I guess my problem is that are there really any non-obvious ideas that require little resource investment to develop? I admit I am not a fan of the "bolt out of the blue" theory of inspiration -- that the same insights could not possibly come from someone else dealing with the same problem in the same context. In that case, what incentive is there not to disclose it by using it as soon as possible? It didn't cost you anything significant to develop, thus you're not losing out on taking advantage of the "first adopter" privilege. Lots of ordinary incremental "innovations" happen that way every day. Creations are only useful if they are, well, used. As soon as someone sees your widget, they are going to get an idea of how it works, and people will reverse-engineer it to understand it. In that case, hoarding something which was your "life's work" makes sense, but not something which you came upon in a few blinks of an eye.
On this issue, even Thomas Edison seemed to agree, at least for himself:
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." "I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work."
Now, I realize that some of the greatest inventions and discoveries DID come about as accidental discoveries, but usually they came from extraordinary efforts to do something else first. Sticky-note adhesive being a good example of this. I personally don't recall anything coming from "shower moments" (and was not as a result of extraordinary research, either intentional or accidental) which changed the world, however.
As such, I think that this is an important consideration for patents, despite the fact that it is not currently codified in patent law.
I suppose that the history of the patentability of paper clips would stand in stark contrast to my stance, but it should be noted that the most useful and successful (arguably, the best-designed) instance of them, the Gem clip, was never patented.
For #1, no, I don't think that is the problem (at least after having read the patent claims). Initially, I wasn't sure, however.
For #2, if I take someone with "ordinary skill in the art", propose the problem to him in a general way, and ask him for a solution, and he comes up with something close in a very short time frame, without any real investment in the problem, then I think that it is quite obvious. Further, regarding the specificity of finger placements, there are only so many ways that human hands can hold a particular object, and people will likely gravitate to those which are most comfortable and result in the least amount of effort. It seems clear to me that such was an important consideration for the so-called "gestures", so it isn't something I really see as an "innovative" approach to solving the problem, just because the gestures were the "simplest" or "most comfortable" to get the job done, no matter what level of specificity was used to describe them on paper.
Lastly, my main complaint about the patent system goes to a more fundamental issue.. that patents were intended as an incentive to protect the investment of resources in creating innovative solutions to problems. If there is no significant investment, what protection is needed to act as an incentive? That is why I believe that the vast majority of software, design, and business method patents should never have been granted, because they represent so-called "innovations" that took little to no extraordinary resources to develop, thus they do not deserve the protection to recoup the cost of resources that they did not incur.
If I, as a programmer, come up with a nifty trick one day to make a UI massively more user friendly, and my resource expenditure to develop/implement it is practically nil, why should I think that another programmer, faced with the same problem, wouldn't come up with (practically or exactly) the same solution with a similarly nil resource expenditure? Further, why in the world should I believe that I have the right to seek out a 20-year legal monopoly preventing all other programmers from what amounts to essentially doing their damn job by practicing their "ordinary skill" in a "useful art"?
Now, if I spend many years and millions of dollars of research with a team of people to come up with an amazing and innovative solution to a particular problem, I surely would want patent protection for it, because that's what patents were meant to protect. I would also be incensed at people cheapening patent protections by getting patents for "trivial research", just because they spent five minutes "being the first" to solve an obvious problem.
No, patents were supposed to protect real innovations, to give people a reason to invest time, money, and other resources in a risky attempt at advancing the state of the art. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it, since Joe Blow competitor could avoid spending the same resources doing the same thing, and just copy the original innovator's work.
Fake innovations, like this patent, which cost next to nothing and had no risk, being an obvious and incremental advance, don't need the protection of a patent.
There is no need for patents to incentivize "inventing the obvious", because people are going to solve obvious problems with obvious solutions anyway, and there is no cost or risk associated with doing so. The only thing such patents do is stifle any and all innovation by blocking even incremental and obvious advances.
>There's plenty of truly ingenious ideas where one comes up with "patent claims" pretty much in a couple of hours.
You're right; that is what is wrong with patents. No real effort went into innovating anything.
>It's engineering it into a product that takes tons of time and money. Patents aren't (and shouldn't be!) about how many resources it takes to productize the invention.
Patents aren't supposed to be granted for just ideas which never have been implemented. You're supposed to be able to show at least a workable prototype of the so-called "invention" as part of the patent application, thus, the engineering is actually part of the cost of development for obtaining the patent.
>They should be for ingenious stuff, period.
Right, but WHERE is the ingeniousness of this idea? Further, WHERE is the actual expense in effort in resources to develop it?
We already had accelerometers. We already had touch screens. We already had automatic portraitlandscape changes based on sensed orientation of an output device in the real world. We already had the "gesture" paradigm.
Someone shows up with a problem statement:
"Hey, as a user, I would like to not have my screen always reorient itself automatically because I am laying on my side in bed trying to use my multifunction smart doodad"
In less than 5 minutes, even a layperson could have come up with "why don't you give me a gesture that lets me manually hold the orientation in place?", even the specific gesture (or one of several options). It wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that this is actually a user suggestion.
Then, as far as engineering goes, 15 minutes of coding, and voila!
Pray tell, what, exactly, is the innovation here, and what is the value in giving such an "invention" a TWENTY YEAR MONOPOLY?
Is ANY tiny incremental improvement now patent-worthy? If so, then what does that mean for REAL inventions, which come from spending millions to billions in research and development? If you want to get rich from your patent portfolio, why bother expending all those resources when all you have to do is mix red and blue paint to make purple?
I think the irony meter just exploded with your amplification of my point. Thanks for that.
If it takes longer to document the process than to invent the process, even to the absurdity of legalese involved in patents, is it really something worthy of a patent?
Patents aren't about creating solutions to problems, they are about creating innovative solutions to problems. Solutions which aren't obvious and cost significant resources to develop.
Just because a problem didn't exist until now doesn't make the first (and most obvious) solution to it patent-worthy.
OK, where's the innovation? Where's the "big idea" that deserves a 20+ year monopoly? Where's the amazing advance that anyone with ordinary skill in the art of making mobile devices with touch screens and accelerometers wouldn't spend FIVE FRICKIN' MINUTES working up this oh-so-obvious solution to a simple problem?
Yeah, but it's such a huge leap to using that information to update the display to follow the detected orientation. Probably took them millions of dollars and years of research to figure it out, too. Isn't that the whole point of patent protection? To give people incentive to expend copious resources coming up with something that is non-trivial and non-obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art? i.e., something TRULY innovative that expands the sum of man's knowledge and truly builds upon the state-of-the-art.
Giving patents for bullshit like this cheapens real patents where real people spend real time and real money to create REAL innovations.
When accelerometers came out, I thought they were so cool; a million OBVIOUS ideas popped into my head about how I could use them. This was one of them. It also popped into the heads of thousands of other people.. "wow, we can sense the orientation of stuff.. we can use that input to change the way information is presented in an output system". It didn't take years of research or millions of dollars. I could literally pull a few parts off the shelf, wire them together, write a little PIC code, and some UI widget code, et voila! All I needed was a problem in search of a solution, and it was RIGHT THERE!
THAT is NOT what PATENTS are FOR.. PERIOD.
They weren't created to protect the "I can build this in an afternoon" projects. They weren't intended for "gee, I can put these two things together and make a third thing" projects. If there is no true innovation, no real investment, what, exactly, are they supposed to protect in those cases? Someone's right to a monopoly over common-sense thinking and problem-solving?
Considering the difficulty to achieve manned spaceflight with so few actual failures, they knew and accepted the risks gladly. I don't think they would disagree at all.
Anyone expecting perfection in such a cutting-edge and hugely risky endeavor is kidding themselves.
It was precisely what the terrorists wanted in the first place.. to make us so fearful that we started to treat people even worse, on average, than most third-world dictatorial/theocratic regimes do. They hated us for our way of life (rightly or wrongly.. doesn't matter at this point), and they succeeded in making it worse by proving that our high-and-mighty principles of liberty and privacy weren't as high-and-mighty as we kept saying they were to the rest of the world.
The only thing the TSA (and our government as a whole in the same vein) has done is to encourage the terrorists even more.
I'm with the OP, though. I'll take a bus, train, ship, or drive myself before I will subject myself to their degrading and humiliating treatment.
Because that is what getting a "real" BS entails, getting a "well-rounded" education.
Instead, it sounds like you are wanting a vocational/technical school degree, which is subpar, compared to getting a BS.
Do note that many colleges allow you to CLEP your way out of certain core requirements courses, which means you take a comprehensive test for that course and, if you pass, you get credit for it with whatever grade you get. The tests still cost money, but not usually as much as the full course. Of course, if you fail the test, you'll be out more money, since you'll have to take the course to get the credit. So, if you feel your high school education was superlative enough to let you test your way out of the "time-wasting" core curriculum, then by all means do so. It will save you time and money. Just don't be too surprised when you reach the limits of your knowledge in them at some point and have to take the courses anyway.
Not sure wtf that is supposed to mean. Who said he has left "the tech game"? Getting old by itself doesn't make knowledge and experience just poof, ya know. I fully expect to continue to do research, programming, and tech work until the day they find me keeled over on my keyboard.
Quite simply because a Ponzi scheme requires a couple of things that Bitcoin does not have:
1) A central "hub" entity, either a person or an organization, who handles and runs the scheme. 2) A promise of greater returns than other forms of investment. Bitcoin promises no returns at all, and does not market itself as any kind of "investment". It is simply a currency; nothing more, nothing less. Any "investment opportunities" that anyone is advertising are specific to that individual, and not part of Bitcoin's strategy.
It is not even a pyramid scheme, since there are no "levels" (anyone can trade with anyone else, not a specific "upline" contact), and, thus, there is no direct "recruitment".
The so-called "advantage to getting in early" is not particular to Ponzi schemes, or even illegal schemes at all. Legal stocks and bonds also provide that advantage, as do many cultural and technological trends. Ever heard the phrase "early adopter"?
That said, the problems I see with Bitcoin are twofold:
1) Market manipulation and stability - Since there is no regulating body able to deal with huge fluctuations in the value of Bitcoins, it is ripe to be gamed to death. This will cause huge fluctuations in the value of bitcoins, and make it nigh upon impossible to price real-world products and services in Bitcoins, since the currency will not be stable. A book seller, for example, would have to constantly change the price of his books with the fluctuating Bitcoin exchange rate, and cash out his coins immediately to ensure receiving the expected real-world value represented by the Bitcoins. 2) Technology issues - Bitcoin's strength relies on one major hashing algorithm. If someone successfully engineers an attack on it which vastly speeds up the process of mining, the market will fail, because if Bitcoin becomes ubiquitous, it can't afford to be stopped for a long enough time to change out algorithms. Also, the current Bitcoin clients are pretty heavy on system resources (it appears to scan the entire block chain every time a new block comes out, causing massive amounts of disk access), and will only get worse over time.
..is NOT to reward someone who invested nothing other than a few neuronal sparks coming up with an idea, but to reward someone who risked a significant investment in time, money, and materials to be able to recoup that investment plus make a profit in exchange for sharing the fruits of that investment with everyone.
The VAST majority of software and business-method related patents are nothing that someone competent with ordinary skill in the field could not come up with as a common-sense solution to a specific problem, WITHOUT said investment OR risk.
That said, the problem is that bringing the original intent of patents back into the system is not in the best interests of those who decide who gets elected (it isn't the voters, natch) and, thus, will not happen without a revolution of some kind which circumvents their control.
Even civil disobedience won't get us very far because, ultimately, most people could care less that they are controlled like sheep, and believe that their masters are the "good guys" and can "do no wrong". As a result, get used to it until the system explodes and has to be replaced by something else, hopefully better, but such is not guaranteed. It is the time-honored tradition of the human race since time immemorial to let the decay of civilization outrun our ability to contain or mitigate it, to ultimately consume and destroy us.
I just wish it would hurry the hell up so we can start anew.
Not from me it doesn't. I block all ads, I don't use gmail, and my searches are for things which aren't generally very targetable for advertisements, and not traceable back to me.
Just like every retarded social networking fad before it, and every one which will come after it which lulls people into giving up their privacy for a pittance, there is nothing that a respectable company should WANT to "counter" "with their own".
It is sad to see that Schmidt has fallen so far to lose sight of his own company's egalitarian mantra: "Do no evil". He now only sees the evil, and he covets it, like Gollum covets the One Ring.
You're a one-man company starting out. You've got a big idea, but you need to realize the basics of that idea before it will have a chance to become something more than a gleam in your eye. Thus, start out with tools that you have on hand and have complete control over. Realize the foundation of your idea, then scale it. Start small, and plan your migration to larger platforms well ahead of time. If it takes off, you'll be well-prepared to meet the demand. If it doesn't, then you've not over-invested your time/money.
As for "the Cloud", remember the old adage "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Everyone has "bad internet days"; don't put your ability to work on your project at even greater risk.
Create a site that chases a fad, get a decent-sized following by any means necessary (usually by providing some nearly-useless service and spamming it all over the place), don't ever let anyone out of it (keep those numbers up!), convince a bunch of speculators that it is solid gold just waiting to be dug up, IPO, live high on the hog while the speculators eat each other buying and selling your vapor, then either sell out to some other starry-eyed wannabee who has more money than sense (or just needs a tax write-off) or sell off a large portion of the stock as people begin to realize that they've been had and before the stock tanks. Retire or Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
The only people making any money on pyramid/ponzi schemes like this are the owners, anyone to whom they gave stock options, the smart/quick speculators (who take the money of the slow/stupid ones), and anyone who soaks the company for products/services whilst they have more FAR more money than sense ("We have this AWESOME combination CMS/CRM/B2B/ISAH product that would make your entire service 1000% more awesome! Only $5,000,000!" "What a bargain! We'll take three!").
The real losers are the people who actually use the service for the (supposedly) intended purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue, Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn fork! fork! fork!
I guess my problem is that are there really any non-obvious ideas that require little resource investment to develop? I admit I am not a fan of the "bolt out of the blue" theory of inspiration -- that the same insights could not possibly come from someone else dealing with the same problem in the same context. In that case, what incentive is there not to disclose it by using it as soon as possible? It didn't cost you anything significant to develop, thus you're not losing out on taking advantage of the "first adopter" privilege. Lots of ordinary incremental "innovations" happen that way every day. Creations are only useful if they are, well, used. As soon as someone sees your widget, they are going to get an idea of how it works, and people will reverse-engineer it to understand it. In that case, hoarding something which was your "life's work" makes sense, but not something which you came upon in a few blinks of an eye.
On this issue, even Thomas Edison seemed to agree, at least for himself:
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
"I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work."
Now, I realize that some of the greatest inventions and discoveries DID come about as accidental discoveries, but usually they came from extraordinary efforts to do something else first. Sticky-note adhesive being a good example of this. I personally don't recall anything coming from "shower moments" (and was not as a result of extraordinary research, either intentional or accidental) which changed the world, however.
As such, I think that this is an important consideration for patents, despite the fact that it is not currently codified in patent law.
I suppose that the history of the patentability of paper clips would stand in stark contrast to my stance, but it should be noted that the most useful and successful (arguably, the best-designed) instance of them, the Gem clip, was never patented.
For #1, no, I don't think that is the problem (at least after having read the patent claims). Initially, I wasn't sure, however.
For #2, if I take someone with "ordinary skill in the art", propose the problem to him in a general way, and ask him for a solution, and he comes up with something close in a very short time frame, without any real investment in the problem, then I think that it is quite obvious. Further, regarding the specificity of finger placements, there are only so many ways that human hands can hold a particular object, and people will likely gravitate to those which are most comfortable and result in the least amount of effort. It seems clear to me that such was an important consideration for the so-called "gestures", so it isn't something I really see as an "innovative" approach to solving the problem, just because the gestures were the "simplest" or "most comfortable" to get the job done, no matter what level of specificity was used to describe them on paper.
Lastly, my main complaint about the patent system goes to a more fundamental issue.. that patents were intended as an incentive to protect the investment of resources in creating innovative solutions to problems. If there is no significant investment, what protection is needed to act as an incentive? That is why I believe that the vast majority of software, design, and business method patents should never have been granted, because they represent so-called "innovations" that took little to no extraordinary resources to develop, thus they do not deserve the protection to recoup the cost of resources that they did not incur.
If I, as a programmer, come up with a nifty trick one day to make a UI massively more user friendly, and my resource expenditure to develop/implement it is practically nil, why should I think that another programmer, faced with the same problem, wouldn't come up with (practically or exactly) the same solution with a similarly nil resource expenditure? Further, why in the world should I believe that I have the right to seek out a 20-year legal monopoly preventing all other programmers from what amounts to essentially doing their damn job by practicing their "ordinary skill" in a "useful art"?
Now, if I spend many years and millions of dollars of research with a team of people to come up with an amazing and innovative solution to a particular problem, I surely would want patent protection for it, because that's what patents were meant to protect. I would also be incensed at people cheapening patent protections by getting patents for "trivial research", just because they spent five minutes "being the first" to solve an obvious problem.
No, patents were supposed to protect real innovations, to give people a reason to invest time, money, and other resources in a risky attempt at advancing the state of the art. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it, since Joe Blow competitor could avoid spending the same resources doing the same thing, and just copy the original innovator's work.
Fake innovations, like this patent, which cost next to nothing and had no risk, being an obvious and incremental advance, don't need the protection of a patent.
There is no need for patents to incentivize "inventing the obvious", because people are going to solve obvious problems with obvious solutions anyway, and there is no cost or risk associated with doing so. The only thing such patents do is stifle any and all innovation by blocking even incremental and obvious advances.
>I don't argue that the patent system is perfect (I think the obviousness test is weaker than it should be for example).
But isn't that precisely the problem with this patent?
How obvious does a solution have to be to be considered obviously unpatentable? What is the litmus test now? How tiny does the increment have to be?
Is it a true test of obviousness, or it is a test of "obviousness" as the word is defined in the non-Euclidean world of lawyer-speak?
I read the patent claims, and I don't see anything at all that anyone with "ordinary skill in the art" wouldn't go "duh" over.
>There's plenty of truly ingenious ideas where one comes up with "patent claims" pretty much in a couple of hours.
You're right; that is what is wrong with patents. No real effort went into innovating anything.
>It's engineering it into a product that takes tons of time and money. Patents aren't (and shouldn't be!) about how many resources it takes to productize the invention.
Patents aren't supposed to be granted for just ideas which never have been implemented. You're supposed to be able to show at least a workable prototype of the so-called "invention" as part of the patent application, thus, the engineering is actually part of the cost of development for obtaining the patent.
>They should be for ingenious stuff, period.
Right, but WHERE is the ingeniousness of this idea? Further, WHERE is the actual expense in effort in resources to develop it?
We already had accelerometers.
We already had touch screens.
We already had automatic portraitlandscape changes based on sensed orientation of an output device in the real world.
We already had the "gesture" paradigm.
Someone shows up with a problem statement:
"Hey, as a user, I would like to not have my screen always reorient itself automatically because I am laying on my side in bed trying to use my multifunction smart doodad"
In less than 5 minutes, even a layperson could have come up with "why don't you give me a gesture that lets me manually hold the orientation in place?", even the specific gesture (or one of several options). It wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that this is actually a user suggestion.
Then, as far as engineering goes, 15 minutes of coding, and voila!
Pray tell, what, exactly, is the innovation here, and what is the value in giving such an "invention" a TWENTY YEAR MONOPOLY?
Is ANY tiny incremental improvement now patent-worthy? If so, then what does that mean for REAL inventions, which come from spending millions to billions in research and development? If you want to get rich from your patent portfolio, why bother expending all those resources when all you have to do is mix red and blue paint to make purple?
I think the irony meter just exploded with your amplification of my point. Thanks for that.
If it takes longer to document the process than to invent the process, even to the absurdity of legalese involved in patents, is it really something worthy of a patent?
Because there wasn't a need?
Patents aren't about creating solutions to problems, they are about creating innovative solutions to problems. Solutions which aren't obvious and cost significant resources to develop.
Just because a problem didn't exist until now doesn't make the first (and most obvious) solution to it patent-worthy.
..than to develop the invention in the first place.
OK, where's the innovation? Where's the "big idea" that deserves a 20+ year monopoly? Where's the amazing advance that anyone with ordinary skill in the art of making mobile devices with touch screens and accelerometers wouldn't spend FIVE FRICKIN' MINUTES working up this oh-so-obvious solution to a simple problem?
"Shower Eurekas" don't deserve patent protection.
Yeah, but it's such a huge leap to using that information to update the display to follow the detected orientation. Probably took them millions of dollars and years of research to figure it out, too. Isn't that the whole point of patent protection? To give people incentive to expend copious resources coming up with something that is non-trivial and non-obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art? i.e., something TRULY innovative that expands the sum of man's knowledge and truly builds upon the state-of-the-art.
Giving patents for bullshit like this cheapens real patents where real people spend real time and real money to create REAL innovations.
When accelerometers came out, I thought they were so cool; a million OBVIOUS ideas popped into my head about how I could use them. This was one of them. It also popped into the heads of thousands of other people .. "wow, we can sense the orientation of stuff.. we can use that input to change the way information is presented in an output system". It didn't take years of research or millions of dollars. I could literally pull a few parts off the shelf, wire them together, write a little PIC code, and some UI widget code, et voila! All I needed was a problem in search of a solution, and it was RIGHT THERE!
THAT is NOT what PATENTS are FOR.. PERIOD.
They weren't created to protect the "I can build this in an afternoon" projects. They weren't intended for "gee, I can put these two things together and make a third thing" projects. If there is no true innovation, no real investment, what, exactly, are they supposed to protect in those cases? Someone's right to a monopoly over common-sense thinking and problem-solving?
You go Niko!
Now, if we can just get that show on our local stage sometime...
No. No, I don't think they would.
Considering the difficulty to achieve manned spaceflight with so few actual failures, they knew and accepted the risks gladly. I don't think they would disagree at all.
Anyone expecting perfection in such a cutting-edge and hugely risky endeavor is kidding themselves.
It was precisely what the terrorists wanted in the first place.. to make us so fearful that we started to treat people even worse, on average, than most third-world dictatorial/theocratic regimes do. They hated us for our way of life (rightly or wrongly.. doesn't matter at this point), and they succeeded in making it worse by proving that our high-and-mighty principles of liberty and privacy weren't as high-and-mighty as we kept saying they were to the rest of the world.
The only thing the TSA (and our government as a whole in the same vein) has done is to encourage the terrorists even more.
I'm with the OP, though. I'll take a bus, train, ship, or drive myself before I will subject myself to their degrading and humiliating treatment.
Because that is what getting a "real" BS entails, getting a "well-rounded" education.
Instead, it sounds like you are wanting a vocational/technical school degree, which is subpar, compared to getting a BS.
Do note that many colleges allow you to CLEP your way out of certain core requirements courses, which means you take a comprehensive test for that course and, if you pass, you get credit for it with whatever grade you get. The tests still cost money, but not usually as much as the full course. Of course, if you fail the test, you'll be out more money, since you'll have to take the course to get the credit. So, if you feel your high school education was superlative enough to let you test your way out of the "time-wasting" core curriculum, then by all means do so. It will save you time and money. Just don't be too surprised when you reach the limits of your knowledge in them at some point and have to take the courses anyway.
Not sure wtf that is supposed to mean. Who said he has left "the tech game"? Getting old by itself doesn't make knowledge and experience just poof, ya know. I fully expect to continue to do research, programming, and tech work until the day they find me keeled over on my keyboard.
Quite simply because a Ponzi scheme requires a couple of things that Bitcoin does not have:
1) A central "hub" entity, either a person or an organization, who handles and runs the scheme.
2) A promise of greater returns than other forms of investment. Bitcoin promises no returns at all, and does not market itself as any kind of "investment". It is simply a currency; nothing more, nothing less. Any "investment opportunities" that anyone is advertising are specific to that individual, and not part of Bitcoin's strategy.
It is not even a pyramid scheme, since there are no "levels" (anyone can trade with anyone else, not a specific "upline" contact), and, thus, there is no direct "recruitment".
The so-called "advantage to getting in early" is not particular to Ponzi schemes, or even illegal schemes at all. Legal stocks and bonds also provide that advantage, as do many cultural and technological trends. Ever heard the phrase "early adopter"?
That said, the problems I see with Bitcoin are twofold:
1) Market manipulation and stability - Since there is no regulating body able to deal with huge fluctuations in the value of Bitcoins, it is ripe to be gamed to death. This will cause huge fluctuations in the value of bitcoins, and make it nigh upon impossible to price real-world products and services in Bitcoins, since the currency will not be stable. A book seller, for example, would have to constantly change the price of his books with the fluctuating Bitcoin exchange rate, and cash out his coins immediately to ensure receiving the expected real-world value represented by the Bitcoins.
2) Technology issues - Bitcoin's strength relies on one major hashing algorithm. If someone successfully engineers an attack on it which vastly speeds up the process of mining, the market will fail, because if Bitcoin becomes ubiquitous, it can't afford to be stopped for a long enough time to change out algorithms. Also, the current Bitcoin clients are pretty heavy on system resources (it appears to scan the entire block chain every time a new block comes out, causing massive amounts of disk access), and will only get worse over time.
..is NOT to reward someone who invested nothing other than a few neuronal sparks coming up with an idea, but to reward someone who risked a significant investment in time, money, and materials to be able to recoup that investment plus make a profit in exchange for sharing the fruits of that investment with everyone.
The VAST majority of software and business-method related patents are nothing that someone competent with ordinary skill in the field could not come up with as a common-sense solution to a specific problem, WITHOUT said investment OR risk.
That said, the problem is that bringing the original intent of patents back into the system is not in the best interests of those who decide who gets elected (it isn't the voters, natch) and, thus, will not happen without a revolution of some kind which circumvents their control.
Even civil disobedience won't get us very far because, ultimately, most people could care less that they are controlled like sheep, and believe that their masters are the "good guys" and can "do no wrong". As a result, get used to it until the system explodes and has to be replaced by something else, hopefully better, but such is not guaranteed. It is the time-honored tradition of the human race since time immemorial to let the decay of civilization outrun our ability to contain or mitigate it, to ultimately consume and destroy us.
I just wish it would hurry the hell up so we can start anew.
That smarts. :p
Not from me it doesn't. I block all ads, I don't use gmail, and my searches are for things which aren't generally very targetable for advertisements, and not traceable back to me.
Just like every retarded social networking fad before it, and every one which will come after it which lulls people into giving up their privacy for a pittance, there is nothing that a respectable company should WANT to "counter" "with their own".
It is sad to see that Schmidt has fallen so far to lose sight of his own company's egalitarian mantra: "Do no evil". He now only sees the evil, and he covets it, like Gollum covets the One Ring.
No.
You're a one-man company starting out. You've got a big idea, but you need to realize the basics of that idea before it will have a chance to become something more than a gleam in your eye. Thus, start out with tools that you have on hand and have complete control over. Realize the foundation of your idea, then scale it. Start small, and plan your migration to larger platforms well ahead of time. If it takes off, you'll be well-prepared to meet the demand. If it doesn't, then you've not over-invested your time/money.
As for "the Cloud", remember the old adage "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Everyone has "bad internet days"; don't put your ability to work on your project at even greater risk.
Still saying that now, really.
It's really simple:
Create a site that chases a fad, get a decent-sized following by any means necessary (usually by providing some nearly-useless service and spamming it all over the place), don't ever let anyone out of it (keep those numbers up!), convince a bunch of speculators that it is solid gold just waiting to be dug up, IPO, live high on the hog while the speculators eat each other buying and selling your vapor, then either sell out to some other starry-eyed wannabee who has more money than sense (or just needs a tax write-off) or sell off a large portion of the stock as people begin to realize that they've been had and before the stock tanks. Retire or Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
The only people making any money on pyramid/ponzi schemes like this are the owners, anyone to whom they gave stock options, the smart/quick speculators (who take the money of the slow/stupid ones), and anyone who soaks the company for products/services whilst they have more FAR more money than sense ("We have this AWESOME combination CMS/CRM/B2B/ISAH product that would make your entire service 1000% more awesome! Only $5,000,000!" "What a bargain! We'll take three!").
The real losers are the people who actually use the service for the (supposedly) intended purpose.
Seriously. Come on, a friggin' TWEET from some random twat is CONFIRMATION? O.o