Normal math already uses unproven conjectures and hypotheses. There are things which seem fairly intuitive even to laymen but are very hard to prove. I am reminded of a theorem I learned about in college, that went unproven for ages: i think it was something like "given a closed loop, a point can only be either inside or outside it" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis
The thing about suggestions is that they are usually veiled orders, and if you refuse to do something important, they quickly show their true form;)
Something as routine as patenting whatever's patentable sounds like it doesn't merit an underling's wrath. A team must work smoothly, and egos just get in the way. If you're too proud to conform to the corporate culture, you don't belong there and should seek employment in some patent-averse company, such as one that's based around FOSS solutions.
The sad reality of the world is that conformists succeed. Nobody likes a contrarian or a primadonna. Leaders create union, not dissent. If you want to move the world forward with your own ideology, an evolutionary approach is usually better than a revolutionary one. If you want to rally people behind you then you need to tell them what they want to hear. Especially if they have any power over you.
Even in a leftist country such as mine (Portugal), it is the overarching *law*, not a negotiable contract clause, that you're hired to do your work and failure to follow orders is fair grounds for non-indemnified and immediate dismissal, just as unexplained decreases in productivity and the creation of conflict.
You may have forgiving bosses or tyrannical ones, and they may choose to keep you around in spite of those problems, giving you second chances, etc. but this newfangled "Generation Y" behavior where people don't take their work seriously and do not respond well to hierarchies and authority is, perhaps, one of america's problems rather than advantages:)
FYI... I run my own business, along with 2 other partners. We do expect employees to STFU and do their job. They don't find it the least bit opressive. There are lots of brilliant people out there who love their work and do it well and just STFU. I don't care about your personal views on anything. There's a task, there's a deadline, go do it and leave me alone. In return, you can work from home, or Starbucks, or whatever, you can work weird hours and since you're such a brilliant professional who does things right the first time around, I won't pick too many nits with what you've done. Oh, and did I mention that we pay you about 2 or 3 times the going market rate?:) Yup, getting people that are actually good and don't bother us merits a reward. We made about $500k last year, which was our first, so I suppose we're doing something right.
There's a place where you follow strict orders and shut the fuck up. It's called your job. There's another place where you can fight for ideologies, it's called a trade association. You can both be a good worker and a good activist, if you know your place and timing:)
You could just as well argue that nothing is patenteable, as a patent contains the human-readable method for doing something, and software is a machine-readable method for doing something. Analogies... everybody has one and they all stink:)
Second Life is fundamentally different from other client-server gaming architectures. For starters, the server is not a stand-alone application. The backend consists of a wide variety of servers, namely, all content is centrally stored on an Apache cluster, there's a MySQL cluster for metadata, there's a server just for message routing and topographical server adjacency, and the actual physical simulator which is a fairly heavy application. It's not possible to simply run a batch file with the server and the client executables, and it would likely take more than one computer, possibly three. The simulator is not designed with concurrency in mind, it does not tolerate multitasking or disk access very well. If you expect a smooth experience, you will probably have to run the simulator, client and support systems in three different computers. That's not unheard of, but certainly more than the average luser has lying around, and it will probably be a bit daunting to configure all of that:)
Well, as someone who actually runs a content development business, I can easily explain the returns to you. Second Life is great for Direct Marketing - users show very high levels of engagement. These days, brand managers are increasingly realizing that the $50,000 30-second spot is dead.
Advertising is a lot like teaching - you have a message to convey, and you want people to get it right, and to take their time. Buying a slot of time on TV supposedly gets to a lot of people, but less and less people actually watch TV. The average TV watcher is 50. The average SL user is 30. Internet is picking up where TV left off, so Internet marketing becomes more and more important.
Apart from that, TV time is too expensive. Television networks are expensive because they pay a lot for content. Second Life relies mostly on User Generated Content, so it's cheaper. You get rid of a middleman, sort of. You still have a (much cheaper) infrastructural middleman - Linden Lab - and of course you have a content / promotional team. But you can talk to people directly, and it's a far more personal and interesting experience than raw text IMs or emails.
If you try to directly engage a consumer out on the street, they're going somewhere or just distracted, thinking about their own lives, you generally do not want to talk to salespeople on the street. In Second Life, people are there because they're bored, they have some free time and want to meet other people, or share fun experiences with others.
A corporate-sponsored event can be a lot more entertaining than an amateur event. A single person will usually not build a whole sim and design/code up a companion website where people can have a fashion contest and submit their entries. We successfully reached about 75% of the target audience with one such event, and registered a total interaction time of 6 hours per person per week. That's like getting people to voluntarily watch 720 TV commercials a week! A banner ad usually only has a clickthrough rate of 0.1% at most.
You couldn't do this on the web - there's no associated identity, so no fashion contest. You couldn't do this IRL - too much trouble to actually dress up and go somewhere, plus people are way too shy for that. Hence, Second Life!
We also had a little Viral Marketing experiment, which was also wildly successful. On the web, you don't really have an integrated micropayments system. In Second Life, with the L$, you can have automated systems that instantly reward people for spreading leaflets. We ran out of money really fast, and will try to do something like that but with 10x more money soon:)
We additionally use Second Life for meetings, recruitment and training. It's fairly easy to see how a lot of flights cost more than $1000, and you don't even need a whole sim. With the current oil madness, telepresence becomes more important and cost-effective. Academic research has demonstrated much higher levels of attention and message retention for students/trainees that took their classes in Second Life over the control group. It's a lot cheaper to organize a virtual recruitment party than to rent a hotel conference room and hire a catering service. Etc.:P
Did your 1998 computer have a "NASA" or "DoD" sticker? Let's have a contest! Which of the following pictures depict a 1998 game character and which is from a Second Life avatar?:) See if you can guess!
(There is no such thing as Linden content, if you mean the Welcome Area, it was built like 4 years ago by a friend of mine, as a contractor... when SL had a completely different engine... and there was essentially nobody doing it professionally)
Firstly, your prices are outdated, it's only $1000 these days. Secondly, Second Life has been in development for almost ten years, and is distributed free of charge. You seem to not realize that Linden Lab has over 200 employees. Someone has to pay for the software development.
Something's only profitable if you can actually sell it. Given that Gallium is used to make... LCDs, was it? I somewhat doubt people are willing to pay another $1000 for their LCD just so miners can have fun poking holes in the ground.
Now all we need is for MS to promote their alternatives to PDF a bit more. God, I hate those horrible PDFs full of scanned page images. They should be OCR'ed by Google. I have like two gigs of them, and they're not *searchable* in any way, therefore they're not useful. (many years of old magazine archives...)
A mathematical function can be one-to-one, but also many-to-one. What your teacher probably told you is that it cannot be one-to-many. If you have two horizontally parallel lines on a chart, that cannot be expressed as a function. You may have learned about injection, surjection and bijection somewhere along the line?
It's basic high-school math that not every function has an inverse function. We can understand "engineering" in this context, as opposed to "hacking", as the careful planning of a system so that we use "well-behaved" functions, thereby maximizing our future ability to refactor said system, and minimizing the losses of potentially useful information throughout the various operations... For instance, a properly engineered graphics application will let you zoom in and out of a picture without permanently transforming the source data. Some older, or "hackier" applications would use the now-shrunk data for the enlargement operation, resulting in a morass of useless pixels. Nature is lazy, it follows the path of least resistance, so its output tends to be like this, building upon previous work rather than starting from scratch. There's an whole book out there about "unintelligent design", detailing why we cannot be the creation of a perfect divine entity since we're so poorly engineered. Wikipedia has some info on it as well.
Why would anyone want to put their health info anywhere? I think most people would simply write down "uhh... healthy?". Do people really have so many diseases it takes a computer program to organize them?:D
Unless you're really old, in which case you probably don't even own a computer. Would you need one to write down "don't forget take your blood pressure pills" or "remember to check your pee for diabetes"? Or maybe you had a weird accident, in which case you would write "healthy, except for that nasty missing hand thing". Or maybe you suffer from some rare hereditary or congenital thing... *shrug* Aside from those, what are the odds of you EVER becoming ill in modern society?
To be quite honest, and having lost a large portion of my family in recent years, I get the idea that people these days are relatively healthy until they get something fatal like heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
Most infectious diseases have been wiped out. At least in the western, computer-using world? I get a cold once a year, I eat something bad once in a blue moon, but I don't need a doctor or pills for it. I really don't know anyone who would need to use something like this. Maybe I'm just lucky!
The "european" union will not end with "europe". Morocco is also very keen on joining, so is Cape Verde, and just like Turkey, they're going to keep trying. We already have some overseas territories. French Guiana? Shitloads of little french and british islands everywhere. Also, the EU already has a border with Russia thank you very much... Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania...;)
Did they compare the average lifespans as well?:) Because if I'm gonna die of a heart attack at 50 instead of living to get cancer at 70, I'd rather stick with sugars than change to fats.
That's an interesting bit of commentary, but you are ignoring the fact that most artists also have to work in teams, under the guidance of directors, producers etc... Also, a lot of programmers would say that designing and implementing a decent system is most certainly a form of art, and that code can be "beautiful" just as mathematical proofs are often described as "elegant".
I'm saying that information believed to be useful dies hard. There is a type of person that naturally loves to accumulate and spread knowledge. There are people like that for every subject, no matter how obscure. Those people (much like anyone) additionally love to be put in a position where they feel validated and useful (their knowledge-amassing habits suddenly turn out to save mankind). It's likely that market dynamics would also kick in and reward that spreading of highly useful information in some way. As an example, we have the bible (and other religious books). There have been people believing it to be an indispensable lifestyle guide for thousands of years. Those people have stood much to gain from spreading the faith. I'm not a christian, but I believe that evangelism, missionary activities, spreading the word is probably seen by christians as living a holy life, doing god's work etc.
The neat thing about the world we live in is that there are people with all kinds of crazy little obssessions. There are people who just love history, and people who obssess about arcane wilderness survival techniques. In the event of a catastrophe, so long as those few in possession of the knowledge you need are not entirely wiped out, odds are such information will be sufficiently highly valued to spread very quickly. Just look at the bible. It's got info from thousands of years ago because lots of people are convinced it is a unique pearl of wisdom handed down directly from their all-mighty creator;)
There is this thing called the "last mile problem" in computer networks. If everyone in a city lived in a gigantic colo, sure, bandwidth would be cheap. One pipe for the whole city! Thing is, cities have millions of people spread all over the place. It's wiring up those millions of people in the last miles to the big pipe that gets you. Now you have to have millions of cables. That costs money, and manpower to lay them costs even more money, and maintenance men to fix them, and a call center to put up with you, etc. etc. Ever heard of this other thing called "the economies of scale"? Hope that helped.
If you did that, nobody would want to work for the patent office. Besides, the whole point of banding together to form a collective, whether it be a corporation, a non-profit, or a government institution, is that people can have a greater effect on society by pooling their work together into a coordinated effort while limiting their liability. If you would like the USPTO as a whole to be penalized for the aggregate proportion of lame versus useful patents, that would be more acceptable, but still hard to implement. How exactly do you punish something like the USPTO? They're not in it to make money, so fines are not exactly a punishment. What would you achieve by fining them to death, closing the USPTO due to "bankruptcy"?:P Firing whoever's in charge of it? Again, nobody would want to work there if they had to accept that liability. A better solution would simply be to raise the prices of patents on a tiered scale, so that megacorps would have to pay for issuing an excessive number of patents, which would give the USPTO more resources to check them and serve as a small deterrent. Scalable business model == good thing.
Call me an idiot, but I don't see how putting up a pre-made antenna on top of a building here and there can begin to compare to laying cables all over the planet, yet cell phone calls have always been ridiculously expensive compared to land lines. You're essentially getting your transmission medium for free - air - whereas copper, fiber, and an army of people to bury those cables must cost an insane amount of money.
It's not quite that simple for humans, since our success is dependent on the kind of parental support and education we get. Rock star kids probably end up tremendously fucked up in the head, get into drugs, and jump off a bridge before they breed. I seem to recall it has been shown by some studies that having grandparents around can make a great difference. They take care of you while your parents are busy with their personal or work life. They are often able to instill you with a greater amount of wisdom than your parents would be able to. Human civilizations all across the planet have something in common: they nurture great respect for their elders. One could argue that behavior exists in us all at a primordial, instinctive level, because evolution selected for it.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Several companies with apparently equal core businesses and competencies can essentially offer the same thing at different prices by including intangible, low-cost, high-margin benefits. In simpler terms. A silver ring is cheap. A diamond too. An engagement ring, however, can be worth a lot more than the sum of its aforementioned parts. Price is determined by what the market will bear, not raw materials. Value is subjective. There are many ways to create added value that are not directly linked to your costs. If you work for a tiny low-margin company you're going to be treated like crap. If you work for, say, google, who essentially gets millions in ad money for next to nothing, you too can live like a king.
Slashdot Mirror
Normal math already uses unproven conjectures and hypotheses.
There are things which seem fairly intuitive even to laymen but are very hard to prove.
I am reminded of a theorem I learned about in college, that went unproven for ages: i think it was something like "given a closed loop, a point can only be either inside or outside it"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis
> Old folks homes with robots
PAK. CHOOIE. UNF.
The thing about suggestions is that they are usually veiled orders, and if you refuse to do something important, they quickly show their true form ;)
Something as routine as patenting whatever's patentable sounds like it doesn't merit an underling's wrath.
A team must work smoothly, and egos just get in the way. If you're too proud to conform to the corporate culture, you don't belong there and should seek employment in some patent-averse company, such as one that's based around FOSS solutions.
The sad reality of the world is that conformists succeed. Nobody likes a contrarian or a primadonna. Leaders create union, not dissent. If you want to move the world forward with your own ideology, an evolutionary approach is usually better than a revolutionary one. If you want to rally people behind you then you need to tell them what they want to hear. Especially if they have any power over you.
Even in a leftist country such as mine (Portugal), it is the overarching *law*, not a negotiable contract clause, that you're hired to do your work and failure to follow orders is fair grounds for non-indemnified and immediate dismissal, just as unexplained decreases in productivity and the creation of conflict.
You may have forgiving bosses or tyrannical ones, and they may choose to keep you around in spite of those problems, giving you second chances, etc. but this newfangled "Generation Y" behavior where people don't take their work seriously and do not respond well to hierarchies and authority is, perhaps, one of america's problems rather than advantages :)
FYI... I run my own business, along with 2 other partners. We do expect employees to STFU and do their job. They don't find it the least bit opressive. There are lots of brilliant people out there who love their work and do it well and just STFU. I don't care about your personal views on anything. There's a task, there's a deadline, go do it and leave me alone. In return, you can work from home, or Starbucks, or whatever, you can work weird hours and since you're such a brilliant professional who does things right the first time around, I won't pick too many nits with what you've done. Oh, and did I mention that we pay you about 2 or 3 times the going market rate? :)
Yup, getting people that are actually good and don't bother us merits a reward.
We made about $500k last year, which was our first, so I suppose we're doing something right.
There's a place where you follow strict orders and shut the fuck up. It's called your job. :)
There's another place where you can fight for ideologies, it's called a trade association.
You can both be a good worker and a good activist, if you know your place and timing
You could just as well argue that nothing is patenteable, as a patent contains the human-readable method for doing something, and software is a machine-readable method for doing something. :)
Analogies... everybody has one and they all stink
Second Life is fundamentally different from other client-server gaming architectures. :)
For starters, the server is not a stand-alone application. The backend consists of a wide variety of servers, namely, all content is centrally stored on an Apache cluster, there's a MySQL cluster for metadata, there's a server just for message routing and topographical server adjacency, and the actual physical simulator which is a fairly heavy application.
It's not possible to simply run a batch file with the server and the client executables, and it would likely take more than one computer, possibly three. The simulator is not designed with concurrency in mind, it does not tolerate multitasking or disk access very well. If you expect a smooth experience, you will probably have to run the simulator, client and support systems in three different computers. That's not unheard of, but certainly more than the average luser has lying around, and it will probably be a bit daunting to configure all of that
Well, as someone who actually runs a content development business, I can easily explain the returns to you.
Second Life is great for Direct Marketing - users show very high levels of engagement. These days, brand managers are increasingly realizing that the $50,000 30-second spot is dead.
Advertising is a lot like teaching - you have a message to convey, and you want people to get it right, and to take their time. Buying a slot of time on TV supposedly gets to a lot of people, but less and less people actually watch TV. The average TV watcher is 50. The average SL user is 30. Internet is picking up where TV left off, so Internet marketing becomes more and more important.
Apart from that, TV time is too expensive. Television networks are expensive because they pay a lot for content. Second Life relies mostly on User Generated Content, so it's cheaper. You get rid of a middleman, sort of. You still have a (much cheaper) infrastructural middleman - Linden Lab - and of course you have a content / promotional team. But you can talk to people directly, and it's a far more personal and interesting experience than raw text IMs or emails.
If you try to directly engage a consumer out on the street, they're going somewhere or just distracted, thinking about their own lives, you generally do not want to talk to salespeople on the street. In Second Life, people are there because they're bored, they have some free time and want to meet other people, or share fun experiences with others.
A corporate-sponsored event can be a lot more entertaining than an amateur event. A single person will usually not build a whole sim and design/code up a companion website where people can have a fashion contest and submit their entries. We successfully reached about 75% of the target audience with one such event, and registered a total interaction time of 6 hours per person per week. That's like getting people to voluntarily watch 720 TV commercials a week! A banner ad usually only has a clickthrough rate of 0.1% at most.
You couldn't do this on the web - there's no associated identity, so no fashion contest. You couldn't do this IRL - too much trouble to actually dress up and go somewhere, plus people are way too shy for that. Hence, Second Life!
We also had a little Viral Marketing experiment, which was also wildly successful. On the web, you don't really have an integrated micropayments system. In Second Life, with the L$, you can have automated systems that instantly reward people for spreading leaflets. We ran out of money really fast, and will try to do something like that but with 10x more money soon :)
We additionally use Second Life for meetings, recruitment and training. It's fairly easy to see how a lot of flights cost more than $1000, and you don't even need a whole sim. With the current oil madness, telepresence becomes more important and cost-effective. Academic research has demonstrated much higher levels of attention and message retention for students/trainees that took their classes in Second Life over the control group. It's a lot cheaper to organize a virtual recruitment party than to rent a hotel conference room and hire a catering service. Etc. :P
Did your 1998 computer have a "NASA" or "DoD" sticker? :)
Let's have a contest! Which of the following pictures depict a 1998 game character and which is from a Second Life avatar?
See if you can guess!
http://www.fpsteam.it/img2006/sin/sin_elexis_bathroom_04.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3246/2670018726_c289810160.jpg?v=0
(There is no such thing as Linden content, if you mean the Welcome Area, it was built like 4 years ago by a friend of mine, as a contractor... when SL had a completely different engine... and there was essentially nobody doing it professionally)
Firstly, your prices are outdated, it's only $1000 these days.
Secondly, Second Life has been in development for almost ten years, and is distributed free of charge.
You seem to not realize that Linden Lab has over 200 employees. Someone has to pay for the software development.
Something's only profitable if you can actually sell it. Given that Gallium is used to make... LCDs, was it?
I somewhat doubt people are willing to pay another $1000 for their LCD just so miners can have fun poking holes in the ground.
Now all we need is for MS to promote their alternatives to PDF a bit more. God, I hate those horrible PDFs full of scanned page images. They should be OCR'ed by Google. I have like two gigs of them, and they're not *searchable* in any way, therefore they're not useful. (many years of old magazine archives...)
A mathematical function can be one-to-one, but also many-to-one. What your teacher probably told you is that it cannot be one-to-many.
If you have two horizontally parallel lines on a chart, that cannot be expressed as a function.
You may have learned about injection, surjection and bijection somewhere along the line?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injective_function
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surjective_function
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijective_function
It's basic high-school math that not every function has an inverse function.
We can understand "engineering" in this context, as opposed to "hacking", as the careful planning of a system so that we use "well-behaved" functions, thereby maximizing our future ability to refactor said system, and minimizing the losses of potentially useful information throughout the various operations...
For instance, a properly engineered graphics application will let you zoom in and out of a picture without permanently transforming the source data.
Some older, or "hackier" applications would use the now-shrunk data for the enlargement operation, resulting in a morass of useless pixels.
Nature is lazy, it follows the path of least resistance, so its output tends to be like this, building upon previous work rather than starting from scratch.
There's an whole book out there about "unintelligent design", detailing why we cannot be the creation of a perfect divine entity since we're so poorly engineered. Wikipedia has some info on it as well.
Why would anyone want to put their health info anywhere? I think most people would simply write down "uhh... healthy?". :D
Do people really have so many diseases it takes a computer program to organize them?
Unless you're really old, in which case you probably don't even own a computer. Would you need one to write down "don't forget take your blood pressure pills" or "remember to check your pee for diabetes"?
Or maybe you had a weird accident, in which case you would write "healthy, except for that nasty missing hand thing".
Or maybe you suffer from some rare hereditary or congenital thing... *shrug*
Aside from those, what are the odds of you EVER becoming ill in modern society?
To be quite honest, and having lost a large portion of my family in recent years, I get the idea that people these days are relatively healthy until they get something fatal like heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
Most infectious diseases have been wiped out. At least in the western, computer-using world?
I get a cold once a year, I eat something bad once in a blue moon, but I don't need a doctor or pills for it.
I really don't know anyone who would need to use something like this. Maybe I'm just lucky!
You mean, in much the same way France and Austria and Poland and everyone else put their peeves with Nazi Germany behind their backs? You do know they're not being manipulated by the Nazis anymore? :)
;)
Sweden and Denmark, Spain and Portugal, France and England. Or everyone else for that matter. There is no single border in europe that has not been shifted back and forth over the course of countless wars.
The "european" union will not end with "europe". Morocco is also very keen on joining, so is Cape Verde, and just like Turkey, they're going to keep trying. We already have some overseas territories. French Guiana? Shitloads of little french and british islands everywhere.
Also, the EU already has a border with Russia thank you very much... Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania...
What's a few trillions among friends? :)
Did they compare the average lifespans as well? :)
Because if I'm gonna die of a heart attack at 50 instead of living to get cancer at 70, I'd rather stick with sugars than change to fats.
That's an interesting bit of commentary, but you are ignoring the fact that most artists also have to work in teams, under the guidance of directors, producers etc...
Also, a lot of programmers would say that designing and implementing a decent system is most certainly a form of art, and that code can be "beautiful" just as mathematical proofs are often described as "elegant".
I'm saying that information believed to be useful dies hard.
There is a type of person that naturally loves to accumulate and spread knowledge.
There are people like that for every subject, no matter how obscure.
Those people (much like anyone) additionally love to be put in a position where they feel validated and useful (their knowledge-amassing habits suddenly turn out to save mankind).
It's likely that market dynamics would also kick in and reward that spreading of highly useful information in some way.
As an example, we have the bible (and other religious books). There have been people believing it to be an indispensable lifestyle guide for thousands of years. Those people have stood much to gain from spreading the faith. I'm not a christian, but I believe that evangelism, missionary activities, spreading the word is probably seen by christians as living a holy life, doing god's work etc.
The neat thing about the world we live in is that there are people with all kinds of crazy little obssessions. There are people who just love history, and people who obssess about arcane wilderness survival techniques. ;)
In the event of a catastrophe, so long as those few in possession of the knowledge you need are not entirely wiped out, odds are such information will be sufficiently highly valued to spread very quickly.
Just look at the bible. It's got info from thousands of years ago because lots of people are convinced it is a unique pearl of wisdom handed down directly from their all-mighty creator
There is this thing called the "last mile problem" in computer networks.
If everyone in a city lived in a gigantic colo, sure, bandwidth would be cheap. One pipe for the whole city!
Thing is, cities have millions of people spread all over the place. It's wiring up those millions of people in the last miles to the big pipe that gets you. Now you have to have millions of cables. That costs money, and manpower to lay them costs even more money, and maintenance men to fix them, and a call center to put up with you, etc. etc.
Ever heard of this other thing called "the economies of scale"?
Hope that helped.
If you did that, nobody would want to work for the patent office. :P
Besides, the whole point of banding together to form a collective, whether it be a corporation, a non-profit, or a government institution, is that people can have a greater effect on society by pooling their work together into a coordinated effort while limiting their liability.
If you would like the USPTO as a whole to be penalized for the aggregate proportion of lame versus useful patents, that would be more acceptable, but still hard to implement. How exactly do you punish something like the USPTO?
They're not in it to make money, so fines are not exactly a punishment.
What would you achieve by fining them to death, closing the USPTO due to "bankruptcy"?
Firing whoever's in charge of it? Again, nobody would want to work there if they had to accept that liability.
A better solution would simply be to raise the prices of patents on a tiered scale, so that megacorps would have to pay for issuing an excessive number of patents, which would give the USPTO more resources to check them and serve as a small deterrent.
Scalable business model == good thing.
Call me an idiot, but I don't see how putting up a pre-made antenna on top of a building here and there can begin to compare to laying cables all over the planet, yet cell phone calls have always been ridiculously expensive compared to land lines.
You're essentially getting your transmission medium for free - air - whereas copper, fiber, and an army of people to bury those cables must cost an insane amount of money.
It's not quite that simple for humans, since our success is dependent on the kind of parental support and education we get.
Rock star kids probably end up tremendously fucked up in the head, get into drugs, and jump off a bridge before they breed.
I seem to recall it has been shown by some studies that having grandparents around can make a great difference. They take care of you while your parents are busy with their personal or work life. They are often able to instill you with a greater amount of wisdom than your parents would be able to.
Human civilizations all across the planet have something in common: they nurture great respect for their elders. One could argue that behavior exists in us all at a primordial, instinctive level, because evolution selected for it.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Several companies with apparently equal core businesses and competencies can essentially offer the same thing at different prices by including intangible, low-cost, high-margin benefits. In simpler terms. A silver ring is cheap. A diamond too. An engagement ring, however, can be worth a lot more than the sum of its aforementioned parts.
Price is determined by what the market will bear, not raw materials. Value is subjective. There are many ways to create added value that are not directly linked to your costs.
If you work for a tiny low-margin company you're going to be treated like crap. If you work for, say, google, who essentially gets millions in ad money for next to nothing, you too can live like a king.