) data on who plays which games. Meanwhile, actual customers get surveilled, and sometimes denied access to their paid-for games.
In sum, this scheme presents spurious value to Valve, and no value to customers, while also pissing customers off. Valve is too smart a company not to realize this. Why they persist is a fucking mystery.
- David Stein
I found Half-Life 1 to be infinitely creepy. After a long gaming session, I got up to get something from the fridge. Along the way, I happened to run into a single strand of spider-web hanging down from the ceiling. My barnacle-avoidance instincts kicked in and I twisted my body out of the way - it took me a second to figure out what the hell I was doing.
Of course, I have all of the usual stories of seeing stuff when trying to fall asleep after late-night gaming - falling Tetris pieces, Super Puzzle Fighter blocks, Puzzle Bobble bubbles, even minesweeper scenarios. I think it's especially prevalent with games featuring lots of visual elements that your brain can abstract into functional pieces...?
- David Stein
Remember ICQ? ICQ ran like Windows 3.1 junkware - ads, dinky icons, reliability that can only be described as squidgy. Yet people still used it, in droves, until AOL came out with a client more suited to this decade. Ditto Netscape, by the way - I think Netscape 2.x used to crash on one out of every three webpages.
So it's not the quality of the application (and I agree with you that most RSS newsreaders are pretty clumsy and awful.) The primary determinant of success is simply: How useful is it?
RSS has the potential to be useful. I should be able to type in my top twelve news/blog sites, and have an aggregator constantly fetch new articles from them. My computer should always have the full text of top articles, bookmarkable and archivable, site/keyword/topic searchable, automatically categorized according to some standard hierarchy (across sites, even.) I'd love my computer to be a capable archive of every interesting thing I've read.
RSS does nothing like this. It's primitive and crippled. If I see an interesting headline, I don't want to have to go to another site to read it, or bookmark it so I can read it when I have a connection again. I just want to read the damn article. RSS doesn't let me, so I don't use RSS.
Few things are more disappointing than failed potential. RSS is just groundwork for the more capable technology that will likely follow it.
- David Stein
Don't get me wrong - I read about six blogs a day, and I truly believe they're the future portal of the Internet. Without blogs, the WWW is mostly comprised of organization websites (companies and universities being the top two), and frankly, that's hideously boring. Blogs are the spiritual successor to Netscape's "What's Cool?" feature, and due to the huge number of blogs, you can probably find two dozen that specifically cater to your interests.
However, I believe that blogs run the risk of being a flash in the pan - of being a trend that seemed really promising, but just never achieved cultural critical mass. I posit that many of these new readers are people who latched onto the buzzword and wanted to jump on the zeitgeist bandwagon. When the next shiny thing comes along in twenty minutes, they'll hop off and scurry away. Basically, I'm wondering if many of those new readers will vanish in 2005, and may take with them some of the momentum that drives the community. Remember that many predicted in 1998 that VRML would revolutionize the Internet.
As I see it, greater cultural (mainstream) adoption of blogs is hampered by two factors:
- Absence of a central, well-known blog directory. It's difficult to find new blogs that cater to your interests. It's like an Internet without search engines - in 1995, finding new websites involved stumbling upon them via links from other sites. Imagine if we didn't have telephone books, and if ordering pizza usually involved asking your friends for the number of some good pizza places. That's pretty low-yield, but I feel that's how most need-a-new-blog scavenging missions go. Quite simply, this inefficiency loses readers.
- An overriding interest in new blog technologies that seem to appeal mostly to other bloggers. Seriously, guys. RSS is a good first-draft effort, but it feels extremly dinky and lightweight. I don't understand why bloggers are so enthralled with the concept of immediately receiving the first 50 characters of an update to another blog. For most of us, this is more trouble than it's worth. We'd love to have a service that grabbed entire articles and posts for offline reading, but no such mechanism exists. Similarly, all of the momentum around trackback/pingback is kind of baffling.
These comments are meant strictly as constructive criticism. For a few years, the Internet seemed like it was mostly an electronic storefront for the corporate world, which is pathetic. Blogs are the best hope for bringing life back to the net, and have admirably succeeded. But I want to see this trend continue, not fade away into obscurity.Now, yes, I am aware of sites like Blogwise, which offers some rudimentary blog indexes. My point is that they're not central pillars of the blog community - they're not well-known, indispensible resources. They're not the Google of the blog community. That niche is currently unfilled.
I don't really mean to disparage the general interest in these new technologies. But there seems to be a disproportionate amount of attention paid to them, compared with their practical value, and that momentum could be redirected toward technologies that more of us find genuinely useful. :shrug:
- David Stein
Yeah, I'm really glad we have all of this freedom to innovate. I mean, look at how far the word processor market has advanced, give ten years of freedom. Since Office 95, Word has improved by... um... well, at least the paperclip is 3D now.
Okay, Word is stagnant. But - but - but we have freedom to operate! Without this, we wouldn't've had the flood of new competitors in the word processor market who've striven to dethrone Word by heavily pushing the development edge and offering great, innovative alternatives! ... Er, wait, that hasn't happened either.
Face reality. In most software markets, "freedom to innovate" means that everyone sits around and waits for someone to develop an improvement, and then they copy that improvement. So what's the point of wasting money on R&D when your competitors will do it for you? Specifically, what's the point of creating a whole new product to take on Microsoft, the king of stolen innovation?
And so, the word processor market has stagnated for a decade. Ditto spreadsheets. Ditto small database software, too, and PowerPoint, and Media Player. We've seen the same apps banged out with 1995+(x) labels, the same price tags, and no new features. It's likely to continue.
This cycle of stagnation is exactly what software patents are designed to break. It gives companies to invest in researching new ways of doing things, on the promise that their competitors won't immdiately copy them. Yes, the bleeding edge is likely to be dulled by patent concerns. But it spurs development in commodity applications, which, in fact, comprise most of the software market.
Keep in mind that biotechnologists raised the same chicken-little cry when the USPTO started issuing biotech patents: an end to biotech innovation, interference with daily activities, and general calamity for the future of biotech. Thirty years later, biotech looks amazingly vibrant - one of the few bright spots in our post-industrial economy.
- David Stein
That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane - Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn - world serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs. Feed it up a knock, speed, grunt no, strength no. Ladder structure clatter with fear of height, down height. Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for hire and a combat site. Left her, wasn't coming in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tethered crop. Look at that low plane! Fine then. Uh oh, overflow, population, common group, but it'll do. Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed. Tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right - right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign tower. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn. Lock him in uniform and book burning, blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. Light a candle, light a motive. Step down, step down. Watch a heel crush, crush. Uh oh, this means no fear - cavalier. Renegade and steer clear! A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide. Mount St. Edelite. Leonard Bernstein. Leonid Breshnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You symbiotic, patriotic, slam, but neck, right? Right.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine...fine...
(It's time I had some time alone)
True. But by the same token, game sales are only part of the gaming industry - consider:
Faster PCs to run more recent games.
Peripherals - video cards, sound cards, speakers, bigger hard drives (Myst IV is seven gigabytes!), joysticks. I'm sure console sales were included in the $10B tally, but I doubt PC sales were.)
Broadband connections, a significant portion of which are used for Counter-Strike, XBox Live, etc.
Arcade machine sales. Granted, arcades are very different from the '80s geek emporiums, but experience games - e.g., Dance Dance Revolution - still have a significant arcade draw. Dave 'n' Buster's is always crowded.
And, of course, consider the back-and-forth between the movie and videogame industries. On the one hand: movies like Tomb Raider, House of the Dead, Resident Evil, and the upcoming Metroid film. On the other hand: The Lord of the Rings games (primarily inspired by the films), James Bond games, and of course the Star Wars game franchise (a stand-alone industry by now, but inspired by the films.)
(Now, to be fair - you might similarly inflate movie industry tallies with TV and home theater sales. My point is that it's hard to draw clear lines around "the industry," and that these metrics are a lot more subjective than they first appear.)
- David Stein
Technically, yes. It's a liquid with an incredibly high viscosity, such that its flow is only observable on a geologic time frame.
Realistically, no. It has none of the normal properties of liquids. It retains its shape for hundreds of years. It's hard (try rapping your knuckles on a typical liquid.) It doesn't noticeably expand or contract with temperature and pressure differences. You can't dissolve anything in it in its normal state (maybe when it's molten, but not at 20C.) And it's got almost no heat capacity - heat passes through it almost as if it weren't there.
- David Stein
Even if they won't freeze or boil within normal operating temperatures - they're still running current through it, right? Even if the liquid is stable and inert from -10C to +40C, an electric problem could cause it to heat up in a hurry.
- David Stein
Down, boy. I said monitoring, not strip-searching.
I am a huge civil liberties wonk - both for Americans and for foreigners (e.g., the Gitmo fiasco is a blight on the legal system.) But I also recognize that (a) the U.S. has an interest in tightening up its efforts against terrorism, and (b) in that regard, it might be wise to pay more attention to countries with a publicly-stated grudge against America. Now, that doesn't mean forcing North Koreans into internment camps. It does mean that the NSA should pay a little closer attention to them - discreetly and within limits.
- David Stein
Oh, I completely agree with you. Grad school tuition has similarly ballooned - most lawyers (including me) who attend schools in the top one or two tiers finish with more than $80,000 in debt. That's an awful way to start one's career. Schools are a financial racket - an easy way to make a ridiculous amount of money - and this is a huge problem.
But you'll have to connect the dots between tuition and federal surveillance of individual students. I can't even imagine a connection.
- David Stein
One of the interesting things about terrorism is that it's damn hard to stop. Look at Israel - even with a police state, huge racial profiling, etc., they still have trouble stopping very low-tech bombers.
But in the wake of 9/11, we know that we have to take extra steps somehow. May as well take the easy, relatively unintrusive steps first. One such step involves trying not to assist terrorists - as you wrote, not making it easy on them. Scrutinize who we let into flight schools; scrutinize who we let work with nuclear materials. That sort of thing.
It's not likely to be terribly effective. Sadly, though, neither are most of the alternatives, and the alternatives are much more expensive, impractical, and intrusive. :shrug:
- David Stein
From the article: "The idea, proposed by a research wing of the Department of Education, is designed to improve federal oversight of students' enrollment rates, graduation rates, and tuition. Currently, that information is provided only in summary form by universities, leaving gaps in national college statistics. When students transfer from one college to another, for example, they show up in the federal rolls as dropouts."
Apparently, metrics on student graduation rates are the lifeblood of our government. We can't tolerate even small inaccuracies.
(Of course, we can tolerate small inaccuracies in, say, our voting system. But that's just a different story.)
I can't imagine any legitimate purpose for this. Even if you argue that the government allocates public university funding based on education rates, the aggregate metrics generated by each institution should be more than sufficient. If a university isn't providing accurate data, then you need to force it to comply - not usurp its job with hideous spyware.
I imagine that the real purpose is to track foreign students at American universities. In fact, the government does have a legitimate purpose in monitoring, say, Iranian exchange students who are studying nuclear physics. But I can't imagine why they wouldn't bolt that duty to visa enforcement, rather than just brazenly spying on the population.
- David Stein