Re:More bias from women against pay
on
Sexism In Science
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not surprising at all. If you are hiring someone to work under you, the amount you would offer to pay them will be influenced by how much you make yourself (anchoring). If women are paid less than men, it's perfectly natural for them to offer lower salaries to the people that will work under them.
To a child: If you have hair on some parts of your head and not on others, and want to make it look like you have hair on all of your head, what would you do? If a significant number of people would come up with the proposed invention in a short amount of time, it is obvious pretty much by definition of the word.
Frankly, I think the "obvious" answer is "comb hair from one part over the bald spot," no?
The existence of one obvious solution doesn't preclude another solution from being obvious. Anyone who doesn't have enough hair in a single region will start combing from multiple regions, and you quickly arrive at the patented approach (or at least the first few claims). Anyway, we've apparently exceeded Slashdot's depth limit, so I think that's a hint that it's time to stop and do some work. It's been a thought-provoking discussion, though.
Well, do you have a suggestion for a test that's better than the current test for obviousness?
Earlier, I suggested having a group of teenagers try to solve the problem and seeing if they came up with the patented approach. I wasn't entirely kidding.
But, on the other hand, they're asking for a small percentage of the billions of dollars you made.
Irrelevant. It is far more money than it would have cost to produce the invention yourself, so the whole "mutually beneficial and therefore good for society" argument is out the window.
Not at all... people don't have to train search engines to do searches for them
A neural net has to be trained to be used, so the training step is entirely obvious.
Plus, you still haven't shown how that technique is obvious.
To a child: If you have hair on some parts of your head and not on others, and want to make it look like you have hair on all of your head, what would you do? If a significant number of people would come up with the proposed invention in a short amount of time, it is obvious pretty much by definition of the word.
You're assuming that the sole place someone would publish is the USPTO. That's not true - there are white papers, functional specs, theses...
I'm assuming that trivial methods would not receive enough publicity in other media to be easily discoverable because nobody will waste time writing about / reading about things that are trivial. Virtually anyone that ever has a need for Fast Fourier Transforms knows about them in advance of that need because the algorithm is discussed in many books because it is substantial. I'm pretty sure Eolas' technique was never published in a book because nobody would find it to be worth reading about. BT wasn't out there enlightening people about their great invention -- they forgot they even had the patent until they stumbled over it and realized they could use it to sue people.
Additionally, in my example above, the company that gets the patent offers a license to the others in the industry. They don't need to search for it, they have a letter in their mailbox. No fuss, no muss.
Except, of course, that the patent doesn't land in your mailbox at the moment when it will solve an actual problem that you have, and it will land in your box with hundreds of other off-topic obvious patents. It's pretty much junk mail, except that reading it is much more time consuming. Hence, still more of a burden than it is worth.
you're arguing that the economics of licensing are difficult. I agree... But why should that be a justification for abolishing patents?
I never said anything about abolishing patents. I said patents should only be granted for things that are very much non-obvious. We can argue about how obviousness should be quantified or established, but I think it should be a factor when granting the privilege of a monopoly.
I have no idea why people refer to that as a patent on hyperlinks.
Clearly it isn't a patent on hyperlinks since their case failed in court, but BT claimed (in court) that it was, so it's not so crazy to refer to it that way. Anyway, that patent is important for a few reasons: 1) It is close enough to being a patent on hyperlinks that BT was willing to assert in court that it was a patent on hyperlinks. While it failed for various technical reasons, it's pretty reasonable to think that the USPTO would have approved a similar patent application that got the technical details for a hyperlink right, had such a patent been filed. So, hyperlinks probably could have been patented even if they weren't. That raises the legitimate question: Does our society really benefit from granting patents on things that trivial? 2) How much money did Prodigy and others pay in legal fees to defend themselves? Fighting bad patents is very expensive, and the benefit to society of publishing an obvious idea is minimal, so why should society grant patents on things that are obvious?
That was a settlement during a suit. That's not licensing at all. Microsoft probably could have gotten out for much less, had they not held out through trial and a $565 million jury settlement. Hence my point - licensing may be much less expensive.
I'm well aware that it wasn't a licensing fee, but that misses the point. Eolas didn't offer a license for $100 or even $250. I believe it was tens of millions of dollars, but I'm not going to spend the time hunting for a reference -- it was, inevitably, some fraction of what they thought they could win in court. The scenario you described, where the existence of the patent benefits both the patent holder and the licensees because the licensees pay less for the idea than it would have cost to develop it themselves almost never holds in reality (I'll assert that without any statistics to back it up). Licenses are often (again, I'm just asserting this, but it makes sense since court awards seem to be based on volume of usage rather than effort to develop)
Consider a small idea that takes 20 man-hours to invent. It's not a giant groundbreaking idea, so it doesn't deserve a patent? Okay, so the inventor keeps it secret and never publishes his 20-hour idea. Now, what if there are a hundred companies in that industry with a hundred engineers who all have to spend 20 man-hours re-inventing the same idea. That's 1980 hours wasted that could have been spent innovating the next problem, all because the first guy kept it secret and never published. That's horribly inefficient, and is exactly what the patent system is supposed to avoid.
Now, sure, a 20-hour idea isn't worth much in license fees or royalties, but it's still worthy of patent protection. Let those other companies pay a pittance - $100 each, say - to the first company for a license. That company gets their expenses back and then some, everyone else pays less than they'd pay their own engineers to invent it, and everyone's happy.
There are several problems with that argument:
1) Publication of a trivial solution has zero value to the public. Why? Because the effort required to find the published solution is greater than the effort to solve it yourself. The relevant patent might use different language, making it hard to find. You may have to read several patents (very tedious) to find the one that is actually applicable. How much time are you willing to spend searching for a solution that is obvious enough that you can do it yourself? When I need to know the integral of some function, it's going to have to be a really hard integral for me to go hunting through a book for it instead of just doing it myself. People don't do searches on the USPTO site to find ways to solve their problems, they do searches to see if they're going to be sued for the solutions they've already come up with. Need an example? How about BT's patent on hyperlinks? Did anybody learn about hyperlinks from BT? I doubt it. Everyone solved a problem themselves in the obvious way.
2) You are assuming that the licensing fee for a trivial patent will be small (less than it would cost to invent it yourself), and there is no reason for that to be the case. If there is not other practical solution to the problem (i.e. no competition), the patent owner can charge whatever the market will bear, regardless of how easy it would be for the licensee to invent the solution himself/herself because the patent takes "doing it yourself" off the table as an option. That's the nature of competition (drives price down to cost of production) vs. monopoly (price to maximize profit). While I'm not familiar with the details of the Eolas patent, it's hard to imagine that the hundreds of millions of dollars that they got from Microsoft for it bore any relationship to the amount of effort put into the invention. Also, if 100 companies are going to license a patent at $100 each, that's $10,000 for the patent holder, which doesn't cover the cost of obtaining the patent (which is far greater than the filing fee due to the time you spend on it and the lawyer's fees), let alone the cost of putting together a licensing agreement. And, the cost to licensees of having their lawyer review the license agreement will be far more than $100. A patent licensed to 100 licensees at a cost substantially below the 20 hours to develop it themselves is untenable.
3) The patents that people are most annoyed about wouldn't save you anywhere close to 20 hours of work because they simply outline a general idea with 19+ hours worth of implementation detail omitted. Look at the claims in the BT hyperlink patent referenced earlier -- there is really nothing for the public to learn from there, just a tool for suing people.
Incidentally, I think you may be misunderstanding the definition of the term "prior art,"
If you had asked me to explain the difference between "anticipatory prior art" and "prior art" I couldn't have
Thanks for the detailed reply. Your explanation for the motivation behind granting patents is interesting, and while different from mine it gets you to the same place -- an invention should be very non-obvious to have enough value to the public to warrant offering a 20-year monopoly in exchange for the publication of the idea.
I'm really not sure what you objected to in my original post, unless you are claiming, like another poster, that the examiner can't "make a case" for obviousness without prior art (since my basic point was that asserting obviousness should be much easier than finding prior art in many cases, again keeping in mind that I think the standard for non-obvious should be pretty high). Maybe that is true under current legal standards, but I think we all know in our guts that most of these "with a computer" patents are obvious, no matter how difficult it is to quantify obviousness. If you are going to accept only prior art as sufficient to show non-obviousness, you are going to have patents on obvious ways to utilize a technology every time a new technology comes along since prior art is impossible. Perhaps the USPTO should bring in a bunch of teenagers, ask them to solve a problem, and if they come up with the same solution presented in the proposed patent claim it is obvious.
They don't can't reject a patent for being intuitively obvious; they have to point to specific prior art...
IANAL, so I can't dispute that, but it's pretty sad if true. A lack of prior art doesn't make something non-obvious. If you are trying to solve a problem that nobody has attempted to solve before, every solution you come up with, no matter how trivial or non-obvious, would have no prior art.
Yeah! And why do we waste so much time in criminal trials? It seems they could save a lot of time looking at evidence if they just took the "guilty" part of the law seriously and threw people in jail right off the bat.
Your analogy seems exactly backwards to me. In criminal law you are innocent until proven guilty. Nobody can (ideally) take your freedom away unless they can make, and are willing to shoulder the expense of making, a compelling case in court against you.
Patents aren't about taking something away from the patent applicant, they are about granting the applicant the special privilege of a monopoly on an invention. That monopoly takes freedoms away from others as they cannot utilize ideas that they may have developed independently. Why should you be granted that monopoly, at the expense of everyone else, simply because you ask for it? Why should the rest of us have to shoulder the burden of taking you to court to prove that you don't deserve to take our rights away? This is the opposite of innocent until proven guilty.
Unless you want to just throw out the Constitution, of course.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant patents "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." It does not, as far as I am aware, require Congress to grant your particular patent.
I'm going to assert my opinion that the purpose of patents is to keep people from copying ideas that took substantial work or creativity to develop, since such copying would deprive the inventor of financial benefit for the idea, which would reduce the incentive to innovate. An undesirable side-effect is that patents also keep someone from utilizing the idea if he/she developed it independently (rather than copying), and we live with that side-effect because it is almost impossible to prove that someone copied an idea (unlike copying a book). As such, we require patented ideas to be non-obvious to an expert in the field, so the likelihood of someone else coming up with the idea independently, rather than copying, and suffering the loss of not being able to utilize it due to a patent is small. If that is, in fact, the motivation for the non-obvious requirement, an idea should be very non-obvious to be patentable.
Given that a patent is a privilege, not a right, and should (rightly) not be granted unless the idea is non-obvious to an expert in the field, why should the USPTO rubber-stamp your patent? If the idea is obvious to a patent examiner who is not an expert in the field, it seems it would not come remotely close to being non-obvious to an expert in the field, so the burden to prove otherwise should be on the person applying for the patent, not the rest of the public. If the USPTO punts the most basic of obviousness judgements straight to the courts, some unfortunate company or individual will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to defeat the patent in court just so they can use an idea they came up with themselves without copying.
Or are you laying off staff and diverting that workload that you should be paying staff to do in order for your executive board to pocket the fees in massive bonuses and now granting every application that hits your inbox?
Unlike most government agencies, the USPTO isn’t allocated funds by Congress. It gets all of its money from the fees paid by those seeking patents and trademarks. Congress hasn’t allowed the USPTO to keep all of those fees. Over the past two decades, Congress has siphoned off more than $800 million, according to the agency.
So, unless things have changed since that article was written a year ago, the fees you are paying are being swallowed by Congress rather than being spent on reviewing patents.
"Our hope is that Ask Patents will reduce the number of patents mistakenly granted for obvious, unoriginal non-inventions, especially around software," said Stack Exchange boss Joel Spolsky in a blogpost about the site... Mr Spolsky said that although US patent clerks worked hard they typically had less than 22.5 hours so spend on each application.
I can understand the USPTO having difficulty finding all prior art with limited resources, but why do they need help determining that something is obvious? It seems they could save a lot of time hunting for prior art if they just took the "non-obvious" part of the patent requirement seriously and dismissed all of the "do X obvious thing with a computer" patents right off the bat.
Misinterpreted destinations, sure, and those glitches aren't obvious if you don't know the area, so they can be very time consuming to find and correct. If you page through the Amazing Maps collection, you'll find a lot of stuff that is obviously messed up even to someone that doesn't know anything about geography, like clouds, warped roads, and complete mutilation.
Anyway, I don't have a horse in this race -- I just thought it was interesting to look at.
The trick is to get onto the bus/train smelling really bad, so nobody will dare get close to you. Many people seem to already be employing this technique.
I saw similar behavior the other day under different circumstances with a much older version of Linux. OpenSUSE 10.2, had a YouTube video playing and plugged in a Logitech USB headset (which I've never done before). Mouse pointer would move, but windows would not respond. Would not respond to key presses. Could not ssh into the computer. May be a different trigger for the same weird state.
Please preserve the old stories and comments at their current URLs instead of running over the place with a bulldozer like the acquirers of Digg did. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks that we don't want to see broken.
which is analogous to the reason you didn't want to buy the competing product to the Nexus 7
Analogous at a rather different level, though, and that's the critical distinction. If a specific website is so heavily laden with ads that I find it to be annoying, I can simply avoid going to that website (assuming that they don't have a monopoly on information that is critical to me). In other words, I can boycott the website. It's my choice, on a website-by-website basis, whether it is worth tolerating the ads for access to the content. Assuming that the Nexus 7 allows me to go to whatever websites I want, I can choose to go to Google's sites, giving them ad dollars, or I can go elsewhere. If Google starts cluttering their homepage with so many ads that I find it annoying, I just point the Nexus 7 to DuckDuckGo.com, and the problem is solved (to Google's detriment -- that's what happens when you get too greedy with ads).
Amazon has moved the ads one level farther up, into the device itself, so the user cannot avoid them by using the device differently. The ads can only be avoided by avoiding the device itself. It is now the device itself, not a single website, that is the point where I must decide whether I am willing to tolerate the ads. As pointed out in the very first post in this thread, if you don't like the ads you have to boycott the device itself, which is what I've chosen to do. Also, since I am buying the device as a gift, Amazon is forcing me to make a decision about whether or not the ads are acceptable on behalf of someone else, which makes it a somewhat shitty gift.
Finally, the presence of ads on the Kindle is actually somewhat worse than ads on a website for the following reason: I pay for the device today, but I won't know how off-putting the ads are until some point in the future. Even if the ads Amazon is displaying today aren't too annoying to me, they might get worse at some point in the future. If Slashdot covers itself in rapidly blinking ads tomorrow, I can simply stop coming here. If the ads on the Kindle become crappy, I'm stuck with it as my $199 is already gone.
Amazon has changed their mind and is now allowing people to buy their way out of the ads. That's good, but the fact that they ever thought this was a good road to go down leaves me concerned.
The CNet article you linked to is about ads on Google.com. Does the Nexus 7 force you onto Google.com? That's a serious question -- I've been assuming that I could use whatever search engine (or other websites) I want on the Neus 7; am I wrong?
The real irony is that an "advertisement company" has enough sense to limit their ads to websites that I have the freedom to avoid if I choose, while Amazon thinks I should be obligated to tolerate ads wedged into the OS where they become unavoidable.
Bingo! I was planning to buy a Nexus 7 as a gift and thought I might have a tough decision between that and the Fire, but the ads made the choice easy.
The Nokia has a memory card slot, it's just inside the cover. So you'd have to remove the cover and change the card.
Nope.
Nokia unveiled its flagship Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 handset today, but it doesn't feature an SD card slot... although the Nokia Lumia 820, which has only 8GB of storage, does include a micro-SD card slot behind its removable cover,
Slashdot Mirror
It's not surprising at all. If you are hiring someone to work under you, the amount you would offer to pay them will be influenced by how much you make yourself (anchoring). If women are paid less than men, it's perfectly natural for them to offer lower salaries to the people that will work under them.
To a child: If you have hair on some parts of your head and not on others, and want to make it look like you have hair on all of your head, what would you do?
If a significant number of people would come up with the proposed invention in a short amount of time, it is obvious pretty much by definition of the word.
Frankly, I think the "obvious" answer is "comb hair from one part over the bald spot," no?
The existence of one obvious solution doesn't preclude another solution from being obvious. Anyone who doesn't have enough hair in a single region will start combing from multiple regions, and you quickly arrive at the patented approach (or at least the first few claims). Anyway, we've apparently exceeded Slashdot's depth limit, so I think that's a hint that it's time to stop and do some work. It's been a thought-provoking discussion, though.
Well, do you have a suggestion for a test that's better than the current test for obviousness?
Earlier, I suggested having a group of teenagers try to solve the problem and seeing if they came up with the patented approach. I wasn't entirely kidding.
But, on the other hand, they're asking for a small percentage of the billions of dollars you made.
Irrelevant. It is far more money than it would have cost to produce the invention yourself, so the whole "mutually beneficial and therefore good for society" argument is out the window.
Not at all... people don't have to train search engines to do searches for them
A neural net has to be trained to be used, so the training step is entirely obvious.
Plus, you still haven't shown how that technique is obvious.
To a child: If you have hair on some parts of your head and not on others, and want to make it look like you have hair on all of your head, what would you do?
If a significant number of people would come up with the proposed invention in a short amount of time, it is obvious pretty much by definition of the word.
You're assuming that the sole place someone would publish is the USPTO. That's not true - there are white papers, functional specs, theses...
I'm assuming that trivial methods would not receive enough publicity in other media to be easily discoverable because nobody will waste time writing about / reading about things that are trivial. Virtually anyone that ever has a need for Fast Fourier Transforms knows about them in advance of that need because the algorithm is discussed in many books because it is substantial. I'm pretty sure Eolas' technique was never published in a book because nobody would find it to be worth reading about. BT wasn't out there enlightening people about their great invention -- they forgot they even had the patent until they stumbled over it and realized they could use it to sue people.
Additionally, in my example above, the company that gets the patent offers a license to the others in the industry. They don't need to search for it, they have a letter in their mailbox. No fuss, no muss.
Except, of course, that the patent doesn't land in your mailbox at the moment when it will solve an actual problem that you have, and it will land in your box with hundreds of other off-topic obvious patents. It's pretty much junk mail, except that reading it is much more time consuming. Hence, still more of a burden than it is worth.
you're arguing that the economics of licensing are difficult. I agree... But why should that be a justification for abolishing patents?
I never said anything about abolishing patents. I said patents should only be granted for things that are very much non-obvious. We can argue about how obviousness should be quantified or established, but I think it should be a factor when granting the privilege of a monopoly.
I have no idea why people refer to that as a patent on hyperlinks.
Clearly it isn't a patent on hyperlinks since their case failed in court, but BT claimed (in court) that it was, so it's not so crazy to refer to it that way. Anyway, that patent is important for a few reasons:
1) It is close enough to being a patent on hyperlinks that BT was willing to assert in court that it was a patent on hyperlinks. While it failed for various technical reasons, it's pretty reasonable to think that the USPTO would have approved a similar patent application that got the technical details for a hyperlink right, had such a patent been filed. So, hyperlinks probably could have been patented even if they weren't. That raises the legitimate question: Does our society really benefit from granting patents on things that trivial?
2) How much money did Prodigy and others pay in legal fees to defend themselves? Fighting bad patents is very expensive, and the benefit to society of publishing an obvious idea is minimal, so why should society grant patents on things that are obvious?
That was a settlement during a suit. That's not licensing at all. Microsoft probably could have gotten out for much less, had they not held out through trial and a $565 million jury settlement. Hence my point - licensing may be much less expensive.
I'm well aware that it wasn't a licensing fee, but that misses the point. Eolas didn't offer a license for $100 or even $250. I believe it was tens of millions of dollars, but I'm not going to spend the time hunting for a reference -- it was, inevitably, some fraction of what they thought they could win in court. The scenario you described, where the existence of the patent benefits both the patent holder and the licensees because the licensees pay less for the idea than it would have cost to develop it themselves almost never holds in reality (I'll assert that without any statistics to back it up). Licenses are often (again, I'm just asserting this, but it makes sense since court awards seem to be based on volume of usage rather than effort to develop)
Consider a small idea that takes 20 man-hours to invent. It's not a giant groundbreaking idea, so it doesn't deserve a patent? Okay, so the inventor keeps it secret and never publishes his 20-hour idea. Now, what if there are a hundred companies in that industry with a hundred engineers who all have to spend 20 man-hours re-inventing the same idea. That's 1980 hours wasted that could have been spent innovating the next problem, all because the first guy kept it secret and never published. That's horribly inefficient, and is exactly what the patent system is supposed to avoid.
Now, sure, a 20-hour idea isn't worth much in license fees or royalties, but it's still worthy of patent protection. Let those other companies pay a pittance - $100 each, say - to the first company for a license. That company gets their expenses back and then some, everyone else pays less than they'd pay their own engineers to invent it, and everyone's happy.
There are several problems with that argument:
1) Publication of a trivial solution has zero value to the public. Why? Because the effort required to find the published solution is greater than the effort to solve it yourself. The relevant patent might use different language, making it hard to find. You may have to read several patents (very tedious) to find the one that is actually applicable. How much time are you willing to spend searching for a solution that is obvious enough that you can do it yourself? When I need to know the integral of some function, it's going to have to be a really hard integral for me to go hunting through a book for it instead of just doing it myself. People don't do searches on the USPTO site to find ways to solve their problems, they do searches to see if they're going to be sued for the solutions they've already come up with. Need an example? How about BT's patent on hyperlinks? Did anybody learn about hyperlinks from BT? I doubt it. Everyone solved a problem themselves in the obvious way.
2) You are assuming that the licensing fee for a trivial patent will be small (less than it would cost to invent it yourself), and there is no reason for that to be the case. If there is not other practical solution to the problem (i.e. no competition), the patent owner can charge whatever the market will bear, regardless of how easy it would be for the licensee to invent the solution himself/herself because the patent takes "doing it yourself" off the table as an option. That's the nature of competition (drives price down to cost of production) vs. monopoly (price to maximize profit). While I'm not familiar with the details of the Eolas patent, it's hard to imagine that the hundreds of millions of dollars that they got from Microsoft for it bore any relationship to the amount of effort put into the invention. Also, if 100 companies are going to license a patent at $100 each, that's $10,000 for the patent holder, which doesn't cover the cost of obtaining the patent (which is far greater than the filing fee due to the time you spend on it and the lawyer's fees), let alone the cost of putting together a licensing agreement. And, the cost to licensees of having their lawyer review the license agreement will be far more than $100. A patent licensed to 100 licensees at a cost substantially below the 20 hours to develop it themselves is untenable.
3) The patents that people are most annoyed about wouldn't save you anywhere close to 20 hours of work because they simply outline a general idea with 19+ hours worth of implementation detail omitted. Look at the claims in the BT hyperlink patent referenced earlier -- there is really nothing for the public to learn from there, just a tool for suing people.
Incidentally, I think you may be misunderstanding the definition of the term "prior art,"
If you had asked me to explain the difference between "anticipatory prior art" and "prior art" I couldn't have
Thanks for the detailed reply. Your explanation for the motivation behind granting patents is interesting, and while different from mine it gets you to the same place -- an invention should be very non-obvious to have enough value to the public to warrant offering a 20-year monopoly in exchange for the publication of the idea.
I'm really not sure what you objected to in my original post, unless you are claiming, like another poster, that the examiner can't "make a case" for obviousness without prior art (since my basic point was that asserting obviousness should be much easier than finding prior art in many cases, again keeping in mind that I think the standard for non-obvious should be pretty high). Maybe that is true under current legal standards, but I think we all know in our guts that most of these "with a computer" patents are obvious, no matter how difficult it is to quantify obviousness. If you are going to accept only prior art as sufficient to show non-obviousness, you are going to have patents on obvious ways to utilize a technology every time a new technology comes along since prior art is impossible. Perhaps the USPTO should bring in a bunch of teenagers, ask them to solve a problem, and if they come up with the same solution presented in the proposed patent claim it is obvious.
Ugh. Should have been:
no matter how trivial or obvious, would have no prior art.
They don't can't reject a patent for being intuitively obvious; they have to point to specific prior art...
IANAL, so I can't dispute that, but it's pretty sad if true. A lack of prior art doesn't make something non-obvious. If you are trying to solve a problem that nobody has attempted to solve before, every solution you come up with, no matter how trivial or non-obvious, would have no prior art.
Yeah! And why do we waste so much time in criminal trials? It seems they could save a lot of time looking at evidence if they just took the "guilty" part of the law seriously and threw people in jail right off the bat.
Your analogy seems exactly backwards to me. In criminal law you are innocent until proven guilty. Nobody can (ideally) take your freedom away unless they can make, and are willing to shoulder the expense of making, a compelling case in court against you.
Patents aren't about taking something away from the patent applicant, they are about granting the applicant the special privilege of a monopoly on an invention. That monopoly takes freedoms away from others as they cannot utilize ideas that they may have developed independently. Why should you be granted that monopoly, at the expense of everyone else, simply because you ask for it? Why should the rest of us have to shoulder the burden of taking you to court to prove that you don't deserve to take our rights away? This is the opposite of innocent until proven guilty.
Unless you want to just throw out the Constitution, of course.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant patents "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." It does not, as far as I am aware, require Congress to grant your particular patent.
I'm going to assert my opinion that the purpose of patents is to keep people from copying ideas that took substantial work or creativity to develop, since such copying would deprive the inventor of financial benefit for the idea, which would reduce the incentive to innovate. An undesirable side-effect is that patents also keep someone from utilizing the idea if he/she developed it independently (rather than copying), and we live with that side-effect because it is almost impossible to prove that someone copied an idea (unlike copying a book). As such, we require patented ideas to be non-obvious to an expert in the field, so the likelihood of someone else coming up with the idea independently, rather than copying, and suffering the loss of not being able to utilize it due to a patent is small. If that is, in fact, the motivation for the non-obvious requirement, an idea should be very non-obvious to be patentable.
Given that a patent is a privilege, not a right, and should (rightly) not be granted unless the idea is non-obvious to an expert in the field, why should the USPTO rubber-stamp your patent? If the idea is obvious to a patent examiner who is not an expert in the field, it seems it would not come remotely close to being non-obvious to an expert in the field, so the burden to prove otherwise should be on the person applying for the patent, not the rest of the public. If the USPTO punts the most basic of obviousness judgements straight to the courts, some unfortunate company or individual will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to defeat the patent in court just so they can use an idea they came up with themselves without copying.
Or are you laying off staff and diverting that workload that you should be paying staff to do in order for your executive board to pocket the fees in massive bonuses and now granting every application that hits your inbox?
From this article:
Unlike most government agencies, the USPTO isn’t allocated funds by Congress. It gets all of its money from the fees paid by those seeking patents and trademarks. Congress hasn’t allowed the USPTO to keep all of those fees. Over the past two decades, Congress has siphoned off more than $800 million, according to the agency.
So, unless things have changed since that article was written a year ago, the fees you are paying are being swallowed by Congress rather than being spent on reviewing patents.
"Our hope is that Ask Patents will reduce the number of patents mistakenly granted for obvious, unoriginal non-inventions, especially around software," said Stack Exchange boss Joel Spolsky in a blogpost about the site ... Mr Spolsky said that although US patent clerks worked hard they typically had less than 22.5 hours so spend on each application.
I can understand the USPTO having difficulty finding all prior art with limited resources, but why do they need help determining that something is obvious? It seems they could save a lot of time hunting for prior art if they just took the "non-obvious" part of the patent requirement seriously and dismissed all of the "do X obvious thing with a computer" patents right off the bat.
Kiev
Misinterpreted destinations, sure, and those glitches aren't obvious if you don't know the area, so they can be very time consuming to find and correct. If you page through the Amazing Maps collection, you'll find a lot of stuff that is obviously messed up even to someone that doesn't know anything about geography, like clouds, warped roads, and complete mutilation.
Anyway, I don't have a horse in this race -- I just thought it was interesting to look at.
For those that haven't already seen it, there is a growing collection of iOS 6 map glitches on The Amazing IOS 6 Maps
Like sitting on the bus/train?
The trick is to get onto the bus/train smelling really bad, so nobody will dare get close to you. Many people seem to already be employing this technique.
I saw similar behavior the other day under different circumstances with a much older version of Linux. OpenSUSE 10.2, had a YouTube video playing and plugged in a Logitech USB headset (which I've never done before). Mouse pointer would move, but windows would not respond. Would not respond to key presses. Could not ssh into the computer. May be a different trigger for the same weird state.
Dice,
Please preserve the old stories and comments at their current URLs instead of running over the place with a bulldozer like the acquirers of Digg did. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks that we don't want to see broken.
Thanks,
Everyone
If i ever get in trouble, I want Apple's lawyers defending me. They can't seem to do wrong.
Seems more like they can do wrong exceptionally well ;-)
All intel has done now is simply issued a challenge...
Well, that's not all they've done. They've also pissed away a lot of karma with the Linux community.
which is analogous to the reason you didn't want to buy the competing product to the Nexus 7
Analogous at a rather different level, though, and that's the critical distinction. If a specific website is so heavily laden with ads that I find it to be annoying, I can simply avoid going to that website (assuming that they don't have a monopoly on information that is critical to me). In other words, I can boycott the website. It's my choice, on a website-by-website basis, whether it is worth tolerating the ads for access to the content. Assuming that the Nexus 7 allows me to go to whatever websites I want, I can choose to go to Google's sites, giving them ad dollars, or I can go elsewhere. If Google starts cluttering their homepage with so many ads that I find it annoying, I just point the Nexus 7 to DuckDuckGo.com, and the problem is solved (to Google's detriment -- that's what happens when you get too greedy with ads).
Amazon has moved the ads one level farther up, into the device itself, so the user cannot avoid them by using the device differently. The ads can only be avoided by avoiding the device itself. It is now the device itself, not a single website, that is the point where I must decide whether I am willing to tolerate the ads. As pointed out in the very first post in this thread, if you don't like the ads you have to boycott the device itself, which is what I've chosen to do. Also, since I am buying the device as a gift, Amazon is forcing me to make a decision about whether or not the ads are acceptable on behalf of someone else, which makes it a somewhat shitty gift.
Finally, the presence of ads on the Kindle is actually somewhat worse than ads on a website for the following reason: I pay for the device today, but I won't know how off-putting the ads are until some point in the future. Even if the ads Amazon is displaying today aren't too annoying to me, they might get worse at some point in the future. If Slashdot covers itself in rapidly blinking ads tomorrow, I can simply stop coming here. If the ads on the Kindle become crappy, I'm stuck with it as my $199 is already gone.
Amazon has changed their mind and is now allowing people to buy their way out of the ads. That's good, but the fact that they ever thought this was a good road to go down leaves me concerned.
The CNet article you linked to is about ads on Google.com. Does the Nexus 7 force you onto Google.com? That's a serious question -- I've been assuming that I could use whatever search engine (or other websites) I want on the Neus 7; am I wrong?
The real irony is that an "advertisement company" has enough sense to limit their ads to websites that I have the freedom to avoid if I choose, while Amazon thinks I should be obligated to tolerate ads wedged into the OS where they become unavoidable.
Bingo! I was planning to buy a Nexus 7 as a gift and thought I might have a tough decision between that and the Fire, but the ads made the choice easy.
8 GB is pathetic for a smartphone
The Lumia 820 with 8 GB does have a micro SD slot. The Lumia 920 with 32 GB does not have a micro SD slot.
The Nokia has a memory card slot, it's just inside the cover. So you'd have to remove the cover and change the card.
Nope.
Nokia unveiled its flagship Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 handset today, but it doesn't feature an SD card slot ... although the Nokia Lumia 820, which has only 8GB of storage, does include a micro-SD card slot behind its removable cover,