They will have to get used to remote handling of BSOD.
They will need to have humans local to the actual machines to press the reset button when a BSOD occurs. A new breakthrough will then be announced called "proximity computing" whereby they will move the computers near those using them to avoid the extra employees who were hired to press the reset button. Buy shares in companies that are used to move the computers backwards and forwards each time the management reverses their previous "breakthrough".
Or make the machines all VMs so they can SSH into the "hardware" and reset it, or get network-connected power buttons and video cards.
It's a service that comes with your real credit card. For instance, I have a Citibank-branded MasterCard, and if I log in to the citicards.com website there's a menu item somewhere that lets me generate extra card numbers with various restrictions (only usable at one merchant, $$ limit, time limit, only usable once).
Boyden warns that a very clever AI without a sense of purpose might very well 'realize the impermanence of everything, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence.'
This is silly. Why would a machine without a sense of purpose or drive decide to play video games or seek entertainment or do anything except just sit there? Playing games would result from the wrong motivation ("wrong" from a certain perspective, anyway) not from the lack of any motivation.
Plus there's the whole issue of "motivation" implying "free will". Which we probably would have no reason to implement, if we even understood it well enough to be able to implement it.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Is that a myth because no one will steal your idea even if you don't protect it, or is it a myth because people will find a way to steal your idea anyway?
Or is it because someone halfway around the world came up with the same idea two weeks before you did?
Obviously, Child A needs to learn his multiplication tables too.
So you're saying "school + extracurricular learning > school", which is a rather silly thing to argue about.
What this is about is whether "extracurricular learning > school", which could be slightly less silly. If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything, and could generate interest in all of history, politics, math, literacy, science (how to use experiments and record-keeping to assist curiosity), the various trivia that we learned from science (earth goes around the sun), basic accounting, etc.
So even assuming you are entirely correct (for both topics at hand, his wanting to maybe get a patent, and his wanting to not get sued into the next century for infringing someone else's patent), it's still a bit more involved than "go play with the USPTO's search engine for a while".
Before I go read your 325 page PDF on my lunch break, would you mind giving some quote or an indication of what page to look at first?
The very beginning (well, after the 2 pages of acknowledgments) is a good place, it talks about steam engines there for a couple pages. Then there's also chapter 3 starting on page 49.
In fact the evidence shows that the invention of marvelous
machines, drugs and ideas does not require the spur of patents. If
anything, the evidence shows, it is the other way around: patents
protection is not the source of innovation, but rather the
unwelcome consequence that, eventually, tames it.
We have already looked at the computer software industry:
at its inception and during its most creative decades it was
essentially free of patents while making almost no use of copyright
protection in order to prevent entry by competitors. As creativity
slowed down, consolidation took place and a few large
monopolists emerged (one in particular), the demand for copyright
first and patents later grew. Nowadays copyright and patents stand
at the core of the software industry, which has become both
monopolized and substantially less innovative than in the past. [...]
We shall see now that the story of software is far from
unique. Most successful industries have followed the same pattern:
intellectual property plays little role at the pioneering stage when
new innovations and better and cheaper goods come pouring in.
Then, when the creative reservoir runs dry, there is the desperate
scramble for the pork that intellectual property provides.
He's afraid to make that innovation available to others.
This guy seems to be a little dim in that he could just do a patent search. Instead, he wants advice from people on/..
If you actually read the other comments, you'll see that people get advised by their companies legal departments that doing a patent search is actually a rather bad idea.
Because that is an interesting real world scenario to consider in this context. In fact, it would make for a good litmus test: would your hiring process stop the SF admin problem from occurring?
Particularly given that it's not at all clear that the admin was even the problem...
Just because the mainstream media misuses tech words, does not mean that it is really correct.
The thing is, it's not a technical word. It's more of a social/identity word, and that consists just as much of people identifying you as it does of you identifying yourself. It's a case where "everybody does it" makes it correct.
Many other personality disorders range from the ho-hum (adjustment disorders) to the downright funny (obsessive compulsive personality disorder).
It's only funny for the first couple minutes. Then it starts to get old, and then it starts to drive you insane.
Re:This article seems to be anti-hacker
on
How To Hire a Hacker
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps you mean cracker
"If I was a real cracker, I'd want to be topped with a real cheese, maybe a strong stilton."
And I thought "hacker" actually meant someone who (literally) hacked on things. With a hatchet or similar. Or maybe language just changes, and we need to all get over it.
Companies pay people to invent things. Patents are not meant to provide riches & fame to holy Inventors, they are meant to increase innovation. Please explain how companies will be able to hire R&D departments in your scenario, where the employees will just individually patent and keep all the work they were hired to do.
I'd actually go a step further, and say that patents cannot be bought not sold, period, not at all, no exceptions.
That is really, really stupid. Should we also abolish all forms of money and go back to a barter system?
That would, hopefully, put the kibosh on most of the patent trolls. Y'know, people who don't do any work, but like to profit off of other people's work.
No, people like Matt Katzer seem able to cause trouble just fine without being a corporation or buying patents.
Patents are a ridiculous idea in this modern age, anyway. With global communications a reality, it's nearly a given that any idea out there will be rapidly assimilated, reverse engineered and eventually done better than the inventor. This is a good thing. It benefits everybody.
That's been the case for quite a long time, even before modern global communications.
The patent system as it stands is an obstruction to the overall development of the human species and should be abolished.
Yes. But the way to do that is not to replace it with an even more broken system. As long as patents do exist, they have to be sellable and belong initially to whoever took the risk of doing/funding the research. Otherwise they're mostly useless but still just as dangerous, and would make it rather silly for companies to invest in R&D.
- No more than 7 years on a patent. No extensions. No exceptions.
If something was known when I was a kid, I should be allowed to use that knowledge as a grown-up. 7 years would put that in the middle of high-school, sounds about right.
- Patents to be awarded to individuals only, not companies
Why? What does this solve? Patents are theoretically supposed to promote progress; how does making them unavailable to things with a research budget accomplish this?
Sure, the researchers themselves won't infringe. But they do have to care, because otherwise the people that hired them will end up infringing.
Really? I don't think most researchers work in the legal department.
/me rolleyes
So maybe the extent of their having to care is just that they keep the legal department informed of what looks promising, and money that could have gone to their budget goes to legal instead so they can do whatever research of their own.
>> turning the common case of simultaneous invention into a lottery,
Actually, that is resolved in the USPTO in an administrative proceeding called an "interference."
Not a lottery.
Yes, I know we're "first-to-invent" rather than "first-to-file". That doesn't make it any less a lottery -- several people "invent" the same thing around the same time, only one gets a patent. Or perhaps you're saying that invention is wholly deterministic, and inventing something always takes the same amount of time?
Actually, there is a very old and very strong research exemption under patent law.
Sure, the researchers themselves won't infringe. But they do have to care, because otherwise the people that hired them will end up infringing.
Several key inventions, like the steam engine, electricity, airplanes, cars, electronic transistors have launched entire industries that have provided jobs and other material benefits to millions of people for over a century. Without these inventions, these jobs wouldn't exist, these industries would not exist, and you and your parents, even the govt., would probably be poorer.
And without patents, those inventions would have been more widely available sooner, with more improvements. You can find a number of actual historical examples here.
Nobody is asking for a handout, just what is rightfully, and justly owed.
You bloody well are asking for a handout, and at a net cost to society. Go look at history, note the prevalence of simultaneous inventions. Look at the innovations in software before it was considered patentable. You're seriously trying to claim that you're that indispensable, that only you can come up with a particular idea?
Your statement insinuates the reverse engineering person somehow has legal rights to the work of others just because reverse engineering the invention is hard.
No.
I am saying that they have that right by default (because knowledge fundamentally cannot be owned), and that reverse engineering being hard means that the fundamental justification for the patent system ("to promote the progress of science and the useful arts") cannot justify taking that right away in such a case.
All patents do is ensure the inventor, the person giving the benefits, is adequately compensated for his work, that's all.
No, they do not. They attempt to do so, but don't do a very good job and have a huge number of bad side effects (like blocking other inventions, turning the common case of simultaneous invention into a lottery, adding overhead to basically all research, etc).
I've worked in a couple different areas of patentable subject matter, and most of them are functionally indistinguishable from computer algorithm patents in terms of what happens. Business method patents are a whole 'nother kind of mess.
It's equivalent to an assertion that if we didn't have the death penalty, there would be a thousand-fold increase in the murder rate. Sure, that's an interesting thought, but there's no evidence whatsoever, so on its own, it doesn't really mean much.
You can look at places without the death penalty and see that that claim is absurd.
You can also look at history and at other places to see what happens to innovation when there are no patents, or when patents expire. Which seems to show that innovation goes up slightly in such cases.
At that point, he's indemnified. Therefore, he performs no due diligence, because it's expensive and he's fully covered against loss.
But he never does that anyway, because if he did ask someone knowledgeable they specifically told him that looking can triple his liability and is therefore a really bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
They will have to get used to remote handling of BSOD. They will need to have humans local to the actual machines to press the reset button when a BSOD occurs. A new breakthrough will then be announced called "proximity computing" whereby they will move the computers near those using them to avoid the extra employees who were hired to press the reset button. Buy shares in companies that are used to move the computers backwards and forwards each time the management reverses their previous "breakthrough".
Or make the machines all VMs so they can SSH into the "hardware" and reset it, or get network-connected power buttons and video cards.
How can a concrete, environmentally controlled, power sucking, place people drive to be considered green?
Spraypaint.
It's a service that comes with your real credit card. For instance, I have a Citibank-branded MasterCard, and if I log in to the citicards.com website there's a menu item somewhere that lets me generate extra card numbers with various restrictions (only usable at one merchant, $$ limit, time limit, only usable once).
Boyden warns that a very clever AI without a sense of purpose might very well 'realize the impermanence of everything, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence.'
This is silly. Why would a machine without a sense of purpose or drive decide to play video games or seek entertainment or do anything except just sit there? Playing games would result from the wrong motivation ("wrong" from a certain perspective, anyway) not from the lack of any motivation.
Plus there's the whole issue of "motivation" implying "free will". Which we probably would have no reason to implement, if we even understood it well enough to be able to implement it.
If they have that much useless detail on everyone, chances are they won't be able to actually find anything in it. Yay for security through obscurity.
On the other hand, someone's probably going to break in and get all those credit card numbers...
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Is that a myth because no one will steal your idea even if you don't protect it, or is it a myth because people will find a way to steal your idea anyway?
Or is it because someone halfway around the world came up with the same idea two weeks before you did?
Obviously, Child A needs to learn his multiplication tables too.
So you're saying "school + extracurricular learning > school", which is a rather silly thing to argue about.
What this is about is whether "extracurricular learning > school", which could be slightly less silly. If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything, and could generate interest in all of history, politics, math, literacy, science (how to use experiments and record-keeping to assist curiosity), the various trivia that we learned from science (earth goes around the sun), basic accounting, etc.
So even assuming you are entirely correct (for both topics at hand, his wanting to maybe get a patent, and his wanting to not get sued into the next century for infringing someone else's patent), it's still a bit more involved than "go play with the USPTO's search engine for a while".
Before I go read your 325 page PDF on my lunch break, would you mind giving some quote or an indication of what page to look at first?
The very beginning (well, after the 2 pages of acknowledgments) is a good place, it talks about steam engines there for a couple pages. Then there's also chapter 3 starting on page 49.
Like GP said.
If you think Verisign is going to give up that lucrative business, you are crazy.
1) They don't have a choice in the matter.
2) This is probably why they're pushing "Extended Validation" certs now.
Since he did innovate, I fail to see your point.
He's afraid to make that innovation available to others.
This guy seems to be a little dim in that he could just do a patent search. Instead, he wants advice from people on /. .
If you actually read the other comments, you'll see that people get advised by their companies legal departments that doing a patent search is actually a rather bad idea.
"a little dim", indeed.
Perhaps you mean cracker
Cracker is a derogatory slang term for people originating in rural areas of the southern part of the US.
If you want to hire a cracker, just look for the baseball cap and check for a pickup truck with a gun rack-- or a John Deere tractor-- parked outside.
...so what's "redneck" mean, then?
Because that is an interesting real world scenario to consider in this context. In fact, it would make for a good litmus test: would your hiring process stop the SF admin problem from occurring?
Particularly given that it's not at all clear that the admin was even the problem...
Just because the mainstream media misuses tech words, does not mean that it is really correct.
The thing is, it's not a technical word. It's more of a social/identity word, and that consists just as much of people identifying you as it does of you identifying yourself. It's a case where "everybody does it" makes it correct.
Many other personality disorders range from the ho-hum (adjustment disorders) to the downright funny (obsessive compulsive personality disorder).
It's only funny for the first couple minutes. Then it starts to get old, and then it starts to drive you insane.
Perhaps you mean cracker
"If I was a real cracker, I'd want to be topped with a real cheese, maybe a strong stilton."
And I thought "hacker" actually meant someone who (literally) hacked on things. With a hatchet or similar. Or maybe language just changes, and we need to all get over it.
"Companies" don't invent things. People do.
Companies pay people to invent things. Patents are not meant to provide riches & fame to holy Inventors, they are meant to increase innovation. Please explain how companies will be able to hire R&D departments in your scenario, where the employees will just individually patent and keep all the work they were hired to do.
I'd actually go a step further, and say that patents cannot be bought not sold, period, not at all, no exceptions.
That is really, really stupid. Should we also abolish all forms of money and go back to a barter system?
That would, hopefully, put the kibosh on most of the patent trolls. Y'know, people who don't do any work, but like to profit off of other people's work.
No, people like Matt Katzer seem able to cause trouble just fine without being a corporation or buying patents.
Patents are a ridiculous idea in this modern age, anyway. With global communications a reality, it's nearly a given that any idea out there will be rapidly assimilated, reverse engineered and eventually done better than the inventor. This is a good thing. It benefits everybody.
That's been the case for quite a long time, even before modern global communications.
The patent system as it stands is an obstruction to the overall development of the human species and should be abolished.
Yes. But the way to do that is not to replace it with an even more broken system. As long as patents do exist, they have to be sellable and belong initially to whoever took the risk of doing/funding the research. Otherwise they're mostly useless but still just as dangerous, and would make it rather silly for companies to invest in R&D.
So we need another transformation now: "What is intellectual property? It is thought control."
"Copyright is censorship. Patents are thoughtcrime."
Trademarks, OTOH, are mostly useful (but I seem to recall are taken to not-useful extremes in some countries).
- No more than 7 years on a patent. No extensions. No exceptions.
If something was known when I was a kid, I should be allowed to use that knowledge as a grown-up. 7 years would put that in the middle of high-school, sounds about right.
- Patents to be awarded to individuals only, not companies
Why? What does this solve? Patents are theoretically supposed to promote progress; how does making them unavailable to things with a research budget accomplish this?
Really? I don't think most researchers work in the legal department.
/me rolleyes
So maybe the extent of their having to care is just that they keep the legal department informed of what looks promising, and money that could have gone to their budget goes to legal instead so they can do whatever research of their own.
>> turning the common case of simultaneous invention into a lottery, Actually, that is resolved in the USPTO in an administrative proceeding called an "interference." Not a lottery.
Yes, I know we're "first-to-invent" rather than "first-to-file". That doesn't make it any less a lottery -- several people "invent" the same thing around the same time, only one gets a patent. Or perhaps you're saying that invention is wholly deterministic, and inventing something always takes the same amount of time?
Actually, there is a very old and very strong research exemption under patent law.
Sure, the researchers themselves won't infringe. But they do have to care, because otherwise the people that hired them will end up infringing.
Several key inventions, like the steam engine, electricity, airplanes, cars, electronic transistors have launched entire industries that have provided jobs and other material benefits to millions of people for over a century. Without these inventions, these jobs wouldn't exist, these industries would not exist, and you and your parents, even the govt., would probably be poorer.
And without patents, those inventions would have been more widely available sooner, with more improvements. You can find a number of actual historical examples here.
Nobody is asking for a handout, just what is rightfully, and justly owed.
You bloody well are asking for a handout, and at a net cost to society. Go look at history, note the prevalence of simultaneous inventions. Look at the innovations in software before it was considered patentable. You're seriously trying to claim that you're that indispensable, that only you can come up with a particular idea?
Your statement insinuates the reverse engineering person somehow has legal rights to the work of others just because reverse engineering the invention is hard.
No.
I am saying that they have that right by default (because knowledge fundamentally cannot be owned), and that reverse engineering being hard means that the fundamental justification for the patent system ("to promote the progress of science and the useful arts") cannot justify taking that right away in such a case.
All patents do is ensure the inventor, the person giving the benefits, is adequately compensated for his work, that's all.
No, they do not. They attempt to do so, but don't do a very good job and have a huge number of bad side effects (like blocking other inventions, turning the common case of simultaneous invention into a lottery, adding overhead to basically all research, etc).
I've worked in a couple different areas of patentable subject matter, and most of them are functionally indistinguishable from computer algorithm patents in terms of what happens. Business method patents are a whole 'nother kind of mess.
What makes them different?
It's equivalent to an assertion that if we didn't have the death penalty, there would be a thousand-fold increase in the murder rate. Sure, that's an interesting thought, but there's no evidence whatsoever, so on its own, it doesn't really mean much.
You can look at places without the death penalty and see that that claim is absurd.
You can also look at history and at other places to see what happens to innovation when there are no patents, or when patents expire. Which seems to show that innovation goes up slightly in such cases.
At that point, he's indemnified. Therefore, he performs no due diligence, because it's expensive and he's fully covered against loss.
But he never does that anyway, because if he did ask someone knowledgeable they specifically told him that looking can triple his liability and is therefore a really bad idea.