The abuse of the patent system is beyond repair. I say we completely overhaul the entire system and only grant 10 patents per year. There are not even 10 things that are patent-worthy invented in an average year. Not anymore. Combining a cellphone and a pen is not unique and nonobvious and should not be patentable. Give the 10 best, truly innovative inventions one of ten patents after an exhaustive review at the end of the year. No genetic patents, no "business method" patents. Only truly novel inventions should be patentable. Frankly I can't think of the last invention that I've seen that is worthy of a patent. 10 per year is still allowing at least 5 crap things to get an unfair monopoly that is completely undeserved.
The views expressed by your employees on their own time do not represent your company unless you take the time and energy to point it out and MAKE it so. No reasonable person would think that a Walmart employee's ranting on his/her facebook page represents the official views of Walmart. Of course, nobody should say who their employer is on Facebook or any other such site. But we know that's not going to be a prerequisite for firings. People have and will be fired for their online content even when they don't mention their job/employer. What's to stop Domino's pizza from firing an employee because she is pro-choice?
There is going to come a point where the First Amendment will need to be incorporated onto the actions of private actors like big corporations. Frankly I think we're well past that point.
Yes, exactly. You're the first person to say what I was thinking - the cops and the family want to find this purportedly missing person and none of them is willing to cough up a mere 20 dollars?
There is no privacy right in having your phone turned off or turned on, and many courts have held the police don't need a warrant to locate a cellphone (though some have, as I recall). Regardless, the issue is over a corporation being cheap. But the people looking for him were equally cheap.
Now, maybe the tried to pay but were told "sorry, only the account holder may pay" or "sorry we only accept money orders for overdue accounts, you can't pay by credit card on this account" or some other bullshit like that. In THAT CASE, with someone missing and maybe in danger, the company would be in the wrong. But nobody should ever have to shell out $20 to help the police (also known as the government). Plus this time they say it's a missing person, next time they say it's a missing person but it's really just some arab guy they want to spy on.
The company is certainly not guilty of murder/manslaughter (had the guy died) as some people are saying here. That's ridiculous. Nobody has any duty to assist in an investigation beyond providing information you actually know.
Closing a loophole to require owed taxed to be paid is not equivalent to "raising taxes" though that's of course the same pathetic argument the Republican-Christian party is making. "It's a substantial tax increase to force us to pay the taxes we've been dodging."
Why should I, a normal citizen with a normal job, pay more in taxes than a huge company like KBR?
It amazes me that anyone could side with tax cheats, and actually argue that not only should be be permitted to continue to avoid paying their taxes, but that it's bad policy and immoral to require them to pay such owed taxes. Unbelievable. Meanwhile a lot of the companies doing this tax dodging have been receiving bailouts from those taxpayers who do pay their taxes.
Nobody wants to pay taxes, and everyone wants their tax rate to be lower. How about some consistency, though - like everyone who owes taxes should pay them.
I am a person who entirely believes in science, and as an atheist I greatly disapprove of anything resembling faith. I hate to say it, but so much of this superstring, 11 dimensional stuff sounds more like faith, or religion, than actual hard science. None of what's talked about here sets out a testable hypothesis, and it sounds like they're just making up stuff the way religious people do, though using words like "dimensional" instead of "power of Christ" to explain what otherwise can't be explained (or explained within the bounds of their own premises).
I mock religion all the time. I have to hold science and scientists up to the same standard. I'd be a hypocrite to accept unprovable scientific mumbojumbo, interdimensional whatnots and all. at face value while discounting unprovable religious mumbojumbo all the time.
There was a whole episode of American Dad ("Tearjerker") where Roger, playing a James Bond villian, was cloning hollywood actors/actresses, albeit with robots, to make the clones act in horrible movies nobody would want to see, so his movie would win the Oscar.
Crazy religious people should not be allowed to watch TV.
I have a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader, and I love it. I love the e-ink, I love having all my books in one place (and it saves lots of space - don't need huge bookshelves). I like being able to backup all my books. There are many advantages to eBooks. But I did not spend $250 on the eBook reader because i somehow managed to convince myself that since eBooks cost a few dollars less than traditional bound paper books I'd save myself money in the long run. Only an idiot would convince themselves that an eBook reader is a way to save money. It's not. You can always buy USED paper books (go to Half-Price Books or another used book store) cheaper than you can buy new-release eBooks. But that doesn't mean it's not a useful device.
That being said, many copyrighted ebooks can be downloaded for free on bittorrent sites (not saying one should do this). In that case, it would save money assuming you would otherwise be purchasing the books in traditional format from Amazon or somewhere else.
But don't kid yourself, buying eBooks for $14 instead of traditional paper books for $17 is not going to offset the cost of a $250-$300 electronic device anytime in your near future. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to use frugality as a reason to drop a few hundred bucks on an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader. People are dumb, but that's the level of stupidity at which people probably are not going to be doing a lot of reading, let alone book-buying in the first place.
I love my Sony Reader, but it was a luxury that I paid for, and I have no illusions that it will be saving me money anytime in the near future.
Also patent owners should have to disgorge all profits made on a patent that is declared by a court to be invalid (especially if procured by "fraud on the patent office"). Merely having the patent cancelled, and getting to keep years of profits, is not enough of a disincentive to apply for and/or enforce frivilous patents.
Right now they are always increasing the application fee, and it is non-refundable. But they have patent "maintenance fees" for each of the first 12 years after a patent is granted as is in effect. So that right there is a huge incentive for the USPTO to grant patents - automatic 12 years of annual fees per patent. The USPTO has NO incentive to deny a patent, and every incentive to grant all of them.
Then, in 1991, under pressure to reign in massive budget deficits, lawmakers passed (and President George H.W. Bush signed) a law that revolutionized the way the patent office does business. Borrowing ideas then in vogue among private sector consultants and CEOs to "reengineer" organizations to make them more "customer-driven," Congress instructed the patent office, which had always been funded from government revenues, to now pay its own way through fees charged to applicants, and to make the process of winning a patent easier on them.
In many ways, these changes worked exactly as planned. Partly because patents were easier to get and partly because the 1990s were a period of explosive technological innovation, the agency saw a rush of new business. Patent applications more than doubled from 178,083 in 1991 to 355,418 in 2003. The office became self-financing and flush with cash. Congress was even able to tap its surplus pool of user fees to help pay down the federal deficit. The patent office hired new examiners, and in 2003, moved into fancy new headquarters in a billboard property along the George Washington Parkway near the Pentagon.
The 1991 decision to make the PTO pay for itself, however, has created a series of perverse incentives that encourage the office to approve undeserving applications, and has made it easier for applicants to game the system.
Because each new application now brings in a $380 fee, the agency has an incentive to approve those patents sending a signal to the market to apply for more. Additionally, patent-holders pay annual maintenance fees for the first 12 years of a patent's life, meaning that each approved patent brings in a total of over $3,000 to the office. So every patent issued means a bigger budget for the patent office, and helps to guarantee that Congress will continue to look kindly on the office. "It's like telling the Treasury Department, go call the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and tell them that they're gonna get paid by how many twenties they print," says David Martin, who runs M-CAM, an intellectual-property consulting firm based in Charlottesville, Va., and has testified frequently before Congress about the patent system.
The problem is that Congress decided not to fund the USPTO and allow it to fund itself through application fees, processing fees, and all whatever other fees the USPTO wants to charge. So, the more patents they review and grant, the more money they make. This was the primary cause of the patent explosion - it suddenly became in the Patent and Trademark Office's best interests to allow and grant as many patents as possible. Take the $500 application fee (or whatever it is), charge a review fee, charge a patent issuance fee, and leave it up to the courts sort out whether or not a patent on a method of removing snot from a nose with a finger is a valid patent or not. That's what's been going on.
My solution is for congress to fund the USPTO, but that they should only be allowed to issue, say, 100 patents per year. All patent applications are held and reviewed and at the end of the year, the top 100 are granted patents. Frankly, 100 is too generous, I'd rather it be 20 to 30. These days there are nowhere close to 100 truly innovative and nonobvious inventions per year. Maybe 5 or 6, at the most. So 20 patents per year is more than adequate, and 100 is allowing crap that shouldn't otherwise be patentable. Once new patents become a rarity, the number of patent applications will drop exponentially. It should not be a valid business model to own a portfolio of ridiculous patents and sit around waiting for someone to infringe them. That does not foster innovation - quite the opposite.
So, give the USPTO $100,000 or so in federal funding, grant 100 patents per year (a board can pick the top 100), and by all means don't give the USPTO financial incentives to grant as many patents as it can, only to leave the actual work of determining patent validity up to the judiciary. Our courts are clogged enough without people suing over patent infringement for nosepicking methods.
Sure you can encrypt compressed data. I was just making a general comment on the statement that "certain forms of compression are also incompatible with PGP whole disk encryption." It seemed germane to the topic. But yes if it's already compressed then it can be encrypted.
It is impossible to compress encrypted data, or at least data that are properly encrypted. If properly encrypted, the resultant cyphertext should be completely random - any patterns mean it is pseudorandom and thus not properly encrypted (by "proper" I mean unbreakable by means of cryptoanalysis, for example a simple substitution cypher does not result in an even, random distriubtion of letters - there will be more of the letter that represent "E" than the letter that represents "Z").
It is impossible to compress completely random data. As such, it is impossible to compress properly encrypted data, since it should be completely random. For this reason you cannot compress a PGP encrypted file (or hard drive, for that matter) since the cyphertext of the PGP encrypted file is completely random data, even if the plaintext is nothing but the letter "W" written over and over again ten thousand times.
Could you link to that proof? Is there a Wikipedia article about that proof that I could read up on? Or is it just opinions that copyrights are based on flawed logic? In that case, state it as an opinion and I will respect it as an opinion.
Sure, one word: Wilco.
Wilco has tremendous talent, puts its albums on the internet for free download, and still makes good money. Wilco proves people will buy quality media despite being able to copy it for free. This alone proves the logic in support of copyright ("It's necessary to foster the creative arts") is fundamentally flawed. Radiohead has done the same thing, to a lesser example. Even if musicians couldn't make money selling recorded media due to free copying, they could make money via performances. You can't copy the experience of sitting front row at a great concert. You can bootleg the audio or even video it but it's surely not the same as being there live. That's how musicians should make money. Not from selling music. You just can't do that anymore.
ARGH! STRAWMAN!! No-one makes that argument! The problem is that copying = no chance of you buying (whereas statistically you had some chance of buying before) = loss, in the sense that without gluttonous quantities free entertainment you, or at least other people in the same boat, would have bought some stuff.
Yes, people make the argument all the time, and it sounds like it's precisely the argument you are making. I have a HUGE DVD (and now blu-ray) collection, 95% of which are things I initially copied. So, copying = no chance of buying is simply not true. It may reduce the chance that it will be bought on a macro level, but that just goes back what you call a straw man argument. "Would have bought it" = "lost sale" = "stealing."...if copyright were gone, but I'd hazard a guess that Brittany Spears would be one of the few artists still making music.
She doesn't even "make" her own music, people do it for her. A bunch of corporate executives, marketing gurus, and demographic specialists sit around at a huge oak table and come up with lyrics for new Brittney Spears songs. They run it through focus groups, tweak it to appeal to the most people possible, hire nameless studio musicians to stick a drum beat to it, and use multi-million dollar recording studios to make Brittney's voice sound sexy and in tune with the drum-beat. Then they put her in a skimpy outfit, do a $150,000 photo shoot, and stick a picture of her on the album cover, spend $10 million marketing the new album (the quality of what's actually on it is wholly irrelevant), and people are convinced they should spend $20 on her new album. Only copyright makes such a shallow, petty, worthless, drivel-producing paradigm possible, let alone profitable. She's famous only because she's hot and sex sells. Neil Young is famous because he has musical talent, is a great singer and an amazing musician. If there were no copyright, Brittney Spears would be giving lap dances for $20 a pop. Nothing more. The only singing she'd be doing would be tone-deaf lullabies to her 16 children, trying to get them to go to sleep.
Copyright was never intended to prevent private copying for noncommercial uses. Please don't try to argue that "copying = not buying = commercial loss = commercial use" because it's a horribly disingenuous and intellectually dishonest argument. Stealing is depriving someone else of their property. Even if copying is depriving someone of a potential sale, there is no vested property right in potential sales. If so capitalism would not work, as competition would be equivalent to stealing. The makers of cars would be stealing from the makers of horsedrawn carriages. The makers of refrigerators would be stealing from ice manufacturers. The makers of calculators would be stealing from the makers of abacuses (abaci?). You get the point.
I should be able to copy and read/watch/listen to/play in my own home, for my own use, any media in existence.
The notion that without monopolies, creative people would not create has long been disproved. No monopolies are necessary to foster creativity. The best, most creative people will create regardless. The hacks are the ones who need monopoly protection. For example, without copyright, Neil Young would still be making music, but Brittney Spears would not.
Because copyright has been so greatly abused, because it's been proven to be based on flawed logic, and because it only serves to hinder creativity and make money for those who do not deserve it, copright should be abolished completely. There should still be protection for attribution to prevent plaigariasm, in some form.
Modern commercials rely on one of two things to sell a product or service. One, you will improve your chances of having sexual intercourse with a desireable mate if you purchase our product/service. Two, you are in danger and you need to purchase our product/service to be safe. Over the past couple of years the "scare" meme has turned into more of a direct threat. The best example is those horrible, evil free credit report dot com commercials, where they come out and say if you don't buy our product you'll lose all your money and have to work at a crappy seafood restaurant and drive a shit car (the fact that they're selling something is only to be discerned in the fine print at the bottom of the commercial and the last few words, quickly rattled off, at the end of the commercial). "Buy our product or be poor" is a threat. Auto insurance companies do this a lot too... I just saw an Allstate ad that showed a family losing all their money due to a car accident because they didn't have Allstate insurance.
None of these threats is a legitimate concern for consumers. There's nothing different about saying consumers have a security problem on their computers and need to buy software to fix it. "Buy our product or hackers will destroy your computer and steal your private data."
It should be illegal to threaten consumers. Such commercial speech should not be protected by the First Amendment.
It makes perfect sense to me (it's obvious, to be blunt) that right wingers afraid of terrorists, illegal aliens, criminals, foreigners, etc would be more easily startled than those without such fears. But do such fears cause right-wing viewpoints, or do those viewpoints cause such fears? Or is it a little bit of both (self-perpetuating)?
My guess is that a singular experience will lead to one picking up a fear-based political viewpoint, which will then, in turn, cause additional fears to be ingrained into one's psyche.
And of course rational discussion doesn't correct the problem. It's like religion - you can't reason someone out of something that they didn't reason themselves into.
First of all, legally, a copy of a contract is just as legitimate as the original (yes, IAAL). Both can be alleged to be forgeries just as easily. In fact a copy could be more easily proved to be a forgery than the original, as one could compare signatures and show that the signature was lifted from another source. It's like one of those infamous "Majestic 12" documents that was allegedly signed by Harry Truman - the best evidence we have that it is not authentic is that the Truman signature is exactly like another signature on another document, it was lifted, cut and pasted, onto the MJ-12 document. Note: I don't want to debate the MJ-12 documents here.
Anyway, the other reason why fax signatures are not a security risk is that you know who is going to be sending you the fax. "Sign it and fax it over to me today." You get the fax today. Nobody else would reasonably know about that expectation. It's like going to pick up money from western union - "I'm here to pick up $100 for Brian Halloweth"... the fact that you know about the 100 bucks for someone named Brian Halloweth is good evidence your claim is legitimate. Ditto with the fax signature. Of course this doesn't apply to general applications that can be signed and faxed at any time, unexpectedly. But those can just as easily be forged, and in this scenario the faxee is less likely to know the signature of the faxor.
Any alleged weakness in a fax signature is also a weakness in a real signature. That's the bottom line. I don't buy the notion that they are a huge security risk.
I'm quite sure the center of Wikipedia, the article linked most by others, is the article on "American Idol." The most pathetic thing is usually the correct one. That would be the most pathetic thing. Thus, it's probably right.
Exactly! Most people simply can't get beyond the happy-sounding name (which usually involves "Children/s") of the bill (which is why they do that). Who could possibly be against something called the PATRIOT Act? Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act? That sounds good! Digital Millennium Copyright Act? Sounds good, a new copyright act for a new digital millennium! Yay!
If this law didn't help insurance companies at the expense of the insured, Bush would veto the fuck out of it.
Voting sounds good, but rather than the public at large, I'd say have a board of patent examiners or some other group educated in this sort of thing. Lay people wouldn't know what is truly unique versus a cellphone with a camera in it. Unique and pervasive are two different things.
I'm very skeptical of IP, for the most part. Trademarks are legitimate because they prevent consumer fraud, one brand pretending to be another. If anyone could use the Nike name/label everyone would be ripped off all the time. However the law should not require trademark holders to zealously defend their names or be deemed to lose them. Why encourage, or even require litigation?
Patents, for bona finde inventions, not derivatives, not marketing systems, not software, not combinations of inventions (a vaccuum cleaner with a lightbulb should not be patentable, but the first internal conbustion engine should be) are legitimate. However, these days there should only be about 1 or 2 patents per year. If even that. Maybe 1 or 2 every couple of years. A patent being granted should be a rare thing, newsworthy in and of itself. Nowadays, pretty much everything new and unique has already been made. I won't rehash patent abuse here on Slashdot - you all know better than everyone else how patents are abused. No more than 1 invention per year is truly unique and worthy of patent protection (for a limited time, of course).
Copyrights have proven to be worthless. Copyright provides absolutely zero incentive for artists to create works - people with artistic talent will create works of art no matter whether they can have a financial monopoly on said works. In fact, as a rule of thumb, works made for profit are far worse than works made for art's sake. Copyright has been used for nothing more than to stifle free expression, to blackmail consumers, and to purge knowledge and art from availability. I don't mean just from the public domain. Everything should be in the public domain. I mean there are movies and books that are out of print and unavailable b/c they can't be legally purchased! Anything that reduces the available knowledge to mankind needs to be done away with. But on a more personal level, the idea that people have to pay to sing happy birthday in a movie, that a restaurant owner can't turn on the radio in his establishment (let alone play a CD), or that I can't make a mix CD for a friend is simply asinine and contrary to a free society. When you make something, the only thing you deserve is credit for the work. Plaigairism is bad. Nobody should be able to take credit for your work - but credit is all you deserve. Nothing more.
In sum: Copyright has to go. Patent needs to be limited to, say, the top 5 submissions per year (and that's generous, it should be 1 per year at most). Trademark is legitimate.
That's interesting, as it contradicts previous teachings of the church. However, even this statement seems to mean newborn babies and toddlers will go to hell. They did not yet have a chance to "sincerely seek God" and be "moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience." Ditto for retarded people.
But it does seem to apply to insular, isolated people who due solely to geography had not been conquered by christians or otherwise had christianity thrust in their faces. That would, of course, apply to extraterrestrials, too. Well, other than the Grays who have certainly been to Earth frequently enough over the past 50+ years to know about Jesus n' Pals.
why wouldn't original sin apply to them? Or did god create them entirely separate from man (the obvious answer is yes, but I mean in terms of Genesis and the 'six days' and all that crap). Just because you had no chance to know about jesus doesn't mean you get a hell-pass for not accepting him as god, at least according to many of the wackier christians. Babies and children who die too young to learn about jesus go to hell. Retarded people who can't learn about him go to hell. Isolated, insular tribes who never met a christian go to hell. I don't see why intelligent life forms on another planet would be any different. They're analogous to a tribe of people isolated deep in the jungle or on a small island in the middle of the ocean - never coming in contact with a christian, the bible, or even so much as the word 'jesus'... they still go burn in hell for all eternity according to most christians I've talked to about this issue. There's no due process for the heaven-hell adjudication. So based on the Drake Equation, I contend that hell is full of aliens. Only a de minimus portion of hell is actual homo sapien from the planet earth.
Of course, each planet could have its own hell, or hell could be segregated by planet/species.
Or religion could simply be a factor that precludes a species from being considered "intelligent" life.
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The abuse of the patent system is beyond repair. I say we completely overhaul the entire system and only grant 10 patents per year. There are not even 10 things that are patent-worthy invented in an average year. Not anymore. Combining a cellphone and a pen is not unique and nonobvious and should not be patentable. Give the 10 best, truly innovative inventions one of ten patents after an exhaustive review at the end of the year. No genetic patents, no "business method" patents. Only truly novel inventions should be patentable. Frankly I can't think of the last invention that I've seen that is worthy of a patent. 10 per year is still allowing at least 5 crap things to get an unfair monopoly that is completely undeserved.
The views expressed by your employees on their own time do not represent your company unless you take the time and energy to point it out and MAKE it so. No reasonable person would think that a Walmart employee's ranting on his/her facebook page represents the official views of Walmart. Of course, nobody should say who their employer is on Facebook or any other such site. But we know that's not going to be a prerequisite for firings. People have and will be fired for their online content even when they don't mention their job/employer. What's to stop Domino's pizza from firing an employee because she is pro-choice?
There is going to come a point where the First Amendment will need to be incorporated onto the actions of private actors like big corporations. Frankly I think we're well past that point.
Yes, exactly. You're the first person to say what I was thinking - the cops and the family want to find this purportedly missing person and none of them is willing to cough up a mere 20 dollars? There is no privacy right in having your phone turned off or turned on, and many courts have held the police don't need a warrant to locate a cellphone (though some have, as I recall). Regardless, the issue is over a corporation being cheap. But the people looking for him were equally cheap. Now, maybe the tried to pay but were told "sorry, only the account holder may pay" or "sorry we only accept money orders for overdue accounts, you can't pay by credit card on this account" or some other bullshit like that. In THAT CASE, with someone missing and maybe in danger, the company would be in the wrong. But nobody should ever have to shell out $20 to help the police (also known as the government). Plus this time they say it's a missing person, next time they say it's a missing person but it's really just some arab guy they want to spy on. The company is certainly not guilty of murder/manslaughter (had the guy died) as some people are saying here. That's ridiculous. Nobody has any duty to assist in an investigation beyond providing information you actually know.
Closing a loophole to require owed taxed to be paid is not equivalent to "raising taxes" though that's of course the same pathetic argument the Republican-Christian party is making. "It's a substantial tax increase to force us to pay the taxes we've been dodging." Why should I, a normal citizen with a normal job, pay more in taxes than a huge company like KBR? It amazes me that anyone could side with tax cheats, and actually argue that not only should be be permitted to continue to avoid paying their taxes, but that it's bad policy and immoral to require them to pay such owed taxes. Unbelievable. Meanwhile a lot of the companies doing this tax dodging have been receiving bailouts from those taxpayers who do pay their taxes. Nobody wants to pay taxes, and everyone wants their tax rate to be lower. How about some consistency, though - like everyone who owes taxes should pay them.
I am a person who entirely believes in science, and as an atheist I greatly disapprove of anything resembling faith. I hate to say it, but so much of this superstring, 11 dimensional stuff sounds more like faith, or religion, than actual hard science. None of what's talked about here sets out a testable hypothesis, and it sounds like they're just making up stuff the way religious people do, though using words like "dimensional" instead of "power of Christ" to explain what otherwise can't be explained (or explained within the bounds of their own premises).
I mock religion all the time. I have to hold science and scientists up to the same standard. I'd be a hypocrite to accept unprovable scientific mumbojumbo, interdimensional whatnots and all. at face value while discounting unprovable religious mumbojumbo all the time.
There was a whole episode of American Dad ("Tearjerker") where Roger, playing a James Bond villian, was cloning hollywood actors/actresses, albeit with robots, to make the clones act in horrible movies nobody would want to see, so his movie would win the Oscar.
Crazy religious people should not be allowed to watch TV.
I have a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader, and I love it. I love the e-ink, I love having all my books in one place (and it saves lots of space - don't need huge bookshelves). I like being able to backup all my books. There are many advantages to eBooks. But I did not spend $250 on the eBook reader because i somehow managed to convince myself that since eBooks cost a few dollars less than traditional bound paper books I'd save myself money in the long run. Only an idiot would convince themselves that an eBook reader is a way to save money. It's not. You can always buy USED paper books (go to Half-Price Books or another used book store) cheaper than you can buy new-release eBooks. But that doesn't mean it's not a useful device. That being said, many copyrighted ebooks can be downloaded for free on bittorrent sites (not saying one should do this). In that case, it would save money assuming you would otherwise be purchasing the books in traditional format from Amazon or somewhere else. But don't kid yourself, buying eBooks for $14 instead of traditional paper books for $17 is not going to offset the cost of a $250-$300 electronic device anytime in your near future. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to use frugality as a reason to drop a few hundred bucks on an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader. People are dumb, but that's the level of stupidity at which people probably are not going to be doing a lot of reading, let alone book-buying in the first place. I love my Sony Reader, but it was a luxury that I paid for, and I have no illusions that it will be saving me money anytime in the near future.
Also patent owners should have to disgorge all profits made on a patent that is declared by a court to be invalid (especially if procured by "fraud on the patent office"). Merely having the patent cancelled, and getting to keep years of profits, is not enough of a disincentive to apply for and/or enforce frivilous patents.
Right now they are always increasing the application fee, and it is non-refundable. But they have patent "maintenance fees" for each of the first 12 years after a patent is granted as is in effect. So that right there is a huge incentive for the USPTO to grant patents - automatic 12 years of annual fees per patent. The USPTO has NO incentive to deny a patent, and every incentive to grant all of them.
See http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0506.roth.html for a nice summary of the issue I'm talking about. I believe 35 U.S.C. section 42 is the law in question re: USPTO self-funding.
From the article:
Then, in 1991, under pressure to reign in massive budget deficits, lawmakers passed (and President George H.W. Bush signed) a law that revolutionized the way the patent office does business. Borrowing ideas then in vogue among private sector consultants and CEOs to "reengineer" organizations to make them more "customer-driven," Congress instructed the patent office, which had always been funded from government revenues, to now pay its own way through fees charged to applicants, and to make the process of winning a patent easier on them.
In many ways, these changes worked exactly as planned. Partly because patents were easier to get and partly because the 1990s were a period of explosive technological innovation, the agency saw a rush of new business. Patent applications more than doubled from 178,083 in 1991 to 355,418 in 2003. The office became self-financing and flush with cash. Congress was even able to tap its surplus pool of user fees to help pay down the federal deficit. The patent office hired new examiners, and in 2003, moved into fancy new headquarters in a billboard property along the George Washington Parkway near the Pentagon.
The 1991 decision to make the PTO pay for itself, however, has created a series of perverse incentives that encourage the office to approve undeserving applications, and has made it easier for applicants to game the system.
Because each new application now brings in a $380 fee, the agency has an incentive to approve those patents sending a signal to the market to apply for more. Additionally, patent-holders pay annual maintenance fees for the first 12 years of a patent's life, meaning that each approved patent brings in a total of over $3,000 to the office. So every patent issued means a bigger budget for the patent office, and helps to guarantee that Congress will continue to look kindly on the office. "It's like telling the Treasury Department, go call the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and tell them that they're gonna get paid by how many twenties they print," says David Martin, who runs M-CAM, an intellectual-property consulting firm based in Charlottesville, Va., and has testified frequently before Congress about the patent system.
The problem is that Congress decided not to fund the USPTO and allow it to fund itself through application fees, processing fees, and all whatever other fees the USPTO wants to charge. So, the more patents they review and grant, the more money they make. This was the primary cause of the patent explosion - it suddenly became in the Patent and Trademark Office's best interests to allow and grant as many patents as possible. Take the $500 application fee (or whatever it is), charge a review fee, charge a patent issuance fee, and leave it up to the courts sort out whether or not a patent on a method of removing snot from a nose with a finger is a valid patent or not. That's what's been going on. My solution is for congress to fund the USPTO, but that they should only be allowed to issue, say, 100 patents per year. All patent applications are held and reviewed and at the end of the year, the top 100 are granted patents. Frankly, 100 is too generous, I'd rather it be 20 to 30. These days there are nowhere close to 100 truly innovative and nonobvious inventions per year. Maybe 5 or 6, at the most. So 20 patents per year is more than adequate, and 100 is allowing crap that shouldn't otherwise be patentable. Once new patents become a rarity, the number of patent applications will drop exponentially. It should not be a valid business model to own a portfolio of ridiculous patents and sit around waiting for someone to infringe them. That does not foster innovation - quite the opposite.
So, give the USPTO $100,000 or so in federal funding, grant 100 patents per year (a board can pick the top 100), and by all means don't give the USPTO financial incentives to grant as many patents as it can, only to leave the actual work of determining patent validity up to the judiciary. Our courts are clogged enough without people suing over patent infringement for nosepicking methods.
Sure you can encrypt compressed data. I was just making a general comment on the statement that "certain forms of compression are also incompatible with PGP whole disk encryption." It seemed germane to the topic. But yes if it's already compressed then it can be encrypted.
It is impossible to compress encrypted data, or at least data that are properly encrypted. If properly encrypted, the resultant cyphertext should be completely random - any patterns mean it is pseudorandom and thus not properly encrypted (by "proper" I mean unbreakable by means of cryptoanalysis, for example a simple substitution cypher does not result in an even, random distriubtion of letters - there will be more of the letter that represent "E" than the letter that represents "Z"). It is impossible to compress completely random data. As such, it is impossible to compress properly encrypted data, since it should be completely random. For this reason you cannot compress a PGP encrypted file (or hard drive, for that matter) since the cyphertext of the PGP encrypted file is completely random data, even if the plaintext is nothing but the letter "W" written over and over again ten thousand times.
Could you link to that proof? Is there a Wikipedia article about that proof that I could read up on? Or is it just opinions that copyrights are based on flawed logic? In that case, state it as an opinion and I will respect it as an opinion. Sure, one word: Wilco. Wilco has tremendous talent, puts its albums on the internet for free download, and still makes good money. Wilco proves people will buy quality media despite being able to copy it for free. This alone proves the logic in support of copyright ("It's necessary to foster the creative arts") is fundamentally flawed. Radiohead has done the same thing, to a lesser example. Even if musicians couldn't make money selling recorded media due to free copying, they could make money via performances. You can't copy the experience of sitting front row at a great concert. You can bootleg the audio or even video it but it's surely not the same as being there live. That's how musicians should make money. Not from selling music. You just can't do that anymore.
ARGH! STRAWMAN!! No-one makes that argument! The problem is that copying = no chance of you buying (whereas statistically you had some chance of buying before) = loss, in the sense that without gluttonous quantities free entertainment you, or at least other people in the same boat, would have bought some stuff.
...if copyright were gone, but I'd hazard a guess that Brittany Spears would be one of the few artists still making music.
She doesn't even "make" her own music, people do it for her. A bunch of corporate executives, marketing gurus, and demographic specialists sit around at a huge oak table and come up with lyrics for new Brittney Spears songs. They run it through focus groups, tweak it to appeal to the most people possible, hire nameless studio musicians to stick a drum beat to it, and use multi-million dollar recording studios to make Brittney's voice sound sexy and in tune with the drum-beat. Then they put her in a skimpy outfit, do a $150,000 photo shoot, and stick a picture of her on the album cover, spend $10 million marketing the new album (the quality of what's actually on it is wholly irrelevant), and people are convinced they should spend $20 on her new album. Only copyright makes such a shallow, petty, worthless, drivel-producing paradigm possible, let alone profitable. She's famous only because she's hot and sex sells. Neil Young is famous because he has musical talent, is a great singer and an amazing musician. If there were no copyright, Brittney Spears would be giving lap dances for $20 a pop. Nothing more. The only singing she'd be doing would be tone-deaf lullabies to her 16 children, trying to get them to go to sleep.
Yes, people make the argument all the time, and it sounds like it's precisely the argument you are making. I have a HUGE DVD (and now blu-ray) collection, 95% of which are things I initially copied. So, copying = no chance of buying is simply not true. It may reduce the chance that it will be bought on a macro level, but that just goes back what you call a straw man argument. "Would have bought it" = "lost sale" = "stealing."
Copyright was never intended to prevent private copying for noncommercial uses. Please don't try to argue that "copying = not buying = commercial loss = commercial use" because it's a horribly disingenuous and intellectually dishonest argument. Stealing is depriving someone else of their property. Even if copying is depriving someone of a potential sale, there is no vested property right in potential sales. If so capitalism would not work, as competition would be equivalent to stealing. The makers of cars would be stealing from the makers of horsedrawn carriages. The makers of refrigerators would be stealing from ice manufacturers. The makers of calculators would be stealing from the makers of abacuses (abaci?). You get the point. I should be able to copy and read/watch/listen to/play in my own home, for my own use, any media in existence. The notion that without monopolies, creative people would not create has long been disproved. No monopolies are necessary to foster creativity. The best, most creative people will create regardless. The hacks are the ones who need monopoly protection. For example, without copyright, Neil Young would still be making music, but Brittney Spears would not. Because copyright has been so greatly abused, because it's been proven to be based on flawed logic, and because it only serves to hinder creativity and make money for those who do not deserve it, copright should be abolished completely. There should still be protection for attribution to prevent plaigariasm, in some form.
Modern commercials rely on one of two things to sell a product or service. One, you will improve your chances of having sexual intercourse with a desireable mate if you purchase our product/service. Two, you are in danger and you need to purchase our product/service to be safe. Over the past couple of years the "scare" meme has turned into more of a direct threat. The best example is those horrible, evil free credit report dot com commercials, where they come out and say if you don't buy our product you'll lose all your money and have to work at a crappy seafood restaurant and drive a shit car (the fact that they're selling something is only to be discerned in the fine print at the bottom of the commercial and the last few words, quickly rattled off, at the end of the commercial). "Buy our product or be poor" is a threat. Auto insurance companies do this a lot too... I just saw an Allstate ad that showed a family losing all their money due to a car accident because they didn't have Allstate insurance. None of these threats is a legitimate concern for consumers. There's nothing different about saying consumers have a security problem on their computers and need to buy software to fix it. "Buy our product or hackers will destroy your computer and steal your private data." It should be illegal to threaten consumers. Such commercial speech should not be protected by the First Amendment.
It makes perfect sense to me (it's obvious, to be blunt) that right wingers afraid of terrorists, illegal aliens, criminals, foreigners, etc would be more easily startled than those without such fears. But do such fears cause right-wing viewpoints, or do those viewpoints cause such fears? Or is it a little bit of both (self-perpetuating)? My guess is that a singular experience will lead to one picking up a fear-based political viewpoint, which will then, in turn, cause additional fears to be ingrained into one's psyche. And of course rational discussion doesn't correct the problem. It's like religion - you can't reason someone out of something that they didn't reason themselves into.
Are they treated differently? If so, how?
First of all, legally, a copy of a contract is just as legitimate as the original (yes, IAAL). Both can be alleged to be forgeries just as easily. In fact a copy could be more easily proved to be a forgery than the original, as one could compare signatures and show that the signature was lifted from another source. It's like one of those infamous "Majestic 12" documents that was allegedly signed by Harry Truman - the best evidence we have that it is not authentic is that the Truman signature is exactly like another signature on another document, it was lifted, cut and pasted, onto the MJ-12 document. Note: I don't want to debate the MJ-12 documents here. Anyway, the other reason why fax signatures are not a security risk is that you know who is going to be sending you the fax. "Sign it and fax it over to me today." You get the fax today. Nobody else would reasonably know about that expectation. It's like going to pick up money from western union - "I'm here to pick up $100 for Brian Halloweth" ... the fact that you know about the 100 bucks for someone named Brian Halloweth is good evidence your claim is legitimate. Ditto with the fax signature. Of course this doesn't apply to general applications that can be signed and faxed at any time, unexpectedly. But those can just as easily be forged, and in this scenario the faxee is less likely to know the signature of the faxor.
Any alleged weakness in a fax signature is also a weakness in a real signature. That's the bottom line. I don't buy the notion that they are a huge security risk.
I'm quite sure the center of Wikipedia, the article linked most by others, is the article on "American Idol." The most pathetic thing is usually the correct one. That would be the most pathetic thing. Thus, it's probably right.
Exactly! Most people simply can't get beyond the happy-sounding name (which usually involves "Children/s") of the bill (which is why they do that). Who could possibly be against something called the PATRIOT Act? Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act? That sounds good! Digital Millennium Copyright Act? Sounds good, a new copyright act for a new digital millennium! Yay! If this law didn't help insurance companies at the expense of the insured, Bush would veto the fuck out of it.
Voting sounds good, but rather than the public at large, I'd say have a board of patent examiners or some other group educated in this sort of thing. Lay people wouldn't know what is truly unique versus a cellphone with a camera in it. Unique and pervasive are two different things.
I'm very skeptical of IP, for the most part. Trademarks are legitimate because they prevent consumer fraud, one brand pretending to be another. If anyone could use the Nike name/label everyone would be ripped off all the time. However the law should not require trademark holders to zealously defend their names or be deemed to lose them. Why encourage, or even require litigation? Patents, for bona finde inventions, not derivatives, not marketing systems, not software, not combinations of inventions (a vaccuum cleaner with a lightbulb should not be patentable, but the first internal conbustion engine should be) are legitimate. However, these days there should only be about 1 or 2 patents per year. If even that. Maybe 1 or 2 every couple of years. A patent being granted should be a rare thing, newsworthy in and of itself. Nowadays, pretty much everything new and unique has already been made. I won't rehash patent abuse here on Slashdot - you all know better than everyone else how patents are abused. No more than 1 invention per year is truly unique and worthy of patent protection (for a limited time, of course). Copyrights have proven to be worthless. Copyright provides absolutely zero incentive for artists to create works - people with artistic talent will create works of art no matter whether they can have a financial monopoly on said works. In fact, as a rule of thumb, works made for profit are far worse than works made for art's sake. Copyright has been used for nothing more than to stifle free expression, to blackmail consumers, and to purge knowledge and art from availability. I don't mean just from the public domain. Everything should be in the public domain. I mean there are movies and books that are out of print and unavailable b/c they can't be legally purchased! Anything that reduces the available knowledge to mankind needs to be done away with. But on a more personal level, the idea that people have to pay to sing happy birthday in a movie, that a restaurant owner can't turn on the radio in his establishment (let alone play a CD), or that I can't make a mix CD for a friend is simply asinine and contrary to a free society. When you make something, the only thing you deserve is credit for the work. Plaigairism is bad. Nobody should be able to take credit for your work - but credit is all you deserve. Nothing more. In sum: Copyright has to go. Patent needs to be limited to, say, the top 5 submissions per year (and that's generous, it should be 1 per year at most). Trademark is legitimate.
That's interesting, as it contradicts previous teachings of the church. However, even this statement seems to mean newborn babies and toddlers will go to hell. They did not yet have a chance to "sincerely seek God" and be "moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience." Ditto for retarded people. But it does seem to apply to insular, isolated people who due solely to geography had not been conquered by christians or otherwise had christianity thrust in their faces. That would, of course, apply to extraterrestrials, too. Well, other than the Grays who have certainly been to Earth frequently enough over the past 50+ years to know about Jesus n' Pals.
why wouldn't original sin apply to them? Or did god create them entirely separate from man (the obvious answer is yes, but I mean in terms of Genesis and the 'six days' and all that crap). Just because you had no chance to know about jesus doesn't mean you get a hell-pass for not accepting him as god, at least according to many of the wackier christians. Babies and children who die too young to learn about jesus go to hell. Retarded people who can't learn about him go to hell. Isolated, insular tribes who never met a christian go to hell. I don't see why intelligent life forms on another planet would be any different. They're analogous to a tribe of people isolated deep in the jungle or on a small island in the middle of the ocean - never coming in contact with a christian, the bible, or even so much as the word 'jesus' ... they still go burn in hell for all eternity according to most christians I've talked to about this issue. There's no due process for the heaven-hell adjudication. So based on the Drake Equation, I contend that hell is full of aliens. Only a de minimus portion of hell is actual homo sapien from the planet earth.
Of course, each planet could have its own hell, or hell could be segregated by planet/species.
Or religion could simply be a factor that precludes a species from being considered "intelligent" life.