The central problem is that it's unconstitutional in that it no longer would award patents to the first person to actually invent something, but rather to the first person to file for a patent. The Constitution permits Congress to grant patents to inventors, not mere filers.
Wrong. If you took a moment to look at the relevant clause in the Constitution (To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries), you would see that, as is typical of constitutional grants of power, the details of implementing it are left to Congress. The clause certainly does not specify exactly how inventors are to be identified. The roles of filing, prior art and the timing of all the relevant events in the process are certainly within Congress's discretion.
I have read the quoted Briefing Book on the website non-profit organization The National Security Archive, and also the underlying NSA document Transition 2001.
A careless reading of that Briefing Book's comments on Transition 2001 might leave you with the impression that the NSA is calling for being freed from compliance with the 4th Amendment. However, that is NOT what the Briefing Book says, nor does the underlying NSA document do so. Slashdotters, please read the documents before making wild-eyed postings.
Here are the relevant paragraphs from Transition 2001:
SIGINT in the Industrial Age meant collecting signals, often high frequency (HF) signals connecting two discrete and known target points, processing the often clear text data and writing a report. eSIGINT in the Information Age means seeking information on the Global Net, using all available access techniques, breaking often strong encryption, again using all available means, defending our nation's own use of the Global net, and assisting our warfighters in preparing the battlefield for the cyberwars of the future. The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today. The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.
Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws. But senior leadership must understand that today's and tomorrow's mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the "protected" communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries.
The most important implication of declassifying NSA would be a better understanding of...
As is so often the case, the slashdot article has a misleading headline. The parent has responded to that headline, not the article itself, nor the 'Briefing Book' published by the nonprofit "National Security Archive", nor underlying NSA document Transition 2001. There is nothing at all about declassifying the NSA (a meaningless phrase) in the slashdot article, the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book somewhat misleadingly titled "The National Security Agency Declassified" (referring to declassified documents) from which the article quotes, or the underlying Transition 2001 report.
As Justice Marshall said, the power to tax is the power to destroy. To whatever extent a thing is taxed, to that extent it is outlawed.
What the rent-seeking state telephone monopoly is proposing is that data transmitted over the internet that happens to have human speech encoded in it must be identified as such and taxed by the state. This strikes at the heart of the internet.
we, the people... who actually pay for the federal government
Why would you assume that because some powerful people rob you blind, that somehow makes them your employees or servants subject to your bidding, rather than the other way around?
The parent poster has large gaps in his understanding of the relevant laws and their practical application. He shares them with us, and is modded Insightful.
I think the prosecution is going to have a hard time proving...
What prosecution? The state sends you a bill assessing use tax due (and possibly penalties). You either pay it or sue them in civil court (and lose; see below). If you don't pay, they come after you with further civil 'remedies' that do not require them to charge you with any crime.
that the cigarettes were consumed at all
This is utterly irrelevant. The use tax has nothing to do with consumption. The mere purchase and presence of the goods in your state makes you liable for the tax. Even rented goods (such as Netflix DVDs) are subject to the tax.
What do you mean 'so-called hybrids' - they ARE hybrids, period.
My point about the name 'hybrid' is that it would be perfectly appropriate for automobiles using energy from two sources or fuels. For example, petrol plus solar panels. Or petrol plus a battery charged overnight. But it is not appropriate for the vehicles under discussion. When true hybrids come along, what will we call them?
Your contention that it is meaningless to differentiate between energy sources in a hybrid car because they both originate with fossil-fuel is just as artificial a position.
I did not say that it is meaningless to differentiate between fuels if they ultimately derive from the same source. Only one type of fuel is fed into these cars: petrol. I would have no problem with calling a car a 'hybrid' if, for instance, it used petrol plus electricity generated by an oil-fired generator, transmitted via high-tension wires, transformed and used to charge a battery overnight. The fact that the energy in the battery originated from the same crude oil is inconsequential. The car as a system would be using two 'fuels', and thus be a true hybrid.
part of the energy in the storage batteries is derived from conversion of kinetic energy to electrical energy through the braking system... . This energy is NOT fossil-fuel derived, so therefore you cannot say that all the energy used to power the car comes from gasoline.... You can add 100% non-dino energy to the batteries just by braking down a long incline - thereby charging your batteries a bit by using the force of gravity.
Unfortunately, I believe you have not considered where the potential energy comes from that is converted to kinetic energy and recaptured in regenerative braking while traveling downhill: the fuel expended to raise the car to the hilltop. I will not attempt to explain that at length in this space, but recommend that you consult any introductory physics textbook.
The so-called 'hybrids' use nothing but 'conventional fuel', albeit in an unconventional manner. For marketing purposes, the manufacturers lead the public to believe that they derive part of their energy from combustion of petrol and part "from electricity", which is meaningless but impressive to the average consumer, who doesn't stop to ask why, if that is so, he is not having to charge up his car every night.
Our local newspaper recently published a glowing 'news story' (a regurgitation of marketing hype) written by a dreamy-eyed reporter who clearly believed that somehow there was a second energy source besides petrol involved. He even claimed that as long as a 'hybrid' was driven below a certain speed, it consumed no petrol (Lest I be flamed, let me make it clear that I am well aware that a 'hybrid' can switch its internal combustion engine on and off as needed while drawing current from the storage cells. The reporter's claim went far beyond that. If he were to be believed, we could all drive around for free the rest of our lives as long as we kept our speed under a certain threshold.)
In the light of Google's willful reduction of an archive of tremendous value to the world to near unusability, on the heels of their departure from objectivity in searching and their kowtowing to totalitarian states, it is silly to speak of the likelihood of Google's becoming evil in the future. After Johnny has knocked you down and started kicking you in the teeth, it's a little late to be discussing whether he is going to become a bully.
The parent posting may be Informative, in that it shows us the kinds of naive notions about intellectual property law that are floating about. But it is hardly Insightful.
One need not be a lawyer to understand that patents are very different from copyrights. You needn't actually "base your design on someone else's patented product" in order to infringe on a patent. Nor do you need to be seeking a patent. You need merely to use without license a patented device or method, even if you invented it independently.
Even when there was sanity in the U.S. patent system, and competence in the USPTO, there was always some probability that one's completely original invention would run afoul of a patent. When the Office is handing out patents willy-nilly without requiring non-obviousness, and without regard to the existence of prior art, this becomes almost impossible to avoid without an expensive exercise in due diligence.
If your suggested reform (which I have argued for myself) were the law, the technology under discussion here would neither help to push books into the public domain, nor keep books "in print" in the sense of being offered for sale in well-printed, durable editions. It would instead be standard practise for evading the law's axe. But at least we would always be able to acquire a copy of a given work, though it be a flimsy, poorly printed and acidic one. And if the inventory of available titles were essentially all books every published, and the price were low enough, we might not care.
He [Handley] notes that every ERP package he's worked with--Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP--has a single ship-to address in the purchasing module. That's great for a company like IBM, which is organized around a central receiving unit, but...
No, it's not even great for a large public company. It's unbelievably stupid. These vendors are getting the big bucks for massive ERP products containing everything but the kitchen sink, but when it comes to shipping and receiving, they typically just tack on a ridiculously simplistic toy module so they can add "Shipping and Receiving" as another bullet in their marketing materials.
It has been shown that all computer programs may be mapped to integers and hence are denumerable. Any number that can be generated by a computer program (pi, e, etc) therefore is denumerable.
Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.
People keep calling it "government" property, as tho the government was some business somewhere in DC with really tough security guards.... The property is "publicly" owned, not "government" owned.
You imply that you are a US citizen, but you sound like someone from far away, unfamiliar with our culture. Native English speakers in the US know that "public" is a euphemism for "state" (what we Americans usually call "the Government"). Just as "public transportation" means state owned and operated transportation facilities, and "public schools" means state owned and operated schools, "public property" means property owned by the state. If you doubt it, just ask yourself who exercises these ownership rights over "public" lands:
the right to possess and use that property and to exclude all others
the right to sell, give away, or otherwise dispose of that property
the right to enter the property
the right to lease or rent the property to others
the right to encumber a property, such as pledging a property as collateral for a loan
There simply isn't enough information in a 2D image to construct a 3D image. If there were, your brain would already do it (and, in fact, already does to a limited extent). How hard it is to avoid self-contradiction!
CmdrTaco had to know full well that the inventor's claim is rubbish, and hardly newsworthy. So why wave the submitter's wide-eyed naïveté around in public, rather than quietly passing over his story?
Re:String theory is "religion" for scientists
on
The Fabric of the Cosmos
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm afraid that you are somewhat confused. String theory is not the observed behaviour mentioned in step 1. It is the hypothesis/theory mentioned in steps 3 - 5.
Thank you for this clarification. I had always thought that getting verified meant switching from credit card to account draft. My skepticism toward marketing fluff made me read their appeal to customers to get verified ("Fund payments with your checking account!") as "Let us quit having to pay the credit card transaction fees so we can pocket almost the entire 3% from sellers". All this time I've been carefully nursing what remains of my $2000 limit:).
Have you not noticed that PayPal puts a lifetime limit of US$2000 on what you can charge to your credit card? So how is it that we are supposed to "Always Always ALWAYS use a CC when paying via PayPal"?.
I'll tell you why many Slashdotters think there's no such thing as criminal copyright infringement -- because copyright infringement is not inherently a criminal act. In legalese, it is not malum in se. They intuit that it is a noncriminal act, and then naively assume that their beneficent government would not go around outlawing such things.
If we actually tried to put this extraterritoriality 'principle' into effect, even with the "(real) effect" test suggested in the parent post, the whole world would fall into unresolvable chaos. We would all be walking on eggs every day, knowing that we are guilty of all manner of criminal violations, despite our best efforts. Not only would we have to learn and attempt to follow the constantly changing criminal laws of every state on the planet, but we would even sometimes find it logically impossible not to violate some laws, because performing an act affecting people in other states might be illegal in one state, while refraining from performing that same act (where refraining affects people in other states) might be illegal in another.
Even the mail bomb example proves nothing. The bomber has done a terrible thing, and likely violated the laws of the state in which he acted. But to suggest that he violated some criminal law of the US is silly. Now, that doesn't mean that the US cannot do anything about it. The US can attempt to persuade the state under whose laws the act was performed to persue criminal remedies against the perpetrator, or it can take military action against the perpetrator or his state. Such international action should not be confused with criminal law enforcement.
But it IS just as secure and safe (actually, more so) -- for PayPal. They have always portrayed getting "Verified" (opening up your checking account to them) as being for enhanced security, without bothering to mention that it is THEIR security that is enhanced, not yours. Similarly, my bank has recently sent out marketing materials to its credit card holders bragging about a new security "service" that they are going to generously make available to us "free of charge!" Of course, it is solely to their benefit, and our detriment.
Slashdot Mirror
The central problem is that it's unconstitutional in that it no longer would award patents to the first person to actually invent something, but rather to the first person to file for a patent. The Constitution permits Congress to grant patents to inventors, not mere filers.
Wrong. If you took a moment to look at the relevant clause in the Constitution (To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries), you would see that, as is typical of constitutional grants of power, the details of implementing it are left to Congress. The clause certainly does not specify exactly how inventors are to be identified. The roles of filing, prior art and the timing of all the relevant events in the process are certainly within Congress's discretion.
Before all the indignant venting begins, please allow me to suggest that you take a moment to read the article.
I have read the quoted Briefing Book on the website non-profit organization The National Security Archive, and also the underlying NSA document Transition 2001.
A careless reading of that Briefing Book's comments on Transition 2001 might leave you with the impression that the NSA is calling for being freed from compliance with the 4th Amendment. However, that is NOT what the Briefing Book says, nor does the underlying NSA document do so. Slashdotters, please read the documents before making wild-eyed postings.
Here are the relevant paragraphs from Transition 2001:
SIGINT in the Industrial Age meant collecting signals, often high frequency (HF) signals connecting two discrete and known target points, processing the often clear text data and writing a report. eSIGINT in the Information Age means seeking information on the Global Net, using all available access techniques, breaking often strong encryption, again using all available means, defending our nation's own use of the Global net, and assisting our warfighters in preparing the battlefield for the cyberwars of the future. The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today. The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.
Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws. But senior leadership must understand that today's and tomorrow's mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the "protected" communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries.
The most important implication of declassifying NSA would be a better understanding of ...
As is so often the case, the slashdot article has a misleading headline. The parent has responded to that headline, not the article itself, nor the 'Briefing Book' published by the nonprofit "National Security Archive", nor underlying NSA document Transition 2001. There is nothing at all about declassifying the NSA (a meaningless phrase) in the slashdot article, the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book somewhat misleadingly titled "The National Security Agency Declassified" (referring to declassified documents) from which the article quotes, or the underlying Transition 2001 report.
Moderators, take note.
As Justice Marshall said, the power to tax is the power to destroy. To whatever extent a thing is taxed, to that extent it is outlawed.
What the rent-seeking state telephone monopoly is proposing is that data transmitted over the internet that happens to have human speech encoded in it must be identified as such and taxed by the state. This strikes at the heart of the internet.
we, the people ... who actually pay for the federal government
Why would you assume that because some powerful people rob you blind, that somehow makes them your employees or servants subject to your bidding, rather than the other way around?
The parent poster has large gaps in his understanding of the relevant laws and their practical application. He shares them with us, and is modded Insightful.
...
I think the prosecution is going to have a hard time proving
What prosecution? The state sends you a bill assessing use tax due (and possibly penalties). You either pay it or sue them in civil court (and lose; see below). If you don't pay, they come after you with further civil 'remedies' that do not require them to charge you with any crime.
that the cigarettes were consumed at all
This is utterly irrelevant. The use tax has nothing to do with consumption. The mere purchase and presence of the goods in your state makes you liable for the tax. Even rented goods (such as Netflix DVDs) are subject to the tax.
What do you mean 'so-called hybrids' - they ARE hybrids, period.
... . This energy is NOT fossil-fuel derived, so therefore you cannot say that all the energy used to power the car comes from gasoline. ... You can add 100% non-dino energy to the batteries just by braking down a long incline - thereby charging your batteries a bit by using the force of gravity.
My point about the name 'hybrid' is that it would be perfectly appropriate for automobiles using energy from two sources or fuels. For example, petrol plus solar panels. Or petrol plus a battery charged overnight. But it is not appropriate for the vehicles under discussion. When true hybrids come along, what will we call them?
Your contention that it is meaningless to differentiate between energy sources in a hybrid car because they both originate with fossil-fuel is just as artificial a position.
I did not say that it is meaningless to differentiate between fuels if they ultimately derive from the same source. Only one type of fuel is fed into these cars: petrol. I would have no problem with calling a car a 'hybrid' if, for instance, it used petrol plus electricity generated by an oil-fired generator, transmitted via high-tension wires, transformed and used to charge a battery overnight. The fact that the energy in the battery originated from the same crude oil is inconsequential. The car as a system would be using two 'fuels', and thus be a true hybrid.
part of the energy in the storage batteries is derived from conversion of kinetic energy to electrical energy through the braking system
Unfortunately, I believe you have not considered where the potential energy comes from that is converted to kinetic energy and recaptured in regenerative braking while traveling downhill: the fuel expended to raise the car to the hilltop. I will not attempt to explain that at length in this space, but recommend that you consult any introductory physics textbook.
The so-called 'hybrids' use nothing but 'conventional fuel', albeit in an unconventional manner. For marketing purposes, the manufacturers lead the public to believe that they derive part of their energy from combustion of petrol and part "from electricity", which is meaningless but impressive to the average consumer, who doesn't stop to ask why, if that is so, he is not having to charge up his car every night.
Our local newspaper recently published a glowing 'news story' (a regurgitation of marketing hype) written by a dreamy-eyed reporter who clearly believed that somehow there was a second energy source besides petrol involved. He even claimed that as long as a 'hybrid' was driven below a certain speed, it consumed no petrol (Lest I be flamed, let me make it clear that I am well aware that a 'hybrid' can switch its internal combustion engine on and off as needed while drawing current from the storage cells. The reporter's claim went far beyond that. If he were to be believed, we could all drive around for free the rest of our lives as long as we kept our speed under a certain threshold.)
In the light of Google's willful reduction of an archive of tremendous value to the world to near unusability, on the heels of their departure from objectivity in searching and their kowtowing to totalitarian states, it is silly to speak of the likelihood of Google's becoming evil in the future. After Johnny has knocked you down and started kicking you in the teeth, it's a little late to be discussing whether he is going to become a bully.
The parent posting may be Informative, in that it shows us the kinds of naive notions about intellectual property law that are floating about. But it is hardly Insightful.
One need not be a lawyer to understand that patents are very different from copyrights. You needn't actually "base your design on someone else's patented product" in order to infringe on a patent. Nor do you need to be seeking a patent. You need merely to use without license a patented device or method, even if you invented it independently.
Even when there was sanity in the U.S. patent system, and competence in the USPTO, there was always some probability that one's completely original invention would run afoul of a patent. When the Office is handing out patents willy-nilly without requiring non-obviousness, and without regard to the existence of prior art, this becomes almost impossible to avoid without an expensive exercise in due diligence.
... kids with two heads, ...
If your suggested reform (which I have argued for myself) were the law, the technology under discussion here would neither help to push books into the public domain, nor keep books "in print" in the sense of being offered for sale in well-printed, durable editions. It would instead be standard practise for evading the law's axe. But at least we would always be able to acquire a copy of a given work, though it be a flimsy, poorly printed and acidic one. And if the inventory of available titles were essentially all books every published, and the price were low enough, we might not care.
He [Handley] notes that every ERP package he's worked with--Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP--has a single ship-to address in the purchasing module. That's great for a company like IBM, which is organized around a central receiving unit, but ...
No, it's not even great for a large public company. It's unbelievably stupid. These vendors are getting the big bucks for massive ERP products containing everything but the kitchen sink, but when it comes to shipping and receiving, they typically just tack on a ridiculously simplistic toy module so they can add "Shipping and Receiving" as another bullet in their marketing materials.
It has been shown that all computer programs may be mapped to integers and hence are denumerable. Any number that can be generated by a computer program (pi, e, etc) therefore is denumerable.
Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.
People keep calling it "government" property, as tho the government was some business somewhere in DC with really tough security guards. ... The property is "publicly" owned, not "government" owned.
You imply that you are a US citizen, but you sound like someone from far away, unfamiliar with our culture. Native English speakers in the US know that "public" is a euphemism for "state" (what we Americans usually call "the Government"). Just as "public transportation" means state owned and operated transportation facilities, and "public schools" means state owned and operated schools, "public property" means property owned by the state. If you doubt it, just ask yourself who exercises these ownership rights over "public" lands:
the right to possess and use that property and to exclude all others
the right to sell, give away, or otherwise dispose of that property
the right to enter the property
the right to lease or rent the property to others
the right to encumber a property, such as pledging a property as collateral for a loan
the right to do nothing with a property
There simply isn't enough information in a 2D image to construct a 3D image. If there were, your brain would already do it (and, in fact, already does to a limited extent).
How hard it is to avoid self-contradiction!
If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it.
I haue not payed for sweet sunshine
Nor haue I payed for words that rime
I haue not payed for e or pi
I haue not payed for "Greensleeues".
Oh, what a thief am I
I haue not payed for sun or skye
Oh, what a thief am I
I haue not payed for "Greensleeues".
CmdrTaco had to know full well that the inventor's claim is rubbish, and hardly newsworthy. So why wave the submitter's wide-eyed naïveté around in public, rather than quietly passing over his story?
I'm afraid that you are somewhat confused. String theory is not the observed behaviour mentioned in step 1. It is the hypothesis/theory mentioned in steps 3 - 5.
Thank you for this clarification. I had always thought that getting verified meant switching from credit card to account draft. My skepticism toward marketing fluff made me read their appeal to customers to get verified ("Fund payments with your checking account!") as "Let us quit having to pay the credit card transaction fees so we can pocket almost the entire 3% from sellers". All this time I've been carefully nursing what remains of my $2000 limit :).
Have you not noticed that PayPal puts a lifetime limit of US$2000 on what you can charge to your credit card? So how is it that we are supposed to "Always Always ALWAYS use a CC when paying via PayPal"?.
I'll tell you why many Slashdotters think there's no such thing as criminal copyright infringement -- because copyright infringement is not inherently a criminal act. In legalese, it is not malum in se. They intuit that it is a noncriminal act, and then naively assume that their beneficent government would not go around outlawing such things.
If we actually tried to put this extraterritoriality 'principle' into effect, even with the "(real) effect" test suggested in the parent post, the whole world would fall into unresolvable chaos. We would all be walking on eggs every day, knowing that we are guilty of all manner of criminal violations, despite our best efforts. Not only would we have to learn and attempt to follow the constantly changing criminal laws of every state on the planet, but we would even sometimes find it logically impossible not to violate some laws, because performing an act affecting people in other states might be illegal in one state, while refraining from performing that same act (where refraining affects people in other states) might be illegal in another.
Even the mail bomb example proves nothing. The bomber has done a terrible thing, and likely violated the laws of the state in which he acted. But to suggest that he violated some criminal law of the US is silly. Now, that doesn't mean that the US cannot do anything about it. The US can attempt to persuade the state under whose laws the act was performed to persue criminal remedies against the perpetrator, or it can take military action against the perpetrator or his state. Such international action should not be confused with criminal law enforcement.
But it IS just as secure and safe (actually, more so) -- for PayPal. They have always portrayed getting "Verified" (opening up your checking account to them) as being for enhanced security, without bothering to mention that it is THEIR security that is enhanced, not yours. Similarly, my bank has recently sent out marketing materials to its credit card holders bragging about a new security "service" that they are going to generously make available to us "free of charge!" Of course, it is solely to their benefit, and our detriment.
marketing n. the art of lying to customers