We need to move more towards a system that emphasizes testing the obviousness more than searching for prior art. Prior art searches are expensive and can never be even close to exhaustive, and so will always have huge holes.
How can that be done? The current system makes obviousness impossible to test for, because once the patent is published it looks obvious after the fact.
So in order to test the obviousness, a short summary of what the invention does, without any details of how it does it, should be published while keeping the rest of the patent hidden. If within some predefined time period (say 90 days) somebody can come up with a detailed description of how to do the same thing, or actually implement something that does it, and that implementation or description is similar to the methods described in the patent application, it should be regarded as obvious and the patent not awarded. That somebody else could create it in such a short time, and is willing to do so knowing they won't get a patent for it, is a strong indicator that the alleged invention is simple enough that it does not need the incentive of a patent in order for it to be created.
Of course, some will object saying that for some inventions, the problem or goal is in itself nonobvious and innovative, even if the implementation is obvious. Well, I say even those still don't deserve a patent. Those kinds of inventions do not require the incentive of a patent, because the first person to think of it or someone else would almost certainly create it anyway if the implementation is obvious. If someone else encounters the same problem, they will solve it in an obvious way. If no one else encounters the problem, there isn't much harm done in not having the patent granted.
"What if these 'doomed' companies are the ones who didn't outsource and they can no longer compete with the guys who are getting all their labor for dirt cheap?"
They aren't. The troubled companies named in the article do offshoring.
Innovation is dead. One set of companies don't develop anything of real value, but spend their time suing others for patent infringement. While the others have to spend their time and money defending against lawsuits, or even squashing projects and ideas early because of the fear of being sued. And the type of innovation that is based upon building on earlier ideas has slowed to a trickle, because those ideas are tied up in patent thickets.
They all keep shouting how offshore outsourcing will cut costs, boost the bottom line, cure cancer and bring world peace. That the savings are so COMMANDING that they MUST get rid of US and Western European jobs to send the work where the labor is cheap.
I'm sure we'll soon be seeing an emergence of Indian and Chinese software companies producing software that competes directly with the Western bigwigs. Guess where they got that knowledge?
When companies start doing this kind of niggling cost-cutting that only saves pennies while pissing off employees big time, it is a sure sign that layoffs are soon to follow. In less than a year they will have a set of layoffs, so the original poster had better start looking for a job now.
When an employee pays for certification or training, that is just about paying for their own qualifications. There is no inherent obligation for an employer to pay for that.
But having them pay for the equipment and services they need to use on the job is a whole different matter.
Or will the songs be burned from an archive of music that has been lossly compressed (more lossy than a standard CD)? Similar to when you burn downloaded songs from an online service?
Let these be actual CD quality songs, burned to actual CDs that are playable in any standards-compliant CD player, without DRM or artificial errors or any other insane copy-protection scheme, and I will become a frequent customer. But somehow I don't think the MPAA would allow that. Knowing them, the songs must be crippled in some way, by reduced quality or encryption or both.
" If they are violating Segates patents, then they SHOULD be sued..
Abuse of patent the system is wrong, but if you have received patent approval, you have the right ( obligation as far as im concerned ) to protect your patent."
Obtaining a patent for something that was invented before or is obvious to those skilled in the field, and choosing to sue for infringement of that patent, is itself an abuse of the patent system (regardless of the fact that the system allows such abuse by granting low-quality patents).
They should be sued only if they are violating the patents AND the patents are for legitimate non-obvious inventions. Occurrences of the latter are very uncommon these days.
They expected the 17-digit VIN system to last 30 years. Only 30 years. So what the hell did they think we would be using for transportation in year 31 -- hovercraft or jetpacks?
At the time when options are awarded, their value and expense to the company should be expensed based on Black-Scholes or some other acceptable formula. The reason why they shold be expensed at that time is that they effectively represent an expected long-term liability to the company.
However, when the options are actually exercised, the company should also expense any difference between the initial valuation and the actual profit made when exercised. If they are exercised with a smaller profit to the employee than their initial valuation, that difference should be added back to the company since that would represent a reduction of liability.
Similarly, when options expire without being exercised the initial valuation should be added back to the company's value as that expiration represents the removal of liability.
A combination of expensing options when granted and adjusting the expense when exercised or expired would provide the most accurate picture of their effect on the company's value.
If they allow non-Windows PCs to connect without that invasive software, then set up one Linux PC that directly connects into their network. If you can do everything you need in Linux, you can stop there.
However if your academic work requires Windows software such as Excel or Visual Basic, you then proceed to set up a Windows PC that connects to your Linux PC which serves as a router. As far as the university is concerned, all they see is a Linux PC connected.
Yes, I know college students are usually strapped for cash which could make having 2 PCs unaffordable. But if the Linux PC is used just as a router, they can use any throwaway 200MHz machine for that purpose, probably even getting one for free from the University itself.
"I have seen php code that makes me cry it was so badly written, I have also seen perl code that bad but don't blame the language, blame the idiot who is writing the unreadable code."
That idiot already left the company and I have to deal with his code.
Like it or not, some languages do have more of a propensity for unreadable code than others. A Perl program written by an idiot will very likely be much more unreadable than a similar Java program written by an idiot.
Agree 100%. Having consistent indentation is good. But that indentation is much better achieved with a code reformatting utility than by forcing the programmer to constantly indent while typing.
It becomes especially annoying when refactoring piece of a large method out into a smaller method, which forces you to manually readjust the indentation. With other languages I could just cut-and-paste the segment of code, reformat the code, and everything is indented nicely again.
I am looking for a tool that will enable me to use curly braces when typing a Python program, then when you're done it would indent the code accordingly and strip out the curly braces to produce a program that the Python interpreter would accept. If I can't find one I may just write one.
All a counterfeiter has to do is get hold of a copy of an older version of graphics software that doesn't have the money-detection scheme. No fancy hacking or cracking is required.
This law is like building a safe with three-foot thick steel walls to "secure" your valuables, while leaving a big hole in the side that even a fat man can crawl through.
They can legally discriminate based on race, age, gender, religion, or anything they want. So companies can limit their applicants by flagrantly advertising age, gender, and other requirements that would be illegal in the US.
Businesses have much less regulations and worker protections than in the US and other industrialized countries, so they often collude to set artificially high prices for goods (although those prices may be still lower than in the US, due to the limited income of third-world consumers) and artificially low wages and working conditions for labor. And a handful of families control the majority of the wealth in the country.
US companies that outsource should realize that the countries and companies that have a blatant disregard for worker's rights and fair competition also aren't going to give damn about less tangible ideas like intellectual property and privacy.
Re:Call Me Crazy But....
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
"Wouldn't a better defense be to simply write good code?"
Yes. But that is something that over 50% of today's coders aren't capable of.
Even monopolists have to worry about elasticity of demand if they want to maximize profits. In a competitive market, the alternatives for the consumer are the competing firms and not buying the product at all. In a monopoly, unless it is for an essential service or commodity like electricity, the consumer still has the choice of the monopolist or nobody at all.
Without choosing a competitor's product, there are alternatives such as not upgrading your OS for 6 years (many people still run Win98), not buying another computer because the OS price makes it too expensive, and piracy. If they raise or drop their price by more than 25% there would definitely be a nontrivial decrease or increase in the quantity sold.
A legal fine (as opposed to a per-unit excise tax) is a fixed cost which does not affect the marginal cost of goods sold. So if they could have increased profits by raising their prices they would have done so already and would not need the "incentive" of a fixed cost to make them willing or able to do so. In other words, their prices already affect their marginal cost structure and monopoly power, neither of which is increased by a legal fine.
"Think about health nuts (vegans, etc). They refuse to eat meats, etc, or perhaps they work out 4 hours a day. Whatever it is, they may prolong their life by some amount (a few years perhaps) but when your whole life revolves around extending it, what good is it?"
People who are that involved with their health do so because they enjoy it. You don't run 10 miles a day or abstain from meat if it's a daily torture to do so. For you it might be torturous, but for them it isn't a big problem.
If you worked overtime while punching the clock and not getting paid for it, and were penalized or reprimanded when you went below 40 hours, you you may be able to successfully sue them for back pay. When you're overtime-exempt, employers generally aren't supposed to track hours and penalize you for undertime. Many ex-employees have won suits like this which forced the employers to give pack pay not only to the plaintiffs but to every other employee.
"I'd rather have a student who can setup a word problem into the relevant equations and punch the relevant keys on their calculator, rather than a trained monkey who can multiply a and b in their head."
If they don't first learn to multiply a and b in their head, it will be harder for them to know what keys to punch and why. It will also be harder for them to recognize when they make a mistake. If a problem boils down to multiplying 5x22x17, and they have a strong grasp of doing multiplication without a calculator, they would immediately realize they made a mistake if the calculator told them 2244 is the answer (they'd recognize from the 5 and the 22 that the answer has to be divisible by 10, therefore it's supposed to end in a zero so it can't be 2244).
I say lose the calcuator until they get into fractional powers and trigonometric functions. Until then, keep the numbers managable enough that most problems are doable without a calculator, and have them learn to use logarithm tables. Doing problems by hand helps students to get an instinctive feel for numbers and concepts so they can understand how to turn word problems into numbers and formulas and eventually calculators and computers. Get the fundamentals down pat before touching the calculator.
P.S. I tutored high school and college students in everything from algebra to calculus, and my brother is a high school teacher who wrote a math book on which I assisted. None of us touched a calculator in school until 10th grade -- when we were doing trig and calculus.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to move more towards a system that emphasizes testing the obviousness more than searching for prior art. Prior art searches are expensive and can never be even close to exhaustive, and so will always have huge holes.
How can that be done? The current system makes obviousness impossible to test for, because once the patent is published it looks obvious after the fact.
So in order to test the obviousness, a short summary of what the invention does, without any details of how it does it, should be published while keeping the rest of the patent hidden. If within some predefined time period (say 90 days) somebody can come up with a detailed description of how to do the same thing, or actually implement something that does it, and that implementation or description is similar to the methods described in the patent application, it should be regarded as obvious and the patent not awarded. That somebody else could create it in such a short time, and is willing to do so knowing they won't get a patent for it, is a strong indicator that the alleged invention is simple enough that it does not need the incentive of a patent in order for it to be created.
Of course, some will object saying that for some inventions, the problem or goal is in itself nonobvious and innovative, even if the implementation is obvious. Well, I say even those still don't deserve a patent. Those kinds of inventions do not require the incentive of a patent, because the first person to think of it or someone else would almost certainly create it anyway if the implementation is obvious. If someone else encounters the same problem, they will solve it in an obvious way. If no one else encounters the problem, there isn't much harm done in not having the patent granted.
How do I know? Here is one source:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight
Click the link "Exporting America: List of companies exporting jobs".
If you don't trust CNN, just Google for those companies' names together with "offshore" or "outsourcing" and similar words.
"What if these 'doomed' companies are the ones who didn't outsource and they can no longer compete with the guys who are getting all their labor for dirt cheap?"
They aren't. The troubled companies named in the article do offshoring.
"Here's an idea.... INNOVATE or die."
Innovation is dead. One set of companies don't develop anything of real value, but spend their time suing others for patent infringement. While the others have to spend their time and money defending against lawsuits, or even squashing projects and ideas early because of the fear of being sued. And the type of innovation that is based upon building on earlier ideas has slowed to a trickle, because those ideas are tied up in patent thickets.
They all keep shouting how offshore outsourcing will cut costs, boost the bottom line, cure cancer and bring world peace. That the savings are so COMMANDING that they MUST get rid of US and Western European jobs to send the work where the labor is cheap.
I'm sure we'll soon be seeing an emergence of Indian and Chinese software companies producing software that competes directly with the Western bigwigs. Guess where they got that knowledge?
"But somehow I don't think the MPAA would allow that. Knowing them, the songs must be crippled in some way, by reduced quality or encryption or both."
... but RIAA, MPAA = same set of piracy-paranoid greedy bastards!
Yes, I really meant the RIAA
When companies start doing this kind of niggling cost-cutting that only saves pennies while pissing off employees big time, it is a sure sign that layoffs are soon to follow. In less than a year they will have a set of layoffs, so the original poster had better start looking for a job now.
When an employee pays for certification or training, that is just about paying for their own qualifications. There is no inherent obligation for an employer to pay for that.
But having them pay for the equipment and services they need to use on the job is a whole different matter.
Or will the songs be burned from an archive of music that has been lossly compressed (more lossy than a standard CD)? Similar to when you burn downloaded songs from an online service?
Let these be actual CD quality songs, burned to actual CDs that are playable in any standards-compliant CD player, without DRM or artificial errors or any other insane copy-protection scheme, and I will become a frequent customer. But somehow I don't think the MPAA would allow that. Knowing them, the songs must be crippled in some way, by reduced quality or encryption or both.
" If they are violating Segates patents, then they SHOULD be sued..
Abuse of patent the system is wrong, but if you have received patent approval, you have the right ( obligation as far as im concerned ) to protect your patent."
Obtaining a patent for something that was invented before or is obvious to those skilled in the field, and choosing to sue for infringement of that patent, is itself an abuse of the patent system (regardless of the fact that the system allows such abuse by granting low-quality patents).
They should be sued only if they are violating the patents AND the patents are for legitimate non-obvious inventions. Occurrences of the latter are very uncommon these days.
They expected the 17-digit VIN system to last 30 years. Only 30 years. So what the hell did they think we would be using for transportation in year 31 -- hovercraft or jetpacks?
At the time when options are awarded, their value and expense to the company should be expensed based on Black-Scholes or some other acceptable formula. The reason why they shold be expensed at that time is that they effectively represent an expected long-term liability to the company.
However, when the options are actually exercised, the company should also expense any difference between the initial valuation and the actual profit made when exercised. If they are exercised with a smaller profit to the employee than their initial valuation, that difference should be added back to the company since that would represent a reduction of liability.
Similarly, when options expire without being exercised the initial valuation should be added back to the company's value as that expiration represents the removal of liability.
A combination of expensing options when granted and adjusting the expense when exercised or expired would provide the most accurate picture of their effect on the company's value.
Other places like Borders have been doing this kind of thing for years.
So it looks like the new trend is to take any old concept or practice, add "in a bank" and get a patent, instead of adding "on the internet".
If they allow non-Windows PCs to connect without that invasive software, then set up one Linux PC that directly connects into their network. If you can do everything you need in Linux, you can stop there.
However if your academic work requires Windows software such as Excel or Visual Basic, you then proceed to set up a Windows PC that connects to your Linux PC which serves as a router. As far as the university is concerned, all they see is a Linux PC connected.
Yes, I know college students are usually strapped for cash which could make having 2 PCs unaffordable. But if the Linux PC is used just as a router, they can use any throwaway 200MHz machine for that purpose, probably even getting one for free from the University itself.
The probability of both hitting, given that A already hit, is just the probablity that B will hit.
Other posters were implicitly referring to the fact that the first one already hit, while your statement is referring to a time when none has hit yet.
"I have seen php code that makes me cry it was so badly written, I have also seen perl code that bad but don't blame the language, blame the idiot who is writing the unreadable code."
That idiot already left the company and I have to deal with his code.
Like it or not, some languages do have more of a propensity for unreadable code than others. A Perl program written by an idiot will very likely be much more unreadable than a similar Java program written by an idiot.
Agree 100%. Having consistent indentation is good. But that indentation is much better achieved with a code reformatting utility than by forcing the programmer to constantly indent while typing.
It becomes especially annoying when refactoring piece of a large method out into a smaller method, which forces you to manually readjust the indentation. With other languages I could just cut-and-paste the segment of code, reformat the code, and everything is indented nicely again.
I am looking for a tool that will enable me to use curly braces when typing a Python program, then when you're done it would indent the code accordingly and strip out the curly braces to produce a program that the Python interpreter would accept. If I can't find one I may just write one.
All a counterfeiter has to do is get hold of a copy of an older version of graphics software that doesn't have the money-detection scheme. No fancy hacking or cracking is required.
This law is like building a safe with three-foot thick steel walls to "secure" your valuables, while leaving a big hole in the side that even a fat man can crawl through.
They can legally discriminate based on race, age, gender, religion, or anything they want. So companies can limit their applicants by flagrantly advertising age, gender, and other requirements that would be illegal in the US.
Businesses have much less regulations and worker protections than in the US and other industrialized countries, so they often collude to set artificially high prices for goods (although those prices may be still lower than in the US, due to the limited income of third-world consumers) and artificially low wages and working conditions for labor. And a handful of families control the majority of the wealth in the country.
US companies that outsource should realize that the countries and companies that have a blatant disregard for worker's rights and fair competition also aren't going to give damn about less tangible ideas like intellectual property and privacy.
"Wouldn't a better defense be to simply write good code?"
Yes. But that is something that over 50% of today's coders aren't capable of.
Even monopolists have to worry about elasticity of demand if they want to maximize profits. In a competitive market, the alternatives for the consumer are the competing firms and not buying the product at all. In a monopoly, unless it is for an essential service or commodity like electricity, the consumer still has the choice of the monopolist or nobody at all.
Without choosing a competitor's product, there are alternatives such as not upgrading your OS for 6 years (many people still run Win98), not buying another computer because the OS price makes it too expensive, and piracy. If they raise or drop their price by more than 25% there would definitely be a nontrivial decrease or increase in the quantity sold.
A legal fine (as opposed to a per-unit excise tax) is a fixed cost which does not affect the marginal cost of goods sold. So if they could have increased profits by raising their prices they would have done so already and would not need the "incentive" of a fixed cost to make them willing or able to do so. In other words, their prices already affect their marginal cost structure and monopoly power, neither of which is increased by a legal fine.
They aren't making any profits and haven't made any in a long long time, so why not become a non-profit and be honest about it?
"Think about health nuts (vegans, etc). They refuse to eat meats, etc, or perhaps they work out 4 hours a day. Whatever it is, they may prolong their life by some amount (a few years perhaps) but when your whole life revolves around extending it, what good is it?"
People who are that involved with their health do so because they enjoy it. You don't run 10 miles a day or abstain from meat if it's a daily torture to do so. For you it might be torturous, but for them it isn't a big problem.
If you worked overtime while punching the clock and not getting paid for it, and were penalized or reprimanded when you went below 40 hours, you you may be able to successfully sue them for back pay. When you're overtime-exempt, employers generally aren't supposed to track hours and penalize you for undertime. Many ex-employees have won suits like this which forced the employers to give pack pay not only to the plaintiffs but to every other employee.
"I'd rather have a student who can setup a word problem into the relevant equations and punch the relevant keys on their calculator, rather than a trained monkey who can multiply a and b in their head."
If they don't first learn to multiply a and b in their head, it will be harder for them to know what keys to punch and why. It will also be harder for them to recognize when they make a mistake. If a problem boils down to multiplying 5x22x17, and they have a strong grasp of doing multiplication without a calculator, they would immediately realize they made a mistake if the calculator told them 2244 is the answer (they'd recognize from the 5 and the 22 that the answer has to be divisible by 10, therefore it's supposed to end in a zero so it can't be 2244).
I say lose the calcuator until they get into fractional powers and trigonometric functions. Until then, keep the numbers managable enough that most problems are doable without a calculator, and have them learn to use logarithm tables. Doing problems by hand helps students to get an instinctive feel for numbers and concepts so they can understand how to turn word problems into numbers and formulas and eventually calculators and computers. Get the fundamentals down pat before touching the calculator.
P.S. I tutored high school and college students in everything from algebra to calculus, and my brother is a high school teacher who wrote a math book on which I assisted. None of us touched a calculator in school until 10th grade -- when we were doing trig and calculus.