What makes you think that printf("hello world") is bug free? My version of libc is 6.2.7-10. As indicated by that huge revision number, your call is invoking code with a decades long history of bugs and fixes. There are certainly many more bugs to be discovered.
At any rate, did you remember to check the return value?
The purpose of the patent system is not to encourage only those few rare flashes of genius, but to encourage innovation.
The only way to encourage "innovation" would be to reward rare flashes of genius, and nothing more. Giving out monopolies on mundane improvements only serves to stifle competition, innovation, and the free market in general.
You could easily have a lot of small startups thinking "you know, we could make a VCR replacement with a hard drive" only to conclude that it wasn't worth competing with Sony or Toshiba.
So what? Then Sony or Toshiba would market PVRs. And they wouldn't be able to monopolize the market for 20 years like TiVo is trying to do right now.
The patent system rewards you for working on the problem.
And that's one thing that's wrong with the patent system. Do you seriously think that nobody else would have worked on the PVR problem if TiVo hadn't? If so, you're deluded.
If there were a problem so deep or obscure that it's unlikely that anyone else would have even worked on it for a significant amount of the 20-year monopoly period, *then* it might be worthy of a patent just for working on the problem. Otherwise, I say keep the government's hands off of the issue and out of the market.
You seem to be one of those who enjoy the "horse race" property of having the first one to show up at the patent office win huge indulgences from the government, just because they're first. I strongly disagree.
Lots of things. There are some patent claims that you look at and say: "That wasn't obvious. That was a brilliant idea that might not have been independently thought of for a very long time."
Unfortunately, there are far too many that you look at and say "That was obvious. That's how anybody would have done it if they were working on the same problem." This is one of those cases.
IMO, the law should be changed to heavily favor the first case, and a very strong burden should be put on patent applicants to make it that way. The bar for innovation should be raised much higher than it is now, and the total number of patents issued should be drastically reduced.
Today's patent landscape is mosly a minefield strewn with countless millions of junk patent claims. It stifles entire industries and leaches money away from real productivity into pointless legal expenses.
Go read the claims in the patent. They are obvious.
Regardless of what the rubberstampers in the USPTO do, being the first to come up with trivial solutions in a new problem domain does not imply nonobvious. Why did nobody else think of these ideas before TiVo? Not because of any deep thinking on TiVo's part. It simply was because they were working on a new set of problems made possible by larger faster hard disks. (An enabling technology which TiVo had nothing to do with.)
If TiVo did any innovation, it was to tinker around with those drives and run to the patent office a few weeks before others did. Anybody else working in parallel on the same problems would have come up with the same exact solutions. That doesn't warrant a 20-year monopoly on DVRs.
Really? Battery life on my desktop sucks. It dies as soon as I remove the power cord.
You must be doing something wrong then. I've got a couple of old desktops whose batteries are still not drained after going for more than 10 years on their original charge!
You present the process of kludging together this boondoggle and spreading pork to different political centers as proof of its "success". You neglect to mention that it was so vastly over budget and behind schedule that they canceled most any of the "science" they planned to do on it. The main purpose of its remaining skeleton crew has been to try to keep it from falling out of orbit, as well as a feeble excuse to keep its sister boondoggle, the Space Shuttle, off of the scrap heap. This entire enterprise has achieved little else than to propagate its own existence at huge expense.
In another five decades they hope to be able to have Notepad proven and ready to run so you can actually get some work done!
Progress has been slow, mainly because for most of the last 20 years, they've been hung up trying to formally prove that a newline character looks like a rectangle.
So your saying that there is a 83% change of getting cancer or some other smoking related disease from smoking smoking?
No. It's called a metaphor. However, the odds of dying from smoking are certainly higher than playing normal Russian roulette, which is already an idiotic activity.
If you're just going to sidestep every reply with a nitpick about some detail, then it's not worth discussing with you. The fact of the matter is, smoking is very dangerous. You can wave your hands as much as you want, but that doesn't change the truth.
And if you put 5 bullets in a gun and play Russian roulette, it doesn't mean that you'll definitely die of a gunshot wound. It would mean, however, that you have a profound misunderstanding of how to effectively use statistical information.
Smoke too much marijuana and you will.... fall into a deep, peaceful sleep.
That's mainly because smoked marijuana kicks in so fast that people generally pass out before they can OD. If you eat too many hash brownies (which take more like 20 minutes to absorb), you can overdose on THC.
Well since they aren't going to sell real electronics anymore, maybe they'll stop reporting who is buying what electronics components to the government.
The government was particularly interested in compiling a database of those citizens who were so gullible and/or desperate that they would pay $1.79 for a pair of 1/4-Watt resistors. Such behavior a real danger sign.
Also please attempt (using the same distorted "logic" I hope) to explain to me how requiring two people to work white collar jobs to sustain the lifestyle that my parents sustained with a single person working a 9-5 blue collar job proves that I am "wealthier" than my parents were in the 60's, '70s and 80's.
Look around your house. You probably have more stuff than your parents did. Lots more. And most pieces of stuff you have do much more than your parents' stuff. You also have much more free time than your parents did, because the amount of time spent on chores and cooking have been hugely reduced. And your house likely has twice the square footage of you parent's. And it's air conditioned. All of this despite increased government spending.
I wish I could grant your wish and send you back to the 1970s so you could drive around in an AMC Gremlin and listen to 8-tracks, but I'm sorry I can't help you there.
Arizona's population went up by about 27% in that timeframe, and inflation increased by about 25%. That brings us to 158% of 2000 without any changes in gov't spending relative to income.
So in constant dollars per person, their spending only went up 25%. That's not out of line with other governments.
Why does government spending always seem to go up in general? Mostly because increasing technology levels. This has many effects which I won't go into here, but one big one is people live longer. (And Arizona is full of old people living longer.)
At any rate, the governments' fraction of the total economies have been going up for centuries, and will continue to go up no matter how bitter that makes you. Individuals' absolute wealth has continued to increase regardless of the smaller fraction of overall activity they retain. That's the way it is; we don't live in an agrarian society any more. Deal with it.
Well, we could all probably get by without your programming. OTOH, having access to the source code to important programs like Microsoft Office and popular hardware drivers would save billions of dollars of pointless reverse-engineering hacking per year. I'd argue that registration would be the choice that reduces the overall amount of government intervention on the populace. (Don't forget that copyright itself is an activist government program in that puts serious burdens on everyone who uses computers.)
If you didn't want to deal with it, you wouldn't have to register it. You just couldn't expect to get copyright protection in that case.
Do you really want releasing software to become a process for which you have to register and do paperwork with the government at every release?
Currently, when you release software, you are enjoy the free services of armed government agents and courts who you can send to punish those who infringe your copyrights. Registering your releases seems like a small price to pay for that entitlement.
I don't have time right now to track down how many curies of radiation coal plants release. However, a common sense thought experiment will illustrate the point. Run a 1GW coal plant for a year and gather up the huge pile of fly ash that results. It will be about as radioactive as common granite, and you can stand in it indefinitely without any ill health effects from radiation. (Just like the people who work handling this stuff every day without bothering with any radiation protective gear.)
Now run a 1GW nuclear reactor for a year. Turn it off and walk into the reactor core which contains all the resulting waste products. You'll receive a lethal dose of radiation within minutes.
It's not true. He is misrepresenting the actual (and true) claim, which is that that during normal operations, coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear plant creates many orders of magnitude more radioactive waste than a coal plant; however, almost all of it is normally kept contained, whereas the coal waste is released into the air.
Of course, people who have concerns about the radiation involved with nuclear power aren't worried about radiation released during normal operations, so the claim is rather pointless. They're worried about accidents, sabotage, leakage, and WMD proliferation, which are all ways that the containment could fail.
In the 1940s-1950s, the US detonated numerous nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada and New Mexico, releasing a hell of a lot more radioactive material than Chernobyl
Nope. The 100 or so bombs detonated above ground on the US mainland were relatively small, releasing a few kg of material each. Chernobyl released tons of material. To match that, you'd have to go to the US thermonuclear tests in the Pacific ocean, some of which released about of ton of fission products each. (Some of those test site islands are actually still uninhabitable.)
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
So far, much better than the last global financial meltdown that happened when (and because) we were still on the gold standard.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think that printf("hello world") is bug free? My version of libc is 6.2.7-10. As indicated by that huge revision number, your call is invoking code with a decades long history of bugs and fixes. There are certainly many more bugs to be discovered.
At any rate, did you remember to check the return value?
The purpose of the patent system is not to encourage only those few rare flashes of genius, but to encourage innovation.
The only way to encourage "innovation" would be to reward rare flashes of genius, and nothing more. Giving out monopolies on mundane improvements only serves to stifle competition, innovation, and the free market in general.
You could easily have a lot of small startups thinking "you know, we could make a VCR replacement with a hard drive" only to conclude that it wasn't worth competing with Sony or Toshiba.
So what? Then Sony or Toshiba would market PVRs. And they wouldn't be able to monopolize the market for 20 years like TiVo is trying to do right now.
The patent system rewards you for working on the problem.
And that's one thing that's wrong with the patent system. Do you seriously think that nobody else would have worked on the PVR problem if TiVo hadn't? If so, you're deluded.
If there were a problem so deep or obscure that it's unlikely that anyone else would have even worked on it for a significant amount of the 20-year monopoly period, *then* it might be worthy of a patent just for working on the problem. Otherwise, I say keep the government's hands off of the issue and out of the market.
You seem to be one of those who enjoy the "horse race" property of having the first one to show up at the patent office win huge indulgences from the government, just because they're first. I strongly disagree.
What isn't Obvious in hindsight?
Lots of things. There are some patent claims that you look at and say: "That wasn't obvious. That was a brilliant idea that might not have been independently thought of for a very long time."
Unfortunately, there are far too many that you look at and say "That was obvious. That's how anybody would have done it if they were working on the same problem." This is one of those cases.
IMO, the law should be changed to heavily favor the first case, and a very strong burden should be put on patent applicants to make it that way. The bar for innovation should be raised much higher than it is now, and the total number of patents issued should be drastically reduced.
Today's patent landscape is mosly a minefield strewn with countless millions of junk patent claims. It stifles entire industries and leaches money away from real productivity into pointless legal expenses.
They invented something new and unique.
New and unique and obvious.
Go read the claims in the patent. They are obvious.
Regardless of what the rubberstampers in the USPTO do, being the first to come up with trivial solutions in a new problem domain does not imply nonobvious. Why did nobody else think of these ideas before TiVo? Not because of any deep thinking on TiVo's part. It simply was because they were working on a new set of problems made possible by larger faster hard disks. (An enabling technology which TiVo had nothing to do with.)
If TiVo did any innovation, it was to tinker around with those drives and run to the patent office a few weeks before others did. Anybody else working in parallel on the same problems would have come up with the same exact solutions. That doesn't warrant a 20-year monopoly on DVRs.
That seems like cheating. I guess the Stanley Steamer Rocket still retains the record for the fastest piston-powered steam car.
(Interestingly, this article also claims that the Rocket unofficially hit 150mph right before it crashed and was totaled in 1907.)
Really? Battery life on my desktop sucks. It dies as soon as I remove the power cord.
You must be doing something wrong then. I've got a couple of old desktops whose batteries are still not drained after going for more than 10 years on their original charge!
You present the process of kludging together this boondoggle and spreading pork to different political centers as proof of its "success". You neglect to mention that it was so vastly over budget and behind schedule that they canceled most any of the "science" they planned to do on it. The main purpose of its remaining skeleton crew has been to try to keep it from falling out of orbit, as well as a feeble excuse to keep its sister boondoggle, the Space Shuttle, off of the scrap heap. This entire enterprise has achieved little else than to propagate its own existence at huge expense.
Thank God that the government is turning over more of its functions to the private market.
Market? What market?
This is a 75-year lease. The government is turning over its functions to a private monopoly.
Why don't we just bring back the East India Company while we're at it?
In another five decades they hope to be able to have Notepad proven and ready to run so you can actually get some work done!
Progress has been slow, mainly because for most of the last 20 years, they've been hung up trying to formally prove that a newline character looks like a rectangle.
So your saying that there is a 83% change of getting cancer or some other smoking related disease from smoking smoking?
No. It's called a metaphor. However, the odds of dying from smoking are certainly higher than playing normal Russian roulette, which is already an idiotic activity.
If you're just going to sidestep every reply with a nitpick about some detail, then it's not worth discussing with you. The fact of the matter is, smoking is very dangerous. You can wave your hands as much as you want, but that doesn't change the truth.
And if you put 5 bullets in a gun and play Russian roulette, it doesn't mean that you'll definitely die of a gunshot wound. It would mean, however, that you have a profound misunderstanding of how to effectively use statistical information.
Smoke too much marijuana and you will.... fall into a deep, peaceful sleep.
That's mainly because smoked marijuana kicks in so fast that people generally pass out before they can OD. If you eat too many hash brownies (which take more like 20 minutes to absorb), you can overdose on THC.
Well since they aren't going to sell real electronics anymore, maybe they'll stop reporting who is buying what electronics components to the government.
The government was particularly interested in compiling a database of those citizens who were so gullible and/or desperate that they would pay $1.79 for a pair of 1/4-Watt resistors. Such behavior a real danger sign.
Why do we still pursue solutions that end up relying on 19th century technology?
Even worse, we are still moving most of our stuff around on 5th century BC technology! This is simply inexcusable!!
Also please attempt (using the same distorted "logic" I hope) to explain to me how requiring two people to work white collar jobs to sustain the lifestyle that my parents sustained with a single person working a 9-5 blue collar job proves that I am "wealthier" than my parents were in the 60's, '70s and 80's.
Look around your house. You probably have more stuff than your parents did. Lots more. And most pieces of stuff you have do much more than your parents' stuff. You also have much more free time than your parents did, because the amount of time spent on chores and cooking have been hugely reduced. And your house likely has twice the square footage of you parent's. And it's air conditioned. All of this despite increased government spending.
I wish I could grant your wish and send you back to the 1970s so you could drive around in an AMC Gremlin and listen to 8-tracks, but I'm sorry I can't help you there.
The state doubled its budget in 9 years... why?
Arizona's population went up by about 27% in that timeframe, and inflation increased by about 25%. That brings us to 158% of 2000 without any changes in gov't spending relative to income.
So in constant dollars per person, their spending only went up 25%. That's not out of line with other governments.
Why does government spending always seem to go up in general? Mostly because increasing technology levels. This has many effects which I won't go into here, but one big one is people live longer. (And Arizona is full of old people living longer.)
At any rate, the governments' fraction of the total economies have been going up for centuries, and will continue to go up no matter how bitter that makes you. Individuals' absolute wealth has continued to increase regardless of the smaller fraction of overall activity they retain. That's the way it is; we don't live in an agrarian society any more. Deal with it.
Well, we could all probably get by without your programming. OTOH, having access to the source code to important programs like Microsoft Office and popular hardware drivers would save billions of dollars of pointless reverse-engineering hacking per year. I'd argue that registration would be the choice that reduces the overall amount of government intervention on the populace. (Don't forget that copyright itself is an activist government program in that puts serious burdens on everyone who uses computers.)
If you didn't want to deal with it, you wouldn't have to register it. You just couldn't expect to get copyright protection in that case.
Do you really want releasing software to become a process for which you have to register and do paperwork with the government at every release?
Currently, when you release software, you are enjoy the free services of armed government agents and courts who you can send to punish those who infringe your copyrights. Registering your releases seems like a small price to pay for that entitlement.
. Imagine a remake of Casablanca with new digital special effects.
Let's see... Maybe Sam gets remastered as a 3-eyed amphibious alien who plays his piano with 28 articulated tentacles.
It could work.
Ok, then. If my post doesn't satisfy your need for proof, I invite you go turn it into a real experiment and see what happens.
I don't have time right now to track down how many curies of radiation coal plants release. However, a common sense thought experiment will illustrate the point. Run a 1GW coal plant for a year and gather up the huge pile of fly ash that results. It will be about as radioactive as common granite, and you can stand in it indefinitely without any ill health effects from radiation. (Just like the people who work handling this stuff every day without bothering with any radiation protective gear.)
Now run a 1GW nuclear reactor for a year. Turn it off and walk into the reactor core which contains all the resulting waste products. You'll receive a lethal dose of radiation within minutes.
It's not true. He is misrepresenting the actual (and true) claim, which is that that during normal operations, coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear plant creates many orders of magnitude more radioactive waste than a coal plant; however, almost all of it is normally kept contained, whereas the coal waste is released into the air.
Of course, people who have concerns about the radiation involved with nuclear power aren't worried about radiation released during normal operations, so the claim is rather pointless. They're worried about accidents, sabotage, leakage, and WMD proliferation, which are all ways that the containment could fail.
In the 1940s-1950s, the US detonated numerous nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada and New Mexico, releasing a hell of a lot more radioactive material than Chernobyl
Nope. The 100 or so bombs detonated above ground on the US mainland were relatively small, releasing a few kg of material each. Chernobyl released tons of material. To match that, you'd have to go to the US thermonuclear tests in the Pacific ocean, some of which released about of ton of fission products each. (Some of those test site islands are actually still uninhabitable.)
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
So far, much better than the last global financial meltdown that happened when (and because) we were still on the gold standard.