Finally a voice of reason! As an American, I think, like most of the posts I see hear by slashdot, that this French project is a good thing. What's so strange is that so many here, especially the upmodded posts, are pointing fingers at Americans and Google as the divisive ones, when nationalistic pride is clearlt the driving force behind this otherwise noble project.
Is it divisive pride or necessary protection of the world's cultural heritage? It's BOTH.
Of course you and I are in a privileged class. The class that lives with sufficient peace and economic security, as purchased by those who have sacrified their lives and their labor throughout history to make this possible, in order to buy a computer. Or use it at the library or work or whatever you do.
It's just that some privileged classes are higher than mine. I don't know you personally to know whether your class has more privileges than mine, so many apologies if I suggested that this was so.
I made a lot of pertinent points in the reply, but to focus on the hierarchy...
I'm not too focused on the particulars on Maslow's hierarchy--indeed, I had to look it up just now. My emphasis was on the hierarchy aspect--that there are short term simple needs and longer term more subjective needs. There are reasons why suicide rates are higher in industrialized countries than poor ones. Once you don't worry about starvation and roving gangs of bandits anymore, there is a danger that you drift into despair if you don't find something fulfilling to do with your new freedom.
But, just from the brief reading I'm doing now and vague recollections from high school, I think Maslow meant something more specific by self-actualization. It's a improvement of your self specifically, not of your possessions, or your status, or your power, or your fame. That's not to say that MMOGs are incompatible with this. If you're sharpening your problem solving skills, or socializing and cooperating with others, or finding a new creative talent, then you can be reasonably said to be self actualizing. But gaining levels and collecting gold pieces? I'm not sure people so low functioning that this would be considered mind building should use networked computers. Which is why they invented single player console RPGs, though sadly they've shifted in focus away from kids 9 or 10 or so who might find the inventory management and strategies of such games stimulating to older teens and adults as mere escapism.
As far as what I want to do--well, I'm just making recommendations. However, since I believe that the principles I describe are what underlies our desire for fun, completely discarding them is something a corporations does at its own risk. I think a revolt against "treadmill"-ism is what doomed The Sims Online--a game that might have been a breath of fresh air in MMOGs ended being a parody of the worst aspects of online persistent gaming.
I should clarify that I don't think that all video games playing or even all MMORPGs are unhealthy, or even that any specific MMORPG is unhealthy in all cases. I do think there are "healthier" MMORPGs that might actually result in people expanding their brains as they play them. Second Life's emphasis on creativity, and A Tale in the Desert's focus on socialization come to mind. Even Everquest and the like, if they are played in moderation, is, as you say, healthier than a lot of other things in life. It is definitely NOT okay to ban them, and I apologize if I suggested that it was.
But so many of these commercial games are designed to not be played in moderation. Especially some of the ones with subscription business models. That doesn't mean they can't be enjoyable, and it doesn't mean they should be banned. But it does mean one should be careful of ones own behavior when you're playing. Try to stand apart from yourself, and ask yourself if this is what you want to be.
You certainly have no moral obligation to listen to my comments And, not knowing you, I may not have any actual comments about your particular game playing habits. For some people, the happiness they get from killing rats for an hour and gaining a level may be the best they can do in life. But do you really feel it is the best you can do personally?
The value systems of human beings are Hofstadter-esque strange loops. We can decide how much we value different value systems, and we can decide how much we value those different valuations, and so on, turtles all the way down.
I'm not suggesting you pay my value system any credence. But I am suggesting a new way of looking at things and asking for an honest appraisal. That's what these MMORPGs are--new value systems produced by Sony corporation for our enjoyment. Do you value and enjoy their value system--or could there be a way of getting what you want without climbing their treadmill? Maybe yes, maybe no--but the first step is the asking.
Why do I bother trying to explain a new point of view? Because to some extent our values and behaviors are contagious. Memetic. Social. Whatever word you want to use. Free-will paradoxes and Indra's Net aside, each of our behaviors and expressions ends up influencing everyone else around us. I think any attempt at improving ourselves has to be both collective and non-coercive. The libertarians focus on the latter while the statists focus on the former, but both are necessary and therefore I can't side entirely with either.
You're talking about the wrong issue. Maybe a community should support municipal wireless, maybe they shouldn't. It all depends on what % of people would be interested in such a thing--it's surely far cheaper for the town to provide such access than it is for every individual in the town to buy it themselves, but parts of Texas are probably sparsely populated enough that WiFi would be of no use at all. In my communitiy in suburban Pennsylvania, I would oppose WiFi because so few people would actually make use of it.
But that's not the issue here. The issue is whether the state government should prohibit municipal governments from supplying such access. There is no possible way that could be a good idea. If you don't like government-WiFi, just vote against it at your town meeting. Your municipal government is closer to you than your state government--for the state to choose private corporations over town meetings seems like a huge blow to the culture participatory democracy our government was founded on.
Reasoning like yours is however the main force between mentioned legislation and its sucess depends on wether the majority agrees with your premises.
I appreciate the sentiment, as I too would like to see less government involvement in this sort of thing, especially the war on some drugs.
But if moral nihilism is all that stands between you and totalitarianism, I think it's a lost cause. What you're talking about is throwing out all concept of "higher" good. It's a popular position to argue for, because it's easy. The conditional nature of normative statements is often implicit, and of course no normative statement can be concluded from objective, physical fact. But I don't think people really internalize the implications of such a view. People have evolved (genetically or memetically) an innate sense of beauty that they apply to all things subconsciously, even though the values of consumerism repeatedly try to stamp it out with commercial propaganda.
Like putting your thumb over a water hose, the more you try to discourage this sort of thinking, the more the pressure increases in those few places it escapes your grasp. You tell avery Americans all foods are "part of a healthy diet", fine. But that just makes them all the more likely to overreact to drug usage.
The real way to encourage your objective is to support noninterference, nonviolence, tolerance, pacificism, etc. Point out that legally discouraging things just breeds attitudes like yours.
Warnings about games/gambling/drugs etc. are pretty alarmist considering how few people actually harm themselves with the habit.
I disagree. I think games alone, if the individual is not careful, can be incredibly destructive. They target a particularly useful segment of society--the nerd/geek/asperger's segment, and manipulate their love of minutia into a hypnotic treadmill. No one should force these people to discard games, and there are quite a few games that don't try to appeal to false success to aid their addictiveness. But we should encourage players everywhere to take a step back from themselves, and look at what is really motivating them.
But it goes beyond games, drugs, and gambling.
It's also food, television, and consumption in general. Add up the CDC statistics, and you'll find that diet and tobacco vastly outpace any other cause of death in America. But causes of death don't begin to touch it--what about the cause of wasted life? No one collects statistics on who ends up screaming on their death bed at all the opportunities they missed, the dreams unrealized. People are being trained from birth to define their lives in terms of the products they consume, size of their salaries, and their social rank. We refuse to allow ourselves to climb Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And it's turning us into diseased automatons leading lives of quiet desperation.
You are right to oppose legislation of "better" consumption, but there's no reason we have to abandon higher goodness to attain that goal.
If a high level in an mmorpg makes me proud nobody can argue with that. Not you, not any doctor nor any politician.
Of course they can argue it. You can argue about anything. I mean, no, I can't argue that it makes you proud. Only you can answer that. However, I can argue that you shouldn't be proud of that. And you can argue that you should. Which is what is happening right here. As David Hume realized, ought and should statements and their negations cannot be derived from is statements.
But it is logically possible to argue from one "should" statement to another. For example, I can argue that if you believe that people should try to improve themselves mentally and physically, then some classes of video games should not be played. (NOTE: I did not say should be banned, I said should not be played.)
It is impossible for me to pull an Ayn Rand and try to justify my normative beliefs purely from first principles and observations of the world. (You should be careful--your ethical nihilism may be falling into this trap as well, depending on interpretation.) However, my suspicion is that most people, if they pull their fingers out their ears and stop screaming "la la la you can't tell me what I should do!" might actually discover they agree with enough of my normative premises to agree with my conclusion.
Hey, I'm not gonna force you to save yourself. But I just had some suggestions as to what products might be harmful to your mind and wasteful of your energies. You might have another notion of wasteful and harmful than I do. In which case, no one is forcing you to read what I have written.
If it was a seperate download, not included or facilitated in XP or IE, and allowed you to switch to other information providers, then while I can't speak for everyone I would say the same in that case.
As soon as someone mentions the addictive qualities of video games, everyone activates their libertarian defensiveness shield. Which is an understandable response, given the tendency of some governments to ban "addictive" things kids like and old white guys hate. (I'm only a few years from becoming an old white guy myself, but whatever.)
However, the audience for video games seems to keep getting older and older, and I suspect we'll have video games for quite awhile.
But ask yourself why you REALLY like to play video games. What's fun about these things? And how do you feel about those reasons?
Is it because you want to face new challenges, socialize, and observe a new fantasy world? I doubt think anyone can argue these things are unhealthy, in moderation.
Or is it because you want the sense of accomplishment that comes from the level-up hamster wheel, which rewards you primarily for playing longer rather than playing better? Is it because your seeking an escape from reality?
(One could argue that these games give us the detachment from self that eastern religions advocate. I suspect otherwise, but that's far too complex to think about here.)
There was a scene from Minority Report in which someone was spending time in a virtual reality simulation of his peers praising him for receiving an imaginary reward. How much of the attractiveness of these MMORPGs comes from the very same desire for false success?
Things shouldn't be banned because they are unhealthy, but you shouldn't defend the healthiness of something just because someone is trying to ban it. The worth of an activity is in the eye of the beholder, but you shouldn't discard your own judgment just to spite people you disagree with.
Free yourself of all prejudice and bitterness, then ask yourself whether a desire for pre-programmed, treadmill success is healthy? Are you a better person after you have finished, or are you just older?
And, if any games developer happens to come down with an odd case of misplaced utilitarianism in capitalist world, maybe you should ask yourself what effect your game has on people. There are certainly MMOG games that lack any explicit level treadmill. Second Life comes to mind.
The human desire for fun exists in order to stretch our mental and physical abilities. Yet so many things we call "fun" actually contract these abilities. Worse, things we do to "relax" like watch television or smoke leave us even more stressed out and tired than when we started. The Taoists encourage us to be relaxed and alert, yet so many times we Westerners are entranced by our anxieties. We've grown so used to that state that for "fun" we invent new anxieties to entertain us on our computer and television screens.
Trying to stop it with lawsuits and laws is laughable, of course. But that does not stop my mourning.
The thing is, it doesn't really matter if he's crazy. Neither of us know how to spell the outgoing chairman's name. If the Dems had a candidate you liked, why would you vote against that candidate just because the chairman's a loon? His personal angry attidute will forever prevent him from being president, but as a chairman what matters is his organizing and fundraising skills, and perhaps his willingness to think outside establishment terms. The man has good ideas, he's just completely inappropriate for the public eye.
He may be overly antagonistic, but the Republicans managed to succeed despite having twice as much hate and venom as the Democrats--and at least Leftist hate is just anger at another point of view, not Ann Coulter-style racism. It was Kerry and the party establishment's attempt to seem moderate that doomed the campaign. Besides, if you were willing to go with Zell Miller, you've got no right to talk about venom.
It's good that he's a fiscal conservative. We might expect a lot of former Republicans (like myself--I voted for Bush in 2000) to realize their party no longer cares about fiscal conservatism--it's just big government for the sake of big business. The medical overhaul Bush insisted on is a great example of that--he has promised to veto any attempt to limit the windfall to drug companies. As politics switches its focus to domestic issues, Dean could end up looking like a moderate.
The promising thing about Dean is that he knows its not about moving to the center--Americans won't respect someone who capitulates for political convenience. But he also understands that strategic retreats are necessary on certain lost cause issues--like gun control.
The worrying thing about Dean and the Democratic party in general is that they've misunderstood the power of the internet and decentralized organization. They see it in terms of collecting money and volunteers to send to campaign in other states. But that's a foolish plan--people are alienated by out of staters coming to convince them to change their minds, as Dean should have learned in Iowa and Kerry should have learned in Ohio. Instead, internet resources should be aimed at getting people engaged in their own communities--whether its just getting people to volunteer in their own neighborhoods or even encourage people to run for local offices.
Don't forget, MMORPGs are services, not products. Marginal costs of production, unlike software, are not zero. It's not necessarily a natural monopoly--the more players you have, the more load you have on servers. Of course, fixed costs aren't zero, and if some company ever manages to handle a growing player base properly, network effects will be important (you want to play on the server all your friends play on.) But not all important, because as games phase in popularity players are tempted to switch to games with newer features.
I imagine there will always be some demand for fringe MMOGs--like Second Life or A Tale in the Desert. Just like the rest of the internet, people are fragmented by interest as much as by geography.
On the other hand, if people stared playing latency dependent MMORPGs, geography could actually start being a big deal.
"Natural monopoly" is an economics term that, while it probably describes Microsoft and any other dominant software maker, doesn't really have anything to do with what you're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Also, if Microsoft carries out their software patent threats, that will make Microsoft a coercive monopoly as well. Hell, I guess breaking your competitor's legs is just another way of trying to make their product more attractive than the next guys.
Hell, the game's requirement should merely be a pile of silicon, plastics, and metals, as well as a heat source. With some patience and some luck, you might experience a thermodynamic miracle, and the various components will form a 4 Ghz Pentium-based system with information on its hard drive equivalent to a registered copy of Half-Life 2. In fact, the box shouldn't even include any data CDs--just a license to use any copy of Half-Life 2 that spontaneously generates in statistical violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Fine ; go sell some extasy on the street, then, because, after all, police should go after the buyer as long as you don't use it yourself.
Um, yes, that is rather silly logic, because the purpose of extasy prohibition is to prevent harm to the purchaser. You aren't trying to claim that whoever is purchasing ads from Google is being harmed, are you? No, you're complaining about a third party.
A better analogy would be if the police arrested a car salesman because someone bought a car and intentionally ran someone over with it. The model you should look for is A purchases something from B in order to harm C. It makes no sense to blame B, when there are billions of perfectly legitimate uses for what B is selling.
Hey, it's your country, and if you think logic has gone out of style in your glorious new era of post-post-postmodernism, well, don't let us spoil your fun.
The bullshit part is that google.fr is sued rather than whoever bought the ad on google.fr. I mean, you Frenchies can pass a law that everyone must walk on their heads when selling a product, and no one's got any right to change it (except maybe the WTO) but everyone's got the right to call you pack of crazy yet ultimately harmless loons.
You may have a different opinion in the USoA, but know what ? We don't care.
And pretty soon, no one will care. France's economy, international clout, and demographics are in decline. I predict that by 2092 A.D. Arabic and English will be more common in France than French, and by 2137 A.D. the accent/dialect of English spoken in France will no longer even be considered particularly sexy or romantic. You'd better be ready to learn Sharia law to get a jump on the impending changes.
All google wanted to do was let you use a search engine and make a bit of cash. Your senseless law has created an obstacle. Google loses a bit of cash, though in the worst possible case they'll just make google.com point to a French-language page hosted in another country if the user has a French ip (it probably does that already), so they probably won't lose that much. A minor annoyance, by far eclipsed by their problems here in America with their "Froogle" trademark. (What the...why am I suddenly walking on my head?)
Windows XP has billions and billions of lines of code. Each line of code is a completely uniquely designed manufactured object.
You can say so, but this is completely false under 35 USC 101 and related case law.
I wasn't making a legal statement at all. It was simple fact--Windows XP has billions of lines of code, or so Microsoft tells us. Each line of code represents distinct intellectual labor on the part of Microsoft employees. You can deny this, but you're basically passing a law declaring pi to be 3, as the urban legend goes. Or like the fabled king who declared that the tides should stop.
If more people at Slashdot understood that, and spoke from that perspective, it would be a HUGE step toward forming some constructive criticism of the system and putting pressure to fix it where it belongs - on judges and congressmen.
Well, it's not the average slashdotter's job (and it's DEFINITELY not a job for a curmudgeon like me) to actually lobby judges and congressmen personally. We kinda smell funny. There are tech activist lawyers who actually know how things work, and they go and do it, sometimes with stinky donations from us. But here's the thing. The core problem is not a legal one, but an economic one.
I don't question the internal legal consistency of patent law, I'm saying it is unworkable in the real world. The whole problem can be boiled down to one economic reality--legal analysis of code is 90% of the time harder than actually writing it. Surely lawyers would agree--that's why they make more money than computer programmers.
Sadly, this contradicts the primary fixations of both legal and economics communities. In fact, the latter is far worse than the former. Too many of them refuse to accept that a commons can be more efficient than a regulated market if costs of compliance outweigh benefits.
It's just a bunch of turf wars. Lawyers, judges, congressmen, and economists can't simply retreat and admit that their presence in a market may actually be more expensive than their worth. It's all about sphere of influence. Some folks in the USPTO may realize the problem, but do they dare go before Congress and admit they should be doing less rather than more in one narrow field?
It might be better world if slashdotters and people in general participated more in our governing process, but as to whether that would actual help this issue, I do not have much faith there. To get bogged down in the actual letter of the law seems counter-productive--our sentiment is generally fueled by utilitarianism, not legal interpretation.
What DOES give me hope is the rising anti-patent and anti-big business (and sadly anti-American) tide of opinion in some other countries. Europe and Australia, to my understanding, still haven't adopted software patents (and probably not gene patents either), and if it eventually turns out that a great number of software products are available in other countries but not in America, (perhaps Linux itself one day?) that's really the only hope we have of changing the law here.
Anyway, like I say, I always act like a jerk on the internet for no reason other than it's the internet and that's what you're supposed to do (though I think whoever invented road rage has prior art on that), but it has been cool talking with you, so if you're still reading this (I'll check back), best of luck with your readings!
Oh, one other thing
This is how the system has worked for over a hundred years - to "fix" this would mean filing for a patent would cost in the neighborhood of $100,000 regardless of whether or not it eventually issues - and that's a solution I would rather not have.
I don't feel as strongly about this as I do about software patents, but I think that's actually the ideal solution. The person applying for a patent, the person who actually benefits from the patent, should pay the full costs of that patent. If the benefits of the patent don't outweigh the complete costs of enforcement throughout the legal system, then issuing that patent is just a drain on our economy. That alone would probably solve a great deal (not all) of the problems with patents.
LZH compression, while it may be a good example of a fairly issued patent, is nonetheless a PERFECT example of what's wrong with the system--because it was also a submarine patent. Whatever the justification of granting the patent originally, Unisys's underhanded way of offering up GIF as a standard file format and then later getting up in arms over patents is proof that the system needs to be dismantled.
Please note that I am not disagreeing with your stance about software patents (however this is vaguely defined in general and especially thus far in our conversation), but rather where the source of the problem lies.
Okay, my stance on software patents is that they are impossible to enforce uniformly. Windows XP has billions and billions of lines of code. Each line of code is a completely uniquely designed manufactured object. What mechanical device could be compared to that? The preposterousness of using $35 million dollars to analyze the work of billions of dollars of software coding should be obvious to all--legal analysis of a body of code is more difficult and expensive than actual analysis. The problem is that too many of things that get patented are things that could have been invented by undergrad interns like one-click shopping--or like probably all computer-human interface design patents ever issued--but require years of man-hours of highly educated labor to actually prove the uniqueness of.
Indeed, even if you are correct that slashdotters know nothing about patents, doesn't this once again prove my point with your words? Because many of these slashdotters are the ones writing the code covered by these patents to begin with.
The USPTO and legal sytem may work hard, but they've been assigned an impossible task. Rather than own up to that, they instead, by necessity, become completely arbitrary. They rationally satisfice by giving incomplete analysis to their work, because there is no possible way we could afford to pay them enough to TRULY analyze all code fairly and equitably without doubling our GDP.
In any event, "prior art means already patented" IS true in the real world 99.9% of the time, whatever the law says, whatever token motions various legal and executive entities go through occasionally. Not to mention that the ambiguities of prior art are nothing compared to the ambiguities of obviousness.
If you want to argue that USPTO isn't to blame for this, I guess I might agree. The system as it exists is arbitrary because it cannot be any other way. If the system was NOT arbitrary and unfair, there wouldn't be any reason to oppose software patents. The only reason I DON'T have to call a lawyer everytime I right a line of code is because all corporations now consider patent violation an unpredictable cost of doing business--software firms cannot also afford to become legal firms. Even Microsoft, no friend of slashdot, is learning that with many of the lawsuits against them.
This is precisely the type of argument that's so popular on Slashdot whenever someone expresses religious faith, and it is precisely the argument I offer in response to your unwillingness to consider that the documented statues and established practice of the USPTO are not what you have somehow come to believe.
Speaking of religious faith, your post reminds me of a theologian telling us that we must believe in God because we haven't spent anywhere near as many years studying the Bible that he did. Theologians and lawyers alike cannot stand when someone dares to cut their Gordian knot and note that the whole thing is based on premises of doubtful soundness. In the case of the legal system, the whole concept of rational satisficing is an immense threat to their future job security--many applications of legal analysis will cost more than the resulting benefits to society of said analysis.
Once upon a time, medieval theologians were also Master and Commander of society. Beware the wheel of fortune.
Please note that I am not disagreeing with your stance about software patents (however this is vaguely defined in general and especially thus far in our conversation), but rather where the source of the problem lies.
Okay, my stance on software patents is that they are impossible to enforce uniformly. Windows XP has billions and billions of lines of code. Each line of code is a completely uniquely designed manufactured object. What mechanical device could be compared to that? The preposterousness of using $35 million dollars to analyze the work of billions of dollars of software coding should be obvious to all--legal analysis of a body of code is more difficult and expensive than actual analysis. The problem is that too many of things that get patented are things that could have been invented by undergrad interns like one-click shopping, but require years of man-hours of highly educated labor to actually prove the uniqueness of.
Indeed, even if you are correct that slashdotters know nothing about patents, doesn't this once again prove my point with your words? Because many of these slashdotters are the ones writing the code to begin with.
The USPTO and legal sytem may work hard, but they've been assigned an impossible task. Rather than own up to that, they instead, by necessity, become completely arbitrary. They rationally satisfice by giving incomplete analysis to their work, because there is no possible way we could afford to pay them enough to TRULY analyze all code fairly and equitably without doubling our GDP.
In any event, "prior art means already patented" IS true in the real world 99.9% of the time, whatever the law says, whatever token motions various legal and executive entities go through occasionally. Not to mention that the ambiguities of prior art are nothing compared to the ambiguities of obviousness.
If you want to argue that USPTO isn't to blame for this, I guess I might agree. The system as it exists is arbitrary because it cannot be any other way. If the system was NOT arbitrary and unfair, there wouldn't be any reason to oppose software patents. The only reason I DON'T have to call a lawyer everytime I right a line of code is because all corporations now consider patent violation an unpredictable cost of doing business--software firms cannot also afford to become legal firms. Even Microsoft, no friend of slashdot, is learning that with many of the lawsuits against them.
This is precisely the type of argument that's so popular on Slashdot whenever someone expresses religious faith, and it is precisely the argument I offer in response to your unwillingness to consider that the documented statues and established practice of the USPTO are not what you have somehow come to believe.
Speaking of religious faith, your post reminds me of a theologian telling us that we must believe in God because we haven't spent anywhere near as many years studying the Bible that he did. Theologians and lawyers alike cannot stand when someone dares to cut their Gordian knot and note that the whole thing is based on premises of doubtful soundness. In the case of the legal system, the whole concept of rational satisficing is an immense threat to their future job security--many applications of legal analysis will cost more than the resulting benefits to society of said analysis.
Once upon a time, medieval theologians were also Master and Commander of society. Beware the wheel of fortune.
The court system is a great resource for purely legal related stuff. The court system is an infinitely worthless resource for software IP related stuff because almost nobody who works in it exhibits even the slightest understanding of how software is developed.
Case in point, people at Slashdot seem to firmly believe that the USPTO gets to decide what is novel or obvious, or more broadly, gets to interpret law. This notion could not be more false. The USPTO acts according to case law, and anything the USPTO does can ultimately be appealed to a Federal court - meaning that a failure to act according to existing case law would land the USPTO in the hot seat inside a courtroom.
Evidence or citation for this claim? From what we've seen, when a bad patent is issued, the lawsuit is between the person it is issued to and and the person infringing on it. Has there been any example of someone suing USPTO for a bad patent? If what you are saying is true, then the continued existence of some of the more ludicrous patents we've seen is the most damning possible thing any thing could be of our legal system.
In otherwords, whether your right or wrong, you're still wrong. I don't know what your job is, but you've demonstrated far more ignorance of both law and technology than the average slashdotter exhibits--so I pray to God you're talking out of your ass, and not actually in a position of power within the system--indeed, in that case, your very existence would be the ultimate proof that your defense of the legal system is flawed.
Regarding the issue of "prior art means 'already patented'", this is, of course, slanderously false. There are, however, incredible advantages to using existing patents as prior art over non-patent literature, the least of which are unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112.
Nice one. Call someone slanderously false, but then admit that he or she is absolutely correct in your next sentence. Did it occur to you that they were probably speaking De Facto rather than De Jure?
Until every Joe Nobody's website meets those criteria, searching the wide internet for that mythical piece of prior art that sufficiently teaches a claimed invention is often the definition of time wasted on the government's dime.
In other words, prior art means 'already patented'. That may not be what the law says, but that's what happens in the real world. Perhaps you need to spend more time thinking about what you've read, rather than reading more.
Here's the problem. If every time I write a line of code, I have to call a lawyer, then software is going to be many, many, many orders of magnitude more expensive. Governments that refuse to accept the American software patent regime will accomplish way more than we will. American corporations that are wising up to how broken the current system will just have to outsource as much of their business as they can--they won't be able to sell in America, but if we don't wise up how insane our legal system has become we won't have much of an economy worth selling to anyway.
What is slowly dawning on everyone is that a truly fair and uniform software patent regime would cost us many, many times more man hours of legal labor per year than the number of lawyers on our entire planet times the number of hours in an entire century.
A lawyer for every line of code. Every web page must have "unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112. "
This can't happen. So we are left with a completely arbitrary and kind of random system that offers some benefits and risks to major corporations, immense benefits to lawyers, and immense detriment to software developers and lawyers. There is no fair solution but to eliminate the anomaly of patentable software. Turing's Machine is prior art on all bit manipulations, period, end of story, life can finally go on.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally a voice of reason! As an American, I think, like most of the posts I see hear by slashdot, that this French project is a good thing. What's so strange is that so many here, especially the upmodded posts, are pointing fingers at Americans and Google as the divisive ones, when nationalistic pride is clearlt the driving force behind this otherwise noble project. Is it divisive pride or necessary protection of the world's cultural heritage? It's BOTH.
It's just that some privileged classes are higher than mine. I don't know you personally to know whether your class has more privileges than mine, so many apologies if I suggested that this was so.
You know, sometimes it makes sense to hold a priviledged class responsible for its actions.
Peasant's Quest
Those guys are like the Taliban when they blew up my Super Buddha Bros. statues!!!
I made a lot of pertinent points in the reply, but to focus on the hierarchy...
I'm not too focused on the particulars on Maslow's hierarchy--indeed, I had to look it up just now. My emphasis was on the hierarchy aspect--that there are short term simple needs and longer term more subjective needs. There are reasons why suicide rates are higher in industrialized countries than poor ones. Once you don't worry about starvation and roving gangs of bandits anymore, there is a danger that you drift into despair if you don't find something fulfilling to do with your new freedom.
But, just from the brief reading I'm doing now and vague recollections from high school, I think Maslow meant something more specific by self-actualization. It's a improvement of your self specifically, not of your possessions, or your status, or your power, or your fame. That's not to say that MMOGs are incompatible with this. If you're sharpening your problem solving skills, or socializing and cooperating with others, or finding a new creative talent, then you can be reasonably said to be self actualizing. But gaining levels and collecting gold pieces? I'm not sure people so low functioning that this would be considered mind building should use networked computers. Which is why they invented single player console RPGs, though sadly they've shifted in focus away from kids 9 or 10 or so who might find the inventory management and strategies of such games stimulating to older teens and adults as mere escapism.
As far as what I want to do--well, I'm just making recommendations. However, since I believe that the principles I describe are what underlies our desire for fun, completely discarding them is something a corporations does at its own risk. I think a revolt against "treadmill"-ism is what doomed The Sims Online--a game that might have been a breath of fresh air in MMOGs ended being a parody of the worst aspects of online persistent gaming.
But so many of these commercial games are designed to not be played in moderation. Especially some of the ones with subscription business models. That doesn't mean they can't be enjoyable, and it doesn't mean they should be banned. But it does mean one should be careful of ones own behavior when you're playing. Try to stand apart from yourself, and ask yourself if this is what you want to be.
You certainly have no moral obligation to listen to my comments And, not knowing you, I may not have any actual comments about your particular game playing habits. For some people, the happiness they get from killing rats for an hour and gaining a level may be the best they can do in life. But do you really feel it is the best you can do personally?
The value systems of human beings are Hofstadter-esque strange loops. We can decide how much we value different value systems, and we can decide how much we value those different valuations, and so on, turtles all the way down. I'm not suggesting you pay my value system any credence. But I am suggesting a new way of looking at things and asking for an honest appraisal. That's what these MMORPGs are--new value systems produced by Sony corporation for our enjoyment. Do you value and enjoy their value system--or could there be a way of getting what you want without climbing their treadmill? Maybe yes, maybe no--but the first step is the asking.
Why do I bother trying to explain a new point of view? Because to some extent our values and behaviors are contagious. Memetic. Social. Whatever word you want to use. Free-will paradoxes and Indra's Net aside, each of our behaviors and expressions ends up influencing everyone else around us. I think any attempt at improving ourselves has to be both collective and non-coercive. The libertarians focus on the latter while the statists focus on the former, but both are necessary and therefore I can't side entirely with either.
Destroy all cross-media licenses!
But that's not the issue here. The issue is whether the state government should prohibit municipal governments from supplying such access. There is no possible way that could be a good idea. If you don't like government-WiFi, just vote against it at your town meeting. Your municipal government is closer to you than your state government--for the state to choose private corporations over town meetings seems like a huge blow to the culture participatory democracy our government was founded on.
I appreciate the sentiment, as I too would like to see less government involvement in this sort of thing, especially the war on some drugs.
But if moral nihilism is all that stands between you and totalitarianism, I think it's a lost cause. What you're talking about is throwing out all concept of "higher" good. It's a popular position to argue for, because it's easy. The conditional nature of normative statements is often implicit, and of course no normative statement can be concluded from objective, physical fact. But I don't think people really internalize the implications of such a view. People have evolved (genetically or memetically) an innate sense of beauty that they apply to all things subconsciously, even though the values of consumerism repeatedly try to stamp it out with commercial propaganda.
Like putting your thumb over a water hose, the more you try to discourage this sort of thinking, the more the pressure increases in those few places it escapes your grasp. You tell avery Americans all foods are "part of a healthy diet", fine. But that just makes them all the more likely to overreact to drug usage.
The real way to encourage your objective is to support noninterference, nonviolence, tolerance, pacificism, etc. Point out that legally discouraging things just breeds attitudes like yours.
Warnings about games/gambling/drugs etc. are pretty alarmist considering how few people actually harm themselves with the habit.
I disagree. I think games alone, if the individual is not careful, can be incredibly destructive. They target a particularly useful segment of society--the nerd/geek/asperger's segment, and manipulate their love of minutia into a hypnotic treadmill. No one should force these people to discard games, and there are quite a few games that don't try to appeal to false success to aid their addictiveness. But we should encourage players everywhere to take a step back from themselves, and look at what is really motivating them.
But it goes beyond games, drugs, and gambling. It's also food, television, and consumption in general. Add up the CDC statistics, and you'll find that diet and tobacco vastly outpace any other cause of death in America. But causes of death don't begin to touch it--what about the cause of wasted life? No one collects statistics on who ends up screaming on their death bed at all the opportunities they missed, the dreams unrealized. People are being trained from birth to define their lives in terms of the products they consume, size of their salaries, and their social rank. We refuse to allow ourselves to climb Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And it's turning us into diseased automatons leading lives of quiet desperation.
You are right to oppose legislation of "better" consumption, but there's no reason we have to abandon higher goodness to attain that goal.
Of course they can argue it. You can argue about anything. I mean, no, I can't argue that it makes you proud. Only you can answer that. However, I can argue that you shouldn't be proud of that. And you can argue that you should. Which is what is happening right here. As David Hume realized, ought and should statements and their negations cannot be derived from is statements.
But it is logically possible to argue from one "should" statement to another. For example, I can argue that if you believe that people should try to improve themselves mentally and physically, then some classes of video games should not be played. (NOTE: I did not say should be banned, I said should not be played.)
It is impossible for me to pull an Ayn Rand and try to justify my normative beliefs purely from first principles and observations of the world. (You should be careful--your ethical nihilism may be falling into this trap as well, depending on interpretation.) However, my suspicion is that most people, if they pull their fingers out their ears and stop screaming "la la la you can't tell me what I should do!" might actually discover they agree with enough of my normative premises to agree with my conclusion.
Hey, I'm not gonna force you to save yourself. But I just had some suggestions as to what products might be harmful to your mind and wasteful of your energies. You might have another notion of wasteful and harmful than I do. In which case, no one is forcing you to read what I have written.
If it was a seperate download, not included or facilitated in XP or IE, and allowed you to switch to other information providers, then while I can't speak for everyone I would say the same in that case.
However, the audience for video games seems to keep getting older and older, and I suspect we'll have video games for quite awhile.
But ask yourself why you REALLY like to play video games. What's fun about these things? And how do you feel about those reasons?
Is it because you want to face new challenges, socialize, and observe a new fantasy world? I doubt think anyone can argue these things are unhealthy, in moderation.
Or is it because you want the sense of accomplishment that comes from the level-up hamster wheel, which rewards you primarily for playing longer rather than playing better? Is it because your seeking an escape from reality?
(One could argue that these games give us the detachment from self that eastern religions advocate. I suspect otherwise, but that's far too complex to think about here.)
There was a scene from Minority Report in which someone was spending time in a virtual reality simulation of his peers praising him for receiving an imaginary reward. How much of the attractiveness of these MMORPGs comes from the very same desire for false success?
Things shouldn't be banned because they are unhealthy, but you shouldn't defend the healthiness of something just because someone is trying to ban it. The worth of an activity is in the eye of the beholder, but you shouldn't discard your own judgment just to spite people you disagree with.
Free yourself of all prejudice and bitterness, then ask yourself whether a desire for pre-programmed, treadmill success is healthy? Are you a better person after you have finished, or are you just older?
And, if any games developer happens to come down with an odd case of misplaced utilitarianism in capitalist world, maybe you should ask yourself what effect your game has on people. There are certainly MMOG games that lack any explicit level treadmill. Second Life comes to mind.
The human desire for fun exists in order to stretch our mental and physical abilities. Yet so many things we call "fun" actually contract these abilities. Worse, things we do to "relax" like watch television or smoke leave us even more stressed out and tired than when we started. The Taoists encourage us to be relaxed and alert, yet so many times we Westerners are entranced by our anxieties. We've grown so used to that state that for "fun" we invent new anxieties to entertain us on our computer and television screens.
Trying to stop it with lawsuits and laws is laughable, of course. But that does not stop my mourning.
The thing is, it doesn't really matter if he's crazy. Neither of us know how to spell the outgoing chairman's name. If the Dems had a candidate you liked, why would you vote against that candidate just because the chairman's a loon? His personal angry attidute will forever prevent him from being president, but as a chairman what matters is his organizing and fundraising skills, and perhaps his willingness to think outside establishment terms. The man has good ideas, he's just completely inappropriate for the public eye.
He may be overly antagonistic, but the Republicans managed to succeed despite having twice as much hate and venom as the Democrats--and at least Leftist hate is just anger at another point of view, not Ann Coulter-style racism. It was Kerry and the party establishment's attempt to seem moderate that doomed the campaign. Besides, if you were willing to go with Zell Miller, you've got no right to talk about venom.
It's good that he's a fiscal conservative. We might expect a lot of former Republicans (like myself--I voted for Bush in 2000) to realize their party no longer cares about fiscal conservatism--it's just big government for the sake of big business. The medical overhaul Bush insisted on is a great example of that--he has promised to veto any attempt to limit the windfall to drug companies. As politics switches its focus to domestic issues, Dean could end up looking like a moderate.
The promising thing about Dean is that he knows its not about moving to the center--Americans won't respect someone who capitulates for political convenience. But he also understands that strategic retreats are necessary on certain lost cause issues--like gun control.
The worrying thing about Dean and the Democratic party in general is that they've misunderstood the power of the internet and decentralized organization. They see it in terms of collecting money and volunteers to send to campaign in other states. But that's a foolish plan--people are alienated by out of staters coming to convince them to change their minds, as Dean should have learned in Iowa and Kerry should have learned in Ohio. Instead, internet resources should be aimed at getting people engaged in their own communities--whether its just getting people to volunteer in their own neighborhoods or even encourage people to run for local offices.
Don't forget, MMORPGs are services, not products. Marginal costs of production, unlike software, are not zero. It's not necessarily a natural monopoly--the more players you have, the more load you have on servers. Of course, fixed costs aren't zero, and if some company ever manages to handle a growing player base properly, network effects will be important (you want to play on the server all your friends play on.) But not all important, because as games phase in popularity players are tempted to switch to games with newer features.
I imagine there will always be some demand for fringe MMOGs--like Second Life or A Tale in the Desert. Just like the rest of the internet, people are fragmented by interest as much as by geography.
On the other hand, if people stared playing latency dependent MMORPGs, geography could actually start being a big deal.
Software patents exist by no less government fiat than the a state's exclusive ability to sell alcohol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Also, if Microsoft carries out their software patent threats, that will make Microsoft a coercive monopoly as well. Hell, I guess breaking your competitor's legs is just another way of trying to make their product more attractive than the next guys.
Hell, the game's requirement should merely be a pile of silicon, plastics, and metals, as well as a heat source. With some patience and some luck, you might experience a thermodynamic miracle, and the various components will form a 4 Ghz Pentium-based system with information on its hard drive equivalent to a registered copy of Half-Life 2. In fact, the box shouldn't even include any data CDs--just a license to use any copy of Half-Life 2 that spontaneously generates in statistical violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Um, yes, that is rather silly logic, because the purpose of extasy prohibition is to prevent harm to the purchaser. You aren't trying to claim that whoever is purchasing ads from Google is being harmed, are you? No, you're complaining about a third party.
A better analogy would be if the police arrested a car salesman because someone bought a car and intentionally ran someone over with it. The model you should look for is A purchases something from B in order to harm C. It makes no sense to blame B, when there are billions of perfectly legitimate uses for what B is selling.
Hey, it's your country, and if you think logic has gone out of style in your glorious new era of post-post-postmodernism, well, don't let us spoil your fun.
The bullshit part is that google.fr is sued rather than whoever bought the ad on google.fr. I mean, you Frenchies can pass a law that everyone must walk on their heads when selling a product, and no one's got any right to change it (except maybe the WTO) but everyone's got the right to call you pack of crazy yet ultimately harmless loons. You may have a different opinion in the USoA, but know what ? We don't care. And pretty soon, no one will care. France's economy, international clout, and demographics are in decline. I predict that by 2092 A.D. Arabic and English will be more common in France than French, and by 2137 A.D. the accent/dialect of English spoken in France will no longer even be considered particularly sexy or romantic. You'd better be ready to learn Sharia law to get a jump on the impending changes. All google wanted to do was let you use a search engine and make a bit of cash. Your senseless law has created an obstacle. Google loses a bit of cash, though in the worst possible case they'll just make google.com point to a French-language page hosted in another country if the user has a French ip (it probably does that already), so they probably won't lose that much. A minor annoyance, by far eclipsed by their problems here in America with their "Froogle" trademark. (What the...why am I suddenly walking on my head?)
You can say so, but this is completely false under 35 USC 101 and related case law.
I wasn't making a legal statement at all. It was simple fact--Windows XP has billions of lines of code, or so Microsoft tells us. Each line of code represents distinct intellectual labor on the part of Microsoft employees. You can deny this, but you're basically passing a law declaring pi to be 3, as the urban legend goes. Or like the fabled king who declared that the tides should stop.
If more people at Slashdot understood that, and spoke from that perspective, it would be a HUGE step toward forming some constructive criticism of the system and putting pressure to fix it where it belongs - on judges and congressmen.
Well, it's not the average slashdotter's job (and it's DEFINITELY not a job for a curmudgeon like me) to actually lobby judges and congressmen personally. We kinda smell funny. There are tech activist lawyers who actually know how things work, and they go and do it, sometimes with stinky donations from us. But here's the thing. The core problem is not a legal one, but an economic one.
I don't question the internal legal consistency of patent law, I'm saying it is unworkable in the real world. The whole problem can be boiled down to one economic reality--legal analysis of code is 90% of the time harder than actually writing it. Surely lawyers would agree--that's why they make more money than computer programmers.
Sadly, this contradicts the primary fixations of both legal and economics communities. In fact, the latter is far worse than the former. Too many of them refuse to accept that a commons can be more efficient than a regulated market if costs of compliance outweigh benefits.
It's just a bunch of turf wars. Lawyers, judges, congressmen, and economists can't simply retreat and admit that their presence in a market may actually be more expensive than their worth. It's all about sphere of influence. Some folks in the USPTO may realize the problem, but do they dare go before Congress and admit they should be doing less rather than more in one narrow field?
It might be better world if slashdotters and people in general participated more in our governing process, but as to whether that would actual help this issue, I do not have much faith there. To get bogged down in the actual letter of the law seems counter-productive--our sentiment is generally fueled by utilitarianism, not legal interpretation.
What DOES give me hope is the rising anti-patent and anti-big business (and sadly anti-American) tide of opinion in some other countries. Europe and Australia, to my understanding, still haven't adopted software patents (and probably not gene patents either), and if it eventually turns out that a great number of software products are available in other countries but not in America, (perhaps Linux itself one day?) that's really the only hope we have of changing the law here.
Anyway, like I say, I always act like a jerk on the internet for no reason other than it's the internet and that's what you're supposed to do (though I think whoever invented road rage has prior art on that), but it has been cool talking with you, so if you're still reading this (I'll check back), best of luck with your readings!
Oh, one other thing
This is how the system has worked for over a hundred years - to "fix" this would mean filing for a patent would cost in the neighborhood of $100,000 regardless of whether or not it eventually issues - and that's a solution I would rather not have.
I don't feel as strongly about this as I do about software patents, but I think that's actually the ideal solution. The person applying for a patent, the person who actually benefits from the patent, should pay the full costs of that patent. If the benefits of the patent don't outweigh the complete costs of enforcement throughout the legal system, then issuing that patent is just a drain on our economy. That alone would probably solve a great deal (not all) of the problems with patents.
LZH compression, while it may be a good example of a fairly issued patent, is nonetheless a PERFECT example of what's wrong with the system--because it was also a submarine patent. Whatever the justification of granting the patent originally, Unisys's underhanded way of offering up GIF as a standard file format and then later getting up in arms over patents is proof that the system needs to be dismantled.
Okay, my stance on software patents is that they are impossible to enforce uniformly. Windows XP has billions and billions of lines of code. Each line of code is a completely uniquely designed manufactured object. What mechanical device could be compared to that? The preposterousness of using $35 million dollars to analyze the work of billions of dollars of software coding should be obvious to all--legal analysis of a body of code is more difficult and expensive than actual analysis. The problem is that too many of things that get patented are things that could have been invented by undergrad interns like one-click shopping--or like probably all computer-human interface design patents ever issued--but require years of man-hours of highly educated labor to actually prove the uniqueness of.
Indeed, even if you are correct that slashdotters know nothing about patents, doesn't this once again prove my point with your words? Because many of these slashdotters are the ones writing the code covered by these patents to begin with.
The USPTO and legal sytem may work hard, but they've been assigned an impossible task. Rather than own up to that, they instead, by necessity, become completely arbitrary. They rationally satisfice by giving incomplete analysis to their work, because there is no possible way we could afford to pay them enough to TRULY analyze all code fairly and equitably without doubling our GDP.
In any event, "prior art means already patented" IS true in the real world 99.9% of the time, whatever the law says, whatever token motions various legal and executive entities go through occasionally. Not to mention that the ambiguities of prior art are nothing compared to the ambiguities of obviousness.
If you want to argue that USPTO isn't to blame for this, I guess I might agree. The system as it exists is arbitrary because it cannot be any other way. If the system was NOT arbitrary and unfair, there wouldn't be any reason to oppose software patents. The only reason I DON'T have to call a lawyer everytime I right a line of code is because all corporations now consider patent violation an unpredictable cost of doing business--software firms cannot also afford to become legal firms. Even Microsoft, no friend of slashdot, is learning that with many of the lawsuits against them.
This is precisely the type of argument that's so popular on Slashdot whenever someone expresses religious faith, and it is precisely the argument I offer in response to your unwillingness to consider that the documented statues and established practice of the USPTO are not what you have somehow come to believe.
Speaking of religious faith, your post reminds me of a theologian telling us that we must believe in God because we haven't spent anywhere near as many years studying the Bible that he did. Theologians and lawyers alike cannot stand when someone dares to cut their Gordian knot and note that the whole thing is based on premises of doubtful soundness. In the case of the legal system, the whole concept of rational satisficing is an immense threat to their future job security--many applications of legal analysis will cost more than the resulting benefits to society of said analysis.
Once upon a time, medieval theologians were also Master and Commander of society. Beware the wheel of fortune.
Please note that I am not disagreeing with your stance about software patents (however this is vaguely defined in general and especially thus far in our conversation), but rather where the source of the problem lies. Okay, my stance on software patents is that they are impossible to enforce uniformly. Windows XP has billions and billions of lines of code. Each line of code is a completely uniquely designed manufactured object. What mechanical device could be compared to that? The preposterousness of using $35 million dollars to analyze the work of billions of dollars of software coding should be obvious to all--legal analysis of a body of code is more difficult and expensive than actual analysis. The problem is that too many of things that get patented are things that could have been invented by undergrad interns like one-click shopping, but require years of man-hours of highly educated labor to actually prove the uniqueness of. Indeed, even if you are correct that slashdotters know nothing about patents, doesn't this once again prove my point with your words? Because many of these slashdotters are the ones writing the code to begin with. The USPTO and legal sytem may work hard, but they've been assigned an impossible task. Rather than own up to that, they instead, by necessity, become completely arbitrary. They rationally satisfice by giving incomplete analysis to their work, because there is no possible way we could afford to pay them enough to TRULY analyze all code fairly and equitably without doubling our GDP. In any event, "prior art means already patented" IS true in the real world 99.9% of the time, whatever the law says, whatever token motions various legal and executive entities go through occasionally. Not to mention that the ambiguities of prior art are nothing compared to the ambiguities of obviousness. If you want to argue that USPTO isn't to blame for this, I guess I might agree. The system as it exists is arbitrary because it cannot be any other way. If the system was NOT arbitrary and unfair, there wouldn't be any reason to oppose software patents. The only reason I DON'T have to call a lawyer everytime I right a line of code is because all corporations now consider patent violation an unpredictable cost of doing business--software firms cannot also afford to become legal firms. Even Microsoft, no friend of slashdot, is learning that with many of the lawsuits against them. This is precisely the type of argument that's so popular on Slashdot whenever someone expresses religious faith, and it is precisely the argument I offer in response to your unwillingness to consider that the documented statues and established practice of the USPTO are not what you have somehow come to believe. Speaking of religious faith, your post reminds me of a theologian telling us that we must believe in God because we haven't spent anywhere near as many years studying the Bible that he did. Theologians and lawyers alike cannot stand when someone dares to cut their Gordian knot and note that the whole thing is based on premises of doubtful soundness. In the case of the legal system, the whole concept of rational satisficing is an immense threat to their future job security--many applications of legal analysis will cost more than the resulting benefits to society of said analysis. Once upon a time, medieval theologians were also Master and Commander of society. Beware the wheel of fortune.
Case in point, people at Slashdot seem to firmly believe that the USPTO gets to decide what is novel or obvious, or more broadly, gets to interpret law. This notion could not be more false. The USPTO acts according to case law, and anything the USPTO does can ultimately be appealed to a Federal court - meaning that a failure to act according to existing case law would land the USPTO in the hot seat inside a courtroom.
Evidence or citation for this claim? From what we've seen, when a bad patent is issued, the lawsuit is between the person it is issued to and and the person infringing on it. Has there been any example of someone suing USPTO for a bad patent? If what you are saying is true, then the continued existence of some of the more ludicrous patents we've seen is the most damning possible thing any thing could be of our legal system.
In otherwords, whether your right or wrong, you're still wrong. I don't know what your job is, but you've demonstrated far more ignorance of both law and technology than the average slashdotter exhibits--so I pray to God you're talking out of your ass, and not actually in a position of power within the system--indeed, in that case, your very existence would be the ultimate proof that your defense of the legal system is flawed.
Regarding the issue of "prior art means 'already patented'", this is, of course, slanderously false. There are, however, incredible advantages to using existing patents as prior art over non-patent literature, the least of which are unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112.
Nice one. Call someone slanderously false, but then admit that he or she is absolutely correct in your next sentence. Did it occur to you that they were probably speaking De Facto rather than De Jure?
Until every Joe Nobody's website meets those criteria, searching the wide internet for that mythical piece of prior art that sufficiently teaches a claimed invention is often the definition of time wasted on the government's dime.
In other words, prior art means 'already patented'. That may not be what the law says, but that's what happens in the real world. Perhaps you need to spend more time thinking about what you've read, rather than reading more.
Here's the problem. If every time I write a line of code, I have to call a lawyer, then software is going to be many, many, many orders of magnitude more expensive. Governments that refuse to accept the American software patent regime will accomplish way more than we will. American corporations that are wising up to how broken the current system will just have to outsource as much of their business as they can--they won't be able to sell in America, but if we don't wise up how insane our legal system has become we won't have much of an economy worth selling to anyway.
What is slowly dawning on everyone is that a truly fair and uniform software patent regime would cost us many, many times more man hours of legal labor per year than the number of lawyers on our entire planet times the number of hours in an entire century.
A lawyer for every line of code. Every web page must have "unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112. "
This can't happen. So we are left with a completely arbitrary and kind of random system that offers some benefits and risks to major corporations, immense benefits to lawyers, and immense detriment to software developers and lawyers. There is no fair solution but to eliminate the anomaly of patentable software. Turing's Machine is prior art on all bit manipulations, period, end of story, life can finally go on.
You attack the