Of which the end result is more money spent on police services to protect you from the families of these people who didn't have the sense to save money, but don't have the good taste to magically disappear when they become inconvenient.
As mentioned above.. you can own it on your own all you like. Don't share it.
Patents on an invention make sense because in order to realize a profit on it you have to distribute it, which allows for copying.
Patents on processes make no sense, because you do not have to distribute the process in order to realize a profit from it. If the process is so simple that any customer can see it and apply it, then by its very nature it does not pass the "non-obvious" test.
As such, there is no justification to patent processes. Those the consumer can't ascertain you realize profit from by utilization (ala Coke), those that the consumer can ascertain are not worthy of patent protection (ala 1-Click).
As an aside, you do realize that by equating business methods with "expressions of ideas" you are agreeing with me that they should not be patentable?
That aside though, I disagree that business processes are an expression of an idea. They are the idea itself. Copyright does not (and should not) protect the idea. The idea of a monster sucking blood is not protected because Anne Rice has the copyright to "The Vampire Lestat", her specific expression of it is.
If you can show me a business process where the only protection required is on the specific expression (such as the specific code for a 1-click shopping system), and not the idea itself, you may have a point.
As mentioned above.. you can own it on your own all you like. Don't share it.
Patents on an invention make sense because in order to realize a profit on it you have to distribute it, which allows for copying.
Patents on processes make no sense, because you do not have to distribute the process in order to realize a profit from it. If the process is so simple that any customer can see it and apply it, then by its very nature it does not pass the "non-obvious" test you mention.
As such, there is no justification to patent processes. Those the consumer can't ascertain you realize profit from by utilization, those that the consumer can ascertain are not worthy of patent protection.
I don't think we should be able to patent processes at all.
A process is the ultimate business advantage. If you can come up with it, you deserve to reap the rewards from using it. Not from selling it to or litigating against some other group.
This is where the system breaks down. Some things are not meant to be non-freely shared around society.
Patents should return to whence they came. Physical objects.
Copyrights should return to whence they came. Expression of ideas.
Processes are neither, and therefore shouldn't be covered by either.
No.. what's truly retarded is when some dipshit on Slashdot says that they don't "see anything wrong with one company providing phone service to you" in the same breath as "as long as there is no barriers to entry for other firms", and doesn't immediately see the problem inherent in that statement.
That's like saying you don't see anything wrong with ebola so long as nobody catches it. Or that there's nothing wrong with terrorism so long as they don't hurt anybody.
Yeah, given some pipe-dream condition that'll never happen, anything can be fine. You just need to find the right impossibility to posit first.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. Given when these numbers are from, most people who paid Microsoft a dime didn't have a choice.. because it came pre-loaded on the machine they purchased so that they could take work home from the office/give their kid to do homework on from school, etc.
These days, things are a little better, but it's still a bitch to get a PC without Windows, and even when you do, you have to suffer through a lot of software that, sad to say and despite the karma burn this'll earn me, simply doesn't work as well for a lot of real world tasks.
I wanna be a Linux guy. I really do.
But my job requires editing of reports with multiple people. Most of whom don't have any computer skills to speak of. Hell, they can barely get Word running. There simply isn't another option. Open Office's revision tracking is near painful to use. Trying to get it to interoperate on files from people who have bargain basement PCs and no tech background to speak of?
Such surgery is not done in Canada for lack of qualified surgeons, AFAIK -- even then the survival rate is about 70%.
AFAIK? Which is it? Is it not done, or is it done with a 70% survival rate?
If the former, you may have something. If the latter, then the Canadian government didn't pay the American Health System because the surgery could have been done here.
And sorry that your dad was on the receiving end, but we make economic judgements about lives every day. If your dad had a 70% survival chance with the surgery, but the same money could give two people, or even one, an 80% survival chance, then yes, it does boil down to cost effectiveness because this is money, as you point out, taken from all of us. Money spent on a surgery where the person doesn't survive is health care money entirely wasted. Where such spending takes away from the ability of others to survive, that's truly criminal.
No, they're trying to apply US patent laws to items that are being sold in the US.
As a Canadian, I think the Canadian government is wrong to step in here. NTP, as much as they're bad for the industry in general, have the legal point.
What really needs to be looked at is the patent system itself. Submarine patents need to be abolished. Patents need to be granted on a pass/fail system. They either get through the first time, or they get rejected. If they get rejected, then a new application is required, with, naturally, a new date. This would prevent submarine patents that just float around for years, getting modified over the years in order to adjust for ways technology is going and making it look like it dates back to when the original patent was submitted.
In addition, patents should go back to requiring a physical copy. Ideas are like assholes. Everybody has one, most of them stink. You require somebody submit a working product before approval of the final patent is granted and that'll help considerably.
People who need surgery to save their lives typically get it in Canada, and typically in very short order. Now, if it's not life-threatening, and especially if it's "elective", yeah, you can expect to wait around for a good while.
Now, do you have examples of these Canadians you speak of that have been denied life-saving surgery? And, equally important, are there as many of them as there are examples of people needing life-saving surgery in the states and not receiving it, insured or otherwise?
Take this: I can see it now: rioting, crack adicted, geriatrics running through the streets! Old people are not going to start nocking over banks and beating up young people to pay their medicare bills. This is just moronic.
Add this: Or you could act like a grown man, and take care of the people who spawned you. Yes I am suggesting you take your parrents into your house.
Remember this: It's really easy to be generous with someone elses money.
And put them all together to understand that it won't be the geriatrics committing the crime. It'll be the poor middle aged S.O.B. who has to try and support his parents at the same time as his family.
Who's money will he be generous with? Likely the rich middle aged S.O.B. who is supporting his parents at the same time as his family.
Only it'll be a much more direct and personal robbing of a specific rich S.O.B. than taxes are, one that perhaps ends in violence or death, thus leaving not one, but two geriatric familis out in the cold as the breadwinners are dead or incarcerated.. (and incidentally, leaves you paying for the incarceration anyway)
Bravo, Sir. You managed to shift a low tax burden from everybody generally to a high burden on a very specific few people. Now so long as you can ensure you're not one of those very few, you're in a better position, and to hell with everyone else, hm?
Private failures to save do not just disappear in a nice clean puff of economic smoke. They become an expense of the legal system, and housing a person in a 6x9 cell with 3squares and guards provided is a helluva lot more expensive to society than a privately owned slum.
And how much of the poverty problem are private charities able to handle right now?
Or are you doing some magical hand-waving saying that people who don't have to put in social security payroll taxes will donate more? This is hogwash. Research has been done and determined that charitable donations are steady as a percentage of income. In other words, those who donate already will likely donate more if they make more, but at the same percentage of their total income.
Those who don't, won't.
Given that even with the governments help private charities are woefully inadequate to combat poverty, you're saying that without government intervention they'd suddenly be able to?
What you're really advocating is a rise in crime rate, as people unable to find legal means of support are forced to turn to illegal means.
You end up paying it in the end anyway, all that differs is if it goes to feed them in a jail cell or feed them in a slum. Except jails cost more than slums to run.
Yet the virus writer is doing the same thing. His team is the code. He's assembled it for the purpose of committing an illegal act. How do we know this? Because there is no legal act that can be done with a virus, since the intent of a virus is to propogate on an open network. If it was not, propogation code would not be needed and hence not be present.
To suggest that the virus writer's code is not acting as an agent of him when he's assembled it, provided it with what it needs to be run and left it available for anybody to run it is very much akin to setting up some fatal trap that simply requires somebody else to come along and push the button.
Yes, he can be arrested if he has intent to push the button, but I'm suggesting that he should be able to arrested simply for designing something that has no legal purpose.
Cool. So if I plan a way to murder the President, assemble all the required materials and pay for a team to be able to use them effectively once receiving a special code word, then post a flyer on the white-house gates that says "To kill the president, call this number and give them this code word." I'm not responsible for what happens at all?
Just because a plant is Round-Up Ready does not necessarily mean it's Round-Up seed. You see, nature has this thing called mutations. After all, just because Monsanto has their patent on Round-Up Ready canola doesn't mean that every strain of Round-Up resistant canola infringes on their patent.
This is also why the patent should be rescinded. You shouldn't be able to patent something that can happen naturally.
Unfortunately, neither the defense team nor the judge caught on to this line of argument. Not to mention that the case basically bankrupted Schmeiser (which is part of the reason for why there was no counter-suit)
Really, the only person that Monsanto should have had a case against was the witness that testified he hadn't treated their intellectual property with due care and attention to prevent it from spreading.
So what you're saying is that farmers should have to pay the expense of being aware if their crop is contaminated with a better growing seed? What if they happen to think it's a mutation that happened on its own?
There's a difference between creating atmosphere and simply attempting to scare you.
Doom 3 did the latter. Which is why it didn't work. You can only *be* scared a finite amount of times by the same occurrence.
If you create an atmosphere though, you don't even need anything to happen to be scared. Some of the tensest and scariest moments in thief come simply because of the atmosphere. You can be completely alone in the game and be scared simply because you're think that you're not alone.
Sorry.. what MMORPGs are about is making more money for their owners.
The formula for making money is simple. Pay out as little as you can, while taking in as much as you can.
Catering to the power-gamers requires paying out a lot in order to keep up with them in terms of content, as well as providing bandwidth for the 24/7 no-lifer.
At the same time, it reduced the amount you take in because the audience of moms & tots (a much larger for a longer period) gets alienated.
Catering to the mom & tot crowd means your content generation costs are lessened, your bandwidth cost/user-month is lessened, and your subscription revenues are increased both in quantity (larger audience available) and length (takes them longer to plow through what you've made).
Blizzard seems to have figured out that power-gamers are a poor audience if you're looking to make money from a game.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it took you very few years to get it right.
What's taken a long time is for the rich to figure out how to get around it.
You're free to opt out at any time.
..not yet.
Nobody's closed the borders, after all.
At least..
Of which the end result is more money spent on police services to protect you from the families of these people who didn't have the sense to save money, but don't have the good taste to magically disappear when they become inconvenient.
Just copied my post from below:
As mentioned above.. you can own it on your own all you like. Don't share it.
Patents on an invention make sense because in order to realize a profit on it you have to distribute it, which allows for copying.
Patents on processes make no sense, because you do not have to distribute the process in order to realize a profit from it. If the process is so simple that any customer can see it and apply it, then by its very nature it does not pass the "non-obvious" test.
As such, there is no justification to patent processes. Those the consumer can't ascertain you realize profit from by utilization (ala Coke), those that the consumer can ascertain are not worthy of patent protection (ala 1-Click).
As an aside, you do realize that by equating business methods with "expressions of ideas" you are agreeing with me that they should not be patentable?
That aside though, I disagree that business processes are an expression of an idea. They are the idea itself. Copyright does not (and should not) protect the idea. The idea of a monster sucking blood is not protected because Anne Rice has the copyright to "The Vampire Lestat", her specific expression of it is.
If you can show me a business process where the only protection required is on the specific expression (such as the specific code for a 1-click shopping system), and not the idea itself, you may have a point.
One more thing they can offer..
A huge bankroll to prop up undercutting of the competition.
As mentioned above.. you can own it on your own all you like. Don't share it.
Patents on an invention make sense because in order to realize a profit on it you have to distribute it, which allows for copying.
Patents on processes make no sense, because you do not have to distribute the process in order to realize a profit from it. If the process is so simple that any customer can see it and apply it, then by its very nature it does not pass the "non-obvious" test you mention.
As such, there is no justification to patent processes. Those the consumer can't ascertain you realize profit from by utilization, those that the consumer can ascertain are not worthy of patent protection.
I don't think we should be able to patent processes at all.
A process is the ultimate business advantage. If you can come up with it, you deserve to reap the rewards from using it. Not from selling it to or litigating against some other group.
This is where the system breaks down. Some things are not meant to be non-freely shared around society.
Patents should return to whence they came. Physical objects.
Copyrights should return to whence they came. Expression of ideas.
Processes are neither, and therefore shouldn't be covered by either.
No.. what's truly retarded is when some dipshit on Slashdot says that they don't "see anything wrong with one company providing phone service to you" in the same breath as "as long as there is no barriers to entry for other firms", and doesn't immediately see the problem inherent in that statement.
That's like saying you don't see anything wrong with ebola so long as nobody catches it. Or that there's nothing wrong with terrorism so long as they don't hurt anybody.
Yeah, given some pipe-dream condition that'll never happen, anything can be fine. You just need to find the right impossibility to posit first.
..I wonder why?
Bzzt, thanks for playing.
Given when these numbers are from, most people who paid Microsoft a dime didn't have a choice.. because it came pre-loaded on the machine they purchased so that they could take work home from the office/give their kid to do homework on from school, etc.
These days, things are a little better, but it's still a bitch to get a PC without Windows, and even when you do, you have to suffer through a lot of software that, sad to say and despite the karma burn this'll earn me, simply doesn't work as well for a lot of real world tasks.
I wanna be a Linux guy. I really do.
But my job requires editing of reports with multiple people. Most of whom don't have any computer skills to speak of. Hell, they can barely get Word running. There simply isn't another option. Open Office's revision tracking is near painful to use. Trying to get it to interoperate on files from people who have bargain basement PCs and no tech background to speak of?
No dice.
Okay, so let's get this straight..
Such surgery is not done in Canada for lack of qualified surgeons, AFAIK -- even then the survival rate is about 70%.
AFAIK? Which is it? Is it not done, or is it done with a 70% survival rate?
If the former, you may have something. If the latter, then the Canadian government didn't pay the American Health System because the surgery could have been done here.
And sorry that your dad was on the receiving end, but we make economic judgements about lives every day. If your dad had a 70% survival chance with the surgery, but the same money could give two people, or even one, an 80% survival chance, then yes, it does boil down to cost effectiveness because this is money, as you point out, taken from all of us. Money spent on a surgery where the person doesn't survive is health care money entirely wasted. Where such spending takes away from the ability of others to survive, that's truly criminal.
No, they're trying to apply US patent laws to items that are being sold in the US.
As a Canadian, I think the Canadian government is wrong to step in here. NTP, as much as they're bad for the industry in general, have the legal point.
What really needs to be looked at is the patent system itself. Submarine patents need to be abolished. Patents need to be granted on a pass/fail system. They either get through the first time, or they get rejected. If they get rejected, then a new application is required, with, naturally, a new date. This would prevent submarine patents that just float around for years, getting modified over the years in order to adjust for ways technology is going and making it look like it dates back to when the original patent was submitted.
In addition, patents should go back to requiring a physical copy. Ideas are like assholes. Everybody has one, most of them stink. You require somebody submit a working product before approval of the final patent is granted and that'll help considerably.
You might want to cut back on the kool-aid.
People who need surgery to save their lives typically get it in Canada, and typically in very short order. Now, if it's not life-threatening, and especially if it's "elective", yeah, you can expect to wait around for a good while.
Now, do you have examples of these Canadians you speak of that have been denied life-saving surgery? And, equally important, are there as many of them as there are examples of people needing life-saving surgery in the states and not receiving it, insured or otherwise?
Take this:
I can see it now: rioting, crack adicted, geriatrics running through the streets! Old people are not going to start nocking over banks and beating up young people to pay their medicare bills. This is just moronic.
Add this:
Or you could act like a grown man, and take care of the people who spawned you. Yes I am suggesting you take your parrents into your house.
Remember this:
It's really easy to be generous with someone elses money.
And put them all together to understand that it won't be the geriatrics committing the crime. It'll be the poor middle aged S.O.B. who has to try and support his parents at the same time as his family.
Who's money will he be generous with? Likely the rich middle aged S.O.B. who is supporting his parents at the same time as his family.
Only it'll be a much more direct and personal robbing of a specific rich S.O.B. than taxes are, one that perhaps ends in violence or death, thus leaving not one, but two geriatric familis out in the cold as the breadwinners are dead or incarcerated.. (and incidentally, leaves you paying for the incarceration anyway)
Bravo, Sir. You managed to shift a low tax burden from everybody generally to a high burden on a very specific few people. Now so long as you can ensure you're not one of those very few, you're in a better position, and to hell with everyone else, hm?
Bzzt. Wrong.
Private failures to save do not just disappear in a nice clean puff of economic smoke. They become an expense of the legal system, and housing a person in a 6x9 cell with 3squares and guards provided is a helluva lot more expensive to society than a privately owned slum.
Brilliant.
And how much of the poverty problem are private charities able to handle right now?
Or are you doing some magical hand-waving saying that people who don't have to put in social security payroll taxes will donate more? This is hogwash. Research has been done and determined that charitable donations are steady as a percentage of income. In other words, those who donate already will likely donate more if they make more, but at the same percentage of their total income.
Those who don't, won't.
Given that even with the governments help private charities are woefully inadequate to combat poverty, you're saying that without government intervention they'd suddenly be able to?
What you're really advocating is a rise in crime rate, as people unable to find legal means of support are forced to turn to illegal means.
You end up paying it in the end anyway, all that differs is if it goes to feed them in a jail cell or feed them in a slum. Except jails cost more than slums to run.
Yet the virus writer is doing the same thing. His team is the code. He's assembled it for the purpose of committing an illegal act. How do we know this? Because there is no legal act that can be done with a virus, since the intent of a virus is to propogate on an open network. If it was not, propogation code would not be needed and hence not be present.
To suggest that the virus writer's code is not acting as an agent of him when he's assembled it, provided it with what it needs to be run and left it available for anybody to run it is very much akin to setting up some fatal trap that simply requires somebody else to come along and push the button.
Yes, he can be arrested if he has intent to push the button, but I'm suggesting that he should be able to arrested simply for designing something that has no legal purpose.
Cool. So if I plan a way to murder the President, assemble all the required materials and pay for a team to be able to use them effectively once receiving a special code word, then post a flyer on the white-house gates that says "To kill the president, call this number and give them this code word." I'm not responsible for what happens at all?
Except the judge and the defense team goofed.
Just because a plant is Round-Up Ready does not necessarily mean it's Round-Up seed. You see, nature has this thing called mutations. After all, just because Monsanto has their patent on Round-Up Ready canola doesn't mean that every strain of Round-Up resistant canola infringes on their patent.
This is also why the patent should be rescinded. You shouldn't be able to patent something that can happen naturally.
Unfortunately, neither the defense team nor the judge caught on to this line of argument. Not to mention that the case basically bankrupted Schmeiser (which is part of the reason for why there was no counter-suit)
Really, the only person that Monsanto should have had a case against was the witness that testified he hadn't treated their intellectual property with due care and attention to prevent it from spreading.
Assuming they can get some non-Monsanto seed that isn't priced to high heaven because it comes from the now niche market organic farmers.
So what you're saying is that farmers should have to pay the expense of being aware if their crop is contaminated with a better growing seed? What if they happen to think it's a mutation that happened on its own?
No.
There's a difference between creating atmosphere and simply attempting to scare you.
Doom 3 did the latter. Which is why it didn't work. You can only *be* scared a finite amount of times by the same occurrence.
If you create an atmosphere though, you don't even need anything to happen to be scared. Some of the tensest and scariest moments in thief come simply because of the atmosphere. You can be completely alone in the game and be scared simply because you're think that you're not alone.
Not his, but quite possibly the parents feelings.
After all, do they really want to hold on to their son's pictures from Abu Gharib or the like?
Sometimes it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Perhaps there's something in here that can help.
http://www.peercast.org/code/
Sorry.. what MMORPGs are about is making more money for their owners.
The formula for making money is simple. Pay out as little as you can, while taking in as much as you can.
Catering to the power-gamers requires paying out a lot in order to keep up with them in terms of content, as well as providing bandwidth for the 24/7 no-lifer.
At the same time, it reduced the amount you take in because the audience of moms & tots (a much larger for a longer period) gets alienated.
Catering to the mom & tot crowd means your content generation costs are lessened, your bandwidth cost/user-month is lessened, and your subscription revenues are increased both in quantity (larger audience available) and length (takes them longer to plow through what you've made).
Blizzard seems to have figured out that power-gamers are a poor audience if you're looking to make money from a game.
'bout time somebody did.