If we have insufficient information about something, then it's usually better to take no action than to actively attempt to change it. Instituting new software patents in an assertive action. Unless you can can prove with hard numbers that more software patents and royalties (above and beyond existing copyright-based licensing) will actually benefit the industry, it's best to leave it alone.
The people arguing for no change don't have to prove their argument. The burden of proof is on those who want to make these changes.
It's probably not your battery. The power company would own them all, and you'd put down a security deposit. You would only keep each battery pack for a period of days or hours; as long is it takes to discharge them in your car. You would have no financial interest in whether a particular battery pack is good/bad/mediocre.
It's possible that they would offer a "no dud" guarantee on any battery fillup. If you somehow got stranded because you don't get reasonable watt-hours out of a charged battery, they'd give you some kind of rebate. I don't see this happening very often, because they'd probably monitor each battery pack through its lifetime and recycle them just before they start going bad.
It seems like a lot of people are focused on the batteries. What the consumer would be buying at the service station is electricity. They would simply be holding onto any particular set of batteries for a few hours to a few days. If the battery design were standardized, the energy companies could handle anyone's batteries and sort that out amongst themselves.
It would be like the old days when soda pop was sold in returnable bottles. You were paying for the pop. You got the bottles too, and you could return them for your deposit at any store. You cared about the pop, not about the bottles.
The sensible thing would be to include built-in watt-hour meters on the batteries. You'd only pay for the amount of juice you actually consumed on that particular battery pack before you swapped it out. If you got an especially weak set of batteries, you would have to swap it out sooner, but you'd pay less for that swap.
(Unless you're returning a rental car. Then they'd be sure to always bill you for a 100% charge at 5X the standard rate + 23% tax no matter what you actually used.)
I put compact fluorescents in my 3 outdoor light fixtures. IIRC, the ones I have claim to work down to -20degF. It got down to -10 last winter, and they ran a little dim but otherwise worked just fine. (They aren't floodlights however. I'm not sure if any of the CF floodlights are rated for outdoor use.)
In the two years since I installed them, I figure I've already saved $100 in electricity.
Well, I guess you must be a Lisp programmer, because I can't think of any other languages that have fewer inconsistencies that Python. Usually Python is criticized for being too regular.
What you mean (and what the python compiler seems special cased to do) is:
not (a is b)
It is a special case. The Python language reference states that "is not" is a single operator. So that particular construct is parsed at a lower level than general expressions, and the expression evaluator never sees it.
However, I like that it was done that way because it flows nicely when you read it. I use it a lot, mainly when I use None to mean "NA": if foo is not None: bar.append(foo). For some reason, I prefer to use 'is' instead of '=' to check against the singleton value None. It seems to make the special case of checking for NA values stand out more clearly.
Since it's doubtful that anybody would actually ever us the expression a is (not b), I think that this operator trick is worth it.
Microsoft's incredible insight here seems to involve taking Python's 10-year old technology, porting it to BASIC, and heavily optimizing it by removing the whitespace sytactic sugar between 'is' and 'not'. (This saves over 16% space!)
If anything was more worthy of patent protection, I don't know what it could be.
Actually, it's pretty obvious that the motivation for such a stupid little patent that applies to one language is simply to prevent people from reimplementing the language as a whole. Nobody cares about IsNot itself, including Microsoft. However, since 100% code compatibility is required to do a full reimplementation, this essentially would grant them a 20-year monopoly on compatible implementations of VB.
This is one of the worst things about the current patent system. Patent holders are allowed to use patents on small things to control access to huge things. Patents should somehow be changed to only protect the claims in the patent, they should not be allowed to use compatibility issues to amplify small patents into generalized barriers to entry of a whole industry.
Current gov't crash tests into a fixed barrier from 35mph involve around 10 Gs of average deceleration, with the peak accelerations undoubtedly being higher due to the uneven nature of a collision. Many current cars pass this test with little likely injury to the passengers.
A controlled stop would likely come out better than that.
There are lots of mechanical safeguards on an elevator that keep it from plummeting to the floor should the computer fail (as they often do).
IMO, the solution is to make cars more like elevators. Instead of trying to put them on the current free-form road system. Put them on something more like a model railroad set.
I imagine cars about the size of golf carts that could run at high speeds on the constrained tracks, and at low speeds on regular roads to account for the fact that you can't build tracks to every single building.
This would have many advantages. First is the obvious time savings because the driver doesn't have to pay attention for most of the trip. Much more time is saved by central router pre-planning all traffic, totally eliminating slowdowns. (If there's too much demand for the system to handle, you'd be told to chill out for a while before the trip even starts.)
There would be huge safety gains, because the tracks could be built with no grade-level crossings whatsoever. In the constrained environment, I think that a 10X to 100X improvement in safety (similar to airplanes per mile) would be doable. Precise central scheduling would eliminate most needs for local traffic decision making, and the cars would only need to have local backup systems (based on radars, cameras and/or wireless P2P with other cars) that are designed only to avoid collisions due to errors.
The tracks could have mechanical features to support a "tail hook" kind of feature on the cars. In an emergency, the car could use the tail hook to stop at something like 10G deceleration, so it could come from 60 mph to a dead stop in about 12 feet without harming the (seatbelted) passengers.
Cargo capacity would be infinite by having robot cars that are programmed to follow you like a trailer. You could add any number of these to make your own train. You would summon them at places like a lumber yard, then when you're done, you send them back on their way to the next job.
Energy savings would be huge, because people wouldn't need to drive around with excess cargo capacity at all times. 99% of the time, the golf-cart passenger compartment would be sufficient, so the total mass being driven around would drop by a huge factor. Moreover, they would probably be electric, with small batteries for driving off-track. Centrally-generated electricity would power the cars and charge their batteries while on the tracks.
The tracks themselves could be prefabricated and put together like model railroad tracks, allowing huge flexibility in transportation. They might even be temporarilly set up for special one-time events, and then taken down again. I think that each track might be able to carry the equivalent of two of today's freeway lanes because of central scheduling. The footprint could be very small, like 6 feet wide by 5 feet tall per track, saving massive amounts of real estate. In cities, most tracks would be elevated or buried to reduce congestion.
I don't think the tracks would necessarily have actual rails; the cars might just automatically steer to stay in the center of the track. This would allow for flexibilty in design of track intersections. T and cross intersections could be used in low-traffic segments, and the central scheduling would eliminate the need for stop lights or similar local controls. (There would probably actually be stop lights, but they would cycle instantly on a per-car basis. They would only be actually used for emergency collision detection.)
A system like this seems pretty radical, but it could be initially tested out as a cargo-only system to replace trains and/or trucks in a limited area. Once the kinks are worked out there, it's use and scope could be expanded.
Yeah, cause we'll need lots of software engineers in an age of barbarism
In the post-apocalyptic age, the economy is going to be based mainly on bartering beef jerkey, jugs of gasoline, scrapped auto parts, cartons of cigarrets and boxes of ammo. Managing all those complex transactions and inventory without quality software tools would be overly burdensome to marauders who strive to excel. There will be a strong demand for IT professionals who can help streamline the economy of the dystopian future.
The USPTO is primarily paid to examine patents, not issue them or except maintenance fees.
Yes, and there wouldn't be so many patents to examine if people didn't think that they had a good chance of getting them issued. The more that get issued, the more that get examined. Are you sure that you're not including applications that get re-examined? In my experience (I have well over a dozen patents, courtesy of my former employers), most applications ultimately get approved.
Have you ever debated prior art with an attorney?
Yes. I've been pulled into patent lawsuits.
Have you ever signed your name and submitted papers to a federal court where your entire argument depends on a date you found on a website? Do think that's a fun or easy thing to do?
Who the hell cares if it's fun or easy? If the patent examiner sees evidence that there's prior art on of a website, then its his civic duty to investigate further before yanking a chunk of knowledge out of the public domain for 20 years.
. If there were the slightest shred of truth to your hyperbole, then why does the USPTO issue about 1250 patents per week but we read about maybe 1 or 5 per month at most? Why do people always fall back on the "swinging sideways on a swing" or the "one click purchase" patents? If reality and facts were on your side, then wouldn't we be reading about hundreds or thousands of "rubber stamped" patents per month? Per year?
Because a vast numbers of bogus patents are issued but haven't yet been "discovered" by the appropriate leeches. That's one of the things that this VC new venture is going to be involved in. It doesn't matter if 95% of the patents are reasonable. One bad patent can cause orders of magnitude more economic damage to an industry than the economic worth of a typical good patent.
Of course, it's not really your fault. You probably aren't aware that when a patent ends up on the front page, the examiner's entire career is in jeopardy.
Sure, there's always going to be a couple of low-level scapegoats per year to cover the collective asses of the whole system.
You probably aren't aware that the examining process takes 12-48 months and involves 10-200 pages of correspondence between the attorneys and the examiners.
Sure I am. I've been through the process many times. All it takes is ca$h, a good attorney and some technical jargon. My employers have patented some of my brilliant ideas, and some of my less-than mediocre ideas, depending mainly on how many patents they wanted to get that year. I've never noticed any correlation between the quality of the idea and the difficulty of obtaining a patent. (BTW, have you ever noticed that one of the main jobs of an attorney is to simply reformat technical documentation into double-spaced courier font for $200/hr, changing every 's' ending on a plural noun to the phrase "a plurality of". How can you read that monospaced crap all day?)
the attorney can push the application to a board of appeals, in which case the decision to issue is largely out of the examiner's hands yet the examiner's name is still on the issued patent.
The board of appeals is an integral part of the overall flawed system.
What, like prohibition? I guess you never heard of the war on drugs?
That would be mainly pushed by the feds headquartered in the same city as the USPTO.
I guess you haven't seen police officers enforcing segregation?
I'm not aware of any current laws requiring segregation. Back when police did enforce it, they were part of the problem, when instead they should have been protesting and resisting the laws instead of saying "I'm just doing my job here".
The USPTO does not have authority to "reject" an application (in the sense that the USPTO says "no" and the case is final) - it can only attempt to convince the attorneys that an appeal would be a waste of time, then the applicant abandons.
I don't think that anybody has a problem with assigning patents, assuming that all of the patents issued were in fact novel, useful and nonobvious. However, that's not the case, especially in the area of software patents.
The problem is that we have a bunch of bad patents in the wild. Unfortunately, any issued patent is presumed valid by the courts unless overwhelming evidence is gathered against it at great expense.
The problem here is that the worse an issued patent is (overbroad, obvious, not novel, submarined), the more valuable it is to a pure patent aggregator. This is because bad patents are more likely to cover things that have become common practice, so they empower the holder with vast powers over entire industries. IP-only companies are going to be natural magnets for bad patents, because they care only about getting the maximum bang for the buck. There are no other considerations like actually trying to produce useful products.
Patent law is subjective by its very nature. If the USPTO had a vested interest in not granting patents, it could probably reduce the number of granted patents by a factor of 10 just by interpreting the letter of the law as conservatively as possible, never giving the applicant the benefit of the doubt, doing exhaustive prior art searches, and generally making it a royal pain in the ass to get any patent.
However, the USPTO has a vested interest in encouraging as many patents as possible, since more patent applications == more income, and a bigger patent office is a bigger kingdom for the people in charge. Plus, it's just plain easier to rubber-stamp the stuff coming in without checking it thoroughly. That's why we see the exact opposite of the approach I described above.
Basically, if a law is really bad, the local police often don't bother enforcing it. They've got better things to do. The USPTO doesn't have anything better to do, and it enforces the bad laws that it oversees with great enthusiasm.
How do you expect me to make a backup of 150GB of data?
That's what the old slow PCs cluttering up your basement (or available dirt cheap) are for. Put a $90 hard drive in one, fire it up every once in a while and rsync your files to it. Inbetween those times you can keep incremental backups on a smaller medium.
(It's probably a good idea to keep the backup system completely unplugged from power and network when not in use in case of electrical surges.)
The difference of course is that most of those retailers and manufacturers are primarilly conduits of capital. They may collect a lot of revenue, but the vast majority of that is immediately transferred back out to their suppliers. They just retain a modest profit margin and operating expenses.
Microsoft, OTOH, is more like an economic black hole. Huge chunks of the revenue they collect just accumulates in their bank account. They don't seem to be able to figure out what to do with it, even though it's obvious that over the years they should have been investing more of it in improving the quality of their software.
Between the.NET SDK, and the Visual C++ 7.1 Toolkit, and the PlatformSDK, you can download all the tools you need to build (including the optimizing C compiler) for free.
Yep, you can do that. But then you'll spend so much trying find a usable set of runtime libraries in that mishmash, and then figuring out whether you're actually licensed to redistribute them, you'll end up wishing you hadn't. (Each of the SDKs is cleverly packaged with different incompatible and irregular subsets of the Windows runtime libraries, just to make it so hard to figure out that you'll run out and buy their non-free development tools out of frustration.)
Plus, if you use any outside code at all, it will almost invariably assume that you have the MS IDE environment to build it. You're then faced with rewriting the build process for that code from scratch.
You could always use the sonic boom itself as a weapon. This crazy project actually test fired a working nuclear-powered ramjet:
The proposed use for nuclear-powered ramjets would be to power an unmanned cruise missile, called SLAM, for Supersonic Low Altitude Missile... Once powered up, the unshielded half-gigawatt nuclear reactor would emit highly lethal radiation in a large radius; such a vehicle could not possibly be human-piloted or reused. Indeed, some questioned whether a cruise missile derived from Project Pluto would need a warhead at all; the radiation from its engine, coupled with the shock wave that would be produced by flying at Mach 3 at treetop level, would have left a wide path of destruction wherever it went. Contrary to some reports, the exhaust of the engine would not itself be highly radioactive. Also, the nuclear engine could in principle operate for months, so a Pluto cruise missile could simply fly a long and winding pattern over enemy territory to cause incredible damage.
Not true. Zeppelins were flying passengers around the world for years (if not decades) before the Hindenberg disaster made them unfashionable. The Graf Zeppelin for example circumnavigated the globe several times (with paying customers) without a single incident.
The Graf Zeppelin is remembered mainly because (along with the Los Angeles) it was one of the very few that wasn't destroyed in an accident. A single lucky example comes nowhere near demonstrating that airships were generally safe.
While its true that the USAF's foray into dirigible technology didnt fare well, the German Zeppelins were by far the safest form of transport at the time.
Even in the 1930s, airplanes weren't falling out of the sky at the rates of dirigibles. If they were too dangerous for the US Navy to operate safely (even though they were filled with helium, out of a fleet of 4, 3 were lost and the fourth nearly lost), they didn't hold much promise for commercial transport. (BTW, there was no USAF back then.)
The Bush tax cuts HELP the middle class, or are you so dumb you can't even read the IRS stats?
Since these tax cuts were accompanied by increased spending, they help the middle class in exactly the same way as a fresh rock helps a crack addict.
The so-called "cuts" are just pandering to the segment of the population that doesn't understand basic math. Government spending has been increasing, and the spending + interest will all be paid for with even more taxes and/or heavy inflation. These tax cuts have mainly been a mechanism to funnel capital from the American public to foreign bond holders.
If the producer of that TV show decides that they only want to allow it to be watched when they want it to (which would be the case if they flagged that bit) then I you have a choice to follow their rules or just don't watch their show -- you don't have a right to watch their show.
Wrong. That's not what the law says. Even under this dubious broadcast flag regulation, you are allowed to save and view copies of TV shows, regardless of the producers' wishes.
Why do you think you have a *right* over other people's property?
You seem to be confused about just what is "property" under copyright law. If I have a legally obtained copy (including copies made under fair use), that's my property, and I can use it as I see fit. The copyright holder has no rights over my property.
What the copyright holder owns is a limited right to prevent me from making *further copies* of any copies I have.
MSFT is not, as TFA summary indicates, "licencing the internet," in any meaningful way. That would imply that MSFT owns or controls what it is licencing.
In that case I'm sure everybody will also be eager to sign the new license I'm offering that grants rights to use the Brooklyn Bridge.
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The people arguing for no change don't have to prove their argument. The burden of proof is on those who want to make these changes.
It's possible that they would offer a "no dud" guarantee on any battery fillup. If you somehow got stranded because you don't get reasonable watt-hours out of a charged battery, they'd give you some kind of rebate. I don't see this happening very often, because they'd probably monitor each battery pack through its lifetime and recycle them just before they start going bad.
It would be like the old days when soda pop was sold in returnable bottles. You were paying for the pop. You got the bottles too, and you could return them for your deposit at any store. You cared about the pop, not about the bottles.
(Unless you're returning a rental car. Then they'd be sure to always bill you for a 100% charge at 5X the standard rate + 23% tax no matter what you actually used.)
In the two years since I installed them, I figure I've already saved $100 in electricity.
Well, I guess you must be a Lisp programmer, because I can't think of any other languages that have fewer inconsistencies that Python. Usually Python is criticized for being too regular.
It is a special case. The Python language reference states that "is not" is a single operator. So that particular construct is parsed at a lower level than general expressions, and the expression evaluator never sees it.
However, I like that it was done that way because it flows nicely when you read it. I use it a lot, mainly when I use None to mean "NA": if foo is not None: bar.append(foo). For some reason, I prefer to use 'is' instead of '=' to check against the singleton value None. It seems to make the special case of checking for NA values stand out more clearly.
Since it's doubtful that anybody would actually ever us the expression a is (not b), I think that this operator trick is worth it.
Microsoft's incredible insight here seems to involve taking Python's 10-year old technology, porting it to BASIC, and heavily optimizing it by removing the whitespace sytactic sugar between 'is' and 'not'. (This saves over 16% space!)
If anything was more worthy of patent protection, I don't know what it could be.
Actually, it's pretty obvious that the motivation for such a stupid little patent that applies to one language is simply to prevent people from reimplementing the language as a whole. Nobody cares about IsNot itself, including Microsoft. However, since 100% code compatibility is required to do a full reimplementation, this essentially would grant them a 20-year monopoly on compatible implementations of VB.
This is one of the worst things about the current patent system. Patent holders are allowed to use patents on small things to control access to huge things. Patents should somehow be changed to only protect the claims in the patent, they should not be allowed to use compatibility issues to amplify small patents into generalized barriers to entry of a whole industry.
Current gov't crash tests into a fixed barrier from 35mph involve around 10 Gs of average deceleration, with the peak accelerations undoubtedly being higher due to the uneven nature of a collision. Many current cars pass this test with little likely injury to the passengers. A controlled stop would likely come out better than that.
IMO, the solution is to make cars more like elevators. Instead of trying to put them on the current free-form road system. Put them on something more like a model railroad set.
I imagine cars about the size of golf carts that could run at high speeds on the constrained tracks, and at low speeds on regular roads to account for the fact that you can't build tracks to every single building.
This would have many advantages. First is the obvious time savings because the driver doesn't have to pay attention for most of the trip. Much more time is saved by central router pre-planning all traffic, totally eliminating slowdowns. (If there's too much demand for the system to handle, you'd be told to chill out for a while before the trip even starts.)
There would be huge safety gains, because the tracks could be built with no grade-level crossings whatsoever. In the constrained environment, I think that a 10X to 100X improvement in safety (similar to airplanes per mile) would be doable. Precise central scheduling would eliminate most needs for local traffic decision making, and the cars would only need to have local backup systems (based on radars, cameras and/or wireless P2P with other cars) that are designed only to avoid collisions due to errors.
The tracks could have mechanical features to support a "tail hook" kind of feature on the cars. In an emergency, the car could use the tail hook to stop at something like 10G deceleration, so it could come from 60 mph to a dead stop in about 12 feet without harming the (seatbelted) passengers.
Cargo capacity would be infinite by having robot cars that are programmed to follow you like a trailer. You could add any number of these to make your own train. You would summon them at places like a lumber yard, then when you're done, you send them back on their way to the next job.
Energy savings would be huge, because people wouldn't need to drive around with excess cargo capacity at all times. 99% of the time, the golf-cart passenger compartment would be sufficient, so the total mass being driven around would drop by a huge factor. Moreover, they would probably be electric, with small batteries for driving off-track. Centrally-generated electricity would power the cars and charge their batteries while on the tracks.
The tracks themselves could be prefabricated and put together like model railroad tracks, allowing huge flexibility in transportation. They might even be temporarilly set up for special one-time events, and then taken down again. I think that each track might be able to carry the equivalent of two of today's freeway lanes because of central scheduling. The footprint could be very small, like 6 feet wide by 5 feet tall per track, saving massive amounts of real estate. In cities, most tracks would be elevated or buried to reduce congestion.
I don't think the tracks would necessarily have actual rails; the cars might just automatically steer to stay in the center of the track. This would allow for flexibilty in design of track intersections. T and cross intersections could be used in low-traffic segments, and the central scheduling would eliminate the need for stop lights or similar local controls. (There would probably actually be stop lights, but they would cycle instantly on a per-car basis. They would only be actually used for emergency collision detection.)
A system like this seems pretty radical, but it could be initially tested out as a cargo-only system to replace trains and/or trucks in a limited area. Once the kinks are worked out there, it's use and scope could be expanded.
In the post-apocalyptic age, the economy is going to be based mainly on bartering beef jerkey, jugs of gasoline, scrapped auto parts, cartons of cigarrets and boxes of ammo. Managing all those complex transactions and inventory without quality software tools would be overly burdensome to marauders who strive to excel. There will be a strong demand for IT professionals who can help streamline the economy of the dystopian future.
Yes, and there wouldn't be so many patents to examine if people didn't think that they had a good chance of getting them issued. The more that get issued, the more that get examined. Are you sure that you're not including applications that get re-examined? In my experience (I have well over a dozen patents, courtesy of my former employers), most applications ultimately get approved.
Have you ever debated prior art with an attorney?
Yes. I've been pulled into patent lawsuits.
Have you ever signed your name and submitted papers to a federal court where your entire argument depends on a date you found on a website? Do think that's a fun or easy thing to do?
Who the hell cares if it's fun or easy? If the patent examiner sees evidence that there's prior art on of a website, then its his civic duty to investigate further before yanking a chunk of knowledge out of the public domain for 20 years.
. If there were the slightest shred of truth to your hyperbole, then why does the USPTO issue about 1250 patents per week but we read about maybe 1 or 5 per month at most? Why do people always fall back on the "swinging sideways on a swing" or the "one click purchase" patents? If reality and facts were on your side, then wouldn't we be reading about hundreds or thousands of "rubber stamped" patents per month? Per year?
Because a vast numbers of bogus patents are issued but haven't yet been "discovered" by the appropriate leeches. That's one of the things that this VC new venture is going to be involved in. It doesn't matter if 95% of the patents are reasonable. One bad patent can cause orders of magnitude more economic damage to an industry than the economic worth of a typical good patent.
Of course, it's not really your fault. You probably aren't aware that when a patent ends up on the front page, the examiner's entire career is in jeopardy.
Sure, there's always going to be a couple of low-level scapegoats per year to cover the collective asses of the whole system.
You probably aren't aware that the examining process takes 12-48 months and involves 10-200 pages of correspondence between the attorneys and the examiners.
Sure I am. I've been through the process many times. All it takes is ca$h, a good attorney and some technical jargon. My employers have patented some of my brilliant ideas, and some of my less-than mediocre ideas, depending mainly on how many patents they wanted to get that year. I've never noticed any correlation between the quality of the idea and the difficulty of obtaining a patent. (BTW, have you ever noticed that one of the main jobs of an attorney is to simply reformat technical documentation into double-spaced courier font for $200/hr, changing every 's' ending on a plural noun to the phrase "a plurality of". How can you read that monospaced crap all day?)
the attorney can push the application to a board of appeals, in which case the decision to issue is largely out of the examiner's hands yet the examiner's name is still on the issued patent.
The board of appeals is an integral part of the overall flawed system.
What, like prohibition? I guess you never heard of the war on drugs?
That would be mainly pushed by the feds headquartered in the same city as the USPTO.
I guess you haven't seen police officers enforcing segregation?
I'm not aware of any current laws requiring segregation. Back when police did enforce it, they were part of the problem, when instead they should have been protesting and resisting the laws instead of saying "I'm just doing my job here".
The USPTO does not have authority to "reject" an application (in the sense that the USPTO says "no" and the case is final) - it can only attempt to convince the attorneys that an appeal would be a waste of time, then the applicant abandons.
Any
The problem is that we have a bunch of bad patents in the wild. Unfortunately, any issued patent is presumed valid by the courts unless overwhelming evidence is gathered against it at great expense.
The problem here is that the worse an issued patent is (overbroad, obvious, not novel, submarined), the more valuable it is to a pure patent aggregator. This is because bad patents are more likely to cover things that have become common practice, so they empower the holder with vast powers over entire industries. IP-only companies are going to be natural magnets for bad patents, because they care only about getting the maximum bang for the buck. There are no other considerations like actually trying to produce useful products.
However, the USPTO has a vested interest in encouraging as many patents as possible, since more patent applications == more income, and a bigger patent office is a bigger kingdom for the people in charge. Plus, it's just plain easier to rubber-stamp the stuff coming in without checking it thoroughly. That's why we see the exact opposite of the approach I described above.
Basically, if a law is really bad, the local police often don't bother enforcing it. They've got better things to do. The USPTO doesn't have anything better to do, and it enforces the bad laws that it oversees with great enthusiasm.
That's what the old slow PCs cluttering up your basement (or available dirt cheap) are for. Put a $90 hard drive in one, fire it up every once in a while and rsync your files to it. Inbetween those times you can keep incremental backups on a smaller medium.
(It's probably a good idea to keep the backup system completely unplugged from power and network when not in use in case of electrical surges.)
Microsoft, OTOH, is more like an economic black hole. Huge chunks of the revenue they collect just accumulates in their bank account. They don't seem to be able to figure out what to do with it, even though it's obvious that over the years they should have been investing more of it in improving the quality of their software.
(BTW, the cheap versions of their C++ tools don't include an optimizing compiler. That still requires manual cobbling and downloads.)
So to paraphrase the Hair Club for Men guy: "I'm not only the president, I'm under audit!"
Yep, you can do that. But then you'll spend so much trying find a usable set of runtime libraries in that mishmash, and then figuring out whether you're actually licensed to redistribute them, you'll end up wishing you hadn't. (Each of the SDKs is cleverly packaged with different incompatible and irregular subsets of the Windows runtime libraries, just to make it so hard to figure out that you'll run out and buy their non-free development tools out of frustration.)
Plus, if you use any outside code at all, it will almost invariably assume that you have the MS IDE environment to build it. You're then faced with rewriting the build process for that code from scratch.
The Graf Zeppelin is remembered mainly because (along with the Los Angeles) it was one of the very few that wasn't destroyed in an accident. A single lucky example comes nowhere near demonstrating that airships were generally safe.
While its true that the USAF's foray into dirigible technology didnt fare well, the German Zeppelins were by far the safest form of transport at the time.
Even in the 1930s, airplanes weren't falling out of the sky at the rates of dirigibles. If they were too dangerous for the US Navy to operate safely (even though they were filled with helium, out of a fleet of 4, 3 were lost and the fourth nearly lost), they didn't hold much promise for commercial transport. (BTW, there was no USAF back then.)
There's one little difference: most of the major dirigibles that were ever built were destroyed in accidents. They were death traps.
The survival rates for accidents that occurred at altitude weren't usually so rosy as the Hindenburg's outcome.
Since these tax cuts were accompanied by increased spending, they help the middle class in exactly the same way as a fresh rock helps a crack addict.
The so-called "cuts" are just pandering to the segment of the population that doesn't understand basic math. Government spending has been increasing, and the spending + interest will all be paid for with even more taxes and/or heavy inflation. These tax cuts have mainly been a mechanism to funnel capital from the American public to foreign bond holders.
Wrong. That's not what the law says. Even under this dubious broadcast flag regulation, you are allowed to save and view copies of TV shows, regardless of the producers' wishes.
Why do you think you have a *right* over other people's property?
You seem to be confused about just what is "property" under copyright law. If I have a legally obtained copy (including copies made under fair use), that's my property, and I can use it as I see fit. The copyright holder has no rights over my property.
What the copyright holder owns is a limited right to prevent me from making *further copies* of any copies I have.
In that case I'm sure everybody will also be eager to sign the new license I'm offering that grants rights to use the Brooklyn Bridge.