>Foreign aid doesn't fix poverty. It causes financial dependency. It's the old saw about feeding a man to fish versus teaching him to fish. Allowing foreign workers to compete for jobs in the global market is akin to "teaching a man to fish."
Who said anything about "foreign aid"? I'm talking about individuals, not the government, giving to charities. Those charities can be whatever you believe is best. If you believe in teaching someone to fish, then donate to the education of the children. There are plenty of non-profit organizations that spend the majority of their funds ensuring that children in third-world countries can go to school.
>I'd also like references to some authority who shares your view on your other statements (Except for the trade deficit figure which sounds about right).
For the most part, I recommend each person do their due diligence because you learn more doing the research.
However, I'll give you one interesting piece I ran into when I was searching for someone who believed, as I do, that the trade deficit was deterorating America's wealth at a rapid rate. I never suspected it would be one of the richest men in the world sounding the alarm since most economists and large corporations were preaching free trade too much to confess the graveness of the trade deficit.
You're right. Pegging against the dollar has pros and cons, and can often lead to what you described. Unforunately, it's not happening in China. The pros continue to outweigh the risks for them.
Many speculate that China's currency would fall if unpegged, and China has hinted of slowly creating a trading window, where it is expected to hit the bottom of the window. Yet, China has very little incentive at this time to free their currency. The Bush administration has been lobbying China to do it, and they've responded pretty coldly, pretty much telling us that it's their business if they want to do it.
China currently makes up 1/4 of our trade deficit, if I remember correctly.
The biggest issue that countries have when pegging to the dollar, which you highlighted, is that they are impacted by our central bank rates. Thus, if they happen to be in a recession when we are, or their economy is growing when we are, then the peg is a win/win for them. But, if they are in a recession when we are fighting inflation, or vice-a-versa, then our central bank rates can really counter their economy, creating a demand to break the peg.
If we raise rates while they are in a recession, for instance, the value (not official price) of their currency decreases, forcing them to raise rates at a time that is undesirable. If they don't raise rates, then the grey markets appear to alleviate the differences in currency, and the pressure for a run on their currency can grow, increasing the dramatic effect when they finally permit their currency to float again.
If China ever experiences recession, then maybe we'll see more internal pressure for them to permit the yuan to float. Until then, don't expect much relief from China.
I believe it is also a myth that American's need to give up jobs in order for third world countries to prosper. It makes no economic sense, unless you are running a multi-national corporation. A job is productivity. It's what you produce, not what you consume. You can then take the income from what you product, and net taxes, choose to (a) save/invest, (b) spend, or (c) donate.
How does taking someone who is educated, invested in a degree, and obtained certifications, and then idling the person, and ultimately turning the person homeless helpful to anyone? All it does is take a person's potential and throw it out the window. It eliminates productivity. As a side effect, it elliminates consumption, but only because the person cannot produce.
I firmly believe in helping the poor, and plan to dedicate part of my life to it. But I absolutely will never espouse ruinning productivity to achieve it. It's a lie that eliminating productivity can possibly relieve proverty!
Instead of trying to idle Americans, and increasing the homeless problem, how about we instead attemt to get Americans to increase contributions to relieve poverty, both in American and in third-world countries?
And here's a thought... how about we increase jobs in India and China without sacrificing jobs in the US? Why can't they produce more without us producing less?
Consumption and production are two different issues. The only relationship is that in a capitalist society, individual production is necessary for individual consumption. But it does not determine the portion of income from production to be used for consumption. That's a completely different issue.
People like you really do need to discover homelessness. You are cold and callous, clearly wishing that America loses its prosperity under the illusion that poverty is good for the environment.
The reality is that homelessness grows during a recession, as people lose jobs and can't get back on their feet.
The heartlessness it takes to wish this is beyond comprehension. I can only hope that you experience homelessess resulting from joblessness so you can change, and develop a heart.
It's also true that the environment takes a toll in the long term when a country's economy collapses, because the funds and political incentive to help clean the environment vaporize, and being able to survive overcomes any ideal of "cleanliness". This is why third world countries are so well known for their poor environmental policies.
On the other hand, technology, created by a prospering economy, has done a lot to help counter environmental issues. Our clean air today is possible because of the prosperous economy. The EPA has come a long way, and has been enabled by our corporations' ability to pay the "tax". In a down economy, the EPA loses political ground. In a continual economic struggle, which free trade appears to be creating, the EPA and other environmental organizations are likely to become a lot less popular, as American's fight to avoid homelessness, or seek to provide a healthy life for their children.
3> The falling dollar will NOT balance trade. This is a myth propogated by the same economists that predicted that those with a college degree have nothing to fear from free trade, and that the US would eventually run a surplus, because what goes around comes around.
China pegs its currency to the US dollar, which means that when the dollar falls, so does China's currency. So, the falling dollar does absolutely nothing to increase competitiveness with China or any of the other nations pegged to the dollar. In fact, it helps those nations become more competitive in the world.
So long as the US does free trade with nations that have different economic and political structures, the US will always be at a disadvantage, effectively giving away our wealth. This is the fundamental cause of the trade deficit.
Currently, the US trade deficit equals 4% of our GNP, and is growing! It's now over 1/2 trillion annually. This amounts to wealth leaving our country. Our short-term pain is mitigated by our growing nation's debt to other nations, and the asset purchases other nations are making in the US. In other words, where selling our assets and taking loans to finance the trade deficit. The falling dollar does not fix this, it merely decreases the acceleration at the cost of lower investment in the US.
The falling dollar actually encourages multi-nationals to move our jobs overseas, to mitigate the risk of investing too highly in the US dollar. This is why IBM is opening shops in China and India. It helps them to become immune to fluctuations in US currency. A strong dollar encourages investment in the US, and a weak dollar encourages investment overseas.
I've already taken the step by publishing JoshuaBranch AS as a commercial product. It provides off-the-shelf application security for J2EE applications. I was going to open source it, but livelihood before ideals.
In any case, I still plan to open source a lot of the components its built on. Someday, I might even open source a "lite" version. Down the road, I hope to have a good mix of open source and commercial offerings, with commercial offerings focused on corporate needs.
I'm done relying on consulting for livelihood.
OpenStandards.net will continue to be not-for-profit. Hopefully, someday, I'll have the funds to even help it fulfill its complete vision, increasing open standards and being an advocate for open source. The success of JoshuaBranch AS could determine it.
PUBPAT challenges microsoft patent to protect competition in software markets: Patent Office Shown New Evidence Proving FAT Technology was Obvious
NEW YORK -- The Public Patent Foundation filed a formal request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office today to revoke Microsoft Corporation's patent on the FAT File System, touted by Microsoft as being "the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers, and, since the advent of inexpensive, removable flash memory, also between digital devices." In its filing, PUBPAT submitted previously unseen prior art showing the patent, which issued in November 1996 and is not otherwise
due to expire until 2013, was obvious and, as such, should have never been granted.
"Microsoft is using its control over the interchange of digital media to aid its ongoing effort to deter competition," states PUBPAT's Request for ExPartes Reexamination of U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517. "The '517 patent is causing immeasurable injury to the public by serving as a tool to enlarge Microsoft's monopoly while also preventing competition."
Last fall, Microsoft began to demand royalty bearing licenses for the entire portfolio of patents around the FAT File System. However, the fact that Microsoft has not offered licenses for use in Free and Open Source Software has led some to speculate that Microsoft intends to use its patents to fight the competitive threat posed by Free Software.
"We'd like to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and believe that they are not adopting a strategy of foreclosing competition through the use of dubious patents," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director and Founder. "Unfortunately, their past anticompetitive behavior combined with their recent launch of a comprehensive patent assertion campaign causes us
to have serious concerns about their intentions."
Although PUBPAT's filing only directly deals with one patent, the fact that it is the oldest of the patents in the FAT File System portfolio makes it
more likely that, once it is held invalid by the Patent Office, each of the other patents will be viewed similarly.
"In the end, our beef is not with Microsoft per se," says Ravicher. "It's with our broken patent system that is completely failing to ensure only
deserving patents get issued."
The Request for Reexamination can be found at PUBPAT Activities > Protecting the Public Domain.
Contact:
Daniel Ravicher, Executive Director, Public Patent Foundation: 212-545-5337;
info@pubpat.org; www.pubpat.org.
About PUBPAT:
The Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") is a not-for-profit legal services organization working to protect the public from the harms caused by the
patent system. PUBPAT provides the general public, particularly those persons or businesses otherwise deprived of access to the system governing patents, with representation, advocacy, and education. To be kept informed of PUBPAT News, subscribe to the PUBPAT News List by sending an email with "subscribe" in the subject line to news-request@pubpat.org.
By INQUIRER staff : Donnerstag 15 April
2004, 14:03
*A CONFERENCE* chaired by the Federal Trade Commission, the National Academy
of Sciences and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology kicks off in
California in a few hours time.
The idea is reform the patent system without stopping innovation, but the
industry is along there in the shape of giants Intel, Microsoft, Symantec
and others, and we're sure they'll try to pursue their own agenda.
There will also be representatives from the European Patent Office and the
US Patent and Trademark Office.
Luckily, they are counterbalanced by legal organisations and academics.
The FTC document proposes a number of changes to the current system
including a new admin procedure to challenge a patent's validity without
having to go to law, allowing courts to find patents invalid on the
preponderance of evidence rather than clear and convincing evidence, and the
limiting of awards of "treble" damages.
It's pretty clear that for many large companies, patent actions have become
a wing of marketing. Kicking off big patent cases can tie a smaller
competitor up for years as the painful battle continues through the courts.
Let's hope sanity prevails. But don't hold your breath for that.
Day 1: Thursday, April 15, 2004 at the Bancroft Hotel
1. 12:00 - 1:00 pm, Press Conference
- Mark Myers: NAS & Xerox Corporation
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC
1:30 - 3:00 pm
Overview of the Patent System and FTC Proposal for Reform
- Susan DeSanti: Senior Policy Analyst, FTC
- Prof. Peter Menell: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Prof. Robert Merges: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
Day 2: Friday, April 16, 2004 at the Bancroft Hotel
8:00 - 8:30 am
Opening Remarks
- Dean Designate Chris Edley: Boalt Hall School of Law
- Robert Merges of BCLT and Boalt Hall School of Law
- Mark Myers: NAS & Xerox Corporation
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC
8:30 - 9:40 am, Non-obviousness Panel (Reinvigorating the Non-obviousness Standard)
- Rochelle Dreyfuss: New York University
- Rebecca Eisenberg: University of Michigan
- Ron Laurie: Inflexion Point Strategy, LLC
9:45-11:00 am, Opposition and Post-Grant Review Panel
- Robert Blackburn: Chiron Corporation
- Prof. Joe Farrell: Economics, UC Berkeley (CPC)
- Bronwyn Hall: Economics, UC Berkeley
- Dietmar Harhoff: European Patent Office
- Steve Kunin: Patent and Trademark Office
- Prof. Robert Merges: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Douglas Norman: Eli Lilly
11:00 - 11:15 am, Break
11:15 am - 12:45 pm, Litigation Panel (Including Presumption of Validity)
- Mark Janis: University of Iowa
- Mark Lemley: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Lynn Pasahow: Fenwick & West
- James Pooley: Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
- Matthew Powers: Weil Gotshal & Manges
- Arti Rai: Duke University
12:45-2:00 pm., Lunch
2:00 - 3:45 pm, Industry/Institutional Issues Panel
- Carl Shapiro: Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley (co-moderator)
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC (co-moderator)
- Robert Baechtold: Fitzpatrick Cella Harper and Scinto & AIPLA
- Robert Barr: CISCO
- Bart Eppenauer: Microsoft
- Sean Johnston: Genentech
- Jay Monahan: eBay
- Ron Myrick: Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner
- Kulpreet Rana: Google
- Robert Sacoff: Pattishall, McAuliffe & ABA IP Section
- David Simon: Intel Corporation
- Herb Wamsley: Intellectual Property Owners
3:45-4:00 p.m., Concluding Remarks
Commissioner Mozelle Thompson
How about if you divide an officer's salaray in half, so that half is base, and the other half is bonus. You then sum the bonus half into a pool for all the officer's to divide.
Then you create a web voting system where people can rate the validity of a patent. If the ratings of the patents an officer approves is average at the end of the year, then his next year bonus will be average, giving him the same salary he would get without the system.
However, you slide it for those that are over or under the average. Thus, an office that gets low validity ratings would receive less pay, and an office that receives higher validity ratings would receive higher ratings would receive a higher bonus.
This would permit peer review of patents after they are approved, while at the same time create an incentive for the patent officers to give more weight to the validity of a patent!
Isn't this our number one complaint, anyway? Patents lacking validity being approved, requiring high legal costs to overturn?
Or you could turn one into a Smart Toaster (TM). Then you'd only need to boot it in the morning, perhaps using a $5 timer to turn it on and off during your preferred toasting range.
"Does the UN need reform? definitely. But one of the most needed reforms is getting rid of the veto"
It blows me away how many people are completely unaware of why the UN was created. It wasn't created to be a world government body to solve all the world's problems. It was created to prevent WW III, which primarily involving giving the super powers a forum to work out disagreements instead of declaring war. The atom bomb had a lot to do with why the UN was created.
Veto power was and still is the only means of keeping the superpowers (those with the most nukes) involved, primarily the US, Russia and China. This hasn't changed. Proposing getting rid of veto power is an invitation to nuclear holocaust, because the US, Russia and China would simply withdraw. They have no incentive to permit smaller nations to dictate what they can and cannot do. If a ruling passed they disagreed with they could either ignore it, or go to war if the ruling resulted in harm to their country (e.g., global embargo of the US.) The veto power is the only thing that protects them from "majority rule".
This seems illogical to a lot of people, particularly if you subscribe to the philosophy that the majority is always right. But you really have to ignore the concept and reality of what a superpower is to pretend that no veto could ever work. Being a superpower means that even the UN and all the nations in the world can't force you to do something that you don't want to do. The solution? Why create a war over it when you can simply veto it?
The reason France was given veto power is slightly different, but at the time it revolved around ensuring stability in Europe.
'Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other...Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and help us fly the plane.'
PULL THE NOSE UP! PULL THE NOSE UP! WE'RE GONNA CRASH!!!! NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
Actually, IBM pushes WebSphere and DB2 on the mainframe. Indeed, they even push Linux in a partition on the mainframe now, too, and hypersockets for fast TCP/IP communications between partitions.
I did some work for a large payroll company, and this was the platform IBM sold them for running mission critical payroll processing for its thousands of customers.
This isn't about legacy application as much as it is about consolidating clustered applications into an easier to manage platform. Believe it or not, you can still do state-of-the-art software development despite the physical housing being a mainframe.
We did all the software development on the PC. The mainframe was simply the deployment destination. This is one advantage of the J2EE architecture. This also ruled out.NET, as Windows didn't offer the stability that Linux offered on the mainframe. However, we did happen to use Windows on the PCs in order to be able to use Rational Rose. Barring Rose, which isn't needed in deployment, our development architecture was completely compatible with Linux.
From a J2EE perspective, this eliminated the need to manage clusters in operation, as well as to develop for them. Clustering, despite its raves in the news, has a lot of production related issues that the mainframe solves. This is part of IBM's marketing pitch.
You people are being too harsh on the US government. Now that we'll have all these fingerprints, we'll be able to PROVE who hijacked a plane that crashes into a building!
I'd like to see how it handles going into a tree. What if the tree is at the end of a cliff? The hardest thing for automobiles to detect are steep drops ahead, since they are a negative obstacles.
So, you're headed towards that tree near the edge of a cliff, thanking God that it's going to save your life. Your car panics, and steers you a few degrees left to avoid the tree.
That will raise the next question... how much data is saved to investigate severe craches where your car is smashed to bits and burning because of the 1,000 foot drop.
That's extremely true, and I wish more people were aware of it. This actually started in the 80s when we created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) court to gather evidence on alleged spies without public accountability and sealing of the evidence so the defendent can never see it even when it is the primary evidence used to prosecute.
This became a rubber stamp court, with only one request out of over 7,500 since its inception being rejected by the judges. Of course, the people are unaware of it because the proceedings of the court are secret, and the defendents are usually unaware of the evidence being used against them.
The existence of the court is not secret though, as it was created by a law passed in the 80s, and the quantity of searches granted by the court is public. Indeed, the US government was accused of abusing this court recently to broaden its purpose, before the Patriot Act was "clarified" to permit such abuse by the US prosecutors, FBI and intelligence agencies. One of the judges on the panel scolded the US government for being deceptive in the types of cases it was bringing, indicating that the US government does try to bring people before FISA that are not spies, but instead ordinary criminals. The US appealed a decision to legally obtain a broading of the courts purpose, originally without legislation.
If I remember correctly, congress passed a law to "clarify" that the Patriot Act extended this to cover those suspects of "terrorism". Hasn't it occurred to anyone that none of the trials of suspected terrorists are public?
This is such a sad demise of the US Constitution and American liberty. To me, I'd be willing to die like our forefathers did to preserve American freedom and create the Bill of Rights. I just wish we weren't so willing to discard it today under the illusion that our life-spans will be longer. When I was a child, being willing to die to perserve American freedom was a common notion. Now, being willing to give up freedom to avoid the remotest chance of dying, no matter how statistically improbable, has become a de facto notion. To suggest otherwise, well, that would be unpatriotic! Or would it be terrorist?
Unfortunately, without the ability for the press or the people to attend trials of suspected terrorists, it's unlikely that this will ever be overturned. We'd have to prove that the system as used unjustly, but the Patriot Act has removed all accountability, so that it is nearly impossible to prove the injustice.
The question is, if it was "spies" yesterday, and now includes those labeled as "terrorist" or "threats to national security" by the investigators and prosecutors today, then what label is next? Or, are the current labels broad enough to permit US prosecutors to throw anyone in prison for life that they see fit? It's hard to discern when our government is no longer accountable to the people it's supposed to represent.
Is there anyway to determine what cases the government has filed to prevent public accountability under the Patriot Act? I'd like to follow up on this to at least try to estimate how many cases there are today. If at all possible, I'd like to know if it even remotely possible to discover any injustices occurring. Justice is, after all, the purpose of all this. Right?
You are absolutely right. Making a case to the general public is the toughest challenge. Yet, if you look at the concerns underlying the patent issues, particularly as we would raise them to congress, they really are concerns for the general public. The challenge is in raising awareness, and helping people understand that they are impacted. Here are what I believe to be some underlying fundamental issues that should concern everyone that cares about the economy or is concerned about job security.
Patents are increasingly putting a chill on innovation by discouraging small businesses from taking risk. The risk of a small or medium sized company being sued over a patent claim that should never have been possible is growing, and the primary concern isn't that they won't be legally right, but that they won't have the legal war chest (funds) to be legally right. This decreases jobs and America's competitiveness, two issues central to Americans being able to achieve their dreams, or at least pay their bills. PEOPLE'S TERMS: Current patent policy is decreasing America's competitiveness and causing your jobs to go overseas.
Patents resulting for reasons other than innovation are increasing the cost of consumer items created and produced in America. This is in part because patents are, by definition, government created monopolies for their owners. Half-hazardly creating monopolies without any of the justifications laid down by the authors of the constitution and commonly accepted reasons we permit them can have only one end... continual erosion of the economy and equitable price structure. PEOPLE'S TERMS: You're paying too much for goods produced in America, imports are increasing, your jobs are going overseas for no justifiable reason.
I agree, copyright reform is needed, as well. Yet, I try to keep patent and copyright reform separate in discussions to reduce the temptation to use the phrase "intellectual property", and because their issues are very different, though both very important.
Due to the USPTO's current high demand to patent everything under the sun, they have been increasingly outsourcing their positions to Mayotte, having a workforce that "fits the qualifications of our most rigid analysis positions", cites one top official. That same official said that due to some difficulties in getting the children in the country Internet access, however, they probably won't be able to surpass the 90% outsourcing objective they recently peaked at.
Does anyone see this rising to a boiling point anytime soon? When will people start lobbying for patent reform?
I've read comments on this subject from IBM, the largest patent holder in the world, indicating they might even endorse patent reform. Their stance has been that they use patents primarily as a defense, adding that until the system is fixed, they don't have much of a choice.
This is also putting a rush to patent everything, worse than a gold rush, not so much to profit like these annoying cases, but to build a defense, like IBM does. Only, as we all know, the little guy has little defense. Thus there is both a chill and imbalance on innovation today.
Is anyone lobbying congress for patent reform? I'd like to know what we can do.
- The perception created by France in International politics.
- The perceptions Americans have, who generally read the headlines about French views in International politics, and are also influenced by posts like the original post that started the whole thread.
As for individual French people, or France as a place to live, I don't believe any one stereo type covers it all. I have had plenty of friends that were born in France that don't fit the stereo type, and don't like the social system there because of they way it is punitive on the young, stifles economics and buys votes making reform nearly impossible.
On the other hand, I've met other French people that believe that France is always right, and American's are just a bunch of uncultured pigs, which more or less was the tone of the original poster.
However, when it comes to issues such as economics, I tend to view any country with an unemployment rate above 10% as having no place to tell another country, such as the USA, what they are doing wrong, and hypocritical if they do.
The number one reason that Americans don't like the French is because they often come across as condescending know it alls. I'd say your post proves my point.
I heard one friend say after living in Europe for 6 years, "France is the conscious of the world." The perspective from America is that if France is the conscious, then the world is a God hating devil worshipper. France regularly opposes the fundamental values that American's have. So, hearing France get self-righteous in International forums tends to turn a lot of stomachs.
Your post reaffirms American perception of France, leading them to embolden their stereotypes of the French.
The UN was never created to be a truly democratic institution. Its purpose was simply to create a less violent forum for nations to share their disagreements and from time to time actually work together. It beats having a WW III. That was the goal. So far, since there has been no WW III, it appears to have met its original purpose.
The debate heightens when the UN goes beyond its original purpose. The veto powers were designed to prevent the UN from becoming a world government. It was also to give the superpowers, the primary targets of the UN's purpose, a reason to participate. Being a superpower inherently means you don't have to participate, and thus likely to leave the UN as soon as you disagreed with something it was determined to do. Veto power prevents the super powers from leaving the UN.
The backlash the UN has had in the US is due to those that have tried to turn the UN into more than its original purpose.
Passing out condoms in Africa is an example of an issue that turned some in the US against the UN. Whether or not you agree with the concept, it's hard to debate that it has nothing to do with peace and preventing another world war.
If you want superpowers like the US to continue to participate in the UN, then quit trying to turn it into something it wasn't created to be. Find another institution to accomplish those goals. Otherwise, you are inviting WW III.
Two things are outdated that need to change:
- The business model of the artists
- The distribution model of recorded creativity
Both of these can change without declaring countless Americans as enemies of the state, which is the effect of the assault Hatch is proposing in his letter.
Slashdot Mirror
>Foreign aid doesn't fix poverty. It causes financial dependency. It's the old saw about feeding a man to fish versus teaching him to fish. Allowing foreign workers to compete for jobs in the global market is akin to "teaching a man to fish." Who said anything about "foreign aid"? I'm talking about individuals, not the government, giving to charities. Those charities can be whatever you believe is best. If you believe in teaching someone to fish, then donate to the education of the children. There are plenty of non-profit organizations that spend the majority of their funds ensuring that children in third-world countries can go to school.
For the most part, I recommend each person do their due diligence because you learn more doing the research.
However, I'll give you one interesting piece I ran into when I was searching for someone who believed, as I do, that the trade deficit was deterorating America's wealth at a rapid rate. I never suspected it would be one of the richest men in the world sounding the alarm since most economists and large corporations were preaching free trade too much to confess the graveness of the trade deficit.
America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us (Warren Buffet) (pdf)
America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us (Warren Buffet) (html)
America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us (Warren Buffet) (html, Fortune Article, paid subscription required)
Many speculate that China's currency would fall if unpegged, and China has hinted of slowly creating a trading window, where it is expected to hit the bottom of the window. Yet, China has very little incentive at this time to free their currency. The Bush administration has been lobbying China to do it, and they've responded pretty coldly, pretty much telling us that it's their business if they want to do it.
China currently makes up 1/4 of our trade deficit, if I remember correctly.
The biggest issue that countries have when pegging to the dollar, which you highlighted, is that they are impacted by our central bank rates. Thus, if they happen to be in a recession when we are, or their economy is growing when we are, then the peg is a win/win for them. But, if they are in a recession when we are fighting inflation, or vice-a-versa, then our central bank rates can really counter their economy, creating a demand to break the peg.
If we raise rates while they are in a recession, for instance, the value (not official price) of their currency decreases, forcing them to raise rates at a time that is undesirable. If they don't raise rates, then the grey markets appear to alleviate the differences in currency, and the pressure for a run on their currency can grow, increasing the dramatic effect when they finally permit their currency to float again.
If China ever experiences recession, then maybe we'll see more internal pressure for them to permit the yuan to float. Until then, don't expect much relief from China.
U.S. group to file China currency case soon
How does taking someone who is educated, invested in a degree, and obtained certifications, and then idling the person, and ultimately turning the person homeless helpful to anyone? All it does is take a person's potential and throw it out the window. It eliminates productivity. As a side effect, it elliminates consumption, but only because the person cannot produce.
I firmly believe in helping the poor, and plan to dedicate part of my life to it. But I absolutely will never espouse ruinning productivity to achieve it. It's a lie that eliminating productivity can possibly relieve proverty!
Instead of trying to idle Americans, and increasing the homeless problem, how about we instead attemt to get Americans to increase contributions to relieve poverty, both in American and in third-world countries?
And here's a thought... how about we increase jobs in India and China without sacrificing jobs in the US? Why can't they produce more without us producing less?
Consumption and production are two different issues. The only relationship is that in a capitalist society, individual production is necessary for individual consumption. But it does not determine the portion of income from production to be used for consumption. That's a completely different issue.
The reality is that homelessness grows during a recession, as people lose jobs and can't get back on their feet.
The heartlessness it takes to wish this is beyond comprehension. I can only hope that you experience homelessess resulting from joblessness so you can change, and develop a heart.
It's also true that the environment takes a toll in the long term when a country's economy collapses, because the funds and political incentive to help clean the environment vaporize, and being able to survive overcomes any ideal of "cleanliness". This is why third world countries are so well known for their poor environmental policies.
On the other hand, technology, created by a prospering economy, has done a lot to help counter environmental issues. Our clean air today is possible because of the prosperous economy. The EPA has come a long way, and has been enabled by our corporations' ability to pay the "tax". In a down economy, the EPA loses political ground. In a continual economic struggle, which free trade appears to be creating, the EPA and other environmental organizations are likely to become a lot less popular, as American's fight to avoid homelessness, or seek to provide a healthy life for their children.
China pegs its currency to the US dollar, which means that when the dollar falls, so does China's currency. So, the falling dollar does absolutely nothing to increase competitiveness with China or any of the other nations pegged to the dollar. In fact, it helps those nations become more competitive in the world.
So long as the US does free trade with nations that have different economic and political structures, the US will always be at a disadvantage, effectively giving away our wealth. This is the fundamental cause of the trade deficit.
Currently, the US trade deficit equals 4% of our GNP, and is growing! It's now over 1/2 trillion annually. This amounts to wealth leaving our country. Our short-term pain is mitigated by our growing nation's debt to other nations, and the asset purchases other nations are making in the US. In other words, where selling our assets and taking loans to finance the trade deficit. The falling dollar does not fix this, it merely decreases the acceleration at the cost of lower investment in the US.
The falling dollar actually encourages multi-nationals to move our jobs overseas, to mitigate the risk of investing too highly in the US dollar. This is why IBM is opening shops in China and India. It helps them to become immune to fluctuations in US currency. A strong dollar encourages investment in the US, and a weak dollar encourages investment overseas.
I've already taken the step by publishing JoshuaBranch AS as a commercial product. It provides off-the-shelf application security for J2EE applications. I was going to open source it, but livelihood before ideals.
In any case, I still plan to open source a lot of the components its built on. Someday, I might even open source a "lite" version. Down the road, I hope to have a good mix of open source and commercial offerings, with commercial offerings focused on corporate needs.
I'm done relying on consulting for livelihood.
OpenStandards.net will continue to be not-for-profit. Hopefully, someday, I'll have the funds to even help it fulfill its complete vision, increasing open standards and being an advocate for open source. The success of JoshuaBranch AS could determine it.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 15, 2004
PUBPAT challenges microsoft patent to protect competition in software markets: Patent Office Shown New Evidence Proving FAT Technology was Obvious
NEW YORK -- The Public Patent Foundation filed a formal request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office today to revoke Microsoft Corporation's patent on the FAT File System, touted by Microsoft as being "the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers, and, since the advent of inexpensive, removable flash memory, also between digital devices." In its filing, PUBPAT submitted previously unseen prior art showing the patent, which issued in November 1996 and is not otherwise due to expire until 2013, was obvious and, as such, should have never been granted.
"Microsoft is using its control over the interchange of digital media to aid its ongoing effort to deter competition," states PUBPAT's Request for ExPartes Reexamination of U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517. "The '517 patent is causing immeasurable injury to the public by serving as a tool to enlarge Microsoft's monopoly while also preventing competition."
Last fall, Microsoft began to demand royalty bearing licenses for the entire portfolio of patents around the FAT File System. However, the fact that Microsoft has not offered licenses for use in Free and Open Source Software has led some to speculate that Microsoft intends to use its patents to fight the competitive threat posed by Free Software.
"We'd like to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and believe that they are not adopting a strategy of foreclosing competition through the use of dubious patents," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director and Founder. "Unfortunately, their past anticompetitive behavior combined with their recent launch of a comprehensive patent assertion campaign causes us to have serious concerns about their intentions."
Although PUBPAT's filing only directly deals with one patent, the fact that it is the oldest of the patents in the FAT File System portfolio makes it more likely that, once it is held invalid by the Patent Office, each of the other patents will be viewed similarly.
"In the end, our beef is not with Microsoft per se," says Ravicher. "It's with our broken patent system that is completely failing to ensure only deserving patents get issued."
The Request for Reexamination can be found at PUBPAT Activities > Protecting the Public Domain.
Contact:
Daniel Ravicher, Executive Director, Public Patent Foundation: 212-545-5337;
info@pubpat.org; www.pubpat.org.
About PUBPAT:
The Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") is a not-for-profit legal services organization working to protect the public from the harms caused by the patent system. PUBPAT provides the general public, particularly those persons or businesses otherwise deprived of access to the system governing patents, with representation, advocacy, and education. To be kept informed of PUBPAT News, subscribe to the PUBPAT News List by sending an email with "subscribe" in the subject line to news-request@pubpat.org.
By INQUIRER staff : Donnerstag 15 April 2004, 14:03
*A CONFERENCE* chaired by the Federal Trade Commission, the National Academy of Sciences and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology kicks off in California in a few hours time.
The idea is reform the patent system without stopping innovation, but the industry is along there in the shape of giants Intel, Microsoft, Symantec and others, and we're sure they'll try to pursue their own agenda.
There will also be representatives from the European Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Luckily, they are counterbalanced by legal organisations and academics.
The agenda for the workshop is here http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/patentsystem/pate ntsystemagenda.pdf, and
there's a very lengthy discussion document about proposed reform on the FTC
site, here http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/10/innovationrpt.pdf.
The FTC document proposes a number of changes to the current system including a new admin procedure to challenge a patent's validity without having to go to law, allowing courts to find patents invalid on the preponderance of evidence rather than clear and convincing evidence, and the limiting of awards of "treble" damages.
It's pretty clear that for many large companies, patent actions have become a wing of marketing. Kicking off big patent cases can tie a smaller competitor up for years as the painful battle continues through the courts. Let's hope sanity prevails. But don't hold your breath for that.
Day 1: Thursday, April 15, 2004 at the Bancroft Hotel
1. 12:00 - 1:00 pm, Press Conference
- Mark Myers: NAS & Xerox Corporation
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC
1:30 - 3:00 pm
Overview of the Patent System and FTC Proposal for Reform
- Susan DeSanti: Senior Policy Analyst, FTC
- Prof. Peter Menell: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Prof. Robert Merges: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
Day 2: Friday, April 16, 2004 at the Bancroft Hotel
8:00 - 8:30 am
Opening Remarks
- Dean Designate Chris Edley: Boalt Hall School of Law
- Robert Merges of BCLT and Boalt Hall School of Law
- Mark Myers: NAS & Xerox Corporation
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC
8:30 - 9:40 am, Non-obviousness Panel (Reinvigorating the Non-obviousness Standard)
- Rochelle Dreyfuss: New York University
- Rebecca Eisenberg: University of Michigan
- Ron Laurie: Inflexion Point Strategy, LLC
9:45-11:00 am, Opposition and Post-Grant Review Panel
- Robert Blackburn: Chiron Corporation
- Prof. Joe Farrell: Economics, UC Berkeley (CPC)
- Bronwyn Hall: Economics, UC Berkeley
- Dietmar Harhoff: European Patent Office
- Steve Kunin: Patent and Trademark Office
- Prof. Robert Merges: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Douglas Norman: Eli Lilly
11:00 - 11:15 am, Break
11:15 am - 12:45 pm, Litigation Panel (Including Presumption of Validity)
- Mark Janis: University of Iowa
- Mark Lemley: BCLT & Boalt Hall School of Law
- Lynn Pasahow: Fenwick & West
- James Pooley: Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
- Matthew Powers: Weil Gotshal & Manges
- Arti Rai: Duke University
12:45-2:00 pm., Lunch
2:00 - 3:45 pm, Industry/Institutional Issues Panel
- Carl Shapiro: Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley (co-moderator)
- Commissioner Mozelle Thompson: FTC (co-moderator)
- Robert Baechtold: Fitzpatrick Cella Harper and Scinto & AIPLA
- Robert Barr: CISCO
- Bart Eppenauer: Microsoft
- Sean Johnston: Genentech
- Jay Monahan: eBay
- Ron Myrick: Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner
- Kulpreet Rana: Google
- Robert Sacoff: Pattishall, McAuliffe & ABA IP Section
- David Simon: Intel Corporation
- Herb Wamsley: Intellectual Property Owners
3:45-4:00 p.m., Concluding Remarks
Commissioner Mozelle Thompson
Then you create a web voting system where people can rate the validity of a patent. If the ratings of the patents an officer approves is average at the end of the year, then his next year bonus will be average, giving him the same salary he would get without the system.
However, you slide it for those that are over or under the average. Thus, an office that gets low validity ratings would receive less pay, and an office that receives higher validity ratings would receive higher ratings would receive a higher bonus.
This would permit peer review of patents after they are approved, while at the same time create an incentive for the patent officers to give more weight to the validity of a patent!
Isn't this our number one complaint, anyway? Patents lacking validity being approved, requiring high legal costs to overturn?
Or you could turn one into a Smart Toaster (TM). Then you'd only need to boot it in the morning, perhaps using a $5 timer to turn it on and off during your preferred toasting range.
It blows me away how many people are completely unaware of why the UN was created. It wasn't created to be a world government body to solve all the world's problems. It was created to prevent WW III, which primarily involving giving the super powers a forum to work out disagreements instead of declaring war. The atom bomb had a lot to do with why the UN was created.
Veto power was and still is the only means of keeping the superpowers (those with the most nukes) involved, primarily the US, Russia and China. This hasn't changed. Proposing getting rid of veto power is an invitation to nuclear holocaust, because the US, Russia and China would simply withdraw. They have no incentive to permit smaller nations to dictate what they can and cannot do. If a ruling passed they disagreed with they could either ignore it, or go to war if the ruling resulted in harm to their country (e.g., global embargo of the US.) The veto power is the only thing that protects them from "majority rule".
This seems illogical to a lot of people, particularly if you subscribe to the philosophy that the majority is always right. But you really have to ignore the concept and reality of what a superpower is to pretend that no veto could ever work. Being a superpower means that even the UN and all the nations in the world can't force you to do something that you don't want to do. The solution? Why create a war over it when you can simply veto it?
The reason France was given veto power is slightly different, but at the time it revolved around ensuring stability in Europe.
PULL THE NOSE UP! PULL THE NOSE UP! WE'RE GONNA CRASH!!!! NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
Segment fault at <a very personal memory address>
I did some work for a large payroll company, and this was the platform IBM sold them for running mission critical payroll processing for its thousands of customers.
This isn't about legacy application as much as it is about consolidating clustered applications into an easier to manage platform. Believe it or not, you can still do state-of-the-art software development despite the physical housing being a mainframe.
We did all the software development on the PC. The mainframe was simply the deployment destination. This is one advantage of the J2EE architecture. This also ruled out .NET, as Windows didn't offer the stability that Linux offered on the mainframe. However, we did happen to use Windows on the PCs in order to be able to use Rational Rose. Barring Rose, which isn't needed in deployment, our development architecture was completely compatible with Linux.
From a J2EE perspective, this eliminated the need to manage clusters in operation, as well as to develop for them. Clustering, despite its raves in the news, has a lot of production related issues that the mainframe solves. This is part of IBM's marketing pitch.
Hackers Claim New Fingerprint Biometric Attack
How To Fake Fingerprints
Doubt cast on fingerprint security
So, you're headed towards that tree near the edge of a cliff, thanking God that it's going to save your life. Your car panics, and steers you a few degrees left to avoid the tree.
That will raise the next question... how much data is saved to investigate severe craches where your car is smashed to bits and burning because of the 1,000 foot drop.
This became a rubber stamp court, with only one request out of over 7,500 since its inception being rejected by the judges. Of course, the people are unaware of it because the proceedings of the court are secret, and the defendents are usually unaware of the evidence being used against them.
The existence of the court is not secret though, as it was created by a law passed in the 80s, and the quantity of searches granted by the court is public. Indeed, the US government was accused of abusing this court recently to broaden its purpose, before the Patriot Act was "clarified" to permit such abuse by the US prosecutors, FBI and intelligence agencies. One of the judges on the panel scolded the US government for being deceptive in the types of cases it was bringing, indicating that the US government does try to bring people before FISA that are not spies, but instead ordinary criminals. The US appealed a decision to legally obtain a broading of the courts purpose, originally without legislation.
If I remember correctly, congress passed a law to "clarify" that the Patriot Act extended this to cover those suspects of "terrorism". Hasn't it occurred to anyone that none of the trials of suspected terrorists are public?
This is such a sad demise of the US Constitution and American liberty. To me, I'd be willing to die like our forefathers did to preserve American freedom and create the Bill of Rights. I just wish we weren't so willing to discard it today under the illusion that our life-spans will be longer. When I was a child, being willing to die to perserve American freedom was a common notion. Now, being willing to give up freedom to avoid the remotest chance of dying, no matter how statistically improbable, has become a de facto notion. To suggest otherwise, well, that would be unpatriotic! Or would it be terrorist?
Unfortunately, without the ability for the press or the people to attend trials of suspected terrorists, it's unlikely that this will ever be overturned. We'd have to prove that the system as used unjustly, but the Patriot Act has removed all accountability, so that it is nearly impossible to prove the injustice.
The question is, if it was "spies" yesterday, and now includes those labeled as "terrorist" or "threats to national security" by the investigators and prosecutors today, then what label is next? Or, are the current labels broad enough to permit US prosecutors to throw anyone in prison for life that they see fit? It's hard to discern when our government is no longer accountable to the people it's supposed to represent.
Is there anyway to determine what cases the government has filed to prevent public accountability under the Patriot Act? I'd like to follow up on this to at least try to estimate how many cases there are today. If at all possible, I'd like to know if it even remotely possible to discover any injustices occurring. Justice is, after all, the purpose of all this. Right?
Links:
THE SECRET FISA COURT: RUBBER STAMPING ON RIGHTS
Secret court meets to consider Justice Department appeal
Secret court gives U.S. gov't wiretap powers
Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft
Secret court may limit government power to spy on domestic terror
These links aren't in chronological order, and I obtained them using a simple
I agree, copyright reform is needed, as well. Yet, I try to keep patent and copyright reform separate in discussions to reduce the temptation to use the phrase "intellectual property", and because their issues are very different, though both very important.
Due to the USPTO's current high demand to patent everything under the sun, they have been increasingly outsourcing their positions to Mayotte, having a workforce that "fits the qualifications of our most rigid analysis positions", cites one top official. That same official said that due to some difficulties in getting the children in the country Internet access, however, they probably won't be able to surpass the 90% outsourcing objective they recently peaked at.
I've read comments on this subject from IBM, the largest patent holder in the world, indicating they might even endorse patent reform. Their stance has been that they use patents primarily as a defense, adding that until the system is fixed, they don't have much of a choice.
This is also putting a rush to patent everything, worse than a gold rush, not so much to profit like these annoying cases, but to build a defense, like IBM does. Only, as we all know, the little guy has little defense. Thus there is both a chill and imbalance on innovation today.
Is anyone lobbying congress for patent reform? I'd like to know what we can do.
- The perception created by France in International politics.
- The perceptions Americans have, who generally read the headlines about French views in International politics, and are also influenced by posts like the original post that started the whole thread.
As for individual French people, or France as a place to live, I don't believe any one stereo type covers it all. I have had plenty of friends that were born in France that don't fit the stereo type, and don't like the social system there because of they way it is punitive on the young, stifles economics and buys votes making reform nearly impossible.
On the other hand, I've met other French people that believe that France is always right, and American's are just a bunch of uncultured pigs, which more or less was the tone of the original poster.
However, when it comes to issues such as economics, I tend to view any country with an unemployment rate above 10% as having no place to tell another country, such as the USA, what they are doing wrong, and hypocritical if they do.
I heard one friend say after living in Europe for 6 years, "France is the conscious of the world." The perspective from America is that if France is the conscious, then the world is a God hating devil worshipper. France regularly opposes the fundamental values that American's have. So, hearing France get self-righteous in International forums tends to turn a lot of stomachs.
Your post reaffirms American perception of France, leading them to embolden their stereotypes of the French.
The debate heightens when the UN goes beyond its original purpose. The veto powers were designed to prevent the UN from becoming a world government. It was also to give the superpowers, the primary targets of the UN's purpose, a reason to participate. Being a superpower inherently means you don't have to participate, and thus likely to leave the UN as soon as you disagreed with something it was determined to do. Veto power prevents the super powers from leaving the UN.
The backlash the UN has had in the US is due to those that have tried to turn the UN into more than its original purpose.
Passing out condoms in Africa is an example of an issue that turned some in the US against the UN. Whether or not you agree with the concept, it's hard to debate that it has nothing to do with peace and preventing another world war.
If you want superpowers like the US to continue to participate in the UN, then quit trying to turn it into something it wasn't created to be. Find another institution to accomplish those goals. Otherwise, you are inviting WW III.
Two things are outdated that need to change: - The business model of the artists - The distribution model of recorded creativity Both of these can change without declaring countless Americans as enemies of the state, which is the effect of the assault Hatch is proposing in his letter.