Yes, certainly we cannot abandon linear computation. The point I was trying to make is that the merit of 3D computational structures isn't nullified by problems with heat dissipation. They would be limited in the sense that they would need to be very parallel -- but that is still useful for a vast number of problems.
I'm not sure I would call the neurons either analog or digital -- they are more complicated than that. But regardless, both the brain and a computer do computations, which is the important aspect in this case.
Not that brain heat dissipation matters for the discussion (as we already know roughly how much energy the brain consumes), but as far as I can recall, some theories in evolutionary biology assumes that heat dissipation from the head actually has been a "problem".
You have a point in that the body also consumes power, and is a required support system for the brain (much like my computer needs a PSU, motherboard, memory circuits, etc). However, 100 W is still extremely low from an energy per computation perspective.
Indeed, although if the need for more processing power arises from increasing data sets, Amdahl's law isn't as relevant. (Amdahl's law applies when you try to solve an existing problem faster, not when you increase the size of a problem and try to solve it equally fast as before, which is often the case.)
I wasn't trying to say that we can parallelize every problem -- I was commenting that 3D processing structures might very well have merit, since it is useful in cases where you can parallelize. And those cases are not few.
First is heat. Volume (a cubic function) grows faster than surface area (a square function). It's hard enough as it is to manage the hotspots on a 2D chip with a heatsink and fan on its largest side. With a small number of z layers, you would at the very least need to make sure the hotspots don't stack.
I'm not saying your point is entirely invalid, however, heat isn't necessarily a problem if you can parallelize the computation. Rather the opposite, in fact. If you decrease clock frequency and voltage, you get a non-linear decrease of power for a linear decrease of processing power. This means two slower cores can produce the same total number of FLOPS as one fast core, while using less power (meaning less heat to dissipate). As an extreme example of where this can get you, consider the human brain -- a massively parallel 3D processing structure. The brain has an estimated processing power of 38*10^15 operations per second (according to this reference), while consuming about 20 W of power (reference). That is several orders of magnitude more operations per watt than current CPU:s have.
Apologies for going slightly off-topic, but since I can't turn down an interesting semantic discussion;-):
Unless I'm mistaken, in all use cases a "fact" is still some kind of statement or information that can be true or false. For example, the statement "The temperature of this object is 300 degrees kelvin" can be a fact. However, the temperature itself is a quantity. You can measure the quantity, which results in a fact, and you can verify the fact by measuring the quantity again, but you cannot "measure" the fact.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the study (it is apparently not accessible from Sweden through the link).
This study measures a fact (death certificates vs reported drink rates).
A fact is not something that you measure. You can collect statistical data, and you can try to infer a conclusion from the data. There are all sorts of ways to make the wrong conclusion though, depending on how the data was collected, if it involved subjectivity somewhere, if there are some underlying mechanisms you are not modelling, whether you are incorrectly assuming that correlation implies causation etc. etc. (see for instance Wikipedia.)
The study might measure a number of death certificates (where? when?) and reported drinking rates (reported how?) as you say, but whether that means that "Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers" (if that is even what they study says, I'm quoting the Time article) is a rather far-reaching conclusion someone has made, possibly incorrectly. Maybe they forgot to compensate for some important factor; Perhaps people with predisposition for some deceases (are told to) avoid alcohol? Perhaps those who avoid alcohol have some personality trait that make them more stressed, working longer hours, or sleeping less, which in turn could be detrimental to life expectancy? And if there in fact is a positive connection between drinking and life expectancy, does it apply to everyone or just a small part of the population? Maybe alcohol works as a light medication for depression, helping some but harming most?
Facts can vary with each collections but don't tend to reverse.
There is a difference of scale, so to speak. Tailing someone is possible and legal, but it requires resources (probably something like 10 people working full time, if you would want to follow someone 24/7 with two officers in the tailing car). That resource cost is a disincentive and restricts the use to cases where a tail really is necessary, and it limits the time you keep tailing someone. If all you need is to attach a reasonably cheap tracker to a car, you can track people routinely and during much longer periods of time. For this reason, use of tracking devices is not the same as following people around.
It depends upon what constitutes a problem, doesn't it?
Not really, no. It may depend on whether there is a problem or not, but if there is one and they decide it's not worth fixing it before starting to ship, then they are not "giving a shit" about people having the problem.
In any case, the problem would be that the phone can allegedly drop calls by the mere fact that you grip it differently. Not so much that the reception is bad per se.
But I actually don't think this issue really needs to be that big a deal -- they dealt with it fairly well by offering free bumpers, and much of the debate may very well be blown out of proportion (again, I don't know how big the problem is in practice). But this "we knew exactly what we were doing all along" reasoning from Jobs doesn't necessarily helps their case PR wise. If people really are experiencing this, it just makes them come off as jerks. They should admit they may have made a design mistake (it should not be as easy to accidentally short-circuit the antennas), offer a solution (like free bumpers) and be done with it.
I'm not sure how that translates into not giving a shit.
The expression was a quote from the parent. To put it a perhaps bit more elegantly, it means that they went through with the design despite knowing it had a reception problem. This is essentially precisely what you just said (although Steve Jobs' word should probably be take with a grain of salt given the fact that he has to handle a PR situation at the moment).
I'm not going to go into a debate about how bad this problem is from a technical standpoint, since I know too little about it. But at the moment I am more inclined to believe that they have screwed up the antenna design at least to a degree, even though they won't admit it, rather than that they meant it to be like this.
I don't think it's a matter of saying "We're better than they are" as it is a matter of saying "before you accuse us of not testing, take a good look at our investment in testing facilities". Sure, the testing procedures may have been (probably were) flawed, but that's a separate issue from the rampant accusations of them not giving a shit.
Is it separate? If they have all these testing facilities and the testing procedure were in fact not flawed, then this problem is not caused by negligence but rather deliberate prioritization (i.e. time to market and/or development costs were more important). It other words, it would mean they really did not "give a shit".
I'm not certain boasting about their testing abilities is the rhetorically smartest thing to do at this moment.
Shiny new weapons have the distinct advantage that the guys holding the purse can look at and touch what they have paid for once it has been built. It is usually much harder to raise funds for "soft" work, I guess both for the psychological reason that it's not as easy to put a mental value into something that is abstract, but also for the very practical reason that it's harder for the buyers to verify that they actually got what they were promised.
Honestly mods, how can the parent get any closer to a school book example of a flamebait? He doesn't respond to anything the GP said, nor give any arguments of his own. The fact that it was modded insightful shows how politicized the global warming debate is.
Look, this debate can evidently go on forever, and I have better things to do. I could provide arguments against most of what you said, but fundamentally, you are the one who wants the government to hand out monopoly rights to private entities, so frankly, the burden of proof is on you to motivate why this gains the public. And I mean solid data, not theoretical arguments or simple assertions.
As a software developer, also designing and working with various hardware solutions (covered by patents), I can tell you that software patents helps me nothing. In particular when they are granted for trivial things (like animating a book page in a certain way). Patents are expensive to file for, they are hard to make any money out of, and the tens or hundreds of thousands of existing software patents makes development a legal quagmire. The primary reason to have them is to fsck with you competitors, forcing them to jump through hoops to solve the same problems.
As for a "test" for triviality, Swedish legislation for instance says something in the lines of: If an expert in the field posed with the same problem could likely come up with the same solution, then it is trivial. So in this case, if there is a significant chance that a MMI-expert would think of making the page transparent, while trying to find a good way to animate page turning, then it is trivial. I think even this is a bit loose, but finding some reasonable phrasing isn't the problem if you accept that in the end it has got to come down to subjective judgement somewhere.
That's not a test, just a process... What test do they apply? The important thing about any test for obviousness isn't "are the people reviewing the application or patent experts or are they performing peer-review", it's "are they engaging in hindsight?" Because everything is obvious in hindsight. You can have the top experts in the world doing your review process, and they're still prone to using hindsight. And if they do, their judgment is invalid, by definition.
But you can't get away from that. Many things are obvious in hindsight, but some of them were obvious without the hindsight as well. This is a judgement call someone has to make, or we will have patents on obvious things (which is a bad thing). The situation is exactly the same for peer-reviewed journals: unless what you are describing in your article is novel and non-obvious, it does not deserve publication. And we do the same with criminal law (is there unreasonable doubt?). You can help by writing guidelines and establishing precedence, but someone or some people still has to evaluate each case. If you want a perfectly "fair" process, you'll get a degenerate one, and that is worse than having a somewhat subjective but balanced process.
Areas where IP legislation isn't upheld to the same degree: China, Vietnam... a few others like that. Consumer products exist there because they're imported from countries where IP protection exists. So, no... Not so much.
And yet strangely, when I have been to China I have found consumer products not available in the west. (Or [Citation needed], as you would have put it.)
Being "first to market" is useful in industries where startup capital is a requirement. It's not a requirement in the software industry, where you can duplicate someone else's million-dollar efforts for a penny. There is no advantage merely to being first to market, without IP protection.
And here I thought we were discussing patents, and not copyright. No, you cannot duplicate the page flipping animation efforts for a penny, if you mean a software having the animation. You can duplicate the idea of animating a page for a penny, but on the other hand i wager it cost Microsoft about as much for someone to get the idea in the first place.
In software, ideas cost essentially nothing (unless they are very theoretical, in which case we are talking about math). Implementation costs money, but that is covered by copyright, not patents.
It wouldn't have gained society anything to give William Golding a patent on stories about "children stranded on a deserted island", but giving him a copyright on Lord of the Flies was a good thing.
Both economics and history support my position.
Here we disagree again.
And pre-patent protection, how many consumer products were there? Not many. That's my point... NOT that "every piece of software would be sold with ginormous NDA licenses" but that no software would be sold to consumers. You know, similar to the way consumers didn't get access to many inventions pre-patents. Again, history and economics are on my side.
I don't know where you read your history, but that is very much not the case. Consumer software existed well before software patents where being handed out, and it continues to exist in parts of Europe where software patents still have not been upheld. There is really no evidence to support your position, and I don't know where you got it from. Otherwise, please do provide the evidence.
Most products - including "most clothes for instance" - have IP protection. In fact, almost every product has IP protection of some sort.
Gosh, if only Coca-Cola had intellectual property. Oh, wait... They have one of the strongest trademarks in the world, they have many trademarked and copyrighted products, they have design patents on their bottles, and they even
Sure, there's no clear test for "what's obvious" or not, but can you articulate one?
There could be some sort of review process, consulting a number of experts, similar to peer-reviewed scientific journals. Because no matter how you do it or where you draw the line, in the end it will always come down to someones judgement. There will never exist a "mechanical" definition that can be applied with absolute objectivity, unless you make it a degenerate case such as "nothing is obvious" (almost where we are today) or "everything is obvious".
... or "requiring and enforcing major licenses". If you think software licenses are oppressive now, consider if each and every user had to sign an NDA to use software. More likely, software would only be available to the very wealthy or to large corporations, and so such NDAs would be more easily enforced. In other words, there wouldn't be consumer products, because there wouldn't be economic value in something that your competitor could easily reverse engineer and sell, without any government-enforced monopoly protection.
Frankly, I believe that's a bad thing. I like having consumer products.
Consumer products would continue to exist just as they are today, just like they do in areas where IP legislation isn't upheld to the same degree, and just as they did before software patents started to be approved. Of course there is still value in adding a page flipping animation. Obvious or not, coming up with the idea carries an infinitesimal cost in relation to the market size, and being first to market with it gives you an advantage. You think innovation would stop, I do not.
The idea of slapping an NDA to a consumer product is rather silly. Not only would it do nothing to prevent the ideas from leaking out, but it would be a huge disincentive for customers comparing products. Those without the NDA would sell more e-books.
And by the way, the market is littered with products that are easy to copy and/or carries no IP protection, and they are still profitable. This is the case for any kind of commodity (oil, food, steel, wood etc.) as well as many other products (most clothes for instance). You can still make a cheaper or higher quality "copy" than your competitors. Or you can brand them -- Coca Cola still makes incredible amounts of money selling a product of which there are many equivalent (and cheaper!) "copies".
No, my argument - which is the legal one, upheld by the Federal courts - is that everything that is done for the first time and isn't a trivial combination of things already done is presumptively non-obvious.
And this is a trivial combination of animation, transparency and touch gestures. Regardless, the current legal state (in the US anyway) isn't necessarily a good one.
So you mean that if Microsoft wouldn't get a patent on their page flipping graphics, they would keep it a secret and we would never know about it? How exactly would they go about that? By not selling any e-books?
By black boxing their systems, by requiring and enforcing major licenses to use their software, etc.
Seriously, your whole argument boils down to "it's obvious... why? Because, having read it, I say so. Why didn't I come up with before? Well, I totally could have, if I wanted to. [...]
And your argument is that everything that is done for the first time is by definition not obvious. This completely neglects the fact that many things are done only when the need arises, or when technology makes it possible. Someone has got to be first, regardless of how simple it is.
[...] I just don't like coming up with commercially valuable ideas, because I'm hardcore like that."
I make my living coming up with commercially valuable ideas. Do you?
Actually, as you note most ideas are never written down, so people have to keep coming up with them. It gains society quite a bit to hand out time-limited monopolies to people who disclose their ideas. It reduces the need to constantly reinvent the wheel.
If that really were the case, how come software developers essentially never go through patent databases to find ideas when they are looking for a solution to a problem? It may be a nice idea on paper, but in practice the patent system really doesn't work the way you think. In fact, it is often a good idea not to do patent searches simply to avoid exposing yourself to liability for knowingly infringing on a patent. Today it has become near impossible to write a moderately complex piece of software without accidentally infringing on several patents.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage inventors to add to the wealth of knowledge in the public domain by disclosing their inventions, instead of keeping them trade secrets.
So you mean that if Microsoft wouldn't get a patent on their page flipping graphics, they would keep it a secret and we would never know about it? How exactly would they go about that? By not selling any e-books?
This patent fulfills the purpose of the patent system even less with the definition you gave.
Either because no one had needed to before, or people really have been doing it, and you just don't know about it.
And just because you don't find it obvious doesn't mean it deserves a patent. The question is if it is obvious to an expert in the field. Thinking "hey, why don't we make the page transparent" and calling that an invention really is ridiculous. Name an area in computing and I am sure the slashdot crowd could come up with twenty ideas of similar technological height within an hour.
The purpose of the patent system isn't to reward anyone who has an idea (and registers it). Ideas are cheap, and anyone can have them. Most are never written down, and fewer still are realized. It gains society nothing to hand out monopolies for each and everyone who fills out a form. The purpose of the patent system is to protect those who have invested a lot to create an invention, so that they may regain their losses. The steam engine required empirical research and engineering work, and the patent would contain drawings and instructions on how to recreate the machine. It was a lot more than simply saying "hey, maybe we could use steam to turn a wheel".
What you described is easily thought up during five minutes of brainstorming by any reasonably creative person. Do you really think we (the society) should grant them a 20 year monopoly on that idea, for them to regain their "research costs"?
I don't know when it happened, but it seems today people view patents like some kind of intellectual homesteading. "I claimed this first, so it is mine!"
Nor am I a physicist, but from what I can understand of Wikipedia, the Rydberg constant is a derived value using quantum mechanics. So if it is off, then some more fundamental constant is off (like the elementary charge or the speed of light), or the theory is wrong.
"Hell" might have religious origins but these days it's just a standard english word in nearly any use-case.
The SI unit system is used in a lot more languages than English though. (SI stands for Système international, you know.) Personally, I'd rather have some systematic naming scheme for the higher order prefixes.
I also think it's kind of pointless to standardize on a name that will likely offend a lot of people, even if you and I have no problem with it, just because it makes you chuckle the first couple of times you hear it.
You are asserting a lot of things which aren't necessarily true.
You gave a lot of examples of dictators, claiming a war is/would be needed to remove them, yet very few of them lost their power due to being invaded. Looking at history, I'd say the proven ways in which a country has gotten rid of a dictator are: Due to him(/her?) dying of old age; due to being overthrown by the people (not seldom quite peacefully, as those siding with the dictator generally tend to give up when they realize they cannot win -- as an example, read up on how Otpor! overthrew Milosevic, which you incidentally claimed could only have been removed by force); or by gradually giving up his/her power, as has been the case with many European countries as they progressed to become constitutional monarchies.
Invading a country and getting rid of a dictator doesn't automatically mean it makes the situation better for the people, even in a reasonably long term perspective. Iraq is still not a great place to live, in fact, right now it's likely worse than when Saddam ruled. The primary difference is perhaps that there is no longer a single individual at the top to which we can attribute all the horrors going on.
And finally, this whole argument that sometimes you need to go to war to overthrow dictators is rather academical given that nations never go to war unless they think it ultimately gains their own population, or in some cases the political leadership. If they do, the leaders are not doing their job properly. You may not agree this is how it should work, but this is how it works.
Considering how expensive, brutal and dehumanizing a war is, you'd have to come up with more than simple assertions to convince me, and hopefully most others, that there is absolutely no other workable recourse.
...and a symphony is just a bunch of harmonic pressure waves at the same time. Seriously though, not that I would call this groundbreaking news in any way, but I do at least find it kind of fascinating to hear how "instrument like" the Alfvén waves of a coronal mass ejection apparently sounds like. The fact that you have to shift the waveform in the frequency domain to the audible region to be able to listen to it doesn't make the waveform itself less interesting. It's exactly the same thing they do with colors in space telescope photos, since we obviously can't see in x-ray for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, certainly we cannot abandon linear computation. The point I was trying to make is that the merit of 3D computational structures isn't nullified by problems with heat dissipation. They would be limited in the sense that they would need to be very parallel -- but that is still useful for a vast number of problems.
I'm not sure I would call the neurons either analog or digital -- they are more complicated than that. But regardless, both the brain and a computer do computations, which is the important aspect in this case.
Not that brain heat dissipation matters for the discussion (as we already know roughly how much energy the brain consumes), but as far as I can recall, some theories in evolutionary biology assumes that heat dissipation from the head actually has been a "problem".
You have a point in that the body also consumes power, and is a required support system for the brain (much like my computer needs a PSU, motherboard, memory circuits, etc). However, 100 W is still extremely low from an energy per computation perspective.
Indeed, although if the need for more processing power arises from increasing data sets, Amdahl's law isn't as relevant. (Amdahl's law applies when you try to solve an existing problem faster, not when you increase the size of a problem and try to solve it equally fast as before, which is often the case.)
I wasn't trying to say that we can parallelize every problem -- I was commenting that 3D processing structures might very well have merit, since it is useful in cases where you can parallelize. And those cases are not few.
First is heat. Volume (a cubic function) grows faster than surface area (a square function). It's hard enough as it is to manage the hotspots on a 2D chip with a heatsink and fan on its largest side. With a small number of z layers, you would at the very least need to make sure the hotspots don't stack.
I'm not saying your point is entirely invalid, however, heat isn't necessarily a problem if you can parallelize the computation. Rather the opposite, in fact. If you decrease clock frequency and voltage, you get a non-linear decrease of power for a linear decrease of processing power. This means two slower cores can produce the same total number of FLOPS as one fast core, while using less power (meaning less heat to dissipate). As an extreme example of where this can get you, consider the human brain -- a massively parallel 3D processing structure. The brain has an estimated processing power of 38*10^15 operations per second (according to this reference), while consuming about 20 W of power (reference). That is several orders of magnitude more operations per watt than current CPU:s have.
Apologies for going slightly off-topic, but since I can't turn down an interesting semantic discussion ;-) :
Unless I'm mistaken, in all use cases a "fact" is still some kind of statement or information that can be true or false. For example, the statement "The temperature of this object is 300 degrees kelvin" can be a fact. However, the temperature itself is a quantity. You can measure the quantity, which results in a fact, and you can verify the fact by measuring the quantity again, but you cannot "measure" the fact.
This study measures a fact (death certificates vs reported drink rates).
A fact is not something that you measure. You can collect statistical data, and you can try to infer a conclusion from the data. There are all sorts of ways to make the wrong conclusion though, depending on how the data was collected, if it involved subjectivity somewhere, if there are some underlying mechanisms you are not modelling, whether you are incorrectly assuming that correlation implies causation etc. etc. (see for instance Wikipedia.)
The study might measure a number of death certificates (where? when?) and reported drinking rates (reported how?) as you say, but whether that means that "Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers" (if that is even what they study says, I'm quoting the Time article) is a rather far-reaching conclusion someone has made, possibly incorrectly. Maybe they forgot to compensate for some important factor; Perhaps people with predisposition for some deceases (are told to) avoid alcohol? Perhaps those who avoid alcohol have some personality trait that make them more stressed, working longer hours, or sleeping less, which in turn could be detrimental to life expectancy? And if there in fact is a positive connection between drinking and life expectancy, does it apply to everyone or just a small part of the population? Maybe alcohol works as a light medication for depression, helping some but harming most?
Facts can vary with each collections but don't tend to reverse.
Scientific conclusions change all the time.
There is a difference of scale, so to speak. Tailing someone is possible and legal, but it requires resources (probably something like 10 people working full time, if you would want to follow someone 24/7 with two officers in the tailing car). That resource cost is a disincentive and restricts the use to cases where a tail really is necessary, and it limits the time you keep tailing someone. If all you need is to attach a reasonably cheap tracker to a car, you can track people routinely and during much longer periods of time. For this reason, use of tracking devices is not the same as following people around.
It depends upon what constitutes a problem, doesn't it?
Not really, no. It may depend on whether there is a problem or not, but if there is one and they decide it's not worth fixing it before starting to ship, then they are not "giving a shit" about people having the problem.
In any case, the problem would be that the phone can allegedly drop calls by the mere fact that you grip it differently. Not so much that the reception is bad per se.
But I actually don't think this issue really needs to be that big a deal -- they dealt with it fairly well by offering free bumpers, and much of the debate may very well be blown out of proportion (again, I don't know how big the problem is in practice). But this "we knew exactly what we were doing all along" reasoning from Jobs doesn't necessarily helps their case PR wise. If people really are experiencing this, it just makes them come off as jerks. They should admit they may have made a design mistake (it should not be as easy to accidentally short-circuit the antennas), offer a solution (like free bumpers) and be done with it.
I'm not sure how that translates into not giving a shit.
The expression was a quote from the parent. To put it a perhaps bit more elegantly, it means that they went through with the design despite knowing it had a reception problem. This is essentially precisely what you just said (although Steve Jobs' word should probably be take with a grain of salt given the fact that he has to handle a PR situation at the moment).
I'm not going to go into a debate about how bad this problem is from a technical standpoint, since I know too little about it. But at the moment I am more inclined to believe that they have screwed up the antenna design at least to a degree, even though they won't admit it, rather than that they meant it to be like this.
I don't think it's a matter of saying "We're better than they are" as it is a matter of saying "before you accuse us of not testing, take a good look at our investment in testing facilities". Sure, the testing procedures may have been (probably were) flawed, but that's a separate issue from the rampant accusations of them not giving a shit.
Is it separate? If they have all these testing facilities and the testing procedure were in fact not flawed, then this problem is not caused by negligence but rather deliberate prioritization (i.e. time to market and/or development costs were more important). It other words, it would mean they really did not "give a shit".
I'm not certain boasting about their testing abilities is the rhetorically smartest thing to do at this moment.
Shiny new weapons have the distinct advantage that the guys holding the purse can look at and touch what they have paid for once it has been built. It is usually much harder to raise funds for "soft" work, I guess both for the psychological reason that it's not as easy to put a mental value into something that is abstract, but also for the very practical reason that it's harder for the buyers to verify that they actually got what they were promised.
By your logic every single modern day camera is actually a DSLR because they use one lens and are digital.
...including the IPhone itself before it was modified.
Honestly mods, how can the parent get any closer to a school book example of a flamebait? He doesn't respond to anything the GP said, nor give any arguments of his own. The fact that it was modded insightful shows how politicized the global warming debate is.
Look, this debate can evidently go on forever, and I have better things to do. I could provide arguments against most of what you said, but fundamentally, you are the one who wants the government to hand out monopoly rights to private entities, so frankly, the burden of proof is on you to motivate why this gains the public. And I mean solid data, not theoretical arguments or simple assertions.
As a software developer, also designing and working with various hardware solutions (covered by patents), I can tell you that software patents helps me nothing. In particular when they are granted for trivial things (like animating a book page in a certain way). Patents are expensive to file for, they are hard to make any money out of, and the tens or hundreds of thousands of existing software patents makes development a legal quagmire. The primary reason to have them is to fsck with you competitors, forcing them to jump through hoops to solve the same problems.
As for a "test" for triviality, Swedish legislation for instance says something in the lines of: If an expert in the field posed with the same problem could likely come up with the same solution, then it is trivial. So in this case, if there is a significant chance that a MMI-expert would think of making the page transparent, while trying to find a good way to animate page turning, then it is trivial. I think even this is a bit loose, but finding some reasonable phrasing isn't the problem if you accept that in the end it has got to come down to subjective judgement somewhere.
That's not a test, just a process... What test do they apply? The important thing about any test for obviousness isn't "are the people reviewing the application or patent experts or are they performing peer-review", it's "are they engaging in hindsight?" Because everything is obvious in hindsight. You can have the top experts in the world doing your review process, and they're still prone to using hindsight. And if they do, their judgment is invalid, by definition.
But you can't get away from that. Many things are obvious in hindsight, but some of them were obvious without the hindsight as well. This is a judgement call someone has to make, or we will have patents on obvious things (which is a bad thing). The situation is exactly the same for peer-reviewed journals: unless what you are describing in your article is novel and non-obvious, it does not deserve publication. And we do the same with criminal law (is there unreasonable doubt?). You can help by writing guidelines and establishing precedence, but someone or some people still has to evaluate each case. If you want a perfectly "fair" process, you'll get a degenerate one, and that is worse than having a somewhat subjective but balanced process.
Areas where IP legislation isn't upheld to the same degree: China, Vietnam... a few others like that. Consumer products exist there because they're imported from countries where IP protection exists. So, no... Not so much.
And yet strangely, when I have been to China I have found consumer products not available in the west. (Or [Citation needed], as you would have put it.)
Being "first to market" is useful in industries where startup capital is a requirement. It's not a requirement in the software industry, where you can duplicate someone else's million-dollar efforts for a penny. There is no advantage merely to being first to market, without IP protection.
And here I thought we were discussing patents, and not copyright. No, you cannot duplicate the page flipping animation efforts for a penny, if you mean a software having the animation. You can duplicate the idea of animating a page for a penny, but on the other hand i wager it cost Microsoft about as much for someone to get the idea in the first place.
In software, ideas cost essentially nothing (unless they are very theoretical, in which case we are talking about math). Implementation costs money, but that is covered by copyright, not patents.
It wouldn't have gained society anything to give William Golding a patent on stories about "children stranded on a deserted island", but giving him a copyright on Lord of the Flies was a good thing.
Both economics and history support my position.
Here we disagree again.
And pre-patent protection, how many consumer products were there? Not many. That's my point... NOT that "every piece of software would be sold with ginormous NDA licenses" but that no software would be sold to consumers. You know, similar to the way consumers didn't get access to many inventions pre-patents. Again, history and economics are on my side.
I don't know where you read your history, but that is very much not the case. Consumer software existed well before software patents where being handed out, and it continues to exist in parts of Europe where software patents still have not been upheld. There is really no evidence to support your position, and I don't know where you got it from. Otherwise, please do provide the evidence.
Most products - including "most clothes for instance" - have IP protection. In fact, almost every product has IP protection of some sort.
Gosh, if only Coca-Cola had intellectual property. Oh, wait... They have one of the strongest trademarks in the world, they have many trademarked and copyrighted products, they have design patents on their bottles, and they even
Sure, there's no clear test for "what's obvious" or not, but can you articulate one?
There could be some sort of review process, consulting a number of experts, similar to peer-reviewed scientific journals. Because no matter how you do it or where you draw the line, in the end it will always come down to someones judgement. There will never exist a "mechanical" definition that can be applied with absolute objectivity, unless you make it a degenerate case such as "nothing is obvious" (almost where we are today) or "everything is obvious".
... or "requiring and enforcing major licenses". If you think software licenses are oppressive now, consider if each and every user had to sign an NDA to use software. More likely, software would only be available to the very wealthy or to large corporations, and so such NDAs would be more easily enforced. In other words, there wouldn't be consumer products, because there wouldn't be economic value in something that your competitor could easily reverse engineer and sell, without any government-enforced monopoly protection. Frankly, I believe that's a bad thing. I like having consumer products.
Consumer products would continue to exist just as they are today, just like they do in areas where IP legislation isn't upheld to the same degree, and just as they did before software patents started to be approved. Of course there is still value in adding a page flipping animation. Obvious or not, coming up with the idea carries an infinitesimal cost in relation to the market size, and being first to market with it gives you an advantage. You think innovation would stop, I do not.
The idea of slapping an NDA to a consumer product is rather silly. Not only would it do nothing to prevent the ideas from leaking out, but it would be a huge disincentive for customers comparing products. Those without the NDA would sell more e-books.
And by the way, the market is littered with products that are easy to copy and/or carries no IP protection, and they are still profitable. This is the case for any kind of commodity (oil, food, steel, wood etc.) as well as many other products (most clothes for instance). You can still make a cheaper or higher quality "copy" than your competitors. Or you can brand them -- Coca Cola still makes incredible amounts of money selling a product of which there are many equivalent (and cheaper!) "copies".
No, my argument - which is the legal one, upheld by the Federal courts - is that everything that is done for the first time and isn't a trivial combination of things already done is presumptively non-obvious.
And this is a trivial combination of animation, transparency and touch gestures. Regardless, the current legal state (in the US anyway) isn't necessarily a good one.
So you mean that if Microsoft wouldn't get a patent on their page flipping graphics, they would keep it a secret and we would never know about it? How exactly would they go about that? By not selling any e-books?
By black boxing their systems, by requiring and enforcing major licenses to use their software, etc.
Black boxing an interface? In a consumer product?
Seriously, your whole argument boils down to "it's obvious... why? Because, having read it, I say so. Why didn't I come up with before? Well, I totally could have, if I wanted to. [...]
And your argument is that everything that is done for the first time is by definition not obvious. This completely neglects the fact that many things are done only when the need arises, or when technology makes it possible. Someone has got to be first, regardless of how simple it is.
[...] I just don't like coming up with commercially valuable ideas, because I'm hardcore like that."
I make my living coming up with commercially valuable ideas. Do you?
Actually, as you note most ideas are never written down, so people have to keep coming up with them. It gains society quite a bit to hand out time-limited monopolies to people who disclose their ideas. It reduces the need to constantly reinvent the wheel.
If that really were the case, how come software developers essentially never go through patent databases to find ideas when they are looking for a solution to a problem? It may be a nice idea on paper, but in practice the patent system really doesn't work the way you think. In fact, it is often a good idea not to do patent searches simply to avoid exposing yourself to liability for knowingly infringing on a patent. Today it has become near impossible to write a moderately complex piece of software without accidentally infringing on several patents.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage inventors to add to the wealth of knowledge in the public domain by disclosing their inventions, instead of keeping them trade secrets.
So you mean that if Microsoft wouldn't get a patent on their page flipping graphics, they would keep it a secret and we would never know about it? How exactly would they go about that? By not selling any e-books?
This patent fulfills the purpose of the patent system even less with the definition you gave.
Either because no one had needed to before, or people really have been doing it, and you just don't know about it.
And just because you don't find it obvious doesn't mean it deserves a patent. The question is if it is obvious to an expert in the field. Thinking "hey, why don't we make the page transparent" and calling that an invention really is ridiculous. Name an area in computing and I am sure the slashdot crowd could come up with twenty ideas of similar technological height within an hour.
The purpose of the patent system isn't to reward anyone who has an idea (and registers it). Ideas are cheap, and anyone can have them. Most are never written down, and fewer still are realized. It gains society nothing to hand out monopolies for each and everyone who fills out a form. The purpose of the patent system is to protect those who have invested a lot to create an invention, so that they may regain their losses. The steam engine required empirical research and engineering work, and the patent would contain drawings and instructions on how to recreate the machine. It was a lot more than simply saying "hey, maybe we could use steam to turn a wheel".
What you described is easily thought up during five minutes of brainstorming by any reasonably creative person. Do you really think we (the society) should grant them a 20 year monopoly on that idea, for them to regain their "research costs"?
I don't know when it happened, but it seems today people view patents like some kind of intellectual homesteading. "I claimed this first, so it is mine!"
Nor am I a physicist, but from what I can understand of Wikipedia, the Rydberg constant is a derived value using quantum mechanics. So if it is off, then some more fundamental constant is off (like the elementary charge or the speed of light), or the theory is wrong.
"Hell" might have religious origins but these days it's just a standard english word in nearly any use-case.
The SI unit system is used in a lot more languages than English though. (SI stands for Système international, you know.) Personally, I'd rather have some systematic naming scheme for the higher order prefixes.
I also think it's kind of pointless to standardize on a name that will likely offend a lot of people, even if you and I have no problem with it, just because it makes you chuckle the first couple of times you hear it.
Considering how expensive, brutal and dehumanizing a war is, you'd have to come up with more than simple assertions to convince me, and hopefully most others, that there is absolutely no other workable recourse.
...and a symphony is just a bunch of harmonic pressure waves at the same time. Seriously though, not that I would call this groundbreaking news in any way, but I do at least find it kind of fascinating to hear how "instrument like" the Alfvén waves of a coronal mass ejection apparently sounds like. The fact that you have to shift the waveform in the frequency domain to the audible region to be able to listen to it doesn't make the waveform itself less interesting. It's exactly the same thing they do with colors in space telescope photos, since we obviously can't see in x-ray for instance.