Your scheme would be so easy to circumvent, that it would be without any value to the inventor. What you have to do, is stop granting patents on solutions that are so obvious that they can barely be distinguished from the problems they claim to solve, effectively granting a patent on the problems themselves.
I might be a bit anxious if it were Einstein evaluationg the non-obviousness of my invention - but nowadays, it looks more like it's a bunch of 3rd graders, who have lost their [REJECTED] stamp. Clearly something is broken - and paying the patent office per patent granted, is likely to make matters worse rather than better. If you insist on a financial encentive, you also neeed to penalize the office when a patent is struck down in court.
Sure... it's just that for every mpeg 1 layer 3 patent, ther's so many inventions where the the only novelty is adding: "on a mobile device" to the end of the list of claims. When, in that context, it comes down to all or nothing regarding software patents - we're better of choosing nothing.
As long as patent offices rubber stamp anything not already patented, they're causing more harm than good. The software business has been doing so great without patents, that it's almost certain to do worse with them. Currently software patents are used mostly to delay the enevitable disruptions in a young a turbulent sector of the economy.
Most software patents handed out theese days, are about the first solutions that entered the head of the first person trying to do something. Unless the problem can be given to (in this case) a reasonably competent developer without him coming up with the same solution - the inventor is not giving anything of value to the public in return for his monopoly.
A few software inventions like: arithmetic coding and the RSA cryptosystem pass this test - whereas things like the FAT filesystem patents, and most other software patents, like the currently popular ending in: "...on a mobile device" are things that would have been made and disclosed to the public if they matter at all.
Does anyone know if ther's a chance that thing will pass? The E.P. seems to have a pretty good track record with regard to striking down this kind of special interest, anti consumer legislation. This, and previous statements from it's committee's leads me to think the ACTA has no chance of passing a vote.
If I thought there was a chance of this somehow passing under the radar, I'd write my "local" MEP http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members/expert/groupAndCountry/view.do?group=2965&country=DK&partNumber=1&language=EN&id=96703. I highly doubt that it'll be nescessary though - as she's in: 1) Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and 2) Delegation for relations with the countries of Southeast Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) - I'm sure she's very aware of the ACTA.
As I understand it, the US changed it's "first-to-invent" to the "first-to-file" system used in most of the rest of the world. And here where I live (in Denmark) that also means that you can't patent things that are already in the public. I've even heard of smaller companies paying obscure hobbyist magazines for publishing minor inventions - just to prevent others patenting something they waee not willing to pay for patenting themselves. I also doubt you could patent the wheel - even though there are no patents on that. The coca cola formula is a trade secret unknown to the public, and probably could be patented - at least if it did something new and non-obvious. Trade secrets and patents are by definition mutually exclusive. If someone somewhere posted a review describing the locking feature of the N1M in a public forum or magazine - it's not patentable.
The last time Sony stuck to their guns, they actually won in Bluray vs HD-DVD. This is still the exception though: MemoryStick, MiniDisc and Metamax all R.I.P. The point is that the proprietary game has more loosers than winners - so the vendors should just learn to agree on standards. Fragmented techs see way lower adoption rates than unified standards. 1394 is dead or dying (regardless of implementor), CEC is struggling because of propritary naming and some incompatibility. BluRay didn't take off before HD-DVD threw in the towel... the list goes on.
Consumers just wan't universal compatibility - not vendor lock-in. And they vote accordingly with their feet.
This sounds like a great thing, not at all like the title implies. Pooling the rescources into a project that has a greater chance of success, should prove a good thing for everyone who cares about MeeGo. There's enough of a lead for the competetion as it is, even without dividing the OS community into different factions.
It started out that way - but by the time Linus graduated in 1997, linux had become a huge thing, and I bet that if he hadn't made it the topic of his masters - he wouldn't have finished at all.
The title of Linus' thesis is: "Linux: a Portable Operating System" - so yes, it counts.
The real question is, if it is enough that a project can trace it's roots back to a academia - even if >90% was added later and or by developers outside academia. I bet many products considered purely commercial started out started out in the back of the head of students during their studies. Many of those dropped out to build a company rather than stay and write a thesis about it. If you include those, and even consider some studying other majors than CS - your probably looking at the bulk of all software in existence.
... It's not yet clear how to make sense of this result.)
Of course we both know that it's 99.9% probably experimental error - they just havn't found it yet, and now they've asked the americans to help them find the error.
When I get my neutrino modem, I will use it to send my first post from the future.
But seriously - I can't imagine this being possible. If this is true - we'd be seeing distant supernovae on the neutrino detectors years before they flare up un the night sky. As far as I know the two events are measured within seconds of each other, even when they are millions of light years away. 0.03% of millions a years is much much more than seconds.
I think it's more profound than that - and therefore highly unlikely. The future can already be said to affect the past in a quantum computer. This thing (if true) would open the door to receiving messages from the future, changing the past in a deliberate way, talking with someone inside the event horizon of a black hole.... I could go on and on. I'm thinking that Maxwell's demon and his future twin would also be able to wreck thermodynamics with this - so my bets are that an error will be found.
Only an undergrad myself - but I was thinking the same thing. The implications of FTL would enable the creation of thought experiments breaking most known laws of physics (at least as we know them).
On the other hand, light travelling slightly slower than what maybe aught to be called the "causality propagation limit" would only challenge our knowledge about the nature of the vacuum - which is already up for debate. Light already travels slower than c in all substances other than vacuum, and Einstein certainly never took the soup of virtual particles that we call the vacuum into considerartion, when he made his famous theory.
This material is usefull in a pressure swing adsorber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_swing_adsorption) for seperating CO2 from a gas mixture in an economical way. What you do with your pure CO2 afterwards is another matter.
Combine it with a plentiful, but potentially unreliable, source of clean energy (like a desert solar power plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert) you can turn that electricity into methane, and from that into higher hydrocarbons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids) - and voila!.... you could have cars running one gasoline made from carbon fixed from the air using solar power.
We all have a self confirming bias in favour of one system or another. The problem is that the greater the effort to please a wide audience, the less optimized it becomes for the speicalized user. Windows and all the mainstream linux distros are both going down the road of running tons of unneded stuff, that just slows everything down. We both know that - so we cut away the worst of the bloat on our primary system, which then runs pretty decently - but the 200 mashines in the server farm, and your wifes PC that gets infected with malware at least once a year - they'll all have to make du with a stock install, whicever OS they're running.
And I think it's strange how the latest Windows always seems to be the greatest thing on earth - while all previous versions suddenly stinks from the day when MicroSoft wan't to sell you the upgrade. They should rather adopt some sort of subscription model so everyone was running on the same newest version without the all the planned obsoletion.
Just in case anyone was wondering about my bias: I have an MSDN (free MS software galore) subscription AND run gentoo linux on my main mashine.
It's like the good old cold war, with each side holding enough firepower to destroy the other 1000 times over. Now it seems like Apple went against the advice of game theory, thinking it could make a "limited war" against another. The real question is how many of the other "patent superpowers" will get engulfed in the ensuing patent armageddon... Samsung, Google, Intel, IBM
Noone said so, but taxpayer money are being used to hide the real price of oil, which brings us to the point that it's not fair to compare that to the current unsubsidized price of green energy.
The trouble is that corp wellfare only works in this country alone. Unless you're suggesting that we also subsidies energy in other countries too.
But that's exactly what it does. Western world taxpayers are paying for the R&D that's continously pressing down the pricfe of photovoltaics - and now ther're actually cheap enough for many people in the developing world. Especially for those who would otherwise have to also pay for powerlines covering vast distances. A PV is also cheaper to run than a diesel generator.
The argument that with enough subsides eventually it will become economically feasible doesn't cut it and it's not true. The subsidies have a habit of never going away - see Oil Industry.
Make a "green" energy source economically feasibly without subsidies and it will take the World by storm - there will be no need for laws to force people to use it or tax incentives or any other political trickery.
So why are demanding that green energy should be able to compete without subcidy, and at the same time you admit that oil is heavily subsidiced??
And I wonder if green energy wouldn't already be competitive, if you added to oil the price that taxpayers are paying for "protecting national interests" in the form of huge military bases incidentally located near the biggest oil wells... oh and a couple of wars fought mostly over those same oil wells.
If you spent half whats being spent on the War on Terror on green energy instead, green energy would already be cheaper than fossil - and ther'd be no reason for the U.S to have bases in Saudi Arabia, nor support it's corrupt government. That incidentally happens to be why ther's a War on Terror in the first place.
I wonder how much it will cost to adapt to the consequences of global warming... - but that's another story alltogether.
A superior technology will win and has always won.
Really?. We mostly don't know about the technology that lost - some of whic was probably superior - at least from a technical and/or long term perspective. And I think that even you could probably name a few superior pieces of technology that lost to better marketing and or random market events.
It's true that the European Patent Office has been granting US-style software patent for many years - but it's also the case that noone has dared to enforce such a patent via the European courts. This is probably bacause the EPO has been employing a very "creative" interpretation to justify it's practice - and is far from certain that it would hold up. That's one of the reasons that the EPO is working to desperately to change the law before it's shown that it has been breaking the current laws.
Now that the attempts to sneak sw-patents through the parlament have been stopped - it's trying to set up a whole seperate system without any accountability to any publicly elected body what so ever. That attempt can only be described as undemocratic - even by those who would support the acknowledgement of sw-patents.
Maybe - but by doing it so early in the process, they're giving Cameron a chance to back away towards the moral high ground. A wiser cause of action would be to let him entangle himself in legeslation and then wait for the right moment to play the card.
I'm shocked that any western leader would not know by heart, that censorship is a no no. And is't barely 6 months Egypt's dictator was lamented for doing the exact same thing.
I'm equally shocked that the chineese would not notice that their support is not exactly helpin Cameron either. This reminds me of when Bush's war on terror gave Putin an excuse to wage his own war on terror in Chechnya.
When will our leaders learn that merely being elected doesn't make you an automatic "Good Guy" in the eyes of the world.
- in related news, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad parises Cameron's commitment to uphold law and order (by any means).
Judging from the article, it's just the über expensive, high TDP models they're talking about. No one in their right mind would ever buy an extreme edition and then stick with the boxed cooler. That would be like buying a 5.000$ TV and then feed it with a signal through the 50c composite cable that probably came bundled with the DVD-player. Difference is that the cooler intel would have to ship with a 180W CPU, would likely add 50$ to the cost - and still be tossed in the "spare part closet". This way they can pay their shareholders another 50$, and you'll have space for another failed harddrive in the closet.
I'd be happy to send you a picture of an old Pentium (P54C) 150 boxed CPU that came with it's heatsink GLUED to the ceramic package. I'm not talking about a particularly stale blob of thermal paste either. In fairness, I think it's one of the first boxed retail CPU's intel ever did - so some of the younger readers of this forum might not have been born at the time:-)
I'd say you have to fuck up pretty badly to kill a CPU. I'd only ever seen it happen once - and that was and old T-bird (yes AMD) where the guy put a thermal sensor between the die and the heat sink. The thing got so hot that a label on the pin side turned from white to brown. He told me he would try and have it replaced under warrenty...
Slashdot Mirror
Your scheme would be so easy to circumvent, that it would be without any value to the inventor. What you have to do, is stop granting patents on solutions that are so obvious that they can barely be distinguished from the problems they claim to solve, effectively granting a patent on the problems themselves.
I might be a bit anxious if it were Einstein evaluationg the non-obviousness of my invention - but nowadays, it looks more like it's a bunch of 3rd graders, who have lost their [REJECTED] stamp. Clearly something is broken - and paying the patent office per patent granted, is likely to make matters worse rather than better. If you insist on a financial encentive, you also neeed to penalize the office when a patent is struck down in court.
Sure... it's just that for every mpeg 1 layer 3 patent, ther's so many inventions where the the only novelty is adding: "on a mobile device" to the end of the list of claims. When, in that context, it comes down to all or nothing regarding software patents - we're better of choosing nothing.
As long as patent offices rubber stamp anything not already patented, they're causing more harm than good. The software business has been doing so great without patents, that it's almost certain to do worse with them. Currently software patents are used mostly to delay the enevitable disruptions in a young a turbulent sector of the economy.
Most software patents handed out theese days, are about the first solutions that entered the head of the first person trying to do something. Unless the problem can be given to (in this case) a reasonably competent developer without him coming up with the same solution - the inventor is not giving anything of value to the public in return for his monopoly.
A few software inventions like: arithmetic coding and the RSA cryptosystem pass this test - whereas things like the FAT filesystem patents, and most other software patents, like the currently popular ending in: "...on a mobile device" are things that would have been made and disclosed to the public if they matter at all.
Does anyone know if ther's a chance that thing will pass?
The E.P. seems to have a pretty good track record with regard to striking down this kind of special interest, anti consumer legislation. This, and previous statements from it's committee's leads me to think the ACTA has no chance of passing a vote.
If I thought there was a chance of this somehow passing under the radar, I'd write my "local" MEP http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members/expert/groupAndCountry/view.do?group=2965&country=DK&partNumber=1&language=EN&id=96703. I highly doubt that it'll be nescessary though - as she's in:
1) Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and
2) Delegation for relations with the countries of Southeast Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
- I'm sure she's very aware of the ACTA.
As I understand it, the US changed it's "first-to-invent" to the "first-to-file" system used in most of the rest of the world. And here where I live (in Denmark) that also means that you can't patent things that are already in the public. I've even heard of smaller companies paying obscure hobbyist magazines for publishing minor inventions - just to prevent others patenting something they waee not willing to pay for patenting themselves. I also doubt you could patent the wheel - even though there are no patents on that. The coca cola formula is a trade secret unknown to the public, and probably could be patented - at least if it did something new and non-obvious. Trade secrets and patents are by definition mutually exclusive. If someone somewhere posted a review describing the locking feature of the N1M in a public forum or magazine - it's not patentable.
The last time Sony stuck to their guns, they actually won in Bluray vs HD-DVD. This is still the exception though: MemoryStick, MiniDisc and Metamax all R.I.P. The point is that the proprietary game has more loosers than winners - so the vendors should just learn to agree on standards. Fragmented techs see way lower adoption rates than unified standards. 1394 is dead or dying (regardless of implementor), CEC is struggling because of propritary naming and some incompatibility. BluRay didn't take off before HD-DVD threw in the towel... the list goes on.
Consumers just wan't universal compatibility - not vendor lock-in. And they vote accordingly with their feet.
This sounds like a great thing, not at all like the title implies. Pooling the rescources into a project that has a greater chance of success, should prove a good thing for everyone who cares about MeeGo. There's enough of a lead for the competetion as it is, even without dividing the OS community into different factions.
It started out that way - but by the time Linus graduated in 1997, linux had become a huge thing, and I bet that if he hadn't made it the topic of his masters - he wouldn't have finished at all.
The title of Linus' thesis is: "Linux: a Portable Operating System" - so yes, it counts.
The real question is, if it is enough that a project can trace it's roots back to a academia - even if >90% was added later and or by developers outside academia. I bet many products considered purely commercial started out started out in the back of the head of students during their studies. Many of those dropped out to build a company rather than stay and write a thesis about it. If you include those, and even consider some studying other majors than CS - your probably looking at the bulk of all software in existence.
... It's not yet clear how to make sense of this result.)
Of course we both know that it's 99.9% probably experimental error - they just havn't found it yet, and now they've asked the americans to help them find the error.
When I get my neutrino modem, I will use it to send my first post from the future.
But seriously - I can't imagine this being possible. If this is true - we'd be seeing distant supernovae on the neutrino detectors years before they flare up un the night sky. As far as I know the two events are measured within seconds of each other, even when they are millions of light years away. 0.03% of millions a years is much much more than seconds.
I think it's more profound than that - and therefore highly unlikely. The future can already be said to affect the past in a quantum computer. This thing (if true) would open the door to receiving messages from the future, changing the past in a deliberate way, talking with someone inside the event horizon of a black hole.... I could go on and on. I'm thinking that Maxwell's demon and his future twin would also be able to wreck thermodynamics with this - so my bets are that an error will be found.
Only an undergrad myself - but I was thinking the same thing. The implications of FTL would enable the creation of thought experiments breaking most known laws of physics (at least as we know them).
On the other hand, light travelling slightly slower than what maybe aught to be called the "causality propagation limit" would only challenge our knowledge about the nature of the vacuum - which is already up for debate. Light already travels slower than c in all substances other than vacuum, and Einstein certainly never took the soup of virtual particles that we call the vacuum into considerartion, when he made his famous theory.
This material is usefull in a pressure swing adsorber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_swing_adsorption) for seperating CO2 from a gas mixture in an economical way. What you do with your pure CO2 afterwards is another matter.
Combine it with a plentiful, but potentially unreliable, source of clean energy (like a desert solar power plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert) you can turn that electricity into methane, and from that into higher hydrocarbons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids) - and voila! .... you could have cars running one gasoline made from carbon fixed from the air using solar power.
We all have a self confirming bias in favour of one system or another. The problem is that the greater the effort to please a wide audience, the less optimized it becomes for the speicalized user. Windows and all the mainstream linux distros are both going down the road of running tons of unneded stuff, that just slows everything down. We both know that - so we cut away the worst of the bloat on our primary system, which then runs pretty decently - but the 200 mashines in the server farm, and your wifes PC that gets infected with malware at least once a year - they'll all have to make du with a stock install, whicever OS they're running.
And I think it's strange how the latest Windows always seems to be the greatest thing on earth - while all previous versions suddenly stinks from the day when MicroSoft wan't to sell you the upgrade. They should rather adopt some sort of subscription model so everyone was running on the same newest version without the all the planned obsoletion.
Just in case anyone was wondering about my bias: I have an MSDN (free MS software galore) subscription AND run gentoo linux on my main mashine.
It's like the good old cold war, with each side holding enough firepower to destroy the other 1000 times over. Now it seems like Apple went against the advice of game theory, thinking it could make a "limited war" against another. The real question is how many of the other "patent superpowers" will get engulfed in the ensuing patent armageddon... Samsung, Google, Intel, IBM
Noone said so, but taxpayer money are being used to hide the real price of oil, which brings us to the point that it's not fair to compare that to the current unsubsidized price of green energy.
strike "one of" from the last line, and you'd be exactly right.
The trouble is that corp wellfare only works in this country alone. Unless you're suggesting that we also subsidies energy in other countries too.
But that's exactly what it does. Western world taxpayers are paying for the R&D that's continously pressing down the pricfe of photovoltaics - and now ther're actually cheap enough for many people in the developing world. Especially for those who would otherwise have to also pay for powerlines covering vast distances. A PV is also cheaper to run than a diesel generator.
The argument that with enough subsides eventually it will become economically feasible doesn't cut it and it's not true. The subsidies have a habit of never going away - see Oil Industry.
Make a "green" energy source economically feasibly without subsidies and it will take the World by storm - there will be no need for laws to force people to use it or tax incentives or any other political trickery.
So why are demanding that green energy should be able to compete without subcidy, and at the same time you admit that oil is heavily subsidiced??
And I wonder if green energy wouldn't already be competitive, if you added to oil the price that taxpayers are paying for "protecting national interests" in the form of huge military bases incidentally located near the biggest oil wells. .. oh and a couple of wars fought mostly over those same oil wells.
If you spent half whats being spent on the War on Terror on green energy instead, green energy would already be cheaper than fossil - and ther'd be no reason for the U.S to have bases in Saudi Arabia, nor support it's corrupt government. That incidentally happens to be why ther's a War on Terror in the first place.
I wonder how much it will cost to adapt to the consequences of global warming... - but that's another story alltogether.
A superior technology will win and has always won.
Really?. We mostly don't know about the technology that lost - some of whic was probably superior - at least from a technical and/or long term perspective. And I think that even you could probably name a few superior pieces of technology that lost to better marketing and or random market events.
It's true that the European Patent Office has been granting US-style software patent for many years - but it's also the case that noone has dared to enforce such a patent via the European courts. This is probably bacause the EPO has been employing a very "creative" interpretation to justify it's practice - and is far from certain that it would hold up. That's one of the reasons that the EPO is working to desperately to change the law before it's shown that it has been breaking the current laws.
Now that the attempts to sneak sw-patents through the parlament have been stopped - it's trying to set up a whole seperate system without any accountability to any publicly elected body what so ever. That attempt can only be described as undemocratic - even by those who would support the acknowledgement of sw-patents.
Maybe - but by doing it so early in the process, they're giving Cameron a chance to back away towards the moral high ground. A wiser cause of action would be to let him entangle himself in legeslation and then wait for the right moment to play the card.
I'm shocked that any western leader would not know by heart, that censorship is a no no. And is't barely 6 months Egypt's dictator was lamented for doing the exact same thing.
I'm equally shocked that the chineese would not notice that their support is not exactly helpin Cameron either. This reminds me of when Bush's war on terror gave Putin an excuse to wage his own war on terror in Chechnya.
When will our leaders learn that merely being elected doesn't make you an automatic "Good Guy" in the eyes of the world.
- in related news, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad parises Cameron's commitment to uphold law and order (by any means).
Judging from the article, it's just the über expensive, high TDP models they're talking about. No one in their right mind would ever buy an extreme edition and then stick with the boxed cooler. That would be like buying a 5.000$ TV and then feed it with a signal through the 50c composite cable that probably came bundled with the DVD-player. Difference is that the cooler intel would have to ship with a 180W CPU, would likely add 50$ to the cost - and still be tossed in the "spare part closet". This way they can pay their shareholders another 50$, and you'll have space for another failed harddrive in the closet.
I'd be happy to send you a picture of an old Pentium (P54C) 150 boxed CPU that came with it's heatsink GLUED to the ceramic package. I'm not talking about a particularly stale blob of thermal paste either. In fairness, I think it's one of the first boxed retail CPU's intel ever did - so some of the younger readers of this forum might not have been born at the time :-)
I'd say you have to fuck up pretty badly to kill a CPU. I'd only ever seen it happen once - and that was and old T-bird (yes AMD) where the guy put a thermal sensor between the die and the heat sink. The thing got so hot that a label on the pin side turned from white to brown. He told me he would try and have it replaced under warrenty...