I'm afraid I can't cite my source. It was many years ago, so I could be wrong.
It might be from Art of Programming, volume 1, where he deliberately created an assembly language which was different from any other, but I think it was an article I read.
(Yeah, I've got the old edition of Art of Programming, the assembly-language version. I'm old, and my memory is failing. Shoot me now.)
Re:i hate these "email is dead" stories
on
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
According to the article, Knuth gave up on email in 1990. I know that as a Stanford processor he's on the cutting edge, but 1990 was way before email became something that everybody and his brother had. I suppose the term "spam" had been coined, but Canter and Siegel were still four years off. How much email could the man have gotten?
So I concur with you that he just didn't want to talk to people. And that's funny, because email is a wonderfully standoffish way to communicate. I'm not on the hook to respond immediately. You and I don't have to be ready to talk at the same instant, the way you do on the phone.
I just played phone tag for two weeks with one bastard who didn't return most of my calls. If he'd give me a freaking email address he could have dashed off a note with the binary answer I needed in 30 seconds any time he wanted. (Literally, all I wanted was a yes-or-no answer. Dipstick finally called me this morning.)
Of course, this is the same Don Knuth who proposed that programming classes should be taught without computers, and you expel any student who writes a compiler for the language you're teaching in. He wanted to get students to be good at paper debugging. So maybe the inventor of TeX is just a luddite.
I think Yogi Berra said it best
on
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with you, but you have to be careful about how you define "using it". Part of the point of patents is that they can be given to people without the ability (or money) to actually put the idea into practice. You're supposed to be able to go up to a large company (like Sony) and say, "Hey, I've got this idea, and the US government says I thought of it first. I'll let you use it if you pay me."
But to be able to set a market price for that idea, there has to be the option of not selling it. If the company can say, "Hey, wonderful. If you don't sell it to us you'll lose it. Here's a quarter. Don't spend it all in one place," then the whole point of the patent process has been subverted.
The patent owner has to be able to walk away. And while he's walked away, it's not fair for the company to go to the patent office and say, "Hey, we offered him a nice shiny quarter, and he wouldn't sell. He's not using it so you should take the patent away."
At least, that's the intention. These days, with the patent office failing to enforce the "obviousness" requirement or even the "novel" requirement, I'm not certain that the original intention has any force.
But if you're willing to go there, I'm sure there are ways to write the rules so that you must make a good-faith effort to put your patent into practice rather than sitting around waiting for somebody to violate it. That's not anywhere near fair, either.
I gather (IANAL) that most states require you to pay taxes on stuff that is shipped into the state for you. (I believe it's called the use tax. They just can't force the retailer in another state to collect it under the current rules. You're supposed to report it on your taxes and pay it.
Honestly, I wouldn't know how to go about paying it in my state. Theoretically I'm on the hook for 5% of everything I've ever had shipped to my house.
This is all about trying to collect a tax that (theoretically) you owe them under the law already. Whether that tax is "fair"... there's no such thing as a fair tax so I'm not going to take a stand on that one way or another.
I wonder if that's because of the e-ink display. A display that uses the ambient light rather than requiring a back light can save a lot of power.
But (at least in the present state of technology) it's probably a crummy video game machine. (In fact, as far as I'm aware, that technology doesn't yet refresh fast enough to play movies properly.)
That's certainly true. It's tolerable when I'm on the LAN with the server. When I'm working via VPN from home, I get up and watch some TV when doing a full checkout of my system. (Some of that is the binaries, though much is just the sheer number of files and the latencies caused by the SSH.)
It's really nice to be able to have your entire product in one place and under version control. Third party DLLs (or.so's or jars), images, your documentation... just about anything that's part of your product.
That way it's all in one place and easily backed up. If you get a new version of the DLL/jar/so you can just drop it into a new branch for testing. If your customer won't upgrade from version 2.2 to version 3.0, you can recreate the entire product to help fix bugs in the old version rather than just saying, "We've lost it, you've got to upgrade."
Basically, by putting your entire project under version control, you know that it's all in one place, no matter what version it is you want. Even if the files don't change, you know how to reconstruct a development installation without having to dig around in multiple locations (source in version control, DLLs in one directory on the server, etc.)
Yeah, so it costs some extra disk to store it. Disk is cheap.
Yeah, I'm baffled by how this helps myself. I was wondering if it fits into the bit where my newspaper's police blotter always fills up with prostitution arrests in an election year, because they want to be seen as "cleaning up the city". But while there are plenty of people outraged by prostitution, I can't imagine how the law-and-order types will see this as a big moral victory.
I want to know what office Kent County Assistant Prosecutor Lynn Hopkins is running for. This sounds like an EXCELLENT time for a little prosecutorial discretion. I can't help but think that she's got something in mind.
Anamorphic widescreen is still less than 500 scan lines. It's vastly better than the really crummy ones, but I am looking forward to 1080.
But I'm not buying a TV that supports that many scan lines while they still cost so much money, and so I don't have a dog in the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight. By the time I buy a TV that'll actually display those releases properly, this fight will probably be settled.
Perhaps it's just because I look at things differently, but for me "more details" is sufficient reason. I find standard-definition movies blurry, especially after they've been letterboxed down to the point where I'm looking at 200-something vertical scan lines. I keep trying to clean my glasses, because I just can't see anything.
I gather that if I had the right TV and the right player and the right movie I could still score that whopping 486 NTSC scanlines. But I'm a late-adopter when it comes to TV, and I'm waiting until after the switchover and the prices come down. So I guess you could say that I'm not buying it, either, but I can at least say that I'm really looking forward to being able to see the expressions on people's faces when the shot shows the entire body and some scenery too.
Sorry, I'm out of mod points, so I'll just have to concur with you. I'd be less irritated if people stopped to consider how self-serving their arguments are. This article is rationalizing behavior which is both illegal and immoral by hoping that somehow, somewhere, something they're taking for free is making life better for somebody.
The first sentence of my post was:
To my reckoning, a movie (say) is "worth" $9 per ticket times 20,000,000 people who want to see it. Please show me where I said that the movie cost $180,000,000 to make. I said that they would sell the movie to you for $180,000,000 because that's what it was worth to them, and then you'd own it free and clear. Now $180M is your cost and you're free to do whatever you want with it, but nobody said anything about what it cost for them to make it.
I wasn't referring to how much the movie cost to make. I'm talking about the demand side of things. The movie is worth $180,000,000 because 20,000,000 people are each willing to buy a $9 ticket to it.
The cost to actually make the movie comes into this only in the sense that if they couldn't make that much money, they wouldn't do it at all. Other than that it has no bearing on the value of the object.
The same applies to the carpenter and his chair. He doesn't sell it for the price of his materials. He sells it for what he thinks he can get. If he goes on eBay he'll sell it to the highest bidder. His chair isn't a commodity. If all you want is "someplace to sit" you'll find the cheapest chair you can get, but if you want something nicer you'll get a good one. It'll cost you more not because it's made out of better and more expensive materials but because you want it more than you want the other one.
You have plenty of ways to spend your time. You don't have to see Spider-Man 3. You can do all sorts of stuff for free, including staring at the walls. But you want to see Spider-Man 3 and so it costs you. That cost has absolutely nothing to do with how much it costs to generate Sandman and everything to do with the fact that you're sitting there on a Thursday evening with $9 burning a hole in your pocket. If you wanted to spend it economically, you'd stare at the wall, and if you didn't have $9 that's exactly what you'd do.
The upshot: don't put everything in terms of marginal price. This isn't half a ton of corn or a container of widgets you're buying.
To my reckoning, a movie (say) is "worth" $9 per ticket times 20,000,000 people who want to see it. (At least, that's what Shrek or Spider-Man is worth. Actually, it's a bit less than that, because the movie house gets a share, and a bit more, because I'm leaving off DVDs, but you get the point.)
I'm perfectly content to sell the movie like a chair, exactly once, and it's yours. Show it in your basement, put it on the web, display it on the surface of the moon.
But it doesn't cost $9. It costs $180,000,000.
That's why artists expect to be able to "sell" the same thing in perpetuity. There's aggregate demand, it's a lot nicer to ask each of them for a share and ask them not to give it away. The scarcity is only artificial because there's no other way to distribute the costs equally, so that everybody who wants to see it can do so at a reasonable cost.
In essence it's a polite agreement among viewers to share the cost equitably. But "politeness" is not something legally enforceable, especially not when the alternative is to get something for free.
But by all means: if you'd rather give the studio $180,000,000 instead for a truly free copy, I suspect they'd be perfectly content. I don't think they take PayPal, though.
I should have spoken more precisely. I should have rendered it as "If I can copy it I should be permitted to."
Societies have always existed in a background of restricting things that people can physically do but which which are harmful to society as a whole. If we restricted the law to what could be absolutely forbidden or required, we wouldn't need lawyers; we'd just need a physics textbook.
Many other crimes happen every day, but the amount of crime that happens is controlled by legal and social coercion. The limiting factors are how much we're willing to spend, how intrusive we allow our government to be, and how the balance of power rests between the criminals, the government, and the civilian population.
Within those limitations, we enforce the aggregate opinion of society on what is _right_, which is a complex calculation of strength of opinion, harm done, and what things we wish to encourage and discourage.
If my idea is the only thing I have, and I give it away, I don't eat. That's "so what".
I don't know the best solution to this situation. Clearly we want to reward people to create patterns for a living: writers, musicians, filmmakers. Just as clearly, doing so using the same mechanisms as physical property is no longer workable. (It was, at one point in the past: an author traded his book to a publisher for money, who then had the exclusive license to print physical copies. That no longer holds in a world where such things are sold electronically.)
Like I said, I don't have any solutions. I do know that I find the attitude that "if I can copy it I should be able to" (which I see a fair bit of on Slashdot) rather self-serving: people are taking their newfound ability to copy music, movies, etc. and objecting to any attempt to limit it as if they were entirely entitled to it. The sellers are still working under an old paradigm, and it's unfair to tell them that they're the losers until somebody manages to come up with a new paradigm.
I'd be less upset if Slashdotters showed any interest in coming up with that new paradigm. Instead, the attitude seems to be, "Hey, free music/movies/etc!". Tremendous effort is put into breaking any new copy protection (which, I concur, will be ultimately futile) and none into suggesting a new business model.
(Well, there's the ever popular "musicians should play more concerts" model. If I ever meet such a person in person, I shall ask them if they've ever tried to play concerts professionally, and if they haven't I shall spit in their faces.)
Why? Wouldn't we both come out richer, each having both ideas?
No, because the idea in and of itself is not worth anything. It just kinda sits there. But ideas can turn into real things: a hardback book you can read, a machine that makes it easier to harvest corn, a medication that saves your life. Ultimately, you can sell that thing to somebody, and they'll swap you money (or something else valuable.)
If I'm a big manufacturing corporation, I'm only to happy to swap my idea for using two crayons at the same time to write my name for your idea that saves me a lot of money on each widget I manufacture. We both now have to ideas. But I also have widgets I can sell you, and you have some pretty pieces of paper.
The point is that ultimately intellectual property and real property are not quite as different as your quote would have us believe. They both have economic value, and "giving away" your idea is in fact an economic benefit to somebody else at a loss to yourself.
Some of us produce stuff; others produce ideas. To claim that the ideas have no economic value is to put those who make ideas for a living out of work.
I can see Blockbuster suing them, or some other company whom Netflix threatened. But I can't imagine that there are enough of those companies to form a "class".
The article is pretty vague on exactly what the evidence is. The actual lawsuit is more informative, but harder to read.
The class (as I finally figured out on page 17 of the lawsuit) is Netflix customers, of whom Dennis Dilbeck is the representative sample. They're suing based on the idea that Netflix's prices are higher than they should be, because competition by Blockbuster should have brought prices down. I just can't see a judge buying it; these people all paid for Netflix's service at the asking price voluntarily.
From what I've read so far, I'm just not buying their claim. They are citing one patent in particular, which is about delivery of resources based on people making requests on a computer, but that's considerably different from Netflix's rental queue.
(I'm assuming that patents are not a completely stupid idea. Please, if you're in the "all patents are inherently evil" category, can you just assume that I agree with you and go preach to the choir in some other thread?)
I don't consider Netflix's idea at all obvious. I thought it was pretty neat when I came up with it: the idea of a rental service which doesn't have a due date is pretty cool and I'd never heard of it.
I know we hate patents, but I hate idiot class-action lawsuits even more. I've been involved in dozens of them; I literally throw them away unopened when they arrive in the mail. The lawyers always make money and I always get a coupon for 30 cents off my next bag of Chex Mix.
Sometimes, I'm even suing myself. Some of those lawsuits were shareholders suing the company. Well, I'm still a shareholder, so I'm suing myself.
All the lawyers need to find is one fool member of the class to make a claim, and the company will often settle rather than fight. It's free money for class-action lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid I can't cite my source. It was many years ago, so I could be wrong.
It might be from Art of Programming, volume 1, where he deliberately created an assembly language which was different from any other, but I think it was an article I read.
(Yeah, I've got the old edition of Art of Programming, the assembly-language version. I'm old, and my memory is failing. Shoot me now.)
According to the article, Knuth gave up on email in 1990. I know that as a Stanford processor he's on the cutting edge, but 1990 was way before email became something that everybody and his brother had. I suppose the term "spam" had been coined, but Canter and Siegel were still four years off. How much email could the man have gotten?
So I concur with you that he just didn't want to talk to people. And that's funny, because email is a wonderfully standoffish way to communicate. I'm not on the hook to respond immediately. You and I don't have to be ready to talk at the same instant, the way you do on the phone.
I just played phone tag for two weeks with one bastard who didn't return most of my calls. If he'd give me a freaking email address he could have dashed off a note with the binary answer I needed in 30 seconds any time he wanted. (Literally, all I wanted was a yes-or-no answer. Dipstick finally called me this morning.)
Of course, this is the same Don Knuth who proposed that programming classes should be taught without computers, and you expel any student who writes a compiler for the language you're teaching in. He wanted to get students to be good at paper debugging. So maybe the inventor of TeX is just a luddite.
"Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded."
I agree with you, but you have to be careful about how you define "using it". Part of the point of patents is that they can be given to people without the ability (or money) to actually put the idea into practice. You're supposed to be able to go up to a large company (like Sony) and say, "Hey, I've got this idea, and the US government says I thought of it first. I'll let you use it if you pay me."
But to be able to set a market price for that idea, there has to be the option of not selling it. If the company can say, "Hey, wonderful. If you don't sell it to us you'll lose it. Here's a quarter. Don't spend it all in one place," then the whole point of the patent process has been subverted.
The patent owner has to be able to walk away. And while he's walked away, it's not fair for the company to go to the patent office and say, "Hey, we offered him a nice shiny quarter, and he wouldn't sell. He's not using it so you should take the patent away."
At least, that's the intention. These days, with the patent office failing to enforce the "obviousness" requirement or even the "novel" requirement, I'm not certain that the original intention has any force.
But if you're willing to go there, I'm sure there are ways to write the rules so that you must make a good-faith effort to put your patent into practice rather than sitting around waiting for somebody to violate it. That's not anywhere near fair, either.
I gather (IANAL) that most states require you to pay taxes on stuff that is shipped into the state for you. (I believe it's called the use tax. They just can't force the retailer in another state to collect it under the current rules. You're supposed to report it on your taxes and pay it.
Honestly, I wouldn't know how to go about paying it in my state. Theoretically I'm on the hook for 5% of everything I've ever had shipped to my house.
This is all about trying to collect a tax that (theoretically) you owe them under the law already. Whether that tax is "fair"... there's no such thing as a fair tax so I'm not going to take a stand on that one way or another.
I wonder if that's because of the e-ink display. A display that uses the ambient light rather than requiring a back light can save a lot of power.
But (at least in the present state of technology) it's probably a crummy video game machine. (In fact, as far as I'm aware, that technology doesn't yet refresh fast enough to play movies properly.)
Can I then use the iTV to sling it back to my television set?
Maybe we can get them to sling it back and forth until it opens a wormhole or something.
That's certainly true. It's tolerable when I'm on the LAN with the server. When I'm working via VPN from home, I get up and watch some TV when doing a full checkout of my system. (Some of that is the binaries, though much is just the sheer number of files and the latencies caused by the SSH.)
It's really nice to be able to have your entire product in one place and under version control. Third party DLLs (or .so's or jars), images, your documentation... just about anything that's part of your product.
That way it's all in one place and easily backed up. If you get a new version of the DLL/jar/so you can just drop it into a new branch for testing. If your customer won't upgrade from version 2.2 to version 3.0, you can recreate the entire product to help fix bugs in the old version rather than just saying, "We've lost it, you've got to upgrade."
Basically, by putting your entire project under version control, you know that it's all in one place, no matter what version it is you want. Even if the files don't change, you know how to reconstruct a development installation without having to dig around in multiple locations (source in version control, DLLs in one directory on the server, etc.)
Yeah, so it costs some extra disk to store it. Disk is cheap.
Yeah, I'm baffled by how this helps myself. I was wondering if it fits into the bit where my newspaper's police blotter always fills up with prostitution arrests in an election year, because they want to be seen as "cleaning up the city". But while there are plenty of people outraged by prostitution, I can't imagine how the law-and-order types will see this as a big moral victory.
I hear they could use some extra body armor over there. And they'll never, ever, ever be exposed to moisture in the freaking desert.
I want to know what office Kent County Assistant Prosecutor Lynn Hopkins is running for. This sounds like an EXCELLENT time for a little prosecutorial discretion. I can't help but think that she's got something in mind.
"She must be a dyke," I'd say.
"No, that's just wishful thinking," my wingman tells me. "Maybe you should change your socks more often."
Shows him!
Anamorphic widescreen is still less than 500 scan lines. It's vastly better than the really crummy ones, but I am looking forward to 1080.
But I'm not buying a TV that supports that many scan lines while they still cost so much money, and so I don't have a dog in the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight. By the time I buy a TV that'll actually display those releases properly, this fight will probably be settled.
Perhaps it's just because I look at things differently, but for me "more details" is sufficient reason. I find standard-definition movies blurry, especially after they've been letterboxed down to the point where I'm looking at 200-something vertical scan lines. I keep trying to clean my glasses, because I just can't see anything.
I gather that if I had the right TV and the right player and the right movie I could still score that whopping 486 NTSC scanlines. But I'm a late-adopter when it comes to TV, and I'm waiting until after the switchover and the prices come down. So I guess you could say that I'm not buying it, either, but I can at least say that I'm really looking forward to being able to see the expressions on people's faces when the shot shows the entire body and some scenery too.
Hang on, I'm working on it. I'll get back to you.
Sorry, I'm out of mod points, so I'll just have to concur with you. I'd be less irritated if people stopped to consider how self-serving their arguments are. This article is rationalizing behavior which is both illegal and immoral by hoping that somehow, somewhere, something they're taking for free is making life better for somebody.
I wasn't referring to how much the movie cost to make. I'm talking about the demand side of things. The movie is worth $180,000,000 because 20,000,000 people are each willing to buy a $9 ticket to it.
The cost to actually make the movie comes into this only in the sense that if they couldn't make that much money, they wouldn't do it at all. Other than that it has no bearing on the value of the object.
The same applies to the carpenter and his chair. He doesn't sell it for the price of his materials. He sells it for what he thinks he can get. If he goes on eBay he'll sell it to the highest bidder. His chair isn't a commodity. If all you want is "someplace to sit" you'll find the cheapest chair you can get, but if you want something nicer you'll get a good one. It'll cost you more not because it's made out of better and more expensive materials but because you want it more than you want the other one.
You have plenty of ways to spend your time. You don't have to see Spider-Man 3. You can do all sorts of stuff for free, including staring at the walls. But you want to see Spider-Man 3 and so it costs you. That cost has absolutely nothing to do with how much it costs to generate Sandman and everything to do with the fact that you're sitting there on a Thursday evening with $9 burning a hole in your pocket. If you wanted to spend it economically, you'd stare at the wall, and if you didn't have $9 that's exactly what you'd do.
The upshot: don't put everything in terms of marginal price. This isn't half a ton of corn or a container of widgets you're buying.
To my reckoning, a movie (say) is "worth" $9 per ticket times 20,000,000 people who want to see it. (At least, that's what Shrek or Spider-Man is worth. Actually, it's a bit less than that, because the movie house gets a share, and a bit more, because I'm leaving off DVDs, but you get the point.)
I'm perfectly content to sell the movie like a chair, exactly once, and it's yours. Show it in your basement, put it on the web, display it on the surface of the moon.
But it doesn't cost $9. It costs $180,000,000.
That's why artists expect to be able to "sell" the same thing in perpetuity. There's aggregate demand, it's a lot nicer to ask each of them for a share and ask them not to give it away. The scarcity is only artificial because there's no other way to distribute the costs equally, so that everybody who wants to see it can do so at a reasonable cost.
In essence it's a polite agreement among viewers to share the cost equitably. But "politeness" is not something legally enforceable, especially not when the alternative is to get something for free.
But by all means: if you'd rather give the studio $180,000,000 instead for a truly free copy, I suspect they'd be perfectly content. I don't think they take PayPal, though.
I should have spoken more precisely. I should have rendered it as "If I can copy it I should be permitted to."
Societies have always existed in a background of restricting things that people can physically do but which which are harmful to society as a whole. If we restricted the law to what could be absolutely forbidden or required, we wouldn't need lawyers; we'd just need a physics textbook.
Many other crimes happen every day, but the amount of crime that happens is controlled by legal and social coercion. The limiting factors are how much we're willing to spend, how intrusive we allow our government to be, and how the balance of power rests between the criminals, the government, and the civilian population.
Within those limitations, we enforce the aggregate opinion of society on what is _right_, which is a complex calculation of strength of opinion, harm done, and what things we wish to encourage and discourage.
If my idea is the only thing I have, and I give it away, I don't eat. That's "so what".
I don't know the best solution to this situation. Clearly we want to reward people to create patterns for a living: writers, musicians, filmmakers. Just as clearly, doing so using the same mechanisms as physical property is no longer workable. (It was, at one point in the past: an author traded his book to a publisher for money, who then had the exclusive license to print physical copies. That no longer holds in a world where such things are sold electronically.)
Like I said, I don't have any solutions. I do know that I find the attitude that "if I can copy it I should be able to" (which I see a fair bit of on Slashdot) rather self-serving: people are taking their newfound ability to copy music, movies, etc. and objecting to any attempt to limit it as if they were entirely entitled to it. The sellers are still working under an old paradigm, and it's unfair to tell them that they're the losers until somebody manages to come up with a new paradigm.
I'd be less upset if Slashdotters showed any interest in coming up with that new paradigm. Instead, the attitude seems to be, "Hey, free music/movies/etc!". Tremendous effort is put into breaking any new copy protection (which, I concur, will be ultimately futile) and none into suggesting a new business model.
(Well, there's the ever popular "musicians should play more concerts" model. If I ever meet such a person in person, I shall ask them if they've ever tried to play concerts professionally, and if they haven't I shall spit in their faces.)
But if your idea is better than my idea, I lose.
Why? Wouldn't we both come out richer, each having both ideas?
No, because the idea in and of itself is not worth anything. It just kinda sits there. But ideas can turn into real things: a hardback book you can read, a machine that makes it easier to harvest corn, a medication that saves your life. Ultimately, you can sell that thing to somebody, and they'll swap you money (or something else valuable.)
If I'm a big manufacturing corporation, I'm only to happy to swap my idea for using two crayons at the same time to write my name for your idea that saves me a lot of money on each widget I manufacture. We both now have to ideas. But I also have widgets I can sell you, and you have some pretty pieces of paper.
The point is that ultimately intellectual property and real property are not quite as different as your quote would have us believe. They both have economic value, and "giving away" your idea is in fact an economic benefit to somebody else at a loss to yourself.
Some of us produce stuff; others produce ideas. To claim that the ideas have no economic value is to put those who make ideas for a living out of work.
I can see Blockbuster suing them, or some other company whom Netflix threatened. But I can't imagine that there are enough of those companies to form a "class".
The article is pretty vague on exactly what the evidence is. The actual lawsuit is more informative, but harder to read.
The class (as I finally figured out on page 17 of the lawsuit) is Netflix customers, of whom Dennis Dilbeck is the representative sample. They're suing based on the idea that Netflix's prices are higher than they should be, because competition by Blockbuster should have brought prices down. I just can't see a judge buying it; these people all paid for Netflix's service at the asking price voluntarily.
From what I've read so far, I'm just not buying their claim. They are citing one patent in particular, which is about delivery of resources based on people making requests on a computer, but that's considerably different from Netflix's rental queue.
(I'm assuming that patents are not a completely stupid idea. Please, if you're in the "all patents are inherently evil" category, can you just assume that I agree with you and go preach to the choir in some other thread?)
I don't consider Netflix's idea at all obvious. I thought it was pretty neat when I came up with it: the idea of a rental service which doesn't have a due date is pretty cool and I'd never heard of it.
I know we hate patents, but I hate idiot class-action lawsuits even more. I've been involved in dozens of them; I literally throw them away unopened when they arrive in the mail. The lawyers always make money and I always get a coupon for 30 cents off my next bag of Chex Mix.
Sometimes, I'm even suing myself. Some of those lawsuits were shareholders suing the company. Well, I'm still a shareholder, so I'm suing myself.
All the lawyers need to find is one fool member of the class to make a claim, and the company will often settle rather than fight. It's free money for class-action lawyers.
It's kind of ironic, given that Americans had just fought their bloodiest war ever, to call it a more "civilized time".
It's often said that people were more civil to each other in the past. I'm not certain if it's true, or if it's just rose-colored glasses.