Story is definitely wrong on issue of obviousness question.
Any smart sixth grader could come up with stuff like this in his sleep. The implementation details may not be obvious, but the idea being patented is such a hum drum application of run of the mill computer technology that it is pathetic that anyone considers this patentable at all.
Yet another example of why software patents are a threat to the health of the republic. The sad thing is that Facebook probably actually thinks this is an "invention".
To be more specific, software patents are the enemy of software in general. To say nothing of technology, progress, health, welfare, and economic development...
On the contrary, software patents are the greatest enemy to open source software that can possibly be imagined. The reasons for that ought to be obvious.
If Microsoft really believed this to any significant degree, they would disable Windows Genuine Advantage. As it is they probably believe in the equivalent of piracy hormesis, i.e. a little bit is good up to a point, after that it is a net harm.
Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least.
Controlling for language and operating system, the idea that an IDE or set of development tools can increase the productivity of an average programmer by a factor of 100 is insane. A factor of two, on average, maybe. More than that is evidence that the programmers don't actually have to think, i.e. they are glorified code monkeys writing trivial code of the sort that any talented sixth grader could turn out.
Any programmer whose productivity in C++ is improved 1500% by using Visual Studio is a really bad programmer, so bad that he more likely has negative productivity, the sort of employee his employer should pay to quit.
it was pretty likely that anti-P2P legislation would get proposed.
Anti-P2P? I do not think that word means what you think it does. If anything, this is arguably pro-P2P legislation, because the legal restriction of various nefarious practices will give compliant P2P software an air of legitimacy which it often lacks now. "We comply with all government regulations and mandates..."
Besides the things you have mentioned, here are a couple of others:
1. A patent holder pays legal costs policy. If you want to sue someone over a an artificial and probably defective government granted monopoly, you should pay reasonable legal costs for their defense, up front. Then if you win, you get those costs refunded as part of the judgment.
2. Mandatory licensing. No patent holder should be allowed to refuse to license a patent under reasonable and non discriminatory terms. Mandatory arbitration to establish what is "reasonable".
3. Cost recovery. All patent submissions should be required to include documented research and development costs associated with the invention. Then cost recovery from all parties should be limited to twice the research and development costs plus $10,000. As soon as the licensing fees exceed that amount, the patent should go into the public domain.
Both the patent office and the courts should have the ability to review and discount dubious research and development cost claims. We are talking about an artificial, government granted monopoly to something that is not naturally "property" after all.
I am not opposed to short term software patents for real inventions. The problem is that 95% of the software patents granted in the last decade are essentially garbage - grants of monopolies to entire fields of endeavor based on the slightest hint of originality, if that.
As someone recently said, if you can put 10 PhDs in a room, ask them to solve a problem, and they do not come up with the same idea in less than an afternoon, then perhaps it should be patentable. Most of the software patents I have seen lately are for things that anyone with experience in the field is likely to suggest off the top of his head. Some are *much* more obvious than that.
An idea shouldn't be patentable just because no one has bothered to patent it before, because there was no economic interest in doing so. Software patents are granted all the time for things that exhibit no originality or creativity, but rather standard engineering practice - old ideas that reach the point of economic viability even though someone could have done exactly the same thing fifty years ago on a less economical basis, no creativity required.
Simpler solution: Besides all the other problems with them (like the inability of the patent office to tell what is an "invention"), software patents are a net drag on the economy, therefore they should be eliminated.
Including ZFS (or something like it) would not have any affect on the ability of other filesystems to use the Linux LVM / RAID layers. Nothing would stop a ZFS user from using those layers as well, instead of or in addition to the RAID functionality ZFS offers. The ZFS FUSE people do that, for example.
The downside of traditional software RAID is the RAID 5 "write hole", to the degree that I don't see why any sane individual would run software RAID 5 at all. The RAID 5 functionality in the Linux kernel is not particularly useful in real life. ZFS RAID-Z does not have that problem, and is.
The US government only spends around 20% of GDP every year, so it shouldn't need to take in much more than that to balance the budget.
That is what it used to spend, at the federal level only. As of late the Feds are spending more like 25% of GDP, while only collecting enough revenue to pay for 17%. Hence the trillion dollar deficits.
If you include all levels, the government spends about 45% of GDP these days. No doubt the real problem is that they are not spending enough.
I should hasten to add that if a "self employed" person is actually an employee of his own corporation, he and the corporation he owns pays Social Security / Medicare (payroll) tax on his salary just as if he were an ordinary employee.
"Self employment tax" is for sole proprietorships and single member LLCs that elect to be treated like one. All that doesn't make much of a difference. The issue is to what degree can a business owner legitimately avoid paying Social Security and/or self employment tax on the sum total of his income from that business.
The income tax he has to pay is unaffected - although if (horror of horrors) the person starts an class C corporation, the corporation has to pay its own income tax on its net income prior to paying any distributions and/or dividends, which are then taxed on the owner's individual income tax return again. Paying 70% of one's income to the federal government can get mighty discouraging, so in a case like this is more economical to take virtually all of their compensation in the form of salary.
Capital gains do not enter the picture until the owner sells all or part of his business to someone else.
Ya see the thing is generally speaking capital gains tax is less than income and payroll tax. Consultants running their own companies generally pay capital gains on most of their income whereas employees pay income tax and their employers pay payroll tax, which generates more revenue for the government. The extra benefits for employees are nice too, but that isn't really the goal.
The only problem about that paragraph is that it is almost entirely wrong. Unless a consultant sells his company he will never pay any capital gains tax on that enterprise. All the income distributions that are not counted as salary (and hence subject to self employment tax) will be counted as ordinary taxable income and will be subject to ordinary income tax.
If a consultant with his own company abuses this distinction he can largely avoid paying any self employment tax (which is the equivalent of Social Security) so the IRS has rules to require such individuals to pay themselves some reasonable salary for the work they actually perform.
The only serious problem here is nomenclature - dividends and distributions are not "capital gains". Capital gains occur when the value of an asset goes up, and in the United States are generally only taxed when the gain is realized, typically when the asset is sold. If a consultant never sells his company, he will never pay any capital gains tax on that investment.
The money he pays himself as a company owner he will pay ordinary income tax on. In fact, the only reason to pay himself that way at all is to avoid some of the social security (self employment) tax he would otherwise pay. In part, because there are rules about what is reasonable in that regard.
When Michael Mann loses his job and can't get another one for the mixture of fraud and / or incompetence he displayed with statistical techniques that can turn any data series into a hockey stick and his later tree ring data cherry picking, I will think you might be right about that.
While the science around climate change deserves scrutiny and probing, this probing should probably be done by scientists, not legislators.
Why do you think they passed this bill? To _make_ a policy statement. Do you think that physical scientists have any special expertise in economics or social policy? If anyone it is overstepping their bounds here it is the scientists who act as if they have been anointed arbiters over all political questions.
The question at hand is a political one, not a scientific one: whether the EPA should be regulating carbon dioxide. It is not the EPA that has the power to pass cap and trade it is Congress. How dare they(!). Certainly Congress isn't qualified to decide such life and death matters. Instead we should appoint a committee of seven scientists and let all power flow down from there.
Because carbon dioxide is not a "pollutant" by any normal definition, and that is what the pertinent laws were set up to regulate. Trying to regulate CO2 emissions without a new law designed to mitigate global warming is making an end run around congressional authority. Essentially a bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats stretching laws to do things they weren't intended to cover.
I imagine about 90% of the new homes constructed in the U.S. today have standard twisted pairs from the telephone company. Telco fiber reaches the neighborhood of course, and then it is copper all the way from there. Same deal with cable companies. Fiber to the neighborhood and then coax the rest of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Story is definitely wrong on issue of obviousness question.
Any smart sixth grader could come up with stuff like this in his sleep. The implementation details may not be obvious, but the idea being patented is such a hum drum application of run of the mill computer technology that it is pathetic that anyone considers this patentable at all.
Yet another example of why software patents are a threat to the health of the republic. The sad thing is that Facebook probably actually thinks this is an "invention".
To be more specific, software patents are the enemy of software in general. To say nothing of technology, progress, health, welfare, and economic development...
On the contrary, software patents are the greatest enemy to open source software that can possibly be imagined. The reasons for that ought to be obvious.
If Microsoft really believed this to any significant degree, they would disable Windows Genuine Advantage. As it is they probably believe in the equivalent of piracy hormesis, i.e. a little bit is good up to a point, after that it is a net harm.
Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least.
Controlling for language and operating system, the idea that an IDE or set of development tools can increase the productivity of an average programmer by a factor of 100 is insane. A factor of two, on average, maybe. More than that is evidence that the programmers don't actually have to think, i.e. they are glorified code monkeys writing trivial code of the sort that any talented sixth grader could turn out.
Any programmer whose productivity in C++ is improved 1500% by using Visual Studio is a really bad programmer, so bad that he more likely has negative productivity, the sort of employee his employer should pay to quit.
Anti-P2P? I do not think that word means what you think it does. If anything, this is arguably pro-P2P legislation, because the legal restriction of various nefarious practices will give compliant P2P software an air of legitimacy which it often lacks now. "We comply with all government regulations and mandates..."
Besides the things you have mentioned, here are a couple of others:
1. A patent holder pays legal costs policy. If you want to sue someone over a an artificial and probably defective government granted monopoly, you should pay reasonable legal costs for their defense, up front. Then if you win, you get those costs refunded as part of the judgment.
2. Mandatory licensing. No patent holder should be allowed to refuse to license a patent under reasonable and non discriminatory terms. Mandatory arbitration to establish what is "reasonable".
3. Cost recovery. All patent submissions should be required to include documented research and development costs associated with the invention. Then cost recovery from all parties should be limited to twice the research and development costs plus $10,000. As soon as the licensing fees exceed that amount, the patent should go into the public domain.
Both the patent office and the courts should have the ability to review and discount dubious research and development cost claims. We are talking about an artificial, government granted monopoly to something that is not naturally "property" after all.
I am not opposed to short term software patents for real inventions. The problem is that 95% of the software patents granted in the last decade are essentially garbage - grants of monopolies to entire fields of endeavor based on the slightest hint of originality, if that.
As someone recently said, if you can put 10 PhDs in a room, ask them to solve a problem, and they do not come up with the same idea in less than an afternoon, then perhaps it should be patentable. Most of the software patents I have seen lately are for things that anyone with experience in the field is likely to suggest off the top of his head. Some are *much* more obvious than that.
An idea shouldn't be patentable just because no one has bothered to patent it before, because there was no economic interest in doing so. Software patents are granted all the time for things that exhibit no originality or creativity, but rather standard engineering practice - old ideas that reach the point of economic viability even though someone could have done exactly the same thing fifty years ago on a less economical basis, no creativity required.
The inability to collect damages for past infringement (due to laches) has no effect on the ability to enforce a patent for the remainder of the term.
Simpler solution: Besides all the other problems with them (like the inability of the patent office to tell what is an "invention"), software patents are a net drag on the economy, therefore they should be eliminated.
Including ZFS (or something like it) would not have any affect on the ability of other filesystems to use the Linux LVM / RAID layers. Nothing would stop a ZFS user from using those layers as well, instead of or in addition to the RAID functionality ZFS offers. The ZFS FUSE people do that, for example.
The downside of traditional software RAID is the RAID 5 "write hole", to the degree that I don't see why any sane individual would run software RAID 5 at all. The RAID 5 functionality in the Linux kernel is not particularly useful in real life. ZFS RAID-Z does not have that problem, and is.
ZFS was designed as a huge blob of interdependent code
Not true, any more than the claim that Linux is. ZFS has internal layers and an architecture that is as sane as any system out there.
The state of CA kicks in a few tax incentives and there are Federal incentives.
As if tax incentives have anything to do with the real economic cost of an investment like this...
The US government only spends around 20% of GDP every year, so it shouldn't need to take in much more than that to balance the budget.
That is what it used to spend, at the federal level only. As of late the Feds are spending more like 25% of GDP, while only collecting enough revenue to pay for 17%. Hence the trillion dollar deficits.
If you include all levels, the government spends about 45% of GDP these days. No doubt the real problem is that they are not spending enough.
I should hasten to add that if a "self employed" person is actually an employee of his own corporation, he and the corporation he owns pays Social Security / Medicare (payroll) tax on his salary just as if he were an ordinary employee.
"Self employment tax" is for sole proprietorships and single member LLCs that elect to be treated like one. All that doesn't make much of a difference. The issue is to what degree can a business owner legitimately avoid paying Social Security and/or self employment tax on the sum total of his income from that business.
The income tax he has to pay is unaffected - although if (horror of horrors) the person starts an class C corporation, the corporation has to pay its own income tax on its net income prior to paying any distributions and/or dividends, which are then taxed on the owner's individual income tax return again. Paying 70% of one's income to the federal government can get mighty discouraging, so in a case like this is more economical to take virtually all of their compensation in the form of salary.
Capital gains do not enter the picture until the owner sells all or part of his business to someone else.
Ya see the thing is generally speaking capital gains tax is less than income and payroll tax. Consultants running their own companies generally pay capital gains on most of their income whereas employees pay income tax and their employers pay payroll tax, which generates more revenue for the government. The extra benefits for employees are nice too, but that isn't really the goal.
The only problem about that paragraph is that it is almost entirely wrong. Unless a consultant sells his company he will never pay any capital gains tax on that enterprise. All the income distributions that are not counted as salary (and hence subject to self employment tax) will be counted as ordinary taxable income and will be subject to ordinary income tax.
If a consultant with his own company abuses this distinction he can largely avoid paying any self employment tax (which is the equivalent of Social Security) so the IRS has rules to require such individuals to pay themselves some reasonable salary for the work they actually perform.
The only serious problem here is nomenclature - dividends and distributions are not "capital gains". Capital gains occur when the value of an asset goes up, and in the United States are generally only taxed when the gain is realized, typically when the asset is sold. If a consultant never sells his company, he will never pay any capital gains tax on that investment.
The money he pays himself as a company owner he will pay ordinary income tax on. In fact, the only reason to pay himself that way at all is to avoid some of the social security (self employment) tax he would otherwise pay. In part, because there are rules about what is reasonable in that regard.
When Michael Mann loses his job and can't get another one for the mixture of fraud and / or incompetence he displayed with statistical techniques that can turn any data series into a hockey stick and his later tree ring data cherry picking, I will think you might be right about that.
You think Madoff is an economist? I hardly know where to start...
While the science around climate change deserves scrutiny and probing, this probing should probably be done by scientists, not legislators.
Why do you think they passed this bill? To _make_ a policy statement. Do you think that physical scientists have any special expertise in economics or social policy? If anyone it is overstepping their bounds here it is the scientists who act as if they have been anointed arbiters over all political questions.
The question at hand is a political one, not a scientific one: whether the EPA should be regulating carbon dioxide. It is not the EPA that has the power to pass cap and trade it is Congress. How dare they(!). Certainly Congress isn't qualified to decide such life and death matters. Instead we should appoint a committee of seven scientists and let all power flow down from there.
No legal consequences whatsoever. Political impact possibly.
Because carbon dioxide is not a "pollutant" by any normal definition, and that is what the pertinent laws were set up to regulate. Trying to regulate CO2 emissions without a new law designed to mitigate global warming is making an end run around congressional authority. Essentially a bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats stretching laws to do things they weren't intended to cover.
I imagine about 90% of the new homes constructed in the U.S. today have standard twisted pairs from the telephone company. Telco fiber reaches the neighborhood of course, and then it is copper all the way from there. Same deal with cable companies. Fiber to the neighborhood and then coax the rest of the way.